Out To Win Part 2

The Commission for the Relief of Belgium was actually anything but neutral; to minister to the results of brutality is tacitly to condemn.

At Neuilly-sur-Seine the American Ambulance Hospital sprang up.

It undertook the most grievous cases, making a specialty of facial mutilations. American girls performed the nursing of these pitiful human wrecks. Increasingly the crusader spirit was finding a gallant response in the hearts of America's girlhood. By the time that President Wilson flung his challenge, eighty-six war relief organizations were operating in France. In very many cases these organizations only represented a hundredth part of the actual personnel working; the other ninety-nine hundredths were in the States, rolling bandages, shredding oak.u.m, slitting linen, making dressings. Long before April, 1917, American college boys had won a name by their devotion in forcing their ambulances over sh.e.l.l torn roads on every part of the French Front, but, perhaps, with peculiar heroism at Verdun. Already the American Flying Squadron has earned a veteran's reputation for its daring. The report of the sacrificial courage of these pioneers had travelled to every State in the Union; their example had stirred, shamed and educated the nation. It is to these knight-errants--very many of them boys and girls in years--to the Mrs. Whartons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the Thaws that I attribute America's eager acceptance of Calvary, when at last it was offered to her by her Statesmen. From an anguished horror to be repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in whose heart lay hidden the treasure-trove of national honor.

The individual American soldier is inspired by just as altruistic motives as his brother-Britisher. Compa.s.sion, indignation, love of justice, the determination to see right conquer are his incentives.

You can make a man a conscript, drill him, dress him in uniform, but you cannot force him to face up to four years to do his job unless the ideals were there beforehand. I have seen American troop-ships come into the dock with ten thousand men singing,

"Good-bye, Liza, I'm going to smash the Kaiser."

I have been present when packed audiences have gone mad in reiterating the American equivalent for _Tipperary_, with its brave promise,

"We'll be over, We're coming over, And we won't be back till it's over, over there."

But nothing I have heard so well expresses the cold anger of the American fighting-man as these words which they chant to their bugle-march, "We've got four years to do this job."

II

WAR AS A JOB

I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch three separate nations facing up to the splendour of Armageddon--England, France, America.

The spirit of each was different. I arrived in England from abroad the week after war had been declared. There was a new vitality in the air, a suppressed excitement, a spirit of youth and--it sounds ridiculous--of opportunity. The England I had left had been wont to go about with a puckered forehead; she was a victim of self-disparagement. She was like a mother who had borne too many children and was at her wits' end to know how to feed or manage them.

They were getting beyond her control. Since the Boer War there had been a growing tendency in the Press to under-rate all English effort and to over-praise to England's discredit the superior pushfulness of other nations. This melancholy nagging which had for its constant text, "Wake up, John Bull," had produced the hallucination that there was something vitally the matter with the Mother Country. No one seemed to have diagnosed her complaint, but those of us who grew weary of being told that we were behind the times, took prolonged trips to more cheery quarters of the globe. It is the Englishman's privilege to run himself down; he usually does it with his tongue in his cheek. But for the ten years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the prophets of Fleet Street certainly carried their privilege beyond a joke.

Pessimism was no longer an amusing pose; it was becoming a habit.

One week of the iron tonic of war had changed all that. The atmosphere was as different as the lowlands from the Alps; it was an atmosphere of devil-may-care a.s.surance and adventurous manhood. Every one had the summer look of a boat-race crowd when the Leander is to be pulled off at Henley. In comparing the new England with the old, I should have said that every one now had the comfortable certainty that he was wanted--that he had a future and something to live for. But it wasn't the something to live for that accounted for this gay alertness; it was the sure foreknowledge of each least important man that he had something worth dying for at last.

A strange and magnificent way of answering misfortune's challenge--an Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should break our hearts by their going.

Death may be regarded as a funeral or as a Columbus expedition to worlds unknown--it may be seized upon as an opportunity for weeping or for a display of courage. From the first day in her choice England never hesitated; like a boy set free from school, she dashed out to meet her danger with laughter. Her high spirits have never failed her.

Her cavalry charge with hunting-calls upon their lips. Her Tommies go over the top humming music-hall ditties. The Hun is still "jolly old Fritz." The slaughter is still "a nice little war." Death is still "the early door." The mud-soaked "old Bills" of the trenches, cheerfully ignoring vermin, rain and sh.e.l.l fire, continue to wind up their epistles with, "Hoping this finds you in the pink, as it leaves me at present." They are always in the pink for epistolary purposes, whatever the strafing or the weather. That's England; at all costs, she has to be a sportsman. I wonder she doesn't write on the crosses above her dead, "_Yours in the pink:_ _a British soldier, killed in action_." England is in the pink for the duration of the war.

The Frenchman cannot understand us, and I don't blame him. Our high spirits impress him as untimely and indecent. War for him is not a sport. How could it be, with his homesteads ravaged, his cities flattened, his women violated, his populations prisoners in occupied territories? For him war is a martyrdom which he embraces with a fierce gladness. His spirit is well ill.u.s.trated by an incident that happened the other day in Paris. A descendant of Racine, a well-known figure at the opera, was travelling in the Metro when he spotted a poilu with a string of ten medals on his breast. The old aristocrat went over to the soldier and apologised for speaking to him. "But," he said, "I have never seen any poilu with so many decorations. You must be of the very bravest."

"That is nothing," the man replied sombrely; "before they kill me I shall have won many more. This I earned in revenge for my wife, who was brutally murdered. And this and this and this for my daughters who were ravished. And these others--they are for my sons who are now no more."

"My friend, if you will let me, I should like to embrace you." And there, in the sight of all the pa.s.sengers, the old habitue of the opera and the common soldier kissed each other. The one satisfaction that the French blind have is in counting the number of Boche they have slaughtered. "In that raid ten of us killed fifty," one will say; "the memory makes me very happy."

Curiously enough the outrage that makes the Frenchman most revengeful is not the murder of his family or the defilement of his women, but the wilful killing of his land and orchards. The land gave birth to all his flesh and blood; when his farm is laid waste wilfully, it is as though the mother of all his generations was violated. This accounts for the indomitable way in which the peasants insist on staying on in their houses under sh.e.l.l-fire, refusing to depart till they are forcibly turned out.

We in England, still less in America, have never approached the loathing which is felt for the Boche in France. Men spit as they utter his name, as though the very word was foul in the mouth.

In the face of all that they have suffered, I do not wonder that the French misunderstand the easy good-humour with which we English go out to die. In their eyes and with the continual throbbing of their wounds, this war is an occasion for neither good-humour nor sportsmanship, but for the wrath of a Hebrew Jehovah, which only blows can appease or make articulate. If every weapon were taken from their hands and all their young men were dead, with naked fists those who were left would smite--smite and smite. It is fitting that they should feel this way, seeing themselves as they do perpetually frescoed against the sky-line of sacrifice; but I am glad that our English boys can laugh while they die.

In trying to explain the change I found in England after war had commenced, I mentioned Henley and the boat-race crowds. I don't think it was a change; it was only a bringing to the surface of something that had been there always. Some years ago I was at Henley when the Belgians carried off the Leander Cup from the most crack crew that England could bring together. Evening after evening through the Regatta week the fear had been growing that we should lose, yet none of that fear was reflected in our att.i.tude towards our Belgian guests.

Each evening as they came up the last stretch of river, leading by lengths and knocking another contestant out, the spectators cheered them madly. Their method of rowing smashed all our traditions; it wasn't correct form; it wasn't anything. It ought to have made one angry. But these chaps were game; they were winning. "Let's play fair," said the river; so they cheered them. On the last night when they beat Leander, looking fresh as paint, leading by a length and taking the championship out of England, you would never have guessed by the flicker of an eyelash that it wasn't the most happy conclusion of a good week's sport for every oarsman present.

It's the same spirit essentially that England is showing to-day. She cheers the winner. She trusts in her strength for another day. She insists on playing fair. She considers it bad manners to lose one's temper. She despises to hate back. She has carried this spirit so far that if you enter the college chapels of Oxford to-day, you will find inscribed on memorial tablets to the fallen not only the names of Britishers, but also the names of German Rhodes Scholars, who died fighting for their country against the men who were once their friends. Generosity, justice, disdain of animosity-these virtues were learnt on the playing-fields and race-courses. England knows their value; she treats war as a sport because so she will fight better. For her that approach to adversity is normal.

With us war is a sport. With the French it is a martyrdom. But with the Americans it is a job. "We've got four years to do this job. We've got four years to do this job," as the American soldiers chant. I think in these three att.i.tudes towards war as a martyrdom, as sport and as a job, you get reflected the three gradations of distance by which each nation is divided from the trenches. France had her tribulation thrust upon her. She was attacked; she had no option.

England, separated by the Channel, could have restrained the weight of her strength, biding her time. She had her moment of choice, but rushed to the rescue the moment the first Hun bayonet gleamed across the Belgian threshold. America, fortified by the Atlantic, could not believe that her peace was in any way a.s.sailed. The idea seemed too madly far-fetched. At first she refused to realise that this apportioning of a continent three thousand miles distant from Germany was anything but a pipe-dream of diplomats in their dotage. It was inconceivable that it could be the practical and achievable cunning of military bullies and strategists. The truth dawned too slowly for her to display any vivid burst of anger. "It isn't true," she said. And then, "It seems incredible." And lastly, "What infernal impertinence!"

It was the infernal impertinence of Germany's schemes for transatlantic plunder that roused the average American. It awoke in him a terrible, calm anger--a feeling that some one must be punished.

It was as though he broke off suddenly in what he was doing and commenced rolling up his shirt-sleeves. There was a grim, surprised determination about his quietness, which had not been seen in any other belligerent nation. France became consciously and tragically heroic when war commenced. England became unwontedly cheerful because life was moving on grander levels. In America there was no outward change. The old habit of feverish industry still persisted, but was intensified and applied in unselfish directions.

What has impressed me most in my tour of the American activities in France is the businesslike relentlessness of the preparations.

Everything is being done on a t.i.tanic scale and everything is being done to last. The ports, the railroads, the plants that are being constructed will still be standing a hundred years from now. There's no "Home for Christmas" optimism about America's method of making war.

One would think she was expecting to be still fighting when all the present generation is dead. She is investing billions of dollars in what can only be regarded as permanent improvements. The handsomeness of her spirit is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that she has no understanding with the French for reimburs.e.m.e.nt.

In sharp contrast with this handsomeness of spirit is the iciness of her purpose as regards the Boche. I heard no hatred of the individual German--only the deep conviction that Prussianism must be crushed at all costs. The American does not speak of "Poor old Fritz" as we do on our British Front. He's too logical to be sorry for his enemy.

His att.i.tude is too sternly impersonal for him to be moved by any emotions, whether of detestation or charity, as regards the Hun. All he knows is that a Frankenstein machinery has been set in motion for the destruction of the world; to counteract it he is creating another piece of machinery. He has set about his job in just the same spirit that he set about overcoming the difficulties of the Panama Ca.n.a.l.

He has been used to overcoming the obstinacies of Nature; the human obstinacies of his new task intrigue him. I believe that, just as in peace times big business was his romance and the wealth which he gained from it was often incidental, so in France the job as a job impels him, quite apart from its heroic object. After all, smashing the Pan-Germanic Combine is only another form of trust-busting--trust-busting with aeroplanes and guns instead of with law and ledgers.

There is something almost terrifying to me about this quiet collectedness--this Pierpont Morgan touch of sphinxlike aloofness from either malice or mercy. Just as America once said, "Business is business" and formed her world-combines, collaring monopolies and allowing the individual to survive only by virtue of belonging to the fittest, so now she is saying, "War is war"--something to be accomplished with as little regard to landscapes as blasting a railroad across a continent.

For the first time in the history of this war Germany is "up against"

a nation which is going to fight her in her own spirit, borrowing her own methods. This statement needs explaining; its truth was first brought to my attention at American General Headquarters. The French att.i.tude towards the war is utterly personal; it is bayonet to bayonet. It depends on the unflinching courage of every individual French man and woman. The English att.i.tude is that of the knight-errant, seeking high adventures and welcoming death in a n.o.ble cause. But the German att.i.tude disregards the individual and knows nothing of gallantry. It lacks utterly the spiritual elation which made the strength of the French at Verdun and of the English at Mons.

The German att.i.tude is that of a soulless organisation, invented for one purpose--profitable conquest. War for the Hun is not a final and dreaded atonement for the restoring of justice to the world; it is a business undertaking which, as he is fond of telling us, has never failed to yield him good interest on his capital. I have seen a good deal of the capital he has invested in the battlefields he has lost--men smashed to pulp, bruised by sh.e.l.ls out of resemblance to anything human, the breeding place of flies and pestilence, no longer the homes of loyalties and affections. I cannot conceive what percentage of returns can be said to compensate for the agony expended on such indecent Golgothas. However, the Hun has a.s.sured us that it pays him; he flatters himself that he is a first-cla.s.s business man.

But so does the American, and he knows the game from more points of view. For years he has patterned his schools and colleges on German educational methods. What applies to his civilian centres of learning applies to his military as well. German text-books gave the basis for all American military thought. American officers have been trained in German strategy just as thoroughly as if they had lived in Potsdam.

At the start of the war many of them were in the field with the German armies as observers. They are able to synchronise their thoughts with the thoughts of their German enemies and at the same time to take advantage of all that the Allies can teach them.

"War is a business," the Germans have said. The Americans, with an ideal shining in their eyes, have replied, "Very well. We didn't want to fight you; but now that you have forced us, we will fight you on your own terms. We will make war on you as a business, for we are businessmen. We will crush you coldly, dispa.s.sionately, without rancour, without mercy till we have proved to you that war is not profitable business, but h.e.l.l."

The American, as I have met him in France, has not changed one iota from the man that he was in New York or Chicago. He has transplanted himself untheatrically to the scenes of battlefields and set himself undisturbedly to the task of dying. There is an amazing normality about him. You find him in towns, ancient with chateaux and wonderful with age; he is absolutely himself, keenly efficient and irreverently modern. Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border, from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you see the lean figure and the slouch hat of the U.S.A. soldier. He is invariably well-conducted, almost always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself. The excessive gravity of the American in khaki has astonished the men of the other armies who feel that, life being uncertain, it is well to make as genial a use of it as possible while it lasts. The soldier from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone, listening--waiting for the call to come. He doesn't sink into the landscape the way other troops have done. His impatience picks him out--the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose. I have seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself. Every man and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is happening inside him, "Let them take off my khaki and send me back to America, or else hurry me into the trenches. I came here to get started on this job; the waiting makes me tired."

"Let me get into the trenches," that was the cry of the American soldier that I heard on every hand. Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will acquit himself.

I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American that I ever met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic end. The American who acc.u.mulates a fortune to himself, whether it be through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines or establishing a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating, manipulating, evolving--the exhilaration and adventure of swaying power. And so there came a day when I caught my American soldier dreaming and off his guard.

All day I had been motoring through high uplands. It was a part of France with which I was totally unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, m.u.f.fled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic.

Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps, and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed of our pa.s.sage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself in the morning, taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre, now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters working on death's ma.n.u.script. After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging--all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.

My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again nodded. The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush of wind lay heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here and not in the trenches. When I was in the line I had often made up life's deficiencies by imagining, imagining.... Perhaps I was really in the line now. I wouldn't wake up to find out. That would come presently--it always had.

We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily. No, we weren't stopping--only going through a village. What a quaint grey village it was--worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. I was on the point of drowsing off again when I caught sight of a word written on a sign-board, _Domremy_. My brain cleared. I sat up with a jerk. It was magic that I should find myself here without warning--at Domremy, the Bethlehem of warrior-woman's mercy. I had dreamed from boyhood of this place as a legend--a memory of white chivalry to be found on no map, a record of beauty as utterly submerged as the lost land of Lyonesse.

Hauntingly the words came back, "Who is this that cometh from Domremy?

Who is she in b.l.o.o.d.y coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking in the furnaces of Rouen?

This is she, the shepherd girl...." All about me on the little hills were the woodlands through which she must have led her sheep and wandered with her heavenly visions.

We had come to a bend in the village street. Where the road took a turn stood an aged church; nestling beside it in a little garden was a grey, semi-fortified mediaeval dwelling. The garden was surrounded by high spiked railings, planted on a low stone wall. Sitting on the wall beside the entrance was an American soldier. He had a small French child on either knee--one arm about each of them; thus embarra.s.sed he was doing his patient best to roll a Bull Durham cigarette. The children were vividly interested; they laughed up into the soldier's face. One of them was a boy, the other a girl. The long golden curls of the girl brushed against the soldier's cheek. The three heads bent together, almost touching. The scene was timelessly human, despite the modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc might have been that little girl.

I stopped the driver, got out and approached the group. The soldier jumped to attention and saluted. In answer to my question, he said, "Yes, this is where she lived. That's her house--that grey cottage with scarcely any windows. Bastien le Page could never have seen it; it isn't a bit like his picture in the Metropolitan Gallery."

He spoke in a curiously intimate way as if he had known Joan of Arc and had spoken with her there--as if she had only just departed.

It was odd to reflect that America had still lain hidden behind the Atlantic when Joan walked the world.