Chapter 24

Such Canadians as hold Edmund Burke to have been a spokesman of consummate political wisdom are apt to regard the busy stir of doctrinaires, who scream for closer political junction of the British peoples, even as Burke regarded the hurry of some of the same kidney in his time. Resolute to bind the thirteen colonies forever to England, they proceeded to offend, outrage, and drive those colonies to independence. Be it remembered that these colonies had contributed so loyally, so liberally to England's armaments and wars that grateful London Parliaments had insisted on voting back to them the subsidies they had granted, holding the contributions too generous. To later proposals of foolish henchmen of George III., proposals that the colonies, since they had revealed themselves as strong and rich, should be dragged into some formal political subordination by which, as by latter-day Imperial Federation, they might be involuntarily mustered and taxed for imperial purposes, Burke said:

Our hold on the colonies is the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are the ties which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your Government; they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance....

As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces toward you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have. The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows on every soil. They may have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia; but until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.

This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly.... Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, ... your letters of office and your instructions and your suspending clauses are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your Government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even to the minutest member.

And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain and all her children alike would chain themselves together! Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke's immortal scorn of such formalists:

"A sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. To men truly initiated and rightly taught, those ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."

ENGLAND.

By JOHN E. DOLSON.

Birth land of statesmen, bards, heroes, and sages; Mother of nations--the homes of the free; Builder of work that will last through the ages, Hope for Humanity centres in thee.

Now that thy bugles their clear calls are shrilling, Now that thy battle voice echoes worldwide, O'er the long reaches of sea rush the willing Sons of thy children to fight by thy side.

Eager to aid thee with treasure and tissue, Other leal millions will come to thy call. Civilization is staked on the issue-- Woe to Mankind if thy lion should fall!

Fall he will never, till English force slacken In the great soul of thy dominant race, Now, as of old, do the Destinies beckon Thee to be highest in power and place.

Conflicts now raging will pass into story, Nations may sink in defeat or disgrace; Long be thy future resplendent with glory, Long be thy triumphs the pride of our race!

American Aid of France

By Eugène Brieux

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

M. Eugène Brieux, the celebrated French poet and playwright, who is in this country as the official representative of the French Academy--the "Forty Immortals"--has written a remarkable tribute to American aid of France during the present war. The address, which is herewith presented, was read by M. Brieux at the residence of Mrs. John Henry Hammond of New York City recently before a gathering of two hundred men and women who have been interested in the work of the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris.

Miss Marie Van Vorst, who nursed the wounded at the American Ambulance in Paris, will speak to you of it as an eyewitness. From her you will receive direct news of your splendid work of humanity. While she was caring for wounded French, English, and German I was attached to another hospital at Chartres. It happens, therefore, that I have never seen the American Military Hospital created by you, but I am not in ignorance concerning it any more than any other Parisian, any more, indeed, than the majority of the French people. I know that the American Ambulance is the most remarkable hospital that the world has seen. I know that you, since the beginning of the war, have brought the aid of medical science to wounded men and that you have given not only money, but an institution, all ready, complete and of the most modern type, and, even more, that you have sent there your best surgeons and a small army of orderlies and nurses.

I know that at first one could not find a place; that there was available only a building in course of construction, intended to be the Pasteur School at Neuilly. This building was far from completion; it lacked doors and there were no stairs. I know that in three weeks your generosity, your energy, and your quick intelligence has made of this uncertain shell a modern military hospital, with white walls, electric light, baths, rooms for administering anaesthetics, operating rooms, sterilizing plants, apparatus for X-rays, and a dental clinic. I know that automobiles, admirably adapted to the service, carried the wounded. And yet I do not know all. I know only by instinct of the devotion of your young girls, of your women, and of your young men, belonging often to prominent families, who served as stretcher bearers and orderlies.

I am not ignorant of the fact that they count by the hundreds those who have been cured at the American Ambulance at Neuilly, nor of the further fact that the rate of mortality is extremely low, although they have sent you those most gravely injured. I know that it is all free; that there are no charges made for the expenses of administration; that for the service rendered by your people there is no claim, and that every cent of every dollar subscribed goes entirely and directly to the care of the wounded. I know also that the expenses at the hospital are $4,000 a day, and that ever since the beginning your charity has met this demand.

Such splendid effort has not been ignored or misunderstood. The President of the French Republic has cabled to President Wilson his appreciation and his gratitude; General Fevier, Inspector General of Hospitals of the French Army, has publicly expressed his admiration; the English physicians and public men have shared their sentiments.

As to the people of Paris, as to the French nation, they have been touched to the depths of their being. And yet in France we have found all this quite natural. I shall tell you why. We have so high a regard for you that when you do anything well no one is surprised. I believe that if a wounded soldier arriving at your hospital exclaimed, "This is wonderful!" his comrade who had been ahead of him would answer in a tone of admonition: "That surprises you? You do not know then that it is done by the Americans, by the people from the United States?" In this refusal to be astonished in the face of remarkable achievements, when they come from you, there is a tribute, a praise of high quality which your feelings and your patriotism will know how to appreciate.

I have said that all that comes from you which is good and great seems natural to us, and I have given you a reason; but there is another. In France we are accustomed to consider the Republic of the United States as an affectionate, distant sister. When one receives a gift from a stranger one is astonished and cries out his thanks, but when the gift comes from a brother or from some one who, on similar occasions, has never failed, the thanks are not so outspoken but more profound. One says: "Ah, it is you, my brother. I suffer. I expected you. I knew that you would come, for I should have gone to you had you needed me. I thank you."

And, indeed, we are closely bound together, you and we. Without doubt, common interest and an absence of possible competition helps to that end, but there is something more which unites us--it is our kindred sentiments. It is this kinship which has created our attraction for each other and which has cemented it; it is our common ground of affections, of hatreds, of hopes; our ideals rest upon the same high plane. To mention but one point, one of you has said: "The United States and France are the only two nations which have fought for an ideal." And it is that which separates us, you and us, from a certain other nation, and which has served to bring us two close together.

We love you and we are grateful for what you are doing for us. When the day came for my departure from France to represent here the French Academy I asked of Mr. Poincaré, who had visited the American Ambulance at Neuilly, if duty did not forbid me to go. "No," he said to me. "Go to the United States. Carry greetings to the great nation of America." And he gave to me, for your President, the letter with which you are familiar, where he expressed the admiration and the sympathy that he has for you.

I have been traveling North and South in the Eastern part of the United States. I have had many opportunities to admire your power and the extent of your efforts. Today, in thinking of the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris, I admire your persistence in labor. You have established this hospital. That was good. But it costs a thousand dollars a day, and yet you keep on with the work. That is doubly good. Indeed, one can understand that you have not been willing, after having created this model hospital, that some day through lack of support its doors should close and the wounded you have taken in be turned over to others; certainly those first subscribers undertook a sort of moral obligation to themselves not to permit the work to fail. But, none the less, it is admirable that it should be so. To give once is something, but it is little if one compares the value of the first gift to those which follow.

The first charity is easily understood. Suddenly war is at hand. Its horrors can be imagined and every one feels that he can in some measure lessen them, and he opens his purse. Then time passes, the war continues, and one becomes accustomed to the thoughts that were at first unbearable--it is so far away and so long. Others in this way were checked after their first impulse.

But you, you have thought that, if it is good to establish a hospital, that alone was not enough, and that each day would bring new wounded to replace those who, cured, took up their guns again and returned to the field of battle. And since at the American Ambulance the wounded are cured quickly, the very excellence of your organization, the science of your surgeons, and the greatness of your sacrifices all bring upon you other and new sacrifices to be made.

But the word "sacrifice" is badly chosen. You do not make sacrifices, for you are strong and you are good. When you decide upon some new generous act you have only to appeal to your national pride, which will never allow an American undertaking to fail. You have the knowledge of the good that you are doing, and that, for you, is sufficient. You know that, thanks to your generosity, suffering is relieved, and you know that, thanks to the science of your surgeons, this relief is not merely momentary, but that the wounded man who would have remained a cripple if he had been less ably cared for, will be, thanks to you, completely cured, and that, instead of dragging out a miserable existence, he will be able to live a normal life and support a family which will bless you. Such men will owe it all to the persistence of your generosity.

I return always to that point, and it is essential. To give once is a common impulse, common to nearly all the world. It means freeing one's self from the suffering which good souls feel when they see others suffer. But to give again after having given is a proof of reflection, of an understanding of the meaning of life; it is to work intelligently; it is to insure the value of the first effort; it means the possession of goodness which is lasting and far-seeing. That is a rare virtue. You have it. And that is why I express a three-fold thanks, for the past, for the present, and for the future--thanks that come from the bottom of the heart of a Frenchman.

A FAREWELL.

By EDNA MEAD.

Look, Love! I lay my wistful hands in thine A little while before you seek the dark, Untraversed ways of War and its Reward, I cannot bear to lift my gaze and mark The gloried light of hopeful, high emprise That, like a bird already poised for flight, Has waked within your eyes. For me no proud illusions point the road, No fancied flowers strew the paths of strife: War only wears a horrid, hydra face, Mocking at strength and courage, youth and life. If you were going forth to cross your sword In fair and open, man-to-man affray, One might be even reconciled and say, "This is not murder; only passion bent On pouring out its poison"--one could pray That the day's end might see the madness done And saner souls rise with the morrow's sun. But this incarnate hell that yawns before Your bright, brave soul keyed to the fighter's clench-- This purgatory that men call the "trench"-- This modern "Black Hole" of a modern war! Yea, Love! yet naught I say can save you, so I lay my heart in yours and let you go.

Stories of French Courage

By Edwin L. Shuman

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

There has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une Ambulance," which brings the war closer to the eye and heart than anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded. The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."

When the war broke out this large-hearted priest and busy author dropped all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the wounded to it, often direct from the front.

Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of bereavement to parents.

From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.

Take, for instance, the case of Charles Marée, a blue-eyed, red-bearded hero of thirty years, an only son who had taken the place of his invalid father at the head of their factory, and who had responded to the first call to arms. During his months of suffering his parents were held in territory occupied by the enemy and could not be reached. The abbé goes on to tell his story:

Let us not be deceived by the calm smile on his face. For six weeks Charles Marée has been undergoing an almost continual martyrdom, his pelvis fractured, with all the consequences one divines, weakened by hemorrhage, his back broken, capable only of moving his head and arms.... He is one of our most fervent Christians: I bring him the communion twice a week, and he never complains of suffering. He is also one of our bravest soldiers; he has received the military medal, and when I asked him how it came about he told me the following in a firm tone and with his hand in mine, for we are great friends:

"It was given to me the 8th of October. I had to fulfill a mission that was a little difficult. It was at Mazingarbe, between Béthune and Lens, and 9 o'clock in the evening. Two of the enemy's armored auto-machine guns had just been discovered approaching our lines. I was ordered to go and meet them with a Pugeot of twenty-five or thirty horse power--I was automobilist in the Thirtieth Dragoons.

"I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two hostile machines were reported to be approaching. After twenty minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited. A quarter of an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the sound of the first mitrailleuse. With one spin of the wheel I threw my machine across the middle of the road. That of the enemy struck us squarely in the centre. The moment the shock was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the chauffeur and the mechanician.

"But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived. The two men on it comprehended what had happened. While one of them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they turned their machine and retreated. My companion, happily, was not hurt, so he could take me to Vermelles, where the ambulance service was. The same evening they gave me the military medal, for which I had already been proposed three times."

After three months of suffering, borne without complaint, this man died without having been able to get a word to his parents. The abbé had become deeply attached to him, and the whole hospital corps felt the loss of his courageous presence.

Some of the horror of war is in these pages, as where the author says:

The doctors worked till 3 o'clock this morning. They had to amputate arms and legs affected with gangrene. The operating room was a sea of blood.

Some of the pathos of war is here, and even a little of its humor, but most of all its courage. Both of the latter are mingled in the case of an English soldier who was brought in wounded from the field of Soissons.

"I fought until such a day, when I was wounded."

"And since then?"

"Since then I have traveled."

An English infantry officer, a six-footer, brought to the hospital with his head bandaged in red rather than white, showed the abbé his cap and the bullet hole in it.

"A narrow escape," said the abbé in English, and then learned that the escape was narrower than the wounded forehead indicated. Another bullet, without touching the officer, had pierced the sole of his shoe under his foot, and a third had perforated his coat between the body and the arm without breaking the skin.

The author's attitude toward the Germans, always free from bitterness, is sufficiently indicated in such a paragraph as this:

This afternoon I gave absolution and extreme unction to an Irishman, who has not regained consciousness since he was brought here. He had in his portfolio a letter addressed to his mother. The nurse is going to add a word to say that he received the last sacraments. A Christian hope will soften the frightful news. Emperors of Austria and Germany, if you were present when the death is announced in that poor Irish home, and in thousands, hundreds of thousands of others, in England, in France, in Russia, in Servia, in Belgium, in your own countries, in all Europe, and even in Africa and Asia!... May God enlighten your consciences!

The French wounded in the hospital at Neuilly--during the period when the German right wing was being beaten back from Paris--frequently accused the German regulars of wanton cruelty, but testified to the humanity of the reservists. The author relates several episodes illustrating both points. Here are two:

"The regulars are no good," said a brave peasant reservist. "They struck me with the butts of their rifles on my wound. They broke and threw away all that I had. The reserves arrive, and it is different; they take care of me. My comrade, wounded in the breast, was dying of thirst; he actually died of it a little while afterward. I dragged myself up to go and seek water for him; the young fellows aimed their guns at me. I was obliged to make a half-turn and lie down again."

Another, who also begins by praising the German field officers, saw soldiers of the active army stripping perfectly nude one of our men who had a perforated lung, and whom they had made prisoner after his wound:

"When they saw that they would have to abandon him, they took away everything from him, even his shirt, and it was done in pure wickedness, since they carried nothing away."

One of the most amazing escapes is that of a soldier from Bordeaux, told partly in his own racy idiom, and fully vouched for by the author. After relating how he left the railway at Nanteuil and traversed a hamlet pillaged by the Germans he continues:

We form ourselves into a skirmish line. The shells come. The dirt flies: holes to bury an ox? One can see them coming: zzz--boom! There is time to get out of the way.

Arrived at the edge of the woods, we separate as scouts. We are ordered to advance. But, mind you, they already have our range. The artillery makes things hum. My bugler, near me, is killed instantly; he has not said a word, poor boy! I am wounded in the leg. It is about two o'clock. As I cannot drag myself further, a comrade, before leaving, hides me under three sheaves of straw with my head under my knapsack. The shells have peppered it full of holes, that poor sack. Without it--ten yards away a comrade, who had his leg broken and a piece of shell in his arm, received seven or eight more wounds.