Part 2 (2/2)
It was the infernal impertinence of Germany's schemes for transatlantic plunder that roused the average American. It awoke in him a terrible, calm anger--a feeling that some one must be punished.
It was as though he broke off suddenly in what he was doing and commenced rolling up his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves. There was a grim, surprised determination about his quietness, which had not been seen in any other belligerent nation. France became consciously and tragically heroic when war commenced. England became unwontedly cheerful because life was moving on grander levels. In America there was no outward change. The old habit of feverish industry still persisted, but was intensified and applied in unselfish directions.
What has impressed me most in my tour of the American activities in France is the businesslike relentlessness of the preparations.
Everything is being done on a t.i.tanic scale and everything is being done to last. The ports, the railroads, the plants that are being constructed will still be standing a hundred years from now. There's no ”Home for Christmas” optimism about America's method of making war.
One would think she was expecting to be still fighting when all the present generation is dead. She is investing billions of dollars in what can only be regarded as permanent improvements. The handsomeness of her spirit is ill.u.s.trated by the fact that she has no understanding with the French for reimburs.e.m.e.nt.
In sharp contrast with this handsomeness of spirit is the iciness of her purpose as regards the Boche. I heard no hatred of the individual German--only the deep conviction that Prussianism must be crushed at all costs. The American does not speak of ”Poor old Fritz” as we do on our British Front. He's too logical to be sorry for his enemy.
His att.i.tude is too sternly impersonal for him to be moved by any emotions, whether of detestation or charity, as regards the Hun. All he knows is that a Frankenstein machinery has been set in motion for the destruction of the world; to counteract it he is creating another piece of machinery. He has set about his job in just the same spirit that he set about overcoming the difficulties of the Panama Ca.n.a.l.
He has been used to overcoming the obstinacies of Nature; the human obstinacies of his new task intrigue him. I believe that, just as in peace times big business was his romance and the wealth which he gained from it was often incidental, so in France the job as a job impels him, quite apart from its heroic object. After all, smas.h.i.+ng the Pan-Germanic Combine is only another form of trust-busting--trust-busting with aeroplanes and guns instead of with law and ledgers.
There is something almost terrifying to me about this quiet collectedness--this Pierpont Morgan touch of sphinxlike aloofness from either malice or mercy. Just as America once said, ”Business is business” and formed her world-combines, collaring monopolies and allowing the individual to survive only by virtue of belonging to the fittest, so now she is saying, ”War is war”--something to be accomplished with as little regard to landscapes as blasting a railroad across a continent.
For the first time in the history of this war Germany is ”up against”
a nation which is going to fight her in her own spirit, borrowing her own methods. This statement needs explaining; its truth was first brought to my attention at American General Headquarters. The French att.i.tude towards the war is utterly personal; it is bayonet to bayonet. It depends on the unflinching courage of every individual French man and woman. The English att.i.tude is that of the knight-errant, seeking high adventures and welcoming death in a n.o.ble cause. But the German att.i.tude disregards the individual and knows nothing of gallantry. It lacks utterly the spiritual elation which made the strength of the French at Verdun and of the English at Mons.
The German att.i.tude is that of a soulless organisation, invented for one purpose--profitable conquest. War for the Hun is not a final and dreaded atonement for the restoring of justice to the world; it is a business undertaking which, as he is fond of telling us, has never failed to yield him good interest on his capital. I have seen a good deal of the capital he has invested in the battlefields he has lost--men smashed to pulp, bruised by sh.e.l.ls out of resemblance to anything human, the breeding place of flies and pestilence, no longer the homes of loyalties and affections. I cannot conceive what percentage of returns can be said to compensate for the agony expended on such indecent Golgothas. However, the Hun has a.s.sured us that it pays him; he flatters himself that he is a first-cla.s.s business man.
But so does the American, and he knows the game from more points of view. For years he has patterned his schools and colleges on German educational methods. What applies to his civilian centres of learning applies to his military as well. German text-books gave the basis for all American military thought. American officers have been trained in German strategy just as thoroughly as if they had lived in Potsdam.
At the start of the war many of them were in the field with the German armies as observers. They are able to synchronise their thoughts with the thoughts of their German enemies and at the same time to take advantage of all that the Allies can teach them.
”War is a business,” the Germans have said. The Americans, with an ideal s.h.i.+ning in their eyes, have replied, ”Very well. We didn't want to fight you; but now that you have forced us, we will fight you on your own terms. We will make war on you as a business, for we are businessmen. We will crush you coldly, dispa.s.sionately, without rancour, without mercy till we have proved to you that war is not profitable business, but h.e.l.l.”
The American, as I have met him in France, has not changed one iota from the man that he was in New York or Chicago. He has transplanted himself untheatrically to the scenes of battlefields and set himself undisturbedly to the task of dying. There is an amazing normality about him. You find him in towns, ancient with chateaux and wonderful with age; he is absolutely himself, keenly efficient and irreverently modern. Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border, from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you see the lean figure and the slouch hat of the U.S.A. soldier. He is invariably well-conducted, almost always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself. The excessive gravity of the American in khaki has astonished the men of the other armies who feel that, life being uncertain, it is well to make as genial a use of it as possible while it lasts. The soldier from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone, listening--waiting for the call to come. He doesn't sink into the landscape the way other troops have done. His impatience picks him out--the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose. I have seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself. Every man and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is happening inside him, ”Let them take off my khaki and send me back to America, or else hurry me into the trenches. I came here to get started on this job; the waiting makes me tired.”
”Let me get into the trenches,” that was the cry of the American soldier that I heard on every hand. Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will acquit himself.
I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American that I ever met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic end. The American who acc.u.mulates a fortune to himself, whether it be through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines or establis.h.i.+ng a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating, manipulating, evolving--the exhilaration and adventure of swaying power. And so there came a day when I caught my American soldier dreaming and off his guard.
All day I had been motoring through high uplands. It was a part of France with which I was totally unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, m.u.f.fled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic.
Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps, and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed of our pa.s.sage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself in the morning, taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre, now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters working on death's ma.n.u.script. After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging--all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.
My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again nodded. The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush of wind lay heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here and not in the trenches. When I was in the line I had often made up life's deficiencies by imagining, imagining.... Perhaps I was really in the line now. I wouldn't wake up to find out. That would come presently--it always had.
We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily. No, we weren't stopping--only going through a village. What a quaint grey village it was--worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. I was on the point of drowsing off again when I caught sight of a word written on a sign-board, _Domremy_. My brain cleared. I sat up with a jerk. It was magic that I should find myself here without warning--at Domremy, the Bethlehem of warrior-woman's mercy. I had dreamed from boyhood of this place as a legend--a memory of white chivalry to be found on no map, a record of beauty as utterly submerged as the lost land of Lyonesse.
Hauntingly the words came back, ”Who is this that cometh from Domremy?
Who is she in b.l.o.o.d.y coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that cometh with blackened flesh from walking in the furnaces of Rouen?
This is she, the shepherd girl....” All about me on the little hills were the woodlands through which she must have led her sheep and wandered with her heavenly visions.
We had come to a bend in the village street. Where the road took a turn stood an aged church; nestling beside it in a little garden was a grey, semi-fortified mediaeval dwelling. The garden was surrounded by high spiked railings, planted on a low stone wall. Sitting on the wall beside the entrance was an American soldier. He had a small French child on either knee--one arm about each of them; thus embarra.s.sed he was doing his patient best to roll a Bull Durham cigarette. The children were vividly interested; they laughed up into the soldier's face. One of them was a boy, the other a girl. The long golden curls of the girl brushed against the soldier's cheek. The three heads bent together, almost touching. The scene was timelessly human, despite the modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc might have been that little girl.
I stopped the driver, got out and approached the group. The soldier jumped to attention and saluted. In answer to my question, he said, ”Yes, this is where she lived. That's her house--that grey cottage with scarcely any windows. Bastien le Page could never have seen it; it isn't a bit like his picture in the Metropolitan Gallery.”
He spoke in a curiously intimate way as if he had known Joan of Arc and had spoken with her there--as if she had only just departed.
It was odd to reflect that America had still lain hidden behind the Atlantic when Joan walked the world.
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