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The World Decision by Robert Herrick

R >> Robert Herrick >> The World Decision




Whether the French can apply the inner meaning of the German lesson,
can incorporate it into their characters and transmit it to their
children, is a larger question for us as well as for them, for the
whole world. But their success in applying it in this war is all
the more noteworthy in contrast with the failure of their two great
allies, who were not invaded, not handicapped at the start, as was
France. The failure of Great Britain and of Russia to master the
lesson is so obvious, so lamentable, that it needs no emphasis here.
France, with the brunt of invasion only a few miles from the gates
of Paris, her factories and mines lost, has provided herself very
largely, has supplied Serbia with ammunition, Italy with artillery,
Russia, England, and Italy with aeroplanes. For many months the
thirty miles of the western front held by the English was defended
with the assistance of French artillery.

The Slav one expected to fail in getting his German lesson, for
obvious reasons, especially because of his reactionary and corrupt
bureaucracy. But not the Anglo-Saxon! As a clever French staff
officer remarked,--"The two disappointments of the war have been
the Zeppelins and the English." Without making a _post mortem_ on
the English case, the Latin superiority is a phenomenon worth
pondering. For the Anglo-Saxon, cousin to the Teuton, would supposably
be the better fitted to receive the German lesson of organization
and discipline. But that ideal of individual liberty, which England
surely did not inherit from her Germanic ancestors, seems to have
degenerated into a license that threatens her very existence as a
great state. The English still talk of "muddling through somehow"!
If the end of autocracy is barbarism, the end of liberty is anarchy.

The Latin has kept the mean between the two extremes. The French,
having fought more desperately in their great revolution for individual
freedom than any other people, seem able to recognize its necessary
limits and to subordinate the individual at necessity to the salvation
of the nation. In the Latin blood, however modified, there remains
always the tradition of the greatest empire the world has known, which
for centuries withstood the assaults of ancient barbarism. The wonderful
resistance and adaptability of the French to-day is of more than
sentimental importance to mankind. All the world, including their foes,
pay homage to the gallantry and greatness of the French spirit in their
dire struggle, but what has not been sufficiently recognized is the
significance to the future of the recovery by the Latin peoples of the
leadership of civilization. We Americans who have both traditions in our
blood, with many modifications, are as much concerned in this world
decision as the combatants themselves.

So much has become involved in the titanic struggle, so many
subordinate issues have risen to cloud the one cardinal spiritual
issue at stake, that we are likely to forget it or deny that there
is any. Is the world to be barbarized again or not?

* * * * *

This reiterated use of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical
nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this
world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims
of respective "_Kulturs_" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the
barbarian can have a very superior form of "_Kultur_" and yet remain
a barbarian in soul? These pages on the German lesson are a tribute
to Germany's special contribution to the world. Social and industrial
organization, systematic instead of loose ways of doing things,
prudence, thrift, obedience and subordination of the individual to
the state, discipline--in a word, an efficient society. It is a great
lesson! No one to-day can belittle its meaning. Possibly the remote,
hidden reason for all this seemingly useless bloody sacrifice in our
prosperous modern world is to teach the primary principles of the
lesson. God knows that we all need it--we in America most after the
Russian, and next to us the English. If the world can learn the lesson
which Germany is pounding in with ruin, slaughter, and misery,--can
discipline itself without becoming Teutonized,--the sacrifice is not
too great. If the non-Germanic peoples cannot learn the lesson
sufficiently well, then the Teuton must rule the world with "his old
German God." His boasted superiority will become fact, destiny.

That is the momentous decision which is being wrought out these days
in Europe with blood and tears--the relative importance to mankind of
discipline and liberty. The ideal is to have both, as much of one as
is consistent with the other. In this country and in England may be
seen the evil of an individualism run into license--the waste, the
folly of it. And in Germany may be seen the monstrous result of an
idolatrous devotion to the other ideal--the man-made machine without
a soul. Between the two lies the fairest road into the future, and
that road, with an unerring instinct, the Latin follows.

* * * * *

The German lesson is not the whole truth: it is the poorer half of
the truth. An undisciplined world is more in God's image than a world
from which beauty, humanity, and chivalry have been exterminated. But
discipline is the primal condition of survival. Between these two poles,
between its body and its soul, mankind must struggle as it has always
struggled from the beginning of time....

When I looked on the sensitive, suffering faces of Frenchwomen in
their mourning, the wistful eyes of crippled youths, the limp forms
of wounded men, the tense, bent figures of dirty _poilus_ in their
muddy trenches, I knew that through their souls and bodies was
passing the full agony of this struggle.




V


_The Faith of the French_

I do not mean religious faith, although that too has been evoked,
reaffirmed by the trials and griefs of the war, but I mean faith in
themselves, in their cause, in life. The unshakable faith of the French
is the one most exhilarating, abiding impression that the visitor takes
from France these days. It is so universal, so pervasive, so contagious
that he too becomes irresistibly convinced, no matter how dark the present
may be, how many victories German arms may win, that the ultimate triumph
of the cause is merely deferred.

There has never been the slightest panic in France, not during the
mobilization when white-faced men and women realized that the dreaded
hour had struck, not even in those days of suspense when the public
began to realize that the first reports of French victories in Alsace
were deceptive and that the enemy was almost at the gates of Paris.
A million or so people left the city with the Government in order to
escape the expected siege, but there was no panic, not even among the
wretched creatures driven from their homes in the provinces before the
blast of the German cyclone.

Ever since the battle of the Marne the tide of confidence has been
steadily rising, in spite of the tedious disappointments of trench
warfare, the small gains of ground, the steady toll of lives, in
spite of reverses in Galicia and Poland and the mistakes in the
Dardanelles, in spite of English sluggishness and Russian weakness.
Each reverse has been courageously accepted, analyzed, and found not
decisive, merely temporary. Victory must come to the ones who can
endure to the end, and the French know now that they can endure.
"We can do it all alone, if we have to!" Again, "The Germans know
that they are beaten already: they know it in Berlin as well as we
do." This confidence is based on realities--first on the success with
which France has learned the German lesson and completely reorganized
her life for the business of war. "We were not ready last August--but
we are now." Her machine is growing stronger in spite of the daily
waste of life, while the German machine is weakening steadily.

* * * * *

The farther one gets into the military zone, the more fervent and
evident is this confidence, until on the front it is an irresistible
conviction that inspires men and officers alike. Even a novice like
myself began to understand why the army is sure of ultimate victory,
and the longer one stays at the front the more this faith of the
French seems justified. In the first place, they have so well got
that German lesson! The supply of shell and gun is so abundant, also
of fresh troops in reserve thanks to "Papa" Joffre's frugality with
human lives; the first, second, third lines--on _ad infinitum_ to
Paris--are so carefully fortified, so alertly held against any "drive"!
And the troops are so fit! They have made themselves at home in their
new camping life behind the lines of dugouts and caves; they have
become gnomes, woodsmen, cavemen, taking on the earth colors of the
primitive world to which they have been forced to return in order
to free the soil of their country. Then one sees the steady creeping
forward of the front itself, not much as it looks on a small-scale
map, but as the officers point out the blasted woods, or the brow of
a hill over which the trenches have been slowly pushed metre by metre
throughout the interminable weeks of constant struggle, one sees that
gradually the French have got the upper hand, the commanding positions
in long stretches of the trench wall. They are on the hills, their
artillery commands the level fields before them. It is like the struggle
between two titanic wrestlers who have swayed back and forth over the
same ground so long that the spectator can see no advance for either.
But one wrestler knows that the inches gained from his adversary count,
that the body in his grasp is growing weaker, that the collapse will
come soon--with a rush. He cannot tell fully why he feels this
superiority, but he knows that his adversary is weakening.

Perhaps a colonel on the front will tell you with elation,--"We know
that the Boches across the way are discouraged, because our prisoners
say so,--we take prisoners more easily than we did,--and they are all
mixed up in their formations. We know that they have to drive their men
to the job, that the lines about here are stripped as bare as they dare
keep them. There used to be a lot of reserve troops behind their lines,
but our aviators say there aren't any in X----any more! And they aren't
as free with their _obus_ as they used to be, and they are 'old
nightingales,' not first quality." Perhaps the staff officers will smile,
knowing that the enemy is massing his forces elsewhere on the long front,
but this trick of rapid change is becoming harder to perform, and more
exhausting. At any rate, the plain _poilus_ in the front trenches are
instinctively sure: "We'll have 'em now soon!" They have watched that
grim gray wall opposite so long that, like animals, they can feel what
is going on there on the other side.

* * * * *

At staff headquarters in a more contained, reserved way there is
the same air of vital confidence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the
general asked me. "We are pumping good water all over this sector
into the front trenches, too.... Oh, we are _bien installe!_ ... It
may be another year, two, perhaps more, but the end is certain. There
is one man in the trenches, another just behind in reserve, still
another resting somewhere in the woods for his week off, and more,
all the men we want back in the _depots_!" And he turns the talk to
the good health of his men, their fine spirit. For one of the human,
lovable qualities of the officers whom I met is that they prefer to
talk about the comfort, the _morale_, the _esprit_, of their men to
discussing "operations."

Just here I see where the French have risen above the machine idea
of the German lesson. There is a something plus, over and above
"preparation," "organization," "efficiency," which the Latin has
and on which his confidence in ultimate victory largely rests. That
is his belief in the individual, his reliance on the strength of the
individual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the all-important
factor in the army: military force depends ultimately upon the _esprit_
of the individual which creates the _morale_ of the whole. Of course,
the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern
way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor
transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the
individual, without the cooeperation of his _esprit_, the army would
be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest
of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed
to the German machine theory of war.

The German staff has done marvels with its machine. It hurls armies
over the map of Europe of initiative and devotion in the common soldier,
who in the Latin conception of the word remains a human being with a
soul. An officer remarked to me, "We cannot have our men come from the
trenches glum and downcast--a Frenchman must laugh and joke or something
is wrong with him. So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines, and
sports." Instead of more drill they give their men "shows," so that they
may laugh and forget the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!

* * * * *

The civilian shines through every French soldier--the civilian who is
a human being like you or me, with the same human needs. The officers
chat and joke familiarly with their men. Comradeship is substituted for
tyranny. France, one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still takes
the ideal of equality seriously. When I asked an officer at Rheims why
he had not had a day's leave in ten months while English officers went
home on leave, he said, with a shrug,--"France is a republic: our men
must get their leaves first."

The machine system gives startling results--in a short campaign. But
when it comes to an endurance contest, to the long, long strains of
trench warfare, something other than drill and organization is necessary,
something that will rouse the human being to the last atom of effort
that he has in him. When men must stand up to their waists in icy water,
live in the inferno of constant bombardment, not for hours and days, but
for weeks and months, something other than discipline is needed to keep
them sufficiently alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly,
unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the hell they have escaped,--not
once, but twice, three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism in the
individual soldier has been the triumph of the Latin system.

The faith of the French rests justly on their heroic resolution, their
ability to endure as individuals, more than on the lesson learned of
preparation and organization.

* * * * *

Faith is a belief in the evidence of things unseen. French faith
is of many kinds, not purely material, not military. They believe
so profoundly in the perfect justice and high importance of their
cause that it would seem as if they counted upon the cause alone to
win the victory. No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better
cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unprepared, which is the best
evidence of peaceable will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor
people, bleeding from the wounds of their own country,--what better
cause for war could men have? And the Latin intelligence of the
French enables them from the humblest to the highest to perceive the
universality of the principles for which they are called upon to die.
It is no selfish, not even a merely national, cause--it is the cause
of nothing less than humanity in which they fight.

The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the
cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all
wars can be avoided--perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no!
For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy
is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in
the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and
have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But
the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses,
when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they
will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of
personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our
victory."

The philosopher's belief is based on the faith that the principles
of justice, of law, of humanity are stronger, more enduring than any
organization of force no matter how efficient, for this is a moral
world. And the individual or nation who relies upon might to enforce
wrong must in the end, perceiving the irrationality of his world,
collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-breakingly slow, but
the grist is as sure as life itself.

Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has expressed "The Moral Victory":
"It is the noblest, the highest of causes which has been submitted
to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justifies the terrible extent
of the drama and the immense sacrifices it imposes. The material results
of victory will be immense, the moral results will be even greater....
Moral forces are superior to physical forces, and in spite of all they
will have the last word.... Our youth has gone to the front in the
serene conviction that it was fighting not only for the _patrie_, but
for humanity, that this war was a sort of crusade, that they could
claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne d'Arc."

It is that heroic consciousness of a righteous martyrdom that I read
on the faces of the black-robed women in the street, too proud for
tears; in the silent figures on the hospital beds, suffering without
protest an agony too deep for words. And when I encountered a file
of soldiers in the muddy trenches, flattening themselves out against
the earth walls to let me pass, carrying pails of soup to the comrades
up front, or sitting motionless beside their burrows along the trench
wall, their hands clasping their rifles,--dirty, grimed, and bearded,--I
saw the same thing in their tired eyes, their drawn faces. Mute martyrs
in the cause of humanity, in _my_ cause, they were giving their lives
for others, for _me_, not merely that the German might be driven from
France, but that justice and honor and peace between men might prevail
in the world!

* * * * *

Because the French people are inspired with the grandeur and the
moral significance of their cause, they cannot understand a certain
cynical attitude of mind, well illustrated by a former Senator of
the United States, who has been high in the councils of the defunct
Progressive Party. After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he
remarked at a luncheon given him by some distinguished Frenchmen,--"Don't
tell me about the justice of your cause or about the atrocities. I am
not interested in that. What I want to know is, who is going to win!"
Who is going to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The barbarian
mind cannot comprehend that the winning itself in a world cause is
inextricably involved in the justice and worth of the cause.

For the same reason the French people have been puzzled by the sort
of neutrality preached and practiced at Washington since the outbreak
of the war. It is plain enough that neither France nor England desires
to have the United States go to war with Germany. We can help them
better as a huge supply house than as an ally, much as that might
offend our vanity. The French appreciate also our President's desire
to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-loving people and know
the frightful costs of war. But they cannot understand a neutrality
that avoids committing itself upon a moral issue such as was presented
to the world in Belgium, in the sinking of the Lusitania. And in spite
of the strict censorship, which for obvious reasons has muzzled the
French press in its comment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occasionally
flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson neutrality have appeared in print,
as the following from Hanotaux: "We should be wanting truly in frankness
toward our great sister republic if we left her in the belief that this
series of documents, of a tone particularly friendly and affectionate,
addressed to the German Government after such acts as theirs, had not
occasioned in France a certain surprise.... Up to this time the Allies,
who have not, God be praised, compromised or even menaced the life of
any neutral, of any American, have not received the twentieth part of
these friendly terms that the German Government has brought forth by
its implacable acts.... What the world awaits from President Wilson is
not merely a note, it is a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does
the American Government, what does President Wilson think of the German
doctrine,--'Necessity knows no law--the end justifies the means'?...
Every Government that acts or speaks at the present hour decides the
nature of the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation of those
eternal principles that are alone capable of directing humanity toward
its sacred end."

To our eternal shame as a nation our Government has evaded, up to
this hour, pronouncing the expected verdict, has preferred to quibble
and define, in its vain attempt to hold the barbarian to a "strict
accountability"--whatever that may mean. France does not want our
army or our navy, not even our money and our factories, except on
business terms, but she has looked in vain for our affirmation as
a nation of our belief in her great cause, which should be our own
cause--the cause of all free peoples.

* * * * *

What a timid and verbal interpretation of neutrality has prevented
our Government from affirming, the American people, let us be
thankful, have done generously, abundantly. They have pronounced
a not uncertain verdict, and they have followed this moral verdict
with countless acts of sympathy. The cause of France, the faith of
the French, have roused the chivalry of the best Americans. Our youths
are fighting in the trenches, our doctors and nurses are giving their
services, our money is helping to stanch the wounds of France. As
a people we too have affirmed our faith in the cause and are doing
generously, spontaneously, as is our wont, what we can to win that
cause for the world. The splendid hospital of the American Ambulance
at Neuilly, equipped and operated on the generous American scale,
is the real monument to the beliefs, the hopes, the faith of the
American people.

In that modification of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which America is
fast evolving, there is a subtle sympathy and likeness with the Latin,
which this crisis has brought into evidence. We are less English than
French in spirit, in our ideal of culture, of life.




VI


_The New France_

"This is a return for a new departure!" the Italian poet cried to
his people at Quarto when they were still hesitating between the
paths of a prudent neutrality and intervention in the world decision.
Probably in the poet's thought there was more of concrete ambition
for "national aspirations" than of spiritual rebirth. But for the
French nation it is the spiritual rebirth alone that has any meaning.
No material enlargement of France has ever been seriously contemplated.
The acquisition of Alsace can hardly be termed conquest, and whatever
hopes of indemnity or other material advantages the French may have
permitted themselves to dream of must fade as the financial burden of
all Europe mounts ever higher. Even the recovery of Alsace, according
to those best able to judge,--in spite of German assertions,--would
never have roused France to an aggressive war. Conquest, material
growth, is not an active principle in the French character. How often
I have heard this thought on French lips,--"We want to be let alone,
to be free to live our lives as we think best, to develop our own
institutions,--that is what we are fighting for!" For forty years
the nation has lived under the fear of invasion, a black cloud
always more or less threatening on the frontier, and when the day of
mobilization came every Frenchman knew instinctively what it meant--the
long-expected fight for national existence. And the hope that sustains
the people in their blackest moments is the hope of ending the thing
forever. "Our children and our children's children will not have to
endure what we suffer. It will be a better world because of our
sacrifice."

The conquest that France will achieve is the conquest of herself,
and the fruits of that she has already attained in a marvelous measure.
The reality of a new France is felt to-day by every Frenchman and is
aboundingly obvious to the stranger visiting the country he once knew
in her soft hours of peace. To be sure, intelligent French people say
to you, when you comment on the fact, "But we were always really like
this at bottom, serious and moral and courageous, only you did not see
the real France." Pardonable pride! The French themselves did not know
it. As so often with individual souls, it took the fierce fire of
prolonged trial to evoke the true national character, to bring once
more to the surface ancient and forgotten racial virtues, to brighten
qualities that had become dim in the petty occupations of prosperity.

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