Part 23 (2/2)

If they are ”thrice armed” who have their ”quarrel just,” then England, France, Russia, and Belgium can await with confidence, not merely the immediate issue of the t.i.tanic conflict, but also the equally important judgment of history.

EPILOGUE

On the evening of July 31, 1914, the author reached Basle. The rapid progress of events, narrated in this volume, suggested the wisdom of continuing the journey to Paris that night, but as I wanted to see the tomb of Erasmus in the Basle Cathedral I determined to break my long journey from St. Moritz.

It seemed a fitting time to make a pilgrimage to the last resting-place of the great humanist philosopher of Rotterdam and Louvain, for in that prodigious upheaval of the sixteenth century, which has pa.s.sed into history as the Reformation, Erasmus was the one n.o.ble spirit who looked with a tolerant and philosophical mind upon both parties to the great controversy. He suffered the fate of the conservative in a radical time, and as the great storm convulsed Europe the author of the _Praise of Folly_ probably said on more than one occasion: ”A plague o' both your houses.” Nearly four centuries have pa.s.sed since he joined the ”silent majority,” between whom is no quarreling, and the desolated Louvain, which he loved, is to-day in its ruins a standing witness that immeasurable folly still rules the darkened counsels of men.

As I reached Basle and saw the spires of the Cathedral rising above the Rhine, it seemed to me that the great convulsion, which was then rocking all Europe with seismic violence, was the greatest since that of the French Revolution and might have as lasting results as the great schism of the sixteenth century.

I was not fated to see the tomb, for when I reached my hotel the facilities of civilization had broken down so abruptly that if I did not wish to be interned in Switzerland I must leave early on the following morning for Paris. Transportation had almost entirely collapsed, communication was difficult, and credit itself was so strained that ”mine host” of the Three Kings was disposed to look askance even at gold.

Our journey took us to France by way of Delle. Twenty-four hours after we pa.s.sed that frontier town, German soldiers entered and blew out the brains of a French custom-house officer, thus the first victim in the greatest war that the world has ever known.

As we journeyed from Basle to Paris on that last day of July the fair fields of France never looked more beautiful. In the gleaming summer sun they made a new ”field of the cloth of gold,” and the hayricks looked like the aureate tents of a mighty army. It was harvest time, but already the laborers had deserted their fields which, although ”white unto the harvest,” seemed bereft of the tillers. Some had left the bounty of nature to join in the harvest of death. From the high pasture lands of the Alps the herdsmen at the ringing of the village church bells had left their herds and before night had fallen were on their way to the front.

At Belfort the station was crowded with French troops and an elderly French couple came into our compartment. The eyes of the wife were red with weeping, while the man sank into his seat and with his head upon his breast gazed moodily into vacancy. They had just parted with their son, who had joined the colors. I stood for a time with this French gentleman in the corridor of the train, but as he could not speak English or German and I could not speak French, it was impossible for us to communicate the intense and tragical thoughts that were pa.s.sing through our minds. Suddenly he pointed to the smiling harvest fields, by which we pa.s.sed so swiftly, and said ”_Perdu! perdu!_” This word of tragical import could have been applied to all civilization as well.

The night of our arrival in Paris I fully expected to see a half a million Frenchmen parading the streets and enthusiastically cheering for war and crying, as in 1870, ”a Berlin!” I was to witness an extraordinary transformation of a great nation. An unusual silence brooded over the city. A few hundred people paraded the chief avenues, crying ”down with war!”, while a separate crowd of equal size sang the national hymn. With these exceptions there was no cheering or enthusiasm, such as I would have expected from my preconceived idea of French excitability. Men spoke in undertones, with a quiet but subdued intensity of feeling rather than with frenzied enthusiasm.

With a devotion that was extraordinary and a pathetically brave submission to a possible fate, they seemed to be sternly resolved to die to the last man, if necessary, in defense of their n.o.ble nation.

Although I subsequently saw in the thrilling days of mobilization many thousands of soldiers pa.s.s through the railroad stations on their way to the front, I never heard the rumble of a drum or saw the waving of regimental colors.

No sacrifice seemed to be too great, whether it was asked of man, woman, or child. The spirit of materialism for the time being vanished. The newspapers shrunk to a single sheet and all commercial advertis.e.m.e.nts disappeared. Theaters, art galleries, museums, libraries, closed their doors. Upon some streets nearly every shop was closed, with the simple but eloquent placard ”Gone to join the colors.” The French people neither exulted, boasted, nor complained.

The only querulous element was a small minority of the large body of American tourists, so suddenly caught in a terrific storm of human pa.s.sions, who seemed to feel that this Red Sea of blood should part until they could walk dry-shod to the sh.o.r.e of safety.

In Germany similar scenes were enacted and a like spirit of courage and self-sacrifice was shown.

It is a reflection upon civilization that two nations, each so brave, heroic, and self-sacrificing, should, without their consent and by the miserable and iniquitous folly of scheming statesmen and diplomats, be plunged into a war, of which no man can see the end and which has already swept away the flower of their manhood.

One great lesson of this conflict may be that no aggressive war ought to be initiated unless the policy of that war is first submitted to the ma.s.ses of the people, upon whom the burdens in the last a.n.a.lysis fall and who must pay the dreadful penalty with their treasure and their lives.

If the policy of this war had been submitted by a referendum to the Austrian and German peoples with a full statement of the facts of the Servian controversy, would they not have rejected a form of arbitrament, which creates but does not settle questions, convinces no one, and only sows the seeds of greater hatred for future and richer harvests of death? If the be-ribboned diplomats and decorated generals of the General Staffs at Berlin and Vienna had been without power to precipitate this war, unless they themselves were willing to occupy the trenches on the firing line, this war might never have been.

Nearly five months have pa.s.sed since that summer day, when I pa.s.sed through smiling harvest fields from the mountains to the Seine. The trenches, in which innumerable brave men are writing with their blood the records of their statesmen's follies, are filled with snow. The blackest Christmas Eve within the memory of living man has come and gone, perhaps the blackest, since in the stillness of the night there fell upon the wondering ears of the shepherds the gracious refrain of ”Peace on earth, good will among men.” On that night devout German soldiers sang in their trenches in Flanders and along the Vistula the hymn of Christmas Eve, ”_Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht_.”

Was this unconscious mockery, an expression of invincible faith, or a reversion from habit to the gentler a.s.sociations of childhood? The spirit of Christmas was not wholly dead, for it is narrated that these brave men in English and German trenches on this saddest of Christmas Eves declared for a few hours of their own volition a Christmas truce.

”Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long, And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, So hallowed and so gracious is the time.”

There is not between the men in one trench and those in another, each seeking the speediest opportunity to kill the other, any personal quarrel. On occasion they even fraternize, only to resume the work of mutual extermination. They would not have quarreled, if the Berchtolds, the von Bethmann-Hollwegs, and the von Jagows had had sufficient loyalty to civilization to submit any possible grievance, which either had, to the judgment of Europe.

A spectacle more ghastly than this ”far-flung battle line” has never been witnessed since the world began, for these soldiers in gray or khaki are not savages but are beings of an advanced civilization.

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