“HE KNOWS, DOESN’T HE?”
I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by the German governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, after a visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of a portion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of the extent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying open between a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominent in relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men were obviously angry, although laughing immoderately. “Look at that,” said one of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coast of Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. “He knows, doesn’t he?”
And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter attack on British journalism (“The scaremongering of that paper is doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and England”), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year’s truce in the building of battleships (“Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and we’ll mind ours”), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany’s object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but merely to keep the seas open to her trade. “Why,” said one of the men, “nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month.” “Quite so,” said another, “and so far as German people go that’s the beginning and end of the whole matter.”
WE BELIEVED IT
We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my countrymen who through many years believed that story—that the accident of Germany’s disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to break British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlarge her navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through the Kiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced to shoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threatening fortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of the Bight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I did my best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and the darkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from gigantic furnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day when frail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns. I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of the scholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription and of the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafés, and the hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than military necessity.
And then there was the human charm of some German homes to soothe away suspicion—the scholar’s quiet house (beyond the clattering parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank “to all good friends in England,” and the sweet simplicity of the little town in Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, where the nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musical societies, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was so difficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-power and dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall those German homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to do so. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were already approaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmur long before ourselves—heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much less and worse than nothing.
THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT
Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war came down on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it. On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smaller things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914, when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had already gathered in the sky.
Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke’s assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
“What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God’s name should we have to fight about it?” we thought. Or perhaps, “We’ve always been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war.”
So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and retired from their company. Another, who came from the working-classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before—leaving us a derided and, therefore, easily-vanquished people.
THE PART CHANCE PLAYED
But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his letter the pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressed that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British intervention, when his neighbour said: “But what about Belgium? You have promised to protect her, and if you don’t do so she will be destroyed.”
That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by the strong. The result was swift and sure—the letter in the Minister’s pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.
Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision among our people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with the consequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany (“Hands off Belgium,”) contributed to the making of the war. But it is at least an evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance that if unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers of good. Yet so strangely do the invisible forces confound the plans of men that the crowning proof of this came two days later—on August 8, in the Commons—when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, and practically declared for war.
It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House that day expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. Sir Edward Grey’s speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect of being unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together, the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongue of one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision that have never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifest sincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelming effect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himself may have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to a British gentleman. “You can’t stand by and do nothing while the friend by your side is being beaten to his knees. You can’t let a mischievous and unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour whom he has joined with you in swearing to protect?” There was no resisting that Our own interest might leave us cold; we might even be sceptical of our danger. But we were put on our honour, and every man in the House with the instincts of a gentleman was swept away by that appeal as by a flood.
“WHY ISN’T THE HOUSE CHEERING?”
Then came our Prime Minister’s passionate, fiery, yet dignified and even exalted denunciation of the proposal of Germany that we should trade with her in our neutrality by committing treachery to France and Belgium—(“To accept your infamous offer would be to cover the glorious name of England with undying shame”); then the announcement of the ultimatum sent by Great Britain to Germany demanding an assurance that the neutrality of Belgium should be respected; and finally that speech of John Redmond’s, which, spoken on the very top of the crisis that had threatened to bring a fratricidal war into Ireland, has been, perhaps, the most thrilling and dramatic utterance yet produced by the war. “I tell the Government they may take every British soldier out of Ireland to meet the enemy of the Empire. Ireland’s sons will take care of Ireland. The Catholics of the South will stand shoulder to shoulder with their Protestant fellow-countrymen of the North to fight the common foe.”
It was another appeal to the gentlemen in the British nation, and in one moment it swept the bitter waters of the Home Rule crisis out of all sight and memory. I have heard a Cabinet Minister say that, as he listened to Redmond’s speech, he was surprised at the silence with which it was received. “Why isn’t the House cheering?” he had asked himself. But all at once he had felt his eyes swimming and his throat tightening, and then he had understood.
THE NIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATUM
Our nation knew everything now, and had made her choice, yet the twelve hours’ interval between noon and midnight of August 4 were perhaps the gravest moments in her modern history. I am tempted, not without some misgivings, but with the confidence of a good intention, to trespass so far on personal information as to lift the curtain on a private scene in the tremendous tragic drama.
The place is a room in the Prime Minister’s house in Downing Street. The Prime Minister himself and three of the principal members of his Cabinet are waiting there for the reply to the ultimatum which they sent to Germany at noon. The time for the reply expires at midnight. It is approaching eleven o’clock. In spite of her “infamous proposal,” the Ministers cannot even yet allow themselves to believe that Germany will break her pledged word.
She would be so palpably in the wrong. It is late and she has not yet replied, but she will do so—she must. There is more than an hour left, and even at the last moment the telephone bell may ring and then the reply of Germany, as handed to the British Ambassador in Berlin, will have reached London.
It is a calm autumn evening, and the windows are open to St. James’s Park, which lies dark and silent as far as to Buckingham Palace in the distance. The streets of London round about the official residence are busy enough and quivering with excitement. We British people do not go in solid masses surging and singing down our Corso, or light candles along the line of our boulevards. But nevertheless all hearts are beating high—in our theatres, our railway stations, our railway trains, our shops, and our houses. Everybody is thinking, “By twelve o’clock to-night Germany has got to say whether or not she is a perjurer and a thief.”
Meanwhile, in the silent room overlooking the park time passes slowly. In spite of the righteousness of our cause, it is an awful thing to plunge a great empire into war. The miseries and horrors of warfare rise before the eyes of the Ministers, and the sense of personal responsibility becomes almost insupportable. Could anything be more awful than to have to ask oneself some day in the future, awakening in the middle of the night perhaps, after rivers of blood have been shed, “Did I do right after all?” The reply to the ultimatum has not even yet arrived, and the absence of a reply is equivalent to a declaration of war.
THE THUNDERSTROKE OF FATE
Suddenly one of the little company remembers something which everybody has hitherto forgotten—the difference of an hour between the time in London and the time in Berlin. Midnight by mid-European time would be eleven o’clock in London. Germany would naturally understand the demand for a reply by midnight to mean midnight in the country of dispatch. Therefore at eleven o’clock by London time the period for the reply will expire. It is now approaching eleven.
As the clock ticks out the remaining minutes the tension becomes terrible. Talk slackens. There are long pauses. The whole burden of the frightful issues involved for Great Britain, France, Belgium, Russia, Germany—for Europe, for the world, for civilization, for religion itself, seems to be gathered up in these last few moments. If war comes now it will be the most frightful tragedy the world has ever witnessed. Twenty millions of dead perhaps, and civil life crippled for a hundred years. Which is it to be, peace or war? Terrible to think that as they sit there the electric wires may be flashing the awful tidings, like a flying angel of life or death, through the dark air all over Europe.
The four men are waiting for the bell of the telephone to ring. It does not ring, and the fingers of the clock are moving. The world seems to be on tiptoe, listening for a thunderstroke of Fate. The Ministers at length sit silent, rigid, almost petrified, looking fixedly at floor or ceiling. Then through the awful stillness of the room and the park outside comes the deep boom of “Big Ben.” Boom, boom, boom! No one moves until the last of the eleven strokes has gone reverberating through the night. Then comes a voice, heavy with emotion, yet firm with resolve, “It’s war.”
When the clock struck again (at midnight) Great Britain had been at war for an hour without knowing it.
If I have done wrong in lifting the curtain on this private scene, I ask forgiveness for the sake of the purpose I put it to—that of showing that it was not in haste, not in anger, but with an awful sense of responsibility to Great Britain and to humanity that our responsible Ministers drew the sword of our country.
THE MORNING AFTER
If Mr. Maeterlinck’s theory is sound, that this war is the visible reflection of a vast, invisible conflict, what a gigantic battle of the unseen forces of good and evil must have been raging throughout the universe when Europe rose on the morning of August 5, 1914! Think what had happened. While the light was dawning, the sun was rising, and the birds were singing over Europe, the greater nations were preparing to turn a thousand square miles of it into a gigantic slaughter-house. After forty years of unbroken peace, in which civilization, as represented by law, science, surgery, medicine, art, music, literature, and above all religion, in their ancient and central home, had been striving to lift up man to the place he is entitled to in the scheme of creation, war had suddenly stepped in to drag him back to the condition of the barbarian. From this day onward he was to live in holes in the ground, to be necessarily unclean, inevitably verminous, and liable to loathsome diseases. Although hitherto law-abiding, and perhaps even pious, with an ever-developing sense of the value and sanctity of human life, he was henceforward to take joy in the destruction of thousands of his fellow-creatures by devilish machines of death, and not to shrink from an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of his enemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all other nations.
“We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and we shall make amends as soon as our military necessities have been served.”
“YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU”
What a mockery! What a waste! What a hideous reversion! What a confession of blank failure on the part of civilization, including morality and religion! But, happily, the invisible powers of evil had not got it all their own way, even on that morning of August 5. Out of the very shadow of battle great things were already being born among the children of men, and chief among them were the spirits of sacrifice and brotherhood. Even the cruel loss of nearly all that makes human life worth living—cleanliness and purity and exemption from foul disease—could be borne for the defence of truth and freedom. And then it was worth a world of suffering to realize the first-fruits of that golden age of brotherhood among all the nations of the earth (except those of our enemy) which has been the peace-dream of humanity for countless centuries.
We in Great Britain have no reason to be ashamed of how our country answered the call. A few years before the outbreak of war I talked about conscription with a British admiral in the cabin of his flagship. “There’s not the slightest necessity for it in this country,” said the admiral. The moment war was declared the whole nation would rise to it. A great thrill would pass over our people from end to end of the land, and we should have millions flocking to the colours.
The old sailor proved to be a true prophet. None of us can ever forget the spontaneous response in August 1914 to the cry, “Your King and country need you.” To such as, like myself, are on the shadowed side of the hill of life, and therefore too old for service, it was a profoundly moving thing to see how swiftly our immense voluntary army sprang (as by a miracle) out of the earth, to look at the long lines of young soldiers passing with their regular step through the streets of London, to think of the situations given up, of the young wives and little children living at home on shortened means, and of the risk taken of life being lost just when it is most precious and most sweet.
What was the motive power that impelled the young manhood of Great Britain to this tremendous sacrifice? The thought of our country’s danger? The danger to France? The danger to Belgium? The fact that a man named Palmerston had pledged his solemn word for them long years before they were born, or even the mothers who bore them were born, that they would go to their deaths rather than allow a great crime to be committed or England’s oath be broken? I don’t know. I do not believe anybody knows. But I am not ashamed of my tears when I remember it all, and sure I am that in those first critical days of the war the invisible powers of justice must have been fighting on our side.
THE PART PLAYED BY THE BRITISH NAVY
Perhaps the first of the flashes as of lightning by which we have seen the drama of the past 365 days is that which shows us the part played by the British Navy. What a part it has been! Do we even yet recognize its importance? Have our faithful and loyal Allies a full sense of its tremendous effect on the fortunes of the campaign? On Sunday, August 2, two days before the dispatch of Great Britain’s ultimatum to Germany, we saw thousands of our naval reserve flying off by special boats and trains to their ships on our east and south coasts. On Monday, August 8, the British Navy had taken possession of the North Sea.
It was a legitimate act of peace, yet never in this world was there a more complete, if bloodless, victory. The great German North Sea fleet, which (according to a calculation) had been constructed at a cost of £300,000,000 sterling, to keep open the seas of the world to German trade; the fleet which had, in our British view, been built with the sole purpose of menacing British shores, was shut up in one day within the narrow limits of its own waters!
In the light of what has happened since it is not too much to say that if the British Fleet had taken up its cue only forty-eight hours later the north coast of France would have been bombarded, every town on our east coast from Aberdeen to Dover would have been destroyed, and Lord Roberts’s prophecy of German invasion would have been fulfilled. But, thank God, the watchdogs of the British Navy were there to prevent that swift surprise. They are there (or elsewhere) still, silently riding the grey waters in all seasons and all weathers, waiting and watching and biding their time, and meanwhile (in spite of the occasional marauding of submarines, the offal of fighting craft) keeping the oceans free to all ships except those of our enemies. And now, when we hear it said, as we sometimes do, that Great Britain holds only thirty-five miles of land on the battle-front in Flanders, let us lift our heads and answer, “Yes, but she holds thirty-five thousand miles of sea.”
THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM
One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of the flashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was that which revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record of greater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Such strength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddenness of surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany’s spokesmen, including Herr Ballin, Prince von Bülow, and even Professor Harnack (all “honourable men,” and the last of them a churchman), that down to a few days before the outbreak of hostilities “not one human being” among them had “dreamt of war,” it is the fact that within a few hours of the dispatch of Germany’s ultimatum, to Belgium, before the ink of it could yet be dry and while the period of England’s ultimatum in defence of Belgian integrity was still unexpired, the German legions were attacking Liège.
It was a cowardly and contemptible assault, but what a resistance it met with! A little peace-loving, industrial nation, infinitely small and almost utterly untrained, compared with the giant in arms assailing it, having no injury to avenge, no commerce to capture, no territory to annex, desiring only to be left alone in the exercise of its independence, stood up for six days against the invading horde, and hurled it back.
But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right, and after a flash of Belgium’s unexampled bravery we were compelled to witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liège fell before overwhelming numbers, then Namur, Ter-monde, Brussels, Louvain, and, last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror! The harvests of Belgium trodden into the earth, her beautiful cities and ancient villages given up to the flames, her historic monuments, that had been associated with the learning and piety of centuries, razed to the ground; and, above everything in its pathos and pain, the multitudes of her people, old men, old women, young girls, and little children in wooden shoes, after the unnameable atrocities of a brutalized, infuriated, and licentious soldiery, flying before their faces as before a plague!
WHAT KING ALBERT DID FOR KINGSHIP
But there were flashes of almost divine light in the black darkness of Belgium’s tragedy, and perhaps the brightest of them surrounded the person of her King. What King Albert did in those dark days of August 1914, to keep the soul of his nation alive in the midst of the immense sorrow of her utter overthrow his nation alone can fully know. But we who are not Belgians were thrilled again and again by the inspired tones of a great Spirit speaking to his subjects with that authority, dignity, and courage which alone among free nations are sufficient to unite the people to the Throne.
“A country which defends its liberties in the face of tyranny commands the respect of all. Such a country does not perish.” What King Albert did for Belgium in the stand he made against German aggression is partly known already, and will leave its record in history, but what he did at the same time for kingship throughout the world, as well as in his country, can only be realized by the few who are aware that almost at the moment of the outbreak of war the Belgian Courts (much to the unmerited humiliation of Belgium) were on the eve of such disclosures in relation to the life and death of the King’s predecessor as would certainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries.
Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as I saw him in a garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away: “Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the world.”
After King Leopold’s death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court—of the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them; of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediately preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documents of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man’s body to share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of his end, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save for one scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was, whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partly false, of shame, greed, lust, and life-long duplicity! And all this dark tale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of open Court, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world how contemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies of mankind.
But the war and King Albert’s part in it saved Belgium from that unmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroic young sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by the side of our own king’s soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic of France, has sustained the highest traditions of kingship. He may have lost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but he has won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tent is pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. He may be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom of souls.
“WHY SHOULDN’T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?”
The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of the drama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the war with the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely than the tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy. Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeat there is always a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our first Expeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after we learned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts and listened with strained ears.
We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through the streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its cuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun. The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regiment after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours, and even days—the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before had “never so much as dreamt” of war!
At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they had fought like heroes—why shouldn’t they, since they were Englishmen?—but had been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreating rapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What? Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too, the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, too awful!
The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but nevertheless it did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who does not see that the qualities in which it is unsurpassed among the races of mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts the darkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers were falling back from Mons, the old cry “Your King and country need you” went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands of free men leapt to the relief of the flag.
There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it is hard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in the great drama of the war—the spontaneous response of the poor who sprang forward to defend their country, though they had no more material property in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make their graves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelong possession, and often the foundation of their titles and honours.
“BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND... ENGLAND.”
What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the upper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young men of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure indulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but, behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thought too many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creatures of fashion) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageous womanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurrying to the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching the scenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make the bravest man’s heart turn sick.
Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early days of September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty lists had been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old people hardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and had nothing left—not even a little child to live for. At the railway stations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sights which searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed to look, feeling they opened sanctuaries in which God’s eye alone should see.
Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has lost two of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. The dear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, struggling to keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform and she can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. “I’ve seen the last of him,” she says; “something tells me I’ve seen the last of him. And now I’ve given everything I have to the country.”
Ah! that’s what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you brave mothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoops to any method, any crime.
Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only son being brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had been of his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord’s, or perhaps rowed stroke—and won—for Cambridge. And now on the field of Flanders.... He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it when the war broke out. “Ours is an old family,” he had told himself, “four hundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to the war my line may end, my family may stop... but then liberty must go on, civilization must go on, and... England!”
Yes, it must be night before the British star will shine.
THE PART PLAYED BY FRANCE
Perhaps the next great flash as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the past 365 days was that which revealed at its sublimest moment the part played by France. In those evil days of July 1914, when German diplomacy was carrying on the indecent pretence of quarrelling with France about Austria’s right to punish Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, there were Frenchmen still living who had vivid memories of three bloody campaigns. Some could remember the Crimean War. More could recall the Italian War of 1859, which brought the delirious news of the victory of Magenta, and closed with Solferino, and the triumphant march home through the Place de la Bastille, and down the Rue de la Paix. And vast numbers were still alive who could remember 1870, when the Emperor was defeated at Worth and conquered at Sedan; when Paris was surrounded by a Prussian army, when the booming of cannon could be heard on the boulevards; when tenderly nurtured women, who had never thought to beg their bread, had been forced by the hunger of their children to stand in long queues at the doors of the bakers’ shops; when the city was at length starved into submission, and the proud French people, with their immemorial heritage of fame, were compelled to permit the glittering Prussian helmets to go shining down their streets.
A new generation had been born to France since even the last of these events, but was it with a light heart that she took up the gage which Germany so haughtily threw down? Indeed, no! Never had France, the bright, the brilliant, the cheerful-hearted, shown the world a graver face.
A few students across the Seine might shout “A Berlin! A Berlin!” just as our boys in khaki chalked up the same address on their gun carriages. Idlers in blouses along the quays might scream the “Marseillaise.” Gangs of ruffians in back streets might break the windows of the shops of German tradespeople. Some bitter old campaigners might talk about revenge. But when the drums beat for the French regiments to start away for Alsace and the Belgian frontier, the heart of France was calm and steadfast.
“This is a fight for the right, for France, and for the freedom of our souls!”
THE SOUL OF FRANCE
Then when the men had gone there came that anxious silence in which every ear was strained to catch the first cry from the army. Would it be victory or defeat? In the strength of her new-born spirit France was ready for either fate. The streets of Paris were darkened; the theatres were shut up; the cafés were ordered to close at nine o’clock; the sale of absinthe was prohibited that Frenchmen might have every faculty alert to meet their destiny; and the principal hotels were transformed into hospitals for the wounded that would surely come.
They came. We were allowed to see their coming, and in those early days of the war, before the Red Cross companies had got properly to work, the return of the first of the fallen among the French soldiery made a terrible spectacle. At suburban stations, generally in the middle of the night, long lines of third-class railway carriages, as well as rectangular, box-shaped cattle wagons, such as in conscript countries are used for purposes of mobilization, would draw up out of the darkness.
Instantly hundreds of pale, wasted, generally bearded, and often wounded faces would appear at the windows, crying out for coffee or chocolate. Then the cattle wagons would be unbolted, and the great doors thrown back, disclosing six or eight men in each, lying outstretched on straw, with their limbs swathed in blood-stained bandages, and their eyes glazed with pain. They were the brave fellows who, a few weeks before, had gone to Flanders in the pride and prime of their strength. In some cases they had lain like that for two whole days on their long way back from the fighting line, with no one to give them meat or drink, with nothing to see in the darkness of their moving tomb and nothing to hear, except the grinding of the iron wheels beneath them, and the cries of the comrades by their side.
“Mon Dieu! Que de souffrances! Qui l’aurait cru possible? O mon Dieu, aie pitié de moi.”
THE MOTHERHOOD OF FRANCE
Still the soul of France did not fail her. It heard the second approach of that monstrous Prussian horde, which, like a broad, irresistible tide, sweeping across one half of Europe, came down, down, down from Mons until the thunder of its guns could again be heard on the boulevards. And then came the great miracle! Just as the sea itself can rise no higher when it has reached the top of the flood, so the mighty army of Germany had to stop its advance thirty kilomètres north of Paris, and when it stirred again it had to go back. And back and back it went before the armies of France, Britain, and Belgium, until it reached a point at which it could dig itself into the earth and hide in a long serpentine trench stretching from the Alps to the sea. Only then did the spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as of lightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before the white statue of Jeanne d’Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St Michael 10,000 of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on the broad space in front of the majestic façade, to call on the Maid of Orleans to % intercede with the Virgin for victory. It was a great and grandiose scene, recalling the days when faith was strong and purer. Old and young, rich and poor, every woman with some soul that was dear to her in that inferno at the front—the Motherhood of France was there to pray to the Mother of all living to ask God for the triumph of the right.
“Jesus, hear our cry for our country! Justice for France, O God!”
And in the spirit of that prayer the soul of France still lives.
FIVE MONTHS AFTER
The next of the flashes as of lightning that revealed the drama of the past 365 days came to us at Christmas. The war had then been going on five months, showing us many strange and terrible sights, but nothing stranger and more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare itself. A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of pomp and of personal prowess, with the charging of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms, and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers of soldiery. It was now a broad and desolate waste, in which no human figure was anywhere visible as far as the eye could reach—a monstrous scar on the face of the globe, such as we see in volcanic countries, only differing in the evidence of design that came of long, parallel lines of turned-up soil, which were the trenches wherein hundreds of thousands of men lived under the surface of the ground. Over this barren waste there was almost perpetual smoke, and through the smoke a deafening cannonading, which came of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel, called shells. Sometimes the shells were burying themselves unbroken in the empty earth, but too often they were scouring the trenches, where they were bursting into jagged parts and sending up showers of horrible fragments which had once been the limbs of living men.
Such was warfare by machinery as the world caught its first, full, horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end of December 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had been glimpses of great things—great heroisms, great victories, and great proofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed to keep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the lives of our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many glorious incidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbing throat. But some of them could not possibly be concealed, so we heard of the gallant stand of the dauntless sons of our daughter Canada, and we saw our great old warrior, Lord Roberts, going out to the front in his eighty-third year to visit his beloved Indian troops, dying as was most fit on the battlefield, within sound of the guns in the war he had foretold, and then being brought home, borne through the crowded streets of London and buried under the dome of St. Paul’s, amid the homage of his Bang and people.