Part 8

French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot, We love them not, we hate them not, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone-- England!

England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the German race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish hate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred not unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the sufferer’s own head. But as no sane father of a family would make free of his children’s nursery the deranged relative who required the protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. God forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, passionately opposing Germany’s objects in this war and loathing Germany’s methods. We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of “human empire.” We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable hardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In putting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no more than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can never be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a game with it.

THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIA

And then Russia! Distance from the scene of action, the great length of the line of operations and the vast area behind it have made it difficult or impossible for us to see the drama of the Russian campaign as we have seen that of France, Belgium, and our own Empire. But we have seen something, and it has been enough to give the lie to certain of the emphatic protestations with which Germany made war. We had heard it said by the German Chancellor that the fact that Russia was mobilizing in those last days of July 1914 made it impossible for Germany to ask Austria to extend the time-limit imposed upon Serbia--a time-limit which would have been indecent among civilized people if it had concerned nothing more serious than the destruction of a kennel of dogs suspected of rabies. But all the world knows now that Russian mobilization was a process inevitably so slow that the German armies had flung themselves upon Belgium twelve days before the Russian advance began.

Then we had heard it said by the German Churchmen that in taking the side of Russia we, British and French people, leaders among the enlightened races, were helping Muscovite barbarians to oppose the cause of civilization. But since Louvain, Termonde, and Rheims, not to speak of the unnameable iniquities of Liège, the world knows where the barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home--in Berlin, not in Petrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meek ones of the Russian peasantry.

THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT DEATH

The truth, as everybody knows who knows Russia, is that “barbarous,” the classic taunt of the German against Russia, is, of all words, the least proper as a description of the Russian mind and character. I have myself been only once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and under conditions which were calculated, beyond anything that has happened since down to to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the Russian soul, In 1892, when the cholera had come sweeping up from the south, I travelled for weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little towns of Galicia and the cities beyond the Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel. I visited the plague spots where men’s lives were being mown down at the devastating stride of 5000 deaths a week, and where men’s hearts, the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men, were being sapped and quenched and consumed by terror and panic and despair. I saw the Russian people under the black shadow and in the malign presence of the Great Death, living in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and awe. And when my visit came to an end I left Russia with the feeling that, relatively short as my life among the Russian people had been, I knew them because I had been with them when their very souls lay bare.

What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate; but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we mean the “will to life” which animates the savage man. And I now say, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims and Liège are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.

THE RUSSIAN SOUL

The truth is, too, that there is not in the world a more religious people than the Russian--a people more submissive to what they conceive (not always wisely) to be the will of the Almighty, the governance of the unseen forces. As opposed to the average German intellect, which for the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to spiritualize the material. No one can doubt this who has seen the Russian peasants on their pathetic pilgrimages to the Holy Land, standing (among the lepers, uttering their clamorous lamentations) before the gates of the Garden of Gethsemane, or trooping in dense crowds down the steep steps to the underground Church of the Virgin. The literature of Russia, too, reflects this trait of the Russian soul, and not only in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke’s, Nietzsche’s, and Bernhardi’s would be impossible in Russia, not, heaven knows, because of their “intellectual superiority,” which is another name for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, their glorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which the Russian mind sets lower than the unseen powers of his soul.

THE RUSSIAN MOUJIK MOBILIZING

So the flashes as of lightning that have shown us the part Russia has played in the drama of the past 365 days have revealed a people acting under something very like a religious impulse. We have seen the moujiks being mobilized in remote parts of the vast country, and have found it a moving picture. It is probable that the war had been going on for weeks before they heard anything about it. Almost certainly they had no clear idea of where the fighting was, or what it was about, the theatre of the struggle being so far away and their ignorance of the world outside their own little communities so profound and impenetrable. We may be sure that when the echo of the great war did at length reach them it was quite undisturbed by any foolish pretence associated with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand (that lie could only be expected to impose on the enlightened peoples of the West) and concerned itself solely with the safety of Russia. The humblest Russian is proud of Russia; proud that it is so big and powerful among the nations of the world. He will gladly die rather than see it made less, so deep is his devotion to the long-suffering giant whose blood is throbbing in his veins.

Therefore when the call of war came to the moujiks in their far-off homes, we saw them answering it as if it had been the call of their faith. First a service in the village church; then a procession behind the village pope to the village shrine (“Now go away and fight for Russia, my children”), then the setting off for the distant railway station, the mothers and young wives of the soldiers marching for miles by their sides, carrying their rifles and haversacks along the wide roads white with dust. What scenes of human pathos! For a long time the officers are indulgent to irregularities--have they not just left their own dear women behind them?--but at length the word of command rings out, and everybody not connected with the army has to go back. Ah, those partings! Still, God is good! And hadn’t Masha promised to burn a candle to the Virgin every day while her husband is away? Ivan will come back; yes, of course Ivan will come back, and by that time baby will be born, and then what joy, what lifelong happiness!

HOW THE RUSSIANS MAKE WAR

From some of the greater cities of Western Russia there came flashes of similar scenes. The memory of that time of the cholera is closely involved for me in the thought of these tragic days, and by the light of what I saw in Kief, in Sosnowitz, in Lublin, in Cracow, in Warsaw, and along the line of front in poor, stricken Poland, where, as I write, men are being mown down like grass, I seem to see what took place there at the beginning of August 1914, and is taking place now. I see the churches crowded and the congregations trailing out through the open porches into the churchyards around them. Old men and women who are too lame to struggle their way through the throng are lying under the open windows with their sticks and crutches stretched out beside them. Others outside are on their knees, following the services as they proceed within, clasping their hands, making the sign of the Cross, giving the responses, and joining in the singing.

Inside the churches, where the women kneel on one side in their bright cotton head-scarves and the soldiers on the other in their long, dark coats, prayers are being said for Russia, that God will protect her and her “little Father,” the Tsar, and all his faithful children, making the dark cloud that is on their horizon to pass them by unharmed. From porch to chancel they bend forward with their faces as near to the floor as their close crowding will permit. Then they sing. No one who has not been to Russia has ever heard such singing--no, not even in Rome in the Church of the Gesu as the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the year. There is no organ, and if there is a choir its voices are lost in the deep swell of the melancholy wail that rises from the people. Perhaps the morning is a bright one, and the sun is shining in dusty sheets of dancing light through the clerestory windows on to the altar ablaze with gold, twinkling behind its yellow candles and the bowed heads of the priests. When the service ends the soldiers form up in lines and march out through the kneeling crowds within and the overflowing congregations lying prone outside.

So do the Russians make war. Not generally to the beating of drums, or yet the singing of their searching national anthem, and assuredly not as bloodhounds hunting for prey, but in the spirit of a simple people, often humble in their ignorance but always strong in their faith--in the certainty that there is something else in God’s world besides greed and gold, something higher than “the will to power,” something better for a nation than to enlarge its empire, and that is to possess its soul.

And now in their hour of trial let us salute our brave Allies in the East. Let us assure them of the sincerity of our alliance. We rejoice in their victories. We count their triumphs as our own. When we hear of their reverses our hearts are full. We feel that out of the storm of battle a great new spirit has been born into Russia, awakening her from a sleep of centuries. We feel, too, that a great new spirit of brotherhood has been born into the world, uniting the scattered and divided parts of it, and that there is no more moving manifestation of the unity of mankind than the fact that the Russian and British peoples, after long years of misunderstanding, are now fighting for the same cause from opposite sides of Europe. May they soon meet and clasp hands!

THE PART PLAYED BY POLAND

And then Poland. Down to the end of the first year of war the part played by Poland has been that of absolute martyr. Like the water-mill in Zola’s story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemies and then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armies of the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are gone she lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine and pestilence which have stalked in the wake of war.

No more pitiful and abject picture does the terrible conflict present. Without part or lot in the European quarrel, with little to gain and everything to lose by it, having no such right of choice as gave glory to the martyrdom of Belgium, Poland has had nothing to do but to endure.

At the beginning of the war, when the battery of Gerrman hatred was directed chiefly against Russia, the world was told that the measure of her barbarity was to be seen in the condition to which the Polish people had been reduced under Russian rule. But did the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins and von Bülows who put forth this plea, count on our ignorance of Galicia, in which the condition of the Poles is immeasurably more wretched under the rule of their Ally, Austria?

In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw something of the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both were unfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most inhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; with swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with roads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond--such is a great part of Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.

But little as Nature has done to cheer the spirits of the Poles, who live under Austrian rule, what man has done is less. It is nothing at all, or worse than nothing.

Thickly-sown on the eastern frontier are many densely populated manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving the effect of standing barefoot on the damp earth. As you walk through them they look like interminable lines of featureless streets, full of those sweating, screaming, squabbling masses of humanity that take away all your pride in the dignity of man’s estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, the dominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and often unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, but more frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous façades. When closed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prison cells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces of their doors--pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, a typology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants who have not, as a whole, been taught to read.

And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that the body is half asleep and the spirit no more than half awake. To see them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as the least of God’s creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool--always ready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven, having no right, and hardly any hope.

Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along the banks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishing of hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself what has been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who once laboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions of Culture, I find only one answer--the suppression of nationality! In that fact lies the moral of Galicia’s martyrdom. Let Belgium’s nationality be suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her condition will soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keep the body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy its soul.

THE SOUL OF POLAND