MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
GOING TO WAR IN GREECE
THE WAYS OF THE SERVICE
THE VAGABOND
WITH KUROKI IN MANCHURIA
OVER THE PASS
THE LAST SHOT
MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR
MY YEAR OF THE
GREAT WAR
BY
FREDERICK PALMER
Author of “The Last Shot,” “With Kuroki in Manchuria,”
“The Vagabond,” etc.
[Illustration]
Toronto
McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart
Limited
COPYRIGHT, 1915
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
_First Edition_ OCTOBER
_Second, Third and Fourth Editions_ NOVEMBER
_Fifth Edition_ DECEMBER
Printed in U. S. A.
TO THE READER
In “The Last Shot,” which appeared only a few months before the Great
War began, drawing from my experience in many wars, I attempted to
describe the character of a conflict between two great European
land-powers, such as France and Germany.
“You were wrong in some ways,” a friend writes to me, “but in other
ways it is almost as if you had written a play and they were following
your script and stage business.”
Wrong as to the duration of the struggle and its bitterness; right
about the part which artillery would play; right in suggesting the
stalemate of intrenchments when vast masses of troops occupied the
length of a frontier. Had the Germans not gone through Belgium and
attacked on the shorter line of the Franco-German boundary, the
parallel of fact with that of prediction would have been more complete.
As for the ideal of “The Last Shot,” we must await the outcome to see
how far it shall be fulfilled by a lasting peace.
Then my friend asks, “How does it make you feel?” Not as a prophet;
only as an eager observer, who finds that imagination pales beside
reality. If sometimes an incident seemed a page out of my novel, I was
reminded how much better I might have done that page from life; and
from life I am writing now.
I have seen too much of the war and yet not enough to assume the pose
of a military expert; which is easy when seated in a chair at home
before maps and news despatches, but becomes fantastic after one has
lived at the front. One waits on more information before he forms
conclusions about campaigns. He is certain only that the Marne was a
decisive battle for civilisation; that if England had not gone into the
war the Germanic Powers would have won in three months.
No words can exaggerate the heroism and sacrifice of the French or
the importance of the part which the British have played, which we
shall not realise till the war is over. In England no newspapers were
suppressed; casualty lists were given out; she gave publicity to
dissensions and mistakes which others concealed, in keeping with her
ancient birthright of free institutions which work out conclusions
through discussion rather than taking them ready-made from any ruler or
leader.
Whatever value this book has is the reflection of personal observation
and the thoughts which have occurred to me when I have walked around my
experiences and measured them and found what was worth while and what
was not. Such as they are, they are real.
Most vital of all in sheer expression of military power was the visit
to the British Grand Fleet; most humanly appealing, the time spent in
Belgium under German rule; most dramatic, the French victory on the
Marne; most precious, my long stay at the British front.
A traveller’s view I had of Germany in the early period of the war;
but I was never with the German army which made Americans particularly
welcome for obvious reasons. Between right and wrong one cannot be a
neutral. By foregoing the diversion of shaking hands and passing the
time of day on the Germanic fronts, I escaped having to be agreeable to
hosts warring for a cause and in a manner obnoxious to me. I was among
friends, living the life of one army and seeing war in all its aspects
from day to day, instead of having tourist glimpses.
Chapters which deal with the British army in France and with the
British fleet have been submitted to the censor. In all, possibly one
typewritten page fell foul of the blue pencil. Though the censor may
delete military secrets, he may not prompt opinions. Whatever notes
of praise and of affection which you may read between the lines or in
them spring from the mind and heart. Undemonstratively, cheerily as
they would go for a walk, with something of old-fashioned chivalry, the
British went to death.
Their national weaknesses and strength, revealed under external
differences by association, are more akin to ours than we shall realise
until we face our own inevitable crisis. Though one’s ancestors had
been in America for nearly three centuries and had fought the British
twice for a good cause he was continually finding how much of custom,
of law, of habit, and of instinct he had in common with them; and how
Americans who were not of British blood also shared these as an applied
inheritance that has been the most formative element in the crucible of
the races which has produced the American type.
My grateful acknowledgments are due to the American press associations
who considered me worthy to be the accredited American correspondent
at the British front, and to _Collier’s_ and _Everybody’s_; and may
an author who has not had the opportunity to read proofs request the
reader’s indulgence.
FREDERICK PALMER.
British Headquarters, France.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WHO STARTED IT? 1
II “LE BRAVE BELGE!” 20
III MONS AND PARIS 29
IV PARIS WAITS 36
V ON THE HEELS OF VON KLUCK 47
VI AND CALAIS WAITS 73
VII IN GERMANY 82
VIII HOW THE KAISER LEADS 95
IX IN BELGIUM UNDER THE GERMANS 113
X CHRISTMAS IN BELGIUM 129
XI THE FUTURE OF BELGIUM 142
XII WINTER IN LORRAINE 159
XIII SMILES AMONG RUINS 177
XIV A ROAD OF WAR I KNOW 200
XV TRENCHES IN WINTER 214
XVI IN NEUVE CHAPELLE 226
XVII WITH THE IRISH 246
XVIII WITH THE GUNS 262
XIX ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER 284
XX TRENCHES IN SUMMER 290
XXI A SCHOOL IN BOMBING 310
XXII MY BEST DAY AT THE FRONT 316
XXIII MORE BEST DAY 335
XXIV WINNING AND LOSING 344
XXV THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK 350
XXVI FINDING THE BRITISH FLEET 368
XXVII ON A DESTROYER 374
XXVIII SHIPS THAT HAVE FOUGHT 378
XXIX ON THE “INFLEXIBLE” 393
XXX ON THE FLEET FLAGSHIP 400
XXXI SIMPLY HARD WORK 412
XXXII HUNTING THE SUBMARINE 421
XXXIII THE FLEET PUTS TO SEA 425
XXXIV MANY PICTURES 433
XXXV BRITISH PROBLEMS 446
MY YEAR OF THE GREAT WAR
I
WHO STARTED IT?
The ultimate arbitrament--The diplomatist’s status--The causes in
the aims and ideals of the peoples--Europe’s economic relation
to the rest of the world--The economic cause--“Biological
necessity”--England’s position--Her complacency--The “German
Wedge”--The German system--Modern efficiency methods--“A
machine civil world”--The Kaiser’s mission--A German the
world over--Germany’s plans and ambitions--Her war spirit--
Activities in Italy--The Austrian situation--The Slav-Teuton
racial hatred--France, a nation with a closed-in culture--The
Kaiser’s “peace”--The Germanic “isolation.”
Who started it? Who is to blame? The courts decide the point when there
is a quarrel between Smith and Jones; and it is the ethics of simple
justice that no friend of Smith or Jones should act as judge. When the
quarrel is between nations, the neutral world turns to the diplomatic
correspondence which preceded the breaking-off of relations; and only
one who is a neutral can hope to weigh impartially the evidence on both
sides. For war is the highest degree of partisanship. Every one engaged
is a special pleader.
I, too, have read the White and Blue and Yellow and Green Papers.
Others have analysed them in detail; I shall not attempt it. One
learned less from their dignified phraseology than from the human
motives that he read between the lines. Each was aiming to make out the
best case for its own side; aiming to put the heart of justice into
the blows of its arms. Obviously, the diplomatist is an attorney for a
client. Incidentally, the whole training of his profession is to try
to prevent war. He does try to prevent it; so does every right-minded
man. It is a horror and a scourge, to be avoided as you would avoid
leprosy. When it does come, the diplomatist’s business is to place all
the blame for it with the enemy.
One must go many years back of the dates of the State papers to find
the cause of the Great War. He must go into the hearts of the people
who are fighting, into their aims and ambitions, which diplomatists
make plausible according to international law. More illumining than
the pamphlets embracing an exchange of despatches was the remark of a
practical German: “Von Bethmann-Hollweg made a slip when he talked of a
treaty as a scrap of paper and about hacking his way through. That had
a bad effect.”
Equally pointed was the remark of a practical Briton: “It was a good
thing that the Germans violated the neutrality of Belgium; otherwise,
we might not have gone in, which would have been fatal for us. If
Germany had crushed France and kept the Channel ports, the next step
would have been a war in which we should have had to deal with her
single-handed.”
I would rather catch the drift of a nation’s purpose from the talk
of statesmen in the lobby or in the club than from their official
pronouncements. Von Bethmann-Hollweg had said in public what was
universally accepted in private. He had let the cat out of the bag.
England’s desire to preserve the neutrality of Belgium was not
altogether ethical. If Belgium’s coast had been on the Adriatic rather
than on the British Channel, her wrongs would not have had the support
of British arms.
Great moral causes were at stake in the Great War; but they are
inextricably mixed with cool, national self-interest and racial
hatreds, which are also dictated by self-interest, though not always by
the interests of the human race. One who sees the struggle of Europe
as a spectator, with no hatred in his heart except of war itself,
finds prejudice and efficiency, folly and merciless logic, running in
company. He would return to the simplest principles, human principles,
to avoid confusion in his own mind. Not of Europe, he studies Europe;
he wonders at Europe.
On a map of the world twice the size of a foolscap page, the little
finger’s end will cover the area of the struggle. Europe is a very
small section of the earth’s surface, indeed. Yet at the thought of a
great European war, all the other peoples drew their breath aghast.
When the catastrophe came, all were affected in their most intimate
relations, in their income, and in their intellectual life. Rare was
the mortal who did not find himself taking sides in what would have
seemed to an astronomer on Mars as a local terrestrial upheaval.
From Europe have gone forth the waves of vigour and enterprise which
have had the greatest influence on the rest of the world, in much the
same way that they went forth from Rome over the then known world. The
war in this respect was like the great Roman civil war. The dominating
power of our civilisation was at war with itself. Draw a circle around
England, Scandinavia, the Germanic countries, and France, and you have
the hub from which the spokes radiate to the immense wheel-rim. It is a
region which cannot feed its mouths from its own soil, though it could
amply a little more than a century ago in the Napoleonic struggle. In
a sense, then, it is a physical parasite on the rest of the world; a
parasite which, however, has given its intellectual energy in return
for food for its body.
This war had for its object the delivery of no people from bondage,
except the Belgians after the war had begun; it had no religious
purpose such as the Crusades; it was not the uprising of democracy
like the French Revolution. Those who charged the machine guns and the
wives and mothers who urged them on were unconscious of the real force
disguised by their patriotic fervour. Ask a man to die for money and he
refuses. Ask him to die in order that he may have more butter on his
bread and he refuses. This is putting the cause of war too bluntly.
It is insulting to courage and to self-sacrifice, assessing them as
something set on a counter for sale. For nations do not know why they
fight, as a rule. Processes of evolution and chains of events arouse
their patriotic ardour and their martial instinct till the climax comes
in blows.
The cause of the European war is economic; and, by the same token,
Europe kept the peace for forty years for economic reasons. She was
busy skimming the cream of the resources of other countries. Hers was
the capital, the skill, the energy, the _morale_, the culture, for
exploiting the others. All modern invention originated with her or
with the offspring of her races beyond seas. Steamers brought her raw
material, which she sent back in manufactures; they took forth, in
place of the buccaneers of former days seeking gold, her financiers,
engineers, salesmen, and teachers, who returned with tribute or sent
back the interest on the capital they had applied to enterprise. She
looked down on the rest of the world with something of the Roman
patrician feeling of superiority to outsiders.
But also the medical scientist kept pace with other scientists and with
invention. Sanitation and the preservation of life led to an amazing
rapidity of increase in population. There were more mouths to feed
and more people who must have work and share the tribute. Without the
increase of population it is possible that we should not have had war.
Biological necessity played its part in bringing on the struggle, along
with economic pressure. The richest veins of the mines of other lands,
the most accessible wood of the forests, were taken, and a higher rate
of living all over Europe increased the demand of the numbers.
Most fortunate of all the European peoples were the British. Most
significant in this material progress was the part of Germany. England
had a narrow stretch of salt water between her and the other nations.
They could fight one another by crossing a land frontier; to fight her,
they must cross in ships. She had the advantage of being of Europe and
yet separated from Europe. All the seas were the secure pathway for her
trade, guaranteed for a century by the victory of Trafalgar. By war she
had won her sea power; by war she was the mistress of many colonies.
Germany’s increasing mercantile marine had to travel from a narrow sea
front through the channel called British. Rich was England’s heritage
beyond her own realisation. Hers the accumulated capital; hers the
field of resources under her own flag to exploit.
But she had done more. Through a century’s experience she had learned
the strength of moderation. What she had won by war she was holding
by wisdom. If some one must guard the seas, if some one must have
dominion over brown and yellow races, she was well fitted for the
task. Wherever she had dominion, whether Bombay or Hongkong, there was
freedom in trade and in development for all men. We who have travelled
recognise this.
When the war began, South Africa had no British regular garrisons, but
the Boers, a people who had lost their nation in war with her fifteen
years before, took up arms under her flag to invade a German colony.
India without a parliament, India ruled by English governors, sent her
troops to fight in France. In place of sedition, loyalty from a brave
and hardy white people of another race and from hundreds of millions of
brown men! Such power is not gained by war, but by the policy of fair
play; of live and let live. Measurably, she held in trust those distant
lands for the other progressive nations; she was the policeman of wide
domains. Certainly no neutral, at least no American, envied her the
task. Certainly no neutral, for selfish reasons if for no other, would
want to risk chaos throughout the world by the transfer of that power
to another nation.
England was satiated, as Admiral Mahan said. She had gained all that
she cared to hold. It is not too much to say that, of late years,
colonies might come begging to her doorstep and be refused. Those
who held her wealth were complacent as well as satiated--which
was her danger. For complacency goes with satiation. But she, too,
was suffering from having skimmed the cream, for want of mines and
concessions as rich as those which had filled her coffers, and from
the demand of the increased population become used to a higher rate of
living. Her vast, accumulated wealth in investments the world over was
in relatively few hands. In no great European country, perhaps, was
wealth more unevenly distributed. Her old age pensions and many social
reforms of recent years arose from a restlessness, locally intensified
but not alone of local origin.
Another flag was appearing too frequently in her channel. A wedge was
being forced into her complacency. A competitor who worked twelve hours
a day, while complacency preferred eight or ten, met the Englishman at
every turn. A navy was growing in the Baltic; taxes pressed heavily
on complacency to keep up a navy stronger than the young rival’s. Who
really was to blame for the clerks’ pay being kept down, while the cost
of living went up? That cheap-living German clerk! What capitalist was
pressing the English capitalist? The German! The newspapers were always
hinting at the German danger. Certain interests in England, as in any
other country, were glad to find a scapegoat. Why should Germany want
colonies when England ruled her colonies so well? Germany--always
Germany, whatever way you looked, Germany with her seventy millions,
aggressive, enterprising, industrious, organised! The pressure of the
wedge kept increasing. Something must break.
Does any one doubt that if Germany had been in England’s place she
would have struck the rival in the egg? But that is not the way of
complacency. Nor is it the way of that wisdom of moderation, that live
and let live, which has kept the British Empire intact.
Germany wanted room for her wedge. In Central Europe, with foes on
either side, she had to hold two land frontiers before she could start
her sea wedge. She was the more readily convinced that England had won
all she held by war because modern Germany was the product of war. By
war Prussia won Schleswig-Holstein; by war Germany won Alsace-Lorraine,
and welded the Germanic peoples into a whole. It was only natural that
the German public should be loyal to the system that had fathered
German success.
Thus, England reveres its Wellingtons, Nelsons, Pitts, and maintains
the traditions of the regiments which fought for her. Thus, we are
loyal to the Constitution of the United States, because it was drafted
by the forefathers who made the nation. If it had been drafted in
the thirties we should think it more fallible. It is the nature of
individuals, of business concerns, of nations, to hold with the methods
that laid the foundations of success till some cataclysm shows that
they are wrong or antiquated. This reckoning may be sudden loss of his
position in a crisis for the individual, bankruptcy for the business
concern, war for the nation. One sticks to the doctor who cured him
when he was young and perhaps goes to an early grave because that
doctor has grown out of date.
The old Kaiser, Bismarck, and von Moltke laid the basis of the German
system. It was industry, unity, and obedience to superiors, from
bottom to top. Under it, if not because of it, Germany became a mighty
national entity. Another Kaiser, who had the merit of making the most
of his inheritance, with other generals and leaders, brought modern
methods to the service of the successful system. A new, up-to-date
doctor succeeded the old, with the inherited authority of the old.
That aristocratic, exclusive German officer, staring at you, elbowing
you if you did not give him right of way in the street, seemed to
express insufferable caste to the outsider. But he was a part of the
system which had won; and he worked longer hours than the officers of
other European armies. Seeming to enjoy enormous privileges, he was
really a circumscribed being, subject to all the rigid discipline that
he demanded of others, bred and fashioned for war. Wherever I have met
foreign military attachés observing other wars, the German was the
busiest one, the most persistent and resourceful after information; and
he was not acting on his own initiative, but under careful instructions
of a staff who knew exactly what it wanted to know. “Germany shall
be first!” was his motto; “Germany shall be first!” the motto of all
Germans.
In the same way that von Moltke constructed his machine army, the
Germany of the young Kaiser set out to construct a machine civil world.
He had a public which was ready to be moulded, because plasticity to
the master’s hand had beaten France. Drill, application, and discipline
had done the trick for von Moltke--these and leadership. The new
method was economic education plus drill, application, and discipline.
It is not for me to describe the industrial beehive of modern Germany.
The world knows it well. The Kaiser, who led, worked as hard as the
humblest of his subjects. From the top came the impetus which the
leaders passed on. Germany looked for worlds to conquer; England had
conquered hers. The energy of increasing population overflowed from the
boundaries, pushing that wedge closer home to an England growing more
irritably apprehensive.
Wherever the traveller went he found Germans, whether waiters, or
capitalists, or salesmen, learning the language of the country where
they lived, making place for themselves by their industry. Germany was
struggling for room, and the birth rate was increasing the excess of
population. The business of German nationalism was to keep them all in
Germany and mould them into so much more power behind the sea wedge.
The German teaching--that teaching of a partisan youth which is never
complacent--did not contemplate a world composed of human beings, but
a world composed of Germans, loyal to the Kaiser, and others who were
not. Within that tiny plot on the earth’s surface the German system was
giving more people a livelihood and more comforts for their resources
than anywhere else, unless in Belgium.
Germany and her Kaiser believed that she had a mission and the right
to more room. Wherever there was an opportunity she appeared with his
aggressive paternalism to get ground for Germanic seed. The experience
of her opportunistic fishing in the troubled waters of Manila Bay in
’98 is still fresh in the minds of many Americans. She went into China
during the Boxer rebellion in the same spirit. She had her foot thrust
into every doorway ajar and was pushing with all her organised imperial
might, which kept growing.
I never think of modern Germany without calling to mind two Germans
who seem to me to illustrate German strength--and weakness. In a
compartment on a train from Berlin to Holland some years ago, an
Englishman was saying that Germany was a balloon which would burst.
He called the Kaiser a vain madman and set his free English tongue on
his dislike of Prussian boorishness, aggressiveness, and _verbotens_.
I told him that I should never choose to live in Prussia; I preferred
England or France; but I thought that England was closing her eyes to
Germany’s development. The Kaiser seemed to me a very clever man, his
people on the whole loyal to him; while it was wonderful how so great
a population had been organised and cared for. We might learn the value
of co-ordination from Germany, without adopting militarism or other
characteristics which we disliked.
The Englishman thought that I was pro-German. For in Europe one
must always be pro or anti something; Francophile or Francophobe,
Germanophile or Germanophobe. I noticed the train-guard listening at
intervals to our discussion. Perhaps he knew English. Many German
train-guards do. Few English or French train-guards know any but their
own language. This also is suggestive, if you care to take it that way.
When I left the train, the guard, instead of a porter, took my bag to
the custom house. Probably he was of a mind to add to his income, I
thought. After I was through the customs he put my bag in a compartment
of the Dutch train. When I offered him a tip, the manner of his refusal
made me feel rather mean. He saluted and clicked his heels together and
said: “Thank you, sir, for what you said about my Emperor!” and with
a military step marched back to the German train. How he had boiled
inwardly as he listened to the Englishman and held his temper, thinking
that “the day” was coming!
The second German was first mate of a little German steamer on the
Central American coast. The mark of German thoroughness was on him. He
spoke English and Spanish well; he was highly efficient, so far as I
could tell. After passing through the Straits of Magellan, the steamer
went as far as Vancouver in British Columbia. Its traffic was the small
kind which the English did not find worth while, but which tireless
German capability in details and cheap labour made profitable. The
steamer stopped at every small West, South, and Central American
and Mexican port to take on and leave cargo. At any hour of the
night anchor was dropped, perhaps in a heavy ground-swell and almost
invariably in intense tropical heat. Sometimes a German coffee planter
came on board and had a glass of beer with the captain and the mate.
For nearly all the rich Guatemala coffee estates had passed into German
hands. The Guatemaltecan dictator taxed the native owners bankrupt and
the Germans, in collusion with him, bought in the estates.
Life for that mate was a battle with filthy _cargadores_ in stifling
heat; he snatched his sleep when he might between ports. The steamer
was in Hamburg to dock and refit once a year. Then he saw his wife
and children for at most a month; sometimes for only a week. In any
essay-contest on “Is Life Worth Living?” it seemed to me he ought to
win the prize for the negative side.
“Since I have been on this run I have seen California ranches,” he
said. “If I had come out to California fifteen years ago, when I
thought of emigrating to America, by working half as hard as I have
worked--and that would be harder than most California ranchers
work--I could have had my own plot of ground and my own house and
lived at home with my family. But when I spoke of emigrating I was
warned against it. Maybe you don’t know that the local officials have
orders to dissuade intending emigrants from their purpose. They told
me that the United States and Canada were lands of graft, injustice,
and disorder, where native Americans formed a caste which kept all
immigrants at manual labour. I should be robbed and forced to work
for the trusts for a pittance. Instead of an imperial government to
protect me, I should be exploited by millionaire kings. Wasn’t I a
German? Wasn’t I loyal to my Kaiser? Would I forfeit my nationality?
This appeal decided me. And I am too old, now, to start at ranching.”
Had I been one of those wicked millionaire kings of the United States
or Canada, I should have set this man up on a ranch, believing that he
was not yet too old to make good in a new land if he were given a fair
start, knowing that he would pay back the capital with interest; and I
have known wicked millionaire kings to be guilty of such lapses as this
from their tyranny.
The imperial German system wanted his earning power and energy back
of the sea wedge. German steamship companies promoted emigration
from Hungary, Russia, and Italy for the fares it brought. The German
government, however, took care that the steamship companies carried
no German emigrants; and it ruled that no Russian peasant or Polish
Jew bound for Hamburg or Bremen on the way to America might stop over
_en route_ across Germany, lest he stay. Russians and Poles and Jews
were not desirable material for the German sea wedge. Let them go
into the _pot-au-feu_ of the capacious and indiscriminating American
melting-pot, which may yet make something of them that will surprise
the chauvinists.
Breed more Germans; keep them fed, clothed, employed, organised
industrially, educated! Don’t relieve the economic pressure by
emigration or by lowering the birth rate! Keep up the military spirit!
Develop the money spirit! Instilled with loyalty to the Kaiser, with
a sense of superiority in industry and training as well as of racial
superiority, the German felt himself the victim of a world injustice.
He saw complacent England living on the fat of empire. He saw America
with its rich resources and lack of civil organisation and discipline
and its waste individual effort.
If the United States only would not play the dog in the manger! If
Germany could apply the magic of her system to Mexico or Central
America, what tribute that would bring home to Berlin! Consider
organised German industrialism working India for all that it was worth!
Or Zanzibar! Or the Straits Settlements! Germany had the restless
ambition, with an undercurrent of resentment, of the young manager with
modern methods who wants to supplant the old manager and his old-fogy
methods--an old manager set in his way, but a very kindly, sound old
manager, to whose ways the world had grown accustomed.
Taxes for armament, and particularly for that new navy, lay heavily on
Germany, too. Driving the wedge by peaceful means became increasingly
difficult. It needed the blow of war to split open the way to rich
fields. The war spirit lost nothing by Germany’s sense of isolation.
For this isolation England was to blame; she and the alliances which
King Edward had formed around her. England was to blame for everything.
Germany could not be to blame for anything. The national rival is
always the scapegoat of patriotism. So Germany prepared to strike, as
one prepares to build and open a store or to put on a play.
Where forty years ago the Englishman, with his aggressive ways, was the
unpopular traveller in Europe, the German had become most disliked. In
Italy, with his expanding industry, he ran many hotels. His success and
his personal manners combined to make the sensitive Italian loathe
him. Thus, he sowed the seed of popular feeling which broke in a wave
that forced Italy into the war.
Germany thought of England as too selfish and cunning in her
complacency really to come to the aid of France and Russia. She would
stay out; and had she stayed out, Germany would have crushed Russia and
then turned on France. But Germany did not know England any better than
England knew Germany. The jaundiced mists of chauvinism kept even high
leaders from seeing their adversaries clearly.
Austria, too, was feeling economic pressure. Her people, especially
the Hungarians, looked toward the southeast for expansion. Her shrewd
statesmanship, its instincts inherited from the Hapsburg dynasty,
playing race hatred against race hatred and bound, so it looked, to
national disruption, welcomed any opportunity which would set the mind
of the whole people thinking of some exterior object rather than of
internal differences. She annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina with its Slav
population at a moment when Russia was not prepared to aid her kindred.
Bosnia and Herzegovina are better off for the annexation; they have
enjoyed rapid material progress as the result.
Bounded by the Danube and the Turk were the Balkan countries, which
ought to be the garden spot of civilisation. Here, poverty aggravated
racial hate and racial hate aggravated poverty in a vicious circle.
Serbia, longest free of the Turk, adjoining Austria, had no outlet
except through other lands. She was a commercial slave of Austria,
dependent on Austrian tariffs and Austrian railroads, with Hungarian
business men holding the purse-strings of trade. In her swineherds
and tillers the desire for some of the good things of modern life
was developing. Strangling, with Austria’s hands at her throat, with
many clever, resourceful agitators urging her on, she fought in the
only way that she knew. To Austria she was the uncouth swineherd who
assassinated the Austrian Crown Prince and his consort. This deed was
the exterior object which united Austria in a passionate rage. For
Austria, more than any other country, could welcome war for the old
reason. It let out the emotion of the nation against an enemy instead
of against its own rulers.
A deeper-seated cause was the racial hatred of Slav and Teuton. For
rulers do not make war these days; they try to keep their thrones
secure on the crest of public opinion. They appear to rule and to
give, and are ruled and yield. Whoever had travelled in Russia of
late years had been conscious of a rising ground-swell in the great
mass of Russian feeling. Your simple _moujik_ had an idea that his
Czar had yielded to the Austrians and the Germans. In short, the
German had tweaked the nose of the Slav race with the annexation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Czar had borne the insult because his people
were willing.
Slow to think, and not thinking overmuch, the Russian peasant began
to see red whenever he thought of a German. As a whole public thinks,
eventually its rulers must think. The upper class of Russia was
inclined to fan the flames of the people’s passions. If the people were
venting their emotions against the Teuton they would not be developing
further revolutions against the old order of things. The military class
was prompt to make use of the national tendency to strengthen military
resources. By action and reaction across the frontiers the strain was
increasing. Germany saw Russia with double her own population and was
sensitive to the dangers behind Russia’s ambitions. Russia stood for
everything abhorrent to German order and racial feeling.
And what of France? There is little to say of her when we assign
responsibility. Here was a nation with its population practically
stationary; a nation with a closed-in culture; a democracy with its
racial and national integrity assured by its own peculiar genius.
Visions of conquest had passed from the French mind. Her “place in the
sun” was her own sun of France. Her trade was that due to skill in
handicraft rather than to any tactics of aggression. At every Hague
conference France was for all measures that would assure peace; Germany
against every one that might interfere with her military ambition;
England against any that might limit her action in defending the seas.
The desire for “revenge” for ’70 had died out in the younger generation
of Frenchmen. Her stationary population, which chauvinists resented,
had solved the problem of expansion. From father to son, she could be
content with her thrift, her industry, and her arts, and with the joy
of living. For, more than any other European nation, she had that gift:
the joy of living. Her armies and her alliances were truly for defence.
She could not fight Germany and Austria alone. She must have help. If
Russia went to war she, too, must go to war. She acted up to her belief
when she held back her armies five miles from the frontier till the
German struck; when she gave Germany a start in mobilisation--a start
which, with England’s delay, came near being fatal for her. That price
she paid for peace; that advantage Germany gained by striking first. It
is a hard moral for the pacificists, but one which ought to give the
French conscience a cleaner taste in after years.
The Kaiser, too, insisted that he was for peace. So he was, according
to German logic. He realised his military power as the outside world
could not realise it. Had Italy joined her forces to her allies, he
might have crushed France and then turned on Russia, as his staff had
planned. For striking he could reduce France to a second-rate power,
take her colonies, fatten German coffers with an enormous indemnity,
and gain Belgium and the Channel ports as the next step in national
ambition before crushing England and securing the mastery of the seas.
But he held off the blow for many years; that is the logic of his
partisanship for peace. The fact that France proved stronger than he
thought hardly interfered with his belief in his own moderation, in
view of his confidence in his arms before the test came. He was for
peace because he did not knock the other man down as soon as he might.
No other race in all Europe liked the Germans; not even the Huns, or
the Czechs, or the Croats, and least of all the Italians. The Belgians,
too, shared the universal enmity. It was Germany that Belgium feared.
Her forts looked toward Germany; she looked toward England and France
for protection. In this she was unneutral; but not in the thing that
counted--thorough military preparation.
Thus were the Germanic empires isolated in sentiment before the war
began. This strengthened their realisation that their one true ally was
their power in arms, unaffected by any sentiment except that of beating
their enemies. Europe, straining under the taxation of preparation,
long held back by fear of the cataclysm, yet drawn by curiosity as to
the nature of its capacity, sent her millions of soldiers to that test
in practice of the struggle of modern arms which had been the haunting
subject of her speculation.
II
“LE BRAVE BELGE!”
The stampede to Europe--Early days in Belgium--Characteristics of
the Allies’ armies--Rumours--First skirmishes--When would
the English come?--_Shipperke_ spirit--Pathos of the Belgian
defence--A Taube and a Belgian cyclist patrol--Brussels before
its fall--A momentous decision.
The rush from Monterey, in Mexico, when a telegram said that general
European war was inevitable; the run and jump aboard the _Lusitania_ at
New York the night that war was declared by England against Germany;
the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable memory, a suspense
broken by fragments of war news by wireless; the arrival in an England
before the war was a week old; the journey to Belgium in the hope
of reaching the scene of action!--as I write, all seem to have the
perspective of history, so final are the processes of war, so swift
their execution, and so eager is every one for each day’s developments.
As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the first year of the
Great War is the longest year I have known.
_Le brave Belge!_ One must be honest about him. If one lets his
heart run away with his judgment he does his mind an injustice. A
fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the eighth
month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative efficiency of
the different armies engaged.
“Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal sympathies?”
I asked.
“Certainly,” he replied.
When he had my opinion he exclaimed:
“You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it was
the bravest and best of all.”
“Is that what they think at home?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“The Atlantic is broad,” I suggested.
This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a
sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The
side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to
suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to
be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to associate
my experience with any real knowledge.
In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the
organisation of their concerns, and their resources of competition
with a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: “I like
him, but he has a poor head for affairs.” Yet he was the type who,
if he had been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of
war, who would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand
and to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany,
where some of the best brains of the country are given to making war
a business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position
on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--a
general of civil life.
“But look how the Belgians have fought!” he exclaimed. “They stopped
the whole German army for two weeks.”
The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was the
popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the pigmy
fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil. On that
day when a gallant young king cried, “To arms!” all his people became
gallant to the imagination.
When I think of Belgium’s part in the war I always think of the little
Belgian dog, the _shipperke_, who lives on the canal boats. He is a
home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out on
the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on two
or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will
fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the _shipperke_
spirit. All the Belgians who had the _shipperke_ spirit tried to sink
their teeth in the calves of the invader.
One’s heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August,
1914, when one set out toward the front in an automobile from a
Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with
bunting; but there was something brewing in one’s mind which was as
treason to one’s desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture
of German cavalry patrols while it might!
On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in their
long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field, digging
shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was them
or the Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I had the
impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw militia in
uniforms taken from grandfather’s trunk facing the trained antagonists
of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.
_Le brave Belge!_ The question on that day was not, Are you brave? but,
Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the British arrive
in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the positions of the
French and the British armies, one was as good as another. All the
observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor and all he saw for the
defence of Belgium was a regiment of Belgians digging trenches. He need
not have been in Belgium before to realise that here were an unwarlike
people, living by intensive thrift and caution--a most domesticated
civilisation in the most thickly populated workshop in Europe, counting
every blade of grass and every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures
go a long way at small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about
to be opened to the withering blast of war.
Out of the Hôtel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the
cathedral door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light,
quick step, his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly
entered a car; and after him came a tall British officer, walking more
slowly, imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or
beat him--both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of
the last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to
be Belgian Headquarters.
How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was
helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of
Frenchmen; of the army. I had always believed in the French army, and
have more reason now than ever before to believe in it. There was no
doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of
marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would
arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this
better than that German staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said,
would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it bring
fulness of its strength into the first and perhaps the deciding shock
of arms? Where was the French army?
The other officer who came out of the Hôtel de Ville was the
representative of a little army--a handful of regulars--hard as
nails and ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The
restaurant keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain--he knew. He
whispered his military secret to me. The British army was toward
Antwerp, waiting to crush the Germans in the flank should they advance
on Brussels. We were “drawing them on!” Most cheerful, most confident,
mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his restaurant
was in ruins.
We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass
which was written for us by a Belgian reservist in Brussels between
sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most
accommodating, pass; the only one I have received from the Allies’ side
which would have taken me into the German lines.
The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of
Haelen, where some dogs of a dog machine gun battery lay panting in
their traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his
passionate repetition of, “Assassins! The barbarians!” which seemed to
choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans. His was
a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where we
pleased, he said; and the Germans were “out there,” not far away. Very
tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as the
dogs of the mitrailleuse battery.
We went outside to see the scene of “the battle,” as it was called
in the despatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the
headless lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered
about. The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which
was something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had
been shelled and burned.
A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some account
of it and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of secrecy.
A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been only a
reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns as well as
cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a tiny
feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The scouting of
the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same object. Waiting
behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a patrol with their own
cavalry when the word came by telephone, the Belgians bagged many a
German, man and horse, dead and alive.
Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits
supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every
German cavalryman was an Uhlan, according to popular conception. These
Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the accounts that
one read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted youth, with horses
fresh and a trooper’s zest in the first flush of war, returned to say
that he had ridden to such and such points without finding any signs of
British or French forces, he had paid for the loss of the others. The
Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the eyes of the army, in
co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.
A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with her
children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old with
toil. “_Les Anglais!_” she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had
some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out half
a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have them. She
knew only a few words of French, not enough to express the question
which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were burning with
appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist toward the
Germans.
When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the
invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average European
would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman. But pitiful she
was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his dog battery,
or the infantry awkwardly entrenching back of Louvain, or flag-decked
Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with the true
_shipperke_ spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which was about
to burst in a flood.
It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where every one
learns a single language, English, that she and her ancestors, through
centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated country to people
who speak French and to French civilisation, should never have learned
to express themselves in any but their own tongue--singular, almost
incredible, tenacity in the age of popular education! She would save
the lance heads and garner every grain of wheat; she economised in all
but racial animosity. This racial stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it
keeps Europe powerful in jealous competition of race with race.