Part 7

Then Christmas in the trenches--we had glimpses of that, too. The people who governed nations from their Parliament Houses might have doubts about the peace-dream of the poets, the Utopia of universal brotherhood which gleams somewhere ahead in the far future of humanity, but the soldiers on the battlefields, even in the welter of blood and death had somehow heard the call of it.

The appeal of the Pope for a truce to hostilities during the days sacred to the Christian faith had fallen on deaf ears in the Cabinets of Europe. In that zone of mutual deception which is another name for war, neither of the belligerents could trust the other not to take an unfair advantage of any respite from slaying that might be called in the name of Christ, and, therefore, the armies must continue to fight. But the men in the trenches had found for them-selves a better way. When Christmas Eve came they began--German and British--to talk about Christmas Eves which they had spent at home. Visions arose of crowded streets, of shops decorated with holly and mistletoe, of churches with little candle-lit Nativities, of Christmas-trees at home laden with fairy lamps and presents, of children sitting up late to dance and laugh and then hanging up their stockings before going to bed to dream of Santa Claus, of church bells ringing for midnight mass, and, last of all, of the “waits” by the old cross in the market-place in the midst of the winter frost and snow.

Suddenly in one of the trenches some of the soldiers began to sing. They sang a Christmas carol, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night.” The soldiers in the parallel trenches of the enemy heard it, knew what it was, and joined in with another Christmas carol, sung in their own language. In a little while both sides were singing, each in its turn, listening and replying, all along the two dark gullies that stretched across blood-stained Europe. Then Chinese lanterns were lit and stuck up on the head of the trenches, and salutations were shouted across the narrow ground between. “Merry Christmas to you, Fritz, old man!” “Same to you, Tommy!” And then next morning, Christmas morning, in the grey light of the late dawn, some daring soul, clambering over the trench head, marched boldly up to the line of the enemy with the salutation of the sacred day. In another moment everybody was up and out, shaking hands, and posing for photographs, friend and foe, German and British.

After a while they became aware that the ground they were standing on was like an unroofed charnel-house, littered over with the bodies of their unburied dead. So they set themselves to cover up their comrades in the earth, never asking which was British and which German, but laying them all together in the everlasting brotherhood of death--that English boy whose mother was waiting for him in England, and this German lad whose young wife was weeping in his German home.

My God, why do men make wars?

THE COMING OF SPRING

But perhaps, as Zola says, it is only the soft-hearted philosophers who are loud in their curses of war, and the truer wisdom was that of the stoical ancients, who could look with indifference on the massacre of millions. To keep manly, to remind ourselves that the generations come and go, that after all people die, and that more die one year than another--this should be the wise man’s way of reconciling himself to the inhumanities of war. It is horrible doctrine, but certainly nature seems to speak with that voice, and hence the pang that came to us with the next great flash as of lightning, which showed us the battle-front at the beginning of the spring.

The long lines in the West had hardly changed so much as a single point to north or south since October 1914. Yet what horrors of conflict the intervening months had witnessed, bloody in their progress, though barren in their results! The storms of the spring (which in much of Northern Europe is only another name for a second winter) had gone through it all. Our soldiers had suffered frightfully, and some of us at home, awakening in the middle of stormy nights, had thought we heard the booming of far-off guns under the thunder of the sky.

Three millions of men were dead by this time, and that belt of green country, which many of us had crossed with light hearts a score of times, was nothing now but a vast graveyard stretching from the foot of the Swiss mountains to the margin of the North Sea. Here a charred and blackened mass of stones, which had once been a group of houses; there a cottage by the roadside, once sweet and pretty under its mantle of wild roses, now hideous with a gaping hole torn in its walls, and its little bed visible behind curtains that used to be white. And yet Nature was going on the same as ever--hardly giving a hint that the Great Death had passed that way. Our boys at the front wrote home that the leaves were beginning to show on the trees, that the grass was growing again, and that in the lulls of the cannonading they could hear the birds singing.

NATURE GOES HER OWN WAY

We found it heart-breaking. But it has been always so. I was in Naples during the whole period of the last great eruption of Vesuvius, and, looking through the gloom of the heavens, piled high with the whorls of fire and smoke that were covering the Vesuvian valleys and villages with a grey shroud, waist deep, of volcanic dust, I thought the face of Nature in that sweet spot could never be the same again; but when I went back to it a year later I could see no difference. I sailed south through the Straits of Messina a few weeks before the earthquake, and, returning north a few months later, I looked eagerly for the change which I imagined must have been made by the frightful upheaval of the earth that had killed hundreds of thousands, and shaken the soul of the entire human family, but I could see no change at all, even through the strongest field-glasses, until I came within sight of the waste and wreckage of the little works of men. Yes, Nature goes her own way, winter and summer, seedtime and harvest, healing her own wounds, but taking no thought of ours.

Yet, cruel as Nature seemed to be at the beginning of the spring, it was not so cruel as man. With the better weather our enemies began to devise and put into operation new and more devilish methods of warfare. Perhaps this was a result of their fear, for there is no cruelty so cruel as the cruelty that comes of fear, and no inhumanity so inhuman. Having expressed themselves as shocked by our alleged use of dum-dum bullets, they were now ransacking their laboratory for gases that would burst the lungs of our soldiers, and for inflammable oils that would set them afire as if they were criminals tarred and feathered and tied to a stake. Their battleships, built to fight craft of their own kind, or at least fortresses capable of replying to their fire, were now sent out to bombard innocent watering-places lying breast open to the sea. Their air-craft, constructed for reconnaissances, were ordered to drop bombs out of the clouds on to sleeping cities in the darkness of the night. And their submarines, tolerated by international courts only as weapons of attack on warships, were authorized to sink harmless merchantmen, without any word of warning, or any effort to save life. Could scientific knowledge under the direction of moral insanity go one step farther? Flying in the highest sky, hiding behind the densest clouds, stealing across the heavens in the dark hours, dropping fireballs on to the silent earth, sneaking back in the dawn; and then sailing through the womb of the great deep, rising like a serpent to spit death at innocent ships, diving to avoid destruction and scudding away under cover of the empty sea--what a spectacle of divine power at the service of devilish passion! It was difficult to believe that our enemies had not gone mad. They were no longer fighting like men, but like demons.

THE SOUL OF THE MAN WHO SANK THE LUSITANIA

The crowning horror of Germany’s barbarities came with the sinking of the Lusitania.

Perhaps nothing less shocking could have made us see how much less cruel Nature is at her worst than man in his madness may be. Three years before the Titanic had been sunk on a clear and quiet night, because a great iceberg formed in the frozen north had floated silently down to where, crossing the ship’s course in mid-Atlantic, it struck her the slanting blow that sent her to the bottom. Thus a great, blind, irresistible force, operating without malice or design, had in that case destroyed more than a thousand human lives. But when the Lusitania was sunk in broad daylight, and nearly as many persons perished, it was because our brother man, in the bitterness of his heart and the cruelty of his fear, had been bent on committing wilful murder.

What is the present state of the soul of the person who perpetrated that crime?

Can he excuse himself on the ground that he was obeying orders, or does his conscience refuse to be chloroformed into silence by that hoary old subterfuge? When he first saw the great ship sailing up in the sunshine, its decks crowded with peaceful passengers, and he rose like a murderer out of his hiding-place in the bowels of the sea, what were the feelings with which he ordered the torpedo to be fired? When, having launched his bolt, he sank and then rose again, and heard the drowning cries of his victims struggling in the water, what were the emotions with which he ran away? And when he returned to tell his story of the work he had done, with what dignity of manhood did he hold up his head in the company of Christian men? God knows--only God and one of his creatures.

THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL

For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of such enormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck’s theory that invisible powers of evil are using man for the execution of devilish designs. But if so, they have had no mercy on their creatures. We read that when, in fear of another flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the children of Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excuses the Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion of intellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever before listened to such whirlwind logic?

When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crew to perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act of war. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defend herself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When British battleships have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starve sixty-five millions of German people. But when German submarines have attempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand passengers of many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a just revenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simple humanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of her neutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian in a railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and becomes a proper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed a German soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has been guilty of assassination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germany has refused to honour her name to a “scrap of paper” she has been a holy martyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hers she has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed. Therefore God punish England! Above all, when God has crowned the arms of Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty, William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore God bless the Kaiser!

Surely confusion of intellect can go no further, and the German Tower of Babel must soon fall.

THE ALIEN PERIL

But out of this failure of logic on the part of “deep-thinking Germany” a danger came to us from nearer home than the battlefield. One of the most vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama of the past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania, showed us the full depths of the “alien peril.” Before the war we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst. They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice of our law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them had married our British women, who had borne them British children. Most of them had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned to understand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many had been honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had become theirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagner a British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to break down, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universal brotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest, education, and environment were making us one with these strangers within our gates.

Then came a startling awakening. We realized beyond possibility of doubt that many thousands of our German aliens had been keeping up a dual responsibility, and that the chief of their two duties had been duty to their own country. We found beyond question that a settled system of espionage was at work in Great Britain, under the direction of the German authorities; that information which could only be of use in the event of invasion had for many years been gathered up by some of the people whom we had called our friends, and that day by day and hour by hour, as the war went on, secrets valuable to our enemy had been filtering through to Germany from influential places in this country.

What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even our self-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point at the time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realized that there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It is one of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims with moral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience could justify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Why should not our German governesses burn down the houses in which our children lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt to assassinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever was necessary was right.

“We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessity knows no law.”

HYMNS OF HATE

About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious, intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it “sacred hate”) were composed, recited, and sung: