The Face of Paris
I shall never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal, to forget what Paris had been before the war, but as with persons so with places the first impression often gives a deeper, keener insight into character than repeated contacts. I knew that the German invasion, which had swept so close to the city in the first weeks of the war, and which after all the anxious winter months was still no farther than an hour's motor ride from Paris, must have wrought a profound change in this, the most personal of cities. One read of the scarcity of men on the streets, of the lack of cabs, of shuttered shops, of women and girls performing the ordinary tasks of men, of the ever-rising tide of convalescent wounded, etc. But no written words are able to convey the whole meaning of things: one must see with one's own eyes, must feel subconsciously the many details that go to make truth.
When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question—"Why are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit, it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or foreigners—Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the daily labor was done by them. The little café was full of men,—almost every one in some sort of uniform,—drinking their coffee and scanning the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all day long,—the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafés,—and yet they told so little of what was going onlà-bas!…. The silence in the restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French café never. But I soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way.
Will the French ever recover wholly their habit of free, careless, expressive speech? Of all the peoples under the trials of this war they have become by general report the most sternly, grimly silent. Compared with them the English, deemed by nature taciturn, have become almost hysterically voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse, recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teutonic strategy has evoked from the English a flood of outraged comment. But from the beginning the French have wasted no time on suchbêtiseas they would call it: they have put all their energies into their business, which as every French creature knows is to fight this war through to a triumphant end—and not talk. An extraordinary reversal of national temperaments that! From the mobilization hour it was the same thing: every Frenchman knew what it meant, the hour of supreme trial for his country, and he went about his part in it with set face, without the beating of drums, and he has kept that mood since. Henri Lavedan, in a little sketch of the reunion between apoilu, on leave after nine months' absence in the trenches, and his wife, has caught this significant note. The good woman has gently reproached her husband for not being more talkative, not telling her any of his experiences. The soldier says,—"One doesn't talk about it, little one, one does it. And he who talks war doesn't fight…. Later, I'll tell you, after, whenitis signed!"
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There were plenty of cabs and taxis on the streets by the time I reached Paris, rather dangerously driven by strangers ignorant of the ramifications of the great city and of the complexities of motor engines. Most of the tram-lines were running, and the metro gave full service until eleven at night, employing many young women as conductors—and they made neat, capable workers. Many of the shops, especially along the boulevards, were open for a listless business, although the shutters were often up, with the little sign on them announcing that the place was closed because thepatronwas mobilized. And there was a steady stream of people on the sidewalks of all main thoroughfares,—at least while daylight lasted, for the streets emptied rapidly after dark when a dim lamp at the intersection of streets gave all the light there was—quite brilliant to me after the total obscurity of Venice at night! But my French and American friends, who had lived in Paris all through the crisis before the battle of the Marne,—with the exodus of a million or so inhabitants streaming out along the southern routes, the dark, empty, winter streets,—found Paris almost normal. The restaurants were going, the hotels were almost all open, except the large ones on the Champs Élysées that had been transformed into hospitals. At noon one would find something like the old frivol in the Ritz Restaurant,—large parties of much-dressed and much-eating women. For the parasites were fluttering back or resting on their way to and from the Riviera, Switzerland, New York, and London. The Opéra Comique gave several performances of familiar operas each week, rendered patriotic by the recitation of theMarseillaiseby Madame Chenal clothed in the national colors with a mighty Roman sword with which to emphasize "Aux armes, citoyens!" The Française also was open several times a week and some of the smaller theaters as well as the omnipresent cinema shows, advertising reels fresh from the front by special permission of the general staff.
The cafés along the boulevards did a fair business every afternoon, but there was a striking absence of uniforms in them owing to the strict enforcement of the posted regulations against selling liquor to soldiers. That and the peremptory closing of cafés and restaurants at ten-thirty reminded the stranger that Paris was still an "entrenched camp" under military law with General Gallieni as governor…. The number of women one saw at the cafés, sitting listlessly about the little tables, usually without male companions, indicated one of the minor miseries of the great war. For themidinetteand thefemme galantethere seemed nothing to do. A paternal government had found occupation and pay for all other classes of women, also a franc and a half a day for the soldier's wife or mother, but the daughter of joy was left very joyless indeed, with the cold misery of a room from which she could not be evicted "pendant la guerre." They haunted the cafés, the boulevards,—ominous, pitiful specters of the manless world the war was making.
Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marché Saint-Honoré as usual, and I could not see that prices of food had risen abnormally in spite of complaints in the newspapers and the discussion about cold storage in the Chamber of Deputies. Restaurant portions were parsimonious and prices high as usual, but the hotels made specially low rates, "pendant la guerre," which the English took advantage of in large numbers. The Latin Quarter seemed harder hit by the war than other quarters, emptier, as at the end of a long vacation; around the Arch there was a subdued movement as between seasons. The people were there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinnerà la guerreat an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even for the sophisticated. In these surface ways living in Paris was like going back a century or so to a society much less highly geared than the one we are accustomed to. I liked it.
* * * * *
Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness, hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets. It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of business—there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement. Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris on Sunday—except in the rue de la Paix—as I remembered Paris Sundays. No, it was something quite new—the physical expression of that inner silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond—là-bas, all along those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges, where for nine months their men had faced the invader.
Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their personal woe into devotion to others….
There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles. Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through, even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint! One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound he had received, and that night he was going back to hisdépôt. For they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be endured in silence.
There were not many troops on the streets,—at least French soldiers and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front or in theirdépôtsoutside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of theMarseillaise, were brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the Champs Élysées behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes. There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in the theaters, at the cafés, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down the Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the cafés, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful often in their silent eyes.
To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of refugees and destitute, Paris was filled with relief organizations. The sign of some "oeuvre" decorated every other building of any size, it seemed. Apart from the numerous hospitals, there were hostels for the refugee women and children, who earlier in the war had poured into Paris from the north and east, workrooms for making garments, distributing agencies, etc. All civilian Paris had turned itself into one vast relief organization to do what it could to stanch the wounds of France. Of the relief and hospital side of Paris I have the space to say little: much has been written of it by those more competent than I. But in passing I cannot refrain from my word of gratitude to those generous Americans who by their acts and their gifts have put in splendid relief the timid inanities of our official diplomacy. While the President has been exchanging futile words with the Barbarian over the murders on the Lusitania, to the bewilderment and contempt of the French nation, the American Ambulance at Neuilly has offered splendid testimony to the real feelings of the vast majority of true Americans, also an excellent example of the generous American way of doing things. That great hospital, as well as the American Clearing-House and the individual efforts of many American men and women working in numberless organizations, encourage a citizen from our rich republic to hold up his head in spite of German-American disloyalty, gambling in munitions stocks, and official timidity.
* * * * *
Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large numbers of seriously wounded—to find for them suitable labor and to reëducate their crippled faculties so that they could support themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiancé back to life and hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the blind.
In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their hearts out in grief and anxiety.
* * * * *
At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day'scommuniquéwas given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted. They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away, as though saying to themselves,—"Not to-day—then to-morrow!" The newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening than favorable reports from the front—an endless chronicle of bravery and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large, heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand,là-bas.
There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for "demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of the "grands blessés" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident—the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "permissionnaires" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the lastpoiluhad been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris.
* * * * *
Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet even the school children were learning history in a way they will never forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,—"Do you see that legless man? TheBochesdid that—remember it!" In these ways the new generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it for many years to come.
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At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the clear June sky—one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,—for which they have less excuse than even for Louvain or Rheims,—and in making a big hole close to the Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship and curiosity among them—at first they had a realréclame!
Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or sat at the tables in front of the cafés, more shops opened—even the great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes. Considering that less than a year before the national government had left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris—as had been the case with Italy—had returned under the stress of its tragedy to its best self—a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation conquers—and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution possible—victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering—a deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities. She has lived too long in the face of death.
The Wounds of France
The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of the whole.
The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne; the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches. Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape of France.
* * * * *
To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances, it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral. Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed, just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.
What happened to Senlis when the German troops visited it can be seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical fear offrancs-tirailleursthat characterized them from the time they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief hotel. While he was busy with these commands,—most of the inhabitants had fled that morning,—shots were exchanged in the lower end of the town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens, gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic of the German method, but need not be repeated here.
The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial. The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten lesson in the German method of making war.
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As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris, and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest, was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François—from Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.
One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets—long undulating swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly that smiling and gracious air ofla douce France—gently sloping fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic. And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams, in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and crossroads hamlet.
It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads, and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days. Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains, where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,—Favresse, Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,—with acre upon acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees—and graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.
The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century Gothic church had been shaved off—in the ten-foot deep mass of débris lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again, I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one village in ten has escaped the scourge.
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I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth. But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country homes—the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I remember, all but seven had been devastated—by incendiary fire. Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable—the "legitimate" wrack of war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.
The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances—where else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned, their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.
Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the champagne bottle!
* * * * *
When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers'képi, who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant. The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon thousands of them,—singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to receive the dead of the vicinity.
Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier'sképiwhenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated, mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense ofla patrie.
So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation, that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers' homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the wounds can be forgotten.
* * * * *
The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Épernay road, I could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city. It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets, and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells. With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments. They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions occurred within a few feet of the building.
There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims—there have not been any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people, only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence, for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old, too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies. After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no longer protect from the barbarian.
Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed mouldings and figures—irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art—have been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge, fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face, smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty. Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it was—the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can never utterly be erased from her outraged person….
A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French history,—minster of her kings,—and its destruction would be especially bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches in the lofty façade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them. The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse, bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church, who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.
What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting grave from which no German skill can resurrect it…. Within, the cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a pious search could rescue from the débris around the cathedral. In this room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his unshakable faith….
At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced—if within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the destruction of a cathedral. Rheims—unless saved by a miracle—is doomed. And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal and the Latin ideal: one must die.
* * * * *
The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again—at Soissons, at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere destruction.
The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,—the lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,—for almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen—in a quarry near Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general explained,—"They hope to make peace with us—quelle sale race!"
These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat, make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable, unforgivable wounds of France!
The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality done to their"douce France."To the French, quite as much as to the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire world of space.
The Barbarian
The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization. The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture. The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized" as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.
What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts of beings—the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many barbarians,—American life is full of them,—and my knowledge of them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.
* * * * *
Real truth often underlies popular nomenclature. It is neither accident nor a desire to abuse that has given the German the name of barbarian in the Latin nations. Just as the Latin peoples are the inheritors of Greek ideals, so the German peoples seem to be the active modern protagonists of all that the Greeks meant by their term "barbarian." The French before the war regarded the Germans as not wholly well-bred persons, lacking in some of those niceties of feeling and conduct which seemed to them important—"parvenus" as a French officer characterized his feeling about the race, and added the descriptive adjective "sale"—dirty. Since the war there has been ground into the French the more awful inhumanities of which theseparvenusare capable. Therefore, when they think of the German, there comes instinctively to their lips the ancient term of complete distinction,—les barbares,—by which is meant a person and a nation who are not governed by ideals of taste, honor, humanity, what to the non-barbarian are summed up in the one word "decency." The adjective that the officer used—"sale"—does not imply necessarily literal physical dirt, but a moral callousness and unrefinement of soul which in the spiritual realm corresponds with the term "dirty" in the physical. He sees the soul of the German as a dirty soul, unclean, unsqueamish. And this conception of the enemy has given to the French soldier something of that crusader spirit which has sustained him through his terrible conflict. As M. Émile Hovelaque has expressed it,—"France is fighting the battle of humanity, of the world, of America, of every nation, man, and child who are resolved to live their own life in their own way, under the dictates of their conscience, within the limits of the laws they have accepted." The battle of the world to push back once more the pest of barbarism! It is that which has roused French chivalry, French heroism, not merely the love of thepatrie. Indeed, for the higher spirits thepatrieis closely identified with the non-barbaric ideals of humanity.
* * * * *
The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoiled in disgust from the invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, the shooting of Edith Cavell, from the wanton destruction of monuments. All these barbarities are indisputable facts, which may be explained and extenuated, but cannot be denied. There is another class of barbarities,—the so-called "atrocities,"—which are more easily denied, but which most people who have taken the trouble to examine the charges know to be equally true. The record of these multiplied atrocities is so enormous and so well authenticated that it would seem to me useless to add any words to the theme were it not for an amazing attitude of indifference to the subject on the part of many Americans. "We don't want to hear any more atrocity stories," they say. "Perhaps the atrocities have been exaggerated, probably there's truth on both sides. Anyway, war is brutal as every one knows." Some newspapers will not publish the atrocity charges, whether because of our popular prejudice against anything "unpleasant" unless freshly sensational or because of more sinister reasons, the reader may judge.
This attitude is both evasive and cowardly. It is essential to understand the atrocity for a proper realization of the war and of the German menace. It is false to say that all war is barbarous, and that in every war similar atrocities have occurred. As Mr. Hilaire Belloc has well said,—"Men have often talked during this war … as though the crime accompanying Prussian activities in the field were normal to warfare…. It is of the very first importance to appreciate the truth that Prussia in this campaign has postulated in one point after another new doctrines which repudiate everything her neighbors have held sacred from the time when a common Christianity first began to influence the states of Europe. The violation of the Belgian territory is on a par with the murder of civilians in cold blood, and after admission of their innocence, with the massacre of priests and the sinking without warning of unarmed ships with their passengers and crews. To regard these things as something normal to warfare in the past is as monstrous an historical error as it would be to regard the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution as normal to civil disputes within the states."
It is the business of every person who is concerned about anything more than his own selfish fate to examine into the atrocity charges and to convince himself, not only of the truth, but of the more serious implications in their premeditated and persistent character. The record has been well made, fortunately, often in judicial form. It is already voluminous and being added to constantly. Best of all the evidence, perhaps, are the German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of which have been edited by Professor Bédier, of the Collège de France, with facsimile photographs of the texts. Next I should place in evidence the so-called German "War Book" ("Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege"), where under the convenient title of "Indispensable Severities" may be found the text for many of the worst atrocities committed in Belgium and France.
If the atrocity charge against the Germans is false or exaggerated, it is surely time to know it, but no mere denial or general argument can be accepted in rebuttal. The world must convince itself of the truth. The German crimes have been too many and too public, too well authenticated by witnesses to be disproved by mere denial. The best public opinion of the world has condemned military Germany as a barbarous outlaw. The crimes committed with the connivance of the supreme military authorities, authorized by their instructions to their officers, have fouled the name German for eternity: it will be coupled with Vandal, Tartar, Barbarian.
* * * * *
I believe the atrocity charges to be substantially true in a vast majority of cases. Moreover, I do not believe that half the truth of them has been told or ever will be. My reasons for this belief in the atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these murders would sanction all other atrocities. Second, the witness of persons in whose credibility I have confidence, such as French officers and civilians, nurses and doctors, whose occupations have thrown first-hand evidence in their way, who have personal knowledge of specific outrages. Third, from what I myself gathered while I was in France from the lips of abused persons. Although I did not look for atrocities, I could not avoid getting reports from such people as I met in the devastated territory of the Marne, weighing their stories, and estimating the validity of them.
I believe in the truthfulness of that abbé of Esternay, who was one of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the keen old peasant woman at Châtillon, whose home had been riddled by German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately, there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley, though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility of a story, and I believe the abbé, the old woman, and many others who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.
One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape, incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples—these are the blacker crimes against the German name.
* * * * *
Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they would not listen to Prince von Bülow's song, latterly against Americans because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war will explain much of all this barbarism—but not all.
The supreme evidence of German atrocities is to be found in the infamous "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," a singular revelation of national character in which the German general staff has summed up for young officers the principles that should govern the conduct of invading armies. One finds here,—"By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions; it will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war, nay, more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them." This convenient generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions, and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems exceptional severities are "indispensable." After perusing the "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," need one seek more evidence of German atrocities from the levying of confiscatory fines upon conquered peoples to the use of noncombatants as human screens in military operations? The germ of the barbarous system is there contained in its entirety.
* * * * *
But the implication of all this is much deeper than might appear on the surface. Such a theory of warfare as is set forth in the "War Book," as has been exemplified throughout the war, having its climax to date in the murder of Edith Cavell, is not the result of uncontrolled passions wrought to ferocity. It is deliberate, preconceived, defended,—an article of faith intimately bound up with the German ideal of the state. There is the danger. That the precept of the higher military authorities is accepted by the general public may be seen in the following passage from the Hamburg "Fremdenblatt"—or is it but a press note inserted by the high commandment? "Toxic gases are simply a new instrument of warfare; they are condemned because they are not universally adopted…. In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling. New technical knowledge gives new arms to those who are not fools and know how to use them…. Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates humanity. All these are changing ideas and Germans are not disposed to discuss them during the war."
An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"—for the sake of terrorizing hostile peoples—and humanitarianism is condemned as "sentimentalism and flabby emotion."
There we have the gist of the whole affair—what makes the Frenchman instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character.
It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken orgies in châteaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism. The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon, terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the long count against Germany. Assume the vital major premise and the rest follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a natural fund of brutality.
* * * * *
"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling…. Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates humanity. All these are changing ideas."
The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war, it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed, to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness and barbarism.
* * * * *
One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning, they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified themselves against his cruel power.
But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many fresh examples—too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German atrocity is documented in France over and over, within the knowledge of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.
* * * * *
In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc. "That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback, "is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously—not against monuments, against women and children and old people, but as soldiers against soldiers!"
The Latin is sometimes cruel—he has within him the capacity for cruelty—and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically, has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity, Spanish atrocity—they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never won on that principle of "indispensable severity."
It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting, and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirtypoiluin the trench. For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.