As Hindenburg and the Kaiser came down, as we read, from Mont d’Hiver,
during the recent offensive, they saw on the edge of a crater two
wounded British soldiers. The Kaiser ordered that they should be cared
for: their wounds were bound up and they were given brandy, and
brought round from unconsciousness. That is the German account of it,
and it may well be true. It was a kindly act.
Probably had it not been for this the two men would have died among
those desolate craters; no one would have known, and no one could have
been blamed for it.
The contrast of this spark of imperial kindness against the gloom of
the background of the war that the Kaiser made is a pleasant thing to
see, even though it illuminates for only a moment the savage darkness
in which our days are plunged. It was a kindness that probably will
long be remembered to him. Even we, his enemies, will remember it. And
who knows but that when most he needs it his reward for the act will
be given him.
For Judas, they say, once in his youth, gave his cloak, out of
compassion, to a shivering beggar, who sat shaken with ague, in rags,
in bitter need. And the years went by and Judas forgot his deed. And
long after, in Hell, Judas they say was given one day’s respite at the
end of every year because of this one kindness he had done so long
since in his youth. And every year he goes, they say, for a day and
cools himself among the Arctic bergs; once every year for century
after century.
Perhaps some sailor on watch on a misty evening blown far out of his
course away to the north saw something ghostly once on an iceberg
floating by, or heard some voice in the dimness that seemed like the
voice of man, and came home with this weird story. And perhaps, as the
story passed from lip to lip, men found enough justice in it to
believe it true. So it came down the centuries.
Will seafarers ages hence on dim October evenings, or on nights when
the moon is ominous through mist, red and huge and uncanny, see a
lonely figure sometimes on the loneliest part of the sea, far north of
where the Lusitania sank, gathering all the cold it can? Will they see
it hugging a crag of iceberg wan as itself, helmet, cuirass and ice
pale-blue in the mist together? Will it look towards them with
ice-blue eyes through the mist, and will they question it, meeting on
those bleak seas? Will it answer--or will the North wind howl like
voices? Will the cry of seals be heard, and ice floes grinding, and
strange birds lost upon the wind that night, or will it speak to them
in those distant years and tell them how it sinned, betraying man?
It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely part of the sea, when he
confesses to sailors, blown too far north, the dreadful thing he
plotted against man. The date on which he is seen will be told from
sailor to sailor. Queer taverns of distant harbours will know it well.
Not many will care to be at sea that day, and few will risk being
driven by stress of weather on the Kaiser’s night to the bergs of the
haunted part of sea.
And yet for all the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass
and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the
sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the
children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners
meeting him in the mist grudge him no moment of the day he has earned,
or the coolness he gains from the bergs, because of the kindness he
did to the wounded men. For the mariners in their hearts are kindly
men, and what a soul gains from kindness will seem to them well
deserved.