The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 Part 19

War makes men brave and courageous? Rubbis.h.!.+ It fills them with the cruelty of hysteria and the panic of the unknown. I am not talking of battle, which is a different thing. But I say the men who guarded the German frontier--and I dare say every other frontier--in the first stress of war, were wrenched and shaken with veritable hysteria. At St.

Ludwig and Constance those husky soldiers in ironmongery, with shaved heads and beards and outstanding ears, fell into sheer savagery, not because they were bad and savage men, but simply because they were hysterical. The fact is worth noting.

It explains many a b.l.o.o.d.y and infamous deed in the tragic history of sad Alsace and of little Belgium. The war-begotten reversal to savagery brought with it all the hysteria of the savage man. The sentries at St.

Ludwig struck with muskets and sabres because they were hysterical with terror of the new, unknown state into which they had been plunged, not because they were not men like you and me. Surely the savage Uhlan who ravaged the cottages of Alsace was your brother and mine, and the Magyar beyond the Danube and the Cossack at Kovna. Only they had gone back to the terrors of the man who dwelt in a cave.

Traffic stopped; and when it stopped civilization fell away from the travelers. That was strange. Take the afternoon of the day war was declared, the date being Aug. 1, in the year of our Lord 1914, and the hour 7:30 P.M., Berlin time. It was the last train that reached the frontier from Paris. Between Delle and Bicourt lies a neutral zone about three kilometers--say, nearly two and a half miles--in extent. On one side France and invasion and terror and war; on the other side of the zone the relative safety of Switzerland. Six hundred pa.s.sengers poured out of the French train at noon into that neutral zone and started to walk to Swiss safety. A blazing August sun; a road of pebbles and stinging, upblown dust.

The pa.s.sengers had been permitted to bring on the train only what luggage they could carry; so they were laden with bags and coats, dressing bags and jewel cases--all they had deemed most valuable. Mostly women. German ladies fleeing for refuge; Russian ladies; English, American; and a crowd of men, urgent to reach their armies, German, Swiss, Russian, Austrian, Servian, Italian; withal many of the kind of American men who go to Switzerland in August.

And the caravan started in the dust and heat of a desert. A woman let fall her heavy bag and plodded on. Another threw away her coats. Men shook off their bundles. The heat was stifling. And through the clouds of dust a panic terror crept. It was the antique terror of the G.o.d Pan--the G.o.d All; it was a fear as immense as the sky.

A woman screamed and began to run, throwing away everything she had safeguarded so she might run with empty hands. A score followed her. Men began to run. They thrust the women aside, cursing; and ran. And for over two miles the road was covered thick with coats and bags, with packages and jewel cases. The greed of possession died out in the causeless fear.

These hoa.r.s.e, pus.h.i.+ng men, these sweating, shameless women had gone back 10,000 years into prehistoric savagery. Lightly they threw away all the baubles and gewgaws civilization had fas.h.i.+oned for adorning and disguising their raw humanity, and the habits of civilization as well.

They had touched but the outermost edge of war, and their very clothes fell off them.

III.

BARBARISM AND WOMEN.

War; and it takes eighty-four hours to make a twelve-hour journey from the Alps to Paris; the cable is dead; the telegraph is dumb; letters go only when smuggled over the frontiers by couriers; you look about you and find you are in a mediaeval and mysterious world. You stand amid the melancholy ruins of canceled cycles. The mailed fist of war has smashed your world to pieces. You do not know it.

The man you thought of as a brother looks at you with eyes of pa.s.sionate hatred; you have eaten bread and salt together; you have drunk together; you have been uplifted by the same books; you have been sublimed by the same music; but he is a German, and your blood was made in another land, and he looks at you with suspicion and hate--perhaps you are a spy. (The spy mania! Dear Lord, what absurd, b.l.o.o.d.y, and abominable stories I could write of this madness which has Europe by the throat, this madness which is only another form of war hysteria.) A reversal to barbarism; you and the man who was your friend have gone back to the fear and hatred of primitive savages, meeting at the corner of a dark wood. All of humanity we have acquired in the slow way of evolution sloughs off us.

We are savages once more. For science is dead. All the laboratories are shut, save those where poison is brewed and destruction is put up in packages. Education has ceased, save that fierce Nietzschean education which declares: "The weak and helpless must go to the wall; and we shall help them go." All that made life humanly fair is hidden in the fetid clouds of war where savages (in terror and hysteria) grope for each other's throats.

The glory of war--rot! The heroism of war--rot! The scarlet and beneficent energies of war--rot! When you look at it close what you see are hulking ma.s.ses of brutes with fear behind them prodding them on, or wild and splendid savages, hysterical with hate, battling to save their hearth fires and women from the oncoming horde. Reversal to barbarism.

Think it over. Upon whom falls the stress of war? Not upon the soldier.

He is killed and fattens the soil where he falls; or he is maimed and hobbles off toward a pension or beggary--both tolerable things; anyway he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a Belgian--which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut like a Greek of Thermopylae--and become thus a permanent part of the world's finest history.

I would like to write here the name of a friend, Charles Flamache of Brussels. He was 21 years old. He was an artist who had already tasted fame. He had known the love of woman. That his destiny might be fulfilled he died, the blithe, brave boy, in front of Liege. It was the right death at the right time--ere yet the ma.s.sed Prussians had rolled in fire and blood over his fair small land. Wherefore, hail and farewell, young hero!

But upon whom falls the stress of war?

In a time of barbarism those who suffer are always the weak. War is in its essence (as said Nietzsche, the German philosopher of "world power") an attack upon weakness. The weakest suffer most.

I saw children born on cinder heaps, and I saw them die; and the mothers die gasping like she dogs in a smother of flies.

Some day the story of what was done in Alsace will be written and the stories of Vise and Aerschot and Onsmael and Louvain will seem pale and negligible; but not now--five generations to come will whisper them in the Vosges.

What I would emphasize is that in the natural state of barbarism induced by the war the woman falls back to her antique state of she animal. In thousands of years she has been made into a thing of exquisite and mysterious femininity; in a day she is thrown back to kins.h.i.+p with the she dog. Slashed with sabres, p.r.i.c.ked with lances, she is a mere thing of prey.

Surely not the dear Countess and Baroness? Of course not. War is made in the palaces, but it does not attack the palaces. The worth of every nation dwells in the cottage; and it is upon the cottage that war works its worst infamy. Go to Alsace and see.

Pillage, loot, incendiarism, "indemnity"--you can read that in the records of the invasion of Belgium; that is war; it is all right if war is to be, for all this talk of chivalrous consideration for foes and regard for international law is all nonsense; necessity, as Bethmann-Hollweg said, knows no law, and necessity has always been the tyrant's plea; it is the business of a soldier to kill and terrify; if he restricts his killing and terrifying he is a bad soldier and bad at his work of barbarism; but--

There is a more sinister side to Europe's lapse into barbarism. The women are paying too dear. And to make them pay dear is not really the business of a soldier, not even a bad soldier. Yet the woman is paying, G.o.d knows. A tragic payment.

IV.

AFTER BARBARISM, WHAT?

One morning at dawn--it was at Amberieu--I saw the long trains go by carrying the German wounded and the German prisoners, who had been taken in the battles of the Vosges. There were 2,400 taken on toward the south. There were French nurses with the wounded. I saw water and fruit and chocolate given to the prisoners.

This was early in the war. The sheer lapse into barbarism had not yet come. Soon the German newspapers announced:

"Great concern is expressed in press and public utterances lest prisoners of war receive anything in the line of favored treatment.

Newspapers have conducted an angry campaign against women who have ventured at the railway station to give coffee or food to prisoners of war pa.s.sing through; commanding officers have ordered that persons 'demeaning themselves by such unworthy conduct' are to be immediately ejected from the stations, and in response to public clamor official announcements have been issued that such prisoners in transport receive only bread and water."

And the French followed suit; no "coddling" of prisoners; back to barbarism, the lessons of humanity forgot and savagery come again.

Civilization in the old world is smashed. I have traversed the ruins; and my feet are still dirty with mud and blood. But I can tell you what is going to come out of that welter of ruin. There will come a sane and righteous hatred of militarism. What will be surely destroyed is Caesarism. Prophecy? This is not prophecy; I am stating an a.s.sured fact.

Even at this hour of hysterical and relentless warfare there lies deep in the heart of the democracy of Europe a consuming hatred of militarism.

Drops of water (or blood) do not more naturally flow into each than did the English hatred of Caesarism blend with the high French hatred of the evil thing; and when the palaces have done fighting, the cottages of Europe, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean and from the Black Sea to the Hebrides, will proclaim its destruction.

And you will see it; you will see Caesarism drowned in the very blood it has shed. And the German, mark you, will not be the least bitter of the foes of militarism. He will be indeed a relentless foe.

Reversal to barbarism, say you? A shuddering lapse into savagery?

Quite true; that is the state of Europe over the fairest and most highly civilized provinces. The picture of Sir John French strolling up and down the battle line smoking a cigarette does not give a fair idea of it; nor do you get it from the Kaiser on a hilltop surveying his ma.s.sed war bullocks surging forth patiently to battle; all that belongs to the picture books of war.

The real thing is dirtier.

Civil Life in Berlin

[From The London Times, Oct. 17, 1914.]

_A gentleman, the subject of a neutral country, who has just returned from a visit to Germany, has furnished The Times with the following statement as to his impressions. He says:_

I did not hear any boasting over German successes. When I spoke to Germans of their victories they would reply: "Yes, we have had victories--but what of the dead?" This thought is present even in places where one might think that for the time being every effort would be made to prevent its intrusion. In Berlin, for example, where all the theatres are open and attracting crowded audiences, it is the burden of a song sung during one of the patriotic plays, of which several are now being performed.

I went to a theatre on the night of the fall of Antwerp. A play ent.i.tled "1914" was acted, in the course of which many topical allusions were made by the well-known comedian Thielscher. Even in these serious times the Berliner, who is famous for the form of humor known as Berliner Witze, cannot refrain from his jokes. One of these was the question: "Why does Germany understand war so well? Because it has been declared upon her eight times!"--the point of the jest lying in the fact that the German word _Erklaren_, "to declare," means also "to explain." Another pun of the same kind was made out of the word _Niederlage_, which means both "defeat" and "depot." "Germany," said one of the characters, "is surrounded by enemies on all sides." "Yes," was the reply, "she is the head establishment, while England, France, and Russia only have the _Niederlage_."

There were some serious scenes in this play, in the middle of one of which some one stepped quickly on to the stage and, interrupting the actors, exclaimed: "One moment, one moment, if you please! Antwerp has fallen!" Of course, there was tremendous enthusiasm at this announcement, but when it had subsided, one of the company came forward and sang: