And Italy! Although it is only since May that Italy has stood by our side on the battle-front, in an effort to avert from the world a new military domination, we have known from the beginning that her heart was with 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 me that he heard an Italian statesman say, “Italy always meant war.” We can well believe it. We have believed it from the first. On one of the early days of August, when a British regiment was passing through the streets of London on its way to Charing Cross, it was noticed that an old man in a red shirt and a peaked cap was marching with a proud step by the side of our soldiers. He turned out to be a Garibaldian, who had been living many years in Soho. Having dug up from his time-eaten trunk the simple regimentals of the army of the Liberator, he had come out to walk with our boys on the first stage of their journey to France. In the person of that old soldier of liberty we saw and saluted Italy—Italy that had known what it was to make her own sacrifices for the right, and was now ready 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 lay under the quivering wing of war, in danger of attack from our enemies, and liable to misunderstanding among ourselves. She was party to a Triple Alliance which, ironically enough, bound her (up to a point) to her historic adversary, Austria, as well as to that Germany whose emperors had again and again sent their legions south in vain efforts to rule even the papacy from across the Rhine.
How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption; perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost Oriental in his “sense of the theatre,” and knows better, perhaps, than any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life) played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: “Holy Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my honour, the nuns will do so.”
The Triple Alliance was a secret document, but everybody knew that it required Italy to join with Austria and Germany in the event of their being compelled to engage in a defensive war. Therefore the first question for Italy was whether the war declared by Austria against Serbia and by Germany against Belgium, although apparently aggressive, was in reality defensive. There was a further question for Italy—what would happen to her if she decided against her Allies? She did decide against them, thereby giving the lie direct to the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins, and von Bülows who had been telling the neutral nations that the war had been forced upon Germany. By all the laws of nations Germany and Austria ought then, if they had honestly believed their own story, to have declared war on Italy. They preferred to wheedle her, to try to buy 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 Italian capital its most astute statesman, who was married to a much-admired Italian woman. It was all in vain. Italy knew her own mind and had made reckoning with her own heart. She had begun with contempt for the nation which could invade Serbia, under the pretence of avenging the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand, and with loathing for the other nation which could violate Belgium after it had sworn to protect her, and now she went on to hatred and horror of the perpetrators of the outrages in Liège, in Louvain, and in Rheims, that were scorching men’s eyes in the name of war.
Still, Italy, although separating herself from her former allies, was not yet taking sides against them. Why? If their war was an aggressive and unjustifiable one, why could not Italy say so at once with her sword as well as her pen? There was a period of uncertainty, impatience, even of misunderstanding among her own people. Whispers reached them that their 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 should not fight against them. This was a blow to Italian aspirations, for Victor Emmanuel III is the best-beloved man in Italy, the father of his people, whose heads would bow before his will even though their hearts were torn.
Then came negotiations with Austria about the restoration of provinces which had once belonged to Italy and were still inhabited by Italians. It looked like paltering and peddling, like sale and barter. The people were losing patience; they thought time was being wasted. Beyond the Alps men were dying for liberty in a mighty struggle against the worst tyranny that had ever threatened the world, yet Italy was doing nothing.
But the people did not know all. Even then their country was already at war within the limits of her own frontier—silently in her tailors’ workshops, where uniforms were being sewn for the immense army she was soon to call into the field, audibly in the forges of Milan and Terni, where vast quantities of munitions were being hammered out for a long campaign.
Then, by one of the most vivid, if pathetic, of the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the drama of the past 365 days, we saw the actual war come to Italy. It came in a profoundly impressive form—the dead body of young Bruno Garibaldi, grandson of the Liberator. Fighting for France, Bruno had fallen in a gallant charge at the front, and his brother, who was by his side, had carried his body out of the trenches and brought it home. We who know Rome do not need to be told how it was received there. We can see the dense mass of uncovered heads in the Piazza delle Terme, stretching from the doors of the railway station to the bronze fountain at the top of the Via Nazionale, and we can hear the deep swell of the Garibaldian hymn, which comes like a challenge as well as a moan from 50,000 throats. Not for the first time was a dead Garibaldi being borne through the streets of Rome, and those of us who remembered the earlier day knew well that with the body of this Italian boy the war had entered Italy.
Then, at a crisis in Italy’s internal government, our enemy, having failed to buy, bribe, or corrupt Italy, began to threaten her. Out of the delirium of his intoxicated conscience, which no longer shrank from crime, he told Italy that if she dared to break her neutrality her fate should be as the fate of Belgium. That frightened some of us for a moment. We thought of Venice, of Florence, of Assisi, of Subiaco, of Naples, and of Rome, and, remembering the methods by which Germany was beating and bludgeoning her way through the war, our hearts trembled and thrilled at a dreadful vision of the lovely and beloved Italian land under the heel of a ruthless aggressor—of the destruction of the history of Christendom as it had been written by great artists on canvas and by great architects in stone through the long calendar of nearly two thousand years. But we also thought of Savoy, of Palestro, of Cas-ale, of Caprera, and of “Roma o morte,” and told ourselves that, come what might, victory or defeat, the children of Victor Emmanuel III would never allow themselves to buy the ease and safety of their bodies by the corruption and degradation of their souls.
That was the great and awful hour when Italy stood on the threshold of her fate; but though Great Britain’s heart was bleeding from the sacrifices she had already made, and had still to make, and though Italy’s intervention meant so much to us, we did not feel that we had a right 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 scrap of paper. It was in our blood, born of our devotion to humanity, to justice, 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 for herself, and the bond between us would not be broken!
How the sequel has justified our faith! And when the great hour struck at last, after ten months of suspense, and Italy—ready, fully equipped, united—found the voice with which she proclaimed war, what a voice it was! Eloquent voices she had had throughout, in her Press as well as in her legislative chambers—Morelli’s, Barzini’s, Albertini’s, Malagodi’s, not to speak of Sartorio’s, Ferrero’s, Annie Vivantes, and many more—but it quickens my pulse to remember that it was the voice of a poet which at the final moment was to speak for the Italian soul.
Friends newly arrived from Italy tell me that not even in Rome (where one always feels as if one were living on the borderland of the old world and the new, with thousands of years behind and thousands of years in front) can anybody remember anything so moving as the substance and the reception of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s speech from the balcony of the Hotel Regina. We can well imagine it. The spirit of Time itself could have found no greater scene, no more thrilling moment. The broad highway on the breast of the hill going up to the Porta Pinciana, faced by the palace of the Queen Mother and flanked by the gardens of the Capuchin monastery, with the Colosseum, the Capitol and the Forum almost visible to the right—what a theatre to speak in!
There were 5000 persons below, all “Romans of Rome,” and the Queen Mother 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 his epilogue. Cæsar, Brutus, Cicero, the story of the old oppression from which the world had freed itself after agelong tribulation, and then a picture of the new tyranny that was sweeping down from across the Rhine. What wonder if the warm-hearted Roman populace, to whom patriotism is a religion, were carried away by an appeal which seemed to come to them with the voice of Dante, Mazzini, Carducci, and Garibaldi from the very earth beneath their feet!
So on May 20,1915, knowing well what the terrors of war were, and how remote the prospects of early victory, Italy took her place in arms by the side of the Allies. And now the heart of old Rome, so long perturbed, is tranquil. With heroic confidence she relies on her brave sons, led by her dauntless King, to justify her. And when she hears the truculent boast of our enemy that after he has disposed of Russia, he will destroy Italy as a power in Europe, she answers calmly, “Yes, when the last Roman capable of bearing arms lies dead in Roman soil—perhaps then, but not sooner.”
And then the neutral countries—what is the part which they have played in the drama of the past 365 days? I think I may fairly claim to have had better opportunities than most people for studying one aspect of it, its moral aspect, and therefore I trust I may be forgiven if I make a personal reference. Seeing, in the earliest days of the war, that Germany was doing her best to divert the eye of the world from the crime she had committed in Belgium, and being convinced that Britain’s hope both now and in the future lay in keeping the world’s eye fixed on that outrage, I moved the proprietors of theDaily Telegraphto the publication of “King Albert’s Book.”
What that great book was it must be quite unnecessary to say, but it may be permitted to the editor to claim that it constituted the first (as it may well be the final) impeachment of the Kaiser before the bar of the nations for a crime in Belgium as revolting as that of Frederick the Great in Silesia and a thousandfold more fatal. After the publication of “King Albert’s Book,” Germany knew that before the tribunal of the civilized world she stood tried and condemned. But though representative men and women in thirteen different countries united within the covers of the historic volume to express their abhorrence of Germany’s iniquity, the whole weight of the world’s condemnation could not be included.
From many of the neutral nations there came pathetic cries of inability to join in the general protest. Famous men wrote that the neutrality of their countries imposed upon them the duty and the penalty of silence. “My brother is a member of our Government,” wrote one illustrious man of letters, “and if I am not to get him into trouble I must hold my tongue.” Another, whose German name, if it could be published, would carry 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, and to tell what is in my mind would be treason to my country.” This message came from a remote place in Spain, the writer having been compelled to fly from France, because his blood was German, while unable to take refuge in Germany because his heart was French.
Perhaps the most tragic of these vistas of the sufferings of great souls in neutral countries came from the United States. Profoundly affecting were nearly all President Wilson’s public utterances, even when, as sometimes occurred, our sympathy could not follow them. And certainly one of the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning, whereby we have seen the war in its moral aspect, was that which showed us the United States, at his proclamation, arresting for a whole day, on October 4, 1914, the immense and tumultuous activities of her vast continent in order to intercede with the Almighty to vouchsafe healing peace to His striving children.
It was a great and impressive spectacle. As I think of it I seem to feel the quieting of the headlong thoroughfares of Chicago, the hushing of the thud and drum of the overhead railways in New York, and then the slow ringing of the bells in the square tower of that old Puritan Church in Boston—all calm and peaceful now as a New England village on Sunday morning.
But truth to tell we of the belligerent countries were not deeply moved or comforted by America’s prayers. We thought our cause was that of humanity, and the sure way to establish it was by protest as well as prayer. We did not ask or desire that America should take up arms by our side. We did not wish to enlarge the area of the conflict that was deluging Europe in blood. Confident in the justice of our cause, we thought we knew that by the help of the Lord of Hosts, and by the strength of His stretched-out arm, the forces of the Allies would be sufficient for themselves. Neither did we wish to make a parade of our wounds to excite America’s pity. With all our souls we believed that for every drop of innocent blood that was being shed outside the recognized area of battle the Avenger of blood would yet exact an awful penalty. But when humanity was being openly outraged, and conventions to which America had set her seal were being flagrantly violated, we thought, with Mr. Roosevelt, that it was the duty of the United States, as a Christian country, to step in with the expression of her deep and just indignation.
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 that spoke at Gettysburg) has lately sent to Germany on the sinking of theLusitania, and the outrage thereby committed on the laws of justice and humanity, which are immutable, the whole civilized world (outside the countries of our enemies) now salutes the United States in respect and reverence.
Among the flashes as of lightning that revealed to us the drama of the past 365 days, some of the most vivid were those that lit up the condition at home towards the end of Spring. The war had been going on ten months when it fell on our ears like a thunderclap that all was not well with us in England. In the ominous unrest that followed there was danger of serious division, with the risk of a breakdown in that national unity without which there could be no true strength. The result was a Coalition Government, uniting all the parties save one, followed by 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 in personal corruption, but the Cabinet now called into being was beyond the suspicion of even party interest. The first appeal to the purse of the British people had yielded one hundred and thirty millions in a year, 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 a family.
Nor did the industries of the country, in spite of the lure of drink and the temptation to strikes, fall behind the spirit of the people. At the darkest moment of our inquietude the call of health took me for a tour in a motor-car over fifteen hundred miles of England, and though my journey lay through three or four of the least industrial and most placid of our counties, I found evidences of effort on every hand, The high roads were the track of marching armies of men in training; the broad moors were armed camps; the little towns were recruiting stations or depots for wagons of war; the land lay empty of workers with the hay crop still standing for want of hands to cut it, and the villages seemed to be deserted save by little children and the feeble, old men, who had nothing left to do but to wait for death.
The voice of the great war had been heard everywhere. From the remote hamlet of Clovelly the young men of the lifeboat crew had left for the front, and if the call of the sea came now it would have to be answered by sailors over sixty. In Barnstaple two large boardings on the face of a public building recorded in golden letters the names of the townsmen who had joined the colours. In every little shop window along the high road to Bath there were portraits of the King, Kitchener, Jellicoe, French, and Joffre, flanked sometimes by pictures of poor, burnt and blackened Belgium.
On the edge of Dartmoor, in Drake’s old town, Tavistock, I saw a thrilling sight—thrilling yet simple and quite familiar. Eight hundred men were leaving for France. In the cool of the evening they drew up with their band, four square in the market-place under the grey walls of the parish church, a thousand years old. The men of a regiment remaining behind had come to see their comrades off, bringing their own band with them. For a short half-hour the two bands played alternately, “Tipperary,” “Fall In,” “We Don’t want to Lose You,” and all the other homely but stirring ditties with which Tommy has cheered his soul. The open windows round the square were full of faces, the balconies were crowded, and some of the townspeople were perched on the housetops. Suddenly the church clock struck eight, the hour for departure; a bugle sounded; a loud voice gave the word of command like a shot out of a musket; it was repeated by a score of other sharp voices running down the line, and then the two bands, and the men, and all the people in the windows, on the balconies and on the roofs (except such of us as had choking throats) played and sang “For Auld Lang Syne.” Was the spirit of our mighty old Drake in his Tavistock town that day?
“Come on, gentlemen, there’s time to finish the game, and beat the Spaniards, too!”
One glimpse at the end of my little motor tour seemed to send a flash of light through the drama of the past 365 days. It was of our young Prince of Wales, home for a short holiday from the front. I had seen the King’s son only once before—at his investiture in Carnarvon Castle. How long ago that seemed! In actual truth “no human creature dreamt of war” that day, 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 world thought we had never seen the like of that spectacle—the grey old ruins, roofless and partly clothed by lichen and moss, the vast multitude of spectators, the brilliant sunshine, the booming of the guns from the warships in the bay outside, the screaming of the seagulls overhead, the massed Welsh choirs singing “Land of my Fathers,” and, above all, the boy of eighteen, beautiful as a fairy prince in his blue costume, walking hand in hand between the King and Queen to be presented to his people at the castle gate.
And now he was home for a little while from that blackened waste across the sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of a ruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of hell. He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the work and sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he would go back, in another few days, although he had more to lose by going than any other young man on the battle-front—a throne.
But if he lives to ascend it he will have his reward. England will not forget.
When we hear people say that Great Britain is not yet awake to the fact that she is at war I wonder where they keep their eyes. If I had been a Rip Van Winkle, suddenly awakened after twenty years of sleep, or yet an inhabitant of Mars dropped down on our part of this planet, I think I 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 through our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I have any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something for England, and few or none idle who are of military age except such as have 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’s battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against the young manhood of my country.
The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman’s part in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and undivided glory.
Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the State. 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. Every class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of British womanhood, and it seemed to say, “We hate war as no man can ever hate it, but it has been forced upon us all, so we, too, want to take our share in it.”
But long before July 17, 1915, woman’s part in this war began. It began on August 5, 1914, when the first hundred thousand of our voluntary army sprang into being as by a miracle. The miracle (if I am asked to account for it) had its origin in the word of woman. Without that word we should have had no Kitchener’s Army, for “on the decision of the women, above everything else, lay the issues of the men’s choice.” {*}
* The Times.
It needs little imagination to lift, as it were, the roofs off a hundred homes, and see and hear what was going on there in those early days of the war, after the clear call went out over England, “Your King and Country need you.”
In the little house of a City clerk, married only a year before, the young wife is saying, “Yes, I think you ought to go, dear. It’s rather a pity, so soon after the boy was born... just as you were expecting a rise, too, and we were going to move into that nice cottage in the garden suburb. But, then, it will be all for the best, and you mustn’t think of me.”
Or perhaps it is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. “Nearly time for you to 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 say daddy promised to bring her a dolly from France.... Crying? Of course not I Why should I be crying?... Good-bye then I Good-bye!...”
Or perhaps it is evening in a great house in Belgravia, and Lady Somebody is saying adieu to her son. How well she remembers the day he was born! It was in May. The blossom was out on the lilacs in the square, and all the windows were open. How happy she had been! He had a long fever, too, when he was a child, and for three days Death had hovered over their house. How she had prayed that the dread shadow would pass away! It did, and now that her boy has grown to be a man he comes to her in his officer’s uniform to say,... Ah, these partings! They are 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 mother of Sub-Lieutenant So-and-So receives letters from him nearly every other week. Such cheerful little pencil scribblings! “Dearest Mother, I have a jolly comfortable dug-out now—three planks and a truss of straw, and I sleep on it like a top.” Or, perhaps, “You see they have sent me back to the Base after six weeks under fire, and now I have a real,realroom, and a real,realbed!” The dear old darling! She puts her precious letters on the mantelpiece for everybody to see, and laughs over them all day long. But when night comes, and she is winding the clock before going upstairs, thinking of the boy who not so long ago used to sleep on her knees.... “Ah, me!”
And then the final trial, the last tragic test—the women are equal to that also. First, the letter in the large envelope from the War Office: “Dear Madam, the Secretary of State regrets to inform you that Lieutenant So-and-So is reported killed in action on... Lord Kitchener begs to offer you...” And then, a little later, from the royal palace: “The King and Queen send you their most sincere....” Oh, if she could only go out to the place where they have laid... But then the Lord will know where to find His Own!
Somebody in Paris said the other day, “No one will ever make our women cry any, more—after the war.” All the springs of their tears will be dry.
It is brave in a man to face death on the battlefield, instantaneous death, or, what is worse, death after long suffering, after lying between trenches, perhaps, on the “no-man’s ground” which neither friend nor foe can reach, grasping the earth in agony, seeing the dark night coming on, and then dying in the cold shiver of the dawn. Yes, it is brave in a man to face death like that. But perhaps it is even braver in a woman to face life, with three or four fatherless children to provide for, on nothing but the charity of the State. Then battle is in the blood of man, and the heroic part falls to him by right, but it is not in the blood of woman, who shrinks from it and loathes it, and yet such is her nature, the fine and subtle mystery of it, that she flies to the scene of suffering with a bravery which far out-strips that of the man-at-arms.
On the breasts that have borne tens of thousands of the sons who have fallen in this war the Red Cross is now enshrined. It is the new scarlet letter—the badge not of shame, but glory. And “through the rolling of the drums” and the thundering of the guns a voice comes to us in this year 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, her natural right, and the part she has taken in this war has proved it.
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. With five 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 mourning that enters into nearly every household; with a war still in progress compared with which all other wars sink into insignificance; with a public debt which Pitt, Fox, and Burke (who thought £240,000,000 frightful) would have considered certain to sink the ship of State; with taxation such as our fathers never conceived possible—what will be our condition when this hideous war comes to an end?
It is dangerous to prophesy, but, as far as we can judge, the least of the results will be that we shall all be poorer; that great fortunes will have diminished and vast enterprises disappeared; that what remains of our savings will have a different value; that some of us who thought we had earned our rest will have to go on working; that the industrial classes will have a time of privation; and that (most touching of human tragedies) the old and helpless and dependent among the very poor will more than ever feel themselves to be in the way, filling the beds and eating the bread of the children.
Yet none can say. It is one of the paradoxes of history that after the longest and most exhausting wars the accumulation of the largest national debts and the imposition of the heaviest taxations, nations have rapidly become rich. Although 1817 was a time of extreme distress in these islands, England prospered after the Napoleonic wars. Although 1871 was a time of fierce trial in Paris, yet France recovered herself quickly after the war with Germany. And though the Civil War in America left poverty in its immediate trail, the United States have since amassed boundless wealth.
So do the nations, generation after generation, renew their strength even after the most prolonged campaigns. But beyond the economic loss there will in this case be the physical loss of ten millions, perhaps, of the young manhood of Europe dead, and ten other millions permanently disabled, with all the injury to the race thereby resulting; and beyond the physical loss there will be the intellectual loss in the ruthless destruction of those ancient monuments which had linked us with the past; and beyond the intellectual loss there will be the moral loss in the uprooting of that sympathy of nation with nation which had seemed to unite us with the future. As a consequence of this war a great part of Europe 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 our fellow-creatures in whose welfare we shall take joy.
But, thank God, there is another side to the picture, both for young and old. If we are to be poorer we shall be more free. If we are to be weak and faint from loss of blood we shall rest at night without dread of that shadow of the sword which has darkened the sleep of humanity for forty years. If the countries of our enemies are to be closed to some of us in the future, the countries of our Allies will be more than ever open; nay, they will be almost the same to us as our own. France will be our 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 the Steppes, I shall feel as if I were in the thatched cottage of one of my own people in our little island in the Irish Sea. So does blood shed in a common cause break down the barriers of race and language and bind together the children of one Father. The dead of our Allies become our dead, and our dead theirs. That Frenchman died to save my son; therefore he is my brother, and France is my country. “One’s country is the place where they lie whom we loved.”
Thus war, brutal, barbarous war, has its spiritual compensations, and pray heaven the present one may prove to have more than any other. If it does not, something will break in us after all we have gone through. Our faith in the invisible powers to bring a good end out of all this welter of blood and destruction has become a religion. It must not fail us if our souls are to live.
“It is good to pray for peace, but it is better to pray for justice. It is better to pray for liberty. It is better to pray for the triumph of the right, for the victory of human freedom.” {*}
* New York Times.
Then let us pray for victory over our enemies, having no qualms, no shame, and no remorse. We know that Christ pronounced a death sentence on war, and that as soon as Christianity shall have established an ascendancy war will cease. But if anybody tells us in the meantime that by Christ’s law we are to stand aside while a strong Power, which is in the wrong, inflicts frightful cruelties upon a weak Power which is in the right, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ’s law we are to permit ourselves to be trodden upon and trampled out of being by an empire resting on violence, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that by Christ’s law we are not to oppose the gigantic ambition of a “War Lord” who claims Divine right to stalk over Europe in scenes of blood, rapacity, and impurity, let us answer that we simply don’t believe it. If anybody tells us that Christ’s words, “Resist not evil,” were intended to say that spiritual forces will of themselves overcome all forms 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 would put an end to government, to science, and to literature, and allow the worst elements of human nature to rule the world. It would also put Christianity on the scrap-heap—Christianity “with its benevolent morality, its exquisite adaptation to the needs of human life, the consolation it brings to the house of mourning and the light with which it brightens the mystery of the grave.” {*}
*Macaulay.
God forbid that the very least of us should say one word that would prolong the horrors of this terrible war. But it is just because we hate war that at the end of these 365 days we still think we must carry it on. It is just because our hearts are bleeding from the sacrifices we have made, and have still to make, that we feel they must be compelled to bleed.
Let us, then, pray with all the fervour of our souls for Belgium, for Poland, for Italy, for Russia, for France, but above all, for our own beloved country, mother of nations, mother, too, of some of the bravest and best yet born on to the earth, that as long as there remains one man or woman of British blood above British soil this England and her Empire may be ours—ours and our children’s.