Legion, the Tailleurs, the Moroccans--all marching in one direction,
eastward to the trenches. There were rumours of something immense
about to happen--no one knew quite what. Were we going to put on a
new offensive or were we going to resist one? Many answers were given:
they were all guesswork. Meanwhile, our progress was slow; we were
continually halting to let brigades of artillery and regiments
of infantry pour into the main artery of traffic from lanes and
side-roads. When we had backed our car into hedges to give them
room to pass, we watched the sea of faces. They were stern and yet
laughing, elated and yet childish, eloquent of the love of living and
yet familiar with their old friend, Death. They knew that something
big was to be demanded of them; before the demand had been made,
they had determined to give to the ultimate of their strength. There
was a spiritual resolution about their faces which made all their
expressions one--the uplifted expression of the unconquered soul of
France. That expression blotted out their racial differences. It did
not matter that they were Arabs, Negroes, Normans, Parisians; they
owned to one nationality--the nationality of martyrdom--and they
marched with a single purpose, that freedom might be restored to the
world.
When we reached the city to which we journeyed, night had fallen.
There was something sinister about our entry; we were veiled in fog,
and crept through the gate and beneath the ramparts with extinguished
head lights. Scarcely any one was abroad. Those whom we passed, loomed
out of the mist in silence, passed stealthily and vanished.
This city is among the most beautiful in France; until recently,
although within range of the Hun artillery, it had been left
undisturbed. In return the French had spared an equally beautiful city
on the other side of the line. This clemency, shown towards two gems
of architecture, was the result of one of those silent bargains that
are arranged in the language of the guns. But the bargain had been
broken by the time I arrived. Bombing planes had been over; the Allied
planes had retaliated. Houses, emptied like cart-loads of bricks into
the street, were significant of the ruin that was pending. Any moment
the orchestra of destruction might break into its overture. Without
cessation one could hear a distant booming. The fiddlers of death were
tuning up.
Early next morning I went to see the Préfet. He is an old man, whose
courage has made him honoured wherever the French tongue is spoken.
Others have thought of their own safety and withdrawn into the
interior. Never from the start has his sense of duty wavered. Night
and day he has laboured incessantly for the refugees, whom he refers
to always as "my suffering people." He kept me waiting for some
time. Directly I entered he volunteered the explanation: he had just
received word from the military authorities that the whole of his
civil population must be immediately evacuated. To evacuate a civil
population means to tear it up and transplant it root and branch, with
no more of its possession than can be carried as hand-baggage. Some
75,000 people would be made homeless directly the Préfet published the
order.
It was a dramatic moment, full of tragedy. I glanced out into the
square filled with wintry sunlight. I took note of the big gold gates
and the monuments. I watched the citizens halting here and there to
chat, or going about their errands with a quiet confidence. All this
was to be shattered; it had been decided. The same thing was to happen
here as had happened at Yprés. The bargain was off. The enemy city,
the other side of the line, was to be shelled; this city had to take
the consequences. The bargain was off not only as far as the city was
concerned, but also as regards its inhabitants' happiness. They had
homes to-day; they would be fugitives to-morrow. Then I looked at
the old Préfet, who had to break the news to them. He was sitting at
his table in his uniform of office, supporting his head in his tired
hands.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I have called on the Croix Rouge Américaine to help me," he
said. "They have helped me before; they will help me again. These
Americans--I have never been to America--but they are my friends.
Since they came, they have looked after my babies. Their doctors and
nurses have worked day and night for my suffering people. They are
silent; but they do things. There is love in their hands."
While I was still with him the Red Cross officials arrived. They had
already wired to Paris. Their lorries and ambulances were converging
from all points to meet the emergency. They undertook at once to place
all their transport facilities at his disposal. They had started their
arrangements for the handling of the children. Extra personnel were
being rushed to the spot. There was one unit already in the city. They
had hoped to go nearer to the Front, but on arriving had learnt that
their permission had been cancelled. It was a bit of luck. They could
set to work at once.
I knew this unit and went out to find it. It was composed of American
society girls, who had been protected all their lives from ugliness.
They had sailed from New York with the vaguest ideas of the war
conditions they would encounter; they believed that they were needed
to do a nurse-maid's job for France. Their original purpose was to
found a crêche for the babies of women munition-workers. When they
got to Paris they found that such institutions were not wanted. They
at once changed their programme, and asked to be allowed to take
their crêche into the army zone and convert it into a hospital for
refugee children. There were interminable delays due to passport
formalities--the delays dragged on for three months. During those
three months they were called on for no sacrifice; they lived just
as comfortably as they had done in New York and, consequently, grew
disgusted. They had sailed for France prepared to give something that
they had never given before, and France did not seem to want it. At
last their passports came; without taking any chances, they got out
of Paris and started for the Front. Their haste was well-timed; no
sooner had they departed than a message arrived, cancelling their
permissions. They had reached the doomed city in which I was at
present, two days before its sentence was pronounced. Within four
hours of their arrival they had had their first experience of being
bombed. Their intention had been to open their hospital in a town
still nearer to the front-line. The hospital was prepared and waiting
for them. But in the last few days the military situation had changed.
A hospital so near the trenches stood a good chance of being destroyed
by shell-fire; so once again the unit was held up. It volunteered to
abandon its idea of running the hospital for children; it would run it
as a first aid hospital for the armies. The offer was refused. These
girls, whose gravest interest a year ago had been the season's dances
and the latest play, were determined to experience the thrill of
sacrifice. So here they were in the doomed city, as the Red Cross
officials said, "by luck"--the very place where they were most needed.
When I visited them, after leaving the Préfet's, they had not yet
heard that they were to be allowed to stay. They had heard nothing of
the city's sentence or of the evacuation of the civil population. All
they knew was that the hospital, which had been appointed with their
money, was only a few kilometres away and that they were forbidden
even to see it. They were gloomy with the fear that within a handful
of days they would be again walking the boulevards of Paris. When
the news was broken to them of the part they were to play, the full
significance of it did not dawn on them at once. "But we don't want
anything easy," they complained; "this isn't the Front." "It will
be soon," the official told them. When they heard that they cheered
up; then their share in the drama was explained. In all probability
the city would soon be under constant shell-fire. Refugees would be
pouring back from the forward country. The people of the city itself
had to be helped to escape before the bombardment commenced. They
would have to stay there taking care of the children, packing them
into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the
wounded and decrepit out of danger and always returning to it again
themselves. As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed on
them their faces brightened. Risk and service, that was what they most
desired; they were girls, but they hungered to play a soldier's part.
They had only dreamt of serving when they had sailed from New York.
Those three months of waiting had stung their pride. It was in Paris
that the dream of risk had commenced. They would make France want
them. Their chance had come.
When I came out into the streets again the word was spreading. Carts
were being loaded in front of houses. Everything on wheels, from
wagons to perambulators, was being piled up. Everything on four legs,
dogs, cattle, horses, was being harnessed and made to do its share
in hauling. We left the city, going back to the next point where the
refugees would be cared for. On either side of the road, as far as eye
could stretch, trenches had been dug, barricades thrown up, blockades
and wire-entanglements constructed. It all lay very quiet beneath the
sunlight. It seemed a kind of preposterous pretence. One could not
imagine these fields as a scene of battle, sweating torture and agony
and death. I looked back at the city, one of the most beautiful in
France, growing hazy in the distance with its spires and its ramparts.
Impossible! Then I remembered the carts being hurriedly loaded and
the uplifted faces of those American girls. Where had I seen their
expression before? Yes. Strange that they should have caught it! Their
expression was the same as that which I had noticed on the Tailleurs,
the Foreign Legion and the Moroccans--the crack troops of France....
So they had become that already! At the first hint of danger, their
courage had taken command; they had risen into soldiers.
Through villages swarming with troops and packed with ordnance
we arrived at an old caserne, which has been converted into the
children's hospital of the district. It is in charge of one of the
first of America's children's specialists. While he works among the
refugees, his wife, who is a sculptress, makes masks for the facially
mutilated. He has brought with him from the States some of his
students, but his staff is in the main cosmopolitan. One of his nurses
is an Australian, who was caught at the outbreak of hostilities in
Austria and because of her knowledge, despite her nationality, was
allowed to help to organise the Red Cross work of the enemy. Another
is a French woman who wears the Croix de Guerre with the palm. She
saved her wounded from the fury of the Hun when her village was lost,
and helped to get them back to safety after it had been recaptured.
The Matron is Swedish and Belgian. The ambulance-drivers are some
of the American boys who saw service with the French armies. In this
group of workers there are as many stories as there are nationalities.
If the workers have their stories, so have the five hundred little
patients. This barrack, converted into a hospital, is full of babies,
the youngest being only six days old when I was there. Many of the
children have no parents. Others have lost their mothers; their
fathers are serving in the trenches. It is not always easy to find out
how they became orphans; there are such plentiful chances of losing
parents who live continually under shell-fire. One little boy on being
asked where his mother was, replied gravely, "My Mama, she is dead.
Les Boches, they put a gun to 'er 'ead. She is finished; I 'ave no
Mama."
The unchildlike stoicism of these children is appalling. I spent
two days among them and heard no crying. Those who are sick, lie
motionless as waxen images in their cots. Those who are supposedly
well, sit all day brooding and saying nothing. When first they arrive,
their faces are earth-coloured. The first thing they have to be taught
is how to be children. They have to be coaxed and induced to play;
even then they soon grow weary. They seem to regard mere playing as
frivolous and indecorous; and so it is in the light of the tragedies
they have witnessed. Children of seven have seen more of horror in
three years than most old men have read about in a life-time. Many
of them have been captured by and recaptured from the Huns. They have
been in villages where the dead lay in piles and not even the women
were spared. They have been present while indecencies were worked upon
their mothers. They have seen men hanged, shot, bayoneted and flung
to roast in burning houses. The pictures of all these things hang
in their eyes. When they play, it is out of politeness to the kind
Americans; not because they derive any pleasure from it.
Night is the troublesome time. The children hide under their beds with
terror. The nurses have to go the rounds continually. If the children
would only cry, they would give warning. But instead, they creep
silently out from between the sheets and crouch against the floor like
dumb animals. Dumb animals! That is what they are when first they
are brought in. Their most primitive instincts for the beginnings of
cleanliness seem to have vanished. They have been fished out of caves,
ruined dug-outs, broken houses. They are as full of skin-diseases as
the beggar who sat outside Dives' gate, only they have had no dogs to
lick their sores. They have lived on offal so long that they have the
faces of the extremely aged. And their hatred! Directly you utter the
word "Boche," all the little night-gowned figures sit up in their cots
and curse. When they have done cursing, of their own accord, they sing
the Marseillaise.
Surely if God listens to prayers of vengeance, He will answer the
husky petitions of these victims of Hun cruelty! The quiet, just,
deep-seated venom of these babies will work the Hun more harm than
many batteries. Their fathers come back from the trenches to see them.
On leaving, they turn to the American nurses, "We shall fight better
now," they say, "because we know that you are taking care of them."
When those words are spoken, the American Red Cross knows that it is
achieving its object and is winning its war of compassion. The whole
drive of all its effort is to win the war in the shortest possible
space of time. It is in Europe to save children for the future, to
re-kindle hope in broken lives, to mitigate the toll of unavoidable
suffering, but first and foremost to help men to fight better.
IV
THE LAST WAR
_The last war!_ I heard the phrase for the first time on the evening
after Great Britain had declared war. I was in Quebec en route for
England, wondering whether my ship was to be allowed to sail. There
had been great excitement all day, bands playing the Marseillaise,
Frenchmen marching arm-in-arm singing, orators, gesticulating and
haranguing from balconies, street-corners and the base of statues.
Now that the blue August night was falling and every one was released
from work, the excitement was redoubled. Quebec was finding in war
an opportunity for carnival. Throughout all the pyramided city the
Tri-colour and the Union Jack were waving. At the foot of the Heights,
the broad basin of the St. Lawrence was a-drift in the dusk with
fluttering pennons. They looked like homing birds, settling in
dovecotes of the masts and rigging.
As night deepened, Chinese lanterns were lighted and carried on poles
through the narrow streets. Troops of merry-makers followed them,
blowing horns, dragging bells, tin-cans, anything that would make a
noise and express high spirits. They linked arms with girls as they
marched and were lost, laughing in the dusk. If a French reservist
could be found who was sailing in the first ship bound for the
slaughter, he became the hero of the hour and was lifted shoulder high
at the head of the procession. War was a brave game at which to play.
This was to be a short war and a merry one. Down with the Germans! Up
with France! Hurrah for the entente cordiale!
Beneath the coronet of stars on the Heights of Abraham the spirit of
Wolfe kept watch and brooded. It was under these circumstances, that I
heard the phrase for the first time--_the last war_.
The street was blocked with a gaping crowd. All the faces were raised
to an open window, two storeys up, from which the frame had been taken
out. Inside the building one could hear the pounding of machinery,
for it was here that the most important paper of Quebec was printed.
Across a huge white sheet a man on a hanging platform painted the
latest European cables. A cluster of electric lights illuminated him
strongly; but he was not the centre of the crowd's attention. In the
window stood another man. Like myself he was waiting for his ship
to sail, but not to England--to France. He was a returning French
reservist. Across the many miles of ocean the hand of duty had
stretched and touched him; he was ecstatically glad that he was
wanted. In those first days this ecstasy of gladness was a little hard
to understand. Thank God we all share it instinctively now. He was
speaking excitedly, addressing the crowd. They cheered him; they were
in a mood to cheer anybody. His face was thin with earnestness; he
was a spirit-man. He waved aside their applause with impatience. He
was trying to inspire them with his own intensity. In the intervals
between the shouting, I caught some of his words, "I am setting out
to fight the last war--the war of humanity which will bring universal
peace and friendship to the world."
A sailor behind me spat. He was drunk and feeling the need of
sympathy. He began to explain to me the reason. He was a fireman on
one of the steamers in the basin and a reservist in the British Navy.
He had received his orders that day to report back in England for
duty; he knew that he was going to be torpedoed on his voyage across
the Atlantic. How did he know? He had had a vision. Sailors always had
visions before they were drowned. It was to combat this vision that he
had got drunk.
I shook him off irritably. One didn't require the superstitions of an
alcoholic imagination to emphasize the new terror which had overtaken
the world. There was enough of fear in the air already. All this
spurious gaiety--what was it? Nothing but the chatter of lonely
children who were afraid to listen to the silence--afraid lest they
might hear the creaking footstep of death upon the stairs. And these
candles, lighting up the fringes of the night--they were nothing but a
vain pretence that the darkness had not gathered.
But this spirit-man framed in the window, he was genuine and
different. Yesterday we should have passed him in the street
unnoticed; to-day the mantle of prophecy clothed him. Within two
months he might be dead--horribly dead with a bayonet through him.
That thought was in the minds of all who watched him; it gave him an
added authority. Yet he was not thinking of himself, of wounds,
of death; he was not even thinking of France. He was thinking of
humanity: "I am setting out to fight the last war--the war of humanity
which will bring universal peace and friendship to the world."
Since the war started, how often have we heard that phrase--_the last
war!_ It became the battle-cry of all recruiting-men, who would have
fought under no other circumstances, joined up now so that this might
be the final carnage. Nations left their desks and went into battle
voluntarily, long before self-interest forced them, simply because
organised murder so disgusted them that they were determined by weight
of numbers to make this exhibition of brutality the last.
Before Europe burst into flames in 1914, we believed that the last
war had been already fought. The most vivid endorsement of this belief
came out of Germany in a book which, to my mind, up to that time was
the strongest peace-argument in modern literature. It was so strong
that the Kaiser's Government had the author arrested and every copy
that could be found destroyed. Nevertheless, over a million were
secretly printed and circulated in Germany, and it was translated into
every major European language. The book I refer to was known under its
American title as, _The Human Slaughter-House_. It told very simply
how men who had played the army game of sticking dummies, found
themselves called upon to stick their brother-men; how they obeyed at
first, then sickened at sight of their own handiwork, until finally
the rank and file on both sides flung down their arms, banded
themselves together and refused to carry out the orders of their
generals. There was no declaration of peace; in that moment national
boundaries were abolished.
In 1912 this sounded probable. I remember the American press-comments.
They all agreed that national prejudices had been broken down to such
an extent by socialism and friendly intercourse, that never again
would statesmen be able to launch attacks of nations against nations.
Governments might declare war; the peoples whom they governed would
merely overthrow them. The world had become too common-sense to commit
murder on so vast a scale.
Had it? The world in general might have: but Germany had not. The
argument of _The Human Slaughter-House_ proposed by a German in
protest against what he foresaw was surely coming, turned out to be a
bad guess. It made no allowance for what happens when a mad dog starts
running through the world. One may be tender-hearted. One may not like
killing dogs. One may even be an anti-vivisectionist; but when a dog
is mad, the only humanitarian thing to do is to kill it. If you don't,
the women and children pay the penalty.
We have had our illustration in Russia of what occurs when one side
flings away its arms, practising the idealistic reasonings which this
book propounds: the more brutal side conquers. While the Blonde Beast
runs abroad spreading rabies, the only idealist who counts is the
idealist who carries a rifle on his shoulder--the only gospel to which
the world listens is the gospel which saviours are dying for.
The last war! It took us all by surprise. We had believed so utterly
in peace; now we had to prove our faith by being prepared to die for
it. If we did not die, this war would not be the last; it would be
only the preface to the next. To paraphrase the words of Mr. Wells,
"We had been prepared to take life in a certain way and life had taken
us, as it takes every generation, in an entirely different way. We had
been prepared to be altruistic pacifists, and ..."
And here we are, in this year of 1918, engaged upon the bloodiest war
of all time, harnessing the muscle and brain-power of the universe
to one end--that we may contrive new and yet more deadly methods
of butchering our fellow men. The men whom we kill, we do not hate
individually. The men whom we kill, we do not see when they are dead.
We scald them with liquid fire; we stifle them with gas; we drop
volcanoes on them from the clouds; we pull firing-levers three, ten,
even fifteen miles away and hurl them into eternity unconfessed. And
this we do with pity in our hearts, both for them and for ourselves.
And why? Because they have given us no choice. They have promised,
unless we defend ourselves, to snatch our souls from us and fashion
them afresh into souls which shall bear the stamp of their own image.
Of their souls we have seen samples; they date back to the dark
ages--the souls of Cain, Judas and Cæsar Borgia were not unlike them.
Of what such souls are capable they have given us examples in Belgium,
captured France and in the living dead whom they return by way of
Evian. We would rather forego our bodies than so exchange our souls.
A Germanised world is like a glimpse of madness; the very thought
strikes terror to the heart. Yet it is to Germanise the world that
Germany is waging war to-day--that she may confer upon us the benefits
of her own proved swinishness. There is nothing left for us but to
fight for our souls like men.