The Ways of War

In Unconquered France

My dear Franz,

That was the familiar device you wrote in the book you gave me when twelve years ago we drank our final Bruderschaft at Innsbruck station. I was saying good-bye to your Alpenrose, your Rose of the Alps, where the great mountains spring up their ten and fourteen thousand feet out of the very pavements, where the Golden Roof glitters over its antique arcades, where the great bronze warriors guard the sleep of your Emperor Max, where Andreas Hofer fought the good fight against an imperial tyrant, where inns, old before the French Revolution, all but touch gables across the narrow, immemorial gassen. You wanted me to remember all that, but most of all, I think, you wanted me to remember the quiet valleys, full of colour and peace, the red cupolaed churches where we went to Mass at four o’clock of a Sunday morning, the mountains we conquered together, with their summit air that we thought better than wine, until we came back, leg-weary if heart-high, in the evening to drink your thin country vintage, and applaud the zither-players and the amazing Tyrolese dancers. When I was last in your Tyrol I did not see you, Franz: you had gone to Berlin to study philology, that characteristic pseudo-science which Nietzsche and your Prussians have transformed into a seed-bed of criminal philosophies.

Those good days of our youth are worse than dead, a rivulet lost in the salt sea of estrangement that has engulfed so many friendships and so much happiness. We have other things to remember. Two years ago your Austria drove a sword into the heart of Europe. The agony of simple men then initiated still continues. I wonder where that damnable, recurrent date found you this midsummer? Fighting against that Italia irredenta with which you used to sympathise so generously? Falling back before that Russia which you used to agree with me in regarding as the chosen home of great novels and profound religion? In the lines against France, that France which shaped and nourished the soul of every free soul in Teutondom—and they have not been many—from Heine to your own tragic Empress? There is another possibility which I had almost forgotten. No Man’s Land, or, as one had better call it, Dead Man’s Land, is no great width at the point we hold. Just as I am here swallowing chalk and clay, consorting with rats and lesser forms of obscene life, mixing with wounds and blood, so may you be over there. I look across the long grass, lush with disintegrating corpses, and imagine that Prussia may have laid hold of you for other pursuits than philology. Perhaps it is you whose machine-gun taps every night like a devil-ridden typewriter against this particular area of our parapet?

You will agree with me, even now, that war, if not Hell, is cousin to it, cousin German. To condemn humanity to pass through that chamber of torture is a decision so grave and terrible that even emperors might well tremble before it. In the lineaments of the obscurest man slain in battle stands written the judgment of the rulers of the earth. Can your Austria face her conscience? I know that at the question you will be disposed to parry with a gibe at “English self-righteousness.” But, as it happens, I am not English, and mere self-righteousness does not survive the ordeal of battle. Living through this nightmare of blood you cannot but ask yourself how it began. The diplomatic correspondence is there to answer the question. These documents, the most memorable in secular history, are the charter of justification behind every decree of death that passes from the Allied lines to yours. Your Austria had grounds, tragical grounds, of complaint against some Serbians: you sought not justice, but the destruction of Serbian independence. You leagued yourself with Prussia—that blood-and-iron-monger—to break the faith of Europe and the homes of Belgium. You have heard all this before? You will hear it again, till the end of time. Not all the babbling savants of Berlin can ever erase the record of those two bully’s blows. They are the Alpha and the Omega of the war. Of course, it is true that there were other forces behind this reversion to violence and barbarism. All the explosive sediment of history was behind it, but it was your touch on the trigger that released all that imprisoned damnation.

Your natural place was not with Prussia. You, who were once the master, are now the valet of Germanism. You had not elaborated through forty years a religion of murder. Like us Irish, you were perhaps more fascinating than successful; you were a nation of gentlemen. You had grace, delicacy and honour. You listened to the crowned commercial traveller from Potsdam, who promised you a short war and a golden guerdon of trade. We know now that it was he who forced your hand in the Serbian negotiations. To be allured by such a bribe is no new sin in our experience; every nation of the Alliance, at some time or other in the bad past, has fallen in similar wise. Does it seem to you that Mephistopheles is in the way of keeping his promise? I notice in your newspapers that your people are impressed by the area of enemy territory you occupy. The present truth of the military situation is that you occupy only as a detected burglar “occupies” the house he has attempted to rifle—that is to say, pending the arrival of the police. And, Franz, the police, although as usual somewhat slow, have arrived. There is no doubt of that.

It seems to me quite candidly that the time has come to separate Habsburg from Hohenzollern. We are willing to believe that you acted under duress. During the war you have not befouled your name beyond forgiveness: no Cavell or Fryatt looms up in judgment against you. Your base and cynical over-lord, having compelled you to a gamble in blood, now begins to exhibit the nakedness of soul of every cut-throat cut-purse who finds that he has caught a Tartar. I do not know that any deep hatred of Austria is nourished by anyone in the Allied countries who understands the inner economy of the Central Empires. A locus pœnitentiæ will not be refused you. Come back to the civilisation to which you belong. Make it possible for me once again to renew our old Bruderschaft in Innsbruck, and to rejoice together that the Twilight of the Gods of Cruelty has deepened into enduring night.