Is that the foolish dream of the sentimentalist? No, more than that; for the German people, after their agony, were ready to respond to generous dealing, pitiful in their need of it, and there is enough sentiment in German hearts—the most sentimental people in Europe—to rise with a surge of emotion to a new gospel of atonement if their old enemies had offered a chance of grace. France has not won the war by her terms of peace nor safeguarded her frontiers for more than a few uncertain years. By harking back to the old philosophy of militarism she has reestablished peril amid a people drained of blood and deeply in debt. Her support of reactionary forces in Russia is to establish a government which will guarantee the interest on French loans and organize a new military regime in alliance with France and England. Meanwhile France looks to the United States and British people to protect her from the next war, when Germany shall be strong again. She is playing the militarist role without the strength to sustain it.
IV
What of England? … Looking back at the immense effort of the British people in the war, our high sum of sacrifice in blood and treasure, and the patient courage of our fighting-men, the world must, and does, indeed, acknowledge that the old stoic virtue of our race was called out by this supreme challenge, and stood the strain. The traditions of a thousand years of history filled with war and travail and adventure, by which old fighting races had blended with different strains of blood and temper—Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman—survived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship, and sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, but were terrible in their onslaught. The Irish battalions, with recruiting cut off at the base, fought with their old gallantry, until there were few to answer the last roll-call. The Welsh dragon encircled Mametz Wood, devoured the “Cockchafers” on Pilkem Ridge, and was hard on the trail of the Black Eagle in the last offensive. The Australians and Canadians had all the British quality of courage and the benefit of a harder physique, gained by outdoor life and unweakened ancestry. In the mass, apart from neurotic types here and there among officers and men, the stock was true and strong. The spirit of a seafaring race which has the salt in its blood from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s and back again to Wapping had not been destroyed, but answered the ruffle of Drake’s drum and, with simplicity and gravity in royal navy and in merchant marine, swept the highways of the seas, hunted worse monsters than any fabulous creatures of the deep, and shirked no dread adventure in the storms and darkness of a spacious hell. The men who went to Zeebrugge were the true sons of those who fought the Spanish Armada and singed the King o’ Spain’s beard in Cadiz harbor. The victors of the Jutland battle were better men than Nelson’s (the scourings of the prisons and the sweepings of the press-gang) and not less brave in frightful hours. Without the service of the British seamen the war would have been lost for France and Italy and Belgium, and all of us.
The flower of our youth went out to France and Flanders, to Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and Saloniki, and it was a fine flower of gallant boyhood, clean, for the most part eager, not brutal except by intensive training, simple in minds and hearts, chivalrous in instinct, without hatred, adventurous, laughter-loving, and dutiful. That is God’s truth, in spite of vice-rotted, criminal, degenerate, and brutal fellows in many battalions, as in all crowds of men.
In millions of words during the years of war I recorded the bravery of our troops on the western front, their patience, their cheerfulness, suffering, and agony; yet with all those words describing day by day the incidents of their life in war I did not exaggerate the splendor of their stoic spirit or the measure of their sacrifice. The heroes of mythology were but paltry figures compared with those who, in the great war, went forward to the roaring devils of modern gunfire, dwelt amid high explosives more dreadful than dragons, breathed in the fumes of poison-gas more foul than the breath of Medusa, watched and slept above mine-craters which upheaved the hellfire of Pluto, and defied thunderbolts more certain in death-dealing blows than those of Jove.
Something there was in the spirit of our men which led them to endure these things without revolt—ideals higher than the selfish motives of life. They did not fight for greed or glory, not for conquest, nor for vengeance. Hatred was not the inspiration of the mass of them, for I am certain that except in hours when men “see red” there was no direct hatred of the men in the opposite trenches, but, on the other hand, a queer sense of fellow-feeling, a humorous sympathy for “old Fritz,” who was in the same bloody mess as themselves. Our generals, it is true, hated the Germans. “I should like one week in Cologne,” one of them told me, before there seemed ever a chance of getting there, “and
