THE DRAMA OF THREE HUNDRED & SIXTY-FIVE DAYS

SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR

By Hall Caine

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY - 1915

 DEDICATED

 TO THE YOUNG MANHOOD

 OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE

THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS

THE INVISIBLE CONFLICT

Mr. Maeterlinck has lately propounded the theory {*} that what we callthe war is neither more nor less than the visible expression of a vastinvisible conflict. The unseen forces of good and evil in the universeare using man as a means of contention. On the result of the strugglethe destiny of humanity on this planet depends. Is the Angel to prevail?Or is the Beast to prolong his malignant existence? The issue hangs onFate, which does not, however, deny the exercise of the will of man. Mystical and even fantastic as the theory may seem to be, there is noresisting its appeal. A glance back over the events of the past yearleaves us again and again without clue to cause and effect. It isimpossible to account for so many things that have happened. We cannotalways say, "We did this because of that, " or "Our enemies did thatbecause of the other. " Time after time we can find no reason why thingshappened as they have--so unaccountable and so contradictory have theyseemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year hasbeen done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hencesome of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which is, Ithink, the theory of the ancients--the theory on which the Greeksbuilt their plays--that invisible powers of good and evil, operatingin regions that are above and beyond man's control, are working out hisdestiny in this monstrous drama of the war. 

 * The Daily Chronicle. 

And what a drama it has been already! We had witnessed only 365 days ofit down to August 4, 1915, corresponding at the utmost to perhaps threeof its tragic acts, but what scenes, what emotions! Mr. Lowell usedto say that to read Carlyle's book on the French Revolution was tosee history as by flashes of lightning. It is only as by flashes oflightning that we can yet hope to see the world-drama of 1914-15. Figures, groups, incidents, episodes, without the connecting linksof plots, and just as they have been thrown off by Time, themaster-producer--what a spectacle they make, what a medley of motives, what a confused jumble of sincerities and hypocrisies, heroisms andbrutalities, villainies and virtues!

As happens in every drama, a great deal of the tragic mischief hadoccurred before the curtain rose. Always before the passage of war overthe world there comes the far-off murmur of its approaching wings. Eachof us in this case had heard it, distinctly or indistinctly, accordingto the accidents of personal experience. I think I myself heard it forthe first time dearly when in the closing year of King Edward's reign Icame to know (it is unnecessary to say how) what our Sovereign's feelinghad been about his last visit to Berlin. It can do no harm now tosay that it had been a feeling of intense anxiety. The visit seemednecessary, even imperative, there-fore the King would not shirk hisduty. But for his country, as well as for himself, he had feared for hisreception in Germany, and on his arrival in Berlin, and during his drivefrom the railway station with the Kaiser, he had watched and listenedto the demonstrations in the streets with an emotion which very nearlyamounted to dread. 

The result had brought a certain relief. With the best of all possibleintentions, the newspapers in both capitals had reported that KingEdward's reception had been enthusiastic. It hadn't been that--at least, it hadn't seemed to be that to the persons chiefly concerned. But it hadbeen just cordial enough not to be chilling, just warm enough to carrythings off, to drown that far-off murmur of war which was like theapproach of a mighty wind. Then, during the next days, there had beenthe usual banqueting, with the customary toasting to the amity of thetwo great nations, whose interests were so closely united by bonds ofpeace! And then the return drive to the railway station, the clatter ofhorsemen in shining armour, the adieux, the throbbing of the engine, the starting of the train, and then. . . . "Thank God, it's over!" If theinvisible powers had really been struggling over the destiny of men, howthe evil half of them must have shrieked with delight that day as theKaiser rode back to Potsdam and our King returned to London!

PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE KAISER

Other whisperings there were of the storm that was so soon to burst onthe world. In the ominous silence there were rumours of a certain changethat was coming over the spirit of the Kaiser. For long years he hadbeen credited with a sincere love of peace, and a ceaseless desireto restrain the forces about him that were making for war. Althoughconstantly occupied with the making of a big army, and inspiring it withgreat ideals, he was thought to have as little desire for actual warfareas his ancestor, Frederick William, had shown, while gathering up hisgiant guardsmen and refusing to allow them to fight. Particularly it wasbelieved in Berlin (not altogether graciously) that his affection for, and even fear of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, would compel him toexhaust all efforts to preserve peace in the event of trouble with GreatBritain. But Victoria was dead, and King Edward might perhaps be smiledat--behind his back--and then a younger generation was knocking at theKaiser's door in the person of his eldest son, who represented forceswhich he might not long be able to hold in check. How would he act now?

Thousands of persons in this country had countless opportunities beforethe war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had onlyone, and it was not of the best. For years the English travellerabroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiosepersonality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage, fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures, scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him--as inthe case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn down (itwas said with his consent) to let his equipage pass through. 

In Rome I saw a man who was a true son of his ancestors. Never hadthe laws of heredity better justified themselves. Frederick William, Frederick the Great, William the First--the Hohenzollerns were allthere. The glittering eyes, the withered arm, the features that gavesigns of frightful periodical pain, the immense energy, the giganticegotism, the ravenous vanity, the fanaticism amounting to frenzy, thedominating power, the dictatorial temper, the indifference to suffering(whether his own or other people's), the overbearing suppression ofopposing opinions, the determination to control everybody's interest, everybody's work--I thought all this was written in the Kaiser'smasterful face. Then came stories. One of my friends in Rome was anAmerican doctor who had been called to attend a lady of the Emperor'shousehold. "Well, doctor, what's she suffering from?" said the Kaiser. The doctor told him. "Nothing of the kind--you're entirely wrong. She'ssuffering from so and so, " said the Majesty of Germany, stamping up anddown the room. At length the American doctor lost control. "Sir, " hesaid, "in my country we have a saying that one bad practitioner is worthtwenty good amateurs--you're the amateur. " The doctor lived throughit. Frederick William would have dragged him to the window and tried tofling him out of it. William II put his arm round the doctor's shoulderand said, "I didn't mean to hurt you, old fellow. Let us sit down andtalk. "

A soldier came with another story. After a sham fight conducted by theKaiser the generals of the German army had been summoned to say whatthey thought of the Royal manoeuvres. All had formed an unfavourableopinion, yet one after another, with some insincere compliment, hadwriggled out of the difficulty of candid criticism. But at length camean officer, who said:

"Sir, if it had been real warfare to-day there wouldn't be enough woodin Germany to make coffins for the men who would be dead. "

The general lived through it, too--at first in a certain disfavour, butafterwards in recovered honour. 

Such was the Kaiser, who a year ago had to meet the mighty wind of War. He was in Norway for his usual summer holiday in July 1914 when affairswere reaching their crisis. Rumour has it that he was not satisfiedwith the measure of the information that was reaching him, thereforehe returned to Berlin, somewhat to the discomfiture of his ministers, intending, it is said, for various reasons (not necessarilyhumanitarian) to stop or at least postpone the war. If so, he arrivedtoo late. He was told that matters had gone too far. They must go onnow. "Very well, if they must, they must, " he is reported to have said. And there is the familiar story that after he had signed his name on thefirst of August to the document that plunged Europe into the conflictthat has since shaken it to its foundations, he flung down his pen andcried, "You'll live to regret this, gentlemen. "

PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE

And then the Crown Prince. In August of last year nine out of every tenof us would have said that not the father, but the son, of the Royalfamily of Germany had been the chief provocative cause of the war. Subsequent events have lessened the weight of that opinion. But theyoung man's known popularity among an active section of the officers ofthe army; their subterranean schemes to set him off against his father;a vague suspicion of the Kaiser's jealousy of his eldest son--all thesefacts and shadows of facts give colour to the impression that not leastamong the forces which led the Emperor on that fateful first of Augustto declare war against Russia was the presence and the importunity ofthe Crown Prince. What kind of man was it, then, whom the invisiblepowers of evil were employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?

Hundreds of persons in England, France, Russia, and Italy must have metthe Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, andformed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence ofprotective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealingtheir little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the caseof the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winterinto a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of theEngadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, incommon with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day, for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for nointellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever itmay be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression. 

I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whetherphysical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; thehatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreatingforehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely inrestless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all;the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; themorbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifferenceto other people's feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumptionof a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions onwhich social intercourse depends--all this was, so far as my observationenabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of theCrown Prince. 21

Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing, ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot rememberto have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story ofan act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easyfor a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantlyhearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, ofdeliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not inform, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, ifMacaulay's stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the openstreets and tell her to go home and mind her brats. 

SOME SALUTARY LESSONS

Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and it was not the year 1720, so the air tingled occasionally with other tales of little salutarylessons administered to our Royal upstart on his style of pursuing thepleasures considered suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of himthat, having given a cup to be raced for on the Bob-run, he was wrothto find on the notice-board of entries the names of a team of highlyrespectable little Englishmen who are familiar on the racecourse; and, taking out his pencil-case, he scored them off, saying, "My cup is forgentlemen, not jockeys, " whereupon a young English soldier standing byhad said: "We're not jockeys here, sir, and we're not princes; we areonly sportsmen. "

I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after aparticularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling thesafety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince ofGermany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not benamed, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kickedoff the road. 

And this is the mindless, but mischievous, person, the ridiculousbuccaneer, born out of his century, who was permitted to interferein the destinies of Europe; to help to determine the fate of tens ofmillions of men on the battlefields, and the welfare of hundreds ofmillions of women and children in their homes. What wild revel theinvisible powers of evil must have held in Berlin on that night ofAugust 1, 1914, after the Kaiser had thrown down his pen!

PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHDUKE FERDINAND

Then the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, whose assassination wasthe ostensible cause of this devastating war--what kind of man was he?Quite a different person from the Crown Prince, and yet, so far as Icould judge, just as little worthy of the appalling sacrifice of humanlife which his death has occasioned. Not long before his tragic end Ispent a month under the same roof with him, and though the house wasonly an hotel, it was situated in a remote place, and though I was notin any sense of the Archduke's party, I walked and talked frequentlywith most of the members of it, and so, with the added help of dailyobservation, came to certain conclusions about the character of theprincipal personage. 

A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and ashort manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious, self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledgeall such men must possess, but narrow in intellect, retrograde insympathy, a stickler for social conventions, an almost unyieldingupholder of royal rights, prerogatives, customs, and usages (althoughby his own marriage he had violated one of the first of the laws of hisclass, and by his unfailing fidelity to his wife continued to resistit), superstitious rather than religious, an immense admirer of theKaiser, and a decidedly hostile critic of our own country--such wasthe general impression made on one British observer by the ArchdukeFerdinand. 

The man is dead; he took no part in the war, except unwittingly by theact of dying, and therefore one could wish to speak of him with respectand restraint. Otherwise it might be possible to justify this estimateof his character by the narration of little incidents, and one such, though trivial in itself, may perhaps bear description. The youngerguests of the hotel in the mountains had got up a fancy dress ball, and among persons clad in all conceivable costumes, including those ofmonks, cardinals, and even popes, a lady of demure manners, who didnot dance, had come downstairs in the habit of a nun. This aroused thesuperstitious indignation of the Archduke, who demanded that the ladyshould retire from the room instantly, or he would order his carriageand leave the hotel at once. 

Of course, the inevitable happened--the Archduke's will became law, and the lady went upstairs in tears, while I and two or three others(Catholics among us) thought and said, "Heaven help Europe when the timecomes for its destinies to depend largely on the judgment of a man whosebe-muddled intellect cannot distinguish between morality of the realworld and of an entirely fantastic and fictitious one. "

ONE OF THE OLDEST, FEEBLEST, AND LEAST CAPABLE OF MEN

That time, as we now know, never came, but a still more fatal time didcome--the cruel, ironical, and sinister time of July 28, 1914, when oneof the oldest, feeblest, and least capable of living men, the Emperorof Austria, under the pretence of avenging the death of theheir-presumptive to his throne, signed with his trembling hand, whichcould scarcely hold the pen, the first of his many proclamations ofwar, and so touched the button of the monstrous engine that set Europeaflame. 

The Archduke Ferdinand was foully done to death in discharging apatriotic duty, but to think that the penalty imposed on the world forthe assassination of a man of his calibre and capacity for usefulness(or yet for the violation of the principles of public safety, thereby involved) has been the murdering of millions of men of manynationalities, the destruction of an entire kingdom, the burning ofhistoric cities, the impoverishment of the rich and the starvation ofthe poor, the outraging of women and the slaughter of children, is alsoto think that for the past 365 days the destinies of humanity havebeen controlled by demons, who must be shrieking with laughter at thestupidities of mankind. 

Thank God, we are not required to think anything quite so foolish, although we can not escape from a conclusion almost equally degrading. Victor Hugo used to say that only kings desired war, and that with thecelebration of the United States of Europe we should see the beginningof the golden age of Peace. But the events of the tremendous days fromJuly 28 to August 4, 1914, show us with humiliating distinctness thatthough Kaisers, Emperors, Crown Princes, and Archdukes may be theaccidental instruments of invisible powers in plunging humanity intoseas of blood, a war is no sooner declared by any of them, howeverfeeble or fatuous, than all the nations concerned make it their own. That was what happened in Central Europe the moment Austria declaredwar on Serbia, and the history of man on this planet has no record ofanything more pitiful than the spectacle of Germany--"sincere, calm, deep-thinking Germany, " as Carlyle called her, whose triumph in 1870 was"the hopefullest fact" of his time--stifling her conscience in order tojustify her participation in the conflict. 

"GOOD GOD, MAN, DO YOU MEAN TO SAY. . . "

"We have tried in vain to localize the just vengeance of our Austrianneighbour for an abominable royal murder, " said the Germans, knowingwell that the royal murder was nothing but a shameless pretext for anopportunity to test their strength against the French, and give law tothe rest of Europe. 

"Let us pass over your territory in order to attack our enemy in theWest, and we promise to respect your independence and to recompense youfor any loss you may possibly sustain, " said Germany to Belgium, withouta thought of the monstrous crime of treachery which she was askingBelgium to commit against France. 

"Stand aside in a benevolent neutrality, and we undertake not to takeany of the possessions of France in Europe, " said Germany to GreatBritain, without allowing herself to be troubled by so much as aqualm about the iniquity of asking us to trade with her in the Frenchcolonies. And when we rejected Germany's infamous proposals, and calledon her to say if she meant to respect the independence of Belgium, whoseintegrity we had mutually pledged ourselves to protect, her Chancellorstamped and fumed at our representative, and said, "Good God, man, doyou mean to say that your country will go to war for a scrap of paper?"

A GERMAN HIGH PRIEST OF PEACE

Nor did the theologians, publicists, and authors of Germany show a moresensitive conscience than her statesmen. One of the theologians wasAdolf Harnack, professor of Church History in Berlin and intimateacquaintance of the Kaiser. Not long before the war he published abook entitled "What is Christianity?" which began with the words, "JohnStuart Mill used to say humanity could not be too often reminded thatthere was once a man named Socrates. That is true, but still moreimportant it is to remind mankind that a man of the name of Jesus Christonce lived among them. " On this text the Book proceeded to enforce thepractical application of Christ's teaching to the modern world, andparticularly to propound his doctrine of the wickedness and futilityof violence, which led the author to the conclusion that it was "notnecessary for justice to use force in order to remain justice. "

Somewhat later Professor Harnack came to this country to attend, if Iremember rightly, a World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, and thememory of him which abides in our northern capital is that of a highpriest and prophet of the new golden age that was dawning on theworld--the age of universal brotherhood and peace. But no sooner hadwar come within the zone of Germany than this man signed (if he didnot write) a manifesto of German theologians which told "evangelicalChristians abroad" that the German "sword was bright and keen, " thatGermany was taking up arms to establish the justice of her cause andthat ever through the storm and horror of the coming conflict the Germanpeople, with a calm conscience, would kneel and pray: "Hallowed be Thyname, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. "

"WE SHALL NEVER MASSACRE BELGIAN WOMEN"

One of the writers who performed the same kind of moral somersault wasGerhart Hauptmann, author of a Socialist drama called "The Weavers, "and, rumour says, protégé (what frightful irony!) of the Crown Prince, Hauptmann knew well (none better) that a vast proportion of the humanfamily live perpetually on the borderland of want, and that of all whosuffer by war the poor suffer most. Yet he wrote (and a degenerate sonof the great Norwegian liberator, Bjôrnsen, published) a letter, inwhich, after telling the poor of his people that "heaven alone knew"why their enemies were assailing them, he called on them (in effect) toavenge unnameable atrocities, which he alleged, without a particle ofproof, had been committed on innocent Germans living abroad, and thensaid, in allusion to Mr. Maeterlinck, "I can assure him that, although'barbarous Germans, ' we shall never be so cowardly as to massacre ormartyr the Belgian women and children. " This was written in August 1914, at the very hour, as the world now knows, when the German soldiers inLiège were shooting, bayoneting, and burning alive old men and littlechildren, raping nuns in their convents and young girls in the openstreets. But the invisible powers of evil have no mercy on theirinstruments after they have worked their will, and Time has turned theminto objects of contempt. 

Nor were the German people themselves, any more than theirmaster-spirits and spokesmen, spared the shame of their duplicityin those early days of August 1914. A large group of them, includingcommercial and professional men, drew up a long address to the neutralcountries, in which they said that down to the eleventh hour they had"never dreamt of war, " never thought of depriving other nations of lightand air or of thrusting anybody from his place. And yet the ink of theirprotest was not yet dry when they gave themselves the lie by showingthat down to the last detail of preparation they had everything readyfor the forthcoming struggle. 

Englishmen who were in Berlin and Cologne on July 81, and August 1(before any of the nations had declared war on Germany), could see whatwas happening, though no telegrams or newspapers had yet made known thenews. A tingling atmosphere of joyous expectation in the streets; thecafés and beer-gardens crowded with civilians in soldiers' uniforms;orchestras striking up patriotic anthems; excited groups singing"Deutschland über Alles, " or rising to their feet and jingling glasses;then the lights put out, and a general rush made for the railwaystations--everybody equipped, and knowing his duty and his destination. 

THE OLD GERMAN ADAM

It was the old historic story of German duplicity, and the nations ofEurope had no excuse for being surprised. When the Prussian Monarchywas first bestowed on the relatively humble family of the Höhenzollerns, they found their territory for the most part sterile, the soil roundBerlin and about Potsdam--the favourite residence of the Margraves--asandy desert that could scarcely be made to yield a crop of rye or oats, so they set themselves to enlarge and enrich it by help of an armyout of all proportion to the size and importance of their States. Theresults were inevitable. When war becomes the trade of a separate classit is natural that they should wish to pursue it at the first favourableopportunity of conquest. That opportunity came to Prussia when CharlesVI died and the Archduchess Maria Theresa succeeded to her father byvirtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction), to which all the Powersof Europe had subscribed. Frederick had subscribed to it. But, nevertheless, in the name of Prussia, without any proper excuse or evendecent pretext, he took possession of Silesia, thereby robbing the allywhom he had bound himself to defend, and committing the same great crimeof violating his pledged word, which Germany has now committed againstBelgium. 

But there was one difference between the outrages of 1740 and 1914. The great barrator made no hypocritical pretence of desiring peace. "Ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me carriedthe day, and I decided for war, " he said. It was reserved forHarnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about theresponsibilities of "Kul-tur" (that harlot of the German dictionary, debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom ofheaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the oldGerman Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of warwith France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian frontierthere was no thought of the Archduke Ferdinand or of the dodderingold man on the Austrian throne, whose paternal heart had been sorelywounded. Germany was out to rob France of her colonies--to rob her, andthe Germans knew it. 

"A few centuries may have to run their course, " said their own poetGoethe (who surely knew the German soul), "before it can be said of theGerman people, 'It is a long time since they were barbarians. '"

Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the warwhich took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not atheologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past ofhis country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a halfbefore, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of manand God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young toremember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for thewelfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have doneso with searching and scorching eloquence (the voice of Bebel) had onlyjust been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, inthe last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a greatnation being lured on to its moral death-agony amid canting appeals tothe Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy. 

A CONVERSATION WITH LORD ROBERTS

Meantime what had been happening among ourselves? The far-off murmur ofthe approaching wind had been heard by all of us, but as none can hopeto describe the effect on the whole Empire, perhaps each may be allowedto indicate the character of the warning as it came to his own ears. Itwas at Naples, not long after the event, that I heard how the late Kinghad felt about his last visit to Berlin. I was then on my way homefrom Egypt, where I had spent some days at Mena, while Lord Roberts wasstaying there on his way back from the Soudan. He seemed restless andanxious. On two successive mornings I sat with him for a long hour inthe shade of the terraces which overlook the Pyramids discussing the"German danger. " After the great soldier had left for Cairo he wroteasking me to regard our conversations as confidential; and down to thismoment I have always done so, but I see no harm now (quite the reverseof harm) in repeating the substance of what he said so many years ago ona matter of such infinite momentousness. 

"Do you really attach importance to this scare of a German invasion?" Iasked. 

"I'm afraid I do, " said Lord Roberts. 

"You think an enemy army could be landed on our shores?"

"As things are now, yes, I think it could. "

"Do you think you could land an army on the East Coast of England andmarch on to London?"

"Yes, I do. "

"In a thick fog, of course?" "Without a fog, " said Lord Roberts. Afterthat he described in detail the measures we ought to take to make suchan attack impossible and I hasten to add that, so far as I can see andknow, the precautionary measures he recommended have all been takensince the outbreak of the war. 

"WE'LL FIGHT AND FIGHT SOON"

By that time I had, in common with the majority of my countrymen whotravelled much abroad, been compelled to recognize the ever-increasinghostility of the German and British peoples whenever they encounteredeach other on the highways of the world--their constant cross-purposeson steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos, post and telegraphoffices--making social intercourse difficult and friendship impossible. The overbearing manners of many German travellers, their aggressive anddomineering selfishness, which always demanded the best seats, the bestrooms, and the first attention, was year by year becoming more and moreintolerable to the British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced. Indeed, it must be admitted that our country-people usually met theGerman claims to be the supermen of Europe with rather unnecessaryself-assertion. If an unmannerly German pushed before us at the counterof a booking-office we pushed him back; if he shouted over our shouldersat a telegraph office we told him to hold his tongue; and if, instiflingly hot weather, he insisted (as he often did) on shutting upagain and again the window of a railway carriage after we had opened itfor a breath of air, we sometimes drove our elbow through the glass forfinal answer--as I saw an English barrister do one choking day on thejourney between Jaffa and Jerusalem. 

These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they weredisquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with ProfessorHarnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood, history, and faith the German and British peoples were brothers (uglyas it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in theworld-task of civilization than with almost any other nation. 

"If we are brothers we'll fight all the more fiercely for that fact, " wethought, "and, God help us, we'll fight soon. "

"HE KNOWS, DOESN'T HE?"

I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by theGerman governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, aftera visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of aportion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of theextent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying openbetween a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominentin relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men wereobviously angry, although laughing immoderately. "Look at that, " saidone of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coastof Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. "_He_ knows, doesn't he?"

And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitterattack on British journalism ("The scaremongering of that paper isdoing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany andEngland"), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of theAdmiralty, who had lately proposed a year's truce in the building ofbattleships ("Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, andwe'll mind ours"), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany'sobject in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, butmerely to keep the seas open to her trade. "Why, " said one of the men, "nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England couldshut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month. " "Quite so, " saidanother, "and so far as German people go that's the beginning and end ofthe whole matter. "

WE BELIEVED IT

We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of mycountrymen who through many years believed that story--that the accidentof Germany's disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire tobreak British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlargeher navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through theKiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced toshoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threateningfortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of theBight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I didmy best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and thedarkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from giganticfurnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day whenfrail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns. I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of thescholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription andof the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafés, and thehotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than militarynecessity. 

And then there was the human charm of some German homes to sootheaway suspicion--the scholar's quiet house (beyond the clatteringparade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank "to allgood friends in England, " and the sweet simplicity of the little town inWestphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, wherethe nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musicalsocieties, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was sodifficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-powerand dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall thoseGerman homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to doso. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were alreadyapproaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmurlong before ourselves--heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much lessand worse than nothing. 

THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT

Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war camedown on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warningsfew or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it. On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smallerthings, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of thehabitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed inthe affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914, when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns hadalready gathered in the sky. 

Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had toolong concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kindof surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be thedangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficultnegotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely thechief of them is to know step by step by what means its representativesare controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in theCabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke'sassassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeledunder the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable ofcomprehending the cause and the measure of it. 

"What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God's nameshould we have to fight about it?" we thought. Or perhaps, "We've alwaysbeen told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, buthere, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war. "

So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days thatit is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six membersare said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historianof high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, andretired from their company. Another, who came from the working-classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings whichany war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. Athird, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believedto have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany toaccount. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as apacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to acolleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declaredmerely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such anoutcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before--leaving usa derided and, therefore, easily-vanquished people. 

THE PART CHANCE PLAYED

But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accidentoften confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of hisletter the pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressedthat night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he foundhimself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patrioticMinister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to Britishintervention, when his neighbour said: "But what about Belgium? You havepromised to protect her, and if you don't do so she will be destroyed. "

That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories oftheir immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israeldownwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, toreligion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul thatwould come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples bythe strong. The result was swift and sure--the letter in the Minister'spocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed. 

Only God knows whether this period, however short, of indecision amongour people, and particularly among our responsible statesmen, with theconsequent delay in dispatching a determined warning to Germany ("Handsoff Belgium, ") contributed to the making of the war. But it is at leastan evidence of our desire for peace, and a sufficient assurance thatif unseen powers were working on our side also, they were the powers ofgood. Yet so strangely do the invisible forces confound the plans of menthat the crowning proof of this came two days later--on August 8, inthe Commons--when our Foreign Minister defined the British position, andpractically declared for war. 

It is not idle rumour that the Government went down to the House thatday expecting to be resisted. The sequel was a startling surprise. SirEdward Grey's speech was far from a great oration. It gave the effect ofbeing unprepared as to form, so loosely did the vehicle hang together, the sentences sometimes coming with strange inexactitude for the tongueof one whose written word in dispatches has a clarity and precision thathave never been excelled. But it had the supreme qualities of manifestsincerity and transparent honesty, and it derived its overwhelmingeffect from one transcendent characteristic of which the speaker himselfmay have been quite unconscious. It spoke to the British Empire as to aBritish gentleman. "You can't stand by and do nothing while the friendby your side is being beaten to his knees. You can't let a mischievousand unprincipled buccaneer tread into the dust the neighbour whom he hasjoined with you in swearing to protect?" There was no resisting thatOur own interest might leave us cold; we might even be sceptical of ourdanger. But we were put on our honour, and every man in the House withthe instincts of a gentleman was swept away by that appeal as by aflood. 

"WHY ISN'T THE HOUSE CHEERING?"

Then came our Prime Minister's passionate, fiery, yet dignified and evenexalted denunciation of the proposal of Germany that we should tradewith her in our neutrality by committing treachery to France andBelgium--("To accept your infamous offer would be to cover the gloriousname of England with undying shame"); then the announcement of theultimatum sent by Great Britain to Germany demanding an assurance thatthe neutrality of Belgium should be respected; and finally that speechof John Redmond's, which, spoken on the very top of the crisis that hadthreatened to bring a fratricidal war into Ireland, has been, perhaps, the most thrilling and dramatic utterance yet produced by the war. "Itell the Government they may take every British soldier out of Irelandto meet the enemy of the Empire. Ireland's sons will take care ofIreland. The Catholics of the South will stand shoulder to shoulderwith their Protestant fellow-countrymen of the North to fight the commonfoe. "

It was another appeal to the gentlemen in the British nation, and inone moment it swept the bitter waters of the Home Rule crisis out ofall sight and memory. I have heard a Cabinet Minister say that, as helistened to Redmond's speech, he was surprised at the silence with whichit was received. "Why isn't the House cheering?" he had asked himself. But all at once he had felt his eyes swimming and his throat tightening, and then he had understood. 

THE NIGHT OF OUR ULTIMATUM

Our nation knew everything now, and had made her choice, yet the twelvehours' interval between noon and midnight of August 4 were perhaps thegravest moments in her modern history. I am tempted, not without somemisgivings, but with the confidence of a good intention, to trespass sofar on personal information as to lift the curtain on a private scene inthe tremendous tragic drama. 

The place is a room in the Prime Minister's house in Downing Street. ThePrime Minister himself and three of the principal members of his Cabinetare waiting there for the reply to the ultimatum which they sent toGermany at noon. The time for the reply expires at midnight. It isapproaching eleven o'clock. In spite of her "infamous proposal, " theMinisters cannot even yet allow themselves to believe that Germany willbreak her pledged word. 

She would be so palpably in the wrong. It is late and she has not yetreplied, but she will do so--she must. There is more than an hour left, and even at the last moment the telephone bell may ring and then thereply of Germany, as handed to the British Ambassador in Berlin, willhave reached London. 

It is a calm autumn evening, and the windows are open to St. James'sPark, which lies dark and silent as far as to Buckingham Palace in thedistance. The streets of London round about the official residence arebusy enough and quivering with excitement. We British people do not goin solid masses surging and singing down our Corso, or light candlesalong the line of our boulevards. But nevertheless all hearts arebeating high--in our theatres, our railway stations, our railway trains, our shops, and our houses. Everybody is thinking, "By twelve o'clockto-night Germany has got to say whether or not she is a perjurer and athief. "

Meanwhile, in the silent room overlooking the park time passes slowly. In spite of the righteousness of our cause, it is an awful thing toplunge a great empire into war. The miseries and horrors of warfarerise before the eyes of the Ministers, and the sense of personalresponsibility becomes almost insupportable. Could anything be moreawful than to have to ask oneself some day in the future, awakening inthe middle of the night perhaps, after rivers of blood have been shed, "Did I do right after all?" The reply to the ultimatum has not even yetarrived, and the absence of a reply is equivalent to a declaration ofwar. 

THE THUNDERSTROKE OF FATE

Suddenly one of the little company remembers something which everybodyhas hitherto forgotten--the difference of an hour between the time inLondon and the time in Berlin. Midnight by mid-European time would beeleven o'clock in London. Germany would naturally understand the demandfor a reply by midnight to mean midnight in the country of dispatch. Therefore at eleven o'clock by London time the period for the reply willexpire. It is now approaching eleven. 

As the clock ticks out the remaining minutes the tension becomesterrible. Talk slackens. There are long pauses. The whole burden of thefrightful issues involved for Great Britain, France, Belgium, Russia, Germany--for Europe, for the world, for civilization, for religionitself, seems to be gathered up in these last few moments. If war comesnow it will be the most frightful tragedy the world has ever witnessed. Twenty millions of dead perhaps, and civil life crippled for a hundredyears. Which is it to be, peace or war? Terrible to think that as theysit there the electric wires may be flashing the awful tidings, like aflying angel of life or death, through the dark air all over Europe. 

The four men are waiting for the bell of the telephone to ring. It doesnot ring, and the fingers of the clock are moving. The world seems tobe on tiptoe, listening for a thunderstroke of Fate. The Ministers atlength sit silent, rigid, almost petrified, looking fixedly at flooror ceiling. Then through the awful stillness of the room and the parkoutside comes the deep boom of "Big Ben. " Boom, boom, boom! No one movesuntil the last of the eleven strokes has gone reverberating through thenight. Then comes a voice, heavy with emotion, yet firm with resolve, "It's war. "

When the clock struck again (at midnight) Great Britain had been at warfor an hour without knowing it. 

If I have done wrong in lifting the curtain on this private scene, Iask forgiveness for the sake of the purpose I put it to--that of showingthat it was not in haste, not in anger, but with an awful sense ofresponsibility to Great Britain and to humanity that our responsibleMinisters drew the sword of our country. 

THE MORNING AFTER

If Mr. Maeterlinck's theory is sound, that this war is the visiblereflection of a vast, invisible conflict, what a gigantic battle ofthe unseen forces of good and evil must have been raging throughout theuniverse when Europe rose on the morning of August 5, 1914! Think whathad happened. While the light was dawning, the sun was rising, and thebirds were singing over Europe, the greater nations were preparing toturn a thousand square miles of it into a gigantic slaughter-house. After forty years of unbroken peace, in which civilization, asrepresented by law, science, surgery, medicine, art, music, literature, and above all religion, in their ancient and central home, had beenstriving to lift up man to the place he is entitled to in the scheme ofcreation, war had suddenly stepped in to drag him back to the conditionof the barbarian. From this day onward he was to live in holes in theground, to be necessarily unclean, inevitably verminous, and liableto loathsome diseases. Although hitherto law-abiding, and perhaps evenpious, with an ever-developing sense of the value and sanctity of humanlife, he was henceforward to take joy in the destruction of thousandsof his fellow-creatures by devilish machines of death, and not to shrinkfrom an opportunity of thrusting his bayonet down the throat of hisenemy. He was to set fire to churches, to throw images of Christ intothe road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quitecommonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but reallybecause a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living onan arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves themaster-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law to all other nations. 

"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and we shall makeamends as soon as our military necessities have been served. "

"YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU"

What a mockery! What a waste! What a hideous reversion! What aconfession of blank failure on the part of civilization, includingmorality and religion! But, happily, the invisible powers of evil hadnot got it all their own way, even on that morning of August 5. Out ofthe very shadow of battle great things were already being born among thechildren of men, and chief among them were the spirits of sacrifice andbrotherhood. Even the cruel loss of nearly all that makes humanlife worth living--cleanliness and purity and exemption from fouldisease--could be borne for the defence of truth and freedom. And thenit was worth a world of suffering to realize the first-fruits of thatgolden age of brotherhood among all the nations of the earth (exceptthose of our enemy) which has been the peace-dream of humanity forcountless centuries. 

We in Great Britain have no reason to be ashamed of how our countryanswered the call. A few years before the outbreak of war I talkedabout conscription with a British admiral in the cabin of his flagship. "There's not the slightest necessity for it in this country, " said theadmiral. The moment war was declared the whole nation would rise to it. A great thrill would pass over our people from end to end of the land, and we should have millions flocking to the colours. 

The old sailor proved to be a true prophet. None of us can ever forgetthe spontaneous response in August 1914 to the cry, "Your King andcountry need you. " To such as, like myself, are on the shadowed side ofthe hill of life, and therefore too old for service, it was a profoundlymoving thing to see how swiftly our immense voluntary army sprang (as bya miracle) out of the earth, to look at the long lines of young soldierspassing with their regular step through the streets of London, to thinkof the situations given up, of the young wives and little childrenliving at home on shortened means, and of the risk taken of life beinglost just when it is most precious and most sweet. 

What was the motive power that impelled the young manhood of GreatBritain to this tremendous sacrifice? The thought of our country'sdanger? The danger to France? The danger to Belgium? The fact that a mannamed Palmerston had pledged his solemn word for them long years beforethey were born, or even the mothers who bore them were born, that theywould go to their deaths rather than allow a great crime to be committedor England's oath be broken? I don't know. I do not believe anybodyknows. But I am not ashamed of my tears when I remember it all, and sureI am that in those first critical days of the war the invisible powersof justice must have been fighting on our side. 

THE PART PLAYED BY THE BRITISH NAVY

Perhaps the first of the flashes as of lightning by which we have seenthe drama of the past 365 days is that which shows us the part played bythe British Navy. What a part it has been! Do we even yet recognizeits importance? Have our faithful and loyal Allies a full sense of itstremendous effect on the fortunes of the campaign? On Sunday, August 2, two days before the dispatch of Great Britain's ultimatum to Germany, we saw thousands of our naval reserve flying off by special boats andtrains to their ships on our east and south coasts. On Monday, August 8, the British Navy had taken possession of the North Sea. 

It was a legitimate act of peace, yet never in this world was there amore complete, if bloodless, victory. The great German North Sea fleet, which (according to a calculation) had been constructed at a cost of£300, 000, 000 sterling, to keep open the seas of the world to Germantrade; the fleet which had, in our British view, been built with thesole purpose of menacing British shores, was shut up in one day withinthe narrow limits of its own waters!

In the light of what has happened since it is not too much to say thatif the British Fleet had taken up its cue only forty-eight hours laterthe north coast of France would have been bombarded, every town on oureast coast from Aberdeen to Dover would have been destroyed, and LordRoberts's prophecy of German invasion would have been fulfilled. But, thank God, the watchdogs of the British Navy were there to prevent thatswift surprise. They are there (or elsewhere) still, silently riding thegrey waters in all seasons and all weathers, waiting and watching andbiding their time, and meanwhile (in spite of the occasional maraudingof submarines, the offal of fighting craft) keeping the oceans free toall ships except those of our enemies. And now, when we hear it said, aswe sometimes do, that Great Britain holds only thirty-five miles of landon the battle-front in Flanders, let us lift our heads and answer, "Yes, but she holds thirty-five thousand miles of sea. "

THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM

One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of theflashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was thatwhich revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record ofgreater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Suchstrength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddennessof surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany's spokesmen, including Herr Ballin, Prince von Bülow, and even Professor Harnack(all "honourable men, " and the last of them a churchman), that down to afew days before the outbreak of hostilities "not one human being" amongthem had "dreamt of war, " it is the fact that within a few hours of thedispatch of Germany's ultimatum, to Belgium, before the ink of it couldyet be dry and while the period of England's ultimatum in defence ofBelgian integrity was still unexpired, the German legions were attackingLiège. 

It was a cowardly and contemptible assault, but what a resistance itmet with! A little peace-loving, industrial nation, infinitely small andalmost utterly untrained, compared with the giant in arms assailingit, having no injury to avenge, no commerce to capture, no territoryto annex, desiring only to be left alone in the exercise of itsindependence, stood up for six days against the invading horde, andhurled it back. 

But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right, and after a flash of Belgium's unexampled bravery we were compelledto witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liège fell beforeoverwhelming numbers, then Namur, Ter-monde, Brussels, Louvain, and, last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror! The harvests ofBelgium trodden into the earth, her beautiful cities and ancientvillages given up to the flames, her historic monuments, that hadbeen associated with the learning and piety of centuries, razed to theground; and, above everything in its pathos and pain, the multitudesof her people, old men, old women, young girls, and little childrenin wooden shoes, after the unnameable atrocities of a brutalized, infuriated, and licentious soldiery, flying before their faces as beforea plague!

WHAT KING ALBERT DID FOR KINGSHIP

But there were flashes of almost divine light in the black darknessof Belgium's tragedy, and perhaps the brightest of them surrounded theperson of her King. What King Albert did in those dark days of August1914, to keep the soul of his nation alive in the midst of the immensesorrow of her utter overthrow his nation alone can fully know. But wewho are not Belgians were thrilled again and again by the inspired tonesof a great Spirit speaking to his subjects with that authority, dignity, and courage which alone among free nations are sufficient to unite thepeople to the Throne. 

"A country which defends its liberties in the face of tyranny commandsthe respect of all. Such a country does not perish. " What King Albertdid for Belgium in the stand he made against German aggression is partlyknown already, and will leave its record in history, but what he didat the same time for kingship throughout the world, as well as in hiscountry, can only be realized by the few who are aware that almostat the moment of the outbreak of war the Belgian Courts (much to theunmerited humiliation of Belgium) were on the eve of such disclosuresin relation to the life and death of the King's predecessor as wouldcertainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries. 

Nobody who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt thathe was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness andmeasured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now asI saw him in a garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldycreature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flattread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away:"Thank God that man is only the King of a little country! If he had beenthe sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of theworld. "

After King Leopold's death, accident brought me knowledge of astoundingfacts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court--ofthe measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemesto deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations withcertain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them;of the circumstances attending the surgical operation which immediatelypreceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless documentsof doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of theintrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man's bodyto share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of hisend, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save forone scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was, whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partlyfalse, of shame, greed, lust, and life-long duplicity! And all this darktale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of openCourt, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world howcontemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies ofmankind. 

But the war and King Albert's part in it saved Belgium from thatunmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroicyoung sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by theside of our own king's soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic ofFrance, has sustained the highest traditions of kingship. He may havelost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but hehas won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tentis pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. Hemay be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom ofsouls. 

"WHY SHOULDN'T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?"

The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of thedrama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the warwith the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely thanthe tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy. Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeatthere is always a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our firstExpeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after welearned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts andlistened with strained ears. 

We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through thestreets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, itssmoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, itscuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun. The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regimentafter regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours, and even days--the mighty legions of the nation that a few days beforehad "never so much as dreamt" of war!

At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they hadfought like heroes--why shouldn't they, since they were Englishmen?--buthad been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreatingrapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What?Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too, the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, tooawful!

The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but neverthelessit did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who doesnot see that the qualities in which it is unsurpassed among the racesof mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts thedarkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers werefalling back from Mons, the old cry "Your King and country need you"went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands offree men leapt to the relief of the flag. 

There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it ishard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in thegreat drama of the war--the spontaneous response of the poor who sprangforward to defend their country, though they had no more materialproperty in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make theirgraves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelongpossession, and often the foundation of their titles and honours. 

"BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND. . . ENGLAND. "

What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or theupper-middle classes had come to believe that too many of the young menof our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasureindulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but, behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thoughttoo many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creaturesof fashion) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageouswomanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurryingto the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching thescenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make thebravest man's heart turn sick. 

Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early daysof September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty listshad been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old peoplehardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and hadnothing left--not even a little child to live for. At the railwaystations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sightswhich searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed to look, feelingthey opened sanctuaries in which God's eye alone should see. 

Old Lady So-and-So seeing her youngest son off to Flanders. She has losttwo of her sons in the war already, and Archie is the last of them. Thedear old darling! It is pitiful to see her in her deep black, strugglingto keep up before the boy. But when the train has left the platform andshe can no longer wave her handkerchief she breaks down utterly. "I'veseen the last of him, " she says; "something tells me I've seen the lastof him. And now I've given everything I have to the country. "

Ah! that's what you have all got to do, or be prepared to do, you bravemothers of England, if you have to defeat a desperate enemy, who stoopsto any method, any crime. 

Then old Lord Such-a-One at Victoria to meet the body of his only sonbeing brought back from the hospital at Boulogne. How proud he had beenof his boy! He could remember the day he captained for Eton at Lord's, or perhaps rowed stroke--and won--for Cambridge. And now on the fieldof Flanders. . . . He had seen it coming, though. He had thought of it whenthe war broke out. "Ours is an old family, " he had told himself, "fourhundred years old, and my son is the last of us. If I let him go to thewar my line may end, my family may stop. . . But then liberty must go on, civilization must go on, and. . . England!"

Yes, it must be night before the British star will shine. 

THE PART PLAYED BY FRANCE

Perhaps the next great flash as of lightning whereby we saw the dramaof the past 365 days was that which revealed at its sublimest momentthe part played by France. In those evil days of July 1914, when Germandiplomacy was carrying on the indecent pretence of quarrelling withFrance about Austria's right to punish Serbia for the assassination ofthe Archduke Ferdinand, there were Frenchmen still living who had vividmemories of three bloody campaigns. Some could remember the Crimean War. More could recall the Italian War of 1859, which brought the deliriousnews of the victory of Magenta, and closed with Solferino, and thetriumphant march home through the Place de la Bastille, and down the Ruede la Paix. And vast numbers were still alive who could remember 1870, when the Emperor was defeated at Worth and conquered at Sedan; whenParis was surrounded by a Prussian army, when the booming of cannoncould be heard on the boulevards; when tenderly nurtured women, who hadnever thought to beg their bread, had been forced by the hunger of theirchildren to stand in long queues at the doors of the bakers' shops; whenthe city was at length starved into submission, and the proud Frenchpeople, with their immemorial heritage of fame, were compelled to permitthe glittering Prussian helmets to go shining down their streets. 

A new generation had been born to France since even the last of theseevents, but was it with a light heart that she took up the gage whichGermany so haughtily threw down? Indeed, no! Never had France, thebright, the brilliant, the cheerful-hearted, shown the world a graverface. 

A few students across the Seine might shout "A Berlin! A Berlin!" justas our boys in khaki chalked up the same address on their gun carriages. Idlers in blouses along the quays might scream the "Marseillaise. " Gangsof ruffians in back streets might break the windows of the shops ofGerman tradespeople. Some bitter old campaigners might talk aboutrevenge. But when the drums beat for the French regiments to start awayfor Alsace and the Belgian frontier, the heart of France was calm andsteadfast. 

"This is a fight for the right, for France, and for the freedom of oursouls!"

THE SOUL OF FRANCE

Then when the men had gone there came that anxious silence in whichevery ear was strained to catch the first cry from the army. Would itbe victory or defeat? In the strength of her new-born spirit France wasready for either fate. The streets of Paris were darkened; the theatreswere shut up; the cafés were ordered to close at nine o'clock; the saleof absinthe was prohibited that Frenchmen might have every faculty alertto meet their destiny; and the principal hotels were transformed intohospitals for the wounded that would surely come. 

They came. We were allowed to see their coming, and in those early daysof the war, before the Red Cross companies had got properly to work, the return of the first of the fallen among the French soldiery made aterrible spectacle. At suburban stations, generally in the middle ofthe night, long lines of third-class railway carriages, as well asrectangular, box-shaped cattle wagons, such as in conscript countriesare used for purposes of mobilization, would draw up out of thedarkness. 

Instantly hundreds of pale, wasted, generally bearded, and often woundedfaces would appear at the windows, crying out for coffee or chocolate. Then the cattle wagons would be unbolted, and the great doors thrownback, disclosing six or eight men in each, lying outstretched on straw, with their limbs swathed in blood-stained bandages, and their eyesglazed with pain. They were the brave fellows who, a few weeks before, had gone to Flanders in the pride and prime of their strength. In somecases they had lain like that for two whole days on their long way backfrom the fighting line, with no one to give them meat or drink, withnothing to see in the darkness of their moving tomb and nothing to hear, except the grinding of the iron wheels beneath them, and the cries ofthe comrades by their side. 

"Mon Dieu! Que de souffrances! Qui l'aurait cru possible? O mon Dieu, aie pitié de moi. "

THE MOTHERHOOD OF FRANCE

Still the soul of France did not fail her. It heard the second approachof that monstrous Prussian horde, which, like a broad, irresistibletide, sweeping across one half of Europe, came down, down, downfrom Mons until the thunder of its guns could again be heard on theboulevards. And then came the great miracle! Just as the sea itself canrise no higher when it has reached the top of the flood, so the mightyarmy of Germany had to stop its advance thirty kilomètres north ofParis, and when it stirred again it had to go back. And back and back itwent before the armies of France, Britain, and Belgium, until it reacheda point at which it could dig itself into the earth and hide in a longserpentine trench stretching from the Alps to the sea. Only then didthe spirit of France draw breath for a moment, and the next flash as oflightning showed her offering thanks and making supplications before thewhite statue of Jeanne d'Arc in the apse of the great cathedral of NotreDame, sacred to innumerable memories. On the Feast of St Michael 10, 000of the women of Paris were kneeling under the dark vault, and on thebroad space in front of the majestic façade, to call on the Maid ofOrleans to % intercede with the Virgin for victory. It was a great andgrandiose scene, recalling the days when faith was strong and purer. Old and young, rich and poor, every woman with some soul that was dearto her in that inferno at the front--the Motherhood of France was thereto pray to the Mother of all living to ask God for the triumph of theright. 

"Jesus, hear our cry for our country! Justice for France, O God!"

And in the spirit of that prayer the soul of France still lives. 

FIVE MONTHS AFTER

The next of the flashes as of lightning that revealed the drama of thepast 365 days came to us at Christmas. The war had then been going onfive months, showing us many strange and terrible sights, but nothingstranger and more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare itself. A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of pomp and of personal prowess, with the charging of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms, and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers of soldiery. It was now abroad and desolate waste, in which no human figure was anywhere visibleas far as the eye could reach--a monstrous scar on the face of theglobe, such as we see in volcanic countries, only differing in theevidence of design that came of long, parallel lines of turned-up soil, which were the trenches wherein hundreds of thousands of men livedunder the surface of the ground. Over this barren waste there was almostperpetual smoke, and through the smoke a deafening cannonading, whichcame of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel, called shells. Sometimes the shells were burying themselves unbroken in the emptyearth, but too often they were scouring the trenches, where they werebursting into jagged parts and sending up showers of horrible fragmentswhich had once been the limbs of living men. 

Such was warfare by machinery as the world caught its first, full, horrified sight of it between the beginning of August and the end ofDecember 1914. But even out of that maelstrom of horror there had beenglimpses of great things--great heroisms, great victories, and greatproofs of the power to endure. A rigid censorship, rightly designed tokeep back from the enemy the information that would endanger the livesof our soldiers, was also keeping us in ignorance of many gloriousincidents of the war such as would have thrilled us up to our throbbingthroat. But some of them could not possibly be concealed, so we heard ofthe gallant stand of the dauntless sons of our daughter Canada, and wesaw our great old warrior, Lord Roberts, going out to the front in hiseighty-third year to visit his beloved Indian troops, dying as wasmost fit on the battlefield, within sound of the guns in the war he hadforetold, and then being brought home, borne through the crowded streetsof London and buried under the dome of St. Paul's, amid the homage ofhis Bang and people. 

THE COMING OF WINTER

Then, as the year deepened towards winter, the rains came, torrentialrains such as we thought we had never known the like of before. Weheard that the trenches were flooded, and that our soldiers were eating, sleeping, and fighting ankle-deep (sometimes knee-deep) in water. Atnight, on going to our white beds at home, we had remorseful visions ofthose slimy red ruts in Flanders where our boys were lying out in thedrenching rain under the heavy darkness of the sky. It was hard tobelieve that human strength could sustain itself against such cruelconditions, and indeed it often failed. 

Towards Christmas tens of thousands of our men had to be brought hometo our hospitals, many of them wounded, but not a few suffering frommaladies which made them unfit for military service. The accident ofbeing asked to distribute presents enabled me to see and talkwith hundreds of them. It was a sweet and exhilarating yet rathernerve-racking experience. These young fellows, who had looked on deathin its most horrible aspects, having had it for their duty to kill asmany Germans as possible, and then to eat and sleep as if nothing hadoccurred--had they been degraded, brutalized, lowered in the scale ofhuman creatures by their awful ordeal?

The sequel surprised me. The veil of mist with which a London winterenshrouds the beginnings of night and day had only just risen when onChristmas morning I reached the wounded soldiers' ward in the first ofthe hospitals I visited. The sweet place was decked out with hollyand mistletoe. Forty or fifty men were lying there in their beds, somebandaged about the head, a few about the face, more about the body, arms, and legs. None of them seemed to be in serious pain, and nearlyall were cheerful, even bright, boyish, and almost childlike. Whatstories they had to tell of the inferno they had come from! It was hell, infernal hell. They would go back, of course, when they were better, andhad to do so, but if anybody said he _wanted_ to go back he was tellinga damn'd lie. 

One boy, scarcely out of his teens, with soft, womanly eyes, light hair, and a face that made me sure he must be the living image of his mother, had had a narrow escape. After being wounded he had been taken prisonerto a farmhouse. Nobody there had done anything for him, and at length, after many hours, watching his opportunity, he had crept into thedarkness and got back to the British trenches by crawling for nearly aquarter of a mile on hands and knees. 

Another young soldier, an Irishman, told me a brave story, such as mighthave been allowed, I thought, to scratch and scrape its way through thethorn hedge of the strictest censorship. It was a story of the greatdays before the armies had dug themselves into the earth like rabbits. Perhaps I had heard something about it? I had. Eight hundred of hiscavalry regiment had ridden full gallop into a solid block of the enemy, making a way through them as wide as Sackville Street. At length theGermans in front had dropped their rifles and held up their hands, whereupon our men had ceased to slay. But, being unable to rein in theirfrantic horses, they had been compelled to gallop on. Then, while theirbacks were turned, the treacherous Huns had picked up their rifles andfired on them from behind, killing many of our best men. 

"And what did you do then?" I asked. 

"Turned back and----"

"And what?"

"Took one man alive, sor. "

"And the rest?"

"Left them there, sor. "

"And how many of you got back?"

"Less than two hundred, sor. "

CHRISTMAS IN THE TRENCHES

Then Christmas in the trenches--we had glimpses of that, too. The peoplewho governed nations from their Parliament Houses might have doubtsabout the peace-dream of the poets, the Utopia of universal brotherhoodwhich gleams somewhere ahead in the far future of humanity, but thesoldiers on the battlefields, even in the welter of blood and death hadsomehow heard the call of it. 

The appeal of the Pope for a truce to hostilities during the dayssacred to the Christian faith had fallen on deaf ears in the Cabinets ofEurope. In that zone of mutual deception which is another name for war, neither of the belligerents could trust the other not to take an unfairadvantage of any respite from slaying that might be called in the nameof Christ, and, therefore, the armies must continue to fight. Butthe men in the trenches had found for them-selves a better way. WhenChristmas Eve came they began--German and British--to talk aboutChristmas Eves which they had spent at home. Visions arose of crowdedstreets, of shops decorated with holly and mistletoe, of churches withlittle candle-lit Nativities, of Christmas-trees at home laden withfairy lamps and presents, of children sitting up late to dance and laughand then hanging up their stockings before going to bed to dream ofSanta Claus, of church bells ringing for midnight mass, and, last ofall, of the "waits" by the old cross in the market-place in the midst ofthe winter frost and snow. 

Suddenly in one of the trenches some of the soldiers began to sing. Theysang a Christmas carol, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night. "The soldiers in the parallel trenches of the enemy heard it, knew whatit was, and joined in with another Christmas carol, sung in their ownlanguage. In a little while both sides were singing, each in its turn, listening and replying, all along the two dark gullies that stretchedacross blood-stained Europe. Then Chinese lanterns were lit and stuckup on the head of the trenches, and salutations were shouted across thenarrow ground between. "Merry Christmas to you, Fritz, old man!" "Sameto you, Tommy!" And then next morning, Christmas morning, in the greylight of the late dawn, some daring soul, clambering over the trenchhead, marched boldly up to the line of the enemy with the salutationof the sacred day. In another moment everybody was up and out, shakinghands, and posing for photographs, friend and foe, German and British. 

After a while they became aware that the ground they were standing onwas like an unroofed charnel-house, littered over with the bodies oftheir unburied dead. So they set themselves to cover up their comradesin the earth, never asking which was British and which German, butlaying them all together in the everlasting brotherhood of death--thatEnglish boy whose mother was waiting for him in England, and this Germanlad whose young wife was weeping in his German home. 

My God, why do men make wars?

THE COMING OF SPRING

But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-hearted philosophers whoare loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of thestoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre ofmillions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations comeand go, that after all people die, and that more die one year thananother--this should be the wise man's way of reconciling himself to theinhumanities of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly nature seemsto speak with that voice, and hence the pang that came to us with thenext great flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front atthe beginning of the spring. 

The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single pointto north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflictthe intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, thoughbarren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much ofNorthern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gonethrough it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us athome, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard thebooming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky. 

Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of greencountry, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score oftimes, was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot ofthe Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred andblackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there acottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wildroses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its littlebed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature wasgoing on the same as ever--hardly giving a hint that the Great Death hadpassed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves werebeginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, andthat in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing. 

NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY

We found it heart-breaking. But it has been always so. I was in Naplesduring the whole period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius, and, looking through the gloom of the heavens, piled high with the whorls offire and smoke that were covering the Vesuvian valleys and villageswith a grey shroud, waist deep, of volcanic dust, I thought the face ofNature in that sweet spot could never be the same again; but when Iwent back to it a year later I could see no difference. I sailed souththrough the Straits of Messina a few weeks before the earthquake, and, returning north a few months later, I looked eagerly for the changewhich I imagined must have been made by the frightful upheaval of theearth that had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken the soul of theentire human family, but I could see no change at all, even throughthe strongest field-glasses, until I came within sight of the wasteand wreckage of the little works of men. Yes, Nature goes her own way, winter and summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own wounds, buttaking no thought of ours. 

Yet, cruel as Nature seemed to be at the beginning of the spring, it wasnot so cruel as man. With the better weather our enemies began to deviseand put into operation new and more devilish methods of warfare. Perhapsthis was a result of their fear, for there is no cruelty so cruel asthe cruelty that comes of fear, and no inhumanity so inhuman. Havingexpressed themselves as shocked by our alleged use of dum-dum bullets, they were now ransacking their laboratory for gases that would burstthe lungs of our soldiers, and for inflammable oils that would setthem afire as if they were criminals tarred and feathered and tied to astake. Their battleships, built to fight craft of their own kind, or atleast fortresses capable of replying to their fire, were now sent outto bombard innocent watering-places lying breast open to the sea. Theirair-craft, constructed for reconnaissances, were ordered to drop bombsout of the clouds on to sleeping cities in the darkness of the night. And their submarines, tolerated by international courts only as weaponsof attack on warships, were authorized to sink harmless merchantmen, without any word of warning, or any effort to save life. Couldscientific knowledge under the direction of moral insanity go one stepfarther? Flying in the highest sky, hiding behind the densest clouds, stealing across the heavens in the dark hours, dropping fireballs on tothe silent earth, sneaking back in the dawn; and then sailing throughthe womb of the great deep, rising like a serpent to spit death atinnocent ships, diving to avoid destruction and scudding away undercover of the empty sea--what a spectacle of divine power at the serviceof devilish passion! It was difficult to believe that our enemies hadnot gone mad. They were no longer fighting like men, but like demons. 

THE SOUL OF THE MAN WHO SANK THE _LUSITANIA_

The crowning horror of Germany's barbarities came with the sinking ofthe _Lusitania_. 

Perhaps nothing less shocking could have made us see how much lesscruel Nature is at her worst than man in his madness may be. Three yearsbefore the _Titanic_ had been sunk on a clear and quiet night, becausea great iceberg formed in the frozen north had floated silently downto where, crossing the ship's course in mid-Atlantic, it struck herthe slanting blow that sent her to the bottom. Thus a great, blind, irresistible force, operating without malice or design, had in that casedestroyed more than a thousand human lives. But when the _Lusitania_was sunk in broad daylight, and nearly as many persons perished, it wasbecause our brother man, in the bitterness of his heart and the crueltyof his fear, had been bent on committing wilful murder. 

What is the present state of the soul of the person who perpetrated thatcrime?

Can he excuse himself on the ground that he was obeying orders, or doeshis conscience refuse to be chloroformed into silence by that hoary oldsubterfuge? When he first saw the great ship sailing up in the sunshine, its decks crowded with peaceful passengers, and he rose like a murdererout of his hiding-place in the bowels of the sea, what were the feelingswith which he ordered the torpedo to be fired? When, having launched hisbolt, he sank and then rose again, and heard the drowning cries of hisvictims struggling in the water, what were the emotions with which heran away? And when he returned to tell his story of the work he haddone, with what dignity of manhood did he hold up his head in thecompany of Christian men? God knows--only God and one of his creatures. 

THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL

For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of suchenormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory that invisible powersof 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 ofanother flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the childrenof Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion oftongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excusesthe Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion ofintellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever beforelistened to such whirlwind logic?

When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crewto perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act ofwar. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defendherself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When Britishbattleships have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starvesixty-five millions of German people. But when German submarines haveattempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand passengersof many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a justrevenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffsand materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simplehumanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs andmaterials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of herneutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian ina railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and becomes aproper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed aGerman soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has beenguilty of assassination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germanyhas refused to honour her name to a "scrap of paper" she has been a holymartyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hersshe has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed. Therefore God punish England! Above all, when God has crowned the armsof Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty, William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore God bless theKaiser!

Surely confusion of intellect can go no further, and the German Tower ofBabel 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 themost vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama ofthe past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the_Lusitania_, showed us the full depths of the "alien peril. " Before thewar we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst. They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice ofour law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them hadmarried our British women, who had borne them British children. Most ofthem had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned tounderstand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many hadbeen honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had becometheirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagnera British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to breakdown, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universalbrotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest, education, and environment were making us one with these strangerswithin our gates. 

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

What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even ourself-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point atthe time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realizedthat there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It isone of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims withmoral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience couldjustify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Whyshould not our German governesses burn down the houses in which ourchildren lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt toassassinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever wasnecessary was right. 

"We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessityknows 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 ofour enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia andthe Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of theGerman Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it wasBritain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it "sacredhate") 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 theGerman Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowedourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in theGerman race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilishhate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred notunfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equallytragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on thesufferer's own head. But as no sane father of a family would makefree of his children's nursery the deranged relative who required theprotection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that therewas only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. Godforbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were undersuspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that someof them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, passionatelyopposing Germany's objects in this war and loathing Germany's methods. We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathiescan rise even higher than nationality into the realm of "human empire. "We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, anddeeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakablehardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to thinkof some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses wefrequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shutup behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among theinevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. Inputting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no morethan our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at thefront. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and theycome out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world cannever be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a gamewith it. 

THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIA

And then Russia! Distance from the scene of action, the great lengthof the line of operations and the vast area behind it have made itdifficult or impossible for us to see the drama of the Russian campaignas we have seen that of France, Belgium, and our own Empire. But we haveseen something, and it has been enough to give the lie to certain of theemphatic protestations with which Germany made war. We had heard it saidby the German Chancellor that the fact that Russia was mobilizing inthose last days of July 1914 made it impossible for Germany to askAustria to extend the time-limit imposed upon Serbia--a time-limit whichwould have been indecent among civilized people if it had concernednothing more serious than the destruction of a kennel of dogs suspectedof rabies. But all the world knows now that Russian mobilization was aprocess inevitably so slow that the German armies had flung themselvesupon Belgium twelve days before the Russian advance began. 

Then we had heard it said by the German Churchmen that in takingthe side of Russia we, British and French people, leaders among theenlightened races, were helping Muscovite barbarians to oppose the causeof civilization. But since Louvain, Termonde, and Rheims, not tospeak of the unnameable iniquities of Liège, the world knows wherethe barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home--in Berlin, not inPetrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meekones of the Russian peasantry. 

THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT DEATH

The truth, as everybody knows who knows Russia, is that "barbarous, " theclassic taunt of the German against Russia, is, of all words, the leastproper as a description of the Russian mind and character. I havemyself been only once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and underconditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happenedsince down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russiansoul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, Itravelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little townsof Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Deathdarkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited theplague spots where men's lives were being mown down at the devastatingstride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts, the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched andconsumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people underthe black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, livingin the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visitcame to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively shortas my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I hadbeen with them when their very souls lay bare. 

What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! Isaw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badlyhoused, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate;but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that wemean 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 thatcan rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightenedof them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vastcountry, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbaritythere may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and thedehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase thenumber of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liègeare morally and physically impossible to the Russian race. 

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religiouspeople than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive(not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance ofthe unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which forthe past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materializethe spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying tospiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen theRussian 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 densecrowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. Theliterature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, andnot 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 cruderwritings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same strivingafter the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke's, Nietzsche's, and Bernhardi's would be impossible in Russia, not, heavenknows, because of their "intellectual superiority, " which is anothername for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, theirglorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which theRussian 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 hasplayed in the drama of the past 365 days have revealed a people actingunder something very like a religious impulse. We have seen the moujiksbeing mobilized in remote parts of the vast country, and have found it amoving picture. It is probable that the war had been going on for weeksbefore they heard anything about it. Almost certainly they had no clearidea of where the fighting was, or what it was about, the theatre ofthe struggle being so far away and their ignorance of the world outsidetheir own little communities so profound and impenetrable. We may besure that when the echo of the great war did at length reach them itwas quite undisturbed by any foolish pretence associated with theassassination of the Archduke Ferdinand (that lie could only be expectedto impose on the enlightened peoples of the West) and concerned itselfsolely with the safety of Russia. The humblest Russian is proud ofRussia; proud that it is so big and powerful among the nations of theworld. He will gladly die rather than see it made less, so deep is hisdevotion to the long-suffering giant whose blood is throbbing in hisveins. 

Therefore when the call of war came to the moujiks in their far-offhomes, we saw them answering it as if it had been the call of theirfaith. First a service in the village church; then a procession behindthe village pope to the village shrine ("Now go away and fight forRussia, my children"), then the setting off for the distant railwaystation, the mothers and young wives of the soldiers marching for milesby their sides, carrying their rifles and haversacks along the wideroads white with dust. What scenes of human pathos! For a long time theofficers are indulgent to irregularities--have they not just left theirown dear women behind them?--but at length the word of command ringsout, and everybody not connected with the army has to go back. Ah, thosepartings! Still, God is good! And hadn't Masha promised to burn a candleto 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 flashesof similar scenes. The memory of that time of the cholera is closelyinvolved for me in the thought of these tragic days, and by the light ofwhat I saw in Kief, in Sosnowitz, in Lublin, in Cracow, in Warsaw, andalong the line of front in poor, stricken Poland, where, as I write, menare being mown down like grass, I seem to see what took place thereat the beginning of August 1914, and is taking place now. I see thechurches crowded and the congregations trailing out through the openporches into the churchyards around them. Old men and women who are toolame to struggle their way through the throng are lying under the openwindows with their sticks and crutches stretched out beside them. Othersoutside are on their knees, following the services as they proceedwithin, clasping their hands, making the sign of the Cross, giving theresponses, and joining in the singing. 

Inside the churches, where the women kneel on one side in their brightcotton head-scarves and the soldiers on the other in their long, darkcoats, prayers are being said for Russia, that God will protect her andher "little Father, " the Tsar, and all his faithful children, making thedark cloud that is on their horizon to pass them by unharmed. From porchto chancel they bend forward with their faces as near to the floor astheir close crowding will permit. Then they sing. No one who has notbeen to Russia has ever heard such singing--no, not even in Rome in theChurch of the Gesu as the clock strikes midnight on the last day of theyear. There is no organ, and if there is a choir its voices are lostin 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 dustysheets of dancing light through the clerestory windows on to the altarablaze with gold, twinkling behind its yellow candles and the bowedheads of the priests. When the service ends the soldiers form upin lines and march out through the kneeling crowds within and theoverflowing congregations lying prone outside. 

So do the Russians make war. Not generally to the beating of drums, oryet the singing of their searching national anthem, and assuredly notas bloodhounds hunting for prey, but in the spirit of a simple people, often humble in their ignorance but always strong in their faith--in thecertainty that there is something else in God's world besides greed andgold, something higher than "the will to power, " something better for anation 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 theEast. Let us assure them of the sincerity of our alliance. We rejoicein their victories. We count their triumphs as our own. When we hearof their reverses our hearts are full. We feel that out of the storm ofbattle a great new spirit has been born into Russia, awakening herfrom a sleep of centuries. We feel, too, that a great new spirit ofbrotherhood has been born into the world, uniting the scattered anddivided parts of it, and that there is no more moving manifestation ofthe unity of mankind than the fact that the Russian and British peoples, after long years of misunderstanding, are now fighting for the samecause 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 partplayed by Poland has been that of absolute martyr. Like the water-millin Zola's story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemiesand then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armiesof the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are goneshe lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine andpestilence 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 andeverything to lose by it, having no such right of choice as gave gloryto 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 wasdirected chiefly against Russia, the world was told that the measure ofher barbarity was to be seen in the condition to which the Polish peoplehad been reduced under Russian rule. But did the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins and von Bülows who put forth this plea, count on our ignoranceof Galicia, in which the condition of the Poles is immeasurably morewretched under the rule of their Ally, Austria?

In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw somethingof the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both wereunfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia isperhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out fromthe warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to thenorthern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, thelong and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the mostinhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; withswampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; withroads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, wherethe loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with riverswithout banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppyfields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; withvillages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and itswooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond--such is a great part ofGalicia, the Polish province of Austria. 

But little as Nature has done to cheer the spirits of the Poles, wholive under Austrian rule, what man has done is less. It is nothing atall, or worse than nothing. 

Thickly-sown on the eastern frontier are many densely populatedmanufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving the effect of standingbarefoot on the damp earth. As you walk through them they look likeinterminable lines of featureless streets, full of those sweating, screaming, squabbling masses of humanity that take away all your pridein the dignity of man's estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, thedominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and oftenunpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, butmore frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous façades. Whenclosed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prisoncells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces oftheir doors--pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, atypology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants whohave not, as a whole, been taught to read. 

And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the worlda more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dullgrey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting thatthe body is half asleep and the spirit no more than half awake. To seethem slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at thedoors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, isto realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the ruleof an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholicchurches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves asthe least of God's creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool--alwaysready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven, having no right, and hardly any hope. 

Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austriancrownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along thebanks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishingof hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself whathas been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who oncelaboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions ofCulture, I find only one answer--the suppression of nationality! In thatfact lies the moral of Galicia's martyrdom. Let Belgium's nationalitybe suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her conditionwill soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keepthe body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy itssoul. 

THE SOUL OF POLAND

It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of anation. The call that comes to a people's heart from the soil that gavethem birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dareto kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and howinfinitely pathetic! The land of one's country may be so bleak, so bare, so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended thatit should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who wereborn to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs ofone's country may be the simplest staves that ever shaped themselvesinto music, yet they search our hearts as the loftiest compositionsnever can. The language of one's country (even the dialect of one'sdistrict) may be the crudest corruption that ever lived on human lips, yet it lights up dark regions of our consciousness which the purest ofthe classic tongues can never reach. Do we not all feel this, whateverthe qualities or defects of our native speech--every Scotsman, everyIrishman, every Welshman, nay, every Yorkshireman, every Lancashireman, every Devonshireman, when he hears the word and the tone which belong tohis own people only? There are phrases in the Manx and the Anglo-Manxof my own little race which I can never hear spoken without the senseof something tingling and throbbing between my flesh and my skin. Why?Because it is the home-speech of my own island, and whatever she is, whatever fate may befall her, however she may treat me, she is my motherand I am her son. 

Such is the mighty and mysterious thing which we call a nation'ssoul. Nobody can explain it, nobody can account for it, but woe to thepresumptuous empire which tries to wipe it out. It can never be wipedout. Crushed and trodden on it may be, as Austria has crushed andtrodden on the soul of Austrian Poland, and as Germany has crushed andtrodden on the soul of Prussian Poland, when they have fallen so lowin the scale of civilized peoples as to flog Polish school children forrefusing to learn their catechism and say their prayers in a languagewhich they cannot understand. But to kill the soul of a nation isimpossible. The German Chancellor could not do that when he violated thebody of Belgium. And though Warsaw has fallen the fatuous Prince Leopoldof Bavaria, with his preposterous proclamations, cannot kill the soul ofPoland. 

At Cracow in 1892 I tried to buy for one of my children the littlePolish national cap, but after a vain search for it through manyshops (where I was generally suspected of being a spy for the Austrianpolice), the cap was brought to me at night, in my private room, by shopkeepers who had been afraid to sell it openly in the day. At Wieliezhe, I, with some forty persons of various nationalities(including the usual contingent of detectives), descended the immenseand marvellous salt-mine which is now used as a show place forvisitors. After passing, by the flare of torches, down long galleriesof underground workings, we were plunged into darkness by a rush of windover a subterranean river through which we had to shoulder our way ona raft. Then suddenly, no face being visible in that black tunnel underthe earth, the Polish part of our company broke into a wild, fierce, frenzied singing of their national anthem which, in those days, theydare not sing on the surface and in the light: "Poland is not lost forever; she will live once more. "

No, Poland is not lost for ever! She will live once more!

THE OLD SOLDIER OF LIBERTY

And Italy! Although it is only since May that Italy has stood by ourside on the battle-front, in an effort to avert from the world a newmilitary domination, we have known from the beginning that her heart waswith the Allies, and she was willing to stake all, when her time came, for the same principles of humanity and freedom. A Roman friend tells methat he heard an Italian statesman say, "Italy always meant war. " We canwell believe it. We have believed it from the first. On one of the earlydays of August, when a British regiment was passing through the streetsof London on its way to Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man ina red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with a proud step by the sideof our soldiers. He turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been livingmany years in Soho. Having dug up from his time-eaten trunk the simpleregimentals of the army of the Liberator, he had come out to walk withour boys on the first stage of their journey to France. In the personof that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted Italy--Italy that hadknown what it was to make her own sacrifices for the right, and was nowready to show us her sympathy in this supreme crisis in our history. 

But she had a trying, almost a tragic, time. For ten long months she layunder the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies, and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to aTriple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point)to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whoseemperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts torule even the papacy from across the Rhine. 

How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathiesand aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacywhich Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption;perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps thefrequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almostOriental in his "sense of the theatre, " and knows better, perhaps, thanany European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life)played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible tograndiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget theold Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to havesaid to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: "HolyFather, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on myhonour, the nuns will do so. "

THE PART PLAYED BY ITALY

The Triple Alliance was a secret document, but everybody knew that itrequired Italy to join with Austria and Germany in the event of theirbeing compelled to engage in a defensive war. Therefore the firstquestion for Italy was whether the war declared by Austria againstSerbia and by Germany against Belgium, although apparently aggressive, was in reality defensive. There was a further question for Italy--whatwould happen to her if she decided against her Allies? She did decideagainst them, thereby giving the lie direct to the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins, and von Bülows who had been telling the neutral nations thatthe war had been forced upon Germany. By all the laws of nations Germanyand Austria ought then, if they had honestly believed their own story, to have declared war on Italy. They preferred to wheedle her, to try tobuy her, bribe her, corrupt her, body and soul. 

They failed. After flooding the peninsula with lying literature, directed chiefly against ourselves, Germany sent back to the Italiancapital its most astute statesman, who was married to a much-admiredItalian woman. It was all in vain. Italy knew her own mind and had madereckoning with her own heart. She had begun with contempt for the nationwhich could invade Serbia, under the pretence of avenging the murderof the Archduke Ferdinand, and with loathing for the other nation whichcould violate Belgium after it had sworn to protect her, and now shewent on to hatred and horror of the perpetrators of the outrages inLiège, in Louvain, and in Rheims, that were scorching men's eyes in thename of war. 

Still, Italy, although separating herself from her former allies, wasnot yet taking sides against them. Why? If their war was an aggressiveand unjustifiable one, why could not Italy say so at once with her swordas well as her pen? There was a period of uncertainty, impatience, evenof misunderstanding among her own people. Whispers reached them thattheir King had said (he never had) that he had given his "kingly word"for it that if Italy could not fight with her former friends she shouldnot fight against them. This was a blow to Italian aspirations, forVictor Emmanuel III is the best-beloved man in Italy, the father of hispeople, whose heads would bow before his will even though their heartswere torn. 

Then came negotiations with Austria about the restoration of provinceswhich had once belonged to Italy and were still inhabited by Italians. It looked like paltering and peddling, like sale and barter. The peoplewere losing patience; they thought time was being wasted. Beyond theAlps men were dying for liberty in a mighty struggle against the worsttyranny that had ever threatened the world, yet Italy was doing nothing. 

But the people did not know all. Even then their country was alreadyat war within the limits of her own frontier--silently in her tailors'workshops, where uniforms were being sewn for the immense army she wassoon to call into the field, audibly in the forges of Milan and Terni, where vast quantities of munitions were being hammered out for a longcampaign. 

HOW THE WAR ENTERED ITALY

Then, by one of the most vivid, if pathetic, of the flashes as oflightning that have shown us the drama of the past 365 days, we saw theactual war come to Italy. It came in a profoundly impressive form--thedead body of young Bruno Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator. Fightingfor France, Bruno had fallen in a gallant charge at the front, and hisbrother, who was by his side, had carried his body out of the trenchesand brought it home. We who know Rome do not need to be told how itwas received there. We can see the dense mass of uncovered heads in thePiazza delle Terme, stretching from the doors of the railway station tothe bronze fountain at the top of the Via Nazionale, and we can hear thedeep swell of the Garibaldian hymn, which comes like a challenge aswell as a moan from 50, 000 throats. Not for the first time was a deadGaribaldi being borne through the streets of Rome, and those of us whoremembered the earlier day knew well that with the body of this Italianboy the war had entered Italy. 

Then, at a crisis in Italy's internal government, our enemy, havingfailed to buy, bribe, or corrupt Italy, began to threaten her. Out ofthe delirium of his intoxicated conscience, which no longer shrank fromcrime, he told Italy that if she dared to break her neutrality herfate should be as the fate of Belgium. That frightened some of us fora moment. We thought of Venice, of Florence, of Assisi, of Subiaco, ofNaples, and of Rome, and, remembering the methods by which Germany wasbeating and bludgeoning her way through the war, our hearts trembledand thrilled at a dreadful vision of the lovely and beloved Italianland under the heel of a ruthless aggressor--of the destruction of thehistory of Christendom as it had been written by great artists on canvasand by great architects in stone through the long calendar of nearly twothousand years. But we also thought of Savoy, of Palestro, of Cas-ale, of Caprera, and of "Roma o morte, " and told ourselves that, come whatmight, victory or defeat, the children of Victor Emmanuel III wouldnever allow themselves to buy the ease and safety of their bodies by thecorruption and degradation of their souls. 

THE ITALIAN SOUL

That was the great and awful hour when Italy stood on the thresholdof her fate; but though Great Britain's heart was bleeding from thesacrifices she had already made, and had still to make, and thoughItaly's intervention meant so much to us, we did not feel that we had aright to ask for it. And neither was it necessary that we should do so. The treaty that bound Italy to England was not written on a scrapof paper. It was in our blood, born of our devotion to humanity, tojustice, to liberty, and to the memory of our great men. Therefore, with the world in arms about her, let Italy do what she thought best forherself, and the bond between us would not be broken!

How the sequel has justified our faith! And when the great hour struckat last, after ten months of suspense, and Italy--ready, fully equipped, united--found the voice with which she proclaimed war, what a voice itwas! Eloquent voices she had had throughout, in her Press as well as inher legislative chambers--Morelli's, Barzini's, Albertini's, Malagodi's, not to speak of Sartorio's, Ferrero's, Annie Vivantes, and manymore--but it quickens my pulse to remember that it was the voice of apoet which at the final moment was to speak for the Italian soul. 

Friends newly arrived from Italy tell me that not even in Rome (whereone always feels as if one were living on the borderland of the oldworld and the new, with thousands of years behind and thousands of yearsin front) can anybody remember anything so moving as the substance andthe reception of Gabriele d'Annunzio's speech from the balcony of theHotel Regina. We can well imagine it. The spirit of Time itself couldhave found no greater scene, no more thrilling moment. The broad highwayon the breast of the hill going up to the Porta Pinciana, faced by thepalace of the Queen Mother and flanked by the gardens of the Capuchinmonastery, with the Colosseum, the Capitol and the Forum almost visibleto the right--what a theatre to speak in!

There were 5000 persons below, all "Romans of Rome, " and the QueenMother was on her balcony. But the orator was worthy of his audience, and his theme. He had the past for his prologue, and the future for hisepilogue. Cæsar, Brutus, Cicero, the story of the old oppression fromwhich the world had freed itself after agelong tribulation, and then apicture of the new tyranny that was sweeping down from across the Rhine. What wonder if the warm-hearted Roman populace, to whom patriotism isa religion, were carried away by an appeal which seemed to come to themwith the voice of Dante, Mazzini, Carducci, and Garibaldi from the veryearth beneath their feet!

So on May 20, 1915, knowing well what the terrors of war were, and howremote the prospects of early victory, Italy took her place in armsby the side of the Allies. And now the heart of old Rome, so longperturbed, is tranquil. With heroic confidence she relies on her bravesons, led by her dauntless King, to justify her. And when she hears thetruculent boast of our enemy that after he has disposed of Russia, hewill destroy Italy as a power in Europe, she answers calmly, "Yes, whenthe last Roman capable of bearing arms lies dead in Roman soil--perhapsthen, but not sooner. "

THE PART PLAYED BY THE NEUTRAL NATIONS

And then the neutral countries--what is the part which they have playedin the drama of the past 365 days? I think I may fairly claim to havehad better opportunities than most people for studying one aspect of it, its moral aspect, and therefore I trust I may be forgiven if I makea personal reference. Seeing, in the earliest days of the war, thatGermany was doing her best to divert the eye of the world from the crimeshe had committed in Belgium, and being convinced that Britain's hopeboth now and in the future lay in keeping the world's eye fixed onthat outrage, I moved the proprietors of the _Daily Telegraph_ to thepublication of "King Albert's Book. "

What that great book was it must be quite unnecessary to say, but it maybe permitted to the editor to claim that it constituted the first (as itmay well be the final) impeachment of the Kaiser before the bar of thenations for a crime in Belgium as revolting as that of Frederick theGreat in Silesia and a thousandfold more fatal. After the publicationof "King Albert's Book, " Germany knew that before the tribunal of thecivilized world she stood tried and condemned. But though representativemen and women in thirteen different countries united within thecovers of the historic volume to express their abhorrence of Germany'siniquity, the whole weight of the world's condemnation could not beincluded. 

From many of the neutral nations there came pathetic cries of inabilityto join in the general protest. Famous men wrote that the neutrality oftheir countries imposed upon them the duty and the penalty of silence. "My brother is a member of our Government, " wrote one illustrious manof letters, "and if I am not to get him into trouble I must hold mytongue. " Another, whose German name, if it could be published, wouldcarry weight throughout the world, said: "I know where my sympathy lies, and so do you, but I dare not speak, for I am a German-born subject, andto tell what is in my mind would be treason to my country. " This messagecame from a remote place in Spain, the writer having been compelledto fly from France, because his blood was German, while unable to takerefuge in Germany because his heart was French. 

THE PART PLAYED BY THE UNITED STATES

Perhaps the most tragic of these vistas of the sufferings of great soulsin neutral countries came from the United States. Profoundly affectingwere nearly all President Wilson's public utterances, even when, assometimes occurred, our sympathy could not follow them. And certainlyone of the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning, whereby we haveseen the war in its moral aspect, was that which showed us the UnitedStates, at his proclamation, arresting for a whole day, on October 4, 1914, the immense and tumultuous activities of her vast continent inorder to intercede with the Almighty to vouchsafe healing peace to Hisstriving children. 

It was a great and impressive spectacle. As I think of it I seem to feelthe quieting of the headlong thoroughfares of Chicago, the hushing ofthe thud and drum of the overhead railways in New York, and then theslow ringing of the bells in the square tower of that old Puritan Churchin Boston--all calm and peaceful now as a New England village on Sundaymorning. 

But truth to tell we of the belligerent countries were not deeply movedor comforted by America's prayers. We thought our cause was that ofhumanity, and the sure way to establish it was by protest as well asprayer. We did not ask or desire that America should take up arms byour side. We did not wish to enlarge the area of the conflict that wasdeluging Europe in blood. Confident in the justice of our cause, wethought we knew that by the help of the Lord of Hosts, and by thestrength of His stretched-out arm, the forces of the Allies would besufficient for themselves. Neither did we wish to make a parade of ourwounds to excite America's pity. With all our souls we believed that forevery drop of innocent blood that was being shed outside the recognizedarea of battle the Avenger of blood would yet exact an awful penalty. But when humanity was being openly outraged, and conventions to whichAmerica had set her seal were being flagrantly violated, we thought, with Mr. Roosevelt, that it was the duty of the United States, as aChristian country, to step in with the expression of her deep and justindignation. 

America was long in doing that. But, thank God, she did it at last, and for the courage and strength of the Notes which President Wilson(speaking with a voice that is no unworthy echo of the great one thatspoke at Gettysburg) has lately sent to Germany on the sinking of the_Lusitania_, and the outrage thereby committed on the laws of justiceand humanity, which are immutable, the whole civilized world (outsidethe countries of our enemies) now salutes the United States in respectand reverence. 

THE THUNDERCLAP THAT FELL ON ENGLAND

Among the flashes as of lightning that revealed to us the drama ofthe past 365 days, some of the most vivid were those that lit up thecondition at home towards the end of Spring. The war had been going onten months when it fell on our ears like a thunderclap that all was notwell with us in England. In the ominous unrest that followed therewas danger of serious division, with the risk of a breakdown in thatnational unity without which there could be no true strength. The resultwas a Coalition Government, uniting all the parties save one, followedby an appeal to the patriotism of the people through their purse. 

Never before had Great Britain witnessed such a response to her call. The first Cabinet in England that aimed at coalition had broken down inpersonal corruption, but the Cabinet now called into being was beyondthe suspicion of even party interest. The first appeal to the purseof the British people had yielded one hundred and thirty millions in ayear, but the appeal now made yielded six hundred millions in a month. It was almost as if Great Britain had ceased to be a nation and become afamily. 

Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink andthe temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At thedarkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tourin a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though myjourney lay through three or four of the least industrial and mostplacid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand, Thehigh roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; thebroad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stationsor depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the haycrop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemedto be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who hadnothing left to do but to wait for death. 

The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remotehamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for thefront, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answeredby sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large boardings on the face ofa public building recorded in golden letters the names of the townsmenwho had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the highroad to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe, French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt andblackened Belgium. 

On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake's old town, Tavistock, I saw athrilling sight--thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundredmen were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew upwith their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls ofthe parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remainingbehind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own bandwith them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately, "Tipperary, " "Fall In, " "We Don't want to Lose You, " and all the otherhomely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. Theopen windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies werecrowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops. Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a buglesounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of amusket; it was repeated by a score of other sharp voices running downthe line, and then the two bands, and the men, and all the people inthe windows, on the balconies and on the roofs (except such of us as hadchoking throats) played and sang "For Auld Lang Syne. " Was the spirit ofour mighty old Drake in his Tavistock town that day?

"Come on, gentlemen, there's time to finish the game, and beat theSpaniards, too!"

A GLIMPSE OP THE KING'S SON

One glimpse at the end of my little motor tour seemed to send a flash oflight through the drama of the past 365 days. It was of our young Princeof Wales, home for a short holiday from the front. I had seen the King'sson only once before--at his investiture in Carnarvon Castle. How longago that seemed! In actual truth "no human creature dreamt of war" thatday, although the shadow of it was even then hanging over our heads. 

Some of us who have witnessed most of the great pageants of the worldthought we had never seen the like of that spectacle--the grey oldruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vastmultitude of spectators, the brilliant sunshine, the booming of theguns from the warships in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagullsoverhead, the massed Welsh choirs singing "Land of my Fathers, " and, above all, the boy of eighteen, beautiful as a fairy prince in his bluecostume, walking hand in hand between the King and Queen to be presentedto his people at the castle gate. 

And now he was home for a little while from that blackened waste acrossthe sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of aruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of hell. He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the workand sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he wouldgo back, in another few days, although he had more to lose by going thanany other young man on the battle-front--a throne. 

But if he lives to ascend it he will have his reward. England will notforget. 

When we hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the factthat she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been aRip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yetan inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I thinkI should have known in any five minutes of any day since August 5, 1914, that Great Britain was at war. Such a spirit has never breathed throughour Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which Ihave any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something forEngland, and few or none idle who are of military age except such ashave heavy burdens or secret disabilities into which I dare not pry. 

It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country'sbattle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on tenthousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, andthe thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, andCleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shiftsday and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimeshalf choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it isnot for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, todishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, orweaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint againstthe young manhood of my country. 

THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN

The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightningwhich have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us thepart played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always inthe histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of thespectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdomof the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands bythe machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governedcontinents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there hasbeen nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman's partin this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, andundivided glory. 

Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of Londonof 30, 000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve theState. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Everyclass of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, andthe tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, andthe heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, aswell as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marchingtogether, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was notso much a procession of British women as a demonstration of Britishwomanhood, and it seemed to say, "We hate war as no man can ever hateit, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take ourshare in it. "

THE WORD OF WOMAN

But long before July 17, 1915, woman's part in this war began. It beganon August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary armysprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to accountfor it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we shouldhave had no Kitchener's Army, for "on the decision of the women, aboveeverything else, lay the issues of the men's choice. " {*}

 * The Times. 

It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundredhomes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early daysof the war, after the clear call went out over England, "Your King andCountry need you. "

In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, theyoung wife is saying, "Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It's rathera pity, so soon after the boy was born. . . Just as you were expectinga rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in thegarden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn'tthink of me. "

Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the dayhe has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and hiswife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime butheartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. "Nearly time for youto go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six. . . . Betty? Oh, no, pity to waken her. I'll kiss her for you when she awakes and saydaddy promised to bring her a dolly from France. . . . Crying? Of coursenot I Why should I be crying?. . . Good-bye then I Good-bye!. . . "

Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and LadySomebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the dayhe was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in thesquare, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He hada long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death hadhovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow wouldpass away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comesto her in his officer's uniform to say, . . . Ah, these partings! Theyare really the death-hours of their dear ones, and the women know it, although, like Andromache, they go on "smiling through their tears. "

With what brave and silent hearts they face the sequel too! The motherof Sub-Lieutenant So-and-So receives letters from him nearly every otherweek. Such cheerful little pencil scribblings! "Dearest Mother, I have ajolly comfortable dug-out now--three planks and a truss of straw, and Isleep on it like a top. " Or, perhaps, "You see they have sent me back tothe Base after six weeks under fire, and now I have a real, _real_ room, and a real, _real_ bed!" The dear old darling! She puts her preciousletters on the mantelpiece for everybody to see, and laughs over themall day long. But when night comes, and she is winding the clock beforegoing upstairs, thinking of the boy who not so long ago used to sleep onher knees. . . . "Ah, me!"

And then the final trial, the last tragic test--the women are equal tothat also. First, the letter in the large envelope from the WarOffice: "Dear Madam, the Secretary of State regrets to inform you thatLieutenant So-and-So is reported killed in action on. . . Lord Kitchenerbegs to offer you. . . " And then, a little later, from the royal palace:"The King and Queen send you their most sincere. . . . " Oh, if she couldonly go out to the place where they have laid. . . But then the Lord willknow where to find His Own!

Somebody in Paris said the other day, "No one will ever make our womencry any, more--after the war. " All the springs of their tears will bedry. 

THE NEW SCARLET LETTER

It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneousdeath, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lyingbetween trenches, perhaps, on the "no-man's ground" which neither friendnor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark nightcoming on, and then dying in the cold shiver of the dawn. Yes, it isbrave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver ina woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to providefor, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in theblood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is notin the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet suchis her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies tothe scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of theman-at-arms. 

On the breasts that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who havefallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarletletter--the badge not of shame, but glory. And "through the rolling ofthe drums" and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in thisyear of service and sacrifice whose message no one can mistake. Woman, who faces death every time she brings a man-child into the world, must henceforth know what is to be done with him. It is her right, hernatural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it. 

AND. . . AFTER?

Such is the drama of the war as I have seen it. How far it has gone, when it will close and the curtain fall on it none of us can say. Withfive millions already dead, twice as many wounded, one kingdom in ruins, another desolate from disease, the larger part of Europe under arms, civil life paralysed, social existence overshadowed by a mourningthat enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progresscompared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; witha public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought £240, 000, 000frightful) would have considered certain to sink the ship of State; withtaxation such as our fathers never conceived possible--what will be ourcondition when this hideous war comes to an end?

It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least ofthe results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortuneswill have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remainsof our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thoughtwe had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrialclasses will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of humantragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor willmore than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds andeating the bread of the children. 

Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that afterthe longest and most exhausting wars the accumulation of the largestnational debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nationshave rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distressin these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herselfquickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in Americaleft poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have sinceamassed boundless wealth. 

So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strengtheven after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic lossthere will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps, of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanentlydisabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyondthe physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthlessdestruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with thepast; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss inthe uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed tounite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part ofEurope will be closed to some of us for the rest of our natural lives, and the world will contain more than a hundred millions fewer of ourfellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy. 

WAR'S SPIRITUAL COMPENSATIONS

But, thank God, there is another side to the picture, both for young andold. If we are to be poorer we shall be more free. If we are to be weakand faint from loss of blood we shall rest at night without dread ofthat shadow of the sword which has darkened the sleep of humanity forforty years. If the countries of our enemies are to be closed to someof us in the future, the countries of our Allies will be more than everopen; nay, they will be almost the same to us as our own. France will beour France, Italy our Italy, Belgium our Belgium, and the next time I, for one, sit by the stove in the log cabin of a Russian moujik on theSteppes, I shall feel as if I were in the thatched cottage of one of myown people in our little island in the Irish Sea. So does blood shedin a common cause break down the barriers of race and language and bindtogether the children of one Father. The dead of our Allies become ourdead, and our dead theirs. That Frenchman died to save my son; thereforehe is my brother, and France is my country. "One's country is the placewhere they lie whom we loved. "

Thus war, brutal, barbarous war, has its spiritual compensations, andpray heaven the present one may prove to have more than any other. If itdoes not, something will break in us after all we have gone through. Ourfaith in the invisible powers to bring a good end out of all this welterof blood and destruction has become a religion. It must not fail us ifour souls are to live. 

LET US PRAY FOR VICTORY

"It is good to pray for peace, but it is better to pray for justice. Itis better to pray for liberty. It is better to pray for the triumph ofthe right, for the victory of human freedom. " {*}

 * New York Times. 

Then let us pray for victory over our enemies, having no qualms, noshame, and no remorse. We know that Christ pronounced a death sentenceon war, and that as soon as Christianity shall have established anascendancy war will cease. But if anybody tells us in the meantime thatby Christ's law we are to stand aside while a strong Power, which is inthe wrong, inflicts frightful cruelties upon a weak Power which is inthe right, let us answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybodytells us that by Christ's law we are to permit ourselves to be troddenupon and trampled out of being by an empire resting on violence, letus answer that we simply don't believe it. If anybody tells us that byChrist's law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a "WarLord" who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood, rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don't believeit. If anybody tells us that Christ's words, "Resist not evil, " wereintended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome allforms of war (including, as they needs must, crime, disease, and death)let us answer that we simply don't believe it. 

Such a clumsy and dangerous interpretation of Christ's doctrine wouldput an end to government, to science, and to literature, and allow theworst elements of human nature to rule the world. It would also putChristianity on the scrap-heap--Christianity "with its benevolentmorality, its exquisite adaptation to the needs of human life, theconsolation it brings to the house of mourning and the light with whichit brightens the mystery of the grave. " {*}

 *Macaulay. 

God forbid that the very least of us should say one word that wouldprolong the horrors of this terrible war. But it is just because we hatewar that at the end of these 365 days we still think we must carry iton. It is just because our hearts are bleeding from the sacrifices wehave made, and have still to make, that we feel they must be compelledto bleed. 

Let us, then, pray with all the fervour of our souls for Belgium, forPoland, for Italy, for Russia, for France, but above all, for our ownbeloved country, mother of nations, mother, too, of some of the bravestand best yet born on to the earth, that as long as there remains one manor woman of British blood above British soil this England and her Empiremay be ours--ours and our children's.