Books: Now It Can Be Told

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I hoped too much. There was no such peace.

PART EIGHT

For What Men Died

I

In this book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as
I observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their
daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor
selected gruesome morsels and joined them together to make a jig-saw
puzzle for ghoulish delight. Unlike Henri Barbusse, who, in his
dreadful book Le Feu, gave the unrelieved blackness of this human
drama, I have here and in other books shown the light as well as the
shade in which our men lived, the gaiety as well as the fear they had,
the exultation as well as the agony of battle, the spiritual ardor of
boys as well as the brutality of the task that was theirs. I have
tried to set down as many aspects of the war's psychology as I could
find in my remembrance of these years, without exaggeration or false
emphasis, so that out of their confusion, even out of their
contradiction, the real truth of the adventure might be seen as it
touched the souls of men.

Yet when one strives to sum up the evidence and reach definite
conclusions about the motives which led men of the warring nations to
kill one another year after year in those fields of slaughter, the
ideals for which so many millions of men laid down their lives, and
the effect of those years of carnage upon the philosophy of this
present world of men, there is no clear line of thought or conviction.

It is difficult at least to forecast the changes that will be produced
by this experience in the social structure of civilized peoples, and
in their relations to one another though it is certain, even now, that
out of the passion of the war a new era in the world's history is
being born. The ideas of vast masses of people have been
revolutionized by the thoughts that were stirred up in them during
those years of intense suffering. No system of government designed by
men afraid of the new ideas will have power to kill them, though they
may throttle them for a time. For good or ill, I know not which, the
ideas germinated in trenches and dugouts, in towns under shell--fire
or bomb-fire, in hearts stricken by personal tragedy or world-agony,
will prevail over the old order which dominated the nations of Europe,
and the old philosophy of political and social governance will be
challenged and perhaps overthrown. If the new ideas are thwarted by
reactionary rulers endeavoring to jerk the world back to its old-
fashioned discipline under their authority, there will be anarchy
reaching to the heights of terror in more countries than those where
anarchy now prevails. If by fear or by wisdom the new ideas are
allowed to gain their ground gradually, a revolution will be
accomplished without anarchy. But in any case, for good or ill, a
revolution will happen. It has happened in the sense that already
there is no resemblance between this Europe after-the-war and that
Europe-before-the-war, in the mental attitude of the masses toward the
problems of life. In every country there are individuals, men and
women, who are going about as though what had happened had made no
difference, and as though, after a period of restlessness, the people
will "settle down" to the old style of things. They are merely sleep-
walkers. There are others who see clearly enough that they cannot
govern or dupe the people with old spell-words, and they are
struggling desperately to think out new words which may help them to
regain their power over simple minds. The old gangs are organizing a
new system of defense, building a new kind of Hindenburg line behind
which they are dumping their political ammunition. But their
Hindenburg line is not impregnable. The angry murmur of the mob--
highly organized, disciplined, passionate, trained to fight, is
already approaching the outer bastions.

In Russia the mob is in possession, wiping the blood out of their eyes
after the nightmare of anarchy, encompassed by forces of the old
regime, and not knowing yet whether its victory is won or how to shape
the new order that must follow chaos.

In Germany there is only the psychology of stunned people, broken for
a time in body and spirit, after stupendous efforts and bloody losses
which led to ruin and the complete destruction of their old pride,
philosophy, and power. The revolution that has happened there is
strange and rather pitiful. It was not caused by the will--power of
the people, but by a cessation of will-power. They did not overthrow
their ruling dynasty, their tyrants. The tyrants fled, and the people
were not angry, nor sorry, nor fierce, nor glad. They were stupefied.
Members of the old order joined hands with those of the people's
parties, out to evolve a republic with new ideals based upon the
people's will and inspired by the people's passion. The Germans, after
the armistice and after the peace, had no passion, as they had no
will. They were in a state of coma. The "knock-out blow" had happened
to them, and they were incapable of action. They just ceased from
action. They had been betrayed to this ruin by their military and
political rulers, but they had not vitality enough to demand vengeance
on those men. The extent of their ruin was so great that it
annihilated anger, political passion, pride, all emotion except that
of despair. How could they save something out of the remnants of the
power that had been theirs? How could they keep alive, feed their
women and children, pay their monstrous debts? They had lost their
faith as well as their war. Nothing that they had believed was true.
They had believed in their invincible armies--and the armies had bled
to death and broken. They had believed in the supreme military genius
of their war lords, and the war lords, blunderers as well as
criminals, had led them to the abyss and dropped them over. They had
believed in the divine mission of the German people as a civilizing
force, and now they were despised by all other peoples as a brutal and
barbarous race, in spite of German music, German folk-songs, German
art, German sentiment. They had been abandoned by God, by the
protecting hand of the altes gutes Deutsches Gottes to whom many had
prayed for comfort and help in those years of war, in Protestant
churches and Catholic churches, with deep piety and childlike faith.
What sins had they done that they should be abandoned by God? The
invasion of Belgium? That, they argued, was a tragic necessity.
Atrocities? Those were (they believed) the inventions of their
enemies. There had been stern things done, terrible things, but
according to the laws of war. Francs-tireurs had been shot. That was
war. Hostages had been shot. It was to save German lives from
slaughter by civilians. Individual brutalities, yes. There were brutes
in all armies. The U-boat war? It was (said the German patriot) to
break a blockade that was starving millions of German children to slow
death, condemning millions to consumption, rickets, all manner of
disease. Nurse Cavell? She pleaded guilty to a crime that was
punishable, as she knew, by death. She was a brave woman who took her
risk open-eyed, and was judged according to the justice of war, which
is very cruel. Poison-gas? Why not, said German soldiers, when to be
gassed was less terrible than to be blown to bits by high explosives?
They had been the first to use that new method of destruction, as the
English were the first to use tanks, terrible also in their
destructiveness. Germany was guilty of this war, had provoked it
against peaceful peoples? No! A thousand times no. They had been, said
the troubled soul of Germany, encompassed with enemies. They had
plotted to close her in. Russia was a huge menace. France had entered
into alliance with Russia, and was waiting her chance to grab at
Alsace-Lorraine. Italy was ready for betrayal. England hated the power
of Germany and was in secret alliance with France and Russia. Germany
had struck to save herself. "It was a war of self-defense, to save the
Fatherland."

The German people still clung desperately to those ideas after the
armistice, as I found in Cologne and other towns, and as friends of
mine who had visited Berlin told me after peace was signed. The
Germans refused to believe in accusations of atrocity. They knew that
some of these stories had been faked by hostile propaganda, and,
knowing that, as we know, they thought all were false. They said
"Lies-lies-lies!"--and made counter--charges against the Russians and
Poles. They could not bring themselves to believe that their sons and
brothers had been more brutal than the laws of war allow, and what
brutality they had done was imposed upon them by ruthless discipline.
But they deplored the war, and the common people, ex-soldiers and
civilians, cursed the rich and governing classes who had made profit
out of it, and had continued it when they might have made peace with
honor. That was their accusation against their leaders--that and the
ruthless, bloody way in which their men had been hurled into the
furnace on a gambler's chance of victory, while they were duped by
faked promises of victory.

When not put upon their defense by accusations against the whole
Fatherland, the German people, as far as I could tell by talking with
a few of them, and by those letters which fell into our hands,
revolted in spirit against the monstrous futility and idiocy of the
war, and were convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the
greed and pride of the governing classes of all nations, who had used
men's bodies as counters in a devil's game. That view was expressed in
the signboards put above the parapet, "We're all fools: let's all go
home"; and in that letter by the woman who wrote:

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones,
the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very
eyes . . . All soldiers--friend and foe--ought to throw down their
weapons and go on strike, so that this war, which enslaves the people
more than ever, may cease."

It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may cause a more
passionate revolution in Germany when the people awaken from their
stupor. It was that view which led to the Russian Revolution and to
Bolshevism. It is the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of
British working-men and making them threaten to strike against any
adventure of war, like that in Russia, which seems to them (unless
proved otherwise) on behalf of the "gilded ones" and for the
enslavement of the peoples.

Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate convictions of masses
of men in Europe. That is one key to the heart of the revolutionary
movement which is surging beneath the surface of our European state.
It is a the belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as the
direct guilt of the German war lords was the guilt of the whole
political society of Europe, whose secret diplomacy (unrevealed to the
peoples) was based upon hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for
imperial power and the world's markets, as common folk play dominoes
for penny points, and risking the lives of common folk in a gamble for
enormous stakes of territory, imperial prestige, the personal vanity
of politicians, the vast private gain of trusts and profiteers. To
keep the living counters quiet, to make them jump into the pool of
their own free will at the word "Go," the statesmen, diplomats,
trusts, and profiteers debauch the name of patriotism, raise the
watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of the mob easily,
skillfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by inflaming the brute-
passion in them, and by concocting a terrible mixture of false
idealism and self-interest, so that simple minds quick to respond to
sentiment, as well as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally
shoulder to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the spell of
that potion. Some go with a noble sense of sacrifice, some with blood-
lust in their hearts, most with the herd-instinct following the lead,
little knowing that they are but the pawns of a game which is being
played behind closed doors by the great gamblers in the courts and
Foreign Offices, and committee-rooms, and counting-houses, of the
political casinos in Europe.

I have heard the expression of this view from soldiers during the war
and since the war, at street-corners, in tram-cars, and in
conversations with railway men, mechanics, policemen, and others who
were soldiers a year ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the
meaning of the war. I am certain that millions of men are thinking
these things, because I found the track of those common thoughts,
crude, simple, dangerous, among Canadian soldiers crossing the
Atlantic, in Canadian towns, and in the United States, as I had begun
to see the trail of them far back in the early days of the war when I
moved among French soldiers, Belgian soldiers, and our own men.

My own belief is not so simple as that. I do not divorce all peoples
from their governments as victims of a subtle tyranny devised by
statesmen and diplomats of diabolical cunning, and by financial
magnates ready to exploit human life for greater gains. I see the evil
which led to the crime of the war and to the crimes of the peace with
deep-spread roots to the very foundation of human society. The fear of
statesmen, upon which all international relations were based, was in
the hearts of peoples. France was afraid of Germany and screwed up her
military service, her war preparations, to the limit of national
endurance, the majority of the people of France accepting the burden
as inevitable and right. Because of her fear of Germany France made
her alliance with Russian Czardom, her entente cordiale with Imperial
England, and the French people poured their money into Russian loans
as a life insurance against the German menace. French statesmen knew
that their diplomacy was supported by the majority of the people by
their ignorance as well as by their knowledge.

So it was in Germany. The spell-words of the German war lords
expressed the popular sentiment of the German people, which was
largely influenced by the fear of Russia in alliance with France, by
fear and envy of the British Empire and England's sea-power, and by
the faith that Germany must break through that hostile combination at
all costs in order to fulfil the high destiny which was marked out for
her, as she thought, by the genius and industry of her people. The
greed of the "bloated aristocrats" was only on a bigger scale than the
greed of the small shopkeepers. The desire to capture new markets
belonged not only to statesmen, but to commercial travelers. The
German peasant believed as much in the might of the German armies as
Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The brutality of German generals was not
worse than that of the Unteroffizier or the foreman of works.

In England there was no traditional hatred of Germany, but for some
years distrust and suspicions, which had been vented in the
newspapers, with taunts and challenges, stinging the pride of Germans
and playing into the hands of the Junker caste.

Our war psychology was different from that of our allies because of
our island position and our faith in seapower which had made us immune
from the fear of invasion. It took some time to awaken the people to a
sense of real peril and of personal menace to their hearths and homes.
To the very end masses of English folk believed that we were fighting
for the rescue of other peoples--Belgian, French, Serbian, Rumanian--
and not for the continuance of our imperial power.

The official propaganda, the words and actions of British statesmen,
did actually express the conscious and subconscious psychology of the
multitude. The call to the old watchwords of national pride and
imperial might thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in
sea--battles and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of "the little
nations" struck old chords of chivalry and sentiment--though with a
strange lack of logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government
was unheeded. Base passions as well as noble instincts were stirred
easily. Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The
more revolting they were the quicker they were swallowed. The foul
absurdity of the "corpse-factory" was not rejected any more than the
tale of the "crucified Canadian" (disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the
cutting off of children's hands and women's breasts, for which I could
find no evidence from the only British ambulances working in the
districts where such horrors were reported. Spy-mania flourished in
mean streets, German music was banned in English drawing-rooms.
Preachers and professors denied any quality of virtue or genius to
German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical
weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack of
patriotism. Truth was delivered bound to passion. Hatred at home,
inspired largely by feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached
such heights that when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal
to say much against their enemy, their straightforward assertions that
Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that he fought bravely, died
gamely, and in the prison-camps was well-mannered, decent,
industrious, good-natured, were heard with shocked silence by mothers
and sisters who could only excuse this absence of hate on the score of
war-weariness.

II

The people of all countries were deeply involved in the general blood-
guiltiness of Europe. They made no passionate appeal in the name of
Christ or in the name of humanity for the cessation of the slaughter
of boys and the suicide of nations and for a reconciliation of peoples
upon terms of some more reasonable argument than that of high
explosives. Peace proposals from the Pope, from Germany, from Austria,
were rejected with fierce denunciation, most passionate scorn, as
"peace plots" and "peace traps," not without the terrible logic of the
vicious circle, because, indeed, there was no sincerity of
renunciation in some of those offers of peace, and the powers hostile
to us were simply trying our strength and our weakness in order to
make their own kind of peace which should be that of conquest. The
gamblers, playing the game of "poker," with crowns and armies as their
stakes, were upheld generally by the peoples, who would not abate one
point of pride, one fraction of hate, one claim of vengeance, though
all Europe should fall in ruin and the last legions of boys be
massacred. There was no call from people to people across the
frontiers of hostility: "Let us end this homicidal mania! Let us get
back to sanity and save our younger sons. Let us hand over to justice
those who will continue the slaughter of our youth!" There was no
forgiveness, no generous instinct, no large-hearted common sense in
any combatant nation of Europe. Like wolves they had their teeth in
one another's throats, and would not let go, though all bloody and
exhausted, until one should fall at the last gasp, to be mangled by
the others. Yet in each nation, even in Germany, there were men and
women who saw the folly of the war and the crime of it, and desired to
end it by some act of renunciation and repentance, and by some
uplifting of the people's spirit to vault the frontiers of hatred and
the barbed wire which hedged in patriotism. Some of them were put in
prison. Most of them saw the impossibility of counteracting the forces
of insanity which had made the world mad, and kept silent, hiding
their thoughts and brooding over them. The leaders of the nations
continued to use mob-passion as their argument and justification,
excited it anew when its fires burned low, focused it upon definite
objectives, and gave it a sense of righteousness by the high-sounding
watchwords of liberty, justice, honor, and retribution. Each side
proclaimed Christ as its captain and invoked the blessing and aid of
the God of Christendom, though Germans were allied with Turks and
France was full of black and yellow men. The German people did not try
to avert their ruin by denouncing the criminal acts of their war lords
nor by deploring the cruelties they had committed. The Allies did not
help them to do so, because of their lust for bloody vengeance and
their desire for the spoils of victory. The peoples shared the blame
of their rulers because they were not nobler than their rulers. They
cannot now plead ignorance or betrayal by false ideals which duped
them, because character does not depend on knowledge, and it was the
character of European peoples which failed in the crisis of the
world's fate, so that they followed the call-back of the beast in the
jungle rather than the voice of the Crucified One whom they pretended
to adore.

III

The character of European peoples failed in common sense and in
Christian charity. It did not fail in courage to endure great agonies,
to suffer death largely, to be obedient to the old tradition of
patriotism and to the stoic spirit of old fighting races.

In courage I do not think there was much difference between the chief
combatants. The Germans, as a race, were wonderfully brave until their
spirit was broken by the sure knowledge of defeat and by lack of food.
Many times through all those years they marched shoulder to shoulder,
obedient to discipline, to certain death, as I saw them on the Somme,
like martyrs. They marched for their Fatherland, inspired by the
spirit of the German race, as it had entered their souls by the memory
of old German songs, old heroic ballads, their German home life, their
German women, their love of little old towns on hillsides or in
valleys, by all the meaning to them of that word Germany, which is
like the name of England to us--who is fool enough to think
otherwise?--and fought often, a thousand times, to the death, as I saw
their bodies heaped in the fields of the Somme and round their pill-
boxes in Flanders and in the last phase of the war behind the
Hindenburg line round their broken batteries on the way of Mons and Le
Cateau. The German people endured years of semi-starvation and a drain
of blood greater than any other fighting people--two million dead--
before they lost all vitality, hope, and pride and made their abject
surrender. At the beginning they were out for conquest, inspired by
arrogance and pride. Before the end they fought desperately to defend
the Fatherland from the doom which cast its black shadow on them as it
drew near. They were brave, those Germans, whatever the brutality of
individual men and the cold-blooded cruelty of their commanders.

The courage of France is to me like an old heroic song, stirring the
heart. It was medieval in its complete adherence to the faith of valor
and its spirit of sacrifice for La Patrie. If patriotism were enough
as the gospel of life--Nurse Cavell did not think so--France as a
nation was perfect in that faith. Her people had no doubt as to their
duty. It was to defend their sacred soil from the enemy which had
invaded it. It was to hurl the brutes back from the fair fields they
had ravaged and despoiled. It was to liberate their brothers and
sisters from the outrageous tyranny of the German yoke in the captured
country. It was to seek vengeance for bloody, foul, and abominable
deeds.

In the first days of the war France was struck by heavy blows which
sent her armies reeling back in retreat, but before the first battle
of the Marne, when her peril was greatest, when Paris seemed doomed,
the spirit of the French soldiers rose to a supreme act of faith--
which was fulfilled when Foch attacked in the center, when Manoury
struck on the enemy's flank and hundreds of thousands of young
Frenchmen hurled themselves, reckless of life, upon the monster which
faltered and then fled behind the shelter of the Aisne. With bloodshot
eyes and parched throats and swollen tongues, blind with sweat and
blood, mad with the heat and fury of attack, the French soldiers
fought through that first battle of the Marne and saved France from
defeat and despair.

After that, year after year, they flung themselves against the German
defense and died in heaps, or held their lines, as at Verdun, against
colossal onslaught, until the dead lay in masses. But the living said,
"They shall not pass!" and kept their word.

The people of France--above all, the women of France--behind the
lines, were the equals of the fighting-men in valor. They fought with
despair, through many black months, and did not yield. They did the
work of their men in the fields, and knew that many of them--the sons
or brothers or lovers or husbands--would never return for the harvest-
time, but did not cry to have them back until the enemy should be
thrust out of France. Behind the German line, under German rule, the
French people, prisoners in their own land, suffered most in spirit,
but were proud and patient in endurance.

"Why don't your people give in?" asked a German officer of a woman in
Nesle. "France is bleeding to death."