Lest We Forget Part 13

The right is more precious than peace. We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts. To such a task we dedicate our lives.

WOODROW WILSON, 1917.

VERDUN

She is a wall of bra.s.s; You shall not pa.s.s! You shall not pa.s.s!

Spring up like summer gra.s.s, Surge at her, ma.s.s on ma.s.s, Still shall you break like gla.s.s, Splinter and break like shivered gla.s.s, But pa.s.s?

You shall not pa.s.s!

Germans, you shall not, shall not pa.s.s!

G.o.d's hand has written on the wall of bra.s.s-- You shall not pa.s.s! You shall not pa.s.s!

The valleys are quaking, The torn hills are shaking, The earth and the sky seem breaking.

But unbroken, undoubting, a wonder and sign, She stands, France stands, and still holds to the line.

She counts her wounded and her dead; You shall not pa.s.s!

She sets her teeth, she bows her head; You shall not pa.s.s!

Till the last soul in the fierce line has fled, You shall not pa.s.s!

Help France? Help France?

Who would not, thanking G.o.d for this great chance, Stretch out his hands and run to succor France?

HAROLD BEGBIE.

THE BEAST IN MAN

A German leader once said, "The oldest right in the world is the right of the strongest." This is true and will always continue to be true as long as the world is made up only of inanimate matter and lifeless forces and of living, thinking beings who consider "the strongest" as meaning the powers or things that can cause the greatest destruction and the most terrible evil. The beasts recognize these as the strongest, and without question admit that the oldest right in the world is the chief right in the world.

But as men have become civilized, they have come to fear destruction, and even the loss of life, less and less, and have learned to feel the strength of beauty, truth, justice, mercy, purity, and innocence. So it comes to pa.s.s that Robert Burns mourns when his plow turns under a mountain daisy or destroys the home of a field mouse. Because he feels the influence of the innocent and the helpless, the "wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower" and the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie," he gives us two of the most beautiful poems in the English language, poems that, by the power of their tenderness, truth, and beauty, have brought tears to the eyes of many a strong, brave man who feared no enemy.

Such was the power of Joan of Arc when she led the French soldiers to battle and to victory,--simply the power of her belief and her faith, for she was a simple, untrained peasant girl, knowing nothing of how battles are to be won.

Such is the power of the English nurse, Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans as a spy, because she helped English and Belgians to escape from the German horrors in Belgium by crossing the line into Holland.

Such is the power of the murdered mothers and children on the _Lusitania_, the memory of whose wrongs cause English and American soldiers to go "over the top," crying "Lusitania! Lusitania!"

Such is the power of undaunted Cardinal Mercier, who in the very midst of German officers and troops, denounces German atrocities in Belgium, and yet is himself untouched.

The exercise of the right of the strongest, the _right_ which comes through _might_, brings about war. General Sherman, who knew the terrors of war from what he saw in our Civil War, said, "War is h.e.l.l."

He could not describe its horrors and so he used the one word that means to most people the most horrible state and place in which human beings can suffer. For many years most men have realized that war is the most dreadful scourge of the human race, and that it should be abolished. But as is always the case, men cannot agree,--which is, of course, the chief reason why there are wars. In the face of terrible calamities, disasters, and great crises, men will agree. Perhaps the World War will prove the great disaster that will lead men to do away forever with war.

For twenty-five years before the world's peace was rudely broken by the ambitions of Germany, the people of other countries had been urgently seeking some means of doing away with war. Peace societies had been organized and wealthy men had donated money to be used in efforts to secure the permanent peace of the world. A Peace Palace had been erected at The Hague from funds donated by the American multi-millionaire, Andrew Carnegie, who had also set aside a fund of $10,000,000 for the purpose of keeping the world at peace. The n.o.bel prize of $40,000 was awarded annually to the person anywhere in the world who had done the most for peace. Theodore Roosevelt, while President, won this by settling the Russian-j.a.panese War. The Tsar of Russia had proposed at one of the conferences of nations held at the Peace Palace that the nations should gradually do away with military preparations. We can see now why all these efforts failed. Germany had her mind and heart set on war and on conquering the world.

Most men agree that war is unnecessary, and before the German attack upon Belgium and upon the liberty of the world, many leaders of thought in other countries were sure a great war could never occur in modern times. One group argued that its cost in money would be so great that no nation could meet it for more than a few months. But the United States is, in 1918, spending nearly $50,000,000 a day for war, and she can continue to do so for some years, if necessary. The cost in dollars will never prevent war nor make a great war a very brief one.

But think of what the cost of the war for one year would accomplish if spent for the purposes of peace, for construction instead of destruction. Ten billion dollars, the approximate cost of the war for the United States for the year 1918, if put at interest at four per cent, would earn $400,000,000, or about the cost of the Panama Ca.n.a.l.

This interest would send 500,000 young men and women to college each year, and pay all their necessary expenses. It would do away with all the slums and poverty of our great cities. If the cost to one nation for one year would, as a permanent fund, accomplish this, it is easy to realize that the world could almost be made an ideal one in which to live, if the money that all the nations spend upon the World War could have been saved and made a permanent fund for the betterment of world conditions.

Another group said, "Modern science has made war so terrible and so destructive that men will not take part in it, or if this is not true now, it soon will be." When we think of what has occurred and is occurring every day in the present war, this seems also unlikely.

When we read of guns that will carry a sh.e.l.l weighing a ton for over twenty-five miles which will, when it explodes, destroy everything within an eighth of a mile, and of guns less destructive that will carry over seventy-five miles, almost wholly destroying a church and killing sixty-five men, women, and children; when we read of bombs dropped from the sky, killing innocent women and children, hundreds of miles from the field of battle; of the terrible work of poison gases and of liquid fire; of battles above the clouds from which men fall to death in blazing air-planes, and of battles beneath the waves in which men sink in submarines to be suffocated to death; of an entire ridge being undermined and blown up by tons of dynamite, with an explosion heard nearly one hundred miles away and killing thousands: how can we believe that war is likely soon to become so terrible that men will not engage in it, if they are willing to do so now? Sir Gilbert Parker well says: "Guns have been invented before which the stoutest fortresses shrivel into fiery dust; sh.e.l.ls destroy men in platoons, blow them to pieces, bury them alive; death pours from the clouds and spouts upward through the sea; motor-power hurls armies of men on points of attack in ma.s.ses never hitherto employed; concealment is made well nigh impossible. These things, however, have but made war more difficult and dreadful; they have not made it impossible. They have only succeeded in plumbing profounder depths of human courage, and evoking higher qualities of endurance than have ever been seen before."

No, most people who are thinking about the subject to-day are agreed that wars will not end because of the destructive power of men, but through the constructive power of human feeling and intellect. When the great majority of men recognize, as so many do now, that as the world exists to-day, no nation can ever gain by a war of aggression, but that the nation at war loses her best, her young and strong, and has left only the old and defective who cannot fight, that she loses her industrial and commercial prosperity as well, and through these losses loses more than she can ever gain by conquest; when all nations realize that the destruction of great cathedrals like Rheims, of the beautiful town hall at Lille, of the unique Cloth Market at Ypres, and of a University like that of Louvain makes the whole world poorer beyond measure, then will men agree that no small group of men, and no single nation shall, in the future, be allowed to cause war; and then they will organize some power strong enough to prevent war.

Then will come the League of Nations to Enforce Peace, or the Parliament of Man of which Tennyson wrote in "Locksley Hall"

seventy-five years ago. The poet seemed as in a vision to see the present World War with its terrors and its battles in the air. Perhaps his vision of the abolition of war and the federation of the world is equally true.

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm;

Till the war drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR DOUGLAS HAIG--IN COMMAND OF THE BRITISH ARMIES _Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y._]

WHEN GERMANY LOST THE WAR[4]

No man knows exactly when and where the three and twenty allies will win the war, but all men know when and where Germany lost it. It was four years ago this morning, at a point near Gemmenich, a village southwest of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was then and there that the first gray uniform crossed the frontier from Germany into Belgium.

An hour before and it was not too late for Germany to win the war, or at least to lose it with honor. An hour afterward, and Germany was doomed. What has befallen her since that 4th of August, what will befall her in the future, were predetermined from the fatal instant of that summer morning when the first German soldier trod where Prussia had promised he should never go. There is not a German killed to-day in the flight to the Vesle whose fate was not written at Gemmenich.

It was not merely that the invasion of a land guaranteed perpetual neutrality brought Great Britain into the fight and turned into a world war what Germany had hoped would be a small, swift, and easy campaign.

It was the exposure of Germany herself. Know of her what we may to-day, we thought of her otherwise four years ago yesterday. She had thrown about herself a mantle which hid the sword and the thick, studded boots. She worked at science and played at art. She sang and thumped the piano. She cleaned her streets and washed her children's faces.

Many persons in America and England believed that she was efficient and that her very _verboten_ signs were guides to the ideal life. Even as the Kaiser reviewed his armies he babbled of peace; peace, to believe him, was the first object of his life.

We do not know of any writer who has condensed the proof of Germany's falsehood and cowardice into so few words as Von Bethmann-Hollweg, who, as Chancellor of the Empire, spoke as follows to the Reichstag four years ago this afternoon:

Gentlemen, we are now acting in self-defence. Necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied Luxemburg and have possibly already entered on Belgian soil. [The speaker knew that the invasion had begun.]

Gentlemen, that is a breach of international law.

The French Government has notified Brussels that it would respect Belgian neutrality as long as the adversary respected it. But we know that France stood ready for an invasion. France could wait, we could not. A French invasion on our flank and the lower Rhine might have been disastrous. Thus we were forced to ignore the rightful protests of the Governments of Luxemburg and Belgium. The injustice--I speak openly--the injustice we thereby commit we will try to make good as soon as our military aims have been attained. He who is menaced as we are and is fighting for his all, can only consider the one and best way to strike.