Part 2

Germany and her Kaiser believed that she had a mission and the right to more room. Wherever there was an opportunity she appeared with his aggressive paternalism to get ground for Germanic seed. The experience of her opportunistic fishing in the troubled waters of Manila Bay in ’98 is still fresh in the minds of many Americans. She went into China during the Boxer rebellion in the same spirit. She had her foot thrust into every doorway ajar and was pushing with all her organised imperial might, which kept growing.

I never think of modern Germany without calling to mind two Germans who seem to me to illustrate German strength--and weakness. In a compartment on a train from Berlin to Holland some years ago, an Englishman was saying that Germany was a balloon which would burst. He called the Kaiser a vain madman and set his free English tongue on his dislike of Prussian boorishness, aggressiveness, and _verbotens_. I told him that I should never choose to live in Prussia; I preferred England or France; but I thought that England was closing her eyes to Germany’s development. The Kaiser seemed to me a very clever man, his people on the whole loyal to him; while it was wonderful how so great a population had been organised and cared for. We might learn the value of co-ordination from Germany, without adopting militarism or other characteristics which we disliked.

The Englishman thought that I was pro-German. For in Europe one must always be pro or anti something; Francophile or Francophobe, Germanophile or Germanophobe. I noticed the train-guard listening at intervals to our discussion. Perhaps he knew English. Many German train-guards do. Few English or French train-guards know any but their own language. This also is suggestive, if you care to take it that way.

When I left the train, the guard, instead of a porter, took my bag to the custom house. Probably he was of a mind to add to his income, I thought. After I was through the customs he put my bag in a compartment of the Dutch train. When I offered him a tip, the manner of his refusal made me feel rather mean. He saluted and clicked his heels together and said: “Thank you, sir, for what you said about my Emperor!” and with a military step marched back to the German train. How he had boiled inwardly as he listened to the Englishman and held his temper, thinking that “the day” was coming!

The second German was first mate of a little German steamer on the Central American coast. The mark of German thoroughness was on him. He spoke English and Spanish well; he was highly efficient, so far as I could tell. After passing through the Straits of Magellan, the steamer went as far as Vancouver in British Columbia. Its traffic was the small kind which the English did not find worth while, but which tireless German capability in details and cheap labour made profitable. The steamer stopped at every small West, South, and Central American and Mexican port to take on and leave cargo. At any hour of the night anchor was dropped, perhaps in a heavy ground-swell and almost invariably in intense tropical heat. Sometimes a German coffee planter came on board and had a glass of beer with the captain and the mate. For nearly all the rich Guatemala coffee estates had passed into German hands. The Guatemaltecan dictator taxed the native owners bankrupt and the Germans, in collusion with him, bought in the estates.

Life for that mate was a battle with filthy _cargadores_ in stifling heat; he snatched his sleep when he might between ports. The steamer was in Hamburg to dock and refit once a year. Then he saw his wife and children for at most a month; sometimes for only a week. In any essay-contest on “Is Life Worth Living?” it seemed to me he ought to win the prize for the negative side.

“Since I have been on this run I have seen California ranches,” he said. “If I had come out to California fifteen years ago, when I thought of emigrating to America, by working half as hard as I have worked--and that would be harder than most California ranchers work--I could have had my own plot of ground and my own house and lived at home with my family. But when I spoke of emigrating I was warned against it. Maybe you don’t know that the local officials have orders to dissuade intending emigrants from their purpose. They told me that the United States and Canada were lands of graft, injustice, and disorder, where native Americans formed a caste which kept all immigrants at manual labour. I should be robbed and forced to work for the trusts for a pittance. Instead of an imperial government to protect me, I should be exploited by millionaire kings. Wasn’t I a German? Wasn’t I loyal to my Kaiser? Would I forfeit my nationality? This appeal decided me. And I am too old, now, to start at ranching.”

Had I been one of those wicked millionaire kings of the United States or Canada, I should have set this man up on a ranch, believing that he was not yet too old to make good in a new land if he were given a fair start, knowing that he would pay back the capital with interest; and I have known wicked millionaire kings to be guilty of such lapses as this from their tyranny.

The imperial German system wanted his earning power and energy back of the sea wedge. German steamship companies promoted emigration from Hungary, Russia, and Italy for the fares it brought. The German government, however, took care that the steamship companies carried no German emigrants; and it ruled that no Russian peasant or Polish Jew bound for Hamburg or Bremen on the way to America might stop over _en route_ across Germany, lest he stay. Russians and Poles and Jews were not desirable material for the German sea wedge. Let them go into the _pot-au-feu_ of the capacious and indiscriminating American melting-pot, which may yet make something of them that will surprise the chauvinists.

Breed more Germans; keep them fed, clothed, employed, organised industrially, educated! Don’t relieve the economic pressure by emigration or by lowering the birth rate! Keep up the military spirit! Develop the money spirit! Instilled with loyalty to the Kaiser, with a sense of superiority in industry and training as well as of racial superiority, the German felt himself the victim of a world injustice. He saw complacent England living on the fat of empire. He saw America with its rich resources and lack of civil organisation and discipline and its waste individual effort.

If the United States only would not play the dog in the manger! If Germany could apply the magic of her system to Mexico or Central America, what tribute that would bring home to Berlin! Consider organised German industrialism working India for all that it was worth! Or Zanzibar! Or the Straits Settlements! Germany had the restless ambition, with an undercurrent of resentment, of the young manager with modern methods who wants to supplant the old manager and his old-fogy methods--an old manager set in his way, but a very kindly, sound old manager, to whose ways the world had grown accustomed.

Taxes for armament, and particularly for that new navy, lay heavily on Germany, too. Driving the wedge by peaceful means became increasingly difficult. It needed the blow of war to split open the way to rich fields. The war spirit lost nothing by Germany’s sense of isolation. For this isolation England was to blame; she and the alliances which King Edward had formed around her. England was to blame for everything. Germany could not be to blame for anything. The national rival is always the scapegoat of patriotism. So Germany prepared to strike, as one prepares to build and open a store or to put on a play.

Where forty years ago the Englishman, with his aggressive ways, was the unpopular traveller in Europe, the German had become most disliked. In Italy, with his expanding industry, he ran many hotels. His success and his personal manners combined to make the sensitive Italian loathe him. Thus, he sowed the seed of popular feeling which broke in a wave that forced Italy into the war.

Germany thought of England as too selfish and cunning in her complacency really to come to the aid of France and Russia. She would stay out; and had she stayed out, Germany would have crushed Russia and then turned on France. But Germany did not know England any better than England knew Germany. The jaundiced mists of chauvinism kept even high leaders from seeing their adversaries clearly.

Austria, too, was feeling economic pressure. Her people, especially the Hungarians, looked toward the southeast for expansion. Her shrewd statesmanship, its instincts inherited from the Hapsburg dynasty, playing race hatred against race hatred and bound, so it looked, to national disruption, welcomed any opportunity which would set the mind of the whole people thinking of some exterior object rather than of internal differences. She annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina with its Slav population at a moment when Russia was not prepared to aid her kindred. Bosnia and Herzegovina are better off for the annexation; they have enjoyed rapid material progress as the result.

Bounded by the Danube and the Turk were the Balkan countries, which ought to be the garden spot of civilisation. Here, poverty aggravated racial hate and racial hate aggravated poverty in a vicious circle. Serbia, longest free of the Turk, adjoining Austria, had no outlet except through other lands. She was a commercial slave of Austria, dependent on Austrian tariffs and Austrian railroads, with Hungarian business men holding the purse-strings of trade. In her swineherds and tillers the desire for some of the good things of modern life was developing. Strangling, with Austria’s hands at her throat, with many clever, resourceful agitators urging her on, she fought in the only way that she knew. To Austria she was the uncouth swineherd who assassinated the Austrian Crown Prince and his consort. This deed was the exterior object which united Austria in a passionate rage. For Austria, more than any other country, could welcome war for the old reason. It let out the emotion of the nation against an enemy instead of against its own rulers.

A deeper-seated cause was the racial hatred of Slav and Teuton. For rulers do not make war these days; they try to keep their thrones secure on the crest of public opinion. They appear to rule and to give, and are ruled and yield. Whoever had travelled in Russia of late years had been conscious of a rising ground-swell in the great mass of Russian feeling. Your simple _moujik_ had an idea that his Czar had yielded to the Austrians and the Germans. In short, the German had tweaked the nose of the Slav race with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Czar had borne the insult because his people were willing.

Slow to think, and not thinking overmuch, the Russian peasant began to see red whenever he thought of a German. As a whole public thinks, eventually its rulers must think. The upper class of Russia was inclined to fan the flames of the people’s passions. If the people were venting their emotions against the Teuton they would not be developing further revolutions against the old order of things. The military class was prompt to make use of the national tendency to strengthen military resources. By action and reaction across the frontiers the strain was increasing. Germany saw Russia with double her own population and was sensitive to the dangers behind Russia’s ambitions. Russia stood for everything abhorrent to German order and racial feeling.

And what of France? There is little to say of her when we assign responsibility. Here was a nation with its population practically stationary; a nation with a closed-in culture; a democracy with its racial and national integrity assured by its own peculiar genius. Visions of conquest had passed from the French mind. Her “place in the sun” was her own sun of France. Her trade was that due to skill in handicraft rather than to any tactics of aggression. At every Hague conference France was for all measures that would assure peace; Germany against every one that might interfere with her military ambition; England against any that might limit her action in defending the seas.

The desire for “revenge” for ’70 had died out in the younger generation of Frenchmen. Her stationary population, which chauvinists resented, had solved the problem of expansion. From father to son, she could be content with her thrift, her industry, and her arts, and with the joy of living. For, more than any other European nation, she had that gift: the joy of living. Her armies and her alliances were truly for defence. She could not fight Germany and Austria alone. She must have help. If Russia went to war she, too, must go to war. She acted up to her belief when she held back her armies five miles from the frontier till the German struck; when she gave Germany a start in mobilisation--a start which, with England’s delay, came near being fatal for her. That price she paid for peace; that advantage Germany gained by striking first. It is a hard moral for the pacificists, but one which ought to give the French conscience a cleaner taste in after years.

The Kaiser, too, insisted that he was for peace. So he was, according to German logic. He realised his military power as the outside world could not realise it. Had Italy joined her forces to her allies, he might have crushed France and then turned on Russia, as his staff had planned. For striking he could reduce France to a second-rate power, take her colonies, fatten German coffers with an enormous indemnity, and gain Belgium and the Channel ports as the next step in national ambition before crushing England and securing the mastery of the seas. But he held off the blow for many years; that is the logic of his partisanship for peace. The fact that France proved stronger than he thought hardly interfered with his belief in his own moderation, in view of his confidence in his arms before the test came. He was for peace because he did not knock the other man down as soon as he might.

No other race in all Europe liked the Germans; not even the Huns, or the Czechs, or the Croats, and least of all the Italians. The Belgians, too, shared the universal enmity. It was Germany that Belgium feared. Her forts looked toward Germany; she looked toward England and France for protection. In this she was unneutral; but not in the thing that counted--thorough military preparation.

Thus were the Germanic empires isolated in sentiment before the war began. This strengthened their realisation that their one true ally was their power in arms, unaffected by any sentiment except that of beating their enemies. Europe, straining under the taxation of preparation, long held back by fear of the cataclysm, yet drawn by curiosity as to the nature of its capacity, sent her millions of soldiers to that test in practice of the struggle of modern arms which had been the haunting subject of her speculation.

II

“LE BRAVE BELGE!”

The stampede to Europe--Early days in Belgium--Characteristics of the Allies’ armies--Rumours--First skirmishes--When would the English come?--_Shipperke_ spirit--Pathos of the Belgian defence--A Taube and a Belgian cyclist patrol--Brussels before its fall--A momentous decision.

The rush from Monterey, in Mexico, when a telegram said that general European war was inevitable; the run and jump aboard the _Lusitania_ at New York the night that war was declared by England against Germany; the Atlantic passage on the liner of ineffaceable memory, a suspense broken by fragments of war news by wireless; the arrival in an England before the war was a week old; the journey to Belgium in the hope of reaching the scene of action!--as I write, all seem to have the perspective of history, so final are the processes of war, so swift their execution, and so eager is every one for each day’s developments. As one grows older the years seem shorter; but the first year of the Great War is the longest year I have known.

_Le brave Belge!_ One must be honest about him. If one lets his heart run away with his judgment he does his mind an injustice. A fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative efficiency of the different armies engaged.

“Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal sympathies?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he replied.

When he had my opinion he exclaimed:

“You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it was the bravest and best of all.”

“Is that what they think at home?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“The Atlantic is broad,” I suggested.

This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to associate my experience with any real knowledge.

In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the organisation of their concerns, and their resources of competition with a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: “I like him, but he has a poor head for affairs.” Yet he was the type who, if he had been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war, who would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--a general of civil life.

“But look how the Belgians have fought!” he exclaimed. “They stopped the whole German army for two weeks.”

The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil. On that day when a gallant young king cried, “To arms!” all his people became gallant to the imagination.

When I think of Belgium’s part in the war I always think of the little Belgian dog, the _shipperke_, who lives on the canal boats. He is a home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the _shipperke_ spirit. All the Belgians who had the _shipperke_ spirit tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.

One’s heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August, 1914, when one set out toward the front in an automobile from a Brussels rejoicing over bulletins of victory, its streets walled with bunting; but there was something brewing in one’s mind which was as treason to one’s desires. Let Brussels enjoy its flags and its capture of German cavalry patrols while it might!

On the hills back of Louvain we came upon some Belgian troops in their long, cumbersome coats, dark silhouettes against the field, digging shallow trenches in an uncertain sort of way. Whether it was them or the Belgian staff officers hurrying by in their cars, I had the impression of the will and not the way and a parallel of raw militia in uniforms taken from grandfather’s trunk facing the trained antagonists of an Austerlitz, or a Waterloo, or a Gettysburg.

_Le brave Belge!_ The question on that day was not, Are you brave? but, Do you know how to fight? Also, Would the French and the British arrive in time to help you? Of a thousand rumours about the positions of the French and the British armies, one was as good as another. All the observer knew was that he was an atom in a motor and all he saw for the defence of Belgium was a regiment of Belgians digging trenches. He need not have been in Belgium before to realise that here were an unwarlike people, living by intensive thrift and caution--a most domesticated civilisation in the most thickly populated workshop in Europe, counting every blade of grass and every kernel of wheat and making its pleasures go a long way at small cost; a hothouse of a land, with the door about to be opened to the withering blast of war.

Out of the Hôtel de Ville at Louvain, as our car halted by the cathedral door, came an elderly French officer, walking with a light, quick step, his cloak thrown back over his shoulders, and hurriedly entered a car; and after him came a tall British officer, walking more slowly, imperturbably, as a man who meant to let nothing disturb him or beat him--both characteristic types of race. This was the break-up of the last military conference held at Louvain, which had now ceased to be Belgian Headquarters.

How little you knew and how much they knew! The sight of them was helpful. One was the representative of a force of millions of Frenchmen; of the army. I had always believed in the French army, and have more reason now than ever before to believe in it. There was no doubt that if a French corps and a German corps were set the task of marching a hundred miles to a strategic position, the French would arrive first and win the day in a pitched battle. But no one knew this better than that German staff whose superiority, as von Moltke said, would always ensure victory. Was the French army ready? Could it bring fulness of its strength into the first and perhaps the deciding shock of arms? Where was the French army?

The other officer who came out of the Hôtel de Ville was the representative of a little army--a handful of regulars--hard as nails and ready to the last button. Where was the British army? The restaurant keeper where we had luncheon at Louvain--he knew. He whispered his military secret to me. The British army was toward Antwerp, waiting to crush the Germans in the flank should they advance on Brussels. We were “drawing them on!” Most cheerful, most confident, mine host! When I went back to Louvain under German rule his restaurant was in ruins.

We were on our way to as near the front as we would go, with a pass which was written for us by a Belgian reservist in Brussels between sips of beer brought him by a boy scout. It was a unique, a most accommodating, pass; the only one I have received from the Allies’ side which would have taken me into the German lines.

The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of Haelen, where some dogs of a dog machine gun battery lay panting in their traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his passionate repetition of, “Assassins! The barbarians!” which seemed to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans. His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where we pleased, he said; and the Germans were “out there,” not far away. Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as the dogs of the mitrailleuse battery.

We went outside to see the scene of “the battle,” as it was called in the despatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about. The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had been shelled and burned.