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L5«. 



BY OWEN WISTER 



Mother 
Lin McLban 

Thx VmOINIAN 

Lady Baltimobb 
Philosophy Four 
Padrb Ignacio 
/k Straight Dial 
Rid Min and Whiti 
Thi JiifMY John Boss 

MiMBIRS OF THI FAMILY 

yU. S. Grant, a Biography 

/Thi Pintioost of Calamity 

Thi Sivin Aqir of Washington 

journiy in slarch of christmas 

Thi Dragon of Wantliy: His Tail 

How Doth thi Simpub Sfiluno Bn 

indispbnsabub information for infants; or, 
Easy Entranob to Education 



OWEN WISTER 

Of the Ameriean AcftdBiuy of ArU and L«tters 

Uembre eomapoadMit de Ia SoddU de 0«ns de Lettna 

Boiioru7 Pellow of Um 'Bajal Bodetj of Litantnra 



JBtm 9prt 

THE IIACMILLAN COMPANY 
1922 
Att rigku T 



• : • • ' 



Copyright, 1922, 



By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set ttp and fMrintcd. Published August, 1922. 



PRZNTBD IN THl UNITBD STATES OF AMERICA 



TO THE MEMOBT OF M. C. W. 



The plight of France, the deed of Qermany, and 

the international destiny of the United States, are 
the main themes of this volume, which closes a series 
of three, begun with The Pentecost of Calamity, 
followed by A Straight Deal. 

Philadelphia, 
Decoration Bay, 1922. 



\ 



r 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PART FIRST 
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE HUN 

PAGE 

I. Faces and a Scar 3 

II. Victims Various 6 

III. The Fragments that Remain — 1 11 

IV. Life Flickering 22 

V. An Inn of the Soul 25 

VI. The Fragments that Remain — 2 42 

VII. Some Peace Conferences 72 

VIII. Le Petit Due 87 

IX. Kansas on an Island 97 

X. A Glimpse of the Poilu 109 

XI. Transfusion prom America 116 

XII. Ludendorff's Pocket 125 

XIII. The Great Shrine 136 

XIV. The Towers in the Night 151 

XV. Uplift 157 

XVI. Chemin de fer de l'Est 174 

XVII. Bar-le-Duc 190 

XVIII. Along the Sacred Way 197 

XIX. Where We Slept Well 217 

XX. The Cook and the Doughboy 227 

XXI. Last Lap to the Armistice 234 

XXII. Verdun 267 

ix 



X 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



XXIII. 

XXIV. 
XXV. 

XXVI. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 

XXIX. 
Appendix 

Appendix 



PART SECOND 
AFTER TWO YEARS 

PA6S 

Old Acquaintance 281 

Over the Spilled Milk 295 

By Their Fbttits 313 

MlLITABISTIC f 348 

Idlb» Well Off? 354 

The Bbain of One Dimension 397 

Can These Bones Live! 410 

A — The Supreme Council Differ About 
Upper Silesia 421 

B— FocH Speaks His Mind 435 



PART FIRST 
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE HUN 



NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 



PACES AND A SCAB 

we went along the straight Toad, I began to see 
what was not there, while what was there dissolved 
slowly away from my open eyes. The April night, 
fnll of sonnds and storm, had dropped upon the hills 
one last thin veil of snow, and this still stretched its 
gleamy film over their ridges. Below, it was gone 
from the wide flat lands, where blossoms expanded 
beneath the sun of the April day. These came by 
like white clouds caught in the twigs of the fruit 
trees. Along the road as we went, they showed above 
the tops of the high French walls, they shone mistily 
across the flat French distance. Among the taller 
trees, in the heights of the poplars and the willows, 
hung like a breath the faintly tinted web that be- 
tokened sap stirring, life awakening, leaves invisible 
but soon to come. Every early delicate hue of field 
and garden and wood beamed through skein upon 
skein of weaving exhalations. On either side the 
constantly straight road, I watched between the 
trunks of the poplars acres upon acres, where wet 
new grass glinted, brooks ran full, and far-off tufts 
of spring color, like puffs of smoke, seemed enmeshed 
in the tangle of the copses. 

8 



4 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

How unlike was this to England, the England I 
had just seen I Tes, but one strange, deep likeness 
there was. I had not walked for five minutes in Eng- 
land after setting foot on shore — ^I had not walked 
for two— before I was aware of the changed English 
face. Once aware of it, it was something I should 
never forget. In the trains, in the streets, in the 
houses, in the churches — especially in the churches — 
you could read that the English face had looked upon 
something, and was changed. When they were talk- 
ing, even when they were laughing, it did not quite go, 
this change in look; and it always wholly returned. 
Soldiers had it, and civilians, men and women; 
not all the children, but even some of them. It 
corresponded to nothing that they ever said. Their 
talk was usual, cheerful, they referred to sad things 
lightly, and they joked and enjoyed your joke. The 
one thing that they never said was the thing which 
their faces said for them. Did they know this? 
Could I ask themt Never. People of old that saw 
Medusa's head were turned to stone. I thought of 
this myth and its marvellous symbol often in the first 
days; but it was not Medusa's head that had been 
looked upon. The English were farther away from 
being stone than ever I had seen them. Turn to old 
photographs of Northerners and Southerners in our 
Civil War, and in the faces of those dedicated boys, 
and of their fathers and mothers, you will find the 
counterpart of what I saw in the English face. Com- 
pared with those of our Civil War, the general Amer- 
ican face of today is an empty countenance. Then, 
on coming from England to France, the same thing 
had been visible at once. Those who examined our 
passports on the quay, those who opened our bag- 



FACES AND A SCAR 5 

gage, the porters who then carried it, the woman 
from whom I bought coffee and bread at the station, 
and the woman at the bookstall on the platform — ^in 
the faces of them all, whether they talked, smiled, or 
were silent, was what I had seen in England, what 
I had not seen at home. The Parisians had it, too, in 
the hotels, the shops, the cafes. I ceased to see the 
kilometre stones as we passed them on this April 
forenoon, or the blossoms, or the fields ; my memory 
showed me only the French faces, of women or of 
men, belonging to every class. The look they wore 
was like a sort of language which did not need to be 
spoken, which needed no translation. It was a com- 
mon language to both French and English, and they 
all understood it. 

Suddenly, in the green field by which we were pass- 
ing on that long straight road, an object broke my 
reverie. It was a charred, half-roasted aeroplane, 
lying there like a great dead black bat. It was a 
symbol, like Medusa ^s head. The Huns had never 
been able to walk as near Paris as this, but they had 
sailed here through the air, dropping flames and 
death during four hideous years. To my fancy now, 
as we went along that straight highway, the trees 
with their blossoms, the hills with their snow, the flat 
country veiled with the tender heralding hues of 
spring, all nature, seemed to wear the look of the 
English and French faces. 



n 



VICTIMS VABIOUS 



Again for a while I watched it, this avenue between 
the high poplars, broad where we were, narrowing to 
a line far ahead in the April haze. There was no 
breeze. The air lay limp after the night's long tur- 
bulence, but our speed brought a sharp wind against 
the face. I watched the houses and villages. La 
Chapelle-en-Serval came and was gone, and Pont- 
arme ; after which we went through some lean woods. 
These were empty, so were the fields, so was 
everything. France was here — ^but where were the 
French? That crumpled aeroplane, far behind us 
now, gave the answer. It, was rare to see man or 
woman dotting the flat spaces. So little motion of 
human beings there was, that each occurrence of it 
caught the eye. Even the village streets stared 
somewhat blankly because they were so nearly bare 
of people. Paris streets had swarmed. Every pave- 
ment had been a jungle of men and women. The 
crowd seemed to obscure the very architecture. One 
stood a long while waiting for a vacant seat to dine, 
and the trains underground were congested thick 
with passengers. There, in Paris, one had met 
the aeroplane in various symbolic guises. By 
the window in the bank where I got my money, stood 
a young messenger with one eye sunk in blankness, 
and black gloves upon his artificial hands. Walking 
about in the room, or seated, were figures with 

6 



VICTIMS VARIOUS 7 

crutches, and empty sleeves, and limping mechanical 
gaits. Nothing had seemed the matter with the 
smiling fellow who answered my bell, took my clothes, 
knocked on my door at the appointed hour, until his 
charming cheerfulness and succulent pronunciation 
led me one day to say : 

**You're from the South, I can hear if 

**Yes, monsieur. From Toulouse. Monsieur 
should make us a visit. It is not France here, we 
are more amiable than these Parisians. Paris is not 
amiable." 

**You^re very far from home." 

**Yes, indeed, monsieur. One must do what one 
can. Oh, I shall go back. ' ' 

Then I learned of his three wounds and that one of 
these was still a living pain. But as the days passed 
this pain was growing less, he was going to be quite 
well and strong. He told me, too, that once for 
twenty-four hours he had been buried with some 
comrades by the bursting of a shell. "We thought 
that was the finish, but they dug us out in time. I 
shall be able to do heavier work as soon as this gets 
all right ^ ^ — ^and he touched his body lightly. If in his 
valiant smiling spirit there was a sore spot, he never 
revealed it. 

In Paris, it needed but to fall into friendly talk like 
this with almost any man at aU, except the very old, 
and you learned that he had paid his toll of blood. 
He had paid it in nineteen-fourteen, or fifteen, or 
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen — ^sometimes in several of 
these years ; and often he had brothers who had paid 
the final toll. Now and then his women had paid 
women's toll, and not infrequently his house and 
village, like his brothers, were come to dust. To you 



8 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

who read this, how can I impart what hearing it was 
like, face to face with those who had lived what they 
told? It can not be done. I can not make yon hear 
them any more that I can make yon see that cmmpled 
aeroplane, lying like a scar on the clean fields. It 
was the first broken refuse, the first dead ember of 
war that I met; and all the monnds and miles of 
extinction that I was presently to look at and remem- 
ber for ever, have not obliterated this stark evil 
image, this plague-spot upon the face of spring. 

Senlis came and went. War signs were here more 
plentiful, yet not enough to jog me back to the sights 
of the road. We passed Villeneuve-sur-Verberie. 
These names I heard, and for a moment saw the 
places, but remember nothing of their aspect. I was 
travelling forty-nine years away ; I was sailing up the 
Rhine that day in 1870 when that war began ; I was 
seeing Bismarck ^s locomotives puffing by, linked for 
mobilization ; I was hearing that hysterical shout of 
false alarm from a man in the skiff on the river : 

**Die Franzosen sind zu Bingen!'' 

Thus this frightened German had raved as he stood 
swinging his arms in the middle of the Rhine to warn 
our steamer back. It had raised amongst the pas- 
sengers a flutter and a suspense, all pleasure to me. 
The events that followed upon this day during many 
months had been all pleasure to me, because I under- 
stood the significance of none of them: our boat^s 
unhindered voyage up the Rhine, near which, in that 
war, no French ever came ; our stay at Mainz ; our 
thwarted plan for Oberammergau ; our flight from 
Munich to Lindau upon a long, crowded train of 
travellers likewise seeking in haste a neutral country ; 
our crossing of the lake to Romanshorn ; then Switz- 



VICTIMS VARIOUS 9 

erland; and soon for me the boarding-school of 
Hof wyl, near Berne. Of less importance to me then 
than my studies and my home-sickness was the public 
news. Older people spoke of Gravelotte and Sedan. 
I did not then connect these names with Bismarck's 
locomotives. Those were a picture, while names of 
distant battles and surrenders had no reality for me. 
Eeality of the locomotive sort came next with another 
set of pictures at that Hof wyl school. Our long stone 
house wherein we both lived and studied faced west, 
and the setting sim bUnked upon it through a grove 
of trees. Eastward at our back the open land sloped 
slowly down for about a mile to a lake, itself about a 
mile long and half as wide. Flanking our right was 
the gymnasium in a big sort of granary, slightly in 
advance of the front line of the house. In this I 
know not how many French soldiers came to be 
barracked. They had fled across the border, from 
Belfort if I remember, into Switzerland, and here 
they had been interned. They were drilled each day. 
They used to be drawn up in front of the granary, and 
we would go and watch them and hear them answer 
to the roll-caU. Their faces were grave, unhappy, 
little washed, little shaved, their uniforms dingy, 
their voices, as they responded, rather wild and 
strange. They were a little piece of the rags of 
Napoleon III 's Empire. Bismarck 's locomotives had 
torn it and these lives to shreds — ^though this I took 
in not then, but long after. What I then took in was 
just the pictures, the daily scenes : the white snow, 
the black trees, the red sparks of setting sun ; the long 
gaunt lines of the schoolhouse and granary ; we boys 
in our uniforms staring at the drill; the dingy 
unhappy interned, their hairy faces, their strange 



10 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

voices, their winter breath; and then, one day, we 
boys ninning to the east side of the house, where we 
watched one of the interned French trying to escape. 
He was a dot on the frozen lake, other dots were on 
the land, and puffs of smoke behind him came from 
the gmis, as he struggled to get away— and he did not 
succeed. You may say that Bismarck's locomotives 
caught him, after all. 

Well, weU. Thus near the beginning of my days 
and thus again near their end, I had seen the symbols 
of Germany's murdering, mangling plunge: puflSng 
engines, victorious then, the bones of a wrecked 
aeroplane just now. A Germany truculent, but as 
yet unpoisoned in 1870, a malign, putrescent Germany 
this time. Was she now cured of her evil dream f 
Was the world henceforth to be able to breathe 
naturally! I saw a stream and a broken bridge ; by 
the side of this we crossed a make-shift bridge, got 
out for a noon meal, and after it set forth back across 
the river to walk in the streets of the town. 



m 

THE FBAOMENTS THAT BBMAIK — ^1 

How suddenly it came! What must the noise of 
shells bet On the ninth day of the siege of Verdim 
I have been told that almost every soldier was crying. 
That is what noise can do. During four months 
there — ^f our months, one hundred and twenty change- 
less days — ^ten thousand shells each day— eight-inch 
shells and upward — fell upon the Verdun fortresses, 
Vaux and Douamont. One hundred and eleven days 
of this shattering noise were still ahead of those 
French soldiers who were crying on the ninth day — 
still ahead, that is, for such as lived it out. I stared 
at the mute wreck which the shells had made in 
Compi^gne. Since November war had been silenced, 
noise was dead, the deafening years that France had 
heard, and through which she had been able to keep 
her heart undaunted and her head clear, were behind 
her, while before her was — ^whatt In the death of 
noise silence was bom. This silence I had begun to 
enter on the way from Paris ; here at Compi^gne it 
deepened. I felt it deepening as you feel the change 
when the thermometer is falling. In the days that 
were to follow I waked and slept and lived in this 
huge silence that spread everywhere, cloaked the 
country and the towns, enveloped trees and ruins and 
people and houses and graves and trenches and 
barbed wire, and was like an element. As fish swim 
in the sea, so did we move in this silence. 

11 



12 NEIGHBORS- HENCEFORTH 

Something, some intimation, had impelled my 
friend and me to separate and walk apart. Each of 
ns saw Compiegne alone, and met again after the first 
experience was over. We did not say much about it. 
All the large joys, loves, griefs, horrors, amazements, 
lie outside the realm of speech : the man who makes 
words in their presence lives too close to himself for 
true understanding or sharing. The hand of the 
Hun had been laid upon Compiegne, and Compiegne 
was withered. Its blight was not complete. All its 
inhabitants were not dead or gone away, all the 
houses were not gutted, life stirred in the streets, 
goods and wares were for sale in some shop windows, 
the French soldier, bright in his blue, starred the pre- 
vailing darkness of civilian garments : — ^but then you 
turned some corner and all this was ended. Ruin like 
a barrier stopped you. Through gaping windows 
you looked beyond to more gaping windows, it was 
dangerous to climb and peer, signs warned you off, 
and decency bade you avert ^our eyes. One turned 
away from peeping through this keyhole at naked, 
slaughtered France. 

People at home have often asked : 

**But when you had seen Compiegne, had you not 
seen everything f Is not one ruin just like another t ' ' 

One ruin in a Sunday paper is like another and you 
look at it spread upon your lap. Mile upon mile of 
ruin in France, travelled over, paused at, dwelt on, 
compared, its particular story listened to — ^this has 
no monotony, this fills your knowledge fuller and ever 
more f uU each day ; compared to Sunday papers, it is 
like seeing Niagara, the Rocky Mountains, the Grand 
Canon, after looking at a map of the United States. 

Compiegne was now behind us, and to our right the 






THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 13 

Oise, brimful, pouring swiftly along, as we went on 
the road to the town of Noyon. That was twenty 
kilometres ahead. The words in my diary of this 
unearthly stretch are few and almost illegible, 
scrawled at the finish, in Noyon. 

Very abrupt in France are the transitions from 
ground and dwellings untouched by shells to fields 
that are all gashed and houses that are mere scorched 
husks. The houses here were worse than the fields. 
The comparison seems desecrating, yet I know of 
none better than to say that every house along this 
road was like a painted house in a play. As each 
came into view you thought, * ^ This one is all right. ' ' 
In the next instant the illusion was blasted. Distant 
walls and chimneys of pomp, suggesting grand pianos 
and family portraits within, turned out as we passed 
them close to be stark, roofless shelters of the void, 
hollow squares enclosing charred beams, rank weeds, 
and twisted iron. From haughtiest to humblest, all 
were dead. 

**0f 1914, that one,^' explained our chauffeur. It 
had evidently been a residence of comfort. 

How did he know the year when its ruin was 
wrought f Had he been there f 

^ * No, monsieur. One knows easily from the moss 
and vines. Those have been growing already a long 
while without any disturbance. ^ ^ 

It was real yet unreal. The sense of the theatre 
haunted the whole of these twenty unearthly kilo- 
metres that first day between Compiegne and Noyon. 
Later, as one *s initiation deepened and grew steeped 
in the terrific until the terrific became the usual,itwas 
then that the usual itself began to look far off and 
unreal. All the way to Noyon, the invariable repeti- 



14 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

tion of ruin failed to stop appearances from deceiving 
me. A little farm would come in sight, its walls 
looking so solid and the tall trees about it so serene, 
that I would exclaim : 

^^At least these people have their home safe I'' 

A few seconds more and we were passing another 
husk, and where were the people whose home the husk 
had beenf Yet still I continued to watch for an 
exception along this road, all the way to Noyon. 

Here the silence let down another veil between 
us and the natural world. Bain was now falling. 
Through it I saw what was neighboring to Noyon — 
barbed wire, trenches under a hUl topped by a ruined 
wood, shell holes, dead trees, ruins of brick, gas-tank 
ruins; and amid all this various death, the dingy 
green forms of German prisoners, and the constant 
sound of explosions in the fields. The prisoners 
were at work all round Noyon, setting off bombs by 
wire, and pillars of smoke rose slowly upward in the 
rain. 

^^They are victims, too," I said to the chauffeur. 

*^Yes, monsieur." 

Victims they were, and their plight was bad, 
though it was as nothing beside the plight of France, 
their victim. While their chance lasted they had 
done to her all that I was seeing and to see, and they 
would be doing it still, had their tide not turned. 

They were at work in Noyon as well as around it. 
Here were no shops, every house I saw was dead, 
many fallen walls piled the streets high, there was no 
passing, not even any walking, save in the few cleared 
spaces. Limips lay about, lumps made of houses 
burst and spattered over their crushed gardens ; roofs 
belonging nowhere, yet still almost whole, tilted like 



THE FBAGMENTS THAT BEMAIN 15 

kites tumbled from the air. Doorways stood alone, 
leading to vacancy. Cellars yawned wide. Into 
these fell the rain and in some of them people seemed 
to be living. Walls still erect masked dislocated 
interiors, and the placard Verifie was on several. 
This meant that the interior had been visited and that 
nothing there would fall upon you or explode, should 
you choose it for a lodging. Older placards were 
upon other walls, announcing Cave abri 50 personnes, 
which meant that fifty could hide down in there when 
bombs were falling upon Noyon. I had seen beauty 
lying dead at Compiegne, arches, pillars, carved 
stones. More was here. The church was a shambles 
of murdered architecture. Black, cawing birds 
sailed and slanted in and out of its windows. Its 
tower |tood, and its outer walls, but within its dis- 
membSred entrance everything had been struck by 
the blow of hate and toppled in one mass of broken 
aisle and choir and crucifix and tomb. Through the 
shrivelled dial of its clock on the tower a shell had 
made its way. They had done to it the worst they 
could ; yet its beauty was not all killed. What of it 
was left stood there, ancient, serene, sanctified by 
centuries of human souls at prayer, still delivering 
to Noyon its message of love divine. From its steps 
I looked across at the wreck of a sweet old house, 
beautiful even in its fragments ; above the shattered 
wall of what had been the garden, a little fruit tree 
lifted its head. Amid the aching stillness, the crum- 
bling, the death, it stood up^ alive and growing. Its 
cluster of pink buds would be blossoms by tomorrow. 
The sight of it, so fresh, so young, so futile, was very 
pitiful. A verse from Exodus came to me unsought : 
''Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off 



16 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is lioly 
ground. ' ' 

Between me and the little blossoming fruit tree, 
three women veiled and in black walked into sight. 
They stopped at the foot of the church steps. After 
a short silence, two of them went on slowly, whilst the 
third, who remained, fixed her grave eyes upon me, 

I came down the steps with my hat in my hand. 

** Madame,^' I said, **this is my first day among all 
this.'' 

"Yes, monsieur, one must get used to it. I was 
from Noyon. I live at Nevers now. ' ' 

* ^ Nevers is a long way from Noyon, madame. ' ' 

"Others have gone farther. I am here today to 
look for my house. ' ' 

She turned away from the steps of the church. In 
a little while, as I walked back to where our car was 
waiting, I saw her with her companions in a street 
impassable except by climbing over the stones of 
toppled residences. The three black figures were 
pointing out and consulting amid a waste of feature- 
less debris, the rain streaming heavily down upon 
them. 

Throughout this day each aspect that April can 
wear had its turn. Nothing of the snow veil, or the 
gleam, or the hazy gentleness of the forenoon accom- 
panied our journey from Noyon to Roye. The sky 
bulged low with swollen, restless clouds. We passed 
the kilometre stones in a pelting shower sometimes, 
and sometimes in the grey of a light that betokened 
further showers along the kilometres which lay 
ahead. For a while our way was accompanied by the 
noise of explosions and their smoke. Stooping 
women were in the fields, their faces down, their arms 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 17 

moving at some work. I thought they were sowing 
seed^ but the chauffeur told us that it was the shell 
holes they were filling. These spotted the earth far 
and near, and seemed thick to us on this first sight 
of them; before the land could be fitly farmed they 
had to be filled by those stooping women. 

Somewhere along this road we saw for the first 
time a war railway, a Ught narrow-gauge affair, 
vacant and idle now, laid in haste upon no secure 
ballast. Over its unsettled bed it tilted and curved 
through this bit of country, its disused rails reddened 
with rust. A year ago it had been full of business, 
plying the Huns with means to deal this silence to 
the slain earth. No trains were here now, and 
nothing to load them with, had they been here. The 
poplars bordering our road had been felled, we ran 
along between their severed stumps, and here for the 
first time we saw in some of the farms the murdered 
fruit trees. There would be the house, shattered, 
and the out-buildings, shattered, sunk in various 
angles of wreck, and beyond these the symmetrically 
amputated orchard, dead, on its knees, so to speak, as 
if it had prayed its destroyers to spare the other 
orchards' lives. Since this land was not to be the 
invader's booty, as much of it as could be killed 
should die. 

Upon the walls and doors of Noyon we had read 
the placards announcing shelter from bombs. These 
were French, in the language of the victims. The 
language of the invaders met us at some cross-roads 
half-way to Roye. The single word zur was on a sign- 
post, the rest broken off. Zur : To . The name 

of the place was splintered away, and the place itself 
was no more to be seen. Shell holes and dead trees 



V. 



X 



18 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

lay between us and its stones. We might turn right 
or left — ^shell holes and dead trees and the stones of 
little places would be all that there was to see. Zur. 
Three letters of the alphabet put together. The 
wrecks of homes and fields were the Huns' work, but 
this was their speech. They had intended that 
Oerman should be spoken here in the future. 

We read the next Hun words on a head-board over 
a grave at the edge of Roye : 

'^Hier ruht in Gott Fahrer Ph. Rihr Mag. F. KeL 
188 Gef alien beim Vormarsch 30 Marz, 1918.*' 

**Here rests in God'' . . . 

In what God, in whose God, was he reposing t 

No man can say. It was neither he, nor such as 
he, upon whose soul lay the guilt of all this. From 
his cradle he had been schooled for it by those who 
had drilled him, mind and spirit. The guilt was 
theirs. This soldier, had he lived to see the Father- 
land again, would have been with millions of other 
Germans an uncertain quantity for the rest of us. 
Would disaster have cured him, or would it have 
merely made him wish to bide his time and come 
again f He was a victim, too, like the living ones I 
had seen as prisoners at Compiegne. His dust was 
more tragic than that of the dead French or English 
that slept in the battlefields of Picardy and Flanders. 
Their countries rose to sacrifice, his country fell. 
That is why Germany's tragedy, from the time I saw 
it clear in the first months of the war, has seemed to 
me always the greatest tragedy of all. 

Just thirteen months ago this soldier had fallen at 
an hour when it seemed as if he and his hordes were 
at last to overrun and rule these shell-shocked fields. 
In that case our turn was to come, our homes and 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT BEMAIN 19 

orchards were to look like this. We did not know it 
then, we went to war not to defend them but to save 
a cause. We later learned that ^^ Paris in three 
weeks, London in three months. New York in three 
years/' had been the plan in full. 

The very ground to which onr road was leading ns 
today was sacred to the memory of onr dead also, had 
seen the stain of onr long neutrality wiped away with 
the grit of our onset, the blood of our dead, the tears 
of our bereft. Montdidier was ahead, where our 1st 
Division had been rushed this week a year ago, and 
one month later it had taken Cantigny with a swift 
and splendid sweep. 

Through Boye our road twisted like an S, by an 
extinct church on the left and on the right a half ruin, 
wherein butchers were at work and whereon was 
advertised horse meat of the first quality. Half 
ruins and whole ruins surrounded a square, the Place 
d'Armes, and over what was left of the door of a 
more important ruin on this square was the sign of 
the Hun : Stadt Kommandcmt. Along the seventeen 
kilometres to Montdidier the ravages of war contin- 
ued unchanged, and war's other leavings increased 
and thickened. So far, trenches and excavations had 
not been close to the road we had come. Line upon 
line of them now furrowed the face of the land like 
huge sentences scrawled across a huge page in some 
ancient alphabet. Dug-outs lined the road, cellared 
the higher banks in rows, like the suburban opera- 
tions of contractors. Immense piles of obus never 
fired, still alive, littered the bare and muddy fields. 
From an aeroplane one could have looked down upon 
these slabs and blocks of imexploded shells as if they 
were the fragments of some dislocated town. A grey 



20 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

lattice-work of camouflage three metres high still 
shielded the road, its material torn and hanging in 
strips, but much of it as it had been in the days when 
it concealed the passing troops and trains of muni- 
tions and provisions. Squads of men were at work 
removing and effaciQg all this. Camions lurched by, 
or stood in the mud. Winter had but lately left this 
region and the labor seemed but just to have begun ; 
for all the change it had made as yet to the eye, war 
and the Huns might have gone away last week. No 
house seemed whole at Montdidier. Between the 
houses and everywhere around them the ground 
looked like a paste of mud irredeemable. You have 
seen places where floods have swept all shapes to a 
general shapelessness. The valley here was some- 
thing like that. In the mud labored the squads of 
men, small objects in the large obliteration. 

We did not take the road through Cantigny, but 
that on the west bank of the river, along a ridge, to 
which we mounted as we left Montdidier. From this 
high ground I was able presently to look across the 
lower territory over which our 1st Division had made 
its attack. Straw still covered the wet floors of the 
dug-outs, their steps were slippery, telephone wires 
stretched and dangled between them, they were still 
concealed by the disguising bushes and the burlap 
lattice-work of camouflage. The footprints of war 
seemed very fresh. You could have picked up from 
the floors and shelves of the dug-outs more tokens 
than you could have carried away. 

Quite different from Compiegne or Noyon or Roye 
was the aspect of Moreuil ; quite different, too, from 
the smaller clusters of dwellings, the petit pays, the 
assembled group of the French farm. Those had 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT BEMAIN 21 

been generally grey, built of brittle stone, and when 
their walls were struck they crumbled partly or en- 
tirely, and their ancient beauty vanished never to 
be made again. Moreuil was of brick and did not 
fall when shells bored through it. Its gutted walls 
enclosed nothing, they stood up like masks, or a bad 
dream. They were of today, their like could easily 
be built again. We looked down upon them from the 
road along the ridge, with the sun shining upon their 
spread of ruin, out of which stuck high into the air 
one chimney that the shells had missed. Beside the 
road a family had built a hovel of tar paper and 
slats, and in the mud the children were laying a 
brick porch in front of its door. Five thousand 
people had lived in Moreuil, five hundred wete able 
to live there today ; in what and on what I did not see. 
Soon after this the signs of war began to dwindle 
away as we went along the valley ; houses that were 
whole increased in number ; the town of Boves was 
much less damaged than any in the fifty miles since 
Compiegne. In Amiens, at a hotel I had known for 
a long while, ended this day. 



IV 



LIFE FUOKEBING 

Gaunt renovationsy raw partitions of wood, newly 
set up and still awaiting paint, met my sight They 
gave to this place, so familiar and once so upholstered 
and cheerful, where I had eaten and slept in other 
days, the appearance of a friend whom one is allowed 
to see for the first time after a wasting and perilous 
illness. 

**Yes,'' said the landlord, **we were bombed, as 
you see. We began again in January.*^ 

"But the cathedral?** 

"We have it, we shall have it. Only hit seven 
times. You will see.** 

"And the fitorkf ** I now asked hiuL 

"Ah, you have been here before, thenf ** 

"Many times. And the last time, in July 1914, 1 
watched from my bedroom window the stork walking 
with a seagull in his domain beneath; and I went 
down into that domain of lawn and garden which the 
wings of the hotel enclosed. But the stork turned 
away from my advances.** 

"He is dead,** said the landlord. "When the 
bombs came, an English officer quartcfred here was 
going on leave, and he offered to take him to a place 
of safety. The stork went to London, where he died. * ' 

The hotel was chill as a cave, few guests seemed to 
be lodging in it, and but a few of these were civilians. 
Of travellers such as we there seemed to be none 
except ourselves. The mere sight-seer was still 

22 



LIFE FLICKERING 23 

debarred. He would swarm later, when roads and 
roofs and meals and all facilities were more ready 
and less scant than they were today. 

Daylight still lingered, the dinner honr was not 
imminent, so I walked ont of the cold hotel into the 
cold, damp streets and turned my steps to the cathe- 
dral. This town, larger than Compidgne, was like 
Compiegne and like no other through which our 
road had lain during this day of desolation, until our 
fleeting sight of Boves. As I went along the streets, 
a curious sensation of reassurance increased within 
me, and I grew aware that this had begun in Boves. 
There I had noticed the first houses which looked 
like usual houses, with roofs and doors and windows 
with people looking out of them, and I had seen 
people walking about or crossing the street, like usual 
people. Here was more of it. Shop windows had 
usual things for sale in them, cheeses and books and 
hats; people stood in the shop doors, women put 
parcels into baskets, men bought newspapers and 
struck matches to light cigarettes; I saw children, 
dogs, and a cat recumbent, sleek, licking her fur as 
if there had never been a bomb in the world. As a 
man who has been deep in a dreadful dream where 
nothing happens but the monstrous, faintly begins to 
feel that it is not true, and then suddenly knows that 
he is in his bed and safe, so I walked in Amiens, re- 
leased from the haunting day by these natural sights. 
The real world still existed. The haunting day 
seemed not of this time, but something long ago: 
those cities of dug-outs and tilted zigzag trenches, 
those slabs of piled anununition, those toppled clumps 
of masonry, those stooping women over the shell 
holes, might all have been a piece of legend, woven 



24 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOETH 

in some great stiff faded fabric hanging in some 
castle where cold airs blow from turrets and cor- 
ridors xmseen. 

**We began again in January/' 

The Hotel du Bhin had been bombed, its landlord's 
business had been smashed and shattered, emptied 
of all profit, guestless, even the pet bird obliterated ; 
but one year ago the destroyer had been shaking these 
gates ; and here were we guests, fed, bedded, paying 
bills. I rejected the sombre prophecy of a great 
Belgian lady, made to one of our soldiers: ** There 
will be no recovery. ' ' These French would recover. 
There was that cat, licking her comfortable fur. She, 
too, was a mute parable. France was not dead, was 
not going to die. Even amid the spread of the war- 
desert were areas of life. Between Maubeuge and 
Landrecies it was said that the Hun had not ravaged. 
Other spots than this had been left alive, and the 
dead places would be raised from the dead. Smoke 
would come again some day out of that lone chimney 
at Moreuil. Smoke would come again from the dead 
chimneys of Lille. Machinery would dank again in 
the dead factories and drowned mines. Wheat and 
fruit would ripen again where I had seen the shell 
holes. Later eyes than mine would never see those 
stooping women. Later eyes than mine would see 
the farmer back upon his farm, the exile restored to 
his dwelling ; travellers coming after me might stand 
on the steps of Noyon church and hear singing within. 
I verily believe that nothing I saw in Amiens streets 
on my way to the cathedral this evening gave me 
more of reassurance and more brought me back 
out of the world where I had been into a possible 
world than that quiet cat, licking her fur I 



AN INN OF THE SOTJL 

I went along the street of the cat and the people 
and the little shops where little purchases were being 
made, bidding a new welcome to each new humble 
sign that I saw of home life being lived. The very 
humblest were the very best. I can remember stop- 
ping to watch a stream of soapy water flowing from 
some outlet ; I had never thought to feel thankful for 
such a sight. Little in the world is more awful 
than the first visit to familiar places after some 
eternal change has passed over them, or over oneself. 
I went on and reached a street so well remembered, 
that for a moment time shut flat, and all my bygone 
sauntering here became present ; it was imbelievable 
that round the comer I should not meet those who 
had walked there with me once. Then I turned the 
comer and with this step was in the silence again. 
My own personal memories vanished as they had 
come, like ghosts. My own silences were swaUowed 
in this great silence of France. I had thought it 
distant for a while, out there, out beyond Boves, out 
among the barbed wire and the holes and the stooping 
women. It was here. It filled like a presence the 
narrower street I had entered. Sills and doors were 
heavy with it. It set its weight upon the very paving- 
stones. The small bustle of life behind me was merely 
a hole in its vastness. I cannot remember what ruin 
I passed in this street, what roofs or walls were 

25 



26 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

bomb-broken, perhaps there were none ; I remember 
the silence idone, its sweeping return upon me, the 
hush in which it steeped my thoughts. 

Were the life and motion in the other street nothing 
but a raft from a great wreck, floating upon this 
waste, never to reach shore, in a little while to be 
engulfed f Did those people sell and buy their small 
wares and cook their suppers merely as men with 
sudden, mortal wounds sometimes go onward for a 
while, unaware that they have been severed from 
existence! 

The landlord's word came back to me. 

What had they begun again in January! The first 
steps of a long climb back to health, or the last lap 
before the null and the void? Was our whole era 
mortally woimded? Had we all been severed from 
existence, were we all on the last lapt Other days 
and civilizations that were over long ago came into 
my head ; great, crumbled, prone cities, whose names 
conjure up the mounded desert, and pillars lying 
about, and wide stone stairways with lions prowling 
upon them. Were the yellow sands of Asia presently 
to have their turn and to sweep over and bury us all t 

I looked up; I had come in my slow walk to the 
cathedral. 

If thoughts can stop, the sight of it stopped mine. 
So does a shutter thrown open in the morning pour 
the room full of light. There is music, very little, 
which to hear makes one feel that it happened of it- 
self, that it came out of space like a wind. There are 
lines of poetry, very few, that do not seem to have 
been written, imless by the elements. No poetry that 
I have read, no music that I have heard, so lift one 
up into that region of marvelUng which lies beyond 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 27 

the powers of speech, as does this church of Amiens. 
Its two great sisters of Beims and Chartres do this 
also : no others in the world : no buildings made by 
man at any time in Italy or Greece or anywhere so 
strike self to nothing and leave only wordless won- 
der, wordless awe, motionless delight. Ont of East- 
em sands rise monuments as august, but they are un- 
f riendly. The only sights surpassing the befriending 
glory of these churches are of the water and of the 
earth and the air, and what nature does at morning 
and evening. To be able to look at them unmoved 
must be to have no soul at all. They are endless like 
nature ; one does not tire of them, and to return to 
them is to find them greater than one's memory. 

My thoughts began again, whilst that miracle in 
stone shone down upon me and into me. How had 
men made itf It looked as if beings from another 
place had come through the sky, bearing it among 
them, and had set it down here and gone away. It 
was greater than the silence. It rose symmetric into 
a realm of august tranquillity far above the voiceless, 
shapeless hell which I had begun to enter at Com- 
piegne. Then I heard myself saying aloud : 

'^ . . . magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas and fairy lands forlorn." 

I looked about the square, the place was empty, 
I had it to myself. Forlorn! Yes, forlorn indeed, 
but not fairy lands. Noyon and Roye and Mont- 
didier and Moreuil were not fairy lands. I thought 
again of those in whose company I had gazed at these 
magic casements in other years. I was glad that they 
were gone, glad that none of them had lived to know 
what men can do to this earth: villages dead and 



28 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

those who had lived in them, fields extinct and those 
who had plowed in them, churches in dust and those 
who had prayed in them, tombs burst open and the 
bones that slept in them, toys in ashes and those who 
had played with them. These casements had opened 
on the foam of many mortal lives, on seven hundred 
years of men. They were two centuries old when 
Columbus was bom. Men and women in how many 
fashions of dress had knelt beneath the vast arches 
within, while the stained light streamed down upon 
their heads. In how many languages had ^^Our 
Father who art in Heaven'' been whispered here? 

The words of one of those companions who once 
had stood at this corner with me, looking up as I was 
looking now, came back to me: 

**You are so beautiful with the prondse and the 
consolation which you speak without words,'' she 
had said, addressing the great church, *Hhat you set 
one praying before one enters you. Surely, just to 
see you would open in every one the vault where his 
childhood's prayers had been shut, no matter how 
long it had been locked ! ' ' She walked away from me 
and went into the church. 

No vault was unlocked in me while I stood re- 
membering this, yet none the less was I drawn by 
memory and by the power of the great church. I 
wished to go inside by that door where my friend 
had entered, and sit down for a while and think 
quietly of her, and of those others for whose death 
I was glad, because they had not known what man 
can do to this earth. 

A soldier came out of the door and behind him a 
verger, who locked it and departed. The church was 
shut till morning. 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 29 

Dusk was advancing bnt light was by no means 
yet gone, it would be slow in going. I did not wish to 
leave until I must ; I moved beneath the spell. The 
power of the church seemed something which not the 
spirit alone but even the body could feel. I stepped 
slowly back from it to see as much of its niajestic 
length and height as I could. Then I grew aware of 
the first figure that had come out of the door. I had 
hardly noticed him while the official was locking it. 
I had seen that he was a soldier with a broad hat and 
had thought no more about him. He was an Amer- 
ican, an officer. Something more than his uniform 
betokened his race, something apart from whatever 
features he might have, something young, ages and 
generations younger than the official who had locked 
the door. He was still standing near it, with his 
back to me. He was too close to the church to be able 
to see anything of it, except the door and the tem- 
porary scaffolding surrounding it. He stood motion- 
less, graceful, intent, and I wondered what it was 
that he found to absorb him so deeply. 

A young soldier from America, standing in antique 
Picardy, staring curiously at the cathedral of 
Amiens : the latest war-clad figure in the pageant of 
wars which had wet every one of that cathedral's 
seven centuries with blood: behind these seven, ere 
ever its first stone had been laid, other centuries wet 
with blood, back to the bringing of Christianity to 
this antique Picardy, sixteen hundred years ago : and 
then still back until the records die away and the 
pageant of wars fades into the years unrecorded and 
unknown. Eoman blood, Norman blood, English 
blood, Spanish blood, French blood, had drenched this 
soil; and now, as if the veins of the Old World had 



30 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

been opened too often and too long, and were run- 
ning dry, time had tapped fresh reservoirs, and had 
drawn the blood of the New World to drench this 
aneient soil. 

The yonng soldier stood so still that, had he not 
raised his hand once and passed it over his forehead, 
he might have been inanimate ; his form had the quiet- 
ness of the cathedral itsell Did this American close 
to that Gothic portal which had been a portal long 
before Columbus was born know on what ground he 
was standing? Had he ever learned the name by 
which Amiens town was known to Julius Csesar when 
he made it the centre of his wars against the Bel- 
gians t Was he of the sort that cares about such 
things t Roman emperors had dwelt here, and after 
them Peter the Hermit ; Geoffrey Chaucer may have 
passed this way on his errands for his Plantagenet 
king. This great church yas begun before St. 
Louis, Eling of France, went on his first Crusade. 
Did this latest crusader, this soldier from the New 
World, who had left his own land and crossed three 
thousand miles of sea to save Christian shrines and 
homes from pagan desecration, know any of thisf 
Six hundred years ago, the invaders whose weapons 
had been cloth yard shafts had come here. Again 
and again Amiens had been wrenched by one violent 
hand from another. The ancient glass of these magic 
casements had been shattered in the French Revolu- 
tion. They had looked down upon the Prussians, 
entering victorious from Villers-Bretonneux in No- 
vember 1870. They had seen the Prussians again in 
August 1914. One year ago Prussia was reaching 
very close to wrench off Amiens from France. But 
France had it safe and America had helped France. 



AN INN OP THE SOUL 31 

Was the boy thinkiiig of this, was he saying some 
sort of prayer as he stood facing this house of (Jodt 
I should never have known, for I wonld never have 
trespassed upon the mood that held him so still ; bat 
he moved abruptly, wheeled from the door, and began 
to walk away. In a few steps he stmnbled and I saw 
from his manner of walking that it was diffictdt for 
him and cost him pain. 

I approached him and asked, had he ever seen this 
before t 

**No,'' he answered without turning his h^ad. 

"Don't you find it very beautiful f I inquired. 

"I suppose I do." His voice was low, and gruff 
and defiant. 

"I care for it more every time I come back to it,*' 
I said. "Just for its sake alone, I almost think I 
would cross the ocean.*' 

"You American!*' Still he looked away from me 
as I answered. 

He remained silent ; only his intention changed. It 
had been plain before this that he wished to go his 
way, and without my company; but now he walked 
with me. 

"I am going round to see the west front,'* I ex- 
plained. 

He went along by my side, stumbling a second 
time. 

We walked very slowly, and, as he did not say a 
word, I spoke of the famous carving. I mentioned 
some of the groups which I remembered; Kings of 
France, a figure of Christ, the apostles, the resurrec- 
tion of the dead. Then we came to the west front 
and there was no carving to see ; piles of sand bags 
wholly concealed the glorious company of figures to 



32 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

keep these master-works of a lost art from the bombs 
of the Huns. 

^^They^re piled like that inside, too,** said my 
companion. ** Where the choir is. The man said 
the choir was a great thing. ' * 

**It*s a great thing, indeed,** I said. ** Nothing 
like it could happen today. Today nothing like any 
of this could happen — ^and it happened only in France. 
You will find nothing in England to stand with it, and 
Germany made a gigantic failure at Cologne.** I 
could not be sure that he heard me, nor yet could I 
stop. **Men are stiU trying to do what these old 
builders did. They fail. They measure and study 
and copy exactly, and they fail. They have tried to 
reproduce the Day of Judgment group that is be- 
hind those sand bags. They have built perfectly 
correct Gothic churches in many modern towns and 
every one of them is as cold and dead as a door- 
nail.** 

The soldier was looking up at the towers. Now 
and then he nodded as I continued my comments and 
my facts. He was a captain and his age I could not 
guess ; different ages seemed to meet in him. He was 
tall, full six feet, his hands shapely and of powerful 
mould, the nails large and smooth. The lines of his 
body were boyish; the lines of nineteen, twenty, 
perhaps, a year or two more at the most ; and his face 
was boyish in shape; but in his voice a seasoned 
maturity sounded; boyhood does not speak in such 
tones. The scant words he had thus far vouchsafed 
me were serried in their utterance, and matched by a 
silence equally compact. Yet he was not being rude. 
His manner conveyed some sort of wish for compan- 
ionship. Something was going on beneath his taci- 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 33 

turnity. He was holding himself in. I remeno^bered 
his stombling^ and thought that he had better sit down 
on the steps, but I hung back from making the 
suggestion. 

He turned from the towers, and, for the first time, 
looked full at me. His eyes burned with a sullen fire. 
In his face I saw, too, what I had seen in the general 
English and French faces, and as yet in no face that 
was American : this boy, also, had seen that which had 
let him into a knowledge he would not get over, 
though he might grow used to it : young his flesh was, 
young his spirit would never be again. 

**That is as dead as a door-nail too.'^ 

This declaration he accompanied with a flinging 
gesture of his arm at the cathedral. 

I looked at him, what he meant not yet quite dawn- 
ing upon me. 

**As for your Day of Judgment — ^he snapped his 
fingers at the piled sand bags — ^**that will never 
happen at all. Never. Because only one person 
would be judged that day. I ^m not afraid of any Day 
of Judgment. Are youf Nobody need be afraid, 
except God for making a world like this. So He Tl be 
careful not to let it happen.'* 

Again he looked at the cathedral. His voice was 
changelessly quiet with something in it implacable. 

**Dead as a door-nail,'* he repeated. **Just as 
dead as any temple to Jupiter in ancient Rome.*' 

**What? When people have been getting strength 
and comfort from it since the thirteenth century t" 

**What did these people know?" 

"Do you remember who some of them were, and 
what they did!" 

"I don't ciare who they were or what they did." 



34 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

** England, France, Europe, America, you and I, 
everything we see, are partly the result of their 
doings and their thoughts. ' ' 

* * Sure they were grown up as to all thai Children 
about religion, though. Swallowed the whole thing. 
Got blessed in there by some guy with candles and 
millinery and then came out and behaved worse than 
I ever would. And I^m no sainf He paused a 
moment, and took it up anew. **Why one of those 
kings that they say buUt up this French nation used 
to pray to leaden iniages in his hat. ' ' 

** People need images still. Some always will. 
Where 's the harm 1 It ^s what ^s hack of the inmge. ' ' 

He did not seem to have heard me. "I swallowed 
it all too, once. Never again. What's ha/ck of the 
image t Nothing. '' 

Young people find much pleasure hi assuring them- 
selves that they are infidels, and still more pleasure 
in assuring other people of this. The case before me 
was not of that kind. No caUow intellectual snobbism 
was prompting this young soldier to show off for 
my benefit. Showing off there was none. True war 
was raging in his soul. Not from spiritual shallow- 
ness, but from spiritual depth, did his eyes burn and 
his voice quietly ring with bitterness. Each sentence 
was evenly spoken and every word feU like a blow 
dealt by implacable disillusion. I think that he had 
never said any of it before ; that he might never have 
said any of it at all, but for my crossing his path, and 
his learning that I was a fellow-countrynmn at a 
moment when the mighty power of the catiiedral had 
collided with whatever mighty anguish was within 
him. I think, too, that he would have said it to no 
one but an entire stranger. 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 35 

Having begun, he did not stop. ^^If a man started 
sinning tixe first day he was old enough to be able to 
sin, and kept on every day of every year of his life 
till he died, would he deserve eternal damnation t" 
This question he answered for himself. "Not even 
the Kaiser deserves hell-without>end. The one who 
ought to be ptmished — ^if there was any such thing as 
* ought' in this game — ^is the one who made a world 
with love and death in it; the one who could have 
made a world where good health was contagious 
instead of disease, and didn 't do it. I don 't thiidc I 'd 
look down on millions in suffering and tell them I'd 
make it up to them some other time in some other 
place. I'd get to work making it up to them sooner 
than that — ^that is, if I was the kind of God they claim 
He is. It's much easier for me to believe a devU made 
this world — ^let you catch a sight of joy just to make 
you know all the better what pain is. Of course I 
don't believe that either." 

* * Then the world made itself ! " I asked. 

"Oh, I've been round and round all that. You 
can't think about it. You can't think about space, or 
the stai:s, or how anything began. If you try to pour 
infinity into a finite brain, smash goes your brain. 
But I have a reasoning power and I 'm not going to 
believe a thing my reasoning power denies." 

I quoted to him from a great Frenchman: "The 
heart has reasons which reason does not under- 
stand." 

He was dogged. "If the sweet-by-and-bye busi- 
ness is good enough for you, it's not for me." 

Of his own move he now walked to the steps and 
sat down. "Friends are coming for me here," he 
explained. 



36 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOETH 

Of what blood was he, of what tradition? Only 
New England could produce just this, I thought ; yet 
in his aspect the senses gleamed untamed. The 
Greeks would not have imagined fauns in the woods, 
had there not been Greeks whose features and whose 
wayis put this into their heads. Now and then in 
these days, a face will make one think of this. The 
ears of this boy, close set to his head, ran up to slight 
points, his brows slanted down to each other, almost 
meeting, and beneath them the wide set of his eyes 
brought woodlands and myths into the mind, and 
nymphs fleeting and hoping to be caught. I watched 
him as he sat on the cathedral steps, brooding, a 
nature-woven Pagan and Christian, like all the best 
of our human texture. 

** Count me among the children as to this,*' I said, 
and as he looked blank, **as to this church,*' I 
explained, **that towers behind us with its tremen- 
dous assertion. I do not need leaden images, and to 
me that stands for the greatest thing in life. I, too, 
have been round and round. It is what that stands for 
that makes this world sensible instead of senseless to 
me.** 

To this he seemed to pay no attention. He lounged 
on the steps, looking at nothing, his body as motion- 
less as his eyes. 

**When the Lusitania happened,** he said, "I was 
about through school. But my father insisted I must 
stay at home and go to college. I wouldn*t go, 
though ; I told father I was going to France. I was 
with the French from August 1916 till we came in. 
Then I transferred.** He made one of his pauses 
here. * * So I have seen it. * * 

I said nothing. 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 37 

**Yes. I have seen it/' he resmned. His voice 
sank and once more he said, **I Ve seen it/' After a 
little while, he added: **I am glad I didn't know 
beforehand. I don't believe I'd have gone in." 

**I believe you would." 

What had made him shake his father off and go, 
what had plunged him into revolt when he came into 
the serene presence of this church, was just what had 
built this church seven hundred years ago ; what long 
before Christ had made a great man say in Asia : * * Do 
not unto others what you would not have them do 
unto you. " The same light that lived in the heart of 
the Oriental teacher, of the cathedral at Amiens, 
lived in the heart of this boy from the New World. 
His denials, his fury, and the horror that caused his 
voice to sink came from the eternal religion in the 
heart of man. How had it come there, why did it 
persist? Logic gives no answer, nothing but a far- 
fetched guess. Logic proves in three steps that a 
brook cannot flow ; that all motion is impossible. Try 
to make logic fit anything that moves, like life or 
water, try to make it fit anything except what is sta- 
tionary, like the multiplication-table, and you will 
speedily reach falsehood. 

**Why, I was innocent!" exclaimed the boy on the 
steps. ** America is innocent — except those who 
saw it." 

"I understand. I've seen its work today. You 
saw it at work. But you mustn,'t be one of those 
whose survival depends on never knowing man's full 
wickedness and life 's whole horror. Very few ever 
do come to know it, and it woxdd kill many of them 
if they did. But you mustn't let it kill you." 

He got up. **It's damp," he said, and began to 



38 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

walk a few steps one way, and back again, stumbling 
occasionally. 

"What good have all their cathedrals done!** he 
demanded. "Ton say this one has been here since 
the thirteenth centnry. How many years of peace 
has it seent How many years since Christ lived 
have been years of peace f And there are your sand 
bags piled np to keep your Christ and your apostles 
and yonr Day of Judgment from being smashed to 
powder by the worst and latest war of the lot. 
Everything that heathen savages ever did has been 
done again and more knowingly, and new things have 
been done that savages didn^t know how to do; more 
kinds of killing, more kinds of victims, more kinds of 
torture, more brains crazed, more tatters of human 
flesh, more ashes of human bones, more holes where 
houses and cradles were, than were ever in the world 
before; war on land, war in the air, war under the 
sea. Science is alive and kicking; but where 's your 
^ Peace on earth, good will to men'f In these last 
words he came near to losing the controlled level of 
his voice. 

* * Yes ; the worst war of the lot, * * I assented. * * All 
your words are true but the last. Good will to men 
is not dead. Never was it alive so much. Against 
the worst war of the lot has been raised the greatest, 
deepest, widest outcry that ever the world has heard. 
No outcry used to be raised at all. Slaughter of the 
defenceless, burning, pillaging, torturing, were held 
the soldier 's perquisite and duty, and priests blessed 
his performance of it. No protest came from any- 
where. Today these monstrous deeds break the rule. 
When these very stones were laid, where was your 
Bed Cross, where your trained nurse, where your 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 39 

dozens and scores of organizations for relief workf 
What nation sent help to Belgium when the Dnke of 
Alva gronnd down the Netherlands f And so these 
stones, these stones sacred to Christ, have seen all 
that mercy happen in the name and for the sake of 
Christ. Yes, today yonr Hnn breaks the rule. 
What mlet The rule of pity. What is it that is 
new, what is it that has grown, slowly grown, through 
the red and smoking centuries t Pity, mercy, care 
for the weak, hospitals, homes for the old, homes for 
the child, for the cripple, the deaf and blind, protec- 
tion even for animals : Pity. The glimmer of light 
that shone in those words 'do not unto others what 
you would not have them do unto you' has conm down 
the ages, through Asia, through Greece, tnrough 
Bome, through Christ, who enlarged it, sometimes a 
bare spark, but never wholly extinguished, imtil to- 
day it glows in millions and millions of breasts. It 
m£^es apostles of tenderness and healing out of 
doctors whose reason denies God, yet who give their 
lives in acting out the word of God. The simple- 
minded — ^those whom you have called children — ^have 
always needed and always will need revelation, 
miracle, mythology, the not-true^ the thing in that 
cathedral which you decline ever to swallow again. 
But youTl not need to swallow it. Use your spirit 
as well as your reason. Tear off the mythology from 
any belief — Greek, Asiatic, Latin, Christian — ^and 
you will find beneath those very various rags some- 
thing abiding, something noble, true, something that 
all the beliefs have held in common : the mysterious, 
nameless thing which the Greeks had their phrase 
for, and the Latins had theirs, and the French have 
theirs, the thing that makes what we Americans^caU 



40 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

a Vhite man.' Let it go at that. Oh^ I, too, have 
been round and round — and years before ever you 
began it ! No more than you, do I attempt to grapple 
with space ; and I don^t attempt to grapple with God. 
I don't see why the conclusions of the head and those 
of the heart should so often deny each other. I don't 
see why reason should often so overwhelmingly 
destroy belief, and emotion — ^the spirit — ^the heart — 
often so overwhelmingly affirm it. But will you tell 
me why we should accord more validity to the con- 
clusions of the head than to those of the heart f I 
believe that the head's reasoning fits stationary 
things, while the heart's fits life. I believe that the 
cathedral holds the truth. Look at it, inside and out. 
Don't let the mythological rags which help children 
to see the truth blind you to the truth. I believe that 
Christianity is the latest and greatest sign of some- 
thing greater even than itself; the same thing that 
all preceding temples of any race and any age had 
something of, only not so much as this cathedral 
holds. All along from his infancy, man has built 
these inns for the soul. After a while the soul moves 
on to be rid of the rags of mythology which 
have begun to stifle it. Truth says forever to man, 
*I exist ; but dare to utter me, and I will turn to a lie 
upon your lips. ' But today, you and I hold one thing 
at least which both the head and the heart can unite 
upon : Pity. Pity has come into the world and grown 
great, while wickedness is no larger than at the 
beginning ; it only has more tools to do its work with. 
Why do we value good men most of all, miss them 
most of all when they leave the world t Because the 
heart loves goodness best and goodness comes from 
somewhere." 



AN INN OF THE SOUL 41 

I stopped. I had been surprised into this. It was 
almost as if it had said itself for me or in spite of me. 
I now became aware that the boy had ceased walking 
back and forth and was standing quite still, his 
untamed eyes fixed upon me. 

**I believe you have said something," he slowly 
muttered. '^If head and heart could get together on 
anything '' 

He stared at the cathedral once again. ''That 
might make one serene/' he added. 

A car came with two young French officers, one of 
whom hailed him in friendly English and quickly 
gave him help as he tried to pull himself in. As they 
started he said to me gruffly : 

''I am glad we met." 

Yes, we had met. He had not asked my name nor 
I his. Neither knew where the other lived. We 
were without clue or context to each other. It was 
not that we expressly forbore from the usual ques- 
tions, but that from first to last we never came to the 
surface where usual questions are exchanged. 



VI 

THE ilUOMENTS THAT BEMAIN — 2 

Wasted beyond hope of repair would have been our 
next day, but for some members of the British Army. 
These came to onr help when we were flonndering like 
a ship without a rudder or compass at what seemed 
to me then, and still seems to me as I look back, the 
uncharted edge of the world. Our chauffeur had 
known his way and the lay of the land through which 
we had come so far. In the cold little room with its 
frozen piano at the Hotel du Bhin he followed my 
finger as I ran it over the route I had laid out for us ; 
and he assented intelligently, with readiness, even 
with eagerness, when I asked him at each point could 
we do this, and this ; would the whole journey be too 
long for one day, if we started early t Not at all, he 
answered. I cast up the sum of the various distances 
for him, I consulted with him about lunch — ^in short, I 
collaborated every step and every hour with hint 

I had to choose, steering my proposed course 
closely by the map and by what I had learned in Paris 
from army officers. The chauffeur saw, heard, rati- 
fied each one of my points with that lucid, compre- 
hending diction which is native to France and envied 
by the rest of us. How should I know beforehand 
that beneath that fluent courtesy he was a forlorn 
imbecile t 

Our start was prompt. The sky threatened, but 

42 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 43 

not yet imminently. Thank f orttme I took with me my 
maps. Former journeys had made me familiar with 
the fact that taking the right turn as one goes through 
the French country is not at all the puzzle which even 
a village of ten or a dozen clustering cottages can 
present. In these little knots one is frequently 
tangled and emerges in a wrong direction. But I was 
not worried yet as we made our way out of Amiens. 
I was not even yet worried by our chauffeur's stop- 
ping two or three times while we were still in the 
town to inquire the road. What I had forgotten was 
the fact, made equally familiar by former journeys, 
that any French peasant Ti^ho knows the road farther 
than ten kilometres beyond his manure pile is a 
prodigy of travelled experience. To be sure, the 
townsfolk of Amiens were not quite peasants— but 
the town of DouUens was our first point, and Doullens 
was distant twenty-seven kilometres. This stretch 
proved too wide for the knowledge of such townsfolk 
of Amiens as pointed the way to our chauffeur. 

My map was spread out. So I had learned to keep 
it, not alone against going wrong, but to herald 
approaching little places as well. I looked out for 
Poulainville. It didn't come. I supposed that we 
had passed it. I wondered if we should see Coisy. 
We didn 't. I concluded it lay too far to the right to 
be seen. But I was rather surprised at getting no 
sight of Villers-Bocage. Presently our road struck 
me as being narrower than the road to Doullens 
looked on the map. I spoke a word to our chauffeur. 
He reassured me with true French competence. I 
believed him abjectly, but, when I read upon a corner 
wall the name Contay and there was no Gontay on 
the map of the road behind us or before us, nolliing 



44 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

at all like that all the way to Doullens, I spoke 
another word to the ohauffeur. Yoti who know the 
history of the war, know well miany reasons for my 
wishing to see Donllens. Near that place the Hnns 
had knowingly bombed a hospital full of wonnded 
Canadians and their nnrses. Papers npon the 
aviator captured afterwards proved this : the hospital 
was marked conspicuously upon these with a cross : 
so his bombs were accurately dropped upon the sick- 
beds and turned them to death-beds. But this was 
not my chief reason. I had one, and it would have 
been enough without the others. Here at this place 
Doullens, in a garden, General Perslung had said 
some momentous words at the close of a momentous 
conclave. That was a spot I wished to see. This 
time the chauffeur was less successful with his 
reassuring French competence. He reiterated that 
we were going quite the right way, quite the best 
possible way, but I held to it that we were not going 
the way to Doullens. 

**0h, no, monsieur,'* said the chauffeur, in a 
surprise as perfect as if the word Doullens had never 
been uttered between us. /^But we are going to 
Arras much straighter than one goes by way of 
Doullens. The road by Doullens is destroyed, 
monsieur. That is well known. * * 

Then, when had it become well known to himf 
And why had he never told me so till now t But why 
ask him such a question t Why ask a Frenchman 
why he is French ? Or why, for that matter, ask why 
the good qualities should be dealt out scatteringly 
among the nations, and nobody hold all the trumps f 

"Go on,*' I requested him resignedly; **go on to 
Arras/* 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 45 

After ally if no road went to Donllens at present, at 
present one conldn^t go there. Without it our day 
would still be crowded with the deepest interest. I 
settled back into calm — ^partial calm. Certainly we 
were headed towards Arras upon a way straighter 
than if we had curved to it westward through 
Doullens. My calm was but partial, because upon 
the inap our present road looked a slight thing, a 
narrow line of red, while a broad important red stripe 
represented the road to DouQens. How singular to 
indicate a destroyed highway thus I But a rag of 
faith in our chauffeur was still left me. 

We went through some more little places, or what 
had been little places once, and before long my rag 
of faith began to tear. Iii the chauffeur's back I 
seemed to discover a less assured expression. The 
appearance of our road was growing less and less the 
sort of thing that keeps up a man's heart, our speed 
was growing more and more cautious, and the bumps 
had ceased to be occasional. Rain began to fall, mud 
began to deepen, stones and holes became the floor 
of this thoroughfare. We crawled up a hill and 
through a village street, evidently of some grace and 
symmetry once, now battered featureless, and at 
perhaps the end of a mile reached a ridge, went on 
for a few wallowing yards, and came to a halt. You 
might have been at anchor on the top of a wave of 
mud struck still, in a mud ocean struck still. What 
wonder t We were at the Sucrerie beyond Mailly- 
Maillet, Beaumont Hamel was at our right, scarce a 
mile off. A waste of motionless, featureless undula- 
tions lay ahead, and in these our road died away, sank 
to nothing. 

As well as I can remember, the chauffeur sat mute 



46 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and stationary, like the obliterated landscape. Big 
heaps of shell stood about Barbed wire lay every- 
where, ragged or rolled into rusty coils. It straggled 
amid deep mud, ruins, and stones. The rain was 
now pouring. A crumpled single-track railway 
crossed what had been the road. A camion stood 
near by. Some English soldiers were guarding some 
German prisoners. These worked stolidly, gathering 
the shells. It was now eleven o'clock, we had been 
travelling slowly and more slow, and had made about 
thirty kUometres, instead of sixty or seventy, when 
help from the British Army came to us at this point 
for the first time this day. 

I looked out of our car, and my look brought a 
young officer up to it. 

^*We were tryiag to get to Arras,'' I said. 

**You have come too far. You must go back a bit 
and turn west at Hedauville, and go round by Acheux. 
This road used to go to Arras, but it's quite gone 
wrong itself, you see." 

**0h, yes, I do seel How long will it take us by 
Acheux!" 

He considered for a moment. * * You might do it in 
two hours and a half." 

At this my heart sank indeed. Two hours and a 
half to Arras, and it was eleven already I We were 
to have been at Lille by twelve-thirty, at Lille we were 
to have lunched, and Lille was twenty-five or thirty 
miles beyond Arras. I saw my whole plan of the 
day fall to nothing. We were to lose not DouUens 
alone, but Arras, Vimy Ridge, Lens, Lille, and the 
whole returning part as weU, Douai, Arteux, Cam- 
brai, every precious point that I had chosen for this 
day of pilgrimage. 



THE FBAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 47 

** Where do yon come fromf asked the young 
officer. 

**Ainiens/* 

^^Yon should have gone by Donllens. Why didn't 
yonf 

"We were going, bnt they told onr chanffenr that 
was aU torn np still. ' ' 

"Well, I know that's not true, becanse I happen to 
have rebuilt it myself.'' 

What was there to do but laugh f I looked at the 
mud and I looked at my map. Lille had been the 
point where food was sure. In every direction about 
us here the only thing we could be sure of was ruins. 
Yesterday, when there was no need for it, we had 
provisions with us; today our cheese and crackers 
and chocolate were reposing in our rooms at the Hdtel 
du !^in. We might decide to go without refresh- 
ment and push on into space, but how about the 
chauffeur! After all, his fault had been to believe 
the word of his fellow-countrymen in preference to 
my map and me. Well, we must turn round, anyhow ; 
that was the first thing to do. Our plight had 
gathered a little group of starers and listeners. Our 
chauffeur couldn't budge the stuck car. A young 
German prisoner sprang forward to help push it so 
that it might be backed and turned. He was natural, 
friendly, anxious to be of use. He looked less than 
twenty. Many of his comrades seemed as young. 
Many had amiable, fresh, and even handsome faces. 
Our young German, who pushed us out of our stick- 
ing-place so willingly and capably, spoke Ehiglish. 
He added to our information about the country and 
the state of the roads. Go back to Amiens ? Not if 
desperation could prevent. If we could not see what 



48 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

we had set out to see, let ns at least try to see some- 
thing else. I discovered that I had with me a few 
forgotten pieces of chocolate, nothing to keep our- 
selves and the chauffeur going all day, but enough to 
put off emptiness when this should begin. Again I 
looked at tny map and there found inspiration : Albert 
was not far off — ^not far, that is, in ordinary times. 
Yes, Albert was accessible. The young officer gave 
directions to us; our collapsed expedition had ap- 
pealed to him, and he entered into our anxiety to save 
some fragments of our broken day. He did not 
address our chauffeur at all; he had taken the 
measure of this moral paralytic and as the hours 
wore on this measure was repeatedly verified. In the 
various moments of stress through which we were 
destined still to pass, this chauffeur displayed the 
enterprise of a stale poultice. 

We thanked the member of the British Army who 
had appeared to us in the nick of time — ^the first nick 
of our time — and our car slowly waded out of that 
huge pie of mud, away from the ridge, the camion, 
the prisoners and the soldiers, and down that sluggish 
rise up which we had so vainly toiled. 

Back we went into an alarmingly small lane which 
tried but did not upset our faith in the British officer. 
This led us to a biggish road {bon pave, said the 
map) and so quite soon to Albert. 

To see this place, known to all the world by its 
Virgin that hung from the shattered church tower so 
long in mid-air, was to save something at least to 
show for our day. Were we to save anything more f 
It did not look so jiist then. The sky was black, the 
rain poured thick, the wind shook our car as it stood. 
Outside lay dismantled Albert, dumb and prone. 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT EEMAIN 49 

Bleak streams of water spouted from holes and slants 
of blind fragments. We had been told to expect no 
food here. We conld see no sign of life, only ruins 
and mud; but through the violence of the wind again 
the great silence of France was perceptible. I first 
became aware of it here, and then remembered its 
presence all along our road since leaving Amiens. 
We had re-entered it but a little way outside the town. 
A few soldiers appeared. To one who passed near I 
said, "Was there a crumb of food anywhere within 
reach f And now stepped in the Britiish Army and 
saved us and our day the second time. At my words, 
**a crumb of food,'* the face of the soldier changed 
from indifference to brotherhood. 

"Come with us,*' he said, "we're just going to 
mess.'* 

He called another soldier and to his care comndtted 
our car and our lump of a chauffeur. We walked 
along with him through the ravaged street. 

He conducted us through puddles and across fallen 
walls in the pelting rain to a little house built out of 
ruins by German prisoners ; a little hollow of shelter 
and comfort, set in the midst of the haggard debris. 
To step into such a box of snugness from such a wild 
and disordered outside once again took one into that 
same unearthly region of marvel, or of dream, 
through which our stunned minds had been moving 
yesterday: gaunt, shrivelled, wasted France — and 
then, suddenly, in the heart of it, this warm little hole 
full of England ! 

Inside the hole were three of our guide's comrades : 
Tommies all, and every one so friendly, so human, so 
simply and plainly glad to make us welcome and share 
with us whatever they had I They had a firejdace 



50 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and a fire ; none before this had we seen in France. 
One of the Tommies was a Scotch boy, I think, and 
one the very marrow of English England; blond, 
blue-eyed, inimitably and nnfathomably humorous. 
I never learned, but I suspected him to be city-bred. 
So developed a philosophy, so mature a sophistica- 
tion, such a readiness of both words and wit, could 
hardly have ripened in the hedges. He made himself 
the spokesman for the party. 

We seldom measure how cold we are until we have 
come from chill into a place of warmth. Our hosts 
poured out Scotch whisky liberally for us, and I took 
A long, stiff, reviving drink of it. 

The fire burned, civilizing the atmosphere; books 
were there, a few ; and a few pictures, newspaper and 
other, tempered the walls. A piano was also present, 
escaped partially alive from the Huns. Behind the 
room opened a tiny kitchen from which our food was 
now carried in. Over the table at which we sat hung 
an empty brass shell case. This was the Tommies ' 
dinner bell. Meat and potatoes were served, and tea 
in cups of great size. Cheese there was, and sugar 
for the tea instead of the usual saccharine. 

The blond Tommy talked along, his comrades 
evidently liking to listen to him as much as we did. 
He relished it, too, without a particle of vainglory, 
but simply because his thoughts came of themselves 
and surprised and delighted him. He had attained a 
philosophy. No school books had helped him to this. 
If education had fallen to his lot, I think he could have 
made his mark. Perhaps he would make it anyhow. 
I doubt his being over twenty-five. Life, as it had 
come along, had day by day written copiously and 
clearly upon his alert mind; and this war, this 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 51 

gigantic adventure, through which he had come alive, 
had evidently set free in him every power of observa- 
tion and reflection that he possessed. 

**She hung on through a good bit of it,'' he said, 
**but she went at last/' 

It was of the Virgin that he spoke. Pictures of her 
have taught her appearance to us all; the upright 
figure with the unusual stretching aloft of her child ; 
and then, after the bomb had struck her, the hori- 
zontal form in the air at right angles to the tower. 

Albert had been dragged from hand to hand and 
dragged back. It was when they had let it go for the 
last time that the Huns smashed it to pieces, as they 
smashed every French thing that they had time to 
break and which they had meant to keep. Albert had 
numbered thirteen thousand inhabitants. Of these 
three hundred now lived here, in cellars. 

The Tommy had been four years in the war and 
four times at Albert. Against whatever he had been 
dashed to his temporary hurt by the tides of destruc- 
tion, he had not sunk amid the back and forth of their 
churning ; he had floated out like a cork, buoyant and 
sound. 

**What would you do to the Kaiser!" he asked us. 
* * Or would you let him go t " 

We had reached the Kaiser, inevitably. The 
Kaiser, in the spring of 1919, was reached more often 
than he is reached today. The voices of the world 
were then still busy propounding various dooms for 
him ; and various dooms were forthwith propounded 
at our lunch table. Everyone had his idea as to what 
would be good and fitting for the Kaiser. None were 
barbarous, as I remember, but all were what you 



52 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

wotild call thorough. The Tommy was clever enough 
to hit my own with his first shot. 

* *I have my plan for him,'* I said. 

*^ Yon wonld have *im 'anged in front of *is palace 
at Potsdam. ' ' 

* * Right, * ' I answered. 

"Right it wonld be. But don't ye know not one of 
'em 11 ever do a thing to 'imr' 

"Well," I said, "things have been done to people.'* 

"Theyll do nothing to 'im." 

"They didn't let Napoleon go scot-free." 

"Ow," said the Tommy, with a look that no words 
can reproduce, " 'ee wasn't related to any of 'em." 

This unexpected generalization was presently fol- 
lowed by another. It was after they had been telling 
me the history of Albert, as known to themselves 
since 1914, the destitution of its people, and the 
obliteration of the very sites of where their homes 
had stood, that I told him about the lady at Noyon, the 
lady who came back from Nevers, and whom I had 
last seen searching for her house. This set going at 
once the blond Tommy's philosophizing. 

"I wouldn't come back," he stated. 

"You mean to find your house!" I asked him. 

* * I wouldn 't do that. The French are sentimental. 
They say we English 'ave no sentiment. I think we 
'ave just as much as the French. But " 

"But you don't mention itf " I ventured to put in. 

All the Tommies gave a barely visible nod, and he 
continued : 

"We'd not come back to our 'ouse, with it looking 
like that. We'd keep away from it, an' live some- 
where else." 

It was not for me to comment or philosophize any 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 53 

more than I had dared to do in that single remark 
which I had interpolated. It had fared well, and I 
would not risk spoiling it by another which might 
fare ill, I longed for the leisure of a day or two in 
which to exchange as many confidences — ^private, 
public, and international — ^with these Tommies as 
they would permit. Apart from their desire to hel^ 
us out they were really glad to see us. What wonder! 
We made a break in their gruesome task at Albert; 
This task was disinterment. Upon the hill and oyer 
the hill lay the dead, not by the hundred, but by many 
thousands. 

"It ^elps their folks at *ome a lot to have 'em cared 
for,'^ the Tommy explained. 

**Are you able to know than aUf*' 1 asked. 

"About 'arf of 'em can be identified,'* he said. 

These British soldiers did not do the actual dig- 
ging, they were too few. They were in charge of 
some forty "Chinks,*' we learned from them. Awd 
among these "Chinks" they had found three women 

in disguise. 

The blond Tommy made a final generalization to 
me. Our meal was ended, our chauffeur waitmg 
somewhere for us with the <5ar, our plan of pilgrimage 
laid out for us, and the Tommy and I climbing in the 
rain together over some heaps that had been houses. 
I spoke to him of the pitiful destruction of old archi- 
tecture in France which no modem builder would 
ever make again. 

"Yes," he said, "the French 'ave a great idea of 
the beautiful. And a very poor one of sanitytion. " 

I wish I were to know his career henceforth, but 
that is not likely. He stood in need of but few books« 
His brain was awake and open and the war had 



54 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

educated it to a point not commonly reached upon the 
benches of our schools. 

Between Albert and Bapaume, an appalling stage 
of eighteen kilometres, the strokes of war had 
scourged the face of the earth to a blind pulp. On 
either side the road the land was a mere featureless 
confluence of bruises and welts. Close at hand, near 
enough for the eye to see and count each different 
kind of rubbish and scar, and seam, and pock-mark, 
one noted rusty cans, rusty wire, rusty shards of 
metal, holes and mounds, graves alone, and by twos 
and threes, arranged and unarranged, scattered and 
continuous, their pale crosses sticking up along the 
road and outward from it until their slim, incessant 
pattern faded into a distance, where lay pieces of 
tanks, and the dead trees pointed crookedly up like 
jagged fingers of bone. From time to time came by 
the little towns — ^Becordel, Pozieres, Le Sars, lying 
upon the dead land like dead leaves. Far away upon 
each side of us the welts and bruises blurred indis- 
tinguishably, merging into a wide, blank, strange- 
colored, mangy waste. Upon this tremendous, deso- 
lation the rain descended from a sombre sky. I 
thought of certain bad lands in our West. Their 
aspect, with its hues suggesting some sickness of the 
soil, some sterility brought on by a curse, was like 
this lost look of the earth between Albert and 
Bapaume. But beneath the resemblance was a dif- 
ference that went to the bottom of things. The 
Western bad lands were of nature 's doing, boiled or 
baked, and so cooked to their strange chemical look 
when our continent was shaping and before man was 
there. These bad lands of France had once waved 
with grain, rustled with leaves, smelt of fruit 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 55 

blossoms and gardens. Their present leprosy had 
been dealt them by the hand of man. This explained 
suddenly to me the secret of the French silence, why 
it held all motion and all noise in a hollow that was 
like a great, cold, dead hand. In the overhanging 
silence of our bad lands there is that which may well 
fill the perceiving spirit with solemnity, even some- 
times possibly with awe; but that silence speaks of 
the mystery of the universe, while this French silence 
spoke of the mystery of evil. 

Through the continuing tempest we came to 
Bapaume, another town dashed to empty fragments. 
It was smaller than Albert, numbering thirty*five 
hundred in its days of prosperity; two hundred of 
them were then living here, as the three hundred of 
Albert were living, in cellars. Twice in the grasp of 
the Huns, like Albert, they had given it the same fate, 
squeezing it to death when they found that they had 
to drop it from their grasp. The crushed beams of 
machinery toppled like trees leaning together after 
a hurricane. Not a house stood whole. Disabled 
tanks sprawled, dripping, along the streets. The rain 
fell now so furiously that we were glad to descry 
another shelter. It held no comforts like that of the 
Tommies at Albert, but no rain came through the 
corrugated arch of iron which formed its roof, and 
beneath this we sat dry in the company of some 
French workmen. The wind reverberated through 
torn sheets of metal while we huddled round a brazier 
with them and they told us of themselves. They 
were friendly, and in their own lucid French way, 
philosophic. They were at work upon some wooden 
barracks to furnish better lodging, I suppose, for 
those who were now eating and sleeping in cellars. 



56 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

They fipoke, as I say, lucidly and qtiietly about iheir 
country, but not happily. It wad not what had 
befallen her in the war, but her present state and 
her future, and what was befalling her in the peace, 
over which they shook their dishevelled, thoughtful 
heads. 

^ ^ France is ill-organized, ' ' said one. 

**Look, monsieur, *' said another. **In the matter 
of tobacco. This is a part of our supplies which they 
bring us to keep us going. Three ounces in three 
weeks ! ' ' He made a gesture. That had been all the 
smoking supplied to him. He fed a little charcoal to 
the brazier with his thin, discolored fingers. 

In the matter of tobacco my companion was better 
organized than France, and he left with them all that 
he had brought for the day. We stopped with them 
a little while longer, talking of France and of them- 
selves, while our chauffeur finished repairing a punc- 
ture. We left them looking after us from their iron 
hut. 

Devastation encompassed us, we had been in its 
midst for many hours, we were to be there for many 
more. Never did it abate, never did we pass a spot 
which it had not blighted, never a house which was 
not a ruin, nor a field unswept by death. Death lay 
upon the surface, death lay beneath. There is an 
awful line spoken in ^^Lear'': The worst is not while 
we can say, ^^This is the worst. '^ Between Albert and 
Bapaume we had said, ^Hhis is the worst." Now, 
during the nineteen kilometres between Bapaume and 
Peronne, we said it again. The strokes of annihila- 
tion to our eyes seemed here to cut deeper: more little 
places— Beaulencourt,, La Transloy, Raucourt— lay 
like dead leaves along the way, the pale crosses 



THE FBAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 5Z 

stretched outward each side beyond sight, little difik 
tinct groups of them making a sort of thin mist, it 
which one could fancy that the spirits of the dead 
were hovering. Strewed also over the earth as far as 
one could see were the old broken shells, the old wire, 
the cans, a ceaseless layer of rusty, littered refuse. 
Northward and eastward this spread on farther than 
we could see or were going to see, beyond Cambrai, 
and Le Cateau and Ypres, away over the frontier, 
sheeting whole counties and departments with this 
extinct deposit of war. 

It was between Bapaume and Peronne that we first 
saw shell holes in their fullest, thickest mass. We 
stood upon the edge of wide spaces, acres upon acres, 
which once had been smooth, healthy fields, where 
now not one blade of grass was to be seen. As 
pestilence can pit and discolor a human face, until 
it is rough with holes like a colander, so this land 
was pitted. The fertile surface wherein seeds and 
roots can flourish was gone, baked, charred, cooked 
to an ashen compound, into which the bombs by 
bursting had plowed up and kneaded the sterile, 
chalky under-soil. There it lay, like some mass of 
horrible contagion. Had you tried to cross it, every 
step you made would have been from edge to edge 
of the holes. They touched each other, broke into 
each other. Some were wide and deep, some looked 
as if one might jump across them. Into their slop 
and slime the rain poured steadily. Sometimes one 
could look across and see where they ended, and 
sometimes one could not. Had one tried to make 
a way over them I do not think one would have ar- 
rived. Where they were, life had been — ^pastures, 
groves, crops, cattle walking and grazing, the voices 



58 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

of grandchildren playing, the voices of grandmothers 
calling to them. I looked upon the ghost of a land 
As it spread ont nnder the dark sky I did not think 
that the storm made it worse. In the light of the snn 
it would be no better. It did not seem as if summer 
or winter could make any difference to it. It looked 
as if the four seasons which we know would never 
pay their visits to it again, but that a changeless sea- 
son of its own was always here, beneath whose light- 
less day it would stretch in all the years to come. 

As at Noyon, so at Peronne were the returning 
dwellers to be seen, clinging to their old places, seek- 
ing out their hearths, unearthing possessions which 
they had buried before they took flight. Like Albert 
and Bapaume, the Huns battered it down when they 
could not keep it as their booty. The message which 
the destroyers had left behind them still placarded 
the ruined front of the town-hall — s, board nailed up, 
with these parting words of advice to the homeless 
French of Peronne: 

Nicht argern nur wv/t%dern — 

Not anger but wonder. 

How could there be either anger or wonder after 
four years' experience of their acts? 

Other messages in other places whence they were 
flying to save ti^eir skins had been left behind — ^mes- 
sages without words : in Soissons the hidden bombs 
had killed many returning people in 1917. In 1918, 
south of Cambrai, when the destroyers were fleeing 
before the British, they had concealed one of these 
bombs and above it in plain sight had nailed a live 
kitten. They were right in their guess. When some 
British Tommies saw and heard the kitten, they 
rushed to help it and were blown to atoms. 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT BEMATN 59 

* ^How you must hate us/* said a captured Prussian 
officer to a British sailor on a ship, and was assured 
that there was no hate. Surprised, he repeated his 
remark, and received the same answer. 

**It is impossible that you should not hate us,*' he 
heavily insisted, **when we have done you so much 
damage. * * 

**0h, no,** said the sailor, *'we don*t *ate yer. We 
just looks at you like scum or vomit or some other 
narsty mess to be swabbed up. * * 

Through this region of the Somme, this grave of 
human flesh and of homes and towns, all l3dng silent 
together, we continued upon our way. Marquaix, 
Eoisel, Hargicourt, each alike was quiet and dismem- 
bered; just a broken spot along the road, with the 
pale, thin crosses and the crooked skeleton trees and 
the jagged bits of houses sticking up among the 
mounds and shell holes, mile after mile. At some 
point during this stage of our journey, the sun shone 
a little and I saw that its light cheered nothing. It 
showed more plainly the mists made by the crosses 
and the distant clots of barbed wire. You have seen 
some autumn hillside where the brambles dried by 
frost spread upon the open land like rusty clouds; 
thus, far off, the barbed wire blurred the slopes. At 
Hargicourt, though my map showed the way, we 
halted at the sight of a living .man to ask him the road 
to Bellicourt. He was an American, a **Y** man, and 
answered us right. He was seeing after the welfare 
of several hundred ** Chinks,** he told us. 

We were very glad to see Bellicourt, to pause and 
get out of the car and climb up and down by the steep 
entrance of that canal tunnel. We were treading the 
exact earth of the Hindenburg Line. Seven months 



60 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

ago almost to a day — September 29tli — October 1st, 
1918, — our second corps, the 27th and 30th Divisions, 
had so battled here, together with the Australians, 
as to win a word of high praise from the British 
General under whom they served. The rain that had 
sluiced us at Hargicourt was now holding up. We 
made our way about in the mud through which our 
men had struggled. Here were still the shell craters 
and the labyrinth of trenches. We looked down the 
abrupt slope to the tunnel wherein the Huns had so 
elaborately and for so long made their electric-lighted 
nest, and out of which we had helped to eject them 
on those gallant days. No church was here in which 
to give thanks for our participation in the capture of 
this position and to think upon my dead and living 
countrymen who fought over this desperate ground. 
I gave my thanks wordlessly, in the open air. In my 
mind I saw the cathedral of Amiens, lofty, tranquil, 
pensive, living ; and I tore away a piece of a poster 
which must have been pasted up at Bellicourt soon 
after its re-taking by the Allies. It requested the 
men to deal with the people round about consider- 
ately, like men, not like Prussians. It was wet then 
from the rain and much stained. Today it is stiff. 
I put it away with a little bullet from a garden at 
Peronne, whence the householder returned from exile 
was digging his silver, his china, the small treasures 
of domesticity that he had buried. 

Along the thirteen kilometres of road to St. Quen- 
tin there was sometimes more sunlight, as I remem- 
ber it, but never a change in the gloomy scene. We 
skirted one shell crater not yet filled in, wide and 
jagged and deep like a quarry; it was the largest 
cavity we had seen so far, and a road had been made 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT EEMAIN 61 

around it. Not far off to our right lay the remains 
of a little place with a name whose beauty tinkles like 
a silver bell : Bellinglise. All France is musical with 
names; names sonorous that chant like legends, or 
gay, that trip like the dances of old jongleurs; names 
full of overtones, where the vowels and syllables fall 
into cadences so melodious, that to read them aloud 
is like a song. Bellinglise ! The mere syllables drew 
a poem from Alan Seeger. That is all I know of 
Bellinglise, except that its wreck lay there by the 
Hindenburg Line. 

In a way St. Quentin was the worst sight of all 
among the ruined towns which we had thus far 
passed. There was much more of it to be ruined than 
at Albert or Peronne, and the whole of it seemed to be 
destroyed. It lay not prone upon the ground, it stood 
up, it presented as one drew near to it a vertical as- 
pect ; there was the illusion of its being mostly safe 
and sound. But above it gaped the hulk of the cathe- 
dral, splintered, shattered, sky showing through its 
holes ; and once we were among the streets we saw the 
truth. Here again in this town came the sense of 
scenery painted for a play of disaster. Walls that 
looked steady and inhabited from a short distance, 
turned sham at close quarters, like wings or the back 
drop on a stage. In the many streets that we went 
through never a house did we pass that was not gut- 
ted : behind the mask of each front, ceilings slumped 
to floors, stairs sagged to cellars, beams blackened 
and gnawed by fire stuck through holes in tilted roofs, 
mirrors and bureaus, unscathed, perched alone upon 
ledges of landing over gulfs of broken plaster. 

By the time that we reached here, we had become 
judges of ruins. We had learned to name their kind 



62 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOETH 

at sight, and approximately to gauge their maturity. 
These vintages of destruction fell into a nxmiber of 
classes. There was the farm or the village which 
had happened to be in the way where a battle was 
going on. It may have fallen at the hands of its 
friends as readily as at those of the enemy; but 
whether hit by French, British, or German shells, its 
pushing down would be lateral, from the missiles 
passing horizontally through it. There was the dyna- 
mited dwelling, the work of mere disappointed greed 
and malice. Its walls might often still be upright, or 
but a little caving in, or bulging out. No shell holes 
would be in such walls, no lateral rents. The earth- 
quake would be up and down, within the walls, and it 
would be the floors and ceilings and crushed things 
between that marked this class. There was the dwell- 
ing that had been mined. This somewhat resembled 
the dynamited sort. The difference would be seen 
chiefly in the clots of soil which had been heaved into 
the air and had faUen upon the top of beams or 
lodged in high crevices. There was the dwelling that 
had been burned by the pastilles invented by the skil- 
ful German chemist, Otswald. In these there would 
be no shaking down or up, no slanting, no sign of 
lateral or vertical shock. Everything would be sim- 
ply and quietly gone that fire could bum, leaving the 
stones or the melted metal. One entire village had 
been left behind thus by the retreating Huns. The 
presence of plants and weeds growing about upon 
various elevations of a ruin marked it as being of 
the earlier war days. 

Despite the state of St. Quentin, plenty of people 
were to be met in the streets. I suppose that these, 
too, were living in cellars. Of one of them we in- 



THE FBAGMENTS THAT BEMAIN 63 

quired the way. I do not see now what else we conld 
have done. My map could not show us how to thread 
our way clean through from one side of the town to 
the other and strike the right turning. It could and 
did show us our general direction, more or less par- 
allel to the river, and near enough to be in sight of it 
at first, I imagined ; and this I explained to the chauf- 
feur. We were to keep southwest, I said, and we 
should cross a railroad in about two kilometres. But 
I made no objection when he stopped and asked of an 
inhabitant the right road to Jussy, I merely remem- 
bered DouUens uneasily. We were told at once, with- 
out pause to meditate, the right way to Jussy, and I 
could see by the chauffeur ^s back that this word from 
a fellow Frenchman meant more to him than anything 
I and my map could say. We crossed the railroad 
remarkably soon, it seemed to me, quite within the 
city limits, and I saw nothing of the river. A good 
way out in the country, after nothing was as I ex- 
pected it to be, I forced the reluctant chauffeur to 
stop, while I called to a man driving a wagon with 
two wheels, how far were we from Jussy t He did 
not seem to know the name. He was from Origny, 
four kilometres onward. Origny! I sought my 
map. There was no such place on the road to Jussy. 
Origny t I found it. We had been set on the highway 
to Guise. It was as if, being at Chicago, you had 
asked the way to Omaha and had been carefully 
headed for Pittsburgh. 

** Henceforth,*' I detonated to the chauffeur, **you 
will do exactly as I say and nothing that anybody 
else says. To the seventy-nine kilometres that we had 
still to go, you have added about twenty-eight more. 
Turn round. Go straight back.*' 



64 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOETH 

I spread the map upon my knees and there I kept it. 

^*Left/^ I said to him as we reached the rim of St. 
Quentin. 

^* Right/' I presently ordered; and in due time we 
came to Jussy. 

Here, with imperishable instinct, he was taking the 
wrong turn, but I hailed him. 

^^ Right,'' I commanded; ^^and cross the railroad, 
and go to Ham. ' ' 

He bleated something about Chauny. A sign 
poLQted thither by the road he had tried to take. 

^^Do what I say and do it at once," I returned. 
* * Do you want to take us round by Noyon and Roye 
that we saw yesterday, and add twenty or thirty kilo- 
metres more when hours are growing as precious as 
diamonds f " 

The sun was now showing itself more often than 
during the stages over which we had so far travelled, 
but we had fallen seriously behind time; it was a 
westering sun thfet shone, and our journey was be- 
come a race with the ebbing day. At the points where 
we had been especially told to stop, Ham, Nesle, 
Chaulnes, Villers-Bretonneux, there could be no stop- 
ping. We must rest content with a glance at each as 
we passed through it with the careful and abated 
pace which bad stretches of road enforced upon us ; 
it was doubtful if the light would last to our journey's 
end. This seemed so uncertain that I resolved to 
forego even the attempt to see Villers-Bretonneux, 
and decided upon what looked upon the map like a 
shorter cut to Amiens by Rosieres. 

Perhaps through our lateness we gained another 
knowledge of the desolation. We saw the day leave 
it, as we made the best speed we could over the dis- 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 65 

ordered kilometres. Furthermore, miany parts of our 
road now lay along the line of rail over which fast, 
expensive trains used to run direct from Calais to 
Bale and Lucerne and the Alps. Thus, having seen 
the tatters of towns and houses, we had a good view 
of this uprooted railroad, alongside of which we fre- 
quently drove, and over which we frequently crossed. 
I retain in mind particularly one blown-up spot at 
which there seemed to have been important and large 
machinery and but few houses. The machinery had 
been spilled and splashed over the railway station and 
the houses and the railroad itself. All lay lumped 
and stirred together, like a gigantic petrified stew. 
Sidings stuck forth from beneath heaps of cranks and 
wheels, vats lay bottom side up between detached 
doors and bushes and pieces of chimney, and one 
steam whistle severed at the neck had evidently flown 
through the air and now sat lonely upon a truck which 
had been dashed from the rails. 

Ham we passed, and were glad to put it behind us. 
Its name rang with memories ; it was strange to be 
glad that we had passed it, instead of sorry that we 
could not stop. Yet, even so, there was the silence 
with us always ; and here also was the river with the 
name that must for ever be an awful name to many, 
the river Somme. Nesle followed Ham fairly soon. 
We made those nine kilometres evenly, and again I 
was glad to count them off. I was watching the day- 
light rather than what more it showed us of destruc- 
tion, and I was watching the road. On my knees lay 
the map open, and the chauffeur had at length been 
reduced to believing what I said. I had by now de- 
livered a number of directions to him, aU of which 
had come true. At every cross-roads, or fork, or 



66 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

turn, he would submissively slow down and listen, and 
then obey me as I barked to him, * ^ Bight *^ or **Left*' 
or * ^ Straight on. ^ * The light waned and I looked at it 
and at my watch and at the map wherever I could 
see the kilometres of devastation which lay ahead of 
us still. I could read which turns we were to take, 
but the time was coming very soon when I should be 
able to read them no longer. I wondered what we 
should all do in the dark. Many ridges and descents 
and roads unknown lay between us and Amiens. We 
had nothing with us in the way of food or covering, 
and no desert could promise less of either than this 
silent land of the Somme. The last sight that we saw 
clearly was the motionless sadness of Chaulnes. The 
grey dusk was coming down upon its fragments. We 
could make them out, thin shapes rising from a blur 
of mounds and undergrowth, and behind and among 
them, grey, stark trees, all dead. More trees rose 
beyond, a wood of them, crooked, splintered, and 
dead. No sight that day had conveyed so much the 
immovable chill of extinction. 

We left grey, quiet Chaulnes behind us, and came 
to a fork which might be so important that I made the 
chauffeur stop. Coming towards us along a smooth- 
looking way for which I yearned, was a camion. In 
my hesitation, my faith wavered, and I asked the 
driver how to go to Amiens. To the right, he an- 
swered, and was gone. It was wrong. The way he 
had come, to the left, was the one. 

Dark was now treading on our heels. We crossed 
without due circumspection a single railroad track 
that jutted rather high and abrupt, bounced with a 
forlorn inward clink of snapping, and stood still. 
Various urgings and motions made by the chauffeur 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 67 

brought no response from the impassive car. He got 
down and opened it. Something was broken. He 
told me its French name. Was it fatal 1 1 asked him, 
and he assured me that in time he could mend it. I 
did not in the least believe him; why should I! It is 
better in such cases to assume the worst and see what 
else can be done. My friend and I walked about 
while the figure of the stooping chauffeur grew more 
dim in the departing light. We did not seem to be 
anywhere, there did not seem to be anything to do. 
We had come to grief exactly beside a little estaminet, 
dark and closed, the glass gone from its window and 
blind boards there instead. It stood where the road 
and the railway crossed each other. I paced several 
times in front of its silent door and pictured us all 
breaking into it presently when the night should have 
completely fallen and the chauffeur completely failed 
to restore the engine to life. Even if it should prove 
entirely empty, the floor of it would be larger to sleep 
in than the car, and smaller than the wide world. 
What difference would it make, anyhow, such a small 
mishap in the presence of such great calamity! Then 
I heard a sound inside, and spoke to the sound ap- 
pealingly and reassuringly. The door was opened 
with caution and there stood a woman. Her face was 
pleasant and it was with a pleasant and gentle voice 
that she greeted me. I could not tell her age, she had 
seen war: Young and old who have gazed under- 
standingly upon the full countenance of war become 
of like age. A gash, recent and not half healed, 
crossed her forehead. She glanced at us and our car, 
took in the mishap, and bade us enter with words of 
very sweet apology : 
*^You see how we are installed.*' 



68 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

The light of one dull lamp was quite enough to 
disclose the state of this home. I suppose that there 
had been a fire in something, for she must have 
cooked somewhere, but I saw none. The room was 
damp and cold. Beside the boarded window which I 
had seen in front were others with neither boards nor 
glass in them, open holes into the night. Still, the 
place had a roof, and it was the first edifice of any 
kind which we had during many hours an opportunity 
to see that was not a total wreck. 

^*We have just come back to it,^^ she said. 

Who ^*we'' were I did not ask her, but presently 
learned without any asking. She and her husband 
had come back from Normandy where they had been 
for a year in refuge. She had lost everything. She 
told us of her fortunes simply and sweetly and every 
syllable was full of perfect, unforced courage. They 
would get on ; the estaminet was on the road where 
people passed and they would be passing more and 
more as times revived. While she told us of her 
prospects, heavy coughing broke out somewhere. 

^*Your husband!^' I asked her. 

^*Yes.'' 

^^I hope that he is not ill?^^ 

^^But not at all, monsieur. It is nothing. He 
went out with friends today, and there it is. It 's but 
that.'' 

**I hope he doesn't do it often?" 

**0h, no!" she assured me with a gay smile as I 
looked at the gash in her forehead. 

Directly he coughed violently and she hastened to 
him in some hole behind the room. Some turn that 
I now made disclosed to me that what I had taken 
for a huddle of bedding lying across some article of 



THE FEAGMENTS THAT EEMAIN 69 

furniture was a perambulator with a baby asleep 
in it. 

^^He^ll be better now/^ said the mother, coming 
back to us from the father. Then she showed her 
placid child to us. 

She had a loaf of coarse bread and some butter 
which made our dinner ; she wanted but * * six sous * ' 
for it. We took the chauffeur ^s share outside to him, 
where he labored at the engine. It was now entirely 
dark. She had a bed and we could have stayed there, 
but as we were considering this the chauffeur came 
in to ask for water and told us that the car would go. 
She had water there in a bucket which she gave him. 
No water was near the estaminet, the nearest was at 
about a kilometre's distance, whence she fetched it 
each day. We gave her some francs for the water, 
and some others in the name of the child in the per- 
ambulator. She did not wish to take them. She pro- 
tested. There was nothing in her face or voice of 
hard luck. She seemed strangely refined for that 
estaminet, her smile rode over her adversity, she was 
a French woman, perfectly game in the true French 
way. 

Our misadventures in wrong roads might have dis- 
couraged my asking any more directions from the 
local-minded natives, had there been any other choice 
save to go blindly on. The camion driver had sent us 
off the broad plain way into a perfect nest of local 
lanes which my map showed now by the light of the 
smoky lamp. We were close to a little place called 
Harbonnieres, in sight of it, really, had there been 
anything now to see except the darkness. But 
whether to go forward or back, and which turns to 
take if we did either one or the other, who of us could 



70 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

sayt Least of all that chauffeur. To go blindly on 
with him and a mended car did not appeal to me, and 
so once more I inquired the way of a native. 

**Go through the pays,*^ she said (the pays was 
the little village of Harbonnieres) **and at the church 
turn to the right, and go two kilometres, and turn 
to the left on the grande route to Amiens." Today 
I know that it is from the women, not the men, that 
you will be directed right. 

Thus we left her, and her estaminet, and her sleep- 
ing baby, and her husband who had spent the day 
with friends, while shie fetched the water from Har- 
bonnieres. 

There was no map any more. Its work was done. 
We sat back in the car and heard its noise as we went 
along. We could see nothing of the land, but when 
objects came close we could make out their general 
shapes. We went through the dark ruins of village 
after village. Here and there some window would 
dimly shine and pass. Along the road we met a two- 
wheeled cart now and then, and sometimes some 
soldiers. We did not know Villers-Bretonneux when 
we came to it, or any other place, but we knew when 
we had passed out of the slaughtered region. Once 
more the signs of natural existence looked strange. 
Soon after these began we entered Amiens, and at a 
quarter past ten we got out at the Hdtel dn Bhin. 

This day did not merely double the knowledge 
which had begun at Compiegne yesterday ; it changed 
what I knew from what had been like a plane into 
something that was like a cube. In its depths were 
the French and the British soul, shining like the 
battlements of light against the powers of darkness. 
Its surface was the stricken fields of France, fields 



THE FRAGMENTS THAT REMAIN 71 

of life five years ago, fields of the great silence now : 
The fallen shapes of towns, the disembowelled soil, 
the shells and the wire where the wheat had been, the 
crosses everywhere to the horizon, the exiled French 
groping for their cellars, the strange languages and 
races swarming n^on the French earth, our jaunty 
doughboys, the British Tommies, the German prison- 
ers, and the Chinese coolies digging up the rotting 
dead; amid this, the tranquil, unharmed cathedral 
at Amiens, and far away across more distances of the 
great silence, the battered cathedral at Reims, both 
rising high above this wide, sad grave of men and 
things. 



vn 



SOME PEACE CONFERENCES 



I had gone out of the beaten way to listen to a comic 
opera, an old comic opera that had been yonng in the 
days of my own youth. I had dined early and sought 
the Trianon Lyrique in time for a good seat in the 
second row, and for all the preliminaries. I like to 
see the musicians file in one by one from the hole 
under the stage, and take their places, and turn up 
the lights over their desks, and spread out their 
sheets of music, and put their respective instruments 
to their chins or their lips or between their knees, and 
get in tune and begin tootUng over little scraps of 
what is coming, until the whole hive of fiddles and 
flutes and curving tubes is buzzing. Well, they 
hadn^t appeared when I sat down ; nor had the public. 
A few early birds like myself, quiet French birds with 
very quiet plumage, dotted the spaces. It was a 
*^ family theatre,'^ the ouvreuse reminded me, where 
innocence could come with its father and mother, and 
sustain no harm. I gave the ouvreuse a whole franc 
for teUing me this and showing me my seat and trying 
to take charge of my overcoat. I felt suddenly re- 
laxed and happy to have escaped from the present 
into this sanctuary of the past, safe from the noises 
of the restless hour, far from the discords of peace. 
The Trianon Lyrique stood in a back-water, a little 
bay of true Paris, untroubled by the chop-sea of sol- 
diers, envoys, correspondents, negotiators, diplomats, 

72 



SOME PEACE CONFEBENCES 73 

experts, intriguers, prime ministers, philanthropists, 
and flags and rags of all nations, which the hurri- 
canes of negotiation had driven to toss and beat upon 
the wider spaces of the city. Thus I sat waiting 
placidly, and held a little conference, a true Peace 
Conference, with myself and my memories. These 
jostled and needed arranging. 

Amiens and the Somme lay behind me, with the re- 
mainder of my pilgrimage to desolation still ahead. 
Between them was this Parisian parenthesis. At 
dinner the last night at Amiens, an officer, a major 
in the British service, had sat with us and told us 
that he had seen women flying from village to village 
with dead babies and household chattels huddled 
under their arms ; and had seen a child whose hands 
the Huns had compelled its own father to cut off. 
I was glad to have the Paris parenthesis, to see the 
shops, the streets, the living life, and to hear the 
home voices of our soldiers. These were everywhere 
in the streets and shops of Paris in April and May, 
1919 ; Paris with a jungle of captured German guns, 
thicMy lacing the Place de la Concorde, bordering 
the wide way from it to the Arc de Triomphe ; Paris 
with American cars and American soldier chauffeurs 
clotting the space in front of the transfigured Hotel 
de Crillon, waiting the pleasure of the envoys, ex- 
perts, philanthropists, and secretaries who sat within 
and seethed without ; and Paris, this chop-sea of spy- 
ing, distrusting sharks swum hither from all waters, 
afloat with the American soldier. You could look 
nowhere and not see Him. He swarmed above the 
ground on the tops of omnibuses, on the ground in 
shops and along the Eue de Bivoli, and underground 
in the trains of the Metro. The sharks swam in 



74 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

waters oongenial ; not be. I have heard a verse about 
him: 

Although he was on pleasure bent, 

He had no frugal mind; 
He did not care how much he spent, 

He was not in his element, 
And he was very innocent, 

And very much too kind. 



Whatever rioting be ma,de it was a drop in the 
bucket of bis decency. Saint he never pretended to 
be, though he was commendably nearer to it before 
than after the loosening influence of the Armistice. 
Yet no matter how he spent bis Paris nights, be was 
a clean, irrelevant creature for Paris to entertain; 
a spirit bow uncooked amid this spiced stew of the 
jaded Old World ! Uprooted by a convulsion, not of 
nature but of human nature, and flung into a soil and 
climate where nothing like him grew, be stuck out 
strangely from the general mess ; and his figure will 
remain with me, buoyant, youthful, detached, the 
most far-fetched apparition I have ever seen thrust 
into a human picture. 

He felt this. He knew it. Those of him who bad 
come over too late to kill Huns, felt it doubly. Gen- 
erally be hated the French, generally be wanted to 
go home, and generally — ^whenever I rubbed shoul- 
ders with him in streets or shops or trains long 
enough for any conversation — ^I reasoned with him. 
Two sentences from an enlisted man at Fort Ogle- 
thorpe sum up what our army felt. He was a young 
master-carpenter who bad left bis work, bis wife, 
and two children. 

**YouTl be anxious to get backf 



SOME PEACE CONFEBENCES 75 

**Not till it^s over. Then home as qtiick as I can 
get/' 

That is why they went: to see it through, to kill 
Huns, to stop the world crime; not for the sake of 
any academic generalizations about democracy. Our 
own danger had not dawned upon them. 

I did not want our soldiers to go home hating the 
French. Without the light that France has thrown 
round the world, how dim the world would be I But 
nothing of this would go far to placate the sore and 
home-sick doughboy. It would be "highbrow stuff*' 
to him. He had his reasons for hating the French, 
and they were good ones, too. The flaws in the 
French character were the very flaws to displease 
him. The French set too little store by the mechan- 
ical conveniences of life, such as plumbing and elec- 
tric lights ; he set too much. He had too little respect 
for thrift and tradition; the French had too much. 
He could be gay and sociable, evening after evening, 
exclusively in men 's company. The French astonish- 
ment at this estranged him whenever he happened to 
find it out. He continually washed and shaved him- 
self clean ; he spent his money lavishly. These were 
less frequent habits in the land whence he had helped 
to expel the Huns. And now these French, after 
flinging their arms round him while the Huns were 
walking on to Paris, were asking him when he was 
going home. He made his English plain, too plain 
for print sometimes. As if he wanted to stay in their 
damned, dirty, stingy country of robbers! These 
small-change frogs called Americans **dollar-chas- 
iers. '' Why the whole of Europe was chasing dollars 
with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Only, 
when it caught one it held on. When an American 



76 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

* treated,'* they called him vulgar. Well, no frog 
was guilty of that vulgarity, anyhow. 

The doughboy needed no official voices, French or 
English, to tell him what he had done. He might 
be foolish and boast, or he might not ; but quite inde- 
pendent of recognition from on high, or tinkling sym- 
bols pinned on his chest, he knew in his heart that 
in the darkest hour of 1918, he had tipped the scales 
to victory ; that without his presence upon the fields 
allotted to him, the British could not have made their 
magnificent advance over the fields allotted to them ; 
that without his presence in France, the Huns would 
still be present in France. He knew all this because 
our American mind, if raw, is clear and just. And 
now they were anxious to get rid of him, which was 
natural ; and letting him know it, which was not tres 
gentih **Tray jontee*' was the phrase employed in 
this connection by one ironic doughboy, who, being 
obviously a charmer, had also made substantial con- 
quests among the French idioms. ** Stinking'* was 
the word given it by another doughboy, plainer 
spoken. 

**How many words of French do you knowf 
This was my usual device for entering upon talk 
with them. 

^ * About six, * ' was their not unusual answer. They 
would turn at my question, and look at me with an 
American's grin for a brother American. 

Sometimes in shops I computed, at their own re- 
quest, the sum of their purchases, and the change 
properly due. The doughboy who had said ** stink- 
ing'' had walked out of a photograph shop with me 
and opened his heart to me along under th« ajrcades 
of the Rue de Rivoli. Concerning the French, he 



SOME PEACE CONFERENCES 77 

knew his mind in his American way, down to the 
ground. 

**Do you think, ^' he demanded, *4f they had come 
over and saved New York and Bridgeport and New 
Haven for us, we'd be showing them the door like 
they're showing it to us f 

**They saved New York and Bridgeport without 
coming over,'' I answered. 

**So they've told me more than once, since the 
Armistice. I '11 call it a good guess. Maybe they did. 
But they saved us in their own country, kind of un- 
consciously. On the side, as it were. There's a dif- 
ference, don't you think? About three thousand 
miles' difference, according to the lowest figure I 
can make it." 

**You must make allowances " I began, rather 

feebly ; for I saw his side of it full as well as he did. 

** Allowances! I've allowed all the allowances my 
mind will allow me to allow. Good night 1 If they 
were sitting around in New Jersey and Connecticut 
after an armistice fixed up at Hoboken, do you think 
we'd be trying to push 'em into the Atlantic, or do 
you think we'd be setting up the drinks I" 

**We're different," I said. I was still feeble. 

** Well, I guess we are different. And if it comes to 
poUteness, give me the American brand yesterday, 
today, and for ever. Too much dictionary about the 
French article and not enough goods delivered. All 
froth and no kick to it. Tray biang apray voo mais 
wee certaynmong meel pardong meel remaircimong. 
Oh, hell ! And say — ^if your house was afire, and you 
pretty nearly aU in fighting it, aad your neighbor saw 
it and came across the fields and jumped in and 
helped put it out, you'd be likely to send him a bill 



78 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

for a pitcher he'd broken and some com he'd trod 
down, wouldn't yout" 

* * Come and eat Innch with me, ' ' I said. * * It 's one 
o'clock." 

He stood pondering. In the course of our talk we 
had reached and gone some distance along the Rue 
Boissy d'Anglas, in the direction of my hoteL 

**I guess I can eat something now." As he came 
out with this, he looked me in the eyes with a con- 
fessing smile. 

^^Too much joy last night f" I asked, smiling also. 

**Yep." 

**No breakfast yet!" 

* * No. ' ' He gave an expressive shudder. 

At the caf6 I chose (where he tried his best to pay 
for something) I laid before him the French case. I 
preached to him the good old doctrine of hear and 
forbear. I was growing practiced; he listened. He 
was another perfect instance of the American mind, 
clear and just, once the facts are laid before it hon- 
estly. I did not completely bring him round, but he 
was going to reach conclusions after we had parted 
which would be more lenient than those he held when 
we met. 

**A11 the same," he said, "once I get back to Dan- 
bury — never againl'^ That was his final word. 

Certain things I withheld from him as I did from 
all of them: worse things that few of them knew. 
These needed much hear and forhear — ^more than I 
was up to at times myself. This weather-cock busi- 
ness was not confined to the classes with whom the 
soldiers mixed. There was a change of wind higher 
up. The warm blasts which had greeted our entrance 
into the war and our landing upon French soil had 



SOME PEACE CONFEEENCES 79 

begun instantly to veer and chill after the Armistice. 
We Americans were no longer Mayflowers and La- 
f ayettes come back to our dear old home. Upon the 
laurels which they had piled somewhat too thick 
around our brows when first we stepped ashore, more 
mud was being cast as each elapsing month pushed 
Chateau-Thierry farther back into the safe past. 
From certain quarters of authority the word had 
gone forth to tone down our contribution to victory 
now that the trick was done. A little adroit French 
phrase had been picked out and passed round from 
inner circles outward : we had given the Allies a coup 
d^epaule. **Leg up'^ is the English for that. Papa 
Joffre, who staunchly insisted that **leg up*' fell 
somewhat short of describing our part at Ch&teau- 
Thierry and Champagne and St. Mihiel and the Ar- 
gonne, and two million men come three thousand 
miles, and successful fighting that extended from 
early summer to the 11th of November — ^Papa Joffre, 
who stuck out for it that this represented something 
more than a **leg up,*' had been officially ** canned, '* 
as our doughboys would have put it. I reflected upon 
this, and upon the fact that the French, with the same 
breath that they called us a **leg up,'' were anxious 
that we should bind ourselves to come over and boost 
them again, if ever the Germans again started up. 
I had discerned in some persons a subtle disap- 
pointment at our proving ourselves not too proud to 
fight; it compelled them to seek something else to 
fling. I had noticed that certain English jeers at our 
neutrality had shifted to jealousy of our participa- 
tion ; a cold glaze had filled certain English eyes at 
the barest reference to our battles. To a friend of 
mine one English lady had complained that just as 



80 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

the Allies were on the threshold of winning we had 
come over and robbed them of the full glory of 
victory. Were such undercurrents to direct the great 
stream of History t Or would the brag upon our part 
die away beside the vast fight and suffering of France 
and England, and their sneers vanish in the realiza- 
tion that in joining them we had wrenched ourselves 
from one of the deepest-rooted articles of our faith, 
and asked nothing f 

Meanwhile, these countries were teaching full as 
much of forbearance to me as they could learn from 
mine. At moments it came hard, but I held to it, even 
when I heard that we had come to make the world 
safe for hypocrisy; reaction inevitable and petulant 
must be met philosophically. Only, not all of our 
doughboys were philosophers ; my next effort at per- 
suasion was not crowned with visible success. 

It began in the Metro. A crowd filled the car, and 
I was glad to feel pretty sure that the remarks which 
some of my fellow-countrymen were making fell upon 
ears that did not understand them. The noise of the 
train in the tunnel led me to move nearer to hear the 
whole instead of parts of what was being said, as the 
chief word which reached me was, as usual, **frogs.'^ 
But as I made my way, over my shoulder came the 
muttered phrase, **ces sales Americains.'' Some 
Frenchman was present who did at any rate under- 
stand what frogs meant and he was returning the 
compliment; and not much league of nations was 
occurring here. 

It was four doughboys comparing recent Parisian 
experiences together quite placidly, and planning ex- 
periences to come. They were not complaining, as I 
had supposed at first; indeed, their adventures had 



SOME PEACE CONFERENCES 81 

been wholly to their satisfaction, and to these they 
referred with a frankness based upon the assumption 
that nobody else knew English. 

"Made me think of one night in Tncson,*' said one. 

"Naw, they're not the same/' said another. 
** Mexican girls can really love yon.'* 

**0h, say, boys,'' said a third, **he's learned what 
true love is I" And they all langhed joyonsly. 

**Say, we got to change at Concorde!" exclaimed 
the second, with sudden alarm. 

** Well, tell us something we don't know," said Tuc- 
son. **More about true love." 

**Well, we don't want to pass Concorde." 

**I11 not let you," said I. "I'm changing there 
myself." 

In Paris it seemed iovariably to startle them 
slightly when anybody who wasn't a doughboy wasn't 
French. 

"Is the hotel St. Xavier still the best in Tucson?" 
I inquired. 

They began to grin, especially a tall one, and one 
with black hair. Tucson was short and slim, with a 
merry eye. 

"I expect," I pursued, "that the right man could 
find true love in Deming, Lordsburg, Benson, Mari- 
copa, Phoenix and Tempe, even Yuma, just as well 
as in Tucson." 

My "even Yuma," was an enormous success; they 
drove their elbows into each other, although two of 
them had blushed deeply at being overheard. By the 
time we were getting out at Concorde, blushes had 
been recovered from, they had learned that I had 
ridden over Arizona and New Mexico before they 
were bom, and I had learned that the hotel St. Xavier 



82 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

was no longer the best in Tucson. When I asked 
young Tucson if the big wild cat I had seen in Mari- 
copa in 1910 was still there, he began, I think, to feel 
as if I must be something in the way of a long-lost 
uncle ; he had seen that cat when he was a boy. 

**Mr. Williams owned it," said he. **Acrosst over 
the track. We lived on Salt River then. Excuse me, 
sir, but I ^d never take you for an American. ' ' 

**I^11 try to excuse you. I should always know 
you were one. Let me congratulate you on your 
division's athletic fame.'' 

**We fought some too, sir." 

* * Oh, all good Americans are proud of that. Where 
are you getting out!" 

**Marb(Bf. Gosh, I wish I could get out of this 
country. ' ' 

**Marbcef 's mine." It was not, I had been getting 
out at Alma, but his exclamation had put the mis- 
sionary spirit in me. Time happened to be nothing, 
and we had begun well. 

^*Why call them frogs t" I asked. 

**Do you like themf " This was Black Hair, after 
we had come up from below and were walking along. 

* * I like them very much. ' ' 
They were silent. 

**I guess we don't, sir," said Tucson, after a few 
steps by my side. 

^*I can give very good reasons for liking them," 
said I. 

One of the two in front of us turned aroimd. 

**We have very good reasons for not," said he. 
This was Tall One. 

Somehow it was slightly portentous. They all 
stopped and faced me, and there stood the five of us 



SOME PEACE CONFERENCES 83 

in an argument on the wide walk of the Champs Ely- 
sees. They appealed, they confided, as to a "friend, 
but every face had grown hard as a flint ; they took up 
their tale in cold anger and grew hot over it at the 
end. 

**You know the St. Mihiel country?^' This was 
Black Hair. 

**Not yet.'' 

**Well, that's where our big kick comes in." 

* * You know we were there last September ! ' ' This 
was Tall One. 

*^0h, yes." 

**Well, that's where we didn't pay for the privi- 
lege," said Tall One. 

** Privilege of fighting for France," said Black 
Hair. 

^ * We '11 fight for Germany next time. We know the 
Germans now. They're the folks to treat a man 
well." 

*^Very well," amplified Tucson. ^^Very, very 
well. And they're clean. Why, look here. About St. 
Mihiel. We had orders to dig in at a place there. 
Second day." 

** Never mind the day. We were just starting to 
dig in." 

**Lots of companies were advancing," continued 
Tucson, **the shells were coming our way right 
then." 

* * German shells, you understand. Coming heavy, ' ' 
said Black Hair. 

**When up runs the farmer," said Tucson, **and 
says to our captain we can't go on till we've paid 
for his land. Then some argument, and then some 
excitement, but our captain talks quiet." 



84 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

**Our captain he's a gentleman/' This was the 
fourth, who had been a solemn listener xmtil now. 

**Yes. A gentleman,'' affirmed Tall One. "When 
yon meet a commissioned officer you don't always 
meet a gentleman." 

* * Even so I " said Fourth One, still solemn. 
**"Well, and so the farmer got more excited and the 

captain got more quiet, and away goes the farmer 
and back he comes with a French officer. * You must 
pay, ' says the officer. We all heard him. ' ' 

* * Even so ! " said the fourth. * ^ Yea, yea. ' ' 
**Shut up, Elmer, for God's sake." 

"The gentleman don't mind. He's been a sport. 
Yea, yea. ' ' And Fourth One suddenly gave a youp 
that must have come from the cattle range. I now 
perceived that either his last night was not finished 
or his next was already begun. 

"Consider yourselves, consider my grey hairs, 
consider the Champs Elysees," I begged him. 

For a moment their eyes grew merry, and then 
hardened, and Tall One took it up. 

* * The Frenchman told the captain we must pay the 
farmer for spoiling his land. The sheUs were coming 
livelier all the time, so the captain told us to keep 
digging and I guess he told the French captain it 
was his busy day. Anyhow Froggy said ^biang, 
biang, ' and he pulled out a paper. ' ' 

"He pulls out a paper," said Fourth One. 

"Wrote on it and handed it to the captain," said 
Black Hair. "Wanted the captain to sign that we'd 
pay for the land afterwards." 

"How about that, sir?" said Tucson. 

"But the captain," said Tall One, "handed that 
paper back to the French officer. ' ' 



SOME PEACE CONFERENCES 85 

* ^ He handed it back. Yea, yea ! ' ' 

*^And he told him,*' Tall One continned, taking no 
notice, **that he had no orders to sign anything; he 
was here to pnsh Hnns off the land, not to pay for it. 
*If yon give me any tronble,' he said ^' 

* * Frog had threatened to bring his men over. They 
were digging in themselves, '' said Black Hair. 

**The captain told him to bring his men over and 
they^d get more good manners shot into them in a 
fraction of a second than they might otherwise ac- 
quire in a lifetime, '' said Tncson. They iSnished 
their tale in short tnms, almost talMng at once. 

*^The French oflScer said '' 

**We didn't get it all, but he and his men were 
going to come over '' 

"To make us pay or quit digging." 

**He and the farmer went away over to where the 
French were digging, but they never came back. ' ' 

**Come back yourself, sir, to God's country. Now 
that the Armistice is signed these French will be glad 
to tell you good-bye. ' ' 

Tucson said that, and now I took my turn. 

"That French officer,'' I began, "had paid that 
farmer for the injury to the land his own soldiers 
were doing." 

Their eyes never left my face. This was a good 
sign, but a bad one went with it. They never once 
asked me a question. I must have talked three or 
four minutes steadily to them as we stood in the 
Champs Elysees, explaining to them the predicament 
of the French peasants and the method of meeting 
it which I understood that the French Government 
had been forced to adopt, and then I came to an end 
with dead silence for an answer. 



86 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

'* Better go back to God^s country, sir/' repeated 
Tucson, smiling. 

**Even so,'* said Fourth One. 

We parted, amicably disagreeing. No arguments, 
only time and reflection, and perhaps not even these, 
would change their minds. 

Waiting in the Trianon Lyrique with my overcoat 
on — ^heavens, how cold that theatre was ! — ^I thought 
over these talks with our doughboys and took out my 
notes of them. Should I cut them out at homef 
Should I cut out the coup d^epaule and everything 
else disagreeable t If I did, would home believe the 
agreeable things I should tellt With the cause of 
France hung our own, and our future welfare, and 
our enlightened participation in the welfare of the 
world. 



vm 



LB PETIT DUO 



The drop-curtain and decorations of the Trianon 
Lyrique well befitted a * * family theatre ' ' ; innocence 
with its father and mother could gaze at these also 
without injury. I blessed them. They ministered 
to my Peace Conference, perhaps they caused it: 
Aurora in her chariot, golden rays her background, 
winged boys her companions, festooning garlands at 
either hand, the head of Pegasus below, like a trophy 
of the chase, and that drop-curtain — really a dividing 
curtain— quiet with colors like a faded oriental rug 
that had been used and walked on and not cleaned 
lately. I blessed it as I would a rest-cure, my reason- 
ing rose serene out of the chop-sea in which I, too, 
had been tossing. The French audience gathered, 
French undisguised, not on exhibition for the benefit 
of Americans any more than the opera, quiet domes- 
tic parties, out for an evening's highly economical 
entertainment. I was enjoying the sight of them 
when the seat next mine was filled by a spectator 
more exotic in that dingy atmosphere than even my- 
self. A woman, a lady — she made me an exactly 
right bow for disturbing me ; a lady plainly by her 
expression, by her lines, by the way she sat, and by 
her perfectly admirable and perfectly quiet clothes. 
We began at once to study each other in that imper- 
ceptible way which is invariably perceived by both 
parties. She was handsome. AU of forty-five (you 

87 



88 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

will be disappointed), probably nearer fifty. She had 
style and missed elegance. Obviously forcible. 
Somebody. A look of giving orders and having it 
done. Too mnch so. Had probably been in war- 
work. Yes, probably the head of something she sup- 
ported with a large bank accoimt. I would bet she 
had secretaries. Oh, yes; one of the chop-sea phil- 
anthropists with a mission. Philanthropists are un- 
mistakable even when they are ladies. I had seen her 
type down-stairs and up at the Hotel de Crillon but 
nothing equal to her. American. New Yorkt I felt 
so. Why did she make me angry f The fiddlers were 
coming out of the hole now. And here she was, by 
herself. Of course she was American. And if any 
man presumed and spoke to her — ^why he'd get itl 
In my mind was no such presumption. Silence was 
what I had come here for, and isolation. 

**We might as well chat,'' she said to me, in Eng- 
lish. ** Don't you think so?" Deep, assured, entirely 
civilized voice. Eyebrows too heavy. 
• * * I '11 say anything you like, ' ' I responded amiably. 

^* You '11 say nothing I don't." 

**I was sure that you appreciated me," I mur- 
mured. 

She turned this over before she was quite satisfied 
with it; then she inquired, *^Have you been here 
long!" 

I took out my watch. ** Sixteen minutes, I think." 

**You know perfectly well that I mean, have you 
been in Paris long!" 

** Perfectly well. My coming is quite recent." 
From the gentleness of my voice any old friend would 
have known that I was going to be detestable. 

**I wonder if I know your name?" she said next. 



. LE PETIT DUG 89 

** Quite unlikely. I'm not from New York/' 

This she also turned over. **I can't seem to place 
you." 

"Ah, don't try!" 

"I came here to get away from — ^well, from all that 
you are probably mistaking for the true France," she 
now explained to me. 

**So did II" I exclaimed. "Well, that is spoiled 
for both of us. We must just console each other. ' ' 

"I am apt to hear of people," she stated, con- 
sidering me. * * You 're certainly not Red Cross. You 
can 't be in the Reconstruction f Or NeuiUy t I know 
them all there. You're surely not a member of Con- 
gress? One can tell them as far as one can see 
them." 

* * Really and truly I 'm not a spy. Give me up I " 

"Well, it makes no difference. I hope you have 
realized that Paris is by no means France!" 

Of course I had. I had realized that about forty 
years ago. Why couldn't she perceive that I knew 
something about France myseU? How had I found 
my way here, far from the areas of Paris got up for. 
strangers, and the spangled shows sung and danced 
for Americans? Her importance blocked her obser- 
vation. She took herself for granted too much, and 
me too little. You will not think highly of me. I 
fell apart, and my lower nature spoke for me, sep- 
arately. If I was to have no isolation she should 
have no satisfaction. 

"Do tell me about that," I said. 

"You see," she forcibly expounded, "Paris, 
through being a great centre, draws and develops all 
the worst elements. ' ' 

"Oh, I see. Like New York." 



90 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

**And Americans live here for months perfectly 
ignorant of the trne France. I hope you intend to 
visit the devastated regions before yon go homef 

'' Should I find true France there?'' 

**It's everywhere, of course, in a way. But in 
provincial France — ^where the devastated regions are, 
you understand — ^you get straight at it, while here 
you have to sift it out, and that takes familiarity with 
the language. ' ' 

**I'll certainly go, if I can.'' 

^*It requires authorization, of course." She 
stopped and considered me again. ^ ^ One obtains that 
in various ways. American ignorance of Europe is 
simply appalling." 

^^ Worse than theirs of usi" I inquired. 

** There is much less of us to know. Our impor- 
tance is great, but it's simple. Knowing Europe 
would be of incalculable advantage to us. Europe is 
very complicated. Each nation has things it does 
better than we do them, and we're so ignorant we 
don't know it. And then, life here! Why life here 
compared to American life is like a wedding-cake 
compared to dry toast. ' ' 

That last was rather good. Why did I know that 
she had tried it on others before she bestowed it on 
mef 

**The doctors pronounce too much wedding-cake 
indigestible, ' ' I said. 

She looked at me suddenly. ^*I wonder if you're 
writing for The Saturday Evening Postf^^ 

**How are you ever going to instruct me if you 
keep on guessing so hard f ' ' 

But she now said, **Ssh. People may want to 
listen." And she settled herself. 



LE PETIT DUG 91 

I was very glad to listen to the slender, sprightly 
overture, in which each tune was an old friend, 

**That is the true France," she informed me when 
it was over. ^*Bnt only the surface. Americans 
suppose it is the whole. Do you know what the war 
has cost France r' 

She couldn't tell me then, because the curtain had 
divided and they were singing the opening chorus. 
But she would tell me between the acts. She was 
only half listening to the opera. She was busy over 
me. Whatever her mission was, I had become a part 
of it while she had the chance. I realized that she 
was a mine of explosive information, that her zealous 
days were spent in some large, good work, that she 
hooked everybody, every likely person, every passing 
listener of the slightest promise. Thus she scattered 
the seed of her cause. It so filled her that no place 
was unpropitious, no time untimely, each new contact 
caused her statistics to burst out of her. Would she 
bring herself in? I wondered. The act went on. 
The little bride was torn from the little bridegroom 
directly after their wedding ceremony, and hurried 
away to a convent, while he was forced to continue 
his education with his two tutors. All in the costume 
of a bygone Watteau age, to graceful bygone melodies 
and rhythms. 

* * Paris cherishes these little gems, ' ' she informed 
me as the curtain closed. ^ * They are extinct with us, 
because the audience that used to understand them is 
extinct. They demand on the part of their hearers 
the rudiments of both education and civilization. 
They would be Greek to Hebrew Broadway. Not 
even Big Bertha stopped the theatres. The actors 



92 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

showed that they were as true sons of France as the 

She was going to hammer me with facts like a pile- 
driver ; that I saw in a flash. It would go on through 
the whole intermission; and intermissions in Paris 
are long. When they have bought seats for the 
theatre, the economic French put out the lamps and 
the fire at home, and feel entitled to lodging at the 
play until near midnight. That was another good 
sentence about Greek to Hebrew Broadway. 

**I have read about the brave patriotism of the 
French actors, ' ' I said. 

You could seldom tell whether she was listening to 
you or not. Whatever she had been in her youth, she 
now belonged to that class of important people who 
hear nothing you say except what happens to strike 
the keynote of their own preoccupation. 

*^ Everything is needed here,'* she now declared. 
** Everywhere you turn, need is what you see.*' 

I sat tight. It was coming. She had got it ready 
like concentrated essence of beef, or a hypodermic 
charge of serum. 

^ ^ The French children have been five years without 
school. We must get the school teachers back to 
them. Only think what a loss of five school years 
would mean to the generation of American voters 
that is growing up. ' ' 

**It would be a loss you couldn't see with the naked 
eye,'* I said. *^You have not been following Ameri- 
can education as closely as French. '^ 

I know she didn't listen to that. 

^* France has lost one entire fifth of her taxes. 
Twenty per cent, of her taxes were paid by the 
devastated regions/' 



LE PETIT DUG 93 

** Yes, I have read about that, too. Lens, Lille, the 
coal, the manufacturing section. Yes, I have read 
that.'' 

** Books without travel are bricks without straw,'' 
she said. 

That was an awfully good one ! I doubt if it was 
her own. She probably collected lines like this and 
salted her public speeches with them. I had now 
become sure that she addressed audiences. I hoped 
the audiences were not wounded soldiers in bed. 

**The whole region north of the Aisne was scien- 
tifically destroyed, ' ' she continued. ^ * Before the war 
France normally spent two billions a year on con- 
struction. Twenty billions are needed now to put her 
buildings back where they were. And who is to do 
this f Of French males between the ages of 18 and 
34, 57 per cent, are dead. They can barely cope with 
the dehlayage. The farmers that survive are willing 
to live in holes to carry on, but what are they to do 
without agricultural machinery!" 

She paused. I sat battered and dumb. Had I 
known the answer I could not have given it. But she 
did not want it. Her pause was for rhetoric, not for 
information or for breath. Her breath never failed. 
It was like an endless chain of prayer. 

**What is necessary to a nation!" she now de- 
manded directly of me. 

**Why — ^I should say " but my mind stopped. 

**What, I mean to say, does any nation have to 
have, or lapse into barbarism!" 

I wondered if I could last through this intermission 
without turning upon her. I decided that I could 
certainly not bear the next. Perhaps I was being 
punished for the activity of my lower nature at the 



94 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

outset of my talk. But of this I am by no means 
certain. I believe that she was one of those who are 
so driven by the steam of the facts they have amassed, 
that they plow ahead, telling you what they know, 
wholly indifferent to whether you know it or not 

^*Is not a nation like an individual! If you and I 
to retain our position among civilized people, not only 
require a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs, 
food in our stomachs, but must also have health and 
strength and education and money to support art, 
literature, science, and to pay our way in an increas- 
ingly expensive and competitive world— is it not plain 
what France needs ? Do you know that tuberculosis 
is unfitting men and women to be parents, and is 
waiting for the new born! The percentage of tuber- 
culosis in France '' 

My mind ceased to retain any more. In the whirl 
of statistics which continued, I sat like a man over- 
taken upon a mountain by thick snow, until the open- 
ing of the curtain came to my relief. Truly, if you are 
in a mood to be let alone, keep well away from persons 
with a mission, women especially. The music Was 
not able to distract me. I prepared some remarks 
for her benefit, and rehearsed them all through the 
act. 

* * With everything that you have said, ' ' I was going 
to tell her, ^*I perfectly agree. Most of it I knew 
already. I am seeing France exactly as you advised. 
Tomorrow I go to Chateau-Thierry and Reims, later 
to Verdun, under the kind and courteous auspices of 
our officers at 37, Rue de Bassano. So far, I have 
been under the equally kind auspices of the Brit- 
ish, at 30, Avenue Marceau. At 5, Rue Francois 
Premier, the courteous French officers were ready to 



LE PETIT DUG 95 

place their services at my disposal and take me to all 
places in their jurisdiction. I have been urged to 
accept a week in Germany, beginning at Coblenz ; and 
General Pershing of his own accord has personally 
bidden me to ask him for anything that he can cause 
to be done for me, and it shall be done. ' ' 

But I said none of it. It would have come from 
my lower nature, although it would have all been true. 

After all, the formidable lady who had loaded me so 
heavily with advice and instruction was not thinking 
of herself, but of her cause. I had wondered if she 
would bring herself in, would dilate upon her own 
exploits in benevolence ; but she never did. And her 
facts and figures were all too true. But I could not, 
I really could not, trust my lower nature through 
another intermission. 

* * I am going to bid you good-night, ' ' I said, as the 
curtain closed again. 

It was a blow, I could see that. * * Oh, stay it out I ' ' 
she said. *^We can talk some more.^' 

** Awfully sorry. It has been ever so interesting 
and helpful. I have an early start tomorrow — ^and 
the third act isn't much.*' 

**You leave Paris tomorrow!" She thought 
rapidly and produced this final, compact parcel of 
tuition : 

^ * You must make allowances for Paris. If you find 
the hotels and the taxi-drivers and the police officials 
when you go for your card of identification, rude, 
remember the four years they have been through. 
Think how it must exasperate their nerves to be 
unable to settle down now, to be still overwhelmed 
with strangers like this. Do make allowances.*' 

**IVe been doing nothing else!" I returned, 



96 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

levelling each word straight at her. **And I have 
been beseeching onr soldiers to do nothing else. 
French manners have always been better outside 
Paris, as American manners are outside New York. 
And now the hotels and taxis and police officials here 
are simply beyond belief — democracy at its dregs/' 

Directly I spoke of onr soldiers, she fixed me with 
concentrated scrutiny, every word that had followed 
missing her entirely. 

**I know!'' she cried. ^* You 're on some vice 
mission." 

* * We 're finding it up-hill work, ' ' retorted my lower 
self. ^ ^ Young Frenchmen hold chastity a provincial- 
ism they've got beyond, young Americans hold it a 
virtue they haven 't reached. Que voulez-vous t ' ' 

She probably took in but little of that, such was her 
satisfaction in having finally placed me; and with 
that I had risen from my seat and was gone. Once 
again a few days later I came face to face with her as 
we went up together in the elevator at the Hotel de 
Crillon, but she did not know me from Adam. It was 
a great relief. 



IX 



KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 



Not yet were my conversations over for this day. 
I emerged from the Trianon Lyrique upon pools of 
water spread in so many places that my short walk to 
the Metro station was materially lengthened through 
avoiding them. The floods of rain which had evi- 
dently been pouring down while I was being given 
French lessons, had left the air bleaker and damper 
even than when I had entered the theatre. In the 
almost empty train I smiled at myself for so resent- 
ing the French lessons. But it is only superior 
persons who don't mind being told what they ought 
to know, and very superior persons indeed who don't 
mind being told what they know already. The right- 
minded reader will say that I should be ashamed of 
my conduct to this instructive female. So I should 
— and am not. The lady had really added to my 
knowledge ; be that said for her. She had given me 
figures and sununaries that I had not known before, 
which I later found to be accurate, and which made a 
solid frame, so to speak, for the picture of devasta- 
tion upon which I had been gazing during my pilgrim- 
age. Albert, Bapaume, Peronne, which I had seen, 
and the withered soil, and all the rest, were the 
visible, physical destruction that spelt the twenty per 
cent, destruction of taxes. The lady was another 
figure in the iridescent horde that ran and twinkled 
over the surface of Paris ; a winged ant, busied upon 

97 



98 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

errands of good; and with all her too-bristling 
energy, she fitted in well with what I had said to the 
gloomy, beclouded boy at the cathedral of Amiens, 

From the Metro I ascended to the surface of the 
earth at the Place du Havre. It was between times : 
the small French cafes and the shops were long 
closed, the theatres not yet ont, and the St. Lazare 
station had mostly ceased to suck in or to disgorge 
travellers. In this lull of the hurrying ants, taxis and 
omnibuses were few, and wide wet expanses of as- 
phalt visible ; and there, on one of those islands that 
make a refuge for street crossers during the crowded 
hours, stood a tall American soldier. My plans had 
been for a little diary and a great deal of bed, but I 
changed them, and walked over to the island. 

**Can you guess my nationality in this light! '^ 
said I. 

His teeth were visible during the smile that began 
his answer. 

** There are parts of Paris that are livelier than 
this,'' I continued. 

^*I'm from Kansas, but IVe found that out,'' he 
returned. * * Oh, yes ; there 's a heap doing here when 
a fellow feels like doing it." 

*^ Don't you ever feel like that?" 

**0h, yes, sometimes. I've been around this city 
some. It's worth seeing, day and night." 

**It certainly is," I agreed. 

* ^ I guess this isn 't your first visit, ' ' said he. 

^*I came here when I was twelve and I've been 
lucky enough to come again, more than once. I lived 
here once for more than a year. Of course I trav- 
elled, too, during that time." 

*^Been in other parts of Europe, toof " he asked. 



KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 99 

** Several, But I'm American, you know, first, 
last, and all the time. " 

He was thoughtful for a moment. * ^ Travel would 
make me more American all the time. ' ' 

^^Then you're as anxious to get home as all the 
others are f 

^*0h, m be glad to get home. But there's some 
been over here longer than I have, and it's only fair 
their turn should come first." 

He shifted forth and back slowly from one foot to 
another, his head two or three inches taller than mine. 

**If I am keeping you " I said. 

**0h, no, I'm on duty here for a while yet." 

He was of the American Military Police, and he 
stood here during certain of the night hours for the 
benefit of such American soldiers as ndght need 
either direction or discipline. Here was Kansas 
upon an island in the Place du Havre, policing New 
Jersey and Michigan and California and all the rest 
of us ! Never throughout this whole journey did my 
mind adjust itself to this stirring of America into the 
sour broth of Europe. 

"I often wonder how my own town would rub its 
eyes if it saw a French soldier policing French 
soldiers in the middle of the street. ' ' 

**Well," he answered judicially, *^I know my town 
would quit after the first rub or two, and start jacking 
up the prices, same as the French have. You from 
New York!" 

**0h, no. New York never rubs its eyes at any- 
thing. I 'm from Philadelphia. ' ' 

* * H 'm. Newton is my town. Newton, Kansas. ' ' 

Nothing could be plainer in the tone of this an- 
nouncement than his quiet and permanent satisfao- 



100 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

tion with Newton, Kansas. If the staple product of 
that town was Americans like this, I hoped that its 
population would double each year. In his observ- 
ant, poised self-reliance, he justified our whole 
theory. And all of six-foot-one. 

*^So you think jacking up the prices is not a 
monopoly of the French T* I asked. 

**It*s human nature,'' he stated. Patience and 
toleration pervaded his voice. 

*^ Where we were lately '' 

He was interrupted. A night-faring doughboy had 
come up, and asked him some question. He walked a 
few steps with the inquirer to the other side of the 
island, and there evidently gave him some detailed 
directions, pointing once or twice with a slow and 
most graceful gesture. But this had not diverted his 
thoughts. 

** Where we were lately,'' he resumed — "have 
you ever tasted French champagne made for our 
express benefit f ' ' 

**I don't think so. Not over here in France, any- 
how. ' ' 

**Well, don't you do it." He gave me this piece 
of advice after a hair's breadth of hesitation and a 
puzzled glance, for which I could not account. **I 
haven't had a very wide experience in champagne 
myself, ' ' he continued. * * But you knew this was put 
np for 'Americans just after your first swaJlow of it 
No, I'm wrong: just before." Again I caught the 
gleam of his teeth as he smiled before he proceeded. 
**They had the two flags crossed on the label. Ours 
and theirs, you understand, most affectionate. Some 
Portuguese were there, too. Well, when a Portuguese 
called for a bottle, they charged him seven francs. 






KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 101 

Americans were charged thirty-five. The captain 
closed np the shop when he found that out. Down 
came the price to the Portuguese level.*' 
**The French are different from us," I said. 

* * Different ! Yes, we all have found that out. The 
captain was going to drain a cesspool and put it in 
some other place more sanitary. The French farmer 
was very hot at the captain and claimed ten thousand 
francs damages for his manure pile. The French are 
certainly different, and they think we are certainly 
different, and I think that the less we see of each 
other the better we 're liable to like each other. The 
Lafayette affair was a good while ago, and I'm not as 
grateful to him as I was before I met his posterity." 

* * But you certainly think the two nations should be 
friends ! " I exclaimed in a pressing manner. ^ ^ They 
don't expect you to pay the first price they ask. 
They're used to bargaining. It's part of the game 
with them. ' ' 

**We play poker in Kansas, but we're not used to 
playing it for a hen's egg with old ladies in caps. 
Oh, I know! We slapped our money down first go 
and it was bigger money than they'd ever seen, and 
they hadn't been seeing much anyhow for four years. 
We all go down when temptation's strong enough, 
and I don 't hold that against them. ' ' 

*'Why hold anything against themt" 

He reflected. **I don't know as I do. Not more'n 
I hold against everybody — ^including myself!" He 
gave a joyous chuckle at this. 

A couple of American soldiers passed near with a 
couple of girls. The girls were keeping very close 
indeed to the soldiers. The young men did not have 
the look of being entirely captivated by the com- 



102 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

panions whom they had secured— or who had secured 
them. My Kansas friend followed them for a 
moment with his eye, which then once more rested, 
oddly interrogative, npon me. 

^^Let me tell yon,'^ I said, ** something you may not 
have thought of — ^though yon have thought of more 
things than any enlisted man I Ve yet talked to— and 
IVe done quite a little preaching to them in this 
city.^' 

A change, as of resignation, passed over his figure ; 
it seemed to settle. 

*^Well, preaching can be good,'' he said. **ni 
stay. ' ' 

** Here's my sermon to you. IVe given it to a lot 
of others — ^and they've listened. For hundreds of 
years these French have had to be fighting their 
neighbors and paying taxes to meet it. We've had 
no neighbors to fight. We've only had five wars 
before this, and free farms for everybody, genera- 
tion after generation. No such thing in France. 
They've had to look close at their pennies, while 
we 've been throwing gold pieces to western bar-tend- 
ers for a drink — and never missing it. But that's 
not all. The fathers of these same French who are 
overcharging you saw the Prussians overrun their 
homes, and rout their armies, and capture their 
emperor, and make them pay the bill. It was a big 
bill. Your father never knew the experience of 
having to dive down into his jeans to help pay an 
indemnity to a foreign conqueror. That was less 
than fifty years ago. The old ladies in caps you 
mention were young wives then, and they saw their 
men go to the front, and didn 't always see them come 
back. And they had to save and save their coppers 



KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 103 

and their poor little pieces of silver to meet that huge 
bill of Germany ^s. That's what they were doing 
while we were spreading westward to free farms at 
our ease. If our fathers had known the bitter experi- 
ence of these French, don't you think it likely they 
would have taught their children to close their hands 
over coin rather than to open them, and don't you 
think the children would be interested in charging as 
high for an egg as anybody was fool enough to be 
willing to pay!" 

He had watched me very steadily while I spoke, 
and, as seemed his custom, waited before answering. 

**You have pointed out another way to look at it. 
History is something I don't know much about. I 
don't know, if I had known, that I'd have put their 
history alongside of ours and drawn conclusions that 
way. Yes, sir, I shouldn't wonder if that was so." 
He indulged himself with a moment of rumination. 
* * I 'U mention that. I have talked to some of the boys k 
who are sore at the prices. ' ' 

**In 1780 the French were sore at ours," said L 
**You spoke about Lafayette just now!" 

**Well, I learned about him at school. Couldn't tell 
you the story of his life, though." 

^^ Neither could I. There were several well-known 
Frenchmen came over to help us. Bochambeau, and a 
young fellow named de Fersen. He wrote home about 
us, and he said — ^well, it will sound quite familiar 
to you. He said almost exactly these words : * They 
fleece us pitilessly, the price of everything is exorbit- 
ant.' Ajid then he went on to say that in our 
dealings with the French we treated them more like 
enemies than friends. That our cupidity was un- 
equalled ; money was our god. There was more that 



\ 



104 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

he said. He had met some very fine people, quite a 
nmnber of them, but he thought the people in general 
were a set of robbers. Now, you see, this young 
Frenchman had come over to help Washington win 
the war.*' 

**Do you mind saying those first words over 
again t'* said Kansas. 

* ^ About fleecing us f 

**Yes.'' 

^ * * They fleece us pitilessly, the price of everything 
is exorbitant.' '' 

** Thank you, I'll tell that to the boys. It sounds 
natural. ' ' 

His duty had caused him to turn and inspect the 
Place du Havre, lest his services or his authority 
should be needed. More people were beginning to 
pass and cross, a more crowded hour had just set in. 
He found nothing, however, to divert his attention. 
He turned back to me and took it up. 

^^But I don't need any points for myself. Before 
I came over here I was a year on the Mexican border. 
The El Paso barbers didn't sit down on any prices 
for us soldiers. Nobody did, barber or grocer or 
tobacco shop or anybody. Let a soldier walk in any 
place and the prices went up like — ^like putting your 
thermometer out in that Rio Grande sun. Well, if 
my own people do that to me, my own people," he 
repeated with emphasis, **what call have I to blame 
these French? Blame them for that, I mean. For 
I do say that no American that I ever saw to know 
would charge his rescuers rent for the trenches they 
rescued him in. ' ' 

*'They charged themselves," I said. 

^*I don't call that an answer," he retorted. 



KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 105 

^^Land holdings here are often so small that a 
trench cuts a big slice of what was available for crops. 
The farmer had to raise food for France. Prance 
paid him damages to help him carry on." 

**And we got shot to help France carry on.'' 

**I don't say it wasn't clumsy." 

** Clumsy!" he chuckled. *^I've another word 
for it." 

^^ Listen I German propaganda twisted another fact 
so as to hurt France with us. The heavy timber 
and iron field revetments and all the tools and 
material to build them cost money. It's like fixtures 
in a house. Any regiment moving into a trench that 
another regiment was vacating signed rough inven- 
tories of trench stores they were taking over. No 
money passed between English regiments, it was 
more for discipline, but money did pass between us 
and the French. That was made to look like rent by 
German propaganda. ' ' 

**A11 right. Any morel" 
Yes. Wait for all the facts before you jump. 
English regiments have drunk from French wells. 
The next regiments Ihat marched by found the pump 
handles wrenched off and had to pay for water. It 
didn't look well to thirsty men. But French wells 
are often shallow. They would have been drained 
dry, and it was all the water the peasants had." 

**Say, brother, you know these Frendi more than 
I have had a chance to. What do you make of 
them!" 

**Look at this splendid city of theirs," I replied. 
**Look at the fight they put up." 

**Yes, that's all so. Yes. But say, take the way 
they lie. Why, they don't lie on the American plan 



<< 



106 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

at alL We don 't lie jnst to be pleasant. Gbt to have 
a stronger reason. And morals. Why, decent girls 
are not allowed to go for a walk with a young man. 
Why, boys come back from the leave areas and tell 
me that French parents were astonished that their 
daughters could be trusted alone with us." 

** Europe is different," I said. *^But we might 
learn a lot of good things from the French." 

* * Well, give me America. I Ve heard what you say 
several times. A man stood here the other night, 
and told me what a splendid thing it was going to be 
for America to be Med with young men bringing 
home such a heap of knowledge they never could have 
got at home. Well, America will not be filled. 
Those who have seen the leave areas are going to 
think France is a better country than those who never 
saw any of it but the war regions. Of course that's 
so. But you have got to be educated before you can 
get education — ^the foreign kind that he meant. 
About the only education that most of the boys will 
take home is more varieties of 

He stopped himself short, and for the third time I 
was aware of his interrogative glance at me. I had 
known what he was about to say well enough. He 
had decided, for some reason that his glance repre- 
sented but did not disclose, not to say it. I decided 
to say it. While I was meditating just how, for I 
wished to be neither Pharisaical on the one hand 
nor coarse on the other, meditation was spared me 
and a spontaneous way provided. Paris was coming 
alive again for its midnight existence. The theatres 
were out, late suburban trains were ready in St. 
Lazare, the Metro exits were spouting passengers 
into the Place du Havre. The number of our dough- 



KANSAS ON AN ISLAND 107 

boys on pleasure bent increased, they were passing by 
in conples and fonrs, the bloom of the New World 
still rich and unworn upon their young faces, and 
about their buoyant figures — ^and hanging upon their 
arms with practised clutch, the Old World in a skirt. 
No bloom left there, without or within. Female, but 
feminine no longer. The tragic moulting of a 
wounded bird of prey. 

**See them I" I murmured aloud, after one couple 
that had crossed close on the island and gone upon 
their way. 

**WhaVs that?^^ inquired the member of the 
military police. 

* * Did you notice him t ' ^ I asked. * * Did you notice 
hert'^ 

**Oh,yes.'^ 

**I would have no sermon for him,'* I continued. 
**None for any of them. They're human. And 
away from home. But I'd like to say, * Won't you 
stop a minute t Won't you just stop and look at her 
for one minutet' " 

**They couldn't see them," returned the soldier — 
**not before morning. I've been blind myself at this 
time of night." He looked me up and down with a 
new eye, and it was in a new voice that he said: 
**Why, I figured you were one of those social-evil 
guys taking longer than usual to reach your point." 

**I knew you were long-suffering," I returned; 
but I didn 't know how long. ' ' 

* * Oh, they mean well, they mean well. Better than 
they get treated. But you know history — ^natural 
history, too." 

I took out my watch. **I intended to be in bed an 
hour ago," I said. 



a 



108 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

He held out his hand. **Come round again when 
I'm here.'* 

Yes, decidedly I wished great increase to the popu- 
lation of Newton, Kansas, were he of its daily breed. 
If the plain people were everywhere such as he, faith 
in them would be more than justified. Like the 
blond Tommy at Albert, he had also his philosophy, 
attained and steady: less highly wrought than the 
Tommy's, because E^sas is less highly wrought 
than London. But it would serve. France did not 
appeal to him. He had been made in America. 
That set limits to his grasp of Europe. These 
both barred his benefiting and shielded his suf- 
fering from the complexities of the ancient Latin 
race. He would have use neither for their exquisite 
mental subtlety, nor their exquisite moral duplicity. 
I hoped that he might go home as soon as was fair 
to our Allies ; I hoped that all our doughboys might. 
He was shrewdly correct in his judgment that most of 
them would extend the area of their permanent 
knowledge by but little except chromatic sensuality. 
In the seething, iridescent ant-hill that Paris was in 
the spring of 1919, they were truly out of the picture, 
and home was the right place for them. Their work 
was over. They had fought a good fight when neces- 
sary, they had been charming with children, and 
respectful to decent women between whiles. Li my 
opinion the New World had no apologies whatever to 
offer the Old. Such were some of my thoughts as I 
went to bed and, as I recalled the slight jar dealt me 
at the end of each conversation that I had held this 
night, the last strand of coherence which crossed my 
mind before sleep overtook me was, * * Can I be getting 
to look like a philanthropist f" 



A GLIMPSE OF THE FOILU 

Very much do I wish that it had come in my way 
to see and to speak with the French poUu at length 
and at leisure, as it had been my luck to do with the 
British Tommy and the American doughboy. More 
talk with the Tommy would have enabled me to say 
with a measure of certainty more about him and his 
wonderful character: that hour at Albert left me 
with the never-to-be-granted wish that I might then 
and there have had days in his friendly company 
under conditions so favoring to intimacy. A 
glimpse, even slighter, of the poilu which I had upon 
the morning after my confidences exchanged with my 
fellow-countryman in the Place du Havre, also left 
me regretful that it was so brief. Something I had 
taken with me and something I had gathered of 
understanding about the American soldier ; and in the 
same way, something, though less, of the British ; of 
the French but very little at first-hand, and even this 
to be set down here with diffidence; of the Italian, 
nothing whatever at first-hand. Of him I can only 
repeat what everybody knows — ^that he is of the land 
which from centuries before Julius Csesar down 
through Dante, Columbus, Michelangelo, Palestrina, 
Galileo, to Marconi, has produced more genius 
than any other two countries of the world put 
together; that his race continues a noble, beautiful, 

109 



110 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

adequate race ; that he fought with fierce and gallant 
bravery on the steep sides of mountains ; and tidat his 
country is doing better today than some of her Allies. 
From politicians and newspapers it is that hindrance 
to true international understanding chiefly comes — 
the politician can utter a few public sentences that 
will estrange two peoples, one editor can write a 
paragraph which wUl have the same effect. 

The poUu that I saw for a while this next morning 
got into our car soon after it had passed the Eastern 
Bailway station and out of the Pantin gate. He 
stood by the roadside, made us a sign, and asked for 
a lift as far as Claye. Claye, interesting because the 
Huns got as close to Paris as this in 1914, was not 
very far, little more than half-way to Meaux, and this 
afforded but a brief chance to lead the poilu to any 
opening of his nature. Could I have said to him, 
*'How beautiful is the corner of your village where 
the old bridge crosses the river ! ' * or any other word 
of intimate admiration for his petit pays, his inch of 
France, where grew his ancestral roots, that would 
have gone at once all the way to his heart. A 
Frenchman's patriotism is very concrete. He loves 
with passion his own place, his own acre, his little 
spadeful of France. He wishes to live and if possible 
to die on the actual piece of earth which has been 
tilled by his forefathers, tilled by himself, whereon 
centuries of his kin have quickened, lived, and passed. 
We Americans do not fold our tents like ^e Arab and 
as silently steal away, but we are the latest version 
of the nomad. We transfer our never-rooted lives 
from Fort Worth to Spokane, or from Albany to San 
Diego, about as readily as we cross the street. We 
have emptied the word **home'' of all its hoarded 



A GLIMPSE OF THE POILU 111 

meaning and sanctity. Against whatever benefits 
this may brings it has wrought incalcnlable harm to 
the national soul. I had been no nearer the poUu^s 
country than the line between Lyons and Modane — 
he was from near Grenoble — ^and the best I conld do 
by way of establishing some bond between us was 
to praise the renown of Grenoble as a seat of learn- 
ing and exclaim: 

'*How beautiful are the mountains of Dauphinfil*' 

'^Then monsieur knows themf he responded at 
once — and became less shy, or reserved, or respectful, 
or whatever it was that his own nature and the 
presence of an American captain who was with us 
caused this enlisted man to be. He was going back 
to them, his mountains. In all the little that he said, 
the emotion of return brooded behind his words. He 
was existing to go hack; that was it. Going back and 
going on — ^these were his two vital motives. We have 
only one of them — agoing on. The soldier on the 
island might yearn for Newton, Kansas; the other 
fellow, the one from Danbury, had said that once back 
there, * * never again. ^ ' But if the one could better his 
lot by moving from Newton to the apple country of 
Oregon, and the other by leaving Danbury for Ihe 
plum belt in California, or the oil belt in Texas, or any 
other belt where material profit beckoned, why the 
betting is at least ninety-nine to one that the lure of 
betterment would snap the tie of home and that they 
would go in a minute. Not so was it with this 
Frenchman. To him his petit pays was forever 
better than any betterment. 

"Then monsieur knows themf 

In those four wistful words was not only a longing 
for the sight of his mountains, but a love of their 



112 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

looks. You will remember the words of the Tommy 
at Albert: **The French 'ave a great idea of the 
beautiful, and a very poor one of sanitytion. '^ Kan- 
sas on the island could not have said just that. He 
was not ripe enough for that particular kind of gener- 
alization. He was quite capable of appraising and 
loathing the villainous plumbing and the villainous 
absence of plumbing in France ; but there he stopped^ 
Westminster Abbey — or a thousand other sights — 
had made ready the Tommy's natural ready eye to see 
the excellences of French architecture. No West- 
minster Abbeys are in Kansas so far. Once a chauf- 
feur, whom I had engaged at Reims for a long jour- 
ney and informed that we should sleep at Orleans the 
next night, said immediately : 

* * Then I shall see if their statue of Joan of Arc is 
as good a one as ours. ' ' 

Imagine a chauffeur whom you were engaging in 
Philadelphia to go to Chicago, saying immediately : 

^^Then I shall see if St. Gaudens' Lincoln beats 
our statue in Fairmoimt Park. ' ' 

A sense of beauty and of art, and a daily-bread UBfi 
of beauty and art — that is one gift of the European 
continent to its plain people, which Kansas cannot 
give, nor Massachusetts, nor any state in our New 
World. In talking with any Frenchman, high or low, 
it will help our understanding of him to remember 
this. It will partially, though not totally, explain 
that fourth dimension of his character which answers 
to nothing in ours. Art, symmetry, has a hand 
in almost all he thinks and does, including his 
immoralities. 

The poUu, then, was not like Kansas on the island, 
nor yet was he like the Tommy at Albert, who had 



A GLIMPSE OF THE POILU 113 

said that he believed he had sentiment, but that this 
wotdd take the shape of keeping him away from, 
rather than taking him back to, a home in rtdns. 
There he was of closer kin to Kansas than to the 
poilu. His home near Grenoble was not in rtdns, but 
had it been so, this would have made no difference to 
him, I am perfectly sure ; no more than it had made 
to the lady who had come back from Nevers to see if 
she could find her house beneath the rubbish piles of 
Noyon; nor to the woman with the gash who had 
returned to a half annihilated estaminet in a wholly 
annihilated region, and had given me a loaf of bread, 
and had talked cheerfully of her future. Ooing bach 
and going on: in her also these had been the two vital 
motives. Through these I connected her with the 
Noyon lady, with this poilu, and with one other who 
had been a poilu. The cheerful and communicative 
valet at my hotel in Paris, he who had been buried for 
a day and three times wounded, who told me that I 
should visit the South where they were more amiable 
than in Paris — ^he was looking forward to taking up 
heavier work at Toulouse, his home, as soon as he 
should be well enough. Going back and going on! 
It was the unspoken watchword of the people of 
France. 

The poilu was a grave personality, of few words, 
unlike the valet from Toulouse, who was of many 
words. Both were peasants, and both somewhere 
along in their thirties, I should say. I don't know 
whether their taciturnity and loquacity were individ- 
ual or of race, and it matters nothing. Various races 
inhabit the different parts of France, some silent, 
some not at aU go, some more open-handed, some 
less ; and they vary in their dialects as widely as they 



114 NEiaHBORS HENCEFORTH 

do in their characteristics — as widely as a citizen of 
Vermont from a citizen of Louisiana. It is the traits 
they all hold in common that mean France, that have 
built her thought, her art, her literature, her law, her 
religion ; it is these, too, which have made her spring 
from the ashes of herself under which she with the 
rest of the world believed she was expiring, and be- 
come, far more truly than the Prussian who coined 
the phrase, a figure in shining armor ; and it is these 
traits finally which, in the great emergency of peace, 
wiU prevent the hideous wound which Germany dealt 
her from being a mortal wound. Through their spir- 
itual passion for the earth of France, backed by their 
power of infinite thrift, her people will save her, 
unless prevented by the tragedy of errors which 
began with the Armistice and has been played by the 
Allies ever since. 

At his little place near Grenoble, the poilu had car- 
ried on some sort of trade in leather before he took 
up arms, and this he was planning to resume. In his 
blood flowed the whole education of his forefathers' 
deep-rooted and coherent past, and to this had been 
added the education of the war. I told him what of 
his woxmded land I had been visiting, and what of it 
I was now upon my way to visit. AU his response 
was, **Oui, monsieur, '' but this was no mere dull 
assent. It was part of the same pattern conveyed by 
the quiet words of the lady at Noyon, * * Others have 
gone further '': understanding acceptance of irrep- 
arable loss and outrage, understanding resolve that 
the dead past must not kill the living present, or the 
future. Such was, in its depths, the French state of 
spirit as I found it and felt it everywhere ; a state as 
noble and adequate for the emergency of peace as 



A GLIMPSE OF THE POILU 115 

their state of spirit in war-time had been noble and 
adequate for that emergency. 

At Claye we drew up for the poilu to get out ; and 
there he thanked ns and went his way, leaving me 
with increased perception of his race. The threads 
of this perception, gathered — some of them — forty 
years ago and along the years since, bnt gathered 
never so attentively as now in the stress of what had 
befallen the world and what the world was going to 
do about it, these threads spun a rich texture of 
reassurance. In that damp street leading to the 
cathedral at Amiens, my none too cock-sure opti- 
mism had been chilled to the bone. So had it been 
chilled at times along the roads of desolation, and 
was to be again, along more such roads. But always 
it was to be warmed up by the rich texture of reas- 
surance. The twin supports of our civilization were 
England and France, and neither was likely to fall. 
You could kill Frenchmen by the million, French 
houses by the hundred thousand, French fields by the 
square mile, you could disintegrate machinery and 
drown mines and amputate orchards ; France her- 
self you could/ not kill: not at any rate by the atroci- 
ties of war, and probably not even by the imbecili- 
ties of peace. Eeassurance spun a vision of many 
poUu^ returning all over France to their little trades 
in leather, their little tillage of the vine, to all their 
little, careful industries; and many women resur- 
recting the little commerce of their estaminets, turn- 
ing their deft, courageous hands to many kinds of 
resurrection; and everybody practising that mas- 
terly thrift which leads to well-being, just as surely 
as our American wastefuhiess leads away from it. 



XI 

TROrSFUSION FROM AMEBIOA 

I regretted that Claye should have come so soon 
and cnt me off from further contact with the poUu; 
and yet perhaps I had got as mnch of him as there 
was. at least for my purposes of observation. His 
more personal opinions and adventures, liad he dnr- 
ing the course of the day become moved to impart 
them, might or might not have been worth hearing. 
On the other hand, the coming hours would have 
been more than likely to shut him up tight. We were 
headed for the fields where our own soldiers had 
revealed their quality, and by so doing had also 
revealed to Foch that he now held in his hand every- 
thing which he needed for victory. The cup of the 
Allies ' vitality, drained horribly and repeatedly, and 
repeatedly filled during the years that we were not 
there, when we did come had been filled the last few 
inches that it lacked, had been filled, indeed, over 
the brim. It could have been re-filled, too, as often 
as needed. America, by the time of the Germans' 
Aisne offensive, was at last prepared. After those 
unforgettable months of extravagant and heart- 
breaking delay and incompetence, America was ready 
to pour millions^Nafter millions into Europe. She 
was r^ady to erupt armies on a scale more gigantic 
than history had ever witnessed. It smote the Prus- 
sian like the tolling of a knell. He did his best to lie 
to his duped and docile Germany, to belittle our 

116 



TEANSFUSION FROM AMERICA U7 

preparation. But in Ms heart he knew better, and 
upon his hopes the lights burned blue and went out. 
Mor.e, I believe, than the good blows we struck, did 
the knowledge that we were there deaden the Hun 
and quicken the Allies. Our apparition at the Mame 
was like an instant change of weather. The French 
moral came up visibly, like a parched crop beneath 
the rain. 

** Where are you going f asked the jaded poUus 
of our jaunty doughboys, as they passed each other, 
the ones coming back exhausted, to rest, the others 
going forward, fresh and untested, to fight. 

**We're going to stop the Huns,'^ was the cheerful 
reply. 

**You*re going to hell,^' retorted the poili^. 

Do any of them remember it now, I wonder, and 
the day on which they said it! Orders for the evacua- 
tion of Paris were printed and ready. 

Yes, we were on our way eastward through Meaux, 
and up the Mame, and across the Mame at Trilport, 
and so through La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to Chateau- 
Thierry. Name after name vibrated for me with 
memories both personal and patriotic. Personal, be- 
cause I had seen this river and these fields and woods 
at the last moment of their and my unsuspecting 
innocence. I had enjoyed them in the company of 
two beloved friends, both dead before the war ended. 
On July 1st, 1914, we had passed through this exact 
region, loving its fertile tranquillity. On that day we 
had seen Reims, Laon, Soissons ; and looked through 
beautiful gates of country places, sequestered, em- 
bowered; had laughed as we went along the roads 
at certain names on sign-posts right and left — ^Lizy, 



118 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

Billy, Charly, Missy, Silly; had laughed more at 
going to the wrong La Ferte in search of the Hotel 
de PEpee — ^La Fert6 Milon; — and had after some 
thirty or forty kilometres of fnrther tranquil loveli- 
ness, snccessfnlly f onnd a delicious omelet and a 
desirable bed at the Hotel de l'£jpee in the right La 
Ferte. Much ruin now scarred La Ferte-sous- Juarre. 
We did not pass the Hotel de TEp^e. Some one 
during the war sent me a photograph of the street, 
showing the hotel portal and a swollen dead horse 
lying in front of it. 

We were nearing now the very site and ground 
of the second battle of the Mame, where the New 
World saved the Old World and where at the first 
battle of the Mame, September 6th-12th, 1914, the 
Old World had saved the New. On May the 27th, 
1918, the mailed fist was lifted for what proved its 
last blow. In Marish it came near to striking Amiens 
down. On a day during those weeks when the Hun 
was sweeping westward, the British soldiers had 
been told by their general that they were fighting 
with their backs to the wall. Bussia had gone to 
the perdition that she is still in. 

**It is a very black hour,'' said a lady to me at 
dinner in Boston, during that time. 

**The darkest hour is before the dawn,'' was all 
that I could find to reply. 

Hope was very faint all over the Allied World. 
News spread daily at which the heart stood still. 

We came to that point where you do not speak of 
what you and all whom you meet are thinking. I 
remember trying to turn my mind away from what 
June seemed likely to bring us. One shrank from 
the thought of June; and through June the deadly 



TRANSFUSION FEOM AMERICA 119 

footsteps stalked nearer and nearer. Indeed, hope 
was very faint. The eye of the Hnn was looking at 
Paris. Our general gave Foch every man he conld. 
The 3rd Division, new-trained to war, was brought 
in haste to the Marne. Part of it, the motorized 
machine-gmi battalion, able to make greater haste, 
came first. On June 4th, at the bridgehead oppo- 
fiite Chd.tean-Thierry, it wag* successful. A French 
ingSnieur had blown up the first part of the bridge, 
but the Germans could still cross, and our boys fin- 
ished the work. From Montdidier the 2nd Division 
followed, transported by every quick vehicle avail- 
able to help block the Paris road. It made good. 
On June 3rd it took Bouresches from the enemy and 
held his best Guards off, on June 26th Belleau Wood 
followed. In their race for honor those glorious 
Marines, with the equally glorious brigade of Regu- 
lars under General Lewis, struck the word **stop'' 
from their dictionary, fighting forward ceaselessly 
until July 10th. Before this 2nd Division was re- 
lieved it had taken Vaux. Half of our Second Corps 
was brought from the British area, and two of the 
five divisions were added to those already standing 
between the enemy and Paris. 

We at home were too far away to feel clearly the 
significance of these bright preludes during June, 
and our hope did not yet revive. The dark hour 
still spread over us. But all the while our troops 
were pouring thicker and thicker into Europe, and 
those in command there knew v^hat this meant ; knew 
that they had an endless stream of young blood to 
use — ^yoimg blood which, if untried, was also untired. 
That was tiie great fundamental magic of the touch 
our hand laid upon the Allies ; the touch of freshness 



120 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

upon weariness. In mid-July parts of the 42nd Di- 
vision, facing the Germans east of Beims, blocked 
them there, while four companies of the 28th Divi- 
sion on the right flank of this offensive opposed the 
on-coming invaders. Look at the map of the Mame 
between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans. That is 
where the invaders succeeded in crossing the river — 
a farthest fling or splash of the tide rising to engulf 
Paris, a sort of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Just 
east of Chateau-Thierry, the very first name on the 
south bank of the stream is Chierry. From this 
little spot run a finger up the river and round its 
bend there to Mezy, and then beyond, opposite Jaul- 
gonne. Between tiiese three little places it was that 
the 3rd Division held the south bank of the Mame. 
The ponderous power of the advancing Hun was 
pressed and driven against this line; — ^his infantry 
in formidable number, supported by artillery and 
screened by smoke. Here one regiment of that 3rd 
Division, though flanked on both wings by Huns who 
had got over, stopped them in front. These Ameri- 
cans met attacks from three directions, tangled up 
two German divisions, and took six hundred pris- 
oners. This was a day that had to be saved; they 
saved it with their sweat, with their blood, with their 
death. Then in the weeks following, our soldiers 
turned to spirits of wild battle, flung clothes off, 
gleamed among the hills, attacked, pursued, beat flat 
the Huns like rattlesnakes. ^*The Terribles*' is the 
name that a French officer gave our 32nd Division, 
as he watched it taking Juvigny. 

This Aisne offensive, launched by the Germans 
on the 27th of May, by mid- July bulged deeply into 
the invaded ground. It was the third pocket dug 



■M^ 



TBANSPUSION FEOM AMEBICA 121 

in the Allies ' front by Lndendorff that spring. First 
had come the centre pocket of the Somme, dng to 
Amiens in March and April; next the right flank 
pocket of the Lys, dug to tiie north in April, towards 
Calais ; and now this last, the beginning of the end, 
at the Mame, dng towards Paris. The change came 
between July 15th, when the 42nd, 28th, and 3rd 
Divisions were engaged, and July 20th. After that 
while the 3rd Division was pushing the enemy away 
from the Mame, and he was falling back beyond the 
Chatean-Thierry-Soissons road before the attack of 
the 1st Corps; and while the 42nd Division was 
fighting through the Foret-de-Pere on its way to the 
Ourcq ; — ^in fact, during the last ten days of July and 
first days of August that saw these divisions of ours 
help the French crowd the enemy back from their 
bulge, back from the Mame to tiie Vesle and the 
Aisne, the change before the dawn grew into the 
dawn itself. 

In celebrating, and most fitly celebrating our own 
part in this, let us take great care lest we forget that 
we did not do it alone. It is such forgetting that has 
done us injury in the hearts of the English and 
French. Books have been written, mere vulgar yelps 
of brag, from which you might think that we alone 
had been there at that second battle of the Mame. 
The French had six or seven divisions to our five 
during the fifteen days when the Hun armies of von 
Mudra and von Boehm were squeezed out of their 
Marne pocket. 

For me, July the 18th will always seem the day 
when the change passed like a speU over our coun- 
try. That is the day, too, when, as I see it, the 
decisive operation in moral surgery took place. In 



122 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

January, in a great hospital near Washington, I had 
sat listening to wounded officers in bed tell of that 
day, and of the night of rain preceding it. Some of 
them would never be whole again, and they knew it 
All were yonng and none complained. Two enlisted 
men complained to me out of all that I saw — ^and 
these two had never been to France. 

^*We have friends in Chicago, *' said one of the 
officers, jokingly of himself and a comrade in the 
next bed. ^*We are going to get two street corners. 
I'm to sell papers, and he'll sell shoestrings and 
pencils." 

As we played cards, or in other ways killed time, 
they told me of the road they came through the 
Foret-de-Villers-Cotterets ; of the great rain and 
thunder; of the mud; of the five parallel tides of 
traffic going one way or the other along the road ; of 
the heavy trucks lurching and sticking in the slanted, 
mushy sides of the road; of the vast silence before 
the guns opened, when the rain had ceased and its 
drops from the leaves sounded in the forest. 

In company with chosen French divisions and the 
splendid Black Watch (for in those first days of our 
initiation it was not yet known by any one how well 
we were going to fight) our 1st and 2nd Divisions 
were picked out for the work of the Soissons drive. 
Then through the five days that we know, the 1st 
Division went on, not to hell, but through it, to the 
heights above Soissons and the village of Berzy-le- 
Sec, which it took. The 2nd Division, quick at its 
work, in two days was in front of Tigny. Together 
they had captured 7,000 prisoners and more than 100 
pieces of artillery. Meanwhile, our 26th Division, 
with the 167th French Division, formed a pivot be- 



TEANSFUSION FROM AMERICA 123 

tween Chateau-Thierry and Bonresches, xmta the 
crooked had been made straight in the battle-line 
farther towards Soissons. Then they became the 
marching right flank of a greatly stretched-out move- 
ment, pivoting near Vanxbain, by Soissons, and by 
the month's end the Hnns had been pnshed back, and 
their bulge chopped short. 

And what of the poUus who had said that word 
about going to hellt They never said it again. At 
the critical moment, when hope was sinking very low, 
when Parisians were to be told to pack up and fly, 
the New World appeared at hope's bedside, and gave 
to the patient its strong, young, healthy blood. The 
transfusion was successful. Hope 's ebbing life came 
back and again flowed strong and steadfast. So 
immediate was the rebound to convalescence, that 
the patient has sometimes forgotten how danger- 
ous the illness was. 

The good deed of our American divisions will glow 
through the pages of history, and our children in the 
years to come will say the names of Chateau-Thierry, 
Soissons, Reims, as we were saying them in our 
streets through those summer days of 1918. 

Here is the tale of the ''Event," of the transfu- 
sion, told from the mouths of Frenchmen. They 
called our coming in the *' Event" in those days. On 
the 4th of June while darkness still spread over 
our world, Clemenceau thus spoke the grim truth 
aloud: ''Exhaustion has set in, enormous with in- 
credible losses for the English army, and formidable 
and perilous for the French. Our available forces 
are spent, but the Americans are coming in for the 
deciding stroke. ... It remains for the living to 
carry out the splendid work of the dead." On the 



124 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

8th of August General Petaiii said to Ms troops : 
^ * The invader falls back. His moral totters. Yester- 
day I told you, * Abnegation, patience, your comrades 
are coming.' I tell you today, ^Doggedness, bold- 
ness, and you will force victory.' '' Between these 
two dates the comrades had come, the ^^ Event" had 
happened, the great transfusion had taken place. 
Throughout that month of August, transfusion con- 
tinued; each day 13,000 more Americans set foot 
upon French soil, and by autumn we numbered al- 
most two million. 



xn 



lxjdendobff's pocket 



At La Fert6-Bous-Jouarre we left the river, not 
to see it again nntil dusk, when we came to it at 
Dormans through Ville-en-Tardenois from Beims. 
This was a day between rivers : the Mame, the Onrcq, 
the Vesle, the Aisne. They have been flowing 
through great events these many centuries. Great 
events have been added to them; soldiers' feet from 
Michigan and Pennsylvania and all oux states have 
trodden earth where Charles the Bold and Loui£ the 
Eleventh and Joan of Arc walked once. As we went 
to BeUeau Wood I forgot to look at anything for a 
while. Pride in our Marines who wrenched it from 
the pick of the German troops, and renuniscence, and 
surmise, idl made such a blend in my thoughts that 
I recall nothing clearly of what was said, or how 
the villages looked, or the fields, until we came to 
Belleau Wood. 

Here we got out and walked the ground over, and 
listened to the words of the young captain who had 
been detailed at 37, Bue de Bassano to be our escort. 
He had fought here himself, and he showed us the 
positions and told us the course of the action. Pol- 
lowing where his finger pointed, I looked across a 
valley from the ridge we stood on to another ridge, 
where he was saying the enemy had been at a certain 
stage. We were at the edge of some not very thick 
groves whict stretched along it; below were mead- 

125 



126 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

owsy green, and a small brook, and beyond these, 
np the opposite ridge, more thin groves; and the 
sun was shining pleasantly. 

^^It makes me think of the Huntington Valley a 
little, ' ' I mused, half aloud. 

^*So it does,'' said the young officer. 

* * Then you have seen tiiat country near Philadel- 
phiat'' 

*^Yes.'' 

Blue flowers were growing about among the 
thickets where we explored. War had been raging 
when they last grew here. Spring was now coming 
fast, had made visible advance since that first day 
when we had passed the roasted aeroplane in the 
field and first entered the great silence. But neither 
spring nor the hand of man had done much yet to 
cover or remove the traces of war. Among the blue 
flowers minenwerf er baskets were lying. They were 
empty of their missiles, and most of the hands that 
had hurled them were knobs and knuckles of bone 
now. The dead lay about here so thick in Belleau 
Wood that they could not be buried. Bits of rotted 
leather jutted out or lay flat among the flowers, and 
cartridges unused, quite plentifully, and pieces of 
firearms. Now and then our officer would pick up 
one of these objects out of the scrap-basket of the 
battle, and identify it for us as being American or 
German. He had had his turn in hospital, and once 
had gone twenty-eight days without removing his 
clothes. As we peered and stooped through the 
thickets, human bones among the new flowers and 
the old last year's matted leaves would stir and twitch 
like dead branches, disturbed by our tread. In a 
pair of old shoes in one muddy place, the bony feet 



LUDENDORFF'S POCKET 127 

still stuck, German feet ; our captain knew them by 
the make of the shoe. 

^*It^8 the young generation at home who ought to 
know about all this/' I exclaimed. **Can the old 
profit by its meaning! They're trying to forget the 
war, and Belgium, and everything, already. Just 
as most adult Germans will die under the influence 
of forty years of Prussian poison, believing Germany 
was invaded and fought a war of defence, so most 
Americans over forty will die drilled in the myth 
that the United States is a law unto itself, like a 
comet in space, and can live in a weather of its own 
unaffected by the storms in the rest of the world. 
That's an idea which will send us shortly to a back 
seat, if we don't get rid of it. At least," I concluded, 
'*I can tell the boys at St. Paul's School something 
about this devastated region." 

''Are you a St. Paul's boy!" said the captain. 
'*I went there too." 

Though I had heard his name, of course, when he 
had been introduced to us in the Rue de Bassano, 
this had not then suggested his identity. I asked it 
now. His father had come from my town, he had 
gone to my school, I knew most members of his 
family, one of my particular friends was his favorite 
aunt. None of these things had made us known to 
each other. We old St. Paul's boys met first beside 
a couple of German feet sticking in the mud, in Bel- 
lean Wood, in the land of the Mame, and the Ourcq, 
and the Vesle, and the Aisne ; not so far from where 
Joan of Arc crowned the Dauphin in 1429; not so 
far from where a synod compelled Abelard to burn 
his books in 1121 ; not so far, either, from where they 
bad chased Attila and his Huns away in 451, His 



128 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

Pennsylvania feet had been chasing another Attila 
and his Huns away in 1918 ; and here were the feet 
of a Hun that hadn't been able to ran off. 

And so to Chatean-Thierry down the MQ, and up 
the hill through Verdilly, Epieds, Beauvardes, graz- 
ing the Foret de Fere, tiirough which our 26th Divi- 
sion, not a year ago, had fought its way to the Ourcq. 
By that time, July 24th to 27th, those boys had 
learned the trick of bird-nesting for machine guns. 

*'KameradI'' 

Thus had a German non-com addressed the cap- 
tain in a wood, just after killing most of his men, 
and just before perceiving that he himself was going 
to be sent after them. 

**I thought ^Kamerad' was too easy to say then,'' 
explained our captain. By that remark we under- 
stood the fate of the non-com. 

It is said that our men after Seicheprey, where 
first they took German prisoners, behaved to them 
much as they might behave to curiosities, to wild 
things caught alive when hunting, almost as some- 
thing to play with. Later, they saw some of their 
own comrades whom the Germans had captured and 
sent back with mutilations made in Germany ex- 
pressly for America. After that they did not play 
with their prisoners. 

Soon after the Foret de Fere, we came to Fere-en 
Tardenois, and I began to mark my map with a cross 
against each place that was in ruins. Today pat- 
terns of crosses wind over it, east and west and north 
and south, tracing the kilometres of ruin that we saw 
beneath the great silence. Once amid all this, and 
only once that I remember, a train of trucks stand- 
ing by some litter left by battles, served as a sign 



LUDENDOEFF^S POCKET 129 

that we were not the only living beings who surveyed 
this valley of extinction. Smoke rose quietly from 
the engine, a little stream that must have been the 
Ourcq, or some tributary, flowed placidly near by. 

I was curious about Laon, and anxious to see that 
cathedral with my own eyes. Had it suffered! Did 
it still exist! Soissons had suffered greatly. Our 
papers had referred to that, but about Laon I had 
never seen a word in them. It lay north beyond the 
Chemin des Dames, on a high ridge, above its steep 
town, visible from a great way offT very defenceless 
It had been a Hun headquarters. Fierce fighting 
had gone on not far from it in the days of the Chemin 
des Dames, and the Hindenburg Line, when the Huns 
were retiring. Indeed, fighting had never ceased in 
this neighborhood. 

Laon was a gem among cathedrals, a little master- 
piece by itself, touched by the hand of Italy, with a 
Virgilian charm and grace shining among its ex- 
quisite aisles. We went on therefore to Laon, after 
seeing Soissons and the Chemin des Dames near 
Malmaison. The town was intact, and so, save for 
one now well-known injury, was the beautiful church. 
How had it come to escape! 

Before Laon was hurt, save for the one tower, the 
Germans striding southwestward from Charleroi 
during the late days of August 1914, took it, and it 
remained theirs, and became a headquarters. Natu- 
rally they spared it. Within the new map of a 
Greater Germany, representing that empire after 
a German peace, Laon was included. In the fall of 
1918 the Germans had to abandon the city, and their 
leave-taking was hasty. They had iasufficient time 
to blow it up, as they had blown up Peroime and its 



130 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

fellow-victims, and thus retard France's commercial 
recuperation by one more piece of wanton and scien- 
tific destruction. But they left agents behind, and 
bombs and mines, and unluckily for German hopes, 
the French came hito Laon and found the agents 
with the bombs not as yet set off. On the 13th of 
October, General Man^in, who through the three pre- 
ceding days had been crashing forward to the north, 
first across the Aisne at (Euilly, and next across 
the Chemin des Dames and the dominating table- 
land of Craonne into actual sight of Laon, entered 
that town at half -past three in the afternoon. He 
was borne up its steep hill by a crowd, not of traitors 
or agents, but of Frenchmen, the tears of joy on their 
cheeks, the strains of the Marsellaise upon their lips. 
The tri-color had been floating from the cathedral 
since eleven. After four years of exile, the great 
church with its clustering town at its feet had come 
back to its own. 

We descended its hill and soon were again out of 
the zone of life and within the zone of death. 
Through the forenoon, our journey had been along a 
part of the bottom and west seam of the pocket which 
Ludendorff had begun on the 27th of May, 1918, 
to dig to the Marne, with the mirage of Paris in his 
eyes. Now for a while we followed the east seam 
of the pocket. The high plain of Craonne through 
centuries of war had been a key unlocking doors 
of communication between adjacent territories of 
France. Here, after he had been pushed back in 
1914 at the first battle of the Marne, the German had 
created his Siegfried position. Deep dips in the land 
and the wooded undulations had been wrought into 
a bulwark dense with undergroimd communications 



LUDENDORFF'S POCKET 131 

and thick-planted gnns. And here the Crown Prince 
with his two armies of von Boehm and von Below 
had started his share of the enterprise at one in the 
morning with all the shells and gases and poisons 
that German invention had placed at his disposal. 
At one 'clock that morning of May 27thy had begun 
that bad news which we had to read for so many 
days. It was only eleven months ago. On the map 
I looked at the names of the places that were coming 
on our road, or that lay near to it on one side or the 
other: Juvincourt on the little river Miette — ^we 
should presently cross between it and La Ville-aux- 
Bois. We went through Corbeny : Craonne was just 
off to our right. At eleven-twenty that morning 
eleven months ago, the delighted Kaiser had arrived 
at a convenient high place, close to where we were 
now, to watch in the splendid sunny weather the 
armies of his boys Fritz and William, and all his 
other armies, battering their way southward, even 
across the Aisne, digging the pocket which was to 
reach the Mame. 

^* William,'' he telegraphed to William's mother, 
*^has today attacked the British and French. . . . 
Fritz was one of the first to reach the Aisne. . . . 
God has granted us a splendid victory and will help 
further." 

*^My soul is torn," he had written his Cousin Aus- 
tria early in the war, **but everything must be deliv- 
ered to fire and blood, men, women, children, and the 
old must be killed, not a tree nor a house must be 
left standing." 

He had written that to Francis Joseph at a time 
when the general American mind still disbelieved 
that such things as it was reading daily in the news- 



132 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

papers could be. On August IGth, 1914, as Foch with 
the 9th Army was facing the advance upon Rethel 
by von Hansen and his army, a German cyclist upset 
himself in the street of Gue d'Ossus. Immediately, 
recorded an officer of the 178th Saxon Regiment, in 
his diary: 

^^We burned the village and drove the inhabitants 
into the flames/' 

As we went over the seven kilometres from Cor- 
beny to Berry-au-Bac, the land changed from being 
a skeleton into bebig the dust of skeletons. It lay 
dead, chalk-white, blasted and stark; not a blade of 
grass, nothing but extinction. Along the west seam 
of the pocket we had seen many poppies. These red 
flowers hid the truth that was behind them: human 
flesh ; then crows in black swarms ; then red poppies 
— ^this had been the rotation of war-crops on the 
Aisne. Here along the east seam we saw not even 
poppies, but only the white sterile chalk. Over this 
ground on May 27th, 1918, the German offensive had 
broken like a flood from a dam. It had rolled down 
from the highland and reached the Aisne, artillery 
following infantry. Nothing had withstood it. The 
German officers whistled as they walked with their 
canes in their hands. During Ihe afternoon it had 
been the same on the west side. Three French battal- 
ions had been surrounded and engulfed in the Foret 
de Pinon. Carrier pigeons brought the last message 
from them, sent about two o ^clock the next morning : 

*^The three last men of the three battalions have 
just surrendered. ' ' 

Whilst these had been holding out, the flood poured 
on: five divisions against one French, the 61st; ten 
against the 22nd; six against the 21st; from the 



LUDENDOEFF'S POCKET 133 

Kaiser's post to Berry-au-Bac, eight against two. 
That is the way it came. The outnumbered French 
and the tired Engjish, still untested from their ex- 
haustion of the earlier weeks, gave way hour after 
hour. They lost not the Aisne only, they were pushed 
beyond the Vesle this first day. The next was like 
it. Fismes went. The Germans came up on the 
wide land of Tardenois. Soissons burned and went 
down. Fere-en-Tardenois followed it. By the 30th 
the Germans had dug to the Mame at Jaulgonne. 
Here our 2nd Division came into it. Over all France 
wires trembled with messages. Our Americans at 
their Jonchery munition depot did not keep the holi- 
day on Decoration Day for which they had made 
ready ; men who had gone to Chaumont to celebrate 
it were called back. A message to Jonchery set 
them making ready instead for a train of trucks 
hastening here from Dijon. These arrived and were 
loaded all through the night. The electric lights 
shone upon the warehouses and by their gleam the 
shells were lifted into the trucks backed up close to 
the warehouses. Then some fifty started west in 
a long winding train on the road to Meaux. 

Bad news still darkened our world ; not many could 
have then perceived the dangerous thing that Luden- 
dorff was doing, hypnotically lured by the mirage of 
Paris. In digging his pocket he had gone in through 
a gate, so to speak, and the gate-posts were still 
standing, and not in his possession. To the west was 
the Foret-de-Villers-Cotterets, to the east, the Mon- 
tague de Beims. He tried desperately, a little later, 
to envelop these by two offensives. Both failed. 
Then the squeezing out began. But before that had 
set in, and before any of us here could know about 



134 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and understand the significance of those gate-posts, 
we heard of peasants flying ; of towns abandoned ; of 
more Germans on the Mame below Chateau-Thierry 
and Vemenil. It was on Jnne the 4th that the force 
of the flood at length had spent itself. The Kaiser 
never sent any more telegrams like that he had sent 
on the 27th of May. For ourselves, as I remember it, 
the news of the victory at the bridge of Ch&tean- 
Thierry on that 4th of Jnne was the brightest we 
had heard for a long while — ^and not so very bright at 
that: only a spark in the night, bnt a spark struck 
by that splendid action of the 7th Machine Gun Bat- 
talion of our 3rd Division, which arrived after 
twenty-four hours on the road and thirty-six with- 
out sleep, and made the name Ch&teau-Thierry as 
immortal for us as Concord an^ Lexington. Clemen- 
ceau spoke on that day: 

^*Our available forces are spent, but the Ameri- 
cans are coming in for the deciding stroke. ... It 
remains for the living to carry out the splendid work 
of the dead.*' 

The dead! Almost as thick and deep along this 
road from Laon to Reims as along our road in the 
terrible land of the Somme, must the dead have been 
heaped. It was written aU over the face of the region. 
It was to be read not alone through the sight of a 
great cemetery which we saw to our right; to look 
at the mere earth itself was enough. The earth here 
had died in torment. I can evoke the vision of its 
twisted corpse today. White, dislocated, crumbled, 
distorted, it was fearful to see, even for us who had 
seen so much. I stared up at a sort of hill. I had 
passed this very way on the 1st of July, 1914. I 
could no more have recognized the spot than you 



LUDENDOEFF'S POCKET 135 

could recognize a dead man who had been lying out 
in the open for a year. Him you have to identify 
by something he wore or carried ; a ring, a knif e, or 
his teeth. Well, I suppose that I could have stood 
here, studied the canal, or the river, or the relation 
of one to the other, and then asked: ^^Is it possible 
this can be Berry-au-Bacf '^ Of the town there was 
nothing left at all. Of the charming country all along 
this way, the quiet fields, the groups of trees I re- 
membered, nothing was left. This ancient doorway 
between the Ardennes and the Isle de France was a 
shrivelled, gaping mouth. The pastures, once so 
calm, were flung up into shapes white and wild, like 
a herd of screaming ghosts petrified to silence sud- 
denly as they crouched and gesticulated. The hill 
at which I stared may have been there before, or it 
may have been heaved up by the mine explosion 
that engulfed many lives here and left a crater which 
looked more like the work of natural convulsion than 
the handicraft of man. White clay now seemed to 
form the substance of this hill, steep, brittle, rough, 
corrugated by violence, like every foot of the sur- 
rounding coimtry. Nothing was growing there then, 
and it is one of the regions where nothing is growing 
yet. Beneath its surf ace, among the dust and bones, 
lie the bulb roots of death, the unexploded shells. 
These are sown in all the battle-grounds of France. 
Until they are gone, no farmer ploughing his field 
can be sure that he will reach the end of any furrow 
alive. 

After Berry-au-Bac we went on through the waste 
that continued for eight miles or so, and ceased 
shortly before we came to Reims. 



xin 

THE GREAT SHBIHB 

On this May evening of 1919, we had to thread 
our way through Beims as through a labyrinth where 
all roads but one led to nothing. A wrong turn right 
or left in this place, where more than one hundred 
thousand had lived five years ago, would have 
brought us to a stop among the stony heaps of their 
houses. The streets into which these houses had 
been flung and piled were slits in the silence. In 
that other German war, the war of 1870, Beims had 
been made the seat of a German governor-general, 
and had paid many heavy tolls to its invaders. I 
looked upon the toU it had paid now, as slowly and 
carefully we made our way to the cathedral. For 
this sight I was ready — ^as ready, that is, as many 
pictures and descriptions can make one. We aU 
know the particular spite that was hurled at this 
monument, and why it was so hurled. We know the 
denial of its bombardment by the ninety-three Ger- 
man professors. They signed a denial of this and 
the other crimes committed by Germany up to that 
time. These professors had the choice of doing this, 
or of losing their positions and having their careers 
broken and their daily bread cut off. They were at 
the mercy of one man's word, their emperor's. We 
pay a high price, a very high price, for democracy ; 
but it is not quite so high as that which Germany 

136 



THE GEEAT SHRINE 137 

paid for her magnificent material order and weU- 
being. 

When the Germans found that their purely wanton 
destruction of what was Francois hoUest building 
had turned against them many hearts that had hith- 
erto been neutral or in doubt, they did what they 
always do in such cases. It happened several times 
during the war that the effect of their actions upon 
the outside world had not been anticipated by them 
and took them by surprise. Their education had 
never led them to suspect that their own standards 
were behind those of the civilized world. Therefore 
their battering of the great church of Beims, which 
struck the civiUzed world as being what Attila might 
have done when he put Reims to fire and sword in the 
5th Century, had to be justified in haste. We know 
the pretext that they put forward a trifle too late. 
It was explained as a military necessity. It was 
pretended that the French were using the cathedral 
to signal from. It was overlooked that they used 
aeroplanes for this. We know, too, the self -contra- 
dicting remarks of German officers upon which this 
excuse was based. We know the kind of shell that 
was found embedded in the walls — needlessly heavy 
for the alleged purpose. The world knows today that 
the Germans meant to pound the cathedral of Reims 
to dust if they could, because it had been, since Joan 
of Arc had the Dauphin crowned there in 1429, the 
central shrine, the place of prayer, pilgrimage and 
patriotism, the spot of all most sacred and dear to 
France : her Independence Hall, her Mount Vernon, 
her Liberty Bell, made holy, not through one century 
like ours, but through seven. It had seen the same 
seven centuries that Amiens had seen, often drenched 



138 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

with blood. From 1328 to 1830, almost every King 
of France Iiad been crowned here. Its great bel]^ 
weighing more than eleven tons, had been ringing 
for festivals and rites before the existence of our 
continent was known. At my last visit, the figure 
of Joan of Arc had sat on her horse in front of the 
church. I looked for her, but the gallant statue was 
gone and its place was vacant. She had been taken 
for safety elsewhere. 

No, they had not smashed Beims to dust. It was 
here to be seen, and would be seen for long years to 
come. It would be proudly standing when those who 
had aimed at its fall were dust themselves. It was 
a wreck, its roof was gone, its eyes, the glorious win- 
dows of stained glass, were blind; you could see 
through into its broken interior, you could note upon 
its western front the ravage of flame and shell : the 
carving, the maimed and incinerated army of saints 
and kings that had been one of the glories of the 
world, bore witness to the intention and the effort of 
the Hun. 

In the third chapter of his account of Germany, 
the chapter entitled From Kant to Hegel, Heinrieh 
Heine made a prophecy, and this is a part of it : 

**But the most frightful of all will be the philoso- 
phers of materialism. . . . The philosophy of mate- 
rialism will be terrible in that it taps tiie elemental 
force of the earth, conjures the latent powers of 
tradition, those of the entire Germanic pantheism, 
in which it arouses that lust of war that we find 
among the ancient Germans, the lust of combat • • • 
for combat's sake. 

**To a certain extent Christianity has mollified 
this brutal battle lust of the Germans ; to destroy it, 



THE OBEAT SHBINE 139 

it has not avaUed, When the Cross, that talisman 
which holds it now in cnrb, comes to break, then 
the ancient warriors' ferocity will surge afresh, that 
mad Berserker frenzy which the Norse minstrels are 
today still singing. Then— and the day will come, 
alas I — ^the old war gods will get np from their fabled 
tombs and mb the dust of centuries from their eyes. 
Thor will stand erect in his might and with his giant 
hammer will smash the gothic cathedrals. . . . When 
you hear the tumult and the shouting, be on your 
guard, dear neighbors of France. . . .*' 

Soon after the bombing of Beims cathedral, this 
passage began to be remembered and quoted. The 
rest of the prophecy is equally remarkable, and I add 
it here. Heine continues : 

'*Do not smile at this advice even though it is given 
by a dreamer ... do not smile at a fantastic poet 
who expects the same revolution in the world of facts 
that has occurred in the intellectual world. Thought 
precedes action as lightning does thunder. Thunder 
in Germany is quite German: it is not very lively, 
but comes rolling: slowly. But come it will : and when 
you hear a crash like no crash ever heard before in 
the history of the world, then you will know that the 
German thunder has culminated at last. At this 
noise earfes will fall dead from the high air and the 
lions in their remotest African deserts will cringe and 
slink away into their royal lairs.'* 

At about that time Bichard Wagner, the last Norse 
minstrel, was sineins:, not yet of mad Berserker 
f renzv, but of the Flying Dutchman, having been led 
to this DPTflv by certain other pa&res written by 
Heinrich Heine. People then alive lived to see this 
same minstrel singing a triumphal march to that 



140 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

conqueror of France in 1870, that Hohenzollem whom 
Bismarck then made Emperor of Germany; the 
minstrel was also writing a coarse extravaganza, a 
Berserker insult to prostrate France, entitled A Co- 
pitvlation; he had also reached the middle of his 
opera Siegfried, in which the old gods were brought 
out of their fabled tombs and sang to us on the stage. 
Wotan, Brunhilde, Siegfried, were names given by 
Hindenburg and his Berserkers to certain of their 
defence lines of 1914-18, when the philosophers of 
materialism had completed their work, when the talis- 
man of Christianity had broken and no longer curbed 
the ancient German battle lust, when the creed of 
blood and iron had been systematically and scien- 
tifically substituted for the creed of the Cross, and 
when German children had been during forty years 
educated backward to be Berserkers. When Thor in 
1914 smashed Reims with his giant hammer, Henry 
Heine had been fifty-eight years in hijs grave, Richard 
Wagner had been in his for thirty-one. Heine had 
made his prophecy seventy-nine years before the 
event. 

With Heine and Wagner and Hindenburg in mind, 
I looked at the smashed glories of Reims. What, I 
wondered, did those remarkably righteous persons, 
who were already assuring us that Germany was a 
tender arid misrepresented creature, make of these 
facts f I thought of another poet also, an American, 
Louise DriscoU by name, who sang her noble lament 
over the cathedral: 

Men planned and wrought 
And set fair towers against a flower-blue sky. 
There is no power in the world like thought, 
And beauty wrought with prayer can never die. 



THE GEE AT SHRINE 141 

What's lost with Beimst 
Tis Germany — ^a land we used to know 
A pleasant land of songs and fairy tales . . . 
Where did they got 

What's lost with BeimsY 

The soul of a great people, blind, betrayed. 

No roaring guns tore flesh from flesh and made 

A desert of their gardens, yet we see 

The desert of the world in Germany I 

Theodore Botrel, the poet of the poilv^, wrote a 
sort of Litany of the ruins : 

Jeune bon Dieu, dans la cr^ehe 
Eajeunis ton 6ternite, 
Toi, dont la tendre loi ne preehe 
Que 1 'amour et la charite. 

Doux Boi du plus doux des Boyaumes 
C'est toi que nous invoquons, 
Et non les vieux dieux des Guillaumes, 
DesAttilas et des Nerons. 

Par Louvain, par Senlis croulantes, 
Et par Beims qui, pres de mourir. 
Tends vers toi ses tours suppliantes 
Comme les moignons d'un martyr; 

Par notre farouche Endurance; 
Par nos otages en exil; 
Jeune bon Dieu, rends la France 
Justice et Gloire ! Ainsi soit il I* 



♦ ttt 



'God merciful and young in thy manger make young again 
thine eternity, Thou whose tender law doth preach but love and 
charity. Gentle King of Kingdom gentlest, Thee it is we invoke, not 
the old gods of Kaisers, Attilas, and Neros. By crumbling Louvain 
and Senlis, and by Keims, who dying lifts to Iliee her suppliant 
towers like a martyr's stumps, by our endurance fierce and exiled 
hostages, God merciful and young give France justice and glory. 
Amen." 



142 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

**They are evacuating ReimSi'^ wrote a young 
Frenchman, a boy of twenty-three, to his godmother 
on the 7th of April, 1917; *4t is very, very sad to 
see. Tonight ten conflagrations were throwing whirl- 
winds of reddened smoke two hundred metres high, 
and the profiles of the two solemn towers were cast 
darkly against the flaming heavens. Sad vehicles 
defiled beneath me, generally automobiles; women 
and children, little boys in their black aprons as if 
they were coming from school ; furniture. The town 
burned in a sort of calm, as in submission to an 
inevitable and foreseen phenomenon. And the 
towers, with a look of eternity, of indestructibility, 
seemed to watch. And all this on a fine night, placidly 
lustrous beneath the Pascal moon.'' 

* * There is no power m the world like thought 
And beauty wrought with prayer can never die. ' ' 

That is what the towers saw; Thor could not smash 
it. It was in the soul and mind of that boy as he 
wrote to his godmother, nine days before his death 
on the battlefield. He wrote other letters, there is 
a little volume of them, letters to his father and 
mother, to certain other elders, and to intimate com- 
rades of his own young generation. With his soul 
and mind he was a piece of that France essential to 
us and civilization, the ultimate France of the spirit 
that should keep our respect and affection. He was 
the modem consequence of the ancient cathedral. 
The same race had built them both. He was a piece 
of beauty wrought with prayer — ^that form of prayer 
which is constant, noble impulse translated constantly 
into noble action; and as I think somehow of him 
and Reims as belonging spiritually to each other, I 



THE GREAT SHRINE 143 

place here not in the order of their writing some 
few sentences from his letters because they are full 
of that thing which Thor with his hammer cannot 
smash. 

He is speaking of two fellow-soldiers : 

**If you could only see the strange life we lead, 
six yards underground. ... D is a peasant. X has 
not the dashing patriotism of D, but he has his recti- 
tude and loyalty and courage. He supplements D's 
intellectual patriotism with the dignity of a free 
man, who declines to accept the trespassing of an 
outsider upon his own concerns. He likes to be 
master in his house and he is master of himself. He 
does not like fighting but goes to it whole-souled from 
self-respect. He has supremely the sense of honor. 
He is the peasant aristocrat.'* 

The boy was a student of medicine with four terms 
to his credit when he entered upon his first term of 
military service. This the outbreak of the war cut 
short. He got leave to go to the front in the ranks, 
and not as a hospital aid. He fought from Charleroi 
to the Mame, where he was wounded. He writes of 
himself : 

*^DonH imagine that any thought of winning dis- 
tinction entered my mind when I took the step I was 
predestined to take. Once more, the place of a 
Frenchman twenty-two years old is under fire, or 
with those who are going there. As it was in 1870 
and has been for ever, our business is to boot the 
enemy out of France. I took my part at the Mame. 
My place now is with those who carry on. It's the 
task of my generation. You Tl say doctors are needed 
as much behind as at the front. I don't want to be 
that kind, nor the kind in the hospital trains ; some 



144 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

of us are needed in it. I couldn^t shake hands with 
G. or N., dt look at my friends in the eye. I'm ill at 
ease among fathers some of whom have sons at the 
front. ... I want to escape any danger purely to 
learn how better to face the next. The living must 
be worthy of the dead, our life mustn't give their 
deaths the lie. One has done nothing so long as 
anything 's left to be done. ... 

**We must win. There's no question of knowing 
if we can or can not, or if we shall succeed or shall 
not. We must, that's all. It is the man who shall 
have willed victory who will vanquish. This deter- 
mination, deep, unconquerable, intimate, this will to 
vanquish, each of us must have it, no matter what 
his place and duty. . . . But this will to vanquish 
that I should like to root in every French heart, in 
order to be useful must stick to defined aims, else it 

wUl be merely a vagne and vain aspiration 

Work, that is the word. Work, that is what the 
enemy has been doing since 1871; it is against his 
work that our dash and our fine courage are bruising 
themselves. France isn't working hard enough.*' 

He writes from hospital to a friend : 

**The German is alien to our mentality . • . his 
materialism (he calls it Deutschland iiher alles) 
stamps everything, stifles every noble generous in- 
stinct, everything that antiquity, the Benaissance, 
our 17th and 18th Centuries planted in us of altruis- 
tic, humane, disciplined impulses, the whole higher 
moral level that distinguishes us from the ancestral 
brute . . . have you any time for reading! I'm 
going to send you your favorite Musset anyhow. 
You 11 always find a minute to read over the May 
Night. It's not very war-like, but beauty in no mat- 



THE GEEAT SHEINE 145 

ter what form is a tonic for the soul and lifts the 
heart. . . .'' 

He writes his mother : 

*^I'll keep your letter as my guide through the 
unforeseen, and try to show myself worthy of what 
you think of me, and to become worthy of what I 
would exact from myself. . . . For the triumph of 
justice and right (though these may be merely illu- 
sions) and for the chastisement of the greatest col- 
lective crime of history, many tears, many drops of 
blood must fall . . . the generation of 1914-15-16 will 
have won moral grandeur, the thing for which it is 
worth while to live life. . . . 

*^What a beautiful walk I took yesterday! I fol- 
lowed an infinity of different paths and thus greatly 
heightened the effect of emerging upon a straight 
road that cuts through the moist and mystic heart 
of the forest to a new horizon. . . . I^m sure that to 
enrich one's inner life one must intensify one's ex- 
ternal life. You must, so to speak, gather sensations 
to nourish thought during those hours when external 
sensations fail. I don't suppose you know how a 
dynamo works f Very simply. For one day a power- 
ful steam-engine spins the dynamo and thus generates 
the electricity which is stored. Next day it may be 
the other way round, if you choose. The stored 
electric energy can run the steam-engine. Very well. 
It 's quite the same with the dynamo we carry within. 
If we desire that it shall in our dark hours illuminate 
our life, we must store up light when the sun shines. 
I doubt if I could have seen any beauty in the land- 
scape yesterday if I had never been in Switzerland. 
I'm deeply sure this applies to everything, and espe- 
cially to the things of the heart. But if I start on 



146 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

that 1^11 never stop. . • • Fool that I am! I was 
going to forget to tell yon that in two days^ very 
likely, they will discharge me from the infirmary and 
let me go back to the trenches. . . . The joy of 
meditation, of philosophizing, is a terrible siren who 
breaks careers and parches strength. She mnst be 
merely an episode. Otherwise the man is lost *' 

In hospital, where he has time for mnch reading 
and re-reading — Shakespeare, Plntarch, Voltaire, La 
Fontaine, the Bible, make but a portion of it— he 
writes his intimate friend : 

** Dismiss yonr idea that war is over for me. My 
cure will take long, but the war longer still. IVe 
sent you Stendhal. I read L' Amour in order to talk 
it over with a young Irish girl (but alas I those things, 
when one is doing them one doesn't discuss them, and 
when one discusses them one doesn't do them, oh, 
thrice alas!). When shall we be able after having 
sacrificed to Mars to return to the temple of Venus t 
When can we resume, dear old Maurice, our good 
confidences, our dreamings by the Mame, all our 
friendship of yesteryear! ... As to my foot, doc- 
tors disagree. Some counsel another operation, 
others disbelieve in it. I wish I could at least rejoin 
my headquarters ... or else be in the zone of the 
armies. Think of having to make war here at Vichy I 
It's a heart-break. ... At any rate I've been of 
some use here, day and night now, these eight months. 
For eight days I had charge of 120 patients, all by 
myself. . . . There 's my life. I blush for it. ..." 

To his father he writes : 

**I don't know what monstrous aberration of mod- 
esty, what imbecile timidity causes one to open his 
heart to strangers only. . . • A son ought to treat his 



THE GBEAT SHRINE 147 

father as something different from a preceptor. • . . 
Many feel a devoted love for him . . • respect, grati- 
tude; few, I believe, think of making their father 
their friend. Whyf False shyness, and then, chil- 
dren have no such notion . • , they seek pleasure 
comrades rather than thought comrades. On the 
other hand, if the notion of such a friendship some- 
times makes a father wistful, it isn't for him to begin, 
he would have to trespass on youth's privacy; such 
a friendship isn't possible unless it springs of its 
own accord from the wishes of the child. Dear 
father, I ask you to be my friend. We are so abso- 
lutely made to get on together. Between us, right 
in the family circle, simple and united, nevertheless 
twenty centuries of convention, of fashion, of con- 
trolling tradition, had piled obstacles between two 
hearts and their natural expansion. We've never 
talked openly as two young people sometimes talk 
together, shrouded in the dimness of a room or in 
the inviting quietness of a beautiful night. At such 
a time trust is stirred and intimacy f oUows it. One 
is surprised the next morning, sometimes, at what 
one has been moved by certain influences to reveal 
to a companion. That's because next morning the 
ice has formed again, the ice that for a moment was 
broken, melted by the warm breath of friendship, 
land the conventional chill re-assumes its rights. . . . 
And since it is to my stay in hospital that I owe this 
inspiration about a change in our relations, I bless 
my illness. . . ." (Here for three pages as wonderful 
as ever came from the pen and the heart of a son 
just twenty-three, he teUs his father of what he has 
read — from Shakespeare to Anatole France, from 
Montaigne to Loti — during these months in hospital. 



148 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

he tells him of his thoughts, of his character and 
what it has lacked and how he hopes it has developed, 
and then he continues) : 

**And so I mean, dear father, to open an immense 
conversation with yon, guards down, in which I'll 
make a clean breast to you of my dreams and my 
enthusiasms. ITl reveal my aspirations, my moral 
and my worldly ambitions, my still halting concep- 
tions about the huge questions IVe not yet thought 
enough about. Wa'll talk of men and acquaintances, 
of life and death, of God and women, or rather, of 
the gods and Woman, of art and politics, of history 
and the wooded slopes of the Vosges, of medicine 
and war, of everything within the domain of thought. 
You'll correct my inaccuracies, I'll revive your illu- 
sions. I'll gain weight, you'll regain youth, and so 
you'll really be my father. ..." 

This French boy was not quite twenty-one when 
he entered the war at its outbreak. During three 
years he seems to have been in almost every part of 
it, the Somme, the Marne, Champagne, the Argonne, 
and to have seen almost all the sights of war and felt 
almost all its sensations, except despondency. If 
ever he felt that he never allows it to appear. 

To the father of a comrade killed at Douaumont 
and dearly loved, he writes, after two pages : 

** Listen, sir, this letter is too painful for you to 
read. I '11 cut it short. But I must aU the same tell 
you that the sacrifice of your son is not wasted. My 
first feeling was of discouragement, of disgust at 
the folly of slaughter which froths over the earth. 
But soon, as often before, the lesson of sacrifice rose 
out of it for me. We need the Scriptures no longer, 
the story of Christ teaches nothing actually, now: 



THE GREAT SHRINE 149 

to learn the beauty and to understand the neces- 
sity of immolation we need but look around us. Such 
examples as Andre has given put the flabby and the 
timid to shame and uplift and strengthen the brave. 
. . . The battle goes forward . . . and those not yet 
fallen must look ahead and still ahead, until their 
turn shall come. . . .^^ 

On New Year ^s Eve of the year that his turn was 
to come, he gave a supper. 

**My party was a grand success. I had sixteen 
guests, and later two who arrived at 11.30. . . . They 
proved charming and greatly enlivened the dawn of 
the present year with their songs and monologues. 
. . . Pate de f ois gras, roast fowls, green peas, salad, 
hot chocolate, plum-pudding, a litre of white wine 
apiece, decent champagne, coffee, cigars. I was able 
to get some rum — ^not so easy! — ^just enough for 
lighting the plum-pudding. A Httle before midnight 
I had the lights put out. Then as the clock struck 
twelve, the pudding was brought in, garlanded with 
blue flame, while corks popped and greetings were 
exchanged. The Marseillaise started by itself. Very 
characteristic. If any one at any other time had 
started the national song, the poilus would have 
booed him down; but they felt a certain solemnity 
in the moment, in spite of everything, and sang the 
hymn out freely and joyfully. . . . This morning I 
got to bed satisfied at having done something for 
cheerfulness and merriment. . . . That's an impera- 
tive human obligation in war-time. . • .'' 

Within four months the turn came for this boy. 
He was warned not to keep so near some comrades 
he stood ready to care for should they be hit. Bul- 
lets were falling thick. **No fear,'' said he, ** bullets 



150 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

are used to me/' A few steps more and he fell with- 
out a sound or a sigh^ shot through the heart. 

Not quite twenty-one when he wrote his first war 
letters, not yet twenty-four when he wrote the last, 
he had explored the realms of duty, of thought, of 
emotion and of action very far. He was a piece of 
the true France, and his spirit came from the same 
world whence, seven centuries before him, had pro- 
ceeded the cathedral of Reims. That world is a place 
which the hannaner of Thor cannot ^mash. 



XIV 

THE TOWEBS IN THE NIGHT 

As at Amiens, so now at Beims, day was sinking 
while I gazed up at the towers of the cathedral. In 
the square below the towers were poilus, standing 
and moving. I looked at these soldiers of France, 
over whose spirits the breath of war had passed. 
What had it done to themf Any one could answer 
that question who had seen the poilu as I had seen 
him often, and had seen him last in July 1914. In 
those other days he had been a very different figure. 
His clothes hung upon him without dignity, his walk 
and bearing slouched, his face had been trivial, the 
whole man seemed to fall short of manhood. Today 
these poUus were grave, upstanding, their carriage 
erect, giving forth a sense of power and accomplish- 
ment in full measure. In truth they were a visible 
part of the majesty of France. Tourgueneff said 
once: **War makes more men than it kills. ^' The 
breath of war had blasted the cathedral and had 
blown the boy away to lie imder one of the crosses 
that scattered the land of France like fallen stars. 
Yet, as from that first immolation upon the Cross, 
so from these others, as the boy wrote to the bereaved 
father of his friend, spiritual resurrection had come. 
These poUiis walking beneath the towers, now, had 
been ready : and the readiness is all. The martyred 
cathedral of Beims still stretched its towers to God, 

151 



152 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and they were still suppliant. Why! The boy had 
written: **Do not weep for ns, but continue us.'' 
Continuing was what confronted the poilv^, France, 
and our whole civilization. Sometimes continuing 
comes very hard. We rise to meet death, but meet- 
ing life is a longer act. When exaltation has per- 
formed its task and sunk away, what then remains to 
carry us through, if we still live f Some things there 
were that Thor had smashed with his hammer: 
homes, hearts, bodies. These broken things needed 
the supplication of those towers. They that were to 
continue must seek help in whatever house of what- 
ever God their spirits knew. Some would pray in 
churches, some without words under the sky, some 
would pray through action, through sacrifice, like the 
boy who saw the sacred worth of inmaolation. All 
would be answered. But voids there would be when 
no answer seemed to come. For broken, unhappy 
men in these voids, I could fancy that Reims stretched 
its suppliant towers to God. 

Like that at Amiens, I had known this cathedral 
well. To come upon it as it was now, with my mem- 
ory of it as it had been, unprepared, would have 
overwhelmed me. But the expected sight was so 
full of unexpected grandeur, that the pain of its 
disfigurement was lost in new admiration. It stood 
up like a sort of proclamation of faith. More than 
ever it seemed living; too great to notice what had 
been done to it; above all temporal suffering; the 
France of seven hundred years, and the France of 
the years to come. 

Day grew more dim. In its waning light I looked 
across the square to see what was left of the little 
inn, the Lion d'Or, where I had eaten and dnmk 



THE TOWERS IN THE NIGHT 153 

and laughed so many times. From my bedroom 
windows there, I had always taken a good-night 
look at the cathedral before blowing out tiie candle. 
Down in its court had grown a vine, trained to make 
a screening arbor, and my last supper here, June 
30th, 1914, had been curtained by its leaves. No 
windows faced the cathedral any more. No court 
was there and no vine. The Lion d'Or was down on 
the ground, and where it had been were pieces of 
plaster and heaps of stones. 

The tide of dusk rose a little higher. We got 
back into our car and began our return southwest 
through the brooding silence of the ruins. There 
were no hours left in which to include the one thing 
more that I should have liked to do this day — swing 
south by the Montague de Reims and thence east- 
ward, forty kilometres, across the Champagne from 
Pompelle to Massiges. Then we should have gone 
over those denuded clay-white plains upon which 
Ludendorjff on the 15th of July had launched that 
other attempt to retrieve the peril of his Mame 
pocket. He had enveloped the eastern gate-post no 
more than the west. He never attained the old Ro- 
man road in front of the French lines. General 
Gouraud stopped him. The Montague de Reims 
remained safe and Chalons-on-the-Mame was not 
reached. Still the Marne pocket was left as it had 
been dug, defenceless on both sides, a very dangerous 
success, won beneath the misleading hypnotism that 
the mirage of Paris cast over his mind. By after- 
noon of that 15th of July, Ludendorff and his em- 
peror saw from Blanc Mont that they had failed. 
West of Reims von Mudra did better on that day, 
pushing eleven French and three American divi- 



154 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

sions back, and extending the pockets; while still 
more to the west von Boehm was winning the south 
bank of the Mame between Dormans and Chateau* 
Thierry, Bnt upon the day following, the tempest 
of thunder and rain in which they came within ten 
miles of Epemay, was a bad omen for them. They 
crawled forward on the 16th of July here and there, 
but the crawling back began also. They gnawed 
vainly at the flanks of the Montague de Reims, and 
along their whole line of eighty kilometres ran a 
slackening of their impetus. July 17th saw the 
quiver of the horde on the turn, and by the next 
dawn, in the thunder and rain of Villers-Cotterets, 
our second battle of the Mame story began. 

Our road southwest from Reims took us dose to 
the edge of part of that ground where they had 
gnawed at the east side of their pocket. We could 
have seen Marfaux had there been more light on the 
way to yille-en-Tardenois. But light was going now, 
visibly each few moments. Had the day been with 
us still, we should have seen clearly just the same 
sights as those of the morning hours, desolate fields, 
desolate houses, emptiness. As it was, the sharp 
edges of this perpetual spectade began to dissolve 
in the quiet gloom. Cruel shapes grew gentle in the 
vagueness, standing fragments softened, smaller 
fragments melted away; imtil discernment of our 
road and what lay to its left and right, ended, and 
one merely felt the presence of whatever objects 
we passed. 

Reims was present, too, in this voiceless obscurity, 
casting over France its ceaseless influence. As 
Amiens stood by the Somme so Reims stood by the 
Vesle, and these two great guardians were stretch- 



THE TOWERS IN THE NIGHT 155 

ing their suppliant towers unseen in the night. **Do 
not weep for ns, but continue us/' 

Donnans came. We had already descended from 
the higher land of Tardenois, and crossed the Mame 
at Bas-Verneuil. Along the river we felt the trees 
passing, and here and there passed little lights, with 
wide blank spaces between them. The ground over 
which our cautious speed was now increasing had 
been the uttermost goal of the Him, it was the out- 
side limit of his onset from the Chemin des Dames ; 
here, as if he had struck some surface, he rebounded, 
and his backward steps to the place whence he had 
come, began. He counted, during the height of his 
fierce advance, 209 divisions against those 192 that 
had met him. France gave 103 of these, England 
58, ourselves 17, Belgium 12, Italy spared 2 from her 
own desperate struggle witii Austria. While these 
were contending, even in the days of gloom that so 
filled the weeks of this spring, leaflets of ill news 
were floating down upon Germany from the sky. 
They told those who picked them up that six hun- 
dred thousand Americans, young, strong, fired with 
zeal, were now landed in France and ready. They 
came through the air with French aviators, who dealt 
them out like packs of cards foretelling misfor- 
tune. These leaflets sailed in little balloons devised 
in England; their messages of truth, well chosen 
to strike chill, were written at Crewe House by 
Sir Campbell Stuart. They fluttered down, and the 
mailed fist was never able to seize them all before 
they had done their work, undeceiving its dupes and 
weakening the beats of their discouraged hearts. 
When our 4th of July came, it was no longer six 
hundred thousand of us, but more than a million, 



156 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

that were present in France, with more arriving 
each day; and this, too, was wafted down upon Ger- 
many from the little balloons. 

Our speed increased as we went along the valley 
with the sense of the great trees at our side and 
overhead. We ran out of them into darkness that 
continued, but across which some distant light would 
shine, then the nearer darkness would again shroud 
us. 

**That was Jaulgonne,'' said our captain once in 
the silence, as a far light showed and sank behind. 

Below Chateau-Thierry we crossed the river again, 
our road improving as we dived forward into the 
endless gulf of the night. No one came by, but lights 
single or by twos and threes shone from time to time 
across succeeding distances. After Meaux our pace 
quickened still more and presently seemed to double 
itself along the empty road. Sometimes upon a rise 
the upward slant of our head-lamps would reveal 
tall tops of trees between whose steady avenues we 
were rushing, and sometimes our flying light would 
glare for a second upon a kilometre stone ; but when 
I thought of the towers, they seemed as near as ever. 
It was as if the silence were filled with their quiet 
presence, this silence that brooded over the night 
as it had dominated the day. After a while the lights 
of Paris began, and at eleven we got out at the hotel. 



XV 



UPLIFT 



I was tired, but also I was wakefiil. Deeper than 
before, deeper even than at Amiens, I seemed to 
see into and comprehend France. My thoughts 
turned also to the living, whose flesh and bones were 
crushed, who had known the wild raptures of the 
blood, the calm rapture of exaltation, and who now 
were knowing the empty stages, where rapture and 
exaltation are not. Upon sticks and crutches, if not 
still unhealed in bed, they were facing, not death, 
but life. I had seen them at home, and in England, 
and now here. **Do not weep for us, but continue 
us.'' The boy who was dead had wanted no tears 
for the dead, but he would have pitied these living. 
They had to continue upon their sticks and crutches, 
dragging themselves somehow across the desert 
stages where there is no exaltation. I trusted that 
in most of them that thing was alive which Thor 
cannot smash. Without it, it were far better that 
they were wholly dead. Those of them that had the 
habit, or the occasional mood, of prayer, pagan or 
Christian, or a blend of both, which is the most 
honest and most human kind, were doomed, like all 
of us, to pray sometimes to emptiness. Neither the 
deepest grief nor the bitterest remorse equals in its 
desolating chill the sensation of unanswered prayer. 
The vision came to me of these maimed survivors, 

167 



158 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

these fragments of men^ the halt and the blind, all 
over the world, a vast horde, crawling painfully 
about, like insects that have fallen upon the table 
from a burning lamp. 

Does war make more men than it kills t I wished 
that I had thought of putting this question to the 
Tommies at Albert, or to the military policeman 
from Kansas. Some kind of answer I should cer- 
tainly have received, though nothing like so mature 
an answer as would have come from a poUu^s more 
subtle and intellectualized Latin intelligence. I went 
back the few steps from the hotel entrance to the 
Place du Havre; Kansas was not upon his island, 
nor anywhere else to be seen tonight. Returning, I 
sat down in the adjacent cafe, ordered a bock and a 
brioche, and opened my map upon the table. 

Some tables away in the almost empty place sat a 
creature whom I was sorry to see, for I feared that 
he would see me and come over. He did not live in 
my hotel, but evidently somewhere in the neighbor- 
hood, and sometimes frequented its reading-room 
and hall. Taking me for a brother American he 
more than once had attempted to invade my privacy 
for longer stretches of time than the natural rights 
of man justified, or my view of my own rights would 
allow. I had hitherto managed not to swallow any 
large dose of him. He was no brother of mine. 
Kansas on the island was a brother, and many of 
our doughboys, and many more people still : but not 
this kind. It takes all sorts of people to make a 
world, and all sorts of people to make a United 
States; and I exceedingly regret that it does so. I 
felt in my bones that this American belonged to the 
numerous and noisy tribe of conscientious objectors 



UPLIFT 159 

to common-sense. Hnndreds of these had come over 
to Europe to teach Europe how to suck eggs. 

His face and clothes were exactly alike, if you 
understand what I mean. He was the sort of per- 
son who at home hands the plate on Sundays in the 
sort of church where the minister improvises prayers 
which last an hour, reads aloud passages from The 
Literary Digest, and misquotes Longfellow. The ris- 
ing and departure of two Frenchmen exposed me to 
his full gaze, and I saw this fix itself upon me across 
the intervening table where their glasses stood. Oh, 
yes, he was coming ! 

*^Well, now, who'd have thought a man like you 
would be sitting up here this late ! ' ' With this greet- 
ing, he seated himself opposite me, and smiled. He 
had a vaguely lustrous eye, and his teeth were too 
long, and slanted outward. 

I pulled out my cigar-case and was stretching it 
over to him, but he lifted his wide, limp hand against 
it. I had a box of cigarettes, and these I offered 
him. 

** Thank you, I never use tobacco.'' 

I tapped my glass of beer. 

**Have one," I suggested, and signalled to a 
waiter. 

**I never use alcohol in any form, thank you,'' he 
said. 

The waiter came. 

** Bring this gentleman a cup of coffee. I hope you 
will keep me company in that f ' ' 

* * Thank you, I have had all the refreshment I ever 
take before retiring." 

**At least let me order you a toothpick 1" I ex- 
claimed. 



160 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

** Sometimes I think yon mnst be qnite a joker," 
said my man. **Well, now, I think you're right to 
joke. Pve seen sights in France — ^well, now, there's 
times when a joke helps some." 

^^Yes," I assented, wondering if I had misjudged 
him. **Yes, indeed. How long were you at the 
front!'' 

**I was not exactly at the front. But I have 
served. My viewpoint is that in aU walks we can find 
some way to serve. And I have seen sights and 
sights." 

**Were you too old for the front!" 

**No. Not too old. Not too old in years, that is, 
you understand. But at Fort Oglethorpe, they found 
my heart was not what it should be for my age. I am 
twenty-nine years and seven months now. Unmar- 
ried. My uncle in the Surgeon General's office wrote 
them about my heart, because he knew more about it 
than those medical reserve doctors did. But I was 
determined to serve if I was strong enough. I was 
going to get over here somehow. ' ' 

** Couldn't you find any chances for service at 
home!" 

** Ah, but I wanted to be in the thick of it I I'm no 
stay-at-home. ' ' 

**Oh,Isee." 

'*And will you tell me what life is without 
service ! " he demanded, slightly chanting the words. 

^'Lots of fun," I answered. '* Especially when 
you're under thirty." 

* * Now you 're joking again. So my uncle got me a 
position in an uplift mission." 

* * How very interesting ! Which one ! The tuber- 
culosis caravan! or the paediatric unit!" 



UPLIFT 161 

'*Peddy — ^I don't think I have heard that men- 
tioned. '^ 

**A number of Americans are going about in 
camions from place to place, showing the French how 
to have and rear children/' 

He cast down his eyes immediately, and was silent. 

* * Pffidiatric is the name for that unit, ' ' I explained. 
^*It comes from the Greek. It is a perfectly nice 
word. Even a lady nplifter can use it without any 
risk.'' 

**My viewpoint,'' he now resumed, **is, that we 
should all avoid certain language. The unavoidable 
use of it by doctors does their tone no good. And 
between tone and action the distaace is very short. 
Did you go to any of our training camps f ' ' 

^^Yes." 

'*Did you hear the language of the young menf 
But you would get no slant on that, because they 
would be careful before you. " 

** Won't you tell me some of the sights you have 
seen?" I asked. 

'*Well, now, you don't have to go far. This great 
French city right now is full of evil. ' ' 

^^ Isn't your city in America?" 

'*I never got a slant on our cities, though I have 
sensed them, visiting. Father intends to buy a new 
home in Little Rock. Have you noticed the man out 
there?" 

''Where?" 

''There is a military policeman out there some 
nights. He makes no attempt, no attempt at all, to 
use his authority." 

"Why, I thought he did." 

"No attempt. He allows young soldiers to walk 



162 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

right by him, when anybody could see they intended 
to practise immorality. If a person like yon spoke 
to him and got his reaction, some good might <^ome 
of it/' 

* * Well, I don 't know about that. Do yon mean that 
yon spoke to himf 

**I did, sir. I felt it my dnty, even if I was no 
longer officially connected with uplift. ' ' 

**You spoke to him about stopping '' 

**I certainly did.' ' 

**Jimminy Christmas! And what * reaction' did 
you gett" 

^^I will not soil my tongue with repeating the 
language that he used. But a man with a viewpoint 
like his is a disgrace to our democratic army. ' ' 

^* You 're not now officially connected with Uplift, 
as you express it ? " 

**Well, not just now. But when I was, I used to 
come out between vaudeville acts and speak to our 
boys about social purity and kindred topics of a 
serious nature. It was against my principles to issue 
cigarettes to them." 

**Do you mean those cigarettes that people in 
America had bought for them and that were sold to 
them instead!" 

* * That was a mistake, ' ' he replied. 

* * A mistake ! Yes. Quite. ' ' 

**The gift cigarettes were unpacked along with 
other cigarettes that we had bought to sell the 
soldiers at cost. The two lots got mixed up. That 
was all. And so when the soldiers opened packages 
they had paid for, and found slips inside printed, 
telling they were the gifts of some society at home, 
why their reaction was based on a mistake. We tried 



UPLIFT 163 

to give them the right slant, but somehow they never 
got it. My xmcle '* 

^*What more sights have yon seenf 

** There is immorality and intoxication everywhere 
yon '' 

^ * Yes, I know, I know. But everybody isn H drnnk. 
And you seem to me to have immorality rather prom- 
inently on your mind. Believe me there is not much 
true * service ' in making a nailitary policeman angry. 
Ton have no idea how easily I can guess the names he 
called you. Having to bear these patiently isn 't very 
strenuous service, is itt And, to be quite frank with 
you, I think service ought to cost a man something — 
his energy, his brains, effective exercise of skiU, or 
good will, something like that — for many hours each 
day, and given freely for nothing. You needn't wait 
for your uncle to get you another job. Jobs lie thick 
here all around .you. ' ' 

Had my deliberate testing him succeeded or failed ? 
Would he not, if he were a self -known hypocrite, have 
got up by now and gone away t During my probing 
words I had watched in vain for that special look, the 
glare of mingled injury and vindictiveness, which 
flashes across the face of the hypocrite found out. If 
he had that sensitive spot, my probe had not reached 
it yet. 

*^I would feel indebted to you,'' he said with 
unction, **if you would mention some job I could do 
here, without overstraining my heart, that is. I am 
a stranger here." 

I bethought me for an instant. I could give him 
some addresses where good workers were welcome — 
but could he be any sort of a good worker f France 
was aflBicted with too many like him, come over from 



164 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

America for the ** uplift'^ as he and they called it, but 
which was no true uplift at all, was merely a mask, 
concealing to others — and to themselves at least par- 
tially — the subtle disguises of a central and impreg- 
nable egotism. Swarms of these psychologically 
diseased people were pervading poor, sad, scarred 
France with their intrusive ** missions,^' and these 
brought really valuable missions of relief into 
disrepute. 

^* Charity begins at home,*' said I lightly, but 
watching him close. ** Don't stay over here. There 
are many hundred wounded soldiers in the Walter 
Reed hospital, near Washington. You could be of 
help to some of them every day, by reading aloud to 
them.'' 

He immediately spread out his hand against this 
suggestion. **I cannot bear the sight of human 
suffering, ' ' he said. * * I find it too afliicting. ' ' 

A psychologic doctor would have been quite satis- 
fied with those two statements. Added to what had 
gone before, they were enough to rip the veil away 
and disclose the true nature of this case. But it in- 
terested me to go fishing for some more ^ * reactions. ' ' 

^*Well," I said, *Hhe Armistice saved much addi- 
tional human suffering. I suppose that we should 
rejoice that it came." 

I certainly rejoice," he stated. 
And yet, do you know," I continued, ** sometimes 
I do not wholly rejoice. Sometimes I ask myself, 
may it not have been premature!" 

He sat erect. ** Premature? When it stopped the 
war!" 

**Yes, if it stopped it too soon for the wholesome 
instruction of Germany." 






UPLIFT 165 

At the word " Germany '* I thought that I dis- 
cerned some fleeting change in his face. But he said : 

** Would you instruct any one, even your enemies, 
by means of war t ' ' 

* * Certainly, if there was no other way. ' ' 

**Then you are quite against universal disarma- 
ments 

** Universal? How do you know that everybody 
will come into that game, or keep the rules of the 
game if they do come in! Don^t forget the Scrap 
of Paper! Don't caress yourself with the thought 
it will be the last Scrap that the world ever sees I ' ' 

* * I am sorry to hear you speak like this, ' ' he said. 
**I never allow myself to be cynical. '^ 

**Just as much as we insure against fire,'' I pur- 
sued, "we must insure against war. Never in mak- 
ing our national plans and preparations can we 
reckon mthont.the possible chance of war." 

**I can't bear to hear you say that," he said. 

**0h, there are compensations," I replied, very 
lightly and deliberately. "War makes more men 
than it kills. ' ' 

He threw both his flabby hands above hi& head. 

"You have no idea what a horror I have of war!" 
he intoned. 

" I 'm quite sure that you have ! ' ' 

This slipped out before I could stop it; but he 
missed it. His vague, lustrous eyes were filled with 
his chronic preoccupation. 

"But please don't imagine," I amplified, "that you 
own the copyright of horror of war. That is no 
monopoly of yours. It is shared by a good many 
millions of us who would like war to become impos- 
sible, and yet who would make war at any moment in 



166 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

the name of righteousness and to defend the liberty of 
the human soul/' 

**I have thought it out clear/' he intoned. **I 
know where I stand. The most sacred thing in the 
whole world is human life. Therefore anything that 
takes human life is pure evil.'' 

**You're a Christian, I presume," I said. 

* * It is certainly my effort to be one, ' ' he replied. 

**Then what do you make out of the Crucifixion!" 
I asked. ' " 

I knew quite well how he must have dealt with 
that, or would now deal with it, if my sudden ques- 
tion had never till now presented itself to him. He 
would push it quickly out of his mind, as he pushed 
out every fact of history or nature or human nature 
that caused the clockwork of his toy idealism to 
slip a cog. But I was not prepared for the ingenuity 
with which his subconscious self would instantly 
protect itself. 

*^I cannot discuss with you the Foxmder of my 
Religion. ' ' 

**No, you can't," I murmured, lost for a moment 
in admiration, which he took for defeat. I had 
pushed him pretty close. He was not a self -known 
hypocrite. But his under-self had felt the approach 
of my probe to the spot it was hiding, and its resent- 
ment had peeped through in a hard flash from his 
eye and a brush of color that had already faded out 
of his cheeks. In his eye was now a reproof at my 
irreverent introduction of the Crucifixion. Well, I 
would try for one * * reaction ' ' more. 

I tapped upon my map, which lay spread upon the 
table. 

"By the way," I said, "there is service that you 



UPLIFT 167 

can do. Of course youVe seen all thisf And I 
swept my hand in a general way from Amiens and 
Picardy eastward and south across Soissons and 
Beims to the edge of the Argonne, which was as much 
of the devastated legions as this particular map 
Included. 

He leaned over and looked at the map, and then 
he shook his head. 

**I have been able to travel very little,'* he said. 
*^My duties have been confining. *' 

**Then you have not seen anything of the devas- 
tated regions f 

^*No.'' 

"Go and see them. There is your chance for 
service.** 

**I have no permit,** he said. "It requires 
influence.** 

"You forget your uncle. I*m seeing them, and I 
have no uncle. All I did was to explain to the proper 
people that I wanted to visit the devastated regions 
in order to see with my own eyes what the Germans 
had done to France, and then go home and report 
it to Americans.** 

"I have no wish to report it,** he replied coldly. 
"I do not consider that any true service.** 

"Why!** 

"It has been too much reported already.** 

"You*re mistaken. It cannot be too much re- 
ported. * * 

^ ^ May I inquire your reason for such an opinion t * * 

"Because there is a pernicious spirit at home 
which masquerades as Christianity. It preaches the 
doctrine of forgiving and forgetting what the Ger- 
mans have done to France and Belgium. Of course 



168 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

nothing could please or could profit the Germans 
quite so well as that the world in general and Amer- 
ica in particular should forget what they did, and 
believe that they would never do it again. ' ' 

By the changes in his face t could read that in 
this final attempt my success was going to be per-" 
feet. When I had spoken of a pernicious spirit as 
*^ masquerading as Christianity/' the same hard 
gleam which I had detected once before again flashed 
in his eye. By the time, however, that I had 
finished speaking, he had schooled himself for the 
moment. It might have been a preacher that now 
addressed me in accents reproachful yet mild. 

**Do you not think,'' he said, *Hhat we should for- 
give our enemies!" 

**I'm afraid you'll have to put that question a little 
plainer before I can answer it, " said I. 

^* Could anything be more plain than the words 
themselves! Are we not told in the Bible to love 
our enemies and do good to them that hate us t " 

**We are. I don't, however, remember that we're 
anywhere told to forgive other people's enemies." 

His control held. He was still the benevolent, 
Christian preacher of the Gospel of Peace. 

**How does this strike you!" I asked him. **The 
United States standing up with its hands spread 
out in the attitude of blessing, and saying to Ger- 
many : *I forgive you for carrying away French wives 
and daughters to slavery and prostitution ; I forgive 
you for throwing poison gas into the hospital and 
streets of the French town of Mezieres in the last 
few minutes before the Armistice was signed, and 
thus killing the defenceless French whose town 
you werei leaving in haste.' Does that sort of for* 



UPLIFT 169 

giveness strike yon as costing the forgiver very 
muchf 

He took instant and adroit advantage of my phrase. 

^^Need forgiveness cost ns anything!" he asked, 
raising one of his tell-tale hands. ^^Did it cost the 
father much to forgive his prodigal son in the para- 
ble t I admit that we shonld hate the sin, but let 
us not hate the sinner. Bemember the prodigal son, 
and how freely he was forgiven I ' ' 

**Aren^t you omitting a rather important part of 
that parable?" said I. ^^The prodigal son said, ^I 
will arise and go to my f ather, and will say unto 
him. Father I have sinned against heaven and before 
thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. ' 
Has Germany said anything like thatf " 

It may have been from his talks to soldiers about 
social purity between the acts of vaudeville enter- 
tainments, or it may have been from other previous 
experiences, that he had learned his various uses of 
adroitness. Wherever he had been, he was certainly 
skilful ; and his skill was, of course, seconded at every 
turn by that under-self in him who was hiding the 
spot he wished to remain xmknown both to himself 
and to all the rest of the world. My facts about 
French wives and poison gas at Mezieres he did not 
take up ; he pushed them out of his mind automati- 
cally, because they interfered with his psychological 
dodb^ork. That mechanism was constructed to ring 
melodious bells and thus drown the noises of reality 
whenever they threatened to disturb his artificial 
and perfectly sterile idealism. 

**Both sides have been guilty of much that you and 
I would condemn," he now said, intoning slightly 
again. 



170 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

^^If you mean that men in hot blood commit acts 
they wonld be ashamed of when they were cool/' 
said I, ^^that is not what I am taUdng about. I am 
talking about a plan of atrocity worked out by the 
Oerman Staff in advance^ the proofs of which you can 
see for yourself if you visit the devastated regions." 

He smiled. ^^ There has been so much exaggera- 
tion." 

** Exaggeration ? I don't know what you call Lord 
Bryce's report. Or the French report of Monsieur 
B6dier." 

**But they were enemies of Germany," the up- 
lif ter reminded me. 

^*Have you read their reports!" 

He paused. That was in order to look as if he 
had read them, and was now being judicial about 
their contents. I doubted his ever having heard 
Bedier's name before; but he could hardly have es- 
caped hearing something about the investigation of 
German atrocities in Belgium conducted under the 
auspices of Lord Bryce. Our papers had spoken of 
it, and the facts presented in the pamphlets had been 
upon many lips. He would be well aware that these 
facts, like the sights in the devastated regions, would 
be disturbing to his psychological clockwork. There- 
fore, to avoid the trouble of putting them out of his 
mind, he would never let them come into it. 

**Lord Bryce," he began in a weighty and dispas- 
sionate manner, ^ 4s an eminent man. He is an honest 
man. We are all convinced of his sincerity." 

** Quite so," saidL 

**But we must not forget that Lord Bryce may 
have been deceived. He was not on the spot. He 
did not see those alleged deeds committed with his 



UPLIFT 171 

own eyes. How conld he be sure that the witnesses 
were telling the trathf 

^* Don't yon think that with his long career in Par- 
liament and in pnblic life that he woiJd have become 
fairly expert in snch matters, pretty carefnl to sift 
what was laid before himf 

**My dear sir, matnre judges have been deceived 
before. Who of ns is infallible t ' ' 

**But there was the Supplemental Report, contain- 
ing photographs of letters written, and diaries — all 
in the handwriting of Germans, who recorded not 
only the atrocities they saw others conmiit, but the 
atrocities they committed themselves. They were 
photographs, remember, with the dates, and the 
names of the writers, their rank, and the regiments 
to which they belonged.'' 

He smiled again. **Can you and I be sure that 
these photographs were not forgeries T ' ' 

It was growing late. No one was left in the cafe 
but ourselves and the waiters. These were noisily 
lifting chairs from the floor and piling them upside 
down upon the empty tables, casting upon us the 
while looks of increasing inhospitality. I decided 
that I must bring him to a boil. So long as he re- 
mained tepid — ^and he knew the strategic value of a 
moderate temperature very shrewdly — ^he could not 
be surprised into that final ^^ reaction" which would 
complete the quod erat demonstrandum of his case. 
To surprise him circumspection was needed, and 
therefore I began my approach from quite a safe 
distance. 

* * Of course I cannot prove to you that those photo- 
graphs of letters in Lord Bryce 's Supplemental Re- 
port were authentic documents. To do that I should 



172 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

have to «how you the letters in the presence of those 
who had written them, and have the men state xmder 
oath that it was their own handwriting. But on the 
other hand, how can yon prove to me that they were 
not genuine t ' ' 

*'I admit freely that I can not. Therefore I hold 
my opinion in reserve. That is what I so wish yon 
would do about all these matters.*' 

He did not know how nearly this remark brought 
me to a boil. But I continued to stalk him. 

**Have you heard anything about Shantung f I 
inquired. ** Hints reach me that it is giving them 
trouble at the Peace Conference. ' ' I spoke softly. 

**0h, no,*' he replied. **I am not near enough to 
anybody there." 

**IVe never been to Japan,*' I said, **or to China 
either. China must be still a very strange place. Is 
it Canton or Shanghai that's the capital f" 

*^Why, Peking is the capital." 

* ' You 've seen it t How I envy you 1 " I spoke more 
softly still. 

**No. I have had no opportunity to visit China." 

* ^ Then, how do you know that Peking is the capi- 
tal! " This I almost whispered. A sudden change 
had come into his look, but he was too late. 

^^You have never seen Peking with your own 
eyes," I pursued. **You can not know that it is 
really the capital of China. You have taken the word 
of maps and geographies for it. How do you know 
that they are not forgeries! Should you not hold 
your opinion in reserve!" 

He rose abruptly. * * I will bid you good-night, ' ' he 
said. **I thought I was talking to a man who lived 
on the higher plane." 



UPLIFT 173 

He was gone at once. More slowly, I folded my 
map and sUd it back into its cover, and left the cafe 
to the piles of chairs and the impatient waiters. I 
had brought him to a boil, the lid he so tightly kept 
upon his under-self had come off, and up from the 
bottom had bubbled the key-word that unlocked him. 
This case of diseased psychology was demonstrated. 

France was filled with ^^uplifters'* such as he, con- 
scientious objectors to common-sense, all living upon 
the *^ higher plane.'' So, unluckily, is America. 



XVI 

OHBMIN DB FEB DB L^BST 

Early the next morning after my talk with the 
nplifter, I entered the Gare de PEst. Above the 
stream of travellergi on their way to the platforms of 
the Eastern railroad in Paris, beacons a white dial, 
a meeting-place for many. Swarms of our dough- 
boys surrounded it ; French passengers were lost in 
this crowd. To these American soldiers returning 
from their permissions, the sight of themselves here, 
and the sound of their own voices was nothing out 
of the way, but it was like a dream to me. I had 
sped past the dial so often in other days, that now 
to come upon this flood of the New World in khaki 
beneath it, literally submerging the Old World, made 
me stare. 

The New World flooded my train, part of which 
was going to Metz, and part to Strasbourg. After 
some five hours it would divide at a junction which 
lay to the southeast of the St. Mihiel country, the next 
step of our pilgrimage. All the way we should run 
just within, or just along, the edge of battle-grounds 
as ancient as Csesar and as recent as Foch ; through 
Meaux and La Ferte-sous-Jouarre on the Mame, 
whence the Hun had been beaten back in Septem- 
ber, 1914; through Chateau-Thierry; through Mezy, 
where on July 15th, 1918, the 38th Eegiment of our 
3rd Division with a platoon of the 30th had won its 
name, ^*The Bock of the Marne.'^ All the more be- 
cause we had passed some of these places yesterday, 

174 



CHEMIN DE PEE DE L'EST 175 

either in daylight or in dark, I was glad that they 
were to come by again, and I should have liked to 
get out and waJk and linger over all that ground 
where our soldiers had stopped Ludendorff. Bight 
down the time-table of our Strasbourg express, name 
after name sounded the overtones of historic asso- 
ciation: Jaulgonne and Dormans rang with Ameri- 
can dash ; ilSpemay bubbled with memories of golden 
wine ; farther up the valley we should follow the 
Mame and be running io the south of Blanc Mont 
and Suippes, and the Main de Massiges, that Cham- 
pagne country where Gouraud had splendidly halted 
Ludendorff. Then, with Chalons-sur-Mame behind 
us, our train would run on eastward below 
Ste. Menehould, below the Argonne, beyond the 
Mame, the Meuse, the Moselle, and so after 
dividing reach its two destinations over rails 
now once again wholly upon French soil. The 
last time that I had travelled on this Chemin de Fer 
de I'Est, my course had been from Strasbourg as far 
as Avricourt across land of the Kaiser's, descended 
to him from his grandfather, who had torn it from 
the map of France after the Bismarck victory in 
1871. After forty-seven years Alsace and Lorraine 
were French once more, and America had helped to 
bring this about. I thought of the crowds beneath 
the clock and of the trains drawn up by the platforms 
during the years before we came in, the black years 
of Verdun, and the mutiny of 1917. Those trains 
had carried soldiers daily up the Mame valley, grave 
soldiers in blue, going to Ste. Menehould, the Ar- 
gonne, Vaux, and Douaiunont, many of them destined 
never to see the clock again. 
To-day it was our soldiers who crowded the train. 



176 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

They were returning to their regiments at various 
places, each fresh (or stale) from his "permission** 
in Paris, and the scene recalled to me in a way cer- 
tain trains at home between New York and Boston, 
when our boys are going back to their various New 
England schools after the Christmas holidays. As 
I walked slowly beside the long train, its open win- 
dows hummed with the sound of voices jocund and 
youthful. No more than the school-boys converse 
about Caesar and his Gallic war, did these doughboys 
make references to the historic interest of the jour- 
ney before them. Bits of their talk reached me from 
the windows, and it was all what you would naturally 
expect and some that you would naturally not repeat. 
Dearly should I have liked to join them and hear 
something of their Parisian adventures and impres- 
sions, their murmur sounded so buoyant, so charm- 
ing to my elderly ears. Thus certainly did Csesar's 
legionaries, and possibly even Attila's, gaily converse 
between slaughters, without any more suspicion that 
their deeds were destined heavily to bore the school- 
boys of today than these vivacious fellows from the 
Hudson and the Mississippi, whom the train of the 
Chemin de Fer de l*Est would presently be rushing 
over Caesar *s and Attila's ground, were aware that 
their deeds, too, would heavily bore the school-boys 
of the future. They in their turn had made history, 
and farther from home that ever Caesar or Attila 
had been able to get. The train was not starting yet, 
and I continued to walk along it, looking at this new 
vision of America in the Old World. Some tales of 
ill behavior on the part of our men had reached 
me, to be sure, and of certain harsh and even cruel 
punishments, which a young soldier friend has since 



CHEMIN DE FEE DE L'EST 177 

told me lie believed on the whole, timely, in spite of 
their widely published excess. I can quite believe it. 
Upon thousands of lusty youths, far from home, let 
loose from military discipline upon a great metropo- 
lis, a firm hand needs to be kept. But ill behavior 
was not the prevailing characteristic of our boys, 
and a picture of them has been drawn by a French- 
man, Andre Chevrillon, whose delightful pages, en- 
titled ^^The Americans at Brest,'* give what I fancy 
represents the impression which France will retain 
of us when incidental memories of roughness and 
discord have died away. In the first days of their 
home-coming our soldiers, just like those I had met 
in Paris streets, cherished some resentments, chiefly 
connected with high prices ; but two years later, the 
officers and enlisted men whom I happened to tell 
that I was goiag back to take another look at France, 
never failed to exclaim, with light in their eyes, that 
they wished they were going too. And quite often 
they would add, that if I should visit such and such 
a place, would I look up a certain house where they 
had been billeted, or a certaiQ comer where they 
had been wotmded, or some other thing, some hill 
or wood or street or bank or stream that was now 
become a magnet in their memories, drawing their 
spirits back to France, the country of their great 
adventure. That is what Time does for us all. 

Not every window of this long train was filled with 
a doughboy, nor was every car dedicated to them. 
At certain windows French travellers stood and 
stared out with that particular glare, which we all 
assume in European trains, to discourage everybody 
else from entering our compartment to take a seat. 
But these glares did not worry me. Our young cap- 



178 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

tain whom we had began to see at 37, Bne de Bas* 
sanoy and begun to know at Belleau Wood, had ns 
still in his charge and had taken every care of ns in 
the matter of tickets and reserved seats in this early- 
starting and thickly-peopled train. Our car was of 
German make, allotted to France after the Armistice, 
and of better build, more solid and handsome in every 
respect than French cars. After we had attained 
full speed it was a cautious rate, never above thirty- 
five miles an hour. Owing to the dilapidations of 
road-beds during four years of fighting, all trains 
ran slower, those between Paris and Strasbourg now 
taking from twelve to thirteen hours instead of seven 
or eight. Over this line three expresses now ran 
daily ; in 1914 there had been nine or ten. The great 
through expresses to Constantinople, Carlsbad, and 
Berlin, for instance, had of course all been abolished. 
About twenty express trains were now running in 
the whole of France. 

Special trains were arranged for our doughboys 
between their various important camps and the dif- 
ferent leave areas, but these could not wholly relieve 
the regular trains of their burden. From certain 
of the best expresses the enlisted man was excluded 
by order — ^and this most naturally was a challenge 
to his young spirit ; he got aboard them whenever he 
could dodge our military police, and exerted his en- 
tire guile to stay in them without being discovered 
and turned out before the journey *s end. 

Soon after we had reached the Marne, I made a 
progress of exploration through the congested cor- 
ridors of almost all the cars. I squeezed my way 
through knots of doughboys blocking the passage, 
leaning, smoking, loquacious, thinking little of other 



CHEMIN DE FEE DE L'EST 179 

passengers, few of them intentionally mae, most of 
them merely yonng and rongh and in high spirits. 
As I worked along back and forth through the long 
train/ and realized that trains all over France, every 
day in the week, were running to and from the leave 
areas bursting with young America, I felt more in- 
dulgent than ever to the French impatience with us, 
I could have put the case better now to the discon- 
tented soldiers with whom I had reasoned in Paris 
streets and shops. 

The wide-awake fellow from Danbury had said: 

**Do you think if they had come over and saved 
New York and Bridgeport and New Haven for us, 
we^d be showing them the door like they're showing 
ittousr' 

**Yes,'' I should certainly now have replied. *^I 
think we should be showing them the door, and less 
civilly. Would you find it easy to say to them every 
time they swarmed into your train, trod on your 
instep, shoved their elbows into your ribs, and filled 
your face with tobacco smoke, *Keep it up, dear 
saviour of my country. How can I ever forget that 
nine months ago you fought at Mezyf ' '^ 

Lovely in the quiet rain was this valley of many 
wars, seeming to grow greener as the drops continued 
to fall gently upon it. It was as if May each hour were 
turning higher the lights of spring, and spring were 
visibly feathering the trees along the Marne. We 
passed the tower of Meaux, the fields sloping up to 
woods, the steeper banks, the levels by the winding 
river. To our right at first, then after Trilport to 
our left, it curved constantly across our way, and 
sometimes we lost it in the sudden darkness of a 
tunnel to emerge upon it again in the sudden light. 



180 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

We soon passed into the zone of rain. Not the least 
gniesome sight here were solitary houses, off on the 
hillsides, gutted within, with grey walls standing 
roofless, and black window-holes like eyes that 
watched you though they were blind : mile after mUe 
of this among the ploughed and sown slants of culti- 
vated soil, that chequered the sloping boundaries of 
the valley. The land here had been less wrecked 
than the buildings and was coming to life again, but 
they were not. And out there beyond sight across 
the river to the north, if you followed those little 
roads up the hiUs, you would come into the plain of 
Tardenois and be swallowed at once in the wide- 
stretching desolation of the Ourcq and the Aisne 
and the Vesle, and could go on to your right or your 
left or in front, and look at Beims, Soissons, Coucy- 
le-Chateau, St. Quentin, and so to Ypres, and never 
take one step that was not upon the grave of some- 
thing. ^ 

At Epemay we made a considerable pause, and 
I got out, and on the platform beheld the manufac- 
ture of some international hate. A boy of about eigh- 
teen had rolled the customary two-story edifice of 
trays on wheels along beside the cars. Bread, or- 
anges, champagne, with other food and drink, filled 
the trays, and the doughboys were stretching their 
arms out of the windows toward these refreshments, 
I didn^t catch what prices the boy had asked for his 
wares, but I came in time to hear the loud results. 
Some of the soldiers had jumped down and sur- 
rounded him and his rolling booth, and stood with 
the buns and the bottles they had picked out, curs- 
ing him for a robber and a cheat. On him was evi- 
dently pouring their accumulated resentment for 



CHEMIN DE FEB DE L^EST 181 

many over-charges. He stood dazed and sulky amid 
the storm of language, speaking not a word of Eng- 
lish, but perfectly able to understand that he was 
being called obscene and filthy names for what was 
no fault of his. He hadn't made the prices, they had 
been set by the proprietor of the buffet in the station. 
And he was so much younger ^;han the soldiers I 

"Say,*' shouted one of them, **you ought to be 
glad for our buying your stuff.*' 

And another from the window, pointing to some 
eatable : 

**Say, Eain-in-the-face, how much is that?" 

I couldn't help laughing at this and at several 
more of their violent remarks; but I was ashamed 
of them, and of myself, too, for not protesting. How 
often had this boy been forced to receive similar in- 
sults, what sentiments toward America was he going 
to retain and spread, how many such scenes had been 
enacted throughout France f And if this was excep- 
tional and I had chanced upon a spot of blackguards 
in khaki, would such spots stain all the decenter 
rest of us in the French memory? 

Of such spots I had heard elsewhere. Every day 
to some soldiers quartered in the north, a lady of 
the neighborhood sent good things from her kitchen 
garden, and, constant in her appreciation of our com- 
ing over, had made these soldiers welcome to the 
pleasant grounds of her estate. This did not stop 
some of them from loud and unfavorable opinions 
of the French, expressed continually in a trolley car 
that ran through the district. There they sat talk- 
ing one day, and there sat the lady too ; and an army 
surgeon, who could bear it no longer, rebuked them 
and was told to mind his business. But he reported 



182 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

the scandal to the commandiBg officer, and there was 
no more of it. Which was France going to remem- 
ber, the army snrgeon or the ''roughnecks''? It 
was not only enlisted men, it was officers as well, 
whose words and conduct spotted American reputa- 
tion. As when, for instance, a certain general accom- 
panied a film machine and a certain benevolent 
organization to a certain hospital, and there ordered 
out the convalescent men and staged a moving pic- 
ture which ''featured'' himself. Assuming his pos- 
ture, he ordered the patients to race and pick up 
little gifts flung to them by the benevolent organiza- 
tion. When the photograph was finished the little 
gifts were taken back from the convalescents, and 
the general with his benevolent apparatus marched 
on to a new place and had more films made. Or 
again, for instance, when a certain officer issued an 
order that "The -th regiment will de-French and 
de-louse at j and embark on the -th." These ex- 
amples — ^more could be given — should suffice to re- 
mind any American, inclined to complain of French 
shortcomings, that the boot is not always on the 
same leg. That the conduct of our enlisted men was 
on the whole more creditable than that of their com- 
missioned officers is something that I have heard 
too often from commissioned officers themselves not 
to believe. Some of the unfit were weeded out, but 
the Armistice came too soon for this process to be 
complete. Quite naturally, much more impregnable 
conceit was to be found among the middle-aged vege- 
table officers of our regular army than in those who 
had come from successful responsibility in civil life. 
While discussing our army with me, a French gen- 
eral said: 



CHEMIN DE FEB DE L^EST 183 

**WliGn an American officer told me that I need 
not tell him anything^ I knew that I had a bad soldier 
to deal with. When an American officer asked me 
to tell him what to do, I knew that he wonld prove 
a good soldier/' He went on to explain with illus- 
trations how admirable he had f onnd the Americans, 
how qnick to seize a point. ^^Make them understand 
a thing once,'* he said, **and you need feel no more 
anxiety. They wonld carry it out. ' ' ^ 

Among our doughboys the spot at Epemay is the 
only one that I saw, and this makes me sure that the 
French are sincere and not merely polite when they 
express admiration of us, as they do today: our 
general tone must have been wonderfully decent. 
Two years later, when a lady who lived on a great 
estate in the eastern part of the country was speak- 
ing to me of the war as it was after we had come in, 
and of the Americans who had during some months 
in 1918 occupied part of her ancient house and part 
of her land, she had such cordial words to say that 
I exclaimed : 

"Well, I hope that you are not telling this to me 
just because I am an American! I hope that our 
boys did conduct themselves pretty weU on the 
^olet*' / K C?^^ 

' * But they were charming ! We shall never forget 
them : so gay, so athletic, and some of them so good 
looking ! And they always thanked us for the little 
that we could do for themu^' Then she smiled and 
shrugged her shoulders. "Some little Americans 
are running about in our village today ; but that was 
quite likely the fault of our own lasses.'' 

"You are very indulgent," I replied; "and from 
the chronicles of chivalry it would appear that wan- 



184 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

dermg warriors have always been apt to leave' their 
portraits behind them." 

It was none the less new to think of : our dough- 
boys home by the Hudson and the Mississippi, or 
sleeping in their graves by the Mame and the Mouse, 
and little Americans strewed about in Lorraine, and 
Dauphine, and Anjou. 

Nobody ever seemed to get out of this train ; they 
fieemed only to get in. They had an excellent oppor- 
tunity to leave us at Chalons-sur-Mame, and one 
other at Vitry-le-FrauQois, but these they neglected 
and stuck to their seats closer than brothers, while 
the corridors remained congested with standing pas- 
sengers. Everyone was apparently bound at least 
as far as we were, and when an emissary in uniform 
from the restaurant car pushed his way past the 
door of our compartment, announcing — 

** Dejeuner deuxieme! Deuxieme service de- 
jeuner I'* — 

I felt my approbation of the French system in- 
crease. The steward's announcement may well be 
translated into the rubric that I once heard a black 
waiter upon the Michigan Central poetically chant- 
ing through my Pullman : 

''Second caU 
In the breakfast halll" 

We rose and manoeuvred towards the distant food, 
our minds at rest. At home, with the number of 
passengers upon our train, and but one restaurant 
car, attaining a meal would have proved a struggle 
to which we very likely might have preferred starva- 
tion. In France there is no standing for thirty or 
sixty miles at the door of the dioing-car, or lurching 



CHEMIN DE FEB DE L'EST 185 

about in its vestibule, till your turn comes. Before 
yoTi get into your train, yon stop at the steps, where 
the steward gives yon a ticket for the service yon 
prefer, nnless yon are late, when yon may have to 
take what yon can get. Sometimes there are three 
services, each lasting abont an honr. Once yon pos- 
sess yonr ticket, yonr cares are over, yon sit qniet 
nntil yonr ** service'' is called, and then yon go and 
find a seat ready for yon at a table which has been 
cleanly re-set. To all this onr vigilant captain had 
attended. While we comfortably ate, drinking good 
white wine with it, the landscape flattened and wid- 
ened, marshes passed, and spreads of water, in which 
many stnnted willows stood in lines or clnmps like 
children wading. Behind this imtronbled scene of 
spring, lay always the conntry of mins and graves, 
Massiges, Ste. Menehonld, the Argonne. 

East and west every day traveled onr donghboys 
on this Chemin de Fer de PEst, npon which I shall 
never travel again withont affectionately thinking of 
them. Like the Chemin de Fer dn Nord and no other 
of the great French railways, its main lines and 
branches crossed and pervaded the npheaved regions 
of the war, and npon both I have made many jonr- 
neys to the land of silence. Over most of their miles 
of track nothing was mnning in May 1919, their 
msty rails stretched throngh emptiness, or were torn 
np. Whilst I have been travelling in their cars, I 
have thonght often of those trains that dnring the 
years of strife had taken soldiers of France and 
England, not to the land of silence, bnt to the land 
of bombs and gas and flames. My own safe jonr- 
neys can never be forgotten, and pictnres of varions 
fellow-traveUers remain vivid in my memory, espe- 



186 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

cially those of fhe Chemin de Fer de I'Est, of which 
my impressions are more copious. Once along the 
Meuse^ I was going to a small village to find, if I 
could, the grave of an American boy. I had the com* 
partment to myself until at our second stop the door 
opened and in got a rosy French girl whose eyes 
sparkled upon a young Frenchman as rosy. They 
sat opposite each other by their window, I sat at 
mine. Unless it was the better to gaze at each other 
I couldn't imagine then, and can't now, why they 
were not sitting on the same seat, for really, such 
honeymooning I have never beheld by dayUght, and 
I am sixty-one years old. Not to be in the way, I 
looked out of my window with the utmost delicacy, 
and repeated verses from the ^^Song of Solomon." 
But at a sharp slap I jumped round. 

^^ Isn't she wicked t" he asked me, gay spirits and 
tenderness blending in his tones. 

^^Yes, indeedl" I exclaimed. His cheek was red 
from her hand. 

What was the use in looking out of the window? 

They went on quite regardless of me, until the 
train slowed for a station. Then he gave her such 
a kiss that she protested. 

^^But the monsieur doesn't mind us," he assured 
her, and both their glances appealed to me, hers 
saying, **You see I can't stop himi" and his, "You 
understand!" 

We halted and she got out. At the open door a 
little baby was lifted up to her, evidently by its grand- 
parents. She took it from them, while he waved 
ardent good-byes to her and the family group. 

**Then you're not getting out with hert" I ex- 
claimed to him in surprise and sympathy. 



CHEMIN DE FEB DE L^EST 187 

He was not, he had to go to his work at another 
place. He had been taking her for a little holiday. 
Soon I had left the train, and was walking by a 
broken wall among crosses, reading the names of 
the dead and of the battles where they had fallen. 

The Chemin de Fer de PEst has furnished my 
memory with many pictures. That harsh scene of 
our doughboys and the French lad at Epemay has 
been softened by timiB and reflection, and also by a 
sprightly performance, in which I played a slight 
part. We had got into a Paris express at Bar-le- 
Duc, and according to my wont I began after a time 
to wander along the corridors to see what I could 
see. Disappointment was my first ** reaction^' (that 
uplifter has poisoned my vocabulary with his cant- 
ing jargon), I found neither honeymooners nor 
doughboys, but only the average population of any 
French express train. As I was standing in the 
corridor of a second-class car, looking out of the 
window and thinking I would give up my search 
for local color and go back to my own car, the door 
of the lavatory opened and three doughboys came 
out. Why three at once in a lavatory t And why only 
three on the whole train! And why had I not seen 
them when I was exploring? I wanted to ask them 
how long they had been in there, but this seemed 
too leading a question for an entire stranger. They 
stopped beside me and stood watching the scenery 
with what struck me as an interest more lively than 
it justified : flat fields, marshes and stretches of water 
with willows, should hardly absorb three doughboys, 
unless they were all landscape painters. Nothing 
was said by any of us for a whUe, until at last one 
of them addressed me with a certain hesitation ; 



188 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

"Do you speak English?'' 

"Oh, yes/' 

"Could you tell ns how soon we get to Chalons t" 

"Well," I answered, "at a guess, I should say 
in about forty-five minutes." 

Why did they all laugh f 

This I did not inquire^ but asked : 

"Are you getting out at Chalons t" at which they 
laughed still more. 

"Oh, no," one said. "We've got three days' per- 
mission for Paris, but we're not allowed to ride on 
this fast through train. Our police will pull us off 
at Chalons if they see us. They nearly caught us at 
the last stop. " 

"111 not tell," said I. Then we were all merry 
together. 

"Have you ever been in the States?" asked one. 

"Gk)d bless your heart, I've been there for two 
hundred years!" Then wet fraternized more than 
ever. 

"The French military police are all right," they 
told me. "It's ours that make the trouble for us." 

Presently I returned to my compartment, and there 
found that I had given wrong information to those 
three confiding boys. We were due at Chalons at 
six, thirty minutes sooner than I had told them, and 
it was now five minutes to six. I hastened back to 
them with this news, at which they immediately 
rushed tumbling into the lavatory. 

"If the police comes, " said one, "tell him there's 
a lady in here." And they locked the door. The 
little indicator by the handle turned to "occupied." 
I should think it was ! 

I stood guard. We reached Chalons at six and left 



CHEMIN DE FEE DE L^EST 189 

it at six-twenty-two. No police came^ but one pas- 
senger tried the door three times, and I shall never 
forget his face. As the train began to move out of 
the station, I felt that I had done my duty, and re- 
turned to our compartment, and narrated the circum- 
stances to my companions. Just as I was finishing, 
the three boys came by, looked in, and on seeing me 
they all laughed joyously. 

**We made the riffle!** cried one. 

On the whole I think that the Chemin de Fer de 
PEst is my favoritei railway in France. 



xvn 



BAB-IiE-DtrO 



Ify in the silence of that wounded land which I 
had come to see, one visited a town not wholly dead 
and empty, those living there were making the best 
of it, were meeting life, with such a spirit and aspect 
that their effort was simply never visible. One had 
come to know so well the seal which the war had set 
upon all faces, that attention noted it no longer, but 
took it for granted, unaware, and looked at other 
things. At the time I was immersed in my journeys, 
the sorrow of it prevailed in my imagination ; today, 
as I think back, it is the pride in human nature which 
can so splendidly meet distress as these French were 
doing that dwells chiefly in memory. Never was 
such horror dealt to any people, never have any 
people so indomitably faced it, not at the moment 
of stress alone, but in the forlorn prolongation of 
its aftermath. Here at this little town of Bar-le-Duc, 
though noon was gone and we had watched ruins since 
early morning, the work of bombs still was visible. 
Far behind us on the Mame — ^a hundred miles, I 
suppose — ^we had passed the wrecks of way-stations, 
such as Dormans, and here also the station roof was 
shattered, walls had jagged holes in them, and in the 
platform itself was a descent to some hiding-place, 
where the railway people had gone during hours 
when the Huns were sailing overhead. 

The town had suffered in no degree comparable 
to such places as Albert, through which the tides of 

190 



BAR-LE-DUC 191 

obliteration had raged back and forth. Bar-le-Duc 
stood on the outer rim of a storm-centre and, saved 
from the worst, had not been pnt ont of existence, 
bnt retained all its features whole — ^streets, houses, 
statues, churches, park; and its shops were open, 
with iron crosses and other still rather fresh relics 
for sale. After getting away from the ruins at the 
station, you might not have seen anything to remind 
you that war had paid this place a visit, but for those 
painted words upon so many dwellings: ^* Shelter, '^ 
^^Cellar,*' "Vaulted Cellar.^' These, which I had 
first noticed at Noyon, and met continually since in 
many towns, showed that war had flown here through 
the air. It was the starting point of what came to 
be known as the Sacred Boad, over which rolled the 
endless chain of camions that during so many months 
brought supplies to Verdun. This road had been 
a creation of General P6tain's resourceful mind; 
without it Verdun could not have stood, with it he 
was able to make good his quiet, great word, "They 
shall not pass." The main line of the Eastern railway 
is connected at Bar-le-Duc with Verdun by a branch, 
a feeble affair with but a single track in 1914; and 
one cannot help thinking that the French Govern- 
ment, had it been the German Government, would 
have been careful to make it solid and ready for war 
emergencies, long in advance of the event. 

In the streets and by the station, some of our offi- 
cers and men in khaki made visible the presence of 
America, and the rule of the military police was, 
as we found one afternoon, still rigorous. As we 
strolled along the Boulevard de la Bochelle, the time 
of day suggested tea to our captain and beer to me, 
so we sat ourselves at a table on the pavement in 



192 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

front of the Cafe de Commerce. We could hardly 
have touched onr chairs when out flew the lady who 
commanded the cafe while her husband was in the 
army. We must come inside, she declared; it was 
not allowed for an officer in uniform to be seen drink- 
ing in public. 

**But, madame/' protested our captain, almost 
piteously. * * Since it is only tea that I ask for ! ^ ' 

**No, no, no, monsieur le Capitaine, it won't do at 
all. I cannot serve you here, not even tea. If it was 
only your American police, they are so kind! I 
would not fear them, but our French police, it is 
they that are the bad ones, ah yes ! You must not 
stay here. Enter, I pray you.' ' 

We entered, and retired meekly far back into the 
comer, where my friends had their tea and I my 
beer. At another table sat two healthy little boys, 
one in knickerbockers, each sedately having his glass 
of beer too. 

Upon the wall above our table still hung the procla- 
mation of the Armistice, its words tingling with joy 
and patriotism. 

Mairie de Bar-le-Duc 
Mes chers Concitoyens 
Le Jour de gloire est arrival 



Vive 1 'Alsace-Lorraine! 
Vive la France! Vive la Rfipublique! 
Vivent k jamais nos Alli^! 

le Maire, 

J. Moulin. 

En Mairie a Bar-le-Duc, 11 November, 1918. 

The eleventh of November, 1918 ! The brightness 
of that day, not yet six months ago, was even now 



BAE-LE-DUC 193 

beginning to darken. Some minds already saw tliat 
the work of the politicians was going to undo much 
of the soldiers' work, and that the '*new heaven and 
new earth,'' announced to mankind by the Prime 
Minister of Great Britain, were of the same substance 
as the rest of his abundant phrases. Here in Bar-le- 
Due an American officer perceived and spoke the 
truth about the allotting of Shantxmg, torn from 
China by Germany, to Japan. 

** Japan," he said, ^*sat into the game and never 
spoke till she knew her time for a bluff had come. 
Then she told them that if they didn't pass the stolen 
goods on to her, she wouldn't join their League of 
Nations. They passed the goods all right, but that 
puts ridicule on the League of Nations. ' ' 

**Our doughboys," said I, **seem as anxious to 
leave France as Mr. Wilson was to come to it." 
With military correctness he ignored this refer- 
ence to his commander-in-chief. **The French are 
equally anxious to move back into their houses, which 
we are occupying; in Verdun a Frenchman is living 
in the txmnel of the citadel, waiting for Americans 
to get out of the only habitable room left in his 
bombed house." 

**I've been urging some of our boys," said I, *'not 
to be too hard on the French." 

"It's the howlers who tell of French prices," he 
said. **In a town in Oklahoma where I was, prices 
were just as bad. Personally I have met more gen- 
erosity here than at home. In this town there is a 
manufacturer whose sheds I have been using as a 
garage. He had to remove all his stuff to make room 
for me. I wanted to pay him, but he refused to 
accept a cent. He said, ^You came over and saved 



194 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

us. It's very little for me to do/ Keep up your 
talk to the complainers, ' ' he added. "It's astonish- 
ing how few understand that we must make allow- 
ances for other people's ways." 

One of the "ways" of Bar-le-Duc is renowned, 
and no allowances have to be nmde for it. I allude 
to a sort of currant preserve ; and when my second 
glass of beer was finished, I asked the lady of the 
cafe for some, but she had none. In response to 
my expression of genuine woe, she told me how to 
find my way to the factory where the delicacy was 
made. 

It was not at all far away, I was soon ringing the 
bell. 

They had none. 

"No, m'sieur. None since four months." 

"Madame, mademoiselle!" I cried, "don't say 
that to me." 

"Alas, monsieur, not one since four months." 

"Madame, mademoiselle, I have come expressly 
six thousand kilometres. Pensez y, madame!" 

"Ah, m'sieur, it is you Americans who have them 
all eaten. You are such sweet tooths." 

"Oh, madame, now I shall go home six thousand 
kilometres, blushing for the greediness of my com- 
patriots. ' ' 

"Eh, m'sieur, it is not a mortal sin, the greediness ! 
But see, when we have sugar again, we shall be able 
to make your currants." 

"Ah!" I exclaimed. "It is the absence of sugar, 
not the presence of Americans." 

"It is the sugar, monsieur. But without doubt the 
Americans quickly discover what is good. ' ' 

Currants might be wanting in Bar-le-Duc, but the 



BAE-LE-DUC 195 

Frencli spirit was here, smiling, joking, going on 
with existence undaunted. The commerce of the 
place was killed, not the courage that would bring 
it again to life. 

The town lies enclosed by hills quite near together, 
and to the south it has climbed part way up their 
sides; so that one-half the population looks down 
from among its plentiftd trees upon the roofs steeply 
mingling in the bottom of the cup. It is only a little 
cupful of France^ but into it great tradition has been 
stirred. The statues of two marshals, bom here, 
rise in their separate squares, and on the pedestal 
of one, Exelmans, stand the words that Napoleon 
Bpoke to him: **One cannot be braver than thou." 
I came upon this after crossing a bridge with a little, 
ancient tower upon it. The bridge was small, the 
river narrow, but a marshal of Napoleon had walked 
there, and long before his day, the Dukes of Bar. 
The little river ran between a vista of poplars, be- 
neath arches of stone ; and though the houses along 
the quays by the poplars were not fine dwellings, old 
French masons had proportioned their lines, and 
French grace filled this formal avenue made by the 
river upon which their windows faced. Yes ; Bar- 
le-Duc has more than currants to give its inhabitants. 
Over the entrance to its shady little park is the 
admirable text: **Plus penser que dire" — **More 
thought than speech' '; and a notice within the gate 
reminds one that, **this park being common prop- 
erty, is placed under the safeguard of the towns- 
folk.*' The back of the Hotel de Ville forms one 
corner of these lawns and walks, stone steps lead 
down from it to them, and its walls rise above them, 
not high, but proportioned by old French masons. 



196 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

and stained with the seasoned hues of time. Gn 
each side of the stone steps couches a lion with a 
conversational expression; one lion seems slightly 
to be pouting, as if he would say: ** Lunch was not 
what I had a right to expect;" the other smiles 
sleepily, and he would certainly say: *^ Lunch came 
up to my ideas." The sky was blue as I sat on a 
bench near these decorous beasts, water trickled 
down the carvings of a fountain into a slumberous 
basin, flowers framed the borders of the lawns and 
daisies starred their sod. The tops of trees new- 
leaved rose like green islands in the sea of steep 
roofs, and loveliness hung quietly over the town. 
It is by no means a town of the first rank in beauty 
or interest, but its present is mellowed with the glow 
of messages from the past. Did our doughboys, when 
they had eaten up the currants of Bar-le-Duc, find 
any of this nourishment for the mind and spirit, or 
had wise Kansas, on his island, been right when he 
said that unless you brought education with you to 
France, France would teach you nothing except riper 
modes of sensuality! I wondered if the stone arches 
over the river, its gracious avenue of poplaris, the 
little old tower on the bridge, the marshal of Napo- 
leon, the wise legend over the garden-gate, *^Plus 
penser que dire," had not perhaps left a memory 
and a yearning here and there in the American mind ; 
if perhaps some of our soldiers, after getting back to 
their own thriving, well-drained, well-lighted towns 
of the West, might not sometimes miss that inward 
illumination which shone here as in every old town 
of France, and which even the most improved light- 
and-power plant cannot provide. 



xvin 

ALONG THE SACRED WAT 

These French and these sights of France that I 
was seeing, hour after hour, and day after day, would 
sometimes string to its highest tautness every nerve 
of attention, and sometimes slack and stnpefy me 
into those trances wherein I seemed for a while to 
notice nothing of the world external ; the only thing 
that they never did was to stale my interest in this 
spectacle of gigantic ruin: not a mile of it, as it 
nnfolded through those four hundred miles that I 
travelled right and left within it, ever grew duU 
through sameness. If this seem strange, if any one 
who has merely been told about the ravage, wonder 
how a panorama of changeless wreck, of houses, 
farms, churches, villages, and forests chewed up and 
spit out by the jaws of war, can fail to weary in the 
end, it is because the visible unrolling of all this 
nourished and enlarged, not knowledge alone, but 
also emotion. The variety was within, and never 
died. No battle was like another nor any individual 
story of man or woman : so that into one ^s streaming 
thoughts came constantly the words, **This, too, the 
Germans did,*' or "This, too, France suffered,*' and 
absorption grew under it as does the scholar's who 
pursues a chosen path, or as something new fills 
every moment the over-sheltered body that has gone 
for breath to the mountains or the ocean. Such a 
breath of pity and awe blew here, that into the stream 



198 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

of thought often came also the words, **Who, after 
seeing this, can ever be the same again f 

Our first few miles out of Bar-le-Duc are nearly 
a blank, scarce more than a general green and love- 
liness of spring present upon changing slopes, no 
clearer memory than this, because the nerves of 
attention had slacked and I was thinking of Nau- 
heim, not of La Voie Sacree. I had strolled about 
the German resort in May and June, 1914, admiring 
the order, the system, the thoroughness, the thought- 
ful care of detail, the plan wrought out to success. 
During one of these walks a Zeppelin had sailed over 
us, and this apparition suggested that Germany 
would devote the same care to planning war as she 
did to planning peace. 

**It is quite likely,^' said I to my companion, **that 
in their War OflSce at Berlin they have blue prints 
and specifications of every bridge, tunnel, signal- 
tower, and siding of the Pennsylvania Railroad.** 

In less than four weeks, Ferdinand the Archduke 
had been assassinated at Serajevo ; in less than eight, 
more Americans than we were beginning to suspect 
the care which Germany devoted to planning war. 
One evening of that first winter, after the French at 
the Mame and the British at Ypres had blocked 
German plans, and 468 miles of fortified trench ran 
across France from the Channel to Switzerland, I 
was sitting at dinner next the president of the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad, and I repeated to him my remark 
at Nauheim. 

**Why that's not so far from the truth,** he said. 
Then I learned a tale of German thoroughness, new 
and typical. 

A§ far back as 1903, there was usually an engineer- 



ALONG THE SACRED WAY 199 

ing attache at the German Embassy in Washington. 
To him or his emissaries the Pennsylvania railroad 
was accustomed to furnish free transportation as well 
as information about mechanical appliances and im- 
provementSy including all the blue prints that they 
asked for. But Germany did not return the compli- 
ment. In Mardi 1904, when the Pennsylvania's 
chief signal engineer came home from a sort of 
roving commission to visit and study certain Euro- 
pean railway systems, he made in his report parti* 
cular mention of the courteous treatment accorded 
his committee by aU railroad officials with whom he 
came in contact in England and Scotland ; but about 
Berlin he was entirely silent. This was because 
in Berlin he had found the door shut, and was told 
that the E!aiser had the key. In consequence of this 
experience, the president in 1905 officially declined a 
request to furnish free transportation to an engineer 
then arriving from Germany. Later, in the days 
when f rightfulness was spreading flames and human 
lamentations wider and ever wider through defence- 
less villages and miles of horror, the railroad whose 
blue prints Berlin had secured was led to do what 
it could to make safe the yards and system of its 
tracks on Long Island, in case But fright- 
fulness in uniform did not step ashore over here ; it 
merely sent vessels to the bottom along our coast 
just after our Secretary of War had come back from 
Europe and told us that the war was 3,000 miles 
away. In August 1914, the British fleet became our 
wall of safety, and behind this we dwelt unscathed. 
I was brought back from these memories by our cap- 
tain, who showed me two **pill boxes'' bordering the 
road, little squat turrets, solid, with peep slits for 



200 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

guns, and fantastically painted. Nothing but a bomb 
falling straight upon their roofs conld smash them, 
and their roofs were colored according to the laws 
of optical illusion to escape the eye of the aviator. 
Some of these contrivances suggested large fat toad* 
stools, others the machines on dinner tables for grind- 
ing pepper. From their insides, men could train guns 
as from a compass upon all points and be almost 
safe. After we had left this lonely couple behind us, 
the scars of war thickened rapidly, trenches, barbed 
wire, roofless walls ; and the silence was here, wait- 
ing for us, even though some of the trenches were 
already being filled, some of the barbed wire already 
rolled up from the liberated fields. 

Do you know the extent of these fields of France 
which frightfulness in uniform laid low according 
to its careful planf To read the cold figures is one 
thing, to feel what they mean is quite another: the 
dead decimals and integers do contain, but they also 
entomb, the story; they need translating into life. 
Of farmland, seed and harvest land, 1,757,000 hec- 
tares were devastated, and if to this be added the 
land that was in pasture and forest, the total is 
3,800,000 hectares. A hectare is 2.471 acres — ^nearly 
two acres and a half; and so, in terms of acres, the 
devastation covers 9 million 389 thousand, 800 acres ; 
and as 640 acres make one square mile, 14 thousand 
and 670 square miles of France were devastated. 
This exceeds the area of certain of our smaller states, 
but it would not cover quite half of Maine, not quite 
a third of Pennsylvania ; and when you come to some 
of our Western States, in their vastness, it would 
be well-nigh swallowed up — Texas alone is some forty 
thousand square miles larger than the whole of 



ALONG THE SACRED WAY 201 

France. But what if we had been devastated, not 
in this same actual amount, but in the same propor* 
tion to our total, as France was! To lose one leg 
is a 25 per cent, loss for a dog, a 50 per cent loss for 
a man: the whole area of France is 204 thousand 
and 92 square miles, and its devastated region is 
between one-thirteenth and one-fourteenth of the 
whole. The area of the United States is three mil- 
lion square miles, we are more than fourteen times 
as large as France, and if one-fourteenth of our soil 
had been devastated, it would cover more than two 
hundred thousand square miles — ^the whole area of 
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, 
Bhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and some of 
Ohio. I select the northern and eastern part of our 
country for my comparison, not only because it is 
geographically the same portion of France which has 
suffered, but also because it is economically parallel, 
the great coal, steel, wool, and other centres of in- 
dustry being preponderantly situated in the north 
and east of France, as they are in New England and 
the Middle States. 

I have been at pains to understate the matter in 
my own multiplications and divisions, by disregard- 
ing certain decimals which would have somewhat in- 
creased my final figures, although not enough to go 
beyond OMo. Unless these calculations err, a man 
could start in a car at VanceBoro, Maine, and go 
through Bangor, Portland, Worcester, Springfield, 
Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Bochester, and Buffalo to 
Pittsburgh, and not reach the western limit of devas- 
tation. He could wind to the north and the south of 
this route, and pass Manchester, Lawrence, Lowell, 



202 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

Fall Biver, Bridgeport, Trenton, Bethlehem, Beading, 
and Scranton, finding all these towns totally or par- 
tially destroyed, their great manufacturing plants 
not only silent, but deliberately paralyzed by the 
removal of their machinery and the flooding of their 
mines. Not alone these larger places whose names I 
have set down, and others of the same kind that I 
have left unmentioned, but also every isolated dwell- 
ing and farm and village between them would be 
wrecked, just as Lille, Lens, St. Quentin, Chauny, 
St. Gobain, Coucy-le-Chateau, Soissons, Beims, and 
Verdun, and the homes and hamlets between were 
wrecked. Four thousand and twenty-two villages 
and towns were destroyed in France, and of these, 
every one east of the front in 1917 was scientifically 
blown up, in obedience to the principle laid down by 
the rule of the German Staff before the war began — 
that the enemy be spiritually and commercially 
crushed. The attempt at spiritual crushing is visible, 
for instance, in the cathedral of St. Quentin, where 
ninety holes were systematically cut in its support- 
ing pillars to receive dynamite. It was never placed 
there. The pillars stand, supporting still a noble 
church which is only half in ruins. In their 1918 
retreat, the Hxms had not expected the Allies to reach 
St. Quentin quite so quickly, and hence (as at Laon), 
they were surprised like burglars at work drilling a 
safe, and had to flee. 

The attempt at commercial crushing is visible, for 
instance, at Lens. Before the war, these mines pro- 
duced annually four million tons of coal, eight hun- 
dred thousand of coke, thirty thousand of tar ; their 
employees lived in eight thousand houses. When 
the war was done and the French came back, of these 



ALONG THE SACKED WAY 203 

eight thousand houses, sixty that cotild be repaired 
were left. When the Huns came to Lens in 1914, 
they stopped the pumps in the mines and measured 
the rising water each day. It did not rise fast enough 
to please them, so they broke the jackets of cast iron 
which encased the shafts, and through the holes 
blasted in them, the water from the wet surrounding 
stratum of soil poured in to speed the general drown- 
ing. Fifty millions of cubic metres of water flooded 
the mines. The machinery was smashed, or removed 
to Germany. Lens was reduced to a sort of ash heap. 
The Huns when they came, set fire at once to the 
plant where the naphtha and tar were made, because 
the sight of the flames made fireworks for their 
diversion. They watched them at a safe distance, 
laughing. Ten years after the Armistice, the mines 
of Lens may be again whole and completely at work 
— ^in 1928 — ^perhaps. Lens is merely one of the in- 
dustrial centres which was destroyed in order to 
crush France commercially. Of homes, where men 
and women and children lived, three hundred and 
four thousand were totally obliterated, and two hun- 
dred and ninety thousand practically — by cannon, or 
by fire, or by mines. This we may call a mixture of 
spiritual and commercial crushing. This devastated 
area, though it was but a fourteenth part of the whole 
of France, paid nevertheless nearly one-fifth (18.5%) 
of the whole taxes, even as New England and the 
Middle States, because of their denser population 
and more concentrated area of manufacture, pay 
more of the taxes than such areas as Texas, New 
Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California and 
much of the South. 
Besides poison gas and like inventions for the 



204 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

killing of men, German ingenuity created devices for 
the killing of things — ^the incendiary fire engine, for 
example, which rolled methodically through village 
streets, setting fire to houses instead of putting them 
out ; or the pastilles of the chemist Dr. Otswald, con- 
veniently portable, and so skilfully compounded that 
one, if lighted and left in a hall or dining-room, would 
suffice to reduce the dwelling to cinders. They had, 
too, a machine for tearing up railroads as you went. 
This was hitched behind the tender of a locomotive, 
and as the engine puffed along, it rooted up the 
sleepers and rails behind it. Of the main lines in 
France, 1,500 miles were destroyed, and 1,490 miles 
of local and branch lines — ^2,990 miles in all. The 
total mileage of railways in France is 31,992 — ^more 
than one-tenth was wrecked. If one-tenth of our 
railway mileage were wrecked, it would be 25,682: 
that very nearly equals the whole of the Boston and 
Maine, the New York and New Haven, the New York 
Central, and the Pennsylvania systems ; it comes to 
more than double the whole Southern Pacific. 

Upon our journey in the wind and the rain from 
Amiens, through the battle lands of the Somme, the 
road to Arras beyond Mailly-Maillet, near Beaumont 
Hamel hill, had perished in a world of featureless 
mud and ghost-like splinters of trees. That was but 
one case. Throughout this devastated fourteenth 
part of France, country and town alike were locked 
away from the living world by the obliteration of 
the thoroughfares. The traveller threaded his way 
through broken landscape and broken village, easily 
blocked, often obliged to turn back, if he was not 
well guided. So we had found it beyond Amiens, 
so next near Soissons and Beims, so now, where 



ALONG THE SACKED WAY 205 

flowed the waters of the Meuse and the Moselle, The 
Sacred Way, the great highroad over which sup- 
plies had gone to Verdun during its fearful siege, 
was still one of the few open channels. From this 
we had turned off, not many miles out of Bar-le-Duc, 
and as we penetrated deeper into the destroyed coun- 
try amid the thickening vestiges of violence, the won- 
der returned as to how this region was now sup- 
pUed, how did food or anything at aU reach those 
who lived here ? The answer was simple — ^the silence 
was the answer. Almost no one did live here now. 
Like the lady who had come back from Nevers to 
look for her house at Noyon, and the brave wife with 
the. gash in her forehead at the estaminet, most of 
those whose homes these ruins once had been had 
taken refuge in other parts of France, the old, the 
women, the children; and very few of them had as 
yet returned. Their return was beginning ; they, too, 
like all France, were determined to come back and 
to go on, and the signs of their determination were 
the small patches of ground, cleared already of 
barbed wire and shells, lying like scattered aprons 
amid the rough bristling wreck of the land. Thirty- 
two thousand, nine hundred and fifty-eight miles of 
French roads had been destroyed, and six hundred 
and forty-eight miles of canals. Four ndllion and a 
half people had liv^d in the devastated fourteenth 
of France — one-tenth of the whole population. Their 
live-stock had been taken, thirteen hundred thou- 
sand head ; twenty thousand, five hundred and thirty- 
nine of their manufactories had been levelled to the 
ground, or gutted of their machinery, and of them- 
selves, two million and seven hundred and thirty-two 
thousand had been driven out of their homes ; while 



206 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

the remainder, nearly two million, had during f onr 
years been forced to pay war levies, and to work 
half starved beneath the hand of the invader, which 
often held the lash ; or else they had known eiole and 
prison. 

Is it wonderful that devastated France was silent t 
It seemed, as one went onward and onward through 
the barbed wire and the trenches and the empty 
walls, as if nothing would ever be able to break tiiis 
silence. Our American artillery, during four hours 
of the brief battle of St. Mihiel, had fired more than 
one million shells. The rusting fragments of those 
shells were now to be gathered up by the peasant 
whose pastures or fields they littered. If one million 
shells were scattered in four hours at one place, what 
was the number that, during four years, had torn the 
ground in all places? The question cannot be an- 
swered, but to ask it is enough. And the barbed 
wire! — ^those skeins of fierce strings that stretched 
tight across such uncoxmted acres, making thick webs, 
eimaeshing hills and valleys. The amount of this 
has been computed — ^there were three hundred and 
ten million square metres of it (a metre is more than 
a yard). Of trenches to be filled up, there were two 
hundred and seventy-seven million cubic metres. 

We passed the town of St. Mihiel without stop- 
ping, and left these assembled ruins behind us to 
come to others and again others, both assembled and 
solitary. If we looked up a hill, its side was pocketed 
with shelter holes, if we looked down at a plain it was 
drilled with dug-outs, ditched with trenches, blurred 
with barbed wire — ^worried out of all semblance to 
serene nature; and if we went through a wood, its 
trees were naked shreds. Germans, French, and 



ALONG THE SACEED WAT 207 

Americans had fought hereabouts. The flames and 
rage of conflict had been less blinding, perhaps, than 
in the days of the Somme in 1916, but quietness had 
departed hence in September 1914. Two Crown 
Princes of the Huns, William and Rupprecht, had set 
on Verdun during the first battle of the Mame. Their 
success might have made that battle a failure. They 
failed. Soon they began again, and by the end of 
the month, St. Mihiel was German territory. It made 
the bottom of a pocket not unlike the one which Lu- 
dendorff dug to the Mame. The Germans stayed 
in it until we drove them out exactly four years 
later; but they were seldom left in perfect peace, 
either along the north or the south edge of their 
pocket. We were going now along its south edge, 
following the road to Pont-il-Mousson, following it 
too quickly ; for here were the Bois Brul6, and Apre- 
mont, Flirey, Limey, presently each in turn to brush 
our very sides, each brooding with tales and mem- 
ories, each deserving to be stopped at and listened 
to with reverence for the dead and the surviving, 
while not far away, to our left, were the Mont Sec and 
Seicheprey. We could not stop, we could not listen 
to any wayside tales, though it seemed as if the earth 
and the torn trees themselves were waiting to tell 
them. At Brule Wood, right on the south seam of 
the pocket, fifty yards and no more separated the 
German trenches and the French lines, and so it was 
for months : scarce ever a day without flames, explo- 
sions, death — ^a man must not speak, must not smoke, 
could not sleep — and eight days of such a life were 
generally the limit that human nerves could stand: 
each spent battalion had to go away and rest, and be 
replaced by a fresh one. Once, in April 1915, after 



208 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

three days of fierce fighting for a trench, it was taken 
and new men sent to keep it. Upon these the Ger- 
nMins snddenly fell and threw them into fright and 
flight. The trench was going to be lost. This was 
seen by an officer who had helped to capture it. He 
was resting with his men, but he called upon them to 
go back, and back they went with him. They took the 
trench again from the Germans ; but it cost time and 
struggle and so many lives that the exhausted living 
faltered among the corpses. In this moment of 
suspense the oflScer saw defeat approaching and — ^let 
his name be told once more — ^Adjutant Jacques Peri- 
card looked around in desperation at his wounded and 
fallen men, and cried : 

* * Debout, les morts ! ' * 

And they rose and went on. So was one trench 
retaken at Bois Brule. 

How many tales of death and life and the soul of 
man should we know, could the groxmd or trees in 
those fourteen thousand, six hundred and seventy 
square miles of devastated France whisper themf 
And what traveller who has once felt that great 
silence which we entered first at Compiegne will ever 
wholly forget it? 

From Brule Wood we came at once to the nothing 
which had once been Apremont — ^no house left in it, 
holes and heaps where the church had stood ; and a 
few steps oflF, a symbol of Germany, solid and sub- 
stantial, a shelter of concrete. This thick thing wore 
an ornament on its wall, a German gun, well carved. 
Symbols of Germany were everywhere, always thick 
built, dominating; thick statues, thick monuments, 
thick tombstones, heavily lettered. Just here by 
crumbled Apremont was a whole Hun village quar- 



ALONG THE SACEED WAY 209 

ried deep in the hillside, full of elaborate comfort 
and relics of efficiency ; the slopes terraced, plants on 
the sills, carved woodwork, stolen tapestry ; little nice 
things, all stolen from the neighboring piles of rub- 
bish which had been French homes once. This was 
just here by the road. Just such another was there 
across the valley on the opposite seam of the pocket — 
Les Sparges. In that snug burrow of the Huns was a 
system of electric lights, an officers ^ club, an elevator, 
a narrow-gauge railway; — ^and more little, nice 
things, stolen from crumbled Fresnes and crxraibled 
St. Remy, Hannonville, Vigneulles, all lying shapeless 
in the plain below, symbols of Germany too; — ^but 
over in Germany, no such symbols ; not a shell hole, 
not a trench, not a scar ; not a church tower fallen, not 
a single stone of a single home displaced ; every pic- 
ture safe on the wall, every chair safe in the room, 
every silver spoon safe in the drawer. In France 
were four thousand destroyed villages, twenty thou- 
sand destroyed factories, five hundred thousand 
homes in dust. Of little, nice things, pictures, silver, 
home tokens and treasures, personal property, in 
short, the Germans had destroyed or stolen twenty- 
one billion francs * worth ; beside the barbed wire and 
the trenches, there were forty-two million cubic 
metres of rubbish to be got rid of by a country that 
had one million, three hundred and eighty-five thou- 
sand men killed outright in action — workers who 
never would rebuild any more than many of the two 
million and a half of wounded. About three and a 
half per cent, of the whole French population were 
killed. Had a proportionate loss been ours, our dead 
would have numbered every man of the 2,084,000 who 
got to France, and more than 1,000,000 more at home. 



210 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

Thus France had her maimed coimtry to rebnUd with 
her maimed hands. 

In 1916, true to the system and the thoughtful care 
of detail of Germany, some German composed a 
manual of 482 pages for the benefit of the German 
Army. It was issued under the auspices of the 
Quartermaster Department. It tabulated the de- 
structions accomplished so far, and the further 
destructions contemplated. It was based on that 
part of the Hun doctrine which forms the supplement 
to atrocity to non-combatants in order to win quickly 
— commercial destruction of the enemy in order to 
make gold from blood and iron. French industry 
was to be put out of business, because, for instance, 
** French railroads, in consequence of the destruction 
of car shops, will have to equip themselves in Ger- 
many ^^; by the destruction of looms, because, ** re- 
suming operation will be very diflBlcult, and an enor- 
mous market for German products will be thus 
created. ^^ The sugar industry **must disappear 
from the world market for two or three years * ' ; and 
it is pointed out that ** mines are paralyzed for years 
by the dismantling of the machinery and the flooding 
of the pits.^' 

Armed with this book, and with the other tools 
needful, the German soldiers paid their visits to the 
various mines and factories in this fourteenth of 
French territory, and left behind them, destroyed 
with Germany's thoughtful care of detail, 55% of 
the total national coal-producing capacity, 94% of 
the wool manufacturing, 90 of the linen, 90 of the 
mineral, 83 of the smelters, 70 of the sugar mills, 
60 of the cotton mills, 45 of the electric power — 
I will not continue the list; is this not enough to 



ALONG THE SACBED WAY 211 

suggest why the devastation of this particular four- 
teenth part of France should deprive the country of 
almost one-fifth of its taxes f Many of the destroyed 
industries which I have named will show more clearly 
to the reader the economic parallel between this 
region and our New England and Middle States. In 
1870 Germany overran France, and in 1871 she de- 
manded an indemnity after her victory. Not an inch 
of Germany had been hurt then, any more than now. 
It was France that was hurt, France that was beaten, 
and France that paid. The Germans occupied her 
soil and her cities until every last cent was paid. 
They withdrew by instalments, according as they re- 
ceived instalments of the indemnity. This time, 
though France is hurt and France is victorious, she 
sees reparations that were promised her by treaty 
incessantly cut down, postponed, excused. Too many 
people both in talk and in books use indemnity and 
reparation as meaning the same thing. They are 
quite different ; uninjured Germany made France pay 
an indemnity in 1871, devastated France demands 
reparation from Germany. 

Our wheels beyond Apremont rolled eastward upon 
and across the front line of battle. We had no time 
to look at any ruins^ but time was not needed to see 
that they were close at hand, sometimes near enough 
almost to be touched, sometimes up a hill or down a 
hiU; BouconviUe village like a mouth with but few 
teeth ; and next, a sullen glimpse of barbed wire and 
distance stretching to sombre hills; and after this, 
the shattered tower of Beaumont Church, sticking up 
against the sky with ruins encumbering its feet. 
Xivray, where the French right made contact with 
our 1st Division's left on the night of September 



212 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 



11, 1918, was scarce two miles off, and Seicheprey was 
nearer still. We should have liked to stand in Seiche- 
prey, upon the ground won in the spring of 1918 from 
the Germans by our 26th Division, known as the 
Yankee. That was our first little independent fight, 
the beginning of the Yankee Division's renown. We 
were sorry not to visit the spot. Beyond it not very 
far was the Mont Sec, a siQlen hump rising out of 
the plain. There, too, we should have liked to dimb — 
into its elaborate tunnels, upon its fortified top, 
whence the Germans during four years had watched 
the plain. In the shape of a smoke screen, the cur- 
tain fell upon their long, safe watch. We should have 
liked to stare down at the land where, behind the 
smoke screen, our 1st Division advanced twelve 
miles from Xivray north into the heart of the pocket, 
and met near Vigneulles the Yankee Division coming 
south from Les Eparges ; so that the Germans were 
stitched into their pocket before they could get out 
of it as they were planning to do ; and the pocket be- 
came ours, and we put them into it — 16,000 prisoners, 
and 443 guns, with other useful chattels, and very 
little loss to ourselves. It was all quickly done — over 
in 48 hours — ^and then we pushed our line west of the 
Moselle farther than had been laid down. Our divi- 
sions fought harder and longer soon after this in the 
Argonne ; but their action at St. Mihiel accomplished 
what Foch asked of them, performed it smoothly and 
speedily ; and what was done here was the doing of 
an American army, commanded by an American 
general, its individuality attained and asserted, not 
without some friction and delay. Four French and 
fifteen American divisions constituted the force as- 
sembled here, and from Beaumont east to the Moselle 



ALONG THE SACRED WAY 213 

at Pont-k-Mousson, our road ran where many Ameri- 
can feet mnst have trod : — ^f eet of the Rainbow Divi- 
sion, of Wood^s Own, of the Second, of the Red 
Diamond, of the Alamo — ^all along this way through 
Flirey (a total wreck) and Limey, another, and 
between ceaseless holes and graves and fragments of 
many things. A railway bridge was one of the larger 
fragments somewhere near Flirey, toppled and 
slanting helpless ; no trains ran here, or for a great 
distance to our west. To our east we came upon 
one at Pont-a-Mousson, steaming and crowded with 
passengers from Paris. It was on its way along the 
Moselle down to Metz. Its open rails were like the 
open road we had come, a single working channel of 
communication, lonely among countless channels that 
were stopped. Of timnels and bridges the Germans 
had destroyed 3,603. 

In Pont-a-Mousson, bruised by shells, is a square, 
the Place Duroc, beautiful and French, with its 
arcade in cracks but not in ruins — ^though by the ninth 
month of the war Pont-a-Mousson had been bom- 
barded one hundred and ten times. Here indeed I 
longed to pause amid the surviving charm before 
plunging into more desolation, but time forbade it. 
This was the east limit of our drive. We turned, 
re-crossed the Moselle, and bore toward Thiaucourt. 
We were all the while within the battle-ground of our 
first American Army's first exploit. We passed 
between pale, broken trees, and concrete caves, and 
many crosses where the dead lay; and everywhere 
here, since 1914, blood had flowed, German and 
French, long before our divisions came. Sometimes 
we got out to walk the ground and listen to our young 
captain, who had fought here. The places had names 



214 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

— The Widow's Wood, called so by the Germans, and 
another the Priest's Wood, named by the French; 
and within its dead and tragic trees was a spring 
where both sides came by turns for water, no man 
shooting while his enemy drank. Sometimes we 
returned into sight of the sullen, distant hump of the 
Mont Sec, rising over open miles of loneliness, some- 
times woods shut us in, and now and then we passed 
more shattered houses ; but whatever it was, earth or 
building, it had always the look of a witness who has 
seen something which has blinded it to all other 
sights, so that, no matter what else may pass before 
it, it will for ever see only this. Our divisions had 
swept across here, the 8&id, the 90th, the 5th, the 
89th, the 2nd, as they pushed the Germans out of the 
pocket. This work done, they were fresh still and 
ready, without any rest, for more; but their high 
spirits had left no echo behind, and the ground over 
which their fierce gay steps had gone bore no trace of 
their gaiety. The Sonune had been more terrible to 
the eye, and so had Berry-au-Bac ; greater sadness I 
had not yet seen than in this region about Thiaucourt, 
and in the Woevre plain beyond that ruined town. 

Thiaucourt, St. Benqit, Woel, Joncourt, St. Hilaire, 
Fresnes-en-Woevre, fetain — ^these are the names 
which plot our course from Pont-a-Mousson west and 
north towards our night's lodging. All along the 
way, we were skirting at no great distance the bound- 
ary of the St. Mihiel advance, where the line, for the 
time being, had been stabilized. At Fresnes we were 
upon this line ; when we reached fetain we had passed 
beyond it to the north, and I understood more about 
the * * operations in the Woevre district. ' ' There was 
much water because there had been mwh rain. It 



ALONG THE SACEED WAT 215 

lay to one side or the other, in irregular ponds reflect- 
ing the afternoon sky, or in round pools which were 
shell holes, or in oozing trenches, with barbed wire 
posts sticking and leaning out of the ooze. Water 
and plain stretched away to right and left ; far to the 
left Les ]fcparges was dimly visible, sullen like the 
Mont Sec, a ridge which had become a gxdf of mud ; 
where half a hill slid down, where planks were laid 
five times and sank, where men wounded and not 
wounded went down and could not be saved. As the 
light grew grey and more grey, its veil softened the 
sharp edge of the ruins. The tower of the church 
at ifitain was the last ruin that we saw clearly. Etain 
had been bombarded for thirteen hours one day in 
August 1914, and again on the day following. Many 
people were burned in its flames or buried in its 
ruins. The last message sent by a girl who stayed at 
her telephone post informing Verdun every fifteen 
minutes how the destruction progressed, was: **A 
bomb has just fallen in the office. ^ ' 

As we had watched them soften and dissolve in the 
twilight of preceding journeys, again this afternoon 
the forms of aU ragged objects in the wide wet plain 
of Woevre melted into the enveiling grey of dusk. 
Whether these towns had been wrecked by French 
or American or German shells, all were the victims 
of German invasion. Latest, as always, to remain 
distinct were the dead trees. Their skeletons stuck 
out of the level dimness like crooked fingers scratch- 
ing the horizon. These woods had been lacerated by 
shells ; others all the way from the war zone across 
France to the Pyrenees had been levelled by the axe 
to keep the war going. To meet our heavy needs, 
more were chopped down when our soldiers came. 



216 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOETH 

Until the war, the thrift of France had kept her grow- 
ing forests ahead of her use of their timber. Had she 
wasted them, as we wasted ours during the 19th Cen- 
tury, an American forester has said that the Allies 
might have lost the war. Some will recover in from 
ten to twenty years, it will take others thirty years, 
and France meanwhile must rebuild as best she can. 
Just to our west and left, lay the forest out of which 
the Germans had come down upon Verdun in Feb- 
ruary 1916. Beyond it, a little south of Spincourt, 
we turned west from the main road, reached a village 
comer, passed through the sound of American voices, 
and soon after came to a stop. Here was our night's 
lodging. It was long since we had left what the 
French call La Voie Sacree, but our course had been 
never once away from groimd where privation and 
grief and courage lived, and many thousands had 
died. Every road that we had travelled was a sacred 
way. 



XIX 



WHERE WE SLEPT WELL 



It was like a scene in a play: once again reality 
suggested this image. In the early stages of our 
journey, when devastation was a sight novel to our 
American eyes, the rearing splinters of homes, the 
walls and windows without insides, had seemed like 
the unreal aspect of what meets one behind the cur- 
tain. That was over long ago. It never looked to 
us like stageland now, we knew it well as war land, 
real, mangled, dumb, its hollows thick with unheard 
sorrow and the crowded, unseen dead. From this 
deeply familiar actuality through which we had been 
moving but a few minutes ago, we walked up some 
steps and entered upon the serene welcome of candles 
lighting a hall and pleasant stairs. An American 
captain, whose voice came from the South, greeted us 
at the hall-door, and behind him shone the candles. 
They were tall, like those in a church, and so arranged 
as to make almost beautiful the almost plain interior 
of this house. They were few in number, and stood 
at various levels, one or two here in the haU below, 
one or two upon the newels of the banisters which 
framed the right-angled ascent of the stairs in two 
short flights to a gallery above, and one or two along 
the gallery, upon which several doors opened. They 
gave light enough to see, yet left the agreeable mys- 
tery of limits and corners not quite visible, of hos- 

217 



218 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

pitable nooks beyond, which might extend to many 
secluded wings and passages. Had this Southern 
captain, perhaps, learned his art of candlelight in 
some plantation house, into whose old, ample rooms 
not electricity, or gas, or even oil, had intruded t I 
never asked him ; but if ever he sees this page, he will 
know how much more I thought than I said about our 
nights beneath this roof, where he was master for a 
while. 

**If only we might stay here for a week I'' I 
thought. The candles and the quiet were so good 
after shell holes, and barbed wire, and ruins, and 
dead trees. 

The seeing eye, the shaping hand, and a military 
sense of order had filled tMs bare house with objects 
collected from war and arranged with skill. Merely 
to study the contents of its rooms and what hung on 
its walls would have taught one as much as many 
lectures. To look at them while the captain or his 
lieutenant talked about them was better than any 
lecture. Whoever made the collection was able to 
draw upon a rich territory, and had not wasted his 
chance. This farm lay in the Woevre plain, and 
battles had been fierce on every side but its north. 
The Meuse was not far off one way, the Moselle an- 
other, Verdun was some twelve miles southwest of it ; 
distilling itself from various marshes in the Woevre 
where blood must have flowed, the little river Loison 
slid through its domain. The village near by, where 
we heard American voices, had been occupied by 
Germans since 1914, never disturbed until the end. 
They had left their mark — ^various marks — ^and from 
their bill-posters forbidding this and that and the 
other, a humorous selection had been made, and these 



WHERE WE SLEPT WELL 219 

now helped to decorate the walls and edify the guests. 
How many of these guests were edified by the 
veritable museum of war which surrounded them, is 
something I have often wondered. Taken over by 
our army soon after November 11, 1918, (I surmise) 
this French farmhouse became the resting-place for 
travellers privileged as guests of the American army 
to visit this part of the devastated region which was 
allotted to our care. For their benefit the wonderful 
museum and relief maps had been arranged, and for 
their welcome the tall candles burned in this hall. 
They certainly gave it the look of a scene set equally 
well for mystery, or crime, or comedy. 

Any one who has had to drink water made sanitary 
by chlorine will not forget its flavor. This water ia 
the only circumstance which I would have had differ- 
ent at our meal ; and, knowing the South, I am sure 
that our host, had the regulations permitted him, 
would have decanted for our refreshment nothing of 
the sort. What we ate I cannot remember, but only 
that it was good enough to turn conversation upon the 
cook. She had four service stripes, the captain said. 
Three, but soon to get a fourth, his lieutenant cor- 
rected ; and for a moment I, in my ignorance, imag- 
ined wildly that she had been in the trenches and gone 
over the top. But she had merely boiled, roasted, 
stewed, and otherwise concocted their meals during a 
period equivalent to the stripes — ^and I am inclined to 
think that they were afraid of her. These commis- 
sioned officers with decorations for bravery smiled 
about their cook ; but to me it looked remarkably like 
the smile of men in the proximity of a powerful per- 
sonality. Candor bids me confess that the few words 
which I exchanged with her may have helped this 



220 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

opinion. I went out to see her, to make her compli- 
ments on an omelet. Upon my standing at the 
threshold of her kitchen, she turned and contem- 
plated me. She was wide, she was thick, she was 
round, she had a shining forest of black hair, a thick 
throat, an eye of domination, and a moustache. I 
imagined that my opinion of her omelet would 
warm the influence that proceeded from her. It did 
not. Her reply was civil — ^but I didn 't stay. If they 
weren^t afraid of her, an army commission must 
toughen you. Any civilian would have given it up as 
I did. 

The captain and the lieutenant talked of the war in 
general, and of incidents in particular ; a very pleas- 
ant meal. And if they did not stand in awe of their 
cook, I know that they were afraid of the lady of the 
house. She was not here now, of course; but since 
their occupation of her premises, she had paid her 
house visits enough to make a formidable impression 
upon the captain. 

* * She 's crazy, ' ' he told me. 

**From the warT^ I asked, prepared to hear some- 
thing painful. 

*^I think her state of mind antedates that, but it 
may have been emphasized by it. They tell me that 
at the dinners she used to give, she put all the old 
people close together at one end of this table and all 
the young away far off at the other, so that the young 
ones shouldn^t hear her jokes.'' 

**I suppose,'' said I, *Hhat as they grew older she 
moved them up. ' ' 

^*Well, from what they say about her jokes," re- 
turned the captain, **I'm not sure that I am old 
enough to be moved up for quite a while yet." 



WHERE WE SLEPT WELL 221 

**I wish that I could have met her,'^ I sighed ; **she 
would not have respected my youth,'' 

**Last time she came in here,'' said the captain, 
* * she saw one of her old family portraits on the wall. 
Heaved a log right through it. She didn't like it 
because German officers had been looking at it four 
years. ' ' 

Like many men from the South, this captain main- 
tained a certain gravity of bearing rarely practised 
by Northerners, who often plunge into a jocosity 
somewhat premature. His stiffness had been aug- 
mented by almost daily experience with the American 
congressman whom he had to make welcome. To find 
that we were not politicians was a visible relief to 
him; on this first evening he steadily unbent. He 
told us that the British, New Zealanders, and Ameri- 
cans had exchanged whisky at the front. 

**A better exchange than personalities," said L 

Some men of our Bloody Hand Division had given 
rise to merriment imintentionally at times when 
laughter was scarce. This division was not wholly 
organized at the time of its landing in April 1918, and 
it was broken up and brigaded with the French. Six 
hundred were killed, two thousand wounded. The 
survivors seemed to be enjoying France. They had 
met with a social success beyond any which they knew 
at home. 

*^ Those darkies are having the time of their lives 
now, ' ' said the captain ; / * they have known less agree- 
able days. One of their regiments was with the 4th 
French Army at Wesserling. Some soldiers built a 
fire with the purpose of boiling a kettle. They set 
four unexploded shells upright, laid the fuel between 
them, set the kettle on top of them, and lighting the 



222 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

fire, sat down to watch the kettle boil. One of them 
was sent for by his commanding officer, and was away 
for a few minutes. Upon returning to the spot, he 
found no kettle, no fire, no comrades, and a large hole 
in the October mud. Immediately he rushed back, 
and cried out to the officer : 
" *Cap'n, dat coffee he done blow up I' 
^* Yes,'^ he continued, ^*when they get home, theyTl 
never need to stop talking. A couple of them got 
more fighting than they approved of over on the west 
edge of the Argonne, and they were running away. 
They reached one of the long straight roads bordered 
with poplars and marked with the distance, and along 
this they ran on and on. At length one said : 

** *Say, dis hyeh is de longest graveyahd I ever 
saw.' 
**And his better-informed mate corrected him: 
** * Them's not gravestones, them's kilontmetees. ' 
The captain gave us, by his use of one happy word, 
an indelible picture of the survivors of the Bloody 
Hand Division, elated by social success in France. 

**When the darkies mount guard," said he, **they 
don't walk; they syncopate." 

A wood fire burned in the room where we sat after 
supper until an early bed-time. An upright piano 
was there and open, with a look of having also merited 
service stripes. I asked, did it belong to the house f 
It did, and had been there during the four years of 
German occupation. 
**Then," said I, **when they had to get out and you 

came in, did you find the piano !" I did not 

complete my sentence. 
They nodded. **We had to scrub it out." 
I told them the remark of a major in charge of the 



WHERE WE SLEPT WELL 223 

interned Germans at Fort Oglethorpe, in whose 
company I had visited the internment camp at that 
place during the preceding fall. We had spent more 
than an hour in going over its various parts ; where 
they ate, where they slept, where they took the air, 
where their possessions were stored. They were 
made much more comfortable than our own people 
who were being trained to fight them over-seas. At 
the end of our inspection, I asked the major: 

**Have you made any generalization about these 
Germans? They are of every station from ragged 
bomb-throwers to New York merchants and Prussian 
Junkers. There is even the leader of a famous sym- 
phony orchestra here. Have you been able to 
observe any one trait which they have in commonr' 

**Yes,*' replied the major. **One and all, their 
personal habits are filthy beyond my willingness to 
describe. ^ * 

This caused our captain no surprise : he had seen 
the piano. I told him that it had fallen to my lot to 
read certain confiscated and impounded letters, writ- 
ten by the conductor of the famous symphony orches- 
tra. These had led the court to give him his choice 
of submitting to internment without more ado— or of 
being prosecuted under the White Slave Act. They 
contained passages which would stain any decent lips. 

As my years have increased, bed-time has grown 
less unwelcome than once it used to be — ^but I could 
have listened all night to this captain and his lieu- 
tenant. Perhaps it is as well for the reader that I can 
remember distinctly but one of the curiosities of 
warfare which they showed us; otherwise I might 
have been tempted to describe every object in that 
museum. You have sometimes, no doubt, walked 



224 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOETH 

behind the counters of chemists ' shops into the pre- 
cincts where they keep their jars and bottles and 
retorts. If so, you may have derived an impression 
of cylinders and cones and tubes of various unearthly 
shapes, standing on shelves or the floor. That is in a 
way what the museum looked like, only the unearthly 
shapes were not of glass, but metal. Shells and 
bombs of many varieties had been gathered here, and 
some of the engines that projected them — such as 
could be got conveniently inside a house : so that you 
saw the instruments which had blasted the salient of 
St. Mihiel and the plain of Woevre into that welter 
of dead fields, dead houses, and dead men, through 
which our journey upon this day had been. There 
they stood. Some were German, some French, some 
American. These glistened, those were dark. Some 
tapered to sharp points. Others were round. One 
specimen was not larger than a baseball. One was 
thicker than a big man and as high as my shoulder. 
Smaller shells stood on exhibit like flower vases when 
you are looking for wedding presents. I touched 
them here and there, while the lieutenant explained 
their natures and uses, how far they could fly, how big 
a hole they could dig, how many bodies at once they 
could behead and disembowel. Their assemblage ex- 
haled a silence — ^these bombs that could deafen — ^but 
a silence perfectly different from that which hung 
over devastated France. The lieutenant put one 
little brass bulb into my hand, and asked, could I 
guess what it was? How could I? He took it, 
seemed to press and turn it, and perhaps touched 
some mechanism at its top, and it split apart in halves 
with saw teeth. Its insides were not simple enough 
for me to be able to describe them clearly. It was a 




WHEEE we slept well 225 

mechanical carrier pigeon; German, I think. In its 
brass guts a message could nestlie and fly from a gun 
safe to its destination ; and I believe that it had some 
sort of fuse of special construction which popped or 
spat or flickered or otherwise indicated its identity 
after it had alighted at the proper address. Bombs, 
belts, guns, grenades— altogether an interesting, sin- 
ister company, with gas-masks among it like faces 
left behind, staring glassily. 

Less sombre were the maps in another room, artil- 
lery fire contour maps, and relief maps of terrain. 
Upon the ridges and hollows of these you could look 
as from an aeroplane upon the Woevre or the Ar- 
gonne, and follow where our divisions had cUmbed 
down, or climbed through. There was the Meuse 
running, and the Moselle, and the little Aire trickling 
along the bristly rises of the Argonne, and Varennes 
and Cheppy and Grand Pre and Mouzon and Sedan, 
that we were to see, with Thiaucourt and the Bois 
Brule and all the rest which we had seen. Thus, with 
the point of a pencil touching here the Mont Sec and 
there Les Eparges or VigneuUes, one could clearly 
follow the pivoting of our 1st and 26th Divisions on 
those two September days when they stitched the 
Germans into the St. Mihiel pocket. 

Not by going over the actual hills and valleys of 
any battle, nor yet from study of their miniature on a 
map, can one completely grasp the detail and the total 
of what happened. Both are needed — ^first the real 
country and after it the map. Thus it results that I 
could very nearly explain St. Mihiel and the Meuse- 
Argonne, because I went over their ground and fol- 
lowed later a pencil point over those relief maps in 
the house where we slept well : whereas about Belleau 



226 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

Wood, over which we only walked, I am quite vague, 
although it was a much simpler action. The reader 
need not dread any attempt of mine to explain to him 
either St. Mihiel or the Meuse-Argoime. Let him 
study, with its subjoined maps, the report of Gteneral 
Pershing. 

While, through relief maps and tales of darkies and 
coffee-pots, we were enlarging our knowledge and 
equipping our intelligence, the doughboys were doQC 
ing. I doubt if they went to bed as early as we did. 
The captain had sent them all off to the neighboring 
village of Billy-sous-Mangiennes. I don't know how 
many of these Billys there are in France, or in which 
of them our doughboys put their American arms 
about French waists to the accompaniment of music, 
and after the music had ceased. The captain told us 
that wherever they went they got up a dance. 



XX 



THE COOK AND THE DOUGHBOY 

* * Splendid day. The first one in France. ' ' 

I filnd that the hour at which I wrote this in my 
diary up in my bedroom was six-thirty the next 
morning. Eave-martiQs were flying in and out of the 
big windows, a chirping of neighboring birds filled 
the air, and upon looking out I saw many in the trees 
and farmyards at their May morning ^s work. There 
was a glitter from the sun that made the young leaves 
glisten, and a glimpse of wet meadows beyond the 
enclosure, sparkling with little pools. It was strange 
to see in the midst of this, just by the house, a 
wrecked aeroplane ; this glared out of the serenity of 
everything else. I do not think that it had fallen 
here, but that they had brought it as an out-door part 
of the collection. 

Voices in the house were audible through the seams 
in the bare plank floors, or through many large 
windows, all of them open ; and as I strolled about in 
a free exploration of the second floor, a voice beneath 
came up to me, and I stood still. 

**Bon jour.^' The words were quite correct, but 
their pronunciation had been born very far away 
from France indeed, although French experience was 
audible in it ; 1 did not need to see him through the 
floor to know that he was a doughboy. 

**Bon jour,'' some one answered him. I did not 

227 



228 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

need to see her either. That was the cook. Her 
voice went with her eye and the Olympic amplitude of 
her bosom : not harsh, by no means soprano, and with 
many lazy overtones of command. He seemed to be 
walking about. 
** Comment te trouves-tu ce matin T' she inquired. 

* * tray bien, mair see. ' ' 

What was comical was his perfectly correct speech 
and his khaki French. 

**As tu bien danse avec la demoiselle!^' the cook's 
deep voice went on musically. 

**0 je ne say pah.'' 

**T'es amuse, heint" 

* * wee, wee. ' ' 

One deep melodious chuckle now came up through 
the floor. That was the cook. It now struck me that 
she was addressing him in the idiom of the second 
person singular ; also that in his tone there was some- 
thing — ^I couldn 't be sure whether it was sheepish, or 
a lack of ease, or merely impatience, and if he were 
entirely conscious of it himself. 

* * Quand on est j eune, f aut bien s 'amuser. ' ' (When 
one is young one must have a good time.) As he did 
not reply to this, she pursued: **La sagesse attendra, 
hein? Faut pas gaspiller tes vingt ans." (Time 
enough to settle down later, eht Mustn't waste your 
youth on that.) 

His reply was to begin whistling a tune as he moved 
about the room. She seemed to be stationary, prob- 
ably by her fire ; for I now heard some rattle of pans 
or lids before her next remark: 
' * Et la demoiselle ? EUe t 'a tr ouve gentil I ' ' 
**Ah, comment es-ker-je say slah?" he now broke 
out. 



THE COOK AND THE DOUGHBOY 229 

Was there to be no more of this dialogue? Alas, 
there was not I His spurt of damaged temper and 
equally damaged grammar proved to be his parting 
remark, and I heard his steps go out of the kitchen. 
Like all international conversations, there was so 
much more in it than the mere words ! But I doubt 
if that particular cook and that particular doughboy 
ever held talks together for very long at a time, and 
I think it likely that most of their conferences termi- 
nated abruptly, on his side at any rate. She could not 
have ruffled Kansas so easily, and Kansas (if he pos- 
sessed fluency in French) would have been able to 
return her fire — ^but then he was out of the common. 
There is no play of the intellect which the general 
American mind comprehends less, and resents more, 
than veiled irony. We are just civilized enough to 
feel it vaguely, and not enough to deal with it lightly. 
It needed but little imagination to see in my mind^s 
eye that cook and doughboy, she old and massive over 
her breakfast pots and pans, he young and defence- 
less beneath the lazy indulgence of her phrases. No 
conversation that I had heard in France, nothing that 
was told me, threw so much light upon how the 
peasants — especially the women — ^must have come in 
time to regard these vigorous children so fresh from 
the Western world. 

I went back to my room, where presently he came, 
bringing some hot water and my boots. The boots, 
after yesterday in the mud, had needed a good deal of 
his attention. He was a shock-headed boy, very 
blond, from Arkansas. There were two of them who 
looked after us, the other being from Louisiana. 
This latter told me, with a sort of disdain, that he 
understood what they said in French pretty well. I 



230 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

did not need to ask this question of the boy from 
Arkansas ; what I had heard through the floor sufficed 
to show him already apt in the language beyond many 
a college graduate. His appearance suggested that 
his fluency had been attained through the tutoring of 
various romantic experiences. His body was slim, 
he was light in his walk, and almost certainly he knew 
how to dance in a manner that would please. I was 
tempted to ask him how he liked the cook, but I 
abstained. His way of replying to questions dis- 
couraged asking them. 

He went out, leaving my boots and hot water ; and 
while I shaved, I heard in memory the cook's ironic 
intonations and comprehended everything that her 
tawny voice had said without words. She was much 
more than herself ; she was her race, her continuous 
history, ancient France, where Csesar had been, and 
Roland, and Diana of Poitiers ; France, whose bask- 
ing shores the Latin and Greek Mediterranean ca- 
ressed. In her syllables and between them, laughed 
quietly the long-memoried Mediterranean which had 
known the Argonauts, and Salamis, and the keels of 
Cleopatra, and had heard old Triton blow his 
wreathed horn. The spirit of the peasant cook con- 
tained all that, while the boy contained not much 
except the Declaration of Independence. She had 
addressed him with the intimate **thou,'' instead of 
**you,'' because her age confronted his youth like 
some antique sibyl gazing from a grove at a faun, 
smiling at his physical charm, and bored with his 
emptiness. At her birth she was older than he would 
be at his death. What the ancient Mediterranean, 
speaking through her person, said to him was really 
this: 



THE COOK AND THE DOUGHBOY 231 

**Yoii are engaging and attractive because you are 
young. I like you, but I like you at a distance. You 
have explored and peopled a continent, but you have 
not yet explored and peopled Time. Intellect and 
Art know nothing of you ; you have not approached 
near enough to them to be visible. We can see your 
sky-scrapers, your Olympus not yet. Your material 
science creates in you the illusion that there is a 
short cut to education, to reflection, to maturity. 
There are no short cuts to anything except perdition. 
You think that to build many churches is to have 
much religion. You hold meetings, even your women 
hold meetings, I ami told, where resolutions are 
passed and laws are made, and by these paper toys 
you imagine that you have caused reality. Such 
things do not cause reality, they merely express it. 

** Never suppose that I am not dazzled by the flame 
of promise which bums in you with such energy. 
See to it that it be not put out by the poison which 
our fatigued old world pours into your still clean and 
lusty veins. I hope, and sometimes believe, that a 
great past will be yours in time to come, because I 
have seen and can never forget what you have done 
for me, and the reason that made you do it. You are 
fierce in battle; I love that. You are good to chil- 
dren; that, too, I love. Grateful I am, but am no 
mistress for the lover who has but one thing to say, 
no companion for one whose future is his chief 
tradition. 

* * Go home to your new world, handsome and vigor- 
ous young barbarian I You still imagine that there 
are answers to everything, that you have found most 
of them, and are going to find all. Remain in your 
intellectually virgin world until your mental and 



232 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

moral adventures shall have brought you into that 
place which lies beyond discouragement, and when in 
your ripeness you can smile at all things, even at 
yourself, without being paralyzed. Remain there 
until you have learned that there is no answer to any 
of the great questions for ever asked by man ; that the 
game is not worth the candle, but that we play it to be 
worth a candle ourselves — ^and that to be able to make 
interesting love, one must be complicated. 

^*I see and praise your restless intelligence, upon 
which Time has not yet chiselled a single line of 
grace. I enjoy your gaiety, which proceeds from a 
soul beneath whose surface Adversity has not yet 
begun to dig the first approach to depth. But alas, I 
<5an not long be sympathetic in the company of one 
who, no matter how capable, is still psychologically 
illiterate and spiritually inexperienced: such is the 
price which you pay for your youth, and be assured 
that youth is worth this price, and more. Be less sure 
that the quick and great success which you have had, 
is a blessing. Ease may tarnish the beginning of our 
days ; it polishes their end. 

**You are still merely a work of nature. A civil- 
ized man is a work of nature too, but he is also a 
highly wrought work of art. Come back in a thou- 
sand years and let me see you, and then, strong and 
handsome boy, perhaps you will be ready for me.'' 

Thus, in the voice of the cook, spoke the old Medi- 
terranean, the mellow, subtle, cynical, sensual sibyl. 
The cook herself heard none of these words, because 
they didn't sound in her brain, but echoed in her 
unconscious blood, and she knew little more about 
them than any telephone knows. 

What if young blond Arkansas had been able to 



THE COOK AND THE DOUGHBOY 233 

hear them, instead of only vaguely and angrily to feel 
them? Instead of ineffectively flying out at her with 
his **Ah, que sais-je/^ what adequate reply would he 
have found t 

By the time that I had read the inner meaning of 
their colloquy, my shaving and toilet were finished, 
and I went down to breakfast. 



XXI 



LAST LAP TO ABMISTIOB 



Winding in many curves upon the map which I 
carried at our journey's end as I had carried it since 
the beginning^ the crosses plot our road through the 
Meuse-Argonne country. Each cross is set against 
the name of some town or village, where another 
broken church tower reared like a bony, up-stretched 
arm ; or walls of broken homes stood waist-high and 
knee-high amid gaping cellars ; or where the town had 
been struck out wholly, dashed into utter invisibility, 
and you could not have known it from the ground, 
save for the sign-post bearing its name and sticking 
in its dust. Like this were Hautcourt and Malan- 
court — ^just names on a board — ^and Fleury by the for- 
lorn wayside between Vaux and Douaumont. Others 
there were; but of these slain towns, of whose very 
bones not one remained, I shall name no more. He 
who did not see, and never now can see, France flayed 
and raw as she lay before healing had set in, may 
try to conjure into his fancy the look of it: stretch 
after stretch of riddled earth, horizon after horizon 
ragged with stark trees, emptiness strewn with dis- 
tortion, walls, towers, standing like limbs whose 
bodies have been hacked away, and short sign-posts 
like headstones over the graves of places dead and 
buried. He who did not see tliis may try to imagine 
it — ^and will fail ; he who has seen it may try to forget 
it — ^and will fail: somewhere in him that sight and 
that silence will live as long as he lives himself. 

284 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 235 

Of this particular piece of the war country General 
Pershing writes : 

*^The Meuse-Argonne front had been practically 
stabilized in September 1914, and, except for minor 
fluctuations during the German attacks on Verdun in 
1916 and the French counter oflEensive in August 
1917, remained unchanged until the American ad- 
vance in 1918. The net result of the four years' 
struggle on this ground was a German defensive sys- 
tem of unusual depth and strength and a wide zone of 
utter devastation, itself a serious obstacle to offensive 
operations. ' ' 

Yes; a wide zone of utter devastation. Wrecks, 
half or whole, are the towns in it, almost all ; nearly 
every name on the map of that three-cornered coun- 
try is a label of obliteration. Go northwest down 
the Meuse from Verdun to Sedan, come south from 
Sedan, skirting the Argonne to Clermont, turn east 
back to Verdun, and you will have enclosed a region 
wherein many places had in them shelter for not a 
living soul in 1919, and two years later, when next I 
saw them, it was still the same with many. Grain 
was green and swaying under the wind where holes 
and shells had been, much of the earth was breath- 
ing again ; but from the dust of Fleury, Hautcourt, 
Malancourt, and many another, nothing had as yet 
arisen. 

A wide zone of utter devastation : with more to its 
east through the Woevre to the Moselle, and more to 
its west across Champagne, and then more. 

It is a large looking country of many distances. 
Across it the eye often sees far. At all its edges and 
also within it, hills rise. Numerous ridges roughen 
and streak it, valleys f uxrow it, patches of woodland 



236 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

darken its open stretches; yet its spaciousness of 
line is the chief aspect that sweeps over the memory, 
with mounded blurs a long way off. In it, as in the 
Somme region, our Western bad lands were sug- 
gested once or twice by the huge, bald, discolored 
slants of excoriation. Nevertheless it resembled but 
little any other of the battle lands that I had seen. 
Many wars had made it their arena, but this was 
true of the other regions also, and with them it had 
in common that look of a place where something has 
happened, of a witness to deeds that will never be 
absent from the eyes again. But as I watched it 
from many changing points beneath the sunshine 
of these final days, I knew, without being told, that 
its serene amplitude in other days of sunshine had 
been of a sober rather than a gay serenity. There 
are faces which show the mark of much agreeable 
society, of many acquaintances, of talk and laughter ; 
while others reveal that meditation has been their 
chief adventure. The Meuse-Argonne country has 
communed a great deal with itself. To the under- 
standing imagination it seems to say: ^^ Fourteen 
hundred years ago I saw Attila. He, too, like these 
later ones, left me for dead. These are worse than 
Attila, because they knew better.'* 

Fourteen hundred years after Attila, the Meuse- 
Argonne saw his successors. They came, turning 
into deeds the words of their high priest, **the sight 
of suffering does one good ; the infliction of suffering 
does one more good," and those other words of their 
high priest, **when one country conquers another 
hothing should be left to it but eyes to weep.'' The 
best of them came here, well taught and faithful 
followers of their Bismarck. Over them was their 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 237 

General von Mndra, with their Crown Prince over 
him — ^but prudently tied to the apron-strings of Mar- 
shal von Haeseler. These tutors were to place upon 
the royal young brow the laurels of their conquests, 
which would then furnish the theme of happy tele- 
grams from his father to his mother — ^those des- 
patches that used to run, ** Willy and God have done 
nobly today/' Thus the Fatherland could hail and 
love the youth. He must have also caused many 
German eyes to weep, for he was perfectly generous 
in throwing away other people's lives. Many thou- 
sand German bones lie in the territory of his failures : 
at St. Hubert and around Four-de-Paris, which he 
tried to take, from October to January of that first 
year; at Fontaine-aux-Charmes and Bolante Wood, 
where he was next active ; and at Les Islettes in June, 
which he missed in his effort to get the railway from 
Ste. Menehould to Verdun. He scattered German 
bones prodigally at all these places, and at many 
others — ^no need to recite his failure at Verdun in 
1916: sitting at Montfaucon safely encased, he 
watched operations through thirty feet of periscope. 
This pipe reached him where he hid underground 
and directed the bone-scattering right and left of 
the Meuse, all the way to Vaux and Douatunont and 
Dead Man's Hill and the other places of which we 
all heard so much during those six months of French 
agony and glory. 

Even though long lulls intervened in the bone- 
scattering from 1914 to 1918, the Meuse-Argonne 
had little respite for communiag with itself. The 
tough ridge of the forest was eaten beneath with 
galleries and mines, its beech and oak thickets on 
top were gashed with paths, strung with wires, sawed 



238 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

short by shells; while out of the woods to its east 
the open coxmtry, from the little Aire at its base to 
the larger Mense over the hills, was bled white and 
left no eyes to weep with. I have seen them — ^the 
empty hollow on the hill where Vauquois stood, and 
Chamy, Samogneux, Consenvoye, Dnn-sur-Meuse, 
Chattancourt, Avoconrt, Varennes, Cunel, Romagne, 
Bnzancy — ^villages crushed, lying among crushed 
woods and pastures crushed, — ^a wide zone of utter 
devastation indeed. 

Hither on September 25th, 1918, came our divi- 
sions to fight their hardest fight of all^— made harder 
and delayed by a bad choking of their supplies along 
the few difficxdt roads : a task allotted them because 
it was so difficult, the tough hog-back of the Argonne 
so mired and enmeshed with defences, and they the 
only men not tired by four years of strain and strug- 
gle. Where they had bled and died and won so 
splendidly not yet six months ago, we followed their 
course as they had gone pushing north and east. 
We went over much of the very ground of their ex- 
ploits, in sight of more, and never far from any of 
it. The mud was still in many places strewn with 
the broken machines of war. In it these lay flat, or 
tilted, or stuck half sunk, rusting slowly as the wet 
weather leaked among their stiff joints. We saw 
where their victorious line had been when the Armis- 
tice stopped their onward rush for Germany, and 
they had flung down their baffled guns, and cried 
tears of disappointed rage, all the more bitter over 
the knowledge that the Germans had been permitted 
to get up from their supplicating knees, and march 
home with their arms and banners like an imdef eated 
army. There is a legend that the great Foch him- 



LAST LAP TO ABMISTICE 239 

self shed tears on that day of fateful error. We 
skirted the territory of their quick advance during 
the first days of the battle. Then in the dismem- 
bered woods through which all sorts of fragments 
lay strewn, and the wires sagged tangled among the 
broken branches, we stepped where the mud allowed 
us in order to see more sacred ground. It was where, 
in the long slow time of hunger, horror, thirst, and 
impregnable determination, American grit had been 
tried out to the full and proved more than equal to 
the test. 

We had gone up the hill from Varennes and turned 
in among the thickets ; and as we passed safe through 
all this extinct, monstrous turmoil of war that lay 
everywhere over the land like a contorted fossil, 
once again — ^it might well have been for the hun- 
dredth time — ^I asked myself, **What was this like 
when it was alive f We must not forget I We can 
forget injuries to ourselves, but not a wound half- 
mortal to mankind, not, at any rate, until the offender 
show by sustained deeds that his spirit is changed. 
Long ago, in 1915, 1 had said that a full comprehen- 
sion of this war would burst any human brain; I 
thought it again now, and that from the thousand 
chronicles of personal experience which will be writ- 
ten, the future will distil, not the total reality, never 
that, but the final impression : and that will rise and 
loom above the general level of history, a terrible 
spectral shape. 

To stop us in the Argonne the Germans brought 
more and more of their best divisions, piled them 
in our way — and could not stop us. They piled them 
here because this ground was now their foot-hold 
for the whole : knock it from under them, and they 



242 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

which filled nearly the whole month of October — ^f rom 
the fourth day until the last. The final chapter like 
the first was short — eleven days — with a return 
to the stride forward, the enemy ^s last defences 
smashed, the stride quickening to a pursuit. We; 
may think, then, of the Meuse-Argonne battle as 
thus divided : a swift beginning, a swift end, with a 
middle twenty-seven days long— days of holding on, 
of crawling on, of torment and great loss, a test of 
every quality and resource which combine to make 
successful aggressive warfare: and when the test 
was over, the survivors ready for more, getting out 
of their Argonne woods, getting up on their Barri- 
court heights, knocking the enemy off the heights 
of Dun-sur-Meuse, driving him back faster and faster 
out of the home into which he had broken, and when 
halted in full stride, weeping with rage at being 
thwarted in catching him in his own home, for which 
he was making with such haste. 

Who was this doughboy that did this t Who were 
they that helped him? 

The front he held was seventy-five ndles wide. 
More than a million of him held it. Behind him from 
where he fought, all the way across France to the 
shore where he had landed, all his machinery was 
working to feed and arm him and care for his wounds. 
It was not perfect — ^how could it be t But daily it 
was growing towards perfection. Though still so 
new at the vast, terrible game — ^three years (and in 
most cases nearly four years) newer than his allies 
— once fairly in the game, he caught up to them with 
a speed that astonished them, and which they remem- 
ber with the warmest admiration. 

To General Mangin I said on a later day, purposely 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 243 

steering dear of any phrase which might hint of 
brag : 

**And I hope yon fonnd that onr soldiers did fairly 
wellt^' 

The tone in which he answered was like a rebnke. 
** Fairly well I'* he exclaimed, **bnt very well! very, 
very well." 

He spoke without reserve and all the more cor- 
dially, perhaps, because during the talk which had 
preceded this question of mine he had found me not 
unaware that we owed our Allies quite as much as 
they owed to us ; that the moral tonic of our coming 
in had been weakened by our delay in coming over; 
that twelve long months after we had come in, only 
300,000 of us had got over; that nothing but the ter- 
rifying imminence of disaster, in March 1918, had 
started the getting us over in adequate numbers, and 
with proper speed ; that, but for the help of British 
transports, more than half of us could not have got 
over even then ; that nothing but the superb sticking 
to it of British and French armies during 1917-18, 
and General Nivelle ^s attack in 1917, without waiting 
for our coming, had held the Germans off, and thus 
given us the time in which to get ready; and that 
during this time our private citizens by the thou- 
sand, Americans on whose shoulders rested great 
private responsibilities, had dropped their work re- 
gardless of their politics, and dedicated their unre- 
warded ability to propping up the most incompetent 
and most ungrateful adndnistration which we have 
thus far staggered along under. The French had 
helped us out with nearly three thousand airplanes 
—we had nothing of this kind ready. As to guns, 
even by Armistice day we had on our front no 75 ^s, 



244 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

155 mnu howitzers, or 155 G. P. F, gnns— the French 
equipped us from their own plants with this artil- 
lery for thirty divisions. During the Meuse-Argonne 
battle our remount resources fell so short that Mar- 
shal Foch turned over to us 13,000 animals from 
the French armies. Our men had been dragging the 
guns through the mud themselves, leaving behind 
their rolling kitchens in order to do it, and eating 
roots. One division had been obliged to do so much 
walking in other regions that it named itself the 
Sight-Seeing Division. 

A word about our deficiencies, the lightest acknowl- 
edgment that we did not win the war alone, that 
General Gouraud, for example, with the 4th French 
Army was fightiag west of the Argonne while Gen- 
eral Liggett with our first army was fighting in it 
and east of it, and that together we broke the evil 
spell and at the finish were, so to speak, flying to 
victory — ^any syllable of such recognition brought 
instantly its generous response from any Frenchman 
just as well as from General Mangin. What they 
liked, what opened their hearts, was a word, or even 
a sign, which expressed appreciation of their cour- 
age and suffering during the three years before we 
brought any courage or suffering into it; receiving 
such word or sign, they would say readily enough 
that we had saved them in 1918. What they did not 
like, what shut their hearts, was to hear us boast. 
It is difficult to pay compliments* to a man who has 
already begun to pay them to himself. 

But who were these American doughboys for whom 
General Mangin had such handsome compliments f 

Four French and twenty-one American divisions 
fought the Meuse-Argonne fight, and of our divisions 



LAST LAP TO AEMISTICE 245 

five were regulars. All the rest came from civil life, 
like the embattled farmer who in 1775 at Concord 
and Lexington fired the shot heard ronnd the world. 
Every trade, profession, walk in life from all over 
the country united to make that roar which spoke 
to the enemy of American courage in the Meuse- 
Argonne. 

And who were the enemy t Germany 's best troops, 
prepared from the cradle for this day, their minds 
put in uniform at the kindergarten. So fierce be- 
came the American onset that when a German divi- 
sion had once got into it, it had to stay in, it could 
not be relieved. Twenty divisions were taken from 
the French and one from the British front to. pile in 
the way of the Americans. Forty-seven days of this, 
forty-seven days of the worst battle Americans have 
known from Lexington and Concord to the Armistice, 
and it was over. Not as at the second battle of the 
Marne, or at St. Mihiel, where we attacked on two 
sides of a pocket and squeezed the enemy out of it, 
but in a remorseless frontal attack, did our divisions 
fight through the Mouse- Argonne, managing entirely 
by ourselves for the first time the whole mechanism 
and apparatus of it — communications, dumps, tele- 
graph lines, and water service. We lost some 117,000 
in killed and wounded, captured 26,000 prisoners, 
847. cannon, 3,000 machine guns, and large quantities 
of material. Except by the five divisions of regulars, 
it was not done, it could not be done, with the tech- 
nical experience of regulars. Life was wasted: — 
seeing the waste at times the French exclaimed, 
* 'they're crazy'*: and perhaps General Pershing's 
words about it belong here : 

The less experienced divisions, while aggressivoi 



<( 



246 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

were lacking in the ready skill of habit They were 
capable of powerful blows, but their blows were apt 
to be awkward — ^team work was not often well under- 
stood. Flexible and resourceful divisions cannot be 
created by a few manoeuvres or by a few months' 
association of their elements. On the other hand, 
without the keen intelligence, the endurance, the will- 
ingness, and enthusiasm displayed in the training 
area, as well as on the battle field, the successful 
results we obtained so quickly would have been ut- 
terly impossible/' 

Let this page therefore chronicle the names of 
those sixteen divisions who by a few manoeuvres and 
a few months' association in the training area were 
able with our five divisions of regulars to obtain so 
quickly those successful results. 

That splendid 26th Division, the Yankee, came 
early to France, fought early, and fought late; the 
28th was the Keystone, and saw war from the second 
Mame to Varennes and Apremont in the Argonne 
Forest; the Blue and Gray, or 29th, captured Hau- 
mont; the Terribles, or 32nd, knew the Vesle and 
met tibie 4th Prussian Guards, and was twice in the 
Mouse- Argonne — especially at Cierges and Bomagne, 
and its name does not disclose that it came from 
Wisconsin and Michigan, but only that the French- 
men who gave it this name thought that it knew how 
to fight; the Prairie came from Illinois, it was the 
33rd, and fought with the British in July, and along 
the Mouse in October ; the 35th, or Santa F6, did not 
come from the ancient city, but from Missouri and 
Kansas, where the trail to the ancient city began, 
and after being in the Vosges it came to the fight, 
especially at Vauquois and Cheppy ; the Buckeye, or 



LAST LAP TO ABMISTICE 247 

37thy naturally came from Ohio, and most particu- 
larly took one side of Montf ancon Hill while the 79th 
took the other ; it was a devastating piece of courage ; 
the true cause of the 42nd being called the Bainbow 
Division was not, as has been repeated, any incident 
in the sky, but because men from twenty-six states 
and the District of Columbia were in it, and of its 
record it has reason to be proud; it knew the July 
fighting in the chalk-white country east of Beims, 
and the Aisne-Mame, and St. Mihiel, and came in 
for the flying finish of the Meuse- Argonne ; I do not 
know whether the 78th got its name from the New 
Jersey men in it or not; men from New York and 
Delaware were there too, and it was called the Light- 
ning Division ; it came into the fight by Grand Pr6, 
where it relieved the heroic 77th after the bitter 
struggle through the Argonne Wood, and had a bitter 
struggle itself to take the Bois des Loges; the Lib- 
erty or 79th Division came from Pennsylvania, Mary- 
land, and the District of Columbia, and after its share 
at Montf aucon and its extra rush to Nantillois, went 
east of the Meuse and was headed for Lorraine ; the 
Blue Bidge began the Argonne early at B6thincourt, 
fought through the whole of it, finishing after the 
capture of Beaumont and Yoncq ; the Wildcat fought 
east of the Meuse, and took Chatillon and other 
towns; and the reader will expect to hear that it 
came from North and South Carolina and Florida, 
but it also came from Porto Bico : the All American, 
or 82nd Division, came from thirty-seven states, 
though it was the National Quard of Georgia, Ala- 
bama, and Tennessee; it fought through October, 
taking Marcq, Chehery, and other places; the 89th, 
at whose capture of Barricourt heights Foch ex- 



248 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

daimed '^the war is over/' was called Wood's Own, 
and I think that Leonard Wood most have liked that 
name as much as did the men ; they came from Kan- 
sas, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraskisi, North Dakota, 
New Mexico, and Arizona ; they began to fight in the 
St. Mihiel, went into the Meuse-Argonne, capturing 
other places beyond Barricourt, and found themselves 
beyond the Meuse on November 11th. They derive 
pleasure also from remembering that they were thei 
football champions of our entire army. The 90th, 
the Alamo, from Texas and Oklahoma, came into 
the fight in October, and stayed till the end, capturing 
ten places and advancing eighteen miles against re- 
sistance. The 77th, the Metropolitan Division, had 
a somewhat special chance to suffer and to triumph. 
They happened to be placed in the thick of the Ar- 
gonne Wood, on the worst side of that bristling 
hog-back, their period on the front line during the 
difficult advance which constitutes the second chaj)- 
ter of the battle being longer than that of any other 
division. They fought from the first day imtil Oc- 
tober 15th, and again from October 31st to November 
11th, and their losses were severe. One incident of 
their fight has become widely known ; we read of it 
in the newspapers each day while it was happening, 
we have read of it since. Three whole years after 
it occurred, we were all reminded of it again by an 
event of piercing sadness. Through the romantic 
phrase of a newspaper correspondent, a misrepre- 
sentation was umntentionally spread, and though the 
error has been corrected and Major Whittlesey set 
right, an established mistake needs to be set right 
more than once. His battalion was not a ^^Lost Bat- 
talion,'' as it was called in the despatches. 



M-' 



;ii^» 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 249 

After the 77th Division had been advancing six 
days, through the bristles and across the slits in 
the hog-back, a wickedly hot fire stopped it, notwith- 
standing which it was ordered to go on. Near a 
place called Binarville, fairly west through the wood 
from Varennes, trickle some marshy tributaries of 
the Aisne, down the west side of the hog-back. These 
make swamps and come to junctions, over whose wet 
ground rise high, steep, wooded rocks in walls. Com- 
panies from the 307th and 308th Infantry with some 
of the 306th Machine Gun Battalion, formed the bat- 
talion which Major Whittlesey was ordered to take 
iato one of these junctions and hold the position. 
He carried out the order, working through the meshes 
of wet growth, losing near a hundred men, raked by 
fire, and taking prisoners nevertheless. Here he was 
to have been supported on the west by some of Gou- 
raud^s 4th French Army, and on the east by the 
307th Infantry. These flanking supports failed to 
make the planned parallel advance each side of him. 
Being thus the only one to succeed in carrying out 
his orders, he found himself cut off, surrounded, with 
food for one day, and set about making the best he 
could of it. He got one message back to headquarters 
by a carrier pigeon, the man he sent for food never 
returned. His general had ordered Whittlesey to 
stay, and now did his best to get reinforcements to 
him. For three days the battalion listened to Ger- 
man voices, returned German fire, and grew more 
hungry, more thirsty, and fewer in numbers — ^from 
more than six hundred to two hundred and fifty — 
but they kept off the Germans, who asked them now 
ij^ and then why they did not surrender. On the fourth 
day, with still no food, with scanty water, and groan- 



250 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

ing wounded, and lessening anunnnition, they still 
held on, refusing the German invitations to surren- 
der. The last of these invitations was not shouted 
from the enemy line, it was a note brought by mes- 
senger — ^a captured American soldier. Part of this 
note read: 

* ^ The suffering of your wounded men can be heard 
over here in the German lines, and we are appealing 
to your humane sentiments to stop. A white flag 
shown by one of your men will tell us that you agree 

w^h these conditions. Please treat Private as 

an honorable man. He is quite a soldier. We envy 
you.*' 

That was a handsome message, and Whittlesey 
made no comment as he read it; it is said that he 
smiled. After showing the note to officers standing 
near him, he put it in his pocket. It was the men 
who shouted their defiance pungently and unprint- 
ably to the enemy when the news of the note and its 
contents got about. They preferred death to sur- 
render, and death it would have been that evening 
for them all, but they were saved by the arrival of 
the 307th. 

There is the story : Whittlesey had orders to take 
and hold at any cost a certain position. He did it, 
and through his dogged courage our line was pushed 
forward and stabilized. 

Whittlesey is dead. Three years after those Ar- 
goime days, he jumped from a steamship to his 
death at sea. We must suppose that his nerves had 
received a bruise incurable. This war with the hor- 
rors of its new science seems to have destroyed the 
mental or physical health of many who came bravely 
through it unhurt, so far as appearances went at 



LAST LAP TO AEMISTICE 251 

the time. Its work on mind and body resembles the 
bnm of radium on occasions, invisible at first, a deep 
sore later, hard to heal, and sometimes fatal. 

Braised nerves, the radium burns of the war, can 
be seen today in many hospitals and asylums. A 
lady where I live wished to arrange a little music 
for the entertainment of some patients, and asked 
that these sick soldiers be allowed to assemble in a 
large hall where the concert could be given. 

*^They cannot be allowed to go there,** said the 
superintendent. **They are seven hundred and fifty 
men permanently raving mad.** 

On many acres in the Meuse-Argonne countless 
great deeds were done that never will be known. The 
hero that lives in most men and may sleep in them 
through a whole life of week-days, waked in this 
fiery month of battle and made of it a sacred day, 
frightful, consecrated, divine through sacrifice. The 
nameless unrewarded dead, the seven hundred and 
fifty madmen, are less sad to think of than certain 
of those who lived and came out whole, in whom 
the hero has fallen so fast asleep again that his very 
existence seems doubtful now. 

Scarce three miles through the wood from the 
swamps and tangles of the Beset Battalion, is quite 
another sight. Prince Eupprecht of Bavaria lived 
in the trees above Varennes most comfortably. To 
see his thoughtfully constructed quarters was ample 
compensation for not seeing the elaborate conve- 
niences below ground that the Germans had made 
for themselves at Les fiparges. I have been twice 
to Eupprecht *s look-out. It must have housed more 
enjoyments and relaxations for his royal senses than 
Montf aucon supplied to the Crown Prince. I cannot 



252 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

blame a prince for taking such good care of his pleas- 
ures so much as I blame those unthinking American 
soldiers who, as soon as they got out of war-stricken 
France into unscathed, whole-skinned Germany, be- 
gan to prefer Germans, merely because they found 
it more comfortable on the uninvaded Rhine than on 
the shattered and bleeding margins of the Mame and 
the Meuse. It is a pity that these doughboys were 
capable of so little reflection — ^thought more like chil- 
dren of eight than men of twenty-five. Elaborate 
thought was apparent everywhere in the quarters of 
the Bavarian prince. One descended concrete steps 
so solid and shapely that they were like what you see 
in some large handsome garden conducting from some 
terrace or arbor to some lake with lilies and gold- 
fish; there, one's eye followed a substantial balus- 
trade, again like something in a park ; down the first 
flight, in the rooms, were wainscotted walls, excel- 
lently finished, apartment led to apartment, one im- 
agined where the electric lights had shone on games 
of cards, and where music and song had made the 
nights agreeable — all in the middle of this muddy, 
wild, disordered wood! Brick heaters were there 
to keep Rupprecht warm; one room had a bay-win- 
dow like a city house; there was ornamentation; 
there was a theatre ; in a trench to the left of Rup- 
precht 's exit was beautiful concrete work; a fine 
stone chimney stuck up into the wild, disordered 
woods from a heavy, sunken concrete roof — ^probably 
a division headquarters; the place was a veritable 
city, the dug-outs went down sixty feet and connected 
right and left. We did not go into a quarter of it. — 
And then on the walls of Rupprecht 's parlor, ** Du- 
buque, la.'^ scrawled in a clear hand. Also, ** Oscar 



LAST LAP TO AEMISTICE 253 

McLeven/' and *'Eobert B. Frankim,'' and "Little 
McCarthy/' 

** During that battle T' I inqnired, astonished that 
they should have had time to write their names — 
or anything — ^then, 

"No/' said our escort. "Done since by visitors/' 
He had "jumped off " at Cheppy, just north of Va- 
renneSy and knew that our men had been otherwise 
occupied. 

Such was the scene inside these concrete caves; 
traces — almost echoes — of comfort, pleasure, luxury ; 
and outside, at their very doors, the wild, disordered 
wood, littered with leavings of war. Not yet were 
the little wooden cleats along the wet paths disar- 
ranged, nor yet the fragments among the sodden 
leaves disturbed, and through the branches every- 
where hung the telephone wires. We picked up, on 
another day, two or three pages from a book, muddy 
but legible still, libidinous and intimate, written to 
stir youth and to goad age. To many an American 
boy it would have been like the first dose of frontier 
whisky to a Cheyenne or a Sioux, only more potent 
in its appeal and more ravaging in its possible in- 
fluence. Had the volume belonged to Prince Rup- 
precht's library! Had it dropped from the kit of 
some soldier of the 77th? Or had Little McCarthy 
brought itf Well, we were not likely ever to know. 

Not on the walls alone had the Little McCarthys 
begun to leave their defacing mark; names and in- 
itials were already carved upon the trees. This was 
not the only place where such records were to be 
seen; they covered the walls thick over at Mont- 
faucon. Names were scribbled by the hundred in 
that house on the height where tiie Crown Prince 



254 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

throngh thirty feet of periscope had safely watched 
other people fight and die. These names were not 
going to secure mnch immortality, however, for the 
people who had written them; already this snug 
abode of the Crown Prince was going the way of aU 
flesh and plaster and mortar and everything else. 
Its gaunt shape reared up on the hillside, and it was 
ceasing to be a house and beginning to be remains; 
in a little while it would be like all the rest of this 
village. We entered the gaps that had been its front 
door; explored its rotting premises, walked up its 
as yet safe stairs; looked out of its window-holes 
over the wide, mournful country towards Verdun; 
watched the swallows flying in and out of these 
holes ; stared at the disiategrating walls ; stared most 
at that observatory which had been built through the 
centre of the house for the Crown Prince. That 
was a structure indeed! It ran up through the 
building which served as a concealment of its iden- 
tity, as camouflage. It was reinforced with steel and 
sand bags and concrete. We admired this symbol 
of the solid, thorough German character — ^and of 
the precautionary valor of the House of Hohen- 
zollem. We mounted to the roof and stood there 
to look better across the wide view, the woods and 
fields over which the 37th and 79th Divisions had 
made that devastating frontal attack by which they 
took Montfaucon. It had been said that you could 
not take it. It stood up there about midway between 
the Mouse and the Argonne, strengthened and pro- 
tected by three years of German military science — 
but they took it. Perhaps it was wasteful tactics, 
certainly it was splendid courage. 

Still better could we see the ground over which 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 255 

they had come from a point on the hill, which rises 
higher than the look-out of the Crown Prince. There 
was much in that graveyard to lead one to stand still : 
another torn acre of tombs, another church that never 
would be a church again. It made a high point in 
the silence— one of the places where this enormous 
stillness came flowing in from every quarter of the 
horizon, flowing and flooding over ridge and wood 
and field, coming to the base of the hiU, rolling up 
its steep sides, and meeting and settling on top in 
a great wave upon which human voices and the sound 
of birds made not the slightest mark. I remember 
that all the time we were there a cuckoo was sing- 
ing ceaselessly. He was as filled with spring as 
was the sunshine, and the green of the new leaves ; 
but he made no difference, nothing made any differ- 
ence, in this sea of silence that stretched around us, 
west to the towers of invisible Beims rising above it, 
and still west to Amiens ; and east also beyond where 
eye could look. 

I had copied no names in the house of the Crown 
Prince, but in this graveyard among the heaved-up 
slabs and ripped interiors where open coffins lay, I 
wrote : J° F^*" Drouet, Docteur Medecin, 1795-1849 ; 
H^^® Hector Guillenot d'Alby, 2™« regiment de cui- 
rassiers, 1814-1855 ; Anne Brouchet, Epouse Drouet 
et d^Alby, 1820-1880. These names were on the 
tablet of a tomb broken open, and they belonged to 
the corpses which had been scattered into sight. The 
tomb was one of several fine monuments and had 
been wired for the telephone and made an observa- 
tion point, but this was no excuse for the wanton 
desecration of the dead. 

From here we could see the entire upland of the 



256 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

heights of the Meuse, as well as the ridge of the 
Argonne Forest, and no place was better for relating 
the parts of this large conntry to the whole. We 
adjusted to each other the points where we had been, 
and some of those still to come. There to the south 
we could make out Hill 304, where our 80th and 4th 
Divisions had begun their part of the Meuse-Argonne 
battle near Bethincourt and Dannevoux, pivoting on 
Verdun and swinging northward. We knew Hill 304, 
for there we had been already in the course of our 
circuitous wandering. We had gone in and out of 
the folds of the landscape, and far and wide, seeing 
various signs of the war scattered broadcast through 
the region. Once, between Etain and Damloup, we 
had passed a Baldwin locomotive, alive and steam- 
ing, recalling home, and symbolizing reconstruction. 
Tank traps had been placed along that road. These 
consisted of very strong stone posts set in the ground 
something like gate-posts, and between them would 
be strung heavy chains. We had passed squads and 
squads of German prisoners, dull in their dingy 
green. These were at work upon the roads, and they 
worked as little as they could. Alike in the knobbed 
and gnomeish countenances of the old and the pleas- 
ant ruddy faces of the young, I seemed to descry the 
same look of puzzlement. Were they heavily won- 
dering all the while how and why they had come to 
be here, or had they worked beyond this to the later 
stage of wondering how soon they would be able to 
revenge themselves? We passed Russians too — 
strangely different from any one else. Our escorts 
could not tell us what they were doing or what their 
status was ; and I doubt if they knew this themselves. 
They had saved France as much in the beginning 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 257 

as we had saved her in the end; they had fought 
bravely, had been vilely betrayed at home, and 
slaughtered pitifully by the thousand, and now their 
country — the one that they had known — ^was welter- 
ing in disaster, no longer herself. I gather that they 
had been treated very stupidly by the French Govern- 
ment, and that their souls must have been poisoned 
by a sense of ingratitude. Over all this unearthly 
mixture of Baldwin locomotive, cheerful doughboys, 
saddened peasants, German prisoners, Russian exUes 
at work or at idleness, amid mounds and holes and 
obliterated roads and villages, shone a bright sxm- 
light upon the trees. In their branches the mistletoe 
bunched like crows ' nests ; while above them in the 
blue soared many larks like floating dots of song. 
Their music fell upon the forlorn fields in scattered 
drops of sound which might have been made by silver 
hammers tapping upon a crystal vault. German 
words were painted large and black upon many a 
village comer, sometimes naming a street, sometimes 
an office or headquarters ; and from these still habit- 
able edifices we would pass almost in a breath to 
zones where all had been blasted flat, and it was 
rare to see any fragment that still resembled a house. 
Along much of these winding journeys, camouflage 
of various patterns remained, whole or in rags ; and 
this also touched with unearthliness a scene where 
shell holes lay like giant soup plates, scummed with 
motionless bubbles and awful liquid. 

And yet the fury which had reduced the world to 
this, produced — otherwise man would have perished 
as much from horror of the brain as from wounds 
of the flesh — songs, and jokes by the thousand, and 
philosophy, and in many cases deep, ultimate, serene 



258 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

belief in God. A piece of poUu philosophy from the 
trenches has been translated into English and ap- 
plied to our doughboys ; but by an American brain 
no such train of logic would have been formulated, 
although, once it was f ormulated, American brains 
might readily have assented to it : 

With the poUu everythmg might be worse. 

Of two things one is certain — 

Either you're mobilized or you're not mobilized; 

If you're not mobilized, there's no need to worry, 

But if you 're mobilized, one of two things is certain — 

Either you're at the front or behind the lines. 

If you're behind the lines, there's no need to worry, 

But if you 're at the front, one of two things is certain — 

Either you're in a safe place or you're exposed to danger. 

If you're exposed to danger, one of two things is certain — 

Either you're wounded or you're not wounded. 

But if you 're wounded, one of two things is certain — 

Either you 're wounded slightly or you *re wounded seriously. 

If you're wounded seriously, one of two things is certain — 

Either you recover or you die. 

If you recover, there's no need to worry. 

If you die you can't worry, so what's the use. 

The gaiety of this, which flashes through it like a 
blade of well-tempered steel, strangely ratifies a word 
of foresighted discernment spoken by Bismarck in 
1874. That was three years after he had defeated 
France and taken Alsace-Lorraine from her. He 
was passing with a friend through some German 
city — ^it may have been Stuttgart — ^and in the evening 
went to hear La Fille de Madame Angot, whose 
words and music were then quite new. It came from 
Paris. At first Bismarck was much diverted, and 
laughed and enjoyed himself. Gradually he ceased 
to laugh, became graver and graver, until he was 



LAST LAP TO ABMISTICE 259 

so dark and silent that his friend in surprise asked 
him if he did not like it. 

**Not at all/' he said. *^For here is an enemy 
singing and dancing, and an enemy who can sing and 
dance like that is not conquered. ' ' 

In those days and long after them, as late as 1914, 
indeed, the rest of the world — ^and even France her- 
self—would have heard in the sportive measures of 
Madame Angot nothing but an irresponsible, if agree- 
able, levity ; but canny old Bismarck heard that phi- 
losophy of the poUu. One remembers it was in the 
following year, 1875, that, if he had been allowed 
by certain other powers, he would have invaded 
France again in order to ** bleed her white'' so that 
she should stay so. Very obviously the gaiety of 
Madame Angot contributed its light straw to his 
perfectly wise and perfectly savage intention. 

Along the valley of the little Aire we followed very 
intelligibly the advance made during the first eleven 
days of October by our 1st Division. While Whittle- 
sey was across in the wood west of the river, perhaps 
six miles off, they were working along east of it, 
capturing Baulny, Exermont, Fleville; and there 
was but little along this ridge to hinder our view of 
the whole of this. Down below ran the river pleas- 
antly, its vaUey green with marshes and busy with 
birds and looking like something at home — ^very dif- 
ferent from the sights on the ridge. To tell a reader 
about mud is hardly worth while, therefore I will say 
no more of it than that later, beyond Grand Pre, and 
between Buzancy and Raucourt, we grew venture- 
some in our exploration, and for a while I wondered 
if I were not going to be sorry that I had come. But 
we got out of it at last, and I must certainly tell you 



260 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

about the bells of Autrecourt, another of the villages 
taken by our 1st Division, in their fight during early 
November. 

On the river Meuse, upon that reach of it which 
saw us come after the Huns in the final days, are 
Mouzon, Letanne, Angecourt, Autrecourt, with Beau- 
mont and Yoncq not far off; all names full of mem- 
ory to our divisions who pushed to the river or 
beyond it during the flight to victory just before 
the Armistice. Mouzon has a most beautiful little 
church, but its bells are gone. So are the bells gone 
from all of the churches thereabouts, save only the 
church at Autrecourt. This has one, the others fol- 
lowed where went their neighbors of Mouzon and 
all the other places. Their bells were removed by 
the Germans for the sake of their metal. One eve- 
ning, just about the time that the order went forth 
to take away all the French church bells that they 
might be melted down in Germany for the better 
destruction of the French, some Hun officers were 
enjoyiQg themselves iq Autrecourt. They were sup- 
ping freely and easily. So were the few other Ger- 
mans who were there. The village, like all of the 
Meuse- Argonne region, had been in German pos- 
session since 1914, and the officers had made them- 
selves much at home. That night during the supper, 
fire broke out in the German military stores. As 
this mishap was not at all one which concerned the 
French, they became the pleased spectators of it. 
Can you see those French peasants and villagers 
with their hands in their pockets, watching the fire 
get the better of the German stores! "When it was 
quite too late to do anything in the way of preven- 
tion, somebody came out from supper and saw. 



LAST LAP TO ABMISTICE 261 

**Mein Gott!'' lie very naturally exclaimed. 

But this did no good, nor did any of the various 
other expressions which followed from him and his 
brother officers, as they came piling out. 

**Why did you not tell us of thisT^ they demanded 
of the villagers. ^ ^ Why did you allow it to get beyond 
control I You should immediately have sounded the 
tocsin. ' ^ 

But to this the villagers had no answer except to 
smile agreeably while they shrugged their shoulders. 

So it all burned to ashes and more had to be sent 
from Germany. 

**Very well,^^ said the officers, **for your pig-dog 
disrespect for the property of the All Highest, you 
shall receive punishment. During three months, be- 
ginning tomorrow, every day two citizens shaU ring 
the tocsin for fifteen minutes.^' 

This sentence was forthwith put into effect, and 
while it was in mid-execution came the people to 
carry out the order from Germany and remove all 
church bells. But if you have no bell you can sound 
no tocsin. Therefore from the church at Autrecourt 
only two bells were taken in order that two citizens 
should be able to carry out the punishment by ring- 
ing the third bell for fifteen minutes every day till 
the three months had expired. 

Today, therefore, while all neighboring church 
towers are empty of their chimes, you can hear one 
bell at Autrecourt calling the peasants and villagers 
to their prayers. 

It was at Mouzon, next door to Autrecourt, a mile 
or so up the Meuse, that the village apothecary told 
me this, after he had accompanied me in a vain 
search for the grave of an American boy, and we 



262 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

were inside the exquisite church. Throughout all of 
this woe-begone country it was merriment bubbling 
from the eternal masculine heart that helped that 
tough heart to beat on sanely till the tempest was 
over ; and when we wander among the crosses where 
lie the dead men whose hearts were stilled during 
the storm, we shall not imagine it rightly if we 
imagine it as going on without laughter. There is 
no laughter for us among the crosses: but of them 
that were in it, few who survive, I think, could have 
come through and remained at all themselves, had 
they not been capable of mirth. Therefore when I 
think of the men who fought and suffered so well — 
French, British, Americans — ^I know that most of 
them joked well too — ^know that nearly every day they 
must have exchanged words such as these between 
two American doughboys talking about a third, and 
overheard by an officer: 
**He's got just about no sense at all.'' 
* * No. If his brains were gunpowder and went off 
they wouldn^t blow his nose.'' 

The **buck privates" whom we saw in the streets 
of Sedan looked as if almost any of them could talk 
like that in almost any circumstances. Sedan they 
had not entered at the end of their rush during those 
early November days of 1918 ; this particular act had 
been most fittingly done by the French ; it was right 
to heal, so far as ever it could be healed, the wound 
and the outrage dealt there by Bismarck to France 
in 1870. Do you remember the outrage? There it 
was that the Emperor Louis Napoleon surrendered, 
and a great disaster fell upon the French army and 
nation; and while that surrender was taking place, 
Prussian trumpets blew the strains of the Marseil- 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 263 

laise into the ears of their vanquished foes. Oh, 
my friend, when yon hear talk about the * irritating ^' 
attitude of France since the war, put yourself, whose 
country has never suffered anything like this, in a 
Frenchman's place; and remember the indemnities 
which Germany purposed to exact from France, 
England, and ourselves, if she had wonl 

Just across the bridge over the Meuse as one came 
from the south into Sedan, was the house where Louis 
Napoleon had been on that day in 1870. Not far 
away on the other side of the street was an old lady 
in a booth selling picture post-cards of the place, and 
of her I bought at once a picture of that Napoleon 
house. 

**I shouldn't have wanted to own this before,'* 

said L 
**0h, no, monsieur,'' she answered, **but now it 

makes one joy, does it not?" 

Our doughboys seemed to swarm in the town, in 
the middle of the street, on the sidewalks, and in the 
house and tree-grown yard of the Cafe de la So- 
quenette. This pleasant establishment did a brisk 
business, and as we ourselves sat there pausing 
before our plunge back into the zone of utter devas- 
tation, the voices of the doughboys came to us from 
tables adjacent. 

**Well," said one, **I'm told that the boats on the 
Bhine have square port-holes to fit the heads of 
Germans." 

We left them and Sedan behind us. We had come 
into the town by the road above which they had been 
stopped by the Armistice, in their forward rush. 
This road, the Meuse, and the railway, are all close 
together at this particular point, to which three of 



264 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

our divisions came — ^the 1st on November 7th, the 
42nd on the 7th and 8th, the 77th on the 10th and 
11th. To mark this farthest fling of their victorious 
tide, a memorial stone stands today above the road. 
This I passed in those later days when the ticket 
agent was so civil to me upon finding I was an 
American. I hope that I shall drive along that road 
some day again. I find myself wishing to linger in 
words upon it now, instead of getting away from 
Sedan. It is because of our doughboys. This is my 
last chance to talk about them when they were at 
their best, and I am loath to leave it. Discipline 
and a great cause lifted thousands high above their 
daily selves for once at least, and for this they should 
feel gratitude instead of demanding pay. The flash 
of Cantigny revealed their mettle ; at Belleau Wood 
and the bridge-head at Chateau-Thierry it flashed 
again; in the second battle of the Mame the flash 
widened to a steady blaze of established certainty; 
St. Mihiel was a feat well and quickly done : but the 
Mouse- Argonne, though less imprinted on the popu- 
lar mind, rises above them all. It was truly a long 
and tough battle, and virtually all their own. It was 
difficult in every way ; through bad weather, through 
bad country, inexpertly fed and supplied at times, on 
account of the mud and the strangulation of the few 
highways of supply— and against more and more of 
Germany's best men fortified behind Germany's best 
defences: forty-seven days of it; nothing like it in 
the whole history of the nation. If there is such a 
thing as being too proud to fight, the American 
doughboy was sorely lacking in it. 

You must not look at human nature with a micro- 
scope alone ; distortion is the consequence. Even the 



LAST LAP TO ARMISTICE 265 

calendared saints were sometimes sinners^ and the 
doughboy was no saint. Moreover, in his mobilized 
ranks abroad were enlisted professional criminals, 
who escaped from discipline and degraded his name 
by their f onl deeds in Paris until a heavy hand closed 
upon them — ^while in his demobilized ranks at home 
are guard-house lawyers, politicians, pension sharks, 
who also degrade his name and drive many of the 
best of him to resign from the organization which 
held at its beginning a hope too ideal to come true 
in a world like this. None of these things has any- 
thing to do with the doughboy and his battles in 
France. He came, often most unwillingly, from a 
nation that hates war, and once in it he so conducted 
himself in that quarrel that his adversary was ware 
of him. Then he lived his great moment when disci- 
pline and the cause made him more of a man than 
he had ever been before. He showed himself a ter- 
rible fighter — those other terrible fighters, the Aus- 
tralians, found him **a bit rough. ^^ He proved a 
soldier dogged, aggressive, enterprising, and humor- 
ous — ^nobody better than he at the game. He also 
showed himself a lover of children, an adept in ath- 
letic sport, a too lavish spender, and keenly appre- 
ciative of hospitality : not in every case, of course : 
avoid the microscope. A good name lingers behind 
him. I wish that all of him were stiU as worthy 
today. And so my chances to dwell upon him, my 
American brother, end. My last close sight of him 
was in Sedan, gay beneath the trees of the Caf6 de 
la Soquenette, conversing about Rhine steamers that 
fitted their port-holes to the square heads of the 
Germans. 



266 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

We left Sedan by another way and went along by 
another river, la Chiers, which comes into the Meuse 
just above Sedan, and goes through Carignan, Mont- 
medy, and Longuyon, as we also did. All that road 
was also along or near the Metz-M6zieres artery, 
whose stranglmg by us throttled Germany's last 
breath and threw her on her knees, praying to be 
spared. There was no way of not granting that 
petition; but prayers granted to Germany do not 
improve her soul. Greater tragedy than the pre- 
mature Armistice and the belated Treaty cannot be 
met in history. We saw the chimneys of the Briey 
basin, whence Germany got much mineral help for 
the war, imtil we cut it off from her — and then in 
one of those strange moments that was like some 
evil magic, growing trees and living houses ended, 
and we re-entered the awful Thing and the awful 
Silence. 

''For mark! No sooner was I fairly found 
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, 

Than, pausing to throw backward a last view 
To the safe road, 'twas gone I grey plain all round : 

Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. 
I might go on ; nought else remained to do. 

''As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair 
In leprosy— thin dry blades pricked the mud 

Which underneath looked kneaded up witii blood. 
And more than that — a furlong on — ^why there I 

What bad use was that engine for, that wheel. 
Or brake, not wheel— that harrow fit to reel 
• Men's bodies out like silkf " 

Had he who wrote that passed in vision seventy 
years beforehand over this ground of the Woevre 
and the Meuse- Argonne t 



XXTT 



VERDUN 



Somewhere far back along our way, near its begin- 
ningy I had remembered that line of mystery in Lear: 
**The worst is not while we can say, This is the 
Worst/' The words came back to me as we for the 
first time neared Verdun; and Verdun has caused 
my speech to die away at every sight of it that I 
have had since. On its heights and in its hollows 
I have walked with friends, none of us speaking a 
word. Nothing that I or any man can say, or any 
picture, will make you know what Verdim is. Music 
might steep the spirit in the same mood. It is best 
such a thing should have to be seen, should cost 
eflfort; could its whole reality be carried about in 
books and spread on laps, even it wotdd be cheap- 
ened. As it is, you must go there to know it all, 
you must climb about among its barbed and wasted 
mounds, and stand high up a long while, and look 
slowly down over the torn sea of shell holes to the 
bottom and across the wide plain there, pock-marked 
and patterned by the blasts of war. Whiffs of the 
rotting dead are no longer blown to your nostrils 
as you go about ; on that first day they were. Writ- 
ten in my notes on the spot, at the moment, is this : 

**Douaumont. Pools, humps, stones, corrugated 
fragments, dead distance, dead near by, stumps, steel 
rail, rusted bits, whiffs from the dead, human bones 
(a German grave, his shoes, his bones, a cross of 
twigs unnamed), a pool with thirty dead in it, and 
larks in the sky.*' 

Sitting at Douaumont and staring, it seemed as if 

267 



268 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

all the miles of sacred ways we had travelled led 
here ; as if we had been coining here ever since Com- 
piegne, through Amiens, Reims, everywhere, the 
whole journey being inevitably to bring us to this. 
In my thought I could see Reims and Amiens back 
on the road — ^truer to say, they came and stood in 
my thoughts suddenly. They were this, and this 
but a piece of them, just like the French boy who 
wrote the letters, just like the whole of magnificent, 
tragic France. 

As you come in one way from ifetain, the white 
dead fingers of the trees begin their stiff gesture 
along the ridges. They beckon motionlessly, spread- 
ing their ranks over the undulating dearth. Stark 
and thin, with crazed knuckle joints, they show that 
something wrong has happened to them, that they did 
not die naturally, but were murdered. They stretch 
around Tavannes and on to Vaux, in groves, or 
by twos and threes, or sometimes just one flayed 
bone, sticking up from meshes of barbed wire and 
bumps of slaughtered earth. This ground, Vaux and 
Douaumont, just these two fortresses, only a part of 
Verdun ^s large circle of strongholds, was where dur- 
ing four months 10,000 shells of 8 inches and larger 
fell every day. Multiply it — one hundred and twenty 
times ten thousand. How is it that any trees at aU 
still stand to show that they were murdered f What 
wonder, that all the men still alive by the ninth day 
of it were weeping t 

**They shall not pass.*^ That was Petain's prom- 
ise about the Huns. 

Before they knew that they never could pass, the 
earth had become like this, and it was November — 
they had begun to try to pass in February. Over 



VERDUN 269 

at Les Eparges not very far to our southeast, 70,000 
French had been killed; of these dead, there were 
8,000 not in shreds, the other 62,000 were mere name- 
less drops of blood and bits of flesh. That seems bad 
— ^but what was the cost of life here to prevent the 
Germans passing? To save Verdun, four hundred 
thousand French were killed, and of these were found 
eighty thousand that still were human bodies. Of 
these bodies about one-half could be identified. On 
the forlorn hill beside the road, and opposite the 
path that leads to Douaumont, is a wooden building, 
a sort of chapel for the fragments of the featureless, 
dismembered dead. A good man, the Padre Noel, 
lives here in the wilderness, to be near these bones 
and give them sacred shelter as fast as they are 
found. They are being carefully searched for and 
almost every day more are collected. Some came 
from quite near, in a pinched little gully, the Bavin 
de la Dame. Five hundred were killed in this place 
and buried ; but later fighting wiped all these graves 
away. In Padre Noel's chapel stood fifty-two coflSns 
full of nameless bones on the last day I was there. 
More are there now. All will never be found in that 
wild continent of obliteration ; but in time, instead of 
the wooden chapel, houses more permanent for those 
bones will stand there: churches where all the be- 
reaved of every faith may come and say their prayers 
— ^a church for Catholics and one for Protestants, 
one for Jews and one for Mohammedans ; the fami- 
lies of every race that died fighting for Verdun will 
have a sacred roof beneath which they can kneel and 
feel at home and think of their dead. Or, if they live 
too far away, or are too poor to come, they can know 
that Padre Noel is there watching over the coflBns, 



270 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

and that when his watch is over, another will follow 
him. Of the four hnndred thousand French killed 
at Verdun, eighty thousand were fairly whole, forty 
thousand recognizable : our American total of deaths 
(to September 1, 1919) was 81,141, of which 35,556 
were killed in action — or about the same number that 
were recognizable after Verdun. 

I wanted to climb down to the bottom of Vaux. 
It was a good long descent; but with the earth in 
natural state, half an hour would have been more than 
enough. With the earth as it was, I got a little way 
below the flat top of the fortress and went no farther. 
I was among barbed wire, I had crossed some sag- 
ging strands of it, more of it was ahead ; all the way 
down, fence after fence of it encircled the slope, each 
but a few yards apart. This was to climb over, with 
a ground to walk on that was ditched deep with 
trenches and so tossed and gutted that, had I made 
the attempt, I should have been letting my body 
down into holes and pulling it up at every dozen steps. 
It would have taken all that morning, even if none 
of the wire proved impassable. So I stopped where 
I was and looked' at the great view. I had seen it 
before in the days when no moving or living thing 
could be descried. Today the slow smoke of a train, 
creeping out from the deep folds of the hiUs on 
its way to the open spaces of reconstruction, marked 
the solitude. Its sound did not come up to me as I 
watched it wind out of sight. It ran on a road-bed 
between shell holes, dug-outs and the blur of barbed 
wire, and once it stopped at a demolished station. 
Beyond this, the hills opened upon the plain stretch- 
ing to the forest of Spincourt. It was from this 
wood that the Germans descended upon Verdun. 



VERDUN 271 

The distance was wan, effaced, of hues lighter or 
darker, according as the land was open or wooded. 
Thus the distance ; near at hand, the broken upheaval, 
the bristling wire, the waste of splinters, slanted 
weeds, and stones. A grave was here. No others. 
It had the hill to itself. It was close against one of 
the barbed wire fences. I made my way to it and 
copied the inscription on the wooden cross : 

L6on Fautier 

30 Avril 1916 

119* Reg* d'infantrie 

That day had been the 38th of the siege of Verdun. 
How many shells by then had fallen on Vaux? And 
why was L6on Fautier not sleeping in some cemetery 
with comrades for company! Had he fallen here, 
and had his people wished that he stay heret The 
cross was set in rubble and supported by stones and 
the rusting shells of the 75 gun. Not a wreath, not 
a leaf, lay on this naked grave. 

Such is Vaux. Such it was in May 1919, and two 
years later it was tmchanged. Exactly like it is its 
neighbor Douaumont. In both you may descend and 
be shown their dark interiors : a great disappearing 
gun with its levers and machinery ; the hospital ; the 
surgery; the chapel; where the commander slept; 
where the soldiers lived; their well of water; the 
place where the Germans came in; the gallery of a 
frightful battle — the walls look stone-deaf from it; 
and other galleries and labyrinths which you do not 
explore, but merely peer into; all by the light of a 
lamp held up for you by a grave poilu. He points 
to where the tunnels lead to the tunnelled citadel in 
Verdun itself, ten miles away. You can visit like- 



272 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

wise this enormous nndergroimd place and its gal- 
leries; its chapel; its dining-room; where soldiers 
and civilians lived in shelter during the siege of the 
city in which every house was struck but one. It is 
all strange and solemn; not to be missed; but you 
will learn more in the outside air. Books have been 
written about Verdun, many books already, a shelf 
of them, well-nigh a literature. They are good, too, 
some of them, well worth reading — ^the last days of 
the Fort de Vaux, for instance. But you will learn 
more in the outside air. Walk in the city, walk in 
the plains, go up the hills and look down. Find some 
chauffeur who fought through it all the four years, 
and is here still, and will tell you about it, if he feel 
that you care. Talk to Padre Noel among his coflSns. 
I walked away from him across the road and wan- 
dered along the path that leads to Douaumont. Pres- 
ently this changes to planks and later accompanies 
the light rails of the little war railroad. It goes 
among and over trenches. Some of them are kept 
as they were, but most are melting in the wet and 
crumbling in the dry. In the bottom of one of these 
shelters I passed near two women in black. They 
were so still that they might have been something 
come from another world. They held a paper and 
looked down at it. I went on to where the path and 
railroad end below the abrupt, gashed sxunmit. This 
was two years after I had written in my diary upon 
my first sight of Douaumont. In the later diary 
come these words : ^* Walked to Douaumont. Rusted 
debris — Slumps — ^larks — ^pools^ — silence.'' I climbed 
to the top. There was the unchanged sight, the de- 
scents of barbed wire, the unfolding hills, the stretch- 
ing distance, wan, effaced. I explored for a while, 



VERDUN 273 

and came down the steep banks to the plank path 
again, and so back among the trenches. Still the two 
women were down in that shelter, motionless, black, 
their paper in hand. I guessed right what brought 
them. Every day, I learned, came women like this 
with papers by which they are guided to the spot 
where their living became their dead. There they 
stay, remembering. 

^ Thus, walking about in the air, and stopping, it 
sinks into you: the murdered trees, the forts, the 
scarred hills rising out of silence into silence, and 
motionless women in black, pilgrims to the foot of 
earth on which their sons and husbands fell. 

After such a sight, more sights followed, as the 
road from Padre Noel and his house of coffins sinks 
to levels below; it passes the Trench of Bayonets, 
the ravine where the buried dead were torn out of 
their graves by later violence; it winds through a 
tormented region, gashed, discolored, quarried with 
shelter holes like rows of ovens, scribbled with 
trenches, blotched with craters — ^the Cote du Poivre ; 
then it comes out beyond these ravaged steeps and 
slants to the level ravage along the Meuse, the 
tumbled village of Bras, the impassable streets of 
Verdun itself. 

One road threaded through the town; into the 
others, as at Reims, the houses had fallen, barri- 
cading passage. By climbing over their heaps one 
could make one's way on foot from one end of a 
street to the other, but in no other manner. When 
next I saw these stones two years later, they were 
not yet built back again into houses; that will take 
a long time; they had been cleared away from the 
streets and stood upon their land, symmetrically 



274 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

piled in level cubes, each stone numbered to mark 
its identity. The jostled disorder of races at Verdun 
in the early day was as mingled as the stones which 
blocked the thoroughfare. We had our lunch in a 
Y canteen that had been a house of which enough 
remained for this purpose. Its street front was 
fairly whole, its back gaped upon a court into which 
the rest of this house and parts of its neighbors had 
been hurled. Timbers lay there, and the twisted iron 
of a balcony, and a plaster Virgin, and over these 
things hung a pair of drawers recently washed. Eat- 
ing together in the room were Russians, French, 
Americans, negroes, and behind the counter serving 
them stood American women in blue caps. Here and 
there in doorways stpod German prisoners. Near 
me was a negro soldier from Virginia who told me 
that his name was Lee ; behind him sat a boy from 
Oklahoma who said that he was glad he had come 
because **he had it to do,^' but now that it was done 
he would like to get home. 

Upon the townsfolk and the peasant mind, what 
mark was left by this huddled medley of races sud- 
denly pitched everywhere into the quiet midst of 
France! A very slight mark upon their minds it 
must be, after four years of fighting for their lives. 
To those who came through that, no sight can ever 
be strange again, no matter what is destined to enter 
Verdun by its ancient gate, beneath which have al- 
ready passed so many centuries of sights. It will 
leave but a faint impression upon the French mind. 
The mark upon the French race might be deeper, 
did heredity cope evenly with environment — but it 
does not. Those half-French offspring of unfor- 
given, overtempted mothers, begotten by Mongolians, 



VERDUN 275 

Slavs, Teutons, Africans, English, Americans, may 
— some of them at least — have tragic childhoods; 
to the nation they will make but little difference, and 
most of them will come to count as wholly French. 
Verdun as it had fallen and still lay, was without 
shape; Verdun with its stones piled in the blank 
spaces where its houses had stood once, was like a 
mouth with many teeth gone. But no gaps were in 
the sane, determined spirit ; not a voice, unless after 
some intimacy of acquaintance, told you of loss, or 
of hardship, but only of going on, of determination 
to come back to full life and vigor, no matter how 
long the struggle might be. By the Meuse, where 
it runs through the town sluggishly, is a little public 
square, the place Chevert, named to honor a soldier 
of Verdun. With top-boots and sword, his spirited 
statue rises in the middle of the square ; underneath 
is his name and rank : Chevert, Lieutenant General, 
1695-1769. Upon another face of the pedestal are 
words recording that the fact that he never became 
a marshal is a loss, not to him, but to those who 
choose him for their model — and then, upon still 
another face, an account of him so proud that I wish 
the words into which I must translate it could equal 
the fire which thrills through the original : 

Without Ancestors, 
Without fortune, without influence, 
Orphan from childhood, 
He entered the Service 

aged eleven years. 

He rose in spite of envy 

by force of merit, 

And each upward step 

was the reward 

of a noble act. 



276 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

^^Welly'' I have thought more than once, as I have 
come to that French soldier's statae in my walks 
about the streets of his native dty, '^he was like 
France in these present years — without fortune, 
without influence, rising in spite of envy, each up- 
ward step the reward of a noble act." 

It is to Verdun, indeed, that all the sacred ways 
conduct. Even after travel along the others, by the 
Lys, by the Somme, by the Mame, and east to the 
Vosges by Thann and Massevaux, something more 
which these have not spoken, is heard in that silence 
there, and one comes from it with knowledge of 
France still deeper than even Beims and Amiens 
could impart. 

Go, after seeing Vaux and Douaumont and all 
other spots which are included in the word Verdun, 
to the Mort Homme. Do not be content to look at 
that hill from your car at Cumieres; leave the car 
and walk to the top of Dead Man's Hill, and stand 
there beside its monument. Give to this an after- 
noon, so that the light of the ending day may shine 
upon that sight and mingle with your thoughts. 
From there is plain each way they came upon Ver- 
dun ; first on the east side of the Meuse to Vaux and 
Douaumont — ^which you can see far across the gulf 
of silence ; then, because the fire from the west side 
forts raked them — Fort de la Chaume, Fort du 
Ghana, Fort des Sartelles, Fort de Choiseul, Fort 
de bois Bourrus, Fort de Marre, Fort du Vacherau- 
viUe — ^they changed their plan of siege and came on 
the Mort Homme side of the Meuse. They fell by 
thousands day after day, but still came, rising as it 
were out of the earth. The French did not learn for 
some time that it was reaUy a timnel through which 



VERDUN 277 

they made their way under the hills from the northern 
slope towards Forges. Hill 304 was part of this 
battle-gronnd. In a circle stand the heights from 
which the French ponred their fire. Sometimes this 
hnge cup of country was a roar of flames to its rim, 
and it wears today the charred look of ordeal. It 
puts you once more in mind of the four hundred 
thousand French who died here, of whom forty thou- 
sand could be recognized. Those men had to fight 
so hard lest the Huns pass that there could be no 
stopping, they were given no breathing spell, until 
70 per cent, of any command was wounded or tolled ; 
then the surviving remnant could pause and wait a 
while until its strength was filled by new men, and 
sleep and change had made it fit to go in again. 

Over Dead Man 's Hill the sky itself seems to grow 
more solemn. From its summit the earth sinks away, 
north, east, and west, in furrow after furrow of f rag^ 
ments. The receding lumps merge and stretch to the 
feet of distant hills, or to the horizon. The eye looks 
across the wide valley to Vaux, or toward Montfau- 
con, over a world that might be a planet after death ; 
a planet that did not bum out and chill gradually, but 
was violently killed through some last encounter 
between the forces that created it. One thinks. Will 
man^s engines, greater than he already, break wholly 
from his control and in the end be able to tear the 
world to dust, so that as dust it floats on through 
space— or will man sometime be so taught by what 
war has done that he will cease to wage it and will 
not have to die before he find peace t 

Nothing that you see from Dead Man's Hill gives 
an answer. You go on looking at the sky, at the 
quiet, pitiful miles ; and here, still more than at Mont- 



278 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

f ancon, the tidal wave of silence rolls in and covers 
the place deep. It is gigantic, but yet so wistf nl, so 
yearning, so potent, that yon come to feel it is a sort 
of being made of a million beings, and has a message, 
and might speak if rightly commanded. 

It went with me away from the hill, north to 
Brienlles and across the Mouse there. As we came 
back along that east side of the river through Sivry, 
and Consenvoye where the German line had been, and 
then Brabant where had been the French line, and the 
ground and the ruin never changed, it seemed to enter 
me. Rain began to fall and light was leaving the day. 
Every village was a heap of stones, many houses 
blown out of all shape. In some houses that were 
half left, a single light burned, and you saw a peasant, 
man or woman, after the day^s work upon the shell 
holes, entering home for the night. Along this road, 
I think in Consenvoye, one half -ruin had passed by 
upon which remained the solitary (German word: 
Spielhaus. 



PART SECOND 



TWO YEAES AFTEB 



In the long run even a gloomy truth is better company 
than a cheerful falsehood. 

Augustine Bibbell, Be$ Judicata. 



xxni 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 



Soon after seeing Verdun I came home, where, with 
far too many Americans, the war was out of sight and 
out of mind. Moreover, great numbers of my fellow- 
countrymen were still of the stale, misdirected 
opinion that we owed our ally, England, nothing 
but a grudge. Whether we like it or not, England is 
quite the best thing since Bome, better than Bome, 
and not only the real cradle of American liberty but 
its constant friend, although she once tried to upset 
the child and has since then rocked it rather violently 
at times. History, which has been concealed from 
American youth by the grudgers, shows unanswer- 
ably that England has never allowed other nations to 
be rough with her offspring, invariably saying 
"hands off'' to all comers who meditated assault — ^to 
Germany last and most emphatically in 1898. A cen- 
tury of suppressed facts shows the distortion instilled 
into the American mind by school histories and poli- 
ticians who want Irish votes. These facts I gathered 
and printed, and it took a long while to make a short 
book. Then I set to work upon my second debt of 
honor, this time to France who, next to England, is 
the greatest thing since Bome, and our next best 
friend. The truth is that since the surrender of 
Comwallis in 1781, France on the whole has been less 
good than England to us, and has given us more oc- 

281 



282 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

casions for a gmdgey if grudge were possible ; but it 
is not ; no American can forget what France did for 
UB in the darkest day of our childhood^ and the high 
example of generosity which she set in the first treaty 
of alliance that she made with us : she was to receive 
no compensation for her help. This was unprece- 
dented in history, and our following the precedent in 
1918 squares no account iq decent minds, because 
between friends there can be no question of such 
accounts. 

More than a dozen of the preceding chapters had 
been written ; it was late in 1920 ; I had not been back 
to see the devastated regions, but many whom I knew 
had been there. Had they all told me the same story, 
there would have been nothing to do but believe them 
and go on writing this book; but the stories would 
have bewildered any one: France was doing very 
well, France was doing very badly, she was rich, she 
was poor, she was working nobly to get on her feet, 
she was perfectly idle and waiting for Germany ^s 
reparation money, she was militaristic and making 
all the trouble there was, she was not militaristic and 
she wanted only to be let alone. What was there to 
do but go over agahi and see for myself! I went 
accordingly for two months — and stayed eight, be- 
cause to see everything and hear everytiiing and after 
that to know my own mind clearly, was quite beyond 
my powers, unless I took my time over it. I did not 
see everything, but certainly I saw France, and I 
heard everything else from very close. 

My pilgrimage in chaos tangible had ended at 
Verdun, and now began a journey in chaos intangible, 
chaos politic, moral, financial, paper nations, paper 
money, crumbling friendships, gathering hatreds^ 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 283 

misery and menace so appalling, that the tragedy of 
the peace grew blacker to me than the tragedy of the 
war and for a while I conld not see the wood for the 
trees. Merely to read the morning paper was to renew 
each day yesterday's restlessness, as in the war 
times ; but this new restlessness was as much subtler 
than the old had been as poison gas is more subtle 
than bullets. Good news came during the war some- 
times, it never came now ; in a word, civilization, after 
its four years' sleepless battle for life, had entered 
upon no healing period of rest, but had merely passed 
from one state of insonmia into another. What was 
happening to Wrangelf Was Austrian starvation be- 
ing relieved! Were the English miners to strike? Was 
the plebiscite in Upper Silesia to be dominated by 
Prussia t Was the Irish question nearer solution f 
Were they going to cut down Germany's reparation 
any further! Would she pay her next instalment t 
It was for answers to such questions as these that 
one opened the morning paper, instead of to see what 
was happening on the West Front. There was no 
west or any other front, no Hindenburg Line between 
warring forces, the new evil was invisible and crossed 
all fronts like a pestilence. Paper money is the mor- 
phine of economic insomnia, as vain and dangerous a 
drug, and many governments in Europe were giving 
themselves weekly injections of it. Through the con- 
tinuous convulsions in exchange, a traveller with 
American money could live in Vienna or Warsaw or 
Buda Pesth luxuriously for about ten dollars a week, 
while on the other hand an Austrian who had buried 
in his garden a fortune equal to a thousand dollars in 
1914, would find it equal to less than two dollars if 
he should dig it up. While these earthquakes rocked 



284 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

the buying and selling of Europe, England's unem- 
ployment dole had merely helped to beget industrial 
paralysis and a breed of bribed idlers. These 
marched through London streets in smaU, mean 
processions flanked by policemen, their flags and 
their faces all one piece of ignoble discontent. Every 
one in England seemed to be hard at work except 
the laboring classes, whose aim, apparently, was 
to make a second Russia of Great Britain. I know 
of a gardener who gave his employer notice, and on 
being asked if he was dissatisfied replied, no, but 
that he could get higher wages for walking in the 
procession of the unemployed. 

Such was the background of my new pilgrimage, 
every day being crowded with experiences and con- 
versations so vivid and engrossiug, that only at cer- 
tain times when I was alone did the menace which 
threatened us all — ^and is nearer now— darken my 
enjoyment. 

I went over every foot of the devastated regions 
that I had seen two years before, and all the rest that 
I had not then seen — from Ypres to Alsace and every- 
thing between ; the Somme four times, the Aisne four 
times, Champagne once, the Meuse-Argonne twice, 
St. Mihiel once, the Vosges once. I began these 
journeys early in February and finished them early 
in August, able so to watch the land in different sea- 
sons. I went as the guest and companion of French 
and English officers, with friends, and alone ; meeting 
everywhere official and unofficial courtesy all the 
more friendly when it was discovered that I had come 
on my own errand, the representative of nobody and 
nothing except my own desire to ascertain the truth 
and tell it. I spent one deeply interesting week at 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 285 

Geneva, meeting under auspices that I can never 
forget the members of the Secretariat of the League 
of Nations. I heard of their work from themselves. 
I saw where they did it, I talked with several of them 
at length. I felt as if I listened to statesmen, not to 
politicians. I came away to grow steadily more 
sorry than ever that the reservations made by our 
Senate should have been rejected by Mr. Wilson. In 
the opinion of Lord Grey they were proper, and M. 
Andre Tardieu, one of the ablest minds in France, has 
written in his book that they were no grave modifica- 
tion of the general document. I wish that Mr. Wil- 
son had not kept us out of the League of Nations ; 
we could do no better thing than to join it intelli- 
gently; various small countries have brought their 
difficulties to it with success, and its action seems 
steadily to be enlarging in scope and gaining in 
authority. Any device so new cannot win immediate 
acceptance, and none so complicated should have been 
set going all at once. I am even of opinion that it 
would be well if France could persuade herself to 
admit Germany into the League if ever the improb- 
able happen and Germany give to her and to the 
world more solid proofs than she has so far of ** moral 
disarmament. ' ' I did not travel in Germany, but I 
met, sometimes daUy, EngUsh and Americans and 
French who had just come from there, and whose 
reports did not seem to me wholly reassuring. For- 
tunately, the convictions which I have been able to 
extract from my second pilgrimage in chaos are few 
and clear : 

Is France militaristic! No. 

Is France idle ? No. 

Is France well off f No. 



286 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

Are those Americans right who wish to keep np 
American isolation f No. 

There they are, my four convictions; but before 
dealing with them, I must say that nothing I found 
over there so concerned me as the falling apart of 
England and France and the falling together of Eng- 
land and Germany. It seemed to me that England 
was forgetting **I)er Tag" rather soon, her battles 
in Flanders and Picardy rather soon, and rather soon 
the twenty thousand manufactories and five hundred 
thousand houses that in France had been laid in 
partial or total ruin. Some of the reasons were 
natural but none of them wise, as it seemed to me, 
unless there were complete ^^ moral disarmament" in 
Germany; and I remembered Benjamin Franklin at 
the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when 
some signer had remarked, ^^We must all hang to- 
gether," and Franklin rejoined, ** Otherwise we shall 
all hang separately. " It seemed to me that the Eng- 
lish were forgetting prematurely that in 1914 Ger- 
many's plan had been to hang several nations 
separately, and that only their hanging together had 
stopped her. 

Beneath the commercial reasons for this estrange- 
ment, lurked two which may be termed psychological. 
There was some jealousy. Each had been necessary 
to the other's salvation, each would have liked it 
better if it had wholly saved the other — although, 
could this have happened, the other (whichever it 
was) would have been still less pleased. Second, the 
principle of old acquaintance was asserting itself 
quite obviously in a sort of inverted manner; one 
heard of unnatural friends and foes. Centuries of 
enmity lay between England and France, and but four 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 287 

years of a common cause. Once the common cause 
was removed, old acquaintance would not be forgot, 
and this acquaintance was hostile, while a long past 
of friendship lay between England and Germany. 
All this was very natural — and very undesirable. It 
was made worse by a misapplication of one of Eng- 
land 's most magnanimous characteristics, shaking 
hands with your enemy and forgetting all about your 
quarrel, once you have soundly thrashed him. This 
does very well, provided two things are true : your 
enemy must give you an honest hand, and he must be 
your enemy alone; you can't gracefully shake hands 
with somebody else's enemy. It does not seem to me 
that Germany has given an honest hand to anybody 
(unless this has happened very lately indeed) and I 
know of no compelling reason to believe that she has 
ceased to be the enemy of France. Why should she t 
Why should she renounce — ^and especially in the cir- 
cumstances of the Armistice and what has followed 
it — ^a plan of world dominion for which she has skil- 
fully and subtly been made ready for so long a time t 
Prussia began to train the grandfathers of the Ger- 
mans who fought this war. Every toy, every song, 
every book, every teaching from their nurseries to 
their manhood has instilled three generations with 
love of the Fatherland, contempt for other nations, 
faith in the sacred mission of Kultur, and conquest 
of the earth to spread its blessings — ^and for other 
benefits of a more material kind. Just because she 
failed in 1918, is all this to drop off Germany's back 
like a change of linen f Were I a German and had 
the deep and sincere belief and love of the Father- 
land that is so fine a passion with them, it would not 
drop off me ; it would be part of my soul. 



288 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

**0h, you're pro-French !' ' said an English friend 
to me. 

Well, it mnst have happened to everyone to agree 
sometimes with one friend rather than with another, 
and in this case I am bonnd to say that I think France 
has the right of it. Some of her spokesmen have put 
her, by their impatience, seemingly in the wrong ; but 
in all faith and justice she is having what Americans 
call a ** raw deal.'' 

Beside the causes of disagreement already named, 
is one for which it is even more difficult to find any 
solution. Without two things no nation can live: 
these are food and safety. To buy food Englaiid 
must sell goods and she needs Germany as a market. 
But France has to be safe; she has seen Germany 
overrun her twice in fifty years and these were not the 
first times, and Germany has a population of sixty- 
five million to France's thirty-eight. Moreover, 
France has to be re-built and this will keep Germany 
poor if she pays. But if Germany is poor, how is 
England to buy bread, since so much of her money 
comes from what she sells to Germany! If Germany 
is rich she can invade France again. Having just 
been half -killed, France does not wish to be wholly 
slain. 

Here is a clash between two national instincts of 
self-preservation, and both are perfectly just ; Eng- 
land must live, France must live ; and this pressing 
fact causes each to have an inlook which is larger 
than their outlook. 

To an Englishman one can say: 

** Are you quite sure that Germany will never come 
after you again? Don't you remember how sure you 
were that she wasn't coming in 1914? Are *Der Tag' 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 289 

and *Gott strafe England' wholly turned to milk and 
honey t And aren't yon forgetting Prance's experi- 
ence? When yon talk of her greedy indemnity, 
aren't yon confusing indemnity with reparation!" 

To a Frenchman one can say : 

**Do you want England to go under t Don't you 
think she might be useful again some day on the 
SommeT And are you quite consistent when you 
insist — as at times you do — ^that Germany must be 
kept poor but that she must also pay you about eight 
hundred million dollars in gold a year t ' ' 

But to an American one must say : 

"If you continue to consider that none of this has 
anything to do with you, you are the biggest fool of 
the lot." 

They are all pushing each other off the plank. But 
need old acquaintances fall out so 1 Must either Eng- 
land or France go under? The thought is xmbear- 
able. Is there no way of taking turns at the plank, 
and making land together somehow? The question 
is really much wider and far worse than this : more 
than two nations are struggling in the water with not 
enough plank, the whole of western civilization is 
barely keeping its head above the surface ; and I have 
slowly and very reluctantly been forced to the con- 
viction that we Americans must throw this civiliza- 
tion a life-preserver; not because it is virtuous' or 
humane to do so — although I think it would be that — 
but because I believe that, if we do not, we shall in 
the end be dragged under ourselves. Our ship of 
state is no longer a solitary craft sailing her own 
voyage to her own port, she is one of a fleet, and the 
ports are all the same: science has enabled such 
increasing millions to survive who used to perish; 



290 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

electricity has so enmeshed the world in its net, that 
we and our various welfares are all crowded and 
woven together in one vast common interest ; we can- 
not get out of the net if we would, it is ultimately sink 
or swim, live or die together. Difference of race, of 
speech, of government, of religion, of anything you 
please, can not outweigh the huge identity of bread 
We can raise enough for ourselves no doubt for a 
while, but does any one who has grown beyond having 
a brain of one dimension, and can see commerce 
steadily and see it whole, imagine that we should do 
well if all the rest of the nations were to die of starva- 
tion t How about Utah Copper, Baldwin Locomotive 
Works, Amoskeag Mills, how about Lowell, Law- 
rence, Manchester, Fail River, Bridgeport, Pitts- 
burgh, Birmingham t Could all the industries of our 
country sell each other enough to keep paying divi- 
dends, or the interest on their bonds t Were these to 
fail, all fortunes in the country would be wiped out, 
there would be no money to pay labor for the work of 
its hands, no money to pay taxes to run the govern- 
ment, none for anything, and everything would stop ; 
we should arrive where Russia is. All Europe is in 
sight of such a state, and if it overtakes Europe, our 
turn will inevitably and implacably be next. Ruin 
will stride over the sea and tear tariffs and senators 
to scraps of paper. Since ours is the only ship at 
present afloat, we shall have to throw some sort of 
life-preserver to Europe. Our contribution to the war 
should be, and will be, supplemented. Much money 
that we lent England she spent upon our own muni- 
tion plants when they worked for her ; only through 
this expenditure were they sufficiently equipped to 
work for us when we came into the war ; wi^out it, 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 291 

they could not have supplied us. If we count as our 
supplemental contribution every dollar that we lent 
England which she spent^ so to speak^ at the fronts 
or which she loaned her allies to spend there^ we 
shall do no more than right. We shall do less than 
right if we fail to do this. — ^But when a man has 
wrecked his own life, it does not become him very 
well to patronize those who are helping him to repair 
it. Europe, through jealousies, meanness, greedy and 
incompetence, has brought herself to grief. Less 
patronizing on the part of Europeans towards Amer- 
icans would oil the machinery quite a little. 

France's irritation with the world in general and 
with her recent ally, England, in particular, is just 
as natural and just as little wise, as the feeling in 
England is about her. France is not idle, not militar- 
istic, nor well to do; she knows that she is by no 
means out of tiie woods, and she feels that she is 
forgotten. 

Her enfevered state affected the pulse of almost 
every sustained conversation that I held with her 
people. I recall how it disturbed the serene and mel- 
low loveliness of a Sunday afternoon in Beaune, when 
spring was coming slowly up that way and the winter 
twigs seemed visibly to be growing warm. I was de- 
fending England, when my companion broke out : 

"It is easy for them. They are as uninvaded as 
Germany herself. '* 

** Think of their dead on your soil,'* I responded. 

**We do think of them. Do they often think of 
ours t They do not see our graves, while we see both 
ours and theirs.'* 

**They are not having an easy time. Their un- 
employed '' 



292 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

'^We have our own iineinployed, as well as our own 
dead/' 

**Yes, but yours — ^why, compared to theirs, your 
unemployed are a handful. Theirs run to the million, 
and yours not even to the hundred thousand." 

**I wonder if you think us Frendi a little — 
Chinese f 

** Since you have said it — ^may I agree t Perhaps 
you will not think it quite such bad manners when I 
add that we Americans are also somewhat Clunese, 
and that I fancy every nation has always been so, 
either moderately or excessively ; but I find only two 
great nations worse than the French, Germany — ^and 
the Chinese!'' 

She laughed. 

'^I think that England is the least Chinese of us 
all," I ventured to add. 

Her laughing stopped. ^^One sees well that after 
all you are pro-English." 

**My dear lady, in London they called me pro- 
French, and two years ago our soldiers eyed me 
askance because I insisted in speaking well of you to 
them. They were inclined to suspect that I was pro- 
everything except pro- American. Sometimes I feel 
that the north pole must be the only agreeable place 
left in the world because nobody lives there. Now, at 
the risk of your displeasure, I repeat, that to every 
unemployed Frenchman England has about four hun- 
dred, and that compared to their need to sell their 
wares, yours is almost negligible. ' ' 

After a short silence, **do you think," she asked, 
* * that if it was their Birmingham, their Leeds, their 
Sheffield, their Canterbury Cathedral, that were in 
ruins, and their wives and daughters who had been 



OLD ACQUAINTANCE 293 

deported and debauched, they would enjoy hearing us 
ask them to excuse Germany's debtf 

I could only meet it by saying, * * Do you ever think 
that what you French lost more than a hundred years 
ago and have adjusted yourselves to, England lost all 
in a moment in this warT — ^At Mons in 1914, at the 
Somme in 1916 — ^the whole flower of her race, 
madame, her youth, her promise, the fit lovers for her 
fittest maidens, the fine-tempered steel of her future 
strength in peace or war, all in a moment, madame, 
burned off the face of her world like a beautiful 
forest. ' ' 

Perhaps it made her think of some of her own dead, 
for she flung up her hands. 

**Ah,'' she exclaimed, ^Hhe horror of it all! *' 

* * Horror indeed I ' ' 

More than once, that chill returned which had shot 
through me as I went along the street in Amiens in 
April 1919, and I asked myself again the same ques- 
tion that I had put then — ^were the signs of life around 
me true stirrings of convalescence, or the last me- 
chanical gestures of a man who does not know that he 
has been killed? 

I recall another talk, in Paris this time, and with 
an American. He had prophesied the war in a book 
entitled ** Problems of Power,'' which Boosevelt ad- 
vised all Americans to read, if they wished to under- 
stand Europe. Most Americans have no such desire. 
His sagacity and knowledge are better appreciated 
in Europe than in his own country; and as he con- 
tinued to unfold and discuss one depth after another 
of the world's desperate plight, it seemed almost as 
if the lights grew dim. 

**What you're saying, if it's true," I remarked, for 



294 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

my pilgrimage was still near its begimiing and my 
eyes not yet half open, '4s that yon and I, sitting here 
at this table, are living in the presence of a tragedy 
that beats j^schylus and Sophocles and Hamlet and 
Lear and Othello and every worst thing in history 
that we can think of, all rolled into one.'' 
^'I think so." 

**Yon might almost imagine," I continued, **that 
malignant gods had sat above the world, up in some 
hell, and deliberately thwarted by black magic every 
hnman effort to save ns from this, and deliberately 
helped every blunder and ignorance and vanity that 
would plunge us deeper into it." 
**Yes, it tempts one to that superstition." 
*' And here sit you and I, enjoying a good dinner I" 
** Would it noticeably help matters if we ab- 
stained f" he inquired; 'Hhe milk is spilled." 



XXIV 

OYEB THE SPILLED MILK 

The reader will recognize almost every fact in this 
chapter, of which not a word would need to be writ- 
ten, were our memories more retentive and coherent. 
History sweeps through each day in a pouring spring 
flood, and on its surface events come whirling by like 
the leaves of a torn book. We see each leaf, it rushes 
on, the next follows; none are put together in our 
brains, and so the import of what is a continuous 
story and a significant warning sweeps by us in un- 
comprehended fragments. 

In March 1918, Germany showed what she thought 
of the fourteen points set forth by Mr. Wilson as a 
basis of peace. She launched an attack upon the 5th 
British Army which came within a hair 's breadth of 
taking Amiens, of cutting apart the British and 
French, and of winning the war; she continued to 
launch attacks until she saw that the jig was up. We 
knew what her peace terms were to be, did she win. 
These were not at all like the fourteen points ; those 
were a repudiation of the spoils system between vic-» 
tor and vanquished in war; by Germany's terms her 
whole war bill was to be paid and whole countries 
were to be annexed. 

Not quite five months later, Ludendorff perceived 
that Germany had failed and must ask for an armis- 
tice. His opinion gradually prevailed in his coimtry. 

295 



296 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

One does not see what right Germany in her hour of 
failure had to peace terms which she had not accepted 
in the hour of success. It is as if the owner of a race 
horse had rejected an offer of twenty thousand 
dollars for the animal, and then after it went lame, 
stipulated for the same price. Germany was encour- 
aged to do this by the letters which Mr. Wilson wrote 
to Max of Baden without consulting the Allies, who 
at that time were driving the German Army out of 
France from the Channel to the Vosges. One can see 
that American prestige, our help that saved the day, 
led to the fourteen points being accepted **in prin- 
ciple" by the Allies as a basis of peace; at such a 
moment, whatever the Allies might think, they could 
not ignore the apparent spokesman and actual symbol 
of the United States. 

Through October 1918 the speed of our success 
heightened until it became what General Mangin has 
called it, a flight to victory; and during these days 
Foch was turning over in his mind the terms of the 
Armistice. In meditating what terms should be 
exacted, he said one day : 

* * They have fought bravely. They shall keep their 
arms." 

It was the word of a gallant soldier, it was a chival- 
rous gesture to heart-sick thousands who had bled in 
the German cause, and whose fault the Prussian 
crime certainly was not. Grant at Appomattox did 
the same to Lee, and his act and Lee's equally gener- 
ous response to it have set both men on a high pin- 
nacle in history; but Prussia does not resemble 
Bobert E. Lee. 

General Bliss, our member of the Supreme War 
Council, was of a mind different from Foch. On the 



OVEB THE SPILLED MILK 297 

28th of October he offered an addition to the terms of 
the Armistice^ of which the following is a translation 
of one paragraph : 

** First, the Associated Powers exact complete dis- 
armament and demobilization of the enemy on land 
and sea, leaving only a home force deemed sufficient 
by the Associated Powers for the maintenance of 
order within the enemy ^s country. This of itself 
means the evacuation of all invaded territory and its 
evacuation without arms, not by soldiers armed or 
partially armed. ^' 

On the ground that it would be difficult to carry 
out, Foch had already rejected a similar proposed 
made to him by M. Clemenceau, and probably for this 
reason the suggestion of General Bliss was not sent 
to him. 

Ignorant of these important links in the chain, I 
had constantly inquired, first in England and then in 
France : 

**Why was the German Army allowed to go home 
with its arms and banners 1 ' * 

* * Oh, one didn 't want to humiliate them too much 1 ' ' 

This was the answer of a distinguished British 
general. 

**But do they seem to have appreciated such mag- 
nanimityf 

He admitted that they had not. 

When I asked the same question in Paris, a mem- 
ber of the government replied : 

**Foch never dreamed that the Armistice woidd 
not be soon followed by a peace treaty, signed in 
Berlin with the allied armies standing at attention, 
and the German people looking on. ' ' 

I must have asked six or seven Frenchmen about it, 



298 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

and perhaps what one elderly and seasoned diplomat 
answered sums it up : 

'^Foch spoke like a soldier." And then, after a 
pause, he added with a gentle smile: ^^but it is a 
pity." 

A clue to what Foch had begun to think by March 
1919y with four months gone since the Armistice and 
no treaty in sight, has been dexterously pulled out of 
the tangle by Mr. Fullerton, the author of ** Problems 
of Power. ' ' Speaking at a public dinner, the marshal 
had said : "An armistice is the equivalent of a capitu- 
lation. " When his speech appeared in print, he had 
made one change: **An armistice is merely a capitu- 
lation." Mr. Fullerton adds that although Foch did 
accept the Armistice, it was in the faith that state- 
craft was not extinct. The reader will find translated 
in Appendix B, the strange, sad iuterview given by 
Foch on November 8th, 1920. 

We have the word of Col. House {Pvblic Ledger, 
Philadelphia, July 12th, 1920) that a plan for peace 
at once had followed straight upon the Armistice ; a 
preliminary treaty to be signed by Christma*, cover- 
ing broadly the army, the navy, reparation, and 
frontiers ; and that this would have been the natural 
step to take while all the Allied armies were confront- 
ing Germany, full of fight and elated with victory. 

Then why was this step not taken f Terror filled 
the German generals during these October-November 
weeks : one of them cried out frankly to his colleagues 
that their army was demoralized, incapable any 
longer to stave the Allies off, and that if a halt were 
not called they would be soon in Cologne. These 
generals were too elderly, too imstrung, so they them- 
selves declared, to meet Foch, and so Erzberger was 



OVER THE SPILLED MILK 299 

sent in their stead. Later^ as we know, he ceased to 
be Prussian enough for the Junkers, and they assas- 
sinated him. 

But, if it was Ihe natural step, why no treaty by 
Christmas t 

During the October week when Foch was pondering 
the Armistice, I was staying at Sagamore Hill ; and, 
**Can you explain,'^ I asked Mr. Roosevelt one 
day, **Mr. Wilson ^s writing notes to Germany over 
the heads of the Allies when Germany is in full 
retreatt^' 

** Don't you seef he said. *^This war may last 
until spring, or it may finish any day ; and Mr. Wilson 
intends to go over and sit at the peace table and be the 
first president of the League of Nations. He is writ- 
ing these notes to prepare for that. ' ' 

It was not then known so generally as it is now 
that the idea of being world mediator had been pres- 
ent in Mr. Wilson's mind since 1916. Mr. Roosevelt 
probably guessed it from the readiness to offer 
Europe the benefits of his mediation which Mr. 
Wilson had already displayed. 

Whatever we may forget, all of us remember 
Armistice Day. Our cities danced in their streets, 
scraps of paper fluttered down like golden snow in 
the sun from twenty stories of windows to the pave- 
ment, bands and leaping processions came round 
comers, a belt of steam whistles blew among the 
suburbs that encircled our industrial centres. In 
Paris our doughboys rushed along in camions, whirl- 
ing girls from the sidewalk up into their arms. Lon- 
don became a wilderness of joy, relief made us ready 
for the new heaven and new earth which Mr. Lloyd 
George later promised us ; we were with him when he 



300 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

said in December that Germany mnst pay to the last 
cent for the wrong she had done^ and again when he 
said that the E^aiser mnst be tried at Westminster. 

Jnst before all this rejoicing, we had held an elec- 
tion. Mr. Wilson had requested ns to vote only for 
Democrats, as he needed Democrats to support his 
policies. It was remembered that upon the day he 
gave his war message to Congress, the leader of the 
Republicans had tendered him that party's cordial 
and total help in carrying on the war, and it was also 
remembered that numerous Democrats in both the 
House and Senate had voted against measures of 
defence and preparation offered by Republicans. 
Mr. Wilson's request did not have a happy effect 
upon the country, and was disregarded at ihe elec- 
tions; but this failed to reach the general mind of 
England and France. 

No treaty was signed by Christmas, but Mr. Wil- 
son sailed for Europe, as Mr. Roosevelt had pre- 
dicted. A group of senators, by no means negligible 
in number, somewhat formally sounded a note of 
warning that they would not accept certain provisions 
if these appeared in any draft of a League of Nations. 
The rumor will not quite die that this and other later 
and important news was prevented from crossing the 
ocean both east and west. I know that the result of 
our November election, and the warning of the sena- 
tors, and the fact that Mr. Wilson did not represent 
the unanimous opinion of our country, came to public 
attention in Paris through a series of articles by M. 
Cheradame in La Democratie NouveUe. How much 
impression these made I can not say. But it is plain 
that no matter what was known in !Eiiigland and 
France, they could hardly ask the President of the 



OVER THE SPILLED MILK 301 

United States for his credentials; as the editor -of 
Pv/nch put it to me in London : 

* * We had to behave. ' ' 

So did we. How were Americans to repudiate 
their own President, and even had they wished to do 
so, by what means could it have been done t Such a 
thing as an American President twice in two months 
sailing three thousand miles away from his desk, and 
staying away four months the second time, was some- 
thing new ; but the cause was new. Americans looked 
on with various opinions, and hoped for the best. 

Early in 1919, Mr. Wilson returned from his first 
absence, and during his brief stay here he spoke about 
the League of Nations in glowing general terms, but 
without making clear its concrete significance for us, 
or answering the specific doubts of the dissenting 
senators, except by somewhat sweeping denunciation 
and one threat. He would weave the Peace and the 
League, he said, so completely together that they 
could not be severed. This was his parting word, 
he sailed the next day ; and I think it may be safely 
assumed that what he counted on was not so much 
European ignorance about the November election or 
the American Constitution as that the Senate, when 
he should press against its head a treaty signed by 
England, Prance, and Italy, would not dare to break 
the heart of the world (as he phrased it later) by 
refusing to go along with him. His miscalculation 
involved us all in European displeasure for a while ; 
even two years later I met the lingering resentment. 

**Does your coimtry always change its opinions so 
easily?^' 

* * I am not quite sure that I follow you. ' ^ 

**Your President demanded a League of Nations. 



302 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

We bowed to his pleasure — ^and failed to please 
yon/' 

**Do your public men always represent the whole 
of your public opinion ? Allow me to felicitate you. ' ' 

**We express our dissent.*' 

**We expressed ours in the election before Mr. 
Wilson went to you/' 

** Ah yes, your elections ! But you have so many and 
they are so far away. We do not understand them." 

** Quite evidently you misunderstood that one. 
But there was something less recent. By our Con- 
stitution treaties are to be made by the President 
with the advice and consent of the Senate. Our Con- 
stitution has been in print a hundred years. ' ' 

* * We know so little about your institutions. ' ' 

* * That is equally evident. But I have never heard 
that ignorance of the law constitutes any defence in 
either civil or criminal cases. ' ' 

Of such conversations I held a nxunber, sometimes 
less sharply edged, but once or twice more so, when I 
found myself adding : 

**You have always shown such a sincere interest 
in our dollars, and lately so much in our military aid 
in case of further unprovoked assault from Ger- 
many, that I wonder if it would not be well for you to 
turn your attention to some aspect of us less directly 
usef id to you f ' ' 

I had to shade my replies according to the shade 
of civility meted to me on each occasion, and I was 
always glad when the talk ended amicably, and never 
sorry when it did not. It was every American 's duty 
to set his country straight, after the miscalculation of 
Mr. Wilson. 

No man's landing on a foreign shore was ever like 



OVEB THE SPILLED MILK 303 

Mr. Wilson's first coming to Enrope. That had been 
awaited like an almost miraculous event. The people, 
the simple rustic people, broken in heart and fortune, 
thirsty for some ideal, longing for some touch that 
should lift them from despair, stretched out their 
hands to him. They had read his words and they 
passionately believed that he was bringing to them a 
gospel of balm which should heal their world. His 
picture hung on the walls of expectant thousands. 
Even their more sophisticated leaders, with whom he 
had said that he was going to match his mind, sup- 
posed that a matured plan lay behind the vision which 
he had belatedly borrowed from the League to En- 
force Peace, and that it was not all mere lofty words. 
His first landing was in December. When, after half 
a year, he started home the second time, his picture 
was gone from the walls, and Europe's moment of 
idealism had passed into cynical laughter. The re- 
coil was also like nothing that history had ever seen. 
Mr. Wilson had matched his mind with his coUeagues ' 
— and the wave upon which he had ridden first to 
Europe 's shores had ebbed as far below the level of 
justice to him as it had previously surged above it. 
He had come to the conference with a noble idea — ^the 
only man who so came, and he came asking for noth- 
ing — ^the only man again. What had happened? 

Because of his letters to Max of Baden, Germany, 
who had no moral right to his fourteen points, trusted 
that these would yet save her skin ; upon these same 
points each country based various hopes of peace and 
prosperity. All were disenchanted soon or late. 

One point of the fourteen, the freedom of the seas, 
had gone early in the game — for game it turned out 
to be, every one for himself, and Mr. Wilson no matclt 



304 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

for any of them. To keep his League of Nations 
afloat he flung overboard all his other points: 
Shantnng went to Japan; open covenants were not 
openly arrived at — ^they can not be, they can only be 
adopted openly — ^but when one day it leaked ont that 
Mr. Wilson was dealing openly with one set of Rus- 
sian delegates, while he was privately dealing with 
their antagonists, a large piece of popular faith in 
him cracked off. Self-determination was enforced 
where it was not wanted, denied where it should have 
been in all fairness applicable; Italy, Hungary, 
Austria were alike aggrieved, the confidence of 
friends and foes was equally destroyed. Germany 
found that through a trick at the eleventh hour, and 
in spite of the unanimous opposition of the American 
experts, Mr. Wilson had consented that her repara- 
tions include pensions for injured French soldiers 
as well as damages to French civilians. For this and 
the taking of her colonies Germany fell away from 
him. An early and deepening chill had cooled French 
enthusiasm; day after day he put off his visit to 
the devastated regions. The French had expected 
him to go at once, and see with his own eyes what 
they had suffered. 

**Is he going this morning?'^ 

^^Didn'thegotoday!'' 

** Isn't he going tomorrow f 

These questions were asked all over France each 
day after his arrival; and his explanation that he 
feared such a sight might prejudice him too much 
against Germany did not help to keep him warm 
in the popular affections, any more than did his 
gaiety at lunch in Soissons on the one day when 
he did finally visit the ruins. This disappointment 



OVER THE SPILLED MILK 305 

to the French heart changed to a more active senti- 
ment when it turned out in later days that his prom- 
ise of future military aid was, without senatorial 
endorsement, void. It was after this that his name 
one night was patated out by unknown hands on the 
signs along the avenue that bears it. 

In various books and in many discussions, the 
weight of blame for the treaty's shortcomings has 
been laid upon this or that particular pair of shoul- 
ders among * * The Big Four ' ' ; — ^they were more often 
the Big Three, if Signor Orlando took as little part 
in the other discussions as he did in those concern- 
tag Upper Silesia, which are given in Appendix A. 
This way of fixing the responsibility is not borne out 
by such facts as one can learn; good and bad were 
alike the collaboration of all, because all in the end 
accepted or rejected the wishes of any one; Mr. 
Wilson happens to have suffered from a heavier 
popular reaction because higher popular hopes were 
set upon him — and, to my thinking, his own con- 
tribution remains the finest in idea. Unluckily, to 
gain its adoption he assented to many less admirable 
provisions. 

The British Prime Minister's lack of plan seems 
due to the financial and labor powers behind hini 
at home ; his zigzag moods too much resembled the 
gestures of something jerked by strings with no 
mind of its own, and they brought upon him that 
caustic comment of M. Clemenceau, that Mr. Lloyd 
George thought only in terms of parliamentary ma- 
jorities. Like many democratic leaders he was 
unsteadied by the eternal jar between domestic and 
foreign policy. Very late indeed in the deliberations 
of the Big Three, he returned one morning from 



306 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOETH 

one of his swift visits to London, and proceeded to 
iil^ist npon the uprooting and reversal of so much 
which had been settled, that silence fell around him. 
Mr. Wilson was described to me as leaning his dea- 
con's head against the back of his chair and gazing 
inmiovably at the ceiling, while Mr. Lloyd George 
harangued with increasing energy. When after some 
fifteen minutes he came to a stop, Mr. Wilson uttered 
four words : 

**You make me sick.'' 

If the Upper Silesia conversations are a fair 
sample of the rest, it is evident that M. Clemenceau 
was far clearer sighted and much better acquainted 
with Europe than either of his colleagues, and he 
seems to me to have risen nearest to the level of 
statesnianship ; but he had too much inlook, too little 
outlook, saw France as a horse in blinders sees the 
road ahead of him and nothing each side of it; on 
that road was Germany to be got out of the way, 
no matter what else happened. He did not discern 
that right and left loomed a menace to everybody, 
more imminent than the German danger to France. 
None of them seemed sufl&ciently to have perceived 
and guarded against this; they were blind to the 
economical prospect, they saw the political only, they 
failed to recognize that henceforth commercial and 
financial team-work between all nations could alone 
repair the destruction already wrought, and make 
safe the bread and the money of the world ; that what- 
ever image and superscription a coin may bear, 
whether it be Caesar's or the American eagle's, hu- 
manity has in the end a purse in common. This is 
clearer to many today than it was then, but warn- 
ings were not wanting — for instance, that of Garvin, 



OVEB THE SPILLED MILK 307 

editor of the London Observer, in his book on what 
onght to be the economic foundations of the peace. 
In a word, Foch the soldier did a clean job in the 
fall, and .in the following spring the politicians — 
did not. Mortals conld not have dealt snccessfnlly 
with a task so monstrous; the blunder was not to 
have set themselves a simpler one. 

And Germany! What of her durtag the fatal and 
precious months between the Armistice and the com- 
pletion of the treaty! 

On November 11th, 1918, Foch had beaten her 
to her knees; she was in deadly fear, abject, un- 
nerved; she thought the Allies would be in Cologne 
within a few days, and she threw up her hands and 
cried **KameradI*' 

Not such was her attitude on that May 7th, 1919, 
when she received the treaties from the hands of 
her conquerors. She had regained something more 
than confidence. Very naturally she had kept her 
ears and eyes open while the Allies delayed and dis- 
cussed. She had seen no peace signed in Berlin 
by Christmas ; what she did see was her army return- 
ing with its arms and its banners; what she heard 
was, that it was undefeated. She erected arches, 
she strewed flowers, she played triumphant music 
for this undefeated army. She got up from her 
knees and listened, and looked all the harder. She 
saw the sailings back and forth of Mr. Wilson, she 
saw Signor Orlando rush away from the confer- 
ence to Rome in a rage over Fiume ; a hundred signs 
during those weeks showed her that her recent ene- 
mies who had stood together and so defeated her 
were now falling apart ; and her despair changed to 
hope. Who can say how much of the increasing 



308 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

gossip and cynicism in Paris, as the conference 
wrangled on fhrongh fhose weeks, did not reach her 
attentive ears 1 She mnst have heard that they were 
"making the world safe for Hypocrisy"; that when 
Orlando went to Bome, the French had struck Italy's 
name from the list of contracting parties in a docu- 
mentary preamble to the treaty, and had to be 
persuaded by their colleagues to re-insert it quickly 
in ink, lest Orlando return and discover the medi- 
tated slight, and deplorable discords ensue. It was 
told at dinners in Paris that one of the army of 
experts gathered there had been reproached by an 
actress for rewarding her too slightly for the pleas- 
ure of her company. 

"My nature is not thought stingy," he replied. 
"Only this morning I gave a whole province to some 
people I have never seen." 

If, in April 1919, 1 could hear comments like this 
upon the lightness with which the old nations of 
Europe were being sliced and repasted into new ones, 
is it not likely that the acute ears of Germany heard 
much more than did my innocent American onesf 
! When her emissaries came to Versailles to receive 

the treaty, she had been up from her knees for a 
long while. This was plainly to be seen by their 
deportment on that Wednesday, May 7th, 1919. On 
the day preceding, at the brief, stiff ceremony when 
these delegates presented their credentials to M. 
Cambon, the fewest possible words had been spoken, 
and nothing was to be observed except the gait of 
the approaching Germans and the color of their com- 
plexions. The satisfactory inference drawn from 
these signs was dispersed next day in the dining- 
room of the Trianon Palace at Versailles. The great 



OVER THE SPILLED MILK 309 

ceremony was held there, all the cotmcil present, 
splendid snnshine pouring in upon the room, blos- 
soms on the f mit trees outside in the garden. The 
Allied delegates sat waiting amid a silent swirl of 
historic association, especially the memory of that 
18th of January, 1871, when Bismarck the conqueror 
sat here and dictated Germans terms to the French. 
The door opened, a voice announced the German 
delegates, the council rose. The Germans walked to 
their chairs and sat down forthwith; then, noticing 
that the company was standing, they stood for a 
moment and reseated themselves. M. Clemenceau, 
presiding, said a few words, Brockdorff-Eantzau was 
handed the text of the treaty ; he set it on the table, 
laid his gloves on it, put his spectacles on, and read 
in German a lengthy and unexpected address. While 
the interpreters translated each passage twice, into 
English and into French 

**Come nearer I'* snapped M. Clemenceau, **I can't 
hear you.' ^ 

The address went on, and the sad-eyed Poch sat 
there with his colleagues, present against his will, 
because he thought his absence would show the enemy 
that he disagreed about the terms of the treaty. He 
dissented deeply from its insecurities, and had said 
so, and had been ignored. He looked at the German's 
manner, noticed the tone of his voice, and heard from 
him that the German people had gone to war in self- 
defence, that there should be a committee of neutrals 
to examine who was guilty; this and more he with 
the Allied council heard said by the seated Brock- 
dorff-Eantzau during the better part of an hour, and 
then the ceremony ended. 

**It is galling," said Mr. Lloyd George to M. An- 



810 NEiaHBORS HENCEFORTH 

dr6 Tardieu as they came away, **to be the winner 
and have to listen to such words as those/' 

They would not have had to listen, there wonld 
have been no such words if, instead of dialogues, 
delays, and discords for six months, the German 
Army had gone home without its flags and arms, and 
the German nation had seen a treaty signed before 
Christmas at Berlin, with the allied armies present. 
The object lesson, the fruit of victory, the chance 
of peace, all was missed by the politicians in the 
spring after the soldiers had done a clean job in the 
fall. 

*^Our alliance,'' wrote Pertinax in the Echo de 
Paris next morning, **has not based its provisions as 
prudence should have dictated, on the assumption of 
the worst, on the possibility of a Germany that nMty 
regain its strength and its unity." 

A German in Switzerland, Carl Rosemeier, pub- 
lished on that same morning a plainer piece of 
prophecy : 

**They will cheat you yet, those Junkers ! Having 
won half the world by bloody murder, they are going 
to win the other half with tears in their eyes, crying 
for mercy." 

A verification of this began immediately ; all Ger- 
many at once set up an outcry over the treaty, and 
this served its end during the days between May 7th 
and that June day when the treaty was signed. Ap- 
parently, as is to be seen in the conversations about 
Upper Silesia which occurred in this period, the 
outcry alarmed Mr. Lloyd George more than it did 
M. Clemenceau or Mr. Wilson. They do not seem 
to have been afraid that the Germans would refuse 
to sign the treaty ; he seems to have been so nervous 



OVER THE SPILLED MILK 311 

and restless about this that he proposed softenings 
and conciliations with which his colleagnes seldom 
agreedy and which brought one day that remark from 
Mr. Wilson as he leaned his head back in his chair. 
Mr. Lloyd George carried some of his points — ^it can 
never be known whether or no they were necessary 
— and the treaty was signed. 

* * The Germans will not observe the most equitable 
stipulations, " remarked M. Clemenceau on that day, 
^^ unless they feel that force stands behind justice/' 

That was in June 1919, and in May 1921, a Ger- 
man said to a friend of mine : 

^^As an American this will not interest you; but 
Germany does not intend to pay France, and France 
is not clever enough to make her. Were the situa- 
tion reversed, we should be clever enough to make 
France pay.'* 

Equally plain talk came from General Ludendorff 
later in the summer of 1920. In addressing the stu- 
dents at Koenigsberg, he referred to Upper Silesia, 
and said : 

**I have no doubt that our country's destiny will 
sooner or later be decided by a battle for the eastern 
region. . . . The greater our country's need, the 
closer shall we rally round the Prussian flag." 

No blame or shame attaches to him for that; it 
is the word of a man true to his country and his 
faith; the blame faUs on those who shut their eyes 
to all this. 

And so, seven months after the clean job of Foch, 
the peace was signed, giving us Mr. Lloyd George's 
new heaven and new earth, and the labors of the 
**Big Three" were ended. Upon M. Clemenceau 
fell unjust wrath; the jar between French foreign 



812 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and domestic policy shook him from public into 
private life. He deserved better from his people. 
Mr. Wilson came home bearing the treaty like a 
magic talisman, flawless, to be accepted just so. Ap- 
parently he knew about nothing it contained except 
his League of Nations, was unaware that he had 
helped to establish a spoils system in the teeth of 
his fourteen points. He had made promises alone 
which two were needed to make, and wrath fell upon 
him at home and abroad. Mr. Lloyd Gteorge came 
off best at home, hardly as well elsewhere. Together, 
the three had invaded commercial thoroughfares as 
Germany invaded Belgium ; had shuffled and re-dealt 
frontiers as if they were a pack of cards ; and many 
of their arrangements seem as if they had supposed 
that they could change human nature with a drop 
of ink. The new heaven and new earth in which we 
are living is their work. 



XXV 

BY THEIR FBTJITS 

When Germany threw up her hands and cried 
**Kamerad!'* she was spared having that done to 
her which she had done to others ; not one blade of 
her grass was trodden down, not one invading foot- 
step crossed her boundaries, not one hair of her head 
was singed ; but her conquerors were agreed that she 
must make good the havoc she had wrought. Then 
these conquerors failed to strike while the iron was 
hot. They doubled the error of a premature armis- 
tice by a belated peace, and by so doing handed over 
their victory to Germany ; and Foch, who had deliv- 
ered the goods, saw these not only squandered but 
never paid for. To the tragedy of the war is added 
this sardonic mockery of the peace: defeated Ger- 
many, who was spared invasion, is now not only to 
be pardoned her sentence of reparation, her con- 
querors must also stretch out united hands and help 
to lift her from the economic collapse which she 
brought upon herself by her assault upon them. Our 
civilization must heal Germany or perish itself by 
the contagion of economic pestilence. To some men 
of finance there seems no other way out. 

Does any literature of any age contain a drama 
parallel to this! — ^wherein the half-killed victim of 
an enslaving tyrant in order to save his own life 
must nurse the sick tyrant back to health, knowing 

813 



814 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

all the while that once the tyrant is firm on his legs 
he will try the same trick again f Let us talk and 
reason moderately, and try to keep onr heads if 
we can. 

The opinion of these financiers wonld weigh more 
with me did I not recall their prophecies at the out- 
set of the war and during its course. They proved 
that the war would be short, because no nation could 
go on paying for it ; it was Kitchener, a soldier, who 
said that it would last three years. The view of the 
financiers looked at the time xmanswerable on paper 
— ^I confess that I cannot answer their present view 
— on paper ; I can only reflect that human effort con- 
tains surprises which upset the wisest calculations, 
and that perhaps there is more life in us and in 
Mother Earth than appears. Nevertheless, that is no 
warrant for a blind optimism such as Americans 
love to indulge in ; the early spoken warning of Mr. 
Ke3mes has come nearer the truth than the new 
heaven and new earth promised to us by Mr. Lloyd 
George, and the United States can no more turn its 
back on the illness of Europe than one Siamese twin 
can ignore his brother's jaundice. We shall have 
to do something, and the sooner the better, but not 
over-hastily. Just how extinct is Germany, just how 
much is she shamming dead! It will be very well 
indeed to keep in mind the warning of the German, 
Carl Bosemeier, published the morning after the 
treaty was delivered to his fellow-countrymen : 
**They will cheat you yet, those Junkers.*' 
Once a Wall Street financier, imprisoned for his 
misdeeds, was pardoned by President Taft upon a 
doctor's word that his health was failing. Upon 
being set free, his health returned immediately. It 



BY THEIR PEUITS 315 

is well known that women often have sent flowers 
and refreshments to a condemned murderer, bnt be- 
stowed not a crumb or a thought upon the family 
of the victim. Should not the quality of mercy be 
more strained than thist Too many people today 
go about talking of the hardships of Germany, and 
quite pass over the hardships of France. Many of 
these persons wonder if the fault was Germany's, 
or are sure that even if she may have been guilty, 
she is sorry for it now. If they are asked the reason 
for their opinion, they fade into vague generaliza- 
tions. Even a simple question to the point has been 
known to embarrass a financier ; one banker who had 
recently returned from Germany and was asserting 
that she had no money wherewith to pay her repara- 
tion, was asked why she did not get some of the 
millions which her profiteers were investing all over 
the world f He replied : 

"Oh, that is another story,'' and proceeded to 
enlarge upon how hard Germany was at work. 

We do not need to be told that. War has not made 
Germany idle or inefficient. The superb manner in 
which she ran her administrative machinery, the per- 
fect physical training of her body politic and eco- 
nomic, put all other nations to shame, and made our 
own municipal and State and Federal Governments 
look like flabby amateurs beside a professional ath- 
lete. We could do nothing better than imitate her 
methods in political housekeeping, and the nearer 
we came to them the better off in health, and safety, 
and order, and pocket we should be; but what we 
particularly need to do in these days is to find out 
how inanimate Germany really is, to watch the straws 
that show which way the wind blows, to judge her 



316 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

by what she has done and is doing: ''by fheir frnits 
ye shall know them" — that is the eternal test. 

The Grerman people are most certainly at work, 
and I doubt if in any of the Allied countries a list 
of dividends like the following could be i>araUeled: 

First year Second 
after the year after 
the 



Bremen Lmolenm Company 10 30 

Unger and Hoffman 15 15 

German Bail Transport 15 40 

Cterman Wool Mani^actnring 10 30 

Saxon Cartonnage 17^ 20 

Ottaiser Iron Works 10 15 

Leipsig Cotton 21 25 

Poppe and Wirth 20 30 

These figures were published in the Norwegian 
Courier of March 8th, 1921. 

For the third year since the war the dividends 
were as large and larger, and I could give a longer 
list of them, but the above seem enough for my -poioL 

Where does the money go? Industrial leaders in 
Germany are known to have on deiK>sit, at home and 
abroad, securities worth one billion dollars. Ger- 
many taxes her people $13.88 per head, in France it 
is $45.22. Bread in Germany costs three and a half 
cents a kUogram, in France eight and a quarter. 
A ten-ton railway car can be transported a thousand 
kilometres in Germany for sixty dollars, it costs 
nearly one hundred and eighty in France. The Grer- 
man foreign debt is less than one billion, that of 
France more than ten billion. 

It seems to me that straws like these show which 



BY THEIE FRUITS 317 

way the wind blows; and here are two others of a 
different sort: 

A friend of mine, lately in Germany, looked out 
of his window at the Hotel Bellevue in Dresden. The 
Opera House stood opposite and some heavy scenery 
was being brought in a dray and unloaded. Some 
five or six men Ufted ponderous colunms and steps 
of temples out of the dray and into the Opera House 
in some five or six minutes. These men did not make 
a needless movement of arm or leg, it was all a 
precise piece of team-work with them, and their job, 
performed by our undrilled American methods, would 
have taken at least half an hour. 

My second straw is an instance of mental and 
moral drill. This same friend was in Berlin, and 
was being shown a particular quarter where the mob 
of the brief revolution had swept through. A space 
of lawn lay in their course, aad my friend pointed 
to the rich and flourishing grass. 

**No revolution ever trod on that,^' he said; ''that 
shows years of care.'' 

* ^ They went round it, naturally, ' ' said his German 
companion, and pointed to the sign ''verboten.'' 

DriU did its magic work when our soldiers came 
to occupy Coblenz and its neighborhood. They were 
not well received during the first hours of their ar- 
rival; they met with sullen manners and scowling 
looks, which is hardly to be wondered at. Had I 
been a German at Coblenz, I should not have felt 
like greeting the American Army with a smile and 
a hand outstretched. The next morning, all was dif- 
ferent at Coblenz ; it was welcome, and geniality, and 
What-can-I-do-for-you? The doughboy did not re- 
flect deeply over this agreeable but unnaturally sud- 



318 NEiaHBORS HENCEFORTH 

den change, lie merely began to like the Germans 
better than he had liked the French. It was his 
officers who used their reason and discerned that 
some wise observer had sent word to Germany's 
control office of the mdeness shown the new arrivals, 
and that the office had at once given out the needful 
direction, changing German manners overnight 

Many accounts of Germany's actual political state 
reach us, some quite plainly meant for uncritical and 
credulous readers, but others as plainly honest and 
well observed. One derives from these latter the 
impression that the present German Government 
wishes to fulfil its obligations to France and the 
world — ^is, in a word, reasonable and well disposed; 
but that it is weak, that the true power lurks behind 
and is in the hands of a few very able captains of 
industry, who are playing chess with the Reichstag 
and all other pieces on the board — spawns, knights, 
bishops, castles, and even kings — for their own bene- 
fit. What is their own benefit? That question is 
answered satisfactorily by no one; we are left un- 
certain what these strong and resourceful men, who 
seem to be the real rulers of Germany, intend. Are 
they at the bottom of the unrest which has been 
playing like sheet lightning over the question of 
Upper Silesia? Were they of General Ludendorff 's 
mind when he told the college students of Koenigs- 
berg that a battle would some day settle that ques- 
tion, and Prussia's army would be victorious there 
through the same drill and discipline and trust in its 
leaders which had won at Tannenberg? I don't 
know; but when I meet those who are inclined to 
release the prisoner because his doctor says that he 
is dying, or who are sending flowers and refresh- 



BY THEIE FRUITS 319 

ments to the outlaw across the Rhine, I think it well 
to remind them of that billion dollars invested in 
foreign secnrities, of those dividends paid by Ger- 
man corporations since the war, and of the difference 
between the German and the French tax rate. 
**They will cheat yon yet, those Jnnkers/' 
I do not say that they will, I do not know that they 
will not ; I know only that straws show which way the 
wind blows. 

Returning travellers bring word of the shifting 
tides in Germany ^s party politics — ^which currents 
are flowing strong and which seem to be weakening ; 
and these reports do not always match. All are 
interesting and none seem important, because they 
tell of what goes on near the surface and not of the 
invisible ground sweU, at which one can only guess. 
There is something to be gathered by the number of 
seats which this or that party has lost or gained in 
the Reichstag; socialism would seem on the whole 
to be on the wane, with a tide setting toward the 
return to traditional institutions, by no means for- 
gotten, tenaciously remembered, increasingly re- 
gretted. In the deep woods are huts upon whose walls 
the royal portraits still hang, they are being put back 
upon walls from which they were removed three 
years ago; it is against the law, but the law does 
not seem to mind. One may be fairly sure that when 
a dreamy, poetic, and long-memoried people, with 
a strong accumulation of legend in their subcon- 
sciousness, have gone to war, and drunk their beer, 
and begotten their sons, for centuries under the rule 
of dukes and princes and kings, serving their fami- 
lies, wearing their colors, singing their songs, danc- 
ing at their pageants, dying in their battles, and far- 




320 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

ing all the while a« well as their neighbors, that the 
taste for their old leaders will die hard in them, and 
they will not immediately drop it all and tnm into 
a self-governing race becanse they have been pre- 
scribed a tablespoonful of democracy three times 
a day after meals. But even if we do wake np some 
morning far or near to see a throne in Germany once 
more, and some dynastic family from Prnssia, or 
Bavaria, or elsewhere seated upon it, not even this 
seems to me the important point for ns: it is not 
what form of government this strong-sonled and 
persistent people may keep or change to, it is what 
of their ambitions will survive beneath any garb, 
what they are going to do, what will be done through 
them, what young Germans who are now five, ten, or 
fifteen years old are being taught — since they are the 
Germany of tomorrow. 

Wellj some of this is known. Old Germans are 
saying,' and young ones are believing, that in 1914 
the Fatherland was obliged to fight a war of self- 
defence, particularly against Eussia; Eussia had 
been making ready to attack it for months. One 
does not know how an old German would meet such 
a comment as this : 

^■But you know that on the night of July 31st, 
1914, when Austria was showing signs of drawing 
back from the gulf to whose edge you had pushed 
her, and had entered into amicable conversation with 
Eussia, you cut it short in haste and declared war 
upon Eussia yourselves. ' ' 

I can not say how this would be met, but in the 
Fatherland it does not have to be; the unfledged 
nestling German asks no questions, he opens wide 
his mind and what he is to know is dropped into it 



BY THEIE FBUITS 321 

by the Prussian parent bird, and consequently, when 
he flies from the nest, it is with a string from Berlin 
tied securely to his brain. Did the war break that 
string? Hardly. The great skill in the devising 
and instilling of lies for an end, by which Germany 
was duped and directed into the war, is not at all 
defunct. It does not invent imaginary bombs at 
Nuremburg any more, or publish Roosevelt's con- 
gratulation to the Kaiser on his victorious entry into 
Paris, or stamp the compressed fuel-bricks for 
locomotives with * ^ Gott strafe England ' ' ; but it cir- 
culates almanacs with saint-like images of the Hohen- 
zoUem family and their military glories, and pious 
texts beneath them; and it makes toys for children, 
boxes of little French houses and churches, and little 
guns with which to knock them down on the nursery 
floor. Could anything be more natural, more excel- 
lent for the young of a nation that had a great preda- 
tory purpose to implant in its people? And what 
people has ever proved by temperament more polit- 
ically docile than the Germans, less instinctively 
revolutionary, better adapted to receiving impres- 
sions like wax, and retaining them like adamant? 
Their subtle educators never miss a trick. On the 
morrow of Mr. Hughes' proposal for disarmament, 
out came the German papers, like the well-drilled 
chorus that they are, with exclamations about '* Yan- 
kee hypocrisy.'' There again they present us with 
a straw for our guidance: the word *^ disarmament" 
is to be associated with the word ^ ^hypocrisy," and 
thus dropped into the docile German mind. It mat- 
ters not whose the mailed fist be at present ; whether 
imperial or industrial, it is there; a soft glove has 
been drawn over it, that is all — ^and sometimes there 



322 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

are little holes in the glove through which the metal 
gleams. ■ 

As no people is more politically docile than the 
Germans, so also none has ever ran more trae to 
form. Merely as a revelation of the changeless per- 
sistence of their character, it is deeply interesting 
to read that, in the first century after Christ, a 
Eoman general named Velleins Paterculns wrote of 
them that they were *'cnnning in ferocity, born to 
lie^' — ^to read this and to remember that in 1914 at 
Fontenoy, they displayed flags of truce, and when 
the French accepted this signal in good faith and 
walked up to receive the surrender, the Germans 
killed them ; to remember that in 1918 near Cambrai, 
they left behind them as they retreated that live 
kitten nailed above the concealed mine which killed 
the British soldiers who hurried to release it from 
its torture. 

Equally interesting is it to find Tacitus writing 
in the fourth book of his history : 

** There will always be similar motives to excite 
the Germans to invade the Gauls. It is lust, greed, 
the desire to change place, to quit their marshes 
and solitudes, to seize upon a fertile soil and its 
inhabitants ' ' 

And after this to read in a number of that illus- 
trated family paper the Oartenkmbe, published in 
1874, an article with pictures of the Marne valley, 
by a German who had walked through it, and who 
concludes : 

'^Your heart bleeds in your breast to think that 
this splendid region does not belong to Germany.'' 

And finally to read the remarks of two Prussian 
generals, von Clausewitz and von Schellendorff : 



BY THEIR FRUITS 323 

*^Let us not forget the task of civilization which 
Providence by its decrees lays npon ns. As Prussia 
was by destiny the kernel of Germany, so Germany 
regenerated shall be the kernel of the future empire 
of the West 

^ ^ That none may go in ignorance, we proclaim that 
henceforth our continental nation has a right not to 
the North Sea only, but also to the Mediterranean and 
Atlantic. Consequently we shall absorb, one after 
another, all provinces which border on Prussia ; we 
shall annex successively Denmark, Holland, Belgium 
• . . then Trieste and Venice, and finally the northern 
part of France from the Somme to the Loire.'' 

General von Schellendorff, in commenting upon 
this prospectus, said: 

* ^ The style of old Clausewitz is very soft. He was 
a poet who put rose-water in his inkstand. Now it 
is with blood that matters of war should be written, 
and the next war will be atrocious ; between Germany 
and France nothing but a duel to the death is ade- 
quate. To be or not to be, that is the question which 
can be settled only by the ruin of one of these antago- 
nists. 

^*. . • We shall annex . . . the north of France 
from the Somme to the Loire. This program, which 
we announce without fear, is no fooPs work; this 
empire which we intend to found will not be a Utopia : 
we have in hand even now the means of realizing 
it.'' 

In nineteen hundred years, the marshes and soli* 
tudes across the Rhine have become miracles of 
fertility and comfort; but ^*the greed, the desire to 
change place, to seize upon a fertile soil and its 
inhabitants," which Tacitus recorded, we too have 



324 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

beheld ; and in thinking it over, once again the acute 
judgment of Heine is borne out. 

**The German is stupid/' he says; ** educate him 
and he becomes malignant." 

Prussia's intensive education of the race of Luther 
and Beethoven has made it the race which bombarded 
the cathedral of Beims and nailed the live kitten to 
the door. 

Midway in the long chain of testimony comes 
Dante, with his word about the Tedeschi lurchi. 
This poet of Latin race and refinement had seen 
plenty of Germans in Italy, and his word lurchi, 
though it is not quite easy to find any single EngUsh 
adjective which expresses it perfectly, is exactly 
translated by the use to which the piano was put by 
the German officers billeted at the farm where we 
slept; by what I heard about the daily personal 
habits of the interned prisoners at Fort Oglethorpe ; 
by what I read in the letters of the orchestra leader ; 
and by what the Germans did in public to Belgium 
women — ^all is a translation of Dante's word lurchi. 
It does not mean those excesses of hot blood common 
to all warfare, but the quality which showed itself 
in the German caricatures, and which impelled Ger- 
man officers, after living months in a French house, 
to defile it when they left. It is perhaps Tacitus 
rather than Dante who is recalled by Bismarck's 
speech concerning the indemnity that he was impos- 
ing in 1871 : 

**If France does not meet her obligations, we wiU 
do as caterpillars do that invade a tree. We will 
eat her leaf by leaf." 

It was Frederick the Great who said that he first 
did what he chose, and afterwards could always find 



BY THEIE FRUITS 325 

pedants to justify it. Did he inherit this from the 
days of Dante? As any rate he transmitted the 
custom; and we still remember that manifesto of 
the ninety-three professors in 1914, who told us 
under their ninety-three signatures the truth about 
the Fatherland. 

**It is not true/^ they declared, *Hhat Germany 
provoked this war.'* 

* * It is not true that we criminally violated the neu- 
trality of Belgium. ^^ Their own Chancellor had said 
the contrary. 

One understands why Schopenhauer wrote in his 
memorabilia: 

**In anticipation of my death I make this confes- 
sion, that I despise the German nation on account 
of its unlimited stupidity, and I blush at belonging 
toit.'^ 

The ninety-three did not stop there; they, and 
others to what number I know not, were busy through 
four years, justifying the acts of their Kaiser until 
he ran off to Holland — ^it may be that they have also 
justified that; but they produced a mass of pam- 
phlets and addresses proving heavily to the entire 
satisfaction of their readers the righteousness of any 
number of things. I do not know what they may have 
had to say about such incidents as this, of which 
there were a great many : 

From the diary of Private Hassemer, 8th corps, 
September 3, 1914, at Sommepy: 

** Horrible carnage, the village burned and razed 
to the ground, the French driven into the houses in 
flames, civilians and all burned together.'' 

I have read in the writings of German generals, 
that work like this is done in order to discourage 



326 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

further resistance on the part of the enemy, and so 
to make the war short : one of the objections to such 
policy seems to be that it did not achieve its pnr- 
pose. Would it have provided Schopenhauer with 
another reason for blushing? We can imagine his 
cheeks growing hot over a solemn pamphlet which 
proved that the Meuse country was Germany's by 
historic right, since Verdtm had long been known in 
Germany as Wirten, showing that the town must 
have had a German origin. The trouble about this 
argument is, that there are twelve other Verduns 
in France, six of which are in the south, quite be- 
yond the inroads of all Hun invasion from Attila 
down. 

Strasbourg was full of printed arguments like this, 
little books, little lectures, that fell into the hands of 
the Allies after the Armistice. They form a library, 
and they draw a nMip of the German mind, a portrait 
of the German spirit, carefully, by its own hand, not 
an enemy's. I can not choke this chapter with one- 
half or one-tenth of these touches which go to make 
the portrait ; three or four must suffice : 

What us the World War bring must, is the excel- 
lent title of a work published in 1914, and I will not 
disarrange its sequence of syllables. It seems ad- 
dressed to mothers, but to mix its genders : 

** Enough of the twaddle about morality I . . . now 
is the moment thou noble . . . woman, Germania 
... to suppress manfully such moments of pity . . . 
nations at war find themselves in a pure state of 
nature ... all feeling of generosity is to be silenced 
. . . even if a state of panic amongst women and 
children is to arise!'' 

Professor Fleischner, of Berlin, publishes in 1915 



BY THEIR FRUITS 327 

at Frankfort his opusde entitled, Of the War against 
German KtUtur. 

**Tlie greatness of Germany, '^ says the professor, 
**has not been wrought by her merchants, diplomats, 
scientific men, or artists. • • . Only the mailed fist 
can establish it • . . Hit and destroy . • . Ger- 
man spirit • • • with the strength and {simplicity of 
the bear and the child. ' ' 

Professor Lasson tells his fellow Germans that 

**To observe a treaty is not a question of right 
but of interest. . . . Force can create what we call 
right . . . the weaker becomes the prey of the 
stronger . • . and this . . . can be called moral as 
well as rational. '* 

Professor Kohler writes in his **Holy War*' that 

** Might overrules right. Americans . . . never 
understood the philosophy of Law. . . . We may 
smile . . . that the vulgarity of our critics . . . 
shows where barbarism and ignorance are to be 
found in this War * ' — ^this war, with whose causes and 
objects Mr. Wilson told us in 1916 that the United 
States was not concerned. 

But on the whole I like this next selection best, as 
a portrait of the German mind. It is Dr. H. U. 
Schmidt, of the University of Gottingen, who speaks 
about the destruction of the cathedral of Reims in 
an address of March 22nd, 1915, one of a series en- 
titled German talks in heavy time. His thesis is, 
that the French deserve to lose Reims, because it 
was built when they were more worthy of it than 
they are now. The doctor says (and I will not dis- 
arrange his style) : 

'*More and more vanishes of course the German 
element also out of the north and east of France; 



328 NEIGHBOBS HENCEPOBTH 

ever less vnH henceforth the possibility for the 
French be to understand what great and genuine in 
the German, yea in the Germanic nature, is. Ever 
stronger must through this the chasm between France 
and Germany, but also between modem France and 
her own pasthood be. The world story is often sym- 
bolic, and the sacrifice of the cathedral of Beims — 
since about that is it being dealt — can as the symbol 
of the estrangement of the French people from their 
own pasthood, how it itself even wider yet with 
necessity be drawn must, taken be." 

I sometimes wonder if the best portrait of the 
German mind — ^its shape, not its content — ^is not per- 
haps the syntax to which it has given birth. 

We see it from the religious angle in an interview 
which the renowned chemist, Professor Otswald, ac- 
corded to **Dagen" of Stockholm. 

** Question. What do you think of the more and 
more decided part which the different churches are 
playing in the countries that have thus far suffered 
invasion f 

"Answer. That is a consequence impossible to 
avoid. The present situation necessarily invokes 
atavistic instincts in many regions. I will say, 
nevertheless, that God the Father is reserved witii 
us for the personal use of the Emperor. Once He 
was mentioned in a report of the General Chief of 
Staff, but, note this well. He has not reappeared 
since. ' ' 

In his talks with Eckemann, Goethe says : 

**I have often felt a profound grief in thinking of 
this German nation, which is estimable in each of 
its individuals, and collectively so wretched. The 
comparison of the German people with other peoples 



BY THEIE FEUITS 329 

arouses painful sentiments which I have sought to 
escape from by every possible means/' 

This was said in days when Prussian education of 
Germany was in its infancy ; after it was full grown, 
and the mailed fist had flung Germany against civili- 
zation, Germany's Prussianized voice spoke true to 
form, true to the word of the Eoman general, the 
word of Tacitus, the word of all ages, in this 
outburst : 

**Let us give up our wretched attempts to excuse 
Germany, let us cease from casting unfounded accu- 
sations upon the enemy. It is not against our will 
that we have thrown ourselves into this gigantic 
adventure. It was not forced upon us by surprise. 
We willed it, it was our duty to will it. We do not 
stand before the tribunal of Europe, we recognize 
no such court. 

**Our might will create a new law in Europe. It 
is Germany who strikes. When she has conquered 
new realms for her genius, then the priests of all 
gods will praise the holy war. . . . 

** Germany does not make this war to punish the 
guilty or to liberate oppressed peoples and rest after- 
wards upon the consciousness of her disinterested 
magnanimity. She makes it in the changeless con- 
viction that her exploits give her the right to more 
space. ... 

* * Spain, Holland, France, and England have seized 
and colonized large territories, the most fertile on 
earth. Germany's hour has sounded. . . • 

* * Come, is Germany strong f Yes. What stuff are 
you telling us, professors in spectacles and theolo- 
gians in slippers f That right exists) Do those 



330 NEIGHBOBS HENCEPOBTH 

lofty notions amount to anything f . . • Force; a fist; 
that's aUI . . . 

'^Oet nsed to the idea that in German land live 
barbarians and warriors. • . . 

^'Wben Tangier and Toulon and Antwerp and 
Calais belong to the Barbaric Power, then we will 
condescended to talk to yon sometimes. '^ 

This was Maximilian Harden in the Zvhwnft. 

After the thorough education which Prussia had 
been giving Germany for several generations, this 
changeless conviction is perf ecUy natural ; but what 
is perf ectiy extraordinary is to hear people excusing 
her on the ground that she was merely doing at last 
what other nations had done at first. The other na- 
tions could not have done it and would not have 
dared to do it, if the weaker peoples whom they 
conquered had been strong enough to stand them off. 
By like reasoning, the apologists who offer these 
extenuating circumstances in Germany's case, would 
invite Mr. Smith to forgive a burglar who had been 
caught breaking into his house, because previous 
burglars had successfully stolen the silver spoons 
of Mr. Jones. 

Is the ^^ changeless conviction" changed? 

When the iron was hot, and the fierce shock of 
the war was stinging pubUc attention awake, tiie 
words of Harden were vividly familiar, often quoted 
together with many others like them that are faded 
utterly out of the general memory, now that the iron 
is cold. When reminded of them today, the apolo- 
gists not infrequently reply : 

**Ah yes; but we have a new Germany since the 
war. She has seen a great light. She is industrious 
and peace loving. If any of the old Junker spirit 



BY THEIB FRUITS 331 

snrvives, it is a negligible imflnencei and on the 
wane/' 

But is the conviction changed f 

Some signs of this were apparent, to be sure ; some 
editorials, some public utterances, showed a new 
spirit. Vorwaerts, the Berlin paper, declared that 
^Hhe German Republic must repair the crimes 
of Imperial Germany . . . and that is why it 
should silence the admirers of the old regime who 
now would lift up their voices in reference to this 
question." 

Such opinions did not strike me as plentiful, fhey 
seemed confined to the small handful of bold and 
liberal papers. The Deutsche Tageszeitung was 
more representative. 

^^The hate between Frenchmen and Germans is 
ineradicable, '^ it said, ** Europe will know no repose 
until the eternal peace disturber is annihilated politi- 
cally and militarily ; and this moment is perhaps less 
distant than may be thought.'' 

To any eyes on the watch for them, gleams like 
this of the mailed fist shone through not infrequent 
holes in the soft glove. While the laments over Ger- 
many's poverty and her utter inability to pay the 
reparation flowed copiously, in a daily stream, from 
the pens of editors and the lips of politicians, now 
and then something like this, from the Welt am 
Montag, would appear : 

** Everybody knows that millions in paper money 
have been hidden away to escape from taxation. It 
must also be recognized that agriculture is rolling 
in wealth. ..." And the journal is so incautious as 
to publish specific details of prosperity : 

As against a five per cent, dividend the year pre- 



332 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

ceding, the Eheingan sugar refinery had this year 
declared forty-eight per cent. 

The Sugar Trade Union of Hamburg had risen 
from sixteen and a half to forty-eight per cent. 

The Dfisseldorf Blast Furnace Company in 1920 
made a profit of twenty-two million marks on a capi- 
tal of three million six hundred thousand. 

The Sandloch Lead Works, capital one and a half 
million, made a profit of seven million marks. 

The Concordia Chemical Factory paid eight per 
cent, one year, seventy-five per cent, the next. 

The North German Iron Trucks rose from eight 
to sixty per cent. 

Observing travellers in Germany noticed a curious 
difference in appearance between those parts of the 
Fatherland under military occupation and in the 
beaten routes of foreign travel, and those parts where 
foreign travel was infrequent. In occupied Ehine- 
land, stoves were in the restaurants and hotels, trains 
were cold and bad, streets were unlighted; France 
was envied the coal she took from Germany and 
did not need, while here it was needed so sorely. 
But if one penetrated into districts more intimately 
German, where nothing had been arranged for effect 
on foreign visitors, bread cards, though required by 
printed rules, were never asked for; there were no 
temporary stoves, the central heating systems were 
going, the hotels and trains were so hot tiiat windows 
had to be open; in short, Ugnite was taking the place 
of coal very satisfactorily, there was plenty of it, 
and there was an effort to hide this fact from the 
Allies. Travellers who happened to visit Turkish 
baths, circuses, cinema shows, merry-go-rounds, out- 
side tho zone of foreign visitors, were not at all 



BY THEIE FEUITS 333 

deceived as to the camouflaged dearth of coal. They 
noticed, too, even while they were hearing the cries 
of distress and the assertions that German industry 
and prosperity were paralyzed, that forests of fresh 
scaffolding bristled in large towns where corpora- 
tions and banks were ia the act of erecting palatial 
quarters wherein to house their expanding needs; 
they observed that a vast new underground railway 
system was being pushed forward in Berlin; it 
seemed odd to them that if funds were so scarce, 
two millions should have been voted to the State 
Fair at Leipzig in 1920, and twenty millions to the 
same enterprise ui 1921. This grant was made at a 
time not remote from the London Conference, where 
Dr. von Simons assured Mr. Lloyd George that Ger- 
many could not possibly pay in reparation more than 
two billion and a half pounds in forty-two years, 
instead of the eleven biUion and a third demanded by 
the Allies. At that moment, the tax per head in 
Germany was three pounds, while in England it was 
twenty-two. 

Mr. Lloyd George broke off his conversation with 
Dr. von Simons, and said later to his English and 
French colleagues: 

* * If we had let him talk for ten minutes more, we 
should have been owing Germany several billion.^' 

In those days when Dr. von Simons was explain- 
ing to Mr. Lloyd George that Germany had nothing 
wherewith to pay her reparations, the news that her 
factories were doing a disastrous business reached 
America, and Americans at once made large offers 
to buy these ruined German plants. Not an offer was 
accepted, not a factory was for sale ! 

When an American in search of them visited the 



334 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

great Elnipp establishment at Essen, he did not find 
it shut np. What he found was a place where work* 
men worked for one-seventh the pay of English labor, 
and did not strike ; where they worked fnll hours, and 
so far from being anarchistic were they that they 
touched their hats to their employers and went to it 
with the same drill of mind and body which had un- 
loaded the scenery from the dray in Dresden, and 
kept the revolution off the grass in Berlin; a place 
that was turning out three hundred locomotives a 
year, three thousand cars a year, trucks in propor- 
tion, cinema apparatus, sewing machines, everything 
in short that can be nmde of steel ; and a place which 
had employed thirty-five thousand men before the 
war, and was now employing forty-five thousand. 

If this American traveller had continued to go 
about the Fatherland in quest of factories for sale, 
he would have found : 

1. Jena, turning out cheaper and better optical 
glass than any competitors; from furnace to show 
room a gigantic organization busy over every stage 
of construction from the making of the glass to the 
mounting of it in microscopes, cameras, field glasses, 
dnema projectors, theodolites, ultramicroscopes, 
nautical and astronomic instruments ; and ten thou- 
sand serious workmen employed upon this. For 
these men in times of recreation, libraries, reading 
rooms, parks were constructed. 

2. Leipzig, printing newspapers, periodicals, illus- 
trated colored plates, Latin and Greek books, cata- 
logues, trade papers of fifty pages, and sensational 
novels — all cheap. Pulp is plentiful because Ger- 
many used Polish forests during the war, and saved 
her own for peace. 



BY THEIE FRUITS 836 

3. Dresdeiiy making pianos, organs, steam organs, 
instroments to snit all national preferences, little 
grands for bridal housekeeping, tall nprights for 
Spain> Italy, South America; and wires for these, 
as well as for violins, mandolins, and guitars. Beside 
this industry of Dresden are the porcelain works at 
Meissen, where workmen proud of their hereditary 
descent from those selected for the works by King 
August II in 1710 were making fake antiques for 
New York dealers, telegraph insnlators, hand-painted 
sets of egg-shell china, crucibles for scientific use, 
electric lampshades, statuettes, vases and plates imi- 
tating the wares of Copenhagen, Sevres, and Li- 
moges. Living is cheap in Meissen, and the work- 
men's houses clean and pretty. 

4. Pforzheim, carving bone for combs, pendants, 
necklaces, beads ; handbags, umbrella handles ; little 
cats and pigs in bronze or celluloid or imitation 
crystal for the watch chain; every sort of cheap 
jewelry ; souvenir brooches with Venice, Seville, and 
the Passion Play at Oberanmiergau done in color on 
their glazed convexity ; souvenir spoons showing the 
ruined cathedral of Reims; and, to advertise a cer- 
tain make of automobile, neat pencils lettered in six 
different languages and distributed free throughout 
the world ; knickknacks inscribed with publicity mat- 
ters in Turkish, Japanese, and Bussian characters. 
Wages at Pforzheim had gone up. 

5. Frankfort and Mannheim fabricating cheap 
dry goods, employing as many hands as before the 
war. 

6. Berlin and its suburbs equally busy; east Ber- 
lin over enamel ware, pianos, optical goods, furni- 
ture, textiles, domestic chattels generally, including 



336 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

jewelry, confectionery, carved frames and cases, per- 
f Tune, fans ; north Berlin over heavier work, electric 
and railway supplies. In the science of perfmne 
several experiments were being successfully made— 
in dry scent, for example, a powdered perfume which 
dissolves when sprinkled upon a warm hand; syn- 
thetic essences, smelling like strawberries, pine- 
apples, mushrooms, that never saw a strawberry or 
pineapple or mushroom; soap in quantity, in spite 
of the loudly alleged shortage of fat. At another 
suburb, Charlottenburg, drugs and medicines. These 
had been made near Cologne until the Armistice, and 
they were then hurriedly removed out of reach of 
the Allies^ observation, lest these chemical secrets 
should become known outside of Germany. The un- 
divulged processes are now producing medicines in 
far greater volume than before the war. They are 
in demand all over the world and their retail price 
is three and four hundred times the cost of produc- 
tion. To escape export duties a brisk traffic in smug- 
gling goes on at various frontiers. I skip Chemnitz 
and its dry goods, and Plauen with its lace and dye- 
ing and bleaching, and other places. 

None of these establishments was for sale ; it was 
the same everywhere; the American quest would 
have been fruitless in purchases, but very profitable 
in experience. 

In their oflfer to buy German manufactories, our 
business men had meant business, had been perfectly 
serious; they believed the **hard luck'' stories so 
ingeniously circulated. Their failure to find any 
acceptances of their offers revealed to them that 
what they had unwittingly done was to ^ * call a bluff. ' ' 

It may be said that among all the industries in 



BY THEIB FBXJITS 337 

which she excels, propaganda is at the head of Ger- 
many's list; the organization of private industry 
stands second, bnt still so high as to overtop anything 
of the sort in those countries which are her competi- 
tors. This organization is being perfected every day ; 
Gennany's set-back has vitalized her energy, whUe 
the Allies' has been slackened by their sterile vic- 
tory. She has carried Trusts into higher terms, 
under the title Community of Interests Association, 
whereunder all productive factors, from the raw 
material at the bottom to the finished article at the 
top, are gathered and co-related under a single 
management. This is known as the ** vertical line'* 
system. For instance, if a company made telephones, 
it would acquire control of all the areas from which 
all the raw materials needed for a complete telephone 
are drawn — amines, forests — and also all the corpora- 
tions, which manufacture wire, or electrical appara- 
tus, or fixtures such as hotels and offices use, switch- 
boards, everything necessary to a system in complete 
working order. Or again if coal is at the bottom and 
hardware of every description at the top of a verti- 
cal line of production, one huge hand of the Com- 
munity of Interests Association grasps both ends 
and everything between, and conducts the whole 
work harmoniously, with the least possible waste and 
the greatest possible gain. Meanwhile, the workmen 
of Germany who carry on the physical part of this 
vast activity retain their habit of drill, have no use 
for strikes, and are satisfied with their state. Small 
concerns outside the association of giants have come 
to grief, and these cases have been adroitly used to 
convey the idea of a general collapse. 

They will cheat you yet, those Junkers.'' 



a 



338 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

With such organized energy, it is not wonderful 
that industrial dividends went from eight to sixty 
per cent, and that a billion of profit is already in- 
vested in foreign securities. Germany, with mas- 
terly self-control, made herself ready to sell to the 
world, and now the world has begun to buy from 
her. Before the war she saved ten billion marks a 
year; were she to save eight billion now, it would 
more than meet the requirements of her reparation. 
It is to be noticed that one of the leading financiers 
of New York — ^not affiliated with German concerns — 
has stated that the payments, spread over forty-two 
years, if capitalized at 8^%, will form a sum of about 
thirteen billion dollars, which Germany can pay 
easily. Under the Treaty of Frankfort, when she 
was victorious in 1871, she laid down and acted upon 
the principle that the nation provoking the war 
ought to pay the costs of the war. She has not been 
dealt with according to her own rule; the Allies 
deliberately have not asked Germany to pay one 
single mark for the cost that they incurred in defend- 
ing themselves : therein lies the profound difference, 
both practical and moral, between the indemnity 
exacted by Germany in 1871 from France who had 
provoked the war and was beaten, and the reparation 
demanded by the Allies from Germany for the in- 
juries that she inflicted upon the land, the houses, 
and the manufactories of France. Most financial 
writers that I have read, even Mr. Frank Vanderlip, 
whose book is the latest and quite the best that I 
know, constantly speak of the indemnity demanded 
from Germany : this is false to fact, and it misleads 
many readers who have not gone into the matter. 

It seems to me also that these financiers are them- 



BY THEIR FRUITS 339 

selves confased by the horrible condition of state 
finance in Germany, while they overlook the vigor- 
ous health of private finance, the large dividends, 
the invested billion of profit. No doubt the govern- 
ment has paid the deficits of railroads whose trans- 
portation was artificially cheap, the losses on exports 
sold needlessly below cost ; has rioted in paper money, 
kept a huge army of salaried Junkers in office, and 
is consequently without funds to pay its current 
expenses. What has that to do with the reparation? 
How is it that new banks and buildings are going 
up, and twenty milUon marks are voted to the Leipzig 
Fair! If private Germans are making millions, 
whose fault is it that the public purse is empty — ^if 
it is empty! A man who kept two bank accounts, 
one overdrawn and a thousand dollars in the other, 
would not be allowed to plead bankruptcy. 

The financier who was pardoned by Mr. Taft on 
account of his ill health, ate soap for days to make 
himself an emaciated and pitiable object. When he 
was let out he changed his diet and soon resumed his 
old appearance and previous habits. It looks more 
than likely that the German Government has been 
eating soap. I suggest that the financiers inquire 
a little further into the case before they ask France 
and the rest of us to commute the Fatherland's sen- 
tence of reparation. I think that they ought to re- 
member more often than they do, how sure they 
were that the war would be a short one; and that 
before asking the world to help in lifting weak Ger- 
many on her legs, they should make us all sure not 
only that she can not get on them by herself, but 
also that when she is up she will not promptly knock 
us all down. 



340 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

What is the mailed fist doing beneath its glove, 
meanwhile! 

Articles 160 and 178 in the Treaty of Versailles 
are definite: 

^*The number of ejBfectives in the army of those 
states which constitute Germany must not exceed 
100,000 men, and shall be exclusively for the purpose 
of maintaining order and for policing the frontiers. 

**A11 measures of mobilization are forbidden.'' 

Article 176 forbids military academies. Berlin 
had one, Munich another. Over these the glove was 
drawn. In each of the division staffs, staff courses 
of lectures were created, to which the entrance ex- 
aminations were like those of the military academy. 
The documents of the army were collected at Berlin 
in a war Ubrary. To sort and classify these and to 
aid in research and historic study, officers were sum- 
moned from time to time. It was not mentioned that 
those officers permanently in custody of the library 
gave courses of lectures and conducted exercises. 
The officers who formerly taught at the military 
academy no longer wear uniforms, but frock coats 
instead and are under civil jurisdiction ; in these cir- 
cxunstances they continue to teach what they taught 
before — for the instruction of their **Sipo,'' their 
Sichereitspolizei — ^their police. These police forces 
are most remarkable. Each man has a gas-mask, 
although Article 171 forbids the further manufac- 
ture of poisonous gas. 

Up to October 1919, the demobilization bureau 
retained lists of reservists, but as these men were 
slowly dispersed the rolls of their names were dis- 
tributed among the local recruiting bureaus, which 
are conveniently called pension bureaus. By their 



BY THEIE FEUITS 341 

means mobilization conld be rapidly effected. In 
1920 the old army, apparently dispersed in accord- 
ance with the treaty, was replaced by the ''Beichs- 
wehr,^' to which the regulars of the old army can 
be despatched by means of the rolls of their names 
at the local *' pension '^ offices. In his Koenigsberg 
speech, Lndendorff in August 1921 lauded the excel- 
lence of the old army, which he declared the Reichs- 
wehr must imitate. 

"Think,'' he said, '*what won us Tannenberg: the 
will of the chiefs, faith in them, discipline and cour- 
age in the face of death. . . . The greater our coun- 
try's need the closer will we rally round the black, 
white, and red Prussian flag." 

This Reichswehr numbered 300,000 men in August 
1919, 320,000 in November, and 370,000 in February 
1921. If to these be added two corps organized in 
Lithuania and Lattonia, and the regulars retained 
under the treaty, the total mounts above 420,000 in 
February 1920. On February 18th, 1920, Mr. Lloyd 
George granted an *' extension" to the time limit 
for German demobilization set by the treaty. This 
caused much Teutonic joy. 

The treaty was signed June 28th, 1919; by July 
Germany had created a State Police force in addi- 
tion to the force existing before the war. That was 
divided into two classes, Ordnungspolizei — Order 
Police — and Kriminalpolizei — Criminal Police — 
each a body for maintaining law and order in cities, 
in other words, a municipal force, armed with re- 
volvers only. 

This new Sichereitspolizei — Safety Police — was 
for the repression of mobs. Its organization was 
military, with companies, battalions, regiments, bri- 



342 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

gades, divisions ; its equipment was the same as that 
of the Eeichswehr, even to cannons, minenwerfer, 
and liaison material. Its uniform was green, the old 
police wore bine. 

By October 1919, this *'Sipo'' was already a little 
army, its Berlin contingent commanded by a briga- 
dier general, its complement three corps of 3,000 
men, with two parks of artillery, 1 squadron, 1 liaison 
detachment. One-third of this force was in service, 
one in readiaess, one in repose. In the spring of 
1920, exercises between it and the Eeichswehr re- 
doubled. In June the Allies at Boulogne made a 
sign of expostulation; they shook their finger at it, 
and said it must stop. Three months later it was 
somewhat larger than in June. The Fatherland pro- 
fessed herself deeply alarmed by her state of internal 
unrest ; still, her desire was only to please the Allies. 
Therefore, being composed of 18 sovereign states 
and 13 of these having a ^'Sipo,'* 10 resolved to 
disband it and one joined them later. Sipo disap- 
peared, but immediately appeared a new force, named 
the Schiitzpolizei. The entire Sipo passed into this, 
dropping in its metamorphosis some inferior mate- 
rial and replacing this with younger and better stuff. 

During April 1919, an agitation in Munich made 
the establishing of the Einwohnerwehr most easy and 
convenient. The citizens had been frightened and 
this new force gave them peace of mind. This body 
had been started by a law passed on the 12th of the 
preceding December; the events at Munich gave it 
fresh impetus. Its ramifications spread through the 
Fatherland, it was provided with arms. To the 
world outside it was presented as a defence against 
internal disorders ; the trouble appeared on invest!- 



BY THEIE FRUITS 343 

gation to be, that Germany had so little disorder and 
so mnch defence, and that such an amount of arms 
which by the treaty should have been delivered to 
the Allies is not plausibly represented as essential 
to this defence. Constant meetings of the young, 
who formed the Einwohnerwehr, kept their hands 
and eyes skilful at target shooting and other military 
accomplishments. Under the pressure of remon- 
strance, this vigorous training society, like Sipo, 
dispersed as mercury when pressed beneath the fin- 
ger ; and, when the finger was removed, came together 
again. A new set of labels was invented for it, very 
long names like Schiitzorganization and Selbschiitz- 
organization ; but underneath them, there it was. 
Bavaria was very slow in perfomung the dispersal. 
Behind all this disguised militarism, work some 
societies who are loyal to the old German traditions, 
and to whom democracy is distasteful. The animus 
of these societies may or may not be the cause of 
that setting of the tide away from the communistic 
parties and towards the traditional dynastic form of 
government; certainly there is a close correspond- 
ence between the facts. It is, however, probable that 
quite independent of any secret organization, the 
wish to return to the old ways lies deep in the breast 
of many a German who is not a member of any of 
them. The Orgesch is the principal secret society 
of this sort in Bavaria, in the Tyrol next door it is 
the Orka ; there is reason to suppose that in this part 
of Europe, as in several others, the frontiers which 
were shuffled and redealt so lightly at the Peace Con- 
ference will not remain in their present arrange- 
ment : it was too often a derangement — ^a violence to 
ancient association, a dislocation of beneficent chan- 



344 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

nels of trade, and a hurried and ignorant tying up of 
the dog and the cat in the same bag. Bavaria may 
loom a very important nucleus of a new Centr^ 
Europe empire, when the various organizations that I 
have mentioned will play their thoroughly rehearsed 
parts. At certain schools today, two months' mili- 
tary instruction has been slipped into the curriculum. 

All the while that these activities have been going 
on beneath the nose of the Entente, news has been 
constantly coming of secret stores of arms. 
Throughout my eight months in Europe, one read 
almost every week of these being discovered. It 
would be in East Prussia, where the key to some 
door was *4osf when the Entente inspector came 
his roimds. The door was forced and thousands of 
rifles were hidden there; or it would be in Berlin 
that a treasure house of military telephone and tele- 
graph apparatus was unearthed. In many directions 
these "caches" of every kind of implement and 
mmiition of war, great and smaU, were being found; 
while on the other hand, some gigantic objects, like 
the Big Bertha guns, have never been found at alL 
The explosions at chemical and dye works, far more 
frequent in the Fatherland than ever before, lead 
one to wonder what the Germans can be making: 
one recalls those gas-masks of the polizei. Now 
and then, too, comes another gleam of the mailed 
fist through some incautious hole in the glove; on 
February 11th, 1921, the Volhzeitwig said : 

*^That nation will be victorious which shall have 
discovered the most virulent germ to spread in the 
country of its enemy and the surest vaccine to render 
itself immune. Fifty agents would be enough to 
infect as large a coimtry as Germany.'' 

Months later, General Ludendorff, running true 



BY THEIE FEUITS 345 

to form in his new book, * * Politics and the Conduct 
of War/' says: 

** Conflict for the individual as for the State is a 
permanent natural phenomenon, and is founded in 
the diviae ordinance of the world ... we must have 
done once for all with the talk of such things as eter- 
nal peace, disarmament, and reconciliation of man- 
kind . . . war will continue to be the last and only 
decisive instrxmient of policy. . . . 

** There must again be a Kaiser . . . the birth of 
Prussianism must again be blown into the adminis- 
tration framework. . . . Political leaders . . . are 
to be trained in school and university in the doctrines 
of Clausewitz." 

Quite near the time when this book appeared, dur- 
ing the last months of 1921, six hundred howitzers 
of large calibre were found walled up in the Bock- 
stroh near Dresden. The Entente investigators were 
discouraged in their search by many artifices and 
objections, but they went on. 

Dr. Wirth, in whose government and good inten- 
tions much confidence is placed by Mr. Vanderlip, 
was sure that these arms had been made before the 
war, and were concealed to be broken up as old mate- 
rial. Is this innocence on the part of the Chancellor t 
But what if it ist The guns were made after the 
Armistice. Breechblocks and other parts of 342 
howitzers were next discovered, five rifling machines 
were hidden under the floor, seven times the number 
of howitzers allowed by the treaty were discovered 
in this one factory, with official invoices directing 
the guns to be kept here and not forwarded, as usual, 
to the arsenal at Spandau. At Spandau were found 
two rooms packed from floor to ceiling with papers 



346 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

concerning the strength of the German Army at the 
time of the Armistice ; these, when asked for at that 
time and ever since, were reported as **losf The 
Entente investigators, who wonld appear to be among 
the most humorous characters alive, left them under 
a guard of the Spandau military authorities over- 
night, and returned to get them the next morning. 
They were all lost again. 

In Upper Silesia, since October, the French have 
reported numerous discoveries of concealed arms — 
seven since January 1st, 1922 ; six hundred shells for 
heavy guns found in a barn; in a coach house the 
equipment for a company of infantry; others in the 
park of a country house, in a music hall, and in a 
deaf and dumb asylum. At the end of January the 
Germans made an armed attack upon French who 
were searching for concealed arms, wounding twenty 
and killing two. This was about six months after 
General Ludendorff's assurance to the students of 
Koenigsberg that the fate of Upper Silesia would 
be decided soon or late by a battle. 

Where is the moral disarmament, where the 
changed intention t What converted and pacific Ger- 
many is to be found in all this 1 And what matters 
it whether Chancellor Wirth and his government are 
the deluded or the conniving cats^ paws of Kulturt 
Since the Armistice, as before it, Germany has run 
true to form, and by her fruits any one can know 
her. The mind^s eye sees the big dividends secretly 
shuffled into foreign investments, the big guns se- 
cretly manufactured, the thousands of young stu- 
dents secretly drilled — and the renowned chemist, 
Dr. Otswald, closeted over test tubes, retorts, and 
microscopes with his scientific brethren, trying for 



BY THEIR FEUITS 347 

new explosives no larger than an egg, bnt able to 
flatten Paris, London, and New York to dust; and 
trying for a new germ, bred from all the deadliest 
contagions that will mingle, and capable of rotting 
any commnnity to deliquescence in twenty-four hours. 

Such a people may not be precisely lovable, but 
they are in truth a great race; their industry puts 
us all to shame, and one bows to their impregnable 
steadfastness to themselves. One can hardly over- 
praise the power of their team-work, or over-damn 
the wabbling incoherence of some of their adver- 
saries, into whose feeble political hands Foch the 
soldier delivered them in November 1918. 

Is there in the whole course of history a spectacle 
more stupefying? 



XXVI 

MIUTARISTIO f 

To divert attention from herself, Germany has 
been pointing the finger of accusation at Prance. 

** Behold the trouble maker I *' she says to her own 
people and to the Allies; **see what a big army she 
is keeping np/' 

It is an old trick. Policemen are familiar with 
it when there is disorder in the street, and they have 
been known to arrest the wrong man. Of course 
the German people are taken in by it. Under the 
forty years of drill to which their minds have been 
subjected by Prussia, they accept all official state- 
ments automatically ; they have believed and will go 
on believing anything that Berlin tells them. At 
the age when the children learn the Lord's Prayer, 
they have been taught the following words : 

' * Germany is my fatherland, a country surrounded 
by enemies. '' 

Upon a soil so carefully tilled, the seed of any 
lie will grow. This Prussian perversion continues 
unimpeded, and the preparation of no germ or ex- 
plosive could be more dangerous, since it is the man 
behind the gun that counts. Therefore it is wholly 
natural and inevitable that sixty-five or seventy 
millions of Germans should believe Prussia when she 
accused France of militarism. But why should any- 
body else t Why should English and Americans look 

348 



MILITAEISTIC! 349 

in the direction that Germany is pointing, and 
express themselves as shocked at the large army of 
France at a time when all really good persons are 
talking about disarmament! It is remarkably like 
the policeman arresting the wrong man in the street, 
and it is also a piece of the whole stupefying 
spectacle. 

At the Peace Conference, France asked for a Rhine 
frontier by way of protection against further inva- 
sions from Germany. This she was prevented from 
getting by England and the United States ; but these 
friends of hers offered her something in exchange 
for what she gave up; they would bind themselves 
to come to her help in case Germany should ever 
assault her again without provocation. Eenouncing 
her Rhine frontier, she accepted this offer. Then her 
friends went home. Mr. Lloyd George had been 
careful to make England ^s promise depend upon 
America's; so that when it turned out that Mr. 
Wilson had promised more than he could perform, 
it all fell down. France had given up her Rhine 
frontier and got — ^nothing ; she was left by England 
and America to take care of herself. 

Against sixty-five million Germans, France counts 
thirty-eight. Her people saw German hordes come 
in to pillage and bum before the land was named 
France, or the invaders were called Germans. From 
the year 102 before Christ, when the Cimbri and 
Teutones got almost to Marseilles and were stopped 
by the Roman general, Marius, down to Ludendorff 's 
last lunge at the Mame in 1918, the land of France 
has been incessantly trodden down by the barbarians. 
Sometimes titey got no farther than the Oise, or 
Verdun; sometimes they swept to the Somme, or 



350 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOETH 

overran Franche-Conte and threatened Italy from 
the stronghold of BesanQon ; sometimes they swarmed 
into the Bhone Basin and destroyed Lyons. There 
were centuries when they broke in several times, and 
again a long period would pass without a visit ; but 
it has been computed that there has been an average 
of one invasion of France by Germans every fifty 
years for fifteen centuries — and the fathers of those 
who fought in 1914 fought in 1870. Had it not been 
for European intervention, Bismarck would have 
tried it again in 1875, because he was not satisfied 
with his job five years earlier. 

Is it not conceivable that England, had she suf- 
fered from a habit of German invasion so chronic 
as this, might have been more acutely attentive to 
the warnings which Lord Roberts gave her through 
those seven years before 1914? Had she renounced 
a Rhine frontier and got nothing for it, would she 
not be likely to want an army f To call France mili- 
taristic in such circumstances looks somewhat like 
putting the cart before the horse. France seems to 
me more like a man who goes about his premises 
armed with a revolver and a big stick, because he 
has lately been twice sandbagged, and the police have 
all gone away. 

I have never noticed that England, or America, 
or any nation enjoyed misrepresentation and abuse ; 
yet they are calling France militaristic and accusing 
her of impatience because she resents it. How satis- 
factory to Germany, their enemy, this attitude 
towards their friend France must be I How per- 
fectly this carries out Germany's plan that the Allies 
should fall apart ! 

Yes ; France is being accused of impatience, and I 



MILITAEISTICf 351 

am afraid that it is true ; the marvel is that she has 
not been much more so. Her newspapers are intem- 
perate at times — are they the only ones t At Wash- 
ington her delegates made a righteous case seem 
wrong for a while, and were surpassed in urbanity 
by the delegates of Great Britain. But put your- 
self in her place, review the story of her recent 
experience : 

One-fourteenth of her territory devastated; four 
million men lost in killed, maimed, and wounded ; a 
frontier renounced in exchange for a broken promise ; 
the German damages awarded her by the court whit- 
tled down under British pressure while the German 
fleet is safe in the British pocket; her demand at 
Washington to increase her own greatly reduced sea 
power, skilfully distorted by the press. Her naval 
plan was held up to the world as an enormity, when 
in fact, after the cobwebs of misrepresentation had 
been brushed away, what she asked was very close 
indeed to what Mr. Hughes proposed. 

By the reporters she was made to appear as in- 
tending to have completed ten new dreadaoughts of 
35,000 tons each by the end of ten years ; as a matter 
of fact, they were to come at the end of twenty years ; 
at the end of ten she would have just two. This was 
the first distortion by the press. 

France had built no new ships for seven years; 
she had turned over to England, for war purposes, 
what vessels she possessed. Some had been lost, and 
her plan when truly stated came to nothing more 
than replacing superannuated tonnage at the rate 
of one new ship in two years. According to this 
plan, she would have at the end of the ** ten-year 
holiday,^' counting six old ships and two new ones, 



352 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

200,000 tons instead of 175,000— only 25,000 more 
than the ratio first proposed I 

Her tonnage in existing capital ships is 283,923; 
Great Britain's is 1,031,000 ; onrs is 628,390. Prance 
has a colonial population 20 million greater than at 
home ; a colonial area of 13 million square kilometres 
to our 9 million ; she has a coast from Belgium to the 
Bay of Biscay, with Ostend, Calais, Havre, Cher- 
bourg, Brest, St. Nazaire, Bordeaux, among the har- 
bors which she must defend, and Marseilles on the 
Mediterranean, with her two African ports, making 
a triangle. Since the beginning of the war she has 
built 5 submarines; since the Armistice, the United 
States has built 44 and is building 38 more, while 
Great Britain has built 41. To put it in another way, 
our total tonnage in submarines existing and to be 
built is 82,105; Great Britain's is 82,464; France 
has 42,949, and is building none, while we propose 
to build 38, having officially declared that the sub- 
marine is a defensive weapon, which is precisely 
what France has contended. 

France was obliged to stand in a false light dex- 
terously thrown upon her during the Washington 
Conference, to hear the outcries of editors based upon 
distorted news, and in the midst of this din a con- 
gressman introducing a bill demanding immediate 
payment of money owed to us by any European 
nation that had announced its intention of increasing 
its navy. Patience is always desirable, but in such 
circumstances is impatience wholly unnatural? 

So much for the charge that France is militaristic 
Why it is nmde by Germany is perfectly plain ; why 
it is made by England is not so plain, because the 
safety of France from Germany is just as important 



MILITAEISTICt 353 

to England now as it was in 1914 ; but as the general 
British mind could not take in what Germany was 
getting ready to do during the seven years before 
1914, it is equally unable now to imagine that Ger- 
many will do anything more. The war is over, the 
German sea power eliminated, and England set upon 
resuming her interrupted trade. The French Army 
seems to be a disadvantage to this, and consequently 
the British mind does not see why France should be 
needing something that is unnecessary to England. 

**Why does she not disband her army as I have 
done? We beat Germany.^' That is virtually the 
thought in the British mind, because it lacks imagina- 
tion, and without this you cannot put yourself in the 
other man's place ; you always put him in yours. 

Mr. H. G. Wells says of his own countrymen : 

**Most Englishmen, even those who belong to what 
we call the educated classes, still do not think sys- 
tematically at all; you can not understand England 
until you master that fact ; their ideas are in slovenly 
detached little heaps, they think in ready-made 
phrases, they are honestly capable therefore of the 
most grotesque inconsistencies. *' 

Why Americans should call France militaristic, 
and why a congressman should offer such a resolu- 
tion as that demanding immediate payment of money 
owed to us by any European power intending to in- 
crease its navy, is because many congressmen, as 
well as many of those who elect them, are in the 
habit of thinking that they know all about everything 
when they know nothing of anything. 



xxvn 

IDLE t WELL OFF t 

As I travelled back and forth through the land of 
France, after two years, I watched the winter go, 
the spring come and go, and a part of the siunmer. 
What I saw and heard of France in her great emer- 
gency of peace through those months would fill a book 
— ^and must be condensed into a chapter. The mere 
aspect of things was often so contradictory as en- 
tirely to explain the discrepancies between the vari- 
ous reports of her state which travellers had brought 
home ; all depended upon where they had gone and 
how long they had stayed. At the bottom there was 
no contradiction, everything that I had been told 
was true, except that France was idle and that she 
was prosperous; she was neither the one nor the 
other. Perhaps the only unchanged things that I 
found were her sane and gallant spirit, and her deep, 
unspoken sadness. 

**See, monsieur, '* said Madeleine my chamber- 
maid, after she and her husband and I had come to 
know each other well, "Nicholas and I, we are work- 
ing and saving to have some day a home where I 
can take care of him, though he doesn't know that. 
You did not see him before the four years of prison 
with the Germans. He is changed, monsieur, changed 
inside, and it is for me who have not been in prison 
to take care of Eim. ' ' 

864 



IDLE! WELL OFF? 355 

I saw many brave women and broken men like that, 
who said no words to me such as Madeleine's, because 
we had not gone far enough in friendship, but whose 
state a glance or a whisper would reveal ; at Bleran- 
court, where American ability and devotion are lift- 
ing to health the crippled communes of the Aisne; 
at Arras, St. Quentin, Soissons, Albert, Bapaxune, 
Beims, Verdun, Thiaucourt, Pont-a-Mousson and 
along the roads between — ^where did I not meet with 
thist Many of the men lacked an arm, or a leg, or 
breathed with lungs that had been gassed ; there they 
were, in the fields, in the estaminets, going on as 
well as they could, each with a woman working hard 
all day, and taking care of her man, because, mon- 
sieur, he is not the same as he used to be I 

I saw those orchards which the Germans had cut 
down, still kneeling as if in supplication, and some 
of their trees like true French trees were trying to 
go on when April came; a rag of bark and wood 
still tied them to their roots, and through this still 
flowed the sap, breaking into white blossoms that 
leaned and bowed close to the ground. 

At Peronne the German placard, **nicht argern 
nur wimdem, ' ' was gone ; Peronne had manufactured 
sugar, and while she waited for the rebuilding of her 
destroyed machinery to resume her ancient industry, 
she was by no means idle. She was sowing wheat in 
her reclaimed fields, and barley, and was raising hay. 
In centuries past she had been a storm-centre of his- 
tory, and had counted many beautiful old buildings 
which I had seen shattered and demolished upon my 
last visit. She was but a tomb of beauty now. She 
recalled the mining camps of the eighties in our West. 
Scarce any movement had been in her wasted streets 



356 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOETH 

in 1919 ; they were wasted still, raw, without order, 
somethiiig like a face that needs shaving, but life 
was bustling in them. The stumps of the dead trees, 
with glaring new board shacks scattered like litters 
of boxes among them, might have been Montana 
forests cut down to make way for civilization. Here 
was a cinema in a tent; there was a pharmacy in a 
shack; there in another was a shop with a proud 
name like Grand Magazin de Paris, with boots and 
buttons and spoons and shovels and nearly every- 
thing else for sale ; long new wooden- barracks like 
bowling alleys housed the homeless people of Pe- 
ronne; this once symmetric and historic town was 
now as ugly and shapeless as any six months old 
place I had ever seen in our Bocky Mountains ; and 
to look at it and reflect that this identity of aspect 
came from destruction in one case and advance in 
the other, was strange and sad. 

The woman who kept an estaminet here where I 
went to drink coffee and get warm, was as lively and 
competent as my friend Madeleine. 

** Until '16 I stayed here in Peronne, monsieur, 
and then I had to go to Amiens. At Amiens they 
complain too much. We have suffered more here, 
do you not think t" 

'*! certainly do.*' 

**As you see, this cafe is made of wood — double 
planks with paper. And the bedroom is very cold, 
constructed by my husband. When the Boches were 
here they made men and women and young girls 
work beneath the stick. There are Boches and 
Boches; but you know, the best of them don't come 
high.'' 

The startling resemblance of these French towns 



IDLE! WELL OFF? 357 

that were being built again to those camps in onr 
West was a common sight which met me all through 
the devastated regions. In their ruins they had been 
noble and pitiful, and now this dignity was gone, and 
the stage through which they were passing wore a 
degraded and sordid appearance, where the beauty 
which had been blasted away was replaced by un- 
sightliness. Yet even this disorderly make-shift and 
improvisation of existence had been touched with 
grace already by the French hand. Amid the raw 
square shacks and the rusted sheets of corrugated 
iron that arched the beds and kitchens of these en- 
camped townsfolk, flowers, blue and white and pink, 
would be growing along some sill in a box, or in the 
earth of some tended corner, and new-washed cur- 
tains veiled the little windows with the caress of 
neatness. 

At Cuisy-en-Almont, I passed a new house two 
stories high, and very pretty, which a man and his 
two daughters had built entirely with their own 
hands. In certain of the larger towns, such as Sois- 
sons, those residents who had been well-to-do and 
had some money still, were not waiting for help 
from the government to rebuild their houses; and 
wherever this was the case, the new residences stood 
out very plainly among the general ruins. They were 
apt to have red roofs, or to be of brick, and were 
often ugly in shape ; and before long it became easy 
to judge from a distant sight of any village how far 
its restoration had progressed, so very marked and 
so very small in amount was the new construction 
amid the old destruction. Help from the government 
came, but it had to come slowly, and by instalments. 
If a destroyed house had been worth 25,000 francs in 



358 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

1914, to rebuUd it in 1919 would cost three or four 
times as much, according to the fluctuations in the 
price of material. Its owner would be given its value, 
in 1914, as damages for his loss, and supplementary 
sums to cover the excess price of replacing it. But to 
establish his claim to any of these subsidies, he must 
return to the place where he had lived and stay there, 
or within a radius of 50 kilometres. Many were liv- 
ing in any fragment of a house that they could find, 
and many in holes, asking merely for somewhere to 
come back to for rest after each day's work. Many 
villages from which the war had swept all life were 
still lifeless and in dust, still totally dead, and some 
of these would never be aUve again; others were a 
quarter alive, or half; while some towns, less de- 
stroyed and with more resources of food and shelter, 
were harboring not only their own population, but 
refugees also; Arras, for example, had numbered 
25,000 people before the war, and now had 50,000. 
But Arras, like other towns where I ate or slept, 
showed the shock of shells not only out-of-doors, 
where the cathedral and Hotel de ViUe had been 
purposely destroyed, and many streets were walled 
by hollow ruins, but indoors too, where big holes 
were in the ceiliag of one's bedroom and big cracks 
in the mirrors 6t the restaurant. I walked about in 
Lens, where the water was gushing copiously out of 
the vent as they pumped it from the flooded mines, 
and where 1,000 houses had been built of the 12,000 
that were needed, and 6,000 men were now worKng. 
These mines were spending a million francs a day, 
in a year it was expected to be many times that sum, 
and they were making a loan of 20 milliards to cover 
their coming expenses. At Bonssoy, north of St. 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 359 

Quentin, there was a graveyard where the Germans 
had emptied titie bones from all cofiSns of lead, of 
which metal they stood in need. They were as pracj- 
tical with their own dead. I heard that English pris- 
oners saw these baled in wire, six naked, corpses to 
a bale, for shipment to various reduction plants. 
They were kept away from those factories, but they 
could smell them. 

The aspect of the French country varied as greatly 
as that of the towns, but it had recovered in far 
greater proportion. The first labor had been spent 
upon the more fertile and valuable areas, and there 
were other wide stretches where nothing as yet had 
been done at all. Miles of shell holes and barbed 
wire that I had seen in 1919 were now smoothed and 
plowed, waiting for the spring; as the season ad- 
vanced and I passed them several times again, I saw 
these acres rise into life and become a waving sea 
of crops. Nothing among or near them would have 
led a traveller to suspect that they had been a wilder- 
ness, two years ago, except the large coils of barbed 
wire which had been removed from them, and often 
lay piled along the roads. These roads ran through 
other miles where the wire and the shells and the 
holes still spread across the desolate surface, over 
which no change had come save a growth of rank 
weeds and grass, robbing this land of its tragic 
appearance without redeeming it from its barrenness. 
So it was by Beaumont Hamel, on that road beyond 
Mailly-Maillet towards Arras. Not even the road 
had been there in April 1919, and now it was the 
only thing there. It was worse beyond Bethune and 
Neuve Chapelle ; indeed, in that direction, there was 
still almost perfect desolation all the way through 



360 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

Armentieres and Messines to Ypres and the Menin 
road and the ridge of Paschendael. Towns and lands 
alike £|till lay in wreck and obliteration nnredeemed, 
not a fragment seemed to have been touched among 
the monnds and the holes and the wire; along the 
main road I saw a thighbone sticking out of a pool. 
This part of the battle-gronnd was one of the few 
that remained where it was still difficult to find one's 
way; we were turned back twice, and oUce had to 
make a long detour in order to gain a road that was 
open. This happened to me in only one other place, 
between the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames; 
through all my other journeys, although one came 
at times to roads that were still impassable, there 
were other roads open near at hand; progress had 
virtually ceased to be the picking out from many 
ways the only one not closed, and had become the 
avoiding among many ways the only one not open. 
France had re-established her channels of conmiuni- 
cation in a very large measure, both her thorough- 
fares and her railroads. These latter on their main 
lines were nearly normal in the service of their trains, 
and the speed, though still not as fast as it had been 
before the war, had decidedly increased. It was only 
a certain small number of branch lines that were 
still unopened. 

While the various voices were busy reporting that 
France was not trying to pick herself up, but was 
lying in the groxmd, supinely waiting until Germany 
should pay her reparations, this is what I found she 
had accomplished by January Ist, 1921 : 

Of the 277 million cubic metres of trenches to 
refill, 219 million had been done ; of the 310 million 
square metres of barbed wire to uproot and remove, 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 



361 



249 million had been done ; of the 3 million 8 hundred 
thousand devastated hectares to be brought back to 
safety and fertility, 3 million four hundred and fif- 
teen thousand had been purged of live shells and 
projectiles, and 3 million 126 thousand had been made 
level and normal. Or, to put it in another way — 

Of shells removed 89% 

Of land leveUed 82.2% 

Of barbed wire removed 80.1% 

Of trenches filled .79% 

Of wreckage cleared away 60% 

in 18 months, with a male population reduced by 4 
million, and a debt increased tenfold. And again — 

Of 1,757,000 hectares destroyed, 1,669,000 were levelled, 
1,405,000 were cultivated, 1,000,000 were sown. 

The French harvest in 1919 had been 24% of the 
harvest before the war; in 1920 it was 50%. 
By January 1st, 1921 — 

334,000 hectares were sown in hay. 



304,000 
57,000 
39,000 
37,000 

150,000 



wheat, 
beets, 
rye. 
barley, 
other crops. 



Of main line railroads restored 96.6% 

** local railroads 28% 

** canals and navigable streams 93% 

** engineering works 70% 

" roads , ., 64.7% 

Three thousand six hundred and three tunnels and 
bridges had been destroyed, one thousand four hun- 
dred and ninety-eight remained to be repaired. 



362 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

That is a part of what idle France had been doing 
in 18 months — ^from the spring of 1919, when she 
was able to begin work, nntil January 1st, 1921 ; and 
here is more of it: 

In November 1918, twenty thousand five hundred 
of her manufactories were paralyzed, either knocked 
down and without machinery, or left standing without 
machinery. After 18 months, 18% of these were 
going concerns, 26% in partial activity; but 56% 
were still stationary. The German work of destruc- 
tion and robbery could not be repaired very rapidly, 
and so, whUe German factories were whirling full 
speed at night as well as in the day, earning those 
30 and 40 per cent, dividends, more than half the 
industry of Prance was still a total wreck. 

But it was in making new houses for her homeless 
millions that France was most behind. She had so 
little money to spend at all, that she devoted most 
of it to what would immediately iacrease her income 
with the least outlay; therefore her first care had 
to be for her fields and her channels of communica- 
tion. Meanwhile, those homeless French lived near 
their place of work in any shelter that could be found 
or improvised. In their anxiety to return to their 
homes and reclaim their land they came back from 
their exile in a stream with which no reconstruction 
of the demolished farms and villages could keep 
pace ; especially ia a country that had lost one-fifth 
of its revenue, and had been spending 9 biUion francs 
a year in self-defence. This outstripping of the 
sheltering capacity in the devastated regions by the 
returning peasants caused a very heavy shortage of 
every kind of habitation, adequate and inadequate. 
Five hundred and ninety thousand dwellings had been 



IDLE! WELL OFPt 363 

wholly or partially destroyed — 293,000 were wiped 
out, tiie remainder left in various stages of ruin. 
By January 1921, 40,000 of these were rebuilt, 280,- 
000 made partly habitable, and to this housing ca- 
pacity 40,000 barracks, 60,000 shacks, and 29,000 
shelters of other substanciBs had been added ; this had 
to accommodate one million seven hundred thousand 
people. The total insufficiency of housing in ratio 
to the housed was 24%; of repaired or provisional 
houses in ratio to the population in 1914, 33.1%; 
the insufficiency of normal houses, 96%. Since Jan- 
uary 1921, the energy of France in restoring herself 
has never flagged; today more than six-sevenths of 
her schools are reopened, nearly half of her destroyed 
homes are permanently or temporarily repaired, 
more than three-quarters of her productive soil has 
been reclaimed. This she has accomplished in spite 
of having been compelled to buy from abroad much 
wheat, sugar, coal, and other necessaries which she 
had produced at home before the Germans destroyed 
her machinery and sources of production. To re- 
build the destroyed a;reas, the bridges, roads, rail- 
ways, telegraphs, to set industries, commerce, farm- 
ers on their feet, France up to the year 1922 had 
devoted fifty-six billion francs since the Armistice. 

Yet Germans have intimated, and others have 
echoed the intimation, that France has been lying 
idle, waiting for Germany to pay the reparations! 
It is singular that Germany should expect such a 
tale to be believed, because the idea that any nation 
which had to go on living should voluntarily expire 
makes a very feeble appeal to human reason; more 
singular still is it that any one should have actually 
believed it. It is somewhat as if a man who had 



364 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

been crushed by his neighbor's automobile should 
wait to be paid the damages before he went to a 
hospital. Germany has given the world another sug- 
gestion about France, certainly more plausible on 
its face. France refused Germany's offer to send 
workmen and rebuild her ruins for her; had she 
accepted this offer, says Germany, France would by 
now be rebuilt. Without taking into consideration 
the problem of feeding a large army of strangers 
when food was scarce and expensive, and also the 
feelings of the French at having to see again and 
to live side by side with those who had wrecked their 
homes, killed their brothers, and debauched their 
sisters, there is something else ; with that offer which 
Germany made went stipulations about the comfort 
and food and general weU-being of her workmen, 
while they should be in France, which it would have 
been perfectly impossible to meet, and the Germans 
knew it. They did not intend that France should 
accept their offer, any more than they had intended 
on July 23d, 1914, that Serbia should accept Aus- 
tria's ultimatum. Acceptance of the scheme would 
have flung Germany into the same flurry of indigna- 
tion at the ** duplicity" of France that they impro- 
vised when Serbia took them aback by accepting the 
ultimatum. The offer was what we call a ^^frame- 
up," something to be used for effect, quite like the 
incident of Casablanca in 1907. That was a "cause 
of war" with France which Germany had been care- 
fully engineering. Germans with a past, who had 
enlisted in France 's Foreign Legion, like many others 
with a past, were induced by German secret agents 
to desert, and were to be represented to the world 
as being worthy subjects of the Kaiser, whom the 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 365 

French Army had kidnapped and enslaved. The 
trick was played prematurely, before the Kaiser felt 
ready to fight; and he backed down in the face of 
the energetic position then taken by M, Clemencean, 
who was President of the Council. 

**Born to lie,^' wrote the Boman general in the 
first century, and this pattern running through the 
German character shows no sign of fading out, after 
two thousand years. Its color has glowed brightly 
whenever, after some conference at which Germany 
has asseverated to the Allies that it is out of her 
power to pay her reparation, they have taken, or 
have even threatened to take, steps to enforce pay- 
ment under the sanctions of the Treaty of Versaflles, 
the cash has been forthcoming at once. 

** You have answered all sorts of questions,'' I said 
to a member of the French Government, **and now 
I am going to ask you one more — ^and even then it 
may be that I shall not have finished!'' 

He bowed. **You know I am always at your 
service. ' ' 

**It is this: how about your taxes t" 

**That is our weak point," he answered with im- 
mediate frankness. ^*We have not been able to col- 
lect our tax from the profiteers as successfully as 
England or yourselves. But Germany has this same 
we£^ point, as well as a number of others. Don't 
forget that!" 

^'I don't!" 

**And that she is the culprit while we are her 
victims. ' ' 

**No American who has seen your devastated re- 
gions will forget that. ' ' 

**Also, it is not that we are conniving with our 



366 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

great industrials, that they may escape the tax and 
hide their profits in foreign investments. That is 
the second deep moral difference between Germany 
and ourselves in this matter of taxes. First, she is 
the guilty debtor, we the injured creditor; second, 
she deliberately winks at the diversion of large sums 
of money into these foreign investments, which by 
the treaty should go to us for reparation. She 
violates the Treaty of Versailles every day. With 
us it is inefficiency. We are violating no treaty, and 
it is only we who suffer from our own — ^weU, call 
it timidity, if you like. The French people hate direct 
taxation, and ministers fear to push them too far. 
Our leaders, like yours, I fancy, find their position 
difficult when it comes to a clash between domestic 
and foreign policies. * * 

** England has the same embarrassment,'* I said. 

**But not Germany,'* he answered. ** Whatever it 
looks like on the surface, they stand together at bot- 
tom, because they are just as much against the world 
in peace as they were in the war, and this keeps them 
unified. Yes, I admit that we fall short of you in 
the matter of taxes. Only half a million Frenchmen 
paid a direct income tax in 1920, when about four 
million ought to have paid. But who does that hurt 
except ourselves? And in spite of it, we have not 
remained at a standstill." 

**I am very well aware of that!** I exclaimed. 

**Yes; but do you know that our exports have 
increased some 16 per cent, over last year, while our 
imports have decreased 45 per cent. T That will come 
to an export balance of nearly a billion francs against 
an import balance of almost 28 billion last year. And 
by our bookkeeping we have continued so far to keep 



IDLE? WELL OFFt 367 

onr heads above bankruptcy. Our public debt 
amounts to — ^in dollars — $1212 per capita against 
England ^s $875 and yours of $240. But of this debt 
of ours — about forty-eight billion and a half dollars 
— only 8.4 per cent, is external debt. And — ^have no 
fear! — ^France will meet her obligations. It is not 
in her tradition to repudiate. Only — ^may we not have 
time to build ourselves up before paying! Who is 
the real debtor — ^France, or the one who forced us 
all to spend these billions to save our liberty! And 
one word more, monsieur '' 

He paused a moment, as if to be able to continue 
his calm manner and speech : 

**Do you think if Germany were just across the 
river from certain bankers and politicians, that they 
would be quite so ready to invite us all to deny our- 
selves for her sake!^* 

**Don^t let them make you give up your army I ^' 
said I, ** whatever else you may have to deny your- 
selves.'' 

* * Oh, we shall keep our army ! Mr. Lloyd George 
is not our Prime Minister, you know.'' 

^^He almost seems so, at times," I ventured to 
murmur. 

He let this go. **They tell us, monsieur, that we 
are asking from Germany more than the true price 
of our damage. That is very easy for financiers to 
say, but not so easy to prove when exchange is in 
such rapid and constant fluctuation that what we 
have correctly calculated on Monday will have be- 
come false on Tuesday. Let Germany pay us until 
our regions that she devastated are rebuilt, and then 
we will excuse her whatever excess we asked." 

"Nobody has ever suggested that," I said. 



868 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

*'l8 it not perfectly simple and practical?'' 
* * Perfectly. But they say that Germany can never 
pay the true cost of rebuilding. ' ' 

**And in reply to that I say, monsieur, that when 
France, short of men, short of money, and with her 
industries paralyzed as you have seen, has been able 
in two years to rebuild herself in the manner that 
you have also seen, that Germany, who has not a 
wheel cracked in her vast industrial machine, can 
pay perfectly well, and in a shorter time than they 
have allowed her. No, monsieur! This is how it 
is : Either Mr. Lloyd George and his friends know 
better, or they do not; either they understand Ger- 
many, or they do not. It comes to the same thing in 
result — ^that they are the best friends that Germany 
has, and are aiding her in her plan which France 
clearly perceives. That plan is to delay her pay- 
ments and so compel us, who can not go on living 
without a roof over our heads, to pay for the new 
roof ourselves — and with the generous help that you 
and other friends are sending us. Germany intends 
the Allies to heal their own wounds — ^and to deal 
them some new ones, perhaps, before the old ones 
are cured. Meanwhile, her democratic workmen are 
very respectful to those above them. When they 
declined to launch for Monsieur Stinnes his new 
ship the von Tirpitz because of its name, he dismissed 
3,000 of them. Since that they have launched the 
Hindenhurg and the Ludendorff for him with the 
most correct and obliging politeness. ' ' 

I slept two nights among the ruins in the depart- 
ment of the Aisne, whence the violence of war had 
scarcely been absent at all during the four years. 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 369 

In that region, out of 841 conminnes, 814 had been 
demolished; of 590,000 people, 290,000 had fled; of 
736,000 hectares, 730,000 had been plowed up by 
projectiles ; of 10,000 kilometres of road 6,000 were 
still impassable, and to rebuild them one million 
seven hundred thousand tons of stone would be re- 
quired. Of 489 kilometres of main line railroads, 
489 — ^the whole — had been destroyed, and of the 648 
kilometres of branch lines, 609 had been destroyed. 
The little town of Coucy-le-Chateau — and nowhere 
in France was there a gem of more exquisite beauty 
— stood on its hill as silent and dead as Herculaneum, 
destroyed by no volcano, but by the eruption of 
wanton, baffled German hate. 

At Anizy-le-Chateau on the Sunday that I spent 
in this region, the croix-de-guerre was given to 21 
of the devastated communes by Marshal FayoUe. 
The people came from their own ruins through the 
dead forests to the ruins of Anizy, and assembled 
round a platform in the sunlight to listen to the 
speeches. These were eloquent and moving, made 
by prominent men who spoke to the bereaved and 
hard-working people of their beloved France. Bright 
flags covered the little broken place, hanging quietly 
in the warm and motionless air. Beyond these and 
across the tiny stream, the Ailette, rose the forest of 
Pinon, grim and leafless, never to be green again, 
every tree a mere dead spike above the marshy green 
of the new grass by the river. Twenty thousand 
dead had been in the forest of Pinon in September 
1918. The great silence was living here still; but 
as those Frenchmen spoke of France and I listened 
to the solemn and passionate devotion of their words, 
and looked at the forest beyond, it was easy to im- 



370 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

agine unheard music floating from the depths; the 
songs of the mothers bidding their dead sons to sleep 
and dream proud dreams because they lay in the 
bosom of their country that they had saved; the 
songs of young mothers over their cradles, bidding 
their new-born to sleep and dream proud dreams 
because they would in their turn live for France and, 
if she asked them, die for her. The heart of the 
ceremony was the conferring of the war cross to 
each one who stood forth to represent his conmiune. 
Its name would be called from the roll, and at this 
the representative approached Marshal Fayolle. 
Then the roll of the commune 's dead would be called, 
name after name ; and after each came the answer : 

*' Jules Touzef 

**Mort pour la France/' 

**Leon Jourdois.'' 

**Mort pour la France/' 

** Andre Renard/' 

*^Mort pour la France/' 

Always the same reply, "dead for France," com- 
mune after commune, until all the twenty-one had 
been decorated with the cross through their repre- 
sentative by Marshal Fayolle. Not only did it not 
seem long, but time ceased to be, the sacredness of 
it was a moment of eternity ; and through it sounded 
the unheard music from the forest of Pinon, and it 
seemed as if the whole company were sitting in the 
cathedral of Reims, invisible, a wreck no longer, made 
whole and rising glorious beyond the grave. 

The people of the communes had wished so much 
to make the marshal and all their guests feel that 
they were welcome, that they had spent themselves 
to provide, not a meal, but a feast. They had done 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 371 

far more than was needed, they had determined that 
none of their poverty which conld be hidden should 
be seen today ; and their endless bill-of-f are, printed 
with snch zest, contained both a smile and a heart- 
break. 

It had been the plan of the ministering spirit who 
presides over the American Belief of this department 
to reduce and simplify, for the sake of expense, each 
detail of help that should cease to be needed. It 
had been hoped that after two years the surgical 
help might cease. Nothing else could ; not the little 
shacks for school children; not the little new brick 
libraries scattered through the wasted region; not 
the automobile service, or the assembly rooms where 
the people came at night to see moving pictures, or 
the dispensary, or the dentist, nothing that meant 
help to work, or to instruct, or to amuse, or to keep 
well; but war wounds had either got well or had 
been placed in the care of more central organizations. 
Nevertheless, surgical equipment had to be continued 
by the American Belief in the Aisne, because of the 
bombs that were being removed from the fields, the 
unexploded hand grenades. A special force was 
being employed all through the devastated regions 
to find and take away these live shells. In the de- 
partment of the Aisne, 648 men had been doing this 
work in 1920, of whom 100 had been killed and 38 
wounded. The French shells were more dangerous 
than the German on account of their mechanism; 
they had a spring which caused the fuse to ignite. 
In time and under exposure, this spring became rusty, 
so that sometimes the lightest touch, or even a jar 
caused by the earth pressing against it where a man 
had set his foot, would snap it, and the man might 



372 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

lose a leg, or be blown to atoms. Consequently the 
surgical equipment had to be retained. 

In the windows and on the counters of the book- 
shops all over France were the signs of a great 
change. Innumerable pamphlets and periodicals 
were now published to teach and encourage out-of- 
door competitive sports. One of these was called, 
*^How to become a good player of Football Asso- 
ciation,^' another, ** Football Rugby,'' another 
* * Feminine Basket Ball. ' ' These were but a few that 
I noticed. Not one of these publications had I ever 
seen before, and until the war the French had paid 
but scant attention to the games of England and 
America. Competitive sport had not been a habit 
or a tradition with them, and to this fact one weak- 
ness in the national character may be ascribed — ^the 
absence of the instinct of team-work, of co-operation, 
straight through the entire social and economic struc- 
ture of the country. 

Two officers, a Frenchman and an American, were 
talking together as they watched a line of our dough- 
boys standing in a heavy rain growing wetter and 
wetter, each soldier patiently waiting his turn to 
have his supper handed to him. This astonished the 
Frenchman. 

**Are your men willing to keep in line like thatt'* 
he asked the American. 

**Yes. Why not!" 

** French soldiers would not endure that deluge of 
rain. They would all crowd each other to get first. ' ' 

What they saw of the British and of ourselves 
during the war, of the games we played, of our gen- 
erally athletic habit, has evidently made a deep im- 
pression upon the French. They constantly spoke 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 373 

to me of the size of our men, and of their broad 
shoulders. It has not stopped there, they have done 
more than talk about it; broad shoulders and the 
instinct of team-work and fair play have seemed to 
them something worth acquiring, and they have set 
about doing this systematically. Football has been 
made compulsory in the French Army. When the 
government is able to pay Soissons the money which 
rebuilding will cost, it wi also return to the Ameri- 
can Belief in the department of the Aisne their outlay 
in developing the play grounds at Soissons and at 
Beims. The 67th regiment was stationed there at 
the time of my visit, and its team played a game of 
basket ball with a team from Couy — ^a neighboring 
village of which not one stone is left upon another. 
The score stood 9 to 9 close to the finish, when the 
soldiers in the Couy team made a desperate rally — 
and won. 

**What made you play so hard just then!*' an 
American asked them. 

** Because, if we won, each of us was to get a per- 
mission of forty-eight hours. ^ ^ 

The ministering spirit of the American Belief 
found at first a grave obstacle in the absence of all 
sense of co-operation, or wish for it, among the 
peasants. They had always done their own work, 
they had no desire to do their neighbor's. But 
France was too short-handed now for such indi- 
vidualism; if the fields were to be reclaimed, if the 
crops were to be sown, the farmers must come to 
each other 's help, and this they were learning to do. 
They were also adjusting themselves to waiting their 
turn to use the farm machinery which was being 
supplied to the department by the American Belief. 



374 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

If competitive sport and the habit of co-operation 
outlast the emergency of the peace, and persist when 
normal conditions are wholly resinned, something so 
new will have taken root in France, that a marked 
and salutary modification may be looked for in the 
national character. Quite as odd and novel as the 
sight of the books on sport for sale in the shops was 
the spectacle of little boys of eight and ten years old, 
kicking footballs in the various French towns where 
I stayed; more interesting still was a game played 
near Paris between an all England and an all French 
team, in which the French outplayed their adversa- 
ries duriDg the second half, and at which fifty thou- 
sand spectators looked on. It was a sight as new 
as aeroplanes were once ; it may in time become as 
familiar. If the war so far has done anything but 
harm to the world, it is in the awakening of the 
French to the value and the practice of outdoor 
competitive sport. 

Another new sight in France was a large official 
placard in the railway stations and in other public 
places, exhorting young husbands to beget many 
children, and specifying the graded sums that would 
be paid by way of support and reward to parents 
with families of three, four, five, and more. Not 
infrequently I saw couples who were evidently quite 
fresh from the marriage service reading these no- 
tices. Once at Meaux, I spoke to such a pair. 

**In Germany,^' I said to them, **I understand that 
this sort of encouragement is not needed.'* 

**It appears so, monsieur, *' said the bridegroom. 

**Well, young man," I returned, **I am sure yon 
know the words of the Marseillaise: * Aliens, enfants 
de la patrie. ' ' ' 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 375 

**C^est juste, monsieur!'' cried the bridegroom 
with a gleaming laugh. The bride had walked a 
few steps away so that she might seem to be out of 
hearing. 

But to Nicolas, who brought my hot water morn- 
ing and evening in Paris, and to Paul, who took me 
80 often and through so many miles of the devas- 
tated regions in his car, I said more. Nicolas had 
been telling me how he came to be taken prisoner in 
the early days of the war. 
**I was of the 8th corps, monsieur.'' 
'*That was away off in the East, wasn't it?" 
**Yes, monsieur, in the Vosges. We were led by 
persons who made some blunder every day. We 
were marched round and round without any point. 
Once we rambled about in various directions for 
fifteen days. We had been at Gerard Mer and at 
other places in the Vosges, and finally one morning 
in a fog we were on a plain near Ste. Die, and the 
battle of Luneville began. We were left without any 
guide, with the Germans on eminences all round us, 
and our whole battalion was captured. Others, who 
were better led and were not helpless, escaped." 
**What did they do with you in Germanyt" 
**They put us to work. I was at Ingoldstadt, and 
also at Bayreuth. I did work in the railroads, and 
of course we never got any news that we believed, 
but we learned how it was going by the difference in 
the manner of the Boches. In 1915 the German 
soldiers who passed us on their way to the front 
used to shake their fists at us. They would have 
massacred us if they had been permitted to do so, 
but we were too useful. Thus we knew things were 
going well with them. Then there were times in '16 



376 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

and '17 when those going to the front did not shake 
their fists at ns. Their heads hnng down. By t^iat 
we could tell that things were not going so well for 
them.'' 

"Were there no German workmen with yont" 

"But yes, monsieur, naturally. Ah, those work- 
men in Germany, they are slaves! See! whenever 
the ingenieur was coming near us — every time and 
each time he came, no matter how often — ^they bowed 
low to him, just as low as the first time. In Prance, 
after you have once touched your hat and said good- 
morning, you don't keep on doing it. C^est tme 
platitude. But they would say to us, *Hushl The 
foreman is coming' ; and they'd start bowing. As if 
we cared for the foreman ! They work through fear. 
Ah, they are slaves. Voila. Aiid that is why they 
are doing so well now in their business, because those 
workmen work through fear. And after the Armis- 
tice they saw their soldiers come back heads high, 
with their arms and banners, wearing flowers. So 
they strewed the streets with flowers and hailed their 
heroic army and believed that the war had finished 
en queue de poisson. They will come again, mon- 
sieur, one knows that. And they outnumber us." 

"Whose fault is that, Nicolas?" 

"It is not our fault that they are barbarians and 
have a child every year. ' ' 

"Well, Nicolas! Then you will call me a barba- 
rian because I have six children ! Listen 1 You have 
heard of Mr. Roosevelt ! " 

"Oh, yes, monsieur. Every one has heard of 
him. He was here and made a fine speech at the 
Sorbonne." 

"Mr. Roosevelt told us Americans that we were 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 377 

committing race suicide. He said that the richer we 
became the fewer children we had, while the foreign- 
ers in our slums were having many, and that it would 
be merely a question of time when the old American 
stock would die out and our Bepublic fall to pieces 
in the hands of races that did not have the tradition 
or the power of self-government in their blood. Now 
I think at this rate you French will commit race 
suicide. You wish us to come back and help you fight 
the Germans if they invade you again. But if I say 
to American mothers that we ought to do this, that we 
ought to save France, they will reply, why should 
we bear sons to be killed in France! Let French 
mothers bear more sons I After all, Nicolas, in Brit- 
tany your peasants do have large families.*' 

*'They are Catholics, monsieur. '* 

^^Well, on too many of the crosses in your ceme- 
teries, I read the names of men who are described 
as the only son of the family.'' 

**It is because the parents wish to have the little 
share of land which they have owned for generations 
descend as a whole to that son. They love it and they 
wish to keep it whole, and not have to divide it among 
several as they are compelled to do by the Code. 
Napoleon." 

**I don't think our American mothers will be im- 
pressed by that argument, Nicolas." 

He now became philosophic. "Yes, monsieur, it 
is true. The Frenchman is an egoist. He does not 
wish to be burdened with the support of a family so 
large that he has no time to enjoy himself. In Ger- 
many life is easier, and their ways do not induce them 
to limit their families. And when a family grows to 
eight — or perhaps it is ten — children, the Kaiser has 



378 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

always stood godfather to that last child. So you 
see, with their feeling about the Kaiser, they have 
had a strong incentive. We, with onr love of our 
land, have that reason for making only one son to 
inherit all of it.^' 

^^Now that the Kaiser is gone, Nicolas, perhaps 
those f anulies of ten will stop. ' * 

**That is not very probable, monsieur. You see, 
when one has got the habit — '* and Nicolas shrugged, 
^ ^ Ah, oui, ' ' he concluded. His generalizations almost 
always ended with "ah, oui.*' 

Paul, my chauffeur, also had his philosophy, like 
most Frenchmen of every class, and, like most 
Frenchmen, he had the art of expressing it. We had 
come into Amiens one afternoon, and I got out on the 
steps at the west front of the cathedral. 

**Paul,'' said I, **I wonder if I could guess your 
agef 

"If monsieur will try,'^ he smiled. 

"I think that you must be about thirty-two. ' ' 

"That is my age, monsieur, '^ he said, with a tone 
of surprise. 

"So you were expecting me to get it wrong f 

"I thought you would say that I was older. '* He 
stopped, and into his face came that look which I had 
begun to know in April 1919 — ^the look of having been 
changed by sights and by knowledge that would never 
be forgotten, and that were always present. Then 
he said quietly and simply : 

"The war has made old people out of many young 
people.'* 

"Yes, Paul. And I suppose the only way to look 
at that, is to think that any man like you, who were 
in your twenties when that whirlwind caught you up 



a 



IDLEt WELL OFF! 379 

from ordinary lif e, would be no tme man at all if he 
were not many years older in the spirit when the 
whirlwind set him down.'' 

**Yes, monsieur.'* 

*^Are you married!" 

* * No, monsieur. Oh, no. Not that. ' ' 

* * Well, but you 're thirty-two. It is quite time. ' ' 

* * Perhaps. I have never turned my mind in that 
direction. It may be that I shall come to it." 

* * Don 't wait too long I ' ' 
He, monsieur, le mariage est si bizarre!" And 

Paul, like Nicolas, punctuated his generalization with 
a shrug. 

The remarkable and unanswerable adjective which 
he applied to marriage stuck in my mind, and on a 
subsequent day, I said to him: 

"Paul, if the idea of a wife does not appeal to you, 
here is something that will. I see the old people 
that the war has made out of young people. I see 
them everywhere, and it is very sad. But I am sure 
that the years of rebuilding which lie before you all 
will not be as dreary as they look. Don 't think about 
them as a whole, don't imagine their united weight 
as pressing down upon every day. It will be dis- 
persed, only a little of it will be in each day, and it 
will always be growing less." 

"That is true," said Paul. 

"And to see France reviving, to be part of it, to 
cause some of it yourself, will carry you through each 
day, and you wUl find, beside plenty of hard work, 
plenty of laughter awaiting you. Perhaps even 
plenty of children I ' ' 

"ChUdren will not be a laughing matter!" said 
Paul. 



380 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

It was easy to talk to him, and to any one before 
whom a possible futnre stretched, a span of years 
wherein to rebuild and refill an emptied life ; — but 
there were others. There was a custodian in the 
museum at Dijon. He grew to know me as we walked 
among the pictures and while he told me about the 
dukes of Burgundy, whose tombs are there ; and one 
day he talked about himself. He was sixty-seven, he 
had seen the Germans come in 1870, he had seen 
France recover from the war only to be thrown 
prostrate again in his old age. 

** There are people,'^ he said, "who can make new 
friends when they have lost old ones. But if one 
loses one 's only son, one has nothing left. Life is a 
burden. One is not sure that one wishes it any 
more." 

What could I say to him? 

Again there were others, many others all over 
France, who had gone a step beyond him, and had 
become sure that they did not wish life any more: 
Clerks, small officials, employees faithful and of many 
years' service, whose fixed salary was no longer 
enough. It had sufficed them, they had felt safe, they 
had built their lives upon it, a roof, a family, books, 
perhaps a garden. Suddenly the bills for food, for 
all necessities, trebled, and they found themselves 
past their middle years — ^and unable to pay. The 
salary grew no larger, they faced implacable debt and 
want at fifty. They had no spring with which to 
start afresh. They drew down their window shades 
— ^and freed themselves from the burden of life. 
Perhaps some might have persisted but for the four 
years * draft upon their fortitude. To meet the war 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 381 

they had drawn npon their courage every day ; there 
was no balance left for further stress. 

It is hard for us, whose Uves and property no in- 
vading enemy has ever disturbed, to think of what 
living near that war was like. Abbeville was a large 
place near enough to it to be bombarded every night 
at times. The shells came in the dark hours. The 
citizens ; attended to their daily affairs in town, but 
they dared not sleep there. Every evening a special 
train took them away, out into the country, and there 
in the fields, or in any shelter that they could find, 
they slept; and each morning the train took them 
back to their business. The aunt and uncle of a 
young lady who told me this came into Abbeville by 
the train one day, and found the house that they had 
locked up the night before was no longer to be seen ; 
it had been dashed to atoms. 

What inhabitants of Philadelphia or St. Louis, or 
anywhere here, can imagine what it was to live 
through weeks and years of such experience? Had 
they done so, they would hardly be asking if France 
intends to ** insist^* upon the whole of her ** in- 
demnity^' from Germany — ^that ** indemnity '' which 
has already been cut down by about one-third of the 
sum set by the Treaty of Versailles. And those 
Americans who talk about the line between us and 
Canada, unguarded for a century, and ask why 
France wishes an army, would they like to change 
places with France, and have an unguarded line 
between them and a race that has invaded them every 
50 years for 15 centuries f 

At Massevaux in Alsace, I found the cure's door, 
and wrote **de la part de M. Clemenceau'' on my 
card, and sent it in. The cure came, and I said : 



382 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

^^Clemenceau sent me here. He told me to come 
and see two of his friends in Massevanx and Thann^ 
and say that he had bidden me to do so, and they 
would talk freely. ' ' 

**Come in,'* said the cure. And he took me first 
upstairs to his room. There the windows looked out 
upon his church. 

After explaining what had brought me to Prance, I 
continued : 

**Is that the church where you took Clemenceau 
and the generals that day of 1918, when Massevaux 
had ceased to be Germany and was France again after 
46 years f 

**But certainly,'' said the cure. 

**You went with him and the generals and their 
soldiers in there, and after standing silent for a while, 
you all sang the Marseillaise together!'' 

^^ But certainly." 

*^What deep and great happiness, mon pere, to be 
able to sing that song aloud again and not to have to 
say French prayers in silence any more I ' ' 

Then we spoke of Alsace, France, and the future. 

* ^ Have you talked with many Alsatians ! " he asked. 

**I wish that I could. I am afraid to begin politics 
with them — ^and I think they are with me. Who can 
be sure who any stranger is f Germany haunts their 
minds, I feel that, and it haunts their manners also. 
What do you think of this ! When I changed trains 
at Cemay to come here, there was a woman getting 
into the car. I drew back and motioned her to go 
first — and she said, * After you, monsieur,' and waited 
till I had preceded her. That is a little thing, mon 
pere, but does it not reveal much!" 

He nodded. *^If they became willing to tell you 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 383 

what they have in their hearts, you would find that 
they all expect the Germans to come back in ten 
years.'' 

**In October 1914/' I said, **when Mr. Wilson was 
writing those notes to Max of Baden, I published a 
little piece in our papers in which I said that if we 
trusted Berlin when it cried *Kamerad,' our children 
would pay for it with their blood. ' ' 

** People in Mulhouse spoke to me of such a piece," 
said the cure. * * They said it was by an American. — 
Alsatians believe that Germany will never pay the 
reparations, but that they would have forced France 
to pay most of it by now, had the situation been 
reversed. ' ' 

*^You are not the first person who has said that 
to me, ' ' I responded. * * The present situation seems 
to me to be chiefly the fault of Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Lloyd George. We are more fortunate than Eng- 
land. England still has Mr. Lloyd George. I was 
indiscreet enough to say to M. Clemenceau that it 
seemed to me Mr. Lloyd George, if he continued on 
the way he is going, would end by achieving what 
Napoleon Bonaparte failed to achieve — ^the destruc- 
tion of the British Empire. ' ' 

The cure looked at me. ^*And what did M. Cle- 
menceau say to that f ' ' 

**NaturaUy he was discreet. But he talked much 
of India. ' ' 

**Have you ever heard any one say that Mr. Wilson 
sent a message through Lloyd George that if the 
Allies did not accept an armistice, he would withdraw 
the American troops!'' 

* * I have heard that several times, but never at first- 
hand. I hope it is not true. " 



384 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

** Listen/' said the cure, "in September 1918, Foch 
was here, in Massevaux, and so was General Castel- 
nau. I said to Foch, *how is it going?' *I hold them,' 
he answered, *they are done.' *Then why go ont' I 
a^ed him. ^Because we must enter Germany and 
fimsh there. Otherwise they will say that we did not 
win, and there will be no finish. ' So said Castelnau 
also. And then, why did they not finish in Germany! 
The greatest victory in history was turned into an 
abortion." 

"It is very grievous for me to think," said I, "that 
we are responsible for that." 

"Oh, we all understand now that it was not you. 
Mr. Wilson was without your mandate." 

"We could not tell you so," said I. 

"Nor could we French tell him so. By his own 
arbitrary act he placed us all in this false position." 

"Then you think that Foch " 

"Foch — ^what was he to do but to be loyal? He 
sank his own judgment, he stood by what was forced 
upon him, and said to the world that an armistice 
gave us all that we wanted without the sacrifice of 
more lives. But do you think that he, who told me 
in September that it must finish in Germany or 
remain unfinished, had changed his mind ? Have you 
ever heard that one afternoon when Clemenceau and 
Wilson and Lloyd George were sitting in council to- 
gether, Foch came in to speak to Clemenceau, and 
Wilson said, *Who is that military man? I will not 
have military men in here.' And Clemenceau, to 
save the situation quickly, rose and said, *It is five 
o 'clock. Let us go to tea. ' Have you heard that ? ' ' 

* * Never. Couldn 't that have been invented ? ' ' 

* * Oh, yes, it could have been invented ; but no inven- 



IDLE! WELL OFF! 385 

tion sticks which is not characteristic. We know that 
Mr. Wilson had no power to promise us your help in 
case of another invasion. But the next war, should 
it come, would be over before you could reach us. 
People will never march to any war again, they will 
fly through the air. ^ ' 

We must have been talking for an hour, when I 
rose. 

^*Let me show you our church, where we sang the 
Marseillaise,^' said the cure. 

He accompanied me out and across the street into 
the church. There he pointed up to a broken window. 

**A bomb did that,*' he said. **It also killed the 
only man who had moved into Massevaux for safety. 
He was an old man. Here is where we stood and 
sang the Marseillaise. ' ' 

I stood there with him for a while ; and after he 
had shown me the rest of the church, and the very 
fine organ, I took my leave. His farewell words 
were: 

**I have known the Germans for forty-five years. 
They are a curious race; like no other. And they 
have won the peace.'* 

On such another afternoon as this I made my way 
to Thann. The light of May was shining upon the 
Vosges, hill and valley were filled with it, the fruit 
blossoms glowed in it. Thann was neighbor to Mas- 
sevaux, separated by one of the wooded ridges of the 
Vosges ; and along the valley where it lay, the mills 
of a large and long-founded industry extended. The 
house of the present master of this industry stood on 
a hill overlooking his manufactories and the village 
where his operatives lived. Once again the name of 



386 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

Clemenceau opened doors to me, and the master took 
me into his study; once again the understanding of 
America was clear and cordial. The responsibility 
of the evil Armistice and of all that followed was 
fixed where it belonged, not upon us or our Senate ; 
and the good that we had done was also fixed where 
it belonged, not upon the man who had ^*kept us out 
of the war,'^ but upon the heart and mind of the 
nation that had ended by seeing the true meaning of 
the war in spite of him. This French gentleman had 
seen many of our officers, and these had told him the 
truth about our country. 

In one of the front windows of the room where we 
talked, a bullet had drilled a splintered hole through 
the pane ; another had dug a cavity in the wall while 
the daughter of the house had sat at the desk where 
her father was sitting now. These were the only 
injuries the house had suffered. Both the master's 
sons had been killed. After speaking of the North 
and the South he asked me about our Middle West. 

**They were slower,'' he said, **to realize the war, 
were they not ! ' ' 

* * For this reason, ' ' I answered. * * They were mis- 
led by our President who told us in 1916 that we were 
not concerned with the causes or the objects of the 
European conflict — ^and they are a community deeply 
absorbed in its own development. They are not in- 
clined to look out of the window. But when they 
finally did look out and saw what was happening, the 
manner in which they rose and set to work was truly 
magnificent. They can do anything, once they are 
aroused. ' ' 

**Is your industrial crisis overt" he asked ; and for 
a while we discussed that and our labor difficulties. 



IDLE I WELL OFF! 387 

I discovered that he was a man who certainly 
looked out of his window and saw long distances. In 
speaking about some of the French methods of busi- 
ness, he said: **We are Chinese/' Presently he 
turned the talk to Alsace and its special problems. I 
had spoken about the double personality which I felt 
in the people of Strasbourg. 

**I am travelling second and third class in the 
trains here,'' I said, ** because it is in those cars 
rather than in the first class that I seem to see the 
Alsatian more distinctly. I notice that the people 
glide from French into the local dialect here, and 
back again into French, almost in the same sentence. 
And I notice also that their appearance is rather 
German than French." 

* * That is quite true. Their bodies have the heavy 
character of the German physique — ^but not their 
minds. Have you observed their manner of speak- 
ing?" 

**I am not quite sure what you mean." 

** There is a lightness, a turn of drollery and of 
wit in what they say which is not at all like the heavi- 
ness of their flesh. Their spirit is French. They have 
not dared to be French outwardly since 1871. In 
November 1918, some soldiers of our army who had 
entered and were marching by a field where stood an 
old peasant woman, saw her suddenly burst into 
tears ; and she cried out to them that it was nothing 
but happiaess at being able to speak French aloud 
again. ' ' 

**Have you any idea how much German sympathy 
is lurking among the people?" I asked. 

** Broadly speaking, I think it is among the lower 
classes that the German spirit hangs on, but^^t is by 



388 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

no means nniversal there. In spite of all that they 
conld do during 46 years, they did not manage to 
make us love them. It was a nde of fear. You have 
heard of the Saveme incidents 

** Where the Prussian officer cut the face of a 
lame cobbler with his sword because he was not 
wearing a sufficiently German expression! Oh, 
yes. And the Crown Prince sent him a message of 
congratulation. ' ^ 

^*But do you know about poulardet^' 

^^Poulardet No.'' 

**In the cafe at Saveme which the Prussian officers 
frequented, there was a bill-of-fare on the table one 
day, upon which, among the German words, was the 
French one, poularde. A young Prussian lieutenant 
was so enraged by the appearance of this that he drew 
his sword and cut the bill-of-fare in two where the 
word occurred. His name was von Forstner. It was 
in the Eestaurant a la Carpe d 'or, opposite the Place 
du Chateau, where this happened. If you have time, 
pay Saveme and that restaurant a visit. The lady 
who saw the whole poularde affair still keeps it." 

**That whole brutal outrage of Saveme," said I, 
**was a sort of rehearsal of what they did next year 
in the war — ^a specimen of what they would have done 
to the world, had they won." 

**Yes, they did their best to Prussianize us and 
divide us against each other, by encouraging disunity 
in both religion and education. They had separate 
schools for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews — ^but 
always with the Kaiser as the centre of worship. I 
have heard a pastor say in a pulpit *you must not 
consider the Kaiser as God's deputy, but as Jesus 
Christ himself.' " He added that it was German 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 389 

policy with the young to educate **le conscience contra 
Pinteref 

* ^ How long do you think it will take, ^ ' I asked, * * for 
Alsace to become completely French!^' 

**A generation should accomplish it. All the chil- 
dren are eager to learn French, and certain troubles 
which we are having now will he adjusted. There is 
a difficulty about the church. The clericals naturally 
resist a change to the present system in France which 
would deprive them of the direct control of their office 
and estate. This would never have come about in 
France if M. Combe and the Pope had either of them 
been capable of compromise. ' ' 

As he talked on about Alsace, and France, and 
America, I listened and replied, feeling all the while 
a sympathy for him that I dared not express. His 
mills in the valley of Thann had been going for a 
hxmdred years, owned and conducted by his family 
from the beginning. He told me that he had never 
had any trouble with his operatives. 

**I have a system of pensions, and I have always 
remembered that these men are human. There came 
a time when they demanded syndicalization. I made 
no objection to this. * You have the right to it, ' I said 
to them. *But I have a right also. I will deal with 
you directly, and not with any outsider; and I will 
treat non-syndicalized men exactly on the same foot- 
ing, neither better nor worse. ^ I thought that I 
knew what would happen, but I did not expect it 
so soon. In six months all of my workmen had left 
the syndicate. '^ 

I wanted to stay on and listen to this French gentle- 
man. His father had been president of the Senate 
during the Dreyfus case, and was one of the first to 



~l»^»L». I ■ 



390 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

believe that DreyfuB was innocent — ^a stand which 
cost him many friends, and his office. He in his torn 
was now a senator. 

**And so M. Clemenceau sent you to me,'* he said. 
'*I have known him since I was knee-high. What a 
manl'* 

**He made me think,*' I answered, "of Mr. Roose- 
velt when he was our President. Whenever I paid 
him a visit, I always felt as if I had been talking to 
Vesuvius in active eruption. ' ' 

Yes, I wanted to stay ; but I had been here an hour, 
and so I rose. 

"But at least you will let me get you some refresh- 
ments he said; and when I declined, "then I will go 
with you to the station.*' 

It was about half a mile ; and as we walked down 
towards the valley, very beautiful church bells 
sounded from below, their tone floating up through 
the quiet air among the woods and ridges. It was 
May 1st, and as we drew nearer the village, we heard 
a strain of thin false brass music. Presently we 
turned a comer, and a very small company of "reds'* 
marched by, blowing trumpets to the glory of dis- 
order. A few ragged children followed them. The 
master pointed to them, smiling. 

"Not a large proportion for a great industrial com- 
munity," he said. 

Once more I looked at him, a senator, a captain 
of industry, the establisher of pensions, friend to 
his men, and owner of a mass of buildings which 
stretched far down the valley ; and with both his sons 
killed in the war. I could not help speaking : 

"Is there none of your blood to follow and take 
this from your hands?" 



IDLE! WELL OFF? 391 

**Not any longer/' he replied qxiietly, '^I am the 
last/' 

I went to Saverne and the lady of the Golden Carp 
enacted the whole scene of the ponlarde for me as I 
sat drinking coffee at the table in the back of the 
room where it had happened. But the youth, or the 
beauty, or some attribute of Lieutenant von Forstner, 
had softened her heart toward him. 

**He was only 19,'' she said. **It was the fault of 
his colonel. ' ' And she told me, among other things, 
that all the children of Saverne were eager to learn 
French, and that the girls were quicker at it than the 
boys. Were I Alsatian, I, too, should wish to learn 
French ; — ^here is some Alsatian : 

**De reizigers gelieven niet op het privaat te gaan 
zoolang de trein in eene static stilstaat. ' ' 

As I talked with General Humbert in Strasbourg, 
a budget of papers lay upon his desk. 

* * This, ' ' he said, laying his hand upon the heap, * * is 
my latest secret information from Germany. They 
are not disarming. They are merely changing the 
name of the Polizei which they agreed at Spa to 
disband into a Polizei with a new name. ' ' Then he 
gave me the details. **And they are practising gun- 
nery twice instead of once a week. ' ' And he thumped 
the papers lightly. 

**I am being indiscreet every day," I said, **and 
now I will add one more to my indiscretions. Some 
of your recent allies are calling you impatient. 
What strikes me is the extraordinary patience of 
France under repeated provocations." 



392 NEIGHBORS HENCErOBTH 

As I was going, he suddenly spoke of America, of 
onr army, of our soldiers and officers, with such a 
warmth and enthusiasm that I will not repeat it ; and 
all I could reply was : 

**My lack of French prevents my expressing to 
you, as I should like to do, how deeply your words 
touch me/' 

Anywhere that you went, anyone that you saw, it 
was the same ; if you were silent on the subject of our 
contribution to the war, they would introduce it 
sooner or later, and always with generous and cordial 
words ; but American boasting had not pleased them 
any better than it pleased those Americans who did 
not boast. 

From Guy Ropartz, the distinguished French com- 
poser, and director of the conservatory of music at 
Strasbourg, I heard most interesting facts about 
music there under the German rule. His Hun pre- 
decessor had done his best to extinguish French music 
in the town — ^none had ever been taught, and none had 
ever been played at the concerts. Ropartz found the 
young people of Strasbourg entirely unaware that 
any French music existed ; they had never heard of 
Saint-Saens, or Cesar Franck, or Debussy, or Berlioz, 
or apparently of anybody except Germans. But he 
found something even more interesting than this. 
The Hun predecessor — ^whose name was Eatzner, I 
think — ^had introduced many improvements into ttie 
symphonies of Beethoven ; he had not only made cuts 
in them, he had put in his own orchestration and made 
changes in the notation. Ropartz was obliged to 
spend much time in restoring Beethoven's own in- 
strumentation in the scores of the symphonies. 

"I always admired greatly the calm conducting of 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 393 

Hans Eichter, ' ' he told me, * * It was not only deeply 
nnderstaiiding, but it was also always reverent His 
aim was never anything but to leam the composer's 
intention and then to carry it ont. But after the time 
of Nikisch and Weingartner, it became the fashion of 
German conductors to use the symphonies of the 
masters merely as vehicles for themselves/' 

**I have heard Nikisch do that to Mozart in Bos- 
ton/' I told him. 

During the war Eopartz had three sons at the 
front. He was then teaching at the conservatory of 
Nancy, and as that town was not safe, he sent his 
wife and daughter away to Brittany, and meanwhile 
kept the students at Nancy busy over the musical 
exercises. 

^*When the whistle blew to announce an air raid," 
he said, **we used to go down into a cellar and con- 
tinue our exercises there until the bombs stopped 
falling and the safety signal blew. Then we would 
come back above ground again and go on with the 
work. The young people were perfectly calm. One 
day I was getting ready to go to Brittany for a short 
visit to my wife and daughter. I was writing and 
signing some papers at my desk before leaving, when 
the thought came to me, what a needless thing it 
would be to be bombed at such a time 1 . So I took my 
papers to the cellar. While I was down there I heard 
a noise of aa unusual quality, not like the sound of 
a Boche bomb, and I wondered if it might be a gas 
or a flame bomb. When I went back, my office had 
gone. A French bomb had fallen upon it. Now it 
would have been tiresome to be killed by that." 

Earlier in the spring, before blossom time, while 
the peasants were plowing their fields, I spent a day 



394 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

in the St. Mihiel country. Much of it was still des- 
olate with the shell holes and the barbed wire, but 
here and there were stretches that had been re* 
claimed. The earth was brown, and one could look 
deep into the violet grey of the woods. Where the 
fields rose to a ridge, the horses and the plowing 
peasants showed against the sky, and along the fur- 
rows went the sowers with their bags, flinging their 
arms with a forward gesture as they scattered the 
seed. Sometimes I got out and talked to those who 
were near the road. Often, as we talked, the sound 
of explosions came heavily from various distances 
through the quiet air, and the clotted pillars of their 
smoke would rise and hang for a long while. Those 
were the live grenades left in the soil by the battles 
and now having their stings drawn. The farm- 
ers were sowing oats to be plowed in later, and there 
was a growth of a bad weed named chien dent to be 
uprooted. One peasant explained that no one dared 
to plow the soil deep. 

'^Because,'' he said, ^^ce n'est pas une noce to hit 
an obus. Those artificers who are being paid 35 
francs a day to explode these shells are very unsys- 
tematic. They ought to do it progressively, like 
plowing, but th&y run here and there. If I am not 
blown up, after my oats next year, I shall plant pota^ 
toes. It will take me 3 or 4 years to get my ground 
clear of weeds. Yesterday I plowed up two obus, but 
I am still here, as you see. ' ' 

On the way back, near Verdun, a puncture gave me 
ia chance for a longer conversation with a farmer and 
his wife. One of their buildings was a complete ruin, 
with rusty shells lying around and inside of it, and 
wire ran tangled through the grass. They were 



IDLE? WELL OFF! 395 

living as best they could in a sort of hovel near by, 
where the woman was digging. 

*^How do you do, madamef I said, **you certainly 
were not here during the war. ' * 

**No, monsieur, we were refugees.*' 

** And where f 

**In Touraine first, and after that at Montpellier.*' 

**And now you are back at work. Does it go 
weUt'* 

**It is very hard to dig. The ground is full of 
stones and tin cans and saletes de toutes especes." 

**Well, madame, I hope you will have a good 
harvesf 

**0h, yes, monsieur, everything is going well.*' 

At this point her man with a plow and two mules 
came up, having finished work for the day. It was a 
very light and a very poor plow, and I asked him 
about it. 

"Yes, look at it,** he said, with a sort of gruff 
joviality. "Everything is very dear now. Before 
the war that cost 125 francs. Now 700. And a good 
mxde 5,000 francs now. Before the war 800. — So you 
are American!** 

"Yes.** 

"We ought to have got some of those big animals 
that you left behind. They would have done our 
plowing well. But other people . . . ** he com- 
pleted his sentence by making a most eloquent and 
comical curving sweep with his hand behind his back, 
and this made his meaning quite plain. 

" Alors vous etes American!** he repeated jovially, 
* * Have you returned to make some more war ! * * 

"Ah, no!** 

He stood straight and stiff, and his face changed 



396 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

to gravity. **Well,^' he said, with deliberation, 
** without you, this would be Germany today/' And 
he pointed down to the earth. 

** We are very glad if we were of any help,*' I said. 

**This would be Germany if you had not come,*' he 
reiterated with emphasis. 

"They should have invaded Germany, '^ said I. 

**Yes.'' 

The chauffeur overheard this. 

"That is true,'* he said. "Nothing more true. 
We wished to go on, but we were not allowed. Foch 
wepf 

"Yes, I have heard that from many. General 
Pershing wanted to go on too.*' 

That is the France which I saw for five months in 
1921, and which some said (and are saying still), is 
idle, prosperous, and militaristic. Though some of 
those that have represented her have at times mani- 
fested impatience at the treatment she has received, 
and the perversions of her true position which have 
appeared in certain newspapers and fallen from the 
lips of certain public men, the plain truth is that as 
a nation she has been as patient with England about 
Germany as England has been patient with America 
about Ireland ; and that is saying a great deal. 



xxvni 

THE BRAIN 06* ONE DIMENSION 

All through History are incidents which to their 
own generation have seemed important, and which 
have dwindled as the years left them behind, while 
the significance of others has steadily enlarged with 
time. To this latter class belong the Norman Con- 
qnest, the invention of printing, and the voyage of 
Columbns. When we, who have lived so close to the 
war that we can not measure it, are long gone, and it 
has fallen into the motionless landscape of the past, 
what will it seem like then! Today we can hardly 
believe that it will ever cease to be known as the Great 
War ; and yet, that is a question to be answered then, 
and not now ; convulsions more gigantic may dwarf 
the terrible years of 1914 to 1918. But as time goes 
on, America's act in 1917 will not look smaller. It 
will grow in two ways, in relation to ourselves and in 
relation to our neighbors. We had risen to greatness 
before, certainly once, paying with our blood ; but to 
keep the Union and free the slave was an act accord- 
ing to our faith, was carrying out into action what our 
religion declared and compelled ; whereas in joining 
the Great War, in leaving our new world and crossing 
the sea to the old, we ran counter to an article of our 
faith so deep that it was second only to our belief in 
liberty defined and assured by law. Both — our 
liberty and our isolation — ^have been woven so close in 
our minds and emotions they can be called American 

397 



398 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOBTH 

instincts. And yet we broke from the second. It 
was like tearing apart one 's brain. To go upon our 
own way, to mind our own affairs, to keep apart from 
others' qnarrels, to stand aloof from the meshes of 
foreign jealousies, this course had been set for us, 
had been preached to us from the beginning, and it 
had been practised throughout a century of success. 
Every decade of our national life had ratified and 
vindicated the wisdom of our isolation; and yet we 
wrenched ourselves loose from the embedded anchor. 
That small handful of Europeans who have studied 
more about Americans than their money, know this 
and understand that to take such a step cost us a sort 
of mental revolution ; they know that our delay was 
inevitable, beyond our control, that a mental revolu- 
tion in a hundred million people is not accomplished 
in a moment ; especially under the powerful and con- 
fusing influences that were at work in our midst, 
befogging us night and day. Some of us, who saw 
where our duty lay sooner than the mass, have been 
inclined to apologize to Europe for our lateness. No 
apologies are due, except from those Europeans who 
still, in cold blood and after the event, have sneered 
because we did not do at once what none of them has 
ever done at all in their whole history. 

One conspicuous demagogue has termed the Euro- 
pean conflict a rich man 's war and a poor man 's fight. 
Those Europeans who have given us their intelligent 
attention know that we fought for an ideal, that it 
was precisely our rich, and not our poor, young men 
who threw themselves first into the war as a class, 
who enlisted in the Allied armies, who formed the 
Lafayette Escadrille, who offered themselves to the 
cause of Liberty before their country had taken the 



THE BEAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 399 

step, who did not wait for the draft, who shoxildered 
arms before the hour of obligation, and whose names 
now shine on the tablets of onr schools and colleges. 
It was onr sons of privilege that showed themselves, 
as a class, worthy of their privilege, whose yonng 
eyes discerned in 1914 what the whole country came 
to see at last. Three words, spoken by one of these 
sons of privilege as he lay dying, enshrine the whole 
truth, the reason that he and his kind went at once, 
never waiting for any call but the call from within. 
He came from one of our great preparatory schools, 
he was a Harvard student, he enlisted in Canada, he 
met his death in Europe. In the hospital where he 
was taken, the nurse asked him how it happened that 
he was in the war when his country was neutral. He 
answered : 

"Our fight too.'' 

The sentence is a parable. No orator, no states- 
man, no poet, could better say why America broke 
from that second article of her belief and poured her 
treasure and her life across three thousand miles of 
sea, and stood ready to go on spending herself to the 
last dollar and the last drop of blood. Nothing in 
that manifestation of our soul and strength more 
astonished the Europeans than how, once we were 
aroused and aware, we accepted conscription and re- 
quired no law to enforce our self-denial. Did the 
Allies need sugar or flour t We went without them — 
it was the kitchen, not the dining room that rebelled ; 
once again it was the privileged classes that saw their 
duty and did it. If oil grew scarce, it was only neces- 
sary to tell us, and thousands gave up the chief 
pleasure in their week and left their automobiles in 
the garage on Sundays* 



400 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

No, it is not likely that our part in the war will 
dwindle as it grows distant in time ; and the essence 
of the internal conflict that it cost ns will be seen more 
clearly than it is today. Although we departed from 
our creed of isolation, that very departure was a pas- 
sionate adherence to the first article of our faith — ^to 
liberty, defined and assured by law. The struggle 
was between those two principles, and the fundamen- 
tal one prevailed ; for in the last analysis, isolation is 
not a fundamental, but a temporary principle, and it 
is no longer a question of our renounciQg it — ^it has 
renounced us. No matter how much some of us may 
wish it, Americans can no longer enjoy a brain of 
one dimension. It is not going to be a question of 
choice, natural laws have settled it for us. You may 
push facts out of the door, they will come in at the 
window. A natural law does not speak, it asserts 
itself in silence, and if you ignore it long enough, it 
will griad you to powder. Here we reach the second 
aspect of our part in the war, its relation not to our- 
selves but to others. Of those four years, we fought 
but half a year ; it is not the size of our participation, 
but its consequences, that are now the point. 

"When the emergency of the war began in August 
1914, we looked at it as one of those foreign complica- 
tions with which WashiDgton told us to have nothing 
to do. By August 1918, nearly two million Ameri- 
cans had gone to fight in France. We had been 
drawn into the emergency. Why ? Look at the map, 
think of electricity and of steam, and you will have 
the answer. Is it very likely that Washington in 
April 1917 would still have advised us to avoid that 
foreign complication f 

Next, the war was over, and in a way, won. We 



THE BBAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 401 

thought at the time that it was won much more com- 
pletely than the ensuing years have disclosed; and 
with a deep sigh of joy and content our country came 
home — ^home physically and mentally. It turned its 
thoughts again to itself, and there was indeed plenty 
to think about. But the emergency of the war has 
been followed by the emergency of the peace. That 
is going on now ; and once again some of us are quot- 
ing Washington. We can no more keep out of the 
present foreign complication than we were able to 
hold aloof from its predecessor. Just as much as that 
was, this is **our fight too'' — not for reasons of 
sentiment, but for reasons of self-preservation. 
Why? Look at the map, think of electricity and 
steam, and again you will have the answer. War and 
peace are merely different processes of self-preserva- 
tion, different means by which nations control and 
protect their existence, manage their affairs, survive. 
We like to hope that peace will some day be the only 
method by which nations live ; but whether this comes 
to pass or not, if the fundamental state of the world 
is changed, and a great war draws everybody into its 
emergency, the emergencies of peace are bound to do 
exactly the same thing. 

It would be good news if we did not have to think 
about Europe as a concern of our own, if foreign 
complications could be pushed out of our reckoning, 
if we could return to our brain of one dimension. 
But that comfortable day is done, and the truth is, 
that the word '^foreign'' has ceased to have any 
economic or political meaning ; in that sense, there is 
little that is foreign in the world any more. We are 
all neighbors in the same street, and neighbors hence- 
forth it is our destiny to be. 



402 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

I do not wonder that great portions of our people 
sincerely believe what I wish that I could believe — 
that our going over to Europe was an accident, an 
exception, a parenthesis in our isolation, a closed inci- 
dent ; and that now we can resume our development 
and attend to our own housekeeping, and never think 
of Europe, or any other part of the world, again 
except when it pleases us to do so as a market for 
our wares, a playground for our holidays, or an 
object of our voluntary compassion and assistance, 
like Belgium. I wish they were right, I wish it were 
true. When I think of our pioneers, our backwoods- 
men, our cowboys, I have a home-sick longing to be 
back in their simple day, and I desire to turn my 
face away from the welter that Europe is in — ^the 
deceits, the jealousies, the greed of conquest, the 
flare of discord, the collapse of prosperity. We are 
no more responsible for that state of things than 
we were for the war ; why saddle ourselves with the 
burdens of others when we have enough of our own 
to carry already? Let Europe be satisfied with the 
help we gave her in 1918, and settle her present 
troubles for herself. That is what many Americans 
are saying and feeling, and it would make a strong 
argument, if isolation were a matter of choice in 
these days as it was in the days when George Wash- 
ington wrote that Farewell Address which is being 
so freely quoted and misquoted just now on the sub- 
ject of entangling alliances. 

It is to be noticed how remarkably little we quote 
or follow a certain other piece of advice which Wash- 
ington gave us in that same Farewell Address — ^that 
we should avoid occasions of expense by cultivating 
peace, **but remembering also that timely disburse' 



THE BRAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 403 

ments to prepare for danger frequently prevent much 
greater disbursements to repel it/' Not once in 
our history have we followed that wise counsel; on 
the contrary, Congress has steadily opposed and ob- 
structed preparedness for war ; and every war which 
we have fought has caught us with our clothes off. 
The hasty toilet that we were compelled to make on 
the last occasion, in 1917, could not have been made 
at all if the British fleet had not stood between us 
and the enemy like a wall, behind which we were 
able to cover our nakedness before it was too late. 
Some day it may be too late. As it is, we are suffer- 
ing from a heavy burden of taxes, due to the hurry 
in, which we had to get ready at the eleventh hour, 
and which might have been averted, had Congress 
and Mr. Wilson heeded the advice of George Wash- 
ington, instead of heaping every champion of pre- 
paredness, such as Augustus Gardner, or Leonard 
Wood, with falsehood, sneers, and abuse. Against 
stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain; and 
our politicians are quick to remember George Wash- 
ington when they can use him for something that 
they like because it is easy and will cost them no 
votes, but they find it convenient to forget him when 
his advice is disagreeable to thenu Consequently in 
these present days they are placing in front of the 
gloomy truth that America can no longer play a lone 
hand but must do team-work with Europe, the cheer- 
ful falsehood that Washington forbade team-work. 

What did Washington really say about Europe 
and its relation to us in his Farewell Address T 

** Europe has a set of primary interests which to 
us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she 
must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes 



404 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. 
Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate 
ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissi- 
tudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations 
and collisions of her friendships or enmities. 

**Our detached and distant situation invites and 
enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain 
one people, under an efficient government, the period 
is not far off when we may defy material injury from 
external arrogance ; when we may take such an atti- 
tude as wiU cause the nentraUty we may at any time 
resolve upon to be scrupulously respected. . . . 

** Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situa- 
tionf "Why quit our own to stand upon foreign 
ground! Why, by interweaving our destiny with 
that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and 
prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rival- 
ship, interest, humor, or caprice I 

* * Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent 
alliances with any portion of the foreign world . . . 
we may safely trust to temporary alliances for ex- 
traordinary emergencies. . . . 

** There can be no greater error than to expect 
or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. ' ' 

That is every word which the Farewell Address 
contains on the subject of alliances; and this docu- 
ment, dated 19th September, 1796, is being offered 
to us as a guide in 1922, with its language about 
foreign alliances generally misquoted. Why not ask 
us to wear knee breeches and a wig because Wash- 
ington wore them? In the first place, he expressly 
admitted temporary alliances for extraordinary 
emergencies, and in the second place his whole 
thought is naturally based on the world as it was in 



THE BRAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 405 

1796. They pay a very poor compliment to the 
marvellously observant and far-sighted sagacity of 
the Father of his Country, when they apply his re- 
marks to 1922, and assume that he would repeat them 
unchanged. In his time, it took nearly two months 
to send a message to Europe and receive an answer ; 
today it can be done in a few hours. Would Wash- 
ington call Europe remote now! Would he speak 
of our ** detached and distant situation'' after seeing 
an aeroplane, and a submarine, and the Baldwin 
Locomotive Works, or any other works which sell 
our wares all over the world? 

When he was notified of his unanimous election as 
President in April 1789, Washington set out from 
Mt. Vernon on the 16th and reached New York on 
the 23d. Had some neighbors in Virginia at that 
time asked him how long one should allow for a com- 
fortable journey to New York, the answer would 
have been seven days ; and as Washington was care- 
ful about details, he would have told the neighbor 
where he would fimd the best lodging for the night at 
the end of each day's journey. Since then London 
has been reached in seven days by many steamers. 
To suppose that he would give us today the same 
advice about Europe that he gave in 1796, is precisely 
as sensible as to suppose that he would tell a friend 
that it would take a week to go from Mt. Vernon to 
New York, . instead of recommending the express 
trains that do it now in five hours. 

Washington 's outlook was not narrowed by a brain 
of one dimension; he thought internationally, his 
policy was not shackled to obsolete conditions. 
Scarcely more than ten years after our Revolution, 
he declined to fall in with the wishes of France, who 



406 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

had been our friend, and made a treaty with Eng- 
land, who had been onr enemy. For this he was 
violently abused by the brains of one dimension of 
that day, until the good results that followed from 
his wise policy put them to silence. If the changes 
in conditions after ten years could cause such a 
change in Washington's mind, it is hardly worth 
while to try to fit to the present day a piece of advice 
given 126 years ago based upon conditions that are 
no longer the same. 

When we be&ran our national life, the total popu- 
lation of the 13 original states was less than that of 
the city of New York today; we exported nothing, 
the few articles that we made, such as glass, were 
of local use; our thin population was scattered in 
unrelated spots from New Hampshire to Georgia, 
with miles of uninhabited wilderness lining between 
them : travel on land was bv horse, on water it was 
by sail. Similarly at that time, the whole world was 
inhabited in spots, no wires or rails tied nations 
together, the tides of trade and intercourse were few, 
and like thin streams, compared to the thick volume 
that pours back and forth between all countries now. 
Today, distance and time are virtually obliterated 
by electricity, Europe and America are no longer 
spots with space between them; they are confluent, 
with thousands of veins and arteries of commerce 
and credit flowing through them, making them like 
parts of one body. If one nation falls a victim to any 
grave and prolonged economic disease, the rest will 
suffer in time just as inevitably as blood poisoning 
in a man 's finger will infect his whole system if it is 
not checked. Like neighbors in the same street, the 
nations of Europe and America depend for their wel- 



THE BRAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 407 

fare more and more upon the same set of supplies, 
supplies of meaty grain, coal, hardware, and credit, 
especially credit; in this essential above all they 
can not get on without team-work If Europe goes 
bankrupt, disaster will flow through the arteries of 
trade and attack us too. The American who shuts 
his eyes to this because it is a fact which jars his 
ideal of isolation, is like a man who puts off making 
his will because it is unpleasant to be reminded that 
he is not going to live for ever. 

As America was compelled to take notice of the 
war, and submit to team-work in order to prevent 
a catastrophe that in the end would have reached 
her as well as England and France, she will have to 
continue her team-work henceforth. She can never 
break away again. Catastrophes are not over, and 
it is as xmlikely that they will ever cease in the future 
as that they ever ceased in the past. The great 
difference between the future and the past is, that 
nations used to be able to have catastrophes by them- 
selves, without one toppling brick pushing down the 
whole row. Consequently, we must join hands with 
Europe to fight all disasters that threaten. 

And we shall play the part of creditor gracefully if 
Europe plays the debtor's part gracefully: it isn't 
pretty for him who stretches out his hand to be 
shaking his fist, or even his finger. 

The signs are good. I can remember that long 
after I was grown up it was a rare thing to hear 
foreign news discussed by Americans of any class. 
It is now the subject of daily conversation, not only 
in marble halls but in street cars. In the Back Bay 
station in Boston, there is a boot-black who comments 
on France and Germany and Mr. Lloyd George while 



408 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

he polishes my shoes ; when I was an nnder-graduate 
I could have walked the length of Beacon Street with 
its most leading citizen and never touched once upon 
foreign affairs. That is because in those days^ affairs 
could still be foreign, while now the word foreign is 
growing obsolete. As Columbus discovered us we 
are now obliged to discover Europe. 

In his day, the world was said to be flat. When 
he proved that it was round a number of persons 
were highly scandalized. Today a number of Ameri- 
cans are highly scandalized to hear that our isolation 
is done for. But I do not think that the brain of 
one dimension is going to prevail now in the peace, 
any more than it did during the war. It came dread- 
fuUy near it, but it failed. We played team-work 
in time. We must not be too late now, and we shall 
not be. In some form, worked out by our men of 
affairs collaborating with our government, we shall 
bear a hand again to England and France. Nothing 
must happen to either of thenL Whatever rough- 
nesses there may be, they are the salt of the earth. 
The danger that hung black over them when we came 
in 1917 has been replaced by another danger, they 
barely keep their heads above water. If they sink 
they are certain to drag us down with thenou For 
our own preservation we must throw them a life- 
preserver. 

And not only for that reason ! In those n^oments 
when France and England are at their best, they 
see a best in us that is not merely material. We 
have money, yes ; but they know and we know (when 
all are at their best) that beyond and above money 
there is that imponderable thing which outweighs 
all gold. It is hard to name; the word ideal has 



THE BRAIN OF ONE DIMENSION 409 

been over-used ; but it is what made us free the slave, 
set Cuba free, and come to help them in 1917. It 
is the thing that built Westminster Abbey, and the 
cathedral of Amiens, and made Washington come 
to New York to be President, when what his heart 
craved was to rest at Mt. Vernon beneath his own 
vine and fig tree. 



CAN THESE BONES LIYB t 

It is not alone in Flanders fields that poppies blow 
between the crosses. From Paschendael and the 
LySy over the Somme and Aisne, across the Argonne 
and past Bomagne and the Meuse and Moselle to 
MassevauXy the dead lie everywhere ; the young dead 
of many languages, whose spirits at the end spoke 
a tongue universal. What they wrote to their 
mothers in a legion of letters that have gone to homes 
all over the world would have been understood by 
every mother bereaved of a son. Whether these last 
messages went to Warwickshire, or InvemesSi or 
Dauphine, or Ontario, or to the lands of the far Pa- 
cific, they could almost be exchanged by those who 
received them, so much do they all say the same thing. 
Their writers, while still in this life, had passed 
beyond these voices to a life where what was terror 
and horror to us who read of it, was to them a state 
of serene and even happy dedication to the will of 
God. As one passes their graves, and again more 
graves, and then still more, out in the open stretches, 
along the sheltering edges of groves, on the slopes 
of hills, among plowed fields or growing harvests, 
or near some lovely ancient spire, the silence of 
France is filled with the memory of them, and to each 
of those quiet hearts one applies the words that are 
graven on the stone of a certain boy who lies in a 
field of Tardenois : 

He has outsoared the darkness of our night. 

410 



CAN THESE BONES LIVE! 411 

Thirty-three hundred British cemeteries are in 
Trance ; we have f onr. 

Mnch thought, mnch art, much care, went to the 
shaping of these cities of the British dead. They 
are very beantiful, and simple reverence lives among 
their paths and growing flowers, and consolation 
almost visible seems to be waiting for every soul 
who comes there in need. Each body that lies in 
them rests in the company of comrades, near the 
very spot where all offered together their last and 
highest sacrifice to the same great cause, and upon 
the soil that all helped together to save. To visit 
these assembled dead, come the living all through the 
year, each to seek some special grave. They take 
away a rich and twofold solace ; they have seen how 
fittingly the ashes dear to them are tended, and they 
have felt the great unison of sacredness which comes 
from all these soldiers^ graves, and is shed upon 
each one. They tell others what they have seen, and 
of the peace which the sight has brought them ; and 
so to mothers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 
and every British land across the world is wafted 
soon or late the knowledge that it is well with their 
boys. 

Along the roads from Ypres to Massevaux, to right 
and left all the way, the signs come by : British Ceme- 
tery, French Cemetery, Canadian, Australian, and 
sometimes American Cemetery; we still have four. 
From our chief one at Eomagne, where once lay all 
our dead of the Meuse-Argonne, not quite one-half 
were taken from where they rested together, and 
were dispersed to rest alone, far away over the sea, 
in company that had not shared their errand or their 
sacrifice. Over the happy renmant at Bomagne, 



412 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

France will bow her head on sacred days when she 
remembers and honors her own sons, through all the 
years to come. If Britain, whose killed were eight 
hundred thousand, counts thirty-three hundred ceme- 
teries, how many must France possess, whose dead 
were not far from twice as manyt But America 
still has four; and France will not forget them on 
her sacred days. 

To see those British cemeteries that are finished, 
gives one the wish that one had the right to lie there 
too. The quiet and beautiful holiness that their 
paths and flowers and similar headstones make is like 
nothing I have ever seen. The headstones are all 
alike, proportioned with excellent skill, expressing 
dignity and simplicity; no upstart column or spike 
of vanity mars the solemn and sweet concord of the 
whole. One is moved to linger, one is led to read 
one name after another. Beautiful is the inscrip- 
tion without a name : 

IN HONOR OF A 
BRITISH SOLDIER 
NAME UNKNOWN. 

2nd July, 1916 




KNOWN UNTO GOD. 

The lettering and the graceful proportions of the 
cross reveal the same thought and art which are to 
be seen in every detail throughout. 



CAN THESE BONES LIVE? 413 

These thirty-three hundred cemeteries are laid out, 
furnished, and maintained by subordinate camps 
which depend upon the general headquarters at St. 
Omer. The local camps are established in each of 
the regions into which the whole territory of the 
British dead is divided. From these are issued the 
headstone and the plants and other supplies, in ac- 
cordance with the directions from St. Omer. At the 
camp in Bethune, for instance, is a nursery for 
plants ; and in 1920 one-quarter of a million of these 
were distributed from here for the graveyards in 
that special region. At St. Omer are the various 
departments which plan and superintend severally 
the laying out of each ground, its grading and shap- 
ing in relation to its environment, its planting with 
trees and shrubs, its decoration with flowers, and its 
paths and arrangement of headstones, and the war 
stone and war cross. 

Some cemeteries are larger ; the one named TYN- 
COT on Paschendael Bidge contains 15,000 dead, 
while others are like country churchyards in size. 
For the 2,000 Chinese I saw some of the headstones 
at Bethune, lettered with their alphabet and carved 
with symbols strange to a Western eye ; but with the 
date and a text in English. These dead have to be 
buried with their feet towards water, in accordance 
with their oriental faith. Among the English graves 
at Heilly were those of some German prisoners, 
tended with the same care and respect ; and an altar 
which had been raised above these bore this sentence : 

freund wenn du nach Deutchland Eommst 
erzahle dass uns liegen sahst 
den Gtesetzen unseres Landes getreu. 



414 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

At Louvencourt^ Englishi French, and Flemish 
words were on the signs of a finished cemetery, where 
the war cross and war stone were in place, and around 
and beneath them, enclosed by the completed stone 
wall, generals, gunners, surgeons, lieutenants, trum- 
peters, drivers, able seamen — ^all ranks were lying 
beside each other, in the same majestic level of death. 
The emblems of their regiments were carved above 
them on each headstone, turf was green upon the 
walks. English daisies grew in it, and flowers grew 
round the graves^ It was Sunday, and the bells of 
Louvencourt were ringing as I walked about and read 
the names. 

How came there to be able seamen in so many of 
these cemeteries ; privates of the Royal Naval Divi- 
sion, which was the 63d f Because they had come 
from Gallipoli. Battalions named after ships and 
admirals were organized for GaUipoli and employed 
there for beach duty, the landing of supplies and 
men. Afterwards they were proud to be turned into 
a fighting division; and so these able seamen retained 
their description but became soldiers and met their 
deaths on dry land. 

The graves in the little plot at Warloy-Baillou 
were beneath old apple trees, and once I was there 
when the blossoms were at the full, and petals from 
them fell quietly now and then upon the dead. Some 
of the trees were failing, and there had been a thought 
of planting cypress or yew or other churchyard 
tree in their stead; but this has been changed, and 
apple trees will always grow here and spread their 
branches and blossoms over these graves. 

Scarce a mile away from this cluster of the dead 
was the cemetery of Forceville, also small, and also 



CAN THESE BONES LIVE! 415 

complete. I returned to it very often, because it is 
not far from Amiens, and in no other that I visited 
did reverence and consolation seem more present 
If the dead know and care where they lie, those that 
are here must be content; and the living who have 
come to see this place in anguish and agitation, be- 
cause it held the dust they mourned, have gone away 
with spirits calmed. This I was told on the spot. 
Mothers have arrived there in winter time, dis- 
traught, out of themselves, asking wild privileges; 
they must see their dead, the earth must be opened, 
they must know how it is with him; perhaps he is 
cold ; she would like to make a fire for him. Wilder 
prayers than this were made. After a little while, 
with that war cross, and that war stone, in that holi- 
ness that hangs over those clustered dead, generals, 
trumpeters, surgeons, able seamen, she has found her 
self-control, she has not raved any more, she has 
felt the strange peace of loss, and has said that now 
when at home again and thinking of it, she would 
not worry any more. 

He is dead and ^one, lady, 

He is dead and gone; 
At his head a grass green turf. 

At his heels a stone. 

Against this graveyard is an old French one with 
high trees in it. As you approach from the road 
you pass along the hedge by the French graves, and 
there among these is a single new one, a British 
soldier. A splintered tree stump, a foot high and 
soon to be hidden with growing leaves, juts up close 
by. He had seen the shell coming and stepped be- 
hind the tree, and along with it he was dashed to 



416 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

fragments. What coxdd be found was buried here. 
A few steps more, and you come to the stone gate 
where the British are. You pass xmder its arch, 
through the solemn swinging door of iron bars that 
show the peace within, and there the turf, the flowers, 
the headstones, the decent order, possess you at once. 
The war cross rises high, but not too far above your 
head; first its pedestal, and then its slender shaft 
of stone, symmetric, perfect, eloquent without words, 
nothing on it but a long slender sword in bronze. 
It holds the eye, it compels to silence. It presides 
at one end of a turf walk that runs through the mid- 
dle of the ground to the war stone at the other end. 
This is like an altar, and behind it, as long as 
itself, a great stone bench, both again compelling to 
silence. They seem to stand for that greater thing 
of which Christianity is but the latest part. The 
war stone and the cross mingle their influences, which 
seem to flow from them, and bathe the headstones 
benignly. Beyond the war stone, over the wall, a 
field stretches away into quietnes;; beyond the w 
cross, over the opposite wall, stretches another field 
but a little way to the trees at the village edge, and 
through these rise the quiet rustic roofs, and an old 
steeple. To one side lies the French cemetery, and 
a field to the other; so is the whole place set and 
framed in tranquility. As one stands and looks at 
this handful of British dead in France, thought goes 
beyond them and their headstones, the gunners and 
trumpeters, to Thermopylae, to Salamis, to Water- 
loo, to Gettysburg, to Verdun. All are of the same 
company. France is the home of those at Forceville 
who died in the battle of the Somme, at Paschendael 
of those who fell in Flanders fields, at Romagne of 



CAN THESE BONES LIVE! 417 

those who fell in the Meuse-Argonne ; and France 
will care for them all perpetually, as for her own, 
whether Calgary, Melbourne, or Omaha was their 
birthplace, and no matter what their name or speech 
or faith; she is the true home of them all, and to 
her dust does their dust belong. 

This is what our brains of one dimension could 
not see: that if all the rest of the dead were to lie 
in France, it would be exile for ours to be brought 
away from that great companionship. Ours alone 
have been brought from the sacred circle of all na- 
tions, and are now dispersed over a wide continent 
that did not witness their sacrifice or share their 
conflict. They lie apart from each other, instead of 
in a place consecrated especially to them, and they 
will be inevitably forgotten when those who mourn 
them now are followed to the tomb themselves and 
in their turn forgotten. Could those exiled bones of 
our soldiers speak through the ground to those who 
visit them now, there are few indeed who would not 
say: 

* * Mother, did no one tell you that I said I wanted 
to stay with the boys I ^ * 

Sad women all over the rest of the world know that 
remembrance and honor will continue to salute their 
assembled dead, when not a flower or a thought is 
any longer given to the dispersed exiles here. 

More than two million lie in France between Flan- 
ders fields and Massevaux. When they died, nations 
were lifted as high above their week-day mood of 
getting and spending as they have fallen below it 
since. Sometimes, very often today, as one reads 
the morning news, one has to remember those ceme- 
teries and the towers of Beims and Amiens rising 



418 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

above that devastated land, in order not to fall into 
despair. From what goes on, there is temptation 
to believe that mankind spent its last drop of nobility 
in the war, and has nothing left but its baseness. 
This is not true now any more than it has ever been. 
Amiens and Reims have stood through many tides. 
Other temples that are crushed only made way for 
them, as their place will be taken by still others. 
What passes is the Inn; what remains is the soul 
which builds the Inn and dwells there, but for a time 
only. Those two million bodies in France prove the 
existence of that soul. Just now it seems stifled and 
extinct, as it has often seemed before, when other 
bodies in other battlefields had proved its existence. 

* * Come from the four winds, breath, and breathe 
upon these slain, that they may live.'' 

We must not expect to live above our week-day 
level for any long time together; but may that level 
rise, as the growth of pity shows it has risen. If it 
is to sink, if the dead have died for no gain at all to 
the world, the world were best unpeopled. Stray 
hints and projects of a next war are given, a conflict 
waged with forces of destruction let loose by men who 
never see each other; new germs of pestilence set 
going, which leave no living to bury the dead, new 
gases made from the minerals and acids of the earth, 
that with a puff blow out the breath of a city. 

To believe that wars will ever wholly cease while 
man is here is hard; but if that is to be war, if 
nothing but more means for destruction have been 
learned, if that alone is what science and human 
minds are making ready for, then may the annihila- 
tion be complete! Let not only London and Paris 
and Berlin and New York, and all near and far, but 



CAN THESE BONES LIVE? 419 

Asia and Africa and every inhabitant of the globe, 
old and young, be extinguished, and so be rendered 
incapable of further abuses of science. Then only the 
wild animals will inhabit the earth: — the wild ani- 
mals, who, although they fight to kill, at least fight 
with tooth and claw, whose instinct for combat is at 
least redeemed by personal courage ; who do not pol- 
lute the streams, who do not bum and fell the forests, 
or despoil the caves of the planet of their coal and 
gold; who leave Niagara to flow in its natural 
majesty, who disfigure no mountain, and blacken no 
valley; who are innocent of chemicals and poison — 
the wild animals, whose character is honester than 
men's because they have no souls to corrupt and 
degrade, and who come into the world and go from it, 
leaving it unmaimed. 

That would be best, if the Spirit of Knowledge 
prove for ever hostile to the Spirit of Life, Each 
time it has won and religion has gone wholly down, 
the civilization where such triumph occurred has 
perished. Better a world without man, if that is 
to be the end. We can not know; but we can be 
calm, and wait until the bruised nerves which the 
years from 1914 to 1918 gave us all have recovered. 
There have always been an Amiens and a Reims to 
symbolize the Spirit of Life; never yet has there 
been a race wise enough to keep the hostile Spirit 
of Knowledge in its place. That is the recurring 
problem of problems; it dwarfs all others; and for 
a while at any rate it looked as if the agony of the 
war had brought us a step nearer to its solution. 



APPENDIX A 

THE SUPREME COUNCIL DIFFER ABOUT 

UPPER SILESIA 

The restitution of Upper Silesia to Poland had been implied 
in Mr. Wilson's fourteen points, January 1918, and again in 
the statement issued by the Allies on June 3d, 1918. After Jan- 
uary 1919, it was definitely to be given back to Poland; and 
so it stood in the treaty as delivered to the delegates of Ger- 
many on May 7th — ^but it did not stand so when the treaty 
was signed, June 28th. During the interval, Mr. Lloyd George 
re-opened the subject. He urged that Upper Silesia should 
decide by a popular vote whether to remain German or rejoin 
Poland. Messrs. Clemenceau and Wilson objected to this change 
of plan on the ground that German methods would prevent the 
election from being a fair one. The opinions and to some ex- 
tent the characters of the three men are disclosed in the dia- 
logues which follow, and which are directly translated from 
the French stenographic reports. These were put into my 
hands by an eminent Frenchman who was part of it all, and 
from whom I had leave to do with them what I saw fit. They 
were published in The Saturday Evening Post of December 
8d, 1921, with some explanatory comments which also follow. 
They are among the few stenogrraphic records of the Supreme 
Council's conversations still in existence. Most of these were 
destroyed by order. 

The question was first brought up by Mr. Lloyd George on 
the 2nd of June, 1919. At this meeting he asked that the left 
bank of the Rhine be not occupied, and that the reparation 
clauses of the treaty be revised to provide for a lump sum to be 
paid down at once, reducing the German debt. Then he turned 
to Upper Silesia, and the material parts of the conversations 
follow, translated from the French record: 

Lloyd George: M^ colleagues all say that the eastern 
frontier of Germany is inadmissible unless it is changed, and 
if Germany refuses to sign [the treaty] they all think that 
steps of coercion will not seem justifiable to the country 
[England]. Moreover they agree with our experts in thinking 
that as Upper Silesia has not been a part of Poland for six or 
seven centuries a plebiscite is indispensable. If the plebiscite 
is favorable to Poland it will be impossible for the Germans to 
talk of retaliation. That is what would have happened in 1871 
if a plebiscite favorable to Germany had been held in Alsace- 

421 



422 NEIGHBORS HENCEFOBTH 

Lorraine. Besides, I am convinced that the plebiscite will be 
favorable to Poland. 

Clemenceau: First, as to Poland, amends are to be made 
for a historic crime, but also there is a barrier between Ger- 
many and Russia to be created. Read the interviews of Ens- 
berger, wl\o wishes Poland to be made as weak as possible, 
because it separates Germany from Russia. Mr. Erzberger 
adds that Germany, once she is in touch with Russia, can attack 
France in far better circumstances than in 1914. Is that what 
you want? Germany in control of Russia? That means that 
our dead are slain for nothing. That's all I have to remark 
on this point for the moment. 

(June 8rd« Afternoon.) 

Wilson: A plebiscite in Upper Silesia seems difficult to me; 
it would be necessary first to expel the German officials. 

Lloyd George: Do you mean the petty officials? 

Wilson: No. I'm thinking of those in charge of the ad- 
ministration. 

Clemenceau: Don't forget that in Germany it's the central 
power that appoints the mayors. 

Lloyd George: I agree that the chief German authorities 
ought to go out of the country before any voting. 

Wilson: Yes, but it's more than that. Fifteen or twenty 
big capitalists are the bosses in Upper Silesia. 

Clemenceau: Quite true. Notably Henckel von Donners- 
marck. 

Wilson: Unless the Germans are absent, a free and honest 
plebiscite, according to my expert advisers, can't be looked for 
in a country so long dominated and under constant fear of 
reprisals. 

Lloyd George: Yet in 1907, in spite of this fear, the Poles 
won the elections. My experts foresee a plebiscite favorable to 
Poland. They believe that such a plebiscite will preclude later 
reprisals by the Germans. 

Wilson: There's no trend of German opinion favorable to 
Upper Silesia; it's a capitalistic affair. 

Lloyd George: Yet the majority of the German Govern- 
ment is socialist, and it is that which is protesting. 

Wilson : Yes, for the benefit of the capitalists. 

Lloyd George: I don't agree with you. It is national 
spirit. Upper Silesia has been separated from Poland for 
seven hundred years. I ask nothing unreasonable in asking 
that the inhabitants be allowed to vote. [Let the reader notice 
the word "inhabitants," used by Mr. Lloyd George. Later on, 
much turns upon this word.] 

Wilson : But I repeat that a free vote will be impossible. 

Lloyd George: Very well, we'll occupy the territory during 
the vote. 

Wilson: Then they'll say that we brought military pres- 
sure to bear. 



APPENDIX A 423 

Clbmbncbau: One way or another the Germans will always 
be protesting. 

Lloyd George: None the less the vote will have been cast. 
Furthermore, how are ^e Germans going to intimidate a re- 
sisting industrial community? We've gone through that in 
Wales, and got the better of the big owners. 

Wilson: You're comparing dissimilar things. 

Lloyd Geobge: But I tell you that the elections have gone 
for the Poles in the localities which concern us. 

Wilson: Those were local elections and not a plebiscite to 
determine nationality. 

Clbmencbau: We haven't promised any plebiscite in this 
region. 

Lloyd George: It's Mr. Wilson who has proclaimed on every 
occasion the right of self-determination. We're providing 
plebiscites for the Saar, Fiume, Klagenf urt, so why deny one to 
Upper Silesia? 

Wilson: I go back on none of my principles, but I don't 
want the Poles to come under German pressure. 

Lloyd George: You're employing the argument you op- 
posed when Mr. Orlando was using it about Dalmatia. 

Wilson: That, is simply absurd. What I'm after is an 
honestly free vote. Now I am advised that the Germans are 
getting ready for military action in Upper Silesia. 

Lloyd George: All the more reason for a plebiscite. 

Wilson: Well, then, what are you offering us? 

Lloyd George: The same procedure as in East Prussia. 

Wilson: And if the Germans decline to obey the decision 
of the League of Nations? 

Clemenceau: You're going to ask them to promise; they'll 
promise, and they'll not keep it. Is that what you want? 

Lloyd George: I don't exclude military occupation of the 
plebiscite zone as a hsrpothesis. 

Wilson: I tell you that Germany will say that pressure 
was used. 

Lloyd George: One division would suffice. 

Wilson: Suffice for them to accuse us of pressure. 

Lloyd George: I want peace. I know from a reliable source 
that the question of Upper Silesia is the most important one 
to the Germans. I prefer sending one division into Silesia 
rather than armies to Berlin. 

Clemenceau: Who says you'll have the choice? 

Lloyd George: I don't want to repeat the madness of 
Napoleon in Russia, and be in Berlin as he was in Moscow. 

Clemenceau: It's a bit late to say all that. 

Wilson: The point is to find out if our decision is equi- 
table. Let them show a mistake as to race, and I am ready to 
correct it; but the threat that Germany will refuse to sign is 
of small interest to me. If the Germans have something valid 
to say as to Upper Silesia I'm willing to go into the question. 



424 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 



x:^V<; 






Lloitd Gbobge: It's not at all too late. The treaty of May 
7th is not an ultimatum. We must hear the Germans. My 
colleasrues in the government think so too. The Germans ask 
nothing unreasonable in asking that the inhabitants be eon* 
suited [Notice again the word ''inhabitants" used by Mr. Lloyd 
George] ; as to the freedom of the vote, that is our business: 
if Germany rejects a plebiscite favorable to Poland the British 
Armjr will march enthusiastically to Berlin. That's what I 
require. I must have the English people with me in case of 
trouble. 

Wilson: It seems to me we are further apart than we were 
at the start. My point is that a ''no" from Germany isn't rea* 
son enough for changing our decisions. I am ready to change 
them in every case where we can be proved in the wrong. 

Lloyd Georgb: There are other considerations. Why re* 
fuse secondary changes if they facilitate the signing? It's my 
conviction that the plebiscite will both give Upper Silesia to 
Poland and facilitate the signature. 

Wilson: Your intentions are excellent, but if we send troops 
we shall be accused of exercising pressure. I should prefer 
taking other guaranties to insure the freedom of the vote, and 
not sending any troops. 

Clembncbau: I have listened attentively to both of you» 
and here's my objection: you want to avoid difficulties, you're 
going to create worse ones. A plebiscite is ideal, but not in 
Germany, where liberty has never existed. To decide on a 
plebiscite and wash your hands of it would be very nice, but 
it would be a crime against the Poles. Occupation of the 
plebiscite zone remains, in which case Germany will say that 

fressure has been used — and do you know what will happen? 
n six months, in a year, right in the midst of peace you'll have 
all the bothers of war^ and then the situation will probably 
be more difficult than it is today. You say. Monsieur lioyd 
George, that you don't wish to go to Berlin; no more do I. If 
we have caused millions of soldiers to be killed it was to save 
our existence. You say that you want to learn the choice of 
Upper Silesia; I reply that under German rule Upper Silesia 
cant make a free choice, and that with interallied occupation 
the Germans will claim that the plebiscite was queered. You 
wish to quiet racial passions; you're going to inflame theoL 
There are times when the simplest and wisest thing is to sav 
no. We believe that we have made a fair treaty. Let's stick 
to it. A plebiscite and an occupation mean quarrels for to- 
morrow, battles perhaps; in a word, the very opposite of what 
you desire. 

Lloyd George: But if you're afraid of German resistance 
it will come about much more if there is no plebiscite, and we 
must recognize that from the standpoint of right Germany will 
be in a better position than ourselves. 

Wilson: We have said on our basis of the peace that all 
the indisputably Polish provinces must come back to Poland. 



APPENDIX A 425 

Lloyd Gborgb: But the Germans say that this is predaely 
not the case in Silesia. 

Clbmencbau: What? Tou know perfectly well that Ger- 
man statistics themselves show a large majority of Upper Sile- 
sia to be Polish. 

Lloyd Gborgb: Bnt the legal aspect is not the only one; 
there's a sentiment, and I want to know that. 

Wilson : The racial question is not doubtful. As to the rest 
I am willing to amplify what we have decided, but we are not 
obliged to do so by the basis of the peace. 

Lloyd Gborgb: On the racial basis one would have to say 
that Alsace is Grerman. 

Clembnceau: The case of Alsace-Lorraine, as you know 
well, is not analogous to any other. 

Wilson: What I maintain is that our decision is not con-f 
trary to the fourteen points. 

Lloyd Gborgb: Who of us had thought of Upper Silesia 
before the report of our experts had brought it to our atten- 
tion? 

Clbmencbau: You are absolutely wrong. All the Poles 
from the start have claimed Upper Silesia. 

Wilson: Monsieur Clemenceau is right. When I received 
Dmovski and Paderewski in Washington I questioned them a 
long while, map in hand. Their claims were excessive, but we 
all agreed upon the formula "to give Poland all regions in- 
habited by Poles." 

Lloyd George: I tell you again that we can never have 
thought of giving to Poland a province which has not been 
Poliui for eight hundred years. 

Clembnceau: And I tell you again that the claim as to 
Upper Silesia has always been formulated by Poland and recog- 
nized as just by us. 

Wilson: We must finish. We might consent to aplebisdte 
under the control of an interallied commission. We would 
declare the plebiscite to be void if the commission reported td 
us that pressure had been exercised. 

Lloyd George: I fancy that Germany would accept an 
American occupation. 

Clembnceau: Well, I promise you that no matter who 11»e 
occupiers may be, Germany will protest Just the same. 

Wilson: Germany doesn't love the United States any better 
than she loves the other allies. What is your decision? Do 
you want a plebiscite and do you wish an interallied commission 
to define how it shall be held? 

Lloyd George: The German troops must evacuate Upper 
Silesia. 

Wilson: Quite so, and the interallied commission must even 
be able to summon allied troops. 

CiJSMBNCBAU: But what force do you think necessary? 

Lloyd George: One division. 

Clbmencbau: I'm not convinced. 



426 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFOBTH 

Lloyd Gbobob: If the Germans refuse to sign I most be 
able to prove to my cabinet and to the people that the fault is 
not ours. 

Then they decided that the experts draw up a scheme; and 
on the mominff of June 5th they Bad in Mr. Paderewskiy whom 
Mr. Wilson addressed as follows: 

Wilson: They tell us that the most serious question is 
Upper Silesia. Our experts have prepared a note, which has 
bc^n communicated to us. But before deciding we want your 
opinion. The material change will be the provision for a 
plebiscite. The population is Polish by a large majority, as we 
know, but some think that a plebiscite, held of course after the 
departure of the German troops, will give more strength to our 
decisions. 

Paderewski: The actual text of the treaty is justice itself. 
In Silesia there are two districts where Poland has an un- 
doubted majority, and one where the majority in German. The 
part to the west, which is agricultural, is under the influence 
of the Catholic clergy, very oangerous from our point of view; 
it influences the opinion of the peasants. To the east the popu- 
lation is more thoughtful and freer, but if only l^e east be- 
comes Polish, the whole industrial region will be close to the 
frontier. 

Lloyd Gborgb: Which zone is the more densely populated? 

Paderewski: The east. In the mining region there are 900,- 
000 Poles, 400,000 Germans. In the fanning region there are 
600,000 inhabitants; it is an indisputably Polish country. 

Wilson: The Germans themselves recognize that the popu- 
lation is Polish. 

Paderewski: Yet, nevertheless, they claim Upper Silesia. 

Lloyd George: If we were to speak of Silesia as a whole, 
and not merely of Upper Silesia, in its entirety it is mainly 
Crerman. 

Paderewski: Yes, many people were speakinp: Polish at 
Breslau when I was there. [He means by this that in a German 
city much Polish was spoken just as much Yiddish is spoken 
in New York, and that these are not the facts which decide to 
what country a city belongs.] 

Clemenceau: But as to what concerns Upper Silesia, do 
you agree to a plebiscite after the evacuation of the territory 
by German troops? That's what we want to know from you. 

Paderewski: Such a change in the treaty would oblige me 
to resign, for the people to whom the text of June 7th [a mis- 
take for May 7th1 promised Upper Silesia would lose their 
confidence. 

Lloyd George: We promised nothing at all, we wrote the 
scheme of a treaty^ we oidnt give it the form of an ultimatum. 
We reserved our liberty to examine the reply of the Germans, 
and consequently we have the right to make concessions if they 
are reasonable. What? Yesterday Poland was divided in 
three pieces, your fellow-countrymen were fighting separately 



APPENDIX A 427 

against each other, and all were fighting together against the 
independence of their own country. Today you are sure of a 
resurrected Poland which will have 20,000,000 inhabitants; 
you're demanding in addition, for example, a population in Gali- 
da which is not Polish. You're demandmg all tms from us; you» 
whose liberty has been won by the death of 1,600,000 French- 
men, 800,000 Englishmen, and 500,000 Italians. It's our blood 
that has paid for your independence. If you kick against our 
decisions we shall have been mistaken in ^rou. 

Padebewski: I confined myself to stating that I could not 
remain in office. 

Lloyd George: We have given liberty to Poland, Bohemia, 
Jugo-Slavia; and those are the countries that kick against 
the plebiscite. They are much more imperialistic than the great 
nations themselves. 

Padebewski: I cannot admit what you say; you are merely 
reproducing newspaper talk. 

Lloyd George: I say that you want to annex people against 
their will. 

Paderewski: Not in the slightest degree. We defend our 
countrymen when they are attacked. 

Clemenceau: I want to come back to the question of the 
plebiscite. If it is held after some postponement and until 
that time American troops occupy the country, do you think 
the vote will be free and favorable to Poland? 

Paderewski: Yes, undoubtedly in the eastern part. As for 
the western part, the threefold influence of the freeholders, the 
officials, and the clericals will make the outcome uncertain. 
Furthermore the object of the Germans is to provoke a dis- 
turbance in order to have to repress it. They have 860,000 
men on the Polish frontier. 

The conversation about Poland was resumed on the morning 
of June 9th. 

Lloyd George: The experts who have been at work over 
the plebiscite do not agree as to the interval between the signing 
of the treaty and the plebiscite. Now this interval bears upon 
the system to be established. We alone are able to solve this 
question. Do not forget that three of the experts are hostile 
in principle to the plebiscite. 

Wilson: It will be enough to ask them to explain the two 
systems. 

Lloyd George: That's it. Moreover, some proposals are not 
acceptable, such as the expulsion of the entire clergy^ The com* 
mission who will be on the ground must be exempt from its 
decisions. ^ 

Clemenceau: I recognize that it may be difficult to expel 
the entire clergy, and yet you cannot overlook the pro-German 
influence that it will exert. 

Lloyd George: As in Ireland; and in spite of that we do not 
expel the Irish clergy. The plebiscite will deprive the Germans 



428 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

of all pretext for fightingr. With concessions as to the repara- 
tions in addition, the Germans will sign. 

On the afternoon of June 11th they returned to the question. 

Clemenceau: Do you wish to hear the commission on Polish 
affairs? 

Lloyd George: That commission is very biased regarding 
Poland; I don't want to debate with it. 

Clemenceau: We'll debate only with each other, but we 
must first hear the commission, question it and listen to it. I 
desire to repeat once again that I am against a plebiscite 
in Upper Silesia. Since you all agree to the principle I'll be 
with you in a spirit of conciliation, but I can't forget that 
wherever the population has elected Polish deputies tiae pleb- 
iscite is useless. [He means that Polish deputies to the Reich- 
stag count for nothing.] 

Wilson : We can examine its limitations. I should add that 
my colleague, Mr. White, has also brought me reports of the 
pro-German influence of the Polish clericals. 

Lloyd George: I'll bet those reports come from Polish 
sources. Look what the Poles are saying about the Jews. They 
claim to be giving them the best treatment in the world, and 
we all know it's not true. A plebiscite is a just thinp:. With- 
out a plebiscite our consciences would not be at ease if British 
troops had to be sent to get themselves killed in Upper Silesia. 
A plebiscite jput off for several months or an interallied occu- 
pation will give us free elections. 

Wilson: You're very biased yourself. My information 
comes from Americans on the spot. You appear to have for- 
gotten what the Germans can do in the way of propaganda and 
pressure. I know what they did in America. What will they 
not do in Silesia, where they are politically and economically 
sovereign? When it comes to the Germans I am against them 
and for Poland. 

Clemenceau: That's truth. 

Lloyd George: I tell you again that if we have to fight 
about the east frontier of Crermany our soldiers won't fight if 
Germany can prove that the plebiscite was rejected in spite 
of Great Britain's opinion. 

Wilson: We've been making no sacrifice of our own inter- 
ests; don't let us consent to them at the expense of a little 
country. [Mr. Wilson meant by this that after a lively discus- 
sion and upon the unbreakable opposition of Mr. Clemenceau 
the clauses relating to the occupation of the left bank of the 
Rhine and the reparations had been retained without change.] 

Lloyd George: You know perfectly well that my sole object 
was not to give Poland territory that was not Polish. Were 
we to do that we could not fight to assure such territory to it. 

Wilson: I'm sorry for the excitement into which Fve 
thrown jrou. It's also quite certain that you've never changed 
your opinion about this. 



APPENDIX A 429 

Lloyd George: I want to avoid conflict. The Germans in 
Upper Silesia consider the Poles an inferior population, for 
wnom they entertain contempt; and to put Germans under 
Polish rule would be to provoke trouble. 

Clbmenceau: You'll have trouble, never ^ doubt it, of all 
sorts, now or later, with or without a plebiscite. 

Lloyd George: I hold an utterly opposite opinion. 

Clemenceau: The future will settle it, but I beg you not to 
forget what I'm saying today. 

Wilson: The first thing to do, according to the experts, is 
to cause the withdrawal of German troops. Will British soldiers 
fight to make the plebiscite respected? 

Lloyd George: Yes, because it's a just principle; and what 
I'd like to know is, if the French Army would fight for Upper 
Silesia to become Polish without a plebiscite? 

Clbmenceau: I reply yes, because the question is not as 
you put it; here's the one question: to know if the Germans 
will sign or not sign the treaty. 

Wilson: The American soldiers will alwajrs fight against 
the Crermans. 

Lloyd George: I'm not speaking for your soldiers; I'm 
speaking for mine. You know how Lord Northcliffe is attack- 
ing me in his newspapers, and yet he is for the plebiscite in 
Upper Silesia. 

[The experts are brought in — Mr. JuleS Cambon, General Le 
Rond, Mr. Morley, and Mr. Lord.] 

Wilson: In what do the experts agree and in what do they 
disagree? 

Le Rond: We agree upon the territorial question, the coal 
(^fuestion, and the financial clauses. We disagrree upon the ques- 
tion of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia. President Wilson two 
days ago ordered us in the name of the Four to present two 
schemes — one for a plebiscite shortly, the other for a postponed 
plebiscite. In Upper Silesia the Poles are not their own 
masters. The big freeholders are lords of the soil; they are 
really feudal with more power than those of the thirteenth 
century, because they own not only the g[round but what is be- 
neath, and the manufactories and the capital. 

Clemenceau: Chiefly the bishop of Breslau, who is one of 
those big freeholders. 

Le Rond: I'll speak presently of him. The big freeholders 
hold the country in a net, notably the clergy. The bishop of 
Breslau is particularly powerful. Since the armistice the Polish 
priests have been sent elsewhere. The Germans suppress the 
Polish newspapers and it's being said that if Silesia becomes 
Polish the money in the savings banks will disappear. Accord- 
ing to the general opinion of the experts, serious precautions 
should be taken. The majority of the experts consider that a 
pretty long postponement is required; between one and two 
years. 

Lloyd George: I accept. 



430 NEIGHBORS HENCEFORTH 

Lb Rond: Out of eight electoral districts in Upper Silesia, 
five were represented in the Reichstag by Poles. 

CiAMENCBAu: Did these Poles claim they were independent? 

Lb Rond: They couldnt under the German system. 

WHiSOn: There was a strong Polish party in Upper Silesia? 

Lb Rond: Yes. 

Lloyd Georob: I fancy it's useless to bring up the question 
of an immediate plebiscite. 

Lb Rond: 111 speak of the preparation for a plebiscite. If 
it doesn't take place until after a fairly long wait you must 
give wider powers to your commission. 

Lloyd George: The question is settled for me. 

Lb Rond: Who will settle the date — ^the Powers or the 
League of Nations? 

Lloyd George: 111 accept either method. 

Wilson: Can you inform us as to the Polish part of Upper 
Silesia? 

Lord: There are two parties, one socialist, one not, but 
both are working for union with Poland. 

Lloyd George: But is it not the same thing as in Ireland 
or in Wales — attachment to the nationality, but never until 
recently, even in Ireland, a serious idea of separation? 

Lord: Separation was not in the program, probably be- 
cause it wasn't supposed possible in the condition of Europe. 

Le Rond: Since the war the movement in favor of union 
with Poland has been very active in the whole of Upper Silesia. 

Lloyd George: I don't contest that, but what I don't know 
is the strength of Polish sentiment. 

[The experts retire.] 

Wilson: I consider that we must decide for a plebiscite a 
year off at least, two years off at the latest. Mr. Lord has it 
from an American on the spot that all classes of the population 
want a plebiscite. Now Mr. Lord himself is against a plebi- 
scite. 

Glemenceau: IVe nothing to add to what I have said. I 
persist in thinking the plebiscite a mistake. Since I'm alone 
in this, I must bow; none the less I continue to believe that we 
are headed for grave difficulties in Upper Silesia and that a 
prompt settlement would have been better. 

Wilson: Here is the scheme for defining the powers of the 
commission on the plebiscite. 

[The scheme is aaopted.] 

Clemenceau: Is occupation provided for? 

Wilson: Yes. 

Clemenceau: Is the evacuation of the German troops stip- 
ulated? 

Wilson: Tes. 

Glemenceau: What interval shall we set for the plebiscite? 

Lloyd George: The committee will make a proposal at the 
end of the year. 

Clemenceau: Who are the troops of occupation? 



APPENDIX A 431 

Lloyd Gkobgb: I think we'll all have to participate. I'd 
still prefer that it was the Americans. 
Wilson: I'll consult my military authorities. 
Clbmenceau: Who'll pay the expenses of the occupation? 
Oblando: The country who'll get Upper Silesia. 

They resumed on the morning of June 14th. 

Wilson: We have decided to have recourse to the plebiscite 
to deprive Germany of the slightest pretext for irredentist 
action in the future. Besides, the Grermans realize that the pop- 
ulation is Polish in majority but they deny its wish to be joined 
to Poland. Mr. Paderewski has marked out two zones — ^the 
mining ref^ion to the east, where the result of the plebiscite 
seems to him not doubtful, and the farming region to the west, 
where the result is doubtful. This n^ust be taken into consid- 
eration. Accordingly we have decided: 

1. That the plebiscite shall be held by commune [township, 
parish]. 

2. That it shall be put off for several months in order that 
German pressure may be eliminated. 

3. That the German troops shall immediately evacuate 
Upper Silesia. 

Paderewski: I can't pretend that this is not a cruel blow, 
for we had been promised Upper Silesia. If the plebiscite turned 
out unfavorable to us it would be the peasants, the working- 
men, who would suffer. As to the period of waiting which you 
have provided, it will create an unwelcome tension. The plebi- 
scite should not be put off longer than six months at the most. 
Our delegation accepts your decision with the respect it has 
for you, but not without profound regret. 

Wilson: Your words move me deeply; I've gone through 
many doubts and scruples of conscience. 

Clemenceau: You know that my opinion has never changed. 

Lloyd George: I was myself much moved by the state- 
ments of Mr. Paderewski. We have reflected a long while^ but 
I am certain that Poland has nothing to fear in the mining 
region from the plebiscite. 

Wilson: An American who went there tells me that union 
with Poland is desired by everybody and that the result will be 
favorable. 

Dmovski: I am convinced that taken altogether the plebi- 
scite will give good results. I know the Grerman argument welL 
They declare fliat the population does not want to be Polish. 
I realize that fifty years ago it was no longer Polish save in 
speech, but during the pastlialf century there has been a great 
awakening. This might now create difficulties if districts which 
in 1919 might hesitate to vote for Poland should rise up against 
German rule later. What would the Great Powers do? 

Wilson: To deal with such questions is one of the essential 
offices of the League of Nations. 



432 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 



Lloyd George: Quite so; we can't settle everything at once, 
but there'll be permanent machinery for adjustment. 

Dmovski: What have you decided about the evacuation of 
Upper Silesia by German troops? 

Wilson: It will take place at once after the signature. 

Dmovski: What have you decided about the Grerman 
officials? 

Wilson: The commission has full power to drive them out. 

Dmovski: The commission in its work would have to be 
aided equally by the German and the Polish element. 

Wilson: The commission will have discretionary powers. 

[Mr. Paderewski and Mr. Dmovski retire.] 

Lloyd George: All the partisans of Poland asked that the 
plebiscite be put off, and here's the Polish delegation asking 
that it take place as soon as possible. 

Wilson: I should have supposed that an interval of from 
one to two years was a guaranty for Poland. 

Clemenceau: Possibly; but Mr. Paderewski tells you that 
the intervening period runs the danger of driving everybody 
crazy. 

Wilson: We must take what he said into consideration and 
adopt a plan that allows at need an abridgment of the interval 
before the plebiscite. I suggest we say from six to eighteen 
months. [Adopted.] 

So Mr. Lloyd George had his way, and a plebiscite in Upper 
Silesia was provided for, accordingly, by Article 88 of the 
Treaty of Versailles, as follows: 

Article 88 : "In the portion of Upper Silesia included within 
the boundaries described below, the inhabitants will be called 
upon to indicate by a vote whether they wish to be attached to 
Germany or to Poland. . . . Germany hereby renounces in 
favor of Poland all rights and title over the portion of Ujjper 
Silesia lying beyond the frontier line fixed by the Principal 
Allied and Associated Powers as the result of the plebiscite.'' 

Section 4 of the annex to this article specifies and limits very 
precisely who the qualified voters are to be. 

a. All persons of either sex who have completed their 20th 

year. 

b. Who were bom in Upper Silesia or were domiciled there 

by January 1st, 1919. 

c. Or who had lost their domicile by being expelled by the 

Crerman authorities. 

Clause C enlarges the definition of "inhabitants" by including 
the banished inhabitants; they can come back; but not Germans 
bom there and emigrated voluntarily. To have meant that all 
persons bom in Upper Silesia should vote after completing their 
20th year, and then to add an annex describing which persona 
should vote there would have been a manifest absurdity. 

One would suppose this pretty clear; but the Germans who 
had emigrated from Schleswig were allowed to return and vote 



APPENDIX A 433 

in violation of provisions virtually similar to these, tlie same 
provisions, virtually, applied to Allenstein and Marienwerder in 
£2ast Prussia (see Article 95), and the treaty was violated in 
the same way. When it came to Upper Silesia the precedent 
thus established was claimed by Germany and conceded by 
the Allies. Germany asserted that Section 4 of the Annex 
destroyed the meaning of "inhabitants'^ in Article 88. 

This grows more inconceivable when you find, in Section 5, 
that "regard will be paid to the wishes of the inhabitants as 
shown by the vote" — ^nothing said about emigrrated Germans; 
that the report of the commission computes the number of voters 
as 1,900,000 — ^which is the number of inhabitants of Upper 
Silesia in 1910, according to the Prussian census — ^no question 
of emigrants here; and that the German note of May 1919 con- 
fines itself to requesting that the right to vote be granted to 
"any German subject aged 20 years complete and living in the 
plebiscite territory at least a yea/r before the conclusion of the 
peace." No question of emigrants here. This request, as the 
reader will notice, was granted by clause b of the annex, fixing 
January 1st, 1919. What followed is more inconceivable still. 

In the summer of 1920, the Allies allowed that emigrated 
Germans should vote in Upper Silesia. In the autumn, Mon- 
sieur G. Leygues obtained the concession that at least these 
Germans should not vote on the same day as the inhabitants. 
In January 1921, at the Paris conference^ this concession was 
renounced by France. In March the plebiscite took place, and 
Germans to the number of r90,000 entered and intimidated the 
voters. This election failed utterly in its object, which was to 
register the true aspirations of the inhabitants. From March 
until August — again in violation of Article 88, which sets one 
month after the vote as the term in which frontiers and admin- 
istration are to be settled — nothing is settled ; then the Supreme 
Council passed the mess it had made to the League of Nations. 
Then the League of Nations by its decision awarded Poland 
more than was, according to German ideas, satisfactory. 

At this the German Cabinet resigned office and took it again 
the next day, like something in a comic opera, while the Berlin 
papers were remarking, "We must help accelerate the Polish 
process of decay," and that Germany was no longer bound by 
the Peace Treaty because **it has been grossly violated again!" 
Soon the League of Nations confessed itself at a loss, not very 
unnaturally. What could it do? It had been founded upon a 
theory of human nature rather than on a condition, and con- 
sequently rested on sand, which we must hope may slowly 
change to rock. Meanwhile, we usually supply sailboats today 
with auxiliary power. The sugg^estion of power, during all this 
passing back and forth of responsibility, came from quite 
another source. General LudendorfF, in a speech he made at 
Koenigsberg, indicated his way of settling the question of 
Upper Silesia. 

"I entertain no doubt," he said, "that the destiny of our 



434 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

country will be decided sooner or later by a battle for tiiat land 
to our east. When the hour comes remember what won ns our 
victory at Tannenberg: — ^the will of our leaders, our faith in 
those leaders, onr discipline and courage in the face of death. 
The greater onr country's need the more closely shall we rally 
round the black, white, and red flag of Prussia. We are proud 
of our beloved Prussia; we are, and we wish to be, Prussians.** 

Great applause followed these words, the audience gave the 
general an ovation. A counter demonstration by sociaUsts was 
promptly suppressed. 

In May 1922. Poland and Germany agreed to abide for fifteen 
years by the decision of the Leagnie of Nations. Will this be 
another scrap of paper? 

The Treaty of Versailles has had but few readers. During 
our presidential campaign in 1920 many friends of the "Le&gne 
of Nations reproached me for being a Republican. Not one of 
these friends had read the treaty; most of them had never even 
seen the outside of it. Yet, perfectly ignorant of its manv 

frovisions, unwise and hastily prepared, they wished it ratified, 
hope that I have made clear the story of Upper Silesia. 
First, early in 1919, it is to be given outright to Poland; next, 
a string is tied to this gift by a plebiscite, at which shall 
vote only native-bom and residents naturalized before January 
1st, 1919, and residents exiled by Grermany; next, contrary to 
this signed agrreement, German emigrrants are to vote; next, 
these are to vote on a diflferent day from the inhabitants; next, 
they are to vote on the same day; finally, 190,000 of them enter 
and vote on the same day, and the election is an intimidation and 
not free, precisely as Clemenceau told Lloyd Georee it would 
be and Lloyd George told Clemenceau he was sure It wouldn't. 
Would not a sticking to the treaty have been simpler? This 
is not a case of posterity interpreting the vague language of a 
document it did not write; it is the departure by the stipulators 
from their own specific stipulations. Many a set of politicians 
have gone back on a treaty which their predecessors signed; 
but never until now have we seen a set of politicians going back 
within two years on what they have sigrned themselves; and 
this irresponsible levity about a solemn agreement not only 
belittles the Allies and encourages Germany in her plan ci 
revenge but it insults and impairs the sense of honor of the 
entire civilized world. 



APPENDIX B 

FOCH SPEAKS HIS MIND 

On November 7tli> 1920, eiehteep months to a day after the 
Treaty of Versailles was delivered to the Germans, Marshal 
Foch was on his way to Amiens to decorate the graves of the 
Australians who had defended the city for three years, and 
saved it in 1918, and had left fifty thousand dead on French soiL 

Perhaps it was because he was in the same private car in 
whidi the Germans had signed the Armistice almost exactly 
two years before, that his companion, M. Jules Sauerwein, a 
writer for Le Mating found him in a mood, at first slightly re- 
luctant but finally almost without reserve, to talk about the 
Armistice. He broke his silence about this and also about two 
other matters of historic interest, namely, the circumstances in 
which he was made commander-in-chief of the allied armies 
after the disaster to the 6th British army in the great spring 
drive of 1918, and the tardiness as well as the character of the 
peace treaty. 

No observer can look at the face of Foch, especially at his 
eyes, without perceiving that his is a nature of perfect loyalty 
and also that whatever animation may pass over the sui^ace, 
he is deeply and finally sad. This comes not alone from the 
personal bereavement that he suffered in the war; it is due also, 
and possibly even more, to the undoing of his work by the 
politicians, which he foresaw but which he was powerless to 
prevent. 

When the world read his reasons for granting an armistice 
at the time they were published — the sparing of human life, 
since all was gained without further bloodshed — ^they seemed 
adequate. Very few could have known then that the Armistice 
was forced upon him against his conviction, and that loyalty 
alone prompted him not only to assent openly but also openly 
to support the step taken. What he would have done had he 
known that no peace would be signed until the following June, 
no one can be sure, probably not even he. 

To lay the calamity of the Armistice wholly at Mr. Wilson's 
door is probably not any more correct than to leave out his in- 
fluence altogether. Several causes would seem to have com- 
bined, and were alleged then, and later. It was said that the 
British Army, after its tremendous and exhausting pursuit, 
could have gone no further then; that all the armies haa 

435 



436 NEIGHBOES HENCEFORTH 

marched so far in advance of their bases of supply as to make 
further proeress at that time, or until the spring, impossible; 
that every oridge and other link of communication had been 
destroyed by the retreating Germans, so that necessary repairs 
both in front and in the rear would have delayed an invasion 
of Crermany until spring, giving Germany time to entrench 
herself formidably; and, finally, that Mr. Wilson, whose 14 
points had helped to allay in January a growing socialistic 
opposition to carrying on the war in 1918, had by his notes 
to Max of Baden in October again revived this opposition to 
an extent so widespread that it had to be reckoned with. These 
reasons, if true, must have seemed strong in November 1918. 
A complete answer to them, however, is to be found in the plan 
for the Lorraine offensive to have been launched on November 
14th. In the light of that, any threat to withdraw the American 
troops would have been by itself enough to have forced the 
Armistice; and if such a threat was in fact made, Mr. Wilson's 
figure will stand almost as prominent in history as that of the 
Kaiser. 

Much controversy surrounds the delay in uniting all the 
armies under the command of Foch after this had been urged 
in high quarters. The conversation between him and Sauerwein 
throws some light upon this, but not enough. Foch begins by 
expressing weariness of repeating the story of the Armistice, 
but as he warms to it, occasionally dropping into colloquialisms 
for which it is not easy to find English equivalents, his opinion 
of the slump from victory to failure is revealed, as well as his 
unhappiness. 

^ "What is an armistice? It is a suspension of arms, a cessa- 
tion of hostilities, which has for its object the discussion of 
peace by putting the governments which have consented to it in 
a situation such that they can impose the peace on which they 
have decided. 

"Has the Armistice which I signed on the 11th of November, 
1918, fulfilled its object? 

"Yes, since on the 28th of June, after seven months of nego- 
tiations, Germany accepted all the conditions of the Allies. I had 
said to M. Clemenceau, the President of the Council, 'Here is my 
Armistice; you can make any peace you please, I am in a posi- 
tion to enforce it.' If the peace has not been good, is it my 
fault? I did my work ; it was for the politicians to do theirs. 

"I had been thinking the peace over for a long while. By 
September 1918 I was writing to M. Clemenceau. I said to 
him: 'The end of the war approaches. Send me a member of 
our foreign ministry to inform me of the conditions of peace 
which you are preparing in order that our armies may occupy 
all the regions which should serve as a guaranty for the execu- 
tion of the treaty which you will make/ 

"Mr. Clemenceau replied: 'That is no business of yours.' 

"Do you wish me to tell you about the Armistice? It has 
been told so often! Very well; I'll tell you that when I saw 



APPENDIX B 437 



them entering this car, Erzberger and the two others, accom- 
panied by a naval officer whose name I have completely for- 
gotten, I had a moment of emotion. I said to myself, 'Here is 
Germany. Very well, since it is coming to me, I will treat it 
as it deserves. It is beaten. I will be stiff, cold, but without 
rancor or rudeness.' 

''I had reached Rethonde at six in the evening, where my 
train was put on a siding. Next morning a train arrived very 
slowly, pushed from behind. It was the German train. They 
laid a footbridge between the two trains because it was very 
muddy. An instant later Weygand entered and told me that 
the German plenipotentiaries were at hand. Erzberger comes 
first, and presents the others in a fairly indistinct voice. It's 
translated. I say: 'Gentlemen, have you your credentials? 
We'll examine their validity.' They show me papers signed 
by Max of Baden. We consider them satisfactory. I turn to 
Erzberger and say to him: 'What do you desire of me?' 'We 
have come,' he answers^ 'to receive communications of the con- 
ditions on which you wish to make the Armistice.' 

"I answer: 'I have no communication to make to you. If 
you have any request to present to me, make it.' And he gives 
some more explanations. I say to him: 'Do you ask for an 
armistice?' He answers me: 'We ask it.' I reply: 'Then I will 
inform you through my intermediary upon what conditions the 
allied governments consent to grant the Armistice.' 

"We sit down in the next car where my officers were. 
Admiral Wemyss at my right, Weygand at my left, and opposite 
me Erzberger, between Oberdorf and Winterfeldt. Weygand 
read them the conditions, which were translated piece by piece. 

"I saw them collapse. Winterfeldt was very pale. I even 
think he was crying. After the reading, I add at once: 'Gen- 
tlemen, I leave this text with you; you have 72 hours to answer 
in. During that time you can present me comments of detail.' 

"Then Erzberger became piteous. 'Monsieur le mar^chal, I 
pray you will not wait for 72 hours. Stop the hostilities to- 
day. Our armies are the prey of anarchy; bolshevism threatens 
them; this bolshevism may spread over Germany, over all 
central Europe, and threaten even France herself.' 

"I don't budge. I reply: 'I don't know what condition your 
armies are in; I only know the state of my own. Not only can 
I not stop the offensive, but I will give the order to push it 
with redoubled energy.' 

"Then Winterfeldt takes it up. He had notes in front of him 
and he had carefully got up his case. 

"'It is necessary,' said he to me, 'that our chief s-of -staff 
should confer and talk over together all the details of execution. 
How can they? How can they communicate if the hostilities 
continue? I request you to stop the hostilities.' 

"I answered him: 'These technical discussions will be en- 
tirely in order in 72 hours. From now until then hostilities 
will continue.' 



438 NEIGHBOES HENCEFOETH 

''They withdrew. As for me, I send an order to all the allied 
armiesy a last call to the courage and energy of all. All the 
commanders-in-chief returned me an entiiusiastic answer: 
'Count on us, we i^all not stop.' 

''I skip the three following days. The Germans attempted 
submersion, submersion by means of notes. Weygand received 
them and transmitted them to me." 

Here the marshal with a smile of kindness and recognition 
interrupted himself to speak of his colleagues. 

'They are" he said to me, ''crack-a-jacks. Ah, how well they 
know weir business I And when there was talk of sending 
Weygand to Poland, and somebody said that he had never been 
in command, I said: 'Don't worry, he'll know what to do.' 

"On the evening of the 10th I remind the Germans that they 
must sign the next day. They receive a long message from 
Hindenburg telling them to sign; but the revolution breaks out 
in Berlin, and I tell them: 'Who do you represent now?' They 
show me a telegram from President Ebert, a cipher telegram 
which was signed '606.' I don't know why. This telegram 
satisfied their authorilj, 

"During the night of the 10th I didn't sleep much. 

"I was resting between midnight and one o'clock, and then 
the Germans arrived. I allowed them 5,000 mitrailleuses, and 
some camions. That was all. At 5.15 they signed in heavy, 
furious handwriting. At seven o'clock I left for Paris. 

"At nine I was with M. Clemenceau. He was not particularly 
amiable. He was growling. He asked me if I had yielded to 
the Germans . • . but no matter about that ... I told him 
that at eleven o'clock the cannon must be fired to announce the 
end of hostilities. He wanted it to be at four in the afternoon 
at the moment he should mount the tribune in the Chamber of 
Deputies. I told him that the allied armies had been advised 
since the night by my order; that at eleven o'clock the last 
shot would be fired, and the whole world would know it. 

"On this M. Barthou, M. Neil, and others entered his study 
and backed me up. He consented to have the cannon fired at 
eleven o'clock. 

"I said to him: 'My work is done. Yours begins.'" 

Saubrwein: But was it really over, your work? After beat- 
ing Germany wasn't it your duty to give advice as to the 
peace? 

Foch: I don't know if it was my duty^ or rather I believe 
it was, and that's what I understood; but I never was given the 
right. 

"I often saw M. Clemenceau and I sent him three written 
notes. But let me tell you the end which will explain the begin- 
ning to you. The peace which thev proposed to sigrn — I spoke 
to you aoout it at the time — seemed bad to me. I summed it up 
thus: neither frontiers nor pledges. 

"For the security of France the frontier of the Rhine was 
needed, a military frontier, you understand, not a political one. 



APPENDIX B 439 

For the reparations due France I demanded the occupation 
of the left bank of the Rhine until the full compliance with the 
treaty was consummated, because in my opinion that was the 
only way to secure those reparations. 

''In the month of April, the 7th, I think, I was allowed to be 
heard at the council of ministers. I had vainly asked to be 
heard by the French delegation. They refused me. I recall 
that council of ministers. I came there with M. Jules Cambon 
and Tardieu. I asked at first if they kept no minutes. It 
ai)pears that this was not the custom. Then, as I had com- 
mitted my remarks to paper, I g^ve a copy to each minister and 
then be^n to speak and develop my tiieme: no guaranties, 
no security. 

"M. Poincar^ supported me, he alone, I must acknowledge it. 
After that they begged me to retire. Going out, I said to M. 
Tardieu before M. Cambon: 

" 'Some day there will be a High Court to judge us, because 
France will never understand how we came to make a failure 
out of victory. On that day I want to present myself with a 
tranquil conscience and my papers in order.^ 

"I made one more attempt. It was at the full session of the 
6th of May, when thev gave to the allied powers the trea^ 
which had been finished during the night. The Portuguese, and 
others whom I don't recall, protested. Then I got up and de^ 
veloped my theme once more. They listened, nobody said a 
word, and the session rose. 

"While they were taking tea in the adjoining room I found 
M. Clemenceau and said: 

"1 had the honor to ask a question, and I should be glad 
of an answer.' 

"Then I saw him talk animatedly a moment with M. Wilson 
and M. Lloyd George. Then he came back to me and declared: 

" 'Our answer is, that there is no answer.' 

"I replied: 

"'Monsieur the President, I am asking myself if I will ac- 
company you tomorrow to Versailles. I find myself facing a 
case of conscience, the gravest that I have ever known in my 
existence. I repudiate that treaty, and I do not wish to par- 
ticipate in the responsibility by sitting beside you.' 

"He was not pleased, and urged me to come. In the evening 
he sent M. John Dupuy to me, who held a long discourse with 
real emotion. Then I> said to myself: 'The Allied governments 
are going to present themselves before Germany to impose a 
treaty upon her. Is it possible for them to present themselves 
without their armies, without the chief of their armies? I 
haven't the right. It would be to weaken them in the presence 
of the enemy. 

"At Versailles I found myself by M. Elotz. When the cere- 
mony of delivery was over, I said: 'Monsieur Minister of tiie 
Finances of the French Republic, with such a treaty you can 
present yourself at the bank of the German Empire and you 



440 NEIGHBOBS HENCEFORTH 

will be paid in fake money/ M. Klotz replied acrimoniously, 
That is not my custom/ 

" *It will be your custom/ I retorted. 

''And those are the people/' concluded Marshal Foch, looking 
sadly at his pipe, ''those are the people to whom I said: 

"'Make what peace you wish. I'll take care that it's per- 
formed/ " 

Sauerwein: It looks as if the head of our government did 
not love you to excess. 

Foch: What can you do? I don't know if he liked me, but 
he did not show it. I recall a council of war in London, the 
14th of March, 1918. I had been nominated commander-in-chief 
of the reserve army, which didn't exist much. At that meeting 
I asked the English to contribute effectives to this army. 

"Marshal Haig declared to me, in the name of the English 
Government, which was principally represented by Mr. Lloyd 
George, that it was impossible. I was going to answer sharply 
when 

" 'Be quiet/ said M. Clemenceau vigorously to me, 'I'm speak- 
ing in the name of the French Government, and I declare that 
I accept Marshal Haigr's answer.'" 

Here, writes M. Sauerwein, Foch smiled, and that violent 
incident seems to have left not the slightest bitterness. 

"I said to myself," continued Foch, "wait. Tomorrow 111 
say something. And next day when the council was on the point 
of separating, I spoke, and I was not cut short this time. I 
declared that a formidable offensive was preparing, and I added 
that I knew what allied battles were. I've taken part at the 
Marne and in Italy. Here is what the liaisons ought to be 
(I said) and here is the way to play team-work, those are the 
precautions to be taken, &c., &c. I assure you (I said to them) 
that nothing is ready to resist the offensive and that it may 
be a disaster. 

"They were impressed all the same. And a few days after- 
wards at Comoi^gne and Doullens they remembered me. [This 
was when Gough's army had been defeated.] 

"At Doullens there were Lord Milner, Marshal Haig, M. 
Poincar6, M. Clemenceau, M. Loucheur, and General P^tain. I 
was not satisfied. From what I could learn. General P^tain 
was getting ready to retire on Paris, General Haig to the west. 
It was the open door for Germany — ^it was defeat. 

"Marshal Haig, supported by Lord Milner, said there must 
be a responsible head and unity of command. I was proposed. 

"'We can/ said Clemenceau, 'give to Marshal Foch the com- 
mand of the armies operating round Amiens.' 

"Marshal Haig was the one who opposed this and declared 
that there was only one sensible solution, which was to give 
me the command of the armies on the w^st front. M. Clemen- 
ceau bowed, and it was decided. 

"At lunch, which followed, M. Clemenceau said to me: 

" 'Well, you have it, the place you wanted!'