The character of European peoples failed in common sense and in
Christian charity. It did not fail in courage to endure great agonies,
to suffer death largely, to be obedient to the old tradition of
patriotism and to the stoic spirit of old fighting races.
In courage I do not think there was much difference between the chief
combatants. The Germans, as a race, were wonderfully brave until their
spirit was broken by the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food.
Many times through all those years they marched shoulder to shoulder,
obedient to discipline, to certain death, as I saw them on the Somme,
like martyrs. They marched for their Fatherland, inspired by the spirit
of the German race, as it had entered their souls by the memory of old
German songs, old heroic ballads, their German home life, their German
women, their love of little old towns on hillsides or in valleys, by
all the meaning to them of that word Germany, which is like the name of
England to us--who is fool enough to think otherwise?--and fought often,
a thousand times, to the death, as I saw their bodies heaped in the
fields of the Somme and round their pill-boxes in Flanders and in the
last phase of the war behind the Hindenburg line round their broken
batteries on the way of Mons and Le Cateau. The German people endured
years of semi-starvation and a drain of blood greater than any other
fighting people--two million dead--before they lost all vitality, hope,
and pride and made their abject surrender. At the beginning they were
out for conquest, inspired by arrogance and pride. Before the end they
fought desperately to defend the Fatherland from the doom which cast its
black shadow on them as it drew near. They were brave, those Germans,
whatever the brutality of individual men and the cold-blooded cruelty of
their commanders.
The courage of France is to me like an old heroic song, stirring the
heart. It was medieval in its complete adherence to the faith of valor
and its spirit of sacrifice for La Patrie. If patriotism were enough as
the gospel of life--Nurse Cavell did not think so--France as a nation
was perfect in that faith. Her people had no doubt as to their duty. It
was to defend their sacred soil from the enemy which had invaded it. It
was to hurl the brutes back from the fair fields they had ravaged
and despoiled. It was to liberate their brothers and sisters from the
outrageous tyranny of the German yoke in the captured country. It was to
seek vengeance for bloody, foul, and abominable deeds.
In the first days of the war France was struck by heavy blows which sent
her armies reeling back in retreat, but before the first battle of the
Marne, when her peril was greatest, when Paris seemed doomed, the
spirit of the French soldiers rose to a supreme act of faith--which was
fulfilled when Foch attacked in the center, when Manoury struck on
the enemy's flank and hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen hurled
themselves, reckless of life, upon the monster which faltered and then
fled behind the shelter of the Aisne. With bloodshot eyes and parched
throats and swollen tongues, blind with sweat and blood, mad with the
heat and fury of attack, the French soldiers fought through that first
battle of the Marne and saved France from defeat and despair.
After that, year after year, they flung themselves against the German
defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, as at Verdun, against
colossal onslaught, until the dead lay in masses. But the living said,
“They shall not pass!” and kept their word.
The people of France--above all, the women of France--behind the lines,
were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with despair,
through many black months, and did not yield. They did the work of their
men in the fields, and knew that many of them--the sons or brothers or
lovers or husbands--would never return for the harvest-time, but did not
cry to have them back until the enemy should be thrust out of France.
Behind the German line, under German rule, the French people, prisoners
in their own land, suffered most in spirit, but were proud and patient
in endurance.
“Why don't your people give in?” asked a German officer of a woman in
Nesle. “France is bleeding to death.”
“We shall go on for two years, or three years, or four, or five, and in
the end we shall smash you,” said the woman who told me this.
The German officer stared at her and said, “You people are wonderful!”
Yes, they were wonderful, the French, and their hatred of the Germans,
their desire for vengeance, complete and terrible, at all cost of life,
even though France should bleed to death and die after victory, is to be
understood in the heights and depths of its hatred and in the passion of
its love for France and liberty. When I think of France I am tempted to
see no greater thing than such patriotism as that to justify the gospel
of hate against such an enemy, to uphold vengeance as a sweet virtue.
Yet if I did so I should deny the truth that has been revealed to many
men and women by the agony of the war--that if civilization may continue
patriotism is “not enough,” that international hatred will produce other
wars worse than this, in which civilization will be submerged, and that
vengeance, even for dreadful crimes, cannot be taken of a nation without
punishing the innocent more than the guilty, so that out of its cruelty
and injustice new fires of hatred are lighted, the demand for vengeance
passes to the other side, and the devil finds another vicious circle in
which to trap the souls of men and “catch 'em all alive O!”
To deny that would also be a denial of the faith with which millions of
young Frenchmen rushed to the colors in the first days of the war. It
was they who said, “This is a war to end war.” They told me so. It was
they who said: “German militarism must be killed so that all militarism
shall be abolished. This is a war for liberty.” So soldiers of France
spoke to me on a night when Paris was mobilized and the tragedy began.
It is a Frenchman--Henri Barbusse--who, in spite of the German invasion,
the outrages against his people, the agony of France, has the courage
to say that all peoples in Europe were involved in the guilt of that war
because of their adherence to that old barbaric creed of brute force and
the superstitious servitude of their souls to symbols of national pride
based upon military tradition. He even denounces the salute to the flag,
instinctive and sacred in the heart of every Frenchman, as a fetish
worship in which the narrow bigotry of national arrogance is raised
above the rights of the common masses of men. He draws no distinction
between a war of defense and a war of aggression, because attack is the
best means of defense, and all peoples who go to war dupe themselves
into the belief that they do so in defense of their liberties, and
rights, and power, and property. Germany attacked France first because
she was ready first and sure of her strength. France would have attacked
Germany first to get back Alsace-Lorraine, to wipe out 1870, if she also
had been ready and sure of her strength. The political philosophy on
both sides of the Rhine was the same. It was based on military power and
rivalry of secret alliances and imperial ambitions. The large-hearted
internationalism of Jean Jaures, who with all his limitations was a
great Frenchman, patriot, and idealist, had failed among his own
people and in Germany, and the assassin's bullet was his reward for the
adventure of his soul to lift civilization above the level of the old
jungle law and to save France from the massacre which happened.
In war France was wonderful, most heroic in sacrifice, most splendid
in valor. In her dictated peace, which was ours also, her leaders were
betrayed by the very evil which millions of young Frenchmen had gone out
to kill at the sacrifice of their own lives. Militarism was exalted in
France above the ruins of German militarism. It was a peace of vengeance
which punished the innocent more than the guilty, the babe at the breast
more than the Junker in his Schloss, the poor working-woman more than
the war lord, the peasant who had been driven to the shambles more than
Sixt von Arnim or Rupprecht of Bavaria, or Ludendorff, or Hindenburg. It
is a peace that can only be maintained by the power of artillery and by
the conscription of every French boy who shall be trained for the next
“war of defense” (twenty years hence, thirty years hence), when Germany
is strong again--stronger than France because of her population,
stronger then, enormously, than France, in relative numbers
of able-bodied men than in August, 1914. So if that philosophy
continue--and I do not think it will--the old fear will be
re-established, the old burdens of armament will be piled up anew, the
people of France will be weighed down as before under a military regime
stifling their liberty of thought and action, wasting the best years of
their boyhood in barracks, seeking protective alliances, buying allies
at great cost, establishing the old spy system, the old diplomacy, the
old squalid ways of inter--national politics, based as before on fear
and force. Marshal Foch was a fine soldier. Clemenceau was a strong
Minister of War. There was no man great enough in France to see beyond
the passing triumph of military victory and by supreme generosity of
soul to lift their enemy out of the dirt of their despair, so that
the new German Republic should arise from the ruins of the Empire,
remorseful of their deeds in France and Belgium, with all their rage
directed against their ancient tyranny, and with a new-born spirit of
democratic liberty reaching across the old frontiers.
Is that the foolish dream of the sentimentalist? No, more than that; for
the German people, after their agony, were ready to respond to generous
dealing, pitiful in their need of it, and there is enough sentiment in
German hearts--the most sentimental people in Europe--to rise with a
surge of emotion to a new gospel of atonement if their old enemies had
offered a chance of grace. France has not won the war by her terms of
peace nor safeguarded her frontiers for more than a few uncertain
years. By harking back to the old philosophy of militarism she has
re-established peril amid a people drained of blood and deeply in debt.
Her support of reactionary forces in Russia is to establish a government
which will guarantee the interest on French loans and organize a new
military regime in alliance with France and England. Meanwhile France
looks to the United States and British people to protect her from
the next war, when Germany shall be strong again. She is playing the
militarist role without the strength to sustain it.