Volume II Part 13 (1/2)

I shall not forget how good you were to take time to write me a word about the meeting of the Board--_the_ Board: there's no other one in that cla.s.s--at Hampton[36], and I did most heartily appreciate the knowledge that you all remembered me. Alas! it's a long, long time ago when we all met--so long ago that to me it seems a part of a former incarnation. These three years--especially these two years of the war--have changed my whole outlook on life and foreshortened all that came before. I know I shall never link back to many things (and alas! too, to many people) that once seemed important and surely were interesting. Life in these trenches (five warring or quarrelling governments mining and sapping under me and shooting over me)--two years of universal amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p in this h.e.l.l are enough--enough I say, even for a man who doesn't run away from responsibilities or weary of toil.

And G.o.d knows how it has changed me and is changing me: I sometimes wonder, as a merely intellectual and quite impersonal curiosity.

Strangely enough I keep pretty well--very well, in fact. Perhaps I've learned how to live more wisely than I knew in the old days; perhaps again, I owe it to my old grandfather who lived (and enjoyed) ninety-four years. I have walked ten miles to-day and I sit down as the clock strikes eleven (P.M.) to write this letter.

You will recall more clearly than I certain horrible, catastrophic, universal-ruin pa.s.sages in Revelation--monsters swallowing the universe, blood and fire and clouds and an eternal crash, rolling ruin enveloping all things--well, all that's come. There are, perhaps, ten million men dead of this war and, perhaps, one hundred million persons to whom death would be a blessing. Add to these as many millions more whose views of life are so distorted that blank idiocy would be a better mental outlook, and you'll get a hint (and only a hint) of what the continent has already become--a bankrupt slaughter-house inhabited by unmated women. We have talked of ”problems” in our day. We never had a problem; for the worst task we ever saw was a mere blithe pastime compared with what these women and the few men that will remain here must face. The hills about Verdun are not blown to pieces worse than the whole social structure and intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. I wonder that anybody is sane.

Now we have swung into a period and a state of mind wherein all this seems normal. A lady said to me at a dinner party (think of a dinner party at all!), ”Oh, how I shall miss the war when it ends!

Life without it will surely be dull and tame. What can we talk about? Will the old subjects ever interest us again?” I said, ”Let's you and me try and see.” So we talked about books--not war books--old country houses that we both knew, gardens and gold and what not; and in fifteen minutes we swung back to the war before we were aware.

I get out of it, as the days rush by, certain fundamental convictions, which seem to me not only true--true beyond any possible cavil--truer than any other political things are true--and far more important than any other contemporary facts whatsoever in any branch of endeavour, but better worth while than anything else that men now living may try to further:

1. The cure for democracy is more democracy. The danger to the world lies in autocrats and autocracies and privileged cla.s.ses; and these things have everywhere been dangerous and always will be.

There's no security in any part of the world where people cannot think of a government without a king, and there never will be. You cannot conceive of a democracy that will unprovoked set out on a career of conquest. If all our religious missionary zeal and cash could be turned into convincing Europe of this simple and obvious fact, the longest step would be taken for human advancement that has been taken since 1776. If Carnegie, or, after he is gone, his Peace People could see this, his Trust might possibly do some good.

2. As the world stands, the United States and Great Britain must work together and stand together to keep the predatory nations in order. A League to Enforce Peace and the President's idea of disentangling alliances are all in the right direction, but vague and general and c.u.mbersome, a sort of b.a.s.t.a.r.d children of Neutrality. _The_ thing, the _only_ thing is--a perfect understanding between the English-speaking peoples. That's necessary, and that's all that's necessary. We must boldly take the lead in that. I frankly tell my friends here that the English have got to throw away their d.a.m.ned arrogance and their insularity and that we Americans have got to throw away our provincial ignorance (”What is abroad to us?”), hang our Irish agitators and shoot our hyphenates and bring up our children with reverence for English history and in the awe of English literature. This is the only job now in the world worth the whole zeal and energy of all first-cla.s.s, thoroughbred English-speaking men. _We_ must lead. We are natural leaders. The English must be driven to lead. Item: We must get their lads into our universities, ours into theirs. They don't know how to do it, except the little driblet of Rhodes men.

Think this out, remembering what fools we've been about exchange professors with Germany! How much good could Fons Smith[37] do in a thousand years, on such an errand as he went on to Berlin? And the English don't know _how_ to do it. They are childish (in some things) beyond belief. An Oxford or Cambridge man never thinks of going back to his university except about twice a lifetime when his college formally asks him to come and dine. Then he dines as docilely as a scared Freshman. I am a D.C.L. of Oxford. I know a lot of their faculty. They are hospitality itself. But I've never yet found out one important fact about the university. They never tell me. I've been down at Cambridge time and again and stayed with the Master of one of the colleges. I can no more get at what they do and how they do it than I could get at the real meaning of a service in a Buddhist Temple. I have spent a good deal of time with Lord Rayleigh, who is the Chancellor of Cambridge University. He never goes there. If he were to enter the town, all the men in the university would have to stop their work, get on their parade-day gowns, line-up by precedent and rank and go to meet him and go through days of ceremony and incantations. I think the old man has been there once in five years. Now this mediaevalism must go--or be modified. You fellers who have universities must work a real alliance--a big job here. But to go on.

The best informed English opinion is ripe for a complete working understanding with us. We've got to work up our end--get rid of our ignorance of foreign affairs, our s.h.i.+rt-sleeve, complaining kind of diplomacy, our sport of twisting the lion's tail and such things and fall to and bring the English out. It's the _one_ race in this world that's got the guts.

Hear this in confirmation: I suppose 1,000 English women have been to see me--as a last hope--to ask me to have inquiries made in Germany about their ”missing” sons or husbands, generally sons.

They are of every cla.s.s and rank and kind, from marchioness to scrubwoman. Every one tells her story with the same dignity of grief, the same marvellous self-restraint, the same courtesy and deference and sorrowful pride. Not one has whimpered--but one. And it turned out that she was a Belgian. It's the breed. Spartan mothers were theatrical and pinchbeck compared to these women.

I know a lady of t.i.tle, very well to do, who for a year got up at 5:30 and drove herself in her own automobile from her home in London to Woolwich where she worked all day long in a sh.e.l.l factory as a volunteer and got home at 8 o'clock at night. At the end of a year they wanted her to work in a London place where they keep the records of the Woolwich work. ”Think of it,” said she, as she shook her enormous diamond ear-rings as I sat next to her at dinner one Sunday night not long ago, ”think of it--what an easy time I now have. I don't have to start till half-past seven and I get home at half-past six!”

I could fill forty pages with stories like these. This very Sunday I went to see a bedridden old lady who sent me word that she had something to tell me. Here it was: An English flying man's machine got out of order and he had to descend in German territory. The Germans captured him and his machine. They ordered him to take two of their flying men in his machine to show them a particular place in the English lines. He declined. ”Very well, we'll shoot you, then.” At last he consented. The three started. The Englishman quietly strapped himself in. There were no straps for the two Germans. The Englishman looped-the-loop. The Germans fell out. The Englishman flew back home. ”My son has been to see me from France.

He told me that. He knows the man”--thus said the old lady and thanked me for coming to hear it! She didn't know that the story has been printed.

But the real question is, ”How are you?” Do you keep strong? Able, without weariness, to keep up your good work? I heartily hope so, old man. Take good care of yourself--very.

My love to Mrs. Alderman. Please don't quote me--yet. I have to be very silent publicly about everything. After March 4th, I shall again be free.

Yours always faithfully,

W.H.P.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 33: A playful reference to the Amba.s.sador's infant grandson, Walter H. Page, Jr.]

[Footnote 34: Drowned on the Hamps.h.i.+re, June 5, 1916, off the coast of Scotland.]

[Footnote 35: President of the University of Virginia.]

[Footnote 36: Hampton Inst.i.tute, at Hampton, Va.]

[Footnote 37: C. Alphonso Smith, Professor of English, U.S. Naval Academy; Roosevelt Professor at Berlin, 1910-11.]

CHAPTER XIX

WAs.h.i.+NGTON IN THE SUMMER OF 1916