Villa Elsa Part 25

When Holland was reached that morning, his pa.s.sport was declared impeccable and his faithful trunk caused him no trouble. Although the war excitement was seizing that region he fortunately met no delay in getting to the coast. Once out of Deutschland he felt amazingly well despite the weariness of his exhausting night. He concluded that the vigorous exercise and sweating he had been through had steamed out of him the vileness he had found in Germany.

It acted like a rejuvenating process. Gard now seemed to himself like a clean, new man. He _was_ to be a new man.

CHAPTER XLII

THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS?

In England, when war came, the confusion was unbelievable. All that Gard had seen, heard, gone through in Deutschland proved the awfulness of the Force flung against Europe which had stupidly considered itself civilized.

He was burning to enlist. But what a chagrin to find his services not wanted! The only satisfaction he could get lay in the suggestion to wait. The more he was put off, the more he was bent on reaching the firing line.

In his enforced and impatient idleness he took out his German note book and began writing letters to Rebner in America, thus giving partial vent to his own feelings. The following brief extracts were written first as he went about different camps, offering himself, then at the front:

_England, October, 1914._

... You know how I went to Germany at your urging, with every favorable impulse toward the Germans. But you had little idea what they are. If our fellow-Americans realized what was thought and said of them beyond the Rhine, they would be in battle now.

As there is no prospect of our Government wanting fighting men, I am trying to get into the English service. No success yet....

How could you, my good mentor, be so in error about the race from which you sprang? Had you been in Germany, the scales would have dropped from your eyes. You have never lived with the Germans there--only read the best about the "most advanced" of mankind. They are so different from our American-Germans. You did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before women, kicks his children about, has coa.r.s.e or vulgar ideas on female chast.i.ty, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say of anyone beyond his boundaries.

Pray do not fancy I am pretending to chide _you_. Weren't we all like you in America, dazzled before what apparently we were humbly ready to admit as the super-race? And yet in a mult.i.tude of ways it is so obviously a people set off by itself in much barbarism. There is its Gothic script which offends the eye somewhat like outlandish runes. Its very language growls and snorts at you, sounds threatening as if angry--pardon me for these sentences! There are its mud-colored towns and architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious, with tastelessness prevailing.

The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by thumpings in some form. The Teuton's inability to see himself as another sees him--is this not, above all, the stamp of an under-civilized people?...

_England, October, 1914._

... Do not think I am unduly harsh, prejudiced, revengeful. I am trying to write in measured terms of what has been forced in upon me and my attention against my wish or expectations.

I have met but one American who said that war was at hand and knew what the Germans really are at home. He was an elderly journalist in Dresden who was jeered at until he almost imagined himself mentally unbalanced. Others thought him so, at any rate.

But Anderson was a true prophet. Dear isolated, desolated soul!

I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he got out safely. How I wish I could grasp his hand and say, How wise were your convictions!

Like myself he had gone to Deutschland to admire and love the Germans. But he found what I found--an astonishing amount of ruthlessness. How could one expect that the ultimate world-justice and world-humanity were to evolve out of a race to which the army, armed soldiers and statesmen clad in steel, stand for so much?

How could anything of universal good come from a people who consider nothing from the viewpoint of a kindly common brotherhood? Contempt, intolerance, physical force, are what they gloat over in international relations. I discovered that when they must ask pardon or make amends, they do so with bad grace. They do not take a magnanimous and frank satisfaction or pleasure in righting a wrong.

You would not believe how lacking their character is in the capacity for penitence, for atonement. We will never see them sorry for any of their present enormities. The still, small voice in them has not been allowed to develop. Their notion of ethics is so different that it is inadmissible from our standards.

To be sensitive, grieve, suffer morally, is apart from their normal consciousness. For all this tender and beautiful side of human nature they subst.i.tute only the discomforted feelings of defeat. No matter how this present conflict ends, he who looks for any sympathetic actions or n.o.ble regrets from them will be dumfounded....

_England, November, 1914_.

Hurrah! I am at last, after disappointments and frettings, under way for Flanders. Lo, I am become, as it were, an Englishman!

The British now see the full peril and are taking almost any kind of men, and I'm going along. I suppose it is because I am so keyed up that I feel so well. I'm surprised at myself. I guess I must have, after all, a little good Anglo-Saxon grit in me.

I am trying to write this scrawl to you on a round milk container in a camp near London. We are not permitted to tell where....

As I was on the point of saying in my last letter, Jesus is never a watchword in Germany. The Nazarene meekness makes small appeal there. All is Gott. The Teuton regards Christ as too much of a weakling. Had He an army? Could He shoot, as all Germans can? He would not fight and therefore was properly destroyed.

If His foolish ideas were followed, the weak would eventually rule the earth whereas, to the German mind, the strong should manifestly rule the earth. The strongest are the fittest, and the fittest should alone survive.

To the Goth the Christian religion and philosophy are baneful, baleful. As the result of their feeble policy was not Christ followed--the Germans claim--by the Dark Ages when mankind was obsessed by His superst.i.tious worship? Lifting men out of this mora.s.s, the proper practical, scientific and warlike forces came at length into play and we have the magnificent modern regime whose basis is armed strength.

Hence--it is argued--Germany came into her own and inevitably leads the world. She represents the perfection of organized physical and mental powers which are the ant.i.theses of the Christ ideal.

And so you never hear much in Deutschland about Peace and Good Will, Do as You would be Done by, Faith, Hope and Charity and the greatest of these is Charity. Such Christian texts and mottoes, which fill our American homes, churches and public places, are little in evidence in Germany because they do not enter into the life. The popular nomenclature is pagan rather than Biblical. Already in this war we behold the Kaiser drawing his names for forts and trenches from his wild pagan mythology, not from Christian sources. And in Deutschland, acts in the field count for so much more than words in the pulpit.

If the Huns win, Teuton hate will, of course, succeed Christian love as the human creed. Friendship, as we know it, will largely cease to exist. Friends will be those who can be cowed into truculence or bought. There will be no truth, justice, equity, in our meaning. Only the will or whim of the Emperor. His State Church, with its worship of Him, will grow as _the_ church.

Everything that southern and western Europe stands for, from ancient Greece to the northern points of Scotland and Ireland (with America in addition)--beauty, loveableness, the brightness of life with its joyousness, gayety, grace, charm--will be stamped down under the metallic heels of the Kaiser's battalions and bureaucrats....

_Boulogne, January, 1915_.

After what I have written you from Germany, and since, about my unexpected disillusionment, you will ask me:

"Well, enough of this. What ought to be done or can be done about it?"

I am thinking about a solution. Not original, for its framework was suggested by my old journalistic friend. I will send you an outline of his idea as he gave it to me one day. All that he said and prophesied has come so direfully true that I have now full faith and confidence in his vision and practical sense on the subject of the Goth race. For he _lived_ and observed among them seven years.

That's the great point--_living together_. And I do not mean living together when people are mature or old but when _young_--when minds, sympathies, etc., are plastic and pliable.

As long as the young Germans are kept home--never sent abroad unless as spies in some form--the Teutons will remain Huns.

Granted that they can't help it if they are born with the Hun strain in their blood which their education or instruction not only preserves but enrages. Admit that they want any barbarism eliminated from their veins. That would be an important point over which our world should hold out to them the glad hand....

Don't be offended, but the best thing that I learned in college was to throw well from left field. At any rate it saved my life, I suppose, at Aix. And I've grown wonderfully fond of pepper. It braces a chap for this Iceland wind that howls down upon us at times. We call baseball and football a part of education. Good, brave things. The Germans don't have them because they have only "instruction."

From what I observed beyond the Rhine, education is a growth in free and liberal countries. As we are seeing in the war, German instruction turns out experts, but also intellectual monsters and scientific fiends--instructed heathens....

Strange to say, I don't believe I could have stood this existence here if my system had not got a good cleansing out when I was sick. I am all the time thinking about the Huns. And it is strictly necessary hereabouts.

CHAPTER XLIII

THE TEUTON PROBLEM. A SOLUTION