Part 5 (1/2)
THE GERMAN TOWER OF BABEL
For the credit of human nature we feel compelled, in sight of such enormities, to go back to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory that invisible powers of evil are using man for the execution of devilish designs. But if so, they have had no mercy on their creatures. We read that when, in fear of another flood, not trusting the promises of the Almighty, the children of Noah began to build a Tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues among them to bring their design to destruction. The excuses the Germans have offered for their barbarities suggest a confusion of intellect that can only lead to a like result. Has the world ever before listened to such whirlwind logic?
When a German submarine has sunk a British merchantman and left her crew to perish we have been told that she was performing a legitimate act of war. But when a British merchantman has mounted a gun in order to defend herself, she has been said to violate the law of nations. When British battles.h.i.+ps have blockaded German ports they have been trying to starve sixty-five millions of German people. But when German submarines have attempted to blockade British ports by drowning a thousand pa.s.sengers of many nations on a British liner, they have been executing a just revenge. When a neutral nation in Europe has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Germany, she has been doing an act of simple humanity. But when the United States has supplied foodstuffs and materials of war to Great Britain she has been breaking the laws of her neutrality. When a brutal German officer has shot a British civilian in a railway train he has committed a justifiable homicide and becomes a proper person for promotion. But when a Belgian civilian has killed a German soldier who violated his daughter before his eyes he has been guilty of a.s.sa.s.sination and quite properly shot at sight. When Germany has refused to honour her name to a ”sc.r.a.p of paper” she has been a holy martyr obeying a law of necessity. But when England has honoured hers she has been a holy humbug, whose hypocrisy deserved to be exposed.
Therefore G.o.d punish England! Above all, when G.o.d has crowned the arms of Germany with success on the battlefield, his most Christian Majesty, William the Pious, has always been with Him. Therefore G.o.d bless the Kaiser!
Surely confusion of intellect can go no further, and the German Tower of Babel must soon fall.
THE ALIEN PERIL
But out of this failure of logic on the part of ”deep-thinking Germany”
a danger came to us from nearer home than the battlefield. One of the most vivid flashes as of lightning whereby we have seen the drama of the past 365 days was that which, immediately after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, showed us the full depths of the ”alien peril.” Before the war we had had fifty thousand German-born persons living in our midst.
They had enjoyed the whole freedom of our commerce, the whole justice of our law courts, and the whole protection of our police. Many of them had married our British women, who had borne them British children. Most of them had learned to speak our language, and some of us had learned to understand their own. A few had become British subjects, and many had been honoured by our King. Our music, literature, and art had become theirs. Shakespeare had, in effect, become a German poet, and Wagner a British composer. The barriers between our races had seemed to break down, and even such of us as had small hope of a golden age of universal brotherhood had begun to believe that marriage, mutual interest, education, and environment were making us one with these strangers within our gates.
Then came a startling awakening. We realized beyond possibility of doubt that many thousands of our German aliens had been keeping up a dual responsibility, and that the chief of their two duties had been duty to their own country. We found beyond question that a settled system of espionage was at work in Great Britain, under the direction of the German authorities; that information which could only be of use in the event of invasion had for many years been gathered up by some of the people whom we had called our friends, and that day by day and hour by hour, as the war went on, secrets valuable to our enemy had been filtering through to Germany from influential places in this country.
What a shock to our sense of security, our pride, and even our self-respect! The horror of the discovery reached its highest point at the time of the sinking of the great liner, for then it was realized that there could be no limit to the expression of German cruelty. It is one of the effects of the spirit of cruelty to strike its victims with moral blindness. If it were possible that the German conscience could justify murder on the sea, why should it not justify it on land? Why should not our German governesses burn down the houses in which our children lay asleep? Why should not a German secretary attempt to a.s.sa.s.sinate one of our public ministers? War was war, and whatever was necessary was right.
”We are doing wrong, but it is necessary to do wrong, and necessity knows no law.”
HYMNS OF HATE
About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious, intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it ”sacred hate”) were composed, recited, and sung:
French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot, We love them not, we hate them not, We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone-- England!
England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the German race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish hate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred not unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the sufferer's own head. But as no sane father of a family would make free of his children's nursery the deranged relative who required the protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. G.o.d forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, pa.s.sionately opposing Germany's objects in this war and loathing Germany's methods.
We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of ”human empire.”
We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable hards.h.i.+ps from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In putting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no more than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can never be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a game with it.
THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIA
And then Russia! Distance from the scene of action, the great length of the line of operations and the vast area behind it have made it difficult or impossible for us to see the drama of the Russian campaign as we have seen that of France, Belgium, and our own Empire. But we have seen something, and it has been enough to give the lie to certain of the emphatic protestations with which Germany made war. We had heard it said by the German Chancellor that the fact that Russia was mobilizing in those last days of July 1914 made it impossible for Germany to ask Austria to extend the time-limit imposed upon Serbia--a time-limit which would have been indecent among civilized people if it had concerned nothing more serious than the destruction of a kennel of dogs suspected of rabies. But all the world knows now that Russian mobilization was a process inevitably so slow that the German armies had flung themselves upon Belgium twelve days before the Russian advance began.
Then we had heard it said by the German Churchmen that in taking the side of Russia we, British and French people, leaders among the enlightened races, were helping Muscovite barbarians to oppose the cause of civilization. But since Louvain, Termonde, and Rheims, not to speak of the unnameable iniquities of Liege, the world knows where the barbaric spirit of Europe had its central home--in Berlin, not in Petrograd; in the proud hearts of the German over-lords, not the meek ones of the Russian peasantry.