THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS?
In England, when war came, the confusion was unbelievable. All that
Gard had seen, heard, gone through in Deutschland proved the
awfulness of the Force flung against Europe which had stupidly
considered itself civilized.
He was burning to enlist. But what a chagrin to find his services
not wanted! The only satisfaction he could get lay in the suggestion
to wait. The more he was put off, the more he was bent on reaching
the firing line.
In his enforced and impatient idleness he took out his German note
book and began writing letters to Rebner in America, thus giving
partial vent to his own feelings. The following brief extracts were
written first as he went about different camps, offering himself,
then at the front:
_England, October, 1914._
... You know how I went to Germany at your urging, with every
favorable impulse toward the Germans. But you had little idea
what they are. If our fellow-Americans realized what was thought
and said of them beyond the Rhine, they would be in battle now.
As there is no prospect of our Government wanting fighting men,
I am trying to get into the English service. No success yet....
How could you, my good mentor, be so in error about the race
from which you sprang? Had you been in Germany, the scales would
have dropped from your eyes. You have never lived with the
Germans there--only read the best about the "most advanced" of
mankind. They are so different from our American-Germans. You
did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty
in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before
women, kicks his children about, has coarse or vulgar ideas on
female chastity, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say of
anyone beyond his boundaries.
Pray do not fancy I am pretending to chide _you_. Weren't we all
like you in America, dazzled before what apparently we were
humbly ready to admit as the super-race? And yet in a multitude
of ways it is so obviously a people set off by itself in much
barbarism. There is its Gothic script which offends the eye
somewhat like outlandish runes. Its very language growls and
snorts at you, sounds threatening as if angry--pardon me for
these sentences! There are its mud-colored towns and
architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious,
with tastelessness prevailing.
The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy
sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by
thumpings in some form. The Teuton's inability to see himself as
another sees him--is this not, above all, the stamp of an
under-civilized people?...
* * * * *
_England, October, 1914._
... Do not think I am unduly harsh, prejudiced, revengeful. I am
trying to write in measured terms of what has been forced in
upon me and my attention against my wish or expectations.
I have met but one American who said that war was at hand and
knew what the Germans really are at home. He was an elderly
journalist in Dresden who was jeered at until he almost imagined
himself mentally unbalanced. Others thought him so, at any rate.
But Anderson was a true prophet. Dear isolated, desolated soul!
I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he got out safely. How I
wish I could grasp his hand and say, How wise were your
convictions!
Like myself he had gone to Deutschland to admire and love the
Germans. But he found what I found--an astonishing amount of
ruthlessness. How could one expect that the ultimate
world-justice and world-humanity were to evolve out of a race to
which the army, armed soldiers and statesmen clad in steel,
stand for so much?
How could anything of universal good come from a people who
consider nothing from the viewpoint of a kindly common
brotherhood? Contempt, intolerance, physical force, are what
they gloat over in international relations. I discovered that
when they must ask pardon or make amends, they do so with bad
grace. They do not take a magnanimous and frank satisfaction or
pleasure in righting a wrong.
You would not believe how lacking their character is in the
capacity for penitence, for atonement. We will never see them
sorry for any of their present enormities. The still, small
voice in them has not been allowed to develop. Their notion of
ethics is so different that it is inadmissible from our
standards.
To be sensitive, grieve, suffer morally, is apart from their
normal consciousness. For all this tender and beautiful side of
human nature they substitute only the discomforted feelings of
defeat. No matter how this present conflict ends, he who looks
for any sympathetic actions or noble regrets from them will be
dumfounded....
* * * * *
_England, November, 1914_.
Hurrah! I am at last, after disappointments and frettings, under
way for Flanders. Lo, I am become, as it were, an Englishman!
The British now see the full peril and are taking almost any
kind of men, and I'm going along. I suppose it is because I am
so keyed up that I feel so well. I'm surprised at myself. I
guess I must have, after all, a little good Anglo-Saxon grit in
me.
I am trying to write this scrawl to you on a round milk
container in a camp near London. We are not permitted to tell
where....
As I was on the point of saying in my last letter, Jesus is
never a watchword in Germany. The Nazarene meekness makes small
appeal there. All is Gott. The Teuton regards Christ as too much
of a weakling. Had He an army? Could He shoot, as all Germans
can? He would not fight and therefore was properly destroyed.
If His foolish ideas were followed, the weak would eventually
rule the earth whereas, to the German mind, the strong should
manifestly rule the earth. The strongest are the fittest, and
the fittest should alone survive.
To the Goth the Christian religion and philosophy are baneful,
baleful. As the result of their feeble policy was not Christ
followed--the Germans claim--by the Dark Ages when mankind was
obsessed by His superstitious worship? Lifting men out of this
morass, the proper practical, scientific and warlike forces came
at length into play and we have the magnificent modern régime
whose basis is armed strength.
Hence--it is argued--Germany came into her own and inevitably
leads the world. She represents the perfection of organized
physical and mental powers which are the antitheses of the
Christ ideal.
And so you never hear much in Deutschland about Peace and Good
Will, Do as You would be Done by, Faith, Hope and Charity and
the greatest of these is Charity. Such Christian texts and
mottoes, which fill our American homes, churches and public
places, are little in evidence in Germany because they do not
enter into the life. The popular nomenclature is pagan rather
than Biblical. Already in this war we behold the Kaiser drawing
his names for forts and trenches from his wild pagan mythology,
not from Christian sources. And in Deutschland, acts in the
field count for so much more than words in the pulpit.
If the Huns win, Teuton hate will, of course, succeed Christian
love as the human creed. Friendship, as we know it, will largely
cease to exist. Friends will be those who can be cowed into
truculence or bought. There will be no truth, justice, equity,
in our meaning. Only the will or whim of the Emperor. His State
Church, with its worship of Him, will grow as _the_ church.
Everything that southern and western Europe stands for, from
ancient Greece to the northern points of Scotland and Ireland
(with America in addition)--beauty, loveableness, the
brightness of life with its joyousness, gayety, grace,
charm--will be stamped down under the metallic heels of the
Kaiser's battalions and bureaucrats....
* * * * *
_Boulogne, January, 1915_.
After what I have written you from Germany, and since, about my
unexpected disillusionment, you will ask me:
"Well, enough of this. What ought to be done or can be done
about it?"
I am thinking about a solution. Not original, for its framework
was suggested by my old journalistic friend. I will send you an
outline of his idea as he gave it to me one day. All that he
said and prophesied has come so direfully true that I have now
full faith and confidence in his vision and practical sense on
the subject of the Goth race. For he _lived_ and observed among
them seven years.
That's the great point--_living together_. And I do not mean
living together when people are mature or old but when
_young_--when minds, sympathies, etc., are plastic and pliable.
As long as the young Germans are kept home--never sent abroad
unless as spies in some form--the Teutons will remain Huns.
Granted that they can't help it if they are born with the Hun
strain in their blood which their education or instruction not
only preserves but enrages. Admit that they want any barbarism
eliminated from their veins. That would be an important point
over which our world should hold out to them the glad hand....
Don't be offended, but the best thing that I learned in college
was to throw well from left field. At any rate it saved my life,
I suppose, at Aix. And I've grown wonderfully fond of pepper. It
braces a chap for this Iceland wind that howls down upon us at
times. We call baseball and football a part of education. Good,
brave things. The Germans don't have them because they have only
"instruction."
From what I observed beyond the Rhine, education is a growth in
free and liberal countries. As we are seeing in the war, German
instruction turns out experts, but also intellectual monsters
and scientific fiends--instructed heathens....
Strange to say, I don't believe I could have stood this
existence here if my system had not got a good cleansing out
when I was sick. I am all the time thinking about the Huns. And
it is strictly necessary hereabouts.