The world decision

(J^

^0ofe6 ftp Robert Ipcrricli

PUBLISHED BY
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

THE WORLD DECISION.
CLARK'S FIELD.

THE WORLD DECISION

l:

THE

WORLD DECISION

BY

ROBERT HERRICK

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1916

0 fr/'

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY ROBERT HERRICK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published January iqib

SECOND IMPRESSION, MARCH I916

CONTENTS

TJRT ONE — ITALY

I. ITALY HESITATES 3

II. THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS 3^

III. THE POET SPEAKS 55

IV. THE PIAZZA SPEAKS 67
V. ITALY DECIDES 82

VI. THE EVE OF THE WAR 9*^

"PART TWO — FRANCE

I. THE FACE OF PARIS 1 13

II. THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE I 28

III. THE BARBARIAN H?

IV. THE GERMAN LESSON 163
V. THE FAITH OF THE FRENCH I 79

VI. THE NEW FRANCE I94

"PART THREE — <iAMERICA

I. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US? 21 3

II. THE CHOICE 228

III. PEACE 238

THE WORLD DECISION
PART ONE . • ITALY

THE WORLD DECISION

Part One — Italy
I

Italy Hesitates

LAST April, when I left New York for
Europe, Italy was "on the verge" of
entering the great war. According to the
meager reports that a strict censorship permitted
to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
many months between a continuance of her pre-
carious neutrality and joining with the Allies,
with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It
was known that she was buying supplies for her
ill-equipped army — boots and food and arms.
Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the
somewhat cynical belief that Italy would never
get further than the verge of war; that her Aus-
trian ally would be induced by the pressure of
necessity to concede enough of those "national
aspirations," of which we had heard much, to
keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly
neutral until the conclusion of the war. An
American diplomat in Italy, with the best oppor-
tunity for close observation, said, as late as the
middle of May: "I shall believe that Italy will go
into the war only when I see it!"

3

THE WORLD DECISION

The process of squeezing her Austrian ally
when the latter was in a tight place — as Italy's
negotiating was interpreted commonly in America
— naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the
nation, and when suddenly, during the stormy
weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision and
broke with Austria, Americans inferred, errone-
ously, that her "sordid" bargaining having met
with a stubborn resistance from Vienna, there
was nothing left for a government that had spent
millions in war preparation but to declare war.
The affair had that surface appearance, which
was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning
the "voice of the piazza having prevailed" re-
vealed not merely pique, but also a complete mis-
understanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of
the underlying motives that led to an inevitable
step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close
range, the swift unfolding of the drama which
ended on May 23 in a declaration of war, can
accept such a base or trivial reading of the matter.
Like all things human the psychology of Italy's
action was complex, woven in an intricate pattern,
nevertheless at its base simple and inevitable,
granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old
impulses stirred in the Italians as well as new.
Italy repeated according to the modern formula
the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of
the Teutonic danger. ^^ Fuori i barbari'' — out
with the barbarians — has lain in the blood of

ITALY HESITATES

Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a
fresh heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by in-
vaded France, by the Lusitania murders. Less
conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a mov-
ing force than this personal antagonism was the
spiritual antagonism between the Latin and the
German, between the two visions of the world
which the German and the Latin imagine and
seek to perpetuate. That in a large and very real
sense this world agony of war is the supreme
struggle between these two opposed traditions of
civilization — a decision between two competing
forms of life — seems to me so obvious as to need
no argument. In such a struggle Italy must, by
compulsion of historical tradition as well as of
political situation, take her part on the side of
those who from one angle or another are uphold-
ing with their lives the inheritance of Rome
against the pretensions of force — law, justice,
mercy, beauty against the dead weight of physical
and material strength.

One had no more than put foot on the quay at
Naples before the atmosphere of fateful hesita-
tion in which Italy had lived for eight months
became evident to the senses of the traveler.
Naples was less strident, less vocal than ever be-
fore. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which
usually seizes violent hold of the stranger and
his effects, was thin and spiritless. Naples was

5

THE WORLD DECISION

almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the
line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters
had the air of a summer resort out of season. The
war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready
money — the idler. Naples was living to itself
a subdued, zestless life. Cook's was an empty
inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where
during the last generation the German has estab-
lished himself in all favorable sites, were thick
with signs of sale.

In other respects there were indications of
prosperity — more building, cleaner streets, bet-
ter shops. In the dozen years since I had been
there, Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even
this beggar's paradise of sun and tourists had
bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abun-
dant signs of the new Italy of industrial expan-
sion, which under German tutelage had begun
to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit
itself. And there were also signs of war-time
bloat — the immense cotton business. Naples as
well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton,
the quays piled with the bales that could not be
got into warehouses. It took a large credulity to
believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian
wants. Cotton, as everybody knew, was g'oing
across the Alps by the trainload. Nevertheless,
our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff,
was held at Gibraltar only a day until the English
Government decided to accept the guarantees of
consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legiti-

6

ITALY HESITATES

mately destined for Italian factories — a straw
indicating England's perplexity in the cotton
business, especially with a nation that might any
day become an ally! It would be wiser to let a
little more cotton leak into Germany through
Switzerland than to agitate the question of
contraband at this delicate moment.

The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and
a few others were making money out of Italy's
neutrality, and neutralista sentiment was natu-
rally strong among these classes and their satel-
lites. No doubt they did their best to give an
impression of nationalism to the creed of their
pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from
Milan who dined opposite me on the way to
Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his class
as well as any one, — "War, yes, in time. . . .
It must come. . . . But first we must be ready — •
we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted
almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready,
would enter the great conflict. He showed no
enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a
curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an accept-
ance of the inevitable, which the American finds
so hard to understand.

And this was the prevailing note of Rome those
early days of May — a dull, passive acceptance
of the dreaded fate which had been threatening
for so many months on the national horizon, ever

7

THE WORLD DECISION

since Austria plumped her brutal ultimatum upon
little Serbia. There were no vivid debates, no
pronounced current of opinion one way or the
other, not much public interest in the prolonged
discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic iter-
ation of the belief that sooner or later war must
come with its terrible risks, its dubious victories.
Given the Italian temperament and the nearness
of the brink toward which the country was drift-
ing, one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if
more normal in its daily life than Naples in spite
of the absence of those tourists who gather here
at this season by the tens of thousands, was
equally acquiescent and on the surface uninter-
ested in the event.

The explanation of this outward apathy in the
public is simple: nobody knew anything definite
enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian
newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of
news published anywhere. The journals are all
personal "organs," and anybody can know whose
"views " they are voicing. There was the " Messa-
gero," subsidized by the French and the English
embassies, which emitted cheerful pro-Ally para-
graphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio,"
founded by the German party, patently the
mouthpiece of Teutonic diplomacy. There was
the "Giornale d' Italia" that spoke for the Vati-
can, and the "Idea Nazionale" which voiced
radical young Italy. And so on down the list.
But there was a perfectly applied censorship

8

ITALY HESITATES

which suppressed all diplomatic leaks. So one
read with perfect confidence that Prince von
Billow had driven to the Consulta at eleven-
fifteen yesterday, and having been closeted with
Baron Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister,
or with the Premier, Signor Salandra, or with
both, for forty-seven minutes, had emerged upon
the street smiling. And shortly after this event
Baron Macchio, the Austrian Envoy, arrived at
the Consulta in his motor-car and had spent
within the mystery of the Foreign Office twenty
or more minutes. The reader might insert any
fatal interpretation he liked between the lines of
this chronicle. That was quite all the reality the
Roman public, the people of Italy, had to specu-
late upon during weeks of waiting, and for the
most part they waited quietly, patiently. For
whatever the American prejudice against the
dangers of secret diplomacy may be, the Euro-
pean, especially the Italian, idea is that all grave
negotiations should be conducted privately —
that the diplomatic cake should be composed by
experts in retirement until it is ready for the
baking. And the European public is well trained
in controlling its curiosities.

It was sufficiently astonishing to the American
onlooker, however, accustomed to flaming extras
and the plethoric discussion in public of the most
intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness
the acquiescence of emotional Italians in this
complete obscurity about their fate and that of

9

THE WORLD DECISION

their children and their nation, which was being
sorted behind the closed doors of the Consulta.
Every one seemed to go about his personal busi-
ness with an apparent calm, a shrug of expressive
shoulders at the most, signifying belief in the
sureness of war — soon. There was little anima-
tion in the cafes, practically none on the streets.
Arragno's, usually buzzing with political proph-
ecy, had a depressing, provincial calm. Unoccu-
pied deputies sat in gloomy silence over their thin
consommations. Even the ist of May passed with-
out that demonstration by the Socialists against
war so widely expected. To be sure, the Govern-
ment had prudently packed Rome and the north-
ern cities with troops: soldiers were lurking in
every old courtyard, up all the narrow alleys,
waiting for some hardy Socialist to "demon-
strate." But it was not the plentiful troops, not
even a lively thunderstorm that swept Rome all
the afternoon, which discouraged the Socialists:
they too were in doubt and apathy. They were
hesitating, passing resolutions, defining them-
selves into fine segments of political opinion —
and waiting for Somebody to act! They too
awaited the completion of those endless discus-
sions among the diplomats at the Consulta, at
the Ballplatz in Vienna, and wherever diplomacy
is made in Berlin. The first of May came and
went, and the carahinieri^ the secret police, the
infantry, the cavalry with their fierce hairy hel-
mets filed off to their barracks in a dripping dusk,

lO

ITALY HESITATES

dispirited, as If disappointed themselves that no-
thing definite, even violence, had yet come out
of the business. So one caught a belated cab and
scurried through the deserted streets to an empty
hotel on the Pinclan, more than half convinced
that the Government meant really to do nothing
except "negotiate" until the spirit of war had
died from the hearts of the people.

Yet much was going on beneath the surface.
There were flashes to be seen in broad daylight.
The King and his ministers at the eleventh hour
decided not to attend the ceremonies at Quarto
of the unveiling of the monument to the Gari-
baldlan "Thousand." Now, what could that
mean.'' Did it Indicate that the King was not yet
ready to choose his road and feared to compromise
himself by appearing In company with the
Francophile poet D' Annunzio, who was to give
the address ? It would be a hard matter to explain
to Berlin, to whose nostrils the poet was anath-
ema. Or did It mean literally that the negotia-
tions with reluctant Austria had reached that
acute point which might not permit the absence
of authority from Rome even for twenty-four
hours.'' The drifting, If It were drifting, was more
rapid, day by day.

There was a constant troop movement all over
Italy, which could not be disguised from anybody
who went to a railroad station. Italy was not
"mobilizing," but that term In this year of war
has come to have a diplomatic insignificance.

II

THE WORLD DECISION

Every one knew that a large army had already
gone north toward the disputed frontier. More
soldiers were going every day, and more men of
the younger sort were silently disappearing from
their ordinary occupations, as the way Is In con-
script countries. It was all being done admirably,
swiftly, quietly — no placards. The carabinieri
went from house to house and delivered verbal
orders. But all this might be a mere " prepa-
ration," an argument that could not be used di-
plomatically at the Consulta, yet of vital force.

There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit
of the Italian Ambassador at Paris to Rome. Why
had he taken that long journey home for such a
brief visit, consumed in conferences with the
ministers? And Prince von Biilow had rallied to
his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger.
Rome was seething with rumor.

The remarkable passivity of the Italian public
during these anxious moments was due in good
part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence In the
men who were directing the state, specifically in
the Prime Minister Salandra and his Minister of
Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the
Government. They were honest, — that every-
body admitted, — and they were experienced.
In less troubled times the nation might prefer the
popular politician Giolltti, who had a large major-
ity of the deputies in the Parliament in his party,

12

ITALY HESITATES

and who had presented Italy a couple of years
earlier with its newest plaything, Libya, — and
concealed the bills. But Giolitti had prudently
retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour.
All the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving
the Salandra Government to work out a solution
of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to
involve his country. Nobody knew precisely
what Giolitti's views were, but it was generally
accepted that he preserved the tradition of the
Crispi statesmanship, which had made the abor-
tion of the Triple Alliance. If he could not openly
champion an- active fulfillment of the alliance, at
least he was avowedly neutralista, the best that
Berlin and Vienna had come to hope from their
southern ally. He was the great unknown factor
politically, with his majority in the Chamber, his
personal prestige. A clever American, long resi-
dent in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the
political powers to make his words significant,
told me, — "The country does not know what
it wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he
comes we shall know whether there will be war!'*
That was May 9 — a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in
Rome the same week — and we knew, but not as
the political prophet thought. . . .

Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thun-
der to come out of this stagnant hesitation. One
day I went out to the little town of Genzano in
the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who
wished to see her son in garrison there. The regi-
es .

THE WORLD DECISION

ment of Sardinian Granatieri, ordinarily stationed
near the King in Rome, had been sent to this
dirty little hill town to keep order. The populace
were so threatening in their attitude that the sol-
diers were confined in their quarters to prevent
street rows. We could see their heads at the win-
dows of the old houses and convents where they
were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile. I
read the word "Soa'/uwo" scrawled in chalk over
the walls and half-effaced by the hand of author-
ity. The hard faces of the townsfolk scowled at
us while we talked with a young captain. The
Genzanans were against the war, the officer said,
and stoned the soldiers. They did not want an-
other African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer
men to till the fields.

Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" gen-
erally was opposed to war. "We shall have to
shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence
before the troops leave," the youthful son of a
prefect told me. That in the North. As for the
South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the
national doubt of Calabria, Sicily, — the weaker,
less certain members of the family. Remembering
the dire destruction of the earthquake in the
Abruzzi, which wrought more ruin to more people
than the Messina catastrophe, also the floods that
had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms
a few weeks before, one could understand popular
opposition to more dangers and more taxes. These
were some of the perplexities that beset the Gov-

14

ITALY HESITATES

ernment. No wonder that the diplomats were
weighing their words cautiously at the Consulta,
also weighing with extreme fineness the quid pro
quo they would accept as "compensation" from
Austria for upsetting the Balkan situation. It
was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many
of those national aspirations might be sacrificed
for the sake of present security without jeopard-
izing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom
of patriots if ever in her history.

The Salandra Government kept admirable
order during these dangerous days, suppressing
the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That
was the wise way, until they knew themselves
which road to take and had prepared the public
mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occu-
pied somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of
authority against popular ebullitions is always a
marvel to the American. To the European mind
government means power, and power is exercised
practically, concretely, not by writs of courts
and sheriff's, but by armed troops. The Salandra
Government had the power, and apparently did
not mean to have its hand forced by the popu-
lace. . . .

The young officer at Genzano had no doubt
that war was coming, nor had the handsome boy
whom we at last ran to ground in an old Francis-
can convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise"
his regiment had received "to go first." His
mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as

IS,

THE WORLD DECISION

he spoke, but like a Latin mother she made no
protest. If his country needed him, if war had to
be. . . . On our way back to Rome across the
Campagna we saw a huge silver fish swimming
lazily in the misty blue sky — one of Italy's new
dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers every-
where In their new gray linen clothes — tanned,
boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows,
scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy.
The night was broken by the sound of marching
feet, for troop movements were usually made at
night. The soldiers were going north by the
trainload. Each day one saw more of them In the
streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio
and Prince von Biilow were as busy as ever at the
Consulta on the Quirinal Hill, and rumor said
that at last they were offering real "compensa-
tions."

The shops of Rome, as those of every city and
town In Europe, were hung with war maps, of
course. In Rome the prevailing map was that
highly colored, imaginative rearrangement of
southern Europe to fit the national aspirations.
The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps
and took a wide swath down the Adriatic coast.
It was a most flattering prospect and lured many
loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the
"Giornale d' Italia" in the Corso there was dis-
played beside an irredentist map an approximate

i6

ITALY HESITATES

sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under
German persuasion. The discrepancy between
the two maps was obvious and vast. On the bul-
letin boards there were many news items emanat-
ing from the "unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste,
chronicling riots and the severely repressive meas-
ures taken by the Austrian masters. The little pi-
azza in front of the newspaper office was thronged
from morning to night, and the old woman in the
kiosk beside the door did a large business in
maps.

And yet this aspect of the Italian situation
seems to me to have been much exaggerated.
There was, so far as I could see, no great popular
fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian
lands, in spite of the hectic items about Austrian
tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers — no
great popular agony of mind over these "unre-
deemed." Also it was obvious that Italy in her
new frontier proposed to include quite as many
unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed
Italians! No; it was rather a high point of propa-
ganda — as we should say commercially, a good
talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the
urge of nationalism, which is one of the extra-
ordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The
American, vague in his feeling of nationalism,
refuses to take quite seriously agitation for the
"unredeemed." Why, he asks with naivete, go
to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent
and Trieste?/

THE WORLD DECISION

I am not attempting to write history. I am
guessing like another, seeking causes in a complex
state of mind. We shall have to go back. Secret
diplomacy may be the inveterate habit of Europe,
especially of Italy. The new arrangement with
the Allies has never been published, probably
never will be. One suspects that it was made,
essentially, before Italy had broken with Austria,
before, perhaps, she had denounced her old alli-
ance on the 5th of May at Vienna. And yet,
although inveterately habituated to the mediae-
valism of secret international arrangements, Italy
is enough filled with the spirit of modern democ-
racy to break any treaty that does not fulfill the
will of the people. The Triple Alliance was really
doomed at its conception, because it was a trade
made by a few politicians and diplomats in secret
and never known in its terms to the people who
were bound by it. Any strain would break such a
bond. The strain was always latent, but it be-
came acute of late years, especially when Austria
thwarted Italy's move on Turkey — as Salandra
revealed later under the sting of Bethmann-Holl-
weg's taunts. It was badly strained, virtually
broken, when Austria without warning to Italy
stabbed at Serbia. Austria made a grave blunder
there, in not observing the first term of the Triple
Alliance, by which she was bound to take her allies
into consultation. The insolence of the Austrian
attitude was betrayed in the disregard of this
obligation: Italy evidently was too unimportant a

18

ITALY HESITATES

factor to be precise with. Italy might, then and
there, the 1st of August, 1914, very well have de-
nounced the Alliance, and perhaps would have
done so had she been prepared for the conse-
quences, had the Salandra Government been then
at the helm.

There is another coil to the affair, not generally
recognized in America. Austria in striking at
Serbia was potentially aiming at a closer envelop-
ment of Italy along the Adriatic, provision for
which had been made in a special article of the
Triple Alliance, — the seventh, — under which
she had bound herself to grant compensations to
Italy for any disturbance of the Balkan situation.
Austria, when she was brought to recognize this
commission of fault, — which was not until
December, 1914, not seriously until the close of
January, 191 5, — pretended that her blow at
Serbia was chastisement, not occupation. But it
is absurd to assume that having chastised the
little Balkan state she would leave it free and
independent. It is true that in January Austrian
troops were no longer in Balkan territory, but
that was not due to intention or desire! They had
been there, they are there now, and they will be
there as long as the Teutonic arms prevail. It is
a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as
Austria moved against Serbia. The response she
must have known also, but she had not the power
to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on
her right under the seventh clause of the Triple

19

THE WORLD DECISION

Alliance to open negotiations for "compensa-
tions" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans,
and finally with the assistance of Berlin compelled
the reluctant Emperor to admit her right.

These complexities of international chess,
which the American mind never seems able to
grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the
street in Europe. Every one has learned the
gambits: they do not have to be explained, nor
their importance demonstrated. The American
can profitably study those maps so liberally dis-
played in shop windows, as I studied them for
hours in default of anything better to do in the
drifting days of early May. The maps will show
at a glance that Italy's northern frontiers are
so ingeniously drawn — by her hereditary enemy
— that her head is virtually in chancery, as every
Italian knows and as the whole world has now
realized after four months of patient picking by
Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks.
And there is the Adriatic. When Austria made
the frontier, the sea-power question was not as
important as it has since become. The east coast
of the Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might
be left to the rude peoples of Montenegro and
Albania. But it has come into the world since
then. Add to this that the Italian shore of the
Adriatic is notably without good harbors and
indefensible, and one has all the elements of the
strategic situation. All fears would be superflu-
ous if Austria, the old bully at the north, would

20

ITALY HESITATES

keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well enough
for over thirty years. But would Austria play
fair with an unsympathetic ally that she had not
taken into her confidence when she determined
to violate the first term of the Triple Alliance?

All this may now be pondered in the "Green
Book," more briefly and cogently in the admir-
able statement which Italy made to the Powers
when she declared war on Austria. That the
Italian Government was not only within its treaty
rights in demanding those "compensations" from
Austria, but would have been craven to pass the
incident of the attack on Serbia without notice,
seems to me clear. That it was a real necessity,
not a mere trading question, for Italy to secure
a stronger frontier and control of the Adriatic,
seems to me equally obvious. These, I take it,
were the vital considerations, not the situation
of the "unredeemed" Italians in Trent and
Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum
of concession which she finally offered to Italy's
minimum of demand, insisted upon taking the
sentimental or knavish view of the Italian atti-
tude: she would yield the more Italianated parts
of the territory in dispute, not the vitally strategic
places. Nor would she deliver her concessions un-
til after the conclusion of the war — if ever! —
after she had got what use there was from the Ital-
ians enrolled in her armies fighting Russia. For
Vienna to regard the tender principle of national-
ism is a good enough joke, as we say. Her per-

21

THE WORLD DECISION

sistence in considering Italy's demands as either
greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of
imagination. The Italians are sentimental, but
they are even more practical. It was not the woes
of the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Gov-
ernment to reject the final offering of Austria, and
to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather
the very practical consideration of that indefensi-
ble frontier, which Austria stubbornly refused to
make safe for Italy — after she had given cause, by
her attack upon Serbia, to render all her neighbors
uneasy in their minds for their safety.

So much for the sentimental and the strategical
threads in the Consulta negotiations. It was
neither for sentiment nor for strategical advan-
tage solely that Italy finally entered the war.
Nevertheless, if the German Powers had frankly
and freely from the start recognized Italy's posi-
tion, and surrendered to her immediate possession
■ — as they were ready to do at the last moment —
sufficient of those national aspirations to safe-
guard national security, with hands off in the
Adriatic, Italy most probably would have pre-
ferred to remain neutral. I cannot believe that
Salandra or the King really wanted war. They
were sincerely struggling to keep their nation out
of the European melting-pot as long as they could.
But they were both shrewd and patriotic enough
not to content themselves with present security
at the price of ultimate danger. And if they had
been as weak as the King of Greece, as subservi-

22

ITALY HESITATES

ent as the King of Bulgaria, they would have had
to reckon with a very different people from the
Bulgars and the Greeks — a nation that might
quite conceivably have turned Italy into a re-
public and ranged her beside her Latin sister on
the north in the world struggle. The path of
peace was in no way the path of prudence for the
House of Savoy.

Lack of imagination is surely one of the promi-
nent characteristics of the modern German, at
least in statecraft. Imagination applied to the
practical matters of daily living is nothing more
than the ability to project one's own personal-
ity beneath the skin of another, to look around
at the world through that other person's eyes and
to realize what values the world holds for him.
The Prince von Biilow, able diplomat though
they call him, could not look upon the world
through Italian eyes in spite of his Italian wife,
his long residence in Rome, his professed love for
Italy. It must have been with his consent if not
by his suggestion that Erzburger, the leader of
the Catholic party in the Reichstag, was sent to
Rome at this critical juncture. The German mind
probably said, — "Here is a notable Catholic,
political leader of German Catholics, and so he
must be especially agreeable to Italians, who, as
all the world knows, are Catholics." The reason-
ing of a stupid child! Outwardly Italy is Catholic,

23

THE WORLD DECISION

but modern Italy has shown herself very restive
at any papal meddling in national affairs. To
have an alien — one of the "barbarV^ — seat him-
self at the Vatican and try to use the papal power
in determining the policy of the nation in a matter
of such magnitude, was a fatal blunder of tact-
less diplomacy. Nor could Herr Erzburger's pres-
ence at the Vatican these tense days be kept secret
from the curious journalists, who lived on such
meager items of news. No more tactful was it for
Prince von Biilow to meet the Italian politician
Giolitti at the Palace Hotel on the Pincian. There
is no harm in one gentleman's meeting another
in the rooms of a public hotel so respectable as
the Palace, but when the two are playing the
international chess game and one is regarded as
an enemy and the other as a possible traitor, the
popular mind is likely to take a heated and preju-
diced view of the small incident. Less obvious to
the public, but none the less untactful, was the
manner in which the German Ambassador tried to
use his social connection in Rome, his family rela-
tionships in the aristocracy of Italy, to influence
the King and his ministers. He might have taken
warning from the royal speech attributed to the
Queen Mother in reply to the Kaiser: "The House
of Savoy rules one at a time." He should have
kept away from the back stairs. He should have
known Italy well enough to realize that the ele-
ments of Roman society with which he was affili-
ated do not represent either power or public opin-

24

ITALY HESITATES

ion In Italy any more than good society does in
most modern states. Roman aristocracy, like all
aristocracies, whether of blood or of money, is
international in its sympathies, skeptic in its soul.
And its influence, in a decisive question of life
and death to the nation, is nil. The Prince von
Billow was wasting his time with people who could
not decide anything. As Salandra said, with digr
nified restraint in answer to the vulgar attack
upon him made by the German Chancellor, —
"The Prince was a sincere lover of Italy, but he
was ill-advised by persons who no longer had any
weight in the nation" — as his colleague in
London seems to have been ill-advised when he
assured his master that Englishmen would not
fight under any circumstances! The trouble with
diplomacy would seem to be that its ranks are
still recruited from "the upper classes," whose
gifts are social and whose sympathies reflect the
views and the prejudices of a very small element
in the state. Good society in Rome was still out
on the Pincian for the afternoon promenade, was
still exchanging calls and dinners these golden
spring days, but its views and sympathies could
not count in the enormous complex of beliefs and
emotions that make the mind of a nation in a
crisis. Prince von Billow's motor was busily run-
ning about the narrow streets of old Rome, the
gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably
open, — guarded by carahinieri^ — but if the
German Ambassador had put on an old coat and

25

THE WORLD DECISION

strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a
little marble-topped table in some obscure cafe,
or had traveled second or third class between
Rome and Naples, he might have heard things
that would have brought the negotiations at the
Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the
other. For Italy was making up its mind against
his master.

Rome was very still these hesitant days of
early May, Rome was very beautiful — I have
never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in
spite of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of
forced retirement of some well-to-do family. The
Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood of
sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray
forestieri might occasionally cross its blazing pave-
ments and dive into Piale's or Cook's, and a few
flower girls brought their irises and big white
roses to the steps, more from habit than for profit
surely. The Forum was like a wild, empty garden,
and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments
of the past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk
after the stranger, out of lonesomeness, babbling
strangely of that other war in which he had part
and mixing his memories with the tags of history
he had been taught to recite anent the Roman
monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse
of bees among the spring blossoms and looked out
upon the silent field that once was the heart of

26

ITALY HESITATES

Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this
richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people
was to be tested in the agony of a merciless war,
that even now the die was being cast less than a
mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is
the most deeply laden in the world with human
memories, which somehow exhale a subtle fra-
grance that even the most casual stranger cannot
escape, that condition the children of the soil.
The roots of the modern Italian run far down
into the mould of ancient things: his distant
ancestors have done much of his political thinking
for him, have established in his soul the conditions
of his present dilemma. ... I wonder if Prince
von Billow ever spent a meditative hour looking
down on the fragments of the Forum from the
ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of
the Capitoline that leads to the Campidolgio, as
far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts the
newer city.? Probably not.

* * *

Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had
always wanted it from the day, two thousand
years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes
came over the Alpine barrier and spread through
the sun-kissed fields of northern Italy. The Italian
knows that in his blood. There are two ways in
which to deal with this German lust of another's
lands — to kill the invader or to absorb him.
Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to

27

THE WORLD DECISION

absorb a race, — hundreds of years, — and pre-
cious sacrifices must be made in the process. No
wonder that Italy does not wish to become Ger-
many's place in the sun! Nor to swallow the
modern German.

When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine bar-
rier and poured himself lustfully out over the
fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally a
place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages
since then his lust has changed its form: now it is
economic privilege that he seeks for his people.
In order to maintain that level of industrial supe-
riority, of material prosperity, to which he has
raised himself, he must "expand" In trade and
influence. He must have more markets to exploit
and always more. It is the same lust with a new
name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely was written
for nations as well as for individuals. But our
modern economic theory, the modern Teutonic
state, is based on the belief: "Thou shalt covet,
and the race that covets most and by power gets
most, that race shall survive!" And here is the
central knot of the whole dark tangle. The Ger-
man coveting greater economic opportunities,
knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his
divine right to possess. It Is conscious Darwinism
— the survival of the fittest, materially, which he
is applying to the world — Darwinism acceler-
ated by an Intelligent will. And the non-Germanic
world — the Latin world, for it is a Latin world
in varying degrees of saturation outside of Ger-

28

ITALY HESITATES

many — rejects the theory and the practice with
loathing — when It sees what it means.

What makes for the happiness of a nation? I
asked myself In the mellow silence of ancient
Rome. Is it true that economic conquest makes
for strength, happiness, survival for the nation
or for the individual.'*

This Italy has always been poor, at least within
modern memory — a literal, actual poverty when
often there has not been enough to eat in the family
pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in
the economic race for bread and butter for her
children. There is neither sufficient land easily
cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make
her rich, to support her growing population
according to the modern standards of comfort.
The Germans despise the Italians for their little
having.

Yet the Italian peasant — man, woman, or
child — Is a strong human being, inured to meager
living and hardship, loving the soil from which he
digs his living with an intense, fiery love. And
poverty has not killed the joy of living in the
Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly
laborious lives which the majority lead, the pri-
vations In food, clothing, housing, the narrow-
ness,— In the modern view, — of their lives, no
one could consider the Italian people unhappy.
Their characters, like their hillside farms, are the

29

THE WORLD DECISION

result of an intensive cultivation — of making
the most out of very little naturally given.

A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these,
not to be despised in the kaiserliche fashion even
as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a
human society. And their poverty has had much
influence in making the Italians the sturdy people
they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing
aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic
opportunity — the want of coal and factories and
other sources of wealth — has kept most of these
people close to the soil, where one feels the
majority of any healthy, enduring race should be.
Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with
little, and able to wring the most out of that little.
It has cultivated them intensively as a people,
just as they have been forced to cultivate their
rock-bound fields foot by foot.

There are qualities in human living more pre-
cious than prosperity, and in these Italians have
shared abundantly — beauty, sentiment, tradi-
tion, all that give color and meaning to life. These
are the treasures of Latin civilization in behalf
of which the allied nations of Europe are now
fighting. ...

I am well enough aware that all this is contrary
to the premises of the economic and social polity
that controls modern statecraft. I know that our
great nations, notably Germany, are based on

30

ITALY HESITATES

exactly the opposite premise — that the strength
of a state depends on the economic development
of its people, on its wealth-producing power.
Germany has been the most convinced, the most
conscious, the most relentless exponent of the
pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the
state depends primarily on the wealth-getting
power of its citizens. She has exalted an economic
theory into a religion of nationality with mystical
appeals. She has taught her children to go sing-
ing into the jaws of death in order that the
Fatherland may extend her markets and thus
enrich her citizens at the expense of the citizens
of other states, who are her inferiors in the science
of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more
abhorrent when dressed out with the phrases of
Christianity!

All modern states are more or less tainted with
the same delusion — ourselves most, perhaps,
after Germany. "We have all sinned," as an emi-
nent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as
well as England and Germany." It is time to
revise some of the fundamental assumptions of
political philosophers and statesmen. Let us
admit that peoples may be strong and happy and
contented without seeking to control increasingly
those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on
the earth's surface, without cutting one another's
throats in an effort for national expansion. The
psychology of states cannot be fundamentally
different from that of the individuals in them.

31

THE WORLD DECISION

And the happiness of the individual has never
been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his
economic prosperity.

Because the Latin soul divines this axiomatic be-
lief, because the Latin world admits a larger, finer
interpretation of life than economic success, all civi-
lization waits upon the great decision of this war.

Suddenly In the calm of these drifting, hesitant
days, when nobody knew what the nation desired,
there came a bolt of lightning. I have said that
the German people lack imagination by which to
understand the world outside themselves. They
do not coordinate their activities. Otherwise,
why commit the barbarism of sinking the Lusi-
tania, just at the moment when they were strain-
ing to keep Italy from breaking completely the
frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably
it never entered any German head in the "high
commandment" that the prosecution of his
undersea warfare might have a very real connec-
tion with the Italian situation. He could not
credit any nation with such "soft sentimentality,"
as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a
large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania
in Italy's decision to make war. Every observer
of these events whom I have talked with or whose
report I have read gives the same testimony, that
Italy first woke to her own mind at the shock of
the Lusitania murders. . . .

-^2

ITALY HESITATES

The news came to me in my peaceful room
above the Barberini Gardens. The fountain was
softly dripping below, the spring air was full of
the song of birds as another perfect day opened.
The warm sunshine reached lovingly up the yel-
lowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the
little, old, familiar things of a long past, which
pull so strongly here in Rome at the human heart,
were moving in the new day. The life of men, so
troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May
morning, with the suave beauty of ideals that for
centuries have coursed through the blood of
Italy. . . . Lulgi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad
who brought the morning coffee and newspapers,
was telling me of the horrid crime. With his out-
stretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he
said the words, then, dropping the paper with its
heavy headlines, cursed it as if it too symbolically
represented the hideous thing that Germany had
become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We
shall fight them, the swine!" A few days after-
ward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on some
Alpine pass.

Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania
was typical of all Rome, all Italy. The same burst
of execration and horror was in every mouth.
"Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-
German sheet that was appearing in Rome: it
got a new significance as it hung in the kiosks or
was scanned by scowling men. It became the
muttered cry of the street. I am not simple

33

THE WORLD DECISION

enough to believe that the sinking of the Lusitania
of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no
more than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough
to sacrifice themselves simply for their moral
resentments. But this fresh example of cynical
indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at
the critical point of decision for the Italian people,
had much to do with the rousing of that war fury
without which no government can push a nation
into war. First there must be the spirit of hate,
a personal emotion in the hearts of many. It must
be remembered also that Italy had felt with the
entire civilized world the outrage of Belgium. It
has even been rumored that one of the hard pas-
sages between Italy and her German allies was
the condition that Germany wished to attach to
any Austrian concessions, by which Italy at the
peace conference should uphold Germany's
"claims" to Belgium. No one knows the truth
about this, but if true it is in itself an adequate
explanation of the failure of the negotiations.
And now the Lusitania came with a fresh shock
as an iterated example of German state policy. It
proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men what
the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world.
The Latin has been cruel and bloody in his deeds,
like all men, but he has never made a cult of
inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of
statecraft. Italians, prone to hate as to love,
prone especially to hate the Teuton, those aliens
who have lusted after their richness and beauty

34

ITALY HESITATES

all these centuries, felt the Lusitania murders to
the depths of their souls. It was like a red writing
on the wall, serving notice that In due season
Germany and Austria would tear Italy limb from
limb because of her "treachery" in not abetting
them in their attack upon the peace of the world.
Prince von Biilow and Baron Macchio might
as well have discontinued their daily visits to the
Consulta after the 7th of May. Whatever they
might have hoped to accomplish with their diplo-
macy to keep Italy neutral had been irretrievably
ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral von
Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a
boot-heel on stone, can set off a powder magazine.
The Lusitania was a goodly sized match. If the
King and his ministers were waiting for the
country to declare itself, if they wanted the ex-
cuse of national emotion before taking the final
irrevocable steps into war, they had their desire.
From the hour when the news of the sinking of
the Lusitania came over the wires, Italy began
to mutter and shout. The months of hesita-
tion were ended. There were elements enough
of hate, and Germany had given them all focus.
"Fuori I Barbarl!" I bought a sheet from the old
woman who went hurrying up the street shouting
hoarsely, — "Fuori I Barbarl!" ..." Fuori i Bar-
baril"... "Barbarl!"...

II

^he Politician Speaks

GIOVANNI GIOLITTI came to Rome,
a few days after the Lusitania affair.
Ostensibly he had come to town from his
home in little Cavour, where he had been in
retirement all the winter, to visit a sick wife at
Frascati. Montecitorio, home of politicians, be-
gan to hum. Rome quivering with the emotions
of its great decision muttered. What did Giolitti's
presence at this eleventh hour signify .f* Remem-
ber what the shrewd American observer had said
the week before, — "Giolitti will tell the Italians
what they want."^

The master politician, the ex-Premier, the heir
to Crispian policies, was received at the railroad
station by a few faithful friends, much as Boss
Barnes or Boss Penrose, returning from a volun-
tary exile in New York or Pennsylvania, might
be received by a few of the "boys." They were
Deputies from Montecitorio frock-coated and
silk-hatted, like politicians all the world over,
not a popular throng of a hundred thousand
Romans singing and shouting, such as a few days
later was to gather in the piazza before the same
station to greet the poet, D' Annunzio. It is well
to understand the significance of this unobtrusive

36

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

coming of the political leader at the moment, to
realize what sinister meaning it had for the exist-
ing Government, for the Italian nation, for the
Allies — for the world.

The Italian Deputies who had been elected two
years before, long before even the astutest poli-
tician had any suspicion of the black cloud that
was to rise over Europe, were Giolittian by a
great majority. Giolitti was then the chief figure
in Italian politics and controlled the Chamber of
Deputies, The Giolitti "machine," as we should
say, was the only machine worth mention in Italy.
Rumor says that it was buttressed with patronage
as American machines are, and, more specifically,
that Giolitti when in power had diverted funds
which should have gone into national defense to
political ends, also had deferred the bills of the Lib-
yan expedition so that at the outbreak of the war
Italy found herself badly in debt and with an army
in need of everything. Soldiers drilled in the au-
tumn of 1 91 4 in patent leathers or barefooted and
dressed as they could, while the Giolittian clubs
and interests flourished. Also it was said that the
prefects of the provinces, who in the Italian sys-
tem have large powers, especially in influencing
elections, were henchmen of the politician. I do
not know how just these accusations may be, nor
how true the more serious accusation shortly to
be hurled abroad that Giolitti had sold himself
for German gold. The latter is easy to say and
hard to prove; the former is hard to prove and

37

THE WORLD DECISION

easy to believe — it being the way of politicians
the world over.

However dull or bright Giolitti's personal honor
may have been, the Parliamentary situation was
difficult in the extreme — one of those absurd
paradoxes of representative government liable
to happen any time. Here were five hundred-
odd elected representatives of the people owing
allegiance, really, not to the King, not to the
nation, not to the responsible ministers in charge
of the state, but to the politician Giolitti. If
they had been elected under the stress of the
war, after the 1st of August, 1914, they might
not have been the same personal representatives
of Giovanni Giolitti. We cannot say. Democra-
cies are prone to be deceived in their chosen
representatives: they discover them mortgaged
to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra Govern-
ment knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in
favor of Italy's old allies, disguised as patriotic-
ally neutralista sympathies. He had discreetly re-
tired to little Cavour in Piedmont all the winter,
maintaining a disinterested aloofness throughout
the prolonged negotiations. Yet he knew, the
Salandra Government and the King knew, the
people knew, that Giovanni Giolitti must be
reckoned with before Parliament could be opened
to ratify the acts of the ministers, to support
them in whatever measures they had prepared to
take. It would be simple political insanity to
open the Chamber before Giolitti had been dealt

38

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

with, leading to acrid discussions, scandal, the
inevitable downfall of the ministry, and political
chaos. The nation must be united and express
itself unitedly by its legal mouthpieces before
the world.

* * *

It has been said, I do not know with what truth,
that Prince von Biilow had informed the ex-
Premier of Austria's ultimate concessions even
before they were presented to Salandra and Son-
nino, and consequently that Giolitti was precisely
aware of the situation when he reached Rome.
It is easy to believe almost anything of a diplo-
macy that dealt with Giolitti in the private rooms
of a hotel after the downfall of the Salandra Gov-
ernment. ... At any rate, Giolitti went through
the forms correctly: he called on the Premier
Salandra, the Foreign Minister Sonnino, who laid
before the ex-Premier the situation as it had
shaped itself. Even the King received him in
private audience. So much was due to the leading
politician of Italy, who controlled, supposedly, a
majority of the existing Parliament. In a sense
he held the Salandra Government in his hand,
after the opening of the Chamber, which could
not be long delayed.

Then the politician spoke. Rather, to be pre-
cise, he wrote a little note to a faithful intimate,
which was meant for the newspapers and got
into them at once. It was a very innocent little

39

THE WORLD DECISION

note of a few lines in which he confided to
"Caro Carlo" his opinion on the tense national
situation: better stay with the old allies — the
Austrian offers seemed sufficiently satisfactory.
This may well have been a sincere, a patriotic
judgment, as sincere and patriotic as Bryan's
resignation from the American Cabinet a few
weeks later. But Italians did not think so. Almost
universally they gave it other, sinister interpre-
tations. Glolitti had been "bought," was nothing
more than the knavish mouthpiece of German
intrigue. Giolitti became overnight traditore, the
arch-conspirator, the enemy of his country! It
must have staggered the politician, this sudden
fury which his innocent advice had roused. And,
to condemn him, it is not necessary to believe him
to have been a knave bought by German gold.

It is important to realize what happened over-
night. Giolitti had become the most hated, most
denounced man in all Italy, and in so far as he
represented honest neutralista sentiment the cause
was dead. If that was what the Salandra Govern-
ment wanted to achieve, they had got their desire.
If, as the politicians say, they were "feeling out"
popular sentiment, they need no longer doubt
what it was. Columns of vituperation appeared
in the anti-German newspapers, crowds began to
form and shout in the streets. " Traditore^'' hissed
with every accent of hate and scorn, filled the air.
Giolitti's life was seriously in danger — or the
Government preferred to think so. The great

4.0

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

apartment house on the Via Cavour In which he
lived was cordoned off by double lines of troops.
Cavalry kept guard, all day and half the night,
before the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore, ready
to sweep through the crowded streets in case the
mob got out of hand. Other troops poured out
of the barracks over the city, doing piquet a
mato on all the main streets and squares of the
city.

Giolltti had, indeed, swayed events, — "told
the people what they wanted," — but not in the
expected manner. He had revealed the nation to
itself, drifting on the verge of war, and they knew
now that they wanted nothing of Giolitti or neu-
trality or German compromises. They wanted
war with Austria. The remarkable fact is that a
nation which had submitted in passivity to abso-
lute ignorance of the diplomatic exchanges, wait-
ing dumbly the decision that should determine Its
fate, — of which it could be said that a large
number, perhaps a majority, were neutral at
heart, — suddenly overnight awoke to a realiza-
tion of the political situation and rejected the
prudent advice of their popular politician, de-
nounced him, and inferentially proclaimed them-
selves for war. At last they had seen: they saw
that the Salandra Government in which they had
confidence had come to the parting of the ways
with Austria, and they saw the hand of Giolltti
trying to play the game of their ancient enemy.

Then the Salandra Government did a bold, a

41

THE WORLD DECISION

dramatic thing: it resigned in a body, leaving the
King free to choose ministers who could obtain
the support of the Giolitti following in Parlia-
ment. It was inevitable, it was simple, it was
sincere, and it was masterly politics. The public
was aghast. At the eleventh hour the state was
left thus leaderless because its real desires were
to be thwarted by a politician who took his orders
from the German Embassy.

Thereupon the "demonstrations" against Gio-
litti, against Austria and Germany, began in
earnest.

The first popular "demonstration" which I
saw in Rome was a harmless enough affair, and
for that matter none of them were really serious.
The Government always had the situation firmly
in hand, with many regiments of infantry, also
cavalry, to reinforce the police, the secret service,
and the carabinieri^ who alone might very well
have handled all the disorder that occurred.
Never, I suspect, was there any more demonstrat-
ing than the Government thought wise. The first
occasion was a little crowd of boys and youths, —
not precisely riff-raff, rather like our own college
boys, — and they did less mischief than a few
hundred freshmen or sophomores would have
done. They marched down the street from the
Piazza Tritone, shouting and carrying a couple
of banners inscribed with "Abasso Giolitti."

42

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

They stoned a few signs, notably the one over the
empty office of the Austrian-Lloyd company,
then, being turned from the Corso and the Aus-
trian Embassy by the police, they rushed back
up the hill to the Salandra residence, to hang
about and yell themselves hoarse in the hope of
evoking something from the former Premier. The
two poles of the following "demonstrations"
were the Salandra and the Giolitti residences with
occasional futile dashes into the Corso. . . .

For the better part of a week these street excite-
ments kept up, not merely in Rome, but all over
Italy: for that one week, while the King sent for
various public men and offered them the task of
forming a new ministry, which in every case was
respectfully declined — as was expected.

Why did the King not send for Giovanni Gio-
litti, the one statesman who under ordinary cir-
cumstances might have expected a summons?
Neither Giolitti nor any of his intimates was
invited to form a cabinet and reestablish constitu-
tional government. Nothing would appear to be
more natural than that the leader of the Opposi-
tion, controlling a majority of the Deputies, who
avowedly represented a policy opposed to that of
the ministers who had resigned, should be asked
himself to take charge. But Giolitti was never
asked, and daily the shouting in the streets grew
louder, more menacing, and the mood of the pub-

43

THE WORLD DECISION

He more tense. Nothing was plainer than that if
Giolitti had a majority of the Deputies, the people
were not for him and his policies. The House of
Savoy, as the King so well put it, rules by express-
ing the will of the people. Each day it was more
evident what that will was. Giolitti, the master
politician, was being outplayed by mere honest
men. They had used him — as Germany had
used him — to try out the temper of the nation.
With him they drew the neutralista and pro-
German fire beforehand, prudently, not to be
defeated by hostile party criticism in the Cham-
ber. And when they got through with the politi-
cian, they threw him out: literally they intimated
through the Minister of Public Safety that they
would not be responsible any longer for his per-
sonal safety. There was nothing for him but to go
— before Parliament had assembled!

As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to
break into revolutionary violence, while the King
received one respectable nonentity after another,
who each time after a very brief consideration
declined the proffered responsibility, Giolitti must
have thought that the life of the politician is not
an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared
on the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out
of the city at dawn that last day. Where was all
the neutralista sentiment so evident the first
months of the war."* And where was the German
influence supposed to be so strong in the upper
commercial classes.^ Germans as well as Austrians

44

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could.
Their insinuating multiplicity was proved by the
numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels along
the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it
prudent to retire over the Alps, were closed.
Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian and
German consulates, also the embassies when
they could get through the cordons of troops on
the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days
might very well give rise to pessimistic reflections
on the folly of popular government to politicians
like Giolitti and the Prince von Biilow, whose
obviously prudent policies were thus being upset
by the "voice of the piazza" led by a very literary
poet! No doubt at this moment they would point
to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece
as enlightened monarchs who know how to secure
their own safety by ignoring the will of their peo-
ples. But the end for Ferdinand and Constan-
tine is not yet.

4c :ic 9|c

The trouble with the politician as with the
trained diplomat is that he never goes beneath
the surface. He takes appearances for realities.
He has often lost that instinct of race which should
enable him to understand his own humanity. To
a Giolitti, adept in the trading game of political
management, it must seem insane for Italy to
plunge into the war against powerful allies, who
at just this time were triumphing in West and

45

THE WORLD DECISION

East alike — all the more when the sentimental and
trading instincts of the populace might be partly
satisfied with the concessions so grudgingly wrung
from Austria. It was not only rash: it was bad
politics!

But what Giolitti and men of his stripe the
world over cannot understand is that the people
are never as crafty and wise and mean as their
politicians. The people are still capable of honest
emotions, of heroic desires, of immense sacrifices.
They love and hate and loathe with simple hearts.
The politician like the popular novelist makes
the fatal mistake of underrating his audience.
And his audience will leave him in the lurch at
the crisis, as Italy left Giolitti. Italy was never
enthusiastic, as its enemies have charged, for a
war of mere aggression, for realizing the "aspira-
tions" because Austria was in a tight place, even
for redeeming a million and a half more or less of
expatriated Italians in Austrian territory. Politi-
cians and statesmen talked of these matters, per-
force; the people repeated them. For they were
tangible "causes." But what Italians hated was
Austrian and German leadership — were the
^^barharV^ themselves, their ancient foe; and
when told that they had better continue to make
their bed with the ^'barbari,^^ they revolted.

There are many men in every nation, — some
of the politician type, some of the aristocratic
type, some of the business type, — who by inter-
est and temperament are timid and fundamentally

46

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

cynical. They are pacifists for profit. About them
gather the uncourageous "intellectuals," who
believe in the potency of all established and domi-
nating power whatever it may be. But these
"leading citizens" fortunately are a minority in
any democracy. They do most of the negotiating,
much of the talking, but when the crisis comes, —
and the issue is out in the open for every one to
see, — they have to reckon with the instinctive
majority, whose emotional nature has not been
dwarfed. That majority is not necessarily the
"rabble," the irresponsible and ignorant mob of
the piazza as the German Chancellor sees them:
it is the great human army of "little people," nor-
mal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish
stake in the community is not large enough to
stifle their deepest instincts. In them, I believe,
lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain
virtues and its abiding strength.

The Italian situation was a difficult one, obvi-
ously. Public opinion had been perplexed. There
were the classes I have just mentioned, by interest
and temperament either pro-German or honestly
neutral. There was the radical mob that the year
before had temporarily turned Italy into repub-
lics. There was the unreliable South. And the
hard-ground peasants who feared, justly, heavier
taxes and the further hardships of war. And there
were the millions of honest but undecided Italians
who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were
intelligent enough to realize the exposed situation

47

THE WORLD DECISION

of Italy, who felt the call of blood for the "un-
redeemed," and the vaguer but none the less
powerful call of civilization from their northern
kin — above all who responded to the fervid his-
torical idealism of the poet voicing the longing
of their souls to become once more the mighty
nation they had been. These were the people
whose change of hearts and minds surprised
Giolitti and the Germans.

What had been going on in those hearts of the
plain people all these months of the great war,
Giolitti could not understand. It was another
Italy from the one he had charmed that rose at
his prudent advice and threw the bitter word
*' traditore^' in his teeth and howled him out of
Rome. Traitor, yes! traitor to the loftier, bolder,
finer longings of their hearts to take their stand
at all cost with their natural allies in this last
titanic struggle with the barbarians. It was this
sort of public that spoke in the piazza and whose
voice prevailed.

The diplomat deals too exclusively with con-
ventional persons, with the sophisticated. The
politician deals too exclusively with the success-
ful, with the commercial and exploiting classes.
Giolitti's associations were of this class. Like any
other bourgeoisie of finance and trade, "big busi-
ness" in Italy was on the side of the big German
battalions, who at this juncture were winning

48

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

victories. Italy was peculiarly under the influence
of German and Austrian finance. One of its lead-
ing lending banks — the Banca Commerclale —
was a German concern. Most of its newer devel-
opments had been accomplished with German
capital, were run by German engineers, equipped
with German machines. Germany has bitterly
reproached her former ally for the "ingratitude"
of siding against the people who had brought her
prosperity. Gratitude and ingratitude in business
transactions are meaningless terms. The lender
gets his profit as well as the borrower, usually
before the borrower. If Italy has needed German
capital, Germany has needed the Italian markets
and Italian industries for her capital. The Ger-
mans surely have used Italy as their commercial
colony. Italy bought her bathtubs, her electric
machines, her coal, and her engines from Ger-
many. For the past generation the German com-
mercial traveler has been as common in Italy as
the German tourist. In fact, was there ever a Ger-
man tourist who was not in some sense a com-
mercial agent for the Fatherland.'*

To the international financier all this is simply
intelligible — a matter of mutually desirable ex-
change. No debtor nation should feel aggrieved
with a creditor nation: rather it should rejoice
that it has attracted the services of foreign cap-
ital. Is the international economist right in his
reasoning.'* Why does the delusion persist among
plain people that the creditor is not always a

49

THE WORLD DECISION

benefactor? It is a very old and persistent delu-
sion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest
was considered illegal and the despised Jews were
the only people who dared finance the world.
Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right,
yet I am fain to believe that the popular notion
has some ground of truth in it too. Obviously,
according to modern notions a country rich in
natural resources, but poor in capital, inherited
savings, must borrow money to "develop" itself.
But granting for the moment that material exploi-
tation of a country is as desirable as our modern
notions assume it to be, even then there are rea-
sons for grave suspicion of foreign lenders. Take
abused Mexico. Its woes are in good part trace-
able to the pernicious influence upon its domestic
politics of the foreign capital which its riches have
attracted. One might instance the United States
as an example of beneficial exploitation by foreign
capital, but with us it must be remembered the
lender has had neither industrial nor political
power. We have always been strong enough to
manage our affairs ourselves and satisfy our cred-
itors with their interest — if need be with their
principal. We have drawn on the European
horde as upon an international bank, but we have
absolutely controlled the disposition of the mon-
eys borrowed. A weak country can hardly do
that. Mexico could not. It had to suffer the for-
eign exploiter, with his selfish intrigues, in person.
Italy has never been as weak as Mexico: it has

SO

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

maintained its own government, its own civiliza-
tion. But the increasing amount of foreign invest-
ment, the increasing number of foreign "inter-
ests" in Italy, has been evident to every Italian.
The hotels, the factories, the shops all testify
patently to the presence of the stranger within
the gates looking after his own interests, breeding
his money on Italian soil.

But why not.? the dispassionate international-
ist may ask. Why should not the Italian hotels
be in the hands of Austrians, Germans, and Swiss;
the new electrical developments be installed and
run by Germans; the shops for tourists and
Italians be owned by foreigners.? There we cross
the unconscious instinct of nationality, which
cannot be ignored. Assuming that there is some-
thing precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure
in the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there
are grave dangers in too much friendly commer-
cial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect
influences of commercial exploitation with foreign
capital are the insidious, the dangerous ones. The
dislike of the foreign trader, the foreign creditor,
may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-
nothingism, but it has a healthy root in national
self-preservation. For an Italian the German
article should be undesirable, especially if its pos-
session means accepting the German and his way
of life along with his goods. The small merchant
and the peasant express their resentments of for-
eign competition rawly, no doubt. Consciously

51

THE WORLD DECISION

it is half envy of the more efficient stranger. Un-
consciously they are voicing the deep traditions
of their ancestors, vindicating their race ideals,
cherishing what is most enduring in themselves.
They would not see their country given over to
the stranger, whose life is not their life.

One unpleasant aspect of the commercial in-
vasion of Italy by the Teuton was his liking to
live there, and consequently the amount of real
estate which he was collecting on the Latin penin-
sula — so much that the lovely environs of Na-
ples were fast becoming a German principality!
These invaders were not traders, nor workers,
but capitalists and exploiters. The process is
known now as "infiltration." The German had
filtered into Italy in every possible way, was sup-
planting its own native life with the Teutonic
thing, as it had in France so largely. Italy could
well profit from that experience of its sister na-
tion. The Germans who filtered into French life,
commercial, industrial, social, were German first
and last. When the crisis came they turned from
their adopted land, where they had lived on terms
of cordial hospitality for ten, twenty, thirty years,
and took themselves back to Germany, in many
cases to reappear as the invader at the head of
armed troops. The experience of France proved
that the peaceful German resident was a German
all the years of his life, not a loyal, vital factor in
his adopted country — too often something of a
spy as well. Therefore Italy might well be dis-

52

THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

turbed over the presence of so much Teutonic
"infiltration" in her own beloved land. And why
should Germany call her ungrateful when she
sought to rid herself of her unwelcome creditors?
German capital had made its five per cent on its
investments, and better: it should not expect to
absorb the life of the nation also.

In every debtor nation there must be an ele-
ment which profits directly from the creditor
relation. It assumes, naturally, the aspects of
"progress," and consists of the richer trading
class and bankers, sustainers of politicians. Such,
I take it, were the followers of Glolitti, and such
was Giolitti himself, a sincere admirer of Teutonic
success and believer in the economic help which
Germany could render to his kind of Italian. Such
men as Giolitti are easily impressed by evidences
of German superiority: they identify progress
with the rapid introduction of German plumbing,
German hotel-keeping, German electric devices,
German banks. AH these, they believe, help a
"backward country" to come forward. They do
not understand the finer spiritual risks that such
material benefits may involve. They are not as
sensitive as the humble peasant, as simpler citi-
zens, to the gradual sapping of the precious
national roots, of the internal debasement that
may be going on through the process of "infil-
tration." They are too prosperous, too cosmo-

53

THE WORLD DECISION

politan to feel losses in national individuality.
They realize merely the better hotels, the better
railways, the improved plumbing in their coun-
try. Their souls are already half-Teutonized.

In his dignified answer to the German Chancel-
lor's vulgar attack on him in the Reichstag,
Salandra referred to the long history of the Ital-
ian people, who "were civilized and leaders of the
world" when the Teuton hordes were still savage.
It was the spirit of that ancient civilization which
did not consist primarily of industrial develop-
ment that stirred in the souls of true Italians and
made them scorn the advice of the Teutonized
politician. He was '' traditore'' to all that nobler
Italians hold dear — to the Latin tradition.

Ill

'The Poet Speaks

THE poet prophet has so long abdicated
his rights among us moderns that we
are incredulous when told that he has
again exercised his function. That is the reason
why the story of a poet's part in leading the
Italian people toward their decision is received
by Americans with such skeptical humor. And
Gabriele d' Annunzio in the role! A poet who is
popularly supposed to be decadent, if not degen-
erate, gossipingly known for his celebrated affair
with a famous actress, whose novels and plays,
when not denounced for their eroticism, are very
much caviar to the "wholesome" man, so full are
they of a remote symbolism, so purely "literary."
"Exotic" is the chosen word for the more tolerant
American minds with which to describe the author
of "II Fuoco" and "San Sebastian."

In recent years the Italian poet has abandoned
his native land, living in Paris, writing his last
work in French, having apparently exiled himself
for the rest of his life and renounced his former
Italianism. Circumstances were stronger than
the poet. The war came, and D'Annunzio turned
back to his native land.

« ♦ ♦

55

THE WORLD DECISION

He came to Italy at a critical moment and char-
acteristically he filled the moment with all the
drama of which it was capable. His reappear-
ance in Italy, as every one knows, was due to
the ceremonies in connection with the unveil-
I Ing of a monument to the famous Garlbaldian
band, — the Thousand, — in the little village of
Quarto outside of Genoa, from which Garibaldi
and his Thousand set forth on their march of
liberation fifty-five years ago. The monument
had been long in the making. The opportunity
for patriotic instigation was heightened by the
crisis of the great war. The King and his minis-
ters had indicated, previously, their intention of
participating in this national commemoration,
but as the day grew near and the political situa-
tion became more acute, it was announced that
the urgency of public affairs would not permit the
Government to leave Rome. It may have been
the literal fact that the situation precipitated by
the presence of GiolittI demanded their constant
watchfulness. Or it may well have been that the
King and the Salandra Government had no Inten-
tion of allowing their hand in this dangerous game
to be forced by any reckless fervor of the poet.
They were not ready, yet, to countenance his
inflammation. At any rate, they left the occasion
solely to the poet.

How he Improved it may best be gathered from
his address. To the American reader, accustomed
to a blunter appeal, the famous Sagra will seem

56

THE POET SPEAKS

singularly uninflammatory — intensely vague
and literary. One wonders how it could fire that
vast throng which poured out along the Genoa
road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But
one must remember that nine months of hesita-
tion had prepared Italian minds for the poet's
theme — the future of Italy. He linked the pres-
ent crisis of choice with the heroic memories of
that first making of a nation. ^'Oggi sta sulla
patria un giorno di porpora; e questo e un ritorno
per una nova dipartita^ o gente d^ Italia .'" — A pur-
ple day is dawning for the Fatherland and this is
a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!
The return for the new departure — to make a
larger, greater Italy, just as the Thousand had
departed from this spot to gather the fragments
of a nation into one. "All that you are, all that
you have, and yourselves, give it to the flame-
bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in
a new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who
must bear their country to these new triumphs:
"O happy those who have more because they can
give more, can burn more. . . . Happy those
youths who are famished for glory, because they
will be appeased. . . . Happy the pure in heart,
happy those who return with victory, because
they will see the new face of Rome, the recrowned
brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy."

The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's
appeal. The Sagra was read in the wineshops of
little villages, on the streets of the cities. The

57

THE WORLD DECISION

voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial
idealism, of patriotism, that glows in the hearts
of all real Italians. He tied their heroic past with
the heroic opportunity of the present. And he
did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the
"aspirations." Instead, "This is a return for a
new departure, O people of Italy!"

The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of
his advice to choose the safe path, must have
wondered, as too many Americans wondered, how
this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by
his fine figures of birds and sea! But there was a
spirit abroad in Italy that would not be appeased
with "compensations": the poet had the follow-
ing of all "young Italy."

D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A
whole week elapsed after the Sagra at Quarto, the
5th of May, before he reached Rome — a week
of growing tumult, of antl-GIolIttl demonstra-
tions, in which his glowing words could sink like
hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay
was well considered. If the poet had seized the
occasion of Quarto, he made his appearance on
the larger scene after the Interest of the whole na-
tion had been heightened by reading his address.

I was one of the immense throng that awaited
the arrival of the train bringing D'AnnunzIo to
the capital. The great bare place before the ter-
minal station was packed with a patient crowd.

58

THE POET SPEAKS

The windows of the massive buildings flanking
the square were filled with faces. There were
faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the
National Museum, around the flamboyant foun-
tain, up the avenues. There were soldiers also,
many of them, inside and outside of the station,
to prevent any excessive disturbance, part of the
remarkable precaution with which the Govern-
ment was hedging every act. But the soldiers
were not needed. The huge throng that waited
hour after hour to greet the poet was not rabble:
it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of
Romans. There was a preponderance of men over
women, of youth over middle age, as was natural,
but so far as their behavior went, they were as
self-contained a "mob" as one might find in
Berlin.

The train arrived about dusk, as the great elec-
tric lamps began to shine above the sea of white
faces. To most the arrival was evident merely
from the swaying of the dense human mass, from
the cadence of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose
into the air from thousands of throats. As room
was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight
figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging
mass. Then the crowd broke on the run to follow
the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian where
the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there
were a hundred and fifty thousand people before
the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto and the adja-
cent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the

59

THE WORLD DECISION

Piazza Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to
the Villa Malta where Prince von Biilow lived,
the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some
words from the poet. The words of Mameli's
"L'Inno" rose in the twilight air. At last the
little gray figure appeared on the balcony above
the throng. . . .

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the
effect of what D'Annunzio said. His words fell
like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one,
with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity
that made them vibrate through the mass of
humanity. They were filled with historical allu-
sions that any stranger must miss in part, but
that touched the fibers of his hearers. He seized,
as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance
of the liberating Thousand and recounted the
inspiring incidents of that day fifty years and
more ago. As I stood in that huge crowd listening
to the poet's words as they fell into the thirsty
hearts of the people, — who were weary with too
much negotiation, — I realized as never before that
speech is given to man for more than reason. The
words were not merely beautiful in themselves:
they flamed with passion and they touched into
flame that something of heroic passion in the
hearts of all men which makes them transcend
themselves. The crowd sighed as if it saw visions,
and there rose instinctively in response the fa-
miliar strains of the Garibaldian Hymn.

Italy had found its voice! The poet did not

60

THE POET SPEAKS

speak of "compensations," a little more of Trent
and Trieste, of a more strategic frontier. He
stirred them with visions of their past and their
future. He voiced their scorns. "We are not, we
will not be a museum, an inn, a picnic ground, an
horizon in Prussian blue for international honey-
moons! . . . Our genius calls us to put our imprint
on the molten matter of the new world. . . . Let
there breathe once more in our heaven that air
which flames in the prodigious song of Dante in
which he describes the flight of the Roman eagle,
of your eagle, citizens! . . . Italy is arming, not for
the burlesque, but for a serious combat. . . . Fiva,
viva Roma, without shame, viva the great and pure
Italy!"

That was the voice which called Italy into the
war: the will that Italy should live "ever grander,
ever purer, without shame." The poet spoke to
the Latin in the souls of his hearers.

He spoke again a number of times. In those
feverish days when the nation was in a ferment,
the restless youth of Rome would rush in crowds
to the hotel on the Pincian and wait there pa-
tiently for their poet to counsel them. He gratified
their desire, not often, and each time that he spoke
he stung them to a fuller consciousness of will. He
spoke of the larger Italy to be, and they knew
that he did not mean an enlargement of bounda-
ries. He spoke clearly, briefly, intensely. It was

6i

THE WORLD DECISION

once more the indubitable voice of the poet and
prophet raised in the land of great poetry.

D' Annunzio grew bolder. He recognized openly
his antagonist — the traitor. The most dramatic
of his little speeches was at the Costanzi Theater
where a trivial operetta was being given, which
was quickly swept into the wings. After the up-
roar on his entrance had been somewhat stilled,
he spoke of Von Biilow and Giolitti and their
efforts to thwart the will of the nation.

"This betrayal is inspired, instigated, abetted
by a foreigner. It is committed by an Italian
statesman, a member of the Italian Parliament
in collusion with this foreigner to debase, to
enslave, to dishonor Italy." . . . Traditore ! I
never thought to hear the word off the operatic
stage. From D' Annunzio's lips it fell like a wave
of fire upon that Inflammable audience. A griz-
zled, well-dressed citizen suddenly leaped to his
feet, yelling, — "I will drink his blood, the traitor.
. . . Death to Giolitti!" . . .

While the big theater rocked and stormed with
passion, outside on the Via Vimlnale barricades
were being hastily thrown up. The cavalry, that
had been sitting their mounts all day before Santa
Maria Magglore guarding the unwelcome Giolitti
from the angry mob, had charged the packed
street, sweeping it clear with the ugly sound of
horses' hoofs on pavement and cries of hunted
men and women. That was the end. The next
morning, be it remembered, the politician sneaked

62

THE POET SPEAKS

away, and two days afterwards the Salandra
Government returned to power. Rome, all Italy,
became suddenly calm, purged of its passion,
awaiting confidently the reopening of Parliament.
The Government had won. The people had
won. The poet had beaten the politician. For his
was the voice to which the great mass of his
countrymen responded.

D' Annunzio spoke again admirably at those
great gatherings of concord when the citizens of
Rome assembled in the Piazza del Popolo and in
the Campidolgio. The poet had made himself the
spokesman of the new Italy which had found
itself in the storm of the past agonizing weeks,
and as such he was recognized by the Govern-
ment. The King and the ministers accorded him
audiences; he was given a commission in the army
and attached to the general staff. Wherever he
appeared he was received with acclamations, with
all the honor that is accorded the one who can
interpret nobly the soul of a nation. And the
poet deserved all the recognition which he re-
ceived — the throngs, the flowers, the vivas, the
adoration of Italian youths. For he alone, one
might say, raised the crisis from the wallow of
sordid bargaining, from the tawdriness of senti-
ment, to a purer passion of Latin ambition and
patriotism. He loftily recalled to his countrymen
the finer ideals of their past. He made them feel

63

THE WORLD DECISION

themselves Latin, guardians of civilization, not
traders for safety and profit.

Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to
say about D' Annunzio. German sympathizers in
America as well as the German Chancellor have
sneered at the influence wielded In Italy's crisis
by a "decadent" poet. Even among American
lovers of Italy there has been skepticism of the
sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a
man who "is not nice to women." A peculiarly
American view that hardly needs comment!

Is it not wiser to assume that the case of
D' Annunzio was really the case of Italy itself —
conversion.'* The deepest passion in the poet's
life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France,
he witnessed the splendid reawakening of French
spirit in face of awful danger. Living in Paris
during the early months of the cataclysm, witness
of the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and
the turn at the Marne, the heroic struggle for
national existence in the winter trenches, he saw
with a poet's vision what France was at death-
grips with, what the Allies were fighting for, was
not territorial gains or glory or even altogether
selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply,
for the existence of a certain humanity. This
world war he realized is no local quarrel: it Is the
greatest of world decisions in the making. And
the man himself was transfigured by it; he found

64

THE POET SPEAKS

himself in his greatest passion as Italy found her-
self at her greatest crisis. Latin that he is, he
divined the inner meaning of the confused issues
presented to the puzzled world. He was fired with
the desire to light from his inspiration his own
hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the
call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For
Italy, most Latin of all the heirs of Rome, with
her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not a
winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeem-
ing of a few lost Italians, but a fight for the world's
best tradition against the forces of death. Once
more it was '^ Fuori i barbari,^' as it had been with
her Latin ancestors.

It seems to me no great mystery.

In the poet's writing there are passages of a
large historical understanding. Of all modern
writers he is foremost Latin, In knowledge, in
instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition.
Even In his erotic and mystical passages this vein
of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of
the potential greatness of the tradition Into which
he was born. What wonder, then, that the first
fundamental passion of the mature man's soul
should be his desire to proclaim once more the
cause of Latin civilization, should be the ardor of
fighting in his own manner with his weapon of
inspired words the world battle? So it seemed
to me as I listened to his voice in the stillness of
that May night. The voice of Roman glory, of
ancient ideals awoke an answering passion in the

6S

THE WORLD DECISION

hearts of the thousands who had gathered there.
" Una grande e pura Italia . . . sensa onta.''^ And
it would be a lasting shame for Italy to keep
out of the struggle that the allied nations were
making, to take her "compensations" prudently
and shrink back within a cowardly neutrality.
Better any other fate.

So it seemed to that throng of eager, soul-
hungry Italians who stood beneath the balcony
of the hotel on the Pincian and drank the poet's
fiery message like a full-bodied wine. At last they
had found themselves.

IV

^he Piazza Speaks

THE voice of the piazza prevailed," the
German Chancellor sneered in his de-
nunciation of Italy at the conclusion. It
can easily be imagined, the picture he made to
himself, in his ugly northern office on Friedrich-
strasse, of the influence that upset all German
pressure and sent Italy into the war on the side
of the Allies; that defeated the industry of the
skilled ambassador, the will of the wily politician.
The Chancellor saw one of those large public
squares in which Latin countries abound, open
centers in their close-built cities, where so much
of the common life of the people goes on, now as
it has for hundreds of years. For the piazza, de-
scending in direct tradition from the ancient
Forum, is the public hall of citizens, where they
trade, gossip, quarrel, plot, love, and hate, from
the crone sunning herself in a sheltered nook over
her bag of chestnuts to the grandee whose palace
windows open above the noisy commonalty. The
Chancellor saw this common meeting-ground, this
glorified street, filled with a ragged mob of "the
baser quality," as on the operatic stage, emptily
vocal or evilly skulking for mischief, like the
mafia, the apache. He saw this loose gathering of

67

THE WORLD DECISION

irresponsibles suddenly stirred to evanescent pas-
sion against the real benefactors of their country
by the secret agents of the Allies, "corrupted by
English gold," in the mechanical melodrama of
the German imagination, marching to and fro,
attacking the shops and homes of worthy Ger-
mans, howling and stoning, by mere noise drown-
ing the sober protests of reflecting citizens, intimi-
dating a weak king, connived at by a bought
government, pushing a whole nation into the
bloody sacrifice of war out of mere recklessness of
rioting — a piazza filled with the rabble minority
who have nothing to lose because they neither
fight nor pay.

Such a picture, reflected in Bethmann-Holl-
weg's splenetic phrase, is a complete delusion of
the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the
real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours
of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like
the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor.
As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demon-
strations" did not begin in any perceptible form
until the bungling hand of Prince von Biilow
betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politi-
cian's intention of defeating the Salandra Govern-
ment in its preparations for war became evident.
At no time did the rioting in the streets equal
the violence of what a third-class strike in an
American mill town can produce. Such as it was

68

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

the Government showed the determination and
ability to keep it strictly within bounds. Rome
was filled with troops. Alleyways and courtyards
oozed troops at the first shouts from the piazza:
the danger points of the Corso, especially the
Piazza Colonna on which the Chigi Palace, the
residence of the Austrian Ambassador, fronts,
were kept almost constantly empty by cordons
of troops. All told, the destruction done by the
mobs could not have amounted to several hundred
dollars — a few signs and shop windows smashed,
a few pavements torn up in the Via Viminale. It
is true that after war was declared upon Austria
there was some pillage of Austrian and German
shops in Milan, which has been greatly exagger-
ated by the German and pro-German press; it was
nothing worse than what happened in Berlin to
English residents in August, 1914. And the Italian
Government immediately took severe measures
with the officials who had permitted the disorders
— removing the prefect and the military com-
mander of Milan.

There is no saying, of course, what might have
happened had the King oiTered the premiership
to Giolitti, and had that astute politician been
rash enough to accept the responsibility of form-
ing a government in accord with his own neutra-
lista sympathies. It is more than likely that revo-
lution would have ensued: possibly Italy would
have entered the war as a republic. For the Ital-
ians are not Greeks, as has been amply proved.

69

THE WORLD DECISION

But the King of Italy, whatever his own sympa-
thies may have been, showed plainly that he had
enough political understanding not to run counter
to the expressed will of his people, to deal with
the "traitor." After a week of tempestuous inter-
regnum, in which the piazza expressed itself
passionately, the Salandra Government returned
to power with all which that implied in foreign
policy. Then the piazza became quiet. If the
piazza must shoulder the responsibility of Italy's
decision, it must be credited with knowing mar-
velously well its own mind.

The constitution of this "mob" is worth atten-
tion. I saw it at many angles. I followed its first
erratic flights through the streets when Salandra
resigned and a gaping void opened before the
nation. I waited for the poet's arrival at the
Roman station, for hours, while the dense throng
of men and women pressed into the great square
and swelled like a dark pool into the adjoining
streets. And I followed with the "piazza" in its
instinctive rush to the hotel on the Pincian Hill to
hear the voice of its spokesman. Again I was in
the Corso when the plumed cavalry cleared the
surging mass from the Piazza Venezia to the
Piazza Colonna. I heard the people yell, "Death
to the traitor Giolitti!" and ^^Fuori i barbari!"
and sing Mameli's "L' Inno." I saw the uproar
melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman

70

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

nights, leaving the cavalry at their vigil before
Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the repose of
Giovanni Giolitti.

I can testify that the "piazza" was composed
very largely of perfectly respectable folk like my-
self. It varied more or less as chance gatherings
of men will vary. Sometimes there were more
workingmen in dirty clothes, sometimes more
youths and boys with their banners, sometimes
more shouters and fewer actors. But the core of
it was always that same mass of common citizen-
ship that gathered anciently In the Forum, that
to-day goes orderly enough to the polls In New
York or Chicago, — plain men, rather young than
old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of
affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper
for information and to the open street for expres-
sion, who relieve themselves of uncomplex emo-
tions by shouting, and who symbolize the things
they hate to the depth of their souls with person-
alities like Giolitti and occasionally shy bricks
at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes,
but not "riff-raff," not anarchist, nor mafia^ nor
apache. Nothing of that did I see those days and
nights.

The greeting to D' Annunzio was made by men
of the professional and Intellectual classes I should
say, having wormed my way In and out of that
vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before
the poet's hotel were composed chiefly of youths,
at school or college, others in working dress. The

71

THE WORLD DECISION

noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs was
that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of
D' Annunzio's appearance there. They were citi-
zens — and their wives — who could afford to
pay the not inconsiderable price charged — and
seats were at a premium. The men around me in
evening dress, who were by no means silent, came
from the "classes" rather than the masses. The
crowds that hung about the Corso and the adja-
cent squares were more mixed, but they held a
goodly proportion of the frequenters of the Cafe
Arragno. The worst that could be said against
these casual gatherings was their youth. It is the
way of youth to vent its passion in speech, to
move and not to stand. Middle age stood on the
sidewalks and watched, sympathetically. Old
age looked down from the windows, contempla-
tively. But both old age and middle age consorted
with youth in the great meetings of consecration
in the Piazza del Popolo and the Campidolgio, af-
ter the will of the people had prevailed. And after
all, youth must fight the wars, and pay for them
for long years afterwards — why should it not
have Its say in the making of them as well as mid-
dle age and old agei* The youths in the ranks of
the patient, good-natured soldiers who did piquet
a mato all day and half the night In the Roman
streets during that vocal week while the piazza
spoke, were openly sympathetic with the mobs
they were holding down. I knew some of the
gray-clad boys. I strolled along the lines and

72

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

saw the smiles, heard the chaffing give-and-take
of citizen and soldier as the mob tried to rush
through the double ranks that cordoned the
streets. There was no hatred there, no violent
conflict with authority. Each understood the
other. The young officers seemed to say to the
crowd, — "You may howl all you like, you fel-
lows, but you must n't throw stones or make a
mess. . . . What 's the good! War is coming any-
way in a few days — they can't talk it away!"
And the crowd replied heartily, — "You are all
right. We understand each other. You are doing
your duty. Soon you will be doing something
better worth while than policing streets and sav-
ing that traitor Giolitti's skin from us. You will
be chasing the Austrians out of Italian territory,
and many of us will be with you then!" And the
young officers looked the other way when the
members of the "mob" offered the tired soldiers
cigarettes and chocolate, and sometimes slipped
through the cordon on private business within the
forbidden area. Only once, once only in all the
excitement did the long-haired horsemen clatter
through the streets in a serious charge, scattering
the shrieking pedestrians. That was by way of
warning, possibly as much to the Government as
to the populace.

Then the decision was made, and after the
Salandra Ministry, in whom the people had confi-
dence, had returned to power, the ministry that
had broken with Austria and refused her grudging

73

THE WORLD DECISION

compromises, the piazza purred like doves and
listened to long patriotic speeches from " repre-
sentative citizens." No soldiers were needed to
keep order in these immense gatherings. For all
were citizens, then, piazza and palace alike in the
face of war.

One easily understands the German Chancel-
lor's scorn over any irregular expression of public
opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the
streets dares to vent any emotion or will other
than that suggested to it by a strong government,
above all daring to voice it passionately. In a
nation such as Germany, where the franchise is
so hedged about that even those who have it can-
not effectively express their wills, where political
opinion is supplied from a central fount of author-
ity, where the nation goes into war at the com-
mand of the Kaiser and his military advisers,
where a war of "defense" and all other national
interests are controlled by the "high command-
ment," consisting at the most of forty or fifty
men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of the
people are obedient puppets, nourished on false-
hoods, where the popular emotion can be turned
on like an electric current at the order of the " high
commandment," — now against this enemy, now
against that one, — first hate of English, then
hate of Italians, now hate of Americans — it is
natural that a high government functionary

74

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

should despise all popular effervescence and mis-
read its manifestations as merely the meretricious,
bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in the
Southern temperament and badly controlled by
a weak, and probably corrupt, government. The
elements in the piazza have no power in the close
organization of Germany, no political expression
whatever: all good citizens are instructed by a
carefully controlled press how to think and feel
and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the
glory of the Latin temperament that it cannot be
throttled and guided like the more docile Teuton
nature, that when it feels vividly it will express
itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in
international concerns. The Latin cannot be
made to march in blind obedience into the jaws
of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy
had come to feel, that Teutonic domination would
be intolerable, that at all cost the Austro-German
ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradi-
tion vindicated and made to endure. It was
proved by the marvelous content, the fervid
unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy,
once the great decision had been made.

Since those full May weeks the world has had
an example of what no doubt the Imperial Chan-
cellor considers the suitable method of dealing
with popular sentiment. The sympathies of
Greeks and Rumanians have been, since the

75

THE WORLD DECISION

opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet
their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both coun-
tries from declaring themselves in favor of the
Allies. The King of Greece has stretched the
constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality,
which, if it were not for the failure of the Allies
to make impressive gains in the first year of the
war, would have doubtless cost him his crown.
The Balkan States are near enough the actual
theater of war to suffer acutely from fear, and a
natural timidity worked upon by many German
agents, more successfully than Prince von Biilow,
has thus far kept the people of Rumania and
Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria is a
fine example of the perfect working of the German
method. The piazza certainly had no hand in the
intrigues of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The
representatives of his people urged him to main-
tain at least neutrality, not to put the nation at
war with its blood kin, against its best interest.
But the thing had all been "arranged" between
the German King of Bulgaria and the German
Government through "negotiation." Germany
had been successful in buying the cooperation of
Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at
the expense of Austria. There were other factors
in the case of Bulgaria that worked to the German
advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice
of the piazza, but the secret agreement of "re-
sponsible government," in other words, the con-
trol of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well

76

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

be proud that she has a sovereign who faithfully
interprets his responsibility of rule in a consti-
tutional state and executes the will of his people
— who listens also to the voice of the piazza, not
merely to the arguments of the foreign diplomat.
And Italy may also be proud that the piazza
spoke at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not
the darkest, when German arms were prevailing
in the East; if the dangers of German conquest
were not as close to Italy as with the Balkan
States, they were not remote, as German threats
too plainly showed.

The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible
in Italy, though the circumstances were almost
parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The piazza
knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for
me is against me," and execrated the professed
neutralista Giolitti. But the Greeks, it seems, are
more easily managed by a "strong" government
and a German king. The end, however, is not yet
in sight. It remains to be seen whether the path
of prudent passivity is the safe one, even selfishly.

Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for
the voice of the piazza .f* All popular government,
even in the limited form of a constitutional mon-
archy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair.
"The House of Savoy rules by executing the will
of the Italian people." Good! But how is that
popular will to be determined.'' Not, surely, by

77

THE WORLD DECISION

taking a poll of the five hundred-odd Deputies of
the Italian Parliament elected two years before
the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule.
Those Deputies were chosen, as we Americans
know only too well how, by mean intrigues of
party machines, by clever manipulation of trained
politicians like Giovanni Giolitti, who by their
control of appointed servants — the prefects of
the provinces — can throw the elections as they
will, can even disfranchise unfriendly elements of
the population. Manhood suffrage is not a pre-
cise, a scientific method of getting at public
opinion. It is possibly the least accurate method
of gauging the will of a people. Something other
than the poll is needed to resolve the will of a
nation. And when that will is determined it makes
little odds what instrumentality expresses it.
Even the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to
the urn for a secret vote on the Salandra measures
a week after the lively expression of popular will
in the piazza, voted — secretly — against their
neutral leader, in favor of war! They had been
converted by the voice of the piazza — by other
things also in all likelihood. If their votes had
been taken ten days before, when Giolitti first
arrived in Rome, the result would have been far
diff"erent: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In
the end the Italian Parliament merely registered
the will of the people, both men and women,
which expressed itself, as it always must, in
diverse ways, through the press, by the voice of

78

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

the piazza, in public and private discussion,
flightily, weightily, passionately, timidly.

Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious
force. What enters into that act of decision which
results in will is never wholly apparent, from the
least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of
government, which admits the right of the indi-
vidual citizen, plain and exalted alike, to be heard
and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of poll-
ing this collective will of the nation. Our electoral
representative method and majority vote is
surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian
way. That right to vote, for which our women
are so eagerly striving, as thinking men realize
only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of
a people is Inaccurately registered, not made,
by the vote. The voice of the piazza when deep
enough and strong enough is as good as any other
way, perhaps, of determining the collective will
of a nation in a crisis; surely far better than the
secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further,
the reason of the piazza on any vital fundamental
matter, such as war, which means life or death, is
as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly
surer, because the piazza, having less to lose or
gain, feels and believes and acts more simply,
basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy,
reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atro-
cities committed on priests and women and chil-

79

THE WORLD DECISION

dren, to the murders of the Lusitania, — all deeds
of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now
reappeared, after centuries, under an intellectual
and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous per-
version of religious sanction. They reacted also,
it might be, to their own sense of personal danger
from an unprotected frontier dividing them from
this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some
thousands of Italians condemned to live under
Austrian rule and fight her battles against their
friends. They responded also to the glory of
Garibaldi's Thousand, who had liberated their
fathers from foreign domination and made a na-
tion out of Italy, and they responded to the great
past of their people from whom the essential ele-
ments of what men know to-day as civilization has
spread over the world. All these emotions were hid-
den in that one cry, — " Out with the barbarians 1 "
The voice of the piazza, with its simple una-
nimity, its childlike psychology, came nearer to
expressing the soul of Italy than the German
Chancellor can comprehend, than any sophisti-
cated diplomat, who has associated only with
"thinking" and "leading" people, can believe.
The Latin soul of Italy which cursed its politician
and thrilled at the words of its poet! That soul
of a people which is greater than any individual,
which somehow expresses itself more authorita-
tively through the simple people who must suffer
for their faiths than through the intellectuals and
the protected members of a society. . . .

80

THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

" Fiva Italia!^* the tanned conscript leaning
from the car window at Subiaco shouted back to
his friends and home. And the old men and girls
left in the fields raised their hats as the train
passed and shouted in reply, — ^^ Viva ItaliaT^
It was not English gold, nor the desire for Trent
and Trieste, that brought that cry to the boy's
lips!

V

Italy Decides

WHATEVER one may think of the piazza
voice, whether the disposition is to sneer
with the German or to trust with the
democrat in its spontaneous expression, it is a
matter of history now that Italy's decision had
been made before the question came to a vote in
the Chamber of Deputies, a fortnight or more be-
fore the reluctant ambassadors of the ex-Alliance
backed into their waiting trains and departed
homeward across the Alps. It is a significant fact
of personal psychology that the crisis of a decision
takes place before action results to calm the dis-
turbed mind. So it was with Italy. Her decision
had really been taken when the Lusitania sank,
when the politician, in face of this fresh outrage,
advised the safer course of neutrality, which would
amount to a connivance with her former associ-
ates in their predatory programme. Traditore!
meant but one thing — a betrayal of the nation's
soul. In the light of more recent events, since
Italy entered the war, there are probably many
Italians who secretly wish that the safer counsel
had prevailed, that, like Greece and Rumania,
Italy had "preserved a benevolent neutrality"
in the great war, even possibly that she had con-

82

ITALY DECIDES

eluded to make her bed In the Teutonic camp. If
the world is to be Teutonized, they would argue,
why put one's head in the wolf's jaw! There
are prudent people of that stripe in every nation,
but since the end of May they have kept silence
in Italy. And it should be forever remembered
to her honor that Italy made her decision In face
of Teutonic successes. If the military situation
did not look so black for the Allies at the end of
May as it does this December, It looked black
enough with the crumbling Russian resistance
before Mackensen's phalanx. Neuve Chapelle
had been a costly and empty victory. There had
been no successful drive In Champagne and Artois
to encourage those who bet only on winning cards.
There were heavy clouds in the east, merely a
sad silence along the western wall. It was long
past Easter, when England had boastfully ex-
pected to open the Dardanelles and the truth was
beginning to appear that Constantinople might
never be reached by the allied operations In
Galllpoli. Italy threw In her lot with the Allies
in a dark hour, if not the darkest.

The great decision which had lain In solution in
the hearts of the people was evoked by events and
made vocal by the flaming words of D' Annunzio,
interpreted by a faithful king, who resisted the
temptation to dethrone himself by calling Ger-
many's hired man to power, and finally registered
by the Deputies at Montecltorlo on May 19. It
was virtually made, I say, the tumultuous week

83

THE WORLD DECISION

that came on the resignation of the Salandra
Government. What followed the return of the
ministry to power was merely automatic, as
peaceful as any day's routine. Parliament was
called to meet on Wednesday, the 19th. The
Sunday afternoon before, the piazza and the
palace and all other elements of Roman citizen-
ship met in a great gathering of content and
consecration at the foot of the Pincian Hill in
the Piazza del Popolo, again the day after in the
Campidolgio above the Forum. How fortunate
a people are to have such hallowed places of
meeting, steeped in associations of great events!
It was a warm, brilliant, sunny day, that Sun-
day, and in the afternoon every one in Rome, it
seemed, was as near the Piazza del Popolo as he
could get. The meeting was addressed by a
number of well-known Romans of varied political
affiliations. But the high note of all the speeches
was a fervid patriotism and harmony. Rome was
calm, believing that it had chosen nobly if not
wisely. On the Campidolgio, D' Annunzio again
sounded the tocsin of the heroic Thousand, and
lauded the army which had been belittled by the
followers of Giolitti. Already the troops were
leaving Rome. . . . Then Parliament opened.
The meeting of the Deputies if memorable was
short. The square and streets about Montecitorio
had been carefully cleared and held empty by
cordons of troops. There was to be no shouting,
no demonstration within hearing of Parliament.

84

ITALY DECIDES

Long before midday the Chamber was crowded
with all the notables who could gain admission.
The proceedings were extremely brief, formal. All
knew that the die had been cast: what remained
was for the army to accomplish. The Premier
Salandra made a brief statement summarizing
the diplomatic efforts that his Government had
undertaken to reach a satisfactory understand-
ing with Austria, the record of which could be
followed in the "Green Book," which was then
given to the public. He informed the Chamber,
what was generally known, that the Triple Alli-
ance had already been denounced on the 5th of
May, and he offered a "project of law," which
was tantamount to a vote of confidence in the
Government and which also gave the King and
his ministers power to make war and to govern
the country during the period of war without the
intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized
both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and
its future course. The measure, undebated, was
voted on secretly. And it is significant that of
more than five hundred Deputies present only
seventy-two voted in the negative. Of these
seventy-two who voted against the Government,
some were out-and-out neutralistas, and some few
were Socialists who had the courage of their con-
victions. The great majority of the Giolittians
must have voted for war. Had they seen a great
light since the piazza raised its voice, since their
leader had fallen from his high place? Possibly

85

THE WORLD DECISION

they had never been with Giolitti on this vital
national question. At least, the fact illustrates
how representative government does roughly
perform the will of its people when that will is
clear enough and passionate enough: the will
registers itself even through unwilling instru-
ments.

After the vote had been taken, the Chamber
adjourned, and when the following day the Senate
ratified, unanimously, the action of the Chamber
of Deupties, Parliament was dissolved. Many of
the members enlisted and went to the front.
Since the end of May Italy has been autocrati-
cally governed. The decrees of the King and his
ministers are law — an efhcient method of govern-
ing a country at war, avoiding those legislative
intrigues that latterly have threatened the con-
cord of France.

It is noteworthy that the Italian Senate voted
unanimously for war. The Senate is not an elec-
tive body. It is composed of dignitaries, old,
conservative men from the successful classes of
the nation, who are not easily swayed by the
emotions of the piazza. From this unrepresenta-
tive body might have been expected a show of
resistance to the Government's measure, if, as
Giolitti and the German party asserted, there
was a serious sentiment in the country in favor of
neutrality which had been howled down by the
mobs. It is inconceivable that such a body could
have been completely cowed by rioting in the

86

ITALY DECIDES

streets. The unanimous vote of the Italian
Senators is sufficient refutation of the Bethmann-
HoUweg slur.

As I crossed the Piazza Colonna the morning
Parliament opened, my attention was caught by a
small crowd before a billboard. First one, then
another passer-by stopped, read something affixed
there, and, smiling or laughing, passed on his way.
In the center of the board was a small black-bor-
dered sheet of paper, with all the mourning em-
blems, precisely resembling those mortuary an-
nouncements which Latin countries employ. It
read : "Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself
by the Devil, lamented by his faithful friends";
and there followed a list of noted Giolittians, some
of whom even then were voting for war with Aus-
tria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that
ebullition of the piazza disdained by the German
Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have bit through
the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his
safety was not among the Deputies voting at
Montecitorio. Later I read in a Paris newspaper
that Giolitti was to spend the summer as far away
from the disturbance of war as he could get, in
the Pyrenees, but it was rumored in Paris that
the French Government, having intimated to its
new ally that it did not wish to harbor Giolitti,
the Italian politician was forced to remain at
home. I believe that once since the " Caro Carlo "

87

THE WORLD DECISION

letter he has spoken to his countrymen, a patriotic
interview in which he announced that he had
been converted to the necessity of the war with
Austria! Thus even the politician comes to see
light. But Giovanni Giolitti, as the black-
bordered card said, is dead politically.

With the votes of Parliament the Roman part
in the drama, the civil part, was ended. Rome
began to empty fast of soldiers, officers, officials.
The scene had shifted to the north, where the
hearts of all Italians were centered. There was a
singular calm in the city. One other memorable
meeting should be recorded, on the Saturday after-
noon following the Parliamentary decision. If
popular manifestations count for anything, the
dense throng in the Campidolgio and later the
same afternoon before the Quirinal Palace demon-
strated the enthusiasm with which the certainty
of war with Austria was accepted.

There are few lovelier spots on earth than the
little square of the Campidolgio on the Capitoline
Hill and none more laden with memories of a long
past. Led by a sure instinct the people of Rome
crowded up the steep passages that led to the crest
of the hill, by tens of thousands. In this hour of
the New Resurrection of Italy, the people sought
the hearthstone of ancient Rome on the Capitoline.
.About the pillars of the Cancelleria, which stands
on Roman foundations, up the long flight of steps

88

ITALY DECIDES

leading to the Aracoeli, even under the belly of
the bronze horse in the center of the square,
Italians thrust themselves. Rome was never more
beautiful than that afternoon. Little fleecy clouds
were floating across the deep blue sky. The vivid
green of the cypresses on the slope below were
stained with the red and white of blooming roses.
In the distance swam the dome of St. Peter's,
across the bend of the Tiber, and through the
rift between the crowded palaces one might look
down upon the peaceful Forum. The birthplace
of the nation! Here it was that the people, the
decision having been made to play their part in
the destiny of the new world now in the making,
came to rejoice. The spirit of the throng was en-
tirely festal. And these were the people, working-
men and their wives and mothers from the dark
corners of old Rome, neither hoodlums nor aris-
tocracy, the people whose men for the most part
were already joining the colors.

The flags of the unredeemed provinces together
with the Italian flag were borne through the crowd
up the steps of the municipal palace to wave be-
side Prince Colonna, as he appeared from within
the palace. Mayor of Rome, he had that after-
noon resigned his position in order to join the
army with his sons. Handsome, with a Roman
face that reminded one of the portrait busts of
his ancestors in the Capltollne Museum close by,
he stood silent above the great multitude. The
time for oratory had passed. He raised his hands

89

THE WORLD DECISION

and shouted with a full voice — " Fiva Italia ! "
and was silent. It was as if one of the conscript
fathers had returned to his city to pronounce a
benediction upon the act of his descendants. The
people repeated the cry again and again, then
broke into the beautiful words of Mameli's
"L' Inno," — ''Fratelli d' Italia:'

Then the gathering turned to cross the city
to the Quirinal, where the King had promised to
meet them. The way led past one of the two
Austrian embassies in the Piazza Venezia — a
danger spot throughout the agitation; but this
afternoon the crowd streamed by without swerv-
ing, intent on better things. On the Quirinal Hill,
between the royal palace and the Consulta, where
the diplomatic conferences are held, the people
packed in again. The roofs of the neighboring
palaces were lined with spectators and every win-
dow except those of the royal palace was filled
with faces. On the balcony above the palace gate
some footmen were arranging a red velvet hang-
ing. Then the royal family stepped out from the
room behind. The King, with his little son at his
side, stood bareheaded while the crowd cheered.
On his other side were the Queen and her two
daughters. King Victor, whose face was very
grave, bowed repeatedly to the cheering people,
but said no word. The little prince stared out
into the crowd with serious intensity, as if he
already knew that what was being done these
days might well cost him his father's throne. The

90

ITALY DECIDES

people cried again and again, — " Viva Italia,
viva il r^"; also more rarely, ^^ Imperio Romanoff
At the end the King spoke, merely, — " Fiva
Italia, mi I "

Perhaps the presence of the German and the
Austrian Ambassadors, who that very hour were
at the Consulta vainly trying to arrange a bar-
gain, restrained the King from saying more to his
people then. Possibly he felt that the occasion
was beyond any words. His face was set and worn.
The full passion of the decision had passed through
him. His people had desired war, and he had
faithfully followed their will. Yet he more than
any one in that crowd must know the terrible
risk, the awful cost of this war. Those national
aspirations for which his country was to strive,
— Trent and Trieste, Istraia and the Dalmatian
coast, in all a few hundred miles of territory, a
few millions of people, — the well informed were
saying would cost one hundred and fifty thousand
Italian soldiers a month, to pick the locks that
Austria had put along her Alpine frontier! No
wonder the King of Italy met his people after the
great decision in solemn mood.

The crowd melted from the Quirinal Square in
every direction, content. Some stopped to cheer
in front of the Ministry of War, which these days
and nights was busy as a factory working over-
time and night shifts. People were reading the

91

THE WORLD DECISION

newspapers, which in default of more vivid news
contained copious extracts from the "Libro
Verde." Yet the "Green Book" was not even
now completed!

The politician had spoken, the poet had said
his fiery word to the people, the piazza had hurled
its will. Parliament had acted and gone its way,
the army staff was hastening north. Yet the
Austrian Ambassador and his German colleague
had not taken the trains waiting for them outside
the Porta Pia with steam up. It was a mystery
why they were lingering on in a country on the
verge of hostilities, where they were so obviously
not wanted any longer. Daily since Parliament
had voted they had been at the Consulta — were
there now in this solemn hour of understanding
between the King and his people! Singly and
together they were conferring with Baron Son-
nino and the Premier. What were they offering?
We know now that at this last moment of the
eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real
gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic perti-
nacity and Teutonic dullness of perception made
her first real offer — the immediate cession and
occupation of the ceded territories she had set as
her maximum, a thing she had refused all along
to consider, insisting that the transfer be deferred
to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." I
do not know that if she had frankly started the
negotiations with this essential concession, it
would have made any real difference. 1 think not.

92

ITALY DECIDES

Her maximum was insufficient: it nowhere pro-
vided for that defensible frontier, and it was but
a meager satisfaction of those other aspirations of
nationality which she despised. It still left a good
many Italians outside of the national fold, and it
still left Italy exposed to whatever strong hand
might gain control on the east shores of the
Adriatic. At all events, in this last moment of
the eleventh hour, if the ambassadors had been
authorized to yield all that Baron Sonnino had
begun by asking, it would not have kept Italy
from the war — now.

Elsewhere I have dealt with the legal and
strategic questions involved in the "Green Book."
These diplomatic briefs. White or Yellow or
Orange or Green, seem more Important at the
moment than in perspective. They are all we
observers have of definite reason to think upon.
But nations do not go to war for the reasons
assigned in them — nothing is clearer than that.
Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case,
they are but the Intellectual counters that men
use to mask their passions, their instincts, their
faiths. According to the briefs both sides should
win and neither. And the blanks between the
lines of these diplomatic briefs are often more
significant than the printed words.

While Baron Macchio and Prince von Biilow,
the Ballplatz and Friedrichstrasse, Baron Sonnino
and his colleagues were making the substance
of the "Green Book," the people of Italy were

93

THE WORLD DECISION

deciding the momentous question on their own
grounds. The spirit of all Italy was roused.
Italian patriotism gave the answer.

" Fiva Italia/'^ the boy conscript shouted, lean-
ing far out of the car window in a last look at the
familiar fields and roof of his native village.
*^ Fiva Italia!^' the King of Italy cried, and his
people responded with a mighty shout, — " Fiva
Italia!^' What do they mean.'' In the simplest,
the most primitive sense they mean literally the
earth, the trees, the homes they have always
known — the physical body of the mother coun-
try. And this primal love of the earth that has
borne you and your ancestors seems to me infin-
itely stronger, more passionate with the European
than with the American. We roam: our frontiers
are still horizons. . . . But even for the simple
peasant lad, joining the colors to fight for his
country, patriotism is something more complex
than love of native soil. It is love of life as he has
known it, its tongue, its customs, its aspects. It Is
love of the religion he has known, of the black or
brown or yellow-haired mother he knows — of
the women of his race, of the men of his race, and
their kind.

Deeper yet, scarce conscious to the simple
instinctive man, patriotism is belief in the tradi-
tion that has made you what you are, in the ideal
that your ancestors have seeded in you of what

94

ITALY DECIDES

life should be. Therefore, patriotism is the better
part of man, his ideal of life woven in with his
tissue. Men have always fought for these things,

— for their own earth, for their own kind, for
their own ideal, — and they will continue to give
their blood for them as long as they are men, until
wrong and unreason and aggression are effaced
from the earth. The pale concept of internation-
alism, whether a class interest of the worker or
an intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot
maintain itself before the passion of patriotism,
as this year of fierce war has proved beyond
discussion.

Italian patriotism, which in the last analysis
Italy evinced in making war against Austria, was
composed of all three elements. Italian patriot-
ism is loyalty to the Italian tradition, hence to
the Latin ideal which is fighting a death battle
with the Teutonic tradition and ideal. Teutonism

— militaristic, efficient, materialistic, unimagina-
tive, unindividual — has challenged openly the
world. Italy responded nobly to that challenge.

VI

^he Eve of the War

ROME became still, so still as to be op-
pressive. Her heart was elsewhere, — in
the north whither the King was about
to go. Rome, like all the war capitals, having
played her part must relapse more and more into
a state of waiting and watching, stirred occasion-
ally by rumors and rejoicings. The streets were
empty, for all men of military age had gone and
others had returned to their normal occupations.
Officers hurried toward the station in cabs with
their boxes piled before them. And the sound of
marching troops also on the way to the station
did not cease at once.

Saturday, the 22d of May, I took the night
express for Venice. The train of first- and second-
class coaches was longer than usual, filled with offi-
cers rejoining their regiments which had already
gone north in the slower troop trains. There
were also certain swarthy persons In civilian garb,
whom it took no great divination to recognize as
secret police agents. The spy mania had begun.
Theirs was the hopeless task of sorting out civilian
enemies from nationals, which, thanks to the com-
plexity of modern international relations, is like
picking needles from a haystack. My papers, how-

96,

THE EVE OF THE WAR

ever, were all In order, and so far there had been
no restrictions on travel; In fact no military zone
had been declared, because as yet there was no
war! When would the declaration come? In
another week? I settled myself comfortably In
my corner opposite a stout captain who rolled
himself In his gray cloak and went to sleep. Other
officers wandered restlessly to and fro In the cor-
ridor outside, discussing the coming war. It was
a heavenly summer night. The Umbrian Hills
swam before us in the clear moonlight as the
train passed north over the familiar, beautiful
route. If Germany should strike from behind at
Milan, exposing the north of Italy? One shud-
dered. After Belgium Germany was capable of
any attack, and Germany was expected then to
go with her ally.

One thing was evident over and above the
beauty of the moonlit country through which we
were rushing at a good pace, and that was the
remarkable improvement In Italian railroading
since my last visit to Italy a dozen years before.
This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked
roadbed, which accounted in part for the rapidity
and ease of the troop movements these last
months. The ordinary passenger traffic had
scarcely been Interrupted even now on the eve of
war. The terrors of the mobilization period,
thanks to Italy's efficient preparation, were un-
founded. It spoke well for Italy at war. It was a
sign of her economic development, her modernl-

97

THE WORLD DECISION

zation. Even Germany had not gone into the
business of war more methodically, more effi-
ciently. Italy, to be sure, had nine months for
her preparation, but to one who remembered the
country during the Abyssinian expedition, time
alone would not explain the improvement.

The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna
were under military control, the quays patrolled,
the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed with sol-
diers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in
the straw of the cattle cars on the sidings, also
long trains of artillery and supplies. Shortly after
daylight the guards pulled down our shutters and
warned us against looking out of the windows for
the remainder of the journey. A childish precau-
tion, it seemed, which the officers constantly dis-
regarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields
of the flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men
in civilian black leaned over and firmly pulled
down the shade. Italy was taking her war seri-
ously.

At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going
north to Udine and — beyond. The almost
empty train rolled into the Venetian station only
an hour late. The quay outside the station was
strangely silent, with none of that noisy crew
of boatmen trying to capture arriving forestieri.
They had gone to the war. One old man, the
figure of Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor
of the gay tribe, took me aboard and ferried me
through the network of silent canals toward the

98

THE EVE OF THE WAR

piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the water-
ways, the windows of the palaces were tightly
shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting. ^
*'The Austrlans," Charon laconically informed
me. It would seem that Venice had been almost
an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was
left at her flight. But within the little squares
and along the winding stony lanes between the
ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens
and soldiers — and very much herself for the first
time in many centuries. The famous piazza re-
called the processional pictures of Guardi. Only
the companies of soldiers that marched through
it on their way to the station were not gorgeously
robed : they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on
their backs. The bronze horses were being low-
ered from St. Mark's, one of them poised in midair
with his ramping legs in a sling. Inside the church
a heavy wooden truss had been put in place to
strengthen the arch of gleaming mosaics. There
was a tall hoarding of fresh boards along the
water side of the Ducal Palace, and the masons
were fast filling in the arches with brick supports.
Venice was putting herself in readiness for the
enemy. Even the golden angel on the new Camp-
anile had been shrouded in black in order that
she might not attract a winged monster by her
gleam. From many a palace roof aerial guns were
pointed to the sky, and squads of soldiers patrolled
the platforms that had been hastily built to hold
them.

99

THE WORLD DECISION

Out at San Niccolo da Lido, where I supped at
a little osteria beneath the trees, a number of gray
torpedo boats rushed to and fro in the harbor
entrance, restless as hunting dogs straining at the
leash. That night Venice was dark, so black that
one stumbled from wall to wall along the narrow
lanes in the search for his own doorway. War was
close at hand: the menace of it, a few miles, a few
hours only away, across the blue Adriatic, at Pola.
In order to understand the significance of frontiers
an American should be in Venice on the eve of
war.

Some hours later I awoke startled from a heavy
sleep, the reverberation of a dream ringing in my
ears. It was not yet dawn. In the gray-blue light
outside the birds were wheeling in frightened
circles above the garden below my balcony. Min-
gled in my dreams with the disturbing noise was
the song of a nightingale — and then there came
another dull, thunderous explosion, followed im-
mediately by the long whine and shriek of sirens
at the arsenal, also the crackle of machine guns
from all sides. Now I realized what it meant.
It was war. The Austrians had taken this way to
acknowledge Italy's defiance. The enemy had
threatened to destroy Venice, and this was their
first attempt. Above the sputter of the machine
guns and the occasional explosions of shrapnel
could be distinguished the buzz of an aeroplane

I GO

THE EVE OF THE WAR

that moment by moment approached nearer.
Soon the machine itself became visible, flying
oddly enough from the land direction, not from
the Adriatic. It flew high and directly across
Venice, aiming apparently for the arsenal, the
Lido, the open sea.

It was an unreality, that little winged object
aloft like a large aerial beetle buzzing busily
through the still gray morning sky, heading
straight with human intelligence in a set line,
bent on destruction. The bombs could not be seen
as they fell, of course, but while I gazed Into the
heavens another thunderous explosion came from
near by, which I took to be the aviator's bomb,
distinguished by the sharpness of its explosion
from the anti-aircraft bombardment. Other guns
along the route of the enemy took up the attack,
then gradually all became silent once more. Only
the cries of the frightened birds circling above
the garden and the voices of the awakened in-
habitants could be heard. From every window
and balcony half-dressed people watched the
flight of the monoplane until it had disappeared
in the vague dawn beyond St. Mark's.

In another half-hour the sirens shrieked again
and the machine gun on the roof of the Papadopoli
Palace just below on the Grand Canal began to
sputter. This time every one knew what it meant
and there was a large gathering on the balconies
and In the little squares to witness the arrival of
the hostile aeroplane. It was another monoplane

lOI

THE WORLD DECISION

coming from the same land direction, flying much
lower than the first one, so low that its hooded
aviator could be distinguished and the bands of
color across the belly of the car. It skirted the
city toward the Adriatic more cautiously. Later
It was rumored that the second aeroplane had been
brought down in the lagoons and its men captured.
Thereafter no one tried to sleep: the little
Venetian bridges and passages were filled with
talking people, and rumors of the damage done
began to come in. Eleven bombs in all were
dropped on this first attack, killing nobody and
doing no serious harm, except possibly at the
arsenal where one fell. I was at the local police
station when one of the unexploded bombs was
brought in. It was of the incendiary type con-
taining petroleum. Also there had been picked
up somewhere in the canals the half of a Munich
newspaper, which seemed to indicate, although
there was nothing of special significance in the
sheet, that the monoplane was German rather
than Austrian. Yet Germany had not yet de-
clared war on Italy. But was it not the German
Kaiser who had threatened to destroy Italy's art
treasures? Were not the German armies in
Flanders and France making war against defence-
less, unmilitary monuments.?

I realized now the necessity of those prepara-
tions to guard the treasures of Venice, priceless

I02

THE EVE OF THE WAR

and irreplaceable — why the Belle ArtI had been
emptied, and the Colleoni trussed with an ugly-
wooden framework. But little at the best could
be done to protect Venice herself, which lies ex-
posed in all her fragile loveliness to the attacks
of the new Vandals. The delicate palaces, —
already crumbling from age, — the marvelous
facade of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color,
the leaning campanili, the little churches filled
with noble monuments to its great ones, — all
were helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling
from warships. Nothing could save Venice from
even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such
pounding as the Germans have given Rheims, or
Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile blow Venice
would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning
thus bereaved to her ancient bridegroom.

Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must
expect. Great preparations for the defense of
Venice have been made. The city might be
ruined ; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers
moving in and out past the Zattere contrasted
strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped like
pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two
worlds, — the world of the gondola, the marble
palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of St.
Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and
the aerial bomb, — the world as man is making
it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters,
to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never
long absent, as may easily be realized from the

103

THE WORLD DECISION

great battle-pieces In the Ducal Palace. But war
then was more the rough play of boisterous chil-
dren than the slaughterous, purely destructive
thing that modern men have made it. And when
those old Venetians were not fighting, they were
building greatly, beautifully, lovingly: they were
making life resplendent.

That awakening in the early dawn into the mod-
ern world of distant enemies and secret deadly
missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed me
a steel arrow which had been dropped within the
arsenal, a small, sharpened, nail-like thing that
would transfix a body from head to feet. These
arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall
where they will. That little machine a mile and
more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way
across the heavens, is the true symbol of war to-
day, not face to face except on rare occasions,
but hellish in its impersonal will to destroy.

A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the
departure of the hostile aeroplanes, a day among
days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The
attack which brought home the actual dangers
to them did not seem to dull their lively spirits.
They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner of
Venice. The little shops were full of people, the
boatmen reviled one another in the narrow canals
as they squeezed past, the vaporetti and the motor-
boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal.

104

THE EVE OF THE WAR

Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to
night attack as a new condition of her peculiar
life.

There were more soldiers than ever moving in
the narrow, winding footpaths, the restaurants
were full of officers in fresh uniforms. On the
water-front beyond the Salute there was much
movement among the destroyers. One of these
gray seabirds went out at midnight, when war
was declared, and took a small Austrian station
on the Adriatic. They brought back some pris-
oners and booty which seemed to interest the
Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes.

Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard
to realize the fact of war in Italy, to remember
that just over the low line of the Lido the hostile
fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic,
that a few miles to the north the attack had be-
gun all along the twisting frontier, that the first
caravan of the wounded had started for Padua.
As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past
the Giudecca, and the blue Euganean Hills rose
out of the gray mist that seems ever to hang on
the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe
in the fact, to realize that all this human beauty
around me, the slow accumulation of the ages of
the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal
destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water
like the city of enchantment that Turner so often
painted. Venice was never so lovely, so wholly the
palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped

105

THE WORLD DECISION

of all the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she
usually endures at this season. It was Venice left
to her ancient self in this hour of her danger.
She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful
great lady, so delicate that the least violence
might kill her! In this dying light of the day she
was already something unearthly, on the extreme
marge of our modern world. . . .

That evening the restaurant windows were cov-
ered tight with shutters and heavy screens before
the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer
before your plate and you ate your food in this
wavering light. There was not the usual tempta-
tion to linger in the piazza after dinner, for the
cafes were all sealed against a betraying gleam of
light and the Venetian public had taken to heart
the posted advice to stay within doors and draw
their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the
moon was rising behind the Salute, throwing its
light across the Canal on to the walls of the pal-
aces opposite. The soft night was full of murmur-
ing voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities.
The people were exchanging views across their
waterways from darkened house to house, specu-
lating on the chances of another aerial raid to-
night. They were making salty jokes about their
enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight
illuminated the broad waterway beneath my win-
dow with its shuttered palaces as if it were already
day. A solitary gondola came around the bend
of the Canal and its boatman began to sing one

1 06

THE EVE OF THE WAR

of the familiar songs that once was bawled from
illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for
the benefit of the tourists in the hotels. To-night
he was singing it for himself, because of the soft
radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song
rose from the silver ripple of the waves below, and
in the little garden behind the nightingale began
to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of
this morning and opened his heart in the old way
to the moonlight May night and to Venice.^

The enemy did not return that night, the moon
gave too clear a light. But a few evenings later,
when the sky was covered with soft clouds, there
was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace
roofs began again bombarding the heavens. This
time the darkness was shot by comet-like flashes
of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange
pyrotechnic aspect to the battle in the air. Again
the enemy fled across the Adriatic without having
done any special damage. Only a few old houses
in the poorer quarter near the arsenal were crum-
bled to dust.

Since that first week of the war the aeroplane
attacks upon Venice have been repeated a num-
ber of times, and though the bombs have fallen
perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo
frescoes in the Scalsi church were ruined, no great
harm had been done. The military excuse — if
after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an

107

THE WORLD DECISION

excuse — is the great arsenal in Venice. The real
reason, of course, is that Venice is the most easily
touched, most precious of all Italian treasure
cities, and the Teuton, as a French general said
to me, wages war not merely upon soldiers, but
also upon women and children and monuments.
It is vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts
the Austrian aeroplanes across the Adriatic —
the essential spirit of the barbarian which the
Latin abhors.

There are some things in this world that can
never be replaced once destroyed, and Venice is
one of them. And there are some things greater
than power, efficiency, and all kaiserliche Kultur.
Such is Italy with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible
youth, its treasure of deathless beauty. As I
passed through the fertile fields on my way from
Venice to Milan and the north, I understood as
never before the inner reason for Italy's entering
the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane civ-
ilization, — the love of freedom for the individual,
the golden mean between liberty and license that
is the Latin inheritance, — all this compelled
young Italy to fight, not merely for her own pres-
ervation, but also for the preservation of these
things in the world against the force that would
destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has
not died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum,"
the poet said, and at the risk of all her jewels Italy

io8

THE EVE OF THE WAR

bravely defied the enemy across the Alps. This
war on which she had embarked after nine long
months of preparation is no mere adventure after
stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it is
a fight unto death between two opposed princi-
ples of life.

"He who Is not for me is against me." There Is
no possible neutrality on the greater issues of life.

PART TWO . . FRANCE

Part Two — France
I

The Face of Paris

I SHALL never forget the poignant impres-
sion that Paris made on me that first morn-
ing 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 impres-
sion 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.

. 113

THE WORLD DECISION

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 al-
ways 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 civil-
ian 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, includ-
ing women and children, so much of the daily la-
bor was done by them. The little cafe 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 news-
papers all day long, — the cabmen as they drove,
the passers-by as they walked hastily on their
errands, the waiters in the cafes, — and yet they
told so little of what was going on Id-bas! . . .
The silence in the restaurant seemed peculiarly
dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter where,
as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French cafe
never. But I soon realized that one of the signifi-
cant aspects of the new France since the war was
its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were
gravely preoccupied with the national task, and

114

THE FACE OF PARIS

whatever their own small part In it might be, it was
too serious a matter to encourage chattering, ges-
ticulating, 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 be-
come by general report the most sternly, grimly
silent. Compared with them the English, deemed
by nature taciturn, have become almost hysteri-
cally voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse,
recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teu-
tonic strategy has evoked from the English a flood
of outraged comment. But from the beginning
the French have wasted no time on such betise as
they would call it: they have put all their energies
into their business, which as every French crea-
ture knows is to fight this war through to a trium-
phant end — and not talk. An extraordinary re-
versal of national temperaments that! From the
mobilization hour It was the same thing: every
Frenchman knew what it meant, the hour of su-
preme 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
a poilu, 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 does n't talk about it, little one, one does

IIS

THE WORLD DECISION

it. And he who talks war does n't fight. .
Later, I'll tell you, after, when it is signed!'*

There were plenty of cabs and taxis on the
streets by the time I reached Paris, rather danger-
ously driven by strangers ignorant of the ramifica-
tions of the great city and of the complexities of
motor engines. Most of the tram-lines were run-
ning, and the metro gave full service until eleven
at night, employing many young women as con-
ductors — and they made neat, capable workers.
Many of the shops, especially along the boule-
vards, were open for a listless business, although
the shutters were often up, with the little sign on
them announcing that the place was closed be-
cause the patron was 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 Elysees that had been trans-

ii6

THE FACE OF PARIS

formed into hospitals. At noon one would find
something like the old frivol in the Ritz Restau-
rant,— 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 Opera Comique gave several performances
of familiar operas each week, rendered patriotic
by the recitation of the Marseillaise by Madame
Chenal clothed in the national colors with a
mighty Roman sword with which to emphasize
''* Aux armes, citoyens!'^ The Fran^aise 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 cafes along the boulevards did a fair busi-
ness 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 peremp-
tory closing of cafes 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 cafes, sitting listlessly
about the little tables, usually without male com-
panions, indicated one of the minor miseries of
the great war. For the midinette and the femme
galante there seemed nothing to do. A paternal
government had found occupation and pay for

117

THE WORLD DECISION

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 cafes, the boulevards, — ominous, pitiful
specters of the manless world the war was making.
Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the
Marche Saint-Honore as usual, and I could not
see that prices of food had risen abnormally in
spite of complaints in the newspapers and the dis-
cussion about cold storage in the Chamber of
Deputies. Restaurant portions were parsimoni-
ous 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 dinner a la guerre at 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 sud-
denly 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 so-
ciety much less highly geared than the one we
are accustomed to. I liked it.

* * *
Ii8

THE FACE OF PARIS

Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a pe-
culiar 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 ordi-
nary volume of movement. Nor was it altogether
a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which ordi-
narily 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 ex-
pression 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 — Id-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, al-
most 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 trans-

119

THE WORLD DECISION

muted 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 im-
portant 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 phe-
nomena in the hospitals this dislike of talking
about what they had been through, even among
the common soldiers. Most likely their experi-
ences 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 his depot. 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 their depots outside the
city. On the Fourteenth of July, when the re-
mains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the Mar^

120

THE FACE OF PARIS

seillaise, were brought to the Invalides, a few
companies of city guards on horseback and of
colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the es-
cort down the Champs Elysees 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 cafes, and
on the streets. As the weeks passed they seemed
to become more numerous, though the authori-
ties had taken pains to keep Paris comparatively
empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling
down the Elysees under the shade of the chestnut
trees, in the metro, at the cafes, 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 trav-
eled, thus handicapped! There was something
wistful often in their srilent eyes.

To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of
refugees and destitute, Paris was filled with relief
organizations. The sign of some ^^ceuvre^^ deco-
rated 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
ppace to say little: much has been written of it

121

THE WORLD DECISION

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 Lusi-
tania, 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 Ameri-
can 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, en-
courage a citizen from our rich republic to hold
up his head in spite of German-American disloy-
alty, 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 seri-
ously wounded — to find for them suitable labor
and to reeducate 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,

122

THE FACE OF PARIS

a young officer, blind, with one arm gone, and
wounded in the face. On his breast was the Serv-
ice 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 fiance
back to life and hope. He was being taught teleg-
raphy by an American teacher of the blind.

In such ways the people of Paris kept them-
selves from eating their hearts out in grief and
anxiety.

At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the
day's communiqve was given out from the War
Office, little groups gathered in front of the win-
dows 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-mor-
row!" The newsless newspapers abounded in
something perhaps more heartening than favor-
able reports from the front — an endless chronicle
of bravery and devotion, of valor, heroism, and
chivalry in the trench. That is what fed the anx-
ious hearts of the waiting people, details of the
large, heroic picture that France was creating so
near at hand, Id-bas.

There were few occasions for popular gather-
ings. The taste for "demonstrations" of any sort
had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds

123

THE WORLD DECISION

met the trains from Switzerland that contained
the first of the ''^grands blesses j"*^ 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 I'Est a great throng of women and
children were kept back by rope and police, un-
til 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 last poilu had 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 nat-
ural thing in Paris, the one living thing uncon-
scious of the war. Yet even the school children
were learning history in a way they will never for-
get. In one of the provincial schools visited by an
inspector, all the pupils rose as a crippled child
hobbled into the schoolroom. "He sufi"ered from

124

THE FACE OF PARIS

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 les-
son,— "Do you see that legless man.^ The
Bodies did 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.

At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to
hear the familiar buzz of the aeroplane, and look-
ing 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 heav-
ens, 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 to-
ward 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

125

THE WORLD DECISION

attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too
risky. They have succeeded in killing some peace-
able 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 Zeppe-
lins ! What they have done, what they could do at
the best is of the nature of petty damage and occa-
sional 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 real reclame!

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 cafes, more shops opened
— even the great dressmaking establishments be-
gan to operate in an attempt to restore commer-
cial 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 govern-
ment 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 para-
sitic luxury with which it has catered to the self-

126

THE FACE OF PARIS

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 ene-
mies, or her friends for that matter, have be-
lieved 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.

II

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 in-
vader 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 be-
gun again in the valley of the Marne; the vine-
yards 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 near-
est 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

128

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

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 mod-
ern 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, trans-
forming the round-arched, thick-walled Norman
building. If for nothing more Senlis would have
amply earned its right to live always as the birth-
place 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 oi francs-tirailleurs that characterized them
from the time they passed Liege. 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

129

THE WORLD DECISION

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 com-
mands, — 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 hap-
hazard 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, incontro-
vertible instance of the German thing, which has
been visited by thousands of French and foreign-
ers 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.

130

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

As every one knows, the Germans breaking into
France at Namur and Mons came on with unex-
ampled 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 Septem-
ber recoiled under the shock of the French offen-
sive. For the better part of a week two millions
of men struggled on a thousand different battle-
fields 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 pres-
sure of this human cyclone, in general from north-
east 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-
Frangois — from Sermaize-les-Bains on the east
to Fere-le-Champenoise, Montmirall, and Ester-
nay 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 vine-
yards, but here In the center and south of the fer-
tile province there are few vines, mostly fields of
ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets — long un-
dulating swales of rich fields, cut by little copses
of thick woods and by white poplar-lined high-
ways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly
that smiling and gracious air of la douce France —

131

THE WORLD DECISION

gently sloping fields and woods and little gray
stone villages each with its small church orna-
mented by the square tower and spire of Cham-
penoise 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 entrench-
ment, 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 com-
pletely razed by the fierce fire that raked them
for days. Sometimes they escaped shell and ma-
chine gun to be burned to the ground vengefuUy
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

132

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

around Vitry-le-Frangois, — Favresse, Blesmes,
Ecrinnes, Thieblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc, —
with acre upon acre of ruined buildings, a chim-
ney 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 debris lay the richly carved capitals of
the massive pillars. At Ecrinnes 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.

I speak of the churches because of their irre-
placeable 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

133

THE WORLD DECISION

habitable building was left after the cyclone
passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Ester-
nay I remember, all but seven had been devas-
tated — 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, prob-
ably 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 num-
berless 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,

134

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

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 strug-
gle 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 some-
how. Until the Germans can kill off the French
peasant women, they can never hope to conquer
France.

Compared with the burning of homes, the raz-
ing 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 chateaux 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 in-
vader the extraordinary quantity of good wine
which he consumed on his raid, because the vic-
tory 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 har-

135

THE WORLD DECISION

vesters were a number of middle-aged men with
the soldiers' kepi, 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 burrow-
ing 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 thou-
sands 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 sol-
dier's kepi whenever it was found with the body.

136

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

It is remarkable, considering the scarcity of hands,
the desolation of the country, the difficulty of exist-
ence, what tender care has been given these graves
of the unknown dead. Many of them were deco-
rated 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 passion-
ate love for those who gave themselves in defense
of la 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: Na-
ture 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.

137

THE WORLD DECISION

The Germans were shelling Rhelms the day I
was there. From the little Mountain of Rheims,
five miles away on the Epernay 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 every-
where 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 after-
noon when the fire ceased the boys were playing
in the streets and women sat in front of their cel-
lar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves
to sudden death. They move about from hole to

138

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

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 si-
lence, for this quarter of the city which received
most of the shells is absolutely deserted. The
grass grew high between the stones in the pave-
ment 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 build-
ings 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 dwell-
ings of its people, whom it could no longer protect
from the barbarian.

Not that the Germans have spared the cathe-
dral in their senseless bombardment of Rheims!
From that first day, when their own wounded lay

139

THE WORLD DECISION

within its walls and were carried out of the burn-
ing building by the French, until the morning I
was there, when a shell tore at the ground be-
neath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Ger-
mans seem to have taken a special malignant de-
light 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 — irre-
placeable 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. Rhelms 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 flow-
ering 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

140

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

intentions with that admirably dispassionate in-
telligence with which the French consider these
brutal manifestations of the German mind, re-
marked, "At present they seem engaged in ring-
ing 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. More-
over, 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 fa9ade. 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 evi-
dence that the city of Rheims still holds stout

141

THE WORLD DECISION

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 an-
cestors from a less barbarous enemy.

What use to enumerate the wounds and out-
rages 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 black-
ened 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 frag-
ments of statue and moulding that a pious search
could rescue from the debris around the cathedral.
In this room, while the German guns were still
raining shells upon Rheims, an old man in work-
man's apron was already moulding casts of the

142

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

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 trembUng 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 Epernay 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

.143

THE WORLD DECISION

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 out-
ward 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 prov-
inces 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 fugi-
tive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The mili-
tary rule forbids any correspondence through neu-
trals, as is permitted prisoners of war, to those

144

THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

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 rigor-
ous, 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, suflFering,
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

145

THE WORLD DECISION

^^ douce France." To the French, quite as much as
to the Bryanlted American, war is a senseless, in-
human thing; but it becomes direfuUy necessary
when the home has been burned and laid waste.
The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of
malevolent destruction which vengefuUy 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.

Ill

'The Barbarian

THE barbarian, as the Greeks used the
word, was not necessarily a person or a
people without civilization. Indeed, cer-
tain ancient peoples known as barbarians had
a high degree of luxury, civilization. The Per-
sians 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 con-
sidered 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 de-
pended upon the force and the ability of the par-
ticular 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 ex-
press themselves superficially in manners, more
deeply in sensitive inhibitions, nor those ameni-
ties of the soul which are known as honor, justice,
mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degen-
erate such persons as permitted themselves to be

147

THE WORLD DECISION

trammeled In their conduct by non-utilitarian
considerations. In his primitive state the bar-
barian'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 appre-
ciate is the suave mean of life, the ideal of indi-
vidual 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 be-
ings — 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 commu-
nity fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the
barbarian philosophy of existence can be found.
I have known personally a great many barba-
rians, — 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 nomencla-
ture. 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

148

THE BARBARIAN

of all that the Greeks meant by their term "bar-
barian." 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 inhuman-
ities of which these parvenus are capable. There-
fore, when they think of the German, there comes
instinctively to their lips the ancient term of com-
plete distinction, — les barhares, — by which is
meant a person and a nation who are not gov-
erned 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 — " jfl/^" — does not imply necessarily lit-
eral physical dirt, but a moral callousness and un-
refinement of soul which in the spiritual realm
corresponds with the term "dirty" in the physi-
cal. 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 some-
thing of that crusader spirit which has sustained
him through his terrible conflict. As M. Emile
Hovelaque has expressed it, — "France is fight-
ing the battle of humanity, of the world, of Amer-
ica, 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

149

THE WORLD DECISION

limits of the laws they have accepted." The bat-
tle 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
the patrie. Indeed, for the higher spirits the patrie
is closely identified with the non-barbaric ideals
of humanity.

The whole conscious world has had the manifes-
tations 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 de-
nied, 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 indif-
ference to the subject on the part of many Ameri-
cans. "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

150

THE BARBARIAN

charges, whether because of our popular preju-
dice 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 barba-
rous, 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 activ-
ities 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 Christian-
ity 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 mas-
sacre 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 con-
cerned about anything more than his own selfish

THE WORLD DECISION

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 con-
stantly. Best of all the evidence, perhaps, are the
German diaries of soldiers and officers, extracts of
which have been edited by Professor Bedier, of
the College 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 commit-
ted 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 Van-
dal, Tartar, Barbarian.

* * *
152

THE BARBARIAN

I believe the atrocity charges to be substan-
tially 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 evi-
dence 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 esti-
mating the validity of them.

I believe in the truthfulness of that abbe of
Esternay, who was one of the unfortunates that
the Germans used as a screen before the opera-
tions of a body of troops. I believe in the truth-
fulness of the keen old peasant woman at Cha-
tillon, 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. Un-
fortunately, there was no photographer at work

153

THE WORLD DECISION

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 in-
stinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credi-
bility of a story, and I believe the abbe, the old
woman, and many others who suffered abomi-
nably 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 ex-
pected where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed
with drink. But the cowardly slaughter of non-
combatants, the wanton destruction of monu-
ments, 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 philo-
sophic materialism, which any one who had fol-
lowed the drift of German thought and literature
might have expected, but its extraordinary lack
of self-control. English and Americans are taught

154

THE BARBARIAN

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 provoca-
tion. 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 Billow'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.

155

THE WORLD DECISION

One finds here, — "By steeping himself in mili-
tary history an officer will be able to guard him-
self against excessive humanitarian notions; it
will teach him that certain severities are indis-
pensable 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 ex-
ceptional severities are "indispensable." After
perusing the " Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege,"
need one seek more evidence of German atrocities
from the levying of confiscatory fines upon con-
quered 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, de-

156

THE BARBARIAN

fended, — 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 Ham-
burg "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 uni-
versally adopted. ... In warfare humanity does
not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations of
the Hague Conferences on this subject are child-
ish 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, tor-
tures, 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 carrylng-
out of state policy; the state relies upon war to
execute its designs. The German military author-

157

THE WORLD DECISION

ities announce and print for the use of their ofH-
cers 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 humanitarian-
ism is condemned as "sentimentalism and flabby
emotion."

There we have the gist of the whole afl*air —
what makes the Frenchman instinctively consider
the German to be a barbarian, what makes mod-
ern Germany the menace of the entire world. It is
not its militaristic ideals, its mechanical civiliza-
tion, 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 staflf offi-
cers' drunken orgies in chateaux, 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 pro-
vided 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

158

THE BARBARIAN

by divine authority is the endurance and the mag-
nification of the German state. Whatever a Ger-
man 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 fol-
lows inevitably, provided her citizens are both
docile and have a natural fund of brutality.

"In warfare humanity does not exist and can-
not exist. All the lucubrations of the Hague Con-
ferences 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 ex-
perience. 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 im-
pulses. 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

159

THE WORLD DECISION

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 im-
pulse 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 sel-
fishness 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 conserva-
tion 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 charac-
ter as now wholly revealed better than the rest of
the world and are not so much surprised by its
manifestations. They have examined the Ger-
man, and have fortified themselves against his
cruel power.

But they cannot forget these incredible out-

i6q

THE BARBARIAN

rages. 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 Com-
mercy, 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

i6i

THE WORLD DECISION

Latin peoples is stained here and there with feroc-
ity. 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 atroc-
ity, 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, dispas-
sionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or
Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the
dirty poilu in the trench. For more than a gener-
ation 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.

IV

J'he German Lesson

THE barbarian must be met on his own
ground of force and efficiency, — "an
eye for an eye," not with arguments or
apologies, not even with numbers or wealth.
The vital question for us all to-day is not how un-
prepared the Allies were for the onslaught of bar-
barism, but how far they have overcome their
handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the
barbarian's lesson. The varying degrees in which
the different allied nations have grasped the mean-
ing of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely
their chance of survival, but also the probable
outcome of the world decision. What that lesson
is which Germany is teaching the world by blood
and iron is a byword on men's tongues to-day:
the value of it is another question.

* * *

Long before the war, Germany had published
far and wide her scorn of her enemies. The Rus-
sians were an undisciplined barbarian horde; the
English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport
the energy that the industrious German devoted
to preparing himself for world rule. As for the
French, they were an amiable and amusing

163

THE WORLD DECISION

people, but degenerate — fickle, feeble, rotten
with disease. Germany's hate was reserved for the
English, her most ignoble slurs for the French.
Needless to say, Germany has not found any one
of her many enemies as wholly despicable as she
had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations
were greatest with France. That the French people
are smaller in stature than the German, that they
eat less and breed less, that by temperament they
are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull
German mind that the race had become degener-
ate and trivial, — negligible. This habit of con-
temptuously attributing to other peoples vileness
and degeneracy because their social ideals differ
from her own is part of that lack of imagination
which is the Teuton's undoing.

The courage, endurance, and high spirit dis-
played by the French have compelled German
admiration. The French have become the most
tolerable of all her enemies, and it is an open
secret that for many months Germany has de-
sired to win France away from her allies by an
honorable, even advantageous peace. Meantime
French prisoners are favored in the German prison
camps, being accorded a treatment altogether
more humane than that given the English pris-
oners or the Russians. But France has repHed to
the dishonorable advances no more than to the
calumnies. One of the astonishing revelations of
national psychology unfolded in the war has been
the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.

164

THE GERMAN LESSON

For nearly two generations the nation has lived
in expectation of an ultimate struggle for exist-
ence with the barbarian: now that it has come
with more than the feared ferocity the French
have no time or energy to waste in comment.
They must expel the barbarian from their home
and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the
menace of his barbarism.

That is in part why the clear-headed Latin
has learned the German lesson faster than his
allies.

m: * *

What everybody knows by this time, and in
America is repeating with sickening fluency, is
that Germany is "efficient," not only militarily
efficient, but socially and economically efficient
— which these days amounts to the same thing.
Germany is "organized" both for peace and war
more efficiently than any other nation in the
world. The two terms that this war has driven
into all men's consciousness are "efficiency" and
" organization." We in America, prone to admire
the sheen of tin, have bowed down in greater
admiration than any other people to German
"efficiency." For efficiency values in the opera-
tions of life are just the ones we are most capa-
ble of appreciating, although our government
and general social organization remain as lament-
ably inefficient as, say, the English. But being a
business people we are fitted to admire business

165

THE WORLD DECISION

qualities above all others. The German army, the
German state are magnificently run businesses!
To some of us, however, the term "efficiency"
has become nauseating because it has been asso-
ciated with so much else that we loathe from the
bottom of our souls. If we cannot have an "effi-
cient" civilization without paying the price for it
that Germany has paid, — the price of humanity,
of beauty, the price of her soul, — let us return
to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian village!

Germany under a highly autocratic system of
government has created a social machine of unex-
ampled and formidable efficiency. The German
realized before his rivals that war had become,
like all other human activities, a matter of busi-
ness on a huge scale. And he had prepared not
merely the special instruments of war, but also
the tributary business on this scale of modern
magnitude: he had converted his state into a pow-
erful war machine. All this which is now com-
monplace has become more glaringly evident to
us onlookers because of the lamentable failure of
England and Russia especially to meet the re-
quirements of the new business. So incapable do
they seem of learning the German lesson that to
some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed
already to disaster. Certainly the English and
the Russians have justified many of those bitter
German taunts.

It has not been so with France. The French
also were caught unprepared — to their honor —

i66

THE GERMAN LESSON

like their allies. Can a real democracy ever be pre-
pared for war? France, suffering grievously from
the first blow dealt by the enemy, looked destruc-
tion in the face before the stand at the Marne.
The famous victory of the Marne, I believe, is
still unknown in Germany — I have been so
informed by an American who spent last winter
in Germany. The battle of the Marne may not
rank in history as quite the greatest battle in the
history of the world. The French may exaggerate
its importance as a military event. The English
have certainly exaggerated the part played by
their little expeditionary force of less than a
hundred thousand in "saving France." That is
for others to dispute. But it was without any
question a great moral victory for the French of
the utmost tonic value to the nation. It saved
France from despair, possibly from the annihila-
tion that follows despair. And ever since the
Marne victory, French confidence and elan have
been rapidly growing. During that bloody Sep-
tember week they realized that the barbarian was
not invincible, the machine was not so perfect but
that human will and human courage could resist
it. Moreover, the machine lacked that quality
of spirit which the French felt in themselves. As
the months have dragged around an entire year
and more in the trenches, almost contempt has
grown in the mind of the French soldier for the
formidable German machine. Strong as it is, it
yet lacks something — that something of human

167

THE WORLD DECISION

spirit without which permanent victories cannot
be achieved. Its strength can be imitated. The
spirit cannot be "organized."

French confidence is more than an official
phrase, a mere bluff!

But — and just here lies the profound signifi-
cance of it all — the French realized at once that
in order to conquer the German machine they
must create an equally efficient and powerful ma-
chine, which with that plus of human spirit and
the inspiration of their cause would carry them
over into victory. So while the English were be-
rating the barbarian for his atrocious misconduct,
advertising " business as usual," and filching what
German trade they could, bungling at this and
that, until they have become a spectacle to them-
selves, the French nation concentrated all its ener-
gies upon preparing an organization fit to meet the
German organization. While General Joffre held
the Germans behind the four hundred miles of
trenches, France made itself over into a society
organized for war — the new business kind of war
which is waged in factory and railway terminal,
not by gallant charges. ^^ Organiser'' has become
in the Frenchman's vocabulary the next most
popular word to ^'patrieJ' One implies, these
days, the other.

It is said that when Germany invaded France,
the French had not a ton of their chief high ex-

i68

THE GERMAN LESSON

plosive on hand. Some of its ingredients they had
been getting from Germany! France lost her coal
and iron mines and her largest factories the first
weeks of the war and has not regained them. Yet
early in last April, according to the official an-
nouncement, France was turning out six times as
much ammunition as was deemed, before the war,
the maximum requirement, and would shortly
turn out ten times as much, which has ere this
probably been greatly exceeded. Meanwhile, by
April the artillery had been increased sevenfold.
In attaining these results, France has accom-
plished a greater marvel relatively speaking than
the most boasted German efficiency. She has had
to get her coal from England, her ores from Spain,
her machines for making guns and shells from us.
She has had to improvise shell factories and gun
plants from automobile factories, electric plants,
railway repair shops — from anything and every-
thing. I visited a small tile factory that was
being utilized to make hand grenades. Innumer-
able small shops in Paris are engaged in munition
work. The amount of ammunition bought in
America by France has been grossly exaggerated
by the German press. Latterly, France has em-
ployed American engineers to build large muni-
tion plants in France that will become the prop-
erty of the Government.

Throughout the spring the Paris newspapers
appeared every morning with large headlines:
" More guns ! More ammunition ! 1 " And they got

169

THE WORLD DECISION

them, made them. The headlines are no longer
needed, for the superiority in shell and guns rests
with the French, not with the Germans, on the
western front.

France, industrially crippled, has accomplished
this marvel in one short year. The country has
become one vast workshop for war. The Latin
genius for organization on the small scale has met
the German genius for organization on the large
scale. The industrial transformation has been
facilitated by the system of conscription over
which the English have wrangled so long and so
futilely to the mystery of their keener-witted
allies. To the Frenchman conscription means
merely the most effective method of applying
patriotism, of cooperation for the common cause.
France has mobilized not only her men, but her
women and children, it might be said, so thor-
oughly have the civilian elements worked into
the shops and other non-military labor. To sort
out their labor and put it where it was most effec-
tive, to substitute women workers for men wher-
ever possible, were the first steps in the huge
work of social reorganization. There were no labor
troubles to contend with, thanks to the conscrip-
tion system and to the awakened patriotism of
every element in society. France looked on
aghast when her necessary supplies of coal were
threatened by the strike of Welsh miners, averted

170

THE GERMAN LESSON

only by the personal pleadings of a popular min-
ister! To the Latin, more disciplined and more
alive to the real dangers of the situation than the
Anglo-Saxon, the English attitude was simply
incomprehensible. Also France has not had her
efhciency so seriously threatened by the liquor
problem as has England: the military authorities
have taken stern measures against this danger
and have carried them out firmly. So far as the
army itself is concerned, the drink evil does not
exist.

The manufacture of ammunition and cannon Is
but one element in the new warfare. France has
had to feed, clothe, and maintain her armies un-
der the same handicap, to meet all the unexpected
requirements in material of the trench war. The
French have rediscovered the hand grenade and
developed it into the characteristic weapon of
the war, have unearthed all their old mortars
from the arsenals and adapted them to the trench,
and created the best aerial service of all the com-
batants. Incidentally they have effectually pro-
tected Paris from air raids since the first months
of the war by their careful aerial patrol. All this
is aside from the task of putting the nation so-
cially and economically on the war basis — in
providing for the wounded, the dependent women
and children, and also for a perpetual stream of
refugees from Belgium and the invaded prov-
inces, a burden that Germany has not yet had to
carry.

171

THE WORLD DECISION

Not all this huge work of reorganization could
be done immediately with equal success. The
sanitary service suffered grievously, especially
at the beginning, — needed all the help that gen-
erous outsiders could give, — still needs it. The
percentage of death among the wounded is too
high, of those returned to the army too low.
There have been wastes in other directions due
to haste, inexperience, political interference, but
nothing like the wastes that England has suffered
from the same causes, infinitely less than we
should suffer judging from the ineptitudes we
displayed in our little Spanish War.

Probably France is not as well organized to-day
for the war business as is Germany. Very pos-
sibly she never will be, which is not to the dis-
credit of her people. The nation has had to do in
one short year, grievously handicapped at the
start, what Germany has done at her leisure dur-
ing forty years. Moreover, the Latin tempera-
ment is intolerant of the mechanical, the routine,
which is the glory of the German. Although the
French have realized with marvelous quickness the
necessity of war organization and have adapted
themselves to it, — have learned the German les-
son,— they are spiritually above making it the
supreme ideal of national effort. Without argu-
ment they have accepted the conditions imposed
upon them, but they do not regard the modern
war business as the flower of human civilization.

* * *
172

THE GERMAN LESSON

Mere preparation, no matter how scientific
and thorough, is by no means the whole of the
German lesson. The first months of the war we
heard too much about German preparedness, too
little about German character. By this time the
world is realizing that military preparation is but
one manifestation of that German character, and
the real danger is German character itself. Accord-
ing to reports in her own newspapers Germany
found herself running short of war materials after
the first weeks of this extraordinarily prodigal
war, which exceeded even her prudent calcula-
tions. But Germany had the habit of preparation
and the social machinery ready to enlarge her war
product. Without advertising her situation to the
world, she provided for the new requirements so
abundantly that she has not yet betrayed any
deficiency in material. And while she was sweep-
ing victoriously across northern France toward
Paris, with the belief that the city must fall before
her big guns, nevertheless her engineers took
pains to prepare the Alsne line of defense, which
saved her armies from disaster and enabled them
to keep their tenacious grip on Belgium and
northern France. This is the real strength of
Germany, the real import of the bitter lesson she
is teaching the world — the habit of preparation,
discipline, organization, thrift. On the specifically
military side the French seem to have learned
this lesson well. They have fortified the ground
between the present front and Paris with line after

173

THE WORLD DECISION

line of defensive works. The fields are gray with
barbed wire. A few miles outside of the suburbs
of Paris may be seen as complete a system of
trenches as on the front, and the kepi of the terri-
torial digging a trench is a familiar sight almost
anywhere in eastern France. It is inconceivable
that any "drive" on the western front could be
successful. The confidence of the French rests in
part on these precautions.

Whether the French can apply the inner mean-
ing of the German lesson, can incorporate it into
their characters and transmit it to their children,
is a larger question for us as well as for them, for
the whole world. But their success in applying
it in this war is all the more noteworthy in con-
trast with the failure of their two great allies, who
were not invaded, not handicapped at the start,
as was France. The failure of Great Britain and
of Russia to master the lesson is so obvious,
so lamentable, that it needs no emphasis here.
France, with the brunt of invasion only a few
miles from the gates of Paris, her factories and
mines lost, has provided herself very largely, has
supplied Serbia with ammunition, Italy with
artillery, Russia, England, and Italy with aero-
planes. For many months the thirty miles of the
western front held by the English was defended
with the assistance of French artillery.

The Slav one expected to fail in getting his Ger-
man lesson, for obvious reasons, especially be-
cause of his reactionary and corrupt bureaucracy.

174

THE GERMAN LESSON

But not the Anglo-Saxon ! As a clever French staff
officer remarked, — "The two disappointments of
the war have been the Zeppelins and the Eng-
lish." Without making a post mortem on the Eng-
lish case, the Latin superiority is a phenomenon
worth pondering. For the Anglo-Saxon, cousin
to the Teuton, would supposably be the better
fitted to receive the German lesson of organiza-
tion and discipline. But that ideal of individual
liberty, which England surely did not inherit
from her Germanic ancestors, "seems to have de-
generated into a license that threatens her very
existence as a great state. The English still talk
of "muddling through somehow"! If the end of
autocracy is barbarism, the end of liberty is
anarchy.

The Latin has kept the mean between the two
extremes. The French, having fought more des-
perately in their great revolution for individual
freedom than any other people, seem able to
recognize its necessary limits and to subordinate
the individual at necessity to the salvation of the
nation. In the Latin blood, however modified,
there remains always the tradition of the greatest
empire the world has known, which for centuries
withstood the assaults of ancient barbarism. The
wonderful resistance and adaptability of the
French to-day is of more than sentimental im-
portance to mankind. All the world, including
their foes, pay homage to the gallantry and great-
ness of the French spirit in their dire struggle,

I7S

THE WORLD DECISION

but what has not been sufficiently recognized
is the significance to the future of the recovery
by the Latin peoples of the leadership of civiliza-
tion. We Americans who have both traditions in
our blood, with many modifications, are as much
concerned in this world decision as the combat-
ants themselves.

So much has become involved in the titanic
struggle, so many subordinate issues have risen
to cloud the one cardinal spiritual issue at stake,
that we are likely to forget it or deny that there is
any. Is the world to be barbarized again or not."*

This reiterated use of the term *' barbarism" is
not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is
exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world
tragedy has been the passionate verbal battlea
over the claims of respective ^^ Kulturs^' to the
favor of survival. Why deny that the barbarian
can have a very superior form of ^^ Kultur^' and
yet remain a barbarian in soul? These pages on
the German lesson are a tribute to Germany's
special contribution to the world. Social and
industrial organization, systematic instead of
loose ways of doing things, prudence, thrift, obe-
dience and subordination of the individual to the
state, discipline — in a word, an efficient society.
It is a great lesson! No one to-day can belittle its
meaning. Possibly the remote, hidden reason for
all this seemingly useless bloody sacrifice in our

176

THE GERMAN LESSON

prosperous modern world is to teach the primary
principles of the lesson. God knows that we all
need it — we in America most after the Russian,
and next to us the English. If the world can learn
the lesson which Germany is pounding in with
ruin, slaughter, and misery, — can discipline itself
without becoming Teutonized, — the sacrifice is
not too great. If the non-Germanic peoples can-
not learn the lesson sufficiently well, then the
Teuton must rule the world with "his old Ger-
man God." His boasted superiority will become
fact, destiny.

That is the momentous decision which is being
wrought out these days in Europe with blood and
tears — the relative importance to mankind of
discipline and liberty. The ideal is to have both,
as much of one as is consistent with the other.
In this country and in England may be seen the
evil of an individualism run into license — the
waste, the folly of it. And in Germany may be
seen the monstrous result of an idolatrous devo-
tion to the other ideal — the man-made machine
without a soul. Between the two lies the fairest
road into the future, and that road, with an un-
erring instinct, the Latin follows.

The German lesson is not the whole truth:
it is the poorer half of the truth. An undisciplined
world Is more In God's Image than a world from
which beauty, humanity, and chivalry have been

177

THE WORLD DECISION

exterminated. But discipline is the primal con-
dition of survival. Between these two poles,
between its body and its soul, mankind must
struggle as it has always struggled from the be-
ginning of time. . . .

When I looked on the sensitive, suffering faces
of Frenchwomen in their mourning, the wistful
eyes of crippled youths, the limp forms of wounded
men, the tense, bent figures of dirty poilus in
their muddy trenches, I knew that through their
souls and bodies was passing the full agony of
this struggle.

V

The Faith of the French

I DO not mean religious faith, although that
too has been evoked, reaffirmed by the
trials and griefs of the war, but I mean faith
in themselves, in their cause, in life. The un-
shakable faith of the French is the one most ex-
hilarating, abiding impression that the visitor
takes from France these days. It is so universal,
so pervasive, so contagious that he too becomes
irresistibly convinced, no matter how dark the
present may be, how many victories German
arms may win, that the ultimate triumph of the
cause is merely deferred.

There has never been the slightest panic in
France, not during the mobilization when white-
faced men and women realized that the dreaded
hour had struck, not even in those days of sus-
pense when the public began to realize that the
first reports of French victories in Alsace were
deceptive and that the enemy was almost at the
gates of Paris, A million or so people left the city
with the Government in order to escape the ex-
pected siege, but there was no panic, not even
among the wretched creatures driven from their
homes in the provinces before the blast of the
German cyclone.

179

THE WORLD DECISION

Ever since the battle of the Marne the tide of
confidence has been steadily rising, in spite of the
tedious disappointments of trench warfare, the
small gains of ground, the steady toll of lives, in
spite of reverses in Galicia and Poland and the
mistakes in the Dardanelles, in spite of English
sluggishness and Russian weakness. Each reverse
has been courageously accepted, analyzed, and
found not decisive, merely temporary. Victory
must come to the ones who can endure to the end,
and the French know now that they can endure.
"We can do it all alone, if we have to!" Again,
"The Germans know that they are beaten al-
ready: they know it in Berlin as well as we do."

This confidence is based on realities — first on
the success with which France has learned the
German lesson and completely reorganized her
life for the business of war. "We were not ready
last August — but we are now." Her machine is
growing stronger in spite of the daily waste of life,
while the German machine is weakening steadily.

The farther one gets into the military zone, the
more fervent and evident is this confidence, until
on the front it is an irresistible conviction that
inspires men and officers alike. Even a novice like
myself began to understand why the army is sure
of ultimate victory, and the longer one stays at
the front the more this faith of the French seems
justified. In the first place, they have so well got

1 80

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

that German lesson! The supply of shell and gun
is so abundant, also of fresh troops in reserve
thanks to "Papa" Joffre's frugality with human
lives ; the first, second, third lines — on ad infini-
tum to Paris — are so carefully fortified, so alertly
held against any "drive"! And the troops are so
fit! They have made themselves at home in their
new camping life behind the lines of dugouts and
caves; they have become gnomes, woodsmen,
cavemen, taking on the earth colors of the primi-
tive world to which they have been forced to re-
turn in order to free the soil of their country. Then
one sees the steady creeping forward of the front
itself, not much as it looks on a small-scale map,
but as the officers point out the blasted woods, or
the brow of a hill over which the trenches have
been slowly pushed metre by metre throughout
the interminable weeks of constant struggle, one
sees that gradually the French have got the
upper hand, the commanding positions in long
stretches of the trench wall. They are on the hills,
their artillery commands the level fields before
them. It is like the struggle between two titanic
wrestlers who have swayed back and forth over
the same ground so long that the spectator can
see no advance for either. But one wrestler knows
that the inches gained from his adversary count,
that the body in his grasp is growing weaker, that
the collapse will come soon — with a rush. He
cannot tell fully why he feels this superiority, but
he knows that his adversary is weakening.

i8i

THE WORLD DECISION

Perhaps a colonel on the front will tell you with
elation, — "We know that the Boches across the
way are discouraged, because our prisoners say
so, — we take prisoners more easily than we did,
— and they are all mixed up in their formations.
We know that they have to drive their men to the
job, that the lines about here are stripped as bare
as they dare keep them. There used to be a lot of
reserve troops behind their lines, but our aviators

say there are n't any in X any morel And

they are n't as free with their obus as they used to
be, and they are 'old nightingales,' not first qual-
ity." Perhaps the staff officers will smile, know-
ing that the enemy is massing his forces elsewhere
on the long front, but this trick of rapid change is
becoming harder to perform, and more exhaust-
ing. At any rate, the plain poilus in the front
trenches are instinctively sure: "We'll have 'em
now soon!" They have watched that grim gray
wall opposite so long that, like animals, they can
feel what is going on there on the other side.

At staff headquarters in a more contained, re-
served way there is the same air of vital confi-
dence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the
general asked me. "We are pumping good water
all over this sector into the front trenches, too.
. . . Oh, we are Hen installe! ... It may be an-
other year, two, perhaps more, but the end is cer-
tain. There is one man in the trenches, another

182

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

just behind in reserve, still another resting some-
where in the woods for his week off, and more, all
the men we want back in the depots !^^ And he
turns the talk to the good health of his men, their
fine spirit. For one of the human, lovable quali-
ties of the officers whom I met is that they prefer
to talk about the comfort, the morale, the esprit,
of their men to discussing "operations."

Just here I see where the French have risen
above the machine idea of the German lesson.
There is a something plus, over and above "prep-
aration," "organization," "efficiency," which the
Latin has and on which his confidence in ultimate
victory largely rests. That is his belief in the indi-
vidual, his reliance on the strength of the individ-
ual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the
all-important factor in the army : military force de-
pends ultimately upon the esprit of the individual
which creates the morale of the whole. Of course,
the army must be equipped in the modern way and
fought in the modern way with all the resources
of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor trans-
port, and heavy artillery. But without the full
devotion of the individual, without the coopera-
tion of his esprit, the army would be a dead ma-
chine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance
contest of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea,
which is absolutely opposed to the German
machine theory of war.

The German staff has done marvels with its
machine. It hurls armies over the map of Europe

183

THE WORLD DECISION

on Its splendid railways, with a perfected system
of organization. But it disregards the individual.
The men are merely so many fighting units, to
be kept sound and well and cured as rapidly as
possible when wounded In order to get them back
into the ranks. The regiments are often reorgan-
ized and combined with other units, German com-
panies even mixed In with Austrian units. They
are handled like pieces of a machine. Each Indi-
vidual, supposably having been "standardized,"
as we say In building. Is an Interchangeable bit
of mechanism, equally useful wherever placed.
But the human being cannot be used that way
with the best effects. He Is an Individual, he has
a soul. The results that can be got from him
beyond the surface result of massed force will
depend on whether that soul can be evoked to
Its full strength. All this the French know, and
their greatest source of confidence Is In the indi-
vidual Intelligence, Individual esprit of the mil-
lions of units, the morale with which they are
filled.

The French soldier Is not as exacting as the Eng-
lish or German soldier about his uniform. Give
him a little kepi to pull over his shock of black
hair and he feels himself In soldier dress. Blue
coat or gray, old red breeches or linen ones, he
does not care. Even on the front one sees the
most nondescript collection of uniforms. In strik-
ing contrast with the admirable feld grau uni-
form In which the German soldier Is equipped. A

184

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

French officer has stated the difference of Ideals
very clearly: —

"The external appearance, the uniform of the
soldier, have their importance, of course, but we
put far above them the moral worth of the soldier.
We excuse the torn coat, the untidy trousers, if
the heart is right. To make sure of that we get
close to the man. We do not burden him with
drill, but every day we question him, talk with
him. It's harder, takes more time, is a delicate
matter. Our control of the men does not depend
so much on the order or disorder of the knapsack

— it is wholly psychical. Our discipline is not so
much the relation of superior to inferior — it is
the common submission to necessary rules and
military orders. One must obey because one has
a conscience, a sense of duty, not from fear.
All our severity, our determination, lie in that —
to develop in the man his sense of duty, to exalt
his faith which will make him sacrifice himself
readily at the word of command. . . . Our method
gets better results than the drill method. We do
not have to drive the men into battle with a re-
volver in the hand."

With the Latin it is always the individual that
counts. Illustration of the results of the method
described — of cultivating the spirit of sacrifice

— has been given over and over again in the des-
perate trench fighting of the past year. A won-
derful collection of heroic tales could be made
from the daily newspapers, showing the qualities

i8s

THE WORLD DECISION

of initiative and devotion in the common soldier,
who in the Latin conception of the word remains a
human being with a soul. An officer remarked to
me, "We cannot have our men come from the
trenches glum and downcast — a Frenchman must
laugh and joke or something is wrong with him.
So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines,
and sports." Instead of more drill they give their
men " shows," so that they may laugh and forget
the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!

The civilian shines through every French sol-
dier — the civilian who is a human being like you
or me, with the same human needs. The officers
chat and joke familiarly with their men. Com-
radeship is substituted for tyranny. France,
one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still
takes the ideal of equality seriously. When I
asked an officer at Rheims why he had not had
a day's leave in ten months while English officers
went home on leave, he said, with a shrug, — •
"France is a republic: our men must get their
leaves first."

The machine system gives startling results —
in a short campaign. But when it comes to an
endurance contest, to the long, long strains of
trench warfare, something other than drill and
organization is necessary, something that will
rouse the human being to the last atom of effort
that he has in him. When men must stand up

1 86

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

to their waists in icy water, live in the inferno of
constant bombardment, not for hours and days,
but for weeks and months, something other than
discipline is needed to keep them sufficiently
alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly,
unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the
hell they have escaped, — not once, but twice,
three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism
in the individual soldier has been the triumph of
the Latin system.

The faith of the French rests justly on their
heroic resolution, their ability to endure as indi-
viduals, more than on the lesson learned of pre-
paration and organization.

Faith is a belief In the evidence of things un-
seen. French faith is of many kinds, not purely
material, not military. They believe so pro-
foundly in the perfect justice and high impor-
tance of their cause that it would seem as if they
counted upon the cause alone to win the victory.
No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better
cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unpre-
pared, which is the best evidence of peaceable
will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor peo-
ple, bleeding from the wounds of their own coun-
try, — what better cause for war could men
have? And the Latin intelligence of the French
enables them from the humblest to the highest
to perceive the universality of the principles for

187

THE WORLD DECISION

which they are called upon to die. It is no selfish,
not even a merely national, cause — it is the
cause of nothing less than humanity in which
they fight.

The philosopher Bergson expressed this sub-
lime confidence in the cause thus (I give the
substance of his words from memory): "Not all
wars can be avoided — perhaps nine out of ten
can. But this one, no! For it is a war of prin-
ciples. It will be a long war because the enemy
is strong and we were unprepared. But we can
wait the end confident in the result. The Ger-
mans have created a false belief, a wrong idea,
and have carried that idea into action with ex-
traordinary thoroughness. But the belief rests
upon error. When the day comes that they meet
reverses, when their idol of force no longer works
miracles for them, then they will collapse, from
within. There will be a general breakdown of
personality from realizing the falsity of their
idea. There lies our victory."

The philosopher's belief is based on the faith
that the principles of justice, of law, of humanity
are stronger, more enduring than any organiza-
tion of force no matter how efficient, for this is a
moral world. And the individual or nation who
relies upon might to enforce wrong must in the
end, perceiving the irrationality of his world,
collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-
breakingly slow, but the grist is as sure as life
itself.

1 88

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has ex-
pressed "The Moral Victory": "It is the noblest,
the highest of causes which has been submitted
to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justi-
fies the terrible extent of the drama and the im-
mense sacrifices it imposes. The material results
of victory will be immense, the moral results will
be even greater. . . . Moral forces are superior
to physical forces, and in spite of all they will
have the last word. . . . Our youth has gone to
the front in the serene conviction that it was
fighting not only for the patrie, but for humanity,
that this war was a sort of crusade, that they
could claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne
d'Arc."

It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous
martyrdom that I read on the faces of the black-
robed women in the street, too proud for tears;
in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffer-
ing without protest an agony too deep for words.
And when I encountered a file of soldiers in the
muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against
the earth walls to let me pass, carrying pails of
soup to the comrades up front, or sitting motion-
less beside their burrows along the trench wall,
their hands clasping their rifles, — dirty, grimed,
and bearded, — I saw the same thing in their tired
eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs in the
cause of humanity, in my cause, they were giving
their lives for others, for me, not merely that the
German might be driven from France, but that

189

THE WORLD DECISION

justice and honor and peace between men might
prevail in the world!

*

Because the French people are inspired with
the grandeur and the moral significance of their
cause, they cannot understand a certain cynical
attitude of mind, well illustrated by a former
Senator of the United States, who has been high
in the councils of the defunct Progressive Party.
After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he
remarked at a luncheon given him by some dis-
tinguished Frenchmen, — "Don't tell me about
the justice of your cause or about the atrocities.
I am not interested in that. What I want to
know is, who is going to win!" Who is going
to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The
barbarian mind cannot comprehend that the
winning Itself in a world cause is inextrica-
bly involved in the justice and worth of the
cause.

For the same reason the French people have
been puzzled by the sort of neutrality preached
and practiced at Washington since the outbreak
of the war. It is plain enough that neither France
nor England desires to have the United States
go to war with Germany. We can help them
better as a huge supply house than as an ally,
much as that might offend our vanity. The
French appreciate also our President's desire
to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-

190

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

loving people and know the frightful costs of
war. But they cannot understand a neutrality
that avoids committing itself upon a moral
issue such as was presented to the world in Bel-
gium, in the sinking of the Lusitania, And in
spite of the strict censorship, which for obvious
reasons has muzzled the French press in its com-
ment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occa-
sionally flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson
neutrality have appeared in print, as the follow-
ing from Hanotaux: "We should be wanting truly
in frankness toward our great sister republic if
we left her in the belief that this series of docu-
ments, of a tone particularly friendly and affec-
tionate, addressed to the German Government
after such acts as theirs, had not occasioned in
France a certain surprise. . . . Up to this time
the Allies, who have not, God be praised, com-
promised or even menaced the life of any neu-
tral, of any American, have not received the
twentieth part of these friendly terms that the
German Government has brought forth by its
implacable acts. . . . What the world awaits
from President Wilson is not merely a note, it is
a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does
the American Government, what does President
Wilson think of the German doctrine, — 'Ne-
cessity knows no law — the end justifies the
means'.^ . . . Every Government that acts or
speaks at the present hour decides the nature of
the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation

191

THE WORLD DECISION

of those eternal principles that are alone capable
of directing humanity toward its sacred end."

To our eternal shame as a nation our Govern-
ment has evaded, up to this hour, pronouncing
the expected verdict, has preferred to quibble and
define, in its vain attempt to hold the barbarian
to a "strict accountability" — whatever that
may mean. France does not want our army or
our navy, not even our money and our factories,
except on business terms, but she has looked in
vain for our affirmation as a nation of our belief
in her great cause, which should be our own
cause — the cause of all free peoples.

What a timid and verbal interpretation of
neutrality has prevented our Government from
affirming, the American people, let us be thank-
ful, have done generously, abundantly. They
have pronounced a not uncertain verdict, and they
have followed this moral verdict with countless
acts of sympathy. The cause of France, the faith
of the French, have roused the chivalry of the
best Americans. Our youths are fighting in the
trenches, our doctors and nurses are giving their
services, our money is helping to stanch the
wounds of France. As a people we too have
affirmed our faith in the cause and are doing gen^r
erously, spontaneously, as is our wont, what we
can to win that cause for the world. The splendid
hospital of the American Ambulance at Neuilly,

1^2

FAITH OF THE FRENCH

equipped and operated on the generous American
scale, is the real monument to the beliefs, the
hopes, the faith of the American people.

In that modification of the Anglo-Saxon tradi-
tion which America is fast evolving, there is a
subtle sympathy and likeness with the Latin,
which this crisis has brought into evidence. We
are less English than French in spirit, in our ideal
of culture, of life.

VI

I'he New France

THIS Is a return for a new departure!"
the Italian poet cried to his people at
Quarto when they were still hesitating
between the paths of a prudent neutrality and
intervention in the world decision. Probably in
the poet's thought there was more of concrete
ambition for "national aspirations" than of
spiritual rebirth. But for the French nation it
is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any mean-
ing. No material enlargement of France has ever
been seriously contemplated. The acquisition
of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and
whatever hopes of indemnity or other material
advantages the French may have permitted
themselves to dream of must fade as the financial
burden of all Europe mounts ever higher. Even
the recovery of Alsace, according to those best
able to judge, — in spite of German assertions,
— would never have roused France to an ag-
gressive war. Conquest, material growth, is not
an active principle in the French character.
How often I have heard this thought on French
lips, — "We want to be let alone, to be free to
live our lives as we think best, to develop our

194

THE NEW FRANCE

own institutions, — that is what we are fighting
fori" For forty years the nation has lived under
the fear of invasion, a black cloud always more
or less threatening on the frontier, and when the
day of mobilization came every Frenchman knew
instinctively what it meant — the long-expected
fight for national existence. And the hope that
sustains the people in their blackest moments is
the hope of ending the thing forever. "Our chil-
dren and our children's children will not have to
endure what we suflfer. It will be a better world
because of our sacrifice."

The conquest that France will achieve Is the
conquest of herself, and the fruits of that she
has already attained in a marvelous measure.
The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every
Frenchman and is aboundingly obvious to the
stranger visiting the country he once knew in
her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent
French people say to you, when you comment
on the fact, "But we were always really like this
at bottom, serious and moral and courageous,
only you did not see the real France." Pardon-
able pride! The French themselves did not know
it. As so often with Individual souls, it took the
fierce fire of prolonged trial to evoke the true
national character, to bring once more to the
surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to
brighten qualities that had become dim in the
petty occupations of prosperity.

After I had been in France a short time, noth-

195

THE WORLD DECISION

ing seemed falser to me than the pessimistic
assertions of certain German-Americans and
faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever
the outcome of the world war France was "done
for," "exhausted," "ruined," must sink to the
level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can
I believe the words of those saddened sympathiz-
ers and helpers in the ambulances and hospitals,
that "France is proudly bleeding to death."
Her wounds have been frightful, and through
them is still gushing much of the best blood of
the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous,
but not irreparable. Once a real peace achieved,
the triumph of the cause, and I venture to pre-
dict that France will give an astonishing spectacle
of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For
the New France is already a fact, not a faith.

Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult
to make concrete as with all spiritual quality.
It is not merely the solidarity of the nation, the
fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacri-
fice, which are qualities more or less true of all
the warring nations, especially of Germany. It
is more than the perpetual Sunday calm along
the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic
frivolity with which Paris — a small part of
Paris — entertained the world. It is not simply
that French people have become serious, silent,
determined, with set wills to endure and to win

196

THE NEW FRANCE

— for that moral tenacity may relax after the
crisis has passed. It is all these and much more
which I shall try to express that has revealed a
new France.

To start with some prosaic proofs of the new
life, I will take the liquor question, a test of social
vitality. It is significant to examine how the
different belligerent nations have treated this
problem, which becomes acute whenever it is
necessary to call upon all national reserves in a
crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany apparently
have no liquor problem; at least the war has not
called attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry
was notoriously cursed with drunkenness, eradi-
cated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase,
though, if persistent reports from the eastern
war region are true, her great reform has not yet
reached her officers. England has played feebly
with the question from the beginning when the
ravages of drink among the working population

— what every visitor to England had known —
became painfully evident to the Government
in its efforts to mobilize war industries and in-
crease production. Various minor restrictions
on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but
nothing that has reached to the roots of the mat-
ter — probably because of the powerful liquor
interest in Parliament as much as from the Eng-
lishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although
the direct handicap of drunken workmen did
not affect France as it did England, the French

197

THE WORLD DECISION

authorities quickly realized the indirect menace
of alcoholism and have taken real measures to
combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For
the army — and that includes practically all the
younger and abler men — the danger has been
minimized by the strict enforcement of regula-
tions as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature of
drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously
in all cafes and drinking-places and which are
carefully observed, as any one who tries to order
liquor in company with a man in uniform will
quickly find out! I never saw a soldier or an
officer in the least degree under the influence of
liquor while I was in France, either at the front
or outside the military zone, and very few work-
ingmen. Not content with the control of liquor
in the army, the French have seriously attacked
the whole problem, which in France centers in
the right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy, —
an ancient custom that in certain provinces has
resulted in great abuses. Legislation against the
houilleurs de crue is one inevitable outcome of the
awakened sense of social responsibility in France.
Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate
question, to which since the war the attention of
all serious-minded people has been drawn. The
French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an
elaborate series of investigations into the rela-
tions between the birth-rate and the consump-
tion of alcohol, which would seem to show that
there is cause and effect between the excessive

198

THE NEW FRANCE

use of alcohol and a declining birth-rate. This
will undoubtedly tend to create a popular senti-
ment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation,
specifically to abolishing the right to distill
spirits. But what is of more real significance is
the changing sentiment among the French in
favor of larger families. Due, no doubt, directly
to the necessities of a draining war, it is also an
expression of those deeper experiences that trial
has brought. The French have always prized
family life, and French family life is, perhaps,
the best type of the social bond that the world
knows. Under the stress of widespread bereave-
ment the French are realizing that the base of
the family is not love between the sexes, but the
existence of children. They want children, not
only to take the place of their men sacrificed,
but as symbols of that greater love for the race
that the war has evoked. Although the crudity of
the "war-bride" method of increasing the popu-
lation is not evident in France, every working-
girl wears the medallion of some "hero" on her
breast. Girls say frankly that they want chil-
dren. The Latin will never accept the German
principle of indiscriminate breeding. As in every
other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the
individual, the personal; but an awakened pa-
triotism and pride of race, a deepened sense of
the real values of life will lead to a greater de-
votion to the family ideal.

199

THE WORLD DECISION'

To shift to the political life of France, the
history of the republic has been tempestuous in
the past. There has been a succession of coups
d'etat, plots, and scandals. One political cause
celehre has followed another — the Boulanger,
the Dreyfus, and quite lately the Caillaux. The
wide publicity which these political scandals
have had is due partly to the Latin love of
excitement, also to the Latin frankness about
washing dirty political linen in public. To the
foreigner it has seemed strange that a republic
could endure with such abysses of intrigue and
personal corruption beneath its political life as
have been shown in the Panama and Dreyfus
scandals. The Germans probably have been mis-
led by them into considering the French nation
wholly despicable and degenerate. But France
has not only endured in spite of these rotten
spots, but her republicanism has grown stronger.
Americans experienced in their own sordid poli-
tics should understand how uncharacteristic of
the real citizenship of a democracy politicians
can be. The real France has never taken with
entire seriousness the machinations of "those
rats in the Chamber." These "rats" were quite
active during the first months of the war. Aside
from the incompetence of the first war minis-
try, which kept the public in ignorance of the
danger so completely that the enemy was at
Soissons before Paris was aware that the French
army was being driven back, and all the blunders

200

THE NEW FRANCE

of the raid into Alsace, France had its sinister
political menace in Joseph Caillaux, who it has
been rumored plotted a disgraceful peace with
Germany before the battle of the Marne. Cail-
laux, when his creature, the grafting paymaster-
general, was exposed, found it wise to go to South
America. An able and on the whole a competent
ministry was placed in power.

When Caillaux returned last spring, rumors
of legislative unrest and plotting against the
Joffre-Millerand control of the army began once
more. Outwardly it was an attempt of party
leaders in the Chamber to gain greater legislative
control of the conduct of the war, ostensibly for
the improvement of bureaucratic methods, as
in the sanitary service, which was notably defi-
cient. But beneath this agitation were the dan-
gerous forces of political France seeking to oust
JofFre, and there lay the menace that a political
clique might get control of the army. This agi-
tation, however, did not disturb the public. As
one Frenchman put it, "If those rats get too
active, Gallieni will take them out and shoot
them. France is behind the army, and the people
will not tolerate legislative interference with it."
The political unrest has at last resulted in a new
and larger cabinet, admittedly the most repre-
sentative body that France could have. The
danger of political interference has passed with-.
out resort to summary methods. It is a triumph
of democracy. France will fight the war to an.

201

THE WORLD DECISION

end under constitutional government, a much
more difficult task than Germany's. Obviously,
as may be seen in England, parliamentary gov-
ernment is a great hindrance to a nation in the
abnormal state of war. Free societies have this
handicap to contend with when they fight an
autocratic machine. To maintain her republican
government without scandals throughout the
war will be a political triumph for France, in-
dicative of the new spirit that has entered into the
nation. The seriousness of the present situation
has sobered all men and has suppressed the poli-
ticians by the mere weight of responsibility. The
New France emerging from the trial of war can
profit by this experience to purge her political
life of the scandalous elements in it.

Italy has closed her Parliament and relapsed
temporarily into autocracy. England and France
are struggling to maintain popular government
as we did through the Civil War.

* * *

Much has been said of the heroic spirit of the
French nation under the tragedy of the war. Too
much could not be said. The war has evoked pa-
triotism among all the peoples engaged, but with
the French there is a peculiar idealistic passion
of tenderness for the patrie which impresses
every observer who has had the good fortune to
see the nation at war. I shall not linger long on
these familiar, inspiring aspects of love for coun-

202

\ THE NEW FRANCE

try that the war has called forth from all classes.
The ideal spirit of French youth has been illus-
trated in some letters given to the public by the
novelist, Henry Bordeaux, called "Two He-
roes." They relate the personal experiences of
two youths, one twenty, the other twenty-one,
whose baptism of fire came in the battle of the
Marne. They grew old fast under the ordeal of
battle and of responsibility for the lives of their
men; their letters home show a loftiness of
spirit, a sense of self-forgetfulness, of devotion
to the cause, that is sublime, poignant — and
typical. In every rank of society the same im-
mense devotion, the same utter renouncement
of selfish thought can be felt. A spirit of ideal
sacrifice has spread throughout the nation,
making France proud, heroic, confident. Such a
spirit must be a benediction for generations to
come.

The common effort, the universal grief, has
drawn all French people so close together that
social and party differences have disappeared.
The French priest has become once more the
heroic leader of his people, fighting by their side
in the trenches. The scholars, the poets, the
artists have all done their part, — the nuns,
the aristocrats, the working-people theirs. While
England has been harassed with strikes and class
recriminations, France has never known in her
entire history such absolute social harmony and
unity, such universal and concentrated will.

203

I THE WORLD DECISION

This spirit of "sacred union" embraces the
women who are doing men's tasks, the rich who
are surrendering their good American securities
to the Government in exchange for national de-
fense bonds, the poor who are bringing their little
hordes of gold to the Bank of France to swell
the gold reserve. I wish that every American
might stand in the court of the Bank of France
and watch that file of women and old men de-
positing their gold — the only absolute security
against want they have! That is faith made
evident, and love.

In looking over the bulky file of French news-
papers, illustrated weeklies, and pamphlets on
the war, which I brought back with me, I am
struck by the fact that the outstanding charac-
teristic of all this comment on the great war
from journalist to statesman and publicist is
not denunciation of the barbarian. Denuncia-
tion plays a singularly small part in the French
reaction to their suffering. References to Ger-
mans and Germany are usually of a psycholog-
ical or humorous character, illustrating the gro-
tesque and antipathetic aspects in which the
Teuton presents himself to the Latin mind.
That part which grieving and denunciation have
played in English comment, the gross and apo-
plectic hate of the German press, is taken by
lyrical enthusiasm for heroism. The newspapers,

204

THE NEW FRANCE

sure pulse of popular appetite, are filled daily
with stories of sacrifice, gallantry, heroism. This
is the aspect of the sordid bloody war that the
French spirit feeds on. It is a fresh manifestation
of an old national trait — the love of chivalry.
Some day, doubtless, these splendid tales of In-
dividual heroism, of soldierly and civilian sacri-
fice, will be gathered together to make the laurel
wreath of the New France. I could fill a volume
with those I have read and heard. And I like to
think that while Germany went wild over the
torpedoing of the Lusltania, — even dared to cele-
brate it in America, — while the Zeppelin raids
arouse her patriotic enthusiasm, the French gloat
over the story of the private who crawled out
of the trench and hunted for two days with-
out food or water for his wounded officer. The
love of the heau geste is an ineradicable trait of
French character. It has had a bountiful satis-
faction In this war.

"We have fought a chivalrous war," General C.
exclaimed, pointing to the little figure of Jeanne
d'Arc. The same general ordered that the gov-
ernment dole of a franc and a half a day be paid
to those Alsatian women whose husbands were
fighting in the German army. "They are French
women: it is not their fault that their husbands
are fighting against France! "And the deathless
touch of all, which will be remembered in the
world long after the destruction wrought to the
cathedral of Rhelms, is the picture of French

205

THE WORLD DECISION

saving German wounded in the burning church —
fired by German shells!

The beau geste, the beautiful act, which en-
nobles all men, not merely the doer of the deed,
— that is what France is giving the world. The
image of men who are more than efficient and
strong and physically courageous, of men who
are filled with a divine spirit of sacrifice and
devotion. Truly supermen. .

Chivalry was a trait of the Old France as it
is of the New. It has fallen somewhat into dis-
repute of late years with the rise of the comfort
and efficiency standards. Nowhere else on the
broad battlefields of Europe has it revived, to
redeem the horror of war, so shiningly as in the
New France.

Another aspect of French character which is
both old and new is the quality of humorous
"sportsmanship" the French have displayed.
When Germany's crack aviator made a daily
visit to Paris, dropping bombs, in the afternoon
during the early weeks of the war, the Parisians
took his arrival as a spectacle and thronged the
boulevards to watch him and applaud. When
at last he was shot through the head, the French
press lamented his loss with genuine appreciation
of his nerve and his skill. A young cavalry officer
at the front told me this story: One of the younger
officers of his regiment, to encourage his men, had

206

THE NEW FRANCE

offered rewards for German shoulder straps, that
is, prisoners. Two simple peasants, misunder-
standing his words, proudly brought in a couple
of pairs of German ears strung on a string Uke
game. The ofhcer, brooding over the incident,
resolved to explain and apologize to the enemy.
Putting his handkerchief on the point of his
sword, he crawled out of the trench and ad-
vanced across the field of death between the
lines.

Tales from the trenches by the hundreds prove
that the French have not lost the sparkle of
wit even under the dreary conditions of trench-
lighting. When Italy joined the Allies, some
soldiers of a front-line trench hoisted the plac-
ard,— "Macaroni mit uns!" Again, when
boasting placards of German successes in Gallcia
were displayed, the French poilus retorted, —
"You lie. You have taken ten thousand officers
and ten millions of troops." When in a German
military prison the keepers boasted of their recent
successes on the western front, the French prison-
ers began to sing the Marseillaise to the astonish-
ment of their German guards, "because," as they
explained, "we know if you have killed all those
French soldiers, you must have lost at least four
times as many!"

The barbarian misread the Gallic love of wit
and laughter. To joke and quip seemed to him
beneath the dignity of men. It Is, rather, the
safety-valve of a highly intelligent people — the

207

THE WORLD DECISION

outlet for their ironic perceptions of life. The
most amusing songs of the war that I have heard
were given by the poilus on a little stage near
Commercy while the cannon thundered a few
miles away. This ability to turn upon himself
and see his life in a humorous light is an invalu-
able quality of the French soldier. So, too, is his
love of handicraft which finds many ingenious
expressions even in the trenches. The French
soldier is always a civilian, with a love of neatly
arranged gardens and terraces, and he lays out
a potager in the curve of a shell-swept hillside, or
a neat flower garden in the crumbled walls of a
village house. He makes rings from the alumi-
num found in German shell-caps, carves the
doorposts of his stone dugout, or likenesses of
his officers on beam-ends, as I saw in a colonel's
quarters in the Bois-le-Pretre.

The French soldier remains, even in this bloodi-
est of wars, always a civilian, a man, capable of
laughter and tears, of heroic heights, of chival-
rous sacrifices, — with the soul's image of what
manhood requires, with the vision of a state of
free individual men like himself.

The New France is inspired with qualities of
Old France, qualities which I call Latin, which
have emerged into high relief under grief and
suffering and effort. It is above all gallant and
high-minded. The wounded Frenchman never

208

THE NEW FRANCE

complains or whimpers. " C'est la guerre — que
voulez-vous !^^ To the surgeon who has operated
on him, — ^^Merci, mon major. ''^ And they lie
legless or armless, perhaps with running sores, a
smile on the face in answer to the sympathetic
word, in long hospital rows. . . .

The fundamental element in this New France
is the gravity, the seriousness of it. Of all the
warring peoples the French seem to realize most
clearly what it all means, what it is for, and the
deep import of the decision not merely to them,
but to the whole world. They are fighting, not
for territory, but for principles. Peace must be
not a rearrangement of maps, but of men's
ideas, of men's wills. They are the conscious
protagonists of a long tradition of ideals that
have once more been put in jeopardy. It is the
character of this human world of ours which they
are struggling to mould, and like actors in a Greek
tragedy they are suitably impressed with the
gravity of the issue in their hands.

The New France has been born in the travail
of the monstrous desolation of trench-land that
stretches, scabby with shell-holes, leprous with
gray wire, pitted with countless graves, scarred
with crumbled villages for four hundred miles
across the fair fields of la douce France. In this
savage desert, inhumanly silent except for the
shrieking of shells, for now more than a year's
time France has struggled with the incarnated
spirit of evil, rearing its head again, armed with

209

THE WORLD DECISION

all the enginery of modern science. The little,
dirty-bearded soldiers squat there in their bur-
rows, white-faced, tense, silent, waiting, watch-
ing, month after month, or plunge over their
walls to give their lives on that death-field out-
side. They are the simple martyrs of the New
France.

France has learned her German lesson; has
reorganized her life to make it tell effectively for
her task, has reorganized her inner life, discarding
frivolity and waste. She has found herself in the
lire. France is not "done for," as my German-
American friends so pityingly deem. Bleeding
from her terrible wounds, she is stronger to-day
than ever before, — stronger in will, in spirit, in
courage, the things that count in the long, long
run even in the winning of wars. Technically
minded soldiers may judge that "Germany can't
be beaten." But the French know in their souls
that she can be, that she is beaten to-day! In
this greatest of world's decisions it is the spirit of
the Latin that triumphs again — the sanest,
suavest, noblest tradition that the earth has ever
known, under which men may work out their
mysterious destiny.

PART THREE . . AMERICA

Part Three — America

I
. tVhat Does It Mean to Us?

I WENT from the French front back to Amer-
ica. The steamer sHpped down the Gironde
between green vineyards, past peaceful vil-
lages, a whole universe distant from that grim,
gray trench-land where the French army was
holding the invader in Titan grip, stole cautiously
into the Bay of Biscay at nightfall to escape
prowling submarines, and began to roll in the
Atlantic surges, part of those "three thousand
miles of cool sea- water" on which our President
so complacently relies as a nonconductor of war-
fare. I was homeward bound to America, the
land of Peace, after four months spent in "war-
ridden Europe" — to that homeland stranger
somehow than the war lands, where my coun-
trymen were protesting to both belligerents
and making money, manufacturing war supplies
and blowing up factories, talking "peace" and
"preparedness" in the same breath; also — and
God be thanked for that! — helping to feed the
starving Belgians, sending men, money, and
sympathy to the French. As the old steamer set-
tled into her fourteen-knot gait, the submarines

213

THE WORLD DECISION

ceased to be of more than conversational con-
cern, and I began to ask myself, — "What does
it all mean to us, this bloody sacrifice of world
war, — to us, strong, rich, peaceful, confident
Americans?"

For in spite of a curious Indifference among
many Americans to the outcome, so long as it did
not get us into trouble with either party, be-
trayed by personal letters and press articles
which I had received, I was profoundly convinced
that the issues of the world tragedy were momen-
tous to us too. "This European butchery means
nothing," said one friend, who supplies editorial
comment for a most widely read American
weekly, "except a lot of poverty, a lot of cripples,
and a lot of sodden hate in the hearts of the peo-
ple engaged. Europe will not be changed appre-
ciably as a result of the war!" Our pacifist ex-
Secretary of State, I remember, wrote Baron
d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring what the
French were fighting for, implying that to the rea-
sonable onlooker there was no clear issue involved
in the whole business, merely the passions of mis-
guided patriotism. The well-meaning agitation for
peace, which as I write has been lifted Into the
grotesque by the Ford peace ship, Is based largely
on this inability to realize the reality of the issue
between the belligerents. And there is our na-
tional attitude of strict neutrality, which fairly
represents the evasive mind of many Americans.
Happily, they seem to say to themselves, "This

214

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

war Is not our affair." We were warned by Wash-
ington to keep clear of European "quarrels," and
wisely we covered our retreat at The Hague by
inserting that little clause which relieved us from
all real responsibility for the observance of the
conventions. Excuse for cowardice and blindness
of vision! Such Americans like to think that as a
nation we have no more concern in the present
war than a peaceable family in one house has with
the domestic upheavals of an unfortunate family
in the next house. The part of prudence is to
ignore all evidences of unpleasantness, to profess
good offices, and to keep on friendly terms with
all the belligerents.

The impression that such an attitude makes on
the American in Europe is painful, whether it be
expressed in personal letters, in newspapers and
magazines, or in diplomatic "notes." He be-
comes impatient with the provincialism of his
own people, ashamed of their transparent selfish-
ness, astonished that human values should have
got so fatally distorted in our fat, comfortable
world. To the European, American neutrality
has become a matter of public indifference, of
private contempt. Inspired with the lofty ambi-
tion of playing the role of mediator in the world
war, President Wilson has lost his chance of in-
fluencing the decision toward which Europe is
bloodily fighting its way. At that great peace
conference which every European has perpetually
in mind, America will be ignored. Only those

215

THE WORLD DECISION

who have shared the bloody sacrifice — at least
have had the courage to declare their beliefs —
will penetrate its inner councils. We have had
our reward — money and safety. It is not fan-
tastic even to expect that the conquerors might
under certain circumstances say to the conquered,
"Take your losses from the Americans : they alone
have made money out of our common woe!"

No, ours has not been the heau geste as a na-
tion. Nor can the American take comfort in the
thought that Washington diplomacy does not
fairly represent the sentiment of our people. As
the weeks slip past, it is only too evident that our
President has interpreted exactly the national
will. The farther west one travels the colder
is the American heart, and duller the American
vision. The numerical center of the United
States is somewhere in the Mississippi Valley.
Europe gave Chicago, in her distress after the
great fire, eighty cents per person; Chicago has
given Belgium and France seven cents per Chi-
cagoan. Not a single Chicago bank appears on
the list of subscribers to the Anglo-French loan,
• — very few banks anywhere west of the Alle-
ghanies. "It is not our quarrel; we are not con-
cerned except to get our money for the goods we
sell them!"

But are we not concerned.? I asked myself as
the old steamer throbbed wheezily westward.

216

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Beneath the deck in the ship's strong room
there were thick bundles of American bonds,
millions of them, part of the big American mort-
gage that Europe has been obliged to sell back to
us. They represent European savings, hopes of
tranquil old age, girls' dots, boys' education and
start in life. The American mortgage is being
lifted rapidly. The stocks and bonds were going
home to pay for the heavy cargoes of foodstuffs
and ammunition and clothes which we had been
shipping to Europe. The savings of the thrifty
French were going to us, who were too rich
already. The French were bleeding their thrift
into our bulging pockets, selling their invest-
ments for shells and guns and barbed wire which
would not keep old age warm, marry their girls,
or start their boys in life. They were doing it
freely, proudly, for the salvation of their patrie^
which they love as the supreme part of them-
selves. And to us what did all this sacrifice mean ?
Oh, that we were growing richer day by day while
the war lasted; "dollar exchange" was coming
nearer; we were fast getting " rotten with money,"
as a genial young coal merchant who had the
deck chair next mine remarked affably. Yes, the
war meant that to us surely, — we were fast rak-
ing in most of the gold that Europe has been forced
to throw on the table of international finance, the
savings, the dots^ the stakes of her next genera-
tion. The number of lean-faced American busi-
ness men, war brokers, on the steamer was plain

217

THE WORLD DECISION

evidence of that. Already Prosperity was flood-
ing into America — that prosperity upon which
our President congratulated the country in his
Thanksgiving address.

But is that prosperity a good thing for the
American people just now.f* Aside from the specu-
lation excited by the superabundance of gold in
our banks, there is the envy of hungry Europe
to be reckoned with a few months or years hence,
after the close of the great war, an envy that
might readily be translated into predatory action
under certain circumstances, as some thoughtful
Americans are beginning to perceive. Eastern
America, where the war money has largely set-
tled, is already fearful, desires to arm the nation
to protect its prosperity. And there is the more
subtle, the more profound danger that this un-
digested war bloat of ours will dull the American
vision still further to the real issue at stake —
the kind of world we are willing, the kind of soul
we wish, to possess. Can we safely digest the
prosperity that the happy accident of our tem-
porary isolation and the prudent policies of our
Government have given us? Are we not feeding
a cancer that will take another war to cut from
our vitals.'*

Most of us on board were Americans going
about our businesses on a belligerent nation's
ship in defiance of Mr. Bryan's advice. The man

218

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

next to me was building a new munitions plant
for France, and beyond him was the European
manager for a large American corporation whose
factories have been taken over by the German
Government. He was returning to America to
enter the munitions business in Pittsburg of
Connecticut. To these commercial travelers of
war the European struggle meant, naturally,
first of all money, the opportunity of a lifetime
to make money quickly; it meant also less viv-
idly helping the Allies, who needed everything
they could get from us and were willing to pay
almost any price for it. Sometimes they talked
of the long list of "accidents" that were happen-
ing daily in American factories and genially
cursed the hyphenated Germans. As for the
other sort of Germans they felt vaguely that
some day America must reckon with them, too.
Evidently they put small faith in the "three
thousand miles of cool sea-water" as a noncon-
ductor of warfare! So here was another aspect
of the war — the possible dangers to us, without
a friend in the world, as every one agreed. And
we talked "preparedness" in the usual desultory
way. The munitions men seemed to think that
they were patriotically working for their own
country in getting "the plant" of war into be-
ing. "Some day we shall need guns and shells
tool" Afterwards I found in America that this
vague fear of probable enemies had seized hold
of the country quite generally, and that the very

219

THE WORLD DECISION

Government which had done nothing toward
settling the present war rightly was planning
for "defense" with a prodigal hand. Peaceful
America was getting alarmed — of what?

There were also in our number some young
doctors and nurses who were returning from the
hospitals in France for a little needed rest. They
were of those young Americans who are giving
themselves so generously for the cause, eager,
courageous, sympathetic. They seemed to me
to have gotten most from the war of all us Ameri-
cans, much more than the munitions men who
were making money so fast. In Belgium, in Ser-
bia, behind the French lines, in the great hospi-
tal at Neuilly, they had got comprehension and
all the priceless rewards of pure giving. They
had seen horror, suffering, and waste indescrib-
able; but they had seen heroism and devotion
and chivalry. And with them should be joined
all the tender-hearted and generous Americans
at home who have aided their efforts, who are
working with the energy of the American charac-
ter "for the cause." Alas, already the word was
coming of a relaxation in the generosities, the
devotions, the enthusiasms of these Americans.
Other interests were coming into our rapid activi-
ties to distract us from last year's sympathies. . . .

So as we rolled on through the soft summer
night while the passengers discussed the latest

220

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Russian reverse of which news had been received
by wireless, I kept asking myself, — "What does
it really mean to us? To vast, rich, young Amer-
ica?" Surely not merely more money, more
power, even a loftier inspiration for the few who
have given themselves generously in sympathy
and aid. After all, these were but incidental. The
threat we were beginning to feel to our own
security, this campaign for "preparedness," did
not seem of prime, moving importance. Probably
in our bewildered state of mind we should wran-
gle politically about the matter of how much
defense we needed, then drop some more hun-
dreds of millions into the bottomless pit of gov-
ernmental extravagance and waste. We had al-
ready spent enough to equip another Germany!
When peace was finally made in Europe, we would
forget our fears; our Congressmen and their
parasites would fatten on the new appropria-
tions, which would be as actually futile as all
their predecessors had been. No; these were
hardly the significant aspects of the war to us as
a people.

No more was that acrobatic exhibition of di-
plomatic tight-rope walking we had witnessed
from Washington. Mere "words, words, words,
professor!" Our dialectic President had thus far
failed to establish any one of his contentions,
either with Germany or Great Britain, nor did
it seem likely that he ever could. While he was
still modifying that awkward phrase, "strict

221

THE WORLD DECISION

accountability," Germany obviously would mur-
der whomsoever it suited her purpose to murder,
and England would hold up any ship that at-
tempted to trade with Germany. All those neu-
tral rights for which Washington was paying big
cable tolls had not been advanced an atom. The
time had gone by when our strong voice could
compel respect from the barbarian, could hearten
the soul of other weaker neutrals. Europe had
taken our exact measure. We should have saved
some dignity had we not murmured more than a
formal protest. . . .

And yet, returning from "war-ridden Europe"
I was more convinced than of anything else in
life that what was being slowly settled in that
grim trench-land over there did mean something
to us — more, much more than money or neutral
rights or sympathetic charities. Not that I was
apprehensive of an immediate German raid on
New York, the crumbling of her sky-scrapers
and the exaction of colossal indemnities. For
it looked to me that Germany might well have
other occupation after peace was made in Eu-
rope, whichever way the war should go. The
German peril did not lie, I thought, in her big
guns, her ships, her "Prussianized machine." It
lay deeper, in herself, in her image of the world.
If Germany could win even a partial victory
under that monstrous creed of applied material-
ism, illuminated as it had been with every sort
of cynical crime, with its reasoned defiance of

222

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

contract, its principle of "indispensable severi-
ties," its "military reasons," that must become
inexorably the law of the world — the barba-
rians' law. Germany would have made the mo-
rality of the world! And of all the world's peoples
to accept the victor's new reading of the com-
mandments, proud America would be the first.
For we cannot rjpist the fascination of success.
The German aim, the German tyranny over the
individual, the German morality — one for you
and me as individuals and another utterly law-
less one when we get together in a social state —
would be imitated more than the German lesson
of thoroughness in civil and military organiza-
tion. Hypnotized by German success, we should
not discipline ourselves, which is the German
lesson, so much as we should riot in the moral
license of the German creed. Americans would
worship at the altar of that queer "old German
god," who apparently encourages rape, murder,
arson, and tyranny in his followers. For in young
America, with every social tradition in its seeth-
ing blood, there is already an insidious tendency
to accept this new-old religion of triumphant
force. American "Big Business" can under-
stand the Kaiser's philosophy, can reverence his
"old German god" when he brings victory, more
than any other people outside of Germany. For
it, too, believes in "putting things over" with a
strong hand. There is not an argument of the
German militarist propaganda that would not

^23

THE WORLD DECISION

find a sympathetic echo somewhere in the head-
quarters of American corporations.

When the old fourteen-knot steamer finally
dropped anchor off quarantine in New York
Harbor and the reporters came on board with
the dust of America on their shoes, the roar of
America in their voices, I was surer than ever
that this greatest of world wars meant a vast deal
more to us than trade or charity or politics,
which is what we seem to be making of it for the
most part. It means the form which our national
character is to take ultimately. The German
peril, which is held before the public in moving
pictures and in alarmist appeals for "prepared-
ness," is already in our midst, not so much at
work blowing up our factories as insidiously at
work in our hearts. The German apologist —
even of Anglo-Saxon blood — is suggesting the
reasonableness of a German verdict. "After
all," one hears from his lips, "there is much on
the other side of the shield, which our English
prejudices have prevented us from seeing. Ger-
many cannot be the monster of barbarism that
she has been painted. As for broken treaties,
the atrocities, the submarines, the murder of
Edith Cavell, and her rough work over here, —
well, we must remember it is war, and the Rus-
sian Cossacks have not been saints! ... As to
her military autocracy, perhaps a little of it would

224

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

not be a bad thing for America. At any rate,
Germany seems to have the power — it is use-
less to think of putting her down. . . . The
American public will forget all about German
crimes once Germany is Victorious." "Nothing
succeeds like success." "There is always a rea-
son for success," etc. Which cynical acceptance
proves that we have already "committed adul-
tery in our hearts."

There are many voices in the air, too many.
Americans have not yet found themselves in this
crisis of world tragedy, and the Government at
Washington has not helped them to an under-
standing. We are vastly relieved at not finding
ourselves "involved" and accept shabby verbal
subterfuges as a triumph of American diplo-
macy. Meanwhile the Lusitania incident has
been conveniently forgotten, with the awkward
phrase "strictly accountable." Along the east-
ern seaboard the anxious and the timid are clam-
oring for "defense" — against what? The talk-
ative pacifists, who would make a grotesque
farce of the bloody sacrifice by a futile peace,
are bringing further ridicule and contempt on
their country with their impertinent if well-
meant efforts. Meantime, the money-makers
have taken this occasion to stage a spectacular
bull market, grumbling on the fruits of war!
And there is the "good-time" side to American
life. For a few brief months after the outbreak
of the war Americans were staggered by the

225

THE WORLD DECISION

awfulness of the tragedy and moved under Its
shadow. Their hearts went out in sympathy, in
feeding the dispossessed, and sending aid to
the wounded. We spent less on ourselves, partly
because of financial fear, partly because of our
desire to give, partly because our hearts were
too heavy to play. But already that serious mood
is passing, and to-day as a people we are hard at
it again, chasing a good time. We feel once more
the same old lustful urge to get and enjoy. . . .
The other night as I looked out on the peopled sea
of the New York opera-house, with its women
richly dressed and jeweled, its white-faced men,
leading the same life of easy prodigal expense,
of sensual gratification, I remembered another
opera staged in the mysterious twilight of Bay-
reuth where from the gloom emerged the hoarse
bass of Fafner's cry, — "I lie here possessing!"
The voice of the great worm proved to be the
voice of Germany. Is it ours also.'*

Do we Americans desire to have our world
Germanized.^ Not in art and language and cus-
toms, though may Heaven preserve us from that
fate also! But Germanized in soul.'* Do we want
the German image or the Latin image of the world
to prevail.'* And are we strong enough in our own
ideal to resist a "peaceful penetration" by tri-
umphant Germany into our minds and hearts?
That is the urgent matter for us. No amount

226

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

spent on big guns, superdreadnoughts, subma-
rines, and continental guards — no amount of
peace talk — can keep the German peril out of
America if we surrender our souls to her creed,
now that Germany seems to be imposing it suc-
cessfully with her armies in Europe. Those dirty
poilus in the front trenches are, indeed, fighting
our battle for us, if we did but know it!

II

'The Choice

WE have all sinned, your people as well
as mine, the English, the French, the
Germans, all, all of us, — but Germany
has sinned most." When M. Hanotaux spoke
these words with a Hebraic fervor of conviction, I
did not have to be told what he meant. The peo-
ple of our time have sinned through their hot de-
sire for material possession of the earth and its
riches — through commercialism, capitalism, call
it what you will. Each great nation has made
its selfish race for economic advancement at the
expense of other peoples : commercial rivalry has
largely begotten this bloody war, which is essen-
tially a predatory raid by one barbarous tribe
against the riches of its neighbors. Whether Eng-
land or Russia under similar circumstances would
have dared a similar attack on the liberties of the
world is open to speculation. To Germany alone,
however, has been reserved the distinction of
elevating greed and the lust of power to the dig-
nity of a philosophic system, a creed with the
religious sanction of that "old German god" to
smite the rivals of the Fatherland and take away
their wealth. It is because Germany has made a
consistent monster out of her materialistic inter-

228

THE CHOICE

pretation of modern science that she is now held
up before the nations of the world as a spectacle
and a warning. "We have all sinned " in believing
that the body is more than the spirit, that food
and pleasure and power are the primary ends
of all living; but Germany alone has had the
effrontery to justify her cynicism by conscious
theory and to teach it systematically to all her
people. She has endowed with life a philosophical
idea, given it the personality of her people, cre-
ated a national Frankenstein to be feared and
loathed. More, she is coming perilously nigh to
imposing her god upon the world!

We have all worshiped at the shrine of material
achievement — in America with the riot of young
strength. England, like old King Amfortas, is
now bleeding from the sins of her youth and call-
ing in vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from
their penalty. She has built her rich civilization
on a morass of exploited millions, and her Neme-
sis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions
strike and drink and feel no imperative urge to
give their lives for an England that sucked her
prosperity from their veins. In the race for com-
mercial supremacy the Latin nations — Italy,
Spain, and France — have been deemed inferior
to Germany, England, and the United States,
because they were less tainted with the lust of
possession, less materialistic in their reading of
life, less powerful in their grasp upon economic
opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin coun-

229

THE WORLD DECISION

tries industry yet remains largely on the small
scale, which is economically wasteful, but which
does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense
of the individual worker. The great corporation
designed for the rapid creation of wealth has not
found that congenial home on Latin soil which it
has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact ac-
counts for the touch of handicraft lingering in the
product of Latin industry, for the strength and
health individually of their working classes, for
their fervor of devotion to the national tradition.
The Latin has never forgotten the claims of the
individual life: democracy to him is more than
the right to vote. Therefore, pure art, pure sci-
ence, pure literature — also the world of ideas —
has a larger part in the life of Latin peoples than
with us in the eternal struggle with the material-
istic forces of life. To the Latin living is not
solely the gratification of the body. He reckons
on the intelligence and the spirit of man as well.

4c * *

It may seem to some that throughout these
pages I have spoken paradoxically of the world
war as primarily a struggle between the Latin
and the Germanic ideal, ignoring the significance
of Russia and of England. In spite of the heroic
resistance of the French and the pertinacious
thrust of the Italians against the steel wall in
which Austria has bound them, the Latin forces
engaged are obviously less than half of the Allied

230

THE CHOICE

Powers. On the sea England is virtually alone.
Nevertheless, I see the struggle as a Latin-Ger-
man one, the great decision as essentially a de-
cision between these two types of ideals. All else
is relative and accidental. Apart from the sur-
prising vitality developed by the two Latin peo-
ples, their astonishing force in the brutal struggle
for survival, — which has disagreeably put wrong
the calculations of their enemy, — it is the mental
and spiritual leadership of the world which is be-
ing fought for rather than the physical. The ideas
and the ideals under which the Allies are fighting,
which can be simply summed up however diver-
gent their manifestations, are French, are Latin
ideas and ideals, not English, not Russian. The
spirit of the cause to which England has lent her
imperial supremacy and Russia her undeveloped
strength is Latin, and since the war began the
English have widely borne testimony to this fact.
The right of peoples, little as well as strong
nations, to live their own lives, to preserve their
own political autonomy, to develop their own
traditions, is part of the Latin lesson learned in
the throes of the great Revolution. It is expressed
passionately, wistfully in that universal cry of the
French people: "We must end this thing — it
must never happen again — we must win the
right to live as we see fit, not under the dictation
of another!" To the Latin mind the world is
peopled by individuals who cannot and should
not be pressed in the same political or economic

231

THE WORLD DECISION

mould, who must win their individual salvation
by an individual struggle and evolution. This
is the ideal of liberty the world over, which
prompted France to send us help in our struggle
with England. It is a wasteful, an uneconomic
ideal, as we Americans have proved in our slov-
enly administration of our great inheritance. Yet
we would not have a machine-made, autocratic
organization, no matter how clean and thrifty and
efficient it might make our cities. We prefer the
slow process of conversion to the machine process
of coercion. And that is one source of our sym-
pathy with French civilization. Let us have all
liberty to its possible limit short of license: the
Latin intelligence has known how to preserve
liberty from becoming license. The result in the
human being of the principle of liberty is indi-
vidual intelligence and spiritual power; those are
the high ideals toward which democracy aims.
The cost of them is efficiency, organization —
immediate results which German discipline ob-
tains. But the cost of the German ideal is the
humanity of life, and that is too big a price to pay.
That there should be found many among us who
are willing to exchange the spiritual flower of our
civilization for the sake of a more efficient social
organization is evidence of the extent to which
the cancer of a materialistic commercialism has
already eaten into our life.

232

THE CHOICE

The Latin vision of life includes chivalry, as
has been abundantly revealed by the spirit of the
French, sorely tried in their struggle with the new
barbarian. Chivalry means beauty of conduct,
an uneconomic, a sentimental ideal, but without
which the life of man on this earth would be for-
lorn, lacking in dignity, in meaning. Take from
mankind the shadowy dream of himself implied
in his desire for a chivalrous world, and you leave
him a naked animal from the jungle, more despi-
cable the more skillful he becomes In gratifying his
lusts. The Latin vision of life Includes also beauty
of art, man's radiation of his inner spiritual
world, and closely woven with the love of art is
respect for tradition — reverence for the past
which has been bequeathed to him by his ances-
tors, which Is incorporated in his blood.

We in America have striven for these beauties
of chivalry, art, and tradition. We have striven
to put them into our lives often blindly, crudely.
We have borrowed and bought what we could
not create; instinctively we pay homage to what
is beyond our industrial power to make, confess-
ing the inadequacy of our materialism to satisfy
our souls. We, too, demand a world in which
beauty of conduct, beauty of manners, and
beauty of art shall be cultivated to give mean-
ing to our lives. The bombardment of Rheims,
the murder of Edith Cavell are as shameful to
the American mind as to the French, and as

233

THE WORLD DECISION .

incomprehensible. These are not matters of rea-
son, but of instinct — commands of the soul.

The Latin ideal is not predatory. Whatever
they may have done in their past, the Latin peo-
ples to-day are not greedy of conquest. If the
Allies win, France will gain little territory. Both
Italy and France have limited their territorial
ambitions to securing their future safety by es-
tablishing frontiers on natural barriers. France
also expects indemnity for her huge losses and
for outraged Belgium. She must rebuild her home
and be freed for generations to come from the
inhibiting fear of invasion. One does not feel
so confident of England: in the past she has had
the pilfering hand. But from prudence if not from
shame England may content herself with a re-
established prestige and a tranquil Europe. Rus-
sia has already reconciled herself to relinquish-
ing Poland, and except for her natural ambition
to enter the Mediterranean she seems without
predatory desires. Russia, it should not be for-
gotten, took up arms to protect her own kin from
the Austrians. The Slav and the Latin have a
spiritual sympathy that cannot exist between
the Latin and the Teuton, which gives their pres-
ent union more than an accidental significance.

Whatever secret ambitions may be brewing in
the chancelleries of Europe, France has put her-
self on record against conquest too emphatically

234

THE CHOICE

to countenance at the peace conference any pred-
atory rearrangement of the map of Europe. She
has made the great war a struggle of principle
— the principle of national liberty against the
principle of military conquest. It is this great
principle which gives significance to her cause
and justifies the awful slaughter and waste of
bleeding Europe. If the pretensions of physi-
cal might, no matter with what excuses, can be
thoroughly defeated, proved to be an impossible
theory of life, so that never again in the history
of the world will a nation attempt to take with
the sword what does not belong to it, the bloody
sacrifice will have been well worth making. The
issues of the great conflict have been obscured,
especially in America, but to the humblest soldier
of France they are as clear as blazing sunlight.
"Never again!" Never the monstrous pretension
that power alone makes right, that the will to
eat gives free license to the eater, however great
his appetite or his belief in himself. That is the
cause of all the world, for which the French are
willing to give all that they have. And I know
no cause more important to be settled for the
future of the human race.

Are we not interested in the right decision of
this cause.'' A peaceable people, loving our own
way, jealous of interference, we should assuredly
present a lamentable spectacle were we called upon

235

THE WORLD^ DECISION

to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy.
Possibly a more lamentable spectacle of ineffi-
ciency combined with corruption than England
has given the world the past year! And at last
we are becoming aware that our policy of selfish
isolation does not mean immunity from attack.
We are realizing that those "three thousand miles
of cool sea-water" no longer make an effectual
barrier against the ingenuity of modern men.

But I would not put the matter on the selfish
basis of our own security. It is vastly larger
than that. It is, vitally, what manner of world
we wish to have for ourselves and our children.
At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with
splendid unanimity the response: Americans did
not want the German world ! Since then, alas,
it would seem that the clear moral reaction of
our people to the demonstration of the world
struggle has been gradually weakening: we are
becoming confused, permitting insidious reason-
ers to cloud the issue, listening to the prompt-
ing of the beast in our own bellies, hesitating,
dividing, excusing, evading the great question
— "seeing both sides." As if there were two
sides to such a plain issue stripped of all its falla-
cies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have
American life take on the moral and intellectual
and artistic color of German ideals.'' Do we
prefer the "old German god" to the culture and
humanities we have inherited from the Latin
tradition? . . . "We, too, have sinned." In our

236

THE CHOICE

blood Is all the crude materialism of a trium-
phant Germany without her discipline and her
organization. We, too, are ready to enter the
fierce war of commercial rivalry with England
and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of
economic expansion, though dubious about our
own imperialism. Surely no people that ever
lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the cross-
roads as America at this hour. Prudence has pre-
vented us as a nation from pronouncing that
moral verdict on the cause which might have
had decisive weight in hastening the world deci-
sion. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent us
individually from realizing the immense impor-
tance to us of the decision that is being ground
out in the tears and blood of Europe. And no
ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Ameri-
cans who care for anything but their own selfish
well-being from doing all in their power to make
ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world.

Every soldier who dies in the trenches of France,
who bears a maimed and disfigured body through
life, is giving himself for us, so that we may
live in a world where individual rights and liber-
ties are respected, where beauty of conduct and
beauty of art may endure, where life means more
than the satisfaction of bodily appetites.

Ill

Peace

THE real cynics of the war are the paci-
fists. They see nothing more serious in
the European agony than what can be
disposed of easily at any time in a peace confer-
ence — by talk and adjustment. So obsessed
are some of them by the slaughter of men, by
the woe and travail of Europe, that they would
turn the immense sacrifice into a grotesque farce
by any sort of compromise — a peace that could
be no peace, merely the armistice for further
war. Their eyes are so blinded by the economic
waste of the war and its suffering that they are
incapable of seeing the great underlying principle
that must be decided. Americans, having evaded
the responsibility of pronouncing a decisive moral
judgment on the rape of Belgium, the sinking
of the Lusitania, and the extermination of the
Armenians, play the buff'oon with women's peace
conferences, peace ships, and endless impertinent
peace talk. We, who have forfeited our right to
sit at the peace conference, who are busily mak-
ing money off the war, having prudently kept
our own skins out of danger, are officiously ready
with proposals of peace. What a peace !^ The

238

PEACE

only peace that could be made to-day would be
a dastardly treason to every one of the millions
whose blood has watered Europe, to every woman
who has given a son or a father or a husband to
the settlement of the cause. The parochialism
of the American intelligence has never been more
humiliatingly displayed than in the activities of
our busy peacemakers.

No sane person believes in war. The sordid-
ness and the horror of war have never been so
fully revealed as during this past year. War has
been stripped of its every romantic feature. Mod-
ern war is worse than hell — it is pure insanity.
We do not need peace foundations, peace confer-
ences, peace ships to demonstrate the awfulness
of war. But crying peace, thinking peace, willing
peace will not bring peace unless conditions that
make peace exist. Here in America we use the
word peace too loosely, as If it meant some abso-
lute state of being which we had achieved through
our innate wisdom rather than from the happy
accident of our world position. But peace Is an
entirely relative term, as any one who has given
heed to the social conditions we have created
should realize. We have enjoyed a certain kind
of peace, the value of which is debatable. And
now, alarmed at the exposed condition of our
eastern seaboard, we are agitatedly preparing to
arm to protect ourselves — from what.^ From

239

THE WORLD DECISION

Germany? Or Is it from England? And still we
recommend an instant peace to Europe!

Awful as are the waste and suffering caused
by war, hideous as modern warfare is, there are
worse evils for humanity. To my thinking the
perpetuation of the lawless, materialistic creed
of the new Germany would be infinitely worse for
the world than any war could be. When the
German tide broke into Belgium and poured out
over northern France, sweeping all before it,
killing, burning, raping, the pacifists no doubt
would have accepted the conqueror as the will
of God and have made peace then ! . . . There are
none more eager for peace than the soldiers in
the trenches who are giving their lives to press
back the barbarian flood. But no peace until
their "work has been done, the cause won."
I have heard Americans express the fear that
European civilization^ is in danger of annihila-
tion from the prolonged conflict. Even that were
preferable to submission to the wrong ideal.
But I see, rather, the possibility of a higher civil-
ization through the settlement of fundamental
principles, the reaffirmation of necessary laws.
It is surely with this abiding faith that the enor-
mous sacrifices are being freely made by the al-
lied nations. "It is of little importance what
happens to us," a Frenchman said to me in
Rhelms, whose home had been destroyed that
morning, whose son had already been killed in
the trenches. "There will be a better world for

240

PEACE

the generations to come because of what we have
endured." That is what the American pacifist
cannot seem to understand — the necessity of
present sacrifice for a better future, the cost in
blood and agony of ultimate principles.

This war is leading us all back to the basic
commonplaces of thinking. Is life under any and
all conditions worth the having.'' Our reason
says not. It tells us that the diseased and the
weak-minded should not be permitted to breed,
that an anaemic existence under degenerating
influences is not worth calling life. We shudder in
our armchairs at the thought of "cannon food,'*
but why not shudder equally at the words
"factory food," "mine food," and "sweat-shop
food".? We are inclined to sentimentalize over
those brave lives that have been spent by the
hundreds of thousands on the battlefields of
France and Poland, but for the most part we
live placidly unconscious of the lives ground out
in industrial competition all about us. Between
the two methods of eating up, of maiming, of
suppressing human lives, the battle method may
be the more humane — I should prefer it for
myself, for my child. What our pacifists desire
is not so much peace as bloodlessness. We should
be honest enough to recognize that for many
human beings, — possibly a majority even in our
prosperous, war-free society, — a violent death

241

THE WORLD DECISION

may not be by any means the worst event. And
it may be the happiest if the individual is con-
vinced that the sacrifice of his existence will help
others to realize a better life. That is the hope,
the faith of every loyal soldier who dies for his
country, of every soldier's father and mother
who pays with a son for the endurance of those
ideals more precious than life itself.

The higher one rises in consciousness, the more
nearly free and self-determined life becomes,
the greater are the rewards of complete sac-
rifice. There are many who have "fallen on
the field of honor" whose lives, if lived out un-
der normal peace conditions, might have meant
much to themselves, possibly to humanity. They
have given themselves freely, without question,
for what seems to them of more importance than
life. Wounded, mutilated past all usefulness,
dying, they have not rebelled. Doctors and
nurses in the hospitals tell the story of their en-
durance without complaint of their bitter fate.
Much as we must feel the awful price which they
have felt obliged to pay, it is not sentimental to
say that the finer spirits among them have lived
more fully in the few crowded weeks of their strug-
gle than if they had been permitted to live out
their lives in all the gratifications of our comfort-
able civilization. Letters from them give an
extraordinary revelation of priceless qualities
gained by these soldiers through complete renun-
ciation and sacrifice. War, it must not be denied,

242

PEACE

is a great developer as well as a destroyer of life.
Nothing else, it would seem, in our present state
of evolution presses the cup of human experi-
ence so full of realization and understanding as
battle and death. The men who are paying for
their beliefs with their lives are living more in
moments and hours than we who escape the or-
deal can ever live. For life cannot be measured
by time or comfort or enjoyment. It is too subtle
for that! A supreme effort, even a supreme agony,
may have more real living worth than years of
"normal" existence. The youths whose graves
now dot so plentifully the pleasant fields of
France have drunk deeper than we can fathom of
the mystery of life.

As for the nation, that greater mother for
whose existence they have given their individual
lives, there is even less question of the benefit of
this war. We Americans are fond of measuring
loss and gain in figures: we reckon up the huge
war debts, the toll of killed and wounded, and
against this heavy account we set down — noth-
ing. It is all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the
crisis of their struggle, there is not a Frenchman
who will not admit the immense good that has
already come to his people, that will come in-
creasingly out of the bloody sacrifice. The war
has united all individuals, swept aside the trivial
and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The
French have discovered within their souls and
shown before the world qualities, unsuspected

243

THE WORLD DECISION

or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, serious-
ness, and they have renewed their famiHar vir-
tues of bravery and good humor and intelligence.
The French soldier, the French citizen, and the
French woman are to-day marvelously moulded
in the heroic type of their best tradition: in the
full sense of the word they are gallant — chival-
rous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price
too great to pay for such a resurrection of human
nobility ?

The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disci-
plines of peace." No one denies them. But how
can humanity be compelled to embrace these
disciplines of peace.'* The German lesson of thor-
oughness and social organization and responsibil-
ity was as necessary before the war as it is to-day,
but neither England nor France, neither Russia
nor our own America gave heed to it until the
terrible menace of extermination in this war
ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It
may be lamentable that humanity should still
be held so firmly in the grip of biologic law that
it must kill and be killed in order to save itself,
but there are things worse than death. Until
humanity learns the secret of self-discipline it
will create diseases that can be eradicated only
with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that
the insanity of war can be prevented by any
system of parliamenting, or litigation, or paper
schemes of international arbitration. Some is-
sues are of a primary importance, unarguable,

244

PEACE

fundamental. No man — and no nation — Is
worthy of life who Is not ready to lay it down In
their settlement. I know that some Americans
are still unable to perceive that any such funda-
mental principle Is at stake In Europe to-day.
Extraordinary as It seems to me I hear intelli-
gent men refer to the great war as if it were a local
quarrel of no real consequence to us. Even the
humblest poilu in the trenches, the simplest work-
ing-woman in France, know that they are giving
themselves not merely in the righteous cause of
self-defense, but In the world's cause In defense
of Its best tradition, Its highest Ideals. Their cause
is big enough to consecrate them.

Therefore a new, a larger, a more vital life has
already begun for invaded and unconquered
France! In order to reap the blessings of war, a
nation must have an irreproachable cause, and
aside from Belgium, France has the clearest rec-
ord of all the belligerents In this world war. She
will gain most from it, not in land or wealth, but
In honor and moral strength, in dignity and pride.
She Is ready to pay the great price for her soul.
This Is the one supreme Inspiration that the
French are giving an admiring world — their
readiness to give all rather than yield to the evil
that threatens them. With the light of such no-
bility In one's eyes, it Is difficult. Indeed, to be
patient with the cynical clamor of comfortable

245

THE WORLD DECISION

neutrals for peace at any price. If there is any-
thing of dignity and meaning in human life, it
lies in selfless devotion to beliefs, to principles;
it is readiness to sacrifice happiness, life, all, in
their defense.

And that is patriotism in its larger aspect. Our
intellectuals discuss coldly the primitive quality
of patriotism and its unexpected recrudescence
in this world war. They talk of it in the jargon
of social science as "group consciousness." Be-
fore I felt its fervor in the crisis of Italy's deci-
sion, in the sublime endurance of the French, I
did not realize what patriotism might mean. It
is not merely the instinctive love for the land of
birth, loyalty to the known and familiar. Much
more than that! The natal soil is but the symbol.
Patriotism is human loyalty to the deeper, better
part of one's own being, to the loves and the
ideals and the beliefs of one's race. It is the love
of family, of land, of tongue, of religion, of the
woman who bore you and of the woman you get
with child, of the God you reverence. It is loy-
alty to life as it has been poured into you by your
forefathers, to those ideals which your race has
conceived and given to the world. " Viva Italia .'"
*^ Five la France!^' is a prayer of the deepest,
purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman
can breathe. Without these subconscious devo-
tions and loyalties the human animal would be
a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those amor-
phous beings who, thanks to our modern econo-

246

PEACE

mic wealth, have become "citizens of the world,"
who wander physically and intellectually from
land to land, who taste of this and that without
incorporating any supreme devotion in their
blood, our cosmopolites and expatriates and in-
tellectuals, froth of a too comfortable existence,
give forth a hollow sound at the savage touch of
war. They become pacifists. They can see neither
good nor evil: all is a vague blur of "humanity."
Patriotism is the supreme loyalty to life of the
individual. Wherever this loyalty is instinctive,
vivid, there some precious tradition has been
bequeathed to a people that still burns in their
blood. Latin patriotism is ardent like man's one
great love for woman, ennobling the giver as well
as the loved one; it is tender like the son's love
for the mother, with the sanctity of acknowledg-
ment of the debt of life. Can any vision of "in-
ternationalism" take the place of these powerful
personal loyalties to racial ideals.'' . . . "Mere
boys led to the slaughter" is the sentimentality
one hears of the marching conscripts of European
armies. Better even so than the curse of no su-
preme allegiance, or devotion, or readiness to
sacrifice — than the aimless selfishness in which
our American youth are brought up!

For every boy in Europe knows, as soon as he
knows anything, that he owes one certain fixed
debt, and that is service to his country, to that

247

THE WORLD DECISION

larger whole that has given him the best part of
his own being. If need be, he owes it his life itself.
It is an obligation he must fulfill before all other
obligations, at no matter what inconvenience
or sacrifice to himself, unquestioningly, immedi-
ately. What takes the place for the American
youth of this primary obligation.^ Himself! He
is expensively nurtured, schooled, puv. forward
into life — for what.f* To help himself as best he
can at the general table of society. He can never
forget himself, subordinate his personal ambition
to any transcendent loyalty. He becomes from
his cradle the egotist.

To-day under the shadow of world war we are
taking thought of national protection, project-
ing schemes of defense including the enrollment
of citizens who may be called upon to fight for
their country. It is less important to teach our
youth the military lessons of self-protection than
it is to teach them the greater lesson of self-for-
getfulness, of devotion to a national ideal — so
that they may be ready to give their lives for that
national ideal as the youth of Europe have given
their lives to settle this world cause. Not a few
hundreds of thousands of national guards, then,
in order to secure ourselves from invasion are
what we need, but that every man or woman born
into the nation or adopting it as home should
be made to feel the obligation of national service.
It matters less what form that service should
take, whether purely military or partly military

248

PEACE

and partly social. It is the service, the sense of
obligation that counts for the individual and for
the nation. The responsibility of service teaches
the importance of ideas, the necessity of sacri-
fice. And he who is ready to sacrifice himself,
to forget himself and become absorbed in the
life that surrounds him, of which he is but an
infinltesi lal unit, to which he owes the best in
him, has already achieved a larger peace than
the pacifist dreams of.

Consider what happened to the youth of France
a little more than a year ago. Suddenly with no
preparation or warning they were called to de-
fend their country from invasion. It was no
longer possible to argue the rights of that diplo-
matic tangle into which European statesmen
had muddled. Whatever the ultimate truth, the
ultimate right of the controversy, the state —
that larger self which was their home, their
mesh of loves and interests and beliefs — de-
manded their service. The youth of France had
been brought up with the knowledge that any
day such a sacrifice might be required, with the
consciousness deeply rooted in their beings that
one of the necessary conditions of their living was
to give their all at the call of the state. They
conceived of no honorable alternative: it was as
inevitable to pay this obligation as it is for de-
cently minded citizens to pay their legal debts.

249

THE WORLD DECISION

They hurried to their mobilization posts, donned
uniforms and equipment, and were shipped away
in regiments to the front. Most of them did not
worry about the possibility of death, but acted
like all healthy human beings, ignoring what they
could not affect, caught up in the novelty and
the requirements of the new life. Yet deep in the
consciousness of the most careless must have lain
some thought that he might never return, that
the cross-marked grave on the hillside, the pit,
or the hospital might be waiting for him.

This consciousness that he can no longer dis-
pose of himself, at least for the finer spirit, must
act as a great release. Having accepted his fate,
and therefore willed it as the only possible choice
for him, he becomes another person, a largely
selfless person, a strangely older, calmer being
capable of thinking and acting clearly, nobly.
Once the great personal decision made, the re-
solve to forego life and happiness and personal
achievement, a clogging burden of selfish consid-
erations drop from within. So one can read the
experience of those two young officers preserved
in Henry Bordeaux's "Two Heroes." They were
free as never before to do what lay before them,
— their officers' duty, — simply, directly. Many
things that they had previously valued seemed
to have lost color, to have become trivial. They
thought solely of acquitting themselves with
honor in what it was their fate to do. They were
ready to obey because before death they were

250

PEACE

humble. They had begun to glimpse the blind
mystery that is life, in which every one must
needs act his part without questioning, with
faith in its ultimate meaning, with the will to
trust its end. They were brave because they were
simple and single-hearted, selfless. They were
strong because they disdained to be weak, having
renounced all. If it were to be their fate to die
unnoted, they were content with the satisfaction
of having done what was expected of them. And
if they died in glory, they were unaware of their
honor, believing that they had done no more
than any of their fellows would have done in the
same opportunity.

Thus, having laid down their lives for the
cause that commanded their faith and loyalty,
they found their real lives — larger, more beau-
tiful, stronger. . . . Not once, but many thou-
sands of times, has this miracle happened! Their
graves are strewn, singly and in groups, over
every field of eastern France. They paid the
debt, did their part little or great, unknown or
glorified by men. Literally they have given their
blood for the soil of their fathers' land.

We know that they have given much more
than their blood to that soil. Just as at the call to
arms, the selfish, the mean, the vicious qualities
of these lives dropped from them in the freedom
of sacrifice accepted, and in place of egotistic

251

THE WORLD DECISION

preoccupations rose once more to the surface
of their natures the ancient virtues of their race,
so in their going they left for the others who
lived, who were to be born, a tremendous legacy
of honor and noble responsibility. By watering
the soil with their blood they have made it in-
finitely more precious for every human being
that treads upon it. They have helped to make
mere life more significant for those who remain
to mourn them. It can never again be quite the
same commonplace affair, so lightly, cheaply
spent, as it had been before. They have not left
behind them joy, but faith. And that is why
the faces of the earnest living who are able to
realize this sacrifice of youth have a grave stern-
ness in them which touches even the most care-
less stranger. Something of the glory created by
the dead and the wounded radiates out even to us
in a distant, peaceful land. . . .

But why, we ask, all this sacrifice, this cruel,
agonizing sacrifice of war.^ That is a mystery
too deep for any to fathom. It is better not to
probe too insistently, to accept it as the man in
Rheims, — "It must be better for the others
afterward because of what we have endured."
That is the expression of faith in life which is the
better part of any religion. For what we suffer
now, for what we give now of our most precious,
it will be repaid to those who are to come. Life
will be freer, grander, more significant: it will be
a better world. Nobody who has seen or felt the

252

PEACE

heavy tragedy of this world war could endure its
horror if he were not sustained by that faith. But
with that faith the losses seem not too vast.
One by one the world's great decisions must be
made, in suflfering, in blood and tears. Peace
comes not through evasion or compromise, either
for the individual or for the state.

THE END

(2CbE RitoetpibE J^it0

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.

APR1A1984

Series 9482

3 1205 00589 4827

llSmuS^.i'^^/^^ LIBRARY FACILITY

AA 000 295 730