MAX BEERBOHMA GRACIOUS ACT. (CARICATURE)FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
MAX BEERBOHMA GRACIOUS ACT. (CARICATURE)FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
MAX BEERBOHM
A GRACIOUS ACT. (CARICATURE)
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
Lacaractéristique de ce conflit européen sera sans doute, aux yeux de nos descendants, qu’il aura été l’instant où la science aura failli à sa mission. La science, cet attribut des dieux dont l’anoblissement s’est étendu aux mortels depuis le temps de Prométhée, la science, cette conquête pure, cette bienfaitrice, cette aïeule tutélaire, oui! la céleste science, nous l’avons vue, en certaines mains, devenir provisoirement scélérate. Elle a choyé l’incendie, rendu pratiques les milliers d’assassinats par noyade. Elle s’est faite empoisonneuse des poumons, vitrioleuse des visages. Les savants d’outre-Rhin auront passé leurs nuits à chercher quel nouvel attentat aux lois divines et humaines, quel crime inédit pourraient être lancés en défi aux nations, par le mauvais génie de leur science à eux, par cette science qui a réussi à rendre la guerre plus hideuse encore qu’elle n’était de naissance.
Si c’étaient ces innovations impies qui dussent ouvrir les chemins que prendra l’avenir, alors une guerre future s’emploierait à rendre vénéneux les épis du froment, sophistiquerait les nuages pour que leur ondée verse les épidémies dont les germes sont actuellement découverts ou celles que créerait le travail des laboratoires allemands. La Kultur drainerait les laves des volcans sous les villes, et arrêterait d’avance les étendues d’écorce terrestre à projeter dans l’espace. Et ceux des diverses planètes, qui sont à lorgner la nôtre, constateraient, aux siècles prochains, qu’une monstrueuse science aurait fait de notre Terre, une seconde Lune, sans espèce vivante ni atmosphère, autour de laquelle des satellites soudain mort-nés seraient les continents exploses de l’Ancien-Monde, ou de l’une et l’autre Amériques.
Mais non! Le vieux maître écrivain François Rabelais a écrit: “Science sans conscience est la ruine de l’âme.” La science sans conscience sera la ruine aussi des gens qui l’ont choisie pour base de leur empire. La science démoniaque verra briser ses ailes de chauve-souris, par ce pouvoirinvisible et impondérable qui, ange gardien des hommes, s’appelle la conscience.
Depuis que la civilisation est en marche, elle va lentement, patiemment, irrésistiblement, vers le mieux, vers le bien. Elle a constitué l’inépuisable réserve, l’invincible armée des valeurs morales, d’où sortent les affranchissements, les justices, les dignités de la race et toute loi de vérité. Cette puissance morale, on a l’Histoire pour en démontrer la constante victoire contre les tyrannies les plus solides, contre les violences les mieux organisées. Mais je n’en veux que la démonstration suivante:
L’État qui a dit que la force prime le droit, l’État qui a piétiné effroyablement toute faiblesse et qui n’a d’égards que pour ce qui est fort, d’où vient que cet État jugea nécessaire de mentir à son peuple, et à la face de tous les peuples sur les vraies causes de la guerre et sur les vrais auteurs responsables? D’où vient que cet État ne manque pas, à chaque occasion, de rééditer le mensonge et de s’y gargariser vainement, ridiculement, follement? Il a marqué ainsi son effroi de la conscience universelle. Celui qui ne s’inquiétait, il y a un an, ni du ciel ni de l’enfer, avait pourtant senti tout de suite, il ne cesse de sentir, aujourd’hui, l’action vengeresse et triomphale s’élaborant dans toutes les consciences de l’humanité, ennemies, neutres, et même sujettes.
Paul Hervieude l’Académie Française
31 Juillet 1915
Itwill be left to our descendants to realize that the chief significance of this European conflict lies in its marking the moment when Science failed in her mission. Science, our heritage from the gods, whose high destiny has been fulfilling itself among mortals since the days of Prometheus: Science, mankind’s purest conquest, the benefactress, the tutelary guardian—celestial Science, corrupted by strange teachings, has turned and rent us. She has let loose the horror of fire and set her hand to the murder of thousands by drowning. She has poisoned the air that men breathe, and flung vitriol in their faces. Her votaries beyond the Rhine have passed the watches of the night in seeking some new violation of laws human and divine—some undreamt outrage to be launched against the nations by the evil genius of that Science of theirs which has made War, hideous as it was at birth, more loathsome still.
If these unholy innovations were to blaze the way for the future, we should find the war-makers of to-morrow causing the wheat-fields to bear a poisoned harvest and forcing the very clouds in heaven to rain down pestilences whose germs are known to us now, or would in time be brought to birth in the alembics of German laboratories. Kultur would channel the lava of volcanoes under great cities, and hurl into space vast stretches of the earth’s crust. The planets of the universe, watching, would learn in centuries to come that a monstrous Science had transformed our World into another Moon, void of life and air, around which swim still-born satellites that were once the blasted continents of the Old World or the Americas.
But this is not to be. The old master-writer, François Rabelais, has said: “Science without conscience spells ruin to the soul.” And so Science without conscience must mean the destruction of that nation which has chosen it as the foundation of empire. Demoniacal Science, dragon-winged, will be shattered against that invisible and imponderable force, the guardian angel of mankind, which is called Conscience.
From the dawn of civilization it has moved slowly, patiently, irresistibly toward the better, toward the good. It has constituted the inexhaustible reserve, the invincible army of moral values, out of which the liberties, the justices, the dignities of the race, and every law of truth, have come to being. History stands ready to number the victories of this moral force over the most strongly organized lawlessness and the mightiest tyrannies. And I ask no better demonstration than this:
The State which has declared that might is right, which has trampled under foot all weakness and respects only that which is strong—how comes it that this State finds itself constrained to lie to its own people and to all the nations about the true causes of this war and the men who are responsible for it? How comes it that this State never fails, whenever chance offers, to repeat the dreary lie and mouth it over desperately, absurdly, vainly? Thus does it betray its terror of the universal Conscience. The power which, one year ago, feared neither heaven nor hell, felt instantly and must ever feel the avenging and triumphant assault of all the consciences of humanity—enemy, neutral, and even subject to itself.
Paul Hervieude l’Académie Française
July 31, 1915
J. L. GÉRÔMETURKISH SOLDIERFROM THE ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING MADE IN 1857
J. L. GÉRÔMETURKISH SOLDIERFROM THE ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING MADE IN 1857
J. L. GÉRÔME
TURKISH SOLDIER
FROM THE ORIGINAL PENCIL DRAWING MADE IN 1857
Le28 août 1914, après une sanglante bataille, la 1èreDivision du Maroc avait refoulé l’ennemi de la Fosse à l’Eau dans la direction de Thin-le-Moutiers.
La nuit venue, malgré des pertes cruelles, la satisfaction était grande: chacun espérait pour le lendemain l’achèvement de la victoire.
Mais contrairement à ces prévisions, l’ordre arriva, sur le coup de onze heures du soir, de se dégager au plus vite et de marcher en retraite vers les plateaux qui dominent à l’Est la route de Mézières à Rethel.
Ce mouvement était une conséquence de la manœuvre géniale conçue dès le 25 août par le GénéralJoffreet qui devait aboutir, comme chacun sait, à la victoire de la Marne; mais nous l’ignorions.
Donc, il fallut se “décrocher” immédiatement. La nuit était très noire; les troupes accablées par une dure journée de combat, couchaient sur leurs positions.
Néanmoins, les ordres se transmirent rapidement et, à minuit, dans un silence complet, la Division retraitait en plusieurs colonnes face à l’Est.
L’ennemi allait-il éventer le mouvement? Il faillait craindre en tout cas qu’à l’aube, c’est à dire après 3 heures de marche, il ne s’en aperçut et ne commençât une poursuite qui aurait été fort gênante.
Il nous aurait en effet rattrapés au pied du plateau, alors que la Division était obligée de se former en une colonne de route unique pour y accéder.
Mais, contrairement à nos craintes rien ne gêna notre opération; à midi, les troupes étaient rassemblées et en ordre parfait dans les environs de Neuvizy, à l’Est de Launois.
Que s’était-il passé? L’ennemi était-il resté sur place? Avait-il lui-même battu en retraite?
C’est dans la journée seulement que l’explication de son attitude nous fut connue.
Par suite de l’obscurité de la nuit ou pour tout autre motif, un bataillon de Tirailleurs Algériens, celui du Commandant MIGNEROT, n’avait pas été touché par l’ordre de repliement.
Il était en toute première ligne et ne possédait d’autre ordre que celui qu’il avait reçu la veille en fin de journée: “Avant-postes de combat; résister à tout prix.”
Aussi à l’aube, lorsque l’ennemi se rendant compte enfin de notre dérobade, voulut pousser de l’avant, il trouva, au centre de notre front, tel qu’il était la veille, ce bataillon en position, ferme, résolu à exécuter son ordre coûte que coûte.
La lutte, au dire des témoins, fut homérique; accablé par des forces supérieures, écrasé par l’artillerie, le bataillon résista sur place d’abord, puis lorsqu’il fut enveloppé sur ses ailes, recula pas à pas, défendant vigoureusement chaque pouce de terrain.
C’est cette superbe attitude qui, à mon insu, assura à la Division, le temps voulu pour exécuter son ascension sur le plateau.
Mais, hélas, ce fut au prix des plus douloureux sacrifices; ce magnifique bataillon qui comptait plus de 1,000 combattants avait perdu le Commandant, la plupart des officiers et 600 hommes.
Au cours de cette glorieuse résistance se produisit l’incident que je veux raconter.
Lorsque le repli commença, il ne pouvait être question de relever morts ou blessés.—Grande fut la stupéfaction des Arabes. C’étaient de vieux soldats, qui avaient combattu un peu partout, en Algérie, au Maroc; toujours ils avaient vu leurs chefs veiller soigneusement à ce qu’aucun blessé, aucun cadavre ne risquât d’être massacré ou profané par l’ennemi—le Berbère ou le Chleuh.—Voici que cette fois, on abandonnait les blessés et les morts. Ils n’en croyaient pas leurs yeux. Des murmures s’élevèrent dans les rangs; un vieux sergent alla même jusqu’à menacer de son fusil un officier en l’appelant traître.
On eut toutes les peines du monde à leur rappeler ce qu’on leur avait pourtant dit: dans les armées de l’Europe, les blessés, les morts, lorsqu’ilstombent aux mains de l’ennemi constituent un dépôt sacré; ils sont traités avec humanité, avec respect.
Hélas, les Arabes avaient raison. Combien de fois l’avons-nous constaté avec indignation et colère!
Mais, au début de la guerre, qui de nous n’eût pas accordé à l’ennemi les sentiments qui sont l’honneur d’une armée: la générosité, l’humanité, le respect des conventions, de la parole donné?
Qui eut imaginé que 45 ans de “Kultur” produiraient de si tristes résultats?
Heureusement, nous avons trouvé à ces désillusions de douces consolations:
Comme tout se compense dans l’univers, il s’est rencontré des âmes exquises qui se sont ingéniées à opposer aux misères de la guerre, les remèdes les plus touchants.
Telle est l’œuvre des Sans-Foyer.
Pour les bienfaits qu’elle a prodigués, pour les nombreux affligés qu’elle a secourus, notre reconnaissance lui est acquise.
Honneur à ses Fondateurs.
Général Humbert
Q. G. IIIᵉ Armée, 28 Août 1915
Onthe 28th of August, 1914, after a hard-fought battle, the First Moroccan Division drove the enemy back from la Fosse à l’Eau, in the direction of Thin-le-Moutiers.
Despite our many losses we were exultant when night fell, and confident of winning a decisive victory the next morning.
But at eleven o’clock, contrary to our expectations, we got an orderto retreat at once towards the east, in the direction of the heights which command the road from Mézières to Rethel.
This movement was part of the strategic plan made by General Joffre on the 25th of August, a plan which led, as every one now knows, to the victory of the Marne—but of that we knew nothing at the time.
The night was pitch dark. The men, worn out by the long day’s fighting, had fallen asleep where they had halted, but the order was rapidly transmitted, and at midnight, in dead silence, the columns of our Division set their faces eastward.
There was a chance that the enemy might discover our purpose. We feared that in three hours when daylight came, we should be pursued, and if we were overtaken it might be awkward, for, to mount to the plateau that lay ahead of us the Division would be obliged to take the narrow road in single column.
Nothing, however, interfered with us; we carried our movement through successfully, and soon the troops were assembled in perfect order to the east of Launois, near Neuvizy.
We could not understand why we had not been molested. Had the enemy remained where we left him, or had he retreated?
Later in the day we learnt the reason of our security. Because of the darkness, or for some other reason, the order to fall back was not transmitted to a battalion of the Tirailleurs Algériens, led by Commandant Mignerot.
The battalion therefore remained where it was, in the first fighting line, in obedience to an order of the day before, which had been to hold its ground at whatever cost.
Thus at dawn, when the enemy found we had given him the slip, and tried to follow us up, this battalion, bent on carrying out the only order it had received, was there to face him.
Those who saw the battle said it was Homeric. Overwhelmed by superior numbers, crushed by artillery, the battalion at first fought where it stood, and then, enveloped on both wings, fell back step by step, fiercely contesting every inch of ground.
That splendid stand gave the Division time to climb the heights in safety. But a heavy price was paid; when the fight began the battalion numbered more than a thousand; when it was over the Commandant, almost all his officers and six hundred of his men were dead.
It was in the course of this glorious resistance that the following incident took place. When the battalion was forced back it was impossible to carry off the dead and wounded. The Arabs were amazed. They were old soldiers who had fought all over Morocco and Algeria, and they had always seen their leaders take the utmost care that no wounded comrades, no corpse of a brave man, should be left behind to be massacred or defiled by savage tribesmen. And now they were abandoning their wounded and their dead. They could not believe their eyes; murmurs arose from the ranks; one old sergeant went so far as to menace his officer with his rifle and call him “traitor.”
Often as they had been told by their chiefs of the respect with which the dead and wounded are treated by European armies, it was almost impossible to reassure them as to the fate of their comrades.
How often since, alas, with bitter wrath, we have had reason to recall their instinctive distrust of the foe!
But in those early days of the war, which one of us would have hesitated to give our enemies credit for the feelings which are part of an Army’s very soul: generosity, humanity, respect for the word of honour?
Who could have imagined that forty-five years of “Kultur” would have borne such fruit?
Fortunately there is consolation even for such disillusionment. This is a universe of compensations, and compassionate souls are striving to lessen the inevitable misery of this most terrible of wars.
Among them we gladly reckon those who come to the aid of the Homeless. And in the name of the many helpless sufferers whom they relieve we offer them our gratitude.
General HumbertCommanding the Third Army of France
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, R.A.PORTRAIT OF HENRY JAMESFROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, R.A.PORTRAIT OF HENRY JAMESFROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, R.A.
PORTRAIT OF HENRY JAMES
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL PAINTING
Therecomes back to me out of the distant past an impression of the citizen soldier at once in his collective grouping and in his impaired, his more or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for long years as the most intimate vision of him that my span of life was likely to disclose. This was a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to recover it, but I mention it because I was to find at the end of time that I had kept it in reserve, left it lurking deep down in my sense of things, however shyly and dimly, however confusedly even, as a term of comparison, a glimpse of something by the loss of which I should have been the poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit, in fine, as only needed darkness to close round it a little from without in order to give forth a vague phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have been very early, in our Civil War, yet not so early but that a large number of those who had answered President Lincoln’s first call for an army had had time to put in their short period (the first term was so short then, as was likewise the first number,) and reappear again in camp, one of those of their small New England State, under what seemed to me at the hour, that of a splendid autumn afternoon, the thickest mantle of heroic history. If I speak of the impression as confused I certainly justify that mark of it by my failure to be clear at this moment as to how much they were in general the worse for wear—since they can’t have been exhibited to me, through their waterside settlement of tents and improvised shanties, in anything like hospital conditions. However, I cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always cherished it, for the sake alone of the general note exhaled, the thing that has most kept remembrance unbroken. I carried away from the placetheimpression, the one that not only was never to fade, but was to show itself susceptible of extraordinary eventual enrichment. I may not pretend now to refer it to the more particular sources it drew upon at that summer’s end of 1861, or to say why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow definitely stricken, so largely either lying in apparent helplessness or moving about in confessed languor: it suffices me that I have always thought of them as expressing themselves at almost every point in the minor key, and that this has been the reason of their interest. What I call the note therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence and the most inspiring—inspiring I mean for consideration of the admirable sincerity that we thus catch in the act: the note of the quite abysmal softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation, that forms the alternative aspect, the passive as distinguished from the active, of the fighting man whose business is in the first instance formidably to bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of course recognise, amid the horrors that the German powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for years conspiring to let loose upon the world by such appalling engines and agencies as mankind had never before dreamed of; but just that is the lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a scale beside which, and though save indeed for a single restriction, the whole previous illustration of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a generalising blur that exhibition of the first American levies as a measure of experience had stamped and harrowed them, the signally attaching mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that if I didn’t fear, for the connection, to appear to compare the slighter things with the so much greater, the diminished shadow with the far-spread substance, I should speak of my small old scrap of truth, miserably small in contrast with the immense evidence even then to have been gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion didn’t come to me, as having contained possibilities of development that I must have languished well-nigh during a lifetime to crown it with.
One had during the long interval not lacked opportunity for a vision of the soldier at peace, moving to and fro with a professional eye on the horizon, but not fished out of the bloody welter and laid down to pant, as we actually see him among the Allies, almost on the very bank and within sound and sight of his deepest element. The effect of many of the elapsing years, the time in England and France and Italy, had indeedbeen to work his collective presence so closely and familiarly into any human scene pretending to a full illustration of our most generally approved conditions that I confess to having missed him rather distressfully from the picture of things offered me during a series of months spent not long ago in a few American cities after years of disconnection. I can scarce say why I missed him sadly rather than gladly—I might so easily have prefigured one’s delight in his absence; but certain it is that my almost outraged consciousness of our practically doing without him amid American conditions was a revelation of the degree in which his great imaging, his great reminding and enhancing function is rooted in the European basis. I felt his non-existence on the American positively produce a void which nothing else, as a vivifying substitute, hurried forward to fill; this being indeed the case with many of the other voids, the most aching, which left the habituated eye to cast about as for something to nibble in a state of dearth. We never know, I think, how much these wanting elements have to suggest to the pampered mind till we feel it living in view of the community from which they have been simplified away. On these occasions they conspire with the effect of certain other, certain similar expressions, examples of social life proceeding as by the serene, the possibly too serene, process of mere ignorance, to bring to a head for the fond observer the wonder of what is supposed to strike, for the projection of a furnished world, the note that they are not there to strike. However, as I quite grant the hypothesis of an observer still fond and yet remarking the lapse of the purple patch of militarism but with a joy unclouded, I limit myself to the merely personal point that the fancy of a particular brooding analystcouldso sharply suffer from a vagueness of privation, something like an unseasoned observational diet, and then, rather to his relief, find the mystery cleared up. And the strict relevancy of the bewilderment I glance at, moreover, becomes questionable, further, by reason of my having, with the outbreak of the horrors in which we are actually steeped, caught myself staring at the exhibited militarism of the general British scene not much less ruefully than I couldremember to have stared, a little before, at the utter American deficit. Which proves after all that the rigour of the case had begun at a bound to defy the largest luxury of thought; so that the presence of the military in the picture on the mere moderate insular scale struck one as “furnishing” a menaced order but in a pitiful and pathetic degree.
The degree was to alter, however, by swift shades, just as one’s comprehension of the change grew and grew with it; and thus it was that, to cut short the record of our steps and stages, we have left immeasurably behind us here the question of what might or what should have been. That belonged, with whatever beguiled or amused ways of looking at it, to the abyss of our past delusion, a collective state of mind in which it had literally been possible to certain sophists to argue that, so far from not having soldiers enough, we had more than we were likely to know any respectable public call for. It was in the very fewest weeks that we replaced a pettifogging consciousness by the most splendidly liberal, and, having swept through all the first phases of anxiety and suspense, found no small part of our measure of the matter settle down to an almost luxurious study of our multiplied defenders after the fact, as I may call it, or in the light of that acquaintance with them as products supremely tried and tested which I began by speaking of. We were up to our necks in this relation before we could turn round, and what upwards of a year’s experience of it has done in the contributive and enriching way may now well be imagined. I might feel that my marked generalisation, the main hospital impression, steeps the case in too strong or too stupid a synthesis, were it not that to consult my memory, a recollection of countless associative contacts, is to see the emphasis almost absurdly thrown on my quasi-paradox. Just so it is of singular interest for the witnessing mind itself to feel the happy truth stoutly resist any qualifying hint—since Iamso struck with the charm, as I can only call it, of the tone and temper of the man of action, the creature appointed to advance and explode and destroy, and elaborately instructed as to how to do these things, reduced to helplessness in the innumerable instances now surrounding us. Itdoesn’t in the least take the edge from my impression that his sweet reasonableness, representing the opposite end of his wondrous scale, is probably the very oldest story of the touching kind in the world; so far indeed from my claiming the least originality for the appealing appearance as it has lately reached me from so many sides, I find its suggestion of vast communities, communities of patience and placidity, acceptance submission pushed to the last point, to be just what makes the whole show most illuminating.
“Wonderful that, from east to west, they mustallbe like this,” one says to one’s self in presence of certain consistencies, certain positive monotonies of aspect; “wonderful that if joy of battle (for the classic term, in spite of new horrors, seems clearly still to keep its old sense,) has, to so attested a pitch, animated these forms, the disconnection of spirit should be so prompt and complete, should hand the creature over as by the easiest turn to the last refinements of accommodation. The disconnection of the flesh, of physical function in whatever ravaged area,thatmay well be measureless; but how interesting, if the futility of such praise doesn’t too much dishonour the subject, the exquisite anomaly of the intimate readjustment of the really more inflamed and exasperated part, or in other words of the imagination, the captured, the haunted vision, to life at its most innocent and most ordered!” To that point one’s unvarying thought of the matter; which yet, though but a meditation without a conclusion, becomes the very air in which fond attention spends itself. So far as commerce of the acceptable, the tentatively helpful kind goes, one looks for the key to success then, among the victims, exactly on that ground of the apprehension pacified and almost, so to call it, trivialised. The attaching thing becomes thus one’s intercourse with the imagination of the particular patient subject, the individual himself, in the measure in which this interest bears us up and carries us along; which name for the life of his spirit has to cover, by a considerable stretch, all the ground. By the stretch of the name, moreover, I am far from meaning any stretch of the faculty itself—which remains for the most part a considerably contracted or inertforce, a force in fact often so undeveloped as to be insusceptible of measurement at all, so that one has to resort, in face of the happy fact that communion still does hold good, to some other descriptive sign for it. That sign, however, fortunately presents itself with inordinate promptitude and fits to its innocent head with the last perfection the cap, in fact the very crown, of an office that we can only appraise as predetermined goodnature. We after this fashion score our very highest on behalf of a conclusion, I think, in feeling that whether or no the British warrior’s goodnature has much range of fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be of it, is at least so goodnatured as to show absolutely everything it touches, everything without exception, even the worst machinations of the enemy, in that colour. Variety and diversity of exhibition, in a world virtually divided as now into hospitals and the preparation of subjects for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked for quite away from the question of physical patience, of the general consent to suffering and mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection of the sort of mind and thought, the sort of moral attitude, that are born of the sufferer’s other relations; which I like to think of as being different from country to country, from class to class, and as having their fullest national and circumstantial play.
It would be of the essence of these remarks, could I give them within my space all the particular applications naturally awaiting them, that they pretend to refer here to the British private soldier only—generalisation about his officers would take us so considerably further and so much enlarge our view. The high average of the beauty and modesty of these, in the stricken state, causes them to affect me, I frankly confess, as probably the very flower of the human race. One’s apprehension of “Tommy”—and I scarce know whether more to dislike the liberty this mode of reference takes with him, or to incline to retain it for the tenderness really latent in it—is in itself a theme for fine notation, but it has brought me thus only to the door of the boundless hospital ward in which, these many months, I have seen the successive and the so strangely quiet tidesof his presence ebb and flow, and it stays me there before the incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away, in its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel boring into the very character of the people, and so going on forever—never arriving or coming out, that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a junction or a terminus. So it draws off through the infinite of the common personal life, but planted and bordered, all along its passage, with the thick-growing flower of the individual illustration, this sometimes vivid enough and sometimes pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now so informed vision, is that it undiscourageably continues and that an unceasing repetition of its testifying particulars seems never either to exhaust its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its sense indeed, if I may so far simplify, is pretty well always the same, that of the jolly fatalism above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to the practices of fortune, however outrageous, that may at times fairly be felt as providing amusement, providing a new and thereby a refreshing turn of the personal situation, for the most interested party. It is true that one may be sometimes moved to wonder whichisthe most interested party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed or the friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried to forearm himself against such a measure of the “criticism of life” as might well be expected to break upon him from the couch in question, and who yet, a thousand occasions for it having been, all round him, inevitably neglected, finds this ingenious provision quite left on his hands. He may well ask himself what he is to do with people who so consistently and so comfortably content themselves withbeing—being for the most part incuriously and instinctively admirable—that nothing whatever is left of them for reflection as distinguished from their own practice; but the only answer that comes is the reproduction of the note. He may, in the interest of appreciation, try the experiment of lending them some scrap of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall meet him on congruous ground, the ground of encouragement to his own participating impulse. They are imaged, under that possibility, after the manner of those unfortunates, the very poor, the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom you have to lend something to wear before they can come to thank you for helping them. The inmates of the long wards, however, have no use for any imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they feel in their own way, they feel a great deal, they don’t at all conceal from you that to have seen what they have seen is to have seen things horrible and monstrous—but there is no estimate of them for which they seek to be indebted to you, and nothing they less invite from you than to show them that such visions must have poisoned their world. Their world isn’t in the least poisoned: they have assimilated their experience by a process scarce at all to be distinguished from their having healthily got rid of it.
The case thus becomes for you that they consist wholly of their applied virtue, which is accompanied with no waste of consciousness whatever. The virtue may strike you as having been, and as still being, greater in some examples than others, but it has throughout the same sign of differing at almost no point from a supreme amiability. How can creatures so amiable, you allow yourself vaguely to wonder, have welcomed even for five minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at the highest pitch, have left so little distortion of the moral nature? It has left none at all that one has at the end of many months been able to discover; so that perhaps the most steadying and refreshing effect of intercourse with these hospital friends is through the almost complete rest from the facing of generalisations to which it treats you. One would even like perhaps, as a stimulus to talk, more generalisation; but one gets enough of that out in the world, and one doesn’t get there nearly so much of what one gets in this perspective, the particular perfect sufficiency of the extraordinary principle, whatever it is, which makes the practical answer so supersede any question or any argument that it seems fairly to have acted by chronic instinctive anticipation, the habit of freely throwing the personal weight into any obvious opening. The personal weight, in its various forms and degrees, is what lies there with a head on the pillow and whatever wise bandages thereabout or elsewhere, and it becomes interesting in itself, and just in proportion, I think, to its having had all its history after the fact. All its history is that of the particular application which has brought it to the pass at which you find it, and is a stream roundabout which you have to press a little hard to make it flow clear. Then, in many a case, it does flow, certainly, as clear as one could wish, and with the strain that it is always somehow English history and illustrates afresh the English way of doing things and regarding them, of feeling and naming them. The sketch extracted is apt to be least coloured when the prostrate historian, as I may call him, is an Englishman of the English; it has more point, though not perhaps more essential tone, when he is a Scot of the Scots, and has most when he is an Irishman of the Irish; but there is absolutely no difference, in the light of race and save as by inevitable variation from individual to individual, about the really constant and precious matter, the attested possession on the part of the contributor of a free loose undisciplined quantity of being to contribute.
This is the palpable and ponderable, the admirably appreciable, residuum—as to which if I be asked just how it is that I pluck the flower of amiability from the bramble of an individualism so bristling with accents, I am afraid I can only say that the accents would seem by the mercy of chance to fall together in the very sense that permits us to detach the rose with the fewest scratches. The rose of active goodnature, irreducible, incurable, or in other words all irreflective,thatis the variety which the individualistic tradition happens, up and down these islands, to wear upon its ample breast—even it may be with a considerable effect of monotony. There it is, for what it is, and the very simplest summary of one’s poor bedside practice is perhaps to confess that one has most of all kept one’s nose buried in it. There hangs about the poor practitioner by that fact, I profess, an aroma not doubtless at all mixed or in the least mystical, but so unpervertedly wholesome that what can I pronounce it with any sort of conscience but sweet? That is the rough, unless I rather say the smooth, report of it; which covers of course, I hasten to add, aconstant shift of impression within the happy limits. Did I not, by way of introduction to these awaiters of articulate acknowledgment, find myself first of all, early in the autumn, in presence of the first aligned rows of lacerated Belgians?—the eloquence of whose mere mute expression of their state, and thereby of their cause, remains to me a vision unforgettable forever, and this even though I may not here stretch my scale to make them, Flemings of Flanders though they were, fit into my remarks with the English of the English and the Scotch of the Scotch. If other witnesses might indeed here fit in they would decidedly come nearest, for there were aspects under which one might almost have taken them simply for Britons comparatively starved of sport and, to make up for that, on straighter and homelier terms with their other senses and appetites. But their effect, thanks to their being so seated in everything that their ripe and rounded temperament had done for them, was to make their English entertainers, and their successors in the long wards especially, seem ever so much more complicated—besides making of what had happened to themselves, for that matter, an enormity of outrage beyond all thought and all pity. Their fate had cut into their spirit to a peculiar degree through their flesh, as if they had had an unusual thickness of this, so to speak—which up to that time had protected while it now but the more exposed and, collectively, entrapped them; so that the ravaged and plundered domesticity that one felt in them, which was mainly what they had to oppose, made the terms of their exile and their suffering an extension of the possible and the dreadful. But all that vision is a chapter by itself—the essence of which is perhaps that it has been the privilege of this placid and sturdy people to show the world a new shade and measure of the tragic and the horrific. The first wash of the great Flemish tide ebbed at any rate from the hospitals—creating moreover the vast needs that were to be so unprecedentedly met, and the native procession which has prompted these remarks set steadily in. I have played too uncertain a light, I am well aware, not arresting it at half the possible points, yet with one aspect of the case staring out sostraight as to form the vivid moral that asks to be drawn. The deepest impression from the sore human stuff with which such observation deals is that of its being strong and sound in an extraordinary degree for the conditions producing it. These conditions represent, one feels at the best, the crude and the waste, the ignored and neglected state; and under the sense of the small care and scant provision that have attended such hearty and happy growths, struggling into life and air with no furtherance to speak of, the question comes pressingly home of what a better economy might, or verily mightn’t, result in. If this abundance all slighted and unencouraged can still comfort us, what wouldn’t it do for us tended and fostered and cultivated? That is my moral, for I believe in Culture—speaking strictly now of the honest and of our own congruous kind.
Henry James
LÉON BAKSTMÉNADEFROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
LÉON BAKSTMÉNADEFROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
LÉON BAKST
MÉNADE
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
Sil’on pouvait suivre des yeux ce qui se passe dans le monde idéal qui nous domine de toutes parts, on constaterait sans nul doute que rien ne se perd sur les champs de bataille. Ce que nos admirables morts abandonnent, c’est à nous qu’ils le lèguent; et quand ils périssent pour nous, ce n’est pas métaphoriquement et d’une manière détournée, mais très réellement et d’une façon directe qu’ils nous laissent leur vie. Tout homme qui succombe dans un acte de gloire émet une vertu qui redescend sur nous, et dans la violence d’une fin prématurée, rien ne s’égare et rien ne s’évapore. Il donne en grand et d’un seul coup ce qu’il eût donné dans une longue existence de devoir et d’amour. La mort n’entame pas la vie; elle ne peut rien contre elle. Le total de celle-ci demeure toujours pareil. Ce qu’elle enlève à ceux qui tombent passe en ceux qui restent debout. La mort ne gagne rien tant qu’il y a des vivants. Plus elle exerce ses ravages, plus elle augmente l’intensité de ce qu’elle n’atteint point; plus elle poursuit ses victoires illusoires, mieux elle nous prouve que l’humanité finira par la vaincre.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Ifour vision could open on that unseen world which dominates us from all sides, we should unquestionably learn that on the battlefields there can be no loss. The heritage which our splendid soldiers yield up in dying is bequeathed to us; and when they perish for our sakes, they give us their lives in no metaphoric, roundabout sense, but really and directly. From every man who meets death gloriously there goes forth a virtuewhich enters into us, and even in the violence of an untimely end nothing goes astray or vanishes. In one short moment the soldier gives open-handed the offering of an entire lifetime of love and duty. Death is powerless to prevail over Life. Its total remains forever unchanged. That which is taken from the fallen passes on to those left standing. While men still live, Death can win nothing. The more desperate its efforts, the brighter burns the flame it would fain extinguish; the more cruelly it pursues its phantom victories, the clearer is it proven that in the end Humanity must surely vanquish.
Maurice Maeterlinck
Translated by J. G. D. Paul
“I,skepticthough I am, am, like every Englishman, a mystic. I see in this war almost literally a fight between God and the Devil.... With all my soul I believe that the ideal of pity is the noblest thing we have, and that its denial which waves on every German flag is the denial of all that the greatest men have striven for for centuries.... I feel that the two enormous spirits that move this world are showing their weapons almost visibly, and that never was the garment of the living world so thin over the gods that it conceals.
“I am not much elated by the thought. I have little opinion of Providence as an ally, and I am surprised at the weakness the Kaiser shows for his pocket deity. What we have to do, in my opinion, we do ourselves, and our task is none the lighter that we defend the right. But I am hardened and set by the thing I believe. We feel that we are fighting for the life of England—yes, for the safety of France—yes, for the sanctity of treaties—yes, but behind these secondary and comparatively material issues, for something far deeper, far greater, for something so great and deep that if our efforts fail I pray God I may die before I see it.”
These are words from a letter of an English physician with the British expeditionary force to an American physician who had sent him Dr. Eliot’s war-book. He, in the war, disclosing how he feels about it, has described also how it seems to thousands of us who are looking on. We too are mystics in our feelings about this war. We too have, and have had almost from the first, this profound sense of a fundamental conflict between the powers of good and evil, the soul of the world at grips with its body.
And while we feel so profoundly that the Allies are on the Lord’s side, a good many of us at least prefer the English doctor’s small reliance on Providence as an ally to the Kaiser’s proprietary confidence in the Almighty’s backing. It is not safe to count on Providence to win for us.He knows us much better than we know ourselves, and may have views for our improvement and the world’s which our minds do not fathom and which do not match our plans. Nevertheless, in a vast crisis to feel one’s self on the Lord’s side, there to fight, win or lose, there to stay, alive or dead, is an enormous stay to the spirit. “I am hardened and set,” says the English doctor, “by the thing I believe.” Then truly is Providence his ally.
To work is to pray; to fight is to pray; to tend the wounded in hospitals and avert disease is to pray. The people in action are quickened and sustained in their faith by their exertions, but what of us who sit afar off in safety and look on at Armageddon?
Our case is pretty trying. When the war first came it was hard for the thousands of us who cared, to sleep in our beds. We felt it was our war, too, and it was, for we too are Europeans, and have besides as great a stake in civilization as any one has. We have kept up our habit of sleeping in our beds because that was more convenient and there was no advantage to any one in our doing otherwise. And we have gone on without much outward change in our work and our habits of life. And we have grown a little callous, and doubtless a little torpid, and lost some of the ardor that came with the first shock. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Americans have had one continuing, underlying thought for a year and a quarter—the war, the great conflict between good and evil, and what to do about it.
There never has been a moment’s doubt about which side would be ours if we went in. But how get in? Where lies duty? By what course may we best help? Is it our war? When and how will the mandate come to us, too, to resist the crushing of civilization under the Prussian jack-boot? There are millions of Americans who want to get into the war, but there are more millions who want to keep out. Our English doctor appreciates the predicament of neutral countries, and this is what he says about it:
“War being what it is, it is hopeless to expect that any nation willengage in it who does not fear great loss or hope great gain. Nations will always be swayed by the influences which are now swaying Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Rumania. No desire of justice would lead those countries to join us. I doubt if it would justify their rulers in declaring war.”
Perhaps that is another way of saying that no country will get into the war that dares to stay out. Nations, especially democratic nations, are not much like men. They may not say, “I will fight for you; I will spend my strength and treasure for you; I will die for you and your cause.” Individuals may feel, say, do all that, but individuals are not nations. A nation says: “The laws of my being must determine my conduct. I must go my own gait according to those rules. But if war stretches across my path I need not turn out for it.”
How far this war has still to go, no one knows. It may still, any day, stretch across the path of the United States, so that the natural drive of our procedure will carry us into it.
Edward Sandford Martin