_THE HYMN OF HATE_
"Saw a Dutchman to-day, saw him from here up."
The speaker indicated with his hands that part of a man's body between
hips and head.
"You know I'm a pretty good shot. Didn't see him again."
Pause.
"Do you know what I've been thinking ever since? I've been hoping he
isn't in my fix; I hope he doesn't have a wife and kid."
The red-headed sergeant from Boston was the spokesman--a sharpshooter
and a fluent user of Sunday-school language--in his own lurid way. It
was night, and he had been hanging around for some time waiting his
chance to "spill himself." I shall forget all of my own speeches, but
never his. I was moved too deeply for words. I stuck my hand out, and
said, "Put her there!" and he understood.
I heard no hymn of hate on our line in France. I saw prisoners of war
treated like men; they had fought like men, our fellows said. I saw
wounded prisoners brought out with every consideration and care. And
as the result of a raid that came over early in March a German captain
of infantry lies by the side of an American captain of infantry. He was
buried with military honors. Why? That was the question I asked, and
the answer I received was a look of surprise.
Modern warfare has not changed the traditions of American arms. I say
that there is no hymn of hate on the American front in France. There
will be desperate deeds a-plenty. In the outpouring of passions men
will become the instruments of appalling vengeance. War is not pretty.
Americans will not lightly regard a crucifixion, and they will punish
treachery. Atrocities will have their own reward. _Men_ cannot sing
songs of peace while handless babies cry in pain before their eyes, and
girls big with child name their despoilers. It is not difficult to be
charitable with those who have seen so much and suffered so greatly,
when they for the moment use the only weapon their foe seems to value
and to fear.
But the programme of the army has no hymn of hate. Its spirit is the
spirit of punishing wrath without malice; its thrust is not for man,
but for a system; it looks upon its foes with even pity and regret
while it abhors and hates and destroys the power that makes them bloody
pawns.
I listened one evening to the address of a one-armed French colonel. He
had been left for dead before Verdun. Thirty-six hours he lay in the
open, suffering the tortures of a living, earth-born hell. He said:
"The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved Paris. Down across Belgium the gray
barbarians came, thrust forth by a philosophy of 'Might makes right'
and believing that terrorizing a people will conquer its will to
resist. They gave their bayonets an extra twist and lingered with them
to be cruel; _they lost seconds_. In the market-places of Louvain
they dishonored women and girls; _they lost minutes_. They butchered
hostages, and left the scars of rapine and murder upon the cities of
Flanders and Picardy; _they lost hours_.
"France had her chance! Britain came! When we turned, we had no time
to hate, no time for the extra bayonet-thrust. We saw no individual
German. It was for France! We heard her cry in the weeping of our
women; she spoke to us from her fields watered with the blood of our
brothers. Vive la France! Vive la France!"
I learned as a lad that to master another, or to master a task, one
must first be master of himself. Once in a great football contest I saw
a college defeated because her captain and star tackle was goaded into
slugging by the constant "dirty work" of the lesser man opposing him. I
felt at the time that the blow which knocked the unfair player into the
mud with a streaming, broken nose was less than he deserved, but that
same blow put my hero out of the game.
I have a book, the supreme ethical, moral, and religious volume of all
time. In it is written that he who treasures an evil passion in his
heart, or allows it residence in his soul, is by so much less than
the man he might be. No hater can be at the height of his possible
efficiency in physical strength, in moral courage, or in spiritual
stamina. In the long run a nation loses power in proportion as her
system of faith disregards moral values.
Germany has temporarily changed the map of Europe, but unless God
contradicts Himself she is farther from triumph to-day than she was
when her legions stood before Liége. No long-distance gun from Krupps'
can outrange the truth.
"The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved Paris." Yes, and it will be written at
the end, "The German 'Hymn of Hate' saved America and the world." It
was not the "Star-Spangled Banner," that hymn of unsullied glory, that
sent America marching out of her isolation into the slaughter-plains
of Europe; it was the "Hymn of Hate," the hymn of submarines and
Zeppelins, of poison gas and unnumbered atrocities, the hymn that
mingled with its chorus the cooing of infants about to drown and the
screams of women about to suffer the greater death.
What Britain and France and Russia and America, perhaps, could not have
done, Germany has done herself.
But is this system of faith practical from the standpoint of the
individual, the individual who has suffered, suffered in his own body
and in the flesh of those dearer to him than his own life, the tortures
of hell? I have visited in scores of British homes of mourning, and
have generally found the fulfilment of the promise, "As thy days, so
shall thy strength be."
In Cooke's Presbyterian Church, Toronto, Canada, one Sunday morning of
November, 1916, I listened to a sermon preached by Rev. Mr. McGaw, then
assistant to Dr. William Patterson. Mr. McGaw later became pastor of a
church in Montreal. He is as Irish as his name suggests. His own family
has been in France from the beginning; when the sermon to which I
refer was delivered, two brothers were lying in hospitals, wounded. At
the close of the service Mr. McGaw prayed; and, as he prayed, I found
myself in a sweat of amazement. He said:
"Our Father, thou knowest that we do not pray for the triumph of German
arms; we pray for the destruction of the power that has wasted the
world, for the despoiling of the ruthless despoiler, for the toppling
of the last crown of autocracy, and that the last throne of militarism
shall be tumbled down. But, our Father, as we pray for our own who
suffer, for our wounded brethren, for our dying comrades, for our
widowed and our orphaned and our bereft, we pray for the sufferers of
the enemy."
By my side that morning sat a returned Canadian soldier with blinded
eyes. As I lifted my head after the prayer, I looked into the face of
my friend who had made so great a sacrifice, and his face was illumined
by a "light that never was on sea or land." I was wrong. McGaw was
right.
The Christian must not forget whose he is and whom he serves, even
though the vindication of righteousness seems afar off and tardy. He
must, for the sake of his country as well as for the demonstration of
the faith committed to him, be a "doer of the word." He must so speak
now that when the war is over he will not be ashamed.
That the soldier does not expect to find the "Hymn of Hate" in the
pulpit, and is resentful when he hears it there, is at least suggested
by a paragraph from a letter in "Letters from Flanders," written by
Lieutenant Bey Gillespie, one of the earlier martyrs of the war, a
Scotch lad of brilliant promise, whose happy part it was to speak, in
speaking his own heart, for hundreds of thousands of other British
youths less able than he to make vocal the quests and questionings of
their souls:
"Personally I do not care for a mixture of the two styles; and when
the cleric says, 'Please God the Germans will take it in the neck,' it
makes me wriggle in my chair and feel uncomfortable all down my back.
However, when he left our German enemies alone and got to those others
with whom a bishop is more particularly concerned, he was very good;
and I think the men enjoyed him, for it was something quite new to most
of them."
In the London _Times_, March 15, 1918, appeared a remarkable letter
from a British officer who had shortly before reached a convalescent
home in Holland after three and one-half years' imprisonment in
Germany. It was a ringing protest against the agitation of the
pacifists in Parliament and a calm but intense arraignment of the
"Landsdowne letter," which had appeared only a short time before. But,
wonderful as was the letter itself, the spirit in which it was written
was even more wonderful. The concluding paragraph is as follows:
"Unless Germany is beaten in the field we cannot win this war. Any
peace based on compromise, whatever its terms, can be only a degree
better than a British defeat. The loss of life, of money, of time,
will have been to no purpose. The whole terrible tragedy will have
to be begun over again. And let no one think that it is for reasons
of revenge or in order to enable us to impose harsh and heavy terms
that we must defeat the German armies. On the contrary, let us be very
generous in the hour of our victory, but until that hour comes let us
cease to wrangle about peace terms. For the moment there can be but one
war aim--to defeat Germany."
That religion does not make the fighting man less bold, his hand less
certain, and his heart less resolute, is evidenced by the fact that the
mightiest soldiers since Christianity became a factor in the affairs of
men have been, to the fulness of the light they possessed, worshippers
of the Nazarene, followers of Him who, being the Prince of Peace, was
not afraid to die for the truth. And the greatest of the captains, who
in the height of his power denied the sway of the Galilean, cried out
in his defeat, "What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal
reign of Christ!"
When this war is ended, ended in the triumph of Democracy,--and until
such triumph comes it must not end,--the words of Julian the Apostate
will live again: "Thou hast conquered, O Galilean."