Our Part in the Great War
by Arthur Gleason · English · Gutenberg #46434 · 443,160 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Our Part in the Great War
Author: Arthur Gleason
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR ***
OUR PART IN THE GREAT WAR
[Illustration: Leon Mirman, the Governor of Meurthe-et-Moselle, and the
refugees for whom he cares.]
OUR PART IN
THE GREAT WAR
BY
ARTHUR GLEASON
AUTHOR OF "YOUNG HILDA AT THE WARS," "THE SPIRIT
OF CHRISTMAS," "LOVE, HOME AND THE INNER LIFE," ETC.
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1917, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation_
_into foreign languages_
To
_FRANCE ON JULY 14TH_
_Three years of world war draw to a close, as France prepares to
celebrate the birthday of her liberty. Never in the thousand years
of her tumultuous history has she been so calm, so sure of the path
she treads, red with the blood of her young men. She has never drunk
any cup of joy so deeply as this cup of her agony. In the early
months of the war, there were doubts and dismays, and the cheap talk
of compromise. There were black days and black moods, and a swaying
indecision. But under the immense pressure of crisis, France has lifted
to a clear determination. This war will be fought to a finish. No
feeble dreams of peace, entertained by loose thinkers and fluent phrase
makers, no easy conciliations, will be tolerated. France has made her
sacrifice. It remains now that it shall avail. She will fulfill her
destiny. Time has ceased to matter, Death is only an incident in the
ongoing of the nation. No tortures by mutilation, no horrors of shell
fire, no massing of machine guns, can swerve the united will. The
"Sacred Union" of Socialist and royalist, peasant and politician, is
firm to endure. The egoisms and bickerings of easy untested years have
been drowned in a tide that sets towards the Rhine. The premier race
of the world goes forth to war. That war is only in its beginning. The
toll of the dead and the wounded may be doubled before the gray lines
are broken. But they will be broken. A menace is to be removed for
all time. The German Empire is not to rule in Paris. Atrocities are
not to be justified by success. Spying will be no longer the basis of
international relationship. France faces in one direction. She waits
in arms at Revigny and along the water courses of the North for the
machine to crack. That consummation of the long watch may be nearer
than we guess. It may be many months removed. It does not matter.
France waits in unshattered line, reserve on reserve, ready to the
call._
_Only once or twice in history has the world witnessed such a spectacle
of greatness at tension. It is not that factories are busy on shells.
It is that everything spiritual in a race touched with genius has been
mobilized. Fineness of feeling, the graces of the intellect, clarity of
thought, all the playful tender elements of worthy living are burning
with a steady light._
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author was enabled to visit Verdun and the peasant district, and to
obtain access to the German diaries through J. J. Jusserand, Ambassador
of France; Frank H. Simonds, editor of the New York _Tribune_, and
Theodore Roosevelt, by whose courtesy the success of the three months'
visit was assured. On arrival in France the courtesy was continued by
Emile Hovelaque, Madame Saint-René Taillandier, Judge Walter Berry,
Mrs. Charles Prince, Leon Mirman, Prefet de Meurthe-et-Moselle, the
Foreign Office and the Ministry of War.
CONTENTS
PAGE
TO FRANCE ON JULY 14TH v
SECTION I
AMERICANS WHO HELPED
I. THE TWO AMERICAS 3
II. THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL 14
III. THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS 34
IV. THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN 55
V. "FRIENDS OF FRANCE" 72
VI. THE SAVING REMNANT 83
SECTION II
WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL
I. NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST 93
II. SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR 105
III. FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION 116
IV. COSMOPOLITANISM 129
V. THE HYPHENATES 142
VI. THE REMEDY 151
SECTION III
THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD
I. LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS 159
II. SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES 170
III. MORE DIARIES 186
IV. THE BOOMERANG 196
SECTION IV
THE PEASANTS
I. THE LOST VILLAGES 211
II. THE HOMELESS 221
III. "MON GAMIN" 226
IV. THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP 228
V. THE LITTLE CORPORAL 240
VI. THE GOOD CURÉ 244
VII. THE THREE-YEAR-OLD WITNESS 257
VIII. MIRMAN AND "MES ENFANTS" 261
IX. AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES 274
X. THE EVIDENCE 289
XI. SISTER JULIE 294
XII. SISTER JULIE--Continued 312
ADDENDUM 321
APPENDIX
I. TO THE READER 329
II. TO NEUTRAL CRITICS 333
SECTION I
AMERICANS WHO HELPED
I
THE TWO AMERICAS
There are two Americas to-day: the historic America, which still lives
in many thousands of persons, and the new various America, which has
not completely found itself: a people of mixed blood, divergent ideals,
intent on the work at hand, furious in its pleasures, with the vitality
of a new race in it, sprinting at top speed in a direction it does not
yet know, to a goal it cannot see. It is in the sweep of an immense
experiment, accepting all races, centering on no single strain.
This new joy-riding generation has struck out a fresh philosophy of
life, which holds that many of the old responsibilities can be passed
by, that the great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of
which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient enemies of the
race. On the further side, which it is believed has at last been
reached, lie, warm in the sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of
well-being. It is a philosophy that fits snugly into a new country of
tonic climate and economic opportunity, distant by three thousand miles
from historic quarrels and the pressure of crowded neighborhood. We
believe that, by coming on the scene with a lot of vitality and good
cheer, we can clean up the old bothersome problems and make a fresh
start in the sunshine. Christian Science in a mild genial form is the
national religion of America. We believe that maladies and failures can
be willed out of existence. As for "the fatalities of history," "an
endless war between two mutually exclusive ideals," we classify that
way of thinking with the surplus luggage of autocracies.
Now, there is a wide area in life where this breezy burst of power and
good-will operates effectively. It is salutary for stale vendettas,
racial prejudices, diseases of the nerves, egoistic melancholias. But
there are certain structural disturbances at which it takes a look and
crosses to the other side, preferring to maintain its tip-top spirits
and its complacency. It does not cure a broken arm, and it leaves
Belgium to be hacked through. The New America trusts its melting-pot
automatically to remake mixed breeds over night into citizens of the
Republic. It believes that Ellis Island and the naturalization offices
somehow do something with a laying on of hands which results in a
nation. Meantime, we go on blindly and busily with our markets and
base-ball and million-dollar films.
Troubling this enormous optimism of ours came suddenly the greatest
war of the ages. We were puzzled by it for a little, and then took up
again our work and pleasures, deciding that with the causes and objects
of this war we were not concerned. That was the clear decision of the
new America of many races, many minds. The gifted, graceful voice
of our President spoke for us what already we had determined in the
silence.
But there are those of us that were not satisfied with the answer we
made. The fluent now-famous phrases did not content us. It is for this
remnant in our population that this book is written. From this remnant,
many, numbering thousands, put by their work and pleasures, and came
across the sea, some to nurse, and some to carry swift relief over
dangerous roads; still others to fight behind trenches and over the
earth, no few of them to die. Nearly forty thousand men have enlisted.
Many hundred young college boys are driving Red Cross cars at the
front. There is an American Flying Squadron. Many hundreds of American
men and women are serving in hospitals. Many thousands of hard-working,
simple Americans at home are devoting their spare time and their spare
money to relief.
I give a few illustrations of the American effort. I have not tried to
show the extent of it. I trust some day the work will be catalogued
and the full account published, as belonging to history. For we have
not wholly failed the Allies. I have merely sought in this book to
cheer myself, and, I trust, some friends of "the good old cause, the
great idea, the progress and freedom of the race." I believe that the
historic America has spoken and has acted in this war. In a time when
our country, perplexed by its own problems of mixed blood and warring
ideas, bewildered by its great possessions, busy with its own vast
work of shaking down a continent, has made a great refusal, it is good
to have the spectacle of some thousands of young Americans, embracing
poverty, taking dangers and even death gladly. There is something of
the ancient crusade still stirring in these bones. The race of Wendell
Phillips and Whittier has representatives above ground. There was an
America once that would not have stood by when its old-time companion
in freedom was tasting the bayonet and the flame. Some of that America
has come down to Chapman and Neville Hall, to Seeger, Chapin, Prince,
Bonnell.
Nothing said here is meant to imply that the sum of all American
efforts is comparable to the gift which the men of France and Belgium
and England have made us. I am only saying that a minority in our
population has seen that the Allies are fighting to preserve spiritual
values which made our own past great, and which alone can make our
future worthy.
That minority, inheriting the traditions of our race, bearing old names
that have fought for liberty in other days, has clearly recognized that
no such torture has come in recent centuries as German hands dealt out
in obedience to German orders. In the section on French peasants, I
have told of that suffering.
In another section, I am speaking to the Americans who remain
indifferent to the acts of Germany. They are not convinced by the
records of eye-witnesses. The wreck of Belgium is not sufficient. Will
they, I wonder, be moved, if one rises from the dead. We shall see, for
in this book I give the words of those who have, as it were, risen from
the dead to speak to them. I give the penciled records of dead Germans,
who left little black books to tell these things they did in Flanders
and the pleasant land of France.
There are many persons who are more sincerely worried lest an
injustice of overstatement should be done to Germany than they are
that Germany has committed injustice on Belgium and Northern France.
The burned houses and murdered peasants do not touch them, but any
tinge of resentment, any sign of anger, in criticizing those acts,
moves them to protest. Frankly, we of the historic tradition are
disturbed when we see a wave of excitement pass over the country at
the arrival of a German submarine--dinners of honor, interviews
with the "Viking"-Captain--and, in the same month, a perfect calm of
indifference greeting the report of the French girls of Lille sent away
and of families broken up and scattered. We that are shocked by the
cold system of the German conquerors, and publish the facts of their
methodical cruelty, are rebuked by American editors and social workers
as exercising our heart emotionally at the expense of our head. But
that hysteria which greets a German officer, indirectly helping in the
job of perpetuating the official German system of murder and arson,
is accepted as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball enthusiasm, and
pleasant revelation of sporting spirit.
We believe we are not un-American, in being Pro-Ally. We believe we
are holding true to the ideas which created our country--ideas brought
across from the best of England, and freshened from the soul of France.
We believe that Benjamin Franklin was an American and a statesman when
he wrote:--
"What would you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a
family compact between England, France and America? America would be
as happy as the Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in
perpetual peace her father and her husband."
Cheer the _Deutschland_ in, and U-53,[1] but permit us to go aside
a little way and mourn the dead of the _Lusitania_. All we ask, we
that are held by some of the old loyalties, is that we be not counted
un-American. We ask you to throw our beliefs, too, into the vast new
seething mass. Let us contribute to the great experiment a little of
the old collective experience. Because the marching feet of France
strike a great music in our heart, do not hold us alien. We are only
remembering what Washington knew. He was glad of the feet of those
young men as they came tramping south to Yorktown.
In the immense labors of the naturalization factory, do not pause to
excommunicate us, who find an ancient, unfaded freedom in England.
We are moved as Lincoln was moved when he wrote to the operatives of
Lancashire--Englishmen starving because of our blockade, starving but
not protesting. Lincoln wrote:--
To the Workingmen of Manchester: I have the honor to acknowledge the
receipt of the address and resolutions which you sent me on the eve
of the new year. When I came, on the fourth of March, 1861, through
a free and constitutional election to preside in the Government of
the United States, the country was found at the verge of civil war.
Whatever might have been the cause, or whosesoever the fault, one
duty, paramount to all others, was before me, namely, to maintain and
preserve at once the Constitution and the integrity of the Federal
Republic. A conscientious purpose to perform this duty is the key to
all the measures of administration which have been and to all which
will hereafter be pursued. Under our frame of government and my
official oath, I could not depart from this purpose if I would. It
is not always in the power of governments to enlarge or restrict the
scope of moral results which follow the policies that they may deem it
necessary for the public safety from time to time to adopt.
I have understood well that the duty of self-preservation rests solely
with the American people; but I have at the same time been aware that
favor or disfavor of foreign nations might have a material influence
in enlarging or prolonging the struggle with disloyal men in which
the country is engaged. A fair examination of history has served
to authorize a belief that the past actions and influences of the
United States were generally regarded as having been beneficial toward
mankind. I have, therefore, reckoned upon the forbearance of nations.
Circumstances to some of which you kindly allude induce me expecially
to expect that if justice and good faith should be practiced by the
United States, they would encounter no hostile influence on the
part of Great Britain. It is now a pleasant duty to acknowledge the
demonstration you have given of your desire that a spirit of amity and
peace toward this country may prevail in the councils of your Queen,
who is respected and esteemed in your own country only more than
she is by the kindred nation which has its home on this side of the
Atlantic.
I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men at
Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis.
It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to
overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundations
of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest
exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the
favor of Europe. Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the
working-men of Europe have been subjected to severe trials, for
the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under the
circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the
question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not
been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic
and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and of the
ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I
do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained
by your great nation; and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in
assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most
reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail
this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that whatever
else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my
own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations
will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.
We believe that Lincoln would have wished his people to show a like
partizanship to-day in the cause of right. Before we all steer quite
out of the tested channel, let us at least remind you that those
captains knew the course. It is idle to talk of a return to the past.
The statesmanship of Franklin is not the statesmanship of to-day. What
Lincoln felt is out of tune with the new America. We must go on with
the vast new turmoils, the strange unguessed tendencies. We must find a
fresh hope in the altered world. Meanwhile, be neutral, but do not bid
us be neutral. You cannot silence us. We mean that our ideas shall live
and fight and finally prevail.
In one section of this book I deal with what the war is teaching us.
The peoples of Europe are reasserting the rights of nationality. We
must understand this. We need a wholesome sense of our own national
being in the America of to-day. Nationality is the one great idea in
the modern world, the one allegiance left us. It has absorbed the
loyalties and fervor that used to be poured out upon art and religion.
Groups of persons find emotional release in the Woman's Movement, in
Trades Unions, in Socialism. But the one universal expression for the
entire community is in nationalism, the assertion of selfhood as a
people. Religious revivals no longer draw the mind of the mass people.
But the idea of nationality sweeps them. It gives them the sense of
kinship, it answers the desire for something to which to tie. It is
easily possible that this idea will fade as the God of the Churches and
the creative love of beauty faded. The Mazzini and Lincoln type of man
may pass as the poet and the saint, Knights and Samurai, passed. But
not in our time, not in a few hundred years to come. Nationalism may be
only one more of the necessary "useful lies," one more illusion of the
human race. But it will serve out our days. The mistake is in thinking
that the heart of the common people will ever be satisfied with a bare
mechanic civilization. Men are unwilling to live unless they have
something to die for. We have filled the foreground in recent years
with new automatic machines, new subdivisions of repetitive process. We
tried to empty the huge modern world of its old values. Then the people
came and smashed the structure, and found a vast emotional release in
the war. The hope of a sane future is not in suppressing that dynamic
of nationality. We must direct it.
II
THE AMERICAN AMBULANCE HOSPITAL
The recital of the young college boy crowding his ambulance between
singing shells and bringing in his wounded down death's alley is
familiar and stirring. And this, for most of us, has been the entire
story. But that is only the first chapter. It is of no value to bring
in a wounded man, unless there is a field hospital to give him swift
and wise treatment, unless there is a well-equipped hospital-train to
run him gently down to Paris, unless there are efficient stretcher
bearers at the railroad station to unload him, and ambulances to
transport him to new quarters. And finally, most important of all,
the base hospital that at last receives him must be furnished with
skilled doctors, surgeons, nurses and orderlies, or all the haste of
transportation has gone for nothing. For it is in the base hospital
that the final and greatest work with the wounded man is wrought out,
which will let him go forth a whole man, with limbs his own and a
face unmarred, or will discharge him a wrecked creature, crippled,
monstrous, because of bungled treatment. It is a chain with no weak
link that must be forged from the hour of the wounding at Verdun to
the day of hospital discharge at Neuilly. And that final success of
the restored soldier is built upon the loyalty of hundreds of obscure
helpers, far back of the lines of glory. That which is fine about it
is the very absence of the large scale romantic. It is humble service
humbly given, with no war-medals in sight, no mention in official
dispatches--only a steady fatiguing drive against bugs and dirt and
germs and red tape.
So I begin my story with the work of the Scotch-American at the
entrance of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine. He is
the man that gives every entering wounded soldier a bath, and he does
it thoroughly in four and a half minutes. He can bathe twelve inside
the hour. He has perfected devices, so that a fractured leg won't be
hurt while the man is being scrubbed. He has worked out foot-rests,
and body-rests and neck-rests in the tub. This man has taken his lowly
job and made it into one of the important departments of the hospital.
And with him begins, too, the long tale of inventive appliances which
are lessening suffering. The hospital is full of them in each branch
of the service. Everywhere you go in relief work of this war, you see
devices--little things that relieve pain, and save time and speed up
recovery. That is one of the things differentiating this war from the
old-time slaughters, where most of the seriously wounded died: the
omnipresence of mechanical, electrical, devices. Inventive skill has
wreaked itself on the sudden awful human need. The hideously clever
bombs, and big guns, all the ingenious instruments of torture, will
shoot themselves away and pass. But the innumerable appliances of
restoration, the machinery of welfare, suddenly called into being out
of the mechanic brain of our time, under pressure of the agonizing
need, will go on with their ministry when Lorraine is again green.
The Ambulance is the cheeriest, the cleanest, the most efficient
place which I have visited since the beginning of the war. There is
no hospital odor anywhere. Fresh air and sunshine are in the wards.
A vagrant from Mars or the moon, who wanted an answer to some of his
questions about the lay-out of things, would find his quest shortened
by spending an afternoon at the American Ambulance.
What does America mean? What is it trying to do? How does it differ
from other sections of the map?
The swift emergency handling of each situation has been American in
its executive efficiency. Things have been done in a hurry, and done
well. In eighteen days this building was taken over from a partially
completed school, with the refuse of construction work heaped high,
and made into an actively-running hospital ready for 175 patients.
That, too, in those early days of war, when workmen had been called to
the colors, when money was unobtainable, transportation tied up, and
Germany pounding down on Paris.
The skillful surgical work, some of it pioneering in fields untouched
by former experience, has been a demonstration of the best American
practice.
The extraordinarily varied types of persons at work under one roof in
a democracy of service presents just the aspect of our community which
is most representative. Millionaires and an impersonator, Harvard,
Dartmouth, Tech, Columbia, Fordham, Michigan, Princeton, Cornell and
Yale men, ranchers, lawyers, and newspaper men--all are hard at work
on terms of exact equality. A colored man came in one day. He said he
wanted to help with the wounded. He was tried out, and proved himself
one of the best helpers in the organization. He received the same
treatment as all other helpers, eating with them, liked by them. Some
weeks later, one of our wealthy "high-life" young Americans volunteered
his services. After the first meal he came wrathfully to the surgeon.
"I've had to eat at the same table with a negro. That must be changed.
What will you do about it?"
"Do about it," answered the surgeon. "You will do one of two things--go
and apologize to a better man than you are, or walk out of this
hospital."
Recently this black helper came to the director in distress of mind.
"Have to leave you," he said. He held out a letter from the motor car
firm, near Paris, where he he had worked before the war. It was a
request for him to return at once. If he did not obey now in this time
of need, it meant there would never be any position for him after the
war as long as he lived.
A day or two later he came again.
"My old woman and I have been talking it over," he said, "and I just
can't leave this work for the wounded. We'll get along some way."
A little more time passed, and then, one day, he stepped up to the
director and said:
"I want you to meet my boss."
The superintendent of the motor car factory had come. He said to the
director:
"I have received the most touching letter from this darkey, saying he
couldn't come back to us because he must help here. Now I want to tell
you that his position is open to him any time that he wants it, during
the war, or after it."
Visitors, after walking through the wards, smelling no odors, hearing
no groans, seeing the faces of the men smiling back at them, are
constantly saying to the director:
"Ah, I see you have no really serious cases here."
It is the only kind of case sent to Neuilly--the gravely wounded man,
the "_grands blessés_," requiring infinite skill to save the limb and
life. So sweet and hopeful is the "feel" of the place that not even
575 beds of men in extremity can poison that atmosphere of successful
practice. Alice's Queen had a certain casual promptness in saying, "Off
with his head," whenever she sighted a subject. And there was some of
the same spirit in the old-time war-surgeon when he was confronted
with a case of multiple fracture. "Amputate. Off with his leg. Off
with his arm." And that, in the majority of cases, was the same as
guillotining the patient, for the man later died from infection. There
was a surgical ward in one of the 1870 Paris hospitals with an unbroken
record of death for every major operation. At the American Ambulance,
out of the first 3,100 operations, there were 81 amputations. The death
rate for the first year was 4.46 per cent.
These gunshot injuries, involving compound and multiple fractures,
are treated by incision, and drainage of the infected wounds and the
removal of foreign bodies. A large element in the success has been
the ingenuity of the staff in creating appliances that give efficient
drainage to the wound and comfort to the patient. The same inventive
skill is at work in the wards that we saw on entering the hospital in
the bathroom of the Scotch-American. These devices, swinging from a
height over the bed, are slats of wood to which are jointed the splints
for holding the leg or arm in a position where the wound will drain
without causing pain to the recumbent man. The appearance of a ward
full of these swinging appliances is a little like that of a gymnasium.
Half the wounded men riding into Paris ask to be taken to the American
Hospital. They know the high chance of recovery they will have there
and the personal consideration they will receive. The Major-General
enjoys the best which the Hospital can offer. So does the sailor boy
from the Fusiliers Marins.
We had spent about an hour in the wards. We had seen the flying man
who had been shot to pieces in the air, but had sailed back to his
own lines, made his report and collapsed. We had talked with the man
whose face had been obliterated, and who was now as he had once been,
except for a little ridge of flesh on his lower left cheek. I had
seen a hundred men brighten as the surgeon "jollied" them. The cases
were beginning to merge for me into one general picture of a patient,
contented peasant in a clean bed with a friend chatting with him, and
the gift of fruit or a bottle of champagne on the little table by his
head. I was beginning to lose the sense of the personal in the immense,
well-conducted institution, with its routine and system. After all,
these men represented the necessary wastage of war, and here was a
business organization to deal with these by-products. I was forgetting
that it was somebody's husband in front of me, and only thinking that
he was a lucky fellow to be in such a well-ordered place.
Then the whole sharp individualizing work of the war came back in a
stab, for we had reached the bed of the American boy who had fought
with the Foreign Legion since September, 1914.
"Your name is Bonnell?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you spell it B-o-n-n-e double l?"
"Yes."
"By any chance, do you know a friend of mine, Charles Bonnell?"
"He's my uncle."
And right there in the presence of the boy in blue-striped pajamas, my
mind went back over the years. Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to
New York, and grown to know the tall, quiet man, six feet two he was,
and kind to small boys. He was head of a book-store then and now. For
these twenty-seven years I have known him, one of my best friends, and
here was his nephew.
"Do you think I'm taller than my uncle?" the boy asked, standing up.
He stood erect: you would never have known there was any trouble down
below. But as my eye went up and down the fine slim figure, I saw that
his right leg was off at the knee.
"I can't play base-ball any more," he said.
"No, but you can go to the games," said the director; "that's all the
most of us do.
"I wish I had come here sooner," he went on as he sat back on the bed:
standing was a strain. He meant he might have saved his leg.
We came away.
"Now he wants to go into the flying corps," said the surgeon.
He still had his two arms, and the loss of a leg didn't so much matter
when you fly instead of march.
"Flying is the only old-fashioned thing left," remarked the boy, in
a later talk. "You might as well work in a factory as fight in a
trench--only there's no whistle for time off."
I have almost omitted the nurses from this chapter, because we have
grown so used to loyalty and devotion in women that these qualities
in them do not constitute news. The trained nurses of the Ambulance
Hospital, with half a dozen exceptions, are Americans, with a long
hospital experience at home. During the early months they served with
no remuneration. An allowance of 100 francs a month has now been
established. They reluctantly accepted this, as each was anxious to
continue on the purely voluntary basis. There are also volunteer
auxiliary nurses, who serve as assistants to the trained women. The
entire nursing staff has been efficient and self-sacrificing.
We entered the department where some of the most brilliant surgical
work of the war has been done. It is devoted to those cases where the
face has been damaged. The cabinet is filled with photographs, the wall
is lined with masks, revealing the injury when the wounded man entered,
and then the steps in the restoration of the face to its original
structure and look. There in front of me were the reproductions of
the injury: the chin shot away, the cheeks in shreds, the mouth a
yawning aperture, holes where once was a nose--all the ghastly pranks
of shell-fire tearing away the structure, wiping out the human look.
Masks were there on the wall of man after man who would have gone back
into life a monster, a thing for children to run from, but brought back
inside the human race, restored to the semblance of peasant father,
the face again the recorder of kindly expression. The surgeon and
the dental expert work together on these cases. The success belongs
equally to each of the two men. Between them they make a restoration of
function and of appearance.
In peace days, a city hospital would have only three or four fractures
of the jaw in a year, and they were single fractures. There are
no accidents in ordinary life to produce the hideous results of
shell-fire. So there was no experience to go on. There were no
reference books recording the treatment of wounds to the face caused
by the projectiles of modern warfare. Hideous and unprecedented were
the cases dumped by the hundreds into the American Ambulance. Because
of the pioneer success of this hospital, the number of these cases
has steadily increased. They are classified as "gunshot wounds of the
face, involving the maxillæ, and requiring the intervention of dental
surgery." These are compound fractures of the jaw, nearly always
accompanied by loss of the soft parts of the mouth and chin, sometimes
by the almost complete loss of the face.
I have seen this war at its worst. I have seen the largest hospital
in France filled with the grievously-wounded. I have seen the wounded
out in the fields of Ypres, waiting to be carried in. I have seen the
Maison Blanche thronged with the Army of the Mutilated. I have carried
out the dead from hospital and ambulance, and I have watched them
lie in strange ways where the great shell had struck. But death is a
pleasant gift, and the loss of a limb is light. For death leaves a rich
memory. And a crippled soldier is dearer than he ever was to the little
group that knows him. But to be made into that which is terrifying to
the children that were once glad of him, to bring shrinking to the
woman that loved him--that is the foulest thing done by war to the
soldier. So it was the most gallant of all relief work that I have
seen--this restoration of disfigured soldiers to their own proper
appearance.
And the work of these hundreds of Americans at Neuilly was summed
for me in the person of one dental surgeon, who sat a few feet from
those forty masks and those six hundred photographs, working at a
plaster-cast of a shattered jaw. He was very much American--rangy and
loose-jointed, with a twang and a drawl, wondering why the blazes a
writing person was bothering a man at work. It was his time off, after
six days of patient fitting of part to part, and that for a year. So he
was taking his day off to transform one more soldier from a raw pulp to
a human being. There were no motor car dashes, and no military medals,
for him. Only hard work on suffering men. There he sat at his pioneer
work in a realm unplumbed by the mind of man. It called on deeper
centers of adventure than any jungle-exploration or battle-exploit. It
was science at its proper business of salvation. Those Krupp howitzers
were not to have their own way, after all. Here he was, wiping out
all the foul indignities which German scientists had schemed in their
laboratories.
Two days later, I saw the boys of the American Ambulance unload the
wounded of Verdun from the famous American train. The announcement of
the train's approach was simple enough--these words scribbled in pencil
by the French authorities:
"_12 Musulman_
"_241 Blessés_
"_8 Officiers_
"_1 Malade_
"_Train Américain de Revigny._"
Those twelve "Musulman" are worth pausing with for a moment. They are
Mohammedans of the French colonies, who must be specially fed because
their religion does not permit them to eat of the unholy food of
unbelievers. So a hospital provides a proper menu for them.
Add the figures, and you have 262 soldiers on stretchers to be handled
by the squad of 38 men from the American Ambulance. They marched up
the platform in excellent military formation. The train rolled in,
and they jumped aboard, four to each of the eight large cars, holding
36 men each. In twenty-seven minutes they had cleared the train, and
deposited the stretchers on the platforms. There the wounded pass into
the hands of French orderlies, who carry them to the French doctors
in waiting in the station. As quickly the doctor passed the wounded,
the boys took hold again and loaded the ambulances en route to Paris
hospitals. It was all breathless, perspiring work, but without a slip.
There is never a slip, and that is why they are doing this work. The
American Ambulance has the job of unloading three-fourths of all the
wounded that come into Paris. The boys are strong and sure-handed, and
the War Ministry rests easy in letting them deal with this delicate,
important work. They feel pride in a prompt clean-cut job. But, more
than that, they have a deep inarticulate desire to make things easier
for a man in pain. I saw the boys pick up stretcher after stretcher as
it lay on the platform and hurry it to the doctor. That wasn't their
job at all. Their job was only to unload the train, but they could not
let a wounded man lie waiting for red tape. I watched one long-legged
chap who ran from the job he had just completed to each new place of
need, doing three times as much work as even his strenuous duty called
for.
"Look here," I said to Budd, the young Texan, who is Lieutenant of the
Station squad. I pointed to a man on a stretcher. My eye had only shown
me that the sight was strange and pathetic. But his quicker eye caught
that the man needed help. He ran over to him and struck a match as he
went. The soldier had his face swathed in bandages. Arms and hands
were thick with bandages, so that every gesture he made was bungling.
He had a cigarette in his mouth, just clear of the white linen. But he
couldn't bring a match and the box together in his muffled hands so as
to get a light. He was making queer, unavailing motions, like a baby's.
In another second he was contentedly smoking and telling his story.
A hand grenade which he was throwing had exploded prematurely in his
hands and face.
Work at the front is pretty good fun. There is a lot of camaraderie
with the fighting men: the exchange of a smoke and a talk, and the
sense of being at the center of things. The war zone, whatever its
faults, is the focal point of interest for all the world. It is
something to be in the storm center of history. But this gruelling
unromantic work back in Paris is lacking in all those elements. No one
claps you on the back, and says:
"Big work, old top. We've been reading about you. Glad you got your
medal. It must be hell under fire. But we always knew you had it in
you. Come around to the Alumni Association banquet and give us a talk.
Prexy will be there, and we'll put you down for the other speech of the
evening."
What the people say is this:
"Ah, back in Paris, were you? Not much to do there, I guess. Must have
been slow. Couldn't work it to get the front? Well, we can't all be
heroes. Have you met Dick? He was at Verdun, you know. Big time. Had a
splinter go through his hood. Better come round to our annual feed, and
hear him tell about it. So long. See you again."
But the boys themselves know, and the hurt soldiers know, and the War
Minister of France knows. These very much unadvertised young Americans,
your sons and brothers, reader, often sit up all night waiting for a
delayed train.
These boys of ours, shifting stretchers, wheeling legless men to a
place in the sun, driving ambulances, are the most fortunate youth
in fifty years. They are being infected by a finer air than any that
has blown through our consciousness since John Brown's time. And the
older Americans over here have that Civil War tradition in their blood.
They are gray-haired and some of them white-haired. For, all over our
country, individual Americans are breaking from the tame herd and
taking the old trail, again, the trail of hardships and sacrifice. They
have found something wrong with America, and want to make it right. I
saw it in the man from Philadelphia, a well-to-do lawyer who crossed in
the boat with me. He was gray-haired, the father of three children,
one a boy of twenty-one. He was taking his first real vacation after a
lifetime of concentrated successful work. I saw him lifting stretchers
out of the Verdun train.
Boys and old men with an equal faith. The generation that isn't much
represented over here is that of the in-betweeners, men between
thirty-five and fifty years of age. They grew up in a time when
our national patriotism was sagging, when security and fat profits
looked more inviting than sacrifice for the common good. Our country
will not soon be so low again as in the period that bred these total
abstainers from the public welfare. The men and boys who have worked
here are going to return to our community--several hundred have already
returned--with a profound dissatisfaction with our national life as it
has been conducted in recent years.
I have left the American train standing at the platform all this
time, but it rests there till the afternoon, for it takes three hours
to clean it for its trip back to the front. Only three hours--one
more swift job by our contingent. It is the best ambulance train in
France. The huge luggage vans of the trans-continental expresses were
requisitioned. Two American surgeons and one French Medecin Chef travel
with the wounded men. It carries 240 stretchers and 24 sitting cases
in its eight cars for "_Les blessés_." The five other cars are devoted
to an operating room, a kitchen for bouillon, a dining car, a sleeping
car for the surgeons, and the other details of administration. Safety,
speed and comfort are its slogan. The stretchers rest on firm wooden
supports riding on an iron spring. The entire train is clean, sweet
smelling, and travels easily. J. E. Rochfort, who has charge of it,
went around to the men on stretchers as they lay on the platform.
"You rode easily?" he asked.
"_Très bien: très confortable._"
If an emergency case develops during the long ride, the train stops
while the operation is performed. It is also held up at times by the
necessities of war. For the wounded must be side-tracked for more
important items of military demand--shells, food, fresh troops.
Village and town along its route turn out and throng the station
to see the "_Train Americain_." The exterior of the cars carries a
French flag at one end, and, at the other, the American flag. I like
to think of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car of the
great train, and brightly scoured each day, riding through France from
Verdun to Paris, from Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple
people watching its progress, knowing its precious freight of wounded,
saying, "_Le train Americain_," as they sight the painted emblem. It is
where it belongs--side by side with the Tricolor. There isn't a great
question loose on the planet to-day, where the best of us isn't in
accord with the best of France.
That is the biggest thing we are doing over there, carrying a message
of good-will from the Yser to Belfort, up and down and clear across
France, and "every town and every hamlet has heard" not our "trumpet
blast," but the whirr of our rescue motors and the sweetly running
wheels of our express. It is one with the work of the Ambulance
Hospital, where, after the bitter weeks of healing, the young soldier
of France receives his discharge from hospital. Looking on the
photograph and plaster cast of what shell-fire had made of him, and
seeing himself restored to the old manner of man, he has a feeling of
friendliness for the Americans who saved him from the horror that might
have been. The man whose bed lay next walks out on his own two legs
instead of hobbling crippled for the rest of his life, and he remembers
those curious devices of swinging splints, which eased the pain and
saved the leg. He, too, holds a kindly feeling for the nation that has
made him not only a well man, but a whole man. And America has two more
friends in France, in some little village of the province.
This work of the hospital, the train, the motor ambulance, is doing
away with the shock and hurt of our aloofness. These young Americans,
stretcher-bearers and orderlies, surgeons and nurses, drivers and
doctors, are unconscious statesmen. They are building for us a better
foreign policy. It is a long distance for friendly voices of America to
carry across the Atlantic. But these helpers are on the spot, moving
among the common people and creating an international relationship
which not even the severe strain of a dreary aloofness can undo. Our
true foreign policy is being worked out at Neuilly and through the
war-cursed villages. This is our answer to indifference: the gliding
of the immense train through France, carrying men in agony to a sure
relief; the swift, tender handling of those wounded in their progress
from the trench to the ward; the making over of these shattered
soldiers into efficient citizens.
The quarrel none of ours?
The suffering is very much ours.
Too proud to fight?
Not too proud to carry bed-pans and wash mud-caked, blood-marked men.
Not too proud to be shot at in going where they lie.
Neutrality of word and thought?
We are the friends of these champions of all the values we hold dear.
War profits out of their blood?
Many hundreds have given up their life-work, their career, their homes,
to work in lowly ways, with no penny of profit, no hope of glory, "just
because she's France."
III
THE FORD CAR AND ITS DRIVERS
This is the story of the American Ambulance Field Service in the words
of the boys themselves who drove the cars. Fresh to their experience,
they jotted down the things that happened to them in this strange new
life of war. These notes, sometimes in pencil, sometimes written with
the pocket fountain pen, they sent to their chief, Piatt Andrew, and
he has placed these unpublished day-by-day records of two hundred men
at my disposal. Anybody would be stupid who tried to rewrite their
reports. I am simply passing along what they say.
One section of the Field Service with twenty cars was thrown out into
Alsace for the campaign on the crest of Hartmannsweilerkopf. Here is
some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Hartmannsweilerkopf is the
last mountain before the Plain of the Rhine, and commands that valley.
The hill crest was taken and retaken. Here, too, is the one sector
of the Western Front where the French are fighting in the enemy's
country. Alsace has been German territory for forty-three years.
The district known as Haute Alsace is a range of mountains, running
roughly north and south; to the east lies German Alsace, to the west
the level country of French Alsace. On the crest of the mountains the
armies of France and Germany have faced each other. The business of the
ambulances has been to bring wounded from those heights to the railway
stations in the plain.
John Melcher, Jr., says of this work:
"The mountain service consists in climbing to the top of a mountain,
some 4,000 feet high, where the wounded are brought to us. Two cars are
always kept in a little village down the mountain on the other side.
This little village is a few kilometers behind the trenches, and is
sometimes bombarded by the Germans. The roads up the mountain are very
steep, particularly on the Alsatian side. They are rough and so narrow
that in places vehicles cannot pass. These roads are full of ruts, and
at some points are corduroy, the wood practically forming steps. On one
side there is always a sheer precipice."
"If you go off the road," writes one of our young drivers, "it is
probably to stay, and all the while a grade that in some parts has to
be rushed in low speed to be surmounted. Add to this the fact that
in the rainy (or usual) weather of the Vosges, the upper half is
in the clouds, and seeing becomes nearly impossible, especially at
night. Before our advent the wounded were transported in wagons or on
mule-backs, two stretchers, one on each side of the mule. Two of us
tried this method of travel and were nearly sick in a few minutes.
Imagine the wounded--five hours for the trip! That so many survived
speaks well for the hardihood of the "Blue Devils." Now with our cars
the trip takes 1-1/2 or 2 hours. We get as close to the trenches as any
cars go. Our wounded are brought to us on trucks like wheelbarrows, or,
at night, on mules, about one-half hour after the wound is received.
This is hard service for both cars and drivers, and it is done in turn
for five days at a time; then we return to St. Maurice to care for the
cars and rest; the ordinary valley service is regarded by us as rest
after the spell on the hills.
"Car 170 (the E. J. de Coppet Car) has been doing well on this
strenuous work. The two back fenders have been removed, one by a rock
in passing an ammunition wagon, and the other by one of the famous
"75's" going down the hill.
"The men appreciate it. Often, back in France, we are trailed as the
'voitures' they have seen at Mittlach, or as the car which brought a
comrade back. They express curiosity as to our exact military status.
The usual thing when we explain that we are volunteers is for them
to say "chic." When they learn that the cars are given by men in the
United States whose sympathy is with them, they nod approval."
Another man writes of the condition of the service:
"At Cheniménil, the headquarters of the automobile service for this
section, we reported to Captain Arboux, and were informed by him of
the terms on which he had decided to accept our services. We were to
draw our food, wine, tobacco, automobile supplies, such as tires, oil,
gasoline, from the Seventh Army, as well as our lodging, and one sou
a day as pay. In short, we were to be treated exactly as the French
Ambulance sections, and to be subject to the same discipline."
Rations consist of a portion of meat, hard bread--baked some weeks
previously--rice, beans, macaroni or potatoes, a lump of grease for
cooking, coffee, sugar and a little wine. For soldiers on duty there
are field kitchens, fire and boilers running on wheels. But billeted
men have their food cooked by some village woman, or a group build wood
fires against a wall. Our men made arrangements to mess at a restaurant.
The work was so continuous that some of the men drove for as long
as fifty hours without sleep, and no one had time for more than an
occasional nap of an hour and a half.
After the battle of Hartmannsweilerkopf the section was decorated as
a whole, and twelve men individually were decorated. Lovering Hill
of Harvard has been in charge of this section. He has received two
citations, two Croix de Guerre, which he doesn't wear, because he knows
that the Western Front is full of good men who have not been decorated.
The boys formed "The Harvard Club of Alsace Reconquise," and had
Harvard Alumni Dinners when the fighting eased up.
"I think that we have saved the wounded many hours of suffering,"
writes Henry M. Suckley of Harvard, 1910. In that quiet statement lies
the spirit of the work done by the American Field Service.
From the head of the Valley of the Fecht, over 10 miles of mountain, 5
up and 5 down, to Krut on the other side--that has been the run.
W. K. H. Emerson, Jr., says:
"Once I went over a bank in an attempt to pass a convoy wagon at
night without a headlight, such light being forbidden over part of
the Mitlach road. I was lucky enough to lean up against a tree before
slipping very far over the bank, and within ten minutes ten soldiers
had lifted the machine, and put it back on the road, ready to start.
Nothing was wrong but the loss of one sidelight, and the car went
better than before. There was great merriment among the men who helped
to put it on the road."
After four months the section had its barracks, at the 4,000-foot
level, blown down by a gale. So they used a new road. Suckley writes of
finding two huge trees across the path.
"I had three wounded men in the car, whom I was hurrying to the
hospital. I walked down two miles to get some men at a camp of
engineers, the road being too narrow to permit turning. There is a new
service to the famous Hartmannsweilerkopf, or, rather, within half a
mile of this most southerly mount contested by the Germans. For three
miles it is cut out of the solid rock, just wide enough for one of our
cars to pass. You can imagine the joys of this drive on a dark night
when you have to extinguish all lights, and when the speed of the car
cannot be reduced for fear of not making the grades. The first aid
post, called Silberloch, is but 200 or 300 yards from the famous crest
which has been the scene of many fierce combats. The bursting of shells
has taken every bit of foliage from the wooded crest, carried pines
to the ground, so that only a few splintered stumps stick up here and
there. At the post no one dares show himself in the open. All life is
subterranean in bomb-proofs covered by five feet of timber. The road is
concealed everywhere by screens, and the sound of a motor may bring a
hail of shells down on your head. The stretcher bearers are so used to
meeting death in its worst forms--by burning oil, by shell fragments,
by suffocating shells--that they have grown to look at it smilingly."
It is a St. Paul's School car that operates there.
"Another time the run was up to an artillery post in the mountains.
The road was extremely steep near the top, and covered with gravel.
It was only by hard effort that a dozen men could push the car up. We
ran to the communicating trench, where they had the man waiting. He
was wounded in the abdomen, and in great pain. We started down over
the terrible road; at every pebble he would groan. When we reached
the worst place of all, where the road had recently been mended with
unbroken stones, his groans began to grow fainter. They ceased, and,
stopping, we found that he was dead. But there had been a chance of
saving his life. A larger car could not have gone up. A wagon or a mule
would have caused his death almost immediately.
"On one of our hills in winter a team of six Red Cross men was kept
on duty waiting for our ambulance to come along. The cars would
go as far as possible up the incline, and before they lost speed
would be practically carried to the crest on the shoulders of the
pushers--mules, with their drivers hanging on the beasts' tails to
make the ascent easier. Strapped on these animals are barbed wire and
hand-grenades, red wine and sections of the army portable houses."
Such is winter in Alsace.
"Luke Doyle had driven his car to the entrance of the Hartmanns
trenches and our last post, when a heavy bombardment forced every one
to make for the bomb-proof. Several men were wounded and he came out to
crank his car and carry them off when he was ordered back to safety. A
few moments later a shell landed close to the 'abri.' It struck a man
and killed him. A flying piece reached Doyle and entered his elbow.
Another of our section, Douglas, arrived, and was knocked flat by a
bursting shell. He rose, put Doyle in his car and drove him up the road
to safety."
Another time, Jack Clark writes:
"Car 161 still lives up to her reputation. Yesterday, in a blizzard,
she was blown off the road between two trees, over three piles of rock,
through a fence and into a ditch. Three men and a horse removed her
from the pasture, and she went on as ever."
Car 163 had 13 cases of tire trouble in two weeks. The whole success
of the adventure depends on the condition of the cars. So through all
the narrative of shell-fire and suffering men recurs the theme of
roads and tires, axle-trouble and hill-grades. The adventure of the car
itself is as real as that of the man. The car becomes a personality to
the man at the wheel, just as the locomotive is to the engineer. It
isn't any old car. It is the little Ford, Number 121, given by Mrs.
Richard Trowbridge of Roxbury, Mass. In that particular car you have
carried 500 wounded men, you have gone into the ditch, stuck in the
mud, and scurried under shell-fire, shrapnel has torn the cover, and
there is the mark of a rifle-bullet on the wheel-spoke. You have slept
at the wheel and in the chassis, after hours of work. You have eaten
luncheons for two months on the front seat. The reader must not get
very far away from the ambulance-car in making his mental picture of
the experience of the boys in North France, and he must not object if
all through this chapter he gets the smell of grease and petrol, and if
the explosions are tires as often as shells. Because that is the way it
is at the front. These boys never take their eyes from the road and the
car. So why should we who read of them?
There is a certain Detroit manufacturer who has a large and legitimate
advertisement coming to him. If he will collect the hundred fervid and
humorous comments written into the records of the field service he will
have a publicity pamphlet which will outlive "A Message to Garcia." For
this job of the jitneys is more than carrying orders; it is bringing
wounded men over impossible routes, where four wheels and a motor were
never supposed to go. Mr. Ford with his ship accomplished nothing, but
Mr. Ford with his cars has done much in getting the boys out of the
trenches. They would have lain there wounded for an hour, two hours, in
the Alsace district for twelve hours longer, if his nimble jitneys had
not chugged up to the boyau and dressing station.
"We expected to be kept rolling all night." To "keep rolling" is their
phrase for driving the car.
"The next sixty hours were not divided into days for us. We ran
steadily, not stopping for meals or sleep except during the brief
pauses in the stream of wounded. Except for one memorable and enormous
breakfast at the end of the first 24 hours, I ate while driving,
steering with one hand, holding bread and cheese in the other. The
first lull I slept an hour and a half, the second night there was no
lull and I drove until I went to sleep several times at the wheel. Then
I took three hours' rest and went on. Gasoline, oil and carbide ran
low; we used all our spare tires. One of our men ran into a ditch with
three seriously wounded soldiers, and upset. Another man broke his rear
axle. During the two and one-half days of the attack, over 250 wounded
were moved by our 15 cars a distance of 40 kilometers."
Ambulance work depends on the supply of gasoline, oil, carbide and
spare parts, solid rations and sleep. Success rests in patching tires,
scraping carbon and changing springs. Any idea of ambulance work is off
the mark that thinks it a succession of San Juan charges. It is hard,
unpicturesque work, with an occasional fifteen minutes of tension.
"A stretcher makes a serviceable bed, and, warmly wrapped in blankets,
one can sleep very comfortably in an ambulance."
"A climb of 800 meters in less than 10 kilometers involves mechanical
stress."
"The unique spring suspension and light body construction make our cars
the most comfortable for the wounded of all the types in service."
A mechanical detail--but it is in these bits of ingenious mechanical
adaptation to human needs that the American contribution has been
made. It isn't half enough in a machine-made war to be dashing and
picturesque. You must fight destructive machinery with still cleverer
engines of relief. The inventive brain must operate as well as the
kind heart and the spirit of fearlessness. It is in the combination
of courage and mechanical versatility that the best of the American
quality has been revealed.
Flashes of the soldier life are given by the boys. Canned beef is
called by the poilu "singe," or monkey meat.
"All that is impossible is explained by a simple 'c'est la guerre.' Why
else blindly scrape one's way past a creaking truck of shells, testing
20 horses, two abreast, steaming in their own cloud of sweaty vapor?
Why else descend slopes with every brake afire, with three human bodies
as cargo, where a broken drive shaft leaves but one instantaneous twist
of the wheel for salvation, a thrust straight into the bank, smashing
the car but saving its load? 'C'est la guerre.'"
"'Chasseurs Alpines': a short, dark-blue jacket, gray trousers, spiral
puttees, and the jaunty soft hat 'bérets.' These are the famous 'blue
devils.'"
"I, who came for four months and have been working eight, can assure
any one who is considering joining the American Ambulance that he will
go home with a feeling of great satisfaction at having been able to
help out a little a nation that appreciates it, and that is bearing the
brunt of the fighting on the Western Front."
"Among the wounded that our cars carried, was the General of the
Division--General Serret"--brought down from the height he had held to
be amputated and to die.
Another section of twenty-four cars started in at Esternay at the time
of the spring freshets, when life was chilly and wet. Eleven received
individually the Croix de Guerre. This section served two divisions
of the second French Army and had a battle front of from seven to ten
miles--the St. Mihiel sector, a region subject to artillery fire. It
has been commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry, a descendant of Commodore
Perry.
They had 1,800 wounded a week, and a mileage of 5,000 kilometers.
"Sudbury broke his arm cranking, this morning."
The service was brisk. Shroder with two wounded was rounding a corner
when a shell hit so close as to jump his car up. One car came in from
service in July with 23 shrapnel holes. On July 8, within 24 hours, the
boys of this section carried 997 wounded.
"During the bombardment the trenches were so smashed by continuous
fire as to cease to be trenches: the men lay in holes in the ground.
They would come down when relieved, dazed and sometimes weeping, yet
they held their ground." Long waits and frantic activity: dullness and
horror alternating. Nine members of the ambulances were in the house
against which a shell exploded. A soldier was killed and one mortally
wounded. The Americans were thrown in a heap on the floor. "Now, the
section occupies a large house just outside the town. There is a large
hole in the garden where a shell alighted soon after this became our
new quarters; but the good fortune of the Ambulance is with it still."
"To Clos Bois. Sharp shrapnel fire. Small branches and leaves showered
down in the wood. It was necessary for two of our men, whose ambulances
stood in the open to expose themselves in putting stretchers in the
cars. Great courage was displayed by McConnell, who was active in this
work even when not required to be so, and who was hit in the back by a
fragment of shell, sustaining, however, no further injury than a bad
bruise. Mention should be made of Martin, who drove away with his car
full of wounded while the firing was still going on, a bullet mark in
his steering-gear, and a spare tire on the roof punctured."
The order of the day, July 22, cited the American section, "Composed of
volunteers, friends of our country."
Here are a half dozen impressions that come to the men in the course of
their work.
"I counted one evening fifteen balls, within a space of a dozen yards
of the doorway where I was sheltering."
"The dark houses, deserted streets, the dim shape of a sentry, the
night scents of the fields"--these are what the evening run reveals.
"On the one hand are the trenches where men live in conditions which
must resemble those of the cave men: dug into the earth, and with
danger of death as a daily habit; on the other, within half an hour's
walk, most of the comforts of civilization. We come down from the work
of carrying hundreds of mangled men, and in the evening sit eating
strawberries and cake in a pretty drawing-room."
"The wounded had a curiously unconcerned appearance, as though having
been hit already they are immune."
"Our young heroes----" Yes, they are all of that, fearless, and swift
to act. But they are practical heroes--good mechanicians, ready to lend
a hand on any lowly job of washing a stretcher or shifting furniture.
I like the rough-neck way of the American Ambulance. There has been a
snobbish attempt made to describe these young workers as belonging to
our "best families," representing the "elite" of America. That is to
miss the point of the work. It is democratic service. Work hard and you
are a popular member of the community. This Lorraine section went to
Verdun, and Robert Toms of Marion, Iowa, wrote me:
"Everybody has the right spirit, and we are all working together. We
are living the real army life--sleeping out of doors and eating in a
barn."
One of the Verdun sections was sent to Bar-le-Duc recently where a
bombardment by fourteen German aeroplanes was under way. Forty persons
were killed and 160 injured. The boys cruised around the streets
during the overhead shelling of forty-five minutes, picking up the
dead and wounded. Almost all the cars were hit by fragments of shell.
This prompt aid under fire endeared the American Ambulance to the
inhabitants of that town. Next day one of the drivers took his coat to
a tailor for repair. The man refused to accept any pay from one who had
helped his city.
A few of us were sitting around quietly one day when a French
sous-officer entered, in a condition of what seems to our inarticulate
Northern stolidity as excitement, but what in reality is merely clear
expression of warm emotion. He said:
"The people of Bar-le-Duc are grateful for what the Americans have
done. Your work was excellent, wonderful. We will not forget it."
This work of the American Ambulance Field Service is the most
brilliant, the most widely known of any we are doing in France. As we
motored through Lorraine, Major Humbert, brother of the Commanding
General of the Third Division, stopped three of us, Americans, and said
he wished to tell us, as spokesman to our country, that the American
Ambulance Service gave great satisfaction to the French Army. "It is
courageous and useful. We thank you."
A Flanders section was sent out, ten cars at first. They served at the
Second Battle of the Yser, when gas was used for the first time by the
enemy. It is a flat country and they ran close to the battle-front.
They were billeted at Elverdinghe till the village crumbled under shell
fire.
The work was in part "cleaning plugs and cylinders, tightening nuts and
bolts, oiling and greasing, washing our little cars just as though they
were a lot of dirty kiddies." The cars receive pet names of Susan, and
Beatrice, and The Contagious Bus. The Contagious Bus, Car 82, driven by
Hayden, carried 187 contagious cases between March 29 and May 12, and
a total of 980 men, covering 2,084 kilometers. In one day 95 men were
transported to the hospitals in that one car.
"At 2.30 in the afternoon a call came from the 'Trois Chemins' poste,
and in answering it Day and Brown had a close call. While on the road
to the poste, at one place in view of the German trenches, they were
caught in a bombardment, seven shells striking within 100 yards of
the machine. Two or three days later, Latimer halted his machine at
the end of the road, and walked down to the poste with the 'Medecin
Auxiliare.' Shrapnel began to break near them and they were forced to
put in the next few minutes in a ditch. They were forced to lie down
five times that morning in this ditch, half full of mud and water. The
red-headed girls still continue to keep open their little store right
near the church on the main street. Downs spent the night on the road
where he had dropped out with a broken transmission. A fire caused by
the heating apparatus broke out in Ned Townsend's car. It flamed out
suddenly, and it was too late to save even his personal belongings."
There are all kinds of interludes in the work. Here is a Christmas
note, "Dec. 25. The section had its Christmas dinner at 5 o'clock.
Kenyon plays the violin very well, and Day and Downs are at home with
the piano. Toasts were drunk all the way from Theodore Roosevelt to
'The Folks at Home.' After dinner impromptu theatricals, Franklin and
White's dance taking the cake."
"Car wanted for Poste de Secours No. 1, 200 yards from trenches, eight
kilometers from our post. The car rocks from shell holes. Watch for the
round black spots."
General Putz, commanding the Détachement d'Armée de Belgique, states:
"In spite of the bombardment of Elverdinghe, of the roads leading to
this village, and of the Ambulance itself, this evacuation has been
effected night and day without interruption. I cannot too highly praise
the courage and devotion shown by the personnel of the section."
One of the men writes: "From 3 a.m. April 22 until 7.30 p.m. April 26,
five cars on duty. In those four days each man got seven hours' sleep,
sitting at the wheel, or an hour on a hospital bed."
Of one sudden shell-flurry: "We stayed still for fifteen minutes, I
smoking furiously, and the English nurse singing. Little 'Khaki,' the
squad's pet dog, lay shaking."
Five days of continuous heavy work exhausted them, and half of the
corps was sent to Dunkirk "en repos." On the day of their arrival
shells came in from a distance of twenty-one miles, twenty shells at
intervals of half an hour. They took a minute and a half to arrive. The
French outposts at the German lines telephoned that one was on its way,
and the sirens of Dunkirk, twenty-one miles away, blew a warning. This
gave the inhabitants a minute in which to dive into their cellars. The
American Ambulances were the only cars left in the town. On the sound
of the siren the boys headed for the Grand Place, and, as soon as they
saw the cloud of dust, they drove into it.
As one of them describes it:
"We spent the next two hours cruising slowly about the streets, waiting
for the next shells to come, and then going to see if any one had
been hit. I had three dead men and ten terribly wounded--soldiers,
civilians, women. The next day I was glad to be off for the quiet
front where things happen in the open, and women and children are not
murdered."
"Seven shells fell within a radius of 200 yards of the cars, with
pieces of brick and hot splinters."
A French official said of the Dunkirk bombardment:
"I was at most of the scenes, but always found one of your ambulances
before me."
A Moroccan lay grievously wounded in a Dunkirk hospital. One of our
boys sat down beside the cot.
"Touchez le main," said the wounded man, feebly. He was lonely.
The boys stayed with him for a time. The man was too far spent to talk,
but every little while he said:
"Touchez le main."
Through the darkness of his pain, he knew that he had a companion
there. The young foreigner at his side was a friend, and cared that he
suffered. It is difficult to put in public print what one comes to know
about these young men of ours, for they are giving something besides
efficient driving. I have seen men like Bob Toms at work, and I know
that every jolt of the road hurts them because it hurts their wounded
soldier.
A young millionaire who has been driving up in the Alsace district,
remarked the other day:
"I never used to do anything, but I won't be able to live like that
after the war. The pleasantest thing that is going to happen to me
when this thing is over will be to go to the telephone in New York and
call up François.
"'That you, François? Come and let's have dinner together and talk over
the big fight.'
"François is a Chasseur Alpin. I've been seeing him up on the mountain.
François is the second cook at the Knickerbocker Hotel, and the finest
gentleman I ever knew."
[Illustration: The section that was "shot up" at Verdun--American
Ambulance Field Service, Section Three. Ralph Blumenthal, the Princeton
All-America football centre, standing at the right. Next him, Waldo
Pierce, the artist.]
[Illustration: Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre, Fifth
Prince of the name, Forty-fifth Count of the name, stooping at the left
to repair a bad tire. He was chauffeur of the car that carried us to
Verdun.]
IV
THE AMERICANS AT VERDUN
The French have been massed at Verdun in the decisive battle of the
war. So were the Americans. Our little group of ambulance drivers were
called from the other points of the 350-mile line, and five sections
of the American Ambulance Field Service and the Harjes and the Norton
Corps work from ten up to twenty hours of the day bringing in their
comrades, the French wounded. One hundred and twenty of our cars and
120 of our boys in the field service were in the sector, under constant
shell-fire. Several were grievously wounded. Others were touched. A
dozen of the cars were shot up with shrapnel and slivers of explosive
shell.
Will Irwin and I went up with Piatt Andrew, head of the field service,
to see the young Americans at work. We left Paris on July 1 in a motor
car. Our chauffeur was Philibert, Eighth Duke of Clermont-Tonnerre,
Fifth Prince of the name, Tenth Marquess of Cruzy and Vauvillars,
Forty-fifth Count of the name, Sixteenth Viscount of Tallart,
Twenty-first Baron of Clermont en Viennois, Ancien Pair de France,
descendant of the Seigneur of Saint Geoire. For nine centuries his
family has been famous. The Duke is a kindly, middle-aged aristocrat,
who is very helpful to the American Field Service. He takes the
boys on visits to some one of his collection of châteaus. He drives
Piatt Andrew on his tours of inspection. He is a gifted and furious
driver, and on our dash from Paris to Verdun he burned up a couple
of tires. It was a genial thing to see him, caked with dust on face
and clothing, tinkering the wheel. To be served by one of the oldest
families in Europe was a novel experience for Irwin and me, though
actually what the Duke was doing in his democratic way is being done
almost universally by the "high-born" of France. Up through thousands
of transports, thousands of horses and tens of thousands of men, we
steered our course to Lovering Hill's section of the American Field
Service.
There on the hillside, to the west of Verdun, were the boys and their
cars. It was daytime, so they were resting. All work is night work.
They were muddy, unshaved, weary. A couple of base-ball gloves were
lying around. One of the boys was repairing a car that had collided
with a tree. There was mud on all the cars, and blood on the inner
side of one car. For ten nights they have been making one of the
hottest ambulance runs of the war.
It was on that run that William Notley Barber, of Toledo, Ohio, was
shot through the back. The shell fragment tore a long, jagged rent in
his khaki army coat, with a circle of blood around the rip, entered the
back and lay against the lung and stomach. The car was shattered. The
next man found him. The wrecked car still stood on the road with a dead
man in it, the wounded soldier whom he was bringing back. We saw Barber
at the field hospital. He had been operated on for the second time. He
showed us the quarter inch of metal which the surgeon had just taken
out, the second piece to be removed. He has won the Medaille Militaire.
This section needed no initiation. They had long served at
Hartmannsweilerkopf in the Alsace fighting, and of their number
Hall was killed. This experience at Verdun is a continuation of the
dangerous, brilliant work they have carried on for sixteen months.
These men are veterans in service, though youngsters in years. By their
shredded cars and the blood they have spilled they have earned the
right to be ranked next to soldiers of the line.
They gave me the impression of having been through one of the great
experiences of life. There was a tired but victorious sense they
carried, of men that had done honest service.
As we sat on the grass and looked out on a sky full of observation
balloons and aeroplanes, a very good-looking young man walked up. Only
one thing about his make-up was marred, and that was his nose--a streak
of red ran across the bridge.
"Shrapnel," he said, as he saw me looking. "And it seems a pity, too. I
spent $600 on that nose, just before I came over here. They burned it,
cauterized it, wired it, knifed it, and pronounced it a thorough job.
And as soon as it was cleaned up, it came over here into powder and
dust and got messed up by shrapnel. Now the big $600 job will have to
be done over again."
This young man is Waldo Pierce, the artist. It was he who once started
on a trip to Europe with a friend, but didn't like the first meal, so
jumped overboard and swam back. He sailed by the next boat, and arrived
on the other side to find his friend in trouble for his disappearance.
Through the side of Pierce's coat, just at the pocket, and just over
the heart, I saw a bullet hole.
"Pretty stagey, isn't it?" he explained. "If it had been a ragged,
irregular hole, somewhere else, say at the elbow, it would have
been all right. But this neat little hole just at the vital spot is
conventional stuff. It looks like the barn door, and five yards away.
"And this is worse yet," he added, as he took out from the inner
breast pocket a brown leather wallet. Through one flap the same
shrapnel bullet had penetrated. Together, coat and wallet had saved
this young man's life.
"That's the sort of thing that wouldn't go anywhere," Pierce went on.
He is a Maine man, and has a pleasant drawl.
Wheeler's car was shot through, the slatting ripped at the driver's
place, the sides a mess. A man on his right and a man at his left were
killed. The stuff passed over his head as he knelt before a tire. The
boys have been playing in luck. A dozen fatalities were due them in
the June drive at Verdun. This was the fiercest offensive of the four
months, and they stood up to it.
We were looking west, and as we looked an aeroplane burst into flames.
As it fell, it left a trail of black smoke, funnel shaped, and always
at the point of that funnel the bright spark, and at the heart of that
spark a man burning to death. The spark descended rather slowly, with
a spiraling movement, and trailing the heavy smoke. It burned brightly
all the way to the horizon line, where it seemed to continue for a
moment, like a setting sun on the earth's rim. Then it puffed out, and
only the smoke in the sky was left. In another moment the light wind
had shredded the smoke away.
It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been coming from Paris
at full tilt to get to the Etat Major and report ourselves. So, after
watering the car and shaking hands all around, we started off, and
straightway the rear left tire went flat, and its successor went flat,
and for the third time it went flat. So we crawled to a village at
midnight, and laid by for repairs.
At 3 a.m. we rose. There was no dressing to be done, as we had rested
in our clothes. We ran out past the city of Verdun on the road going
east to Fort de Tavannes. Wheat was ripening to the full crop in a
hundred fields about us. All the birds were singing. The pleasant stir
and fullness of summer were coming down the air.
Then on a sudden the famous Tier de Barrage broke out--the deadly
barrier of fire that crumbles a line of trenches as a child pokes in an
ant hill: the fire that covers an advance and withers an enemy attack.
Here was what I had been waiting for through twenty-one months of war.
I had caught snatches of it at a dozen points along the line. I had
eaten luncheon by a battery near Dixmude, but they were lazy, throwing
a shell or two only for each course. But here, just before the sun
came up, 200 feet from us, a battery of twelve 75s fired continuously
for twenty minutes. Just over the hill another battery cleared its
throat and spoke. In the fields beyond us other batteries played
continuously. Some of the men put cotton in their ears.
We ran through a devastated wood. The green forest has been raked
by high explosive into dead stumps, and looks like a New Hampshire
hillside when the match trust has finished with it. The road is a thing
of mounds and pits, blown up and dug out by a four months' rain of
heavy shells. The little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into
an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They turn round on their own
tails. They push their pert little noses up a hill, where the road is
lined with famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They refuse to stay
out of service.
We rode back through the partially destroyed city of Verdun, lying
trapped and helpless in its hollow of hills. We drove through its
streets, some of them a pile of stones and plaster, others almost
untouched, with charming bits of water view and green lawns and
immaculate white fronts. The city reminded me of the victim whom a
professional hypnotist displays in a shop window, where he leaves him
lying motionless in the trance for exhibition purposes.
Verdun lay seemingly dead inside the range of German fire. But once the
guns are forced back the city will spring into life.
Then we returned to the ambulance headquarters and in an open tent
shared the excellent rations which the field service provides for its
workers. We were sitting with the French lieutenant and discussing
the values of rhythm in prose when the boys shouted to us from the
next field. An aeroplane was dipping over an anchored sausage-shaped
observation balloon. The aeroplane had marked its victim, which could
not escape, as a bird darts for a worm. The balloon opened up into
flame and fell through thirty seconds, burning with a dull red.
The hours we had just spent of work and excitement seemed to me fairly
crowded, but they were mild in the life of the field service. They
pound away overtime and take ugly hazards and preserve a boy's humor.
More young men of the same stuff are needed at once for this American
Ambulance Field Service. The country is full of newly made college
graduates, wondering what they can make of their lives. Here is the
choicest service in fifty years offered to them.
Even a jitney wears out. Bump it in the carburetor enough times, rake
it with shrapnel, and it begins to lose its first freshness. More
full sections of cars should be given. The work is in charge of Piatt
Andrew, who used to teach political economy in Harvard, was later
Director of the Mint, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and secretary
of Senator Aldrich's Monetary Commission.
[Illustration: A. Piatt Andrew, who, as Director, has raised the
American Ambulance Field Service from a small beginning to a powerful
factor in rescue work.]
As soon as twilight fell we started on the nightly round. Here was
Section 4 of the American Ambulance doing hot service for Hill 304
and Dead Man's Hill. It was on this ride that I saw the real Verdun,
the center of the deadliest action since men learned how to kill. The
real Verdun is the focused strength of all France, flowing up the main
roads, trickling down the side roads and overflowing upon the fields.
The real Verdun is fed and armed by the thousands of motor cars that
bray their way from forty miles distant, by the network of tiny narrow
gauge railways, and by the horses that fill the meadows and forests.
Tiny trucks and trains are stretched through all the sector. They look
like a child's railroad, the locomotive not more than four feet high.
They brush along by the road, and wander through fields and get lost in
woods. The story goes in the field service that one of these wee trains
runs along on a hillside, and just back of it is a battery of 220's
which shoot straight across the tracks at a height of three feet. The
little train comes chugging along full of ammunition. The artillery men
yell "Attention," and begin firing all together. The train waits till
there seems to be a lull, and goes by under the muzzles.
We were still far enough from the front to see this enginery of war
as a spectacle. The flashing cars and bright winged aeroplanes,
the immense concourse of horses, the vast orderly tumult, thousands
of mixed items, separate things and men, all shaped by one will to
a common purpose, all of it clothed in wonder, full of speed and
color--this prodigious spectacle brought to me with irresistible appeal
a memory of childhood.
"What does it remind me of?" I kept saying to myself. Now I had it:
When I was a very little boy I used to get up early on two mornings
of the year: one was the Fourth of July and the other was the day the
circus came to town. The circus came while it was yet dark in the
summer morning, unloaded the animals, unpacked the snakes and freaks,
and built its house from the ground up. Very swiftly the great tents
were slung, and deftly the swinging trapezes were dropped. Ropes
uncoiled into patterns. The three rings came full circle. Seats rose
tier on tier. Then the same invisible will created a mile long parade
down Main Street, gave two performances of two hours each, and packed
up the circus, which disappeared down the road before the Presbyterian
church bell rang midnight.
A man once said to me of a world famous general: "He is a great
executive. He could run a circus on moving day." It was the perfect
tribute. So I can give no clearer picture of what Pétain and his five
fingers--the generals of his staff--are accomplishing than to say they
are running one thousand circuses, and every day is moving day.
Our little car was like a carriage dog in the skill with which it kept
out of the way of traffic while traveling in the center of the road.
Three-ton trucks pounded down upon it and the small cuss breezed round
and came out the other side. The boys told me that one of our jitneys
once pushed a huge camion down over a ravine, and went on innocent and
unconcerned, and never discovered its work as a wrecker till next day.
But soon we passed out of the zone of transports and into the
shell-sprinkled area. We went through a deserted village that is
shelled once or twice a day. There is nothing so dead as a place,
lately inhabited, where killing goes on. There is the smell of tumbled
masonry and moldering flesh, the stillness that waits for fresh horror.
Just as we left the village, the road narrowed down like the neck of
a bottle. It is so narrow that only one stream of traffic can flow
through. By the boys of the field service this peculiarly dangerous
village of Bethlainville is known as "Bethlehem"--Bethlehem, because no
wise men pass that way.
The young man with me had been bending over his steering gear, a few
days before, when a shrapnel ball cut through the seat at just the
level of his head. If he had been sitting upright the bullet would
have killed him. And another bullet went past the face of the boy with
him. The American Field Service has had nothing but luck.
"But don't publish my name," said my friend. "It might worry the folk
at home."
We rode on till we had gone eighteen miles.
"Here is our station."
I didn't know we were there. Our Poste de Secours was simply one more
hole in the ground, an open mouth into an invisible interior--one more
mole hole in honeycombed ground.
We entered the cave, and something hit my face. It was the flap of
sacking which hung there to prevent any light being seen. We walked a
few steps, hand extended, till it felt the second flap. We stepped into
a little round room, like the dome of an astronomical observatory. It
was lit by lantern. Three stretcher bearers were sitting there, and two
chaplains, one Protestant, one Roman Catholic. The Protestant was a
short, energetic man in the early forties, with stubby black beard and
excellent flow of English. The Roman Catholic, Cleret de Langavant, was
white-haired, with a long white beard, a quite splendid old fellow with
his courtesy and native dignity. These two men, the best of friends,
live up there in the shelled district, where they can minister to the
wounded as fast as they come in from the trenches. Of one group of
thirty French stretcher bearers who have been bringing wounded from
Dead Man's Hill to this tunnel, where the Americans pick them up, ten
have been killed.
We went out from the stuffy, overcrowded shelter and stood in the
little communicating trench that led from the Red Cross room to the
road. We were looking out on 500,000 men at war--not a man of them
visible, but their machinery filling the air with color and sound. We
were not allowed to smoke, for a flicker of light could draw fire.
We were standing on the crest of a famous hill. We saw, close by, Hill
340 and Dead Man's Hill, two points of the fiercest of the Verdun
fighting. It was the wounded from Dead Man's Hill for whom we waited.
Night by night the Americans wait there within easy shell range.
Sometimes the place is shelled vigorously. Other nights attention is
switched to other points.
"I shouldn't stand outside," suggested one of the stretcher bearers.
"The other evening one of our men had his arm blown off while he was
sitting at the mouth of the tunnel. He thought it was going to be a
quiet evening."
But the young American doctor liked fresh air.
It was a wonderful night of stars, with a bell-like clarity to the
mild air and little breeze stirring. A perfect night for flying. We
heard the whirr of the passing wings--the scouts of the sky were out.
Searchlights began to play. I counted eight at once, and more than
twenty between the hills. Sometimes they ran up in parallel columns,
banding the western heaven. Sometimes they located the knight errant
and played their streams on him at the one intersecting point. Again
the lights would each of them go off on a separate search, flicking
up and down the dome of the sky and rippling over banks of thin white
cloud.
Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended, gathering intensity
of light till it seemed as if it hit my face, then slowly fell. The
German starlights were swift and brilliant; the French steady and long
continuing.
"No good, the Boches' lights," said a voice out of the tunnel. A French
stretcher bearer had just joined us.
Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once, sometimes red,
sometimes green. Then the pattern lights began to play--the lights
which signal directions for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a
snake and again made geometrical figures. Some of the fifty guns,
nested behind us, fired rapidly for five minutes and then knocked
off for a smoke. From the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps
220's, thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large shells in
the distance. The Germans threw a few shells in the direction of the
village through which we had driven, a few toward the battery back
of us. We could hear the whistle of our shells traveling west and of
their shells coming east. To stand midway between fires is to be in a
safe and yet stimulating situation. From the gently sloping, innocent
hillocks all about us tons of metal passed high over our heads into the
lines. If only one shell in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of
the front has it, the slaughter was thorough.
"It is a quiet evening," said my friend.
It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity; there were no
buildings, no trees, nothing but distance, and the distance filled
with fireworks. I once saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks.
It seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days afterward. But
here in front of us were twenty miles of exploding lights, a continuous
performance for four months. With our heads thrust over the tunnel
edge, we stood there for four hours. The night, the play of lights, the
naked hill top, left us with a sense of something vast and lonely.
The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let us go across the road to
my abri."
He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent over to enter the earth
cave. "I will lead you," he said, taking me by the arm.
"Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must not show any light."
When the cave was securely closed in he flashed a pocket electric. We
were in a room scooped out of the earth. The roof was so low that my
casque struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The available
standing room was three feet by six feet.
"You will forgive me for asking it," he went on, "but please use your
pocket lamp; mine is getting low and I am far away from supplies. We
can get nothing up here."
My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman flashed it on a
photograph pinned against a plank of wood.
"My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from Bensonhurst, Long
Island. And that is my child."
He turned the light around the room. There were pages of pictures from
the _London Daily Mail_ and the _New York Tribune_. One was a picture
of German soldiers in a church, drinking by the altar.
"I call this my New York corner," he explained, "and this is my
visiting card." From a pile he lifted a one-page printed notice, which
read:
"Declaration Religeuse.
"I, the undersigned, belong to the Protestant religion. In consequence
and conforming to the law of 1905, this is my formal wish: In case of
sickness or accident, I wish the visit of a Protestant pastor and the
succor of his ministry whether I am undergoing treatment at a hospital
or elsewhere; in case of death I wish to be buried with the assistance
of a Protestant pastor and the rites of that Church."
Space is left for the soldier to sign his name. The little circular is
devised by this chaplain, Pastor----, chaplain of the----Division.
At 2 o'clock in the morning we were ordered to load our car with the
wounded, one "lying case," three "sitting cases." We discharged them at
the hospital, and tumbled into the tent at Ippecourt at 4 o'clock.
V
"FRIENDS OF FRANCE"
American relief work in France has many agencies and activities. I have
given illustrations of it, but these are only admirable bits among
a host of equals. I have told of the American Field Service. Other
sections of young Americans have been at work in the hottest corners of
the battle front. The Harjes Formation and the American Volunteer Motor
Ambulance Corps, known as the Norton Corps, have made a name for daring
and useful work with their one hundred cars on the firing line. What
the Field Service has done, they too have done and suffered. It was
with a glow of pride that I read the name of my Yale classmate, W. P.
Clyde, junior, of the Norton Ambulance, cited in an order of the day,
and made the recipient of the French War Cross. The commanding general
wrote of him:
"Volunteer for a perilous mission, he acquitted himself with a cool
courage under a heavy and continuous fire. He has given, in the course
of the campaign, numerous proofs of his indifference to danger and his
spirit of self-sacrifice."
I have shown the contribution of scientific skill and mechanical
ingenuity which Americans have made in hospital and ambulance work.
There remains a work in which our other American characteristic of
executive ability is shown. Organization is the merit of the American
Relief Clearing House. When the war broke out, American gifts tumbled
into Paris, addressed and unaddressed. There was a tangle and muddle
of generosity. The American Relief Clearing House was formed to meet
this need. It centralizes and controls the receipt of relief from
America intended for France and her Allies. It collects fresh accurate
information on ravaged districts and suffering people. It prevents
waste and overlapping and duplication. It obtains free transportation
across the ocean for all gifts, free entry through the French customs,
and free transportation on all the French railways. It forwards the
gifts to the particular point, when it is specified. It distributes
unmarked supplies to places of need. It receives money and purchases
supplies. It has 114 persons giving all their time to its work. It has
issued 45,000 personally signed letters telling of the work. It employs
ten auto trucks in handling goods. It has concentrated time, effort
and gifts. It has obtained and spread information of the needs of the
Allies. It has been efficient in creating relationship between the
donor in America and the recipient in France, and in increasing good
will between the nations. I do not write of the Clearing House from the
outside, but from a long experience. For many months my wife has given
all her time to making known the work of Miss Fyfe who manages the work
of relief for civilians, their transportation, and conducts a refugee
house, and a Maternity Hospital in the little strip of Belgium which
is still unenslaved. Little local committees, such as Miss Rider's in
Norwalk, in Cedar Rapids, in Montclair, and in Douglaston, L. I., have
been formed, and 36 boxes of material, and over $1,500 in money, have
been given. Those supplies the Clearing House has brought from New York
to La Panne, Belgium, free of charge, promptly, with no damage and no
losses. What the Clearing House has done for this humble effort, it
has done for 60,000 other consignments, and for more than a million
dollars of money. It has distributed supplies to 2,500 hospitals and
200 relief organizations in France. It has sent goods to Belgium,
Salonica, to the sick French prisoners in Switzerland. It dispatched
the ship _Menhir_ for the relief of Serbian refugees. It has installed
a complete hospital, with 200 beds and a radiograph outfit. The cases
which it transports contain gauze, cotton, bandages, hospital clothing,
surgical instruments, garments, underwear, boots, socks. The names of
the men who have administered this excellent organization in Paris are
H. O. Beatty, Charles R. Scott, Randolph Mordecai, James R. Barbour,
and Walter Abbott.
After the claims of immediate dramatic suffering, comes the great mute
community of the French people, whose life and work have been blighted.
And for one section of that community the Association of "_Les Amis
des Artistes_" has been formed. "To preserve French art from the
deadly effects of the war, which creates conditions so unfavorable to
the production of masterpieces of painting, sculpture, architecture,
decorative arts, engraving," is the object of this society. The members
see that other forms of activity will swiftly revive after the war.
"The invaded districts will be rebuilt, business will flourish. But
art will have a hard and prolonged struggle." The society purchases
from its funds the works of men of talent whom the war has robbed of
means of support. These paintings, statuary, engravings, so acquired,
are annually divided among the members. The purchase is made by a
committee composed of distinguished artists, critics and connoisseurs,
representing the three great French salons and the various art
tendencies of the modern movement. The Honorary Committee includes
Bakst, Hanotaux, Maeterlinck, Rodin and Raemaekers. Americans who are
aiding are Mrs. Mark Baldwin, Mrs. Paul Gans, Walter Gay, Laurence V.
Benét, and Percy Peixotto.
The new American fund of the "Guthrie Committee" for the relief of the
orphans of war has been recently announced. It is planned to raise many
millions of dollars for this object.
Children, artists, invalid soldiers, refugees--there is a various and
immense suffering in France at this moment, and no American can afford
to be neutral in the presence of that need. The sense of the sharp
individual disturbance and of the mass of misery came to me one day
when I visited the Maison Blanche. We entered the open air corridor,
where a group of thirty men rose to salute our party. My eye picked up
a young man, whose face carried an expression of gentleness.
"Go and bring the War Minister your work," said the Major who was
conducting us.
A little chattering sound came from the lips of the boy. It sounded
like the note of a bird, a faint twittering, making the sound of
"Wheet-Wheet"--twice repeated each half minute. Then began the
strangest walk I have ever seen. His legs thrust out in unexpected
directions, his arms bobbed, his whole body trembled. Sometimes he sank
partly to the ground. His progress was slow, because he was spilling
his vitality in these motions. And all the time, the low chirrup came
from his lips. More laborious and cruel than the price paid by the
victims of vice was this walk of one who had served his country.
And yet nothing in the indignity that had been done to his body could
rob him of that sweetness of expression.
"A shell exploded directly in front of him," explained the doctor, "the
sudden shock broke his nervous system, and gave him what is practically
a case of locomotor ataxia. He trembles continuously in every part.
It forces out the little cry. The effect of that shock is distributed
through his entire body. That is what gives hope for his recovery. If
the thing had centered in any one function, he would be a hopeless
case. But it is all diffused. When the war ends many of these men who
are nerve-shattered, will recover, we believe. As long as the war
lasts, they live it, they carry a sense of responsibility, with the
horror that goes with it. But when they know the shelling is over for
ever they will grow better."
In a few minutes the young soldier returned carrying two baskets.
The one thing that is saving that man from going crazy is his basket
making. Very patiently and skillfully his shaking hands weave
close-knit little baskets. Some of them were open trays for household
knick-knacks. Others were worked out into true art shapes of vase. I
shan't forget him as he stood there trembling, the little reed baskets
rocking in his hands, but those baskets themselves revealing not a
trace of his infirmity. Only his nervous system was broken. But his
will to work, his sweet enduring spirit, were the will and the heart of
France.
The War Minister, in whose hands rests the health of four million
soldiers, is as painstaking, as tender as a nurse. Fifteen minutes he
gave that man--fifteen minutes of encouragement. The rest of France
waited, while this one little twitching representative of his race
received what was due from the head of the nation to the humblest
sufferer. Do I need to say that the soldier was bought out? Professor
Mark Baldwin and Bernard Shoninger held an extempore auction against
each other. But one basket they could not buy and that was the tray the
man had woven for his wife. He was proud to show it, but money could
not get it. And he was a thrifty man at that. For, as soon as he had
received his handful of five-franc notes, he went to his room, where he
sleeps alone so that his twittering will not disturb the other men, and
hid the money in his kit. Something more for his wife to go with the
basket.
Clearing house of the suffering of France, the Maison Blanche is the
place where the mutilated of the Grand Army come. As quickly as they
are discharged from hospital, they are sent to this Maison Blanche,
while completing their convalescence, before they return to their
homes. It is here that arms, legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus
that operates these members, are fitted to them. They try out the new
device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a whole man; a something
numb and strange out beyond the responses of the nervous system.
It behaves queerly. It requires much testing to make it articulate
naturally.
Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion pictures have made
gay evenings in time past before the war, file the slow streams of
the crippled, backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the soldiers
it is a matter of routine, one more item in the long sacrifice.
They fit on the member and test it in a businesslike way, with no
sentimentalizing. Too many are there in the room, and other hundreds
on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, for the individual to feel
himself the lonely victim. There are no jests--the war has gone too far
for superficial gayety--and there is no hint of despair, for France is
being saved. The crippled man is sober and long-enduring.
There in that room I saw the war as I have not seen it in five months
of active service at the front. For yonder on the Yser we had the
dramatic reliefs of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. But
here were only broken men. There were no whole men at all in the long
Salle. The spirit of the men was all that it ever was. But the body
could no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped to the waist
or with leg bare waiting their turn with the doctor and the apparatus
expert. There is the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as
if the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. And then the
imagination, abnormally stimulated by so much suffering, plays other
tricks. And it seemed to me as if one were looking in at the window
of one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city slum, where
life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque wounds on the wax flesh.
But here was the crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of
the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism, and the slow
moving up and filing past of the line, as man after man was tested for
flexibility. Here is the army of France--here is the whole vast problem
flowing through one door and gathered in one room.
American money is helping to reëducate these broken men, teaching
them trades. There at the Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have
already trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 257. As I write this,
701 maimed men are still in course of being trained, and the number
in the agricultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 maimed
soldiers have been trained through American help. Most of the money for
this work has been raised by the "American Committee for Training in
Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of which Mrs. Edmund
Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. The president of the society in France in
control of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president of the
American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.
Like England in the battle line, we are only at the beginning of our
effort. In spots and patches we have responded well. Many are giving
all they can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which we have
collected for all causes is excellent. (Though England has given more
than that to Belgium alone, in addition to financing the war and caring
for her own multitude of sufferers.) America has made gifts in goods to
the amount of sixty million dollars. Of local relief committees working
for France we have over two thousand. There are about forty-five
thousand Americans devoting their full time to the service of France as
soldiers, drivers, fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive
officers. There are many thousands in the United States who are using a
portion of their strength and leisure to raise money and supplies. As
Sydney Brooks said to me:
"Those Americans who believe in our cause are more Pro-Ally than the
Allies."
A group of Americans among our millions are aware that Washington wrote:
"All citizens of the United States should be inspired with unchangeable
gratitude to France."
NOTE: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page 321.
VI
THE SAVING REMNANT
I wish to show in this book three expressions of nationality. I seek
to show the fire and vigor of German nationality, and how that force
has been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic militarists in
control. There has been no instance of a noble force so diverted
since the days of the Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power
of religion was used by a clever organization to torture and kill.
Every instinctive element in our being is at times turned awry.
Nationalism suffers just as sex love suffers from the perversions of
evil institutions. But the abuse of instinct is no argument for cutting
loose from that vital source and seeking to live by intellectual
theories, emptied of warm emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying
the intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating instinct as an
enemy. The nationalism of the German people will yet vindicate itself
and swing true to freedom and justice.
I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the love of the peasant
for the soil of his Patrie, for the house where he was born, and for
the sunlight and the equality of his beautiful country. I have shown
that there can be no peace as long as other men with other customs
invade that soil, burn those homes, and impose their alien ideas.
I have told of what the American tradition of nationality has driven
our men and women and our boys to do in France. They see the fight of
France as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution as her
struggle. None of this work was done in vague humanitarianism. These
men and women and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim.
They are giving it to the American cause in France. France is defending
the things that used to be dear to us, and our fellow-countrymen who
are of the historic American tradition are standing at her side.
In recent years, our editors and politicians have been busy in
destroying our historic tradition and creating a new tradition, by
means of which we are to obtain results without paying the price.
Neutrality is the method, and peace and prosperity are the rewards. I
have collected many expressions of this new conception of Americanism.
One will suffice.
Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the National Democratic
Convention, in renominating Woodrow Wilson for president, said:
"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world.... The
policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag.... The
genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared
pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity
shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was there as
much money in our vaults as to-day.... When the history of these days
comes to be written, one name will shine in golden splendor upon the
page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's war, one name will
represent the triumph of American principles over the hosts of darkness
and of death. It will be the name of the patriot who has implanted his
country's flag on the highest peak to which humanity has yet aspired:
the name of Woodrow Wilson."
It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling in fat money
vaults, this assumption that prosperity is greater than sacrifice, that
these young men of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded and to
die. This mockery of the "blackened page" and "blood-smeared pages" of
Europe has stung many thousands of Americans into action. The record of
their service is a protest against such gloating. These fighters and
rescuers and workers would not have served Germany with an equal zest.
Neutrality between France and Germany is impossible to them. Those who
fail to see the difference between France and Germany in this war are
not of our historic American tradition.
Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but
mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are
summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces
in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the
compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a
vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has
heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not
something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and
evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes
varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may
be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music.
It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the
Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries
of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In
America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We
have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by
sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will
spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable
cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has
laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they
create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great
expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have
long gone unheard in our America.
My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first
months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors,
finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our
modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be
carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals,
but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him,
if they need not be paid for."
The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because it is an intellectual
theory, which does not build on instinct. A man's love of his home
and his nation is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values
and moving with the vital current of life itself. Our pacifists would
clear their thinking if they came under shell-fire. All that is sound
in modern radical thought has been strengthened by this war. The
democratic movement in England has become an overwhelming force. But
the unsound elements in radical thought, those elements introduced
by intellectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to average
human nature, have been burned away in the fire. One of those unsound
elements was the theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many Americans
have no belief in the idea of our country. They are busy with the
mechanics of life. Any person who is not "getting results" is felt by
them to be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, they have
laid hold of a doctrine which would justify them in their indifference
to profounder values. It is so that we have weakened our sense of
nationality.
The nation is a natural "biological group," whose members have an
"instinctive liking" for each other and "act with a common purpose."
The instinctive liking is created by common customs and a shared
experience. This experience, expressed in song and legislative
enactment and legend, becomes known as the national tradition, and
is passed on from generation to generation in household heroes, such
as Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government of the people."
That instinctive liking, created by the contacts of a common purpose
and rooted in a loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our
people by importations of aliens, who have not shared in a common
experience, and have not inherited our tradition. It is not possible
to blend diverse races into a nation, when members of one race plot
against our institutions in the interests of a European State, and
members of another race extract wealth from our industry and carry
it home to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so nourished.
A common purpose is not manifested in that way. We have not touched
the imagination of these newcomers. It requires something more than
"big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life of peasants. Our lax
nationalism never reaches the hidden elements of their emotion to make
them one in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and hustling and
easy money are excellent things, but not enough to call out loyalty and
allegiance.
These changing conditions of our growth have blotted out from memory
the old historic experience and substituted a fresher, more recent,
experience. Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created
a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy.
The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans
to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from
different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who
created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes
have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers,
and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new
current of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," "peace and
prosperity": these stir our emotional centers. We used to be shaken
and moved when the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. But
to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal Mercier, and are unmoved. We
no longer know the great accent when we hear it.
So we must look to the young to save us. Henry Farnsworth was a Boston
man, twenty-five years old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.
"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the French once fought
for us."
Our American workers are aiding France because she defends our
tradition, which is also hers, a tradition of freedom and justice,
practiced in equality. In her version of it, there are elements of
intellectual grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed with
a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing purple, which are
peculiar to the Latin temperament. But the ground plan is the same. Our
doctors and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers in the hostels
and the Clearing House, our boys in the American Field Service, are not
alone saving the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They are
restoring American nationality.
SECTION II
WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL
I
NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST
"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by
the British Dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the
line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets ... will have
fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any
political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the
country owned by the United States--certainly more than one million of
square miles. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking,
it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal
borders to it."
(_Lincoln's Message to Congress_, Dec. 1, 1862.)
The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation
between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation
is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking
in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is
a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and
agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more
open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into
practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership
of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with
caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This
has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened
good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the
endorsement of the East.
The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:
"America once divided between North and South. It would not be
impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."
It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and
bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the
matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in
order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic
coöperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy
is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American
nation.
I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions
is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The
new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West,
is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am
sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has
made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle
Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not
given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and
it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied
methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been
an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the
treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods
of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued
by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand
miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers,
who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is
unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was
given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.
There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign
policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its
effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three
relationships:
(1) The enemy.
(2) The Allies.
(3) The Neutrals.
The first two relationships have long been realized. The third--that
of relationship toward neutrals--has never been realized. It is not
fully realized to-day. The failure to realize it led America and
England into the fight of 1812. It led to the Mason and Slidell case
between England and America in the Civil War. The importance of winning
neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day, included in
the forefront of the national effort. It is still spoken of as a minor
matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England
has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral
governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign
policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral
people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.[2] Public
opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty
per cent of American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent is
anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent Pro-German, and
forty per cent neutral. The final weight will rest in whichever cause
wins the forty per cent neutral element. That element is contained
in the Middle West. The failure in dealing with America has been the
failure to see that we needed facts, if we were to come to a decision.
Our only way of getting facts is through the representatives whom we
send over.
A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not touched America
except on the Atlantic Seaboard lies in the exact number of men
from the Eastern Universities who have come across to help France,
as compared with the number from the Middle Western institutions of
learning. For instance, in the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard
has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are
Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the
University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally
one man from a college. The official report up to the beginning of
1916 shows not a man from what many consider the leading University of
America, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than six from the
entire Middle West. There is no need of elaborating the point. The
Middle West has not been allowed to know the facts.
Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the facts of
the war, three men have come four thousand miles to help France. One
is Robert Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr.
Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the
_Cedar Rapids Gazette_. Each man of the three is a successful worker,
and gave up his job. These three men are as significant as the 98
college boys from Harvard.
What took place in that little Iowa group will take place throughout
the whole vast Middle Western territory, when the Allies are willing
to use the only methods that avail in a modern democracy--namely, the
use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals,--by granting
facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy
when they come desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met in
London and Paris when seeking information on German atrocities, German
frightfulness, German methods:
"But surely your people know all that."
How can they know it? Our newspaper men have rarely been permitted
access to the facts by the Allies. But to every phase of the war
they have been personally conducted by the German General Staff. It
has been as much as our liberty was worth, and once or twice almost
as much as our life was worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally
case, so constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. Much
of the interesting war news, most of the arresting interviews, have
come from the German side. The German General Staff has shown an
understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public
opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to
American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including
Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going
to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer,
with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to
any American journalist whose status at home is equal to that of the
public and professional men, whose work he makes known and aids. My own
belief for the first twenty-two months of work in obtaining information
and passing it on to my countrymen was that such effort in their
behalf was not desired by France and England, that their officials and
public men would be better pleased if we ceased to annoy them. I was
thoroughly discouraged by the experience, so slight was the official
interest over here in having America know the truth.
This foreign policy, which dickers with the State Department, but
neglects the people, is a survival of the Tory tradition. One of the
ablest interpreters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy--"the
preference for negotiating with governments rather than with peoples."
But the foreign policy of the United States is created by public
opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who
are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile,
because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the
representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the
last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of
hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to
the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis
and the intellectual material on which to work.
If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a
sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it
gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that
the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more
dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason
is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are
unaware of the situation in our Middle West.
The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body
of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best
universities in America--places of democratic education, reaching
every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on
State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin
and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community,
whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven.
What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight
at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor
at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law.
The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over
200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal
graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our
sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western
movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to
praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories,
and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country,
is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of
their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The
leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette,
Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R.
Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all
of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their
mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is.
The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly
perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt
Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The
stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.
A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of
Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de
Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to
give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of
security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the
planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has
left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the
ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with
formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed
his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that
ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute
for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the
time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery,
became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of
dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the
harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in
another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national
life--least of all was it related to an international ideal.
And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim
dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings
he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the
European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the
Uhlan and the Gerbéviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease
their quarrel, and live as we live?
That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our
national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are
not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the
future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The
friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The
Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to
effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to
them through the voices they know--not alone through "Voix Americaines"
of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell
and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through _Collier's Weekly_
and the _Saturday Evening Post_ and the newspaper syndicates. There
is only one way of reaching American public opinion--the newspapers
and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the
function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come
the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He
supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy.
For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share
the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our
indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had
been aided to gain information.
But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public
opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our
best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on
such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from
first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance
and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my
country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought
to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our
experience:--namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts
for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public
opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public
opinion.
II
SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR
I found in Belgium the evidences of a German spy system, carried out
systematically through a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities
committed on peasant non-combatants by order of German officers. I
saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a
child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as they were being
used as a screen for advancing troops. What I had seen was reported to
Lord Bryce by the young man with me, and the testimony appears in the
Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses burned house by house,
and sprinkled among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with
German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen. Gute leute
wohnen hier."
With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced my observation,
so that I should not overstate or alter in making my report at home.
Opposed to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an
uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore
enlisted in this righteous war to preserve values more precious than
the individual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, I had won
my conviction that there were two wars on the western front.
When I returned from a year in the war zone, five months of which
was spent at the front, I looked forward to finding a constructive
program, hammered out by the social work group, which would interpret
the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to
social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe
that social workers are the finest group of persons in our American
community. They seem to me in our vanguard because of a sane
intelligence, touched with ethical purpose.
It was a disappointment to find them scattered and negative, many of
them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Party, some
even opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.
Few elements in the war were more perplexing than the failure of our
idealists to make their thinking worthy of the sudden and immense
crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in America
was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible stores of moral
heroism in Europe.
The very experts who have prepared accurate reports on social
conditions are failing to inform themselves of the facts of this war.
I have found social workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and
who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying
atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revealing a mental
condition that makes "continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility
as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery about to brain a
child.
I heard the head of a famous institution, a member of the Woman's Peace
Party, tell what promise of the future it gave when a German woman
crossed the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a Belgian woman.
There is something unworthy in citing that incident as answering the
situation in Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's countrymen
are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by
severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning
its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is
not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conference of
good-will. A pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate the
destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment of a vast tragedy
reveals that our people are not living at the same deep level as
the young men I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend the
helpless and to preserve justice.
I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace Party to speak at
Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting of pacifists. When I told her I should
speak of the wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and should
state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew
her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my
stories. She said that her experience as a lawyer had shown her that
punishment never accomplished anything, and the driving out of the
Germans by military measures was punishment.
I have known social workers to aid girl strikers in making their
demands effective. Have the social workers as a unit denounced the
continuing injustice to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian
government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue taxation, of
systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence,
so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage
are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to
mitigate one item of the evil. One was astonished by the sudden hush
that had fallen on the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate
wrong-doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and women. Why
the overnight change from sharp intolerance of successful injustice?
I find that our philanthropists are held by a theory. The theory is
in two parts. One is that war is the worst of all evils. The other is
that war can be willed out of existence. They believe that another
way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous
mediation, and overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed
by a combatant, wrongs that date back many years, so that out of
long-continued treachery the atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.
They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to
them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces
of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets
and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a
confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp
and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness,
between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage
and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the
consciousness of sin.
I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous practice by the army
of invasion--the answer, that war is always like that. But it is too
easy to dismiss all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the easy
generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists,
of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many
other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is complex
into a one-word statement. "Do away with drink at one stroke, and
you have abolished unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad."
"Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating leads to murder."
Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability of prostitution,
with its "lost" girls, had to give way to the presence of facts on the
commercialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present war is
untenable when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies
through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts
of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is
an incurable romanticism in the literature of the pacifists that is
offensive to men in a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from
a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are among the best-known
social workers in the United States:
"It (war) has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a
world of outlanders and aliens and enemies."
This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation in Belgium,
when the country was undermined with German clerks, superintendents,
commercial travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information
and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and
building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and
neighbors" is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to German
officers riding into towns as conquerors where for years they had been
entertained as social guests.
"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness trails at the heels
of all armies."
That description is just when applied to the German army of invasion
which practiced widespread murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate,
and therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British
armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five
months. It does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high motive
with honorable methods. It is unfortunate to overlay the profound
reality of the war with a mental concept.
To summarize:
1. The social workers have failed to apply their high moral earnestness
to this war. They have not accepted the war as a revelation of the
human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong.
As the result their words have offended, as light words will always
hurt men who are sacrificing property and ease and life itself for the
sake of an ideal.
2. They have neglected to inform themselves of the facts of the war.
As the result, they have made no positive program and taken no
constructive action.
Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town
where we lived--a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete
foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the
eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh,
and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone
by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold
their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble
sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar on
hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. Is it too much to ask them
to abstain from their peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?
We should listen to these leaders more readily if we had seen them
risking their lives like the boys of the American Ambulance. To weigh
sacrifice in detached phrases calls for an equal measure of service and
a shared peril. If a few of our social workers had been wounded under
fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking
from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our
idealists have not spoken from this initiation. Miss Addams is still
puzzled and grieved by the response her words about drugged soldiers
called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that his phrase of "too proud to
fight" gave little pleasure to the mothers of dead boys.
With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and build us a program
we can follow, a program of action that preserves the immutable
distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those
dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, let me give two
instances where definite results could be achieved. They are both
highly supposititious cases. But they will serve.
Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian government, under cover
of the war, is harrying and suppressing the Russian revolutionary
centers in Paris and London--the French and British governments
remaining complacent to the act because of the present war alliance.
If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government
policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on
the western front, and which had thrown the immense weight of its moral
support to the defenders of Belgium, such a government would be in a
position to make a friendly suggestion to France and England that "live
and let live" for Russian liberalism would be appreciated.
Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose that, under cover of the
war, Japan was tightening her hold on China, and gradually turning
China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of
powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that
England could be asked to hint gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo
was undesirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world of reality.
What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that will strengthen the
tendencies toward world peace, based on justice. By our indecision and
failure to take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to the world.
It is weak thinking that advocates a policy and is too timid to use
the instruments that will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium
and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in
attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain
in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a
government at Washington that carries weight with the diplomats who
will bring it to pass. We want to see the friendship of France and
England and Canada regained. We are letting all these things slip.
There will come a day when it is too late to do anything except develop
regrets. Why should not social workers declare themselves in time?
At a season of national gravity, when the future for fifty years may
be determined inside of four years, we want those men for our leaders
who can work results in the world of time and space, instead of dream
liberations in the untroubled realms of moral consciousness.
Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, we must have a series
of informal alliances, where the forces of modern democracy tend to
range on one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range on the
other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides,
even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean
ever more and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail in
spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if we are ranged with the
"great allies--exultations, agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable
will to freedom.
III
FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION
The _Chicago Evening American_ places on its editorial page on August
10, 1916, a letter to which it gives editorial approval. The letter
says: "There are thousands of German-born citizens, in fact the
writer knows of no others, whose very German origin has made them
immune against such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment
and language, which count for so much in their effect upon a great
percentage of our population. These very men continue to be loyal
Americans. If we are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the
Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven Putnams?"
The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst finds this statement of
sufficient importance to spread out before five or six million readers
of his newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices the belief of
an ever-increasing element in our population. Our ancestry, literature,
sentiment and language do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore
Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George Haven Putnam. Those names
do go straight back in our national history to the original stock,
which shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their ancestry,
English and American literature, their racial sentiment, and the
English language, which made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger
believes them to be disloyal to the New America. I trust he and his
numerous clan will define what sort of country he wants to make of
us, what ancestry he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will
introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what language. I hope
his group will come out into the open with their program of action. For
they have one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation is the
resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature, its language and
its ideas about life. He means that our civilization shall go his way,
not the way of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever with
the vague internationalism of many of our social workers because under
that fog he and his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate
the influence of such thought as his. It is growing stronger every day.
It is sharply defined, forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.
When one comes among us, sharing the privileges of citizenship, to
tell us that he is "immune" from the claims of our great ancestry, and
the noble sentiment of our past, he is striking at the heart of our
nationality. He is vastly more significant than his own alien voice.
For his claims are being advocated by editors and politicians. His
ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because
it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of
Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with
Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in
the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us
a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the
old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which
cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough citizens become "immune" from the
influences that have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity,
and become the sort of nation which these enemies would have us be. But
these considerations do not bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders
supply the very intellectual defense for this treason. They supply it
in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.
Let us without delay select our position and hold it. Let us stand
firmly on our traditions and history. We have no wish to be "immune"
from our language and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We need a
fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let us reinforce the policy of
Franklin which recognized the desirability of friendship with France
and England. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who paused in the
stress of a great war to strike hands with the workers of England,
because they and he were at one in the love of liberty.
No single factor of race and climate, language and culture is
determinative on that central power of cohesion which gathers a
multitude of persons--"infinitely repellent particles"--into an
organism which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition from a
collective experience. But it does not follow that some one of these
factors cannot be so strengthened as to disturb the balance. If the
geographical territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive
waves of immigration can drown out the sharply defined character of a
people. This is now taking place in the United States. The proof is
our reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed differences of
"opinion." It is that we were untrue to our tradition.
It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by asking: Is there
any such thing as a pure race? Are not the greatest nations of mixed
blood? Do you think race and nation are the same thing? It is true
that no one thing is determinative in the making of a nation. Race and
language, culture and government, border line and climate, religion and
economic system, are each an influence, and, together, they shape the
people in face and habit till they walk the earth with a new stride
and look out on the world with different eyes from those of any people
elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A
certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered
and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered
the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and
sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations.
It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every
action. An English historian, Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this
aptly. He writes:
"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable
factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the
possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and
victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear
names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the
character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places
wherein the national memory is enshrined."
Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:
"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They
prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change
things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal,
they would rather die with her than live without her. That is
nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered
with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as
'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists
of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would
analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they
dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously
agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is
their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser
whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not
behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."
This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete
idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is
to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth
and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood
of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a
doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it,
an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy
it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When
it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then
it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work
that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the
refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue
the noble and costly policy--these mark the decline of a nation. These
are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense
democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same
voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By
our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien
to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own
helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer
move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation--not of outrage
at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own
race--but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray
that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers.
We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time
to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.
I was talking of this recently with a profound student of race
psychology, Havelock Ellis. He said that the determining factor is the
strength of the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is that
civilization potent enough to shape the new contributions? The French
have always had their boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but
so distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it absorbs the
invasion. He said that the question to decide is whether the cells are
sufficiently organized and determinate to receive alien matter.
Surely no student of our social conditions can say that our tendencies
are clear, our collective will formed, our national mind unified. We
keep adding chemical elements without coming to a solution. England
accepted a few invasions and conquests and then had to stiffen up
and work the material into a mold. France was overrun every half
century, but finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders, and
proceeded to the work of coalescing her parts. Our present stream of
tendency, and our present grip on our own historic tradition, are not
strong enough to admit of immense new European contributions. We are
losing the sense of what we mean as a people.
In dealing with any pet assumption of modern thought, one must guard
against misunderstanding. The opponent calls one reactionary and
then one's day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain
statement over into an academic discussion, and the whole matter at
issue is befogged. I am not attacking the desirability of a true
internationalism. I am saying that our conception of it is all
wrong, and that our method of attaining it is futile. The greater
day of peace between nations will not come by weakening the ties
of nationality. It will come through a deepening of the sense of
citizenship in each nation. But much of our recent thinking has tended
to weaken the claims of nationality. It is against this that we must
set ourselves. We want internationalism, but the internationalism we
mean is an understanding and a good will between distinct nations,
not an internationalism which is the loss of a rich variety, and
the blurring of distinctions. Nations will not disappear. They will
heighten their individuality under the process of time. The hope of
peace lies in the appreciation of those differences. We are not to
reach internationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our present-day
theorists advocate. There lies the service of the war. It has taught
us that the Frenchman and the German will refuse to merge their ideas
about life and duty in a denationalized world league. Each wants his
plot of ground, his own patch of sky, his own kind of a world, with
those men for neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman does
not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational training, and a
governmental régime where efficiency and organization are the aims
of the corporate life. The German does not wish his world to contain
waste and laziness and dilettantism. A hundred years ago the world put
up a sign in front of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these
premises." To-day the grass of France is red where the marauder crossed
the line. I have seen the soul of France at tension for two years, and
I know that her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.
It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has
spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give
the final answer. There are diseases of individuality--the "artistic
temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality--which require
chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we
do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of
development. There are diseases of nationalism--the lust for power
and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the
customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy
and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery
of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of
imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to
organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the
vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing
of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees
of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has
been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer,
murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The
misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.
At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality,
internationalism crumbles--the internationalism, I mean, that
disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences.
Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists,
dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method
by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have
defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom
of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from
the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great
idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of
nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital.
"An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a
triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little
nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for
the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand
"the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own
sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices.
Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and
Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who
have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went
from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France.
A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of
Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition
of that historic friendship."
I have found something inspiring in the action of these young Americans
in France. Perhaps out of them will come the leadership which our
country lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, and, as
is the way of elders, reveals moderation of mind and a good-natured
acceptance of conditions. Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great
generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next
generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying.
There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we
have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some
hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In
them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can
be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their
boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in
the greatness of France. May they come home to us very sure of their
possession. We have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality,
and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. They bring us moral
leadership.
Now, all this will have no appeal to the many nationalities among us.
The American tradition (except for a few personalities and ideas) is
meaningless to them. I have dealt with their needs in the preceding
chapter. I am writing these next chapters for the inheritors of our
American tradition, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, though
of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness that fought our wars
and created our civilization, are now too tired, some of them, to do
anything but exploit the other nationalities which have tumbled in on
the later waves of immigration. Others of us are simply swamped by the
multitude and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're all alike.
They will all be Americans to-morrow." If these tame descendants of
America will be true to their own tradition, they will learn to be
merciful to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions. It is
precisely because we "old-timers" have been forgetting our tradition
that we have been blind to the rich inherited life of those that come
to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual values, we shall
welcome the tradition and the hope which the humblest Jew has brought
us.
IV
COSMOPOLITANISM
Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to deny the instinct of nationality. It
works in three ways with us. It seeks to impose an English culture on
our mixed races; it seeks to create an American type at one stroke;
it preaches an undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national
cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which will be composed
of individuals pretty much alike, with the same aspirations. The
differences of inheritance will be thrown away like the bundle from the
pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated with this "new religion of
humanity," which is going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and the
Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the infinite variety of human
nature.
One of its analysts says that "internally it is productive of many
evil vapors which issue from the lips in the form of catchwords." He
traces it to ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage when
"the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and
nationality, is intensely miserable." He is the man without roots,
who has lost his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs, the
affectionate attachments, out of which social life develops.
For the last fifty years certain Germans have preached a boundless
cosmopolitanism, while the German people have practiced an intense
ingrowing racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who
preached it were themselves rebels against the German system. Karl
Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped to found an international movement in
protest against the form of nationality within which they lived. But
the direction and violence of their rebound were governed by the hard
surface from which they recoiled. The personality of these men and the
tonic value of their thought have been of inestimable benefit to our
age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their
opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of
cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping
environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in
their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because
their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just,
their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the
animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of
industrialism were imported to England and to America. The stern and
unbending leaders of socialist thought have reproduced their masters'
voice with an almost unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed
to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have powerfully affected
groups of modern thinkers. I doubt if any single idea has traveled
further and more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality
is a mistaken thing, and that a something wider and vaguer is the goal
of the future. The Latin races have sometimes thought they believed it,
but they quickly corrected their thinking under the impact of event.
Our present school of softened, daintily stepping radicals have
whittled away some of the original doctrine of the class war. The
materialistic theory of history, surplus value and the proletarian
division have had to yield in part to the facts of the case. But the
modern reformers cling to that creation of German and Russian thought,
a cosmopolitan world, the merging of races and nations into a universal
undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries.
We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them
in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group
are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and
failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other
persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of
cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, who are read in America, like
Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine
has misled our social workers, our socialists, our radicals in social
reform, our feminists--almost every element in our social movement.
Our American radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism,
and its child, pacifism. At no point has "modern" thought exercised a
profounder effect than on our social movement.
We need the check here of the Latin mentality. The clear Latin mind
refuses to be misled by idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not
permit of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have
recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future.
Their conception of social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini
and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane evolution. Mazzini says:
"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards
the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. That mission
constitutes its nationality. Nationality is sacred.
"In laboring, according to true principles, for our country we are
laboring for humanity. Our country is the fulcrum of the lever which
we have to wield for the common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we
run the risk of becoming useless both to our country and to humanity.
"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your material conditions
without first solving the national question. You cannot do it.
"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the
idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common principle, recognized,
accepted, and developed by all."
His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a man serve all humanity
whom he has not seen, if he does not serve his nation whom he has seen?
"The individual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff
of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their
aspirations--"By the memory of our former greatness, by the sufferings
of the millions." The limits of nationality will tend toward natural
boundaries--the division of
"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth,
thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil governments have
disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it,
distinctly marked out--as least as far as Europe is concerned--by the
course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and
other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured
it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps
a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design.
Natural divisions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the
peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by
evil governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn.
"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power and the affection of
many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same
tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition, hope, even
by your own single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my
brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that
God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us,
and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily, and
whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which, from its
being centered round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of
its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity."
The method of strengthening the sense of nationality is by education.
"Every citizen should receive in the national schools a moral
education, a course of nationality--comprising a summary view of the
progress of humanity and of the history of his own country; a popular
exposition of the principles directing the legislation of that country."
That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is proved by the
response of the nations in this war. In the seaside town of Hove,
Sussex, where I live, his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out
from the public library thirty-eight times in the last four years.
There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality and inviting a
return to the anarchy of war, and this is the difficulty one has in
pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The
limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly drawn by
Graham Wallas.
"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We must not swallow
more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable
part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe
during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less
possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth
century."
Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the
question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the
course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains,"
but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains
represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality,
Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war
between nations is an international science of eugenics which might
"indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each
other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial
type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly
made possible between individuals of consciously different national
types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be
created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based,
"not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but
upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to
deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We
have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite
dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction
for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will
come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition
of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere
fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely
from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter
enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.
I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the
mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with
the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a
Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids _Gazette_ says:
EXTINCT AMERICANS
"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may
not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being
born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one
American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in
America to take its place.
"Several American races have already died to the extent that
the members are no longer to be separately identified and their
distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the
vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the
Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania
and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and
southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker,
the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place
was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.
"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use an Irish epigram,
change is the only established characteristic of the American. The
American in whose veins flows the blood of half a dozen European
races, whose grandparents may have been born in four states, his
parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other
than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women
of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regarding the exact
composition of the 'American race.' Individually he has on hand a
rather complete stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the
idea that he is doing his best to help establish a representative
order of humanity.
"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. The world and
humanity are the big ideas. The race that deserves to die will pass.
The race that fights for its existence, whose members have pride in
their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A
race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less
numerous and that which is of value will survive. Not only the end of
the race, but the end of the world is in sight for those who leave no
children to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."
The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect. It gives no
foundation for ethics. It gives no sanction for religion. It gives no
soil and roots for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were
grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical units in a
political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory,
attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years
to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating quality. And
it is a habit of mind that is growing among us. It is the inevitable
reflex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns thought in speed
and change, and believes that activity under scientific direction can
satisfy the human spirit.
Actually the stock we came of matters very much--for ourselves. Being
dead, it yet lives, and we are the channel of its ongoing. Only by
using the inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life of the mind
in art and ethics and religion. "Huckleberry Finn," "The Virginian,"
"Still Jim," "The Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess a
permanence of appeal precisely because they are rooted in the sense
of nationality, and are a natural growth out of a tradition. Each
story describes a vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed
by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time of an ebbing tide. Each
has the unconscious pathos of a last stand. But not one of these books
would have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it had dealt
with a life-history removed from its long inheritance. It is only so
that the nations among us will in time produce their literature. It
will not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It will rather
be by rendering the individual (whether Jew or Bohemian) in all the
loneliness of crowds and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts
and "notions" and desires that have come down to him from his very
ancient past, and his little ripple of activity in the endless stream
of descent. Montague Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie Hurst
are aware of this necessity of relating their art to the instinctive
life of their character, and so under the brightest crackle of their
American smartness something goes echoing back to a day that is older
than the Coney Island and Broadway and Atlantic City of their setting.
Joseph Stella in his drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring
his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers are better than
many reports of Mr. Gary on how it is with America at the Pittsburgh
blast furnaces.
But not only is the sense of nationality needed for the finer
activities of the mind. There is need of it in "practical" politics. It
is discouraging that our American social movement has been captured by
cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies with radical changes in
the world of environment. Living conditions are going to be improved.
A greater measure of equality will be achieved in our own time. But how
is the social change inside the country to be related to other States?
What shall be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism
of our radical group is a poor guide for action. It is the vice of
liberals that they don't harness their ideas to facts. The result
is that at time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of Tory
reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance in England, where the
liberals shirked the war during the premonitory years. As the result,
the good old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush, simply
because on foreign policy they had a program which at least dealt with
the facts of the case.
Until liberals are willing to think through on foreign policy,
studying European and world history, defining the meaning of the State
and visualizing its relationship to other States, we shall have a
skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution to the problems of
nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable
territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is
unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign
policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated by little
groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques present a program
of action based on fact-study, which wins public opinion, because the
instinct of the people trusts men who know what they want more than it
trusts a bland benevolence without direction of aim.
Our social workers and other liberals would not think of advocating a
policy of "Christianizing" the employer as the sole remedy for social
maladjustment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they advocate in
inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion,
turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the
mood of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the outer world
will continue to pour into our tight little domestic compartments of
nicely-adjusted social relationships.
In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are of one piece, and
the same realism must be applied to questions like the neutrality of
Belgium and the internationalization of Constantinople which we apply
to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the
same hard study to the map which they put on social reform and internal
development, the world will continue to turn to its only experts on
foreign policy, who unfortunately are largely imperialists.
V
THE HYPHENATES
A famous American president once said to a distinguished ambassador:
"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all
nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one
nation."
And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:
"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and
suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you
lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which
goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end,
you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it
responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it
answers with one tone."
No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day
we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who
dwell among us.
We cannot "make" Americans. We can make "imitation Americans,"
as Alfred Zimmern calls them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and
intellectually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The imaginative
Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes a flashily dressed Padrone.
The poetic, religious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal for
many centuries, becomes a district leader. These individuals have come
to us with rare and charming gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead
of frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have applied a hasty
conversion which denied their life of inherited impulses and desires.
Instead of bringing out the good in them, we have Americanized them
into commercial types.
Where does our future lie?
It lies in developing and making use of men like the great Jews, Abram
Jacobi, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to
their own nature, and who respond to the American environment. These
men are not amateur Gentiles. They are Jews and they are Americans.
It lies in Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in Italy
which are liberal, and who further every effort in America to create
free institutions. We need the help of every man of them to save our
country from commercialism.
Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of living scholars, of
German descent, to give me his views on the future in America. He wrote:
"What is America to do? I should answer: preach hyphenation. Make
the common man realize that nationality is a spiritual force which
has in essence as little to do with government as religion has. When
government interferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into
politics and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same
is true of nationality--in Ireland, in East Europe and elsewhere.
But that is only an accident. To allow governments to exploit for
political ends the huge inarticulate emotional driving force of either
religion or nationality is to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of
religion in the Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the
present war."
Alfred Zimmern says:
"It seems strange that there should be Americans who still hold firmly
to the old-fashioned view of what I can only call instantaneous
conversion, of the desirability and possibility of the immigrant
shedding his whole ancestral inheritance and flinging himself into
the melting-pot of transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white
American soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now the
only way to teach immigrants how to become good Americans, that is
to say, how to be good in America, is by appealing to that in them
which made them good in Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever
they came from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage for
this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality is more
than a creed or a doctrine or a code of conduct, it is an instinctive
attachment."
The road to sound Internationalism, to an understanding between States,
lies "through Nationalism, not through leveling men down to a gray,
indistinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the best elements
in the corporate inheritance of each nation." True democracy wishes to
use the best that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to
melt away their difference into one economic man. The American passion
for uniformity, for creating a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated
type, is merely the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic
desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ireland, to modernize
the Hindu. It is the wish to make man in our own image. It is the last
bad relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the Inquisition. It is
only subtler and more dangerous, because persecution called out hidden
powers of resistance, but triumphant Commercialism, as engineered by
our industrial oligarchy, calls out imitation.
I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis Island by Julian
Dimock. They are subjects chosen almost at random from the stream of
newcomers on the morning of ship-arrival. There is often something very
touching in the expression of these faces: a trust in the goodness
of life, in the goodness of human nature. Man and woman and youth,
they seem to carry something that has been won by long generations of
rooted life and passed on to them for safe-keeping. And suddenly at
the landing in the new world the tradition is touched to a dream of
hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch those same newcomers
as they are disgorged from our city factories. How soon the light
goes out of their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its own
inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty and pert replaces that
unconscious dignity. Something tired from unceasing surface stimulus
takes possession of what was fresh and innocent in open peasant life
and the friendly intercourse of neighbors.
These races, in their weakness and poverty, have been unable to swing
back to their own deep center of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful
if they will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The Jewish
nation is the only dispersion among us which has gathered its will
and recovered its self-consciousness enough to give us any promising
movement. They are slowly recognizing what is being done to their
young. They begin to see that their nation is losing its one priceless
jewel, the possession of spiritual insight. In the movement which is
spreading through the day schools for teaching young Jews the great
ethical tradition of their people, in their educational alliances, in
the Menorah Association, in the Zionist Movement, in the writings of
Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing the first glimmerings of
statesmanship and making the first application of intelligence to our
commercialized cosmopolitan materialistic country which we have had
since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon" Protestant civilization. May
their grip on their nationality never grow less. May the clear program
which they have constructed against the drift and rush of our careless
life seize the imagination of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no
otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis for our civilization.
Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality leads to such clear
statement as Randolph Bourne has given us in _The Menorah Journal_ for
December, 1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting pot" idea, which
attempts to knead the whole population into an undefined colorless
mass, labeled American. In place of that undesirable and absurd
consummation, he offers a coöperation of cultures. "America has become
a vast reservoir of dispersions," and Coöperative Americanism will meet
"the demands of the foreign immigré who wishes freedom to preserve his
heritage at the same time that he coöperates loyally with all other
nationals in the building up of America."
What is Coöperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne answers that it is "an
ideal of a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial
and cultural antecedents, with a common political allegiance and common
social ends, but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which
may be placed anywhere in the world that they like. If the Jews have
been the first international race, I look to America to be the first
international nation."
Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding a Jew or a Greek or an
Irishman. May I go a step further, and say that the same freedom to
express the tradition within them must be extended to the Americans of
the old stock, even those who hold a grateful love for France (some of
them recently have died for that), even those who love England for her
long struggle for political liberty. I cannot feel that Agnes Repplier,
Lyman Abbott, George Haven Putnam and the American Rights League are
deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn which Randolph Bourne
and Max Eastman have applied to them. The American Rights League is
entitled to the same open field and the same respect which the Menorah
Society should receive. Why does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash
the other? I trust he will welcome both. What I think Bourne, James
Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and Max Eastman have failed to see is that
the old American stock (of diverse race but common tradition) had a
right to respond vigorously to this war, where their inheritance of
social, legal and political ideas were battling with hostile ideas.
Somewhere, at some point, the new American tradition must plant itself.
In some issue it must take root. We of the old stock sought to make
this war the issue. We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the
open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must collide into
harmony. I can make clear the difficulty one has in reaffirming the
old American idea by quoting from the letter of an American editor in
response to what the chapters of this book are stating:
"It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of the Old, the
vanishing, America. Do you really believe that Old America should be
raised from the dead:--The America of convenient transcendentalism
where religion allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit
to material aggrandizement? If you blame America for Christian
Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson and Whitman were
our teachers. If you blame America for not taking part in the
European war, you must remember that Washington told us to keep out
of 'entangling alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly
material, out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its
importation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always lies behind
us, and nothing is commoner than finding Paradise in the past."
What I have tried to say is that the tradition of a nation is not a
dead thing, locked in the past. It is a living thing, operating on the
present. A tradition is a shared experience, governing present life.
The State needs to cohere and find itself and establish a cultural
consciousness, blended from manifold contributions. It is destructive
to have new swirling elements ceaselessly driving through the mass.
So I have protested against the too ready and ruthless discarding of
the cultural consciousness bequeathed us by the older American stock.
While the ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again be in
sole command, I believe that they should be more potent than they are
to-day. I believe that politically they have a living value for us, and
that we persistently underestimate the English contribution to freedom
and justice. I deny that my desire that these ideas shall prevail is an
attempt to locate the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky past.
It is, instead, the wish to see our country appropriate a particular
political contribution from the English stock, exactly as it needs to
appropriate certain social values from the Italians and the Greeks, and
many very definite spiritual ideas from the culture of the Jews.
What is the solution of these diverse elements? What blend can we
obtain from a score of mixtures? How fashion a civilization that shall
absorb and assimilate those blood-strains and traditional beliefs? I
think the one clear answer lies in the creation of free institutions,
which shall answer a common need, and which shall violate the
instinctive life and traditions of none. Those free institutions will
be the product of education, legislation, Coöperation, Trades Unionism
and Syndicalism, municipal and State ownership, and widely spread
private ownership and enterprise. The organized State under democratic
control will be the thing aimed at. But these free institutions must
gradually extend over areas far wider than vocational training and
economic well-being. They should seek to offer free expression to the
fully-functioning mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this
way they will give a good life. We have the shadowy beginnings of such
institutions in the public school and library. But we have nothing like
the Danish or English coöperative movement. Our institution of property
affords us nothing like true peasant proprietorship of Ireland.
No apter illustration of how little we have tackled our job can be
found than in American Socialism. There is no American Socialism.
Orthodox socialism in America is dead doctrine, brought across by
German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on their peculiar
environment, and then exhumed in a new country. Meanwhile a great
vital movement toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in Trades
Unionism, Coöperation and municipal and State ownership. Our socialist
locals repeat formulæ which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kautsky,
Vandervelde and Hervé outgrew a generation ago. It is here I hold
that the old American stock can do a service in interpreting American
conditions to our recent arrivals.
But if we continue to leave the door open we shall continue to be
swamped, and we shall employ our little hasty ready-made devices for
turning peasants with a thousand years of inherited characteristics
into citizens. We shatter them against our environment, and then are
astonished that their thwarted instincts, trained to another world,
revenge themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices, and
murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists like Ross warn us in vain.
These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the economic basis on
which alone free institutions can be reared. People, to whom we cannot
afford to pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to arrange a
living wage, will not help us in creating free institutions. Instead,
they are manipulated by the industrial oligarchy into a force for
breaking down the standard of living of all workers. A resolute
restriction of immigration is not a discrimination against any race. It
is the first step toward unlocking the capacities of the races already
among us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is economic.
It rests in the fact that our wage-scale and standard of living are
being shot to pieces by the newcomers. As the result our existent
institutions are not developing in liberal directions, and we are
failing to create new free institutions. It requires a somewhat stable
population, and a fairly uniform economic basis to create a Coöperative
movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union movement, like that in
Australia.
Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the Commonwealth of
nationalities, where men from many lands, drawing their spiritual
reserves from the home that nourished their line through the long
generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the new State which
harbors them and gives them a good life. The task of America is to
create that Commonwealth, that entity which men gladly serve, and
for which at need they willingly die. Our politics have not yet held
that appeal. Not yet can an American
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