again on the footpath that leads to the abbey. On my return journey,
along those roads broken up by rain and by military transport wagons, I
remain under the charm of his welcome. And I compare these two monarchs,
situated, as it were, at opposite poles of humanity, the one at the pole
of light, the other at the pole of darkness; the one yonder, swollen
with hypocrisy and arrogance, a monster among monsters, his hands full
of blood, his nails full of torn flesh, who still dares to surround
himself with insolent pomp; the other here, banished without a murmur to
a little house in a village, standing on a last strip of his martyred
kingdom, but in whose honour rises from the whole civilised earth a
concert of sympathy, enthusiasm, magnificent appreciation, and for whom
are stored up crowns of most pure and immortal glory.
XII
SOME WORDS UTTERED BY HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS
"All the world knows what value to attach to the King of
Prussia and his word. There is no sovereign in Europe who
has not suffered from his perfidy. And such a king as this
would impose himself upon Germany as dictator and protector!
Under a despotism which repudiates every principle, the
Prussian monarchy will one day be the source of infinite
calamity, not only to Germany, but likewise to the whole of
Europe."
THE EMPRESS MARIA THERESA.
_March, 1915._
Far away, far away and out of the world seems this place where the
persecuted Queen has taken refuge. I do not know how long my motor car,
its windows lashed by rain, has rolled along in the dim light caused by
showers and approaching night, when at last the Belgian non-commissioned
officer, who guided my chauffeur along these unfamiliar roads, announces
that we have arrived. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians, has
deigned to grant me an audience at half-past six, and I trembled lest I
should be late, for the way seemed interminable through a countryside
which it was too dark to see; but we were in time, punctual to a moment.
At half-past six on an evening in March, under an overcast sky, it is
already dark as night.
The car stops and I jump out on to the sands of the seashore; I
recognise the sound of the ocean close at hand, and the boundless
expanse of the North Sea, less dark than the sky, is vaguely perceptible
to the sight. Rain and cold winds rage around us. On the dunes two or
three houses without lights in the windows are visible as greyish
outlines. However, someone carrying a little shining glass lamp is
hurrying to receive me; he is an officer in Her Majesty's service,
carrying one of those electric torches which the wind does not blow out,
and which in France we call an Apache's lantern.
On entering the first house to which the aide-de-camp conducts me, I
attempt to leave my overcoat in the hall.
"No, no," he says, "keep it on; we have still to go out of doors to
reach Her Majesty's apartments."
This first villa shelters only ladies-in-waiting and officers of that
court now so shorn of ceremony, and every evening it is plunged
purposely in darkness as a precaution against shrapnel fire. A moment
later I am summoned to Her Majesty's presence. Escorted by the same
pleasant officer with his lantern, I hurry across to the next house.
The rain is mingled with white butterflies, which are flakes of snow.
Very indistinctly I see a desert-like landscape of dunes and sands
almost white, stretching out into infinity.
"Would you not imagine it a site in the Sahara?" says my guide. "When
your Arab cavalry came here the illusion was complete."
It is true, for even in Africa the sands turn pale in the darkness, but
this is a Sahara transported under the gloomy sky of a northern night,
and it has assumed there too deep a melancholy.
In the villa we enter a warm, well-lighted room, which, with its red
furnishings, introduces a note of gaiety, almost of comfort, into this
quasi-solitude, battered by wintry squalls. And there is a pleasure,
which at first transcends everything else--the physical pleasure of
approaching a fireplace with a good blazing fire.
While waiting for the Queen I notice a long packing-case lying on two
chairs; it is made of that fine, unequalled, white carpentry which
immediately reminds me of Nagasaki, and on it are painted Japanese
letters in columns. The officer's glance followed mine.
"That," he says, "is a magnificent ancient sabre which the Japanese have
just sent to our King."
I, personally, had forgotten them, those distant allies of ours in the
Farthest East. Yet it is true that they are on our side; how strange a
thing! And even over there the woes of these two gracious sovereigns are
universally known, and the Japanese desired to show their special
sympathy by sending them a valuable present.
I think this charming officer was going to show me the sabre from Japan,
but a lady-in-waiting appears, announcing Her Majesty, and he withdraws
at once.
"Her Majesty is coming," says the lady-in-waiting.
The Queen, whom I have never yet seen, consecrated as it were by
suffering, with what infinite reverence I await her coming, standing
there in front of the fire while wind and snow continue to rage in the
black night outside. Through which door will she enter? Doubtless by
that door over there at the end of the room, on which my attention is
involuntarily concentrated.
But no! A soft, rustling sound makes me turn my head towards the
opposite side of the room, and from behind a screen of red silk which
concealed another door the young Queen appears, so near to me that I
have not room to make my court bow. My first impression, necessarily
furtive as a flash of lightning, a mere visual impression, I might say a
colourist's impression, is a dazzling little vision of blue--the blue of
her gown, but more especially the blue of her eyes, which shine like
two luminous stars. And then she has such an air of youth; she seems
this evening twenty-four, and scarcely that. From the different
portraits I had seen of Her Majesty, portraits so little faithful to
life, I had gathered that she was very tall, with a profile almost too
long, but on the contrary, she is of medium height, and her face is
small, with exquisitely refined features--a face almost ethereal, so
delicate that it almost vanishes, eclipsed by those marvellous, limpid
eyes, like two pure turquoises, transparent to reveal the light within.
Even a man unaware of her rank and of everything concerning her, her
devotion to duty, the superlative dignity of her actions, her serene
resignation, her admirable, simple charity, would say to himself at
first sight:
"The woman with those eyes, who may she be? Assuredly one who soars very
high and will never falter, who without even a tremor of her eyelids
can look in the face not only temptations, but likewise danger and
death."
With what reverent sympathy, free from vulgar curiosity, would I fain
catch an echo of that which stirs in the depths of her heart when she
contemplates the drama of her destiny. But a conversation with a queen
is not directed by one's own fancy, and at the beginning of the audience
Her Majesty touches upon different subjects lightly and gracefully as if
there were nothing unusual happening in the world. We talk of the East,
where we have both travelled; we talk of books she has read; it seems as
if we were oblivious of the great tragedy which is being enacted,
oblivious of the surrounding country, strewn with ruins and the dead.
Soon, however, perhaps because a little bond of confidence has
established itself between us, Her Majesty speaks to me of the
destruction of Ypres, Furnes, towns from which I have just come; then
the two blue stars gazing at me seem to me to grow a little misty, in
spite of an effort to keep them clear.
"But, madam," I say, "there still remains standing enough of the walls
to enable all the outlines to be traced again, and almost everything to
be practically reconstructed in the better times that are in store."
"Ah," she answers, "rebuild! Certainly it will be possible to rebuild,
but it will never be more than an imitation, and for me something
essential will always be lacking. I shall miss the soul which has passed
away."
Then I see how dearly Her Majesty had already loved those marvels now
ruined, and all the past of her adopted country, which survived there in
the old stone tracery of Flanders.
Ypres and Fumes incline us to subjects less impersonal, and gradually
we at last come to talk of Germany. One of the sentiments predominant,
it seems, in her bruised heart is that of amazement, the most painful as
well as the most complete amazement, at so many crimes.
"There has been some change in them," she says, in hesitating words.
"They used not to be like this. The Crown Prince, whom I knew very well
in my childhood, was gentle, and nothing in him led one to expect----
Think of it as I may, day and night, I cannot understand---- No, in the
old days they were not like this, of that I am sure."
But I know very well that they were ever thus (as indeed all of us
know); they were always the same from the beginning under their
inscrutable hypocrisy. But how could I venture to contradict this Queen,
born among them, like a beautiful, rare flower among stinging nettles
and brambles? To be sure, the unleashing of their latent barbarism which
we are now witnessing is the work of that King of Prussia who is the
faithful successor of him whom formerly the great Empress Maria Theresa
stigmatised; it is he indeed, who, to use the bitter yet very just
American expression, has given them swelled heads. But their character
was ever the same in all ages, and in order to form a judgment of their
souls, steeped in lies, murders, and rapine, it is sufficient to read
their writers, their thinkers, whose cynicism leaves us aghast.
After a moment's pause in which nothing is heard but the noise of the
wind outside, remembering that the young martyred Queen was a Bavarian
princess, I venture to recall the fact that the Bavarians in the Germany
Army were troubled at the persecutions endured by the Queen of the
Belgians, who had sprung from their own race, and indignant when the
Monster who leads this Witches' Sabbath even tried to single out her
children as a mark for his shrapnel lire.
But the Queen, raising her little hand from where it rested on the
silken texture of her gown, outlines a gesture which signifies something
inexorably final, and in a grave, low voice she utters this phrase which
falls upon the silence with the solemnity of a sentence whence there is
no appeal:
"It is at an end. Between _them_ and me has fallen a curtain of iron
which will never again be lifted."
At the same time, at the remembrance of her childhood, doubtless, and of
those whom she loved over there, the two clear blue eyes which were
looking at me grow very misty, and I turn my head away so that I may not
seem to have noticed.
XIII
AN APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE SERIOUSLY WOUNDED IN THE EAST
_June, 1915._
The Orient, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora--the mere enunciation of
these words, especially in these beautiful months of summer, conjures up
images of sun-steeped repose, a repose perhaps a little mournful because
of the lack of all movement in those parts, but a repose of such
adorable melancholy, in the midst of so many remembrances of great past
destinies of humanity, which, throughout these regions, slumber,
preserved under the mantle of Islam. But lately on this peninsula of
Gallipoli, with its somewhat bare and stony hills, there used to be, in
the winding folds of every river, tranquil old villages, with their
wooden houses built on the site of ancient ruins, their white minarets,
their dark cypress groves, sheltering some of those charming gilded
_stelae_, which exist in countless numbers, as everyone knows, in that
land of Turkey where the dead are never disturbed. And it was all so
calm, all this; it seemed that these humble little Edens might have felt
sure of being spared for a long time yet, if not for ever.
But alas! the Germans are the cause of the horror that is unchained here
to-day, that horror without precedent, which it is their genius to
propagate as soon as they have chosen a spot wherein to stretch out
their tentacles, visible or concealed. And it has become a most sinister
chaos, lighted by huge flames, red or livid, in a continuous din of
hell. Everything is overthrown in confusion and ruin.
"The ancient castles of Europe and Asia are nothing more than ruins,"
writes to me one of our old Zouaves, who is fighting in those parts;
"it is to me unspeakably painful to see those idyllic landscapes
harrowed by trenches and shells; the venerable cypress trees are mown
down; funereal marbles of great artistic value are shattered into a
thousand fragments. If only Stamboul at least may be preserved!"
There are trenches, trenches everywhere. To this form of warfare,
underground and treacherous, which the Germans have invented, the Turks,
like ourselves, have necessarily had to submit. And so this ancient
soil, the repository of the treasures of antiquity, has been ploughed up
into deep furrows, in which appear at every moment the fragments of some
marvel dating from distant, unknown epochs.
And at every hour of the night and day these trenches are reddened with
blood, with the blood of our sons of France, of our English friends,
and even of those gentle giants of New Zealand, who have followed them
into this furnace. The earth is abundantly drenched with their blood,
the blood of all these Allies, so dissimilar, but so firmly united
against the monstrous knavery of Germany. Opposite, very close, there
flows the blood of those Turks, who are nothing but the unhappy victims
of hateful plots, yet who are so freely insulted in France by people who
understand nothing of the underlying cause. They fall in thousands,
these Turks, more exposed to shrapnel fire than our own men;
nevertheless they fight reluctantly; they fight because they have been
deceived and because insolent foreigners drive them on with their
revolvers. If on the whole they fight none the less superbly, it is
merely a question of race. And the simplest of them, who have been
persuaded that they had to do with only their Russian enemies, are
unaware that it is we who are there.
On this peninsula we occupy a position won and retained by force of
heroism. The formation of the ground continues to render our situation
one of difficulty and our tenacity still more worthy of admiration. Our
position, indeed, is dominated by the low hills of Asia, where the forts
have not yet all been silenced; there is therefore no nook or corner, no
tent, no single one of our field hospitals, where doctors can attend to
the wounded in perfect security, absolutely certain that no shell will
come and interrupt them.
This terrible void France desires to fill with all possible dispatch.
With the utmost haste, she is fitting out a great hospital ship, which
the Red Cross Society has offered to provide at its own expense with
three hundred beds, with linen, nurses, drugs and dressings. This
life-saving ship will be moored in front of an island close to the
scene of battle, but completely sheltered; steam and motor launches will
be attached to it to fetch those who are seriously wounded and bring
them on board day by day, so that they may be operated upon and tended
in peace before infection and gangrene set in. How many precious lives
of our soldiers will thus be saved!
It must be understood that the stretcher-bearers of the ship will bring
back likewise wounded Turks, if there are any lying in the zone
accessible to them; and this is only fair give and take, for they do the
same for us. Some Zouaves who are fighting there wrote to me yesterday:
"The Turks are resisting with unequalled bravery; this all the
newspapers of Europe admit. But our wounded and our prisoners receive
excellent treatment from them, as General Gouraud himself announced in
an Order of the Day; they nurse them, feed them, and tend them better
than their own soldiers."
And here is a literal extract from a letter from one of our adjutants:
"I fell, wounded in the leg, beside a Turkish officer more seriously
wounded than myself; he had with him emergency dressings and he began by
dressing my wound before thinking of his own. He spoke French very well
and he said to me, 'You see, my friend, to what a pass these miserable
Germans have brought us!'"
If I dwell upon the subject of the Turks it is not, I need hardly say,
because I take a deeper interest in them than in our own men; no one
will insult me by such a reflection. No. But as for our own soldiers,
does not everyone love them already? Whereas these poor fellows are
really too much misjudged and slandered by the ignorant masses.
"Spare them as soon as they hold up their hands," said a heroic
general, brought home yesterday from the Dardanelles covered with
wounds. He was addressing his men in a proclamation admirable for the
loyalty of its tone. "Spare them," he said; "it is not they who are our
enemies."
So, then, the great life-saving ship which is about to be sent to those
parts is being made ready to sail in all haste. But the Red Cross
Society have herewith taken upon themselves a heavy responsibility, and
it will be readily understood that they will need money, much money.
That is why I make this appeal on their behalf to all the world. So much
has already been given that it is an earnest wish that still more will
be forthcoming, for with us charity is inexhaustible when once the noble
impulse stirs. I would ask that help may be given very soon, for there
is need of dispatch.
How greatly this will change the condition of life for our dear
soldiers. What confidence it will give them to know that if they fall,
seriously wounded, there is waiting for them a place of refuge, like a
little corner of France, which is equivalent to saying a corner of
Paradise, and that they will be taken there at once. Instead of the
miserable makeshift field hospital, too hot and by no means too safe,
where the terrible noise never ceases to rack aching temples, there will
be this refuge, absolutely out of range of gun fire, this great peaceful
ship, open everywhere to the good, wholesome air of the sea, where at
last prevails that silence so passionately desired by sufferers, where
they will be tended with all the latest improvements and the most
ingenious inventions by gentle French nurses in white dresses, whose
noiseless footfall disturbs no slumber nor dream.
XIV
SERBIA IN THE BALKAN WAR
_July, 1915._
But lately I had included Serbia--its prince in particular--in my first
accusations against the Balkan races, when they hurled themselves
together upon Turkey, already at grips with Italy. But later on, in the
course of so many wrathful indictments, I did not once again mention the
name of the Serbians. That was because my information from those parts
proved to me clearly that among the original Allies, the Allies of the
Balkans, the Serbians were the most humane. They themselves, doubtless,
observed that I made no further reference to them, for no insulting
letter reached me from their country, whereas Bulgarians and even Greeks
poured upon me a flood of unseemly abuse.
Since then the great philanthropist, Carnegie, in order to establish
the truth definitely in history, has set on foot a conscientious
international court of inquiry, whose findings, published in a large
volume, have all the authority of the most impartial official documents.
Here are recorded, supported by proofs and signatures, the most
appalling testimonies against Bulgarians and Greeks; but noticeably
fewer crimes are ascribed to Serbia's account. But this volume entitled
"Conquest in the Balkans" (Carnegie Endowment) has, I fear, been too
little read, and it is a duty to bring it to the notice of all.
Moreover, who would refuse pardon to that gallant Serbian nation for the
excesses they may have committed? Who would not accord to them the
profound sympathy of France to-day, when the Prussian Emperor, in his
ruthless ferocity, has sacrificed them as a bait for one of his most
abominable and knavish plots? Poor little Serbia! With what magnificent
heroism she has succeeded in defending herself against an enemy who did
not even shrink from the atrocious act of burning her capital at a time
when it was peopled solely by women and children! Poor little Serbia,
suddenly become a martyr, and sublime! I would willingly at least win
back for her some French hearts which my last book may perhaps have
alienated. And that is the sole purpose of this letter.
XV
ABOVE ALL LET US NEVER FORGET!
_August 1st, 1915._
A year ago to-day began that shameful violation of Belgian territory. In
the midst of these appalling horrors, time, it seems, has hastened still
more in its bewildered flight, and already we have reached the
anniversary of that foul deed, the blackest that has ever defiled the
history of the human race. This crime was committed after long,
hypocritical premeditation, and no pang of remorse, no vestige of shame,
caused those myriads of accomplices to stay their hands. It is a crime
that leaves with us, in addition to immeasurable mourning, an impression
of infinite sadness and discouragement, because it proves that one of
the greatest countries in Europe is hopelessly bankrupt of all that men
have agreed to call honour, civilisation, and progress. The barbarian
onslaughts of ancient days were not only a thousand times less
murderous, but, let it be specially noted, incomparably less revolting
in character. There were certain dastardly deeds, certain acts of
profanation, certain lies, at which those hordes that came to us from
Asia hesitated; an instinctive reverence still restrained them; and,
moreover, in those times they did not destroy with such impudent
cynicism, invoking the God of Christians in a burlesque pathos of
prayer!
Thus in our own day has arisen a grisly Emperor, with a pack of
princelings, his own progeny, a litter of wolves, whose most savage and
at the same time most cowardly representative wears a death's head upon
his helmet; and generals and millions of Germans have been found ready
to unite, after a calculated preparation of nearly half a century, in
committing this same preliminary crime, the forerunner of so many
others, and by way of prelude, to crush ignobly in their advance a
little nation whom they had deemed without defence.
But lo! the little nation arose, quivering with sacred indignation, and
attempted to check the great barbarism, suddenly unmasked; to check it
for at least a few days, even at the cost of a seemingly inevitable doom
of annihilation.
What starry crowns can history award worthy of that Belgian nation and
of their King, who did not fear to bid them set themselves there as a
barrier.
King Albert of Belgium, dispossessed to-day of his all and banished to a
hamlet--what tribute of admiration and homage can we offer him worthy of
his acceptance and sufficiently enduring? Upon tablets of flawless
marble let us carve his name in deep letters so that it may be well
insured against the fugitiveness of our French memories, which, alas!
have sometimes proved a little untrustworthy, at least in face of the
age-long infamies of Germany. May we remember for ever, we, and even our
far distant posterity, that to save civilised Europe, and especially our
own country of France, King Albert did not for one moment shrink from
those sheer, unconditional sacrifices which seemed beyond human
strength. Spurning the tempting compromises offered by that monstrous
emperor, he has fulfilled to the end his duty of loyal hero with a calm
smile, as if nothing were more natural. And so perfect is his modesty
that he is surprised if he is told that he has been sublime.