The World Decision Part 7

The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoiled in disgust from the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, the shooting of Edith Cavell, from the wanton destruction of monuments.

All these barbarities are indisputable facts, which may be explained and extenuated, but cannot be denied. There is another cla.s.s of barbarities,--the so-called "atrocities,"--which are more easily denied, but which most people who have taken the trouble to examine the charges know to be equally true. The record of these multiplied atrocities is so enormous and so well authenticated that it would seem to me useless to add any words to the theme were it not for an amazing att.i.tude of indifference to the subject on the part of many Americans. "We don't want to hear any more atrocity stories," they say. "Perhaps the atrocities have been exaggerated, probably there's truth on both sides.

Anyway, war is brutal as every one knows." Some newspapers will not publish the atrocity charges, whether because of our popular prejudice against anything "unpleasant" unless freshly sensational or because of more sinister reasons, the reader may judge.

This att.i.tude is both evasive and cowardly. It is essential to understand the atrocity for a proper realization of the war and of the German menace. It is false to say that all war is barbarous, and that in every war similar atrocities have occurred. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc has well said,--"Men have often talked during this war ... as though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were normal to warfare.... It is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbors have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of their innocence, with the ma.s.sacre of priests and the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their pa.s.sengers and crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within the states."

It is the business of every person who is concerned about anything more than his own selfish fate to examine into the atrocity charges and to convince himself, not only of the truth, but of the more serious implications in their premeditated and persistent character. The record has been well made, fortunately, often in judicial form. It is already voluminous and being added to constantly. Best of all the evidence, perhaps, are the German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of which have been edited by Professor Bedier, of the College de France, with facsimile photographs of the texts. Next I should place in evidence the so-called German "War Book" ("Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege"), where under the convenient t.i.tle of "Indispensable Severities" may be found the text for many of the worst atrocities committed in Belgium and France.

If the atrocity charge against the Germans is false or exaggerated, it is surely time to know it, but no mere denial or general argument can be accepted in reb.u.t.tal. The world must convince itself of the truth. The German crimes have been too many and too public, too well authenticated by witnesses to be disproved by mere denial. The best public opinion of the world has condemned military Germany as a barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will be coupled with Vandal, Tartar, Barbarian.

I believe the atrocity charges to be substantially true in a vast majority of cases. Moreover, I do not believe that half the truth of them has been told or ever will be. My reasons for this belief in the atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these murders would sanction all other atrocities. Second, the witness of persons in whose credibility I have confidence, such as French officers and civilians, nurses and doctors, whose occupations have thrown first-hand evidence in their way, who have personal knowledge of specific outrages. Third, from what I myself gathered while I was in France from the lips of abused persons. Although I did not look for atrocities, I could not avoid getting reports from such people as I met in the devastated territory of the Marne, weighing their stories, and estimating the validity of them.

I believe in the truthfulness of that abbe of Esternay, who was one of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the keen old peasant woman at Chatillon, whose home had been riddled by German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately, there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley, though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility of a story, and I believe the abbe, the old woman, and many others who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.

One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape, incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes against the German name.

Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode in senseless pa.s.sion on the least provocation. The German nation froths with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they would not listen to Prince von Bulow's song, latterly against Americans because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war will explain much of all this barbarism--but not all.

The supreme evidence of German atrocities is to be found in the infamous "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," a singular revelation of national character in which the German general staff has summed up for young officers the principles that should govern the conduct of invading armies. One finds here,--"By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions; it will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war, nay, more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient generalization covers the mult.i.tude of Belgian crimes. This interesting manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions, and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems exceptional severities are "indispensable." After perusing the "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," need one seek more evidence of German atrocities from the levying of confiscatory fines upon conquered peoples to the use of noncombatants as human screens in military operations? The germ of the barbarous system is there contained in its entirety.

But the implication of all this is much deeper than might appear on the surface. Such a theory of warfare as is set forth in the "War Book," as has been exemplified throughout the war, having its climax to date in the murder of Edith Cavell, is not the result of uncontrolled pa.s.sions wrought to ferocity. It is deliberate, preconceived, defended,--an article of faith intimately bound up with the German ideal of the state.

There is the danger. That the precept of the higher military authorities is accepted by the general public may be seen in the following pa.s.sage from the Hamburg "Fremdenblatt"--or is it but a press note inserted by the high commandment? "Toxic gases are simply a new instrument of warfare; they are condemned because they are not universally adopted....

In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling. New technical knowledge gives new arms to those who are not fools and know how to use them.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates humanity. All these are changing ideas and Germans are not disposed to discuss them during the war."

An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"--for the sake of terrorizing hostile peoples--and humanitarianism is condemned as "sentimentalism and flabby emotion."

There we have the gist of the whole affair--what makes the Frenchman instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character.

It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken orgies in chateaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism.

The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon, terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the long count against Germany. a.s.sume the vital major premise and the rest follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a natural fund of brutality.

"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates humanity. All these are changing ideas."

The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war, it would not be her b.u.mptious aggression that the world ought to fear so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed, to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness and barbarism.

One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning, they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified themselves against his cruel power.

But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many fresh examples--too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German atrocity is doc.u.mented in France over and over, within the knowledge of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.

In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc.

"That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback, "is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously--not against monuments, against women and children and old people, but as soldiers against soldiers!"

The Latin is sometimes cruel--he has within him the capacity for cruelty--and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically, has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity, Spanish atrocity--they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never won on that principle of "indispensable severity."

It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting, and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the cool, dispa.s.sionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.

For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.

IV

_The German Lesson_

The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--"an eye for an eye," not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.

The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.

Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde; the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.

As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate was reserved for the English, her most ign.o.ble slurs for the French.

Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.

This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.

The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable, even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies.

One of the astonishing revelations of national psychology unfolded in the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.

For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their home and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the menace of his barbarism.

That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German lesson faster than his allies.

What everybody knows by this time, and in America is repeating with sickening fluency, is that Germany is "efficient," not only militarily efficient, but socially and economically efficient--which these days amounts to the same thing. Germany is "organized" both for peace and war more efficiently than any other nation in the world. The two terms that this war has driven into all men's consciousness are "efficiency"

and "organization." We in America, p.r.o.ne to admire the sheen of tin, have bowed down in greater admiration than any other people to German "efficiency." For efficiency values in the operations of life are just the ones we are most capable of appreciating, although our government and general social organization remain as lamentably inefficient as, say, the English. But being a business people we are fitted to admire business qualities above all others. The German army, the German state are magnificently run businesses! To some of us, however, the term "efficiency" has become nauseating because it has been a.s.sociated with so much else that we loathe from the bottom of our souls. If we cannot have an "efficient" civilization without paying the price for it that Germany has paid,--the price of humanity, of beauty, the price of her soul,--let us return to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian village!

Germany under a highly autocratic system of government has created a social machine of unexampled and formidable efficiency. The German realized before his rivals that war had become, like all other human activities, a matter of business on a huge scale. And he had prepared not merely the special instruments of war, but also the tributary business on this scale of modern magnitude: he had converted his state into a powerful war machine. All this which is now commonplace has become more glaringly evident to us onlookers because of the lamentable failure of England and Russia especially to meet the requirements of the new business. So incapable do they seem of learning the German lesson that to some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed already to disaster. Certainly the English and the Russians have justified many of those bitter German taunts.

It has not been so with France. The French also were caught unprepared--to their honor--like their allies. Can a real democracy ever be prepared for war? France, suffering grievously from the first blow dealt by the enemy, looked destruction in the face before the stand at the Marne. The famous victory of the Marne, I believe, is still unknown in Germany--I have been so informed by an American who spent last winter in Germany. The battle of the Marne may not rank in history as quite the greatest battle in the history of the world.

The French may exaggerate its importance as a military event. The English have certainly exaggerated the part played by their little expeditionary force of less than a hundred thousand in "saving France."

That is for others to dispute. But it was without any question a great moral victory for the French of the utmost tonic value to the nation.

It saved France from despair, possibly from the annihilation that follows despair. And ever since the Marne victory, French confidence and _elan_ have been rapidly growing. During that b.l.o.o.d.y September week they realized that the barbarian was not invincible, the machine was not so perfect but that human will and human courage could resist it.

Moreover, the machine lacked that quality of spirit which the French felt in themselves. As the months have dragged around an entire year and more in the trenches, almost contempt has grown in the mind of the French soldier for the formidable German machine. Strong as it is, it yet lacks something--that something of human spirit without which permanent victories cannot be achieved. Its strength can be imitated. The spirit cannot be "organized."

French confidence is more than an official phrase, a mere bluff!