Part 9 (1/2)
It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous martyrdom that I read on the faces of the black-robed women in the street, too proud for tears; in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffering without protest an agony too deep for words. And when I encountered a file of soldiers in the muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against the earth walls to let me pa.s.s, carrying pails of soup to the comrades up front, or sitting motionless beside their burrows along the trench wall, their hands clasping their rifles,--dirty, grimed, and bearded,--I saw the same thing in their tired eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs in the cause of humanity, in _my_ cause, they were giving their lives for others, for _me_, not merely that the German might be driven from France, but that justice and honor and peace between men might prevail in the world!
Because the French people are inspired with the grandeur and the moral significance of their cause, they cannot understand a certain cynical att.i.tude of mind, well ill.u.s.trated by a former Senator of the United States, who has been high in the councils of the defunct Progressive Party. After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he remarked at a luncheon given him by some distinguished Frenchmen,--”Don't tell me about the justice of your cause or about the atrocities. I am not interested in that. What I want to know is, who is going to win!”
Who is going to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The barbarian mind cannot comprehend that the winning itself in a world cause is inextricably involved in the justice and worth of the cause.
For the same reason the French people have been puzzled by the sort of neutrality preached and practiced at Was.h.i.+ngton since the outbreak of the war. It is plain enough that neither France nor England desires to have the United States go to war with Germany. We can help them better as a huge supply house than as an ally, much as that might offend our vanity. The French appreciate also our President's desire to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-loving people and know the frightful costs of war. But they cannot understand a neutrality that avoids committing itself upon a moral issue such as was presented to the world in Belgium, in the sinking of the Lusitania. And in spite of the strict censors.h.i.+p, which for obvious reasons has muzzled the French press in its comment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occasionally flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson neutrality have appeared in print, as the following from Hanotaux: ”We should be wanting truly in frankness toward our great sister republic if we left her in the belief that this series of doc.u.ments, of a tone particularly friendly and affectionate, addressed to the German Government after such acts as theirs, had not occasioned in France a certain surprise.... Up to this time the Allies, who have not, G.o.d be praised, compromised or even menaced the life of any neutral, of any American, have not received the twentieth part of these friendly terms that the German Government has brought forth by its implacable acts.... What the world awaits from President Wilson is not merely a note, it is a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does the American Government, what does President Wilson think of the German doctrine,--'Necessity knows no law--the end justifies the means'?...
Every Government that acts or speaks at the present hour decides the nature of the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation of those eternal principles that are alone capable of directing humanity toward its sacred end.”
To our eternal shame as a nation our Government has evaded, up to this hour, p.r.o.nouncing the expected verdict, has preferred to quibble and define, in its vain attempt to hold the barbarian to a ”strict accountability”--whatever that may mean. France does not want our army or our navy, not even our money and our factories, except on business terms, but she has looked in vain for our affirmation as a nation of our belief in her great cause, which should be our own cause--the cause of all free peoples.
What a timid and verbal interpretation of neutrality has prevented our Government from affirming, the American people, let us be thankful, have done generously, abundantly. They have p.r.o.nounced a not uncertain verdict, and they have followed this moral verdict with countless acts of sympathy. The cause of France, the faith of the French, have roused the chivalry of the best Americans. Our youths are fighting in the trenches, our doctors and nurses are giving their services, our money is helping to stanch the wounds of France. As a people we too have affirmed our faith in the cause and are doing generously, spontaneously, as is our wont, what we can to win that cause for the world. The splendid hospital of the American Ambulance at Neuilly, equipped and operated on the generous American scale, is the real monument to the beliefs, the hopes, the faith of the American people.
In that modification of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which America is fast evolving, there is a subtle sympathy and likeness with the Latin, which this crisis has brought into evidence. We are less English than French in spirit, in our ideal of culture, of life.
VI
_The New France_
”This is a return for a new departure!” the Italian poet cried to his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision.
Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition for ”national aspirations” than of spiritual rebirth. But for the French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning.
No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated.
The acquisition of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and whatever hopes of indemnity or other material advantages the French may have permitted themselves to dream of must fade as the financial burden of all Europe mounts ever higher. Even the recovery of Alsace, according to those best able to judge,--in spite of German a.s.sertions,--would never have roused France to an aggressive war. Conquest, material growth, is not an active principle in the French character. How often I have heard this thought on French lips,--”We want to be let alone, to be free to live our lives as we think best, to develop our own inst.i.tutions,--that is what we are fighting for!” For forty years the nation has lived under the fear of invasion, a black cloud always more or less threatening on the frontier, and when the day of mobilization came every Frenchman knew instinctively what it meant--the long-expected fight for national existence. And the hope that sustains the people in their blackest moments is the hope of ending the thing forever. ”Our children and our children's children will not have to endure what we suffer. It will be a better world because of our sacrifice.”
The conquest that France will achieve is the conquest of herself, and the fruits of that she has already attained in a marvelous measure.
The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every Frenchman and is aboundingly obvious to the stranger visiting the country he once knew in her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent French people say to you, when you comment on the fact, ”But we were always really like this at bottom, serious and moral and courageous, only you did not see the real France.” Pardonable pride! The French themselves did not know it. As so often with individual souls, it took the fierce fire of prolonged trial to evoke the true national character, to bring once more to the surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to brighten qualities that had become dim in the petty occupations of prosperity.
After I had been in France a short time, nothing seemed falser to me than the pessimistic a.s.sertions of certain German-Americans and faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever the outcome of the world war France was ”done for,” ”exhausted,” ”ruined,” must sink to the level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can I believe the words of those saddened sympathizers and helpers in the ambulances and hospitals, that ”France is proudly bleeding to death.” Her wounds have been frightful, and through them is still gus.h.i.+ng much of the best blood of the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous, but not irreparable. Once a real peace achieved, the triumph of the cause, and I venture to predict that France will give an astonis.h.i.+ng spectacle of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For the New France is already a fact, not a faith.
Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult to make concrete as with all spiritual quality. It is not merely the solidarity of the nation, the fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacrifice, which are qualities more or less true of all the warring nations, especially of Germany. It is more than the perpetual Sunday calm along the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic frivolity with which Paris--a small part of Paris--entertained the world.
It is not simply that French people have become serious, silent, determined, with set wills to endure and to win--for that moral tenacity may relax after the crisis has pa.s.sed. It is all these and much more which I shall try to express that has revealed a new France.
To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase, though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true, her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink among the working population--what every visitor to England had known--became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing that has reached to the roots of the matter--probably because of the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England, the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For the army--and that includes practically all the younger and abler men--the danger has been minimized by the strict enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafes and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen.
Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,--an ancient custom that in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation against the _bouilleurs de crue_ is one inevitable outcome of the awakened sense of social responsibility in France.
Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate question, to which since the war the attention of all serious-minded people has been drawn. The French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an elaborate series of investigations into the relations between the birth-rate and the consumption of alcohol, which would seem to show that there is cause and effect between the excessive use of alcohol and a declining birth-rate. This will undoubtedly tend to create a popular sentiment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation, specifically to abolis.h.i.+ng the right to distill spirits. But what is of more real significance is the changing sentiment among the French in favor of larger families. Due, no doubt, directly to the necessities of a draining war, it is also an expression of those deeper experiences that trial has brought. The French have always prized family life, and French family life is, perhaps, the best type of the social bond that the world knows. Under the stress of widespread bereavement the French are realizing that the base of the family is not love between the s.e.xes, but the existence of children. They want children, not only to take the place of their men sacrificed, but as symbols of that greater love for the race that the war has evoked. Although the crudity of the ”war-bride” method of increasing the population is not evident in France, every working-girl wears the medallion of some ”hero” on her breast. Girls say frankly that they want children.
The Latin will never accept the German principle of indiscriminate breeding. As in every other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the individual, the personal; but an awakened patriotism and pride of race, a deepened sense of the real values of life will lead to a greater devotion to the family ideal.
To s.h.i.+ft to the political life of France, the history of the republic has been tempestuous in the past. There has been a succession of _coups d'etat_, plots, and scandals. One political _cause celebre_ has followed another--the Boulanger, the Dreyfus, and quite lately the Caillaux. The wide publicity which these political scandals have had is due partly to the Latin love of excitement, also to the Latin frankness about was.h.i.+ng dirty political linen in public. To the foreigner it has seemed strange that a republic could endure with such abysses of intrigue and personal corruption beneath its political life as have been shown in the Panama and Dreyfus scandals. The Germans probably have been misled by them into considering the French nation wholly despicable and degenerate. But France has not only endured in spite of these rotten spots, but her republicanism has grown stronger.
Americans experienced in their own sordid politics should understand how uncharacteristic of the real citizens.h.i.+p of a democracy politicians can be. The real France has never taken with entire seriousness the machinations of ”those rats in the Chamber.” These ”rats” were quite active during the first months of the war. Aside from the incompetence of the first war ministry, which kept the public in ignorance of the danger so completely that the enemy was at Soissons before Paris was aware that the French army was being driven back, and all the blunders of the raid into Alsace, France had its sinister political menace in Joseph Caillaux, who it has been rumored plotted a disgraceful peace with Germany before the battle of the Marne. Caillaux, when his creature, the grafting paymaster-general, was exposed, found it wise to go to South America. An able and on the whole a competent ministry was placed in power.