There is in Brussels--if the Uhlans have spared it--a mad and monstrous
picture. It is called "A Scene in Hell," and hangs in the Musée Wiertz.
And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of
hell; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him
the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch
and curse--taking their posthumous vengeance.
And since Napoleon was a notable Emperor in his time, the picture is not
without significance today. Paint in another face; and let it go at
that.
War is a bad thing. Even hell is the worse for it.
War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism.
That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is
civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment
the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in
an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the
morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling
savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women.
Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses
over their heads. And, the grave old professors who were droning
platitudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere
today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine.
(Not less shrill than others is the senile yawp of that good old man
Ernst Haeckel, under whom I studied in my youth.)
A reversal to barbarism.
Here; it is in the tearoom of the smartest hotel in Munich; war has
come; high-voiced women of title chatter over their teacups; comes
swaggering in the Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria; he has just had his
sabre sharpened and has girt his abdomen for war. His wife runs to him.
And she kisses the sabre and shouts: "Bring it back to me covered with
blood--that I may kiss it again!" And the other high-voiced women flock
to kiss the sword.
A reversal to barbarism.
It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician
ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life;
and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood--laughingly as
harlots wet their mouths with wine.
The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the
habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so
painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in
the tearoom of the "Four Seasons," is one with the blonde nude female
who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came
through Gaul.
Reversal to barbarism.
War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open
motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect,
hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress--she the good mother, the
housewife, the fond grandmother--garmented from head to foot in cloth
the color of blood.
Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a
savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of
civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.