Part 3 (1/2)
In the light of what has happened since it is not too much to say that if the British Fleet had taken up its cue only forty-eight hours later the north coast of France would have been bombarded, every town on our east coast from Aberdeen to Dover would have been destroyed, and Lord Roberts's prophecy of German invasion would have been fulfilled. But, thank G.o.d, the watchdogs of the British Navy were there to prevent that swift surprise. They are there (or elsewhere) still, silently riding the grey waters in all seasons and all weathers, waiting and watching and biding their time, and meanwhile (in spite of the occasional marauding of submarines, the offal of fighting craft) keeping the oceans free to all s.h.i.+ps except those of our enemies. And now, when we hear it said, as we sometimes do, that Great Britain holds only thirty-five miles of land on the battle-front in Flanders, let us lift our heads and answer, ”Yes, but she holds thirty-five thousand miles of sea.”
THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM
One of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of the flashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was that which revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record of greater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Such strength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddenness of surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany's spokesmen, including Herr Ballin, Prince von Bulow, and even Professor Harnack (all ”honourable men,” and the last of them a churchman), that down to a few days before the outbreak of hostilities ”not one human being” among them had ”dreamt of war,” it is the fact that within a few hours of the dispatch of Germany's ultimatum, to Belgium, before the ink of it could yet be dry and while the period of England's ultimatum in defence of Belgian integrity was still unexpired, the German legions were attacking Liege.
It was a cowardly and contemptible a.s.sault, but what a resistance it met with! A little peace-loving, industrial nation, infinitely small and almost utterly untrained, compared with the giant in arms a.s.sailing it, having no injury to avenge, no commerce to capture, no territory to annex, desiring only to be left alone in the exercise of its independence, stood up for six days against the invading horde, and hurled it back.
But war is a crude and clumsy instrument for the defence of the right, and after a flash of Belgium's unexampled bravery we were compelled to witness many flashes of her terrible sufferings. Liege fell before overwhelming numbers, then Namur, Ter-monde, Brussels, Louvain, and, last of all, Antwerp. What a spectacle of horror! The harvests of Belgium trodden into the earth, her beautiful cities and ancient villages given up to the flames, her historic monuments, that had been a.s.sociated with the learning and piety of centuries, razed to the ground; and, above everything in its pathos and pain, the mult.i.tudes of her people, old men, old women, young girls, and little children in wooden shoes, after the unnameable atrocities of a brutalized, infuriated, and licentious soldiery, flying before their faces as before a plague!
WHAT KING ALBERT DID FOR KINGs.h.i.+P
But there were flashes of almost divine light in the black darkness of Belgium's tragedy, and perhaps the brightest of them surrounded the person of her King. What King Albert did in those dark days of August 1914, to keep the soul of his nation alive in the midst of the immense sorrow of her utter overthrow his nation alone can fully know. But we who are not Belgians were thrilled again and again by the inspired tones of a great Spirit speaking to his subjects with that authority, dignity, and courage which alone among free nations are sufficient to unite the people to the Throne.
”A country which defends its liberties in the face of tyranny commands the respect of all. Such a country does not perish.” What King Albert did for Belgium in the stand he made against German aggression is partly known already, and will leave its record in history, but what he did at the same time for kings.h.i.+p throughout the world, as well as in his country, can only be realized by the few who are aware that almost at the moment of the outbreak of war the Belgian Courts (much to the unmerited humiliation of Belgium) were on the eve of such disclosures in relation to the life and death of the King's predecessor as would certainly have shaken the credit of monarchy for centuries.
n.o.body who ever met the late King Leopold could have had any doubt that he was a great man, if greatness can be separated from goodness and measured solely by energy of intellect and character. I see him now as I saw him in a garden of a house on the Riviera, the huge, unwieldy creature, with the eyes of an eagle, the voice of a bull and the flat tread of an elephant, and I recall the thought with which I came away: ”Thank G.o.d that man is only the King of a little country! If he had been the sovereign of a great State he would have become the scourge of the world.”
After King Leopold's death, accident brought me knowledge of astounding facts of his last days which were shortly to be exposed in Court--of the measure of his unnatural hatred of his children; of his schemes to deprive them of their rightful inheritance; of his relations with certain of his favourites and his death-bed marriage to one of them; of the circ.u.mstances attending the surgical operation which immediately preceded the extinction of his life; of the burning of endless doc.u.ments of doubtful credit during the night before the knife was used; of the intrigues of women of questionable character over the dying man's body to share the ill-got gold he had earned in the Congo, and finally of his end, not in his palace, but in a little hidden chalet, alone save for one scheming woman and one calculating priest. What a story it was, whether true or false, or (as is most probable) partly true and partly false, of shame, greed, l.u.s.t, and life-long duplicity! And all this dark tale was (one way or other) to be told in the cold light of open Court, to the general discredit of monarchy, by showing the world how contemptible may be some of the creatures who control the destinies of mankind.
But the war and King Albert's part in it saved Belgium from that unmerited obloquy. The modest, retiring, studious, almost shy but heroic young sovereign who, with his valiant little band, is fighting by the side of our own king's soldiers, and the soldiers of the Republic of France, has sustained the highest traditions of kings.h.i.+p. He may have lost his country at the hands of a great Power, drunk with pride, but he has won Immortality. He may have no more land left to him than his tent is pitched upon, but his spiritual empire is as wide as the world. He may be a king without a kingdom, but he still reigns over a kingdom of souls.
”WHY SHOULDN'T THEY, SINCE THEY WERE ENGLISHMEN?”
The next flash as of lightning that revealed to us the progress of the drama of the past 365 days came at the end of the first month of the war with the terrible story of Mons. That touched us yet more closely than the tragedy of Belgium, for it seemed at first to be our own tragedy.
Between the departure of an army and the first news of victory or defeat there is always a time of exhausting suspense. At what moment our first Expeditionary Force had left England no one quite knew, but after we learned that it had landed in France we waited with anxious hearts and listened with strained ears.
We heard the tramp of the gigantic German army, pouring through the streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its cuira.s.siers in burnished helmets that were s.h.i.+ning in the autumn sun.
The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible mult.i.tude! Regiment after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours, and even days--the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before had ”never so much as dreamt” of war!
At last we had news of our men. Against overwhelming odds they had fought like heroes--why shouldn't they, since they were Englishmen?--but had been compelled to fall back at length, and were now retreating rapidly, some reports said flying in confusion, broken and done. What?
Was it possible? Our army thrown back in disorder? Our first army, too, the flower of the fighting men of the world? It was too monstrous, too awful!
The news was cruelly, and even wickedly, exaggerated, but nevertheless it did us good. He knows the British character very imperfectly who does not see that the qualities in which it is unsurpa.s.sed among the races of mankind are those with which it meets adversity and confronts the darkest night. Within a few days of the report that our soldiers were falling back from Mons, the old cry ”Your King and country need you”
went through the land with a new thrill, and hundreds of thousands of free men leapt to the relief of the flag.
There has been nothing like it in the history of any nation. And it is hard to say which is the more moving manifestation of that moment in the great drama of the war--the spontaneous response of the poor who sprang forward to defend their country, though they had no more material property in it than the right to as much of its soil as would make their graves, or the splendid reply of the rich whose lands were an agelong possession, and often the foundation of their t.i.tles and honours.
”BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND... ENGLAND.”
What startling surprises! We of the lower, the middle, or the upper-middle cla.s.ses had come to believe that too many of the young men of our n.o.bility had grown effeminate in idleness and selfish pleasure indulged in on the borderland of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but, behold! they were fighting and dying with the bravest. We had thought too many of their young women (as thoughtless and capricious creatures of fas.h.i.+on) had sacrificed the finest bloom of modest and courageous womanhood in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they were hurrying to the battlefields as nurses, and there facing without flinching the scenes of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches, which make the bravest man's heart turn sick.