The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days Part 5

THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL

For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of such enormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory that invisible powers of evil are using man for the execution of devilish designs. But if so, they have had no mercy on their creatures. We read that when, in fear of another flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the children of Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excuses the Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion of intellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever before listened to such whirlwind logic?

When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crew to perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act of war. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defend herself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When British battleships have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starve sixty-five millions of German people. But when German submarines have attempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand pa.s.sengers of many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a just revenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simple humanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of her neutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian in a railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and becomes a proper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed a German soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has been guilty of a.s.sa.s.sination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germany has refused to honour her name to a "sc.r.a.p of paper" she has been a holy martyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hers she has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed.

Therefore G.o.d punish England! Above all, when G.o.d has crowned the arms of Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty, William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore G.o.d bless the Kaiser!

Surely confusion of intellect can go no further, and the German Tower of Babel must soon fall.

THE ALIEN PERIL

But out of this failure of logic on the part of "deep-thinking Germany"

a danger came to us from nearer home than the battlefield. One of the most vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama of the past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, showed us the full depths of the "alien peril." Before the war we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst.

They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice of our law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them had married our British women, who had borne them British children. Most of them had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned to understand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many had been honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had become theirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagner a British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to break down, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universal brotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest, education, and environment were making us one with these strangers within our gates.

Then came a startling awakening. We realized beyond possibility of doubt that many thousands of our German aliens had been keeping up a dual responsibility, and that the chief of their two duties had been duty to their own country. We found beyond question that a settled system of espionage was at work in Great Britain, under the direction of the German authorities; that information which could only be of use in the event of invasion had for many years been gathered up by some of the people whom we had called our friends, and that day by day and hour by hour, as the war went on, secrets valuable to our enemy had been filtering through to Germany from influential places in this country.

What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even our self-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point at the time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realized that there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It is one of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims with moral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience could justify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Why should not our German governesses burn down the houses in which our children lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever was necessary was right.

"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessity knows no law."

HYMNS OF HATE

About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious, intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it "sacred hate") were composed, recited, and sung:

French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot, We love them not, we hate them not, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone-- England!

England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the German race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish hate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred not unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the sufferer's own head. But as no sane father of a family would make free of his children's nursery the deranged relative who required the protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. G.o.d forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, pa.s.sionately opposing Germany's objects in this war and loathing Germany's methods.

We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of "human empire."

We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable hardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In putting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no more than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can never be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a game with it.

THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIA

And then Russia! Distance from the scene of action, the great length of the line of operations and the vast area behind it have made it difficult or impossible for us to see the drama of the Russian campaign as we have seen that of France, Belgium, and our own Empire. But we have seen something, and it has been enough to give the lie to certain of the emphatic protestations with which Germany made war. We had heard it said by the German Chancellor that the fact that Russia was mobilizing in those last days of July 1914 made it impossible for Germany to ask Austria to extend the time-limit imposed upon Serbia--a time-limit which would have been indecent among civilized people if it had concerned nothing more serious than the destruction of a kennel of dogs suspected of rabies. But all the world knows now that Russian mobilization was a process inevitably so slow that the German armies had flung themselves upon Belgium twelve days before the Russian advance began.

Then we had heard it said by the German Churchmen that in taking the side of Russia we, British and French people, leaders among the enlightened races, were helping Muscovite barbarians to oppose the cause of civilization. But since Louvain, Termonde, and Rheims, not to speak of the unnameable iniquities of Liege, the world knows where the barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home--in Berlin, not in Petrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meek ones of the Russian peasantry.

THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT DEATH

The truth, as everybody knows who knows Russia, is that "barbarous," the cla.s.sic taunt of the German against Russia, is, of all words, the least proper as a description of the Russian mind and character. I have myself been only once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and under conditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happened since down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russian soul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, I travelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the plague spots where men's lives were being mown down at the devastating stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts, the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had been with them when their very souls lay bare.

What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate; but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we mean the "will to life" which animates the savage man. And I now say, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liege are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religious people than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive (not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance of the unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which for the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to spiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen the Russian peasants on their pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land, standing (among the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations) before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or trooping in dense crowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. The literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke's, Nietzsche's, and Bernhardi's would be impossible in Russia, not, heaven knows, because of their "intellectual superiority," which is another name for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, their glorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which the Russian mind sets lower than the unseen powers of his soul.

THE RUSSIAN MOUJIK MOBILIZING

So the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the part Russia has played in the drama of the past 365 days have revealed a people acting under something very like a religious impulse. We have seen the moujiks being mobilized in remote parts of the vast country, and have found it a moving picture. It is probable that the war had been going on for weeks before they heard anything about it. Almost certainly they had no clear idea of where the fighting was, or what it was about, the theatre of the struggle being so far away and their ignorance of the world outside their own little communities so profound and impenetrable. We may be sure that when the echo of the great war did at length reach them it was quite undisturbed by any foolish pretence a.s.sociated with the a.s.sa.s.sination of the Archduke Ferdinand (that lie could only be expected to impose on the enlightened peoples of the West) and concerned itself solely with the safety of Russia. The humblest Russian is proud of Russia; proud that it is so big and powerful among the nations of the world. He will gladly die rather than see it made less, so deep is his devotion to the long-suffering giant whose blood is throbbing in his veins.

Therefore when the call of war came to the moujiks in their far-off homes, we saw them answering it as if it had been the call of their faith. First a service in the village church; then a procession behind the village pope to the village shrine ("Now go away and fight for Russia, my children"), then the setting off for the distant railway station, the mothers and young wives of the soldiers marching for miles by their sides, carrying their rifles and haversacks along the wide roads white with dust. What scenes of human pathos! For a long time the officers are indulgent to irregularities--have they not just left their own dear women behind them?--but at length the word of command rings out, and everybody not connected with the army has to go back. Ah, those partings! Still, G.o.d is good! And hadn't Masha promised to burn a candle to the Virgin every day while her husband is away? Ivan will come back; yes, of course Ivan will come back, and by that time baby will be born, and then what joy, what lifelong happiness!

HOW THE RUSSIANS MAKE WAR

From some of the greater cities of Western Russia there came flashes of similar scenes. The memory of that time of the cholera is closely involved for me in the thought of these tragic days, and by the light of what I saw in Kief, in Sosnowitz, in Lublin, in Cracow, in Warsaw, and along the line of front in poor, stricken Poland, where, as I write, men are being mown down like gra.s.s, I seem to see what took place there at the beginning of August 1914, and is taking place now. I see the churches crowded and the congregations trailing out through the open porches into the churchyards around them. Old men and women who are too lame to struggle their way through the throng are lying under the open windows with their sticks and crutches stretched out beside them. Others outside are on their knees, following the services as they proceed within, clasping their hands, making the sign of the Cross, giving the responses, and joining in the singing.

Inside the churches, where the women kneel on one side in their bright cotton head-scarves and the soldiers on the other in their long, dark coats, prayers are being said for Russia, that G.o.d will protect her and her "little Father," the Tsar, and all his faithful children, making the dark cloud that is on their horizon to pa.s.s them by unharmed. From porch to chancel they bend forward with their faces as near to the floor as their close crowding will permit. Then they sing. No one who has not been to Russia has ever heard such singing--no, not even in Rome in the Church of the Gesu as the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the year. There is no organ, and if there is a choir its voices are lost in the deep swell of the melancholy wail that rises from the people.

Perhaps the morning is a bright one, and the sun is shining in dusty sheets of dancing light through the clerestory windows on to the altar ablaze with gold, twinkling behind its yellow candles and the bowed heads of the priests. When the service ends the soldiers form up in lines and march out through the kneeling crowds within and the overflowing congregations lying p.r.o.ne outside.

So do the Russians make war. Not generally to the beating of drums, or yet the singing of their searching national anthem, and a.s.suredly not as bloodhounds hunting for prey, but in the spirit of a simple people, often humble in their ignorance but always strong in their faith--in the certainty that there is something else in G.o.d's world besides greed and gold, something higher than "the will to power," something better for a nation than to enlarge its empire, and that is to possess its soul.

And now in their hour of trial let us salute our brave Allies in the East. Let us a.s.sure them of the sincerity of our alliance. We rejoice in their victories. We count their triumphs as our own. When we hear of their reverses our hearts are full. We feel that out of the storm of battle a great new spirit has been born into Russia, awakening her from a sleep of centuries. We feel, too, that a great new spirit of brotherhood has been born into the world, uniting the scattered and divided parts of it, and that there is no more moving manifestation of the unity of mankind than the fact that the Russian and British peoples, after long years of misunderstanding, are now fighting for the same cause from opposite sides of Europe. May they soon meet and clasp hands!

THE PART PLAYED BY POLAND

And then Poland. Down to the end of the first year of war the part played by Poland has been that of absolute martyr. Like the water-mill in Zola's story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemies and then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armies of the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are gone she lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine and pestilence which have stalked in the wake of war.

No more pitiful and abject picture does the terrible conflict present.

Without part or lot in the European quarrel, with little to gain and everything to lose by it, having no such right of choice as gave glory to the martyrdom of Belgium, Poland has had nothing to do but to endure.

At the beginning of the war, when the battery of Gerrman hatred was directed chiefly against Russia, the world was told that the measure of her barbarity was to be seen in the condition to which the Polish people had been reduced under Russian rule. But did the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins and von Bulows who put forth this plea, count on our ignorance of Galicia, in which the condition of the Poles is immeasurably more wretched under the rule of their Ally, Austria?

In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw something of the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both were unfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of G.o.d. Shut out from the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most inhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; with swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with roads like ca.n.a.ls, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a s.p.a.ce beyond--such is a great part of Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.