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The World Decision

R >> Robert Herrick >> The World Decision




After I had been in France a short time, nothing seemed falser
to me than the pessimistic assertions of certain German-Americans
and faint-hearted other Americans, that whatever the outcome of the
world war France was "done for," "exhausted," "ruined," must sink to
the level of a third-rate power, and so forth. Nor can I believe the
words of those saddened sympathizers and helpers in the ambulances
and hospitals, that "France is proudly bleeding to death." Her wounds
have been frightful, and through them is still gushing much of the
best blood of the nation. Her bereavement has been enormous, but not
irreparable. Once a real peace achieved, the triumph of the cause,
and I venture to predict that France will give an astonishing
spectacle of rapid recovery, materially and humanly. For the New
France is already a fact, not a faith.

* * * * *

Evidence of this rebirth is naturally difficult to make concrete
as with all spiritual quality. It is not merely the solidarity of
the nation, the fervent patriotism, the readiness for every sacrifice,
which are qualities more or less true of all the warring nations,
especially of Germany. It is more than the perpetual Sunday calm
along the rue de la Paix, the absence of that parasitic frivolity
with which Paris--a small part of Paris--entertained the world.
It is not simply that French people have become serious, silent,
determined, with set wills to endure and to win--for that moral
tenacity may relax after the crisis has passed. It is all these
and much more which I shall try to express that has revealed a
new France.

To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take
the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant
to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this
problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon
all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany
apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called
attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with
drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase,
though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true,
her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played
feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink
among the working population--what every visitor to England had
known--became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts
to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor
restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing
that has reached to the roots of the matter--probably because of
the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the
Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct
handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England,
the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of
alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has
been abolished. For the army--and that includes practically all the
younger and abler men--the danger has been minimized by the strict
enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature
of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafés
and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who
tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly
find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree
under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at
the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen.
Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have
seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the
right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,--an ancient custom that
in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation
against the _bouilleurs de crue_ is one inevitable outcome of the
awakened sense of social responsibility in France.

Connected with the liquor evil is the birth-rate question, to which
since the war the attention of all serious-minded people has been
drawn. The French Academy of Sciences has undertaken an elaborate
series of investigations into the relations between the birth-rate
and the consumption of alcohol, which would seem to show that there
is cause and effect between the excessive use of alcohol and a
declining birth-rate. This will undoubtedly tend to create a popular
sentiment favorable to restrictive liquor legislation, specifically
to abolishing the right to distill spirits. But what is of more real
significance is the changing sentiment among the French in favor of
larger families. Due, no doubt, directly to the necessities of a
draining war, it is also an expression of those deeper experiences
that trial has brought. The French have always prized family life,
and French family life is, perhaps, the best type of the social bond
that the world knows. Under the stress of widespread bereavement the
French are realizing that the base of the family is not love between
the sexes, but the existence of children. They want children, not
only to take the place of their men sacrificed, but as symbols of
that greater love for the race that the war has evoked. Although
the crudity of the "war-bride" method of increasing the population
is not evident in France, every working-girl wears the medallion of
some "hero" on her breast. Girls say frankly that they want children.
The Latin will never accept the German principle of indiscriminate
breeding. As in every other aspect of life, the Latin emphasizes the
individual, the personal; but an awakened patriotism and pride of
race, a deepened sense of the real values of life will lead to a
greater devotion to the family ideal.

* * * * *

To shift to the political life of France, the history of the republic
has been tempestuous in the past. There has been a succession of
_coups d'état_, plots, and scandals. One political _cause célèbre_
has followed another--the Boulanger, the Dreyfus, and quite lately
the Caillaux. The wide publicity which these political scandals have
had is due partly to the Latin love of excitement, also to the Latin
frankness about washing dirty political linen in public. To the
foreigner it has seemed strange that a republic could endure with
such abysses of intrigue and personal corruption beneath its political
life as have been shown in the Panama and Dreyfus scandals. The Germans
probably have been misled by them into considering the French nation
wholly despicable and degenerate. But France has not only endured in
spite of these rotten spots, but her republicanism has grown stronger.
Americans experienced in their own sordid politics should understand
how uncharacteristic of the real citizenship of a democracy politicians
can be. The real France has never taken with entire seriousness the
machinations of "those rats in the Chamber." These "rats" were quite
active during the first months of the war. Aside from the incompetence
of the first war ministry, which kept the public in ignorance of the
danger so completely that the enemy was at Soissons before Paris was
aware that the French army was being driven back, and all the blunders
of the raid into Alsace, France had its sinister political menace in
Joseph Caillaux, who it has been rumored plotted a disgraceful peace
with Germany before the battle of the Marne. Caillaux, when his
creature, the grafting paymaster-general, was exposed, found it wise
to go to South America. An able and on the whole a competent ministry
was placed in power.

When Caillaux returned last spring, rumors of legislative unrest
and plotting against the Joffre-Millerand control of the army
began once more. Outwardly it was an attempt of party leaders in
the Chamber to gain greater legislative control of the conduct of
the war, ostensibly for the improvement of bureaucratic methods,
as in the sanitary service, which was notably deficient. But beneath
this agitation were the dangerous forces of political France seeking
to oust Joffre, and there lay the menace that a political clique might
get control of the army. This agitation, however, did not disturb
the public. As one Frenchman put it, "If those rats get too active,
Gallieni will take them out and shoot them. France is behind the
army, and the people will not tolerate legislative interference with
it." The political unrest has at last resulted in a new and larger
cabinet, admittedly the most representative body that France could
have. The danger of political interference has passed without resort
to summary methods. It is a triumph of democracy. France will fight
the war to an end under constitutional government, a much more
difficult task than Germany's. Obviously, as may be seen in England,
parliamentary government is a great hindrance to a nation in the
abnormal state of war. Free societies have this handicap to contend
with when they fight an autocratic machine. To maintain her republican
government without scandals throughout the war will be a political
triumph for France, indicative of the new spirit that has entered
into the nation. The seriousness of the present situation has sobered
all men and has suppressed the politicians by the mere weight of
responsibility. The New France emerging from the trial of war can
profit by this experience to purge her political life of the
scandalous elements in it.

Italy has closed her Parliament and relapsed temporarily into autocracy.
England and France are struggling to maintain popular government as we
did through the Civil War.

* * * * *

Much has been said of the heroic spirit of the French nation under
the tragedy of the war. Too much could not be said. The war has
evoked patriotism among all the peoples engaged, but with the French
there is a peculiar idealistic passion of tenderness for the _patrie_
which impresses every observer who has had the good fortune to see
the nation at war. I shall not linger long on these familiar,
inspiring aspects of love for country that the war has called forth
from all classes. The ideal spirit of French youth has been
illustrated in some letters given to the public by the novelist,
Henry Bordeaux, called "Two Heroes." They relate the personal
experiences of two youths, one twenty, the other twenty-one, whose
baptism of fire came in the battle of the Marne. They grew old fast
under the ordeal of battle and of responsibility for the lives of
their men; their letters home show a loftiness of spirit, a sense
of self-forgetfulness, of devotion to the cause, that is sublime,
poignant--and typical. In every rank of society the same immense
devotion, the same utter renouncement of selfish thought can be felt.
A spirit of ideal sacrifice has spread throughout the nation, making
France proud, heroic, confident. Such a spirit must be a benediction
for generations to come.

The common effort, the universal grief, has drawn all French people
so close together that social and party differences have disappeared.
The French priest has become once more the heroic leader of his
people, fighting by their side in the trenches. The scholars, the
poets, the artists have all done their part,--the nuns, the
aristocrats, the working-people theirs. While England has been
harassed with strikes and class recriminations, France has never
known in her entire history such absolute social harmony and unity,
such universal and concentrated will.

This spirit of "sacred union" embraces the women who are doing men's
tasks, the rich who are surrendering their good American securities
to the Government in exchange for national defense bonds, the poor
who are bringing their little hordes of gold to the Bank of France to
swell the gold reserve. I wish that every American might stand in the
court of the Bank of France and watch that file of women and old men
depositing their gold--the only absolute security against want they
have! That is faith made evident, and love.

* * * * *

In looking over the bulky file of French newspapers, illustrated
weeklies, and pamphlets on the war, which I brought back with me, I
am struck by the fact that the outstanding characteristic of all this
comment on the great war from journalist to statesman and publicist
is not denunciation of the barbarian. Denunciation plays a singularly
small part in the French reaction to their suffering. References to
Germans and Germany are usually of a psychological or humorous
character, illustrating the grotesque and antipathetic aspects in
which the Teuton presents himself to the Latin mind. That part which
grieving and denunciation have played in English comment, the gross
and apoplectic hate of the German press, is taken by lyrical
enthusiasm for heroism. The newspapers, sure pulse of popular
appetite, are filled daily with stories of sacrifice, gallantry,
heroism. This is the aspect of the sordid bloody war that the French
spirit feeds on. It is a fresh manifestation of an old national
trait--the love of chivalry. Some day, doubtless, these splendid
tales of individual heroism, of soldierly and civilian sacrifice,
will be gathered together to make the laurel wreath of the New
France. I could fill a volume with those I have read and heard. And I
like to think that while Germany went wild over the torpedoing of the
Lusitania,--even dared to celebrate it in America,--while the
Zeppelin raids arouse her patriotic enthusiasm, the French gloat over
the story of the private who crawled out of the trench and hunted for
two days without food or water for his wounded officer. The love of
the _beau geste_ is an ineradicable trait of French character. It has
had a bountiful satisfaction in this war.

"We have fought a chivalrous war," General C. exclaimed, pointing to
the little figure of Jeanne d'Arc. The same general ordered that the
government dole of a franc and a half a day be paid to those Alsatian
women whose husbands were fighting in the German army. "They are
French women: it is not their fault that their husbands are fighting
against France!" And the deathless touch of all, which will be
remembered in the world long after the destruction wrought to the
cathedral of Rheims, is the picture of French saving German wounded
in the burning church--fired by German shells!

The _beau geste_, the beautiful act, which ennobles all men, not
merely the doer of the deed,--that is what France is giving the
world. The image of men who are more than efficient and strong and
physically courageous, of men who are filled with a divine spirit of
sacrifice and devotion. Truly supermen.

Chivalry was a trait of the Old France as it is of the New. It
has fallen somewhat into disrepute of late years with the rise
of the comfort and efficiency standards. Nowhere else on the broad
battlefields of Europe has it revived, to redeem the horror of war,
so shiningly as in the New France.

* * * * *

Another aspect of French character which is both old and new is
the quality of humorous "sportsmanship" the French have displayed.
When Germany's crack aviator made a daily visit to Paris, dropping
bombs, in the afternoon during the early weeks of the war, the
Parisians took his arrival as a spectacle and thronged the boulevards
to watch him and applaud. When at last he was shot through the head,
the French press lamented his loss with genuine appreciation of his
nerve and his skill. A young cavalry officer at the front told me
this story: One of the younger officers of his regiment, to encourage
his men, had offered rewards for German shoulder straps, that is,
prisoners. Two simple peasants, misunderstanding his words, proudly
brought in a couple of pairs of German ears strung on a string like
game. The officer, brooding over the incident, resolved to explain
and apologize to the enemy. Putting his handkerchief on the point of
his sword, he crawled out of the trench and advanced across the field
of death between the lines.

Tales from the trenches by the hundreds prove that the French have
not lost the sparkle of wit even under the dreary conditions of
trench-fighting. When Italy joined the Allies, some soldiers of a
front-line trench hoisted the placard,--"Macaroni mit uns!" Again,
when boasting placards of German successes in Galicia were displayed,
the French _poilus_ retorted,--"You lie. You have taken ten thousand
officers and ten millions of troops." When in a German military
prison the keepers boasted of their recent successes on the western
front, the French prisoners began to sing the _Marseillaise_ to the
astonishment of their German guards, "because," as they explained,
"we know if you have killed all those French soldiers, you must have
lost at least four times as many!"

The barbarian misread the Gallic love of wit and laughter. To joke
and quip seemed to him beneath the dignity of men. It is, rather,
the safety-valve of a highly intelligent people--the outlet for their
ironic perceptions of life. The most amusing songs of the war that I
have heard were given by the _poilus_ on a little stage near Commercy
while the cannon thundered a few miles away. This ability to turn
upon himself and see his life in a humorous light is an invaluable
quality of the French soldier. So, too, is his love of handicraft
which finds many ingenious expressions even in the trenches. The
French soldier is always a civilian, with a love of neatly arranged
gardens and terraces, and he lays out a _potager_ in the curve of a
shell-swept hillside, or a neat flower garden in the crumbled walls
of a village house. He makes rings from the aluminum found in German
shell-caps, carves the doorposts of his stone dugout, or likenesses
of his officers on beam-ends, as I saw in a colonel's quarters in
the Bois-le-Prêtre.

The French soldier remains, even in this bloodiest of wars, always
a civilian, a man, capable of laughter and tears, of heroic heights,
of chivalrous sacrifices,--with the soul's image of what manhood
requires, with the vision of a state of free individual men like
himself.

* * * * *

The New France is inspired with qualities of Old France, qualities
which I call Latin, which have emerged into high relief under grief
and suffering and effort. It is above all gallant and high-minded.
The wounded Frenchman never complains or whimpers. "_C'est la
guerre--que voulez-vous!_" To the surgeon who has operated on
him,--"_Merci, mon major_." And they lie legless or armless, perhaps
with running sores, a smile on the face in answer to the sympathetic
word, in long hospital rows....

The fundamental element in this New France is the gravity, the
seriousness of it. Of all the warring peoples the French seem to
realize most clearly what it all means, what it is for, and the deep
import of the decision not merely to them, but to the whole world.
They are fighting, not for territory, but for principles. Peace must
be not a rearrangement of maps, but of men's ideas, of men's wills.
They are the conscious protagonists of a long tradition of ideals
that have once more been put in jeopardy. It is the character of this
human world of ours which they are struggling to mould, and like
actors in a Greek tragedy they are suitably impressed with the
gravity of the issue in their hands.

The New France has been born in the travail of the monstrous
desolation of trench-land that stretches, scabby with shell-holes,
leprous with gray wire, pitted with countless graves, scarred with
crumbled villages for four hundred miles across the fair fields of
_la douce France_. In this savage desert, inhumanly silent except
for the shrieking of shells, for now more than a year's time France
has struggled with the incarnated spirit of evil, rearing its head
again, armed with all the enginery of modern science. The little,
dirty-bearded soldiers squat there in their burrows, white-faced,
tense, silent, waiting, watching, month after month, or plunge over
their walls to give their lives on that death-field outside. They are
the simple martyrs of the New France.

* * * * *

France has learned her German lesson; has reorganized her life to
make it tell effectively for her task, has reorganized her inner
life, discarding frivolity and waste. She has found herself in the
fire. France is not "done for," as my German-American friends so
pityingly deem. Bleeding from her terrible wounds, she is stronger
today than ever before,--stronger in will, in spirit, in courage, the
things that count in the long, long run even in the winning of wars.
Technically minded soldiers may judge that "Germany can't be beaten."
But the French know in their souls that she can be, that she is beaten
today! In this greatest of world's decisions it is the spirit of the
Latin that triumphs again--the sanest, suavest, noblest tradition that
the earth has ever known, under which men may work out their mysterious
destiny.




Part Three--America


I


_What Does It Mean to Us?_

I went from the French front back to America. The steamer slipped
down the Gironde between green vineyards, past peaceful villages,
a whole universe distant from that grim, gray trench-land where the
French army was holding the invader in Titan grip, stole cautiously
into the Bay of Biscay at nightfall to escape prowling submarines,
and began to roll in the Atlantic surges, part of those "three
thousand miles of cool sea-water" on which our President so complacently
relies as a nonconductor of warfare. I was homeward bound to America,
the land of Peace, after four months spent in "war-ridden Europe"--to
that homeland stranger somehow than the war lands, where my countrymen
were protesting to both belligerents and making money, manufacturing
war supplies and blowing up factories, talking "peace" and "preparedness"
in the same breath; also--and God be thanked for that!--helping to feed
the starving Belgians, sending men, money, and sympathy to the French.
As the old steamer settled into her fourteen-knot gait, the submarines
ceased to be of more than conversational concern, and I began to ask
myself,--"What does it all mean to us, this bloody sacrifice of world
war,--to us, strong, rich, peaceful, confident Americans?"

For in spite of a curious indifference among many Americans to the
outcome, so long as it did not get us into trouble with either party,
betrayed by personal letters and press articles which I had received,
I was profoundly convinced that the issues of the world tragedy were
momentous to us too. "This European butchery means nothing," said one
friend, who supplies editorial comment for a most widely read American
weekly, "except a lot of poverty, a lot of cripples, and a lot of
sodden hate in the hearts of the people engaged. Europe will not be
changed appreciably as a result of the war!" Our pacifist ex-Secretary
of State, I remember, wrote Baron d'Estournelles de Constant inquiring
what the French were fighting for, implying that to the reasonable
onlooker there was no clear issue involved in the whole business,
merely the passions of misguided patriotism. The well-meaning agitation
for peace, which as I write has been lifted into the grotesque by the
Ford peace ship, is based largely on this inability to realize the
reality of the issue between the belligerents. And there is our national
attitude of strict neutrality, which fairly represents the evasive mind
of many Americans. Happily, they seem to say to themselves, "This war is
not our affair." We were warned by Washington to keep clear of European
"quarrels," and wisely we covered our retreat at The Hague by inserting
that little clause which relieved us from all real responsibility for
the observance of the conventions. Excuse for cowardice and blindness
of vision! Such Americans like to think that as a nation we have no more
concern in the present war than a peaceable family in one house has with
the domestic upheavals of an unfortunate family in the next house. The
part of prudence is to ignore all evidences of unpleasantness, to profess
good offices, and to keep on friendly terms with all the belligerents.

The impression that such an attitude makes on the American in
Europe is painful, whether it be expressed in personal letters,
in newspapers and magazines, or in diplomatic "notes." He becomes
impatient with the provincialism of his own people, ashamed of their
transparent selfishness, astonished that human values should have got
so fatally distorted in our fat, comfortable world. To the European,
American neutrality has become a matter of public indifference, of
private contempt. Inspired with the lofty ambition of playing the
rôle of mediator in the world war, President Wilson has lost his
chance of influencing the decision toward which Europe is bloodily
fighting its way. At that great peace conference which every European
has perpetually in mind, America will be ignored. Only those who have
shared the bloody sacrifice--at least have had the courage to declare
their beliefs--will penetrate its inner councils. We have had our
reward--money and safety. It is not fantastic even to expect that the
conquerors might under certain circumstances say to the conquered,
"Take your losses from the Americans: they alone have made money out
of our common woe!"

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