Part 4

The very suspicion that certain sections of American citizens might be cold to this enthusiasm, even disloyal to the State, made American patriotism more self-conscious, demonstrative, and vociferous than in European nations where it was taken for granted. There was a spreading intolerance of the mass mind because of the need of unity. A nonconformist to this enthusiasm was marked down as a traitor or a shirker. Every American citizen, man, woman and child, had to prove allegiance to the state at war by some kind of service and self sacrifice, in work or dollars or both. Woe betide all pacifists, conscientious objectors, or indifferentists. American methods of work, business organisation, industrial energy, dollar “drives,” were all diverted from peace to war. Financiers, industrial magnates, engineers, organisers, gave their service to the State and “speeded up” the war machine. The entire manhood of the nation was mobilised, drilled, equipped with an utter disregard of cost, and with driving zeal. It was a terrific demonstration of force, physical, moral, emotional, set in motion by generous impulses and terrific in potentiality.

In France and Flanders I saw the arrival of the first American troops, and then the following tide of men, behind the lines of the fighting front. It seemed to me then, as it does now, a miracle of history. After three hundred years the New World had come to the rescue of the Old. They marched over fields like those of Agincourt and Crecy where our bowmen and pikemen had fought before America was on the map of the world. And yet those men of the United States Army, different in type from ours, belonging to a different civilisation, spoke the English tongue, and no difference of accent could break our sense of kinship with them. Even though they did not all spring from our stock and blood they were in some way heirs of our tradition, our code of law, our root ideas. We watched them pass behind the lines with a sense of comfort and a kind of wonderment. They were magnificent men, untouched as yet by the strain of war, marvellously fresh, like our first youth which was now dead. Their numbers grew and grew. One came across their camps everywhere, but one question was like a sharp sword in one’s brain: Had they come in time? The Germans were on the Marne again. Paris was being shelled. Marshal Foch had no reserves. In a few days, if the Germans made another thrust, Paris might be surrendered and the spirit of France broken, and the British army involved in general defeat. Such things were unuttered. They were thrust aside even from one’s own mind. But they kept one’s brain on the rack.

THE COUNTER-ATTACK

Then Foch attacked. As rapidly as his line of blue men had come up to strengthen the British Front after the German break-through—I shall never forget the ride of the French Cavalry, on lean horses wet with sweat, and the hurried tide of blue transport waggons, driven by coal-black negroes, and the endless line of guns with dusty, sullen gunners coming to support us when our men had fought back for three frightful weeks—he withdrew them from our Front. They vanished like a dream army. English and Scottish Divisions were entrained for the French Front. Our own lines were thin and weak. Foch was taking the ultimate risks. American infantry and American Marines were put in at Chateau Thierry for their baptism of blood. French infantry, withdrawn from other parts of the line, left almost without defence, were rushed to the Marne. The German salient thrust out like a battering ram, pointing to Paris, was attacked on both sides, at its junctions with the main line. It was pierced and broken. The enemy was panic-stricken and thrown into a mad disorder.

“Who attacked?” asked German prisoners.

“Foch’s Army of Reserve,” was the answer.

“He has no Reserves!” they said with rage. “It was impossible for him to have an Army of Reserve.”

It was an Army of Reserve gathered piecemeal, flung together, hurled forward in a master stroke of strategy, at the last minute of the eleventh hour. It was the second “Miracle” of the Marne.

That battle broke the spirit of the German people and of the German army. They knew that only retreat and defeat lay ahead of them. They had struck their last great blow and it had failed. They had used up their man-power. They, certainly, had no Army of Reserve. They could only hope that the French and British were as exhausted as themselves and that the Americans were still unready. They prepared for a general retreat when the British army took the offensive of August, 1918, and never stopped fighting along the whole length of its line until the day of armistice, while the French and Americans pressed the Germans on their own front.

The American army, inexperienced, raw, not well handled by some of its generals, fought with the valour which all the world expected, and suffered great losses and made its weight felt. The sight of the American troops was a message of doom to the Germans. They knew that behind this vanguard was a vast American army, irresistible as a moving avalanche. However great the slaughter of these soldiers from the New World, pressing on in the face of machine-gun fire, and lashed to death, millions would follow on, and then more millions. The game was up for Germany, and they knew it, and were stricken. Yet they played the game, this grisly game, to the end, with a valour, a science and a discipline which was the supreme proof of their quality as great soldiers. It was a fighting retreat, orderly and controlled, although the British army never gave them a day’s respite, attacked and attacked, captured masses of prisoners, thousands of guns, and broke their line again and again.

THE LAST THREE MONTHS

That sweep forward of the British in the last three months was an astounding achievement. They were the same men who halted on the armistice line down from Mons as those who had begun the attack three months before. They had few reinforcements. They had gone beyond their heavy guns, almost out of reach of their transport. Their losses had been heavy. There was no battalion at more than half its strength. They had been strained to the last fibre of nervous energy. But they had never slackened up. They were inspired by more than mortal strength, by the exultation of advance, the liberation of great cities, the rescue of populations long under German rule, the fever of getting forward to the end at last.

The delirious welcome of the liberated peoples awakened some of the first emotions of war which had long seemed dead. The entry into Lille was unforgettable. The first men in khaki were surrounded by wild crowds of men and women weeping with joy at the sight of them. Their buttons and shoulder straps were torn off as souvenirs. They were kissed by old women, bearded men, young girls, babies. Once again rose the cry of “_Vivent les Anglais!_” as in the beginning of the war. Our men were glad to be alive that day to get the welcome of these people who had suffered mental torture and many tyrannies during those four years under German rule. The fire of gratitude warmed cold hearts, re-lit enthusiasm, made it all seem worth while after all. Surely the French in Lille, the Belgians in Bruges, the people of Tournai, Cambrai, Valenciennes, Liége, have not forgotten those days of liberation. Surely _they_ did not join in the cynical chorus which rose against England in France, or at least in the French press, during the years that followed? That to me is unbelievable, with these memories in my heart.

It was Marshal Foch himself who acknowledged with generous warmth that in these last months of war it was the hammer strokes of the British army which did most to break the German war machine to bits, by enormous captures of prisoners, guns, and ground. General Ludendorff has said so, squarely, in his books; and history will record it, though it was quickly forgotten in some countries and never known in others. It is only for the sake of truth that it is worth recalling now, for there is no boast of victory in the hearts of men, knowing its cost and its horror, and no glory left about that war except the memory of the world’s youth which suffered on both sides of the line.

THE COMING OF PEACE

So it ended, with a kind of stupefaction in the minds of the soldiers. It was an enormous relief, followed by a kind of lassitude of body and spirit. Ended at last! Incredible! At the front on the day of armistice there was no wild exultation, except in a few messes here and there behind the lines. The men who had fought through it, or through enough of it to have been soaked in its dirt, were too tired to cheer or sing or shout because peace had come. Peace! What did that mean? Civilian life again? Impossible to readjust one’s mind to that. Impossible to go home and pick up the old threads of life as though this Thing had not happened. They were different men. Their minds had been seared by dreadful experience. Now that peace had come after that long strain something snapped in them.

Many of them had a curiously dead feeling at first. They thought back to all the things they had seen and done and suffered, and remembered the old comrades who had fallen on the way. Perhaps they were the lucky ones, those who lay dead, especially those who had died before disillusion and spiritual revolt against this infernal business. A war for civilisation?... Civilisation had been outraged by its universal crime. A war against militarism? Militarism had been enthroned in England and France. Liberty, free speech, truth itself, had been smashed by military orders and discipline over the bodies and souls of men. A war against the “Huns?” Poor old Fritz! Poor bloody old Fritz! Not such a bad sort after all, man for man and mass for mass. They had put up a wonderful fight. The glory of victory? Well, it had left the world in a mess of ruin, and the best had died. What would come out of this victory? What reward for the men who had fought, or for any nation? The profiteers had done very well out of war. The Generals had rows of ribbons on their breasts. Youth had perished; the finest and noblest. Civilisation had been saved? To Hell with a civilisation which had allowed this kind of thing! No, when peace came, there were millions of men who did not rejoice much, because they were sick and tired and all enthusiasm was dead within them. They were like convicts after long years of hard labour standing at the prison gates open to them with liberty and life beyond. What’s the good of life to men whose spirit has been sapped, or of liberty to men deprived of it so long they were almost afraid of it? Strange, conflicting emotions, hardly to be analysed, tore at men’s hearts on the night of armistice. Shipwrecked men do not cheer when the storm abates and the bodies of their dead comrades float behind them. Nor did our men along the front where it was very quiet that day after a bugle here and there sounded the “Cease fire!” and the guns were silenced at last. Peace!... Good God!

II.—THE UNCERTAIN PEACE

Ten years after.... The memory of the war days is fading from the mind of the world. The ten million dead lie in their graves, but life goes marching on. Self-preservation, vital interests, new and exciting problems, the human whirligig, are too absorbing for a continual hark-back to the thought of that mortality. We are no longer conscious of any gap in the ranks of youth, torn out by the machinery of destruction. We do not realise the loss of all that spirit, genius, activity and blood, except in private remembrance of some dead boy whose portrait in uniform stands on the mantelshelf. A new generation of youth has grown up since the beginning of the war. Boys of ten at that time of history are now twenty, and not much interested in that old tale. Girls who were twelve are now mothers of babes. The war! Bother the war! Let’s forget it and get on with life. In that youth is right. It is not in its nature nor in moral health to dwell on morbid memories. But it is hard on those whose service is forgotten—so soon. In England—ten years after—there are still 58,000 wounded soldiers in the hospitals—and in France great numbers more; but they are hidden away, as a painful secret of things that happened. Only now and again the sight of their hospital blue in some quiet country lane, near their hiding places, shocks one with a sharp stab of remorse. We had forgotten all that. We hate to be reminded of it.

FADING MEMORIES

Even the men who fought through those years seldom speak of their experience. It is fading out of their own minds, though it seemed unforgettable. They are forgetting the names of the villages in France and Flanders where they were billeted, or where they fought, or where they passed a hundred times with their guns and transport under shell fire. Good heavens!—don’t you remember?—that place where the waggons were “pasted,” where the Sergeant-Major was blown to bits, where old Dick got his “Blighty” wound? No. Something has passed a sponge across those tablets of memory—things that happened afterwards. Now and again at Divisional banquets officers try to revive the spirit of those days and exchange yarns about trench warfare and days of battle. It is queer how they remember only the jokes, the laughable things, the comradeship, the thrill. The horror has passed.

Something else has passed; the comradeship itself, between officers and men, between all classes united for a time in common sacrifice and service, annihilating all differences of rank and social prejudice and wealth at the beginning of the war. It seemed then as though nothing could ever again build up those barriers of caste. The muddiest, dirtiest, commonest soldier from the slums or the factories or the fields was a hero before whom great ladies were eager to kneel in devotion and love, to cut away his blood-stained clothes, to dress his wounds. In the canteens the pretty ladies slaved like drudges to give cocoa or any comfort to “the boys” from the front. In the trenches or in ruins under shell fire young officers wrote home about their men: “They’re too splendid for words!... I am proud to command such a topping crowd.... They make me feel ashamed of things I used to think about the working man. There is nothing too good for them.” The British Government thought so too, and promised them great rewards—“homes for heroes,” good wages for good work, “a world safe for democracy.”

THE BARRIERS OF CLASS

Ten years after, the classes have fallen apart again. The old hostilities between Capital and Labour have been revived with increasing bitterness in many minds. The old barriers have been rebuilt in many countries. For a time, even in England, there was a revolutionary spirit among the men who had served, and a sense of fear and hostility against those who had said that nothing was too good for them. “Our heroes” became very quickly “those damned Socialists,” or those “dirty dogs” who are never satisfied, or those lazy scoundrels who would rather live on the “dole” than take an honest job. The men who had saved England were suspected of plotting for her overthrow, subsidised by Russian money and seduced by the propaganda of a secret society inspired by the spirit of Anti-Christ.

Ten years after the closing up of ranks, the surrender of self interest, and a spiritual union, England is again seething with strikes, industrial conflict, political passion, and class consciousness. There are still a million and a quarter unemployed officially registered in Great Britain, and half a million more not on the registers and worse off. Instead of “homes for heroes” the working people in the great cities are shamefully overcrowded. In the agricultural districts of England young men who fought in the Last Crusade and marched with Allenby to Jerusalem, or those boys who left their fields in ’14 for the dirty ditches in Flanders—for England’s sake—are getting twenty-five shillings a week, upon which a single man can hardly live and a married man must starve. And ten years after they poured out their blood and treasure without a grudge, without reservation, first in the field and last out of it, the old “quality” of England or their younger sons are selling up their old houses to pay taxes which are extinguishing them as a class, depriving them of their old power and prerogatives, and changing the social structure of the nation by an economic revolution which is almost accomplished. On both sides there is bitterness, a sense of injustice, and an utter disillusion with the results of victory.

THE GREAT REACTION

Ten years after the beginning of the war there is no sense of security in Europe or the world. “The war to end war,” as it was called, has done nothing of the kind. Beneath the surface of the present peace there is a lava of hatreds and resentments which bode ill for the future peace of the world. There are larger standing armies in Europe now than in 1913. There are more causes of quarrel, and none of the old quarrels have been extinguished—those racial rivalries, those national ambitions, that commercial competition. The war settled no argument for more than a period of exhaustion. The idea of a “world safe for democracy” is falsified ten years after by a swing-back to extreme forms of nationalism and autocratic government through the greater part of Europe excepting the British Isles and France. The German Republic, established after annihilating defeat, is only biding its time for the return of monarchy, and its present government is anti-democratic. Parliamentary institutions, the safeguard of democracy, have been overthrown or contemptuously treated in many nations. Italy, Spain and Hungary are under military dictatorships. Russia is governed by a new-fangled tyranny under which there is no liberty of speech, conscience or economic life. Turkey, powerful again, is ruled by a committee of generals. Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, are in military alliance with France which, under Poincaré, ridiculed the possibilities of peace based on the goodwill of its neighbours, and relied for safety on a supreme army and the rule of Force.

THE PEACE TREATY

The Treaty of Versailles, which imposed the terms of peace upon Germany and her Allies after their complete surrender, was the direct cause of all the troubles that beset us after the war. It violated the hopes of all moderate minded people, who believed that the world, after its frightful lesson, was ready for a new chapter of civilisation in which militarism might be overthrown as the greatest curse of life, and in which the common folk of nations might be made secure in their homes and work by a code of international law and arbitration. The statesmen who presided over the Peace Conference—Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George—had the fate of the world in their hands. Waiting for their decisions, their new plan of Europe, was a world of emotionalised men and women, ready and eager then, for a little while, to respond to a generous idealism which would lift all peoples above the morass of hatred and misery into which they had fallen. The German and Austrian peoples, starved and defeated, without a rag of pride left to cover their humiliation, fierce with anger against their war lords—their Junkers and their politicians of the old brutal caste—were ready also, for a little while, to join hands with the world democracy in a new order of life. They were conscience-stricken, ready to make amends, resigned to an awful price of defeat—provided they were given their chance of recovery and the liberty of their national life. They clung desperately to the words of President Wilson who, before their surrender, had in his Fourteen Points and other messages to the world outlined a peace which would be generous to the defeated if they overthrew their old gods, and would be based on justice, the rights of peoples, and the commonwealth of nations rather than upon vengeance and hatred.

Fair words, holding out prodigious hopes of a new and better world! But when the terms of the Peace Treaty were made known they struck a knock-out blow not only to German hopes but to all the ideals of people who had looked for something nobler and more righteous by which the peace of the world should be assured. It was a peace of vengeance. It reeked with injustice. It was incapable of fulfilment. It sowed a thousand seeds from which new wars might spring. It was as though the Devil, in a jester’s cap-and-bells, had sat beside Clemenceau in his black gloves, and whispered madness into the ear of Wilson, and leered across the table at Lloyd George, and put his mockery into every clause. In that Hall of Mirrors at Versailles the ideals for which millions of men had fought and died—liberty, fair-play, a war to end war, justice—were mocked and outraged, not by men of evil, but by good men, not by foul design, but with loyalty to national interests. Something blinded them.

The Territorial clauses of the Treaty, based theoretically upon “the self determination of peoples,” created a dozen Alsace Lorraines when one had been a sore in Europe. The old Austrian Empire was broken to bits—that was inevitable—but Austria, with its great capital of Vienna, was cut off from its old source of life, condemned to enormous mortality—which happened—and many of its people were put under the rule of their ancient enemies. The Austrian Tyrol is now the Italian Tyrol. Austrian property and populations are now in the hands of Czechs and Slovaks and Serbians. Hungary was parcelled out without consideration of nationality or economic life. Lines were drawn across its waterways, its railway system and its roads. Its factories, forests and mines were taken from it. Many of its folk were handed over to Roumanians and other hostile peoples. The German colonies in Africa were divided between Great Britain, France and Belgium, although it is a biological necessity that Germany should have some outlet for the energy and expansion of her population if another war may be avoided. The Danzig corridor was made between one part of Germany and another. Greece was given an Empire in Asia Minor and Thrace, over Turkish populations which she could only hold by the power of the sword at the cost of a future war—which she has already fought and lost, abandoned by the Governments which yielded to her claims.

The resurrection of Poland, by which one of the greatest crimes in history was blotted out and national liberty given to the peoples of Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stand to the credit of the peacemakers, although these new nations have no security in the future if Europe relies upon force rather than law. Other frontiers drawn carelessly across the new map of Europe will be blotted out in blood if ever again the passions stirring from the Rhine to the Volga rise against the barriers imposed upon them in this uncertain peace.

THE FANTASTIC FIGURES

But it was on the economic side of the Treaty and in its interpretation that the statesmen of the Allies seemed to be stricken with insanity, which infected many of their peoples until recent months. Germany, they insisted, had to pay all the costs of the war, for the damage she had inflicted and the ruin she had caused. Theoretically, that was just if one took the view that every German peasant, every German mother in a cheap tenement, every German worker on starvation wages, every little sempstress, or University student, ten or twelve years old when the war began, shares the responsibility of those war lords and militarists who challenged the world in 1914.