War; and it takes eighty-four hours to make a twelve-hour journey from
the Alps to Paris; the cable is dead; the telegraph is dumb; letters go
only when smuggled over the frontiers by couriers; you look about you
and find you are in a mediaeval and mysterious world. You stand amid the
melancholy ruins of canceled cycles. The mailed fist of war has smashed
your world to pieces. You do not know it.
The man you thought of as a brother looks at you with eyes of passionate
hatred; you have eaten bread and salt together; you have drunk together;
you have been uplifted by the same books; you have been sublimed by the
same music; but he is a German, and your blood was made in another land,
and he looks at you with suspicion and hate--perhaps you are a spy. (The
spy mania! Dear Lord, what absurd, bloody, and abominable stories I
could write of this madness which has Europe by the throat, this madness
which is only another form of war hysteria.) A reversal to barbarism;
you and the man who was your friend have gone back to the fear and
hatred of primitive savages, meeting at the corner of a dark wood. All
of humanity we have acquired in the slow way of evolution sloughs off
us.
We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are
shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in
packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education
which declares: "The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall
help them go." All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid
clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each
other's throats.
The glory of war--rot! The heroism of war--rot! The scarlet and
beneficent energies of war--rot! When you look at it close what you see
are hulking masses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or
wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their
hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism.
Think it over. Upon whom falls the stress of war? Not upon the soldier.
He is killed and fattens the soil where he falls; or he is maimed and
hobbles off toward a pension or beggary--both tolerable things; anyway
he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good
grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a
Belgian--which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut
like a Greek of Thermopylae--and become thus a permanent part of the
world's finest history.
* * * * *
I would like to write here the name of a friend, Charles Flamache of
Brussels. He was 21 years old. He was an artist who had already tasted
fame. He had known the love of woman. That his destiny might be
fulfilled he died, the blithe, brave boy, in front of Liége. It was the
right death at the right time--ere yet the massed Prussians had rolled
in fire and blood over his fair small land. Wherefore, hail and
farewell, young hero!
* * * * *
But upon whom falls the stress of war?
In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in
its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of "world power")
an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.
I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers
die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.
Some day the story of what was done in Alsace will be written and the
stories of Visé and Aerschot and Onsmael and Louvain will seem pale and
negligible; but not now--five generations to come will whisper them in
the Vosges.
What I would emphasize is that in the natural state of barbarism induced
by the war the woman falls back to her antique state of she animal. In
thousands of years she has been made into a thing of exquisite and
mysterious femininity; in a day she is thrown back to kinship with the
she dog. Slashed with sabres, pricked with lances, she is a mere thing
of prey.
Surely not the dear Countess and Baroness? Of course not. War is made
in the palaces, but it does not attack the palaces. The worth of every
nation dwells in the cottage; and it is upon the cottage that war works
its worst infamy. Go to Alsace and see.
Pillage, loot, incendiarism, "indemnity"--you can read that in the
records of the invasion of Belgium; that is war; it is all right if war
is to be, for all this talk of chivalrous consideration for foes and
regard for international law is all nonsense; necessity, as
Bethmann-Hollweg said, knows no law, and necessity has always been the
tyrant's plea; it is the business of a soldier to kill and terrify; if
he restricts his killing and terrifying he is a bad soldier and bad at
his work of barbarism; but--
There is a more sinister side to Europe's lapse into barbarism. The
women are paying too dear. And to make them pay dear is not really the
business of a soldier, not even a bad soldier. Yet the woman is paying,
God knows. A tragic payment.