A Year of War's Emotions

IF I were to attempt anything like a formal account of the first year of the war, the subject would naturally fall apart into campaigns and ‘phases,’ bounded by dates of day and month more or less precise. It would be the campaign in the West and the campaign in the East, the war in Belgium, the invasion of France, the battle of the Marne, the Russians in East Prussia, the Russians in Galicia, the Germans before Warsaw, the Germans across the Vistula, and so on, in orderly textbook fashion. But when I think back upon the past months as a man and not as a war expert, the chronicle does not present itself as a succession of events and phases, but as a succession of moods and states of mind. The record I most clearly visualize is less of what was going on in Europe than of what was going on in me, and millions like myself, in reaction to the news from the battlefields and the capitals. It is a record of what people in this neutral country thought and talked about, the fluctuation of their hopes and fears, their pities and indignations, their speculations on the world-issues at stake, and their wagers as to whether the war would end before November, 1916. For a review of this kind, maps and charts, names and dates, are of little help, though the concrete event and time underlie, of course, what may be called the psychic chronicle of the war. Such a psychic record, too, falls apart into phases and movements, but they are not always chronologically definable.

The first of the mental periods we lived through was the period of Belgian achievement as distinguished from the period of Belgian suffering. To the extent that chronology can bound a psychological state this phase ran for something like four weeks, from the first gun at Liége to Cambrai and St. Quentin. It was a time when men’s hearts glowed with the vision of righteousness apparently prevailing against might, and of the unconquerable soul of man. During the first three weeks of August, it seemed as if David and Goliath had returned and the colossus of Europe had been shattered by a pigmy. The tradition which was born around Sedan and Metz and had hovered over Europe for nearly half a century had vanished, apparently. The reputation of the German army was gone, the work of Bismarck was undone, and a great many of us were wondering just what would be done with the Hohenzollern. It was the golden age of the war. Right had shown that it was stronger than brute force, the sanctity of treaties had been vindicated, the small nations were to be definitely relieved of the nightmare of absorption by the swollen empires, Belgium was to be rewarded for her pains, Poland was to be restored, the Balkan peoples were to expand along the channels of nationality, a broad belt of neutralized nations between Germany and France was to guard Europe against the recurrence of catastrophe.

There followed a period of severe psychic reaction which I think of as the Sayville or Von Kluck period. After four weeks of isolation, Germany was in touch with her wireless towers on Long Island, and the first news she gave to the world was that force, after all, was having its own way against righteousness. Already we knew that Brussels had fallen, but that, we said, was largely for strategic reasons, or, at worst, because of a delay in the approach of French and British reinforcements. We had some hint, too, that the French were not doing as well as they should have done, measured by Belgium’s showing, but we were not yet adept in translating the official language of the dispatches, with their vague regroupings and retirements and their confused geography.

Then, in the last days of August, Germany, by way of Sayville, announces victory on every hand — victory in Alsace, in Lorraine, in Belgian Luxemburg, victory at Charleroi, and at Mons. The iron ring is drawing tight around France, and Von Kluck shoots up in the headlines. For two weeks after that the world reëchoes to the iron-shod tramp of Von Kluck. The Uhlan of the early Belgian period retires into the background and the invincible Right Wing sweeps on toward Paris.

These were days and nights when the thought of the Kaiser’s regiments marching up the Champs Elysées, made everything else, even to us, three thousand miles away, of little consequence. Something more than a campaign or a war was being decided: the world as men had known it was coming to an end. I have called it the Sayville or Von Kluck period. It might as well be called the period of Greater Sedan. The question was no longer of French victory, but whether the French could escape a Greater Sedan; to avert that was victory enough. Men became superstitious and argued by the calendar. They counted from the declaration of war on July 19, 1870, to Sedan on September 2, 1870, and found it was fortyfive days; and then they counted from the declaration of war on August 1,1914, and gained solace from the thought that if the fatal forty-fifth day passed without the Germans in Paris or the French army destroyed, that too would be a victory. And at Paris they spoke defiantly of falling back to the Pyrenees, if necessary.

I think of the period which followed as the Time-against-Germany period. By this time people were aware that the work of Von Moltke and Bismarck was not undone, that the German army was what forty-five years of preparation should have made it, that t he Germans were apparently winning. Only they were not winning fast enough. Time ran against the Kaiser, and we spoke of the Russian steam-roller. The Russian steam-roller came to grief in the mud of the Masurian Lakes; and, after a painful process of extrication, started lumbering back to the Niemen. But just then came the battle of the Marne, and in a trice we were again port ioning out the German Empire and exiling the Kaiser to St. Helena. The formal history of t he war may yet show that at the Marne the German cause failed definitely, and that the swift rebound of spirits that followed the ‘strategic withdrawal of the German right wing was justified. At present we do not know. Nevertheless, we spoke of the Marne as the high tide of the German onset, which was not so, and we pict ured the rest of the war as a steady Allied advance against the Rhine and the Oder, which was not so. But the present record is one of psychic ups and downs; and after the Marne the psychic state in this country rose to a crest of hopefulness. Would the Germans in their withdrawal from the Marne stop at the Meuse River, or would they keep on till they had reached the Rhine?

They did neither. They stopped at the Aisne River, and from the last week of September we began to think in terms of trenches and big guns. What Krupp had done at Liége and Namur in August he repeated at Maubeuge in early September, while the battle on the Marne was still in the balance, and drove home at Antwerp early in October. Up to the fall of Antwerp we had not lost our faith in the human quality as against the Krupp quality. Those were the days of Joffre and Sir John French and the beginning of the four weeks’ race between Joffre and the Germans for Antwerp and the shores of the North Sea. Like a child stringing beads Joffre strung territorial battalions and cavalry brigades in a chain that seemed destined to reach the Belgian fortress before the heavy German guns.

But the German guns won the race, and for months after that we were under the shadow of the 42-centimetre. German generalship had been outwitted, but German brute strength was in the ascendant. Sixteen-inch guns, caterpillar wheels, motor traction, we saw little else. Just as during mobilization days the imaginative correspondents saw endless lines of troop trains pouring across Cologne bridge or shunted back to East Prussia, so now they followed the itinerary of the Krupp howitzers. Where the guns came they would conquer. How soon would the Germans have them before Verdun ? It was assumed that Germany need only bring them before Verdun, and the walls of the fortress would go down like Jericho. Those were severe days of Krupp depression, but neutral spirits rose once more to a crest upon the wings of the trench. By the beginning of November the Germans were once more doomed to defeat. The heavy gun might have its way with the steel cupolas of the fortresses. It had found its match in the earthworks. By November 15 and the German failure around Ypres, the issue was decided. The water-logged ditch was the master. The Germans could not ‘ break through,’ and we entered on the Kitchener’s Millions phase of the war and the great spring drive in Belgium. We waited.

While Kitchener was gathering his millions for the spring drive and the armies lay watchful but inert in the ditches, the deadlock gave us leisure for a campaign which I believe has impressed itself on the mind of the world more vividly than the strategy and casualties of Galicia and Flanders, and which to a great many of us will be the real war years after dates and names have sunk into obscurity. Who now can place Liao-yang and Mukden wit hin their month or even the year? Who was Kodama? Who was Nodzu? Who, to answer instantaneously, was Kuroki ? But we still remember Samurai and Bushido, Japanese loyalty and superstition, hara-kiri, Emperor worship, Elder Statesmen. So in the present war what will be longest remembered, I dare say, are not the battles and campaigns, but the passions far behind the battle-line. While Kitchener was drilling his men there raged the Battle of the Multi-colored Books, — white books, yellow books, orange books, blue books, green books, red books, — these being the Truth as revealed to the Foreign Offices of the various nations. Between covers of different hue the governments presented their case to the unbiased judgment of the nations who were fighting on one side or the other, or were at heart with the Allies. From England’s White Book and France’s Orange Book the press of London and Paris and Petrograd was convinced of Germany’s iniquity and Austria’s responsibility for the war. From these same books the truth leaped to the eyes of readers in Berlin and Vienna that a conspiracy against civilization had been fomented by Sir Edward Grey and Foreign Minister Sazonof, in spite of the most devoted exertions by the Kaiser to keep the peace of Europe.

You would have said that those many-colored books, with their highly complicated and minute chronology and nomenclature, their dozens of diplomats from half a dozen capitals wiring reports, instructions, concessions, hypotheses, suggestions, temporary proposals, apparently presented a subject for months of careful study and analysis. Yet it is amazing how in the brief space of a few hours between the publication of the book and the going to press of their early editions the editors pierced right to the heart of the truth. A careful though hasty perusal convinced the London Times that what it had always said of the Kaiser was so. A mere glance through the pages revealed to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung the secrets of Britain’s unscrupulous diplomacy in all their hideous nakedness. These books crystallized opinion with astonishing rapidity and uniformity: pro-German opinion in Berlin, pro-Russian opinion in Petrograd, pro-Ally opinion in London and Paris.

The great mass of us who were neither diplomats nor secretaries for foreign affairs gave more time to the books than the editors did, not having their powers of rapid assimilation, but the effect was the same. A telegram of July 29 from Vienna to London or from Berlin to St. Petersburg showed what we had always suspected, that our sympathies with one side or the other were thoroughly justified. This phase of the war has continued from the first weeks to the present moment, subsiding in intensity after the publication of the first three or four books, rising again when Italy entered the list of Publishing Powers, subsiding once more when the war had gone on long enough and passions had become so deeply rooted and the expenditure of blood and treasure had become so great that it no longer mattered who was right or who was wrong. Every nation had paid a sufficiently heavy price to consider itself in the right.

Simultaneously with the battle of the books there raged the battle of the professors and the poets. In this Kultur campaign the Germans displayed their characteristic organization, discipline, and determination, but on the whole it was a defensive fight. The assault was delivered by the Allies. It was they who began the attack on Kultur after Louvain, and Professors Ostwald, Haeckel, Wundt, and Lamprecht only counter-attacked. The Allied bombardment was first directed against Fort Bernhardi, as I have shown in a former article. When that position was in a fair way of being demolished and the paper editions of Bernhardi, as I have pointed out, were selling as low as ten cents, the Allied fire was trained against Fort Treitschke. The Germans in Fort Treitschke held out rather well, but the Allies masked that strong position and concentrated the fire of their batteries on Fort Nietzsche. That position is still under siege.

In this battle of Kultur the casualties were tremendous on both sides, in respect to mental integrity, consistency, sense of proportion. It was not merely that men of learning, writers, poets, abandoned old sympathies and old friendships, but the slaughter among ideas was terrific. With the first day of w ar, the internationalism of the Socialists, the pacifism of the pacifists, went down in wreck. There followed individual disasters, revolutions, surrenders, which showed that men either did not know what they talked about before the war or did not know what they were talking about during the war. The case of Mr. H. G. Wells is to me as significant and as tragic as the fall of Antwerp or the rout of the Russians in Galicia. For, as there is irony in the thought of the anarch Nietzsche becoming the symbol for militarist Germany, there is irony and pathos in the picture of Wells, the prophet of the scientific conquest of the world, of discipline, forethought, orderliness, throwing himself passionately into the war against disciplined and orderly Germany. This man who for twenty years has been preaching against the muddle of modern life as it is lived in England, its lack of purpose, its cowardly compromises, was among the first to raise his voice for the suppression of Germany, for ending the ‘tramping, drilling foolery’ with which Europe had been filled by the Prussian sergeant. In the face of the dread example of efficiency as made in Germany, Wells suddenly awoke to the consciousness that there are things worth more in life than efficiency, purposiveness, and scientific drill. He awoke to the fact that the disorder of British individualism was something worth fighting for and dying for, and if before this he had intimated anything to the contrary, he virtually cried confession. War stripped Mr. Wells of his science, and revealed him only a man with local passions.

It was sapping tactics that were chiefly brought into play by the Allies in the battle of Kultur. The entire German position was undermined. ‘ Let us see,’ said the Allied scientists, professors, historians, scholars, ‘what are the real claims of these German professors, technicians, text-editors, dictionary-makers, and coal-tar specialists, whose authority we have hitherto acknowledged without question, and whose example we have humbly tried to imitate.’ And it at once appeared that German science and learning was a Kultur of mediocrity, a middleman, parasitic, sweat-and-grub Kultur, which made its profits by working over the tailings thrown up by the pioneer delvers of other nations, which rushed in its disciplined Teuton hordes only where some great alien had shown the way, which originated little and borrowed everywhere. The roll of the great discoverers and inventors was called and nearly every time it appeared that it was an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or even a Russian, to whom we owed the basic ideas of progress. All of German progress was coal-tarred with the same brush of imitation. Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Descartes, Lavoisier, Faraday, Pasteur, Becquerel, Benedetto Croce, Mendeleef, were found to be the real foundation of German greatness.

In the field of pure science and invention the thing was easily done, because the game of ‘ I ’m first’ has always been a favorite one for the jingoes of the academy. Take the telegraph, the steamboat, germs, wireless, radioactivity, — and the truth is, of course, that into every discovery the efforts and attainments of many men of many nations have entered. It is only necessary, therefore, to say that without Branly the Hertzian rays would never have been known; that without ClerkMaxwell the Germans would never have started, or the other way about; that without this particular German this other particular Frenchman would never have accomplished what he did. The war only popularized the game, gave it a fiercer spirit of rivalry, until Germany was deprived of credit even for Richard Wagner. For Wagner, in the first place, died in 1883, and so is not a modern German, and in the second place he was anticipated by Liszt and Berlioz, and in the third place his music will yield in the course of time to the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was a Saxon, that is, a non-Prussian, if indeed the crown does not belong to Beethoven, who was of Belgian origin and Viennese environment.

On German scholarship Professor Gilbert Murray pronounced the verdict, measured but conclusive. The German classicists — text-editors, dictionarymakers, commentators — have erudition, but lack the higher quality of imagination and feeling. Where a corrupt reading in a Greek author may be rectified by a knowledge of everything every other Greek author ever wrote, we go to the Germans. Where the correction calls for human insight the Germans will not do. ‘For anything that can be listed and counted,’ said Professor Murray, ’I go to the Germans. For feeling, no.’ If you asked Professor Murray how, outside the domain of specialized learning, he could explain away the Germans who have shown capacities for dreaming, imagining, feeling—the romantics, the mystics, the metaphysicians—he would possibly reply that that was just it. Even in those departments of the human soul that allow of neither mensuration nor classification, the German is a specialist. There have been German mystics, poets, dreamers, but their influence has not leavened the great mass of the German nation so as to give imagination to the German editor of Greek texts or feeling to the German classifier of the Amazon fauna. And if you were to mention Haeckel or Ostwald, the answer might be that upon their showing since the war began these men have revealed the limitat ions of their national character. A professor and a gentleman, a scholar and a poet, — no, sir, they are not made in Germany.

If you sympathize with this short way with the Germans, — and for all the fearful exaggeration to which the point has been pressed, I imagine the case is fairly strong, —you can see why the business of war should have become the great specialty of the Germans. It is a business in which imagination counts for little. Here, too, I suppose there would be no difficulty in proving that the great soldiers, the men who attained t he height of genius, were non-Germans. Frederick the Great is not of modern Germany, and in any case he would be overborne by Napoleon, Nelson, Marlborough, Turenne, Suwaroff. Compared with these men Von Moltke represents just that combination of laboriousness and discipline which is the secret of the triumph of German mediocrity in so many spheres. Yet the fact remains that in war there is no room for academic discussion regarding the relative importance of originality and mediocre application.

In war, results cannot be explained away. If I wish to argue t hat one Pasteur has done more for science than a thousand German bacteriologists with their microscopes, I may be right or wrong; it is not a practical matter. I am at liberty to say to the Greek exeditors, ‘I don’t care if you Germans have written more books on the optative mood; this Englishman has imagination with less knowledge and is my ideal of what a scholar should be. I refuse to warm to your enumerators and classifiers.’ You may be right, you may be wrong; it is a matter of choice. You may say to the Germans, ‘I don’t care for your hundred million dollars of aniline products; an Englishman showed you how’; and you may end the debate with a glow of satisfaction. But when the Germans bring up against you a 42-centimetre gun, when they discharge hydrochloric acid against your trenches, when they spot out your batteries from their Taubes, it is little satisfaction to say, ‘You learned how to make guns from the English and aeroplanes from the French, and poison fumes from the Russian chemists. You are not a people of imagination.’ When the 42-centimetre gun goes off, when the German range-finders locate your battery, you are dead, and whether it is better to be dead with original imagination or alive through laborious mediocrity, is hardly a subject for debate.

As I write, phase after phase of the great conflict suggests itself, almost without end, and always they are phases of emotion, phases of mind, attitudes, hopes, fears, exultation, depression. There was the period when Germany was to be starved into surrender, and the period when England’s empire was on the verge of ruin. There were months when neutrality held us absorbed, the neutrality of Roumania, of the Balkans, of Italy, of the Balkans again, of Roumania once more. There were the days when we lay under the pall of the Lusitania, as dry-wrung of emotions as no event to come can conceivably leave us; it will not yet bear thinking about or writing about. There is the phase which is dominant at this moment of writing, — the munition phase, of which I have already spoken, when everything is forgotten, Kaisers, Kultur, generalship, German persistence, French élan, British doggedness, and the war has resolved itself into a question of shells. And once more as I set down the word munitions, it occurs to me how the history of the human mind in this war may be divided and subdivided. For even under the head of munitions I might go back to the beginning and point out how we lived through a 42-ccntimetre period, a 75millimetre period, a shrapnel period, a hand-grenade period, an asphyxiatinggas period.

But there is one psychic phase of the war which rose to consciousness after the first weeks, which maintained its poignancy throughout the vicissitudes of months, and which, though not so often talked about now or written about, needs only be mentioned to reassert its grip on our hearts. This is the sorrow of Belgium. Though the end of the war may bring about the reconstruction of Europe, though empires may fall and nations lose their existence, the great chapter in the chronicle as it will present itself to the men of the future will be the story of how Belgium suffered. After a year of war, and ten million men in the casualty lists, and dramatic swayings of the battle line across ruined countrysides, — Flanders, Galicia, the blood-soaked plains of Champagne; after Zeppelin and submarine, yes, even after the Lusitania, which to so many of us came as a lurid precipitant of doubts and opinions, one need only mention Louvain to find the emotional centre of this dreadful year. The treaty of peace may perhaps bring about a clearing of judgment on all other questions, an agreement of minds, a dissipation of misunderstandings. Peace will come presumably on the basis of give and take. But there is one clause on which there can be no compromise between the German mind and the mind of the world, and that is Belgium.

What many of us have said about the limitations of German imagination may be wrong. But the behavior of the German mind with regard to Belgium is something which can never be disposed of in any reconciliation. We may put aside and forget the one mad act in a clean life, the one puerile weakness in a great mind. The invasion of Belgium might be such an act of aberration if it were not for the persistent German apology for the treatment of Belgium. Only it is not apology: it is a sort of puzzled wonder on the part of Germany why the world should feel as it did, as it does, about the sufferings of a nation. The invasion of Belgium and the violated scrap of paper might have been forgotten and forgiven, but Germany’s persistent plaint that she has been misunderstood about Louvain, misunderstood about francs-tireurs, about ransoms of cities, cannot be forgotten. If by this time the German mind cannot understand the world’s feeling about Belgium, it never will.

And yet the German diplomats at Washington, the consuls-general and consuls and vice-consuls might have let the Foreign Office at Berlin know. I cannot forget Thanksgiving of 1914. If Germany’s diplomats had been on Franklin Field when Cornell and Pennsylvania were fighting a minor battle of Kultur last Thanksgiving Day, they might have understood. Between halves of a football game where passions ran high, they would have seen a battalion of boy scouts with large tin basins invading the benches. They were collecting money for the Belgians. There were months when in these United States at church festivals, commercial banquets, football games, class reunions, and strawberry festivals, there was always an intermission — for Belgium. It had become a solemn rite, a religion. If Von Bernstorff had been on Franklin Field last November he would have understood — and perhaps Germany would have understood.