Winning a Cause Part 2

FOUR SOLDIERS

THE BOCHE

The _boche_ was chiefly what his masters made him.

He was planned and turned out according to specifications. His leaders and his enemies always knew just what he would do under any given circ.u.mstances, and he himself always knew just what he would do. He would do what he was ordered to do, if he understood the order and had been taught how to execute it; otherwise he would do nothing but stare helplessly. He was a machine built to order, according to plans and specifications.

"In critical moments the boche waited for direction instead of relying on himself. He could not vary a hairbreadth from an order given, even when the variation would have brought success. He was part of a machine army, a cog in a mechanism which needed a push to make it move; his actions must be dictated or he could not act; his very thoughts were disciplined and uniformed."

To the _boche_ there was no chivalry in war. He fought as the barbarians would have fought, if they had had all his knowledge and equipment, but were still uncivilized. Women and children never called forth his pity or his mercy. He would defile and destroy a church or a cathedral with greater pleasure than he would a peasant's hut.

To him there were no laws of war. War meant to fight, to conquer, to kill, to gain the end by any means whatever. Dropping bombs on defenseless women and children and on Red Cross hospitals; torpedoing merchant ships without warning and sending all the pa.s.sengers, even neutrals or friends, to death, or worse, in open boats far from land; firing on stretcher-bearers and nurses; using poison gas and liquid fire; poisoning wells and spreading disease germs; all are forbidden to civilized races by the laws of war. The _boche_ regularly perpetrated them all and committed other atrocities much worse. He hoped to frighten the world by his cruelty and brutality, by making every man, woman, and child among his enemies believe that each _boche_ was an unconquerable giant possessed of a devil.

To the _boche_ war was simply a robbery, and he was one of a robber band. On the land, he was a brigand, on the sea, a pirate. He went about his business with no more mercy and chivalry than a New York gunman or a Paris apache. To him war was a business, an unlawful business to be sure, but, he believed, a profitable one. He went at it, therefore, as he had at manufacturing and commerce in the days of peace. He sought to do bigger things than any one else and to gain an advantage by any means, fair or foul. Why should he think about being fair or humane? He was a thief, not a judge.

And yet let it be recorded that while nearly all _boches_ acted like brutes instead of men, there were some who were different and who showed the highest type of courage and died bravely as soldiers may die.

THE POILU

The soldier of France, the _poilu_, is a crusader. He is fighting to defend France, his great mother, in whose defense, centuries ago, the invisible powers called and sustained Jeanne d'Arc. In his love of country there is something almost religious, like that of the Mohammedan for Mecca and Medina. To serve France, to fight for her, to die for her--and every French soldier expects to die in battle--is a privilege as well as a duty. He fights for his country as an Englishman fights for his home. With the Englishman, his home comes first and is nearest and dearest; with the Frenchman, his country.

Philip Gibbs, who has written from day to day, from the trenches and the battlefields, letters that will never be forgotten because of their beauty and truth, says of the French _poilu_:--

"Yet if the English reader imagines that because this thread of sentiment runs through the character of France there is a softness in the qualities of French soldiers, he does not know the truth. Those men whom I saw at the front and behind the fighting lines were as hard in moral and spiritual strength as in physical endurance. It was this very hardness which impressed me even in the beginning of the war, when I did not know the soldiers of France as well as I do now. After a few weeks in the field these men, who had been laborers and mechanics, clerks and journalists, artists and poets, shop a.s.sistants and railway porters, hotel waiters, and young aristocrats of Paris, were toned down to the quality of tempered steel. With not a spare ounce of flesh on them--the rations of the French army are not as rich as ours--and tested by long marches down dusty roads, by incessant fighting in retreat against overwhelming odds, by the moral torture of those rearguard actions, and by their first experience of indescribable horrors, among dead and dying comrades, they had a beauty of manhood which I found sublime. They were bronzed and dirty and hairy, but they had the look of knighthood, with a calm light shining in their eyes and with resolute lips. They had no gayety in those days, when France was in gravest peril, and they did not find any kind of fun in this war.

Out of their baptism of fire they had come with scorched souls, knowing the murderous quality of the business to which they were apprenticed, but though they did not hide their loathing of it, nor the fears which had a.s.sailed them, nor their pa.s.sionate anger against the people who had thrust this thing upon them, they showed no sign of weakness. They were willing to die for France, though they hated death, and in spite of the first great rush of the German legions, they had a fine intellectual contempt of that army, which seemed to me then unjustified, though they were right, as history now shows. Man against man, in courage and cunning they were better than the Germans, gun against gun they were better, in cavalry charge and in bayonet charge they were better, and in equal number irresistible."

THE TOMMY

John Masefield, the English writer, says, "St. George did not go out against the dragon like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio's picture, nor like that divine calm man in Donatello's statue. He went out, I think, after some taste of defeat knowing that it was going to be bad, and that the dragon would breathe fire, and that very likely his spear would break, and that he wouldn't see his children again, and people would call him a fool. He went out, I think, as the battalions of our men went out, a little trembling and a little sick and not knowing much about it, except that it had to be done, and then stood up to the dragon in the mud of that far land and waited for him to come on."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Saint George and the Dragon, painted by V. Carpaccio in 1516, Venice; S. Giorgio Maggiore. The background, as in most medieval paintings, gives scenes that explain further the legend depicted.]

But as soon as the British Tommy had reached the dragon's lair, he became the British player in a great championship game of the nations.

He was the British sportsman, hunting big game; for in matters of life or death, he is always the player or the sportsman. That it was a hideous dragon breathing out poison gas and fire and destroying Christian maidens, made the sport all the more interesting and worth while. Philip Gibbs says of the English Tommy:--

"They take great risks sometimes as a kind of sport, as Arctic explorers or big game hunters will face danger and endure great bodily suffering for their own sake. Those men are natural soldiers. There are some even who like war, though very few. But most of them would jeer at any kind of pity for them, because they do not pity themselves, except in most dreadful moments which they put away from their minds if they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse still, with a most deadly hatred, all the talk about 'our cheerful men.' For they know that, however cheerful they may be, it is not because of a jolly life or lack of fear. They loathe sh.e.l.l-fire and machine-gun fire. They know what it is 'to have the wind up.' They have seen what a battlefield looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. It is not for non-combatants to call them 'cheerful'; because non-combatants do not understand and never will, not from now until the ending of the world. 'Not so much of your cheerfulness,' they say, and 'Cut it out about the brave boys in the trenches.' So it is difficult to describe them, or to give any idea of what goes on in their minds, for they belong to another world than the world of peace that we knew, and there is no code which can decipher their secret, nor any means of self-expression on their lips."

The Tommy dislikes to show emotion or to brag or to be praised when he is present. To outsiders and to soldiers of other nations sent to help him, he likes to make the duties and the dangers seem as disagreeable, as horrible, and as inevitable as he possibly can, but when he has discharged a particularly tiresome and obnoxious duty himself or has met without flinching a terrible danger, he declares his act was "nothing."

"The _poilu_ and the Tommy are vastly different. The Frenchman works himself up into a fanatical state of enthusiasm, and in a wild burst of excitement dashes into the fray. The Englishman finishes his cigarette, exchanges a joke with his 'bunkie' and coolly goes 'over the top.' Both are wonderful fighters with the profoundest admiration for each other."

The Tommy wants his tea and the officers like to carry their canes and swagger sticks with them "over the top" into battle. A brave, unpretending man, who likes his own ways and wishes to be allowed to follow them and who is willing to fight and die that others also may be free--such is the English Tommy. With him it is all a part of the game, the game of war, and the greatest game of all, the game of life.

He must play his part and play it well.

THE YANK

The _boche_ went into the war as a robber, the _poilu_ as a crusader determined to save the sacred and holy things of the world from desecration and destruction, the _Tommy_ as a player in a great game, and the _Yank_ as a policeman whose job it was to "clean up" the affair.

To the American soldiers, the _Yanks_, and to the American people, the war was a job, a most disagreeable one, but one that must be done. No one else was ready and able to do it; so they went at it smilingly and "jollied" every one with whom they came in contact.

French children were asked to write descriptions of the "Yanks" for a New York paper. They nearly all said that they were big and handsome and quick, that they always smiled and were always hungry, especially for chocolate and candy. The French noticed the everlasting smile of the _Yank_, for after three years of war and suffering the French, even the children, had ceased to smile. It is said the children had even forgotten how to play, but they responded to the love in the hearts of the _Yanks_, as did the German children when the American soldiers crossed the Rhine. To the _Yanks_ there were no enemies among the children; they loved them, French or German.

The _Yank_ did not smile because he failed to realize the seriousness of his job, but because with him the harder, the more dangerous, and the dirtier the job, the more must he smile and "jolly" about it.

"They had come to France to do a certain piece of work. It was a b.l.o.o.d.y, dusty, sweaty, unclean, disagreeable one, and they proposed to finish it. . . . We are a people given to discounting futures, and the average American soldier, to put it bluntly, discounted being killed in action. If our Allies, whose fort.i.tude was sustained in a dark hour by the way that our men fought, could have probed what was in the mind of these Americans, they would have found still further reason for faith in our military strength." So declares Major Palmer of General Pershing's staff.

Raymond Fosd.i.c.k says the character of the American soldier was shown when a Y.M.C.A. secretary asked a large body of _Yanks_ to write on little slips of paper distributed to them what they thought were the three greatest sins in a soldier. When the papers were pa.s.sed back and examined, it was found that they agreed unanimously upon the first sin.

It was cowardice. And almost unanimously upon the second. It was selfishness. And the third was big-headedness.

The _Yank_ is wonderfully free from the sins he hates. Dashing, fearless, willing to die rather than to surrender, unable, as General Bundy said, to understand an order to retreat, he is always a "jollier." It is said one platoon of _Yanks_ went "over the top"

wearing tall silk hats with grenades in one hand and carrying pink parasols in the other. This may be only a story of what the _Yanks_ would have done if permitted, but it is true to their nature.

The _Yanks_ have written the n.o.blest chapter of American history. They have honored their fathers and mothers, their churches, the American public school, and the land of Washington and Lincoln. Those who sleep beneath foreign soil have not died in vain.

DUTY

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is G.o.d to man, When Duty whispers low, "_Thou must_,"

The youth replies, "I _can_."

WHERE THE FOUR WINDS MEET

There are songs of the north and songs of the south, And songs of the east and west; But the songs of the place where the four winds meet Are the ones that we love the best.

"And where do the four winds meet?" you ask.

The answer is ready at hand-- "Wherever our dear ones chance to be By air, or by sea, or land."

So the sailor, keeping his midnight watch 'Mid icicles, snow, and sleet, Can think of a village near Portsmouth town As the place where the four winds meet.

And mother, perhaps, and sweetheart true Pray hard for the North Sea Fleet, And harder still for the boy who's gone To his place, where the four winds meet.

And the man on guard at the "firing-step,"

'Mid star-sh.e.l.ls shimmering down, Can think of his home--where the four winds meet In some sheltered English town.

And thoughts may fly to the distant trench, Whatever its name or "street,"

For "Somewhere in France" seems far less vague If we add, "where the four winds meet."