The World Decision by Robert Herrick

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Saturday, the 22d of May, I took the night express for Venice. The
train of first- and second-class coaches was longer than usual, filled
with officers rejoining their regiments which had already gone north
in the slower troop trains. There were also certain swarthy persons
in civilian garb, whom it took no great divination to recognize as
secret police agents. The spy mania had begun. Theirs was the hopeless
task of sorting out civilian enemies from nationals, which, thanks to
the complexity of modern international relations, is like picking
needles from a haystack. My papers, however, were all in order, and
so far there had been no restrictions on travel; in fact no military
zone had been declared, because as yet there was no war! When would
the declaration come? In another week? I settled myself comfortably
in my corner opposite a stout captain who rolled himself in his gray
cloak and went to sleep. Other officers wandered restlessly to and fro
in the corridor outside, discussing the coming war. It was a heavenly
summer night. The Umbrian Hills swam before us in the clear moonlight
as the train passed north over the familiar, beautiful route. If
Germany should strike from behind at Milan, exposing the north of
Italy? One shuddered. After Belgium Germany was capable of any attack,
and Germany was expected then to go with her ally.

One thing was evident over and above the beauty of the moonlit country
through which we were rushing at a good pace, and that was the remarkable
improvement in Italian railroading since my last visit to Italy a dozen
years before. This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked roadbed,
which accounted in part for the rapidity and ease of the troop movements
these last months. The ordinary passenger traffic had scarcely been
interrupted even now on the eve of war. The terrors of the mobilization
period, thanks to Italy's efficient preparation, were unfounded. It spoke
well for Italy at war. It was a sign of her economic development, her
modernization. Even Germany had not gone into the business of war more
methodically, more efficiently. Italy, to be sure, had nine months for
her preparation, but to one who remembered the country during the
Abyssinian expedition, time alone would not explain the improvement.

The railroad stations at Florence and Bologna were under military
control, the quays patrolled, the exits guarded, the buildings stuffed
with soldiers. I could see their sleeping forms huddled in the straw
of the cattle cars on the sidings, also long trains of artillery and
supplies. Shortly after daylight the guards pulled down our shutters
and warned us against looking out of the windows for the remainder of
the journey. A childish precaution, it seemed, which the officers
constantly disregarded. But when I peeped at the sunny fields of the
flat Lombard plain, one of the swarthy men in civilian black leaned
over and firmly pulled down the shade. Italy was taking her war
seriously.

At Mestre we lost the officers: they were going north to Udine
and--beyond. The almost empty train rolled into the Venetian station
only an hour late. The quay outside the station was strangely silent,
with none of that noisy crew of boatmen trying to capture arriving
_forestieri._ They had gone to the war. One old man, the figure of
Charon on his dingy poop, sole survivor of the gay tribe, took me
aboard and ferried me through the network of silent canals toward the
piazza. Dismantled boats lay up along the waterways, the windows of the
palaces were tightly shuttered, and many bore paper signs of renting.
"The Austrians," Charon laconically informed me. It would seem that
Venice had been almost an Austrian possession, so much emptiness was
left at her flight. But within the little squares and along the winding
stony lanes between the ancient palaces, Venice was alive with citizens
and soldiers--and very much herself for the first time in many centuries.
The famous piazza recalled the processional pictures of Guardi. Only the
companies of soldiers that marched through it on their way to the station
were not gorgeously robed: they were in dirty gray with heavy kits on
their backs. The bronze horses were being lowered from St. Mark's, one
of them poised in midair with his ramping legs in a sling. Inside the
church a heavy wooden truss had been put in place to strengthen the arch
of gleaming mosaics. There was a tall hoarding of fresh boards along the
water side of the Ducal Palace, and the masons were fast filling in the
arches with brick supports. Venice was putting herself in readiness for
the enemy. Even the golden angel on the new Campanile had been shrouded
in black in order that she might not attract a winged monster by her
gleam. From many a palace roof aerial guns were pointed to the sky, and
squads of soldiers patrolled the platforms that had been hastily built
to hold them.

Out at San Niccolo da Lido, where I supped at a little _osteria_
beneath the trees, a number of gray torpedo boats rushed to and fro
in the harbor entrance, restless as hunting dogs straining at the
leash. That night Venice was dark, so black that one stumbled from
wall to wall along the narrow lanes in the search for his own doorway.
War was close at hand: the menace of it, a few miles, a few hours
only away, across the blue Adriatic, at Pola. In order to understand
the significance of frontiers an American should be in Venice on the
eve of war.

* * * * *

Some hours later I awoke startled from a heavy sleep, the
reverberation of a dream ringing in my ears. It was not yet dawn.
In the gray-blue light outside the birds were wheeling in frightened
circles above the garden below my balcony. Mingled in my dreams with
the disturbing noise was the song of a nightingale--and then there came
another dull, thunderous explosion, followed immediately by the long
whine and shriek of sirens at the arsenal, also the crackle of machine
guns from all sides. Now I realized what it meant. It was war. The
Austrians had taken this way to acknowledge Italy's defiance. The enemy
had threatened to destroy Venice, and this was their first attempt. Above
the sputter of the machine guns and the occasional explosions of shrapnel
could be distinguished the buzz of an aeroplane that moment by moment
approached nearer. Soon the machine itself became visible, flying oddly
enough from the land direction, not from the Adriatic. It flew high and
directly, across Venice, aiming apparently for the arsenal, the Lido,
the open sea.

It was an unreality, that little winged object aloft like a large
aerial beetle buzzing busily through the still gray morning sky, heading
straight with human intelligence in a set line, bent on destruction. The
bombs could not be seen as they fell, of course, but while I gazed into
the heavens another thunderous explosion came from near by, which I took
to be the aviator's bomb, distinguished by the sharpness of its explosion
from the anti-aircraft bombardment. Other guns along the route of the
enemy took up the attack, then gradually all became silent once more.
Only the cries of the frightened birds circling above the garden and the
voices of the awakened inhabitants could be heard. From every window and
balcony half-dressed people watched the flight of the monoplane until it
had disappeared in the vague dawn beyond St. Mark's.

In another half-hour the sirens shrieked again and the machine gun
on the roof of the Papadopoli Palace just below on the Grand Canal
began to sputter. This time every one knew what it meant and there
was a large gathering on the balconies and in the little squares to
witness the arrival of the hostile aeroplane. It was another monoplane
coming from the same land direction, flying much lower than the first
one, so low that its hooded aviator could be distinguished and the
bands of color across the belly of the car. It skirted the city toward
the Adriatic more cautiously. Later it was rumored that the second
aeroplane had been brought down in the lagoons and its men captured.

Thereafter no one tried to sleep: the little Venetian bridges and
passages were filled with talking people, and rumors of the damage
done began to come in. Eleven bombs in all were dropped on this first
attack, killing nobody and doing no serious harm, except possibly at
the arsenal where one fell. I was at the local police station when
one of the unexploded bombs was brought in. It was of the incendiary
type containing petroleum. Also there had been picked up somewhere in
the canals the half of a Munich newspaper, which seemed to indicate,
although there was nothing of special significance in the sheet, that
the monoplane was German rather than Austrian. Yet Germany had not yet
declared war on Italy. But was it not the German Kaiser who had threatened
to destroy Italy's art treasures? Were not the German armies in Flanders
and France making war against defenceless, unmilitary monuments?

* * * * *

I realized now the necessity of those preparations to guard the
treasures of Venice, priceless and irreplaceable--why the Belle Arti
had been emptied, and the Colleoni trussed with an ugly wooden framework.
But little at the best could be done to protect Venice herself, which lies
exposed in all her fragile loveliness to the attacks of the new Vandals.
The delicate palaces,--already crumbling from age,--the marvelous facade
of the Ducal Palace with its lustrous color, the leaning _campanili_, the
little churches filled with noble monuments to its great ones,--all were
helpless before an aerial attack, or shelling from warships. Nothing could
save Venice from even a slight bombardment, quite apart from such pounding
as the Germans have given Rheims, or Arras, or Ypres. At the first hostile
blow Venice would sink into the sea, a mass of ruins, returning thus
bereaved to her ancient bridegroom.

Italy is aware of the vengeful warfare she must expect. Great
preparations for the defense of Venice have been made. The city might
be ruined; it could not be taken. The gray destroyers moving in and
out past the Zattere contrasted strangely with the tiny gondolas shaped
like pygmy triremes. It was the mingling of two worlds,--the world of
the gondola, the marble palace of the doges, of the jeweled church of
St. Mark's, and the world of the torpedo boat and the aerial bomb,--the
world as man is making it to-day. The old Venetians were good fighters,
to be sure, not to say quarrelsome. War was never long absent, as may
easily be realized from the great battle-pieces in the Ducal Palace.
But war then was more the rough play of boisterous children than the
slaughterous, purely destructive thing that modern men have made it. And
when those old Venetians were not fighting, they were building greatly,
beautifully, lovingly: they were making life resplendent.

That awakening in the early dawn into the modern world of distant
enemies and secret deadly missiles was unforgettable. Some one showed
me a steel arrow which had been dropped within the arsenal, a small,
sharpened, nail-like thing that would transfix a body from head to feet.
These arrows are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will.
That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing
its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face
to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will
to destroy.

* * * * *

A wonderful day dawned on Venice after the departure of the hostile
aeroplanes, a day among days, and all the Venetians were abroad. The
attack which brought home the actual dangers to them did not seem to
dull their lively spirits. They were busy in the quaint aquatic manner
of Venice. The little shops were full of people, the boatmen reviled
one another in the narrow canals as they squeezed past, the _vaporetti_
and the motor-boats snorted up and down the Grand Canal.

Venice seemingly had accepted her liability to night attack as a new
condition of her peculiar life.

There were more soldiers than ever moving in the narrow, winding
footpaths, the restaurants were full of officers in fresh uniforms.
On the water-front beyond the Salute there was much movement among
the destroyers. One of these gray seabirds went out at midnight, when
war was declared, and took a small Austrian station on the Adriatic.
They brought back some prisoners and booty which seemed to interest
the Venetians more than the hostile aeroplanes.

Yet with all this warlike activity it was hard to realize the fact
of war in Italy, to remember that just over the low line of the Lido
the hostile fleets were looking for each other in the Adriatic, that
a few miles to the north the attack had begun all along the twisting
frontier, that the first caravan of the wounded had started for Padua.
As I floated that afternoon over the lagoons past the Giudecca, and
the blue Euganean Hills rose out of the gray mist that seems ever to
hang on the Venetian horizon, it was impossible to believe in the fact,
to realize that all this human beauty around me, the slow accumulation
of the ages of the finest work of man, was in danger of eternal
destruction. Venice rose from the green sea water like the city of
enchantment that Turner so often painted. Venice was never so lovely,
so wholly the palace of enchantment as she was then, stripped of all
the tourist triviality and vulgarity that she usually endures at this
season. It was Venice left to her ancient self in this hour of her
danger. She was like a marvelous, fragile, still beautiful great lady,
so delicate that the least violence might kill her! In this dying light
of the day she was already something unearthly, on the extreme marge
of our modern world....

That evening the restaurant windows were covered tight with shutters
and heavy screens before the doors. The waiter put a candle in a saucer
before your plate and you ate your food in this wavering light. There
was not the usual temptation to linger in the piazza after dinner, for
the cafes were all sealed against a betraying gleam of light and the
Venetian public had taken to heart the posted advice to stay within
doors and draw their wooden shutters. As I entered my room, the moon
was rising behind the Salute, throwing its light across the Canal on to
the walls of the palaces opposite. The soft night was full of murmuring
voices, for Venice is the most vocal of cities. The people were exchanging
views across their waterways from darkened house to house, speculating on
the chances of another aerial raid tonight. They were making salty jokes
about their enemies in the Venetian manner. The moonlight illuminated the
broad waterway beneath my window with its shuttered palaces as if it were
already day. A solitary gondola came around the bend of the Canal and its
boatman began to sing one of the familiar songs that once was bawled from
illuminated barges on spring nights like this, for the benefit of the
tourists in the hotels. To-night he was singing it for himself, because
of the soft radiance of the night, because of Venice. His song rose from
the silver ripple of the waves below, and in the little garden behind the
nightingale began to sing. Had he also forgotten the disturber of this
morning and opened his heart in the old way to the moonlight May night
and to Venice?

* * * * *

The enemy did not return that night, the moon gave too clear a light.
But a few evenings later, when the sky was covered with soft clouds,
there was an alarm and the guns mounted on the palace roofs began again
bombarding the heavens. This time the darkness was shot by comet-like
flashes of light, and the exploding shells gave a strange pyrotechnic
aspect to the battle in the air. Again the enemy fled across the Adriatic
without having done any special damage. Only a few old houses in the
poorer quarter near the arsenal were crumbled to dust.

Since that first week of the war the aeroplane attacks upon Venice
have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen
perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the
Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military
excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the
great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is
the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities,
and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely
upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is
vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes
across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the
Latin abhors.

* * * * *

There are some things in this world that can never be replaced once
destroyed, and Venice is one of them. And there are some things greater
than power, efficiency, and all _kaiserliche Kultur_. Such is Italy
with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible youth, its treasure of deathless
beauty. As I passed through the fertile fields on my way from Venice
to Milan and the north, I understood as never before the inner reason
for Italy's entering the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane
civilization,--the love of freedom for the individual, the golden mean
between liberty and license that is the Latin inheritance,--all this
compelled young Italy to fight, not merely for her own preservation,
but also for the preservation of these things in the world against the
force that would destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has not
died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum," the poet said, and at the
risk of all her jewels Italy bravely defied the enemy across the Alps.
This war on which she had embarked after nine long months of preparation
is no mere adventure after stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it
is a fight unto death between two opposed principles of life.

"He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality
on the greater issues of life.

PART TWO--FRANCE

I

_The Face of Paris_

I shall never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that
first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare
de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal,
to forget what Paris had been before the war, but as with persons so with
places the first impression often gives a deeper, keener insight into
character than repeated contacts. I knew that the German invasion, which
had swept so close to the city in the first weeks of the war, and which
after all the anxious winter months was still no farther than an hour's
motor ride from Paris, must have wrought a profound change in this, the
most personal of cities. One read of the scarcity of men on the streets,
of the lack of cabs, of shuttered shops, of women and girls performing
the ordinary tasks of men, of the ever-rising tide of convalescent
wounded, etc. But no written words are able to convey the whole meaning
of things: one must see with one's own eyes, must feel subconsciously
the many details that go to make truth.

When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there
were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is
not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has
much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station
restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one
scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question--"Why
are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit,
it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or
foreigners--Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by
opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was
practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the
daily labor was done by them. The little cafe was full of men,--almost
every one in some sort of uniform,--drinking their coffee and scanning
the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all
day long,--the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked
hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafes,--and yet they
told so little of what was going on _la-bas!_.... The silence in the
restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter
where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French cafe never. But I
soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France
since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were
gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own
small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage
chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way.

Will the French ever recover wholly their habit of free, careless,
expressive speech? Of all the peoples under the trials of this war
they have become by general report the most sternly, grimly silent.
Compared with them the English, deemed by nature taciturn, have
become almost hysterically voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse,
recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teutonic strategy has evoked
from the English a flood of outraged comment. But from the beginning
the French have wasted no time on such _betise_ as they would call
it: they have put all their energies into their business, which as
every French creature knows is to fight this war through to a triumphant
end--and not talk. An extraordinary reversal of national temperaments
that! From the mobilization hour it was the same thing: every Frenchman
knew what it meant, the hour of supreme trial for his country, and he
went about his part in it with set face, without the beating of drums,
and he has kept that mood since. Henri Lavedan, in a little sketch of
the reunion between a _poilu_, on leave after nine months' absence in
the trenches, and his wife, has caught this significant note. The good
woman has gently reproached her husband for not being more talkative,
not telling her any of his experiences. The soldier says,--"One doesn't
talk about it, little one, one does it. And he who talks war doesn't
fight.... Later, I'll tell you, after, when _it_ is signed!"

* * * * *

There were plenty of cabs and taxis on the streets by the time I
reached Paris, rather dangerously driven by strangers ignorant of the
ramifications of the great city and of the complexities of motor engines.
Most of the tram-lines were running, and the metro gave full service
until eleven at night, employing many young women as conductors--and
they made neat, capable workers. Many of the shops, especially along
the boulevards, were open for a listless business, although the shutters
were often up, with the little sign on them announcing that the place was
closed because the _patron_ was mobilized. And there was a steady stream
of people on the sidewalks of all main thoroughfares,--at least while
daylight lasted, for the streets emptied rapidly after dark when a dim
lamp at the intersection of streets gave all the light there was--quite
brilliant to me after the total obscurity of Venice at night! But my
French and American friends, who had lived in Paris all through the
crisis before the battle of the Marne,--with the exodus of a million
or so inhabitants streaming out along the southern routes, the dark,
empty, winter streets,--found Paris almost normal. The restaurants were
going, the hotels were almost all open, except the large ones on the
Champs Elysees that had been transformed into hospitals. At noon one
would find something like the old frivol in the Ritz Restaurant,--large
parties of much-dressed and much-eating women. For the parasites were
fluttering back or resting on their way to and from the Riviera,
Switzerland, New York, and London. The Opera Comique gave several
performances of familiar operas each week, rendered patriotic by the
recitation of the _Marseillaise_ by Madame Chenal clothed in the national
colors with a mighty Roman sword with which to emphasize "_Aux armes,
citoyens!_" The Francaise also was open several times a week and some
of the smaller theaters as well as the omnipresent cinema shows,
advertising reels fresh from the front by special permission of the
general staff.

The cafes along the boulevards did a fair business every afternoon,
but there was a striking absence of uniforms in them owing to the strict
enforcement of the posted regulations against selling liquor to soldiers.
That and the peremptory closing of cafes and restaurants at ten-thirty
reminded the stranger that Paris was still an "entrenched camp" under
military law with General Gallieni as governor.... The number of women
one saw at the cafes, sitting listlessly about the little tables, usually
without male companions, indicated one of the minor miseries of the great
war. For the _midinette_ and the _femme galante_ there seemed nothing to
do. A paternal government had found occupation and pay for all other
classes of women, also a franc and a half a day for the soldier's wife
or mother, but the daughter of joy was left very joyless indeed, with the
cold misery of a room from which she could not be evicted "_pendant la
guerre._" They haunted the cafes, the boulevards,--ominous, pitiful
specters of the manless world the war was making.

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