CHAPTER XXXIII
THE FORCING-HOUSE OF BESTIALITY
The Germans have given to us an illustration, though such was not needed by thinking men to convince them of its truth, of the fact that the beast in humanity only requires encouragement to make us more bestial than any wild thing of the jungle or even the filthy cur of the streets. If any man takes as his guiding principle the devilish doctrine that the "end justified the means" he will soon become a menace to his fellows and any good impulses that he may originally have will pass away. The German Government made savagery, brutality, and bestiality a deliberate policy, and now it is their unconscious impulse. Germany is paying a terrible penalty in the degradation and demoralization of her whole people for having given the direction of the country into the hands of the Devil in exchange for power, and the German army is to-day a forcing-house for bestiality and there is no atmosphere in the whole world that so conduces to evil. In the beginning of the war letters and statements of prisoners showed that there were then many decent Germans who were horrified at the abominations they had seen and committed at the command of their government. But latterly, you cannot find any trace of this feeling.
Now they gloat over it.
There is no one in the world to-day except those who are of like mind who do not know that the story of the German atrocities is true, for Germany has _admitted_ enough crimes to convince any sane man that she would stick at nothing. No action could be too cruel, no deed too beastly, no torture too diabolical, no insult too keen, no impulse too filthy, no disfigurement too hideous, no vandalism too shocking, no destruction too complete, no stooping too low that Germany would hesitate to do where she has opportunity. When Germany boasted of the murder by drowning of women and babes on the high seas she proclaimed to the world that she was a criminal, and we do not need to have any other crimes proven to convince us that, while there is such a thing as justice, she must not go unpunished.
Criminals have been forgiven, but not before they are repentant; _Safety_, as well as _Justice_, demands that the murderer, the assassin, the raper shall not go free. Germany has not only committed all these crimes, but her theologians and professors have condoned them. The man who counsels forgiveness to Germany adds hypocrisy to the will to commit the same crimes. To forgive, we are told, is divine, but the Divine does not forgive without repentance. Has Germany shown signs of repentance yet? Well, then, the man who talks of forgiveness to Germany before she is on her knees begging for forgiveness is an enemy of peace and a condoner of crime.
It is so easy for those who have not suffered to tell the victims "to forgive." _We_ do not go in nightly dread lest in the morning we should have to rake among the ruins of our homes for the mangled body of our baby! We do not have to work in daily fear lest we should have to return to an empty house whence wife or daughter have been dragged by brutal hands! _For three years_ the people of London and Paris and thousands of other cities have never known but that at any moment their house might be brought down in ruins about their ears, entombing all that they hold dear! _For three years_ the men of northern France and Belgium have never known but that while they were working, under compulsion, against the life of their own blood and country in a German munition factory, some soldiers might not be calling at their homes to take the woman that they love God alone knows where! These very things have happened to tens of thousands. Week after week the human hawks come over London, and ever the toll of civilians and women and babies done to death grows larger! One hundred thousand young girls were taken from Lille and other cities away from knowledge or protection of their kin, and until recently we had no news of any of them, but some have been thrown into Switzerland, of no further use to Germany; used up like sucked lemons, they are cast aside for the Swiss to feed.
Germany has in her maw to-day more than ten millions of slaves.
In America or Australia there are no hospitals where lie thousands of girls too young to become mothers who have been raped. We have not hundreds of boys who will never become men. A young girl said to me: "There is a baby coming; it is a boche; when it is born I will cut its throat!" A woman showed me on an estaminet floor the blood-stains of her own baby butchered before her eyes. These were French women, not ours. But what if they had been? Your sister! Your mother! Your wife! And they might have been but for the accident of geography.
Would you then have felt as bitter as these people? Or would you still have kindly feelings to Germany and not want to "humiliate her." There may be beings who could see daughter violated or brother mutilated without taking personal vengeance, but such should not be permitted to breathe the air with MEN.
The only people who have a right to say what punishment shall be meted out to Germany for her misdeeds, are the women of France, of Belgium, of Poland, of Serbia, of Rumania, of Italy, who have suffered these things; and if any one, King or President, Parliament or Pope, dares stand between these people and their just wrath they deserve to be pilloried in the minds of men as condoners of crime, as accessories after the fact.
The only chance for permanent peace, and guarantee that these abominable crimes shall not be committed again, is that we should so punish Germany that she shall realize "that war does not _pay_," and that the whole earth may know that no nation can commit these atrocities and go unpunished.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR
The observation of men in many circumstances of peril has quite convinced me that it is those who are most afraid that do the bravest deeds. I do not mean that the fact that they are afraid increases the difficulty of the doing, because it lessens it. It is fear that drives men to heroism! And many a man attempts the superhuman feat of courage not to show to others that he is no coward, but as evidence in the court of his own judgment, to disprove the accusations of conscience, which asserts he is craven. The old illustration of one soldier who accused another of having no bravery because he had no fear, by saying, "If you were as much afraid as I am you would have run away long ago,"
is not true to life, for it is the man of dulled feelings that is the first to run, and the "man who is afraid of being afraid" who stays at his post to the last. I have ever found that the best scouts, men who must generally work alone in the dark, are those of highly strung nervous temperaments. I have noticed, too, that our best airmen were of the same type, for if you go into any mess of pilots on the front you will see them always fidgeting, their hands never still, betraying nervousness. I have gone down the trench before a charge and seen the men with teeth chattering and blanched faces, but at the appointed second these men go over the top, none hesitating, every man performing prodigies of valor; not one but was a hero, yet not one that was not afraid.
There must be something wrong with the make-up of a man who under modern artillery-fire is not afraid. There are no nerves that do not break down eventually under the strain, but the man who shrinks from a shadow, and shudders at the touch of cold mud does his job with care and walks unhesitatingly into the mouth of hell. I have seen our signallers mending the telephone-wire under fire; each time it would break they would curse and tremble, but immediately go out and repair it accurately, slowly, no skimped work, repeating the performance again and again. There is in our spirit some reserve force which on occasion the will uses to stiffen resolution--the second wind of determination.
Fear is the "purgative of the soul"! There is nothing so wholesome for a man as to be "scared to death"! Nothing that so drives out the littlenesses that poison his life and set up the toxaemia of selfishness. Many a man that before the war made the acquiring of wealth or the gaining of the plaudits of his friends his chief aim, now finds that these things have no appeal for him. For he has been to the edge of life and looked into the abyss, and fear has stripped from him the rags of self-adornment; and standing naked between the worlds his soul has found that it needs no beautifying but the cleansing of self-forgetfulness.
This war is one of the greatest blessings this world has ever known, for it has brought to us fear of selfish force, fear of the engines of our own construction, fear of isolation in world politics, fear of secret diplomacy, fear of an unguarded peace, fear of an unprepared future, fear of an undisciplined people, fear of an irresponsible government, and, above all THE FEAR OF FORGETTING!
But there is another reason why a man in battle, though afraid, does not fail. The fact is that men in a regiment or an army are not under the domination of their own will at all, but of the collective will of the whole. That is why some regiments are so anxious to keep alive their traditions, and emblazon their battles on their colors. That is why we devote so much time in the training of young recruits to the knowledge of the esprit de corps of the regiment. That is why the regulars are always the best fighters. It is not their longer training, for that is a handicap with new methods of warfare. It is not because of their superior discipline, for the territorials have not lacked perfect discipline. But there is an atmosphere in the regular regiments that makes one brother that goes into the regulars a better soldier than the other that enlists in militia. This atmosphere is compounded of pride in past achievements and confidence that the colors that have never been lowered, though shot down on many a field, cannot be shamed to-day. The victors of many engagements have an enormous advantage in battle. No one expected anything but the most heroic courage from the British regulars who had never failed when called upon, but every one was not a little anxious how "Kitchener's" would stand their first ordeal of fire.
Every mass of men has, besides the will and mind of each one of them, a collective will and mind. Every town has this--who has not felt, on entering a town and viewing its shops and people, a certain pushing toward behavior--some towns tend to make one frivolous, others grave.
I know a city which, every time I enter, makes me think when last I was in church, while there is another in which I always want to dance or view the Follies. Have you not seen countrymen in town, whose clothes proclaim that they have never been out later than nine o'clock in a lifetime, trying to be the gay Lothario, drinking wine in a cabaret?
Every house has its personality made up of the collective minds of the people who inhabit it. Take your child to one strange house and he will fidget uncomfortably on the edge of his chair; but take him to another, just as strange, and he will romp about without hesitation.
Children are like the canaries we use to detect the presence of poisonous gases, most sensitive to atmosphere.
In the same way an army has ONE WILL, and that is why in battle you will not see one man fail, or there will be panic and all will fail.
In every army there are individual men weak in resolution who, left to themselves, would run away; but as the MIND of the army as a whole is courageous, so they are swept along in spite of themselves. The German army has ONE MIND for bestiality, and the Allied army has ONE MIND for victory.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE SPLENDOR OF THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY
To those who are thrilled by the old-time tales of adventurous chivalry or moved by the narrative of high endeavor and heroic achievement for some noble ideal, I bring a conception of the marvellous glory of these present days. We have been wont to sing of the times when thousands left home and comfort on a Holy Crusade, but the Crusaders of these days are numbered in millions.
Never were there such stirring times as these, never since the first tick of time have the hours been so crowded! Never before did so many men live nobly or die bravely. The young knights from many lands are seeking the Holy Grail, and finding it in forgetfulness of self and in sacrifice for their fellows. You and I are living to-day among the deeds of men that make the deeds of the heroes of past times pale into insignificance. Never were there bred men of such large and heroic mould as the men of to-day.
Here's a trench--on which a shell falls--and where one shell falls another always follows in the same place;--the shell blows in a dugout and there is little chance that the men sheltering therein shall be alive, yet those on either side, knowing that another shell will fall in a second or so, in utter forgetfulness of self leap in and with their bare fingers scrape away the dirt lest haply there should be some life yet remaining in this quivering, mangled human flesh.
Oh! What chances the men of earth have to-day to be as God! The highest conception any religion has given us of God is that he is one that would sacrifice himself--"Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends"--and to-day they're doing it by the million. Every moment is adding names to the honor-roll of heaven of men who follow in His steps.
Have you conceived that the uniting together of the nations that love peace in this struggle will do more to guarantee peace in the future than anything else that has ever happened in world politics,--that it will join France, Britain, and America into a trinity of free peoples who will prevent war, at least for many generations? We are being bound together by the strongest tie that ever tied nation to nation, that ever bound one people to another, not by political treaties that may be torn up, but by the great tie of common blood shed in a common cause on a common soil. That narrow lane that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is the great international cemetery, and for many generations it will be the Mecca of pilgrimages from all our countries. The wreaths of America will mingle with the immortelles of France and the flowers from Britain and the pilgrims shall there get to know, understand, and love each other as they engage in the holy task of paying a common tribute to their common dead. Shall not the mingling blood of Frenchmen, Britons, and Americans make the flowers of peace to grow? They never had such soil before.
There is being created, also, in all our countries a new aristocracy--the aristocracy of courage. We never had a chance up till now to prove who were our real, our best people, and we have been accustomed to measure our citizens by the false and small standards of wealth, birth, and intellect. Well! There has been given to us to-day a new standard whereby we can measure ourselves, the standard of courage, sacrifice, and service. Nobody in England cares to-day whether you are descended from William the Conqueror or not! No one will care in America whether your ancestor came over in the Mayflower, or whether he signed the Declaration of Independence! Every American has a chance to-day of signing a far greater declaration than that great one of '76--the declaration of personal willingness to sacrifice all on the altar of liberty. In England, in America, in Australia, in all the countries of the world in the days that are to be, men and women will make their boast in this one thing, or have no cause for boasting at all, of the part that they had in this fight, the greatest fight that has ever been waged for liberty, for righteousness, and for the virtue of womanhood.
What a splendid opportunity it is for us to be able to personally pay the price of liberty. How easy to forget that freedom has either to be earned by ourselves or enjoyed because some one else has paid the price for us. Had we not forgotten in our countries that the democracy that we boast of is no credit to us because it was won by the blood of other men? Men died that we might be able to govern ourselves! Women carried heart-ache and loneliness to the grave that we might make our own laws!
Liberty! Such an easy word to mouth, but how precious in the sight of God! Liberty is one of the treasures of heaven and only committed to men at great cost, lest they should undervalue it.
In these great and wonderful times there has been given to us the glorious opportunity to earn our own liberty, to prove our own personal right to citizenship in a free country.
You may not be able to pay in good, red blood, you may not be able to pay much in the coin of the republic, but if each of us does not pay in whatsoever coin we have, there will come soon to us the days in which we shall realize that we are thieves and robbers, enjoying that to which we have no right, won so hardly with the deaths and wounds of men and the salt tears of women. In the New World that shall be born after the birth-pangs of the present days, we shall realize that we have no place, our souls shall shrink and shrivel as we gaze on the honor scars of those who have paid, and we shall be elbowed to the outskirts of the crowd, as the people bow before the men whom the President and people delight to honor--the men sightless, the men limbless, the memory of the men lifeless.
CHAPTER XXXVI
NOT A FIGHT FOR "RACE" BUT FOR "RIGHT"
I have no patience with the waterish sentiment that suggests that the lines of the Germans in America and Australia have fallen in hard places because they are called upon to take up arms against their own blood. For this is not a war of race, but of right! It is not a war of Britons, Americans, and French against Germans and Austrians! It is a war of men in all nations against beasts!
There is something in all of us that is stronger than kinship, higher than citizenship--manhood--and every one who is a man, though he be of German blood will join us in this struggle against the monster that has devoured women and children and many fair lands.
We have in the Australian army one general of German blood, another of Austrian, and hundreds of men of both, but they have been fighting loyally with us, because they were men and could not be held back from striking at tyranny and wrong. Remember, in the Australian army all are volunteers.
Every one now knows what Germany stands for and the menace she is to the future of the world if her power is not destroyed, and every one who does not help to defeat her is an ally of the Kaiser and helping him to win the war.
The Judge is to-day separating the sheep from the goats, not according to nationality, but according to how they stand in this strife for right, for never was there a cause so divinely right as the cause of the Allies, and never a cause so devilishly wrong as that of the Germans.
The great mass of the German people have shown themselves to be on the side of evil, but every German in our own countries is given a chance in the present days to prove himself a man who hates brutality and cruelty and wrong, or by standing aloof from helping us show that he has the will to do these things as his kinsman in France. These should be given the same medicine as the Kaiser's millions "over there." We should also root out the Kaiser's secret allies in our midst, some of them not of German blood, who for pay do his dirty work, never forgetting also that the neutral and the lukewarm at this present juncture are also our enemies and have their hands stained with the blood of our kin who die for this cause.
Washington when he called on the English colonists in this country to resist the German mercenaries of the German King of England did not bewail the fate that compelled them to fight against their own country and where their kin dwelt. No! For his cause was just and just-minded men must support it though a sword pierced their own hearts.
Lincoln when he called on the people of the Northern States to free the slaves did not exempt those who had friends or kin down South, but he called on every one who was free to strike a blow for the freedom of other men, though in so doing they should be cutting off their own right arms.
In this war we are not only fighting to free millions who are held in a far worse slavery than ever the negro was in, but we are fighting for our own liberty and that of our children, which has been directly attacked. Not all Germans are bestial and cruel, with no regard for honor, but just how many of them are not remains for the American and Australian citizens of German descent to prove.