Part 7 (2/2)

It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting, and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the cool, dispa.s.sionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque, to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.

For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.

IV

_The German Lesson_

The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--”an eye for an eye,” not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.

The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.

Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde; the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.

As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate was reserved for the English, her most ign.o.ble slurs for the French.

Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.

This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.

The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable, even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies.

One of the astonis.h.i.+ng revelations of national psychology unfolded in the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.

For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their home and put a limit ”for an hundred years” to the menace of his barbarism.

That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German lesson faster than his allies.

What everybody knows by this time, and in America is repeating with sickening fluency, is that Germany is ”efficient,” not only militarily efficient, but socially and economically efficient--which these days amounts to the same thing. Germany is ”organized” both for peace and war more efficiently than any other nation in the world. The two terms that this war has driven into all men's consciousness are ”efficiency”

and ”organization.” We in America, p.r.o.ne to admire the sheen of tin, have bowed down in greater admiration than any other people to German ”efficiency.” For efficiency values in the operations of life are just the ones we are most capable of appreciating, although our government and general social organization remain as lamentably inefficient as, say, the English. But being a business people we are fitted to admire business qualities above all others. The German army, the German state are magnificently run businesses! To some of us, however, the term ”efficiency” has become nauseating because it has been a.s.sociated with so much else that we loathe from the bottom of our souls. If we cannot have an ”efficient” civilization without paying the price for it that Germany has paid,--the price of humanity, of beauty, the price of her soul,--let us return to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian village!

Germany under a highly autocratic system of government has created a social machine of unexampled and formidable efficiency. The German realized before his rivals that war had become, like all other human activities, a matter of business on a huge scale. And he had prepared not merely the special instruments of war, but also the tributary business on this scale of modern magnitude: he had converted his state into a powerful war machine. All this which is now commonplace has become more glaringly evident to us onlookers because of the lamentable failure of England and Russia especially to meet the requirements of the new business. So incapable do they seem of learning the German lesson that to some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed already to disaster. Certainly the English and the Russians have justified many of those bitter German taunts.

It has not been so with France. The French also were caught unprepared--to their honor--like their allies. Can a real democracy ever be prepared for war? France, suffering grievously from the first blow dealt by the enemy, looked destruction in the face before the stand at the Marne. The famous victory of the Marne, I believe, is still unknown in Germany--I have been so informed by an American who spent last winter in Germany. The battle of the Marne may not rank in history as quite the greatest battle in the history of the world.

The French may exaggerate its importance as a military event. The English have certainly exaggerated the part played by their little expeditionary force of less than a hundred thousand in ”saving France.”

That is for others to dispute. But it was without any question a great moral victory for the French of the utmost tonic value to the nation.

It saved France from despair, possibly from the annihilation that follows despair. And ever since the Marne victory, French confidence and _elan_ have been rapidly growing. During that b.l.o.o.d.y September week they realized that the barbarian was not invincible, the machine was not so perfect but that human will and human courage could resist it.

Moreover, the machine lacked that quality of spirit which the French felt in themselves. As the months have dragged around an entire year and more in the trenches, almost contempt has grown in the mind of the French soldier for the formidable German machine. Strong as it is, it yet lacks something--that something of human spirit without which permanent victories cannot be achieved. Its strength can be imitated. The spirit cannot be ”organized.”

French confidence is more than an official phrase, a mere bluff!

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