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<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p>

<h1 class="p4">OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR</h1>

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     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-004.jpg" width="400" height="609"
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     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">Leon Mirman, the Governor of Meurthe-et-Moselle, and
the refugees for whom he cares.</p>
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<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a><br /><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[iii]</a></span></p>

<div class="bord1"><div class="bord2">
<p class="pc4 elarge">
OUR PART IN<br />
THE GREAT WAR</p>

<p class="pc4">BY</p>

<p class="pc1 mid">ARTHUR GLEASON</p>

<p class="pc2 reduct">AUTHOR OF "YOUNG HILDA AT THE WARS," "THE SPIRIT
OF CHRISTMAS," "LOVE, HOME AND THE INNER LIFE," ETC.</p>

<p class="pc2"><i>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS</i></p>

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     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-005.jpg" width="300" height="353"
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<p class="pc">NEW YORK<br />
<span class="mid">FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY</span><br />
PUBLISHERS</p>

</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p>

<p class="pc4 small"><i>Copyright, 1917, by</i><br />
<span class="smcap">Frederick A. Stokes Company</span></p>

<hr class="dec1" />

<p class="pc small"><i>All rights reserved, including that of translation</i><br />
<i>into foreign languages</i></p>

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<p class="pc4 mid">
To<br />
<i>FRANCE ON JULY 14TH</i></p>

<p class="pn2"><i>Three years of world war draw to a close, as
France prepares to celebrate the birthday of her liberty.
Never in the thousand years of her tumultuous
history has she been so calm, so sure of the path she
treads, red with the blood of her young men. She
has never drunk any cup of joy so deeply as this
cup of her agony. In the early months of the war,
there were doubts and dismays, and the cheap talk of
compromise. There were black days and black
moods, and a swaying indecision. But under the
immense pressure of crisis, France has lifted to a
clear determination. This war will be fought to a
finish. No feeble dreams of peace, entertained by
loose thinkers and fluent phrase makers, no easy conciliations,
will be tolerated. France has made her
sacrifice. It remains now that it shall avail. She
will fulfill her destiny. Time has ceased to matter,
Death is only an incident in the ongoing of the
nation. No tortures by mutilation, no horrors of
shell fire, no massing of machine guns, can swerve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span>
the united will. The "Sacred Union" of Socialist
and royalist, peasant and politician, is firm to endure.
The egoisms and bickerings of easy untested years
have been drowned in a tide that sets towards the
Rhine. The premier race of the world goes forth to
war. That war is only in its beginning. The toll
of the dead and the wounded may be doubled before
the gray lines are broken. But they will be broken.
A menace is to be removed for all time. The German
Empire is not to rule in Paris. Atrocities are not to
be justified by success. Spying will be no longer
the basis of international relationship. France faces
in one direction. She waits in arms at Revigny and
along the water courses of the North for the machine
to crack. That consummation of the long watch
may be nearer than we guess. It may be many
months removed. It does not matter. France waits
in unshattered line, reserve on reserve, ready to the
call.</i></p>

<p><i>Only once or twice in history has the world witnessed
such a spectacle of greatness at tension. It is
not that factories are busy on shells. It is that everything
spiritual in a race touched with genius has been
mobilized. Fineness of feeling, the graces of the intellect,
clarity of thought, all the playful tender
elements of worthy living are burning with a steady
light.</i></p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4">AUTHOR'S NOTE</h2>

<p class="pn2">The author was enabled to visit Verdun and the
peasant district, and to obtain access to the German
diaries through J. J. Jusserand, Ambassador of
France; Frank H. Simonds, editor of the New York
<i>Tribune</i>, and Theodore Roosevelt, by whose courtesy
the success of the three months' visit was assured.
On arrival in France the courtesy was continued
by Emile Hovelaque, Madame Saint-René
Taillandier, Judge Walter Berry, Mrs. Charles
Prince, Leon Mirman, Prefet de Meurthe-et-Moselle,
the Foreign Office and the Ministry of War.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a><br /><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>

<div class="sum">

<h2 class="p4">CONTENTS</h2>

<table id="toc1" summary="cont">

 <tr>
  <td colspan="3">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdrl">PAGE</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="3" class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">To France on July 14th</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct1">SECTION I</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct2">AMERICANS WHO HELPED</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">I.</td>
  <td rowspan="6">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Two Americas</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">II.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The American Ambulance Hospital</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">III.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Ford Car and Its Drivers</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">IV.</td>
  <td class="tdlh">T<span class="smcap">he Americans at Verdun</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">V.</td>
  <td class="tdlh">"<span class="smcap">Friends of France</span>"</td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">VI.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Saving Remnant</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td>
 </tr>


 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct1">SECTION II</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct2">WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">I.</td>
  <td rowspan="6">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Neutrality: An Interpretation of the Middle West</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">II.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Social Workers and the War</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">III.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Forgetting the American Tradition</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">IV.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Cosmopolitanism</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">V.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Hyphenates</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">VI.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Remedy</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct1">SECTION III</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct2">THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">I.</td>
  <td rowspan="4">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Lord Bryce on German Methods</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">II.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Some German War Diaries</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_170">170</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">III.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">More Diaries</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">IV.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Boomerang</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_196">196</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct1">SECTION IV</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct2">THE PEASANTS<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">I.</td>
  <td rowspan="12">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Lost Villages</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">II.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Homeless</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">III.</td>
  <td class="tdlh">"<span class="smcap">Mon Gamin</span>"</td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">IV.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Mayor on the Hilltop</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">V.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Little Corporal</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">VI.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Good Curé</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">VII.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Three-Year-Old Witness</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">VIII.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Mirman and "Mes Enfants"</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">IX.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">An Appeal to the Smaller American Communities</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_274">274</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">X.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">The Evidence</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_289">289</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">XI.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Sister Julie</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_294">294</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">XII.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Sister Julie</span>&mdash;Continued</td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_312">312</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">Addendum</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_321">321</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td colspan="4" class="tdct3">APPENDIX</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">I.</td>
  <td rowspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">To the Reader</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_329">329</a></td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdrh">II.</td>
  <td class="tdlh"><span class="smcap">To Neutral Critics</span></td>
  <td class="tdrl"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td>
 </tr>

</table>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4 xlarge">SECTION I</h2>

<p class="pc2 large">AMERICANS WHO HELPED</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a><br /><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">I</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE TWO AMERICAS</p>

<p class="pn2">There are two Americas to-day: the historic
America, which still lives in many thousands
of persons, and the new various
America, which has not completely found itself: a
people of mixed blood, divergent ideals, intent on
the work at hand, furious in its pleasures, with the
vitality of a new race in it, sprinting at top speed in
a direction it does not yet know, to a goal it cannot
see. It is in the sweep of an immense experiment,
accepting all races, centering on no single strain.</p>

<p>This new joy-riding generation has struck out a
fresh philosophy of life, which holds that many of
the old responsibilities can be passed by, that the
great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of
which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient
enemies of the race. On the further side, which it
is believed has at last been reached, lie, warm in the
sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of well-being.
It is a philosophy that fits snugly into a
new country of tonic climate and economic opportunity,
distant by three thousand miles from historic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
quarrels and the pressure of crowded neighborhood.
We believe that, by coming on the scene
with a lot of vitality and good cheer, we can clean
up the old bothersome problems and make a fresh
start in the sunshine. Christian Science in a mild
genial form is the national religion of America. We
believe that maladies and failures can be willed out
of existence. As for "the fatalities of history," "an
endless war between two mutually exclusive ideals,"
we classify that way of thinking with the surplus
luggage of autocracies.</p>

<p>Now, there is a wide area in life where this breezy
burst of power and good-will operates effectively.
It is salutary for stale vendettas, racial prejudices,
diseases of the nerves, egoistic melancholias. But
there are certain structural disturbances at which it
takes a look and crosses to the other side, preferring
to maintain its tip-top spirits and its complacency.
It does not cure a broken arm, and it leaves Belgium
to be hacked through. The New America trusts its
melting-pot automatically to remake mixed breeds
over night into citizens of the Republic. It believes
that Ellis Island and the naturalization offices
somehow do something with a laying on of hands
which results in a nation. Meantime, we go on
blindly and busily with our markets and base-ball
and million-dollar films.</p>

<p>Troubling this enormous optimism of ours came<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
suddenly the greatest war of the ages. We were
puzzled by it for a little, and then took up again
our work and pleasures, deciding that with the
causes and objects of this war we were not concerned.
That was the clear decision of the new
America of many races, many minds. The gifted,
graceful voice of our President spoke for us what
already we had determined in the silence.</p>

<p>But there are those of us that were not satisfied
with the answer we made. The fluent now-famous
phrases did not content us. It is for this remnant
in our population that this book is written. From
this remnant, many, numbering thousands, put by
their work and pleasures, and came across the sea,
some to nurse, and some to carry swift relief over
dangerous roads; still others to fight behind trenches
and over the earth, no few of them to die. Nearly
forty thousand men have enlisted. Many hundred
young college boys are driving Red Cross cars at the
front. There is an American Flying Squadron.
Many hundreds of American men and women are
serving in hospitals. Many thousands of hard-working,
simple Americans at home are devoting
their spare time and their spare money to relief.</p>

<p>I give a few illustrations of the American effort.
I have not tried to show the extent of it. I trust
some day the work will be catalogued and the full
account published, as belonging to history. For we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
have not wholly failed the Allies. I have merely
sought in this book to cheer myself, and, I trust,
some friends of "the good old cause, the great idea,
the progress and freedom of the race." I believe
that the historic America has spoken and has acted
in this war. In a time when our country, perplexed
by its own problems of mixed blood and warring
ideas, bewildered by its great possessions, busy with
its own vast work of shaking down a continent, has
made a great refusal, it is good to have the spectacle
of some thousands of young Americans, embracing
poverty, taking dangers and even death gladly.
There is something of the ancient crusade still stirring
in these bones. The race of Wendell Phillips
and Whittier has representatives above ground.
There was an America once that would not have
stood by when its old-time companion in freedom
was tasting the bayonet and the flame. Some of that
America has come down to Chapman and Neville
Hall, to Seeger, Chapin, Prince, Bonnell.</p>

<p>Nothing said here is meant to imply that the sum
of all American efforts is comparable to the gift
which the men of France and Belgium and England
have made us. I am only saying that a minority in
our population has seen that the Allies are fighting
to preserve spiritual values which made our own
past great, and which alone can make our future
worthy.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>

<p>That minority, inheriting the traditions of our
race, bearing old names that have fought for liberty
in other days, has clearly recognized that no such
torture has come in recent centuries as German hands
dealt out in obedience to German orders. In the
section on French peasants, I have told of that
suffering.</p>

<p>In another section, I am speaking to the Americans
who remain indifferent to the acts of Germany.
They are not convinced by the records of eye-witnesses.
The wreck of Belgium is not sufficient.
Will they, I wonder, be moved, if one rises from
the dead. We shall see, for in this book I give
the words of those who have, as it were, risen from
the dead to speak to them. I give the penciled
records of dead Germans, who left little black books
to tell these things they did in Flanders and the
pleasant land of France.</p>

<p>There are many persons who are more sincerely
worried lest an injustice of overstatement should
be done to Germany than they are that Germany
has committed injustice on Belgium and Northern
France. The burned houses and murdered peasants
do not touch them, but any tinge of resentment, any
sign of anger, in criticizing those acts, moves them
to protest. Frankly, we of the historic tradition
are disturbed when we see a wave of excitement
pass over the country at the arrival of a German<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
submarine&mdash;dinners of honor, interviews with the
"Viking"-Captain&mdash;and, in the same month, a perfect
calm of indifference greeting the report of the
French girls of Lille sent away and of families
broken up and scattered. We that are shocked by
the cold system of the German conquerors, and publish
the facts of their methodical cruelty, are rebuked
by American editors and social workers as exercising
our heart emotionally at the expense of our head.
But that hysteria which greets a German officer,
indirectly helping in the job of perpetuating the
official German system of murder and arson, is accepted
as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball
enthusiasm, and pleasant revelation of sporting
spirit.</p>

<p>We believe we are not un-American, in being
Pro-Ally. We believe we are holding true to the
ideas which created our country&mdash;ideas brought
across from the best of England, and freshened from
the soul of France. We believe that Benjamin
Franklin was an American and a statesman when
he wrote:&mdash;</p>

<p>"What would you think of a proposition, if I
should make it, of a family compact between England,
France and America? America would be as
happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means
of uniting in perpetual peace her father and her
husband."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>

<p>Cheer the <i>Deutschland</i> in, and U-53,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> but permit
us to go aside a little way and mourn the dead of the
<i>Lusitania</i>. All we ask, we that are held by some of
the old loyalties, is that we be not counted un-American.
We ask you to throw our beliefs, too,
into the vast new seething mass. Let us contribute
to the great experiment a little of the old collective
experience. Because the marching feet of France
strike a great music in our heart, do not hold us
alien. We are only remembering what Washington
knew. He was glad of the feet of those young men
as they came tramping south to Yorktown.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>

<p>In the immense labors of the naturalization factory,
do not pause to excommunicate us, who find
an ancient, unfaded freedom in England. We are
moved as Lincoln was moved when he wrote to the
operatives of Lancashire&mdash;Englishmen starving because
of our blockade, starving but not protesting.
Lincoln wrote:&mdash;</p>

<p class="pbq p1">To the Workingmen of Manchester: I have the honor to
acknowledge the receipt of the address and resolutions which
you sent me on the eve of the new year. When I came, on
the fourth of March, 1861, through a free and constitutional
election to preside in the Government of the United States,
the country was found at the verge of civil war. Whatever
might have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one
duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to
maintain and preserve at once the Constitution and the integrity
of the Federal Republic. A conscientious purpose to
perform this duty is the key to all the measures of administration
which have been and to all which will hereafter be
pursued. Under our frame of government and my official
oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It is
not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict
the scope of moral results which follow the policies
that they may deem it necessary for the public safety from
time to time to adopt.</p>

<p class="pbq">I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation
rests solely with the American people; but I have at the
same time been aware that favor or disfavor of foreign
nations might have a material influence in enlarging or prolonging
the struggle with disloyal men in which the country
is engaged. A fair examination of history has served to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
authorize a belief that the past actions and influences of the
United States were generally regarded as having been beneficial
toward mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned upon
the forbearance of nations. Circumstances to some of
which you kindly allude induce me expecially to expect that
if justice and good faith should be practiced by the United
States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the part
of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge
the demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit
of amity and peace toward this country may prevail in the
councils of your Queen, who is respected and esteemed in
your own country only more than she is by the kindred
nation which has its home on this side of the Atlantic.</p>

<p class="pbq">I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men
at Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to
endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented
that the attempt to overthrow this government, which
was built upon the foundations of human rights, and to substitute
for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis
of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe.
Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working-men
of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for the purpose
of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the
circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances
upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism
which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
It is indeed an energetic and reinspiring assurance of
the inherent power of truth, and of the ultimate and universal
triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not
doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained
by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have
no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship
among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment,
therefore, as an augury that whatever else may happen,
whatever misfortune may befall your country or my
own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the
two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them,
perpetual.</p>

<p class="p1">We believe that Lincoln would have wished his
people to show a like partizanship to-day in the
cause of right. Before we all steer quite out of the
tested channel, let us at least remind you that those
captains knew the course. It is idle to talk of a
return to the past. The statesmanship of Franklin
is not the statesmanship of to-day. What Lincoln
felt is out of tune with the new America. We must
go on with the vast new turmoils, the strange unguessed
tendencies. We must find a fresh hope
in the altered world. Meanwhile, be neutral, but
do not bid us be neutral. You cannot silence us.
We mean that our ideas shall live and fight and
finally prevail.</p>

<p>In one section of this book I deal with what the
war is teaching us. The peoples of Europe are
reasserting the rights of nationality. We must understand
this. We need a wholesome sense of our
own national being in the America of to-day.
Nationality is the one great idea in the modern
world, the one allegiance left us. It has absorbed
the loyalties and fervor that used to be poured out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
upon art and religion. Groups of persons find emotional
release in the Woman's Movement, in Trades
Unions, in Socialism. But the one universal expression
for the entire community is in nationalism,
the assertion of selfhood as a people. Religious revivals
no longer draw the mind of the mass people.
But the idea of nationality sweeps them. It gives
them the sense of kinship, it answers the desire for
something to which to tie. It is easily possible that
this idea will fade as the God of the Churches and
the creative love of beauty faded. The Mazzini
and Lincoln type of man may pass as the poet and
the saint, Knights and Samurai, passed. But not
in our time, not in a few hundred years to come.
Nationalism may be only one more of the necessary
"useful lies," one more illusion of the human race.
But it will serve out our days. The mistake is in
thinking that the heart of the common people will
ever be satisfied with a bare mechanic civilization.
Men are unwilling to live unless they have something
to die for. We have filled the foreground in
recent years with new automatic machines, new subdivisions
of repetitive process. We tried to empty
the huge modern world of its old values. Then the
people came and smashed the structure, and found
a vast emotional release in the war. The hope of a
sane future is not in suppressing that dynamic of
nationality. We must direct it.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">II</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL</p>

<p class="pn2">The recital of the young college boy crowding
his ambulance between singing shells
and bringing in his wounded down death's
alley is familiar and stirring. And this, for most of
us, has been the entire story. But that is only the
first chapter. It is of no value to bring in a wounded
man, unless there is a field hospital to give him
swift and wise treatment, unless there is a well-equipped
hospital-train to run him gently down to
Paris, unless there are efficient stretcher bearers at
the railroad station to unload him, and ambulances
to transport him to new quarters. And finally, most
important of all, the base hospital that at last receives
him must be furnished with skilled doctors,
surgeons, nurses and orderlies, or all the haste of
transportation has gone for nothing. For it is in
the base hospital that the final and greatest work
with the wounded man is wrought out, which will
let him go forth a whole man, with limbs his own
and a face unmarred, or will discharge him a wrecked<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
creature, crippled, monstrous, because of bungled
treatment. It is a chain with no weak link that must
be forged from the hour of the wounding at Verdun
to the day of hospital discharge at Neuilly. And
that final success of the restored soldier is built upon
the loyalty of hundreds of obscure helpers, far back
of the lines of glory. That which is fine about it is
the very absence of the large scale romantic. It is
humble service humbly given, with no war-medals in
sight, no mention in official dispatches&mdash;only a
steady fatiguing drive against bugs and dirt and
germs and red tape.</p>

<p>So I begin my story with the work of the Scotch-American
at the entrance of the American Ambulance
Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is the man
that gives every entering wounded soldier a bath,
and he does it thoroughly in four and a half minutes.
He can bathe twelve inside the hour. He
has perfected devices, so that a fractured leg won't
be hurt while the man is being scrubbed. He has
worked out foot-rests, and body-rests and neck-rests
in the tub. This man has taken his lowly job and
made it into one of the important departments of
the hospital. And with him begins, too, the long
tale of inventive appliances which are lessening suffering.
The hospital is full of them in each branch
of the service. Everywhere you go in relief work
of this war, you see devices&mdash;little things that relieve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
pain, and save time and speed up recovery.
That is one of the things differentiating this war
from the old-time slaughters, where most of the seriously
wounded died: the omnipresence of mechanical,
electrical, devices. Inventive skill has wreaked
itself on the sudden awful human need. The hideously
clever bombs, and big guns, all the ingenious
instruments of torture, will shoot themselves away
and pass. But the innumerable appliances of restoration,
the machinery of welfare, suddenly called
into being out of the mechanic brain of our time,
under pressure of the agonizing need, will go on
with their ministry when Lorraine is again green.</p>

<p>The Ambulance is the cheeriest, the cleanest, the
most efficient place which I have visited since the
beginning of the war. There is no hospital odor
anywhere. Fresh air and sunshine are in the wards.
A vagrant from Mars or the moon, who wanted an
answer to some of his questions about the lay-out
of things, would find his quest shortened by spending
an afternoon at the American Ambulance.</p>

<p>What does America mean? What is it trying to
do? How does it differ from other sections of the
map?</p>

<p>The swift emergency handling of each situation
has been American in its executive efficiency. Things
have been done in a hurry, and done well. In
eighteen days this building was taken over from a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
partially completed school, with the refuse of construction
work heaped high, and made into an actively-running
hospital ready for 175 patients.
That, too, in those early days of war, when workmen
had been called to the colors, when money was
unobtainable, transportation tied up, and Germany
pounding down on Paris.</p>

<p>The skillful surgical work, some of it pioneering
in fields untouched by former experience, has been
a demonstration of the best American practice.</p>

<p>The extraordinarily varied types of persons at
work under one roof in a democracy of service presents
just the aspect of our community which is
most representative. Millionaires and an impersonator,
Harvard, Dartmouth, Tech, Columbia,
Fordham, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell and Yale
men, ranchers, lawyers, and newspaper men&mdash;all are
hard at work on terms of exact equality. A colored
man came in one day. He said he wanted to help
with the wounded. He was tried out, and proved
himself one of the best helpers in the organization.
He received the same treatment as all other helpers,
eating with them, liked by them. Some weeks later,
one of our wealthy "high-life" young Americans
volunteered his services. After the first meal he
came wrathfully to the surgeon.</p>

<p>"I've had to eat at the same table with a negro.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
That must be changed. What will you do about
it?"</p>

<p>"Do about it," answered the surgeon. "You will
do one of two things&mdash;go and apologize to a better
man than you are, or walk out of this hospital."</p>

<p>Recently this black helper came to the director
in distress of mind.</p>

<p>"Have to leave you," he said. He held out a
letter from the motor car firm, near Paris, where he
he had worked before the war. It was a request for
him to return at once. If he did not obey now in
this time of need, it meant there would never be any
position for him after the war as long as he lived.</p>

<p>A day or two later he came again.</p>

<p>"My old woman and I have been talking it over,"
he said, "and I just can't leave this work for the
wounded. We'll get along some way."</p>

<p>A little more time passed, and then, one day, he
stepped up to the director and said:</p>

<p>"I want you to meet my boss."</p>

<p>The superintendent of the motor car factory had
come. He said to the director:</p>

<p>"I have received the most touching letter from
this darkey, saying he couldn't come back to us because
he must help here. Now I want to tell you
that his position is open to him any time that he
wants it, during the war, or after it."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span></p>

<p>Visitors, after walking through the wards, smelling
no odors, hearing no groans, seeing the faces of
the men smiling back at them, are constantly saying
to the director:</p>

<p>"Ah, I see you have no really serious cases here."</p>

<p>It is the only kind of case sent to Neuilly&mdash;the
gravely wounded man, the "<i>grands blessés</i>," requiring
infinite skill to save the limb and life. So sweet
and hopeful is the "feel" of the place that not even
575 beds of men in extremity can poison that atmosphere
of successful practice. Alice's Queen had a
certain casual promptness in saying, "Off with his
head," whenever she sighted a subject. And there
was some of the same spirit in the old-time war-surgeon
when he was confronted with a case of
multiple fracture. "Amputate. Off with his leg.
Off with his arm." And that, in the majority of
cases, was the same as guillotining the patient, for
the man later died from infection. There was a
surgical ward in one of the 1870 Paris hospitals
with an unbroken record of death for every major
operation. At the American Ambulance, out of the
first 3,100 operations, there were 81 amputations.
The death rate for the first year was 4.46 per cent.</p>

<p>These gunshot injuries, involving compound and
multiple fractures, are treated by incision, and drainage
of the infected wounds and the removal of
foreign bodies. A large element in the success has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
been the ingenuity of the staff in creating appliances
that give efficient drainage to the wound and
comfort to the patient. The same inventive skill is
at work in the wards that we saw on entering the
hospital in the bathroom of the Scotch-American.
These devices, swinging from a height over the bed,
are slats of wood to which are jointed the splints
for holding the leg or arm in a position where the
wound will drain without causing pain to the recumbent
man. The appearance of a ward full of
these swinging appliances is a little like that of a
gymnasium. Half the wounded men riding into
Paris ask to be taken to the American Hospital.
They know the high chance of recovery they will
have there and the personal consideration they will
receive. The Major-General enjoys the best which
the Hospital can offer. So does the sailor boy from
the Fusiliers Marins.</p>

<p>We had spent about an hour in the wards. We
had seen the flying man who had been shot to pieces
in the air, but had sailed back to his own lines, made
his report and collapsed. We had talked with the
man whose face had been obliterated, and who was
now as he had once been, except for a little ridge of
flesh on his lower left cheek. I had seen a hundred
men brighten as the surgeon "jollied" them. The
cases were beginning to merge for me into one general
picture of a patient, contented peasant in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
clean bed with a friend chatting with him, and the
gift of fruit or a bottle of champagne on the little
table by his head. I was beginning to lose the sense
of the personal in the immense, well-conducted institution,
with its routine and system. After all, these
men represented the necessary wastage of war, and
here was a business organization to deal with these
by-products. I was forgetting that it was somebody's
husband in front of me, and only thinking
that he was a lucky fellow to be in such a well-ordered
place.</p>

<p>Then the whole sharp individualizing work of the
war came back in a stab, for we had reached the
bed of the American boy who had fought with the
Foreign Legion since September, 1914.</p>

<p>"Your name is Bonnell?" I asked.</p>

<p>"Yes."</p>

<p>"Do you spell it B-o-n-n-e double l?"</p>

<p>"Yes."</p>

<p>"By any chance, do you know a friend of mine,
Charles Bonnell?"</p>

<p>"He's my uncle."</p>

<p>And right there in the presence of the boy in blue-striped
pajamas, my mind went back over the years.
Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to New York,
and grown to know the tall, quiet man, six feet two
he was, and kind to small boys. He was head of a
book-store then and now. For these twenty-seven<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
years I have known him, one of my best friends,
and here was his nephew.</p>

<p>"Do you think I'm taller than my uncle?" the
boy asked, standing up. He stood erect: you would
never have known there was any trouble down below.
But as my eye went up and down the fine
slim figure, I saw that his right leg was off at the
knee.</p>

<p>"I can't play base-ball any more," he said.</p>

<p>"No, but you can go to the games," said the
director; "that's all the most of us do.</p>

<p>"I wish I had come here sooner," he went on as
he sat back on the bed: standing was a strain. He
meant he might have saved his leg.</p>

<p>We came away.</p>

<p>"Now he wants to go into the flying corps," said
the surgeon.</p>

<p>He still had his two arms, and the loss of a leg
didn't so much matter when you fly instead of
march.</p>

<p>"Flying is the only old-fashioned thing left," remarked
the boy, in a later talk. "You might as
well work in a factory as fight in a trench&mdash;only
there's no whistle for time off."</p>

<p>I have almost omitted the nurses from this chapter,
because we have grown so used to loyalty and
devotion in women that these qualities in them do
not constitute news. The trained nurses of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
Ambulance Hospital, with half a dozen exceptions,
are Americans, with a long hospital experience at
home. During the early months they served with
no remuneration. An allowance of 100 francs a
month has now been established. They reluctantly
accepted this, as each was anxious to continue on the
purely voluntary basis. There are also volunteer
auxiliary nurses, who serve as assistants to the
trained women. The entire nursing staff has been
efficient and self-sacrificing.</p>

<p>We entered the department where some of the
most brilliant surgical work of the war has been
done. It is devoted to those cases where the face
has been damaged. The cabinet is filled with photographs,
the wall is lined with masks, revealing the
injury when the wounded man entered, and then
the steps in the restoration of the face to its original
structure and look. There in front of me were the
reproductions of the injury: the chin shot away,
the cheeks in shreds, the mouth a yawning aperture,
holes where once was a nose&mdash;all the ghastly pranks
of shell-fire tearing away the structure, wiping out
the human look. Masks were there on the wall of
man after man who would have gone back into
life a monster, a thing for children to run from,
but brought back inside the human race, restored to
the semblance of peasant father, the face again the
recorder of kindly expression. The surgeon and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
dental expert work together on these cases. The
success belongs equally to each of the two men.
Between them they make a restoration of function
and of appearance.</p>

<p>In peace days, a city hospital would have only
three or four fractures of the jaw in a year, and
they were single fractures. There are no accidents
in ordinary life to produce the hideous results of
shell-fire. So there was no experience to go on.
There were no reference books recording the treatment
of wounds to the face caused by the projectiles
of modern warfare. Hideous and unprecedented
were the cases dumped by the hundreds into the
American Ambulance. Because of the pioneer success
of this hospital, the number of these cases has
steadily increased. They are classified as "gunshot
wounds of the face, involving the maxillæ, and requiring
the intervention of dental surgery." These
are compound fractures of the jaw, nearly always
accompanied by loss of the soft parts of the mouth
and chin, sometimes by the almost complete loss of
the face.</p>

<p>I have seen this war at its worst. I have seen
the largest hospital in France filled with the grievously-wounded.
I have seen the wounded out in
the fields of Ypres, waiting to be carried in. I have
seen the Maison Blanche thronged with the Army
of the Mutilated. I have carried out the dead from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
hospital and ambulance, and I have watched them
lie in strange ways where the great shell had struck.
But death is a pleasant gift, and the loss of a limb
is light. For death leaves a rich memory. And a
crippled soldier is dearer than he ever was to the
little group that knows him. But to be made into
that which is terrifying to the children that were
once glad of him, to bring shrinking to the woman
that loved him&mdash;that is the foulest thing done by
war to the soldier. So it was the most gallant of
all relief work that I have seen&mdash;this restoration of
disfigured soldiers to their own proper appearance.</p>

<p>And the work of these hundreds of Americans at
Neuilly was summed for me in the person of one
dental surgeon, who sat a few feet from those forty
masks and those six hundred photographs, working
at a plaster-cast of a shattered jaw. He was very
much American&mdash;rangy and loose-jointed, with a
twang and a drawl, wondering why the blazes a
writing person was bothering a man at work. It was
his time off, after six days of patient fitting of part
to part, and that for a year. So he was taking his
day off to transform one more soldier from a raw
pulp to a human being. There were no motor car
dashes, and no military medals, for him. Only hard
work on suffering men. There he sat at his pioneer
work in a realm unplumbed by the mind of man.
It called on deeper centers of adventure than any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
jungle-exploration or battle-exploit. It was science
at its proper business of salvation. Those Krupp
howitzers were not to have their own way, after all.
Here he was, wiping out all the foul indignities
which German scientists had schemed in their laboratories.</p>

<p>Two days later, I saw the boys of the American
Ambulance unload the wounded of Verdun from the
famous American train. The announcement of the
train's approach was simple enough&mdash;these words
scribbled in pencil by the French authorities:</p>

<p class="pn10 p1">"<i>12 Musulman</i><br />
"<i>241 Blessés</i><br />
"<i>8 Officiers</i><br />
"<i>1 Malade</i><br />
"<i>Train Américain de Revigny.</i>"</p>

<p class="p1">Those twelve "Musulman" are worth pausing
with for a moment. They are Mohammedans of
the French colonies, who must be specially fed because
their religion does not permit them to eat of
the unholy food of unbelievers. So a hospital provides
a proper menu for them.</p>

<p>Add the figures, and you have 262 soldiers on
stretchers to be handled by the squad of 38 men
from the American Ambulance. They marched up
the platform in excellent military formation. The
train rolled in, and they jumped aboard, four to
each of the eight large cars, holding 36 men each.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
In twenty-seven minutes they had cleared the train,
and deposited the stretchers on the platforms. There
the wounded pass into the hands of French orderlies,
who carry them to the French doctors in waiting
in the station. As quickly the doctor passed the
wounded, the boys took hold again and loaded the
ambulances en route to Paris hospitals. It was all
breathless, perspiring work, but without a slip.
There is never a slip, and that is why they are doing
this work. The American Ambulance has the
job of unloading three-fourths of all the wounded
that come into Paris. The boys are strong and sure-handed,
and the War Ministry rests easy in letting
them deal with this delicate, important work. They
feel pride in a prompt clean-cut job. But, more
than that, they have a deep inarticulate desire to
make things easier for a man in pain. I saw the
boys pick up stretcher after stretcher as it lay on
the platform and hurry it to the doctor. That
wasn't their job at all. Their job was only to unload
the train, but they could not let a wounded man lie
waiting for red tape. I watched one long-legged
chap who ran from the job he had just completed
to each new place of need, doing three times as
much work as even his strenuous duty called for.</p>

<p>"Look here," I said to Budd, the young Texan,
who is Lieutenant of the Station squad. I pointed
to a man on a stretcher. My eye had only shown me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
that the sight was strange and pathetic. But his
quicker eye caught that the man needed help. He
ran over to him and struck a match as he went. The
soldier had his face swathed in bandages. Arms
and hands were thick with bandages, so that every
gesture he made was bungling. He had a cigarette
in his mouth, just clear of the white linen. But he
couldn't bring a match and the box together in his
muffled hands so as to get a light. He was making
queer, unavailing motions, like a baby's. In another
second he was contentedly smoking and telling his
story. A hand grenade which he was throwing had
exploded prematurely in his hands and face.</p>

<p>Work at the front is pretty good fun. There is
a lot of camaraderie with the fighting men: the exchange
of a smoke and a talk, and the sense of being
at the center of things. The war zone, whatever
its faults, is the focal point of interest for all the
world. It is something to be in the storm center of
history. But this gruelling unromantic work back
in Paris is lacking in all those elements. No one
claps you on the back, and says:</p>

<p>"Big work, old top. We've been reading about
you. Glad you got your medal. It must be hell
under fire. But we always knew you had it in you.
Come around to the Alumni Association banquet and
give us a talk. Prexy will be there, and we'll put
you down for the other speech of the evening."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>

<p>What the people say is this:</p>

<p>"Ah, back in Paris, were you? Not much to do
there, I guess. Must have been slow. Couldn't work
it to get the front? Well, we can't all be heroes.
Have you met Dick? He was at Verdun, you know.
Big time. Had a splinter go through his hood. Better
come round to our annual feed, and hear him tell
about it. So long. See you again."</p>

<p>But the boys themselves know, and the hurt soldiers
know, and the War Minister of France knows.
These very much unadvertised young Americans,
your sons and brothers, reader, often sit up all night
waiting for a delayed train.</p>

<p>These boys of ours, shifting stretchers, wheeling
legless men to a place in the sun, driving ambulances,
are the most fortunate youth in fifty years.
They are being infected by a finer air than any that
has blown through our consciousness since John
Brown's time. And the older Americans over here
have that Civil War tradition in their blood. They
are gray-haired and some of them white-haired.
For, all over our country, individual Americans are
breaking from the tame herd and taking the old
trail, again, the trail of hardships and sacrifice.
They have found something wrong with America,
and want to make it right. I saw it in the man
from Philadelphia, a well-to-do lawyer who crossed
in the boat with me. He was gray-haired, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
father of three children, one a boy of twenty-one.
He was taking his first real vacation after a lifetime
of concentrated successful work. I saw him
lifting stretchers out of the Verdun train.</p>

<p>Boys and old men with an equal faith. The generation
that isn't much represented over here is that
of the in-betweeners, men between thirty-five and
fifty years of age. They grew up in a time when
our national patriotism was sagging, when security
and fat profits looked more inviting than sacrifice
for the common good. Our country will not soon
be so low again as in the period that bred these total
abstainers from the public welfare. The men and
boys who have worked here are going to return to
our community&mdash;several hundred have already returned&mdash;with
a profound dissatisfaction with our
national life as it has been conducted in recent years.</p>

<p>I have left the American train standing at the
platform all this time, but it rests there till the
afternoon, for it takes three hours to clean it for
its trip back to the front. Only three hours&mdash;one
more swift job by our contingent. It is the best
ambulance train in France. The huge luggage vans
of the trans-continental expresses were requisitioned.
Two American surgeons and one French Medecin
Chef travel with the wounded men. It carries 240
stretchers and 24 sitting cases in its eight cars for
"<i>Les blessés</i>." The five other cars are devoted to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining
car, a sleeping car for the surgeons, and the other
details of administration. Safety, speed and comfort
are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm
wooden supports riding on an iron spring. The
entire train is clean, sweet smelling, and travels
easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it, went
around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the
platform.</p>

<p>"You rode easily?" he asked.</p>

<p>"<i>Très bien: très confortable.</i>"</p>

<p>If an emergency case develops during the long
ride, the train stops while the operation is performed.
It is also held up at times by the necessities of war.
For the wounded must be side-tracked for more
important items of military demand&mdash;shells, food,
fresh troops.</p>

<p>Village and town along its route turn out and
throng the station to see the "<i>Train Americain</i>." The
exterior of the cars carries a French flag at one end,
and, at the other, the American flag. I like to think
of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car
of the great train, and brightly scoured each day,
riding through France from Verdun to Paris, from
Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple
people watching its progress, knowing its precious
freight of wounded, saying, "<i>Le train Americain</i>,"
as they sight the painted emblem. It is where it belongs&mdash;side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a
great question loose on the planet to-day, where the
best of us isn't in accord with the best of France.</p>

<p>That is the biggest thing we are doing over there,
carrying a message of good-will from the Yser to
Belfort, up and down and clear across France, and
"every town and every hamlet has heard" not our
"trumpet blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors
and the sweetly running wheels of our express. It
is one with the work of the Ambulance Hospital,
where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young
soldier of France receives his discharge from hospital.
Looking on the photograph and plaster cast
of what shell-fire had made of him, and seeing himself
restored to the old manner of man, he has a
feeling of friendliness for the Americans who saved
him from the horror that might have been. The
man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two
legs instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his
life, and he remembers those curious devices of
swinging splints, which eased the pain and saved
the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the
nation that has made him not only a well man, but
a whole man. And America has two more friends in
France, in some little village of the province.</p>

<p>This work of the hospital, the train, the motor
ambulance, is doing away with the shock and hurt
of our aloofness. These young Americans, stretcher-bearers
and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
and doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are
building for us a better foreign policy. It is a long
distance for friendly voices of America to carry
across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the
spot, moving among the common people and creating
an international relationship which not even the
severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our
true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly
and through the war-cursed villages. This is our
answer to indifference: the gliding of the immense
train through France, carrying men in agony to a
sure relief; the swift, tender handling of those
wounded in their progress from the trench to the
ward; the making over of these shattered soldiers
into efficient citizens.</p>

<p>The quarrel none of ours?</p>

<p>The suffering is very much ours.</p>

<p>Too proud to fight?</p>

<p>Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud-caked,
blood-marked men. Not too proud to be shot
at in going where they lie.</p>

<p>Neutrality of word and thought?</p>

<p>We are the friends of these champions of all the
values we hold dear.</p>

<p>War profits out of their blood?</p>

<p>Many hundreds have given up their life-work,
their career, their homes, to work in lowly ways,
with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just
because she's France."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">III</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS</p>

<p class="pn2">This is the story of the American Ambulance
Field Service in the words of the
boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh
to their experience, they jotted down the things that
happened to them in this strange new life of war.
These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written
with the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their
chief, Piatt Andrew, and he has placed these unpublished
day-by-day records of two hundred men
at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who
tried to rewrite their reports. I am simply passing
along what they say.</p>

<p>One section of the Field Service with twenty cars
was thrown out into Alsace for the campaign on the
crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is some of the
fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf
is the last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine,
and commands that valley. The hill crest was taken
and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector of the
Western Front where the French are fighting in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
enemy's country. Alsace has been German territory
for forty-three years. The district known as Haute
Alsace is a range of mountains, running roughly
north and south; to the east lies German Alsace,
to the west the level country of French Alsace. On
the crest of the mountains the armies of France and
Germany have faced each other. The business of
the ambulances has been to bring wounded from
those heights to the railway stations in the plain.</p>

<p>John Melcher, Jr., says of this work:</p>

<p>"The mountain service consists in climbing to
the top of a mountain, some 4,000 feet high, where
the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are always
kept in a little village down the mountain on
the other side. This little village is a few kilometers
behind the trenches, and is sometimes bombarded
by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are
very steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They
are rough and so narrow that in places vehicles cannot
pass. These roads are full of ruts, and at some
points are corduroy, the wood practically forming
steps. On one side there is always a sheer precipice."</p>

<p>"If you go off the road," writes one of our young
drivers, "it is probably to stay, and all the while
a grade that in some parts has to be rushed in low
speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that
in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
upper half is in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly
impossible, especially at night. Before our advent
the wounded were transported in wagons or on mule-backs,
two stretchers, one on each side of the mule.
Two of us tried this method of travel and were
nearly sick in a few minutes. Imagine the wounded&mdash;five
hours for the trip! That so many survived
speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils."
Now with our cars the trip takes 1½ or 2 hours.
We get as close to the trenches as any cars go. Our
wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbarrows,
or, at night, on mules, about one-half hour
after the wound is received. This is hard service for
both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn for five
days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to
care for the cars and rest; the ordinary valley service
is regarded by us as rest after the spell on the
hills.</p>

<p>"Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been
doing well on this strenuous work. The two back
fenders have been removed, one by a rock in passing
an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the
famous "75's" going down the hill.</p>

<p>"The men appreciate it. Often, back in France,
we are trailed as the 'voitures' they have seen at Mittlach,
or as the car which brought a comrade back.
They express curiosity as to our exact military
status. The usual thing when we explain that we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
are volunteers is for them to say "chic." When they
learn that the cars are given by men in the United
States whose sympathy is with them, they nod approval."</p>

<p>Another man writes of the condition of the service:</p>

<p>"At Cheniménil, the headquarters of the automobile
service for this section, we reported to Captain
Arboux, and were informed by him of the terms
on which he had decided to accept our services. We
were to draw our food, wine, tobacco, automobile
supplies, such as tires, oil, gasoline, from the Seventh
Army, as well as our lodging, and one sou a
day as pay. In short, we were to be treated exactly
as the French Ambulance sections, and to be subject
to the same discipline."</p>

<p>Rations consist of a portion of meat, hard bread&mdash;baked
some weeks previously&mdash;rice, beans, macaroni
or potatoes, a lump of grease for cooking, coffee,
sugar and a little wine. For soldiers on duty there
are field kitchens, fire and boilers running on wheels.
But billeted men have their food cooked by some
village woman, or a group build wood fires against
a wall. Our men made arrangements to mess at a
restaurant.</p>

<p>The work was so continuous that some of the men
drove for as long as fifty hours without sleep, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
no one had time for more than an occasional nap
of an hour and a half.</p>

<p>After the battle of Hartmannsweilerkopf the section
was decorated as a whole, and twelve men individually
were decorated. Lovering Hill of Harvard
has been in charge of this section. He has
received two citations, two Croix de Guerre, which
he doesn't wear, because he knows that the Western
Front is full of good men who have not been decorated.
The boys formed "The Harvard Club of
Alsace Reconquise," and had Harvard Alumni Dinners
when the fighting eased up.</p>

<p>"I think that we have saved the wounded many
hours of suffering," writes Henry M. Suckley of
Harvard, 1910. In that quiet statement lies the
spirit of the work done by the American Field Service.</p>

<p>From the head of the Valley of the Fecht, over
10 miles of mountain, 5 up and 5 down, to Krut on
the other side&mdash;that has been the run.</p>

<p>W. K. H. Emerson, Jr., says:</p>

<p>"Once I went over a bank in an attempt to pass
a convoy wagon at night without a headlight, such
light being forbidden over part of the Mitlach road.
I was lucky enough to lean up against a tree before
slipping very far over the bank, and within ten minutes
ten soldiers had lifted the machine, and put
it back on the road, ready to start. Nothing was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
wrong but the loss of one sidelight, and the car went
better than before. There was great merriment
among the men who helped to put it on the road."</p>

<p>After four months the section had its barracks, at
the 4,000-foot level, blown down by a gale. So
they used a new road. Suckley writes of finding
two huge trees across the path.</p>

<p>"I had three wounded men in the car, whom I
was hurrying to the hospital. I walked down two
miles to get some men at a camp of engineers, the
road being too narrow to permit turning. There is
a new service to the famous Hartmannsweilerkopf,
or, rather, within half a mile of this most southerly
mount contested by the Germans. For three miles
it is cut out of the solid rock, just wide enough for
one of our cars to pass. You can imagine the joys
of this drive on a dark night when you have to extinguish
all lights, and when the speed of the car
cannot be reduced for fear of not making the grades.
The first aid post, called Silberloch, is but 200 or
300 yards from the famous crest which has been
the scene of many fierce combats. The bursting of
shells has taken every bit of foliage from the wooded
crest, carried pines to the ground, so that only a
few splintered stumps stick up here and there. At
the post no one dares show himself in the open. All
life is subterranean in bomb-proofs covered by five
feet of timber. The road is concealed everywhere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
by screens, and the sound of a motor may bring a
hail of shells down on your head. The stretcher
bearers are so used to meeting death in its worst
forms&mdash;by burning oil, by shell fragments, by suffocating
shells&mdash;that they have grown to look at it
smilingly."</p>

<p>It is a St. Paul's School car that operates there.</p>

<p>"Another time the run was up to an artillery post
in the mountains. The road was extremely steep
near the top, and covered with gravel. It was only
by hard effort that a dozen men could push the car
up. We ran to the communicating trench, where
they had the man waiting. He was wounded in the
abdomen, and in great pain. We started down over
the terrible road; at every pebble he would groan.
When we reached the worst place of all, where the
road had recently been mended with unbroken stones,
his groans began to grow fainter. They ceased, and,
stopping, we found that he was dead. But there
had been a chance of saving his life. A larger car
could not have gone up. A wagon or a mule would
have caused his death almost immediately.</p>

<p>"On one of our hills in winter a team of six Red
Cross men was kept on duty waiting for our ambulance
to come along. The cars would go as far as
possible up the incline, and before they lost speed
would be practically carried to the crest on the
shoulders of the pushers&mdash;mules, with their drivers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
hanging on the beasts' tails to make the ascent easier.
Strapped on these animals are barbed wire and hand-grenades,
red wine and sections of the army portable
houses."</p>

<p>Such is winter in Alsace.</p>

<p>"Luke Doyle had driven his car to the entrance of
the Hartmanns trenches and our last post, when a
heavy bombardment forced every one to make for
the bomb-proof. Several men were wounded and
he came out to crank his car and carry them off when
he was ordered back to safety. A few moments later
a shell landed close to the 'abri.' It struck a man
and killed him. A flying piece reached Doyle and
entered his elbow. Another of our section, Douglas,
arrived, and was knocked flat by a bursting shell.
He rose, put Doyle in his car and drove him up the
road to safety."</p>

<p>Another time, Jack Clark writes:</p>

<p>"Car 161 still lives up to her reputation. Yesterday,
in a blizzard, she was blown off the road between
two trees, over three piles of rock, through a
fence and into a ditch. Three men and a horse removed
her from the pasture, and she went on as
ever."</p>

<p>Car 163 had 13 cases of tire trouble in two weeks.
The whole success of the adventure depends on the
condition of the cars. So through all the narrative
of shell-fire and suffering men recurs the theme of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
roads and tires, axle-trouble and hill-grades. The
adventure of the car itself is as real as that of the
man. The car becomes a personality to the man at
the wheel, just as the locomotive is to the engineer.
It isn't any old car. It is the little Ford, Number
121, given by Mrs. Richard Trowbridge of Roxbury,
Mass. In that particular car you have carried
500 wounded men, you have gone into the ditch,
stuck in the mud, and scurried under shell-fire, shrapnel
has torn the cover, and there is the mark of a
rifle-bullet on the wheel-spoke. You have slept at
the wheel and in the chassis, after hours of work.
You have eaten luncheons for two months on the
front seat. The reader must not get very far away
from the ambulance-car in making his mental picture
of the experience of the boys in North France,
and he must not object if all through this chapter
he gets the smell of grease and petrol, and if the
explosions are tires as often as shells. Because that
is the way it is at the front. These boys never take
their eyes from the road and the car. So why should
we who read of them?</p>

<p>There is a certain Detroit manufacturer who has
a large and legitimate advertisement coming to him.
If he will collect the hundred fervid and humorous
comments written into the records of the field service
he will have a publicity pamphlet which will outlive
"A Message to Garcia." For this job of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
jitneys is more than carrying orders; it is bringing
wounded men over impossible routes, where four
wheels and a motor were never supposed to go. Mr.
Ford with his ship accomplished nothing, but Mr.
Ford with his cars has done much in getting the boys
out of the trenches. They would have lain there
wounded for an hour, two hours, in the Alsace district
for twelve hours longer, if his nimble jitneys
had not chugged up to the boyau and dressing station.</p>

<p>"We expected to be kept rolling all night." To
"keep rolling" is their phrase for driving the car.</p>

<p>"The next sixty hours were not divided into days
for us. We ran steadily, not stopping for meals or
sleep except during the brief pauses in the stream
of wounded. Except for one memorable and enormous
breakfast at the end of the first 24 hours, I
ate while driving, steering with one hand, holding
bread and cheese in the other. The first lull I slept
an hour and a half, the second night there was no
lull and I drove until I went to sleep several times
at the wheel. Then I took three hours' rest and
went on. Gasoline, oil and carbide ran low; we used
all our spare tires. One of our men ran into a ditch
with three seriously wounded soldiers, and upset.
Another man broke his rear axle. During the two
and one-half days of the attack, over 250 wounded
were moved by our 15 cars a distance of 40 kilometers."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span></p>

<p>Ambulance work depends on the supply of gasoline,
oil, carbide and spare parts, solid rations and
sleep. Success rests in patching tires, scraping carbon
and changing springs. Any idea of ambulance
work is off the mark that thinks it a succession of
San Juan charges. It is hard, unpicturesque work,
with an occasional fifteen minutes of tension.</p>

<p>"A stretcher makes a serviceable bed, and, warmly
wrapped in blankets, one can sleep very comfortably
in an ambulance."</p>

<p>"A climb of 800 meters in less than 10 kilometers
involves mechanical stress."</p>

<p>"The unique spring suspension and light body
construction make our cars the most comfortable for
the wounded of all the types in service."</p>

<p>A mechanical detail&mdash;but it is in these bits of
ingenious mechanical adaptation to human needs
that the American contribution has been made. It
isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dashing
and picturesque. You must fight destructive machinery
with still cleverer engines of relief. The inventive
brain must operate as well as the kind heart
and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combination
of courage and mechanical versatility that the
best of the American quality has been revealed.</p>

<p>Flashes of the soldier life are given by the boys.
Canned beef is called by the poilu "singe," or
monkey meat.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span></p>

<p>"All that is impossible is explained by a simple
'c'est la guerre.' Why else blindly scrape one's way
past a creaking truck of shells, testing 20 horses, two
abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty
vapor? Why else descend slopes with every brake
afire, with three human bodies as cargo, where a
broken drive shaft leaves but one instantaneous
twist of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight
into the bank, smashing the car but saving its load?
'C'est la guerre.'"</p>

<p>"'Chasseurs Alpines': a short, dark-blue jacket,
gray trousers, spiral puttees, and the jaunty soft hat
'bérets.' These are the famous 'blue devils.'"</p>

<p>"I, who came for four months and have been
working eight, can assure any one who is considering
joining the American Ambulance that he will
go home with a feeling of great satisfaction at having
been able to help out a little a nation that appreciates
it, and that is bearing the brunt of the fighting
on the Western Front."</p>

<p>"Among the wounded that our cars carried, was
the General of the Division&mdash;General Serret"&mdash;brought
down from the height he had held to be
amputated and to die.</p>

<p>Another section of twenty-four cars started in at
Esternay at the time of the spring freshets, when
life was chilly and wet. Eleven received individually
the Croix de Guerre. This section served two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
divisions of the second French Army and had a
battle front of from seven to ten miles&mdash;the St.
Mihiel sector, a region subject to artillery fire. It
has been commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry, a
descendant of Commodore Perry.</p>

<p>They had 1,800 wounded a week, and a mileage
of 5,000 kilometers.</p>

<p>"Sudbury broke his arm cranking, this morning."</p>

<p>The service was brisk. Shroder with two wounded
was rounding a corner when a shell hit so close as
to jump his car up. One car came in from service
in July with 23 shrapnel holes. On July 8, within
24 hours, the boys of this section carried 997
wounded.</p>

<p>"During the bombardment the trenches were so
smashed by continuous fire as to cease to be trenches:
the men lay in holes in the ground. They would
come down when relieved, dazed and sometimes
weeping, yet they held their ground." Long waits
and frantic activity: dullness and horror alternating.
Nine members of the ambulances were in the house
against which a shell exploded. A soldier was killed
and one mortally wounded. The Americans were
thrown in a heap on the floor. "Now, the section
occupies a large house just outside the town. There
is a large hole in the garden where a shell alighted
soon after this became our new quarters; but the
good fortune of the Ambulance is with it still."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>

<p>"To Clos Bois. Sharp shrapnel fire. Small
branches and leaves showered down in the wood. It
was necessary for two of our men, whose ambulances
stood in the open to expose themselves in
putting stretchers in the cars. Great courage was
displayed by McConnell, who was active in this
work even when not required to be so, and who
was hit in the back by a fragment of shell, sustaining,
however, no further injury than a bad bruise.
Mention should be made of Martin, who drove away
with his car full of wounded while the firing was
still going on, a bullet mark in his steering-gear,
and a spare tire on the roof punctured."</p>

<p>The order of the day, July 22, cited the American
section, "Composed of volunteers, friends of our
country."</p>

<p>Here are a half dozen impressions that come to
the men in the course of their work.</p>

<p>"I counted one evening fifteen balls, within a
space of a dozen yards of the doorway where I was
sheltering."</p>

<p>"The dark houses, deserted streets, the dim shape
of a sentry, the night scents of the fields"&mdash;these
are what the evening run reveals.</p>

<p>"On the one hand are the trenches where men
live in conditions which must resemble those of the
cave men: dug into the earth, and with danger of
death as a daily habit; on the other, within half an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
hour's walk, most of the comforts of civilization.
We come down from the work of carrying hundreds
of mangled men, and in the evening sit eating strawberries
and cake in a pretty drawing-room."</p>

<p>"The wounded had a curiously unconcerned appearance,
as though having been hit already they
are immune."</p>

<p>"Our young heroes&mdash;&mdash;" Yes, they are all of
that, fearless, and swift to act. But they are practical
heroes&mdash;good mechanicians, ready to lend a
hand on any lowly job of washing a stretcher or
shifting furniture. I like the rough-neck way of
the American Ambulance. There has been a snobbish
attempt made to describe these young workers
as belonging to our "best families," representing the
"elite" of America. That is to miss the point of
the work. It is democratic service. Work hard and
you are a popular member of the community. This
Lorraine section went to Verdun, and Robert Toms
of Marion, Iowa, wrote me:</p>

<p>"Everybody has the right spirit, and we are all
working together. We are living the real army
life&mdash;sleeping out of doors and eating in a barn."</p>

<p>One of the Verdun sections was sent to Bar-le-Duc
recently where a bombardment by fourteen German
aeroplanes was under way. Forty persons were
killed and 160 injured. The boys cruised around
the streets during the overhead shelling of forty-five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
minutes, picking up the dead and wounded.
Almost all the cars were hit by fragments of shell.
This prompt aid under fire endeared the American
Ambulance to the inhabitants of that town. Next
day one of the drivers took his coat to a tailor for
repair. The man refused to accept any pay from
one who had helped his city.</p>

<p>A few of us were sitting around quietly one day
when a French sous-officer entered, in a condition
of what seems to our inarticulate Northern stolidity
as excitement, but what in reality is merely clear
expression of warm emotion. He said:</p>

<p>"The people of Bar-le-Duc are grateful for what
the Americans have done. Your work was excellent,
wonderful. We will not forget it."</p>

<p>This work of the American Ambulance Field
Service is the most brilliant, the most widely known
of any we are doing in France. As we motored
through Lorraine, Major Humbert, brother of the
Commanding General of the Third Division, stopped
three of us, Americans, and said he wished to tell
us, as spokesman to our country, that the American
Ambulance Service gave great satisfaction to the
French Army. "It is courageous and useful. We
thank you."</p>

<p>A Flanders section was sent out, ten cars at first.
They served at the Second Battle of the Yser, when
gas was used for the first time by the enemy. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
a flat country and they ran close to the battle-front.
They were billeted at Elverdinghe till the village
crumbled under shell fire.</p>

<p>The work was in part "cleaning plugs and cylinders,
tightening nuts and bolts, oiling and greasing,
washing our little cars just as though they were a
lot of dirty kiddies." The cars receive pet names
of Susan, and Beatrice, and The Contagious Bus.
The Contagious Bus, Car 82, driven by Hayden, carried
187 contagious cases between March 29 and
May 12, and a total of 980 men, covering 2,084 kilometers.
In one day 95 men were transported to the
hospitals in that one car.</p>

<p>"At 2.30 in the afternoon a call came from the
'Trois Chemins' poste, and in answering it Day
and Brown had a close call. While on the road to
the poste, at one place in view of the German
trenches, they were caught in a bombardment, seven
shells striking within 100 yards of the machine.
Two or three days later, Latimer halted his machine
at the end of the road, and walked down to the poste
with the 'Medecin Auxiliare.' Shrapnel began to
break near them and they were forced to put in the
next few minutes in a ditch. They were forced to
lie down five times that morning in this ditch, half
full of mud and water. The red-headed girls still
continue to keep open their little store right near
the church on the main street. Downs spent the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
night on the road where he had dropped out with a
broken transmission. A fire caused by the heating
apparatus broke out in Ned Townsend's car. It
flamed out suddenly, and it was too late to save even
his personal belongings."</p>

<p>There are all kinds of interludes in the work.
Here is a Christmas note, "Dec. 25. The section
had its Christmas dinner at 5 o'clock. Kenyon plays
the violin very well, and Day and Downs are at
home with the piano. Toasts were drunk all the
way from Theodore Roosevelt to 'The Folks at
Home.' After dinner impromptu theatricals, Franklin
and White's dance taking the cake."</p>

<p>"Car wanted for Poste de Secours No. 1, 200 yards
from trenches, eight kilometers from our post. The
car rocks from shell holes. Watch for the round
black spots."</p>

<p>General Putz, commanding the Détachement
d'Armée de Belgique, states: "In spite of the bombardment
of Elverdinghe, of the roads leading to this
village, and of the Ambulance itself, this evacuation
has been effected night and day without interruption.
I cannot too highly praise the courage and devotion
shown by the personnel of the section."</p>

<p>One of the men writes: "From 3 a.m. April 22
until 7.30 p.m. April 26, five cars on duty. In
those four days each man got seven hours' sleep,
sitting at the wheel, or an hour on a hospital bed."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>

<p>Of one sudden shell-flurry: "We stayed still for
fifteen minutes, I smoking furiously, and the English
nurse singing. Little 'Khaki,' the squad's pet
dog, lay shaking."</p>

<p>Five days of continuous heavy work exhausted
them, and half of the corps was sent to Dunkirk
"en repos." On the day of their arrival shells came
in from a distance of twenty-one miles, twenty shells
at intervals of half an hour. They took a minute
and a half to arrive. The French outposts at the
German lines telephoned that one was on its way,
and the sirens of Dunkirk, twenty-one miles away,
blew a warning. This gave the inhabitants a minute
in which to dive into their cellars. The American
Ambulances were the only cars left in the town. On
the sound of the siren the boys headed for the
Grand Place, and, as soon as they saw the cloud of
dust, they drove into it.</p>

<p>As one of them describes it:</p>

<p>"We spent the next two hours cruising slowly
about the streets, waiting for the next shells to come,
and then going to see if any one had been hit. I
had three dead men and ten terribly wounded&mdash;soldiers,
civilians, women. The next day I was glad
to be off for the quiet front where things happen in
the open, and women and children are not murdered."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>

<p>"Seven shells fell within a radius of 200 yards of
the cars, with pieces of brick and hot splinters."</p>

<p>A French official said of the Dunkirk bombardment:</p>

<p>"I was at most of the scenes, but always found
one of your ambulances before me."</p>

<p>A Moroccan lay grievously wounded in a Dunkirk
hospital. One of our boys sat down beside the
cot.</p>

<p>"Touchez le main," said the wounded man, feebly.
He was lonely.</p>

<p>The boys stayed with him for a time. The man
was too far spent to talk, but every little while he
said:</p>

<p>"Touchez le main."</p>

<p>Through the darkness of his pain, he knew that
he had a companion there. The young foreigner at
his side was a friend, and cared that he suffered.
It is difficult to put in public print what one comes
to know about these young men of ours, for they
are giving something besides efficient driving. I
have seen men like Bob Toms at work, and I know
that every jolt of the road hurts them because it
hurts their wounded soldier.</p>

<p>A young millionaire who has been driving up in
the Alsace district, remarked the other day:</p>

<p>"I never used to do anything, but I won't be able
to live like that after the war. The pleasantest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
thing that is going to happen to me when this thing
is over will be to go to the telephone in New York
and call up François.</p>

<p>"'That you, François? Come and let's have dinner
together and talk over the big fight.'</p>

<p>"François is a Chasseur Alpin. I've been seeing
him up on the mountain. François is the second
cook at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the finest
gentleman I ever knew."</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-067.jpg" width="400" height="264"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">The section that was "shot up" at Verdun&mdash;American Ambulance Field Service,
Section Three. Ralph Blumenthal, the Princeton All-America football centre, standing
at the right. Next him, Waldo Pierce, the artist.</p>
</div></div>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-068.jpg" width="400" height="259"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, Fifth Prince of the name, Forty-fifth
Count of the name, stooping at the left to repair a bad tire. He was chauffeur
of the car that carried us to Verdun.</p>
</div></div>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">IV</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN</p>


<p class="pn2">The French have been massed at Verdun in
the decisive battle of the war. So were
the Americans. Our little group of ambulance
drivers were called from the other points of
the 350-mile line, and five sections of the American
Ambulance Field Service and the Harjes and the
Norton Corps work from ten up to twenty hours of
the day bringing in their comrades, the French
wounded. One hundred and twenty of our cars and
120 of our boys in the field service were in the sector,
under constant shell-fire. Several were grievously
wounded. Others were touched. A dozen of the
cars were shot up with shrapnel and slivers of
explosive shell.</p>

<p>Will Irwin and I went up with Piatt Andrew,
head of the field service, to see the young Americans
at work. We left Paris on July 1 in a motor car.
Our chauffeur was Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre,
Fifth Prince of the name, Tenth
Marquess of Cruzy and Vauvillars, Forty-fifth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
Count of the name, Sixteenth Viscount of Tallart,
Twenty-first Baron of Clermont en Viennois, Ancien
Pair de France, descendant of the Seigneur of Saint
Geoire. For nine centuries his family has been
famous. The Duke is a kindly, middle-aged aristocrat,
who is very helpful to the American Field
Service. He takes the boys on visits to some one
of his collection of châteaus. He drives Piatt
Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted
and furious driver, and on our dash from Paris to
Verdun he burned up a couple of tires. It was a
genial thing to see him, caked with dust on face and
clothing, tinkering the wheel. To be served by one
of the oldest families in Europe was a novel experience
for Irwin and me, though actually what the
Duke was doing in his democratic way is being done
almost universally by the "high-born" of France.
Up through thousands of transports, thousands of
horses and tens of thousands of men, we steered our
course to Lovering Hill's section of the American
Field Service.</p>

<p>There on the hillside, to the west of Verdun, were
the boys and their cars. It was daytime, so they
were resting. All work is night work. They were
muddy, unshaved, weary. A couple of base-ball
gloves were lying around. One of the boys was repairing
a car that had collided with a tree. There
was mud on all the cars, and blood on the inner side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
of one car. For ten nights they have been making
one of the hottest ambulance runs of the war.</p>

<p>It was on that run that William Notley Barber,
of Toledo, Ohio, was shot through the back. The
shell fragment tore a long, jagged rent in his khaki
army coat, with a circle of blood around the rip,
entered the back and lay against the lung and stomach.
The car was shattered. The next man found
him. The wrecked car still stood on the road with
a dead man in it, the wounded soldier whom he was
bringing back. We saw Barber at the field hospital.
He had been operated on for the second time. He
showed us the quarter inch of metal which the surgeon
had just taken out, the second piece to be removed.
He has won the Medaille Militaire.</p>

<p>This section needed no initiation. They had long
served at Hartmannsweilerkopf in the Alsace fighting,
and of their number Hall was killed. This experience
at Verdun is a continuation of the dangerous,
brilliant work they have carried on for sixteen
months. These men are veterans in service, though
youngsters in years. By their shredded cars and
the blood they have spilled they have earned the
right to be ranked next to soldiers of the line.</p>

<p>They gave me the impression of having been
through one of the great experiences of life. There
was a tired but victorious sense they carried, of men
that had done honest service.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span></p>

<p>As we sat on the grass and looked out on a sky
full of observation balloons and aeroplanes, a very
good-looking young man walked up. Only one
thing about his make-up was marred, and that was
his nose&mdash;a streak of red ran across the bridge.</p>

<p>"Shrapnel," he said, as he saw me looking. "And
it seems a pity, too. I spent $600 on that nose, just
before I came over here. They burned it, cauterized
it, wired it, knifed it, and pronounced it a thorough
job. And as soon as it was cleaned up, it came over
here into powder and dust and got messed up by
shrapnel. Now the big $600 job will have to be
done over again."</p>

<p>This young man is Waldo Pierce, the artist. It
was he who once started on a trip to Europe with a
friend, but didn't like the first meal, so jumped overboard
and swam back. He sailed by the next boat,
and arrived on the other side to find his friend in
trouble for his disappearance.</p>

<p>Through the side of Pierce's coat, just at the
pocket, and just over the heart, I saw a bullet hole.</p>

<p>"Pretty stagey, isn't it?" he explained. "If it
had been a ragged, irregular hole, somewhere else,
say at the elbow, it would have been all right. But
this neat little hole just at the vital spot is conventional
stuff. It looks like the barn door, and five
yards away.</p>

<p>"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
from the inner breast pocket a brown leather wallet.
Through one flap the same shrapnel bullet had penetrated.
Together, coat and wallet had saved this
young man's life.</p>

<p>"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go anywhere,"
Pierce went on. He is a Maine man, and
has a pleasant drawl.</p>

<p>Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting
ripped at the driver's place, the sides a mess. A man
on his right and a man at his left were killed. The
stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire.
The boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatalities
were due them in the June drive at Verdun.
This was the fiercest offensive of the four months,
and they stood up to it.</p>

<p>We were looking west, and as we looked an aeroplane
burst into flames. As it fell, it left a trail of
black smoke, funnel shaped, and always at the point
of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of
that spark a man burning to death. The spark descended
rather slowly, with a spiraling movement,
and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly
all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to
continue for a moment, like a setting sun on the
earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and only the smoke
in the sky was left. In another moment the light
wind had shredded the smoke away.</p>

<p>It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
coming from Paris at full tilt to get to the Etat
Major and report ourselves. So, after watering the
car and shaking hands all around, we started off,
and straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its
successor went flat, and for the third time it went
flat. So we crawled to a village at midnight, and
laid by for repairs.</p>

<p>At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be
done, as we had rested in our clothes. We ran out
past the city of Verdun on the road going east to
Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full
crop in a hundred fields about us. All the birds were
singing. The pleasant stir and fullness of summer
were coming down the air.</p>

<p>Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage
broke out&mdash;the deadly barrier of fire that crumbles
a line of trenches as a child pokes in an ant hill:
the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy
attack. Here was what I had been waiting for
through twenty-one months of war. I had caught
snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I
had eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but
they were lazy, throwing a shell or two only for
each course. But here, just before the sun came up,
200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired continuously
for twenty minutes. Just over the hill
another battery cleared its throat and spoke. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
fields beyond us other batteries played continuously.
Some of the men put cotton in their ears.</p>

<p>We ran through a devastated wood. The green
forest has been raked by high explosive into dead
stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire hillside
when the match trust has finished with it. The road
is a thing of mounds and pits, blown up and dug
out by a four months' rain of heavy shells. The
little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into
an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They
turn round on their own tails. They push their pert
little noses up a hill, where the road is lined with
famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They
refuse to stay out of service.</p>

<p>We rode back through the partially destroyed city
of Verdun, lying trapped and helpless in its hollow
of hills. We drove through its streets, some of
them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost untouched,
with charming bits of water view and green
lawns and immaculate white fronts. The city reminded
me of the victim whom a professional hypnotist
displays in a shop window, where he leaves
him lying motionless in the trance for exhibition purposes.</p>

<p>Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of
German fire. But once the guns are forced back the
city will spring into life.</p>

<p>Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
and in an open tent shared the excellent rations
which the field service provides for its workers. We
were sitting with the French lieutenant and discussing
the values of rhythm in prose when the boys
shouted to us from the next field. An aeroplane was
dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped observation
balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim,
which could not escape, as a bird darts for a worm.
The balloon opened up into flame and fell through
thirty seconds, burning with a dull red.</p>

<p>The hours we had just spent of work and excitement
seemed to me fairly crowded, but they were
mild in the life of the field service. They pound
away overtime and take ugly hazards and preserve
a boy's humor. More young men of the same stuff
are needed at once for this American Ambulance
Field Service. The country is full of newly made
college graduates, wondering what they can make
of their lives. Here is the choicest service in fifty
years offered to them.</p>

<p>Even a jitney wears out. Bump it in the carburetor
enough times, rake it with shrapnel, and it
begins to lose its first freshness. More full sections
of cars should be given. The work is in charge of
Piatt Andrew, who used to teach political economy
in Harvard, was later Director of the Mint, Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury and secretary of
Senator Aldrich's Monetary Commission.</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-077.jpg" width="400" height="618"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center"> A. Piatt Andrew, who, as Director, has raised the American
Ambulance Field Service from a small beginning to a
powerful factor in rescue work.</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span></p>

<p>As soon as twilight fell we started on the nightly
round. Here was Section 4 of the American Ambulance
doing hot service for Hill 304 and Dead Man's
Hill. It was on this ride that I saw the real Verdun,
the center of the deadliest action since men learned
how to kill. The real Verdun is the focused
strength of all France, flowing up the main roads,
trickling down the side roads and overflowing upon
the fields. The real Verdun is fed and armed by the
thousands of motor cars that bray their way from
forty miles distant, by the network of tiny narrow
gauge railways, and by the horses that fill the
meadows and forests.</p>

<p>Tiny trucks and trains are stretched through all
the sector. They look like a child's railroad, the
locomotive not more than four feet high. They
brush along by the road, and wander through fields
and get lost in woods. The story goes in the field
service that one of these wee trains runs along on a
hillside, and just back of it is a battery of 220's
which shoot straight across the tracks at a height of
three feet. The little train comes chugging along
full of ammunition. The artillery men yell "Attention,"
and begin firing all together. The train waits
till there seems to be a lull, and goes by under the
muzzles.</p>

<p>We were still far enough from the front to see
this enginery of war as a spectacle. The flashing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
cars and bright winged aeroplanes, the immense concourse
of horses, the vast orderly tumult, thousands
of mixed items, separate things and men, all shaped
by one will to a common purpose, all of it clothed
in wonder, full of speed and color&mdash;this prodigious
spectacle brought to me with irresistible appeal a
memory of childhood.</p>

<p>"What does it remind me of?" I kept saying to
myself. Now I had it:</p>

<p>When I was a very little boy I used to get up
early on two mornings of the year: one was the
Fourth of July and the other was the day the circus
came to town. The circus came while it was yet
dark in the summer morning, unloaded the animals,
unpacked the snakes and freaks, and built its house
from the ground up. Very swiftly the great tents
were slung, and deftly the swinging trapezes were
dropped. Ropes uncoiled into patterns. The three
rings came full circle. Seats rose tier on tier. Then
the same invisible will created a mile long parade
down Main Street, gave two performances of two
hours each, and packed up the circus, which disappeared
down the road before the Presbyterian church
bell rang midnight.</p>

<p>A man once said to me of a world famous general:
"He is a great executive. He could run a
circus on moving day." It was the perfect tribute.
So I can give no clearer picture of what Pétain and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
his five fingers&mdash;the generals of his staff&mdash;are accomplishing
than to say they are running one thousand
circuses, and every day is moving day.</p>

<p>Our little car was like a carriage dog in the skill
with which it kept out of the way of traffic while
traveling in the center of the road. Three-ton trucks
pounded down upon it and the small cuss breezed
round and came out the other side. The boys told
me that one of our jitneys once pushed a huge camion
down over a ravine, and went on innocent and unconcerned,
and never discovered its work as a wrecker
till next day.</p>

<p>But soon we passed out of the zone of transports
and into the shell-sprinkled area. We went through
a deserted village that is shelled once or twice a
day. There is nothing so dead as a place, lately inhabited,
where killing goes on. There is the smell of
tumbled masonry and moldering flesh, the stillness
that waits for fresh horror. Just as we left the
village, the road narrowed down like the neck of a
bottle. It is so narrow that only one stream of
traffic can flow through. By the boys of the field
service this peculiarly dangerous village of Bethlainville
is known as "Bethlehem"&mdash;Bethlehem,
because no wise men pass that way.</p>

<p>The young man with me had been bending over
his steering gear, a few days before, when a shrapnel
ball cut through the seat at just the level of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
head. If he had been sitting upright the bullet
would have killed him. And another bullet went
past the face of the boy with him. The American
Field Service has had nothing but luck.</p>

<p>"But don't publish my name," said my friend.
"It might worry the folk at home."</p>

<p>We rode on till we had gone eighteen miles.</p>

<p>"Here is our station."</p>

<p>I didn't know we were there. Our Poste de
Secours was simply one more hole in the ground, an
open mouth into an invisible interior&mdash;one more
mole hole in honeycombed ground.</p>

<p>We entered the cave, and something hit my face.
It was the flap of sacking which hung there to prevent
any light being seen. We walked a few steps,
hand extended, till it felt the second flap. We
stepped into a little round room, like the dome of an
astronomical observatory. It was lit by lantern.
Three stretcher bearers were sitting there, and two
chaplains, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic.
The Protestant was a short, energetic man in the
early forties, with stubby black beard and excellent
flow of English. The Roman Catholic, Cleret de
Langavant, was white-haired, with a long white
beard, a quite splendid old fellow with his courtesy
and native dignity. These two men, the best of
friends, live up there in the shelled district, where
they can minister to the wounded as fast as they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
come in from the trenches. Of one group of thirty
French stretcher bearers who have been bringing
wounded from Dead Man's Hill to this tunnel,
where the Americans pick them up, ten have been
killed.</p>

<p>We went out from the stuffy, overcrowded shelter
and stood in the little communicating trench that
led from the Red Cross room to the road. We were
looking out on 500,000 men at war&mdash;not a man of
them visible, but their machinery filling the air with
color and sound. We were not allowed to smoke,
for a flicker of light could draw fire.</p>

<p>We were standing on the crest of a famous hill.
We saw, close by, Hill 340 and Dead Man's Hill,
two points of the fiercest of the Verdun fighting. It
was the wounded from Dead Man's Hill for whom
we waited. Night by night the Americans wait
there within easy shell range. Sometimes the place
is shelled vigorously. Other nights attention is
switched to other points.</p>

<p>"I shouldn't stand outside," suggested one of the
stretcher bearers. "The other evening one of our
men had his arm blown off while he was sitting at
the mouth of the tunnel. He thought it was going
to be a quiet evening."</p>

<p>But the young American doctor liked fresh air.</p>

<p>It was a wonderful night of stars, with a bell-like
clarity to the mild air and little breeze stirring.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
A perfect night for flying. We heard the whirr of
the passing wings&mdash;the scouts of the sky were out.
Searchlights began to play. I counted eight at once,
and more than twenty between the hills. Sometimes
they ran up in parallel columns, banding the western
heaven. Sometimes they located the knight errant
and played their streams on him at the one intersecting
point. Again the lights would each of them
go off on a separate search, flicking up and down the
dome of the sky and rippling over banks of thin
white cloud.</p>

<p>Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended,
gathering intensity of light till it seemed as if it hit
my face, then slowly fell. The German starlights
were swift and brilliant; the French steady and long
continuing.</p>

<p>"No good, the Boches' lights," said a voice out of
the tunnel. A French stretcher bearer had just
joined us.</p>

<p>Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once,
sometimes red, sometimes green. Then the pattern
lights began to play&mdash;the lights which signal directions
for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a snake
and again made geometrical figures. Some of the
fifty guns, nested behind us, fired rapidly for five
minutes and then knocked off for a smoke. From
the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps 220's,
thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
shells in the distance. The Germans threw a few
shells in the direction of the village through which
we had driven, a few toward the battery back of
us. We could hear the whistle of our shells traveling
west and of their shells coming east. To stand
midway between fires is to be in a safe and yet
stimulating situation. From the gently sloping,
innocent hillocks all about us tons of metal passed
high over our heads into the lines. If only one shell
in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of the
front has it, the slaughter was thorough.</p>

<p>"It is a quiet evening," said my friend.</p>

<p>It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity;
there were no buildings, no trees, nothing but distance,
and the distance filled with fireworks. I once
saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks. It
seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days
afterward. But here in front of us were twenty
miles of exploding lights, a continuous performance
for four months. With our heads thrust over the
tunnel edge, we stood there for four hours. The
night, the play of lights, the naked hill top, left
us with a sense of something vast and lonely.</p>

<p>The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let
us go across the road to my abri."</p>

<p>He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent
over to enter the earth cave. "I will lead you," he
said, taking me by the arm.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span></p>

<p>"Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must
not show any light."</p>

<p>When the cave was securely closed in he flashed
a pocket electric. We were in a room scooped out of
the earth. The roof was so low that my casque
struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The
available standing room was three feet by six feet.</p>

<p>"You will forgive me for asking it," he went on,
"but please use your pocket lamp; mine is getting
low and I am far away from supplies. We can get
nothing up here."</p>

<p>My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman
flashed it on a photograph pinned against a plank
of wood.</p>

<p>"My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from
Bensonhurst, Long Island. And that is my child."</p>

<p>He turned the light around the room. There
were pages of pictures from the <i>London Daily Mail</i>
and the <i>New York Tribune</i>. One was a picture of
German soldiers in a church, drinking by the altar.</p>

<p>"I call this my New York corner," he explained,
"and this is my visiting card." From a pile he lifted
a one-page printed notice, which read:</p>

<p>"Declaration Religeuse.</p>

<p>"I, the undersigned, belong to the Protestant
religion. In consequence and conforming to the law
of 1905, this is my formal wish: In case of sickness
or accident, I wish the visit of a Protestant pastor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
and the succor of his ministry whether I am undergoing
treatment at a hospital or elsewhere; in case
of death I wish to be buried with the assistance of a
Protestant pastor and the rites of that Church."</p>

<p>Space is left for the soldier to sign his name. The
little circular is devised by this chaplain, Pastor&mdash;&mdash;,
chaplain of the&mdash;&mdash;Division.</p>

<p>At 2 o'clock in the morning we were ordered to
load our car with the wounded, one "lying case,"
three "sitting cases." We discharged them at the
hospital, and tumbled into the tent at Ippecourt at
4 o'clock.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">V</h3>

<p class="pcl2">"FRIENDS OF FRANCE"</p>

<p class="pn2">American relief work in France has many
agencies and activities. I have given illustrations
of it, but these are only admirable
bits among a host of equals. I have told of the
American Field Service. Other sections of young
Americans have been at work in the hottest corners
of the battle front. The Harjes Formation and
the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps,
known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for
daring and useful work with their one hundred cars
on the firing line. What the Field Service has
done, they too have done and suffered. It was with
a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale
classmate, W. P. Clyde, junior, of the Norton Ambulance,
cited in an order of the day, and made the
recipient of the French War Cross. The commanding
general wrote of him:</p>

<p>"Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted
himself with a cool courage under a heavy and continuous
fire. He has given, in the course of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to
danger and his spirit of self-sacrifice."</p>

<p>I have shown the contribution of scientific skill
and mechanical ingenuity which Americans have
made in hospital and ambulance work. There remains
a work in which our other American characteristic
of executive ability is shown. Organization
is the merit of the American Relief Clearing House.
When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled
into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was
a tangle and muddle of generosity. The American
Relief Clearing House was formed to meet this need.
It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from
America intended for France and her Allies. It collects
fresh accurate information on ravaged districts
and suffering people. It prevents waste and overlapping
and duplication. It obtains free transportation
across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through
the French customs, and free transportation on all
the French railways. It forwards the gifts to the
particular point, when it is specified. It distributes
unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives
money and purchases supplies. It has 114 persons
giving all their time to its work. It has issued
45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work.
It employs ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has
concentrated time, effort and gifts. It has obtained
and spread information of the needs of the Allies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
It has been efficient in creating relationship between
the donor in America and the recipient in France,
and in increasing good will between the nations.
I do not write of the Clearing House from the outside,
but from a long experience. For many months
my wife has given all her time to making known the
work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work of relief
for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a
refugee house, and a Maternity Hospital in the
little strip of Belgium which is still unenslaved.
Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in Norwalk,
in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Douglaston,
L. I., have been formed, and 36 boxes of
material, and over $1,500 in money, have been
given. Those supplies the Clearing House has
brought from New York to La Panne, Belgium, free
of charge, promptly, with no damage and no losses.
What the Clearing House has done for this humble
effort, it has done for 60,000 other consignments,
and for more than a million dollars of money. It
has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and 200
relief organizations in France. It has sent goods
to Belgium, Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in
Switzerland. It dispatched the ship <i>Menhir</i> for the
relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed a complete
hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph outfit.
The cases which it transports contain gauze,
cotton, bandages, hospital clothing, surgical instruments,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
garments, underwear, boots, socks. The
names of the men who have administered this excellent
organization in Paris are H. O. Beatty,
Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R.
Barbour, and Walter Abbott.</p>

<p>After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering,
comes the great mute community of the French people,
whose life and work have been blighted. And
for one section of that community the Association
of "<i>Les Amis des Artistes</i>" has been formed. "To
preserve French art from the deadly effects of the
war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to the
production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture,
architecture, decorative arts, engraving," is the object
of this society. The members see that other
forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war.
"The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will
flourish. But art will have a hard and prolonged
struggle." The society purchases from its funds the
works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of
means of support. These paintings, statuary, engravings,
so acquired, are annually divided among
the members. The purchase is made by a committee
composed of distinguished artists, critics and connoisseurs,
representing the three great French salons
and the various art tendencies of the modern movement.
The Honorary Committee includes Bakst,
Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
Americans who are aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin,
Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V. Benét,
and Percy Peixotto.</p>

<p>The new American fund of the "Guthrie Committee"
for the relief of the orphans of war has been
recently announced. It is planned to raise many
millions of dollars for this object.</p>

<p>Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees&mdash;there
is a various and immense suffering in France at this
moment, and no American can afford to be neutral
in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp
individual disturbance and of the mass of misery
came to me one day when I visited the Maison
Blanche. We entered the open air corridor, where
a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My
eye picked up a young man, whose face carried an
expression of gentleness.</p>

<p>"Go and bring the War Minister your work,"
said the Major who was conducting us.</p>

<p>A little chattering sound came from the lips of
the boy. It sounded like the note of a bird, a faint
twittering, making the sound of "Wheet-Wheet"&mdash;twice
repeated each half minute. Then began the
strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust
out in unexpected directions, his arms bobbed, his
whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank partly to
the ground. His progress was slow, because he was
spilling his vitality in these motions. And all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
time, the low chirrup came from his lips. More
laborious and cruel than the price paid by the victims
of vice was this walk of one who had served
his country.</p>

<p>And yet nothing in the indignity that had been
done to his body could rob him of that sweetness of
expression.</p>

<p>"A shell exploded directly in front of him," explained
the doctor, "the sudden shock broke his nervous
system, and gave him what is practically a case
of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in
every part. It forces out the little cry. The effect
of that shock is distributed through his entire body.
That is what gives hope for his recovery. If the
thing had centered in any one function, he would
be a hopeless case. But it is all diffused. When
the war ends many of these men who are nerve-shattered,
will recover, we believe. As long as the
war lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of responsibility,
with the horror that goes with it. But when
they know the shelling is over for ever they will
grow better."</p>

<p>In a few minutes the young soldier returned carrying
two baskets. The one thing that is saving that
man from going crazy is his basket making. Very
patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave
close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open
trays for household knick-knacks. Others were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
worked out into true art shapes of vase. I shan't
forget him as he stood there trembling, the little
reed baskets rocking in his hands, but those baskets
themselves revealing not a trace of his infirmity.
Only his nervous system was broken. But his will
to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and
the heart of France.</p>

<p>The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health
of four million soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender
as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he gave that man&mdash;fifteen
minutes of encouragement. The rest of
France waited, while this one little twitching representative
of his race received what was due from
the head of the nation to the humblest sufferer. Do
I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Professor
Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held
an extempore auction against each other. But one
basket they could not buy and that was the tray the
man had woven for his wife. He was proud to
show it, but money could not get it. And he was a
thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had received
his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room,
where he sleeps alone so that his twittering will not
disturb the other men, and hid the money in his kit.
Something more for his wife to go with the basket.</p>

<p>Clearing house of the suffering of France, the
Maison Blanche is the place where the mutilated of
the Grand Army come. As quickly as they are discharged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
from hospital, they are sent to this Maison
Blanche, while completing their convalescence, before
they return to their homes. It is here that arms,
legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus that operates
these members, are fitted to them. They try out the
new device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a
whole man; a something numb and strange out
beyond the responses of the nervous system. It behaves
queerly. It requires much testing to make it
articulate naturally.</p>

<p>Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion
pictures have made gay evenings in time past
before the war, file the slow streams of the crippled,
backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the
soldiers it is a matter of routine, one more item in
the long sacrifice. They fit on the member and
test it in a businesslike way, with no sentimentalizing.
Too many are there in the room, and other
hundreds on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case,
for the individual to feel himself the lonely victim.
There are no jests&mdash;the war has gone too far for
superficial gayety&mdash;and there is no hint of despair,
for France is being saved. The crippled man is
sober and long-enduring.</p>

<p>There in that room I saw the war as I have not
seen it in five months of active service at the front.
For yonder on the Yser we had the dramatic reliefs
of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
But here were only broken men. There were no
whole men at all in the long Salle. The spirit of the
men was all that it ever was. But the body could
no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped
to the waist or with leg bare waiting their turn
with the doctor and the apparatus expert. There is
the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as if
the men in their troubled motions were marionettes.
And then the imagination, abnormally stimulated by
so much suffering, plays other tricks. And it seemed
to me as if one were looking in at the window of
one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city
slum, where life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque
wounds on the wax flesh. But here was the
crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of
the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism,
and the slow moving up and filing past of
the line, as man after man was tested for flexibility.
Here is the army of France&mdash;here is the whole vast
problem flowing through one door and gathered in
one room.</p>

<p>American money is helping to reëducate these
broken men, teaching them trades. There at the
Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have already
trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais
257. As I write this, 701 maimed men are still in
course of being trained, and the number in the agricultural
school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
maimed soldiers have been trained through American
help. Most of the money for this work has been
raised by the "American Committee for Training in
Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of
which Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is Chairman.
The president of the society in France in control
of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president
of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.</p>

<p>Like England in the battle line, we are only at
the beginning of our effort. In spots and patches
we have responded well. Many are giving all they
can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which
we have collected for all causes is excellent.
(Though England has given more than that to Belgium
alone, in addition to financing the war and
caring for her own multitude of sufferers.) America
has made gifts in goods to the amount of sixty million
dollars. Of local relief committees working for
France we have over two thousand. There are about
forty-five thousand Americans devoting their full
time to the service of France as soldiers, drivers,
fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive officers.
There are many thousands in the United
States who are using a portion of their strength and
leisure to raise money and supplies. As Sydney
Brooks said to me:</p>

<p>"Those Americans who believe in our cause are
more Pro-Ally than the Allies."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></p>

<p>A group of Americans among our millions are
aware that Washington wrote:</p>

<p>"All citizens of the United States should be inspired
with unchangeable gratitude to France."</p>

<p class="pn10 p1 small"><span class="smcap">Note</span>: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">VI</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE SAVING REMNANT</p>

<p class="pn2">I wish to show in this book three expressions of
nationality. I seek to show the fire and vigor
of German nationality, and how that force has
been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic
militarists in control. There has been no instance
of a noble force so diverted since the days of the
Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power of religion
was used by a clever organization to torture
and kill. Every instinctive element in our being is
at times turned awry. Nationalism suffers just as
sex love suffers from the perversions of evil institutions.
But the abuse of instinct is no argument
for cutting loose from that vital source and seeking
to live by intellectual theories, emptied of warm
emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying the
intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating instinct
as an enemy. The nationalism of the German
people will yet vindicate itself and swing true to
freedom and justice.</p>

<p>I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
love of the peasant for the soil of his Patrie, for
the house where he was born, and for the sunlight
and the equality of his beautiful country. I have
shown that there can be no peace as long as other
men with other customs invade that soil, burn those
homes, and impose their alien ideas.</p>

<p>I have told of what the American tradition of
nationality has driven our men and women and our
boys to do in France. They see the fight of France
as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution
as her struggle. None of this work was done
in vague humanitarianism. These men and women
and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim.
They are giving it to the American cause in France.
France is defending the things that used to be dear
to us, and our fellow-countrymen who are of the
historic American tradition are standing at her side.</p>

<p>In recent years, our editors and politicians have
been busy in destroying our historic tradition and
creating a new tradition, by means of which we are
to obtain results without paying the price. Neutrality
is the method, and peace and prosperity are
the rewards. I have collected many expressions of
this new conception of Americanism. One will
suffice.</p>

<p>Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the
National Democratic Convention, in renominating
Woodrow Wilson for president, said:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span></p>

<p>"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws
of the world.... The policy of neutrality is as
truly American as the American flag.... The
genius of this country is for peace. Compared with
the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are
almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from
blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was
there as much money in our vaults as to-day....
When the history of these days comes to be written,
one name will shine in golden splendor upon the
page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's
war, one name will represent the triumph of American
principles over the hosts of darkness and of
death. It will be the name of the patriot who has
implanted his country's flag on the highest peak to
which humanity has yet aspired: the name of Woodrow
Wilson."</p>

<p>It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling
in fat money vaults, this assumption that prosperity
is greater than sacrifice, that these young men
of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded
and to die. This mockery of the "blackened page"
and "blood-smeared pages" of Europe has stung
many thousands of Americans into action. The
record of their service is a protest against such gloating.
These fighters and rescuers and workers would
not have served Germany with an equal zest. Neutrality
between France and Germany is impossible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
to them. Those who fail to see the difference between
France and Germany in this war are not of
our historic American tradition.</p>

<p>Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and
gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude
toward nationality, are summoning America to an
artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts
may advance." They write: "The soldier falls
under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted
by his passion to a vision out of which destruction
and death are wrought." To one who has
heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat
scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a
vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil.
Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that
belief takes varying forms, according to the place
and age in which it falls. It may be the expression
of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music.
It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient
beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quickening
received from fresh discoveries of territory and
strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans.
In America we have long tried by artificial stimulants
to revive art. We have omitted the one sure
way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sacrifice,
a reassertion of national idealism. Out of
that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin
surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
never nourish. The sense of the true America has
laid hold of these young men of ours in France.
By living well they create the conditions of art. The
things they do underlie all great expression. Already
they are writing with a tone and accent which
have long gone unheard in our America.</p>

<p>My lot has cast me with young men at their
heroic moment. For the first months of the war it
was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors,
finally with these young Americans. They have
made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan
American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be
carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by
noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if
they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be
paid for."</p>

<p>The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because
it is an intellectual theory, which does not build on
instinct. A man's love of his home and his nation
is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values
and moving with the vital current of life itself.
Our pacifists would clear their thinking if they came
under shell-fire. All that is sound in modern radical
thought has been strengthened by this war. The
democratic movement in England has become an
overwhelming force. But the unsound elements in
radical thought, those elements introduced by intellectual
theorists who scheme a world distasteful to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
average human nature, have been burned away in
the fire. One of those unsound elements was the
theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many
Americans have no belief in the idea of our country.
They are busy with the mechanics of life. Any person
who is not "getting results" is felt by them to
be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain,
they have laid hold of a doctrine which would justify
them in their indifference to profounder values.
It is so that we have weakened our sense of nationality.</p>

<p>The nation is a natural "biological group," whose
members have an "instinctive liking" for each other
and "act with a common purpose." The instinctive
liking is created by common customs and a shared
experience. This experience, expressed in song and
legislative enactment and legend, becomes known as
the national tradition, and is passed on from generation
to generation in household heroes, such as
Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government
of the people." That instinctive liking, created by
the contacts of a common purpose and rooted in a
loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our
people by importations of aliens, who have not
shared in a common experience, and have not inherited
our tradition. It is not possible to blend
diverse races into a nation, when members of one race
plot against our institutions in the interests of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
European State, and members of another race extract
wealth from our industry and carry it home
to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so
nourished. A common purpose is not manifested in
that way. We have not touched the imagination
of these newcomers. It requires something more
than "big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life
of peasants. Our lax nationalism never reaches the
hidden elements of their emotion to make them one
in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and
hustling and easy money are excellent things, but
not enough to call out loyalty and allegiance.</p>

<p>These changing conditions of our growth have
blotted out from memory the old historic experience
and substituted a fresher, more recent, experience.
Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have
created a new American tradition, breeding its own
catch words and philosophy. The change has come
so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans
to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking
and acting from different motives, impulses and desires
than those of the men who created and established
the nation. The types of our national heroes
have changed. We have substituted captains of
industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative
men. Our popular phrases express the new current
of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch,"
"peace and prosperity": these stir our emotional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
centers. We used to be shaken and moved when
the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us.
But to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal
Mercier, and are unmoved. We no longer know the
great accent when we hear it.</p>

<p>So we must look to the young to save us. Henry
Farnsworth was a Boston man, twenty-five years
old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.</p>

<p>"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the
French once fought for us."</p>

<p>Our American workers are aiding France because
she defends our tradition, which is also hers, a tradition
of freedom and justice, practiced in equality.
In her version of it, there are elements of intellectual
grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed
with a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing
purple, which are peculiar to the Latin temperament.
But the ground plan is the same. Our doctors
and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers
in the hostels and the Clearing House, our boys
in the American Field Service, are not alone saving
the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They
are restoring American nationality.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4 xlarge">SECTION II</h2>

<p class="pc2 large">WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a><br /><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p2">I</h3>

<p class="pcl2">NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE
MIDDLE WEST</p>

<p class="pbqn2">"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies,
north by the British Dominions, west by the
Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the
culture of corn and cotton meets ... will have fifty
millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by
any political folly or mistake. It contains more than
one-third of the country owned by the United States&mdash;certainly
more than one million of square miles. A glance
at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the
great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal
borders to it."</p>

<p class="pn20 reduct">(<i>Lincoln's Message to Congress</i>, Dec. 1, 1862.)</p>

<p class="pn2">The war and the election together have revealed
a growing separation between the
ideas of the East and those of the West.
This separation is largely the fault of the East,
which prefers to do its thinking in terms of its own
industrial welfare. The life of the West is a
healthier life. There is better balance between industry
and agriculture, more recognition of the value
of social equality, more open-mindedness to new
ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
The East has been slow to recognize this moral
leadership of the newer country. It has greeted the
men and their ideas with caustic humor and sometimes
with an almost malignant bitterness. This
has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas,
but it has lessened good will. It has led the West
to distrust a policy which has the endorsement of the
East.</p>

<p>The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman
whom I know:</p>

<p>"America once divided between North and South.
It would not be impossible now to separate America,
the East from the West."</p>

<p>It is time for the East to waken itself from its
selfish sleep, and bend its mind to an understanding
of the American community. In the matter of
foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but
in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to
work by sympathetic coöperation. It will have to
prove that its notion of foreign policy is not based
on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American
nation.</p>

<p>I have shown that a section of America of the
Civil War traditions is intensely Pro-Ally, and has
proved it in speech and action. The new America,
spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle
West, is neutral. It is neutral because it does not
know the facts. I am sometimes told in Europe<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
that it is the chink of our money that has made my
country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest
Middle Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian.
The Middle West has not given money, and
it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it
is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of
the Allied methods of conducting the war. In England
and France, there has been an unconscious disregard
of neutral opinion, an indifference in the
treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness
to use the methods of a democracy in appealing to a
democracy. A Government report, issued by a belligerent
power, has little effect on a community
three thousand miles away. But the first-hand accounts,
sent by its own writers, who are known to
be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is
unfortunate that through the first two years of the
war, more news was given to American journalists
by Germany than by England and France.</p>

<p>There is need that some one should speak the
truth about the foreign policy of the Allies. For
that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on
neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves
three relationships:</p>

<p>(1) The enemy.</p>

<p>(2) The Allies.</p>

<p>(3) The Neutrals.</p>

<p>The first two relationships have long been realized.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
The third&mdash;that of relationship toward neutrals&mdash;has
never been realized. It is not fully realized
to-day. The failure to realize it led America
and England into the fight of 1812. It led to the
Mason and Slidell case between England and America
in the Civil War. The importance of winning
neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day,
included in the forefront of the national effort.
It is still spoken of as a minor matter of giving
"penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England
has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties
with neutral governments. But that is only one-half
the actual problem of a foreign policy. The
other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral
people, because there is no such thing finally as
neutrality.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Public opinion turns either Pro or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of
American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent
is anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent
Pro-German, and forty per cent neutral. The final
weight will rest in whichever cause wins the forty
per cent neutral element. That element is contained
in the Middle West. The failure in dealing
with America has been the failure to see that we
needed facts, if we were to come to a decision. Our
only way of getting facts is through the representatives
whom we send over.</p>

<p>A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not
touched America except on the Atlantic Seaboard
lies in the exact number of men from the Eastern
Universities who have come across to help France,
as compared with the number from the Middle Western
institutions of learning. For instance, in the
American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98
men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth
8. These are Eastern institutions. From the
Middle West, with the exception of the University
of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally
one man from a college. The official report
up to the beginning of 1916 shows not a man from
what many consider the leading University of America,
the State University of Wisconsin, and less than
six from the entire Middle West. There is no need<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
of elaborating the point. The Middle West has
not been allowed to know the facts.</p>

<p>Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, the facts of the war, three men have come four
thousand miles to help France. One is Robert Toms,
General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one
is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne
Marshall, Editor of the <i>Cedar Rapids Gazette</i>. Each
man of the three is a successful worker, and gave
up his job. These three men are as significant as
the 98 college boys from Harvard.</p>

<p>What took place in that little Iowa group will
take place throughout the whole vast Middle Western
territory, when the Allies are willing to use the
only methods that avail in a modern democracy&mdash;namely,
the use of public opinion, publicity, and the
periodicals,&mdash;by granting facilities for information
to the representatives of a democracy when they come
desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met
in London and Paris when seeking information on
German atrocities, German frightfulness, German
methods:</p>

<p>"But surely your people know all that."</p>

<p>How can they know it? Our newspaper men
have rarely been permitted access to the facts by the
Allies. But to every phase of the war they have
been personally conducted by the German General
Staff. It has been as much as our liberty was worth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
and once or twice almost as much as our life was
worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally case, so
constant have been the obstacles placed in our way.
Much of the interesting war news, most of the arresting
interviews, have come from the German side.
The German General Staff has shown an understanding
of American psychology, a flexibility in handling
public opinion. The best "stories" have often
come out of Germany, given to American correspondents.
Their public men and their officers, including
Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An
American writer, going to Germany, has received
every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with
the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel
experience to any American journalist whose status
at home is equal to that of the public and professional
men, whose work he makes known and aids.
My own belief for the first twenty-two months of
work in obtaining information and passing it on to
my countrymen was that such effort in their behalf
was not desired by France and England, that their
officials and public men would be better pleased if
we ceased to annoy them. I was thoroughly discouraged
by the experience, so slight was the official
interest over here in having America know the
truth.</p>

<p>This foreign policy, which dickers with the State
Department, but neglects the people, is a survival<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
of the Tory tradition. One of the ablest interpreters
of that tradition calls such a foreign policy&mdash;"the
preference for negotiating with governments
rather than with peoples." But the foreign policy
of the United States is created by public opinion.
Negotiation with the State Department leaves the
people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neutral,
or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If
the Allied Governments had released facts to the
representatives of American public opinion, our foreign
policy of the last two years might have been
more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and
cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution
to the present struggle, because in part
we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual
material on which to work.</p>

<p>If a democracy, like England, is too proud to
present its case to a sister democracy, then at that
point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse
(and this is the excuse which officials give) that the
military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies
are more dominated by their military than Germany.
Of course the real reason is neither of these.
The real reason is that England and France are unaware
of the situation in our Middle West.</p>

<p>The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic,
"uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our
national policy. It has some of the best universities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
in America&mdash;places of democratic education,
reaching every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly
influential on State policy. Such Universities
as the State Universities of Wisconsin
and Michigan are closely related to the life of their
community, whereas Yale University could not
carry a local election in New Haven. What
the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was
of little weight at the Capitol House at Hartford,
Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor
at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks,
has become State law. The Middle West has put
into execution commission government in over 200
of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow
of municipal graft. It practices city-planning.
Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical
movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western
movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing,
uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston
Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories,
and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope
of our country, is to twist values. Both elements
are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical
compounding will come the America of the future.
The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock,
Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry
Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R.
Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate mentality.
But they are honest, and their mistakes are
the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it
is. The best of them have a vision for our country
that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their
political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman
expressed what they are trying to make of our people.
The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new
American.</p>

<p>A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained
in the second of Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles
in recent issues of the Revue de Paris. In that
he shows how distance and isolation have operated
to give our country, particularly the land-bound
heart of it, a feeling of security, a sense of being
unrelated to human events elsewhere on the planet.
He shows how the break of the immigrant with his
Old World has left his inner life emptied of the old
retrospects, cut off from the ancestral roots. That
vacancy the new man in the new world filled with
formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood.
He believed his experiment had cleared human
nature of its hates. He believed that ideals no
longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute
for the ancient warfare against the enemies
of the race. And all the time he was busy with his
new continent. Results, action, machinery, became
his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
religion of dealing very directly with life immediately
at hand, drove him yet the harder to tackle his
own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in another
town in another State: work, but work unrelated
to a national life&mdash;least of all was it related
to an international ideal.</p>

<p>And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it
has become a dim dream, and just now a very evil
dream. But of concern in its bickerings he feels
none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong
in the European War. He confuses the criminal and
the victim. He regards the Uhlan and the Gerbéviller
peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease
their quarrel, and live as we live?</p>

<p>That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching
analysis of our national soul at this crisis. We
have not understood the war. We are not going
to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it,
the future of the democratic experiment on this
earth is imperiled. The friends of France and England
lie out yonder on the prairies. The Allies have
much to teach them, and much to learn from them.
But to effect the exchange, England and France
must be willing to speak to them through the voices
they know&mdash;not alone through "Voix Americaines"
of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren
and President Lowell and Mr. Choate. England
must speak to them through <i>Collier's Weekly</i> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
the <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> and the newspaper syndicates.
There is only one way of reaching American
public opinion&mdash;the newspapers and periodicals.
No other agency avails. England must recognize
the function of the correspondent in the modern democracy.
Through him come the facts and impressions
on which the people make up its mind. He supplies
public opinion with the material out of which
to build policy. For our failure to understand the
war, France and England must share the blame with
America. We should have been ready enough to
alter our indifference and ignorance into understanding,
if only our writers had been aided to gain information.</p>

<p>But the Western Allies have little knowledge of
American public opinion, and small desire to win it.
They have sent some of our best men over in disgust
to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on such
a quest as I have been on, that of proving German
methods from first-hand witness, is regarded by the
Allies as partly a nuisance and partly misguided. If
any public criticism is ever made of my country's
attitude by the French or English, we, that have
sought to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come
forward and tell our experience:&mdash;namely, that it
has been most difficult to obtain facts for America,
as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public
opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of
reaching that public opinion.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">II</h3>

<p class="pcl2">SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR</p>

<p class="pn2">I found in Belgium the evidences of a German
spy system, carried out systematically through
a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities
committed on peasant non-combatants by order of
German officers. I saw German troops burn peasants'
houses. I saw dying men, women and a child,
who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as
they were being used as a screen for advancing troops.
What I had seen was reported to Lord Bryce by the
young man with me, and the testimony appears in
the Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses
burned house by house, and sprinkled among the
gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with
German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen.
Gute leute wohnen hier."</p>

<p>With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced
my observation, so that I should not overstate
or alter in making my report at home. Opposed
to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen
an uprising of the people of three nations, men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
hating war and therefore enlisted in this righteous
war to preserve values more precious than the individual
life. With a bitter and a costly experience,
I had won my conviction that there were two wars
on the western front.</p>

<p>When I returned from a year in the war zone,
five months of which was spent at the front, I looked
forward to finding a constructive program, hammered
out by the social work group, which would
interpret the struggle and give our nation a call to
action. I looked to social workers because I have
long believed and continue to believe that social
workers are the finest group of persons in our American
community. They seem to me in our vanguard
because of a sane intelligence, touched with ethical
purpose.</p>

<p>It was a disappointment to find them scattered
and negative, many of them anti-war, some of them
members of the Woman's Peace Party, some even
opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.</p>

<p>Few elements in the war were more perplexing
than the failure of our idealists to make their thinking
worthy of the sudden and immense crisis which
challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in
America was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible
stores of moral heroism in Europe.</p>

<p>The very experts who have prepared accurate reports
on social conditions are failing to inform themselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
of the facts of this war. I have found social
workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and
who are unaware of the German diaries and German
letters, specifying atrocities, citing "military necessity,"
and revealing a mental condition that makes
"continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility
as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery
about to brain a child.</p>

<p>I heard the head of a famous institution, a member
of the Woman's Peace Party, tell what promise
of the future it gave when a German woman crossed
the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a
Belgian woman. There is something unworthy in
citing that incident as answering the situation in
Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's
countrymen are holding the little nation in subjection,
and impoverishing it by severe taxation, after
betraying it for many years, and then burning its
homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant
murderer is not the same as a naughty child,
whom you cajole into a conference of good-will. A
pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate
the destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment
of a vast tragedy reveals that our people are
not living at the same deep level as the young men
I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend
the helpless and to preserve justice.</p>

<p>I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
Party to speak at Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting
of pacifists. When I told her I should speak of the
wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and
should state that the war must go on to a righteous
finish, she withdrew her invitation, saying she was
sorry the women couldn't listen to my stories. She
said that her experience as a lawyer had shown
her that punishment never accomplished anything,
and the driving out of the Germans by military
measures was punishment.</p>

<p>I have known social workers to aid girl strikers
in making their demands effective. Have the social
workers as a unit denounced the continuing injustice
to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian
government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue
taxation, of systematic steam-roller crushing, were
allowed to be filed in silence, so that these protests
that cover more than twelve months of outrage are
to-day unknown to the general public, and have not
availed to mitigate one item of the evil. One was
astonished by the sudden hush that had fallen on
the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate wrong-doing,
so alert in defense of exploited children and
women. Why the overnight change from sharp intolerance
of successful injustice?</p>

<p>I find that our philanthropists are held by a
theory. The theory is in two parts. One is that
war is the worst of all evils. The other is that war<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
can be willed out of existence. They believe that
another way out can be found, by some sort of
mutual understanding, continuous mediation, and
overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed
by a combatant, wrongs that date back many
years, so that out of long-continued treachery the
atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.</p>

<p>They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this
war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as
the struggle between the forces of decency and the
vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and
disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds
slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a
blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as
the distinction between chastity and licentiousness,
between military necessity and human rights, between
a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their
socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness
of sin.</p>

<p>I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous
practice by the army of invasion&mdash;the answer, that
war is always like that. But it is too easy to dismiss
all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the
easy generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of
pseudo-Marxian Socialists, of Anarchists, of vegetarians,
of Christian Scientists, and of many other sincere
persons who overstate, who like to focus what
is complex into a one-word statement. "Do away<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
with drink at one stroke, and you have abolished
unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad."
"Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating
leads to murder."</p>

<p>Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability
of prostitution, with its "lost" girls, had to
give way to the presence of facts on the commercialized
traffic, so the pacifist position on the present
war is untenable when confronted with the honeycombing
of Belgium with spies through long years
and with the state of mind and the resultant acts
of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and
diaries. There is an incurable romanticism in the
literature of the pacifists that is offensive to men in
a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from
a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are
among the best-known social workers in the United
States:</p>

<p>"It (war) has found a world of friends and
neighbors, and substituted a world of outlanders and
aliens and enemies."</p>

<p>This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation
in Belgium, when the country was undermined
with German clerks, superintendents, commercial
travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information
and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up
peasants for spies and building villas with concrete
foundations for big guns. "Friends and neighbors"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to
German officers riding into towns as conquerors
where for years they had been entertained as social
guests.</p>

<p>"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness
trails at the heels of all armies."</p>

<p>That description is just when applied to the German
army of invasion which practiced widespread
murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate, and
therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian,
French and British armies. I have lived and worked
as a member of the allied army for five months. It
does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high
motive with honorable methods. It is unfortunate
to overlay the profound reality of the war with a
mental concept.</p>

<p>To summarize:</p>

<p>1. The social workers have failed to apply their
high moral earnestness to this war. They have not
accepted the war as a revelation of the human spirit
in one of its supreme struggles between right and
wrong. As the result their words have offended, as
light words will always hurt men who are sacrificing
property and ease and life itself for the sake of
an ideal.</p>

<p>2. They have neglected to inform themselves of
the facts of the war. As the result, they have made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
no positive program and taken no constructive
action.</p>

<p>Let them deal with such facts as the German villa
in the Belgian town where we lived&mdash;a villa that
was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation
for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to
face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a
bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old
girl with her back cut open to the backbone
by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our
social workers shall hold their peace in the presence
of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice
with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar
on hyssop that explains the deed on the cross.
Is it too much to ask them to abstain from their
peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?</p>

<p>We should listen to these leaders more readily if
we had seen them risking their lives like the boys of
the American Ambulance. To weigh sacrifice in
detached phrases calls for an equal measure of
service and a shared peril. If a few of our social
workers had been wounded under fire, we should feel
that their companions in the hazard were speaking
from some such depth of experience as the peasants
of Lorraine. But our idealists have not spoken from
this initiation. Miss Addams is still puzzled and
grieved by the response her words about drugged
soldiers called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
his phrase of "too proud to fight" gave little pleasure
to the mothers of dead boys.</p>

<p>With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and
build us a program we can follow, a program of
action that preserves the immutable distinction between
right and wrong, that lends strength to those
dying for the right. With such frank taking of
sides, let me give two instances where definite results
could be achieved. They are both highly supposititious
cases. But they will serve.</p>

<p>Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian
government, under cover of the war, is harrying and
suppressing the Russian revolutionary centers in
Paris and London&mdash;the French and British governments
remaining complacent to the act because of
the present war alliance. If we had a staunch public
opinion, resulting in a strong government policy at
Washington which had decided there was a right
and a wrong on the western front, and which had
thrown the immense weight of its moral support to
the defenders of Belgium, such a government would
be in a position to make a friendly suggestion to
France and England that "live and let live" for
Russian liberalism would be appreciated.</p>

<p>Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose
that, under cover of the war, Japan was tightening
her hold on China, and gradually turning China into
a subject state. If our government were on relations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
of powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be
conceivable that England could be asked to hint
gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo was undesirable.
The English fleet is a fact in the world
of reality.</p>

<p>What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that
will strengthen the tendencies toward world peace,
based on justice. By our indecision and failure to
take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to
the world. It is weak thinking that advocates a
policy and is too timid to use the instruments that
will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium
and France and a world peace, we need statesmen
who are effective in attaining these things. We need
men who can suggest a diplomatic gain in the cause
of justice that the nations will agree on, because of
a government at Washington that carries weight
with the diplomats who will bring it to pass. We
want to see the friendship of France and England
and Canada regained. We are letting all these
things slip. There will come a day when it is too
late to do anything except develop regrets. Why
should not social workers declare themselves in
time?</p>

<p>At a season of national gravity, when the future
for fifty years may be determined inside of four
years, we want those men for our leaders who can
work results in the world of time and space, instead<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
of dream liberations in the untroubled realms of
moral consciousness.</p>

<p>Before we have an all-embracing internationalism,
we must have a series of informal alliances, where
the forces of modern democracy tend to range on
one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range
on the other side. There will be strange mixtures,
of course, on both sides, even as there are in the
present war. But the grand total will lean ever more
and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail
in spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if
we are ranged with the "great allies&mdash;exultations,
agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable will to
freedom.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">III</h3>

<p class="pcl2">FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION</p>

<p class="pn2">The <i>Chicago Evening American</i> places on its
editorial page on August 10, 1916, a letter
to which it gives editorial approval. The
letter says: "There are thousands of German-born
citizens, in fact the writer knows of no others, whose
very German origin has made them immune against
such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment and
language, which count for so much in their effect
upon a great percentage of our population. These
very men continue to be loyal Americans. If we
are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the
Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven
Putnams?"</p>

<p>The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst
finds this statement of sufficient importance to
spread out before five or six million readers of his
newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices
the belief of an ever-increasing element in our population.
Our ancestry, literature, sentiment and language
do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George
Haven Putnam. Those names do go straight back
in our national history to the original stock, which
shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their
ancestry, English and American literature, their
racial sentiment, and the English language, which
made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger believes
them to be disloyal to the New America. I
trust he and his numerous clan will define what sort
of country he wants to make of us, what ancestry
he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will
introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what
language. I hope his group will come out into the
open with their program of action. For they have
one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation
is the resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature,
its language and its ideas about life. He means
that our civilization shall go his way, not the way
of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever
with the vague internationalism of many of
our social workers because under that fog he and
his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate
the influence of such thought as his. It is
growing stronger every day. It is sharply defined,
forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.</p>

<p>When one comes among us, sharing the privileges
of citizenship, to tell us that he is "immune" from
the claims of our great ancestry, and the noble sentiment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
of our past, he is striking at the heart of our
nationality. He is vastly more significant than his
own alien voice. For his claims are being advocated
by editors and politicians. His ideas are sweeping
our communities. Our nation does not live because
it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts
all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought
at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his
Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and
in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for
ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have substituted
pacifism and commercialism for the old
struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the
old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough
citizens become "immune" from the influences that
have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity,
and become the sort of nation which these enemies
would have us be. But these considerations do not
bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders supply
the very intellectual defense for this treason. They
supply it in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.</p>

<p>Let us without delay select our position and hold
it. Let us stand firmly on our traditions and history.
We have no wish to be "immune" from our language
and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We
need a fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let
us reinforce the policy of Franklin which recognized<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
the desirability of friendship with France and England.
Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who
paused in the stress of a great war to strike hands
with the workers of England, because they and he
were at one in the love of liberty.</p>

<p>No single factor of race and climate, language and
culture is determinative on that central power of
cohesion which gathers a multitude of persons&mdash;"infinitely
repellent particles"&mdash;into an organism
which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition
from a collective experience. But it does not follow
that some one of these factors cannot be so strengthened
as to disturb the balance. If the geographical
territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive
waves of immigration can drown out the
sharply defined character of a people. This is now
taking place in the United States. The proof is our
reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed
differences of "opinion." It is that we were untrue
to our tradition.</p>

<p>It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by
asking: Is there any such thing as a pure race? Are
not the greatest nations of mixed blood? Do you
think race and nation are the same thing? It is
true that no one thing is determinative in the making
of a nation. Race and language, culture and
government, border line and climate, religion and
economic system, are each an influence, and, together,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
they shape the people in face and habit till
they walk the earth with a new stride and look out
on the world with different eyes from those of any
people elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a
nation is that it happened. A certain group of people
developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and
became an organism, fought its way to independence,
and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tradition
of common experience and sacrifice in victory
and defeat is the cord that binds the generations.
It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought
and governs every action. An English historian,
Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this aptly. He
writes:</p>

<p>"The most potent of all nation-molding factors,
the one indispensable factor which must be present
whatever else be lacking, is the possession of a common
tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and
victories won in common, expressed in song and
legend, in the dear names of great personalities that
seem to embody in themselves the character and
ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred
places wherein the national memory is enshrined."</p>

<p>Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:</p>

<p>"Certain people like the arrangements under
which they live. They prefer to die rather than to
let other people come in and change things. Even
if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
they would rather die with her than live without
her. That is nationality. When the call came, the
citizens of the nations answered with what was deep
in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act
as 'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell
away. If pacifists of the ruling class, like Miss
Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would analyze
what is really in their mind, they would find that
what they dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically
and unanimously agreeing to do something.
They distrust democracy on the march. It
is their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just
now, it is the Kaiser whom the democracies are
marching out to find, and the people are not behaving
as the pacifists would like to have them."</p>

<p>This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early
and now obsolete idea, is a recent and a noble idea.
What the common life of the home is to the father
and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth
and fame, that is the life of a nation to its
citizens. In the blood of sacrifice it is welded together.
Mixed races cannot dilute it, a doctored
border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot
quench it, an oppressive government cannot enslave
it. Only one thing can destroy it and that is when
it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When
it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once
aroused it, then it is time for those who love it to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
look to the influences at work that have made it
forgetful. The denial of that common experience,
the refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness
to continue the noble and costly policy&mdash;these
mark the decline of a nation. These are the
signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our
immense democracy to-day. The call that came to
us from France was the same voice that we once
knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By
our failure to respond we show that we have allowed
something alien to enter our inmost life. In our
equal failure to safeguard our own helpless non-combatants,
we reveal that the old compulsions no
longer move us. By the cry that went up from half
our nation&mdash;not of outrage at stricken France, not
of anger for slaughtered children of our own race&mdash;but
that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of
war," we betray that we have lost our hardihood.
We have been overwhelmed by numbers. We have
suffered such a heaping up of new elements that
we have no time to teach our tradition, no will to
continue our race experience.</p>

<p>I was talking of this recently with a profound
student of race psychology, Havelock Ellis. He
said that the determining factor is the strength of
the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is
that civilization potent enough to shape the new
contributions? The French have always had their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but so
distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it
absorbs the invasion. He said that the question to
decide is whether the cells are sufficiently organized
and determinate to receive alien matter.</p>

<p>Surely no student of our social conditions can
say that our tendencies are clear, our collective will
formed, our national mind unified. We keep adding
chemical elements without coming to a solution.
England accepted a few invasions and conquests and
then had to stiffen up and work the material into a
mold. France was overrun every half century, but
finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders,
and proceeded to the work of coalescing her
parts. Our present stream of tendency, and our
present grip on our own historic tradition, are not
strong enough to admit of immense new European
contributions. We are losing the sense of what we
mean as a people.</p>

<p>In dealing with any pet assumption of modern
thought, one must guard against misunderstanding.
The opponent calls one reactionary and then one's
day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain
statement over into an academic discussion, and the
whole matter at issue is befogged. I am not attacking
the desirability of a true internationalism. I
am saying that our conception of it is all wrong,
and that our method of attaining it is futile. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
greater day of peace between nations will not come
by weakening the ties of nationality. It will come
through a deepening of the sense of citizenship in
each nation. But much of our recent thinking has
tended to weaken the claims of nationality. It is
against this that we must set ourselves. We want
internationalism, but the internationalism we mean
is an understanding and a good will between distinct
nations, not an internationalism which is the
loss of a rich variety, and the blurring of distinctions.
Nations will not disappear. They will
heighten their individuality under the process of
time. The hope of peace lies in the appreciation
of those differences. We are not to reach internationalism
by ceasing to become nations, as our
present-day theorists advocate. There lies the
service of the war. It has taught us that the Frenchman
and the German will refuse to merge their ideas
about life and duty in a denationalized world league.
Each wants his plot of ground, his own patch of
sky, his own kind of a world, with those men for
neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman
does not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational
training, and a governmental régime where
efficiency and organization are the aims of the corporate
life. The German does not wish his world
to contain waste and laziness and dilettantism. A
hundred years ago the world put up a sign in front<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these
premises." To-day the grass of France is red where
the marauder crossed the line. I have seen the soul
of France at tension for two years, and I know that
her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.</p>

<p>It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of
Germany that has spread fire and blood across
Europe. But it is easier yet to give the final answer.
There are diseases of individuality&mdash;the
"artistic temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality&mdash;which
require chastening. But because certain
individuals have to be restrained, we do not
crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free
play of development. There are diseases of nationalism&mdash;the
lust for power and territory, the desire
to impose the will, the language and the customs,
on smaller units. When a nation hands over its
foreign policy and its personal morality to the state,
which is only the machinery of a nation, and when
the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists
instead of by the collective will of the nation,
turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe.
Prussian history from the vivisection of Poland,
through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing of
Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no
guarantees of a common aim for human welfare.
But it is because nationality has been betrayed, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer,
murdering women, is no reason for abolishing
Habeas Corpus. The misbehavior of Germany is no
excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.</p>

<p>At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of
reality, internationalism crumbles&mdash;the internationalism,
I mean, that disbelieves in national quality,
and disregards essential differences. Groups of
"workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists,
dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the
terrible method by which nations have created themselves,
and by which they have defended their being.
Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom
of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism
springs from the belief that nations do not matter,
that "humanity is the great idea." "Why should
nations go to war, since the principle of nationality
is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital.
"An effective internationalism can only be rendered
possible by a triumphant nationalism." The present
war is a fight by the little nations of Belgium and
Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for the
preservation of their nationality. We have failed
to understand "the causes and objects" of this war,
because we have weakened our own sense of nationality.
Our tradition has been drowned out by new
voices. Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
and, later, to Garibaldi and Kossuth. To-day, only
those understand the fight of the nations who have
been reared in our American tradition. Richard
Neville Hall went from Dartmouth College and
died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France. A friend
writes of him: "He was saying things about the
France of Washington and Lafayette, how he had
been brought up on the tradition of that historic
friendship."</p>

<p>I have found something inspiring in the action of
these young Americans in France. Perhaps out of
them will come the leadership which our country
lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life,
and, as is the way of elders, reveals moderation of
mind and a good-natured acceptance of conditions.
Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great generation
of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is
dead, and the next generation of George Haven Putnam
and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There
is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must
strive where we have failed. They must fight where
we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these
youth who love France because they love America.
In them our tradition is continued. Through them
the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our people.
May they remember their dead, their boy-comrades
who fell in service at the front. They
have shared in the greatness of France. May they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
come home to us very sure of their possession. We
have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality,
and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance.
They bring us moral leadership.</p>

<p>Now, all this will have no appeal to the many
nationalities among us. The American tradition
(except for a few personalities and ideas) is meaningless
to them. I have dealt with their needs in
the preceding chapter. I am writing these next
chapters for the inheritors of our American tradition,
who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who,
though of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness
that fought our wars and created our civilization,
are now too tired, some of them, to do anything
but exploit the other nationalities which have
tumbled in on the later waves of immigration.
Others of us are simply swamped by the multitude
and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're
all alike. They will all be Americans to-morrow."
If these tame descendants of America will be true to
their own tradition, they will learn to be merciful
to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions.
It is precisely because we "old-timers" have
been forgetting our tradition that we have been
blind to the rich inherited life of those that come
to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual
values, we shall welcome the tradition and the hope
which the humblest Jew has brought us.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">IV</h3>

<p class="pcl2">COSMOPOLITANISM</p>

<p class="pn2">Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to
deny the instinct of nationality. It works in
three ways with us. It seeks to impose an
English culture on our mixed races; it seeks to create
an American type at one stroke; it preaches an
undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national
cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which
will be composed of individuals pretty much alike,
with the same aspirations. The differences of inheritance
will be thrown away like the bundle from
the pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated
with this "new religion of humanity," which is
going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and
the Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the
infinite variety of human nature.</p>

<p>One of its analysts says that "internally it is productive
of many evil vapors which issue from the
lips in the form of catchwords." He traces it to
ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage
when "the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed
of his parentage and nationality, is intensely miserable."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
He is the man without roots, who has lost
his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs,
the affectionate attachments, out of which social life
develops.</p>

<p>For the last fifty years certain Germans have
preached a boundless cosmopolitanism, while the
German people have practiced an intense ingrowing
racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who
preached it were themselves rebels against the German
system. Karl Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped
to found an international movement in protest
against the form of nationality within which they
lived. But the direction and violence of their rebound
were governed by the hard surface from
which they recoiled. The personality of these men
and the tonic value of their thought have been of
inestimable benefit to our age. In their main position
they were much nearer the truth than their
opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with
is their theory of cosmopolitanism. And here a
grievous personal experience in a cramping environment
misled these early radicals, and they incorporated
in their program the anti-national item
which did not belong. Because their analysis of
conditions was in the main so searching, so just,
their thought has continued to exercise a profound
influence, and the animating ideas in their philosophy
of history and in their analysis of industrialism
were imported to England and to America. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
stern and unbending leaders of socialist thought
have reproduced their masters' voice with an almost
unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed
to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have
powerfully affected groups of modern thinkers. I
doubt if any single idea has traveled further and
more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality
is a mistaken thing, and that a something
wider and vaguer is the goal of the future. The
Latin races have sometimes thought they believed
it, but they quickly corrected their thinking under
the impact of event.</p>

<p>Our present school of softened, daintily stepping
radicals have whittled away some of the original
doctrine of the class war. The materialistic theory
of history, surplus value and the proletarian division
have had to yield in part to the facts of the
case. But the modern reformers cling to that creation
of German and Russian thought, a cosmopolitan
world, the merging of races and nations into a
universal undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually
disappearing boundaries. We find it in our intelligent
skilled social workers. I mention them in
no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they
and their group are a noble influence in our country,
and because their blindness and failure in this crisis
are a grief to me and to thousands of other persons
who have looked to them for leadership. We find
this idea of cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
who are read in America, like Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand
Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine
has misled our social workers, our socialists, our
radicals in social reform, our feminists&mdash;almost
every element in our social movement. Our American
radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism,
and its child, pacifism. At no point has
"modern" thought exercised a profounder effect than
on our social movement.</p>

<p>We need the check here of the Latin mentality.
The clear Latin mind refuses to be misled by
idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not permit of
analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians
have recognized that the contribution of nationality
is vital to the future. Their conception of
social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini
and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane
evolution. Mazzini says:</p>


<p class="pbq p1">"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate
towards the fulfillment of the general mission of
Humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Nationality
is sacred.</p>

<p class="pbq">"In laboring, according to true principles, for our
country we are laboring for humanity. Our country is
the fulcrum of the lever which we have to wield for the
common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we run the
risk of becoming useless both to our country and to
humanity.</p>

<p class="pbq">"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
material conditions without first solving the national
question. You cannot do it.</p>

<p class="pbq">"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true
country is the idea to which it gives birth." It is "A
common principle, recognized, accepted, and developed
by all."</p>

<p class="p1">His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a
man serve all humanity whom he has not seen, if
he does not serve his nation whom he has seen?
"The individual is too insignificant, and humanity
too vast." The stuff of nationality is the sacrifice
rendered by the people to realize their aspirations&mdash;"By
the memory of our former greatness, by the
sufferings of the millions." The limits of nationality
will tend toward natural boundaries&mdash;the division
of</p>

<p class="pbqn p1">"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face
of the earth, thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil
governments have disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless
you may still trace it, distinctly marked out&mdash;as
least as far as Europe is concerned&mdash;by the course of the
great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and
other geographical conditions. They (the Governments)
have disfigured it so far that, if we except England and
France, there is not perhaps a single country whose present
boundaries correspond to that design. Natural divisions,
and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the peoples,
will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned
by evil governments. The map of Europe will
be redrawn.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>

<p class="pbq">"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power
and the affection of many millions, all speaking the same
language, gifted with the same tendencies, and educated
by the same historical tradition, hope, even by your own
single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my
brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home,
the house that God has given us, placing therein a numerous
family that loves us, and whom we love; a family
with whom we sympathize more readily, and whom we
understand more quickly than we do others; and which,
from its being centered round a given spot, and from the
homogeneous nature of its elements, is adapted to a special
branch of activity."</p>

<p class="p1">The method of strengthening the sense of nationality
is by education. "Every citizen should receive
in the national schools a moral education, a
course of nationality&mdash;comprising a summary view
of the progress of humanity and of the history of
his own country; a popular exposition of the principles
directing the legislation of that country."</p>

<p>That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is
proved by the response of the nations in this war.
In the seaside town of Hove, Sussex, where I live,
his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out
from the public library thirty-eight times in the last
four years.</p>

<p>There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality
and inviting a return to the anarchy of war, and
this is the difficulty one has in pointing out the
psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly
drawn by Graham Wallas.</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We
must not swallow more than we can digest") or by Mazzini,
played a great and invaluable part in the development
of the political consciousness of Europe during the nineteenth
century. But it is becoming less and less possible
to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth
century."</p>

<p class="p1">Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated
the simplicity of the question. National types
are not divided into homogeneous units "by the
course of the great rivers and the direction of the
high mountains," but are intermingled from village
to village. Do the Balkan mountains represent the
purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which
nationality, Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as
Wallas sees it, for recurring war between nations
is an international science of eugenics which might
"indicate that the various races should aim, not at
exterminating each other, but at encouraging the
improvement by each of its own racial type." In
this way the emotion of political solidarity can be
slowly made possible between individuals of consciously
different national types. A political emotion,
if it is to do away with war, cannot be created
by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must
be based, "not upon a belief in the likeness of individual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
human beings, but upon the recognition of
their unlikeness." We in America have tried to
deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers
Americans. We have sought to escape our
problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite dissimilarity
of the individuals in our population. The
only direction for hope to travel is that the improvement
of the whole species will come rather
from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition
of the value of racial as well as individual
variety than from mere fighting." This is the true
internationalism, and it differs as widely from a cosmopolitan
blur which "makes" Americans as from
the bitter enforced nationality of blood and iron,
or spiritual imperial arrogance.</p>

<p>I have found a perfectly clear statement of what
lies loosely in the mind of modern Americans of
mixed race and intense pre-occupation with the game
of getting on. I have found it in the editorial
columns of a Middle Western paper. The Cedar
Rapids <i>Gazette</i> says:</p>


<p class="pc1 lmid">EXTINCT AMERICANS</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"The authorities who fear that the American race will
'die out' may not have noticed that all the ingredients of
that race are still being born in Europe at about the usual
rate. And, at the worst, if one American race dies out there
will be another race as good or better in America to take its
place.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>

<p class="pbq">"Several American races have already died to the extent
that the members are no longer to be separately identified
and their distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the
county. Among the vanished races are the Pilgrims, the
Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers,
the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey
Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and
southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern
Cracker, the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom
in his time and place was the representative of a small
and distinct nationality.</p>

<p class="pbq">"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use
an Irish epigram, change is the only established characteristic
of the American. The American in whose veins flows
the blood of half a dozen European races, whose grandparents
may have been born in four states, his parents in
two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other
than his own and whose four children may be married to
men and women of four nationalities, is not worrying
greatly regarding the exact composition of the 'American
race.' Individually he has on hand a rather complete
stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the idea that
he is doing his best to help establish a representative order
of humanity.</p>

<p class="pbq">"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race.
The world and humanity are the big ideas. The race
that deserves to die will pass. The race that fights for
its existence, whose members have pride in their kind,
will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle.
A race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind
will not be less numerous and that which is of value
will survive. Not only the end of the race, but the end
of the world is in sight for those who leave no children
to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span></p>

<p class="p1">The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect.
It gives no foundation for ethics. It gives
no sanction for religion. It gives no soil and roots
for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were
grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical
units in a political and industrial system.
They go to their lathe in the factory, attend a
motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for
a few years to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a
dark annihilating quality. And it is a habit of mind
that is growing among us. It is the inevitable reflex
of our bright surface optimism, which drowns
thought in speed and change, and believes that
activity under scientific direction can satisfy the
human spirit.</p>

<p>Actually the stock we came of matters very much&mdash;for
ourselves. Being dead, it yet lives, and we
are the channel of its ongoing. Only by using the
inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life
of the mind in art and ethics and religion. "Huckleberry
Finn," "The Virginian," "Still Jim," "The
Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess
a permanence of appeal precisely because they are
rooted in the sense of nationality, and are a natural
growth out of a tradition. Each story describes a
vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed
by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time
of an ebbing tide. Each has the unconscious pathos
of a last stand. But not one of these books would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it
had dealt with a life-history removed from its long
inheritance. It is only so that the nations among
us will in time produce their literature. It will
not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It
will rather be by rendering the individual (whether
Jew or Bohemian) in all the loneliness of crowds
and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts and
"notions" and desires that have come down to him
from his very ancient past, and his little ripple of
activity in the endless stream of descent. Montague
Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie
Hurst are aware of this necessity of relating their
art to the instinctive life of their character, and so
under the brightest crackle of their American smartness
something goes echoing back to a day that is
older than the Coney Island and Broadway and
Atlantic City of their setting. Joseph Stella in his
drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring
his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers
are better than many reports of Mr. Gary on how
it is with America at the Pittsburgh blast furnaces.</p>

<p>But not only is the sense of nationality needed
for the finer activities of the mind. There is need
of it in "practical" politics. It is discouraging that
our American social movement has been captured by
cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies
with radical changes in the world of environment.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
Living conditions are going to be improved. A
greater measure of equality will be achieved in our
own time. But how is the social change inside the
country to be related to other States? What shall
be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism
of our radical group is a poor guide for
action. It is the vice of liberals that they don't
harness their ideas to facts. The result is that at
time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of
Tory reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance
in England, where the liberals shirked the war during
the premonitory years. As the result, the good
old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush,
simply because on foreign policy they had a program
which at least dealt with the facts of the case.</p>

<p>Until liberals are willing to think through on
foreign policy, studying European and world history,
defining the meaning of the State and visualizing
its relationship to other States, we shall have
a skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution
to the problems of nation-States, submerged
nationalities, backward races, exploitable territory
and international straits, canals and ports of call.
That is unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind
is brought to bear on foreign policy, we shall continue
to have that policy manipulated by little
groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques
present a program of action based on fact-study,
which wins public opinion, because the instinct of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
the people trusts men who know what they want
more than it trusts a bland benevolence without
direction of aim.</p>

<p>Our social workers and other liberals would not
think of advocating a policy of "Christianizing" the
employer as the sole remedy for social maladjustment.
But this is precisely the sort of thing they
advocate in inter-State relationship. They seek to
work by spiritual conversion, turning the hearts of
the rulers to righteousness and softening the mood
of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the
outer world will continue to pour into our tight
little domestic compartments of nicely-adjusted
social relationships.</p>

<p>In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are
of one piece, and the same realism must be applied
to questions like the neutrality of Belgium and the
internationalization of Constantinople which we
apply to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency
are willing to devote the same hard study
to the map which they put on social reform and
internal development, the world will continue to
turn to its only experts on foreign policy, who unfortunately
are largely imperialists.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">V</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE HYPHENATES</p>


<p class="pn2">A famous American president once said to
a distinguished ambassador:</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants
of all nationalities, but they rapidly turn into
Americans and make one nation."</p>

<p class="p1">And the ambassador thought within himself and
later said to me:</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who
have lived and suffered together. There is a bell in a
great church, which if you lightly flick it with the fingernail,
gives out one single tone which goes echoing through
the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end, you can hear
that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it responds
as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke
of crisis it answers with one tone."</p>

<p class="p1">No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of
nationalities, and some day we shall be a Commonwealth
if we deal wisely with these nations who
dwell among us.</p>

<p>We cannot "make" Americans. We can make
"imitation Americans," as Alfred Zimmern calls
them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and intellectually
acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
imaginative Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes
a flashily dressed Padrone. The poetic, religious
Irishman, whose instinct has been communal
for many centuries, becomes a district leader. These
individuals have come to us with rare and charming
gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead of
frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have
applied a hasty conversion which denied their life
of inherited impulses and desires. Instead of bringing
out the good in them, we have Americanized
them into commercial types.</p>

<p>Where does our future lie?</p>

<p>It lies in developing and making use of men like
the great Jews, Abram Jacobi, Charles Proteus
Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to their
own nature, and who respond to the American environment.
These men are not amateur Gentiles.
They are Jews and they are Americans. It lies in
Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in
Italy which are liberal, and who further every effort
in America to create free institutions. We need
the help of every man of them to save our country
from commercialism.</p>

<p>Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of
living scholars, of German descent, to give me his
views on the future in America. He wrote:</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"What is America to do? I should answer: preach
hyphenation. Make the common man realize that nationality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
is a spiritual force which has in essence as little to do
with government as religion has. When government interferes
with freedom of worship, religion comes into politics
and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same
is true of nationality&mdash;in Ireland, in East Europe and
elsewhere. But that is only an accident. To allow governments
to exploit for political ends the huge inarticulate
emotional driving force of either religion or nationality is
to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of religion in the
Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the
present war."</p>

<p class="p1">Alfred Zimmern says:</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"It seems strange that there should be Americans who
still hold firmly to the old-fashioned view of what I can
only call instantaneous conversion, of the desirability and
possibility of the immigrant shedding his whole ancestral
inheritance and flinging himself into the melting-pot of
transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white American
soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now
the only way to teach immigrants how to become good
Americans, that is to say, how to be good in America, is
by appealing to that in them which made them good in
Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever they came
from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage
for this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality
is more than a creed or a doctrine or a code of
conduct, it is an instinctive attachment."</p>

<p class="p1">The road to sound Internationalism, to an understanding
between States, lies "through Nationalism,
not through leveling men down to a gray, indistinctive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the
best elements in the corporate inheritance of each
nation." True democracy wishes to use the best
that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to
melt away their difference into one economic man.
The American passion for uniformity, for creating
a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated type, is merely
the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic
desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ireland,
to modernize the Hindu. It is the wish to
make man in our own image. It is the last bad
relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the
Inquisition. It is only subtler and more dangerous,
because persecution called out hidden powers of resistance,
but triumphant Commercialism, as engineered
by our industrial oligarchy, calls out imitation.</p>

<p>I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis
Island by Julian Dimock. They are subjects chosen
almost at random from the stream of newcomers on
the morning of ship-arrival. There is often something
very touching in the expression of these faces:
a trust in the goodness of life, in the goodness of
human nature. Man and woman and youth, they
seem to carry something that has been won by long
generations of rooted life and passed on to them
for safe-keeping. And suddenly at the landing in
the new world the tradition is touched to a dream
of hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
those same newcomers as they are disgorged from
our city factories. How soon the light goes out of
their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its
own inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty
and pert replaces that unconscious dignity. Something
tired from unceasing surface stimulus takes
possession of what was fresh and innocent in open
peasant life and the friendly intercourse of neighbors.</p>

<p>These races, in their weakness and poverty, have
been unable to swing back to their own deep center
of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful if they
will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The
Jewish nation is the only dispersion among us which
has gathered its will and recovered its self-consciousness
enough to give us any promising movement.
They are slowly recognizing what is being done to
their young. They begin to see that their nation
is losing its one priceless jewel, the possession of
spiritual insight. In the movement which is spreading
through the day schools for teaching young
Jews the great ethical tradition of their people, in
their educational alliances, in the Menorah Association,
in the Zionist Movement, in the writings
of Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing
the first glimmerings of statesmanship and making
the first application of intelligence to our commercialized
cosmopolitan materialistic country which
we have had since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
Protestant civilization. May their grip on their
nationality never grow less. May the clear program
which they have constructed against the drift
and rush of our careless life seize the imagination
of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no
otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis
for our civilization.</p>

<p>Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality
leads to such clear statement as Randolph Bourne
has given us in <i>The Menorah Journal</i> for December,
1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting
pot" idea, which attempts to knead the whole population
into an undefined colorless mass, labeled
American. In place of that undesirable and absurd
consummation, he offers a coöperation of cultures.
"America has become a vast reservoir of dispersions,"
and Coöperative Americanism will meet "the
demands of the foreign immigré who wishes freedom
to preserve his heritage at the same time that
he coöperates loyally with all other nationals in the
building up of America."</p>

<p>What is Coöperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne
answers that it is "an ideal of a freely mingling
society of peoples of very different racial and cultural
antecedents, with a common political allegiance
and common social ends, but with free and
distinctive cultural allegiances which may be
placed anywhere in the world that they like. If
the Jews have been the first international race, I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
look to America to be the first international
nation."</p>

<p>Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding
a Jew or a Greek or an Irishman. May I go a step
further, and say that the same freedom to express
the tradition within them must be extended to the
Americans of the old stock, even those who hold a
grateful love for France (some of them recently
have died for that), even those who love England
for her long struggle for political liberty. I cannot
feel that Agnes Repplier, Lyman Abbott, George
Haven Putnam and the American Rights League
are deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn
which Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman have
applied to them. The American Rights League is
entitled to the same open field and the same respect
which the Menorah Society should receive. Why
does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash the
other? I trust he will welcome both. What I think
Bourne, James Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and
Max Eastman have failed to see is that the old
American stock (of diverse race but common tradition)
had a right to respond vigorously to this war,
where their inheritance of social, legal and political
ideas were battling with hostile ideas. Somewhere,
at some point, the new American tradition must
plant itself. In some issue it must take root. We
of the old stock sought to make this war the issue.
We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must
collide into harmony. I can make clear the difficulty
one has in reaffirming the old American idea by quoting
from the letter of an American editor in response
to what the chapters of this book are stating:</p>

<p class="pbq p1">"It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of
the Old, the vanishing, America. Do you really believe
that Old America should be raised from the dead:&mdash;The
America of convenient transcendentalism where religion
allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit to material
aggrandizement? If you blame America for Christian
Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson
and Whitman were our teachers. If you blame America
for not taking part in the European war, you must remember
that Washington told us to keep out of 'entangling
alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly material,
out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its importation
of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always
lies behind us, and nothing is commoner than finding
Paradise in the past."</p>

<p class="p1">What I have tried to say is that the tradition of
a nation is not a dead thing, locked in the past. It
is a living thing, operating on the present. A tradition
is a shared experience, governing present life.
The State needs to cohere and find itself and establish
a cultural consciousness, blended from manifold
contributions. It is destructive to have new swirling
elements ceaselessly driving through the mass.
So I have protested against the too ready and ruthless
discarding of the cultural consciousness bequeathed
us by the older American stock. While the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again
be in sole command, I believe that they should be
more potent than they are to-day. I believe that
politically they have a living value for us, and that
we persistently underestimate the English contribution
to freedom and justice. I deny that my desire
that these ideas shall prevail is an attempt to locate
the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky
past. It is, instead, the wish to see our country
appropriate a particular political contribution from
the English stock, exactly as it needs to appropriate
certain social values from the Italians and the
Greeks, and many very definite spiritual ideas from
the culture of the Jews.</p>

<p>What is the solution of these diverse elements?
What blend can we obtain from a score of mixtures?
How fashion a civilization that shall absorb and
assimilate those blood-strains and traditional beliefs?
I think the one clear answer lies in the creation
of free institutions, which shall answer a common
need, and which shall violate the instinctive
life and traditions of none. Those free institutions
will be the product of education, legislation, Coöperation,
Trades Unionism and Syndicalism,
municipal and State ownership, and widely spread
private ownership and enterprise. The organized
State under democratic control will be the thing
aimed at. But these free institutions must gradually
extend over areas far wider than vocational
training and economic well-being. They should
seek to offer free expression to the fully-functioning
mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this
way they will give a good life. We have the
shadowy beginnings of such institutions in the public
school and library. But we have nothing like
the Danish or English coöperative movement. Our
institution of property affords us nothing like true
peasant proprietorship of Ireland.</p>

<p>No apter illustration of how little we have tackled
our job can be found than in American Socialism.
There is no American Socialism. Orthodox socialism
in America is dead doctrine, brought across by
German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on
their peculiar environment, and then exhumed in a
new country. Meanwhile a great vital movement
toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in
Trades Unionism, Coöperation and municipal and
State ownership. Our socialist locals repeat formulæ
which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kautsky,
Vandervelde and Hervé outgrew a generation
ago. It is here I hold that the old American stock
can do a service in interpreting American conditions
to our recent arrivals.</p>

<p>But if we continue to leave the door open we
shall continue to be swamped, and we shall employ
our little hasty ready-made devices for turning peasants
with a thousand years of inherited characteristics
into citizens. We shatter them against our environment,
and then are astonished that their
thwarted instincts, trained to another world, revenge
themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices,
and murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists
like Ross warn us in vain.</p>

<p>These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the
economic basis on which alone free institutions can
be reared. People, to whom we cannot afford to
pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to
arrange a living wage, will not help us in creating
free institutions. Instead, they are manipulated by
the industrial oligarchy into a force for breaking
down the standard of living of all workers. A resolute
restriction of immigration is not a discrimination
against any race. It is the first step toward
unlocking the capacities of the races already among
us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is
economic. It rests in the fact that our wage-scale
and standard of living are being shot to pieces by
the newcomers. As the result our existent institutions
are not developing in liberal directions, and
we are failing to create new free institutions. It
requires a somewhat stable population, and a fairly
uniform economic basis to create a Coöperative
movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union
movement, like that in Australia.</p>

<p>Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the
Commonwealth of nationalities, where men from
many lands, drawing their spiritual reserves from
the home that nourished their line through the long
generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the
new State which harbors them and gives them a good
life. The task of America is to create that Commonwealth,
that entity which men gladly serve,
and for which at need they willingly die. Our politics
have not yet held that appeal. Not yet can an
American of these recent years stand off from the
stream of his experience, saying, "What does it
mean that I am an American?" and answer it in the
high terms which a Frenchman can use. Fifty years
ago the American could answer in fairly definite
terms. But does our recent history mean much to
Czech or Russian Jew or Calabrian who has settled
among us? It does not. The stirring of their blood
responds to another history than ours. Shall we
take away their tradition from them? We cannot
if we would. What we can do with their help is
to create free institutions which will win them to a
new allegiance, and this will slowly root itself in
the fiber of their line.</p>

<p>For a few generations they will continue at time
of stress to hear the call of their old home, as a bird
in the autumn takes the call of the South. The
Serb will return to his mountains when the battle-line
is drawn, as he returned five years ago. The
German will go back to his barracks when Russia
begins to spread toward the West. And over those
that do not go back a great restlessness will come,
and they will torment themselves, like a caged bird
in the month of flight. But with each generation
the call will grow fainter, till finally the old tradition
is subdued and the citizen is domesticated.
In this way only can the new allegiance and instinctive
sense of nationality be created, growing
very gradually out of free institutions.</p>

<p>Out of free institutions in State, property, religion
and marriage, ever-developing to fit a developing
people; out of the unfolding process of
law, escaping from legalism and applying psychology
to human relationship; out of an education,
sanctioned by human interest, and devoted not only
to vocational training but to the sense of beauty
and wonder; out of vast movements of the mass-people
toward democratic control; there will some
day grow the new American tradition, which in the
fullness of time will take possession of the heart
of these diverse races and clashing nationalities. It
will not root itself and grow in the years of "naturalization,"
nor yet in one or two generations. But
in a hundred or two hundred years it will coalesce
infinitely repellant particles and gently conquer
antagonisms, and in that day, which not even our
children's children will see, there will at last emerge
the American Commonwealth.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">VI</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE REMEDY</p>

<p class="pn2">I have made out the best case I can for our
people. These chapters have listed every excuse
that can reasonably be given for our failure
to declare ourselves on the moral issue of this
war. They have said that a careless, busy folk, like
those of the Middle West, need many facts to
enable them to see where the truth lies. They have
pointed out how short-sighted is the foreign policy
of the Allies which gives few facts to the American
public. They have shown how the best of
our radicals have failed to think clearly because
they have been befuddled by a vague pseudo-internationalism.
I have stated what I believe to be the
falsity in our present-day conception of Europe, the
self-complacency in our monopoly of freedom and
justice; and I have tried to reveal how that assumption
of merit blinded our eyes to the struggles of
other peoples for the same causes. I have blamed
our failure on Germany and on England. But
after every explanation has been made, it is still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
true that our people ought to have been sensitive.
At a great moment of history we failed of greatness.
There remains a shame to us that we held
aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts
needed to convince France that we were fighting
for human rights in our Revolution. Three thousand
miles of water did not drown the appeal of
our extremity. But to-day our leaders are so bewildered
by dreams of universal brotherhood that
they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our
common people have their eyes to their work, and
do not look up, as the workers of Lancashire looked
up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the
balance of 1863.</p>

<p>This war has shown to us that we are not at the
level of earlier days. We have lost our national
unity, our sense of direction. The war has revealed
in us an unpreparedness in foreign and domestic policy.
It is a curse to know one's weakness unless one
cures it. So this war will not leave us blessed until
we take a program of action. It is a waste of
time to write a book on the war except to convince
and move to action.</p>

<p>The steps are clear.</p>

<p>Our first step is to set our house in order. We
need to recover our self-consciousness, to restate
what we mean by America. A half million newcomers
each year will not help us to find ourselves.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
We shall be the better friends of freedom if we
digest our present welter. Let us fearlessly and
at once advocate a stringent restriction of immigration.
Our citizenship has become somewhat cheap.
Our ideals have become somewhat mixed. Let us
take time to locate the direction in which we wish
to go, and decide on the goal at which we aim.
"Thou, Oh! my country, must forever endure," said
a famous patriot; but in a few years his country had
been melted down into an autocracy. We cannot
rely for all time on luck and happy drift. Size, numbers,
the physical economic conquest of a continent&mdash;these
are not a final good. They are at best only
means toward worthy living. It is easier to rush
in fresh masses of cheap labor than it is to deal
with the workers already here as members of a
free community, aid them in winning a high standard
of living, and establish with them an industrial
democracy. The cheapest way of digging our
ditches and working our factories, and sewing our
shirts, is of course to continue holding open our flood
gates and letting the deluge come. It is the clever
policy of our exploiters, and the sentimental policy
of the rest of us who love to be let alone, if only
we can cover our unconcern with a humanitarian
varnish. But the result of it is the America of to-day
with its oligarchy of industrial captains and
bankers, with its aristocracy of labor, made up of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
powerful trades unions and restricted "Brotherhoods,"
and with its unskilled alien masses of mine
and factory labor, unorganized, exploited. Let us
begin to build the better America by sacrificing the
easy immediate benefits of unrestricted immigration.</p>

<p>Our second step is to teach our tradition to the
hundred million already here. It is a large enough
classroom. We can advertise for new pupils when
our present group matriculates. When it has
matriculated, there will be no popularity for phrases
like "He kept us out of war," nor for songs of "I
didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." The teaching
of that tradition will reveal the interweaving of the
American and the French Revolutions as products
of a single impulse toward world liberation. If we
had known our history, we should have answered
the need of France, as Hall, Chapman, Thaw,
Seeger, and many more answered it who have laid
down their lives for their friend, France. The
teaching of the American tradition will reveal to
our awakened astonished minds that our policy has
not been that of neutrality toward oppressed peoples
like the Belgians. It will reveal that the British
fleet has served us well from the time of Canning
down to Manila Bay. It will stir in us loyalties
that have long been asleep. It will show what
a phrase like "Government for the people" has
meant in terms of social legislation. It will point<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
to the long road we must tread before we reach that
ideal goal. We cannot leave the teaching of our
tradition to the public schools alone. Courses of
evening lectures for the people, the newspapers and
periodicals, clergymen and economists and social
workers, all must help.</p>

<p>Our third step is a deep understanding sympathy
with the forces in the world making for righteousness.
We should have been sensitive enough to see
the right and the wrong of the present war. But
that chance has gone by. Let us now make ready
to contribute to the future. The fundamental question
is this: Are the democracies of the world to
stand together, or is the world-fight for freedom to
be made, with our nation on the side-lines? The
whole emphasis of the world's emotion has shifted
from war to peace. When thought follows this emotion
and rationalizes it, we can begin constructive
work. The test of our desire for peace will be found
in this: Do we mean business? Pacifism is valueless,
because it is a vague emotion. Peace is a thing
won by thought and effort. It is not alone a "state
of mind." If we are willing to give guarantees by
army and navy, and to back up protest by force,
we can serve the cause of peace. But if we continue
our "internationalism" of recent years, we shall not
be admitted to any such effective league of peace
as France and England will form. We must take<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
our place by the side of the nations who mean to
make freedom and justice prevail throughout the
world.</p>

<p>Our fourth step will be that measure of preparedness
which will render us effective in playing our
part in world history. We cannot go on forever
asking the English fleet to supply the missing members
in our Monroe Doctrine. We cannot go on
forever developing a rich ripeness, trusting that no
hand will pluck us. In a competitive world, which
builds Krupp guns, we cannot place our sole reliance
in a good-nature which will be touched to friendliness
because we are a special people. That preparedness
will not stop with enriching munition
makers, and playing into the hands of Eastern bankers.
It will be a preparedness which enlists labor,
by safeguarding wages and hours. It is the preparedness
of an ever-encroaching equality: a democracy
of free citizens, prosperous not in spots but
in a wide commonalty, disciplined not only by national
service of arms, but by the fundamental discipline
of an active effective citizenship. It is a preparedness
which will call on the women to share
the burden of citizenship. It is a preparedness
which mobilizes all the inner forces of a nation by
clearing the ground for equality. It will be a preparedness
not against an evil day, but for the furtherance
of the great hopes of the race.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4 xlarge">SECTION III</h2>

<p class="pc2 large">THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE
DEAD</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a><br /><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">I</h3>

<p class="pcl2">LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS</p>


<p class="pn2">In presenting the facts that follow of the behavior
of the German Army, I am fortunate
in being able to introduce them with a statement
written for me by Lord Bryce. The words
of Lord Bryce carry more weight with the American
people than those of any other man in Europe, and
his analysis of the methods of the German Staff is
authoritative, because he was the Chairman of what
is known as the "Bryce Committee," which issued
the famous report on German "frightfulness."
When I told him that our country would respond
to a statement from him, he asked me to submit
questions, and to these questions he has written answers.</p>

<p>The first question submitted to Viscount Bryce
was this:</p>

<p>"America has been startled by Cardinal Mercier's
statement concerning the deportation of Belgian
men. Our people will appreciate a statement
from you as to the meaning of this latest German
move."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span></p>

<p>Lord Bryce replied to me:</p>

<p>"Nothing could be more shocking than this wholesale
carrying away of men from Belgium. I know
of no case in European history to surpass it. Not
even in the Thirty Years War were there such
things as the German Government has done, first
and last in Belgium. This last case is virtual
slavery. The act is like that of those Arab slave
raiders in Africa who carried off negroes to the coast
to sell. And the severity is enhanced because these
Belgians and the work forcibly extracted from them
are going to be used against their own people. Having
invaded Belgium, and murdered many hundreds,
indeed even thousands, among them women and
children, who could not be accused of 'sniping,' the
German military government dislocated the industrial
system of the community. They carried off
all the raw materials of industry and most of the
machinery in factories, and then having thus deprived
the inhabitants of work, the invaders used
this unemployment as the pretext for deporting
them in very large numbers to places where nothing
will be known of their fate. They were not even
allowed to take leave of their wives and children.
Many of them may never be heard of again. And
von Bissing calls this 'a humanitarian measure.'
Actually, it is all a part of the invasion policy. They
defend it as being 'war,' as they justify everything,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
however inhuman, done because the military needs
of Germany are alleged to call for it. It shows
how hard pressed the military power is beginning
to find itself at this latest stage of the war. It is
said that Attila, when he was bringing his hosts of
Huns out of Asia for his great assault on Western
Europe, forced the conquered tribes into his army,
and made them a part of his invasion. I can hardly
think of a like case since then. In principle it resembles
the Turkish plan when they formed the
Janissaries. The Turks used their Christian subjects,
taken quite young and made Moslems, and
enrolled them as soldiers (to fight against Christians)
to fill their armies, of which they were the
most efficient part. These Belgians are not indeed
actually made to fight, but they are being forced
to do the labor of war, some of them probably digging
trenches, or making shells, or working in quarries
to extract chalk to make cement for war purposes.
The carrying off of young girls from Lille
was terrible enough, and it seemed to us at the time
that nothing could be worse. But the taking away
of many thousand of the Belgian population from
their homes to work against their own countrymen,
with all the mental torture that separation from
one's family brings&mdash;this is the most shocking thing
we have yet heard of. I have been shown in confidence
the reports received from Belgium of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
has happened there. The details given and the
sources they come from satisfied me of their substantial
truth. The very excuses the German authorities
are putting forward admit the facts. In
Belgian Luxemburg I hear that they have been trying
to stop the existing employment in order to have
an excuse for taking off the men."</p>

<p>The second question read:</p>

<p>"How are such acts of German severity to be accounted
for?"</p>

<p>Lord Bryce replied:</p>

<p>"When the early accounts of the atrocious conduct
of the German Government in Belgium were
laid before the Committee over which I presided
they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted
them, going carefully through every case, and rejecting
all those that seemed doubtful, we found
such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from
different sources, and carefully tested by the lawyers
who examined the witnesses, that we could not
doubt that the facts which remained were beyond
question. You ask how German officers came to
give such orders. The Committee tried to answer
that question in a passage of their report. They
point out that for the German officer caste morality
and right stop when war begins. The German
Chancellor admitted that they had done wrong in
invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
their way through. The German military class had
brooded so long on war that their minds had become
morbid. To Prussian officers war has become,
when the interests of the State require it, a sort of
sacred mission: everything may be done by and for
the omnipotent State. Pity and morality vanish,
and are superseded by the new standard justifying
every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said
the Committee, 'is a specifically military doctrine,
the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who
have brooded and thought, written and talked and
dreamed about war until they have fallen under its
obsession and been hypnotized by its spirit.' You
will find these doctrines set forth in 'Kriegsbrauch
im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on
the usages of war on land, issued under the direction
of the German Staff. What military needs suggest
becomes lawful. You will find in that book a
justification for everything the German Army has
done, for seizing hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants
of an invaded area, and shooting them if necessary.
You will find what amounts to a justification even
of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries captured
on prisoners offer the proof that the German
officers acted upon this principle. 'This is not the
only case that history records in which a false theory,
disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church,
has perverted the conception of Duty, and become<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
a source of danger to the world.' This doctrine
spread outside military circles. I do not venture
to say that it has infected anything like the whole
people. I hope that it did not. But national pride
and national vanity were enlisted, and it became a
widespread doctrine accepted by the military and
even by many civilians. The Prussians are far more
penetrated by the military spirit than the Americans
or English or French, and such a doctrine ministered
to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It
was part of Prussian military theory and sometimes
of practice a century ago. But in the rest of Germany
it is a new thing. There was nothing of the
kind in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years
ago.</p>

<p>"In an army there will be individual cases of horrible
brutality&mdash;plunder, rape, ill-treatment of civilians.
There will always be men of criminal instinct
whose passion is loosed by the immunities of
war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn
a decent soldier into a wild beast. But most of
the crimes committed in Belgium were not committed
by drunken troops. The German peasant, the
'Hans' whom we know, is a good, simple, kindly
sort of fellow, as are the rural folk in every country.
But remember in the German army there is a habit
of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely
severe in military discipline. They will shoot readily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
for a minor infraction. It is the officers more
than the private soldiers that were to blame. And
some of the officers were shocked by what they were
forced to do. 'I am merely executing orders and I
should be punished if I did not execute them,' said
more than one officer whose words were recorded.
How can an officer in war time disobey the orders
of the supreme military command? He would be
shot, and if he were to say he could not remain in
an army where he was expected to commit crimes,
to retire in war time, if he were permitted to retire,
would mean disgrace to his name. It is the spirit
of the Higher German Army Command that is to
blame. The authority that issued the orders is
guilty. The German people as a whole are not
cruel, but many of them have been infected by this
war spirit.</p>

<p>"And we little realize how strict is the German
censorship. The German people have been fed with
falsehoods. So far are they from believing in the
record of their own army's cruelties, that they have
been made to believe in cruelties alleged to have
been committed by French and English troops. They
have been fed on stories of soldiers with their eyes
put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the German
Empire in a press communication said:</p>

<p>"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German
wounded. Officials of Belgian cities have invited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
our officers to dinner and shot and killed them
across the table. Contrary to all international law,
the whole civilian population of Belgium was called
out, and after having at first shown friendliness, carried
on in the rear of our troops terrible warfare with
concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats
of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes
while they were sleeping.</p>

<p>"There was no truth at all in these stories."</p>

<p>The next question was submitted as follows:</p>

<p>"Has the German Government made any effort to
prove their general charges and to disprove the detailed
charges of your report and the report made
by the French Government?"</p>

<p>Lord Bryce writes in reply:</p>

<p>"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have
been published throughout the world, and no question
has been raised of their authenticity. They contain
testimony to outrages committed in Belgium
and France that is overwhelming. No answer is
possible. The German Government have never
made a reply to the Report of the British Committee.
They attempted to answer some of the reports made
by the Belgian Government. But their answer was
really an admission to the facts, for it consisted in
allegations that Belgian civilians had given provocation.
They endeavored to prove that Belgian civilians
had shot at them. It would not have been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
strange if some civilians had shot at those who suddenly
burst into their country, but no proof has
ever been given of more than a few of such cases,
nor of the stories of outrages committed by Belgian
priests, women and children on German soldiers.
Even if such occasional shooting by civilians
had taken place, as very likely it did, that did not
justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent persons
and the burning of whole villages. In the burning
of the 26 houses at Melle, which you tell me you
witnessed, no allegations were made of shooting by
civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to whom
you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The
woman, eighty years old, had not shot at them.
These severities were committed as a method to
achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the
civilian population, and destroy the spiritual resources
of the nation."</p>

<p>The final question was this:</p>

<p>"As the result of this war, what hope have we
of reconstruction and an altered policy in Germany?"</p>

<p>Viscount Bryce answered:</p>

<p>"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will
so completely defeat Germany as to discredit the
whole military system and the ideas out of which
the horrors of German war practice have developed.
It is essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
in the eyes of the German people that they will have
done with their military caste and its nefarious doctrine,
and it is essential to discredit the methods
themselves&mdash;discredit them by their failure&mdash;in so
thorough a manner that no nation will ever use them
again. The way, then, of ending what is called
'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It
is our task to show that shocking military practices
and total disregard of right do not succeed. We
must bring to pass the judgment of facts to the effect
that such methods do not avail. In this determination
our British people are unanimous as they
have never been before. The invasion of Belgium,
the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of
the <i>Lusitania</i>&mdash;these three series of acts united the
whole British people in its firm resolve to prosecute
the war to a complete victory. Now on the top of
these things and of isolated crimes of the German
Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and
Captain Fryatt, come these abominable deportations
of Belgians into a sort of slavery."</p>

<p>In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels
the accurate fair-minded scholar. He is without heat
and partisanship. He added in a note:</p>

<p>"We know that our British soldiers fight hard,
but they fight fair, and they have no personal hatred
to their enemies. I have been at the British front
and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
when they take a prisoner often clap him on the
back and give him a cigarette. There is no personal
hatred among our officers or men. Efforts are properly
made here at home to keep bitterness against the
German people as a whole from the minds of our
people, but it is right that they should detest and
do their utmost to overthrow the system that has
produced this war and has made it so horrible."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">II</h3>

<p class="pcl2">SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES</p>

<p class="pn2">I have seen the original diaries of the German
soldiers in the army which devastated Belgium
and Northern France. Things tumble out just
as they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts.
Phillips Brooke once spoke of the sensation there
would be if the contents of our minds were dumped
on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the
soul of the German people spilled out into writing.
This is what Germany was in the year 1914. This
record left by dead men and by captured men is a
very living thing to me, because I saw these German
soldiers at their work of burning and torture.
Here they have themselves told of doing the very
thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point
of their proof, written and signed by the perpetrators
themselves. It is the proof of systematic
massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson.</p>

<p>These diaries found on the field of battle were
brought to the French General Staff along with the
arms and equipments of the dead and the prisoners.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>
They are written by the soldiers because of Article
75 of the German Instruction for Campaign Service
(Felddienst-Ordnung), which states that "these
journals of war serve for information on the general
operations, and, by bringing together the various reports
of active fighting, they are the basis for the
later definitive histories of the campaigns. They
should be kept daily." No words could be more exactly
prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of
all future histories of the war. The keeping of them
is obligatory for the officers, and seems to be voluntary
on the part of the men, but with a measure
of implied requirement. So stern did some of the
soldiers feel the military requirement to be that they
kept on with their record up to the point of death.
Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Company
of the Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Reserves,
which he was writing at the moment he was
fatally wounded.</p>

<p>"Ich bin verwundet. Behüte dich Gott. Küsse
das Kind. Es soll fromm sein." And then the pencil
stops forever. The writing on that final page
of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet."
Those last four sentences are each just
a line long, as if each was a cry. He wrote the
word "Küsse" and could hardly rally himself. His
pencil slips into three marks without meaning, then
he writes "das Kind." I trust my German readers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
will not deny me the use of this diary. It is the
only one of which I have not seen the original. The
photographic reproduction is my only evidence of
this flash of tenderness among a thousand acts of
infamy.</p>

<p>The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks:
the sort that women in our country use for
the family accounts. They contain about 100 pages.
They average five inches in length and three in
width. A few of the diaries, and those mostly belonging
to officers, are written in ink. But most
of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the
large majority in purple.</p>

<p>Many of the diaries are curt records of daily
marches and military operations. The man is too
tired to write anything but distances, names of
places, engagements. That was what the Great German
General Staff had in mind in ordering the practice.
They could not foresee what would slip
through into the record, because in all their calculations
they have always forgotten the human spirit.
Once again we are indebted to German thoroughness.
The causes, the objects, the methods of this
war, will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the
past. History will be clear in dealing its judgments.
Like the surgeon's ray on a fester, German
light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers
have gone on making their naked records of crimes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
committed and their naïve mental reactions on what
they did, till all too late the German machine forbade
further exposure of the national soul. But the
faithful peasant fingers had written what all eternity
cannot annul.</p>

<p>"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated
by bayonet or torn by splinters of shell, the
pencilings in haste, day by day, in spite of fatigue,
in spite even of wounds"&mdash;they are the most human
documents of the war.</p>

<p>This privilege of working with the originals themselves
was extended by the Ministry of War. The
General Staff issued a <i>Laissez-Passer</i>, and gave me
an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieutenant,
who is a Russian and German scholar. Together
we went word by word over the booklets. I
was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my co-worker.
"An honest man," he said, when we came
to Harlak's record. "Un brave soldat," he declared
of the old reservist, who protested against murder.
He was not trying to make a case. He had no need
to make a case. The pity of it is that the case
has been so thoroughly made by German hands.
These diaries have not been doctored in the smallest
detail. There they are, as they were taken from
the body of the dead man and the pocket of the
prisoners. The room where we worked is stuffed
with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
lined with the black-bound diaries and the little red
books of identification carried by each soldier. They
overflow upon tables. In this room and a suite adjoining
sit the official translators of the French General
Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my
examples from the official reports of the French Government.
I wanted to verify for American "neutrals"
that no slightest word had been altered, that
no insertions had been made.</p>

<p>My first diary was that of a Saxon officer of the
Eighth Company, of the 178th Regiment, of the XII
Army Corps. He makes his entry for 26 August,
1914.</p>

<p>"The lovely village of Gué-d'Hossus, apparently
entirely innocent, has been given to the flames. A
cyclist is said to have fallen from his machine, and
in so doing his rifle was discharged, so they fired at
him. Accordingly the male inhabitants were cast
into the flames. Such atrocities are not to happen
again, one hopes."</p>

<p>The German phrases carry the writer's sense of
outrage: "Das wunderschöne Dorf Gué-d'Hossus
soll ganz unschuldig in Flammen gegangen sein.
... Man hat männliche Einwohner einfach in die
Flammen geworfen. Solche Scheusslichkeiten Kommen
hoffentlich nich wieder vor."</p>

<p>He adds: "At Läffe, about 200 men have been
shot. There it was an example for the place; it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
inevitable for the innocent to suffer. Even so there
ought to be a verification of mere suspicions of guilt
before aiming a fusillade at everybody."</p>

<p>In the village of Bouvignes on August 23, 1914,
he and his men entered a private home.</p>

<p>"There on the floor was the body of the owner.
In the interior our men had destroyed everything
exactly like vandals.... The sight of the inhabitants
of the village who had been shot beggars
any descriptions. The volley had nearly decapitated
certain of them. Every house to the last corner had
been searched and so the inhabitants brought out
from their hiding-places. The men were shot. The
women and children put in the convent. From this
convent shooting has come, so the convent will be
burned. Only through the giving up of the guilty
and the paying of 15,000 francs can it save itself."</p>

<p>The German phrases of frightfulness have a sound
that matches their meaning:</p>

<p>"Hatten unsere Leute bereits wie die Vandalen
gehaust." "Männer erschossen."</p>

<p>I opened the diary of Private Hassemer of the
VIII Corps, and in the entry at Sommepy (in the
district of the Marne) for September 3, 1914, I read:</p>

<p>"3/9 1914. Ein schreckliches Blutbad, Dorf
abgebrannt, die Franzosen in die brennenden
Häuser geworfen, Zivilpersonen alles mitverbrandt."</p>

<p>("A hideous bloodbath (massacre), the village<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
totally burned, the French hurled into the burning
houses, civilians, everybody, burned together.")</p>

<p>An unsuspected brutality is here revealed. To
these men a peasant of another race is not a father
and husband and man. He is as a dog. He is
"Ausländer," beyond the pale&mdash;a thing to be chased
with bayonets and burned with fire, to the rollicking
amusement of brave soldiers. Back of the slaughter
lies the basic idea of a biological superiority in the
German people, a belief that their duty calls them
to a sacred war to dominate other races, and create
a greater Germany. They think they are a higher
order of beings, who can kill creatures of a lesser
breed, as one slays the lower order of animals in
the march of progress. Other races have had dreams
of grandeur, but never so mad a dream, so colossal
in its designs on world dominion, so cruel in its
methods of achieving that supremacy.</p>

<p>Soldat Wilhelm Schellenberg, of 106 Reserve Infantry
of the XII Reserve Army Corps, gives his
home as Groitzsch bei Leipzig, "am Bahnhof," first
floor, number 8. "Frau Martha Schellenberg" is to
be notified. His diary is innocent.</p>

<p>I held in my hands the diary of Erich Harlak of
the II Company, 38 Fusilier Regiment of the Sixth
Army Corps. There is a cut through the cover and
pages of the pamphlet&mdash;probably the stab of a bayonet.
Harlak is a Silesian. On the first page he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
writes in German "Bitte dieses Buch gütigst meinen
Eltern zusenden zu wollen." Then in French "Je
prie aussi Les Français de rendre, s'il vous plait, cet
livre à mes parents. Addresse Lehrer Harlak."
"Meinen lieben Eltern gewidmet in Grune bei Lisser
in Posen."</p>

<p>He writes, "I noticed how our cavalry had plundered
here." He gives an instance of how the men
broke to pieces what they could not carry away. "La
Guerre est la Guerre." He writes that in French.
He runs his table of values.</p>

<table id="t01" summary="t01">

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">1</td>
  <td>kleiner sous</td>
  <td class="tdc">=</td>
  <td class="tdc">4</td>
  <td class="tdc">pfennig.</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">1</td>
  <td>grosser sous</td>
  <td class="tdc">=</td>
  <td class="tdc">8</td>
  <td class="tdc">"</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">1/2</td>
  <td>sous</td>
  <td class="tdc">=</td>
  <td class="tdc">2</td>
  <td class="tdc">"</td>
 </tr>

</table>

<p>He has a vocabulary of French words in his own
handwriting. His record is one of honest distress at
the pillage done by his comrades.</p>

<p>When the French soldiers say "C'est la Guerre"&mdash;"that's
the way it is with war"&mdash;they refer to the
monotony of it, or the long duration, or some curious
ironic contrast between a peaceful farmyard scene
and a Taube dropping bombs. The Germans say it
again and again in their diaries, sometimes in the
French phrase, sometimes "Das ist der Krieg," and
almost always they use it in speaking of a village
they have burned or peasants they have shot. To<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
them that phrase is an absolution for any abomination.
It is the blood-brother of "military necessity."</p>

<p>Carl Zimmer, Lieutenant of the 57th Infantry of
the VII Corps, has a diary that runs from August 2
to October 17, 1914. On August 29 he tells of
marching through a village of Belgium.</p>

<p>"Very many houses burned whose inhabitants had
shot at our soldiers. 250 Civilians shot."</p>

<p>At the head of his diary he writes: "Mit Gott
für König und Vaterland." His record is in ink.
Bielefeld in Westphalia is his home town.</p>

<p>Prussia has Prussianized Germany. These diaries
cover the Empire. The writers are Rhenish Pomeranian
and Brandenburgian, Saxon and Bavarian.
And the very people, such as the Bavarians and
Saxons, whom we had hoped were of a merciful tradition,
have bettered the instruction of the military
hierarchy at Berlin. What Prussia preached they
have practiced with the zeal of a recent convert eager
to please his master.</p>

<p>Fahlenstein, a reservist of the 34 Fusiliers, II
Army Corps, writes on August 28th:</p>

<p>"They (the French troops) lay heaped up 8 to
10 in a heap, wounded and dead, always one on top
of the other. Those who could still walk were made
prisoners and brought with us. The severely
wounded, with a shot in the head or lungs and so
forth, who could not make further effort, received
one more bullet, which ended their life. That is
indeed what we were ordered to do."</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-199.jpg" width="400" height="315"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">"The severely wounded received one more bullet. That is what we were
ordered to do."&mdash;The diary of Reservist Fahlenstein of the 34 Fusiliers.</p>
</div></div>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-200.jpg" width="400" height="648"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">Photograph of the German Diary, examined by the
writer of this book. It was written by Corporal Menge
of the 8th. Company of the 74th. Reserve Infantry.
He reports: "A curé and his sister hanged, houses
burned."</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span></p>

<p>("Die schwer verwundeten ... bekamen dennoch
eine Kugel zu, dass ihr Leben ein Ende hatte.
Das ist uns ja auch befohlen worden.")</p>

<p>His unwillingness to do the wicked thing must be
subordinated to the will of the officer.</p>

<p>Corporal Menge of the Eighth Company of the
74th Reserve Infantry, 10 Reserve Corps, writes in
his diary for August 15:</p>

<p>"Wir passieren unter dreimaligen Hurra auf
unsern Kaiser u. unter den Klängen d. Liedes
Deutschland über alles die Belgische Grenze. Alle
Bäume ungefällt als Sperre. Pfarrer u. dessen
Schwester aufgehängt, Häuser abgebrannt."</p>

<p>("We passed over the Belgian border under a
three times given Hurrah for our Kaiser, and under
the Strain of the song Deutschland über alles. All
the trees were felled as barricades. A curé and his
sister hanged, houses burned.")</p>

<p>This is a neatly written diary, which he wishes
to be sent to Fraulein F. Winkel of Hanover.</p>

<p>Penitential days are coming for the German Empire
and for the German people. For these acts of
horror are the acts of the people: man by man, regiment
by regiment, half a million average Germans,
peasants and clerks, stamped down through Belgium
and Northern France, using the incendiary pellet and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
the bayonet. In the words of the manifesto, signed
by the 93 Wise Men of Germany, referring to the
German army, "Sie kennt keine zuchtlose Grausamkeit":
it doesn't know such a thing as undisciplined
cruelty. No, these are the acts of orderly procedure,
planned in advance, carried out systematically.
Never for an instant did the beautiful disciplined
efficiency of the regiment relax in crushing a child
and burning an inhabited house. The people of
Germany have bowed their will to the implacable
machine. They have lost their soul in its grinding.</p>

<p>Private Sebastian Weishaupt of the Third Bavarian
Infantry, First Bavarian Corps:</p>

<p>"10.8.1914&mdash;Parie das erste Dorf verbrannt,
dann gings los; Dorf nach dem andern in Flammen;
über Feld und Acker mit Rad bis wir dann an
Strassengraben kamen, wo wir dann Kirschen assen."</p>

<p>("Octobre 8, 1914. Parux is the first village
burned, then things break loose: 1 village after another
to the flames; over field and meadow with
cycle we then come to the roadside ditches, where
we ate cherries.")</p>

<p>It is all in the day's work: the burning of villages,
the murder of peasants, the eating of cherries. Travelers
among savage tribes have told of living among
them for years, and then suddenly in a flash the
inmost soul of the tribe has revealed itself in some
sudden mystical debauch of blood. There is an immense<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
unbridled cruelty in certain of these German
soldiers expressing itself in strange, abnormal ways.
This is the explanation of some of the outrages,
some of the mutilations. But, for the most part,
the cruelty is not perversion, nor a fierce, jealous
hate. It is merely the blind, brutal expression of
imperfectly developed natures, acting under orders.</p>

<p>Göttsche, now commissioned officer of the 85
Infantry Regiment, 9 Army Corps, writes:</p>

<p>"The captain summoned us together and said: 'In
the fort which is to be taken there are apparently
Englishmen. I wish to see no Englishmen taken
prisoner by the company.' A universal Bravo of
agreement was the answer."</p>

<p>("'Ich wünsche aber Keinen gefangenen Engländer
bei: der Kompagnie zu sehen.' Ein allgemeines
Bravo der Zustimmung war die Antwort.")</p>

<p>Forty-three years of preparedness on every detail
of treachery and manslaughter, but not one hour of
thought on what responses organized murder would
call out from the conscience of the world, nor what
resistances such cruelty would create. It is curious
the way they set down their own infamy. There
is all the naïveté of a primitive people. Once a
black man from an African colony came to where a
friend of mine was sitting. He was happily chopping
away with his knife at a human skull which
he wore suspended from his neck. He was as innocent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
in the act as a child jabbing a pumpkin with
his jack-knife. So it has been with the Germans.
They burn, plunder, murder, with a light heart.</p>

<p>There are noble souls among them who look on
with sad and wondering eyes. What manner of
men are these, they ask themselves in that intimacy
of the diary, which is like the talk of a soul with its
maker. These men, our fellow-countrymen, who
behave obscenely, who pour out foulness&mdash;what a
race is this of ours! That is the burden of the self-communion,
which high-minded Germans have written
down, unconscious that their sadness would be
the one light in the dark affair, unaware that only
in such revolt as their own is there any hope at all
of a future for their race.</p>

<p>The most important diary of all is that of an officer
whose name I have before me as I write, but I
shall imitate the chivalry of the French government
and not publish that name. It would only subject
his family to reprisal by the German military power.
He belongs to the 46th Reserve Infantry Regiment,
5 Reserve Corps. He has a knack at homely details.
He enters a deserted house where the pendulum
of the clock still swings and ticks and sounds
the hours. He believes himself under the direct protection
and guidance of God. He sees it when a
shell explodes, killing his comrades. He speaks of
the beauty of the dead French officers, as he sees<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
them lying in a railway station. He is skeptical
about the lies told against French and Belgians. He
realizes that the officers are whipping up a fury
in the men, so that they will obey orders to kill and
burn. In his pages you can see the mighty machine
at work, manufacturing the hate which will lead
to murder. The hand on the lever at Berlin sets
grinding the wheels, and each little cog vibrates and
moves in unison. He is a simple, pious man, shocked
by the wickedness of his soldiers, offended by the
cruelty of the officers, hating war, longing for its
end. He plans to publish his memoirs of the campaign,
with photographs, which he will return to
France to make after the war. He is a natural
philosopher. Most of all, he loves his quiet smoke,
which keeps him good-humored. He has written a
page in his diary in praise of tobacco.</p>

<p>"I smoke about ten cigars a day. And if it hadn't
been for these cigars my good-humor in these dangers
and fatigues would be much less. Smoking
gives me to a degree calm and content. With it I
have something to occupy my thoughts. It is necessary
for one to see these things in order to understand."</p>

<p>Later he writes:</p>

<p>"October 15, 1914. It had been planned at first
that we should go into quarters at Billy (Billy sous-Nangiennes),
where the whole civil population had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
been already forced out, and whatever was movable
had been taken away or made useless. This method
of conducting war is directly barbarous. I am astonished
how we can make any complaint over the behavior
of the Russians. We conduct ourselves in
France much worse, and on every occasion and on
every small pretext we have burned and plundered.
But God is just and sees everything. His mills
grind slowly, but exceedingly small."</p>

<p>("Diese Art kriegführung ist direkt barbarisch
... bei jeder Gelegenheit wird unter irgend einem
Vorwande gebrannt und geplündert. Aber Gott ist
gerecht und sieht alles: seine Mühlen mahlen langsam
aber schrecklich klein.")</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-207.jpg" width="400" height="674"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">"One village after another to the flames. We then
came to the roadside ditches, where we ate cherries"&mdash;so
writes Sebastian Weishaupt of the 3 Bavarian Infantry.</p>
</div></div>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-208.jpg" width="400" height="657"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">"We have burned and plundered. But God is just
and sees everything. His mills grind slowly, but exceeding
small."&mdash;The diary of an officer of the 46 Reserve
Infantry Regiment.</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span></p>

<p>These extracts which I have given are from diaries
of which I have examined the originals, and gone
word by word over the German, in the penciling of
the writer. The revelation of these diaries is that
the Germans have not yet built their moral foundations.
They have shot up to some heights. But it
is not a deep-centered structure they have reared. It
is scaffolding and fresco. We shall send them back
home to begin again. Sebastian Weishaupt and Private
Hassemer and Corporal Menge must stay at
home. They must not come to other countries to
try to rule them, nor to any other peoples, to try to
teach them. Their hand is somewhat bloody. That
is my feeling in reading these diaries of German
soldiers&mdash;poor lost children of the human race, back
in the twilight of time, so far to climb before you
will reach civilization. We must be very patient
with you through the long years it will take to cast
away the slime and winnow out the simple goodness,
which is also there.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">III</h3>

<p class="pcl2">MORE DIARIES</p>

<p class="pn2">In former European wars foul practices were
committed by individual members of armies.
But the total army in each country was a small
hired band of men, representing only the fractional
part of one per cent of the population. It was in
no way representative of the mind of the people.
Of the present German Army, Professor Dr. Max
Planck, of the University of Berlin, a distinguished
physicist, has recently written:</p>

<p>"The German Army is nothing but the German
people in arms, and the scholars and artists are, like
all other classes, inseparably bound up with it."</p>

<p>We must regard the acts of the German Army as
the acts of the people. We cannot dodge the problem
of their misbehavior by saying they have not
committed atrocities. We have the signed statements
of a thousand German diaries that they have
practiced frightfulness village by village through
Belgium and Northern France. We cannot say it
was a handful of drunken, undisciplined soldiers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
who did these things. It was "the German people
in arms." It was an army that "knows no such thing
as undisciplined cruelty." It was a nation of people
that burned and murdered, acting under orders.
Now, we have arrived at the heart of the problem.
Why did they commit these horrors?</p>

<p>Irritated by an unexpectedly firm resistance from
the Belgian and French Armies, fed on lies spread
by German officers concerning the cruelty of French
and Belgians, they obeyed the commands to burn
houses and shoot civilians.</p>

<p>These commands released a primitive quality of
brutality.</p>

<p>On August 25th, 1914, Reservist Heinrich Bissinger,
of the town of Ingolstadt, of the Second Company,
of the First Bavarian Pioneers, writes of the
village of Orchies:</p>

<p>"A woman was shot because she did not stop at
the word Halt, but kept running away. Thereupon
we burn the whole place."</p>

<p>("Sämtliche Civilpersonen werden verhaftet.
Eine Frau wurde vershossen, weil sie auf Halt Rufen
nicht hielt, sondern ausreissen wollte. Hierauf Verbrennen
der ganzen Ortschaft.")</p>

<p>One wonders if Heinrich Bissinger would wish
the treatment he and his comrades accorded to
Orchies, to be applied to his own home town of Ingolstadt.
If some German peasant woman in Ingolstadt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
failed to understand a word in a foreign
tongue, and were killed, and then if Ingolstadt were
burned, would Heinrich Bissinger feel that "military
necessity" exonerated the soldiers that performed
the deed?</p>

<p>Private Philipp, from Kamenz, Saxony, of the
First Company, of the first Battalion of the 178th
Regiment, writes: "Kriegs Tagebuch-Soldat Philipp,
1 Kompanie (Sachsen)," at the head of his diary.
On August 23 he writes of a village that had been
burned:</p>

<p>"A spectacle terrible and yet beautiful. Directly
at the entrance lay about 50 dead inhabitants who
had been shot, because they had traitorously fired on
our troops. In the course of the night many more
were shot, so that we could count over 200. Women
and children, lamp in hand, had to watch the horrible
spectacle. Then in the middle of the corpses
we ate our rice; since morning we had eaten nothing.
By search through the houses we found much
wine and liquor, but nothing to eat."</p>

<p>("Im Laufe der Nacht wurden noch viele erschossen,
sodass wir über 200 zählen konnten. Frauen
und Kinder, die Lampe in der Hand, mussten dem
entsetzlichen Schauspiele zusehen. Wir assen dann
inmitten der Leichen unsern Reis, seit Morgen hatten
wir nichts gegessen.")</p>

<p>German soldiers obey these orders because their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
military training and their general education have
made them docile. They have never learned to exercise
independent individual moral judgment on
acts ordered by the state. The state to them is an
organism functioning in regions that lie outside the
intellectual and moral life of the individual. In
every German there are separate water-tight compartments:
the one for the life he leads as a husband
and father, the other for the acts he must commit
as a citizen of the Empire and as a soldier of
the Army. In his home life he makes choices. In
his public life he has no choice. He must obey without
compunctions. So he lays aside his conscience.
In the moral realm the German is a child, which
means that he is by turns cruel, sentimental, forgetful
of the evil he has done the moment before,
happy in the present moment, eating enormously,
pleased with little things, crying over a letter from
home, weary of the war, with sore feet and a rebellious
stomach, a heavy pack, and no cigars. I am
basing every statement I make on the statements
written by German soldiers. We do not have to
guess at German psychology. They have ripped
open their subconsciousness.</p>

<p>The lieutenant of the 5th Battalion of reserves of
the Prussian Guard writes on August 24 at Cirey:</p>

<p>"In the night unbelievable things have taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
place. Warehouses plundered, money stolen, violations
simply hair-raising."</p>

<p>("In der Nacht sind unglaubliche Sachen passiert.
Läden ausgeplündert, Geld gestohlen, Vergewaltigungen,
Einfach haarsträubend.")</p>

<p>This diary of the lieutenant's has a black cover, a
little pocket for papers, a holder for the pencil. It
is written partly in black pencil and partly in purple.
Thirty-two pages are written, 118 are blank.
It covers a space of time from August 1 to September
4, 1914.</p>

<p>Mrs. Wharton has brought to my attention the
chronicle of Salimbene, a Franciscan of the thirteenth
century, wherein similar light-hearted crimes
are recorded.</p>

<p>"On one day he (Ezzelino) caused 11,000 men
of Padua to be burnt in the field of Saint George;
and when fire had been set to the house in which
they were being burnt, he jousted as if in sport
around them with his knights.</p>

<p>"The villagers dwelt apart, nor were there any
that resisted their enemies or opened the mouth or
made the least noise. And that night they (the
soldiers) burned 53 houses in the village."</p>

<p>The orders given by the German commanding
general to his officers, far from recommending prudence
and humanity, impose the obligation of holding
the total civil population collectively responsible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
for the smallest individual infractions, and of
acting against every tentative infringement with
pitiless severity. These officers are as specialized a
class as New York gunmen or Paris apaches. Their
career lies in anti-social conduct. "This wild upper-class
of the young German imperialistic idea" are
implacable destroyers. Their promotion is dependent
on the extent of their cruelties.</p>

<p>I have seen an original copy of the order for the
day (Korps-Tagesbefehl) issued on August 12,
1914, by General von Fabeck, commanding the 13th
Army Corps. He says:</p>

<p>"Lieutenant Haag of the 19th Regiment of
Uhlans, acting as chief of patrol, has proceeded energetically
against the rioting inhabitants, and as
agreed has employed arms. I express to him my
recognition for his energy and his decision."</p>

<p>("Ich spreche ihm für seinen Schneid und seine
Umsicht meine Anerkennung aus.")</p>

<p>What that gives to Lieutenant Haag is the power
of life and death over non-combatants, with praise
for him if he deals out death.</p>

<p>Let us hear General von Fabeck speak again.
Here are his instructions for his troops on August
15, 1914 (I have held the original in my hands):</p>

<p>"As soon as the territory is entered, the inhabitants
are to be held responsible for maintaining the lines
of communication. For that purpose the commander<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
of the advance guard will arrange a strong patrol of
campaign gendarmes (Feldgendarmerie-Patrouille)
to be used for the interior of the locality held by
our troops. Against every inhabitant who tries to
do us a damage, or who does us a damage, it is necessary
to act with pitiless severity."</p>

<p>"Mit rücksichtsloser Strenge."</p>

<p>This order is on long sheets of the nature of our
foolscap. It is written in violet ink.</p>

<p>The copy reads:</p>

<p class="pc2">
gez. v. Fabeck<br />
Für die Richtigkeit der Abschrift<br />
Baessler<br />
Oberlt. und Brig-Adjutant.</p>

<p class="p1">Baessler is the aide-de-camp.</p>

<p>Two violations of the rights of non-combatants
are in that order. The requisitioning of inhabitants
on military work where they are exposed to the fire
of their own nation; pitiless severity applied to
every non-combatant on the least suspicion of a
hostile act.</p>

<p>Actually the state which the simple soldiers obey
so utterly is an inner clique of landed proprietors,
captains of industry, and officers of the army&mdash;men
of ruthless purpose and vast ambitions. The sixty-five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
millions of docile peasants, clerks, artizans and
petty officials are tools for this inner clique.</p>

<p>"The theories of the German philosophers and
public men are of one piece with the collective acts
of the German soldiers. The pages of the Pan-German
writers are prophetic. They are not so much
the precursors as the results, the echoes of a something
impersonal that is vaster than their own voice.
Here we have acted out the cult of force, creator
of Right, practiced since its dim origins by Prussia,
defended philosophically by Lasson, scientifically by
Haeckel and Ostwald, politically by Treitschke, and
in a military way by General von Bernhardi."</p>

<p>The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession.
Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beergarden
recreation, its methodical activities, its reveries,
its emotional laxity fed on music, it was generating
destructive forces. Year by year it was
thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous
teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into
the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a
dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates
through to the subconsciousness, it becomes
touched with emotional life, later to leap back into
the light of day in uncontrolled action.</p>

<p>I can produce one of the original bills posted on
the walls of Liège by General von Bulow. Here is
the way it reads:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span></p>

<p class="pc1">Ordre.</p>

<p>A la population Liègeoise.</p>

<p>La population d'Andenne, après avoir témoigné
des intentions pacifiques à l'égard de nos troupes,
les a attaquées de la façon la plus traîtresse. Avec
mon autorisation, le Général qui commandait ces
troupes a mis la ville en cendres et a fait fusilier 110
personnes. Je porte ce fait à la connaissance de la
ville de Liège, pour que ses habitants sachent à quel
sort ils peuvent s'attendre s'ils prennent une attitude
semblable.</p>

<p>Liège, le 22 Août, 1914.</p>

<p class="pri">Général von Bulow.</p>

<p class="p1">("The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after
having testified to their peaceful intentions in regard
to our troops, attacked them in a fashion the most
treacherous. By my authorization, the General who
commanded the troops has burned the town to ashes
and has shot 110 people. I bring this to the knowledge
of the town of Liège, in order that the inhabitants
may know what fate they invite if they take a
like attitude.")</p>

<p>It is only in victorious conquest that the German
is unendurable. When he was trounced at the Battle
of the Marne, he ceased his wholesale burnings and
massacres throughout that district, and continued his
campaign of frightfulness only in those sections of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
Belgium around Antwerp where he was still conquering
new territory. His dream of world conquest
will die in a day, when the day comes that sends
him home. In defeat, he is simple, kindly, surprised
at humane treatment. He ceases to be a
superman at the touch of failure. All his blown-up
grandeur collapses, and he shrinks to his true
stature.</p>

<p>This return to wholesomeness is dependent on two
things: a thorough defeat in this war, so that the
German people will see that a machine fails when
it seeks to crush the human spirit, and an internal
revolution in the conception of individual duty to
the state, so that they will regain the virtues of
common humanity. The water-tight compartments,
which they have built up between the inner voice
of conscience in the individual life and the outer
compulsion of the state, must be broken through.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">IV</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE BOOMERANG</p>

<p class="pn2">One of the best jokes of the war has been
put over on the Germans by themselves.
Here I quote from a German diary of which
I have seen the original. It is written by a sub-officer
of the Landwehr, of the 46th Reserve Regiment,
the 9th Company, recruited from the province
of Posen. He and his men are on the march, and
the date is August 21. He writes:</p>

<p>"We are informed of things to make us shudder
concerning the wickedness of the French, as, for
instance, that our wounded, lying on the ground,
have their eyes put out, their ears and noses cut.
We are told that we ought to behave without any
limits. I have the impression that all this is told us
for the sole purpose that no one shall stay behind or
take the French side; our men also are of the same
opinion."</p>

<p>On August 23 he writes:</p>

<p>"I learn from different quarters that the French
maltreat our prisoners; a woman has put out the
eyes of an Uhlan."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span></p>

<p>By August 24 all this begins to have its effect on
the imperfectly developed natures of his comrades,
and he writes:</p>

<p>"I find among our troops a great excitability
against the French."</p>

<p>There we can see the machinery of hate in full
operation. The officers state the lies to the soldiers.
They travel fast by rumor. The primitive, emotional
men respond with ever-increasing excitement
till they readily carry out murder.</p>

<p>Let us see how all this is working back home in
the Fatherland. I have seen the photographic reproduction
of a letter written by a German woman
to her husband (from whose body it was taken), in
which she tells him not to spare the French dogs
("Hunden"), neither the soldiers nor the women.
She goes on to give her reason. The French, she
says, men and women, are cruel to German prisoners.
The story had reached her.</p>

<p>The German Chancellor in September, 1914,
stated in an interview for the United States:</p>

<p>"Your fellow countrymen are told that German
troops have burned Belgian villages and towns, but
you are not told that young Belgian girls have put
out the eyes of the defenseless wounded on the field
of battle. Belgian women have cut the throats of
our soldiers as they slept, men to whom they had
given hospitality."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>

<p>The final consecration of the rumor was given by
the Kaiser himself. On September 8, 1914, he sent
a cable to President Wilson, in which he repeated
these allegations against the Belgian people and
clergy. Of course, he knew better, just as his Chancellor
and General Staff and his officers knew better.
It was all part of the play to charge the enemy with
things akin to what the Germans themselves were
doing. That makes it an open question, with "much
to be said on both sides." That creates neutrality
on the part of non-investigating nations, like the
United States.</p>

<p>But what he and his military clique failed to see
was that they had discharged a boomerang. The
comeback was swift. The German Protestants began
to "agitate" against the German Roman Catholics.
The old religious hates revived; a new religious
war was on. Now, this was the last thing
desired by the military power. An internal strife
would weaken war-making power abroad. Here was
Germany filled with lies told by the military clique.
Those lies were creating internal dissension. So the
same military clique had to go to work and deny the
very lies they had manufactured. They did not deny
them out of any large love for the Belgian and
French people. They denied them because of the
anti-Catholic feeling inside Germany which the lies
had stirred up. German official inquiries have established<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
the falsity of the atrocity charges leveled
against the Belgians.</p>

<p>A German priest, R. P. Bernhard Duhr, S. J.,
published a pamphlet-book, "Der Lügengeist im
Völkekrieg. Kriegsmärchen gesammelt von Bernhard
Duhr, S. J.," (München-Regensburg, Verlagsanstat,
Vorm. G. J. Manz, Buch und Kunstdruckei,
1915). Its title means "The spirit of falsehood
in a people's war. Legends that spring up in
war-time." His book was written as a defense of
Roman Catholic interests and for the sake of the
internal peace of his own country. This book I have
seen. It is a small pamphlet of 72 pages, with a red
cover. The widest circulation through the German
Empire was given to this proof of the falsity of the
charges laid to the Allies. Powerful newspapers published
the denials and ceased to publish the slanders.
Generals issued orders that persons propagating the
calumnies, whether orally, by picture or in writing,
would be followed up without pity. So died the
legend of atrocities by Belgians. The mighty power
of the Roman Catholic Church had stretched out its
arm and touched the Kaiser and his war lords to
silence.</p>

<p>The charges are treachery, incitement to murder
and battle, traitorous attacks, the hiding of machine
guns in church towers, the murder, poisoning and
mutilation of the wounded. The story ran that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
civil population, incited by the clergy, entered actively
into hostilities, attacking troops, signaling to
the Allies the positions occupied by the Germans.
The favorite and most popular allegation was that
women, old people and children committed atrocities
on wounded Germans, putting out their eyes, cutting
off their fingers, ears and noses; and that priests
urged them on to do these things and played an
active part in perpetrating the crimes. Putting out
the eyes became the prize story of all the collection.</p>

<p>The German priest, Duhr, runs down each lie to
its source, and then prints the official denial. Thus,
a soldier of the Landwehr sends the story to Oberhausen
(in the Rhine provinces):</p>

<p>"At Libramont the Catholic priest and the burgomaster,
after a sermon, have distributed bullets to
the civil population, with which the inhabitants fire
on German soldiers. A boy of thirteen years has
put out the eyes of a wounded officer, and women,
forty to fifty years old, have mutilated our wounded
soldiers. The women, the priest and the burgomaster
have been all together executed at Trèves.
The boy has been condemned to a long term in the
home of correction."</p>

<p>The German commander of the garrison at Trèves
writes:</p>

<p>"Five Belgian francs-tireurs who had been condemned
to death by the court martial were shot at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
Trèves. A sixth Belgian, still rather young, has been
condemned to imprisonment for many years. Among
the condemned there were neither women, nor priests
nor burgomaster."</p>

<p>This communication is signed by Colonel Weyrach.</p>

<p>Postcards representing Belgian francs-tireurs
were placed on sale at Cassel. The commander of
the district writes:</p>

<p>"The commanding general of the XI Army Corps
at Cassel has confiscated the cards."</p>

<p>Wagner Bauer, of the Prussian Ministry of War,
writes of another tale:</p>

<p>"The story of the priest and the boy spreads as a
rumor among troops on the march."</p>

<p>The <i>Herner Zeitung</i>, an official organ, in its issue
of September 9, printed the following: "Among the
French prisoners was a Belgian priest who had collected
his parishioners in the church to fire from
hiding on the German soldiers. Shame that German
soil should be defiled by such trash! And to think
that a nation which shields rascals of that sort dares
to invoke the law of humanity!"</p>

<p>Frhr. von Bissing, commanding general of the VII
Army Corps, writes:</p>

<p>"The story of a Belgian priest, reported by the
<i>Herner Zeitung</i> does not answer at any point to the
truth, as it has since been established. The facts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
have been communicated to the <i>Herner Zeitung</i> concerning
their article."</p>

<p>The <i>Hessische Zeitung</i> prints the following under
title of "Letters from the Front by a Hessian Instructor":</p>

<p>"The door of the church opens suddenly and the
priest rushes out at the head of a gang of rascals
armed with revolvers."</p>

<p>The Prussian Ministry of War replies:</p>

<p>"The inquiry does not furnish proof in support of
the alleged acts."</p>

<p>The <i>Berliner Tageblatt</i>, for September 10, has a
lively story:</p>

<p>"It was the curé who had organized the resistance
of the people, who had them enter the church, and
who had planned the conspiracy against our troops."</p>

<p>The Prussian Minister of War makes answer:
"The curé did not organize the resistance of inhabitants;
he did not have them enter the church, and
he had not planned the conspiracy against our
troops."</p>

<p>The dashing German war correspondent, Paul
Schweder, writes in <i>Landesbote</i> an article, "Under
the Shrapnel in Front of Verdun." He says that
he saw:</p>

<p>"A convoy of francs-tireurs, at their head a priest
with his hands bound."</p>

<p>The German investigator pauses to wonder why<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
every prisoner and every suspect is a franc-tireur,
and then he goes on with his inquiry, which results
in a statement from the Prussian War Minister:</p>

<p>"Deiber (the priest) had nothing charged against
him, was set at liberty, and, at his own request, has
been authorized to live at Oberhaslach."</p>

<p>The <i>Frankfurter Zeitung</i>, September 8, has a
spirited account of a combat with francs-tireurs in
Andenne, written by Dr. Alex Berg, of Frankfort:</p>

<p>"The curé went through the village with a bell,
to give the signal for the fight. The battle began
immediately after, very hotly."</p>

<p>The military authority of Andenne, Lieutenant
Colonel v. Eulwege:</p>

<p>"My own investigation, very carefully made,
shows no proof that the curé excited the people to a
street fight. Every one at Andenne gives a different
account from that, to the effect that most of the
people have seen hardly anything of the battle, so-called,
because they had hidden themselves from
fear in the cellars."</p>

<p>Finally, the War Ministry and the press wearied
of individual denials, and one great blanket denial
was issued. <i>Der Völkerkrieg</i>, which is a comprehensive
chronicle of review of the war, states:</p>

<p>"It is impossible to present any solid proof of
the allegation, made by so many letters from the
front, to the effect that the Belgian priests took part<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
in the war of francs-tireurs. Letters of that kind
which we have heretofore reproduced in our record&mdash;for
example, the recital of events at Louvain and
Andenne&mdash;are left out of the new editions."</p>

<p><i>Der Fels</i>, Organ der Central-Auskunftstelle der
katholischen Presse, states:</p>

<p>"The serious accusations which I have listed are
not only inaccurate in parts and grossly exaggerated,
but they are invented in every detail, and are at
every point false."</p>

<p>And, again, it says:</p>

<p>"All the instances, known up to the present and
capable of being cleared up, dealing with the alleged
cruelties of Catholic priests in the war, have been
found without exception false or fabrications
through and through."</p>

<p>Turning to the "mutilations," we have the <i>Nach
Feierabend</i> publishing a "letter from the front"
which tells of a house of German wounded being
burned by the French inhabitants. Asked for the
name of the place and the specific facts, the editor
replied that "you are not the forum where it is my
duty to justify myself. Your proceeding in the
midst of war of representing the German soldiers
who fight and die as liars, in order to save your own
skin, I rebuke in the most emphatic way."</p>

<p>But the Minister of War got further with the
picturesque editor, and writes:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span></p>

<p>"The editorial department of the <i>Nach Feierabend</i>
states that it hasn't any longer in its possession the
letter in question."</p>

<p>Now we come to the most famous of all the
stories.</p>

<p>"At a military hospital at Aix-la-Chapelle an entire
ward was filled with wounded, who had had
their eyes put out in Belgium."</p>

<p>Dr. Kaufmann, an ecclesiastic of Aix-la-Chapelle,
writes:</p>

<p>"I send you the testimony of the head doctor of a
military hospital here, a celebrated oculist whom I
consulted just because he is an oculist. He writes
me:</p>

<p>"'In no hospital of Aix-la-Chapelle is there any
ward of wounded with their eyes put out. To my
knowledge absolutely nothing of the sort has been
verified at Aix-la-Chapelle.'"</p>

<p>The <i>Kölnische Volkzeitung</i>, October 28, gives the
testimony of Dr. Vülles, of the hospital in Stephanstrasse,
Aix-la-Chapelle, in reference to the "Ward
of Dead Men," where "twenty-eight soldiers lay
with eyes put out." The men laughed heartily
when they were asked if they had had their eyes
put out.</p>

<p>"If you wish to publish what you have seen," said
Dr. Vüller, "you will be able to say that my colleague,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
Dr. Thier, as well as myself, have never
treated a single soldier who had his eyes put out."</p>

<p>Professor Kuhnt, of the clinic for diseases of the
eye at Bonn, writes:</p>

<p>"I have seen many who have lost their sight because
of rifle bullets or shell fire. The story is a
fable."</p>

<p>The <i>Weser-Zeitung</i> has a moving story of a hospital
at Potsdam for soldiers wounded by the francs-tireurs,
where lie officers with their eyes put out.
"Young Belgian girls, of from fourteen to fifteen
years of age, at the incitement of Catholic priests,
have committed the crimes."</p>

<p>The commander at Potsdam writes:</p>

<p>"There is no special hospital here for soldiers
wounded by the francs-tireurs. There are no officers
here with eyes put out. The commander has taken
measures to correct the article under dispute, and
also in other publications."</p>

<p>So perish the lies used against Belgium. Lies
manufactured by the General Staff and taught to
their officers, to be used among the soldiers, in order
to whip them to hate, because in that hate they
would carry out the cold cruelty of those officers
and of that General Staff. Lies put out in order to
blind the eyes of neutrals, like the government at
Washington, to the pillage, the burning and the murder
which the German army was perpetrating as it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
marched through Belgium and Lorraine. Lies that
later had to be officially denied by the same military
power that had manufactured them, because those
lies were stirring up civil strife at home, and because
the Roman Catholic Germans investigated the
sources and silenced the liars.</p>

<p>The Kaiser cabled to our country:</p>

<p>"The cruelties committed in this guerilla warfare
by women, children and priests on wounded
soldiers, members of the medical staff and ambulance
workers have been such that my generals have
at last been obliged to resort to the most rigorous
measures. My heart bleeds to see that such measures
have been made necessary and to think of the countless
innocents who have lost their life and property
because of the barbarous conduct of those criminals."</p>

<p>Now that he knows that those stories are lies he
must feel sorrier yet that his army killed those countless
innocents and burned those peasant homes.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a><br /><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4 xlarge">SECTION IV</h2>

<p class="pc2 large">THE PEASANTS</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a><br /><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">I</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE LOST VILLAGES</p>

<p class="pn2">I was standing in what was once the pleasant
village of Sommeilles. It has been burned
house by house, and only the crumbled rock was
left in piles along the roadside. I looked at the
church tower. On a September morning, at fourteen
minutes of nine o'clock, an incendiary shell had cut
through the steeple of the church, disemboweled the
great clock, and set the roof blazing. There, facing
the cross-roads, the hands of the clock once so
busy with their time-keeping, are frozen. For
twenty-three months, they have registered the instant
of their own stoppage. On the minute hand, which
holds a line parallel with that of the earth, a linnet
has built its nest of straw. The hour-hand, outpaced
by its companion at the moment of arrest,
was marking time at a slant too perilous for the
home of little birds. Together, the hands had traveled
steadily through the hours which make the years
for almost a century. High over the village street,
they had sent the plowman to his field, and the girl<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
to her milking. Children, late from their play, had
scrambled home to supper, frightened by that lofty
record of their guilt. And how many lovers, straying
back from the deep, protecting meadows, have
quickened their step, when the revealing moon
lighted that face. Now it marks only cessation. It
tells of the time when a village ceased to live. Something
came down out of the distance, and destroyed
the activities of generations&mdash;something that made
an end of play and love. Only the life of the linnet
goes on as if the world was still untroubled. Northern
France is held in that cessation. Suddenly death
came, and touched seven hundred villages. Nor can
there ever be a renewal of the old charm. The art
of the builders is gone, and the old sense of security
in a quiet, continuing world.</p>

<p>I have been spending the recent days with these
peasants in the ruins of their shattered world. Little
wooden baraquements are springing up, as neat
and bare as the bungalows of summer visitors on
the shore of a Maine lake. Brisk brick houses and
stores lift out of crumpled rock with the rawness of a
mining camp. It is all very brave and spirited.
But it reminded me of the new wooden legs, with
shining leather supports, and bright metal joints,
which maimed soldiers are wearing. Everything is
there which a mechanism can give, but the life-giving
currents no longer flow. A spiritual mutilation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span>
has been wrought on these peasant people in destroying
the familiar setting of their life. They had
reached out filaments of habit and love to the deep-set
hearth and ancient rafters. The curve of the
village street was familiar to their eye, and the profile
of the staunch time-resisting houses.</p>

<p>From a new wooden structure, with one fair-sized,
very neat room in it, a girl came out to talk with
us. She was about twenty years old, with a settled
sadness in her face. Her old home had stood on
what was now a vegetable garden. A fragment of
wall was still jutting up out of the potatoes. Everything
that was dear to her had been carefully burned
by the Germans.</p>

<p>"All the same, it is my own home," she said,
pointing to the new shack, "it does very well. But
my mother could not stand it that everything was
gone. We ran away for the few days that the
Germans were here. My mother died eight days
after we came back."</p>

<p>The 51st Regiment of German Infantry entered
the village, and burned it by squirting petrol on
piles of straw in the houses. The machine they used
was like a bicycle pump&mdash;a huge syringe. Of the
Town Hall simply the front is standing, carrying its
date of 1836. Seventeen steps go up its exterior,
leading to nothing but a pit of rubbish.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></p>

<p>"For three days I lay hidden without bread to
eat," said a passer-by.</p>

<p>An old peasant talked with us. He told us that
the Germans had come down in the night, and
burned the village between four and six in the morning.
A little later, they fired on the church. With
petrol on hay they had burned his own home.</p>

<p>"Tout brûlé," he kept repeating, as he sent his
gaze around the wrecked village. He gestured with
his stout wooden stick, swinging it around in a circle
to show the completeness of the destruction. Five
small boys had joined our group. The old man
swung his cane high enough to clear the heads of the
youngsters. One of them ran off to switch a wandering
cow into the home path.</p>

<p>"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")</p>

<p>We went to his home, his new home, a brick house,
built by the English Quakers, who have helped in
much of this reconstruction work. He and his wife
live looking out on the ruin of their old home.</p>

<p>"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chimney
plate."</p>

<p>He showed the location and the size of each familiar
thing by gestures and measurements of his
hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in the
field, while the Germans burned the village. He
took me down into the cave, where he had later hidden;
the stout vaulted cellar under the ruined house.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span></p>

<p>"It is fine and dry," I suggested.</p>

<p>"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I
felt it. It was wet and cold.</p>

<p>"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance
where I could be seen."</p>

<p>His wife was made easier by talking with us.</p>

<p>"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness?"
she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My
husband is seventy-eight years old."</p>

<p>The cupboard in her new home stood gaping,
because it had no doors.</p>

<p>"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come
and make those doors," she explained, "but he is
always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and thirty
coffins a day."</p>

<p>These are for the dead of Verdun.</p>

<p>When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers
found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those
of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman,
thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven
years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The
man had been shot, the young mother with the right
forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl
violated, one of the children with his head cut off.
All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter
reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Germans
had burned the house, thinking that the fire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the
flames had not penetrated to the cellar.</p>

<p>Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of
Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a temperate
sun, and the little rivers glide under green
willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered
here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds
of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would
wander from the larger work to the village church
and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness
of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie.
Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and
Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of
the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting
and unfulfilled renown.</p>

<p>The peasant knew he was part of a natural process,
a slow, long-continuing growth, whose beginnings
were not yesterday, and whose purpose would
not end with his little life. And the aspect of the
visible world which reinforced this inner sense was
the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own
home and the homes of his neighbors&mdash;the work of
no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with
its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived,
and his grandfather, and on back through the generations.
There his son would grow up, and one day
inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and
the unfailing fields.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span></p>

<p>Things are dear to them, for time has touched
them with affectionate association. The baker's wife
at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy
woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and
pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But
the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags
and enormous logs.</p>

<p>"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.</p>

<p>"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But
it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have removed
my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in
the shelter."</p>

<p>"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than
you do for your own safety?"</p>

<p>"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set
of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke
of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to
her.</p>

<p>A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the
room they had built out of tile and beams in what
was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair
of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the
daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of
wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the
south and watched their village and their home
burn. They had returned to find the pigs ripped
open. The destruction of live stock was something
more to them than lost property, than dead meat.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
There is an intimate sense of kinship between a
peasant and his live stock&mdash;the horse that carries him
to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe
in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe
in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal.
They had lost their two sons in the war.
The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called
them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."</p>

<p>In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café
des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To
the Rebirth."</p>

<p>In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched
away to fight. When the Germans fell on the town,
2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have returned.
There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and
a score of new brick dwellings, and twenty-four
brick houses are now being built. Six hundred are
living in the big hotel, once used in connection with
the mineral springs for which the place was famous:
its full name is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred
of the 840 houses were shelled and burned&mdash;one-third
by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to
house burning.</p>

<p>The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden
shed, with a small dining-room. This is built on
the ruins of the old hotel. The woman proprietor
said to me:</p>

<p>"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bedrooms<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
and two dining-rooms. It was a fine large
place."</p>

<p>The Café des Alliés is a small wooden shed, looking
like the store-room of a logging camp. We
talked with the proprietor and his wife. They used
to be manufacturers of springs, but their business
was burned, their son is dead in the war, and they
are too old to get together money and resume the
old work. So they are running a counter of soft
drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their
store has ended their life for them.</p>

<p>We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize,
Paul François Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant,
fifty-four years old. The Germans burned his six
houses, which represented his lifetime of savings.</p>

<p>"The Germans used pastilles in burning our
houses," he said, "little round lozenges, the size of a
twenty-five-centime piece (this is the same size as an
American quarter of a dollar). These hop about
and spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhabitants
and put them under arrest, some for one day,
others for three days. Five or six of our people
were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques,
and were then forced to mount guard at the bridges.
The pillage was widespread. The wife and the
daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by
the Germans that they jumped into the river, the
river Saulx. Brocard tried to save them, but was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
held back by the Germans. Later, when he took out
the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet
hole in the head of each."</p>

<p>As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the
village square that a fountain was feebly playing,
lifting a thin jet of water a few inches above the
basin.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">II</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE HOMELESS</p>

<p class="pn2">We are a nomadic race, thriving on change.
Apartment houses are our tents: many of
us preempt a new flat every moving day.
This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness
to strike camp and go further. It is the adaptability
of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made
by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn
up their roots from places where their family line
had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to
street, and from city to city, of the new country,
with no heavy investment of affection in the local
habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory
is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind
it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing
life about him. To many of us it would be an
effort of memory to tell where we were living ten
years ago. The outline of the building is already
dim.</p>

<p>The peasant of France has found a truth of life in
planting himself solidly in one place, with an abiding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
love for his own people, for the house and the
village where he was born. Four centuries ago the
French poet wrote:</p>

<div class="reduct">

<p class="pn10 p1"><i>Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage<br />
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison<br />
Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison<br />
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.</i></p>

<p class="pn10 p1"><i>Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village<br />
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison<br />
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison<br />
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage.</i></p>

<p class="pn10 p1"><i>Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux<br />
Que des palais romains le front audacieux<br />
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine.</i></p>

<p class="pn10 p1"><i>Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin<br />
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin<br />
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.</i></p>

<p class="pn p1">Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,<br />
Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,<br />
And then wended home full worn and full wise,<br />
To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.</p>

<p class="pn p1">When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet<br />
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year<br />
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,<br />
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.</p>

<p class="pn p1">Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span><br />
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.<br />
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.</p>

<p class="pn p1">Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.<br />
Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,<br />
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.</p>

</div>

<p class="p1">Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging
life of France. The peasant remained
where his forefathers had broken the fields and
loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange
lands, like the troubled races? He found his place
of peace long ago. To what country can he travel
where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields? What
people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity
of his neighbors?</p>

<p>Then the hordes from the north came down, eager
to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the
secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and
style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are
these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments
conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly?
Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So
it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring
over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these
peasants. Something was destroyed where the
human spirit had made its home for a longer time
than the individual life: a channel for the generations.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>
Their fields are still red with the poppy, but
their young men who reaped are busy on redder
fields. Their village street is crumbled stone,
through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their
church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of
life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time.
A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can
never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was
caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening
tradition. Something distinguished has passed out
of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless
unreturning light of its windows was only a larger
loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.</p>

<p>Still the peasants return to the place they know.
Even their dead are more living than the faces of
strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once
held their home. There is sadness in a place where
people have lived and been happy, and now count
their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never
is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty
and order. It would have been better to let the
forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the
home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the
invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They
are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a
quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness
of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling
to the consciousness that it can never reveal the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
elements of its distress, because what was done killed
what could tell. But the light of the day is never
seen again with the same eyes after the moment
that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot
down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made
for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will
pass on a consciousness of pain which had never
been in her line before. The thing that happened
in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of her
children, and a familiar music is broken.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">III</h3>

<p class="pcl2">"MON GAMIN"</p>

<p class="pn2">One day when I was in Lorraine, a woman
came to me carrying in her hands a boy's
cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant
woman about forty years of age, named Madame
Plaid. She said:</p>

<p>"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields.
He was not in the house when the Germans came
here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin)
was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He
was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would
have been in September, but he seemed to be all of
nineteen with his height and his size.</p>

<p>"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my
little scamp. They were leading me off and I feared
that they would take me away with them. The
Prussians said that somebody had fired on them
from my house.</p>

<p>"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on
us, just like the others," they said.</p>

<p>"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do anything,
I am sure.'</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span></p>

<p>"'What shirt did he have on?' they asked.</p>

<p>"'A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied.</p>

<p>"They insisted that he was the one that had fired.</p>

<p>"When the cannonading stopped, the people who
had been with me told me that they had seen a young
man lying stretched out in the field, but they could
not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was
that was lying there dead, and yet I drew back.</p>

<p>"'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.'</p>

<p>"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which
had fallen in front of him. I came closer. It was
he. He had his hands tied behind his back.</p>

<p>"See. Here is the cord with which he had been
killed. For he had not been shot. He had been
hanged.</p>

<p>(She held out to us the cord&mdash;a coil of small but
strong rope.)</p>

<p>"And here is the cap.</p>

<p>(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.)</p>

<p>"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians:</p>

<p>"'Do the same thing to me now. Without my
little scamp I cannot go on. So do the same to me.'</p>

<p>"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my
little scamp. I did not find him any more. The
French soldiers had buried him with their dead."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">IV</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP</p>

<p class="pn2">We were searching for the Mayor of Clermont,
not the official Mayor, but the real
Mayor. This war has been a selector of
persons. When the Germans came down on the
villages, timid officials sometimes ran and left their
people to be murdered. Then some quiet curé, or
village storekeeper, or nun, took over the leadership.
Wherever one of these strong souls has lived
in the region of death, in that village he has saved
life. When the weak and aged were wild with
terror, and hunted to their death, he has spoken
bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden rise to
power of obscure persons throughout Northern
France reminds an American of the life history of
Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the Mayor took to
his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight
years old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire
of their village and their home. And ever since, they
have stayed and administered affairs.</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-253.jpg" width="400" height="263"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">One of the new little red-brick houses of reconstructed France.</p>
</div></div>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-254.jpg" width="400" height="619"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">The Mayor of Clermont and his wife, who did not run
away when the invaders came.</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span></p>

<p>Clermont was a village of one thousand inhabitants.
Thirty-eight persons remained&mdash;old people,
religious sisters and the Jacquemets. The Germans
burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a
corps of Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at
their head, and to the XIII corps from Württemberg,
commanded by General von Urach. The particular
regiments were the 121st and 122d Infantry.</p>

<p>We inquired of soldiers where we could find the
Mayor.</p>

<p>"He is up above," they said. We were glad to
leave the hot little village, with its swarms of flies,
its white dust that lay on top of the roadbed in
thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses.
Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding
its heavy wheels into the crumbling road, lifted
white mists of dust, which slowly drifted upon the
leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the
faces of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went
white, mustaches grew fanciful. Nature and man
had lost all variety, all individuality. They were
powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human
eye and the eyes of cattle and horses were the only
things that burned with their native color through
that veil of white that lay on Clermont.</p>

<p>We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay
still held the summer rains. The wheels of our car
buzzed on the slush&mdash;"All out," and we did the last
few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
Mayor good news. The Rosette of the Legion of
Honor had just been granted him.</p>

<p>We found him in a little vine-covered old stone
house on the hilltop, where he took refuge after his
village was burned. He wept when my friend told
him that the emblem of the highest honor in France
was on its way.</p>

<p>"It means I have done something for my country,"
he said.</p>

<p>He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on
crutches, but he goes actively. He has fulfilled his
life. His sons are fighting for France, and he, too,
has served, and his service has been found acceptable
in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient
and sweet, with that gentleness which only goes
with high courage. But underneath that kindliness
and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake
of sadness," which comes to one whose experience has
been over-full.</p>

<p>So we came through the dust of the plain and
the clay of the climb to a good green place. It is a
tiny community set on a hill. That hill was covered
with stately trees&mdash;a lane of them ran down
the center of the plateau, as richly green and fragrant
as the choicest pine grove of New England. The
head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying
bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just
before it broke into lawlessness, one stout tree, standing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
alone, shot up; and tacked to its stalwart trunk,
this notice fronts the armies of France:</p>

<div class="reduct">

<p class="pc1">"<span class="smcap">Cantonnement de Clermont</span>.</p>

<p>"<span class="smcap">Il est formellement interdit aux visiteurs
ou autres d'attacher des chevaux aux arbres.
Toute dégradation aux arbres sera sevèrement
reprimée.</span></p>

<p class="pri">"<span class="smcap">Ordre du Commandant de Cantonnement.</span></p>

<p>"<span class="smcap">It is absolutely forbidden to visitors or
anybody else to tie their horses to the trees.
Any damage to the trees will be severely
punished.</span></p>

<p class="pri">"<span class="smcap">By order of the Commander.</span>"</p>

</div>

<p class="p1">Little strips of bark from the protected tree
framed the notice.</p>

<p>There was the voice of France, mindful of the
eternal compulsions of beauty, even under the guns.
No military necessity must destroy a grove. In the
wreckage of almost every precious value in that
Argonne village, the one perfect thing remaining
must be cherished.</p>

<p>Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination
of wildness and stateliness, caught together in one
little area, except on some hill crest of New Hampshire.
For the first time in two years I felt utterly
at home. This was the thing I knew from childhood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
Nothing that happened here could seem
strange. Nothing spoken in that grove of firs would
fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly
flanked by great growths, planted in 1848&mdash;the inner
line of cypresses, the outer windshield of fir trees.
One lordly fir had been blown down by a shell, and
cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the
grove. We were standing on an historic spot. In
the XIV century, Yolande of Flanders built her
castle here, high above danger. She was the Countess
of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her
district. When a little village to the North protested
at her heavy taxes, she burned the village.
The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She
drowned the two vicars, then built three churches in
expiation, one more for good measure than the number
of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity. One
of her chapels is on the plateau where we were
standing. On the outer wall is a sun dial in colors,
with a Latin inscription around the rim.</p>

<p>"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only
one dart, the last one."</p>

<p>So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel
of Saint Anne.</p>

<p>"Only one shell will get you&mdash;your own shell.
No need to worry till that comes, and then you
won't worry," how often the soldiers of France have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>
said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe
fatalism.</p>

<p>Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle
and fashioned that inscription in soft blue and gold
know in what sad sincerity his words would fall
true. When he lettered in his message for the hidden
years, he never thought it would speak centuries
away to the intimate experience of fighting
men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would
be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had
come searching, till the one fated shell should find
its mark.</p>

<p>The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches
sinking into the conifer bed of the lane. From the
rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of the
great panoramas of France. The famous roads from
Varenne and Verdun come into Clermont and pass
out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the channel
through the heart of France. From here the way
lies straight through Verdun to Metz and Mayence.
We could see rolling fields, and mounting hills,
ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to
twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and
the North and the West, the sweep of land lay under
us and in front of us: an immense brown and green
bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over
the dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades
clattered beneath us. From over the horizon line,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
the guns that nest from Verdun to the Somme grumbled
like summer thunder.</p>

<p>"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor.
"One is a doctor. He is now a prisoner with the
Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry and
Artillery."</p>

<p>We turned back toward the house. His wife was
walking a little ahead of us, talking vivaciously with
a couple of officers.</p>

<p>"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four
races in her, English, Greek, Spanish and French.
She is a very energetic woman, and brave. She is a
soul. She is a somebody. (<i>Elle est une âme. Elle
est quelqu'un.</i>)"</p>

<p>We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of
an olive skin, with gayety and ever-changing expression
in the face. But she is near the breaking-point
with the grief of her loss, and the constant
effort to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes
a little wild. I felt that tears lay close to the lightest
thing she said. Her maiden name was Marie-Amélie-Anne
Barker.</p>

<p>"When the Germans began to bombard our village,"
she told me, "my husband and I went down
into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes.</p>

<p>"'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and
sat in the drawing-room through the rest of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
bombardment. Every little while I went up to see
him, and then came back into the cellar.</p>

<p>"After their bombardment they came in person.
In the twilight of early morning they marched in,
a very splendid sight, with their great coats thrown
over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors
of my neighbors. The people had fled in fright.
The soldiers piled the household stuff out in the
street. I saw them load a camion with furniture
taken from the home of M. Desforges and with
material taken from Nordmann, our merchant of
novelties.</p>

<p>"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the
surgical dressings of our hospital, although it was
under the Red Cross flag.</p>

<p>"I stood in my door, watching the men go by.</p>

<p>"You are not afraid?" asked one.</p>

<p>"I am not afraid of you," I replied.</p>

<p>"I believed my house would not be burned. It
was the house where the German Emperor William
the First spent four days in 1870. It was the house
where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped
out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest
house in this part of France. Each year since 1871,
three or four German officers have come to visit it,
taking photographs of it, because of the part it
played in their history. I was sure it would not be
burned by them.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span></p>

<p>"I left all my things in it&mdash;the silverware, the
little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my
family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said
to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a
deserted house. I will show them we are living
there, with everything in sight. I was working
through the day at the hospital, caring for the German
wounded.</p>

<p>"The soldiers began their burning with the house
of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it
destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw
my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room,
and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the
bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything
that time had brought me, was burned.</p>

<p>"I said to the German doctor that it was very
hard.</p>

<p>"He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's
house, I should have ordered it to be spared.'"</p>

<p>We were silent for a moment. Then Madame
Jacquemet said:</p>

<p>"Come and see what we have now."</p>

<p>She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds
nearly filled.</p>

<p>"All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained.
"See, there are two chairs, two beds.
Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span></p>

<p>"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German
officer, after the village was in ruins.</p>

<p>"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It
was French shells that destroyed it."</p>

<p>"I was here," I answered. "There were no
French shells."</p>

<p>"The village people fired on our troops," he said.</p>

<p>"I was here," I told him. "The village people
did not fire on your troops. The village people ran
away."</p>

<p>"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he
explained.</p>

<p>The Mayor took up the story.</p>

<p>"A German officer took me into his room, one
day," he said. "He closed the door, and began:</p>

<p>"I am French at heart. I believe that your village
was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince
who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a
few kilometers away."</p>

<p>The picture he summoned was so vivid that I
said, "Nero&mdash;Nero, for whom the destruction of a
city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a
little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose
and convincing."</p>

<p>Monsieur Jacquemet went on:</p>

<p>"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little
round ones with a hole in the middle that jump as
they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we found three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment
picked them up when they came through, so that
no further damage should come of them. The Germans
left a sackful in the park belonging to M. Desforges.
The sack contained 500 little bags, and
each bag had 100 pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw
the sack into water, as a measure of safety."</p>

<p>The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence,
and passed one of them around. He has an exact
turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop,
marking with spots and dates the shells that seek
his home.</p>

<p>Under one of the oldest of the linden trees&mdash;the
historian of our party, Lieutenant Madelin, wondered
how old: "four, five centuries, perhaps"&mdash;we
ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor
and his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain
and the Major&mdash;the Major a compact, ruddy, sailor
type of man, with the far-seeing look in his blue eyes
of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon
line.</p>

<p>It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had
so often eaten on the New England hills, in just
that rapid sunlight playing through the leaves of
great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the
dust and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I
shall always see the beauty of this little hill rising
clear of the ruin of its village.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span></p>

<p>Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep,
sitting motionless and dumb, the mother of a soldier.
Her white hair was almost vivid against the decent
somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a
great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her
chin on her hand and looking off into the trees, as
if time was nothing any more. For many days the
carpenters had not been able to work fast enough
to make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was
waiting on the Mayor's doorstep for the coffin of
her son.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">V</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE LITTLE CORPORAL</p>

<p class="pn2">We were in the barracks of the Eighth Regiment
of Artillery. They have been converted
into a home for refugees, but the
old insignia of famous victories still adorn the walls.
We were talking with Madame Derlon. She is a
refugee from Pont-à-Mousson, widowed by German
severity. But unlike so many women of Lorraine
whom I met, she still could look to her line continuing.
For while she sat, slightly bent over and tired,
Charles, her fifteen-year-old son ("fifteen and a half,
Monsieur"), stood tall and straight at her side.
While the mother told me her story, I looked up
from her and saw on the wall the escutcheon of the
Regiment, and I read in illuminated letters the
names of the battles in which it had fought:</p>

<p class="pn20 p1">
"Austerlitz&mdash;1805.<br />
Friedland&mdash;1807.<br />
Sebastopol&mdash;1854.<br />
Solferino&mdash;1859."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>

<p class="p1">At the beginning of the war, her husband was
ferryman of the Moselle, she said. He carried
civilians and soldiers across. Their little son, then
thirteen years old, liked to be near him, and watch
the river and the passing of people. The boy had
discovered a cellar under the bridge&mdash;a fine underground
room, well-vaulted, where boy-like he had
hidden tobacco and where he often stayed for hours,
dreaming of the bold things he would do when his
time came, and he would be permitted to enlist.
His day was closer than he guessed. A cave is as
wonderful to a French boy as it was to Tom Sawyer.
Sometimes he made a full adventure of it and slept
the night through there.</p>

<p>During the early battles, the bridge had been
blown up. So Father Derlon was kept very busy
ferrying peasants and stray soldiers from bank to
bank. One day three German patrols came along.
Charles was standing by the bridge, watching his
father sitting in the wherry. The boy stepped down
into his underground room to get some tobacco. He
was gone only five minutes. When he came back,
the three Germans said to him:</p>

<p>"Your father is dead."</p>

<p>It was so. They had climbed the bridge, and
fired three times; one explosive bullet had entered
the ferryman's head, and two had shattered his arm.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
The Germans said he had been carrying soldiers
across, and that it was wrong to carry soldiers.</p>

<p>"The little one came home crying," said Madame
Derlon. "Since that moment, the little one left
home without telling me. He did not send me any
news of himself. I searched everywhere to try to
find a trace of him. Monsieur Louis Marin, the
Deputy, told me he had seen a boy like my little one
following the soldiers. Actually he had been
adopted by the 95th Territorial Regiment."</p>

<p>He told the soldiers that he had just seen his
father killed by the Germans. One of the captains
took him under his protection. The boy insisted on
becoming a fighter. He was brave and they made
him Corporal. He fell wounded in action, winning
the Croix de Guerre.</p>

<p>Charles Derlon, the little Corporal of the 95th
Infantry, has a bright open face, but it is a face
into which has passed the look of responsibility. In
one moment, he became a man, and he has that quiet
dignity of a boy whom older men respect and make
a comrade of. He holds himself with the trim
shoulders and straight carriage of a little soldier of
France.</p>

<p>One of us asked him:</p>

<p>"And weren't you afraid, my boy, of the fight?"</p>

<p>"It is all the same to me," he replied, "when I get
used to it."</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-269.jpg" width="400" height="618"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">The Little French Corporal, who joined the army at 14
years of age and, wounded, won the Cross of War.</p>
</div></div>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-270.jpg" width="400" height="615"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">The Curé of Triaucourt (at the right) who stayed with
his people when the village was burned. Next him, in
trench helmet, stands one of the thousands of French priests
who serve by day and night at the front, rescuing the
wounded, and cheering the fighting men.</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p>

<p>"And why," we pressed him, "did you run away
without going to your mother? Didn't you think
she might be anxious?"</p>

<p>"Because I knew very well," he said, "that she
would not want to let me go."</p>

<p>"And you are away from the army now, 'on permission'?"
we asked.</p>

<p>Very proudly he answered:</p>

<p>"No, Monsieur. I am on leave of convalescence
for three months. I have been wounded in three
places, two wounds in my arm, and one in my leg."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">VI</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE GOOD CURÉ</p>

<p class="pn2">What was true of Joan of Arc is true
to-day. There is no leadership like the
power of a holy spirit. It lends an edge
to the tongue in dealing with unworthy enemies. It
gives dignity to sudden death. Religion, where it
is sincere, is still a mighty power in the lives of
simple folk to lift them to greatness. Out beyond
Rheims, at the front line trenches, the tiny village
of Bétheny is knocked to pieces. The parish church
is entirely destroyed except for the front wall.
Against that wall, an altar has been built, where the
men of the front line gather for service. Over the
altar I read the words</p>

<p class="pn10 p1"><i>Que le Cœur de Jésus sauve la France</i>.
</p>

<p class="p1">In that name many in France are working. Such
a one is Paul Viller, curé of Triaucourt. The burning
of the village is the world's end for a peasant,
because the village was his world. When the peasants
of Triaucourt saw their little local world rocking,
they turned to the curé. He was ready.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p>

<p>"It is better to run," said the Mayor; "they kill,
those Germans."</p>

<p>As the curé said to the German lieutenant who
tried to force him up the bell-tower, "That ascension
will give me the vertigo," so he felt about running
away: his legs were not built for it. He would
like to "oblige," but he was not fashioned for such
flights.</p>

<p>Curé Viller is 55 years old, short and ruddy and
sturdy. In his books and his travel, and wellgrounded
Latin education, he is far removed from
the simple villagers he serves. But he has learned
much from them. He has taken on their little ways.
He has their simplicity which is more distinguished
than the manners of cities. With them and with him
I felt at home. That is because he was at home with
himself, at home in life. His house was full of
travel pictures&mdash;Brittany fishermen and nooks of
scenery. He had the magazine litter, scattered
through all the rooms, of a reading man who cannot
bear to destroy one printed thing that has served a
happy hour. His volumes ranged through theology
up to the history of Thiers. His desk was the desk
of an executive, orderly, pigeon-holed, over which
the transactions of a village flow each day. A young
priest entered and stated a case of need. The curé
opened a little drawer, peeled off five franc notes
from a bundle, and saw the young man to the door.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
It was as clean-cut as the fingering of a bank-cashier.
The only difference was the fine courtesy exchanged
by the men.</p>

<p>The curé talked with us about the Germans. We
asked him how the peasants felt toward them, after
the burning and the murders.</p>

<p>"I will tell you how the village electrician felt,"
replied he. "He came back after the troops had left
and took a look about the village.</p>

<p>"'If I ever get hold of those Germans, I'll chew
them up,' he said to me.</p>

<p>"'Some of them are still here,' I replied.</p>

<p>"'Show them to me quick,' he demanded.</p>

<p>"'They are in the church&mdash;grievously wounded.'</p>

<p>"We went there. A German was lying too high
on his stretcher, groaning from his wound and the
uncomfortable position.</p>

<p>"'Here, you, what are you groaning about?'
thundered the electrician. He lit a cigarette and
puffed at it, as he glared at his enemy.</p>

<p>"'Uncomfortable, are you? I'll fix you,' he went
on, sternly. Very gently he eased the German down
into the softer part of the stretcher, and tucked in
his blankets.</p>

<p>"'Now, stop your groaning,' he commanded. He
stood there a moment in silence, then burst out again
angrily:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>

<p>"'What are you eyeing me for? Want a cigarette,
do you?'</p>

<p>"He pulled out a cigarette, put it in the lips of
the wounded man and lit it. Then he came home
with me and installed electric lights for me. That
was the way he chewed up the Germans.</p>

<p>"As for me, I lost twenty pounds of weight because
of those fellows. After they have been in a
room, it is a chaos: men's clothing, women's undergarments,
petticoats, skirts, shoes, napkins, cloths,
hats, papers, boxes, trunks, curtains, carpets, furniture
overturned and broken, communicants' robes&mdash;everything
in a mess. I have seen them take bottles
of gherkins, cherries, conserves of vegetables, pots
of grease, lard, hams, everything they could eat or
drink. What they couldn't carry, they destroyed.
They opened the taps of wine casks, barrels of oil
and vinegar, and set flowing the juice of fruits ready
for distillation.</p>

<p>"The official pillage of precious objects which are
to be sent to Germany is directed by an officer. He
has a motor car and men. I have sometimes asked
for vouchers for the objects, stolen in that way. The
vouchers are marked with the signature of the officer
doing the requisitioning, and with the stamp of the
regiment. But who will do the paying, and when
will they do it? The plunderer who takes bottles<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span>
of wine gives vouchers. I have seen some of them
which were playfully written in German, reading:</p>

<p>"'Thanks, good people, we will drink to your
health.'</p>

<p>"They don't always have good luck with their
pillage. A Boche, who is an amateur of honey, rummages
a hive. The valiant little bees hurl themselves
on the thief and give him such a face that he
can't open his mouth or his eyes for a couple of
days. A Boche once held out to me a handful of
papers which he took for checks of great value.
They were receipts filched from the drawers of
Madame Albert Fautellier. The biter was well
bitten.</p>

<p>"When the Germans entered my house they held
revolvers in their hand. It is so always and everywhere.
If all they are asking of you is a match, or
a word of advice, the Boche takes out his revolver
from its holster, and plunges it back in, when he has
got what he wishes. With a revolver bullet he
shoots a steer, and knocks down a pig with the butt
of his rifle. The animals are skinned. He doesn't
take anything but the choice morsels. He leaves the
rest in the middle of the street, or a court or garden,
the head, the carcass and the hide."</p>

<p>No man in France had a busier time during the
German occupation than this village curé. He went
on with his recital:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span></p>

<p>"On Sunday morning, the Germans set our church
clock by German time, but the bell was recalcitrant
and continued to sound the French hour, while the
hands galloped on according to their whim. While
they were here, the hour didn't matter. We lost
all notion of time. We hardly knew what day it
was. My cellar is deep and well vaulted. I placed
there a pick-ax, spades and a large shovel. Every
precaution was taken. I placed chairs, and brought
down water. Wax tapers, jammed in the necks of
empty bottles, gave us light enough. That Sunday
and the days following I had the pleasure of offering
hospitality to 76 persons. My parishioners knew
that my home was wide open to them. When you
are in numbers, you have less fear.</p>

<p>"The men went into the garden to listen and see
whether the battle was coming closer. I recited the
rosary in a loud tone. The little children knelt on
their knees on the pavement and prayed. Cavalry
and infantry passed my door in silence. Once only,
I heard the Teutons chanting; it was the third day of
the battle: a regiment, muddy and frightened, reentered
Friaucourt chanting.</p>

<p>"The hours go slowly. Suddenly we saw to the
East a high column of smoke. Can that be the
village of Evres on fire? I think it is, but to reassure
my people I tell them that it is a flax-mill burning,
or the smoke of cannon. At night we sleep on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
chairs. The children lie down on an immense carpet,
which I fold over them, and in that portfolio they
are able to sleep.</p>

<p>"Monday was a day of glorious sunshine. Nature
seemed to be en fête. After I had buried seven
French and German dead, and was walking home, I
saw coming toward me Madame Procès, her daughter
Hélène, in tears, a German officer and a soldier.
The officer asked me:</p>

<p>"'Do you know these ladies?'</p>

<p>"'Very well,' I answered, 'they are honest people
of my parish.'</p>

<p>"'All right. This soldier has not shown proper
respect to the young lady. He will be rebuked. If
he had gone further he would be shot.'</p>

<p>"The officer then reprimanded the soldier in my
presence. The man, stiff at attention, listened to the
rebuke in such a resentful, hateful way that I
thought to myself there is going to be trouble. The
soldier, his rifle over his shoulder, went toward the
Mayor's office.</p>

<p>"About twenty minutes later I heard firing from
the direction of the Mayor's office, two shots, several
shots, then a regular fusilade. The sullen soldier
had gone down there, clapped his hand to his head,
said he was wounded, and fired. When I heard the
first firing, I thought it was only one more of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
performances. I had seen them kill a cow and a pig
in the street by shooting them.</p>

<p>"But at the sound of these shots the Germans ran
out from the houses and the streets, rifle and revolver
in hand, shouting to me:</p>

<p>"'Your people have fired on us.'</p>

<p>"I protested with all my power, saying that all
our arms had been put in the Mayor's office, and
that no one of us had done the firing. But they only
shouted the louder:</p>

<p>"'Your people have fired on us.'</p>

<p>"Flames broke out in the homes of Mr. Edouard
Gand, and Mr. Gabriel Géminel. We saw the
Boches set them on fire with incendiary fuses. Later
on, we found the remnants of those fuses.</p>

<p>"Women began running to me, weeping and
saying:</p>

<p>"'Curé, save my father.' 'My child is in the
flames.' 'They are killing my children.'</p>

<p>"The shooting went on. The fire spread and
made a hot cauldron of two streets. Cattle and
crops and houses burned.</p>

<p>"Then a strange thing happened. Some Germans
aided in saving clothing and furniture from two or
three of the houses. But most of them watched the
destruction, standing silent and showing neither
pleasure nor regret. I could tell it was no new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span>
sight for them. In two hours, there was nothing left
of the thirty-five houses on two streets.</p>

<p>"Our people ran out, chased by angry Germans
who fired on them as if they were hunter's game.
Jules Gand, 58 years old, was shot down at the
threshold of his door. A seventeen-year-old boy
named Georges Lecourtier, taking refuge with me,
was shot. Alfred Lallemand hid himself in a
kitchen. His body was riddled with bullets. We
found it burned and lying in the rubbish, eight days
later. He was 54 years old. Men, women and children
fled into the gardens and the fields. They
forded the river without using the bridge which was
right there. They ran as far as Brizeaux and
Senard. My cook ran. She had a packet of my
bonds, which I had given her for safe-keeping, and
she had a basket of her own valuables. In her fear
she threw away her basket, and kept my bonds.</p>

<p>"The daughter of one of our women, shot in this
panic, came to me and said:</p>

<p>"'My mother had fifty thousand francs, somewhere
about her.'</p>

<p>"The body had been buried in haste, with none
of the usual rites paid the dead, of washing and
undressing. So no examination had been made. We
dug the body up and found a bag.</p>

<p>"'Is that the bag?' I asked the daughter.</p>

<p>"'It looks like it,' she replied. It was empty.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>

<p>"A day later we found another bag in the dead
woman's room, and in it were the bonds for fifty
thousand francs. That shows the haste and panic
in which our people had fled, picking up the wrong
thing, leaving the thing of most value.</p>

<p>"It was in the garden of the Procès family that
the worst was done. It was Hélène Procès, you
remember, who was insulted by the German soldier.
The grandmother, 78 years old, Miss Laure Mennehand,
the aunt, who was 81 years old, the mother,
40 years old, and Hélène, who was 18, ran down
the garden. They placed a little ladder against the
low wire fence which separated their back yard from
their neighbor's. Hélène was the first one over, and
turned to help the older women. The Germans had
followed them, and riddled the three women with
bullets. They fell one on the other. Hélène hid
herself in the cabbages.</p>

<p>"That same evening some of the villagers went
with me to the garden. The women looked as if
they were sleeping. They had no trace of suffering
in the face. Miss Mennehand had her little
toilet bag, containing 1,000 francs, fastened to her
left wrist, and was still holding her umbrella in her
right hand. Her brains had fallen out. I collected
them on a salad leaf and buried them in the garden.</p>

<p>"We carried the three bodies to their beds in
their home. In one bed, as I opened it, I saw a gold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
watch lying. From Monday evening till Wednesday
morning, the bodies lay there, with no wax taper
burning, and no one to watch and pray. By night
the Germans played the piano, close by.</p>

<p>"'Your people fired on our soldiers,' said a Captain
to me next day. 'I'll show you the window.'</p>

<p>"He led me down the street, and pointed.</p>

<p>"'It is unfortunate you have chosen that window,'
I replied to him; 'at the time you started burning
our village the only person in the house was a paralytic
man, who was burned in his bed.'</p>

<p>"It was the house of Jean Lecourtier, 70 years old.</p>

<p>"In front of the Poincaré house, I met a General,
who, they said, was the Duke of Württemberg. He
said to me:</p>

<p>"'I am glad to see you, Curé. I congratulate you.
You are the first chaplain I have seen. Generally,
when we get to a village, the mayor and the curé
have run away. We officers are angry at what has
taken place here. You have treated us well.'</p>

<p>"'Perhaps you will be able to stop the horror,'
I said to him.</p>

<p>"'Ah, what can you expect? It is war. There
are bad soldiers in your army and in ours.'</p>

<p>"The next day I saw him getting ready to enter a
magnificent car. His arm was bandaged.</p>

<p>"'You are wounded, General?' I asked him.</p>

<p>"'No, not that,' he answered.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p>

<p>"'A strained ligament (<i>entorse</i>)?' I asked.</p>

<p>"'No,' he said, 'don't tell me the French word,'
He opened a pocket dictionary with his unhurt hand,
wetting his finger and turning the pages.</p>

<p>"'It is a sprain (<i>luxation</i>),' he said.</p>

<p>"That is the way they learn a language as they
go along.</p>

<p>"'You are leaving us?' I asked.</p>

<p>"Yes, I am going to my own country to rest."</p>

<p>The afternoon had passed while we were talking.
We rose to make our good-bys.</p>

<p>"Come with me," said the curé. He led us down
the village street, to a small house, whose backyard
is a little garden on the little river. All the setting
was small and homelike and simple, like the village
itself and the curé. A young woman stepped out
from the kitchen to greet us.</p>

<p>"This is the girl," said Father Viller. Hélène
Procès is twenty years old, with the dark coloring,
soft, slightly olive skin, brown eyes, of a thousand
other young women in the valley of the Meuse. But
the look in her eyes was the same look that a friend
of mine carries, though it is now twelve years since
the hour when her mother was burned to death on
board the <i>General Slocum</i>. Sudden horror has fixed
itself on the face of this girl of Triacourt, whose
mother and grandmother and aunt were shot in front
of her in one moment.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span></p>

<p>She led us through the garden. There were only
a few yards of it: just a little homely place. She
brought us to the fence&mdash;a low wire affair, cheaply
made, and easy to get over.</p>

<p>"The bullets were splashing around me," she said.</p>

<p>The tiny river, which had hardly outgrown its
beginnings as a brook, went sliding past. It seemed
a quiet place for a tragedy.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">VII</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS</p>

<p class="pn2">Two persons came in the room at Lunéville
where I was sitting. One was Madame
Dujon, and the other was her granddaughter.
Madame Dujon had a strong umbrella, with a
crook handle. Her tiny granddaughter had a tiny
umbrella which came as high as her chin. As the
grandmother talked, the sadness of the remembrance
filled her eyes with tears. Her voice had pain in it,
and sometimes the pain, in spite of her control, came
through in sobbing. The little girl's face was
burned, and the wounds had healed with scars of
ridged flesh on the little nose and cheek. The emotion
of the grandmother passed over into the child.
With a child's sensitiveness she caught each turn of
the suffering. Troubled by the voice overhead, she
looked up and saw the grandmother's eyes filled with
tears. Her eyes filled. When her grandmother, telling
of the dying boy, sobbed, the tiny girl sobbed.
The story of the murder tired the grandmother, and
she leaned on her umbrella. The little girl put her
chin on her tiny umbrella, and rested it there.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>

<p>Madame Dujon said:</p>

<p>"I will try to tell you the beginning of what I
have passed through, Monsieur, but I do not promise
that I shall arrive at the end. It is too hard. The
day of the twenty-fifth of August, which was a
Monday&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>As she spoke her words were cut by sobs. She
went on:</p>

<p>"When the Germans came to our house, my son
had to go all over the house to find things that they
wanted. I did not understand them, and they were
becoming menacing. I said to them:</p>

<p>"'I am not able to do any better. Fix things
yourself. I give you everything here. I am going
to a neighbor's house.'"</p>

<p>She went with the tiny grand-girl, who was three
years old, her son, Lucien, fourteen years old, and
another son, sixteen. The Germans came here too,
breaking in the windows, and firing their rifles. The
house was by this time on fire. The face of the little
girl was burned.</p>

<p>"My poor boys wished to make their escape, but
the fourteen-year-old was more slow than the other,
because the little fellow was a bit paralyzed, and he
already had his hands and body burned. He tried to
come out as far as the pantry. I saw the poor little
thing stretched on the ground, dying.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p>

<p>"'My God,' he said, 'leave me. I am done for.
Mamma, see my bowels.'</p>

<p>"I saw his bowels. They were hanging like two
pears from the sides of his stomach. Just then the
Germans came, shooting. I said to them:</p>

<p>"'He has had enough.'</p>

<p>"The little one turned over and tried to get the
strength to cry out to them:</p>

<p>"'Gang of dirty&mdash;&mdash;' ("Bande de sal&mdash;&mdash;")</p>

<p>"Every one called to us to come out of the fire.
The fire was spreading all over the house. I did
not want to understand what they were saying. I
went upstairs again where the little girl was, to
try to save her (see still the marks which she received).
I succeeded, not without hurt, in carrying
away the little girl out of the flames.</p>

<p>"I had to leave my boy in the flames, and, like a
mad person, save myself with the little girl.</p>

<p>"I have two sons-in-law, of whom one is the father
of this little girl here. Look at her face marked
with scars."</p>

<p>"Yes. They burned me," said the tiny girl. She
held up her hand to the scars on her face.</p>

<p>"My other little boy escaped from the fire. He
was hidden all one day in a heap of manure. He did
not wish to make me sad by telling how his brother
had cried out to die."</p>

<p>Madame Dujon sobbed quietly and could not go<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
on for a moment. The little girl put her chin on
her little umbrella, and her eyes filled with tears.
The Mayor of Lunéville, Monsieur Keller, said
to us:</p>

<p>"Madame has not told you&mdash;the Germans finished
off the poor child. Seeing that he was nearly dead,
they threw him into the fire and closed the door."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">VIII</h3>

<p class="pcl2">MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS"</p>

<p class="pn2">When I went across to France there was
one man whom I wished to meet. It was
the Prefect of the Meurthe-et-Moselle.
I wanted to meet him because he is in charge of
the region where German frightfulness reached its
climax. Leon Mirman has maintained a high morale
in that section of France which has suffered most,
and which has cause for despair. Here it was that
the Germans found nothing that is human alien to
their hate. When they encountered a nun, a priest,
or a church, they reacted to the sacred thing and
to the religious person with desecration, violation
and murder. But that was only because there were
many Roman Catholics in the district. They had
no race or religious prejudice. When they came
to Lunéville there was a synagogue and a rabbi.
They burned the synagogue and killed the rabbi.
As the sun falling round a helpless thing, their hate
embraced all grades of weakness in Lorraine. In
Nomeny they distinguished themselves by a fury<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>
against women. In some of the villages they specialized
in pillage. Others they burned with zeal.
Badonviller, Nonhigny, Parux, Crevic, Nomeny,
Gerbéviller&mdash;the list of the villages of Meurthe-et-Moselle
is a tale of the shame of Germany and of
the suffering of France.</p>

<p>But not of suffering only. At no place is France
stronger than at this point of greatest strain. The
district is dotted with great names of the humble&mdash;names
unknown before the war, and now to be
known for as long as France is France. Here Sister
Julie held back the German Army and saved her
wounded from the bayonet. Here the staunch
Mayor of Lunéville and his good wife stayed with
their people through the German occupation.</p>

<p>Leon Mirman is the Prefect of all this region.
He was Director of Public Charities in Paris, but
when war broke out he asked to be sent to the post
of danger. So he was sent to the city of Nancy to
rule the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle. The
Prefect of a Department in France is the same as
the Governor of a State in America. But his office
in peace is as nothing compared to his power in time
of war. He can suspend a Mayor and remove an
entire population from one village to another. The
morale of France for that section is dependent on
the reaction he makes to danger and stress.</p>

<p>The answer of the ravaged region to the murder<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
and the burning is a steadiness of courage, a busy
and sane life of normal activity. Beautiful Nancy
still lifts her gates of gold in the Place of Stanislaus.
The lovely light of France falls softly on the white
stone front of the municipal buildings, and from
their interior comes a throbbing energy that spreads
through the hurt district. The Prefect's houses for
refugees are admirably conducted. School "keeps"
for the children of Pont-à-Mousson on a quiet country
road, while their mothers still live in cellars in
the bombarded town, busy with the sewing which
has made their home famous. They are embroidering
table cloths and napkins, and Americans are
buying their work. They are not allowed any longer
to be happy, but they can go on creating beauty.
None of their trouble need escape into the clean
white linen and the delicate needle-work, and the
Bridge of Pont-à-Mousson embosses the centerpiece
as proudly as if the town had not been pounded by
heavy shells for two years.</p>

<p>But the parents were agreed on one thing: it was
no place for children. So these and other hundreds
of little ones have been brought together. The
Prefect means that these children, some of whom
have seen their homes burned, their mothers hunted
by armed men, shall have the evil memory wiped
out. He is working that they shall have a better
chance than if the long peace had continued. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
simple homely things are going on, as if the big
guns could not reach in.</p>

<p>I attended the classes of domestic science, where
little girls plan menus for the family meal. Overhead,
the aeroplanes spot the sky. Three times in
my days in the district they came and "laid their
eggs," in the phrase of the soldiers. Sometimes a
mother is killed, sometimes a sister, but the peaceful
work goes on. The blackboard is scribbled over
with chalk. Piping voices repeat their lesson. I
saw the tiny boys at school. I saw the older boys
working at trades. Some of them were busy at carpentry,
remaking the material for their own village,
bureaus, tables and chairs. We talked with boys
and girls from Nomeny, where the slaughter fell on
women with peculiar severity. These children had
seen the Germans come in. Wherever I went I met
children who had seen the hand grenades thrown,
their homes burning. I visited many hundreds of
these children at school. They are orderly and busy.
It will take more than fire and murder from unjust
men to spoil life for the new generation of France.
For that insolence has released a good will in a
greater race than the race that sought to offend these
little ones.</p>

<p>And the same care has been put on the older
refugees. I saw the barracks of the famous Twentieth
Army Corps&mdash;the Iron Divisions&mdash;and of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
Eighth Artillery used for this welfare work. Mirman
has taken these poor herds of refugees and restored
their community life in the new temporary
quarters. Here they have a hospital, a church and
a cinema. He is turning the evil purpose of the
Germans into an instrument for lifting his people
higher than if they had known only happiness. Beyond
the great power and authority of his office he
is loved. The Prefect is a good man, simple and
high-minded.</p>

<p>He has given me the statement that follows for
the American people. Let us remember in reading
it that it comes from the highest official in France
in charge of the region where systematic atrocity
was practiced in an all-inclusive way. On this
chance section of the world's great area, a supreme
and undeserved suffering fell. Monsieur Mirman
makes here the first official statement of the war on
the subject of reprisals. There is something touching
in his desire for our understanding. France
hoped we would see her agony with the eyes she
once turned toward us. She still hopes on, and sends
this message of her representative:</p>

<p>"I wish you to understand in what spirit we began
the war in France, and especially in this district. It
was our intention to follow the rules of what you
call in English 'Fair Play.' We wished to carry on
the war as we had carried on other wars, to our risk<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
and peril, with all the loyalties of fighting men.
But from the start we have been faced with men
whom we are unable to consider as soldiers, who
have conducted themselves in a section of our Department
as veritable outlaws. You are not going,
unfortunately, to Nomeny, which is a town of this
Department where the Germans have committed
the worst of their atrocities. At least you will go
to Gerbéviller, where they burned the houses, one
by one, and put to death old men, women and children.</p>

<p>"Mention is often made of these two townships
where the inhabitants suffered the most severely
from the invasion of the enemy, but in many other
townships, a long list, the Germans acted in the
same way. They burned the streets, they killed men,
women and children without cause. Always they
gave the pretext, to excuse themselves, that the
civilian population had fired on them. On that
point, I bring you my personal testimony: I say to
you on my honor that this German allegation is absolutely
false.</p>

<p>"At my request I was appointed the Prefect of
Meurthe-et-Moselle on August 9, 1914. In all the
townships of this Department, on my arrival, I requested
in the most urgent terms that the inhabitants
should not give way to restlessness, and should not
resort to a single act which I called an unruly act,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>
by themselves taking direct part in the war. I made
those requests in perfect agreement with all the population,
approved by the most ardent patriots. I held
inquiries, frequent and detailed, to find out if my
instructions had been respected. Not once have I
been able to establish the fact that a civilian fired
on the Germans.</p>

<p>"If isolated instances of that sort did take place,
they could not be admitted as justifying the total
of systematic crimes committed by the Germans, but
I have not been able to lay hold of a single instance.</p>

<p>"I will cite two incidents which will mark out
for you, in a clear-cut way, what I believe to be "the
French method."</p>

<p>"At the beginning of the war a German aviator
threw bombs on a town near Nancy. The Mayor,
revolted, went to the town-hall, where the arms had
been deposited, and took a hunting rifle and fired
at the aviator. It is clear that the German aviator
was committing a crime contrary to all the laws of
war, but I held that the Mayor of that town, by
himself firing in that way on a criminal, was disobeying
the laws of his country. I proceeded to disciplinary
measures against the Mayor: I suspended
him from office for many weeks.</p>

<p>"Another incident: In the first days of August,
1914, the Germans entering Badonviller, exasperated
perhaps by the resistance which our soldiers of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
the rear-guard gave them, or simply wishing to leave
a token of their Kultur, and to terrorize the population,
burned part of the village, and fired on the
inhabitants as if they were rabbits.</p>

<p>"I arrived the next day. The French troops had
reentered Badonviller and had taken some German
soldiers prisoner. The prisoners were being led to
the town-hall. The fires had not yet been put out,
and the women whom the Germans had murdered
were still unburied.</p>

<p>"The Mayor had seen the terrible spectacle. He
had seen his young wife murdered at his doorstep
in front of her little children. He himself had suffered
violence. But he had stuck to his post, and
had continued to carry on the affairs of his town.
While the prisoners were being led along the inhabitants
of Badonviller, who had seen these crimes,
recognized the prisoners and surrounded them,
threatening them and crying out against them. The
Mayor threw himself resolutely between the prisoners
and his people. This Mayor, who had had
his own flesh and blood murdered and his heart torn,
declared with emphasis that those prisoners, no matter
what crimes they had committed, were protected
by the law, and that it was not permitted to any
civilian to touch a hair of their head.</p>

<p>"Because he had called to order some of his people
whose anger was natural enough, because he had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
respected the law under trying conditions, I asked
that this Mayor should be decorated, and the French
Government decreed for him the cross of the Legion
of Honor. He was rewarded in this way, not for
having carried out criminal violence according to
the German method, but on the contrary for preventing,
by coolness and force of will, reprisals made
against enemy prisoners.</p>

<p>"By these examples, and I could cite many others,
you will be able to estimate the ideas with which
the French began the war.</p>

<p>"The French in more than one instance have run
against, not armies, but veritable bands organized
for crime. I say 'organized,' and that is the significant
fact. In a war when individual accidental excesses
are committed, tragic situations, to be sure,
arise, but we ought not to conclude that we have
found ourselves face to face with a general organization
of cruelty and destruction.</p>

<p>"In the townships of which I am speaking, it is
by the order of the heads that the crimes have been
committed. They are not the crimes of individuals:
there has been a genuine organization of murder. It
is that which will be thrown into the light by the
testimony which you will gather&mdash;notably at Gerbéviller.</p>

<p>"Then I call your attention to what the city of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
Nancy has suffered in violation of the laws of humanity
since the beginning of the war.</p>

<p>"From the beginning of August, 1914, Nancy has
been empty of troops, the numerous barracks have
been converted into hospitals; some were used as
asylums for our refugees. Nothing remained at
Nancy, nothing has come since then. You won't
find at the present time a single cannon, a single
depot of ammunition, no fortification, no military
work. For a garrison there are some dozens of old
territorials, barely sufficient in number to keep order.</p>

<p>"On the Fourth of September an enemy aviator
threw bombs on the square where the Cathedral
stands, killing a little girl and an old man.</p>

<p>"A few days later, knowing that they were not
going to be able to enter Nancy, furious at the
thought that they would soon be forced to retire
and that they must give up their cherished dreams,
in the night of the ninth and tenth of September,
those unfortunate men advanced two pieces of artillery
under cover of a storm, bombarded our peaceful
city, and ripped to pieces houses in various quarters
of the town, murdering women and children.</p>

<p>"A military point to that bombardment? I challenge
any one to state it. Act of cruelty, simply,
an act of outlawry.</p>

<p>"Ever since then acts against Nancy are multiplied.
The list is long of victims stricken in Nancy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
by the bombs of Zeppelins, of aeroplanes, and by
the shells of the 380, shot for now many months
by a long-range gun. All the victims are civilians,
mostly women and children. I repeat to you that
the city of Nancy is empty of soldiers.</p>

<p>"And what I say of Nancy is true of the other
towns, particularly at Lunéville, where a bomb falling
in the full market killed 45 persons, of whom
40 were women.</p>

<p>"Adding childishness to violence, with a craving
for the histrionic, obsessed by the desire to strike the
imagination (or let us say more simply having the
souls of 'cabotins'), these outlaws have conceived
the bombardment of Nancy by a 380 cannon on
the first of January&mdash;New Year's, the day of gifts&mdash;and
on the first of July. In that New Year bombardment
they so arranged it that the first shell fell
on Nancy at the last stroke of midnight. I will show
the little furnished house which that shell crushed,
killing six persons, of whom four were women.</p>

<p>"For a long while we were content to suffer those
crimes, protesting in the name of law. We did not
wish to defend ourselves. We shrink from the
thought of reprisals. But public opinion ended by
forcing the hand of the Government. Unanimously
the nation has demanded that, each time an undefended
French town is bombarded by the Germans
by aeroplane, Zeppelin or cannon, a reply shall be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
made to that violation of the laws of war and of the
rights of humanity by the bombardment of a German
town.</p>

<p>"I wish to say to you, and I beg you to make it
known to your noble nation: it is not with serenity
that we see our French soldiers do that work. It
is with profound sadness that we resign ourselves
to those reprisals. Those methods of defense are
imposed upon us. Since all considerations of humanity
are to-day alien to the German soul, we are
reduced for the protection of our wives and our children
to the policy of reprisals and to the assassination
in our turn of the children and the women in
Germany. The Germans have vociferously rejoiced
in the crimes committed by their soldiers; they have
made an illumination for the day of the <i>Lusitania</i>
crime; they have delighted in the thought that on
the first of January the children of Nancy received,
as New Year's presents, shells from a 380 cannon.
The acts of reprisal to which we are forced do not
rejoice us in the least; they sadden us. We speak
of them with soberness. And we have here reason
for hating Kultur all the more. We French hate
the Germans less for the crimes which they have
committed on us than for the acts of violence contrary
to the laws of war which they have forced us
to commit in our turn, and for the reprisals on their
children and their women.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span></p>

<p>"I thank you for having come here. You will
look about you, you will ask questions, you will
easily see the truth. That truth you will make
known to your great and free nation. We shall
await with confidence the judgment of its conscience."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">IX</h3>

<p class="pcl2">AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES</p>

<p class="pn2">Burned villages are like ruins of an ancient
civilization. To wander through them was
as if I were stepping among the bones of a
dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to
the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced
peasants&mdash;only these were living in that belt of
death that cuts across the face of France, like the
scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil
is sacred to a Frenchman. I saw a little shop with
pottery and earthenware in the window: vases, and
jars, and toilet cases. The sign read:</p>

<p>"La terre de nos Grés&mdash;c'est la même terre que
défendent nos soldats dans les tranchées."</p>

<p>("The earth which made these wares is the same
earth which our soldiers defend in the trenches.")</p>

<p>I want the people at home to understand this war.
So I am telling of it in terms that are homely. I
asked the authorities to let me wander through the
villages and talk with the inhabitants. What a village
suffers, what a storekeeper suffers, will mean<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
something to my friends in Iowa and Connecticut.
Talk of artillery duels with big guns and bayonet
charges through barbed wire falls strangely on peaceful
ears. But what a druggist's wife has seen, what
a school-teacher tells, will come home to Americans
in Eliot, Maine, and down the Mississippi Valley.
What one cares very much to reach is the solid silent
public opinion of the smaller cities, the towns and
villages. The local storekeeper, the village doctor,
the farmer, these are the men who make the real
America&mdash;the America which responds slowly but
irresistibly to a sound presentation of facts. The
alert newspaper editor, the hustling real-estate man,
the booster for a better-planned town, these citizens
shape our public opinion. If once our loyal Middle
Westerners know the wrong that has been done people
just like themselves, they will resent it as each
of us resents it that has seen it. This is no dim
distant thing. This is a piece of cold-planned injustice
by murder and fire done to our friends in the
sister republic. I should like a representative committee
from South Norwalk, Conn., Emporia, Kansas,
and Sherman, Texas, to see Gerbéviller as I
have seen it, to walk past its 475 burned houses, to
talk with its impoverished but spirited residents. I
should like them to catch the spirit of Sermaize,
building its fresh little red-brick homes out of the
rubble of the wrecked place.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p>

<p>I had thought that I had some slight idea of
French spirit. I had thought that five months with
their soldiers at Melle, Dixmude, and Nieuport had
given me a hint of France in her hour of greatness.
But I found that not even the cheery first line men,
not even the democratic officers, are the best of
France. They are lovable and wonderful. But the
choicest persons in France are the women in the
devastated districts. They can make or break
morale. What the people back of the trenches are
feeling, the talk that they make in the village inn&mdash;these
are the decisive factors that give heart to an
army or that crumble its resistance. No government,
no military staff can continue an unpopular
war. But by these people who have lost their goods
by fire, and their relatives by assassination, the spirit
of France is reinforced. The war is safe in their
hands.</p>

<p>The heaviest of all the charges that rests against
Germany is that of preparedness in equipment for
incendiary destruction. They had not only prepared
an army for fighting the enemy troops with rifle,
machine-gun and howitzer. They had supplied that
army with a full set of incendiary material for making
war on non-combatants. Immediately on crossing
the frontier, they laid waste peaceful villages by
fire. And that wholesale burning was not accomplished
by extemporized means. It was done by instruments<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
"made in Germany" before the war, instruments
of no value for battle, but only for property
destruction, house by house. Their manufacture
and distribution to that first German army of
invasion show the premeditation of the destruction
visited on the invaded country. On his arm the
soldier carried a rifle, in his sack the stuff for fires.
He marched against troops and against non-combatants.
His war was a war of extermination. The
army carried a chemical mixture which caught fire
on exposure to the air, by being broken open; another
chemical which fired up from a charge of powder;
incendiary bombs which spread flames when
exploded; pellets like lozenges which were charged
with powders, and which slipped easily into the bag.
These were thrown by the handful into the house,
after being started by match or the gun. When the
Germans came to a village, where they wished to
spread terror, they burned it house by house. I have
seen their chalk-writing on the doors of unburned
houses. One of their phrases which they scribbled
on those friendly doors was "Nicht anzünden."
Now "anzünden" does not mean simply "Do not
burn." It means "Do not burn with incendiary
methods." Wherever a spy lived, or a peasant innkeeper
friendly with drinks, or wherever there was
a house which an officer chose for his night's rest,
there the Germans wrote the phrase that saved the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>
house. The other houses to right and left were
"burned with incendiary methods." That phrase is
as revealing as if in a village where there were dead
bodies of children with bayonet wounds upon them,
you discovered one child walking around with a tag
hung round her neck reading "Do not murder this
little girl by bayonet."</p>

<p>That military hierarchy which extends from the
sergeant to the Emperor, controlling every male in
Germany, came down upon Belgium and France,
prepared to crush, not alone the military power, but
every spiritual resource of those nations. I have
a bag of German incendiary pastilles given me by
Jules Gaxotte, Mayor of Revigny. On one side is
inked</p>

<table id="t02" summary="t02">

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">6</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">&mdash;&mdash;</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">0.25.</td>
 </tr>

</table>


<p>On the other side</p>

<table id="t03" summary="t03">

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">6. 10.10.111.</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdc">R.12/1,</td>
 </tr>

</table>

<p class="pn">indicating the company and the regiment and the
division. The pellets are square, the size of a fingernail.
They burn with intensity, like a Fourth of
July torch. That little bag has enough bits of lively
flame in it, to burn an ancient church and destroy a
village of homes. Packets like it have seared the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
northern provinces of France. Not one of those
millions of pellets that came down from Germany
was used against a soldier. Not one was used
against a military defense. All were used against
public buildings and homes. All were used against
non-combatants, old men, women and children. The
clever chemist had coöperated with the General Staff
in perfecting a novel warfare. The admirable organization
had equipped its men for the new task
of a soldier. In their haste the Germans left these
pellets everywhere along the route. The Mayor of
Revigny has a collection. So has the Mayor of
Clermont. Monsieur Georges Payelle, premier president
de la Cour des Comptes, and head of the French
Government Inquiry, has a still larger collection.
These three gentlemen have not told me, but have
shown me this evidence. The purpose of the German
military can be reconstructed from that one
little bag which I hold.</p>

<p>But not only have the Germans dropped their
scraps of evidence as they went along, as if they
were playing hare-and-hounds. They have put into
words what they mean. The German War Book,
issued to officers, outlines their new enlarged warfare.</p>

<p>Madame Dehan of Gerbéviller said to me:</p>

<p>"A high officer arrived this same day (when she
was prisoner) and said:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p>

<p>"'It is necessary to put to death the people here.
They must be shot. This nation must disappear.'"</p>

<p>Monsieur Guilley of Nomeny told me how
Charles Michel, a boy of seventeen, was killed. He
said: "A patrol of scouts, composed of six Bavarians,
said: 'We are going down there to kill, yes,
kill all the people of Nomeny.'</p>

<p>"Arrived at Nomeny, they asked where the farm
was. They then came along the side of the farm
where there was a little door. Three entered there,
the other three came around by the big door. We
were ready for supper, sitting around a table. We
heard blows on blows of the bayonets before the
doors, with cries and exclamations in German. They
came into the place where we were sitting to eat,
and placed themselves facing us, with nothing to
say. They took all that they wanted from the table.
Five of them left, going by a way in front of the
farm. The sixth stayed there, ruminating and
thinking. I believed that he was meditating to himself
a crime, but I thought to myself, 'They wouldn't
kill a man as they would kill a rabbit.'</p>

<p>"We went into the kitchen. The man was always
there. I closed the door. Two men of my farm
were eating in the kitchen. Now, from the kitchen
leading into the stable there was a door. The little
Michel went out by this door. He did not see the
German who was there. The soldier fired at him.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
I heard the rifle shot go. Then I saw the man following
the same way that the others had taken, to
rejoin them at a trot."</p>

<p>"How long did he remain there thinking before
he accomplished his crime?" we asked.</p>

<p>"Plenty long, a good quarter of an hour. He was
a Bavarian, big and strong."</p>

<p>I find that strange racial brooding and melancholy
in the diary of a sub-officer of the Landwehr. On
September 3, 1914, he writes:</p>

<p>"It is well enough that Germany has the advantage
everywhere up to the present; I am not able
to conquer a singular impression, a presentiment that,
in spite of all that, the end will be bad."</p>

<p>In his case it is accompanied by horror at the
wrong-doing of his comrades, a noble pity for wasted
France. But in others, that brooding turned to sudden
cruelty. Any act, however savage, is a relief
from that dark inner burden.</p>

<p>Madame Dauger of Gondrecourt-Aix (Meuse)
said to me:</p>

<p>"On the night of Christmas, 1914, with fixed
bayonets they came to get us to dance with them&mdash;the
dances were entirely unseemly. Ten persons
were forced out to dance. We danced from five in
the evening till half past six."</p>

<p>"Were they soldiers or officers?"</p>

<p>"Only officers; and when they were sufficiently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
drunk, we made the most of that advantage to save
ourselves."</p>

<p>It was Christmas night&mdash;the time to dance. So
they chose partners, by the compulsion of the bayonet,
with the women of an invaded and outraged
race. The same rich, childlike sentiment floods their
eyes with tears at thought of the mother at home.
Cruel, sentimental, melancholy, methodical, they are
a race that needs wise leadership. And they have
not received that. They have been led by men who
do not believe in them. Every evil trait has been
played upon, to the betrayal of the simple rather
primitive personality, which in other hands would
have gone gently all its days. But the homely goodness
has been stultified, and we have a race, of our
own stock, behaving like savages under the cool
guidance of its masters.</p>

<p>The next piece of testimony was given me by a
woman who was within a few days of giving birth
to a child by a German father. I withhold her name
and the name of her village.</p>

<p>"I was maltreated by them, Monsieur. They
abused me. Last year in the month of October,
1915, they arrived. I was learning how to take care
of the cattle, to help my father, who already had
enough with what the Germans required him to do
outside in the fields. My father had not returned;
I was entirely alone. I was in the bottom of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
barn; my children were in the house with my mother.
They were upon me; I did not see them. They
threw me down and held me. They were the soldiers
who lodged with my parents. I cried out three
or four times for some one to come, but it was finished.
I got up from the straw."</p>

<p>"Have you told your parents or any one?"</p>

<p>"No. Never to a person, Monsieur. I am too
much ashamed. But I always think of it. My eldest
child is eleven years old, the next seven years, the
third six years, and the last I have had since the
war. The one I wait for now, of course, I do not
count on bringing up."</p>

<p>Monsieur Mirman, the Prefect, replied:</p>

<p>"Since you must have him, you will tell me at
the time, so that I may take action and give you
assistance."</p>

<p>Through the courtesy of Mrs. Charles Prince, I
spent an afternoon with a French nurse, Marie Louise
Vincent, of Launois, in the Ardenne.</p>

<p>The Germans came. She was on the road, one
hundred yards away, when she saw this:</p>

<p>"I saw an old French beggar, whom everybody
knew, hobbling down the road. He passed through
our village every week. He was called "Père Noël"
(Father Christmas) because of his big beard. He
was seventy-five years old. It was the 29th of August,
about 8 o'clock in the morning. Officers ordered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
twelve men to step out from the ranks. They
took the old man and tied him to a tree. An officer
ordered the men to shoot. One or two of the sous-officers
fired when the men fired. So they shot Père
Noël. The villagers found thirteen bullet holes in
him.</p>

<p>"That day the soldiers burned the first four houses
of our village. They made a big blaze, and if the
wind had turned the whole village would have
burned.</p>

<p>"The commander came to our hospital. He patted
me on the cheek and said he had a big daughter
at home like me, and she was in Red Cross work
like me."</p>

<p>"He said he was very thirsty. I gave him three
glasses of water. I had good wine in the cellar, but
not for him. He talked with the doctor and me.
He asked for the Burgomaster. We said he had
gone away. He asked for those next in authority
to the Burgomaster. We said they had gone away.</p>

<p>"'Why? Why?' asked the commander. 'The
Belgians have told you we are barbarians, that is
why. We have done things a little regrettable, but
we were forced to it by the Belgians. The colonel
whose place I took was killed by a little girl, fourteen
years old. She fired at him point-blank. We
shot the girl and burned the village.'</p>

<p>"Then the French doctor with me asked the commander<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
why his men had burned the four farmhouses.
They were making a bright blaze with their
barns of hay. We could see it.</p>

<p>"'Why, that&mdash;that's nothing,' said the commander.
('Ce n'est rien. C'est tout petit peu.')</p>

<p>"A sous-officer came in to our hospital. He
showed us a bottle of Bordeaux which he had taken
from the cellar of one of our houses. He said:</p>

<p>"'I know it is good wine. I sold it myself to the
woman a couple of months ago. I thought she
wouldn't have had time to drink it all up.'</p>

<p>"'You know France?' asked the doctor.</p>

<p>"'I know it better than many Frenchmen,' replied
the officer. 'For eight years I have been a wine
agent in the Marne district.'</p>

<p>"'At Rheims?'</p>

<p>"'At Rheims.'</p>

<p>"'For the house of Pommery?'</p>

<p>"'No, no. Not that house.'</p>

<p>"After the fighting of August 27 and 28, some
of the peasants began to come back to their homes.
Near us at the little village of Thin-le-Moutier a
few returned. Nine old men and boys came back
on the morning of the 29th. The Germans put them
against a wall and shot them. I saw traces of blood
on the wall and bullet marks. The youngest boy
was too frightened to stand quietly against the wall.
He struggled. So they tied him to a signpost. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
saw traces of his blood on the post. The old
sacristan of the village church was forced to witness
the shooting. The bodies were guarded by a sentinel
for three days. On the third day, August 31,
a German officer ordered an old man and his wife,
of the place, to bring a cart. They carried the bodies
to the graveyard. The officer had the two old
people dig one deep hole. The old man asked permission
to take out the bodies, one by one. But the
officer had the cart upturned, and the bodies, all together,
dumped into the hole.</p>

<p>"A few days later a poor woman came along the
road, asking every one she met if anybody had seen
her boys. They were among the nine that had been
shot.</p>

<p>"A sous-officer, a Jew named Goldstein, a second
lieutenant, came to our hospital. While our French
doctor was held downstairs Lieutenant Goldstein
took out the medical notes about the cases from the
pocket of the doctor's military coat. I protested. I
said that it was not permitted by international law.</p>

<p>"'What do you make of the convention of
Geneva?' I asked him.</p>

<p>"'Ah, I laugh at it" he answered. "He was a
professor of philosophy at Darmstadt."</p>

<p>With all the methodical work of murder and destruction
the figure of the officer in command is always
in the foreground.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span></p>

<p>The Curé of Gerbéviller said to me:</p>

<p>"They ordered me to go on my knees before the
major. As I did not go down on the ground, an
officer, who was there, quickly gave me a blow with
the bayonet in the groin.</p>

<p>"'Your parishioners are the traitors, the assassins;
they have fired on our soldiers with rifles; they are
going to get fire, all of your people,' the major said
to me.</p>

<p>"I replied, No, that was not possible, that at Gerbéviller
there were only old men, women, and children.</p>

<p>"'No, I have seen them; the civilians have fired.
Without doubt, it is not you who have fired, but it
is you who have organized the resistance; it is you
who have excited the patriotism of your parishioners,
above all, among your young men. Why have you
taught your young men the use of arms?'</p>

<p>"Without giving me time to respond, they led
me away. They took me to the middle of the street
in front of my house, with five of my poor old ones.
A soldier was going to find a tent cord and tie us
all together. They did not permit me to go into
my house. They brought out afterwards before me
five other of my parishioners, as well as three little
chasseurs à pied that they were going to make prisoners.
We waited there an hour. I saw passing a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
group of five of my people tied. I thought: What
is going to happen to them?</p>

<p>"At that moment a captain on horseback arrived
in front of us, reined up his horse in excitement,
pulled his foot out of the stirrup and kicked our
chasseurs in the groin. One of my people who was
with me cried out: 'Oh, the pigs....'"</p>

<p>The Great German Staff believe these things are
buried deep in burned cottages and village graves.
They believe an early peace will wipe out the
memory of that insolence. They have forgotten the
thousands of eye-witnesses, of whom I have met
some dozens, and of whom I am one. They cannot
kill us who live to tell what we have seen them do.
They cannot destroy a thousand diaries of German
soldiers that tell the abominations they committed.
This record will become a part of history. They
thought to wipe out their cruelty in success. But
the names of their victims are known, and the circumstance
of their death. Not in China alone have
they made their face a horror for a thousand years,
but wherever there is respect for weakness and pity
for little children.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">X</h3>

<p class="pcl2">THE EVIDENCE</p>

<p class="pn2">I have told in these chapters of the peasants of
Northern France, and I have given their life
in war in their own words. I want to tell here
how this material was gathered, because the power
of its appeal rests on the recognition of its accuracy.
A small part of the testimony I followed in long
hand as it was spoken. The rest, three-quarters of
the total testimony, was taken down in short-hand
by one or the other of two stenographers. I have
used about one-fifth of the collected material.</p>

<p>My companions were the well-known American
writers, Will Irwin and Herbert Corey. Other companions
have been Lieutenant Louis Madelin, the
distinguished historian, whose work on the French
Revolution was crowned by the French Academy;
Lieutenant Jules Basdevant, Professor of International
Law at the University of Grenoble; Lieutenant
Monod, once of Columbia University, and always
a friend of our country; Captain Callet, Professor
of Geography at Saint-Cyr, now of the Etat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
Major of the Third Army; and the Baron de la
Chaise. I don't wish to imply that the French Army
is exclusively composed of scholarly gentlemen with
an established position in the world of letters. But
it happened to be the good pleasure of the French
Minister of War and of the Foreign Office to make
of our trips a delightful social experience. Most
important, these men are worthy witnesses of the
things I have seen, and the statements I have recorded.</p>

<p>In the civil world the corroborating witnesses are
equally authoritative. I was accompanied, for much
of the territory visited, by Leon Mirman, Prefect
of the Department of Meurthe-et-Moselle.</p>

<p>It is no easy job to penetrate the war zone, wander
through villages at leisure, and establish relations
of confidence with the peasants. The whole
experience would have been impossible but for the
help of Émile Hovelaque. This distinguished essayist,
Director of Public Education, went with us
to all the villages. The success of the visit was
due to him. He understands American public opinion
more accurately than any other man whom I
have met abroad. His human sympathy wins the
peasants. A woman brought me her burned granddaughter,
five years old. A mother brought me the
cap of her fourteen-year-old son, and the rope with
which the Germans had hanged him. A woman told<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
me how her mother, seventy-eight years old, was
shot before her eyes. I could not have had their
stories, I should not have been permitted to enter
these secret places of their suffering, if it had not
been for Monsieur Hovelaque.</p>

<p>The pain it cost them to tell these things I shall
not forget. There was one decent married woman,
within a few weeks of the birth of her child by a
German father, who had been outraged by German
soldiers. She had never before told her story, because
of the shame of it. She had not told her
parents nor her sister. I cannot forget that she told
it to me. I cannot rest easily till her suffering and
the suffering of the others with whom I have been
living for two years means something to my people
at home. I have kept all personal feeling out of
my record. It would have been unforgivable if,
in rendering the ruin of Lorraine, I had given way
to anger. But this I have not done. I have only
added many days of detailed work on evidence that
was already conclusive. But this coolness of reporting
does not mean that I think these details of
cruelty should leave us detached spectators.</p>

<p>Let us remember these peasants when the Allies
advance to the Rhine. Let us remember them when
Belgium is indemnified, when Alsace and Lorraine
are cut loose, when the German military power is
crushed, when the individual officers who ordered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
these acts are singled out for the extremity of punishment.
We must teach our memory not to forget.</p>

<p>Certain German officers must be executed. General
Clauss must be executed. He has left a trail
of blood. The officers in command of the 17th
and the 60th Bavarian Regiments, who slaughtered
the women, the children and the old men of Gerbéviller,
must be executed. The officers of the 2nd
and 4th Regiments of Bavarian Infantry, who murdered
fifty men, women and children of Nomeny,
in a cold, methodical hate, with a peculiar care for
the women, must be executed.</p>

<p>In the closing passages of Browning's "Ring and
the Book," the aged prelate, about to go before his
maker, is confronted with the task of giving judgment.
Count Guido, intelligent and powerful, had
murdered Pompilia and her parents. He did it by
the aid of four assassins. Pope Innocent, eighty-six
years old, is called on to decide whether the five
guilty men shall be killed for their evil doings.
Friends urge him to be merciful. The aged Pope
replies:</p>

<div class="reduct">

<p class="pn60 p1">How it trips</p>
<p class="pn20">Silvery o'er the tongue. "Remit the death!<br />
Forgive....<br />
Herein lies the crowning cogency<br />
That in this case the spirit of culture speaks,<br />
Civilization is imperative.<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>Give thine own better feeling play for once!<br />
Mercy is safe and graceful....<br />
Pronounce, then, for our breath and patience fail."<br />
"I will, sirs: but a voice other than yours<br />
Quickens my spirit. Quis pro Domino?<br />
'Who is upon the Lord's side?'"</p>

</div>

<p class="p1">So he orders that Count Guido and his henchmen
be killed on the morrow.</p>

<p class="pn20 reduct">
"Enough, for I may die this very night<br />
And how should I dare die, this man let live?"</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">XI</h3>

<p class="pcl2">SISTER JULIE</p>

<p class="pn2">This is the story of Sister Julie. The Germans
entered her village of Gerbéviller,
where she was head of the poor-house and
hospital. As they came southward through the
place they burned every house on every street, 475
houses. In a day they wiped out seven centuries
of humble village history. In her little street they
burned Numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12, but they
did not burn Number 14, the house where Sister
Julie lived. There they stopped, for she stopped
them. And the twenty houses beyond her hospital
still stand, because that August day there was a
great woman in that little village. They killed
men, women and children throughout the village,
but they did not kill the thirteen French wounded
soldiers whom she was nursing, nor the five Roman
Catholic sisters whom she directed as Mother Superior.
Outside of a half dozen generals, she is perhaps
the most famous character whom the war has
revealed, and one of the greatest personages whom
France has produced: even France in her long history.
The last days of Gerbéviller live in her story.
I write her account word for word as she gives it.
Her recital is touched with humor in spite of the
horror that lay heaped around her. She raises the
poignard of the German Colonel: you see it held
over her head ready to strike. By pantomime she
creates the old paralytic men, the hobbling women,
the man who went "fou."</p>

<div class="figcenter">
     <img src="https://brian.carnell.com/wiki/_media/etext:a:arthur-gleason-our-part-great-war-ill-323.jpg" width="400" height="616"
         alt=""
         title="" />
     <div class="caption"><p class="pn center">The first woman of France: the peasant Sister Julie,
wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. She held up
the German Army and saved the wounded French in her
hospital.</p>
</div></div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>

<p>Because she remained through the days of fire and
blood, and succored his troops, General Castelnau
cited her in an Order of the Day. The Legion of
Honor has placed its scarlet ribbon on the black
of her religious dress. The great of France&mdash;the
President and the Premier, senators and poets&mdash;have
come to see her where she still lives on in the
ruins of the little village.</p>

<p>Amélie Rigard, whose religious name is Sister
Julie, is a peasant woman, sixty-two years old, belonging
to the Order of Saint Charles of Nancy.
She is of the solid peasant type, with square chin
and wide brown eyes. Everything about her is compact,
deep-centered, close-growing; the fingers are
stubby, the arms held closely to the body, and when
the gesture comes it is a strong pushing out from
the frame, as if pushing away a weight. Whenever
she puts out power, she seems to be delivering
a straight blow with the full weight of the body.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span>
With Sister Julie it is not only a genius of simple
goodness. She carries a native shrewdness, with a
salient tang. She knows life. This is no meek person,
easily deceived by people, thinking every one
good and harmless. She reads motives. Power is
what I feel in her&mdash;direct, sheer power. The wonder
is not that she rose to one of the supreme crises
of history, and did a work which has passed into the
consciousness of France. The wonder is that she
remained hidden in a country village for sixty-two
years. Her gift of language, her strength of nature,
had vitality enough to burn through obscurity.
The person she made me think of was that great
man whom I once knew, Dwight Moody. Here was
the same breadth of beam, the simplicity, the knowledge
of human nature, the same native instinct for
the fitting word that comes from being fed on the
greatest literature in the world, and from using the
speech of powerful, uneducated persons. When she
entered the room, the room was filled. When she
left, there was a vacancy.</p>

<p>Here follows the account in her own words, of
the last days of Gerbéviller. The phrase that speaks
through all her recital is "<i>feu et sang</i>," "fire and
blood." The Germans said on entering that they
would give "fire and blood" to the village. The
reason was this: A handful of French chasseurs,
about sixty in number, had held up the German<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
Army for several hours, in order to give the French
Army time to retreat. This battle had taken place
at the bridge outside the village. When at last
the Germans broke through, they were irritated by
the firm resistance which had delayed their plans.
So they vented their ill-will by burning the houses
and murdering the peasants.</p>


<p class="pc1 lmid">SISTER JULIE'S STORY</p>

<p class="pn p1">The Germans reached the Lunéville road at the
entrance of Gerbéviller at 10 minutes after seven
in the morning. They saw the barricades, for our
troops had built a barricade, and they said to a
woman, Madame Barthélemy:</p>

<p>"Madame, remove the barricades." As she waited
undecided for a few seconds, they said:</p>

<p>"You refuse. Then fire and blood."</p>

<p>They then began to set fire to all the houses and
they shot six men. They threw a man into an oven,
a baker, Joseph Jacques, a fine fellow of fifty years
of age, married, with children. It was necessary
to eat, even at Gerbéviller, and it was necessary
to work out a way to make bread. The former baker
had been mobilized, and his good old papa was infirm
and unable to work. So Monsieur Jacques was
busy at this time with the baking. They killed him
when they came. It was about eight o'clock in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
morning. The fires of the oven had already started.</p>

<p>For a long time I did not believe it, but I have
had a confirmation since. You will see how by what
follows. When there was an attack in Champagne,
a youth of Gerbéviller, Florentin, whose father was
the gardener at the chateau, found himself in front
of certain Germans who wished to give themselves
up as prisoners. He looked at them, and said:</p>

<p>"You are not 'Comrades' ('Kamerade' is the word
the German calls out when he surrenders). You
know what you did at Gerbéviller. So don't call
yourselves 'Comrades.'"</p>

<p>A German said to him, "It was I who flung the
man into the oven. I was ordered to do it, or else
I should have been 'kaput.'" (This is slang for a
"dead one").</p>

<p>A search was then made, and in the oven was
found the thigh bone of the unfortunate baker.</p>

<p>I have seen many other things. I have seen a
man, Barthélemy of Chanteheux. I have seen that
man spread out spitted on the ground by a bayonet.</p>

<p>Here is what they have done. It was half-past
six in the evening. I heard their fifes. Our little
chasseurs had retreated. The Germans had made
fire and blood all the day long. I saw them and
watched them well in this street. I was at the door.
Yes, there were six of us at this door. They put
fire to the houses, house by house, shouting as they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
burned them. Picture to yourself a human wave,
where the bank has been broken down. They poured
into the street precipitately, with their "lightning
conductors," which shone brilliant in the sun (the
point of their helmets). They sat down, seven and
eight in front of a house. They kept going by in
great numbers, but these who were ordered remained
behind in front of each house. There these sat before
the houses, while those others went past without
a word. They put their knapsacks on the
ground. They took out something that looked like
macaroni. They hurled it into the house. There
wasn't a pane of glass left in our windows, because
of the pom-pom of cannon on the Fraimbois road.
I saw them ordered to go on with their work of firing
the houses, when they coolly stopped for a tiny
minute to talk. Then, afresh, I saw them look in
their knapsacks, and next I heard a detonation. But
it was not a detonation like that of the report of
a rifle or revolver. This was like the crackle of
powder priming, of crackers, if you prefer. They
were incendiary pastilles which they had thrown into
the fire to hasten the destruction. At the end of
a few minutes the fire picked up with greater intensity,
and directly the roofs broke in one after
the other with a crash. Many of our people did
not see the burning, because they stayed in the cellars,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
lying hidden there, frightened, under the rubbish.</p>

<p>In one of the burning houses a woman was living
in her room on the first floor. Two Germans
came to our house and said:</p>

<p>"My sister, come quick and look for a woman
who is in the fire."</p>

<p>The woman was Madame Zinius. It is our sisters
who went there at their risk and peril.</p>

<p>The Germans had their destruction organized. In
all the well-to-do houses they began by plundering.
They did not burn these as they passed.</p>

<p>A few minutes later we saw five or six vehicles
draw up, the "Guimbardes," vans, for plundering
and carrying away the linen and the clothing.
Women came with these vans, young women, well
dressed, rich enough. They were not "bad."</p>

<p>[When the Germans captured a town, their organization
of loot was sometimes carried out by women,
who brought up motor lorries, which the soldiers
filled with the plunder from the larger houses, and
which the women then drove away. Sometimes
these women were dressed as Red Cross nurses. I
can continue the proof by other witnesses elsewhere
than in Gerbéviller. The organization of murder,
arson and pillage is participated in by German men
and women.]</p>

<p>Monsieur Martin had at his place many sewing-machines,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
with the trade-mark <i>Victoria</i>. The Germans
carried them away.</p>

<p>I have told you that they threw persons into the
fire. Monsieur Pottier was forced back into the fire.
His wife moaned and called for help.</p>

<p>"Help me get my husband out of the fire," she
cried.</p>

<p>"Go die with him," they answered her, and she,
too, was pushed into the flames.</p>

<p>"They" kept coming on, playing the fife. We
awaited them at the door. Only thirteen wounded
French soldiers had stayed with us. They had been
scattered through the different rooms. But we put
them up in one room in order to simplify the service
and give them a bit of "coddling."</p>

<p>We saw four officers on horseback approach.
They dismounted in front of our town-hall, twenty
meters away. They entered the building, and there
they put everything upside down. They tumbled
out all the waste paper, the entire office desk, determined
to find the records.</p>

<p>They remounted and rode up in front of our
house. They sat there looking at us for a moment.
They had the manner guttural and hard, which is the
German way. They began speaking German.
When they showed signs of listening to my reply,
I said to them:</p>

<p>"Speak French. That is the least courtesy you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
can show me. Speak French, I beg of you, and I
will answer you."</p>

<p>"You have French soldiers hidden in your house
with their arms," said one of them.</p>

<p>And he tramped hither and thither like a madman,
and he sputtered and clattered. (Et il se
promenait de long en large comme un fou, et il bavait
et degoisait.)</p>

<p>I answered:</p>

<p>"We have no French soldiers here&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;"</p>

<p>The German: "You have French soldiers."</p>

<p>"Yes, we have French soldiers, but they are
wounded. They have no arms."</p>

<p>One of them, mighty, with a truculent air, pulled
out his sword.</p>

<p>"They have their arms," he shouted, and he
brandished his sword.</p>

<p>"They won't hurt you. Enter," I said.</p>

<p>A Lorraine to say to a German "Enter," that
means mischief. (Un Lorraine dire à un Allemand
"Entrez": Que cela fait mal!)</p>

<p>Two of the officers dismounted. Each of them
hid a dagger somewhere in his breast. That thought
that they could harm my poor little wounded men
made me turn my look a few seconds on the action.
And as they took out their revolvers at the same
time, I did not see where they had hidden the daggers.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span></p>

<p>The finger on the trigger, they nodded their head
for me to go on in front of them. I went in front
and led the way into this room where there was
nothing but four walls, and no furniture except the
thirteen beds of my wounded. I entered by this
door, not knowing in the least what they wanted
to do. Imagine this room with the first bed here,
and then the second here, et cetera, et cetera. I went
automatically to the first and, more involuntarily
still, placed my hand on the bed of wounded Number
One, a dragoon wounded by a horse.</p>

<p>See, now, what took place: the imposing one of
them walked in with his dagger in his left hand
(son poignard, la gauche); the other man with
his revolver was there, ready. With his dagger
in his left hand, the first man stripped the
bed for its full length, lifting the sheet, the coverlet
and the bedclothes. He looked down in a manner
evil, malevolent, ill-natured (méchante, malveillante,
mauvaise).</p>

<p>No response from the wounded men.</p>

<p>He did not say anything when he had seen what
he wished to see. He stepped up to the head of the
wounded man. I made a half turn toward him. I
was separated from him by our wounded man who
was between the two of us.</p>

<p>He said to my poor unfortunate, with a harsh
gesture:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span></p>

<p>"You and your men, you make our wounded suffer
on the battlefield. You cut off their ears. You
put out their eyes. You make them suffer."</p>

<p>Still no response. (Pas réponse encore.)</p>

<p>When I saw the state of mind he was in, I went
round at once on the left side of the wounded, and
I said:</p>

<p>"This is a wounded man, and this place is the
Red Cross. Here we do well for all and ill for
none, and if you mean well, do not hurt us. Leave
us in peace as you do everywhere else. We will
nurse your wounded and nurse them well."</p>

<p>He had turned around to watch the smoke of the
fires which was pouring into the room through that
opening, and he stood there several seconds with set
face.</p>

<p>My little wounded men hardly ventured to
breathe. Seeing that calm, that brooding which did
not bode anything good, I exerted myself to repeat
once more:</p>

<p>"If you mean well, do not hurt us. We will nurse
your wounded."</p>

<p>And, at last, to help him come out of his speechlessness:</p>

<p>"See, there, everything is on fire over there."</p>

<p>He answered me:</p>

<p>"We are not barbarians. No, we are not barbarians.
And if the civilians had not fired on us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>
with rifles, we should not have had any burning
here."</p>

<p>"Those were not civilians. Those were soldiers."</p>

<p>"Civilians," he said.</p>

<p>"No. No. No. Soldiers."</p>

<p>"Civilians," he repeated; "I know well what I am
saying. I saw them."</p>

<p>He made a gesture to show me that men had fired,
while he cried in my ears with all his might
"Civilians."</p>

<p>He went in front of me, and stripped the second
bed. I feared that he might speak to my wounded,
and I thought I should do well if I placed myself
at the head of each of the beds as he uncovered them.
I stepped between the two beds, and I feared what
would come of it all. In this way I made the round
of the room with them, standing at each of the thirteen
points, always placing myself at the pillow of
each wounded man, while "they" advanced bed by
bed, and cautiously.</p>

<p>I did not know how they had arranged their
weapons, but it seemed to me that they always had
their finger placed on the trigger.</p>

<p>The second man with his revolver held his gun a
little low.</p>

<p>I followed them, shutting the door, when they
went to the Infirmary of the old men. They did
not say anything and they did not promise that they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
would not set fire to us. How should I go about getting
that promise?</p>

<p>A third time I asked them:</p>

<p>"It is clearly understood that we shall nurse
your wounded, and that you will not burn this
house."</p>

<p>"They" start to leave, and go toward the door,
walking slowly. When the chief was just leaving,
I said again to him:</p>

<p>"It is clearly understood that you will not harm
us nor burn our house."</p>

<p>"No, no."</p>

<p>I looked to see if he gave the order to any of his
soldiers. I didn't see that, but I noticed one of our
sisters who was drawing a wheelbarrow with an old
man in it, who weighed at least seventy-five kilos
and who was paralyzed.</p>

<p>"Where are you going?" I asked her.</p>

<p>"Over there; the soldiers tell me that they are
coming to set fire to the hospital," she replied. "One
of our old men cried out to me, 'My sister, do not
make us stay here. Let us go and die in peace, since
they are killing everybody here. We would rather
leave and die of hunger in the fields.' So I said,
'Come along, then.'"</p>

<p>For the moment I am all alone in this room with
my thirteen wounded men. I said to myself, "My<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
God, what will become of me all alone in the midst
of fire and blood."</p>

<p>I stood a few seconds in the doorway and then
went in to see our little soldiers.</p>

<p>"My poor children, I ask your forgiveness for
bringing in such a visitation, but I assure you that
I thought my last quarter hour had come. I thought
they were going to kill us all."</p>

<p>"My sister, stay with us," they said; "stay with
us."</p>

<p>"I will bear the impossible, my children, to save
your life."</p>

<p>I remained there a few minutes, and then two
German soldiers presented themselves with fixed
bayonets. I stepped down the two stairs; see what
an escort was there for me!</p>

<p>"Why is this house shut up? There are French
in it, lying hidden with their arms."</p>

<p>"The owner has been mobilized, and so has gone
away. His wife and children have gone away."</p>

<p>They kept on insisting: "The French. Hidden.
In there."</p>

<p>They indicated the place with a gesture.</p>

<p>I thought to myself, What is happening? What
will they do? Here are the men who will set fire
to the house.</p>

<p>"Why will you set fire to this house?" I asked.
"Your chiefs don't wish it. They have promised me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
that they won't burn here. You want to set fire
here out of excitement (par contagion). Will you
put out the fire?"</p>

<p>I said again to them:</p>

<p>"It is wicked to set fire here, because we shall
nurse your wounded."</p>

<p>While this was going on, our sisters upstairs were
not able to subdue the poor father Prévost. He is
an old man of eighty-eight years, partly paralyzed in
leg and arm. I was at the doorway. I heard him
call out:</p>

<p>"They shoved me into the fire. They have gone
away and left me. I am going to fall out of the
window."</p>

<p>I climbed to the fourth floor of the house where
he was, to try to attract him away, but he did not
wish to come. He was foolish. I knew that he was
fond of white sugar. I went up to him and showed
him the sugar. I took his jacket and put his snowboots
on him, so that he could get away more
quickly. You know those boots which fasten by
means of two or three buckles, very primitive, and
which are so speedily put on. At last I led him to
the edge of the doorway here.</p>

<p>The Germans saw him and said: "It is a lunatic
asylum, don't you see?" so they said to each other.
"They want to kill the sisters. There is no need of
going into that house. It is a lunatic asylum."</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span></p>

<p>That is the reason, I believe, why they didn't
come into the house during the night. They entered
the chapel of the hospital.</p>

<p>While I was with the Germans, some of their like
had come to our Infirmary to say:</p>

<p>"You must leave here because we are going to set
fire."</p>

<p>They then said to the old people:</p>

<p>"We have orders to burn the Infirmary."</p>

<p>Among the number we had the poor mother
André, Monsieur Porté, who walked hobbling like
this; Monsieur Georget, who is hung on only one
wire, and Monsieur Leroy, who isn't hung on any
(qui ne tenait qu'à un fil, Monsieur Leroy qui ne
tenait plus non plus).</p>

<p>[Sister Julie limped across the room. She bent
her back double. She went feeble. In swift pantomime
she revealed each infirmity of the aged people.
She created the picture of a flock of sick and crippled
sheep driven before wolves.]</p>

<p>At four o'clock they were led away to Maréville.
Those of whom I tell you died in the course of the
year. Death came likewise to seven others who
would not have died but for that.</p>

<p>The next morning we had German wounded. No
one to care for them. What to do? I said to a
wounded Lieutenant-Colonel:</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span></p>

<p>"You have given us many wounded to tend.
Where are your majors?"</p>

<p>See what he answered me. "They have abandoned
us."</p>

<p>That evening this Lieutenant-Colonel said to me
in a rough voice:</p>

<p>"Some bread, my sister."</p>

<p>"You haven't any bread?" I said. "You have
burned our bakery and killed our baker in it. You
have burned our butcher shop with our butcher in
it. And now you have no bread and no meat. Eat
potatoes as we have to."</p>

<p>He was hit in the calf of the leg, but the leg bone
was not touched, nor the femur; it was not a severe
wound. He unrolled his bandage and showed me
his treatment, assuming an air of pain.</p>

<p>"Aie! Aie!" he cried.</p>

<p>Ah! "They" are more soft (douillets) than our
poor little French. I began to dress his leg.</p>

<p>"It is terrible, my sister, this war. Terrible for
you and for us also. If the French were the least bit
intelligent, they would ask for peace at once. Belgium
is ours. In three days we shall be at Paris."</p>

<p>The bandage tightened on his wound. "Ah," he
said.</p>

<p>I replied to him: "It is your Kaiser who is the
cause of all this."</p>

<p>"Oh, no. Not the Kaiser. The Kaiser. Oh, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
Kaiser." As he pronounced the word "Kaiser," he
seemed to be letting something very good come out
of his mouth, as if he were savoring it.</p>

<p>The bandage went round once more. "Ah," he
said.</p>

<p>"It is then his son, the Crown Prince, who is responsible?"
I continued.</p>

<p>"Not at all. Not at all; it is France."</p>

<p>"France is peace-loving," I replied.</p>

<p>"It is Serbia, because the Austrian Archduke was
killed by a Serbian."</p>

<p>The 29th or 30th of the month shells fell occasionally
over our roof. My famous wounded German
was frightened.</p>

<p>"My sister, I must be carried to the cellar at once."</p>

<p>"There's no danger. The French never fire on the
Red Cross," I said to him.</p>

<p>"I am a poor wounded man. So carry me to the
cellar."</p>

<p>I gave in. I carried him to the cellar, and he
stayed there some days.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">XII</h3>

<p class="pcl2">SISTER JULIE&mdash;CONTINUED</p>

<p class="pn2">During the days of fire and blood Sister
Julie was acting mayor of Gerbéviller. It
was no light job, for she had to steer an
invading army away from her hospital of wounded
men, and she was the source of courage for the village
of peasants, who were being hunted and tortured.
Many months have passed, and nothing is
left of those days but crumbled stone and village
graves and an everlasting memory. But she is still
the soul of Gerbéviller. Pilgrims come to her from
the provinces of France, and give her money for her
poor and sick. The village still has need of her. I
saw her with the woman whose aged mother was
shot before her eyes, and with the mother whose little
boy was murdered.</p>

<p>She went on with her story:</p>

<p class="pc1 lmid">SISTER JULIE'S STORY</p>

<p class="pn p1">As soon as the Germans came they began their
work by taking hostages, the same number as that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
of the municipal councilors. They led them all
away to the end of town by the bridge, on the road
which leads to Rambervillers. A German passed,
and when he saw them he shouted out:</p>

<p>"See the flock of sheep. They are taking you
away to be shot." And he pointed out to them with
his fingers the place of their torment.</p>

<p>In the morning four or five officers arrived to hear
testimony from some of the men. It was Leonard,
the grocer, who told me that four persons were questioned.</p>

<p>"Stand there," They said to them.</p>

<p>"Which is the one who lives next door to the hospital?"
an officer asked.</p>

<p>Leonard stepped forward.</p>

<p>"Is it not true that the Lady Superior of the Hospital
organized her people for the purpose of firing
on our wounded with rifles?"</p>

<p>Leonard replied:</p>

<p>"I am sure that it is not so. And even if she were
to order it, they would not obey."</p>

<p>"Do you know what you are in danger of in telling
lies? We have seen the bullets come from the
hospital. We are sure. Go write your deposition."</p>

<p>"I can't do it," answered Leonard.</p>

<p>He was forced to write his deposition. When he
had finished it, he presented it to the chief.</p>

<p>"Sign it, and follow me. I am sure that I saw<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
bullets come from that part of the street. Certainly
men were there who fired on our chiefs."</p>

<p>They also said to him that our chasseurs had fired
on them from the chateau of Madame de Lambertye,
and they themselves went to get a statement at the
spot to see if it was possible to hit a man from the
chateau and kill him.</p>

<p>I had seen the turrets of the chateau of Lambertye
burning about half-past nine in the morning and all
the upper part. That was by incendiary bombs.
The day after the fires we saw empty cans, about
sixty of them, the kind used for motor-car gasoline,
lying about in the garden of the chateau.</p>

<p>Besides all that, there are still the bodily indignities
which must not be passed over in silence. The
twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth, "they" used fire and
blood. The following days "they" amused themselves
by teasing everybody. The poor Monsieur
Jacob, who makes lemonade, was struck and thrown
to the ground. Then they spit in his face, and
threatened to shoot him, without any reason.</p>

<p>They were drunk with the wine of Gerbéviller, if
one is to judge from their helmets, which had lost
their lightning conductors.</p>

<p>The sacred images of the church were not respected.
It was the evening of the twenty-ninth. A
soldier-priest, Monsieur the Abbé Bernard, went to
see a tiny bit of what was taking place.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span></p>

<p>"Do you know, my sister, what has been done
to the ciborium (sacred vessel for the sacrament)?"</p>

<p>I went with him. We came to the church. We
entered with difficulty. A bell blocked us from
passing, and shells had broken down the vaulting in
many places. We went on our way, but always with
difficulty. We saw the crucifix which had the feet
broken by blow on blow from the butt-end of rifles.
We still went on, and saw the pipes of the organ
lying on the ground. We came in front of the tabernacle
(the box which holds the sacred vessels).
There we counted eighteen bullet holes which had
perforated the door around the lock. The displacement
of air produced by the bursting of the bullet
had forced the screws to jump out. "They" had not
thought that this little dwelling-place was a strongbox
and that it had flat bolts, both vertical and horizontal.
We were now agitated to see if anything
else had taken place in the tabernacle.</p>

<p>Monsieur, the Abbé Bernard, took a hammer, and
as gently as he could he succeeded in making a little
opening just large enough for one to see that there
was something else inside. With the barrel of an
unloaded gun, he then made a full opening. The
ciborium, the sacred vessel, was uncovered and had
been projected against the bottom. The cover,
fallen to one side, had a number of bullet marks, as
the ciborium itself had.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span></p>

<p>The bullets in penetrating the front of the tabernacle
had made everywhere little holes, and these
holes were in a shape nearly symmetrical around the
lock. At the rear there were many much larger holes.</p>

<p>Monsieur, the Abbé, took those sacred things and
the cover of the altar and carried them to the chapel.</p>

<p>The 17th and the 60th Bavarian Regiments were
the ones that did this work. One-third at least of
these men were protestant, and among them were
many returned convicts.</p>

<p>One of our sisters saw a book of a German officer
who was nursed here, and noticed that he was from
Bitsch.</p>

<p>(Bitsch is a Roman Catholic town in Lorraine
which long belonged to France, and which held out
against the Germans almost to the end of the Franco-Prussian
War).</p>

<p>"How is this?" she asked. "You are from Bitsch,
and yet it is you who dare to do the things that you
have done."</p>

<p>"We are under orders," he answered. "The further
we go into France, the worse we shall do. It
is commanded. Otherwise we shall be killed ourselves."</p>

<p>Let us return to the Germans who were applying
fire and blood. They led away fifteen men, old men,
to a shed at about quarter past ten. Later they
made them leave the shed. General Clauss, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[317]</a></span>
was in command of two regiments, was sitting under
the oak tree which you will be able to see on
your return trip. He was in front of a table charged
with champagne, and was drinking, during the time
that his soldiers were arranging the poor unhappy
old men, getting them ready to be shot. They had
bound them in groups of five, and they shot them in
three batches. They now lie buried in the same
spot.</p>

<p>The General said: "When I have filled my cup
and as I raise it to my lips, give them fire and blood."</p>

<p class="p2">We said good-by to Sister Julie. I walked down
the street to the ruins of the chateau of Lambertye.
Sister Julie has told of the empty gasoline cans that
were left in the garden of the chateau. They had
served their purpose well: I stepped through the litter
that was once a beautiful home. But there was
one work which flaming oil could not do. I went
into the garden, and came to the grotto of the chateau.
It is a lovely secret place, hidden behind a
grove, and under the shadow of a great rock. It
glows red from the fundamental stone of its structure,
with jewel-like splinters of many-colored pebbles
sunk in the parent stone. Fire, the favorite German
instrument for creating a new world, could not
mar the stout stone and pebbles of the little place,
but such beauty must somehow be obliterated. So<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[318]</a></span>
the careful soldiers mounted ladders and chipped to
pieces some of the ceiling, painfully with hammers.
The dent of the hammers is visible throughout the
vaulting. The mosaic was too tough even for their
patience, and they had to leave it mutilated but not
destroyed.</p>

<p>Several times in Gerbéviller we see this infinite
capacity for taking pains. The thrusting of the
baker into his own oven is a touch that a less
thoughtful race could never have devised. When
they attacked the tabernacle containing the sacramental
vessel of the Roman Catholic church, Sister
Julie has told how they placed the eighteen bullets
that defiled it in pattern. The honest methodical
brain is behind each atrocity, and the mind of the
race leaves its mark even on ruins.</p>

<p>Finally, when they shot the fifteen white-haired
old men, the murders were done in series, in sets of
five, with a regular rhythm. I can produce photographs
of the dead bodies of these fifteen old men
as they lay grouped on the meadow. We stood under
the oak tree where the officer sat as he drank his
toasts to death. We looked over to the little spot
where the old men were herded together and murdered.
Leon Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle,
said to us as we stood there:</p>

<p>"I, myself, came here at the beginning of September,
1914. Fifteen old men were here, lying one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[319]</a></span>
upon the other, in groups of five. I saw them, their
clothes drooping. One was able to see also by their
attitude that two or three had been smoking their
pipes just before dying. Others held their packets
of tobacco in their hands. I saw these fifteen
hostages, fifteen old men, some ten days after they
had been killed; the youngest must have been sixty
years of age.</p>

<p>"We shall set up here a commemorative monument
which will tell to future generations the thing
that has taken place here."</p>

<p>For centuries the race has lived on a few episodes,
short as the turn of a sunset. The glancing helmet
of Hector that frightened one tiny child, the toothless
hound of Ulysses that knew the beggar man&mdash;always
it is the little lonely things that shake us.
Vast masses of men and acres of guns blur into unreality.
The battle hides itself in thick clouds,
swaying in the night. But the cry that rang through
Gerbéviller does not die away in our ears. Sister
Julie has given episodes of a bitter brevity which
the imagination of the race will not shake off. It
is impossible to look out on the world with the same
eyes after those flashes of a new bravery, a new horror.
I find this sudden revelation in the lifting of
the cup with the toast that signed the death of the
old men. The officer was drinking a sacrament of
death by murder. It is as if there in that act under<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
the lonely tree in the pleasant fields of Gerbéviller
the new religion of the Germans had perfected its
rite.</p>

<p>That rite of the social cup, held aloft in the eyes
of comrades, has been a symbol for good will in all
the ages. Brotherhood was being proclaimed as the
host of the feast looked out on a table of comrades.
At last in the fullness of time the rite, always honored,
was lifted into the unassailable realm of poetry,
when one greater man came who went to his death
blithely from the cup that he drank with his friends.
There it has remained homely and sacred in the
thought of the race.</p>

<p>Suddenly under the oak tree of Gerbéviller the
rite has received a fresh meaning. The cup has been
torn from the hands of the Nazarene. By one
gesture the German officer reversed the course of
history. He sat there very lonely, and he drank
alone. The cup that he tasted was the death of
men.</p>

<p>It is no longer the lifting of all to a common fellowship.
It no longer means "I who stand here am
prepared to die for you": pledge of a union stronger
even than death. It is suddenly made the symbol of
a greater gospel: "I drink to your death. I drink
alone."</p>

<hr class="chap" />

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">ADDENDUM</h3>

<p class="pn2">In the month of November, 1915, the "American
Hostels for Refugees" were founded by
Mrs. Wharton and a group of American
friends in Paris to provide lodgings and a restaurant
for the Belgians and French streaming in from burning
villages and bombarded towns. These people
were destitute, starving, helpless and in need of immediate
aid. The work developed into an organization
which cares permanently for over 4,000 refugees,
chiefly French from the invaded regions. A
system of household visiting has been organized, and
not even temporary assistance is now given to any
refugee whose case has not been previously investigated.
The refugees on arrival are carefully registered
and visited. Assistance is either in the form
of money toward paying rent, of clothing, medical
care, tickets for groceries and coal, tickets for one
of the restaurants of the Hostels, or lodgings in one
of the Model Lodging Houses. Over 6,000 refugees
have been provided with employment.</p>

<p>There are six centers for the work. One house
has a restaurant where 500 meals a day are served<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span>
at a charge of 10 centimes a meal, and an "Ouvroir"
where about 50 women are employed under a dressmaker,
with a day-nursery, an infant-school, a library
and recreation room. Another center is a
Rest-house for women and children requiring rest
and careful feeding. Young mothers are received
here after the birth of their children, and children
whose mothers are in hospital. Sixty meals a day
are served here with a special diet for invalids. Another
center contains a clothing depot, which has
distributed nearly 100,000 garments, including suits
of strong working clothes for the men placed in factories;
layettes, and boots. In the same building are
Dispensary and Consultation rooms. Twenty to
thirty patients are cared for daily at the Dispensary.
Another house contains the Grocery Depot, and another
the office for coal-tickets. An apartment house,
and two other houses have been made into lodging
houses. The apartment lets out rooms at rents varying
from 8 to 15 francs a month. One of the houses
contains free furnished lodgings for very poor
women with large families of young children. These
three houses have met the need of cheap sanitary
lodgings in place of damp, dirty rooms at high rents,
where sick and well were herded together, often in
one filthy bed.</p>

<p>Such is the work of the "American Hostels for
Refugees." The present cost of maintaining all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span>
branches of this well-organized charity is about five
thousand dollars a month.</p>

<p>Mrs. Wharton has also established "American
Convalescent Homes for Refugees." Many refugees
come broken in health, with chronic bronchitis
and incipient tuberculosis and even severer maladies.
Seventy-one beds are provided. There is also a
house where 30 children, suffering from tuberculosis
of the bone and of the glands are being cared for.
Four thousand dollars a month should be provided
at once for this work.</p>

<p>At the request of the Belgian Government Mrs.
Wharton has founded the "Children of Flanders
Rescue Committee." The bombardment of Furnes,
Ypres, Poperinghe and the villages along the Yser
drove the inhabitants south. The Belgian Government
asked Mrs. Wharton if she could receive 60
children at 48 hours' notice. The answer was "yes,"
and a home established. Soon after, the Belgian
Government asked Mrs. Wharton to receive five or
six hundred children. Houses were at once established,
and these houses are under the management
of the Flemish Sisters who brought the children from
the cellars of village-homes, from lonely farmhouses,
in two cases from the arms of the father,
killed by a fragment of shell. Lace-schools, sewing
and dress-making classes, agriculture and gardening
are carried on. Seven hundred and thirty-five children<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>
are cared for. The monthly expense is 8,000
francs.</p>

<p>One of the most important charities in which Mrs.
Wharton, Mrs. Edward Tuck, and Judge Walter
Berry are interested, is that for "French Tuberculous
War Victims," in direct connection with the
Health Department of the French Ministry of War.
Nearly 100,000 tuberculous soldiers have already
been sent back from the French front. They must
be shown how to get well and receive the chance to
get well. One hospital is already in operation, and
three large sanatoria are nearing completion, with
100 beds each. The object is not only to cure the
sufferers, but to teach them a trade enabling them
to earn their living in the country. Tuberculous
soldiers are coming daily to the offices of this charity
in ever-increasing numbers asking to be taken
in. The answer will depend on American generosity.</p>

<p>A group of Americans, headed by Mrs. Robert
Woods Bliss, whose husband is First Secretary of
the American Embassy in Paris, have instituted and
carried on a "Distributing Service" in France. The
name of the organization is "Service de Distribution
Américaine." It was established on its present basis
in December, 1914, and grew out of personal work
done by Mrs. Bliss since the beginning of the war.
The purpose has been to supply hospitals throughout<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>
France with whatever they need. By the end of
1916, the results were these:</p>

<table id="t04" summary="t04">

 <tr>
  <td class="tdlh">Number of towns visited</td>
  <td class="tdrl">1,290</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdlh">Number of hospitals inspected and supplied</td>
  <td class="tdrl">3,026</td>
 </tr>

 <tr>
  <td class="tdlh">Number of articles distributed</td>
  <td class="tdrl">4,839,902</td>
 </tr>

</table>

<p>The Director of the organization is Russell Greeley,
the secretary of Geoffrey Dodge. The service
has a garage outside the gates of Paris with ten
cars and a lorry. All the staff, except the stenographers
and packers, are volunteers.</p>

<p>This work for the French is connected with the
American Distributing Service for the Serbians,
which was begun by sending the late Charles R.
Cross, Jr., to Serbia as a member of the American
Sanitary Commission headed by Dr. R. P. Strong,
in the spring of 1915. Mr. Cross made an investigation
of the situation in Serbia at that time from
the point of view of the American Distributing
Service.</p>

<p>In January, 1916, Mrs. Charles Henry Hawes
of the Greek Red Cross, wife of Professor Hawes
of Dartmouth College, Hanover, being on her way
to Italy and Greece for the purpose of conveying
relief into Albania through Janina, offered her services
to the Distributing Service for the convoying
and distribution of supplies. Mrs. Hawes's offer
was accepted and she was furnished with a small<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span>
fund for the purpose of supplies. Events forestalled
her, but she succeeded in landing and distributing to
the last Serbians leaving San Giovanni di Medua, a
thousand rations. At the same time she took an
active part in relief work at Brindisi, and distributed
about a thousand dollars' worth of supplies to the
Serb refugees passing through that port.</p>

<p>Meanwhile the French Army Medical Service had
created the "Mission de Coordination de Secours
aux Armées d'Orient" for the purpose of distributing
relief supplies to the Serbian and other Allied
armies in the Balkans. A member of the Distributing
Service was appointed a member of the Mission,
and a fund of 100,000 francs placed at the disposal
of the Distributing Service which thenceforward
coöperated actively in the work of the Mission.
Urgent representations of the need of help in Corfou
having been made early in February to the Mission
by the French Army Medical Service, Mrs.
Hawes, representing the Distributing Service and
the Mission jointly, was sent to Corfou where she
established a soup kitchen and did other valuable
relief work at Vido. She was later joined at Corfou
by Countess de Reinach-Foussemagne, Infirmière
Déléguée of the Mission. Through these two agents
the Distributing Service sent to Corfou and distributed
197 cases of foodstuffs, clothing, and various<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
articles needed, 5 cases of medicines and 40 tins of
paraffine. The Service disbursed for similar purposes
through Mrs. Hawes and Countess de Reinach,
fifteen thousand francs in cash. It was also instrumental
in erecting a monument at Vido to the Serbs
who died there.</p>

<p>When the crisis at Corfou was at an end the field
depot of the Mission was moved to Solonica. There
the Service distributed to Serbians various shipments
of relief and hospital supplies: A total of 454 cases.</p>

<p>The Distributing Service now has ready and is
preparing to send forward for the Serbian Army a
laundry outfit, a disinfecting outfit and a complete
field surgical outfit (portable house for operating
room equipment and radiograph plant). A shipment
is also going forward for Monastir where the
field depot of the Mission was established on November
22nd, of 5,000 francs' worth of foodstuffs
and other urgently needed materials, and a larger
quantity is being accumulated to be sent forward
without delay.</p>

<p>In addition, the Distributing Service has sent
about 2,000 kilos of hospital supplies to the Serbs
in the Lazaret of Frioul, off Marseille, and a similar
quantity of material to the hospitals at Sidi-Abdallah
(Tunis), and elsewhere in Tunisia and Algeria,
given over to the treatment of Serbians.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span></p>

<p>Mrs. Bliss and her friends have also conducted
a work for "frontier children," dating from August,
1914, which has cared for French, Belgian and Alsatian
children to the number of 1,500.</p>

<hr class="chap" />

</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span></p>

<div class="break">

<h2 class="p4 xlarge">APPENDIX</h2>

<h3 class="p4">I</h3>

<p class="pcl2">TO THE READER</p>

<p class="pn2">This book is only a sign post pointing to the place
where better men than I have suffered and left a
record. For those who wish to go further on this
road I give sources of information for facts which I have
sketched in outline.</p>

<p>The full authoritative account of the American Ambulance
Field Service will be found in a book called "Friends
of France," written by the young Americans who drove the
cars at the front. It is one of the most heartening books that
our country has produced in the last fifty years. Much of
our recent writing has been the record of commercial success,
of growth in numbers, and of clever mechanical devices.
We have been celebrating the things that result in
prosperity, as if the value of life lay in comfort and security.
But the story of these young men is altogether a
record of work done without pay, under conditions of danger
that sometimes resulted in wounds and death. Their
service was given because France was fighting for an idea.
Risk and sacrifice and the dream of equality are more attractive
to young men than safety, neutrality and commercial
supremacy.</p>

<p>Those who wish to assure themselves that a healthy nationalism
is the method by which a people serves humanity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span>
will find an exalted statement in Mazzini's "The Duties of
Man." A correction of his overemphasis is contained in
"Human Nature in Politics," by Graham Wallas. Valuable
books on Nationality have been written by Ramsay
Muir and Holland Rose. Lord Acton's essay on Nationality
in his "The History of Freedom and Other
Essays" should be consulted. He shows the defects of the
nation-State.</p>

<p>On the American aspects of nationality, Emile Hovelaque
and Alfred Zimmern are the two visitors who have shown
clear recognition of the spiritual weakness of our country,
and at the same time have pushed through to the
cause, and so offered opportunity for amendment. Hovelaque's
articles in the <i>Revue de Paris</i> of the spring of
1916 I have summarized in the chapter on the Middle
West. From Zimmern I have jammed together in what
follows isolated sentences of various essays. This is of
course unfair to his thought, but will serve to stimulate
the reader's interest in looking up the essays themselves.</p>

<p>"There is to-day no American nation. America consists
at present of a congeries of nations who happen to be
united under a common federal government. America is
not a melting pot. It does not assimilate its aliens. It
is the old old story of the conflict between human instincts
and social institutions. The human soul can strike
no roots in the America of to-day. I watched the workings
of that ruthless economic process sometimes described
as 'the miracle of assimilation.' I watched the steam-roller
of American industrialism&mdash;so much more terrible to me
in its consequences than Prussian or Magyar tyranny&mdash;grinding
out the spiritual life of the immigrant proletariat,
turning honest, primitive peasants into the helpless<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span>
and degraded tools of the Trust magnate and the Tammany
boss. Nowhere in the world as in the United States have
false theories of liberty and education persuaded statesmen
on so large a scale to make a Babel and call it a
nation."</p>

<p>And the remedy?</p>

<p>"Those make the best citizens of a new country who,
like the French in Canada and Louisiana, or the Dutch
in South Africa, bear with them on their pilgrimage, and
religiously treasure in their new homes, the best of the
spiritual heritage bequeathed them by their fathers."</p>

<p>Alfred Zimmern is the author of "The Greek Commonwealth,"
contributor to the "<i>Round Table</i>," and one of
the promoters of the Workers Educational Association.
Those who wish to get his full thought on Nationality
should consult the pamphlet "Education and the Working
Class," the volume "International Relationships in the
Light of Christianity," and the <i>Sociological Review</i> for
July, 1912, and October, 1915.</p>

<p>The most penetrating recent articles on the American
democracy as opposed to the cosmopolitanism of the melting
pot were written by Horace M. Kallen in issues of
the New York <i>Nation</i> of February, 1915. Dr. Kallen
is a Jewish pupil of the late William James, of outstanding
ability, the spiritual leader of the younger generation
of Jews. He has touched off a group of thinkers on
the American problem, of whom one is Randolph Bourne.</p>

<p>Those interested in the interweaving of French and
early American history should read the book by Ambassador
Jusserand, called "With Americans of Past and Present
Days."</p>

<p>A careful investigation of the myth-making machinery<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span>
used by nations in war-time is given by Fernand van
Langenhove in "The Growth of a Legend"&mdash;a study based
upon the German accounts of francs-tireurs and "wicked
priests" in Belgium. It is made up of German documents.</p>

<p>A fuller study of the German letters and diaries is
contained in the pamphlets of Professor Joseph Bedier,
the books of Professor J. H. Morgan, and the volumes by
Jacques de Dampierre "L'Allemagne et le Droit des Gens"
and "Carnets de Route de Combattants Allemands."
After an examination of these German documents, no
student will speak of German atrocities as "alleged." The
most careful collection of testimony by eye-witnesses is
that contained in the report of the French Government
Commission, "Rapports et Procès-Verbaux D'Enquête."
I have personally examined several of the witnesses to this
report. They are responsible witnesses. Their testimony
is accurately rendered in the Government record. I trust
that some American of high responsibility, such as Professor
Stowell, of the Department of International Law at
Columbia University, will make an exhaustive study of the
German documents held by the French Ministry of War.</p>

<p>For the peasant incidents in the last section of my book,
I refer to the book by Will Irwin, "The Latin at War,"
as independent corroboration.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span></p>

<h3 class="p4">II</h3>

<p class="pcl2">TO NEUTRAL CRITICS</p>

<p class="pn2">Certain points in my testimony have been challenged
by persons sitting in security, three thousand
miles away from the invaded country, where at my
own cost and risk I have patiently gathered the facts on
which I have based my statements.</p>

<p>I have built my testimony on three classes of evidence.</p>

<p>First: The things I have seen. I have given names,
places and dates.</p>

<p>Second: The testimony of eye-witnesses, made to me in
the presence of men and women, well-known in France,
England and America. These eye-witnesses I have used in
precisely the same way in which a case is built up in the
courts of law.</p>

<p>Third: The diaries and letters written by Germans in
which they describe the atrocities they have committed. I
have seen the originals of these documents.</p>

<p>It is noticeable that the specific fact has never been
challenged. The date has never been found misplaced, the
place has never been confused, the person has never been declared
non-existent. The denial has always been in blanket
form.</p>

<p>The New York <i>Evening Post</i> says: "After the spy came
the invasion, and after the invasion came the 'steam roller,'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>
flattening out Belgium. This is all given in a general
way."</p>

<p>It is given with exact specifications.</p>

<p>Clement Wood, in the Socialist paper, <i>The New York
Call</i>, writes: "This book attempts more of a summing up
of German offenses, and, being written to sustain an opinion
rather than to give impartially the facts, correspondingly
loses in interest and persuasiveness. Its usefulness to the
general reader or the person who desires an unbiased understanding
of the conflict is slight." He speaks of "the
alleged German atrocities in Belgium."</p>

<p>My statements do not deal with opinion but with things
seen. Apparently it is an offense to take sides on this war.
One is a trusthworthy witness if one has seen only picturesque
incidents that do not reveal the method of warfare
practiced by an invading army. One is fair-minded only
by shutting the eyes to the burned houses of Melle, Termonde
and Lorraine, and the dead bodies of peasants; and
by closing the ears to the statements of outraged persons.
One is judicial only by defending the Germans against the
acts of their soldiers, and the written evidence of their officers
and privates.</p>

<p>The <i>Independent</i> says: "He saw the wreck of the convent
school, but learned none of the sisters had been
harmed."</p>

<p>The critic selects that portion of my testimony on the
convent school which relieves the Germans of the charge of
rape. As always, I have given every bit of evidence in
favor of the Germans that came my way. I have told of
the individual soldier who was revolted by his orders. I
have published the diaries of German soldiers which revealed
nobility. But is that scrupulous care of mine a justification<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span>
to the <i>Independent</i> for omitting to tell the humiliations
visited on that convent school?</p>

<p>My testimony of bayonetted dying peasants is "credible
in so far as no testimony from the other side was obtainable."</p>

<p>"Mr. Gleason also saw the ruins of bombarded Belgian
cities."</p>

<p>Is it fair of the <i>Independent</i> to be inaccurate? My evidence
is not of bombarded Belgian cities. It is of Belgian
cities, burned house by house, with certain houses spared
where "Do not burn by incendiary methods" was chalked
on the door.</p>

<p>"Otherwise his evidence is at second or third hand
mainly."</p>

<p>On the contrary, I have quoted witnesses whom I can produce.</p>

<p>The <i>Times</i>, of Los Angeles, says: "He is quite rabid.
He writes with the frenzy of a zealot."</p>

<p>I do not think the colorless recitation of facts, fortified
by name, place and date, is rabid or frenzied.</p>

<p>The <i>Literary Digest</i> says: "Of the 'atrocities' in Belgium,
we find reports of a 'friend,' or a 'friend's friend,'
or what 'some one saw or heard.'"</p>

<p>I have told what I myself saw and heard.</p>

<p>"Fair-minded readers will be inclined to reserve judgment."</p>

<p>But in the light cast by eye-witnesses and German diaries,
we have reserved judgment too long. Our American Revolution
would have been a drearier affair, if the French had
reserved judgment. In a crisis the need is to form a judgment
in time to make it tell for the cause of justice. Truth-seeking
is a living function of the mind.</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span></p>

<p>Another critic says: "By careful reading one sees that,
while it pretends to give real evidence, there isn't any that
is real except where not essential. Mr. Gleason attempts to
belittle the stories of priests inciting girls to deeds of violence."</p>

<p>I do not attempt to belittle those stories. I disprove
them on the evidence given by German generals, whose
names I cite. Because I defend Roman Catholic priests
from slander does not mean that I am anti-Protestant. Because
I prove that Belgium and France have suffered injustice
does not mean that I am anti-German. I went over
to find out whether Belgian and French peasants, old men,
women and children, were a lawless, murderous mob, or
whether the German military had sinned in burning their
homes and shooting the non-combatants. Neutrals can not
have it both ways&mdash;either the peasants were guilty, or the
German Army was guilty. I found it was the German
Army that had sinned.</p>

<p>This critic goes on to say: "Only a few years ago the
entire world was shocked by the horrible atrocities carried
on in the Congo."</p>

<p>Evidently those atrocities were proved to his satisfaction.
But was the case not established by the same process I have
used&mdash;personal observation, documentary proof, and the
testimony of eye-witnesses?</p>

<p>The <i>Post-Dispatch</i>, of St. Louis, says: "Gleason in trying
to make out a strong case against Germany goes too far.
He is too venomous. It will be a hard thing to convince
neutral Americans that German soldiers maliciously ran
their bayonets through the backs of girl children. The
volume would be of much greater historical value if Gleason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
had used his head more and his heart less." Dr.
Hamilton, in <i>The Survey</i>, makes the same point.</p>

<p>In my testimony I detail my evidence, and they who deny
it rest on general statements. I assure them it is not in
lightness that I record these conclusions about the German
Army. I have gone into the zone of fire to bring out German
wounded. I have taken the same hazards as thousands
of other men have taken to save German life. Does venom
act so?</p>

<p>I find in these criticisms an underlying assumption, a
mental attitude, toward war, and therefore toward facts
about war. Some of these periodicals are sincere pacifists.
In the cause of social reform, in their several and very
different ways, they have served the common good. But
because they believe war is the worst of all evils, they assume
that both sides are equally guilty or equally foolish.
It is not a mental attitude which leaves them open-minded.
I want to ask them on what body of facts they base their
criticism. Were they present in Belgium at the moment
of impact? Has the German Government provided them
with detailed documentary proof that in the villages I have
mentioned, on the dates given, the persons I have named
were not burned, were not bayonetted? Have they examined
the originals of the German diaries and found that I
have omitted or altered words? Have they spent many
days in Lorraine taking testimony from curé and sister and
Mayor and peasant? Has that testimony shown that the
destruction and murder did not take place? Has Leon
Mirman, Prefect of Meurthe-et-Moselle, given them a statement
in which he retracts what he said to me?</p>

<p>Several of these critics happen to be personal friends. It
would be impossible to write in resentment of anything they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
say. I am not interested in making out a case for myself.
But I am very much interested in inducing my fellow countrymen
to accept the facts of the present world struggle.
My books about the war have been written with one purpose
only&mdash;to bring home to Americans the undeserved suffering
of Belgium and France. To do that I need the help
of all men of good will. I ask them not to break the force
of the facts which I have patiently collected, by the carelessness
which calls systematically burned cities "bombarded"
cities, and by the mental attitude which finds me
"rabid," when I have given every favoring incident to German
soldiers that I could find. I have spent nearly two
years in observing the facts of this war. Against my desires,
my pre-war philosophy, my hopes of internationalism, I was
driven by the facts to certain conclusions.
</p>

</div>

<div class="sum">

<p class="pc4 large">FOOTNOTES:</p>

<div class="footnotes">

<div class="footnote">

<p class="pfn"><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Some of our people go further even than the giving of banquets
to the efficient staff of the <i>Deutschland</i>. They give praise
to U-53. In a newspaper, edited and owned by Americans, and
published in an American Middle Western city of 40,000 inhabitants,
the leading editorial on the exploits of U-53 was headed,
"Hats Off to German Seamen," and the writer says:</p>

<p class="pfn">"The world in general that had educated itself to regard the
German as a phlegmatic and plodding citizen will remove its
headgear in token of approbation of the sustained series of sensational
feats by German commanders and sailors. The entire
aspect of affairs has been changed by the events of two years.
The Germans have accumulated as much heroic and romantic
material in that time as has been gathered by other nations since
the date of the American Revolution."</p>

<p class="pfn">In the second section of this book, I have told why we talk
like that. The mixture of races (mixed but not blended), the
modern theory of cosmopolitanism, a self-complacency in our
attitude toward Europe, an assumption that we alone champion
freedom and justice, the fading of our historic tradition&mdash;these
have caused us to preach internationalism, but fail to defend ourselves
or the little nation of Belgium. They have led us to
admire successful force.</p></div>

<div class="footnote">

<p class="pfn"><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Mazzini's idea of neutrality was this:</p>

<p class="pfn">"A law of Solon decreed that those who in an insurrection
abstained from taking part on one side or the other should be
degraded. It was a just and holy law, founded on the belief&mdash;then
instinctive in the heart of Solon, but now comprehended and
expressed in a thousand formulæ&mdash;in the solidarity of mankind.
It would be just now more than ever. What! you are in the
midst of the uprising, not of a town, but of the whole human
race; you see brute force on the one side, and right on the other
... whole nations are struggling under oppression ... men die
in hundreds, by thousands, fighting for or against an idea. This
idea is either good or evil; and you continue to call yourselves
men and Christians, you claim the right of remaining neutral?
You cannot do so without moral degradation. Neutrality&mdash;that
is to say, indifference between good and evil, the just and the
unjust, liberty and oppression&mdash;is simply Atheism."</p></div>
</div></div>
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