Part 5

Now we talk about the Dardanelles, where in this hour serious issues hang in the balance; he is pleased to question me about ambushes in those parts, which I frequented for so long a time, and which have not ceased to be very dear to me. But suddenly a colder gust blows in through the window, still opening on to the forlorn little garden. With what kindly thoughtfulness, then, he rises, as any ordinary officer might have done, and himself closes the window near which I am seated.

And then we talk of war, of rifles, of artillery. His Majesty is well posted in everything, like a general already broken in to his craft.

Strange destiny for a prince, who, in the beginning, did not seem designated for the throne, and who, perhaps, would have preferred to go on living his former somewhat retired life by the side of his beloved princess. Then, when the unlooked-for crown was placed upon his youthful brow, he might well have believed that he could hope for an era of profound peace, in the midst of the most peaceful of all nations, but, contrary to every expectation, he has known the most appallingly tragic reign of all. Between one day and the next, without a moment's weakness, without even a moment's hesitation, disdainful of compromises, which for a time, at least, though to the detriment of the civilisation of the world, might have preserved for a little space his towns and palaces, he stood erect in the way of the Monster's onrush, a great warrior king in the midst of an army of heroes.

To-day it is clear that he has no longer a doubt of victory, and his own loyalty gives him complete confidence in the loyalty of the Allies, who truly desire to restore life to his country of Belgium; nevertheless, he insists that his soldiers shall co-operate with all their remaining strength in the work of deliverance, and that they shall remain to the end at the post of danger and honour. Let us salute him with the profoundest reverence.

Another less noble, might have said to himself:

"I have amply paid my debt to the common cause; it was my troops who built the first rampart against barbarism. My country, the first to be trampled under the feet of these German brutes, is no more than a heap of ruins. That suffices."

But no, he will have the name of Belgium inscribed upon a yet prouder page, by the side of Serbia, in the golden book of history.

And that is the reason why I met on my way those inestimable troops, alert and fresh, miraculously revived, who were on their way to the front to continue the holy struggle.

Before him let us bow down to the very ground.

Night is falling when the audience comes to an end and I find myself again on the footpath that leads to the abbey. On my return journey, along those roads broken up by rain and by military transport wagons, I remain under the charm of his welcome. And I compare these two monarchs, situated, as it were, at opposite poles of humanity, the one at the pole of light, the other at the pole of darkness; the one yonder, swollen with hypocrisy and arrogance, a monster among monsters, his hands full of blood, his nails full of torn flesh, who still dares to surround himself with insolent pomp; the other here, banished without a murmur to a little house in a village, standing on a last strip of his martyred kingdom, but in whose honour rises from the whole civilised earth a concert of sympathy, enthusiasm, magnificent appreciation, and for whom are stored up crowns of most pure and immortal glory.

XII

SOME WORDS UTTERED BY HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS

"All the world knows what value to attach to the King of Prussia and his word. There is no sovereign in Europe who has not suffered from his perfidy. And such a king as this would impose himself upon Germany as dictator and protector! Under a despotism which repudiates every principle, the Prussian monarchy will one day be the source of infinite calamity, not only to Germany, but likewise to the whole of Europe."

THE EMPRESS MARIA THERESA.

_March, 1915._

Far away, far away and out of the world seems this place where the persecuted Queen has taken refuge. I do not know how long my motor car, its windows lashed by rain, has rolled along in the dim light caused by showers and approaching night, when at last the Belgian non-commissioned officer, who guided my chauffeur along these unfamiliar roads, announces that we have arrived. Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of the Belgians, has deigned to grant me an audience at half-past six, and I trembled lest I should be late, for the way seemed interminable through a countryside which it was too dark to see; but we were in time, punctual to a moment. At half-past six on an evening in March, under an overcast sky, it is already dark as night.

The car stops and I jump out on to the sands of the seashore; I recognise the sound of the ocean close at hand, and the boundless expanse of the North Sea, less dark than the sky, is vaguely perceptible to the sight. Rain and cold winds rage around us. On the dunes two or three houses without lights in the windows are visible as greyish outlines. However, someone carrying a little shining glass lamp is hurrying to receive me; he is an officer in Her Majesty's service, carrying one of those electric torches which the wind does not blow out, and which in France we call an Apache's lantern.

On entering the first house to which the aide-de-camp conducts me, I attempt to leave my overcoat in the hall.

"No, no," he says, "keep it on; we have still to go out of doors to reach Her Majesty's apartments."

This first villa shelters only ladies-in-waiting and officers of that court now so shorn of ceremony, and every evening it is plunged purposely in darkness as a precaution against shrapnel fire. A moment later I am summoned to Her Majesty's presence. Escorted by the same pleasant officer with his lantern, I hurry across to the next house. The rain is mingled with white butterflies, which are flakes of snow. Very indistinctly I see a desert-like landscape of dunes and sands almost white, stretching out into infinity.

"Would you not imagine it a site in the Sahara?" says my guide. "When your Arab cavalry came here the illusion was complete."

It is true, for even in Africa the sands turn pale in the darkness, but this is a Sahara transported under the gloomy sky of a northern night, and it has assumed there too deep a melancholy.

In the villa we enter a warm, well-lighted room, which, with its red furnishings, introduces a note of gaiety, almost of comfort, into this quasi-solitude, battered by wintry squalls. And there is a pleasure, which at first transcends everything else--the physical pleasure of approaching a fireplace with a good blazing fire.

While waiting for the Queen I notice a long packing-case lying on two chairs; it is made of that fine, unequalled, white carpentry which immediately reminds me of Nagasaki, and on it are painted Japanese letters in columns. The officer's glance followed mine.

"That," he says, "is a magnificent ancient sabre which the Japanese have just sent to our King."

I, personally, had forgotten them, those distant allies of ours in the Farthest East. Yet it is true that they are on our side; how strange a thing! And even over there the woes of these two gracious sovereigns are universally known, and the Japanese desired to show their special sympathy by sending them a valuable present.

I think this charming officer was going to show me the sabre from Japan, but a lady-in-waiting appears, announcing Her Majesty, and he withdraws at once.

"Her Majesty is coming," says the lady-in-waiting.

The Queen, whom I have never yet seen, consecrated as it were by suffering, with what infinite reverence I await her coming, standing there in front of the fire while wind and snow continue to rage in the black night outside. Through which door will she enter? Doubtless by that door over there at the end of the room, on which my attention is involuntarily concentrated.

But no! A soft, rustling sound makes me turn my head towards the opposite side of the room, and from behind a screen of red silk which concealed another door the young Queen appears, so near to me that I have not room to make my court bow. My first impression, necessarily furtive as a flash of lightning, a mere visual impression, I might say a colourist's impression, is a dazzling little vision of blue--the blue of her gown, but more especially the blue of her eyes, which shine like two luminous stars. And then she has such an air of youth; she seems this evening twenty-four, and scarcely that. From the different portraits I had seen of Her Majesty, portraits so little faithful to life, I had gathered that she was very tall, with a profile almost too long, but on the contrary, she is of medium height, and her face is small, with exquisitely refined features--a face almost ethereal, so delicate that it almost vanishes, eclipsed by those marvellous, limpid eyes, like two pure turquoises, transparent to reveal the light within. Even a man unaware of her rank and of everything concerning her, her devotion to duty, the superlative dignity of her actions, her serene resignation, her admirable, simple charity, would say to himself at first sight:

"The woman with those eyes, who may she be? Assuredly one who soars very high and will never falter, who without even a tremor of her eyelids can look in the face not only temptations, but likewise danger and death."

With what reverent sympathy, free from vulgar curiosity, would I fain catch an echo of that which stirs in the depths of her heart when she contemplates the drama of her destiny. But a conversation with a queen is not directed by one's own fancy, and at the beginning of the audience Her Majesty touches upon different subjects lightly and gracefully as if there were nothing unusual happening in the world. We talk of the East, where we have both travelled; we talk of books she has read; it seems as if we were oblivious of the great tragedy which is being enacted, oblivious of the surrounding country, strewn with ruins and the dead. Soon, however, perhaps because a little bond of confidence has established itself between us, Her Majesty speaks to me of the destruction of Ypres, Furnes, towns from which I have just come; then the two blue stars gazing at me seem to me to grow a little misty, in spite of an effort to keep them clear.

"But, madam," I say, "there still remains standing enough of the walls to enable all the outlines to be traced again, and almost everything to be practically reconstructed in the better times that are in store."

"Ah," she answers, "rebuild! Certainly it will be possible to rebuild, but it will never be more than an imitation, and for me something essential will always be lacking. I shall miss the soul which has passed away."

Then I see how dearly Her Majesty had already loved those marvels now ruined, and all the past of her adopted country, which survived there in the old stone tracery of Flanders.

Ypres and Fumes incline us to subjects less impersonal, and gradually we at last come to talk of Germany. One of the sentiments predominant, it seems, in her bruised heart is that of amazement, the most painful as well as the most complete amazement, at so many crimes.

"There has been some change in them," she says, in hesitating words. "They used not to be like this. The Crown Prince, whom I knew very well in my childhood, was gentle, and nothing in him led one to expect---- Think of it as I may, day and night, I cannot understand---- No, in the old days they were not like this, of that I am sure."

But I know very well that they were ever thus (as indeed all of us know); they were always the same from the beginning under their inscrutable hypocrisy. But how could I venture to contradict this Queen, born among them, like a beautiful, rare flower among stinging nettles and brambles? To be sure, the unleashing of their latent barbarism which we are now witnessing is the work of that King of Prussia who is the faithful successor of him whom formerly the great Empress Maria Theresa stigmatised; it is he indeed, who, to use the bitter yet very just American expression, has given them swelled heads. But their character was ever the same in all ages, and in order to form a judgment of their souls, steeped in lies, murders, and rapine, it is sufficient to read their writers, their thinkers, whose cynicism leaves us aghast.

After a moment's pause in which nothing is heard but the noise of the wind outside, remembering that the young martyred Queen was a Bavarian princess, I venture to recall the fact that the Bavarians in the Germany Army were troubled at the persecutions endured by the Queen of the Belgians, who had sprung from their own race, and indignant when the Monster who leads this Witches' Sabbath even tried to single out her children as a mark for his shrapnel lire.

But the Queen, raising her little hand from where it rested on the silken texture of her gown, outlines a gesture which signifies something inexorably final, and in a grave, low voice she utters this phrase which falls upon the silence with the solemnity of a sentence whence there is no appeal:

"It is at an end. Between _them_ and me has fallen a curtain of iron which will never again be lifted."

At the same time, at the remembrance of her childhood, doubtless, and of those whom she loved over there, the two clear blue eyes which were looking at me grow very misty, and I turn my head away so that I may not seem to have noticed.

XIII

AN APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE SERIOUSLY WOUNDED IN THE EAST

_June, 1915._

The Orient, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora--the mere enunciation of these words, especially in these beautiful months of summer, conjures up images of sun-steeped repose, a repose perhaps a little mournful because of the lack of all movement in those parts, but a repose of such adorable melancholy, in the midst of so many remembrances of great past destinies of humanity, which, throughout these regions, slumber, preserved under the mantle of Islam. But lately on this peninsula of Gallipoli, with its somewhat bare and stony hills, there used to be, in the winding folds of every river, tranquil old villages, with their wooden houses built on the site of ancient ruins, their white minarets, their dark cypress groves, sheltering some of those charming gilded _stelae_, which exist in countless numbers, as everyone knows, in that land of Turkey where the dead are never disturbed. And it was all so calm, all this; it seemed that these humble little Edens might have felt sure of being spared for a long time yet, if not for ever.

But alas! the Germans are the cause of the horror that is unchained here to-day, that horror without precedent, which it is their genius to propagate as soon as they have chosen a spot wherein to stretch out their tentacles, visible or concealed. And it has become a most sinister chaos, lighted by huge flames, red or livid, in a continuous din of hell. Everything is overthrown in confusion and ruin.

"The ancient castles of Europe and Asia are nothing more than ruins," writes to me one of our old Zouaves, who is fighting in those parts; "it is to me unspeakably painful to see those idyllic landscapes harrowed by trenches and shells; the venerable cypress trees are mown down; funereal marbles of great artistic value are shattered into a thousand fragments. If only Stamboul at least may be preserved!"

There are trenches, trenches everywhere. To this form of warfare, underground and treacherous, which the Germans have invented, the Turks, like ourselves, have necessarily had to submit. And so this ancient soil, the repository of the treasures of antiquity, has been ploughed up into deep furrows, in which appear at every moment the fragments of some marvel dating from distant, unknown epochs.

And at every hour of the night and day these trenches are reddened with blood, with the blood of our sons of France, of our English friends, and even of those gentle giants of New Zealand, who have followed them into this furnace. The earth is abundantly drenched with their blood, the blood of all these Allies, so dissimilar, but so firmly united against the monstrous knavery of Germany. Opposite, very close, there flows the blood of those Turks, who are nothing but the unhappy victims of hateful plots, yet who are so freely insulted in France by people who understand nothing of the underlying cause. They fall in thousands, these Turks, more exposed to shrapnel fire than our own men; nevertheless they fight reluctantly; they fight because they have been deceived and because insolent foreigners drive them on with their revolvers. If on the whole they fight none the less superbly, it is merely a question of race. And the simplest of them, who have been persuaded that they had to do with only their Russian enemies, are unaware that it is we who are there.

On this peninsula we occupy a position won and retained by force of heroism. The formation of the ground continues to render our situation one of difficulty and our tenacity still more worthy of admiration. Our position, indeed, is dominated by the low hills of Asia, where the forts have not yet all been silenced; there is therefore no nook or corner, no tent, no single one of our field hospitals, where doctors can attend to the wounded in perfect security, absolutely certain that no shell will come and interrupt them.

This terrible void France desires to fill with all possible dispatch. With the utmost haste, she is fitting out a great hospital ship, which the Red Cross Society has offered to provide at its own expense with three hundred beds, with linen, nurses, drugs and dressings. This life-saving ship will be moored in front of an island close to the scene of battle, but completely sheltered; steam and motor launches will be attached to it to fetch those who are seriously wounded and bring them on board day by day, so that they may be operated upon and tended in peace before infection and gangrene set in. How many precious lives of our soldiers will thus be saved!

It must be understood that the stretcher-bearers of the ship will bring back likewise wounded Turks, if there are any lying in the zone accessible to them; and this is only fair give and take, for they do the same for us. Some Zouaves who are fighting there wrote to me yesterday:

"The Turks are resisting with unequalled bravery; this all the newspapers of Europe admit. But our wounded and our prisoners receive excellent treatment from them, as General Gouraud himself announced in an Order of the Day; they nurse them, feed them, and tend them better than their own soldiers."

And here is a literal extract from a letter from one of our adjutants: "I fell, wounded in the leg, beside a Turkish officer more seriously wounded than myself; he had with him emergency dressings and he began by dressing my wound before thinking of his own. He spoke French very well and he said to me, 'You see, my friend, to what a pass these miserable Germans have brought us!'"

If I dwell upon the subject of the Turks it is not, I need hardly say, because I take a deeper interest in them than in our own men; no one will insult me by such a reflection. No. But as for our own soldiers, does not everyone love them already? Whereas these poor fellows are really too much misjudged and slandered by the ignorant masses.

"Spare them as soon as they hold up their hands," said a heroic general, brought home yesterday from the Dardanelles covered with wounds. He was addressing his men in a proclamation admirable for the loyalty of its tone. "Spare them," he said; "it is not they who are our enemies."

So, then, the great life-saving ship which is about to be sent to those parts is being made ready to sail in all haste. But the Red Cross Society have herewith taken upon themselves a heavy responsibility, and it will be readily understood that they will need money, much money. That is why I make this appeal on their behalf to all the world. So much has already been given that it is an earnest wish that still more will be forthcoming, for with us charity is inexhaustible when once the noble impulse stirs. I would ask that help may be given very soon, for there is need of dispatch.

How greatly this will change the condition of life for our dear soldiers. What confidence it will give them to know that if they fall, seriously wounded, there is waiting for them a place of refuge, like a little corner of France, which is equivalent to saying a corner of Paradise, and that they will be taken there at once. Instead of the miserable makeshift field hospital, too hot and by no means too safe, where the terrible noise never ceases to rack aching temples, there will be this refuge, absolutely out of range of gun fire, this great peaceful ship, open everywhere to the good, wholesome air of the sea, where at last prevails that silence so passionately desired by sufferers, where they will be tended with all the latest improvements and the most ingenious inventions by gentle French nurses in white dresses, whose noiseless footfall disturbs no slumber nor dream.

XIV

SERBIA IN THE BALKAN WAR

_July, 1915._

But lately I had included Serbia--its prince in particular--in my first accusations against the Balkan races, when they hurled themselves together upon Turkey, already at grips with Italy. But later on, in the course of so many wrathful indictments, I did not once again mention the name of the Serbians. That was because my information from those parts proved to me clearly that among the original Allies, the Allies of the Balkans, the Serbians were the most humane. They themselves, doubtless, observed that I made no further reference to them, for no insulting letter reached me from their country, whereas Bulgarians and even Greeks poured upon me a flood of unseemly abuse.

Since then the great philanthropist, Carnegie, in order to establish the truth definitely in history, has set on foot a conscientious international court of inquiry, whose findings, published in a large volume, have all the authority of the most impartial official documents. Here are recorded, supported by proofs and signatures, the most appalling testimonies against Bulgarians and Greeks; but noticeably fewer crimes are ascribed to Serbia's account. But this volume entitled "Conquest in the Balkans" (Carnegie Endowment) has, I fear, been too little read, and it is a duty to bring it to the notice of all.

Moreover, who would refuse pardon to that gallant Serbian nation for the excesses they may have committed? Who would not accord to them the profound sympathy of France to-day, when the Prussian Emperor, in his ruthless ferocity, has sacrificed them as a bait for one of his most abominable and knavish plots? Poor little Serbia! With what magnificent heroism she has succeeded in defending herself against an enemy who did not even shrink from the atrocious act of burning her capital at a time when it was peopled solely by women and children! Poor little Serbia, suddenly become a martyr, and sublime! I would willingly at least win back for her some French hearts which my last book may perhaps have alienated. And that is the sole purpose of this letter.

XV

ABOVE ALL LET US NEVER FORGET!

_August 1st, 1915._