agents of other nations, were unravelling German plots and collecting
data of treachery so irrefutable that it had to be accepted. When all
was ready the first chapters of the story were divulged. They were
divulged almost in the form of a serial novel, so that the man who
read his paper to-day and said, "No doubt that isolated item is true,
but it doesn't incriminate the entire German nation," next day on
opening his paper, found further proof and was forced to retreat to
more ingenious excuses. One day he was informed of Germany's abuse of
neutral embassies and mail-bags; the next of the submarine bases in
Mexico, prepared as a threat against American shipping; the day after
that the whole infamous story of how Berlin had financed the Mexican
Revolution. Germany's efforts to provoke an American-Japanese war
leaked out, her attempts to spread disloyalty among German-Americans,
her conspiracies for setting fire to factories and powder-plants,
including the blowing up of bridges and the Welland Canal. Quietly,
circumstantially, without rancour, the details were published of
the criminal spider-web woven by the Dernburgs, Bernstorffs and Von
Papens, accredited creatures of the Kaiser, who with Machiavellian
smiles had professed friendship for those whom their hands itched to
slay and strangle. Gradually the camouflage of bovine geniality was
lifted from the face of Germany and the dripping fangs of the Blonde
Beast were displayed--the Minotaur countenance of one glutted
with human flesh, weary with rape and rapine, but still tragically
insatiable and lusting for the new sensation of hounding America to
destruction.
I have not placed these revelations in their proper sequence; some
were made after war had been declared. They had the effect of changing
every decent American into a self-appointed detective. The weight
of evidence put Germany's perfidy beyond dispute; clues to new and
endless chains of machinations were discovered daily. The Hun had come
as a guest into America's house with only one intent--to do murder as
soon as the lights were out.
The anger which these disclosures produced knew no bounds. Hun
apologists--the type of men who invariably believe that there is a
good deal to be said on both sides--quickly faded into patriots. There
had been those who had cried out for America's intervention from the
first day that Belgium's neutrality had been violated. Many of these,
losing patience, had either enlisted in Canada or were already in
France on some errand of mercy. Their cry had reached Washington at
first only as a whisper, very faint and distant. Little by little that
cry had swelled, till it became the nation's voice, angry, insistent,
not to be disregarded. The most convinced humanitarian, together with
the sincerest admirer of the old-fashioned kindly Hans, had to join in
that cry or brand himself a traitor by his silence.
America came into the war, as every country came, because her life was
threatened. She is not fighting for France, Great Britain, Belgium,
Serbia; she is fighting to save herself. I am glad to make this
point because I have heard camouflaged Pro-Germans and thoughtless
mischief-makers discriminating between the Allies. "We are not
fighting for Great Britain," they say, "but for plucky France." When I
was in New York last October a firm stand was being made against these
discriminators; some of them even found themselves in the hands of the
Secret Service men. The feeling was growing that not to be Pro-British
was not to be Pro-Ally, and that not to be Pro-Ally was to be
anti-American. This talk of fighting for somebody else is all lofty
twaddle. America is fighting for America. While the statement is
perfectly true, Americans have a right to resent it.
In September, 1914, I crossed to Holland and was immensely disgusted
at the interpretation of Great Britain's action which I found current
there. I had supposed that Holland would be full of admiration; I
found that she was nothing of the sort. We Britishers, in those early
days, believed that we were magnanimous big brothers who could have
kept out of the bloodshed, but preferred to die rather than see the
smaller nations bullied. Men certainly did not join Kitchener's mob
because they believed that England's life was threatened. I don't
believe that any strong emotion of patriotism animated Canada in her
early efforts. The individual Briton donned the khaki because he was
determined to see fair play, and was damned if he would stand by a
spectator while women and children were being butchered in Belgium.
He felt that he had to do something to stop it. If he didn't, the same
thing would happen in Holland, then in Denmark, then in Norway. There
was no end to it. When a mad dog starts running the best thing to do
is to shoot it.
But the Hollanders didn't agree with me at all. "You're fighting for
yourselves," they said. "You're not fighting to save us from being
invaded; you're not fighting to prevent the Hun from conquering
France; you're not fighting to liberate Belgium. You're fighting
because you know that if you let France be crushed, it will be your
turn next."
Quite true--and absolutely unjust. The Hollander, whose households
we were guarding, chose to interpret our motive at its most ignoble
worth. Our men were receiving in their bodies the wounds which would
have been inflicted on Holland, had we elected to stand out. In the
light of subsequent events, all the world acknowledges that we
were and are fighting for our own households; but it is a glorious
certainty that scarcely a Britisher who died in those early days had
the least realisation of the fact. It was the chivalrous vision of
a generous Crusade that led our chaps from their firesides to the
trampled horror that is Flanders. They said farewell to their habitual
affections, and went out singing to their marriage with death.
I suppose there has been no war that could not be interpreted
ultimately as a war of self-interest. The statesmen who make wars
always carefully reckon the probabilities of loss or gain; but the
lads who kiss their sweethearts good-bye require reasons more vital
than those of pounds, shillings and pence. Few men lay down their
lives from self-interested motives. Courage is a spiritual quality
which requires a spiritual inducement. Men do not set a price on their
chance of being blown to bits by shells. Even patriotism is too vague
to be a sufficient incentive. The justice of the cause to be fought
for helps; it must be proportionate to the magnitude of the sacrifice
demanded. But always an ideal is necessary--an ideal of liberty,
indignation and mercy. If this is true of the men who go out to die,
it is even more true of the women who send them,
"Where there're no children left to pull
The few scared, ragged flowers--
All that was ours, and, God, how beautiful!
All, all that was once ours,
Lies faceless, mouthless, mire to mire,
So lost to all sweet semblance of desire
That we, in those fields seeking desperately
One face long-lost to love, one face that lies
Only upon the breast of Memory,
Would never find it--even the very blood
Is stamped into the horror of the mud--
Something that mad men trample under-foot
In the narrow trench--for these things are not men--
Things shapeless, sodden, mute
Beneath the monstrous limber of the guns;
Those things that loved us once...
Those that were ours, but never ours again."
For two and a half years the American press specialized on the terror
aspect of the European hell. Every sensational, exceptional fact was
not only chronicled, but widely circulated. The bodily and mental
havoc that can be wrought by shell fire was exaggerated out of all
proportion to reality. Photographs, almost criminal in type, were
published to illustrate the brutal expression of men who had taken
part in bayonet charges. Lies were spread broadcast by supposedly
reputable persons, stating how soldiers had to be maddened with
drugs or alcohol before they would go over the top. Much of what was
recorded was calculated to stagger the imagination and intimidate the
heart. The reason for this was that the supposed eye-witnesses rarely
saw what they recorded. They had usually never been within ten miles
of the front, for only combatants are allowed in the line. They
brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to
their task; they never for one instant guessed the truly spiritual
exaltation which gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a
just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation, death--moral, mental
and physical deformity were the rewards which the American public
learned the fighting man gained in the trenches. They heard very
little of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sacrifice, the
gallant self-effacement which having honor for a companion taught.
And yet, despite this frantic portrayal of terror, America decided
for war. Her National Guard and Volunteers rolled up in millions,
clamouring to cross the three thousand miles of water that they might
place their lives in jeopardy. They were no more urged by motives of
self-interest than were the men who enlisted in Kitchener's mob. It
wasn't the threat to their national security that brought them; it
was the lure of an ideal--the fine white knightliness of men whose
compassion had been tormented and whose manhood had been challenged.
When one says that America came into the war to save herself it is
only true of her statesmen; it is no more true of her masses than it
was true of the masses of Great Britain.
So far, in my explanation as to why America came into the war, I have
been scarcely more generous in the attributing of magnanimous motives
than my Hollander. To all intents and purposes I have said, "America
is fighting because she knows that if the Allies are over-weakened or
crushed, it will be her turn next." In discussing the matter with
me, one of our Generals said, "I really don't see that it matters a
tuppenny cuss why she's fighting, so long as she helps us to lick
the Hun and does it quickly." But it does matter. The reasons for her
having taken up arms make all the difference to our respect for her.
Here, then, are the reasons which I attribute: enthusiasm for the
ideals of the Allies; admiration for the persistency of their heroism;
compassionate determination to borrow some of the wounds which
otherwise would be inflicted upon nations which have already suffered.
A small band of pioneers in mercy are directly responsible for
this change of attitude in two and a half years from opportunistic
neutrality to a reckless welcoming of martyrdom.
At the opening of hostilities in 1914, America divided herself into
two camps--the Pro-Allies and the others. "The others" consisted of
people of all shades of opinion and conviction: the anti-British,
anti-French, the pro-German, the anti-war and the merely neutral, some
of whom set feverishly to work to make a tradesman's advantage out of
Europe's misfortune. A great traffic sprang up in the manufacture of
war materials. Almost all of these went to the Allies, owing to the
fact that Britain controlled the seas. Whether they would not have
been sold just as readily to Germany, had that been possible, is a
matter open to question. In any case, the camp of "The Others" was
overwhelmingly in the majority.
One by one, and in little protesting bands, the friends of the Allies
slipped overseas bound on self-imposed, sacrificial quests. They went
like knight-errants to the rescue; while others suffered, their own
ease was intolerable. The women, whom they left, formed themselves
into groups for the manufacture of the munitions of mercy. There were
men like Alan Seeger, who chanced to be in Europe when war broke out;
many of these joined up with the nearest fighting units. "I have
a rendezvous with death," were Alan Seeger's last words as he fell
mortally wounded between the French and German trenches. His voice
was the voice of thousands who had pledged themselves to keep that
rendezvous in the company of Britishers, Belgians and Frenchmen, long
before their country had dreamt of committing herself. Some of these
friends of the Allies chose the Ford Ambulance, others positions in
the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, and yet others the more
forceful sympathy of the bayonet as a means of expressing their wrath.
Soon, through the heart of France, with the tricolor and the Stars and
Stripes flying at either end, "le train Américaine" was seen hurrying,
carrying its scarlet burden. This sight could hardly be called neutral
unless a similar sight could be seen in Germany. It could not.
The Commission for the Relief of Belgium was actually anything
but neutral; to minister to the results of brutality is tacitly to
condemn.
At Neuilly-sur-Seine the American Ambulance Hospital sprang up.
It undertook the most grievous cases, making a specialty of facial
mutilations. American girls performed the nursing of these pitiful
human wrecks. Increasingly the crusader spirit was finding a gallant
response in the hearts of America's girlhood. By the time that
President Wilson flung his challenge, eighty-six war relief
organizations were operating in France. In very many cases these
organizations only represented a hundredth part of the actual
personnel working; the other ninety-nine hundredths were in the
States, rolling bandages, shredding oakum, slitting linen, making
dressings. Long before April, 1917, American college boys had won a
name by their devotion in forcing their ambulances over shell torn
roads on every part of the French Front, but, perhaps, with peculiar
heroism at Verdun. Already the American Flying Squadron has earned
a veteran's reputation for its daring. The report of the sacrificial
courage of these pioneers had travelled to every State in the Union;
their example had stirred, shamed and educated the nation. It is to
these knight-errants--very many of them boys and girls in years--to
the Mrs. Whartons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the Thaws that I
attribute America's eager acceptance of Calvary, when at last it
was offered to her by her Statesmen. From an anguished horror to
be repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in whose heart lay
hidden the treasure-trove of national honor.
The individual American soldier is inspired by just as altruistic
motives as his brother-Britisher. Compassion, indignation, love of
justice, the determination to see right conquer are his incentives.
You can make a man a conscript, drill him, dress him in uniform, but
you cannot force him to face up to four years to do his job unless the
ideals were there beforehand. I have seen American troop-ships come
into the dock with ten thousand men singing,
"Good-bye, Liza,
I'm going to smash the Kaiser."
I have been present when packed audiences have gone mad in reiterating
the American equivalent for _Tipperary_, with its brave promise,
"We'll be over,
We're coming over,
And we won't be back till it's over, over there."
But nothing I have heard so well expresses the cold anger of the
American fighting-man as these words which they chant to their
bugle-march, "We've got four years to do this job."
II
WAR AS A JOB
I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch three separate nations
facing up to the splendour of Armageddon--England, France, America.
The spirit of each was different. I arrived in England from abroad the
week after war had been declared. There was a new vitality in the
air, a suppressed excitement, a spirit of youth and--it sounds
ridiculous--of opportunity. The England I had left had been wont to
go about with a puckered forehead; she was a victim of
self-disparagement. She was like a mother who had borne too many
children and was at her wits' end to know how to feed or manage them.
They were getting beyond her control. Since the Boer War there had
been a growing tendency in the Press to under-rate all English effort
and to over-praise to England's discredit the superior pushfulness
of other nations. This melancholy nagging which had for its constant
text, "Wake up, John Bull," had produced the hallucination that there
was something vitally the matter with the Mother Country. No one
seemed to have diagnosed her complaint, but those of us who grew weary
of being told that we were behind the times, took prolonged trips to
more cheery quarters of the globe. It is the Englishman's privilege to
run himself down; he usually does it with his tongue in his cheek. But
for the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the prophets
of Fleet Street certainly carried their privilege beyond a joke.
Pessimism was no longer an amusing pose; it was becoming a habit.
One week of the iron tonic of war had changed all that. The atmosphere
was as different as the lowlands from the Alps; it was an atmosphere
of devil-may-care assurance and adventurous manhood. Every one had the
summer look of a boat-race crowd when the Leander is to be pulled off
at Henley. In comparing the new England with the old, I should have
said that every one now had the comfortable certainty that he was
wanted--that he had a future and something to live for. But it wasn't
the something to live for that accounted for this gay alertness; it
was the sure foreknowledge of each least important man that he had
something worth dying for at last.
A strange and magnificent way of answering misfortune's challenge--an
Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business
as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and
unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out
and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should
break our hearts by their going.
Death may be regarded as a funeral or as a Columbus expedition to
worlds unknown--it may be seized upon as an opportunity for weeping
or for a display of courage. From the first day in her choice England
never hesitated; like a boy set free from school, she dashed out to
meet her danger with laughter. Her high spirits have never failed her.
Her cavalry charge with hunting-calls upon their lips. Her Tommies go
over the top humming music-hall ditties. The Hun is still "jolly old
Fritz." The slaughter is still "a nice little war." Death is still
"the early door." The mud-soaked "old Bills" of the trenches,
cheerfully ignoring vermin, rain and shell fire, continue to wind up
their epistles with, "Hoping this finds you in the pink, as it leaves
me at present." They are always in the pink for epistolary purposes,
whatever the strafing or the weather. That's England; at all costs,
she has to be a sportsman. I wonder she doesn't write on the crosses
above her dead, "_Yours in the pink:_ _a British soldier, killed in
action_." England is in the pink for the duration of the war.
The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I don't blame him. Our high
spirits impress him as untimely and indecent. War for him is not
a sport. How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities
flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners in occupied
territories? For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces with a
fierce gladness. His spirit is well illustrated by an incident that
happened the other day in Paris. A descendant of Racine, a well-known
figure at the opera, was travelling in the Metro when he spotted a
poilu with a string of ten medals on his breast. The old aristocrat
went over to the soldier and apologised for speaking to him. "But," he
said, "I have never seen any poilu with so many decorations. You must
be of the very bravest."
"That is nothing," the man replied sombrely; "before they kill me I
shall have won many more. This I earned in revenge for my wife, who
was brutally murdered. And this and this and this for my daughters who
were ravished. And these others--they are for my sons who are now no
more."
"My friend, if you will let me, I should like to embrace you." And
there, in the sight of all the passengers, the old habitué of the
opera and the common soldier kissed each other. The one satisfaction
that the French blind have is in counting the number of Boche they
have slaughtered. "In that raid ten of us killed fifty," one will say;
"the memory makes me very happy."
Curiously enough the outrage that makes the Frenchman most revengeful
is not the murder of his family or the defilement of his women, but
the wilful killing of his land and orchards. The land gave birth to
all his flesh and blood; when his farm is laid waste wilfully, it
is as though the mother of all his generations was violated. This
accounts for the indomitable way in which the peasants insist on
staying on in their houses under shell-fire, refusing to depart till
they are forcibly turned out.
We in England, still less in America, have never approached the
loathing which is felt for the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter
his name, as though the very word was foul in the mouth.
In the face of all that they have suffered, I do not wonder that the
French misunderstand the easy good-humour with which we English go
out to die. In their eyes and with the continual throbbing of
their wounds, this war is an occasion for neither good-humour nor
sportsmanship, but for the wrath of a Hebrew Jehovah, which only blows
can appease or make articulate. If every weapon were taken from their
hands and all their young men were dead, with naked fists those who
were left would smite--smite and smite. It is fitting that they should
feel this way, seeing themselves as they do perpetually frescoed
against the sky-line of sacrifice; but I am glad that our English boys
can laugh while they die.
In trying to explain the change I found in England after war had
commenced, I mentioned Henley and the boat-race crowds. I don't think
it was a change; it was only a bringing to the surface of something
that had been there always. Some years ago I was at Henley when the
Belgians carried off the Leander Cup from the most crack crew that
England could bring together. Evening after evening through the
Regatta week the fear had been growing that we should lose, yet none
of that fear was reflected in our attitude towards our Belgian guests.
Each evening as they came up the last stretch of river, leading by
lengths and knocking another contestant out, the spectators cheered
them madly. Their method of rowing smashed all our traditions; it
wasn't correct form; it wasn't anything. It ought to have made one
angry. But these chaps were game; they were winning. "Let's play
fair," said the river; so they cheered them. On the last night when
they beat Leander, looking fresh as paint, leading by a length and
taking the championship out of England, you would never have guessed
by the flicker of an eyelash that it wasn't the most happy conclusion
of a good week's sport for every oarsman present.
It's the same spirit essentially that England is showing to-day. She
cheers the winner. She trusts in her strength for another day. She
insists on playing fair. She considers it bad manners to lose one's
temper. She despises to hate back. She has carried this spirit so far
that if you enter the college chapels of Oxford to-day, you will find
inscribed on memorial tablets to the fallen not only the names of
Britishers, but also the names of German Rhodes Scholars, who died
fighting for their country against the men who were once their
friends. Generosity, justice, disdain of animosity-these virtues were
learnt on the playing-fields and race-courses. England knows their
value; she treats war as a sport because so she will fight better. For
her that approach to adversity is normal.
With us war is a sport. With the French it is a martyrdom. But with
the Americans it is a job. "We've got four years to do this job. We've
got four years to do this job," as the American soldiers chant. I
think in these three attitudes towards war as a martyrdom, as sport
and as a job, you get reflected the three gradations of distance
by which each nation is divided from the trenches. France had her
tribulation thrust upon her. She was attacked; she had no option.
England, separated by the Channel, could have restrained the weight
of her strength, biding her time. She had her moment of choice, but
rushed to the rescue the moment the first Hun bayonet gleamed across
the Belgian threshold. America, fortified by the Atlantic, could not
believe that her peace was in any way assailed. The idea seemed
too madly far-fetched. At first she refused to realise that this
apportioning of a continent three thousand miles distant from Germany
was anything but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their dotage. It was
inconceivable that it could be the practical and achievable cunning of
military bullies and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly for her
to display any vivid burst of anger. "It isn't true," she said. And
then, "It seems incredible." And lastly, "What infernal impertinence!"