There was war; and the whole machinery of civilization stopped.
Modern civilization is the most complex machine imaginable; its infinite
cogged wheels turn endlessly upon each other; and perfectly it
accomplishes its multifarious purposes; but smash one wheel and it all
falls apart into muddle and ruin. The declaration of war was like
thrusting a mailed fist into the intricate works of a clock. There was
an end of the perfected machine of civilization. Everything stopped.
That was a queer world we woke in. A world that seemed new, so old it
was.
Money had ceased to exist. It seemed at that moment an appalling thing.
I was on the edge and frontier of a neutral State. I had money in a
bank. It ceased to be money. A thousand-franc note was paper. A
hundred-mark note was rubbish. British sovereigns were refused at the
railway station. The Swiss shopkeeper would not change a Swiss note.
What had seemed money was not money.
Values were told in terms of bread.
It was a swift and immediate return to the economic conditions of
barbarism. Metals were hoarded; and where there had been trade there was
barter. And it all happened in an hour, in that first fierce panic of
war.
Traffic stopped with a clang as of rusty iron. The mailed fist had
dislocated the complex machinery of European traffic. Frontiers which
had been mere landmarks of travel became suddenly formidable and
impassable barriers, guarded by harsh, hysterical men with bayonets.
War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbish! It fills them with the
cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of
battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the
German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first
stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St.
Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved
heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not
because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were
hysterical. The fact is worth noting.
It explains many a bloody and infamous deed in the tragic history of sad
Alsace and of little Belgium. The war-begotten reversal to savagery
brought with it all the hysteria of the savage man. The sentries at St.
Ludwig struck with muskets and sabres because they were hysterical with
terror of the new, unknown state into which they had been plunged, not
because they were not men like you and me. Surely the savage Uhlan who
ravaged the cottages of Alsace was your brother and mine, and the Magyar
beyond the Danube and the Cossack at Kovna. Only they had gone back to
the terrors of the man who dwelt in a cave.
Traffic stopped; and when it stopped civilization fell away from the
travelers. That was strange. Take the afternoon of the day war was
declared, the date being Aug. 1, in the year of our Lord 1914, and the
hour 7:30 P.M., Berlin time. It was the last train that reached the
frontier from Paris. Between Delle and Bicourt lies a neutral zone about
three kilometers--say, nearly two and a half miles--in extent. On one
side France and invasion and terror and war; on the other side of the
zone the relative safety of Switzerland. Six hundred passengers poured
out of the French train at noon into that neutral zone and started to
walk to Swiss safety. A blazing August sun; a road of pebbles and
stinging, upblown dust.
The passengers had been permitted to bring on the train only what
luggage they could carry; so they were laden with bags and coats,
dressing bags and jewel cases--all they had deemed most valuable. Mostly
women. German ladies fleeing for refuge; Russian ladies; English,
American; and a crowd of men, urgent to reach their armies, German,
Swiss, Russian, Austrian, Servian, Italian; withal many of the kind of
American men who go to Switzerland in August.
And the caravan started in the dust and heat of a desert. A woman let
fall her heavy bag and plodded on. Another threw away her coats. Men
shook off their bundles. The heat was stifling. And through the clouds
of dust a panic terror crept. It was the antique terror of the God
Pan--the God All; it was a fear as immense as the sky.
A woman screamed and began to run, throwing away everything she had
safeguarded so she might run with empty hands. A score followed her. Men
began to run. They thrust the women aside, cursing; and ran. And for
over two miles the road was covered thick with coats and bags, with
packages and jewel cases. The greed of possession died out in the
causeless fear.
These hoarse, pushing men, these sweating, shameless women had gone back
10,000 years into prehistoric savagery. Lightly they threw away all the
baubles and gewgaws civilization had fashioned for adorning and
disguising their raw humanity, and the habits of civilization as well.
They had touched but the outermost edge of war, and their very clothes
fell off them.