CHAPTER XXSIEGE WARFARE

The kind of modern siege in which the Allies are engaged, unlike the bombardment of a modern fortress, but like the sieges of old times, is bound to be a protracted affair. Still it is not likely that Germany will hold out as long as Troy did. From her geographical position, nearly surrounded by the host of enemies that her arrogance and self-seeking have arrayed against her, she was bound sooner or later to be the besieged party, unless she succeeded in crushing one or more of them by her first impetuous rush. It was not enough to drive them back. She had to annihilate them or at least to bring them to terms at the outset, and that she failed to do. Now, for the time being, she has created troublesome diversions in the Balkans and other parts of the world outside the main field of action, and has even opened a sally-port in the direction of Constantinople. But everywhere else her exits, and to a certain extent her entrances, are barred, north and south by the fleets of the Allies and the hitherto no-man’s land of two neutral states, on the east by the armies of Russia, and on the west by lines of trenches every bit as strong as her own.

It is on this side that the pressure of the siege bearsmost heavily upon her, and that in all probability the breach in her defences will be made. But, as has been ably pointed out inThe Timesby Colonel Repington, whose military judgment carries more weight in France than that of any other English writer on the war, that breach will only be made by an even and continuous distribution of the pressure exerted along the whole of the western line, simultaneously with a sustained attack on the eastern front. It will not be effected by local offensives, however carefully prepared and however gallantly carried out. The day of brilliant cavalry charges on a grand scale is over. Even combined advances of infantry are a form of tactics that must be used as sparingly as possible, because of the enormous waste of life which under present conditions they necessarily entail. The slight advantage gained by the English last September at Loos and the French in Champagne was far too dearly earned. It was magnificent, but it was not siege tactics, and it is only by acting on the principle that the war, more particularly in the west, is not a series of battles but a siege, that it can be won. The time has come when it must be realized that partial offensives of this kind, carried on over a minute section of the front, are not worth the cost. The advance must be made by continuous sapping, that is to say by hammering away with artillery, and, so far as is possible, with nothing but artillery, along the whole line of the enemy’s trenches at the same time, without giving them any rest or any chance of shifting reinforcements from one part of the line or from one front to another.

During the months of comparative stagnation which are now, it may be hoped, drawing to a close, this policy has not been adopted, partly, no doubt, because it could not be. There were not enough guns and not enough high explosive shells. Once or twice they have been massed in huge quantities at some given point, as on those twenty-five miles between Auberives and Massiges in the Champagne country, and they have shown what can be done—provided that too much is not attempted. Our one object is to drive the enemy back. We have to oust them from the ground which they now occupy. That is what is going finally to break themoraleof Germany and the German army. We shall never do it, except at a prohibitive cost, as long as in our attacks we sacrifice length to depth. It is far more valuable to us, and far surer and less costly, to gain say one hundred square miles of ground by advancing a quarter of a mile along a front of four hundred miles than to win back the same acreage by pushing the enemy back five miles along a front of twenty.

But all this is in the future, and is the business of strategists and generals, and not of a newspaper correspondent, who may, after all, be completely wrong in his ideas. All that he can usefully do is to try to give his personal impressions of the way in which the present (or the old) plan has worked. Up till now it has in all probability been the only method that could be adopted, because of the lack of the guns and munitions necessary for a more comprehensive plan of action. It is commonly supposed that in this respect the French have been betteroff than the English. But in any case they, too, have been hampered in their general scheme of attack by a similar necessity for a sparing use of artillery ammunition, and it is this shortage which has principally dictated their conduct of the war of the trenches ever since it began.

At certain points all along the line, from the Channel to Verdun and from Verdun to the Vosges, there are what the German journalist quoted in the last chapter called “Craters of Death,” where, as the siege has progressed, both French and English have, so to speak, brought their battering-rams to bear on the defences. These points have not been chosen because they are the weakest, for there are no weakest points in continuous lines of trenches. One part of the system is as strong as another. But there are, though it sounds paradoxical to say so, strongest points, where the enemy, either because he is particularly well served by lines of communication behind, or because he is particularly anxious for strategical reasons to break through in front, has for months past concentrated greater numbers of guns and men. And since these strongest points have no “weakest” points on either side of them by which they might be turned, it is precisely there that the besiegers have been obliged to concentrate their attack. At the same time any attempt to rush the less thickly manned lines of trenches in between them has been rendered practically impossible by the fact that owing to aeroplanes and telephones and motor-traction any given part of the line can be very quickly strengthened, even to the extent of bringing fresh bodies of troops halfway acrossEurope for the purpose. Under these conditions the position of stalemate to which both besiegers and besieged have very nearly been reduced was practically unavoidable.

This second stage of the war, that is to say the whole wearisome period of the fighting in the trenches, I do not propose to follow at all closely. Even in the struggles round the “craters of death” there was, except on rare occasions, a sameness and a lack of dramatic incident which would be bound to depress the spirits of the general reader. As regards its bearing on the final issue, by far its most important feature is that it has not depressed the spirits of the French soldiers. Even more remarkable than the heroism which from time to time they have shown in making or repelling attacks on a more or less extended scale is the extraordinary cheerfulness with which they have accepted the dreary monotony as well as the wearing daily attrition imposed upon them by the stagnant immobility of the trenches. I have spoken already of this remarkable buoyancy of spirits, which so far as I have seen is characteristic of the whole of the French armies, and need not enlarge upon it again, except to remark that it is one of the most valuable assets upon which the Allies are able to count.

But there is one special aspect of it about which I should like to say a word or two, though it deserves a whole volume to itself. Because the Army of the Republic is a national army, there is no trade or calling or profession which is not represented in its ranks. France not only expects but requires that every able-bodied man of military age shall do his duty in thedefence of his country, unless she has other work to put into his hands. Amongst the rest she calls upon the clergy, and with one consent these men of peace, instead of beginning to make excuse, have answered to the call with a fervour of patriotism which is excelled by no single class of their fellow-countrymen. Before the divorce between Church and State, garrison chaplains, bearing duly specified military grades, were part of the regular equipment of the army. When the State refused to recognize them any longer as functionaries, all priests became at once liable along with the laymen of their own year to ordinary military service. Consequently in the present war, either as men on the active list or as reservists or territorials, thousands ofabbésandcurés, besides monks, novices, choristers, lay brothers, and other servants of the Church, are now serving with the colours.

As far as possible they are employed in the non-combatant ranks, but large numbers of them, both as officers and privates, serve shoulder to shoulder in the trenches and on the field of battle with the other fighting-men. As a body they seem to be inspired, even more than most soldiers, by the courage which springs from contempt of death. In nearly all the countless stories that are told of their heroism the dominant note is the same. Having once, in the pronouncement of their clerical vows, laid down their lives in the service of God, they are always ready to lay them down again in the service of their fellow-soldiers, whenever and wherever the need arises, without for one moment counting the cost. Time after time, like the many humble villagecurés, too old or too weak to serve their country in arms, who have nevertheless gone to meet the barbarians and death without flinching, they have shown to the enemy and to all the world that France has no more gallant sons and soldiers than her priests.

But they have done something more than that. Though they have become the soldiers of France they have remained the soldiers of Christ. Here is one of many instances that come crowding into my mind. A private soldier, badly wounded, was lying in one of the military hospitals, and, believing that he was on the point of death, asked anxiously for the services of a priest. At the moment none was to be found. The man in the next bed, with his thigh hideously shattered by a shell, was lying almost unconscious in a state of partial coma. Gradually, however, he realized what the doctor and the nurses of the ward were talking about. Weak and exhausted as he was, he managed to make one of them understand that he was himself a priest, and would pronounce the absolution of his fellow-soldier if she would hold up his hand; and then, as he whispered the words that brought to the other the comfort that he wanted, his own soul passed away.

That story is typical of the kind of lives which numbers of these men in their double capacity have led and are leading at the present moment. In out-of-the-way corners of the field, far from any church or chaplain, it is an everyday occurrence for some private soldier, with his clerical robes hastily thrown over his uniform, to celebrate mass for the men and officers of his regiment before the battle begins; or, when it is over, with thegrime and the blood of it still thick upon him, to hear the confessions of the dying and give them the last consolations of their faith. Undoubtedly the influence of these soldier-priests and the influence of the religion for which they stand have had a large share in maintaining the wonderfulmoraleof the French troops. Even thefranc maçons, consciously or unconsciously, are affected by it. The war has brought the whole nation as well as the armies face to face with the realities of life and death. They have this enormous advantage over the Germans, that for them the war they are engaged in is a holy war. They are not fighting for what they can get. They are fighting to defend and to free their homes, and therefore they feel and know that they are on the side of freedom and justice and right. In their trouble and peril they have turned instinctively to the consolations and the sustaining strength of what through long ages was their national as well as their personal religion. They have returned to the faith of their fathers. Not only individual soldiers and civilians but the authorities of the State themselves have awakened to the fact that in the great crises of life men and women have a natural craving for something spiritual, something outside of and higher than themselves.

Right at the beginning of the war the official rulers of the State and the Army did a wonderful thing. They took the step of reappointing regularaumoniers, or military chaplains, to the troops of the Republic; that is to say, they had the courage to undo their own work by deliberately revoking part of the anti-clerical legislation which, some years before, the Government hadimposed on the country. In the autumn of 1914 I saw in a town near the eastern frontier a remarkable example of this same disposition on the part of the officials of the State to close, at all events to some extent, the breach between State and Church. In the cathedral of the town (a favourite target for the bombs of German aeroplanes), a solemn service was being celebrated in memory of the soldiers who had fallen during the war. And inside the rails of the chancel, on a chair placed opposite to the throne of the Archbishop and by the side of the General commanding the district, was seated the Prefect of the Department. It was the first time for fifteen years that a Prefect of France, acting in his official capacity and wearing his official uniform, had attended any form of public religious service. To the congregation, therefore, his presence at that solemn moment, while the thunder of Beethoven’s funeral march on the cathedral organ was almost drowned by the thunder of the guns on the heights outside the town, was a fact of the deepest significance. It was the outward and visible sign of the spirit of national unity and brotherly love which sprang into life all over France at the moment when war was declared. It was one of many proofs that for France and her highest interests the war has not been fought and the dead have not died in vain.

* * * * * *

Before I was carried away into this digression by the admiration which every one must feel for these brave soldier-priests of France, I was talking of the way in which, on the eastern half of the front, the chief energy of the war of the trenches has been concentrated at certaindefinite points or “craters of death.” West of the Vosges these points are all in the plain of the Woevre and the Hauts de Meuse, that is to say, along the sides of the St. Mihiel salient. The chief of them are at Les Eparges, on the north side of the angle, in the Forest of Apremont at the angle itself, and near Pont-à-Mousson at the eastern extremity of its southern side. At, and to a lesser extent between, these points the French and the Germans have now been at it, hammer and tongs, for more than a year. I use the expression “hammer and tongs” designedly, because I can think of no other that so well expresses the position. St. Mihiel and the Camp des Romains are situated at the hinge of the tongs, Les Eparges and Pont-à-Mousson towards the extremities of the two legs. With the object of squeezing the legs closer and closer together, so as to crush the German forces between them or at least to force them to retire on Metz, the French have been hammering away at these places for months past, in accordance with sound dynamic principles. At the same time from the Forest of Apremont they have pounded even more vigorously at the Camp des Romains. Dynamically the process of applying the force of the hammer at the St. Mihiel end of the tongs is not so advantageous, but it is, as I have tried to show, necessary. Force must be met by an equivalent force if it is desired to prevent motion in a particular direction, and they have at least so far succeeded in their object as to produce a state of equilibrium.

La Woevre.

The position is one of great interest. What the Germans were trying to do at the end of September,1914, they were still aiming at a year later, and, for all that one can foresee, the situation may be unchanged up to the time when this book is published, or even later. They wanted, and they still want, to cross the Meuse at St. Mihiel and in a sense complete the investment of Verdun. At any time since their first attempt at this manœuvre failed they might have repeated it, or would have repeated it if they could. If they had succeeded the consequences for the French and the whole of the Allies’ line would have been just as serious as at the beginning. Never was there a clearer case of “As you were,” and the fact that the point of danger for the French and the point of opportunity for the Germans was at the angle of the salient has made the situation there more pregnant with possibilities than at almost any other part of the front. The unsatisfactory side of it for our Allies is that because of their failure to turn the enemy out of the Camp des Romains they have not been able to put an end to the occupation of the Woevre, and that to a certain extent the menace of a forward movement still exists. On the other hand, the menace has always been held well in check, and the legs of the tongs are sensibly nearer to each other than they were fifteen months ago.

Through the closing months of 1914 and the whole of the following year a steady pressure was kept up on both sides of the salient by part of the Verdun garrison force and of the Third Army on the north side, that is to say, from the Meuse eastwards, and by part of the Toul garrison and of the Second Army operating from the south towards the Rupt de Mad. As the resultof this general pressure, supplemented by occasional offensive movements in greater force, the enemy were driven back slightly on both their fronts.

The first of these offensive movements was made directly on St. Mihiel from the west. An attack was made on the German troops occupying the left bank of the river, and at first it had every appearance of being successful. The enemy were driven out of the suburb and barracks of Chauvoncourt and retired across the Meuse. Following in hot pursuit, the leading French troops took possession of the barracks—and fell into a trap. The ground had been mined by the Germans before their retreat, and the French paid the consequences of their impetuous advance. Practically the whole of the force that had entered the barracks was destroyed, and in the confusion the enemy successfully counter-attacked and remained masters of Chauvoncourt, which they still hold.

The next attack, a much bigger and brilliantly successful affair, was made at Les Eparges, twelve or thirteen miles north of St. Mihiel and the same distance south-east of Verdun. One of its objects was to defeat the enemy’s project of investing Verdun by driving him further back in the direction of Vigneulles, which lies about mid-way between the two fronts of the salient, and at the same time to threaten his position in the Forest of La Mortagne, to the west of the road from Vigneulles to Les Eparges. The operations, which began on February 17th and lasted till April 10th, were carried out with great determination by the French, and in the end they not only pushed their trenchesforward a considerable distance, but were able to occupy a much safer and more commanding position. Before the advance was made the Germans had constructed a very strong redoubt, to the east of the village of Les Eparges, which was the main objective of theattack.attack.After a careful preparation first by saps and mines, and then by sustained artillery fire, it was gallantly stormed and then evacuated and finally retaken, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, on February 19th. For the next six or seven weeks there was continual fighting on more or less the same ground till, at the beginning of April, the Crown Prince, who had returned from one of his prolonged and mysterious absences to the command of the Fifth Army, had the mortification of adding yet another to the list of his failures, and the French finally and conclusively gained the upper hand. They had fought with extraordinary dash and courage, and had suffered severely. But the result was well worth the cost. The position which they now hold commands a wide view northwards and eastwards over the plain of the Woevre. From the east side of the Forest of Amblonville, in which they have their main cantonments, the ground falls with a fairly steep descent till it rises again to the long bare spur of Les Eparges, over a thousand feet high, looking out over the plain. They are no longer exposed to the risk of an unexpected attack, as it is impossible for the enemy to concentrate troops in the ravines and behind the slopes which separate the forest from Les Eparges without being seen. The other main advantages which the French have gained on this side of the wedge are that they have made someadvance on the two main roads, six or seven miles apart, which run between Verdun and Metz, one along the valley of the Orne past Etain, the other from Fresnes in the direction of Mars-la-Tour. They have also made a slight move forward on the centre of the German line at Lamorville, a few miles to the north of St. Mihiel.

On the southern side of the wedge the chief French efforts have been made at the two extremities of the line, at the Bois d’Ailly and the Bois Brulé, in the Forest of Apremont, and, fourteen and twenty-one miles further east, at the Bois de Mort-Mare, directly south of Thiaucourt, and the Bois le Prêtre, a little to the west of Pont-à-Mousson. The approach to the Forest of Apremont from the Meuse is one of the many places on this part of the front where the French side of the low hills behind the trenches are for miles honeycombed with cave-dwellings. They have been there so long now that they have become part of the landscape and look as if they had always belonged to it. I suppose when the war is over they will still be left for the edification of the cheap trippers and tourists of the world. What will not be left for them to see, for it is gone already, is the Bois Brulé. In the height of summer you can walk for hours along the trenches, through acres of what was once a green forest, and see never a leaf. Nothing is left of the trees but shattered stumps, cut clean off by the shells close to the ground. That gives one some idea of the severity of the endless duel of the guns. At the east end of the wood the hill on which it stands drops down sharply into the plain, andthrough the loopholes in the front trenches (where you do not linger for more than a few seconds at a time) you look down on the brown roofs of the village of Apremont, three or four hundred feet below you. It is full of Germans, though they never show themselves. But their advanced trenches are much closer than that, on the top of the reverse slope of the hill, in some places at the regulation nearest distance of about fifteen yards. Behind the hill, that is to say, on the south or French side of it, and as far as one can see to the east, the plain stretches out flat and unbroken (except by the lines of French and German trenches cut across it), backed on the south by a series of long, straight, level-topped hills, écheloned one behind the other, and ending far away to the right in the blue haze where the heights of the Moselle begin. That is where Pont-à-Mousson lies, and Bois le Prêtre, the greater part of it another dreary forest of stumps, through which the battle raged backwards and forwards again and again for months—or is it centuries?—till at last the whole of it was won and kept for France by her splendid soldiers.

And that is what they are doing all along the line. The progress is slow, but what changes there are in the position of the trenches are in favour of the French. Foot by foot they are winning back the land which was ravished from them at the beginning, and the longer the struggle for the possession of the Woevre goes on the surer it becomes that the occasional offensive movements of the French are assaults and those of the German attempts at sallies. The St. Mihiel salient is still a nuisance, but it has almost, if not quite, ceased to bea danger, and sooner or later it is practically certain that the prolonged attempt to cross the Meuse will have to be abandoned, and that not a single German will be left in France from Verdun to the Vosges.

In the Vosges themselves and in the Sundgau, ever since the retirement from Mulhouse, there has been continual fighting, sometimes of the most violent description, in which the Chasseurs Alpins and the Chasseurs-à-pied, splendidly supported by the French field artillery (supplemented during the latter part of last year with guns of heavier calibre), have done wonderfully fine work. They have not only successfully carried out their main task, which was to prevent the enemy from setting foot on the western slopes of the Vosges, but in the valleys of the Thur and the Doller and at other points along the line have gained a considerable amount of valuable ground. Further north, in the district of Senones, though they have not succeeded in penetrating again into the valley of the Bruche, they have kept the enemy well in check, and at the extreme right of the line, towards the Swiss frontier, have established themselves in a very strong position from which they are able to keep a watchful eye on Altkirch and Mulhouse, and at the same time to guard effectively against any attempt at either a straightforward or a roundabout attack on Belfort.

The main fighting has centred round Thann, Hartmannsweilerkopf, Cernay, Steinbach, the Ballon of Guebweiler, the valley of the Fecht, Reichackerkopf, and the valley of Münster, but from the Donon to Pfetterhausen on the Swiss frontier, especially on thesouthern section of this front, there is hardly any ground that has not been the scene of repeated combats, the net result of which is that the French have almost everywhere made slight advances. The summit of Hartmannsweilerkopf in particular, because it guards the entrance to the valley of St. Amarin, has been bathed in blood over and over again. Four or five times it has been taken and retaken, with dogged perseverance and extraordinary heroism, first by the French and then by the Germans, and the struggle for its possession still continues, though at present it is in the hands of the French. For both sides this famous mountain-top has been one of the most deadly of all those terrible “craters of death.”

Beyond this short general statement I shall not for the present attempt to follow the ins and outs of the campaign on this part of the line. Its strategical importance has been far greater than has appeared, and, once the weather conditions permit, there is always a chance of its developing into an attempt at a big offensive movement by one side or the other. But as regards the story of those heroic struggles we have had, I think, our fill of fighting. In the daily engagements on the plain of Alsace and among the fir-clad mountains of the Vosges the men of the armies of the east have shown the same enthusiastic devotion to their country, the same quiet disregard of danger and death, and the same cheerful endurance and unfailing confidence in the final triumph of right as their brother-soldiers who fought and died for the safety of Epinal and Nancy and Verdun and Toul. Higher praise than that they cannot have.The soldiers of France are the fearless sons of a great-hearted nation.

As I draw near to the end of this imperfect attempt to show the greatness of the debt which England owes to France, one other thought about them comes to me with increasing force. The French have played the game: they have fought the good fight like knights and gentlemen. That, more than almost anything else, is the reason why Englishmen have come to look upon them as something much more than Allies. Because of it they have forged a bond with us and our children’s children which Time itself will hardly be able to weaken. They are our brothers, not only in arms, but in all that civilization stands for. The Germans are—different. They are our enemies, not only because they are fighting against us, but much more because of the way in which they have fought. As a state, and, in cases that cannot be numbered, as individuals they have turned their backs upon principles and ideals by which all honourable nations and men must strive to rule their lives. Their scutcheon is blackened with arson and murder and pillage and rape. Their hands are red with the blood of the innocent. To the ends of the earth and of time they have made their name a byword and a reproach. But—worse than all this—they glory in their shame. They claim that their dishonour is honour and their wrong the right. Their eyes are holden that they cannot see. Some day they will be opened and they will see themselves and their crimes in all their revolting ugliness. For it is unbelievable that a whole nation of ordinary men and women can continue to allow themselvesto be blinded by the false and cruel and iniquitous standards of a few devils in human form. But for the present all their sense of right and wrong is being eaten away by a foul and malignant cancer. Till that cancer has been cut out of their being by the sword they are a deadly danger to the whole world, for their success would infallibly spread its poison into every country on which, in their present condition, they were able to lay their hand. Till the sword has done its work, as firmly and as thoroughly as the surgeon’s scalpel, there is not one of the allied nations which can or will think of peace. Then and then only will come the end of the war.

CHAPTER THE LAST

GERMANY AND THE ALLIES

Once upon a time, in the careless, happy days before the war, a Royal Scotch Princess was married one fine morning to a Royal Irish Prince in a Royal English chapel. The chapel was ancient and small, and the young pair had so many friends that though not nearly all of them could be invited to the ceremony, they filled it to overflowing. Besides the Sovereign Head of both their houses and the State, there were present two Queens (I had almost said two fairy Godmothers) who walked down the chapel hand-in-hand looking as sweet and almost as young as the bride herself, I forget how many other princes and princesses, and scores and scores of the great lights of the land and especially of the legal profession (for where the country-to-be-ruled is there will the lawyers be gathered together). There were not many young people—the occasion was too important and the seats too few—and, except for the brothers and sisters and cousins of the two principals nearly all the guests were married and arrived in couples (like the animals coming into the ark out of the rain) dressed in their finest and full of their own or their ancestors’ importance. For to be there at all, you understand,you had to beSOMEBODY, or at least to the third and fourth generationSOMEBODY’Soffspring, unless you belonged to that mischievous but necessary profession the British Press, the representatives of which, the only blot on this brilliant assembly, were crowded together in a narrow position of vantage so close to the highest and furthest back row of the seats of the mighty that the shadows of the aigrettes in front quivered and danced upon their note-books.

To the strains of the organ, appropriately tender and jubilant by turns, the chapel gradually filled with its distinguished audience, and almost the last to arrive before the Royal party were an old old servant of the State and his matronly spouse, who took their places on two of the gilded chairs immediately below the Press box. Before she shook out the folds of her dress for the last time the lady turned round and, staring straight into the face of the newspaper man behind her, at a range of about two feet, said to her husband in a loud, clear voice (he is rather deaf), “Oh, it’s only reporters.”

Until you have tried it you have no idea of the degree of polite contempt which can be put into that last word. And even when you have tried, and tried your hardest, you will still, if you are only an amateur at the game, fall far short of the dizzy height of scorn reached by this professional expert without any conscious effort at all. For pride of rank and contempt of her inferiors had become to her second nature.

Once upon a time the same great lady (or perhaps it was another) was on her way to the gilded chamber to which her husband had been raised, chiefly by his ownforensic skill, but partly by the nimble pencils of the men who recorded his eloquent speeches for the public press. In the square outside there was a large and excited crowd, some sympathetic, some jeering and hostile, and for a moment her carriage was stopped while the police arrested a pale-faced, elderly woman who had been trying to exercise what she believed to be her legal right of asking for an audience with the representatives of her sovereign. Once more in the same high-pitched voice and with an even deeper tinge of scorn, she explained the situation to her companion: “It’s only one of those wretched suffragettes.”

This book is not a suffragist or anti-suffragist pamphlet. It is an attempt to describe a single phase of the war, and at the same time to consider some of its actual and possible effects. Still, it seems to me worth saying that in England before the war there was in all classes far too much of the spirit expressed in the thoughtless and belittling “only” of these simple little true stories, and that is why I have told them. We were much too fond of using such phrases as “only a woman” or “only a parson.” There were cases before the war when the keepers of public restaurants refused to serve a fellow-subject with food and drink because he was only a soldier—wearing the King’s uniform. That sounds odd to-day. There have been times in our history, and not so very long ago either, when “only a Frenchman” (with or without a qualifying adjective) was the regulation way of speaking of our present Allies and tried and trusty friends, not only because they wore the wrong collars and hats, but because we were generallyinclined to believe that an Englishman could tackle at least three of them with his left hand.

The unwholesome part of this particular form of national pride has, we may hope, left us for good. (It has now, incidentally, infected the Bulgarians, who say to-day that the Western nations can only fight in the trenches, and that in the open field one Bulgar is equal to five French or English.) We began to learn the folly of it even before the war. Sous-lieutenant Carpentier, of the French air-service, taught us a few lessons. So did Jack Johnson—though he was only a nigger. So did the football teams from Africa and New Zealand, though they were only Colonials, and so did our competitors in the Olympic Games, though they were only foreigners. But more than anything else, it is the war that has been and must be still our tutor. It is teaching us the lesson which cock-sure St. Peter (who must surely have had English blood in his veins) learnt long ago at Joppa—that nothing is common or unclean. It is teaching us that we must get rid of the kind of Lucifer pride that goes before a fall. It is teaching us to respect not only our Allies and our foes, but each other. We have found out that the whole of Europe can fight. As a body of soldiers, General French’s contemptible little army, which was sent to fill the gap at Mons, was probably the finest fighting force, regimental officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, that ever stepped on to a field of battle. But it was we non-combatants who wore most of their laurels. At the beginning of this war and in all previous wars, in our complacent English way, we have always thought andtalked of our regular army (when any part of it was at war) as though it were actually the nation, instead of only a minute fraction of it, as though it was we ourselves who were doing the fighting. We have a better right to our national pride now that the Government of the nation has decided and the nation (or most of it) has willingly agreed that at least all its unmarried men of military age shall be trained not only to defend their country but to take their stand beside the other allied nations in their battle for something that is far greater and more sacred and more important than the very greatest of them.

Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.Church at Drouville—Meurthe et Moselle

Photograph by Libert-Fernand, Nancy.

Church at Drouville—Meurthe et Moselle

I take back nothing of what I have written earlier in this book about our refusal as a nation to bring ourselves in this respect in a line with our Allies. Our consent is not even now completely whole-hearted. For seventeen months we did so refuse, and during that time not all the magnificence of our unparalleled voluntary effort was magnificent enough to banish from the minds of our Allies the consciousness, however politely they might conceal it, that we were lagging behind in the struggle for the freedom of the world. But while we lagged behind—great as our contribution was even then to the common cause—we were learning. Outside our own country we have seen the splendid courage of tiny states like Belgium and Serbia, as well as the wonderful soldier-like qualities of the huge national armies of France and Russia and Italy and Germany. From our own people (and from those others as well) we have learnt that priests and parsons and men of every profession and trade and class and condition,however insignificant we used to think them, can endure hardness as good soldiers, and that women, if they cannot fight, can (besides knitting socks, which was all that they were supposed to be good for before the war began) do almost everything else connected with the war which is commonly regarded as men’s work. Now that we have mastered these elementary principles we shall, if we let the war teach us all that it can, go on to the obvious corollary that no nation and no man and no woman has the right to despise another, and that pride and prejudice are the root of nearly all evil.

The war itself is the strongest possible evidence of that truth. For it was the pride of Germany that made the war—not her fear of being strangled by the surrounding nations, not her need of finding colonies for her surplus population, not her desire for a place under the sun, not her passionate longing to ensure for the world the liberty of the seas, not even her jealousy of England, but her overweening pride.

Between the pride of England and the pride of France there are certain well-marked differences. But both, because of their ancient histories, have pride of race, wholesomely tempered by the consciousness thatnoblesse oblige. Germany has the much more aggressive pride of the successfulparvenu. Having made herself, within the memory of people now living, she looked upon her work with all the pride of the self-made man, and saw that it was good—after its kind—and straightway aspired to re-make the whole world after her own image and according to her own material conceptions. To do that she thought, quite wrongly, that it was necessaryfirst to subdue it by the sword. She would have been wiser to keep it in its sheath. Her peaceful invasion was far more penetrating and far more likely to compass the end she had in view of making her the dominating nation of the earth. All the world takes her Kultur now at its proper value. But long before the war, up to the very eve of its declaration, German influence, and above all German finance and commerce, had been permeating all the nations now at war with her, as well as all the neutral states, like bindweed and Virginia Creeper running riot in a suburban garden. If the war had not come the independent existence of some of them—Switzerland, for example—would certainly have been choked. Even the larger countries were beginning to suffer. In England the phrase, “Made in Germany,” first an economic measure of self-protection, then a rather feeble joke, and then a byword, was fast becoming a serious menace—if one accepts as just the principle of England for the English—to the real interests of the country. In France, in England, and in other countries there were too many commercial houses and too many people and too many opinions made in Germany, if those countries were to retain their national characteristics and national liberty of thought and action. The seriousness of the mischief in its gravest form all the world has seen lately in the United States, where the Government have had to struggle hard, and not always with success, against the crippling influence of the fear of the German vote, even though, happier than the neutral states of Europe, they were entirely free from the parallel influence—the fear of the German sword.

The process of Germanization was, in fact, as events move in history, rapid and almost universal. But, fortunately for the world, it was not rapid enough for German pride. So the war was made by the rulers of Germany to hurry forward the spread of German Kultur and all that the word implies, or—was permitted by the higher forces or Powers that rule the evolution of the world, in order to check it. To the Allies, who did not begin the war, but did everything in their power to prevent it, the only possible view is that the Powers or rather the Power that rules the evolution not of Germany alone nor of France nor of England, but of the whole world, is a greater and higher power than the rulers of Germany. That is the confidence in which we are fighting. We do not look upon ourselves as the Chosen People, with a special claim on the mercy of God. We have no special form of culture which we think or pretend it is our duty to impose on the rest of the world. We have no need and no right because our cause is a holy one to invent a special unholy code of the rules of war, and of might and right, in order to secure its triumph. These are forged credentials and counterfeit excuses, and not all the ingenuity of the false prophets who plunged deluded Germany into this war can make them pass as genuine. The prophets and the professors prophesied falsely, and the people, whether they loved to have it so or not, must suffer the consequences.

As for ourselves, we believe, rulers and people, that we went into this war with clean hands and clear consciences. But that is no proof that we are right. TheGermans, or the majority of them, no doubt think the same of themselves and their country. At the bar of the nations we must be judged, when the war is over. But meanwhile, while it is still in progress, we can get some idea of the way in which the other nations regard us from the opinion of the neutral states and even of our Allies.Fas est et ab amicis doceri.

Since the war began I have watched it and England’s share in it from Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, and German and French Switzerland, and have talked about it with the inhabitants of various other countries, including Serbs, Greeks, Russians, Swedes, Montenegrins, and Americans. Never once have I heard it said, though I have seen it hinted in print—in German print—that we came into the war from anything but disinterested motives. And that is the one thing that matters. I was once called upon, when the war was less than a year old, to speak about it at a large meeting of French and German Swiss, specially arranged as a meeting of neutrals. Strictly speaking, it was neutral only in name and on the surface, in the sense that the men composing it were persuaded that their highest duty was to stand together for a United Switzerland, and to sink their differences and individual opinions for the sake of their common country. But the differences and individual opinions were there. Every man in the room, whatever his politics (they were mostly Socialists), consciously and strongly wanted one side or the other, France or Germany, to win. But the very fact that as individual jurymen they were not impartial made their verdict, providedthat it was unanimous, all the more convincing. It was in the days when every one in Switzerland was still discussing the rights and wrongs of the war—and before a German airman had dropped bombs on that particular Swiss town. Having explained that I personally was not a neutral (an obvious remark which was greeted with loud laughter, as a characteristic specimen of English humour), I went on to the further statement, not necessarily quite so obvious to the whole of that particular audience, that England had come into the war because Germany had been guilty of the violation of Belgium’s neutrality, and that if we had not done so we could never have looked the other nations in the face again. Before the words were out of my mouth they had given their verdict in a unanimous burst of applause. Every man of them, and not only those who naturally sympathized with the Allies, showed as clearly as possible that on that point they needed no persuasion. Germany was guilty, and England had done the one thing possible. And that, as far as my observation goes, is the general opinion abroad, not only in Switzerland (in spite of the natural predisposition of many of the inhabitants to think well of Germany as well as to fear her) but in Holland, the Americas, Sweden, and practically the whole of the neutral world.

As for our Allies the French, we have fought side by side for a year and a half, and each of us knows by now of what mettle the other is made. They started the war with two fixed ideas about us—that we were not a military nation (which, if you compare the relative sizeof our two armies at the beginning, was, from their point of view, perfectly true), and that, conscious of the might of our fleet and lulled to a state of careless repose by the sense of our island security, it would take us a long time to wake up to the real seriousness of the war. Looking back on what has passed, it is not easy to say that they were wrong. Some of us—millions of us—realized it from the first. But very many did not. Long after the war had begun there were people in England who held that we were doing more than our share and more than enough, because, as was true, we were doing far more than we had promised. There were even some so foolish and so selfish as to say that our soldiers in Flanders were fighting the battles of France, and not the battles of England, since England had not been and never could be attacked. The French were more generous than these narrow-minded myoptics (who, after all, were only a small minority), and at the same time more clear-sighted. Frankly and with deep gratitude they owned that but for the help of England France must have been crushed. But they also believed that when that had happened our turn would inevitably have come next, and that the only hope for England and the world was that France and England should face the foe together with every ounce of their united strength. Small blame to them, then, if they were seriously concerned when they saw that in England alone of all the combatant nations—Germany excepted—the enervating evil of strikes and labour threats could still exist. Small blame to them if they sometimes wondered how long it would be before, for our own security, we overcameour timid objections to the principle of national service.

But they always felt sure, I think, that the time would come—as it has come, in the last days of 1915—when England would face the necessity of putting her whole strength into the field in order to bring the war to a triumphant conclusion, and to complete what a friend of mine, a high official of France, spoke of in a letter which he wrote to me last May, as“le grand œuvre de la guerre, c’est à dire la Rédemption.”

“C’est bien en effet de rédemption qu’il s’agit,”he went on,“la rédemption du monde. L’humanité voit aujourd’hui, elle voit de ses yeux, ce qu’elle serait devenue si les Boches avaient triomphé, imposant au monde leur loi morale. Pour moi je suis tenté parfois de remercier les Boches d’avoir complété ma vie morale: ils m’ont appris la Haine, la haine forte comme l’Amour, qui emplit le cœur, le réchauffe, le brûle parfois, qui décuple les forces, qui tranforme la vie. C’est le rôle que les Boches joueront désormais dans le monde civilisé; ils auront pour fonction d’être un objet de haine. A cette idée l’Angleterre vient peu à peu. Elle n’est pas encore au point, puisque les ouvriers de tramways de Londres ont fait grève: j’ai vu à l’hôpital un petit chasseur-à-pied, amputé du bras droit, qui en lisant cette nouvelle dans le journal s’est mis à pleurer. Mais le Boche commetra bien encore quelques infamies nouvelles, et l’Angleterre tout entière ‘haïra’ d’une haine active et féconde.”

I doubt myself whether we shall ever quite reach thatpoint. The very sound of the phrase, “Redemption by Hate,” is rather strong meat for English minds. We have not got that Latin fervour of expression, and we have not seen a tithe or anything like a tithe of what the French have seen of the abominable works of the Boche, especially in the eastern provinces. I have heard it rumoured that the British soldier—the British Tommy, that is to say—is by way of thinking and saying that brother Boche is not such a bad fellow after all, and that he would not mind making friends with him. At the present moment and until the war is won anything approaching that frame of mind, if it were at all widespread, would be a calamitous and fatal mistake. The British soldier, especially the British soldier of the new armies, has seen, or at least has fought against, the Germans on the fields of battle and in the trenches, where they are at their best. For no one can deny their fighting qualities. He has not seen “with his eyes” what they did behind the present lines of trenches, when they had to deal not with soldiers, but with defenceless civilians. He is a light-hearted and forgiving individual, and does not realize that what they did then they will do again in this war if ever they get the chance. He cannot be expected in the trenches to grasp the far graver general danger of the poisonous influence which was being exercised on the world and on Germany before the war by the whole rotten system of German Militarism and German Kultur, bolstered up by German pride. He has no time while he is fighting our battles to reflect that that influence will infallibly begin its corrupting and deadening work again after the war,and will spread with far greater rapidity, unless the Militarist party is beaten to its knees.

But, even admitting that here and there in the ranks there may be some of this quasi-friendly feeling towards “brother Boche,” the fact, if it is a fact, need disturb no one. We may not have in England the Latin quickness and fervour of the French, but what we have got is the bulldog grip. Once we have taken hold, though we may be slow in starting, we do not let go. Now that our teeth are set we will hold on to the end—and God defend the right!

But what is the right? The proud German dream of a Greater Germany? I think not. I doubt if even the Germans themselves can think so, if they look at it dispassionately as it was presented—three years before the war began—by the Pan-Germanist prophet, Otto Richard Tannenberg. We certainly cannot complain that they did not give us fair warning.

The gist of his country’s dream can be given quite shortly in his own words. “Greater Germany,” he wrote, “can only be made possible by a struggle with Europe. Russia, France, and England will oppose the establishment of Greater Germany. Austria, feeble as she is, will not weigh heavily in the balance. The Germans will not march against Germany. The basis of our enterprise must be the Pan-Germanist principle.

“Some one must make room, either the Slavs of the West or of the South, or else we ourselves! As we are the strongest the choice will not be difficult. We must give up our attitude of modest expectation. There can be no question of remaining without stirring at thepoint where we stand to-day.... Since 1871 our neighbours have often enough given us chances of appealing to the decision of the sword. Only the wish has been lacking to us. After all, every war can be avoided. But it is also easy to find motives, when one wants to.... As for us, there is no need to hunt for one in the vicissitudes of the relations between the various Courts; one fact is enough for us, that since the foundation, the consolidation, and the expansion of our empire the Germans are being harassed and oppressed in all countries. In Russia, in Austria, in England, in America we have seen a feeling of hatred against Germany develop which we cannot tolerate much longer without losing our standing in those countries.”

That was written, remember, not during the war, nor on the eve of it, but in 1911. We have seen since then how the Pan-Germanist principle that “after all, every war can be avoided, but it is also easy to find motives, if one wants to” was carried out. What we will not see and will not tolerate is the establishment of Greater Germany. For it means amongst other things, according to the prophet Tannenberg, not only that Ireland will become independent of England, and that Austria-Hungary will be incorporated in the German Empire, but that the neutral states of Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Belgium, neutral no longer, will disappear completely from the map of Europe and lose their identity and their freedom in the maw of the same all-embracing and all-devouring organization.

What need have we of further witness? Out of theirown mouths the Germans are condemned, for the thousandth time. The war was deliberately provoked, though “like any war,” it might have been avoided. The excuse for it, invented long beforehand, that it was to put an end to the alleged oppression of Germans in Russia, Austria, England, America, and all other countries, was as false as the pretence that any such oppression existed. The real object, the aggrandizement of Germany, not only by the oppression but by the suppression of all the weaker Latin and German races of Europe, was exhibited naked and unashamed, for all the world to see, long before the would-be oppressor drew the sword. It remains to-day more than ever the real object of the war, now that it is unsheathed. No possible special pleading can maintain, much less prove, that the suppression of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland (to say nothing of the partial suppression of France, England, Russia, Italy, and Servia), is right. The mere suggestion of such an idea is an abominable wrong, which God will not defend, and because of it Great Britain will not tolerate, in any shape or form, the establishment of a Greater Germany. We are going to win this war. But let every man of the Allies and above all every Englishman, reflect on this undoubted fact. Because it is a war between right and wrong, between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, we shall not win it until we have learnt its great lesson, until we know as a nation—and we do not know it yet—that its particular message to our own country is the duty of self-sacrifice.

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