intermingle, where friendships have been formed which yesterday would
not have seemed possible, where men of the world will have learnt that
the soul of a peasant, an artisan, a common workman may prove itself as
great and good as that of a very fine gentleman, and of even deeper
interest, being more impulsive, more transparent and with less veneer
upon it.
In trenches, communication trenches, little dark labyrinths, little
tunnels where men suffer and sacrifice themselves, there will be found
established our best and purest school of socialism. But by this term
socialism, a term too often profaned, I mean true socialism, be it
understood, which is synonymous with tolerance and brotherhood, that
socialism, in a word, which Christ came to teach us in that clear
formula, which in its adorable simplicity sums up all formulae, "Love one
another."
XXV
THE TWO GORGON HEADS
"My plan is first to take possession. At a later stage I can
always find learned men to prove that I was acting within my
just rights."
FREDERICK II.
(_called, for want of a better epithet, the Great_).
I
THEIR KAISER
_April, 1916._
There are certain faces of the accursed, which reveal in the end with
the coming of old age the accumulated horror and darkness that has been
seething in the depths of the soul. The features are by no means always
ignoble, but on these faces something is imprinted which is a thousand
times worse than ugliness, and none can bear to look upon them. Thus it
is with their Kaiser. The sight of his sinister presentment alone, a
mere glimpse of the smallest portrait of him reproduced in a newspaper,
is sufficient to make the blood run cold. Oh that viperine eye of his,
shaded by flaccid lids, that smile twisted awry by all his secret vices,
his utter hypocrisy, morbid brutality, added to cold ferocity, and
overweening arrogance which in itself is enough to provoke a horsewhip
to lash him of its own accord. Once in an old temple in Japan I saw a
gruesome work of art, which was considered a masterpiece of genre
painting, and had been preserved for centuries, wrapped in a veil, in
one of the coffers containing temple treasures.
It is well known how highly the Japanese esteem gruesome works of art,
and what masters their artists are in the cult of the horrible. It was a
mask of a human face, with features, if anything, rather regular and
refined, but if you looked at it attentively its appalling expression,
at the same time cruel and lifeless, haunted you for days and nights.
From out the cadaverous flesh, livid and lined, gleamed its two eyes,
partly closed, but one more so than the other, and they seemed to wink,
as if to say:
"For a long time, while I lay waiting there in my box, I meditated some
ghastly surprise for you, and at last you have come; you are in my
power, and here it is."
Well, for those who have eyes to see, the face of their Kaiser is as
shocking as that mask, hidden away in the old temple over there; it
matters not in what kind of helmet, more or less savage in design, he
may choose to trick himself out, whether it have a spike or a death's
head. In all the years during which the terrible expression of this man
has haunted me, I not only shared the presentiment common to everyone
else that he was "meditating some surprise for us," but I had a
foreboding that his plot would be laid with diabolical wickedness and
would prove more terrible than all the crimes of old, uncivilised times.
And I said to myself:
"It is of vital importance for the safeguard of humanity to kill that
thing."
Indeed he should have been killed, the hyena slain, before his latent
rabidness had completely developed, or at least he should have been
chained up, muzzled, imprisoned behind close set and solid bars.
What could have possessed the anarchists, to whom such an opportunity
presented itself of redeeming their character, of deserving the
gratitude of the world, what could have possessed them? When there is
question of killing a sovereign they attempt the life of the charming
young King of Spain. From the Austrian court, which held a far more
suitable victim, they select and stab the mysterious and lovely Empress,
who never harmed a soul. And of the quartet of kings in the Balkans,
their choice fell upon the King of Greece, when there was that monster
Coburg close at hand, an opportunity truly unique.
Their Kaiser, their unspeakable, Protean Kaiser, whenever it seems that
everything possible has been said about him, bewilders one by breaking
out in some new direction which no one could ever have foreseen. After
his almost doltish obstinacy in persistently posing his Germany as the
victim who was attacked, in spite of most blinding evidence to the
contrary, most formal written proofs, most crushing confessions which
escaped the lips of his accomplices, did he not just recently feel a
need to "swear before God" that his conscience was pure and that he had
not wished for war? Before what God? Obviously before his own, "his old
God," proper to himself, whom in private he must assuredly call, "my old
Beelzebub." What excellent taste, moreover, to couple that epithet "old"
with such a name!
This Kaiser of theirs seems to have received from his old Beelzebub not
only a mission to spread abroad the uttermost mourning, to cause the
most abundant outpouring of blood and tears, but also a mission to shoot
down all forms of beauty, all religious memorials; a mission to profane
everything, defile everything, and disfigure everything that he should
fail to destroy. He has succeeded even in bringing dishonour on science,
by degrading it to play the part of accomplice in his crimes. Moreover
it is not merely that this war of his, this war which he forced upon us
with such damnable deliberation, will have been a thousand times more
destructive of human life than all the wars of the past collectively,
but he must needs likewise attack with vindictive fury, he and his
rabble of followers, all those treasures of art which should have
remained an inviolable heritage of civilised Europe. And if ever he had
succeeded in realising his dream of morbid vanity and becoming absolute
tyrant of the world, not by means of explosives and scrap-iron alone
would he have achieved the ruin of all art, but through the incurably
bad taste of his Germany. It is sufficient to have visited Berlin, the
capital city of pinchbeck, of the gilded decorations of the parvenu, to
form an idea of what our towns would have become. And with a shudder one
contemplates the rapid and final decadence of those wonderful Eastern
towns, Stamboul, Damascus, Bagdad, upon the day when they should submit
to his law.
This unspeakable Kaiser of theirs, how cunningly sometimes he adds to
dishonour a touch of the grotesque. For instance, did he not lately
offer as a pledge to that insignificant King of Greece his word of a
Hohenzollern? The day after the violation of Belgium to dare to offer
his word was admirable enough, but to add that his word was that of a
Hohenzollern, what a happy conceit! Is it the result of dense
unconsciousness or of the insolent irony with which he regards his timid
brother-in-law, at whose little army, on the occasion of a visit to
Athens, he scoffed so disdainfully? Who that has some slight tincture of
history is ignorant of the fact that during the five hundred years of
its notoriety the accursed line of the Hohenzollern has never produced
anything but shameless liars, kites that prey on flesh. As early as 1762
did not the great Empress Maria Theresa write of them in these terms:
"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."
Unhappy King of Greece, who approached too near to the glare of the
Gorgon, and lies to-day annihilated almost by its baleful influence!
Should not his example be as much an object lesson--though without the
heroism and the glory--for sovereigns of neutral nations who have still
been spared, as the examples of the King of Belgium and the King of
Serbia?
Their Kaiser, whose mere glance is ominous of death, baffles reason and
common sense. The morbid degeneracy of his brain is undeniable, and yet
in certain respects it is nevertheless a brain excellently ordered for
planning evil, and it has made a special study of the art of slaughter.
For the honour of humanity let us grant that he is mad, as a certain
prince of Saxony has just publicly declared.
Agreed; he is mad. His case may actually be classified as teratological,
and in any other country but Germany this war of his would have resulted
for him in a strait-waistcoat and a cell. But alas for Europe! the
accident of his birth has made him Kaiser of the one nation capable of
tolerating him and of obeying him--a people cruel by nature and rendered
ferocious by civilisation, as Goethe avers; a people of infinite
stupidity, as Schopenhauer confesses in his last solemn testament.
In some respects this infinite stupidity he himself shares. Otherwise
would he have failed so irremediably in his first outset in 1914 as to
imagine up to the very last moment that England would not stir, even in
face of Belgium's great sacrifice.[3] And is there not at least as much
folly as ferocity in his massacres of civilians, his torpedoing of ships
belonging to neutral countries, his outrages in America, his Zeppelins,
his asphyxiating gas; all those odious crimes which he personally
instigated, and which have had merely the result of concentrating upon
himself and his German Empire universal hatred and disgust?
After forty years of feverish preparation, with such formidable
resources at his disposal, shrinking from no measures however atrocious
and vile, trammelled by no law of humanity, by no pang of conscience, to
wallow thus in blood, and yet after all to achieve nothing but
failure--there is no other explanation possible; some essential quality
must be lacking in his murderous brain. And the nation must indeed be
German in character still to suffer itself to be led onwards to its
downfall by an unbalanced lunatic responsible for such blunders. They
are led onwards to downfall and butchery. And is there never a limit to
the sheepish submission of a people who at this very moment are
suffering themselves to be slaughtered like mere cattle in attacks
directed with imbecile fury by a microcephalous youth, equally devoid of
intelligence and soul?
II
FERDINAND OF COBURG
But recently it would have seemed an impossible wager to undertake to
find an even more abominable monster than their Kaiser and their Crown
Prince. Nevertheless the wager has been made and won; this Coburg has
been found.
And to think that in his time he aroused the enthusiasm of the majority
of our women of France! About the year 1913, when I alone was beginning
to nail him to the pillory, they were exalting his name and flaunting
his colours. "Paladin of the Cross"--as such he was popularly known
among us. Oh, a sincere paladin he was, to be sure, wearing the
scapular, steeped in Masses, after the fashion of Louis XI., yet one
fine morning secretly forcing apostasy upon his son. Moreover we know
that to-day, for our entertainment, he is making preparations for a
second comedy of conversion to the Catholic faith, which he recently
renounced for political reasons, and over there he will find priests
ready to bless the operation and to keep a straight face the while.
He, too, has a Gorgon's head, and his face, like the Kaiser's, is marked
with the stigmata of knavery and crime. Twenty-five years ago, at the
railway station of Sofia, when for the first time I came under the
malevolent glance of his small eyes, I felt my nerves vibrate with that
shudder of disgust which is an instinctive warning of the proximity of a
monster, and I asked:
"Who is that vampire?"
Someone replied in a low, apprehensive voice:
"It is our prince; you should bow to him."
Ah, no indeed; not that!
In private life this man has proved himself a cowardly assassin,
committing his murders from a safe distance, for he prudently crossed
the border whenever his executioner had "work to do" by his orders. And
then, as soon as any particular headsman threatened to compromise him he
would take effective steps to cripple him.[4]
And this man, too, offers up prayers in imitation of that other.
Recently, when there was a hope that his great accomplice was at last
about to die of the hereditary taint in his blood, he knelt for a long
time between two rows of Germans, convoked as audience, to plead with
heaven for his recovery--a monster praying on behalf of another
monster--and he arose, steeped in divine grace, and said to the
audience:
"I have never before prayed so fervently."
Those heavy-witted Boches, for whose benefit these apish antics were
performed, were even they able to restrain their wild laughter? In
political life, likewise, he is an assassin, attempting the life of
nations. After his first foul act of treason against Serbia, his former
ally, whom he took in the rear without any declaration of war, he
endeavoured, it will be remembered, to throw upon his ministers the
blame of a crime which was threatening to turn out badly. And again
without warning he deals another traitorous blow to the same race of
heroes, already overwhelmed by immense hordes of barbarians, like a
highwayman who, under pretence of helping, comes from behind to give the
finishing stroke to a man already at grips with a band of robbers.
Poor little Serbia, now grown great and sublime! Lately, in my first
moments of indignation at the report that reached me of deeds of horror
perpetrated in Thrace and Macedonia, I had accused her undeservedly of
sharing in the guilt. Once again in these pages I tender her with all my
heart my _amende honorable_.
If Germany's _entente_ with Turkey was so little capable of being
accomplished unassisted that it was found necessary to have recourse to
the "suicide" of the hereditary prince, the _entente_ with Bulgaria was
made spontaneously. _Their_ Kaiser and this scion of the Coburgs, who
emulates him, and is, as it were, his duplicate in miniature, found each
other fatally easy to understand. That such sympathy was likely to exist
between them might have been gathered from a mere comparison of the two
faces, each bearing the same expression of beasts that prowl in the
night. How was it that our diplomatists, accredited to the little court
of Sofia, suspected nothing nearly twenty months ago, when the treaty
of brigandage was signed in secret? And to-day, until one devours the
other, behold them united, these two beings, the refuse of humanity,
compared with whom the foulest, most hardened offenders, who drag a
cannon-ball along in a convict's prison, seem to have committed nothing
but harmless and trifling offences.
Arouse yourselves, then, neutral nations, great and small, who still
fail to realise that had it not been for us your turn would have come to
be trampled underfoot like Belgium, like Serbia and Montenegro only
yesterday! The world will not breathe freely until these ultimate
barbarians have been completely crushed; how is it that you have not
felt this? What else can be necessary to open your eyes? If it is not
enough for you to witness in our country all the ruin inflicted on us of
set purpose and to no useful end, to read a vast number of irrefutable
testimonies of furious massacres which spared not even our little
children; if all this is not enough look nearer home, look at the
insolent irony with which this predatory race brings pressure to bear
upon you, look at all the outrages, done audaciously or by stealth,
which have already been committed on the other side of the ocean. Or
again, if indeed you are blind to that which goes on around you, at
least survey briefly all the writings, during centuries, of their men of
letters, their "great men." You will be horrified to discover on every
page the most barefaced apology for violence, rapine, and crime. Thus
you will establish the fact that all the horror with which Europe is
inundated to-day was contained from the beginning in embryo there in
German brains, and, moreover, that no other race on earth would have
dared to denounce itself with such cynical insensibility. And you,
priests or monks, belonging to the clergy of a neighbouring country,
who reproach us with impiety and are the blindest of men in
proselytising for our enemies, turn over a few pages of the official
manifesto addressed to the Belgian bishops, and tell us what to think of
the soul of a people who continually take in vain the name of the "All
Highest" in their burlesque prayers, and then make furious attacks on
all the sanctuaries of religion, cathedrals, or humble village churches,
overthrowing the crucifixes and massacring the priests. Is it logically
possible for anyone, not of their accursed race, to love the Germans?
That a nation may remain neutral I can understand, but only from fear,
or from lack of due preparation, or perhaps, without realising it, for
the lure of a certain momentary gain, through a little mistaken and
shortsighted selfishness. Oh, doubtless it is a terrible thing to hurl
oneself into such a fray! Yet neutrality, hesitation even, become worse
than dangerous mistakes; they are already almost crimes.
An insane scoundrel dreamed of forcing upon us all the ways of two
thousand years ago, the degrading serfdom of ancient days, the dark ages
of old; he plotted to bring about for his own profit a general
bankruptcy of progress, liberty, human thought, and after us, you, you
neutral nations, were designated as sacrifices to his insatiable,
ogreish appetite. At least help us a little to bring to a more rapid
conclusion this orgy of robbery, destruction, massacres, and bloodshed.
Enough, let us awaken from this nightmare! Enough, let the whole world
arise! Whosoever holds back to-day, will he not be ashamed to keep his
place in the sun of victory and peace when it once more shines upon us?
And we, when at last we have laid low the rabid hyena, after pouring
out our blood in streams, should we not almost have a right to say,
with our weapons still in our hands:
"You neutral nations, who will profit by the deliverance, having taken
no part in the struggle, the least you can do is to repay us in some
measure with your territory or with your gold?"
Oh, everywhere let the tocsin clang, a full peal, ringing from end to
end of the earth; let the supreme alarm ring out, and let the drums of
all the armies roll the charge! And down with the German Beast!
FOOTNOTES:
[3] In addition to a thousand other widely known examples of his
shameless knavery, I record another instance, which, moreover, may
easily be verified; an instance perhaps not yet sufficiently widely
published. Be it known to everyone that on August 2nd, 1914, on the very
eve of the violation of Belgium, when the German Army was already massed
on the frontier and all the orders had been given for the attack the
next day, King Albert called upon the Kaiser for an explanation. The
Kaiser replied officially through his diplomatists:
"The Belgians have no cause for alarm. I have not the slightest
intention of repudiating my signature."
[4] Panitza, Stambouloff, etc.
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