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The World Decision

by Robert Herrick · English · Gutenberg #8529 · 353,629 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The World Decision

Author: Robert Herrick


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8529]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD DECISION ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Anne Reshnyk, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team











THE WORLD DECISION

BY

ROBERT HERRICK







CONTENTS


_PART ONE--ITALY_

  I.  ITALY HESITATES

 II.  THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS

III.  THE POET SPEAKS

 IV.  THE PIAZZA SPEAKS

  V.  ITALY DECIDES

 VI.  THE EVE OF THE WAR


_PART TWO--FRANCE_

  I.  THE FACE OF PARIS

 II.  THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE

III.  THE BARBARIAN

 IV.  THE GERMAN LESSON

  V.  THE FAITH OF THE FRENCH

 VI.  THE NEW FRANCE


_PART THREE--AMERICA_

  I.  WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US?

 II.  THE CHOICE

III.  PEACE




THE WORLD DECISION


PART ONE--ITALY


I


_Italy Hesitates_

Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"
of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict
censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and joining
with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It was
known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped army--boots and
food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had come to the somewhat
cynical belief that Italy would never get further than the verge of war;
that her Austrian ally would be induced by the pressure of necessity to
concede enough of those "national aspirations," of which we had heard
much, to keep her southern neighbor at least lukewarmly neutral until
the conclusion of the war. An American diplomat in Italy, with the best
opportunity for close observation, said, as late as the middle of May:
"I shall believe that Italy will go into the war only when I see it!"

The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a
tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in
America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when
suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her decision
and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that her
"sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from Vienna,
there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions in war
preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface appearance,
which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza having
prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a complete
misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motives
that led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close
range, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in a
declaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of the
matter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action was
complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simple
and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulses
stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to the
modern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of the
Teutonic danger. _"Fuori i barbari"_--out with the barbarians--has lain
in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a fresh
heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded France, by the Lusitania
murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a moving force
than this personal antagonism was the spiritual antagonism between the
Latin and the German, between the two visions of the world which the
German and the Latin imagine and seek to perpetuate. That in a large and
very real sense this world agony of war is the supreme struggle between
these two opposed traditions of civilization--a decision between two
competing forms of life--seems to me so obvious as to need no argument.
In such a struggle Italy must, by compulsion of historical tradition as
well as of political situation, take her part on the side of those who
from one angle or another are upholding with their lives the inheritance
of Rome against the pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty
against the dead weight of physical and material strength.

       *       *       *       *       *

One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the atmosphere
of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight months became
evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less strident, less
vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans, which usually
seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was thin and
spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was deserted; the
line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air of a summer
resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest source of ready
money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued, zestless life.
Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of Sorrento, where during
the last generation the German has established himself in all favorable
sites, were thick with signs of sale.

In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building,
cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there,
Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun
and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant
signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German
tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself.
And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton business.
Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton, the quays piled
with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It took a large
credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian wants.
Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the trainload.
Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the stuff, was held
at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government decided to accept
the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that it was legitimately
destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating England's perplexity
in the cotton business, especially with a nation that might any day become
an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany
through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this
delicate moment.

The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making
money out of Italy's neutrality, and _neutralista_ sentiment was
naturally strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt
they did their best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed
of their pockets. But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined
opposite me on the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his
class as well as any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But
first we must be ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted
almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great
conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a
curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable,
which the American finds so hard to understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

And this was the prevailing note of Rome those early days of May--a
dull, passive acceptance of the dreaded fate which had been threatening
for so many months on the national horizon, ever since Austria plumped
her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid debates,
no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not much public
interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a lethargic
iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with its
terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament
and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting,
one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if more normal in its daily
life than Naples in spite of the absence of those tourists who gather
here at this season by the tens of thousands, was equally acquiescent
and on the surface uninterested in the event.

The explanation of this outward apathy in the public is simple: nobody
knew anything definite enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian
newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of news published
anywhere. The journals are all personal "organs," and anybody can know
whose "views" they are voicing. There was the "Messagero," subsidized by
the French and the English embassies, which emitted cheerful pro-Ally
paragraphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio," founded by the German
party, patently the mouthpiece of Teutonic diplomacy. There was the
"Giornale d'Italia" that spoke for the Vatican, and the "Idea Nazionale"
which voiced radical young Italy. And so on down the list. But there was
a perfectly applied censorship which suppressed all diplomatic leaks. So
one read with perfect confidence that Prince von Bülow had driven to the
Consulta at eleven-fifteen yesterday, and having been closeted with Baron
Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, or with the Premier, Signor
Salandra, or with both, for forty-seven minutes, had emerged upon the
street smiling. And shortly after this event Baron Macchio, the Austrian
Envoy, arrived at the Consulta in his motor-car and had spent within the
mystery of the Foreign Office twenty or more minutes. The reader might
insert any fatal interpretation he liked between the lines of this
chronicle. That was quite all the reality the Roman public, the people
of Italy, had to speculate upon during weeks of waiting, and for the most
part they waited quietly, patiently. For whatever the American prejudice
against the dangers of secret diplomacy may be, the European, especially
the Italian, idea is that all grave negotiations should be conducted
privately--that the diplomatic cake should be composed by experts in
retirement until it is ready for the baking. And the European public
is well trained in controlling its curiosities.

It was sufficiently astonishing to the American onlooker, however,
accustomed to flaming extras and the plethoric discussion in public of the
most intimate affairs, state and personal, to witness the acquiescence of
emotional Italians in this complete obscurity about their fate and that of
their children and their nation, which was being sorted behind the closed
doors of the Consulta. Every one seemed to go about his personal business
with an apparent calm, a shrug of expressive shoulders at the most,
signifying belief in the sureness of war--soon. There was little animation
in the cafés, practically none on the streets. Arragno's, usually buzzing
with political prophecy, had a depressing, provincial calm. Unoccupied
deputies sat in gloomy silence over their thin _consommations_. Even the
1st of May passed without that demonstration by the Socialists against war
so widely expected. To be sure, the Government had prudently packed Rome
and the northern cities with troops: soldiers were lurking in every old
courtyard, up all the narrow alleys, waiting for some hardy Socialist to
"demonstrate." But it was not the plentiful troops, not even a lively
thunderstorm that swept Rome all the afternoon, which discouraged the
Socialists: they too were in doubt and apathy. They were hesitating,
passing resolutions, defining themselves into fine segments of political
opinion--and waiting for Somebody to act! They too awaited the completion
of those endless discussions among the diplomats at the Consulta, at the
Ballplatz in Vienna, and wherever diplomacy is made in Berlin. The first
of May came and went, and the _carabinieri_, the secret police, the
infantry, the cavalry with their fierce hairy helmets filed off to their
barracks in a dripping dusk, dispirited, as if disappointed themselves
that nothing definite, even violence, had yet come out of the business. So
one caught a belated cab and scurried through the deserted streets to an
empty hotel on the Pincian, more than half convinced that the Government
meant really to do nothing except "negotiate" until the spirit of war had
died from the hearts of the people.

Yet much was going on beneath the surface. There were flashes to be
seen in broad daylight. The King and his ministers at the eleventh hour
decided not to attend the ceremonies at Quarto of the unveiling of the
monument to the Garibaldian "Thousand." Now, what could that mean? Did
it indicate that the King was not yet ready to choose his road and feared
to compromise himself by appearing in company with the Francophile poet
D'Annunzio, who was to give the address? It would be a hard matter to
explain to Berlin, to whose nostrils the poet was anathema. Or did it
mean literally that the negotiations with reluctant Austria had reached
that acute point which might not permit the absence of authority from Rome
even for twenty-four hours? The drifting, if it were drifting, was more
rapid, day by day.

There was a constant troop movement all over Italy, which could not be
disguised from anybody who went to a railroad station. Italy was not
"mobilizing," but that term in this year of war has come to have a
diplomatic insignificance. Every one knew that a large army had already
gone north toward the disputed frontier. More soldiers were going every
day, and more men of the younger sort were silently disappearing from
their ordinary occupations, as the way is in conscript countries. It was
all being done admirably, swiftly, quietly--no placards. The _carabinieri_
went from house to house and delivered verbal orders. But all this might
be a mere "preparation," an argument that could not be used diplomatically
at the Consulta, yet of vital force.

There was the sudden twenty-four-hour visit of the Italian Ambassador
at Paris to Rome. Why had he taken that long journey home for such a
brief visit, consumed in conferences with the ministers? And Prince von
Bülow had rallied to his assistance the Catholic Deputy Erzburger. Rome
was seething with rumor.

       *       *       *       *       *

The remarkable passivity of the Italian public during these anxious
moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in
the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister
Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the
Government. They were honest,--that everybody admitted,--and they were
experienced. In less troubled times the nation might prefer the popular
politician Giolitti, who had a large majority of the deputies in the
Parliament in his party, and who had presented Italy a couple of years
earlier with its newest plaything, Libya,--and concealed the bills. But
Giolitti had prudently retired to his little Piedmont home in Cavour. All
the winter he had kept out of Rome, leaving the Salandra Government to
work out a solution of the knotty tangle in which he had helped to involve
his country. Nobody knew precisely what Giolitti's views were, but it was
generally accepted that he preserved the tradition of the Crispi
statesmanship, which had made the abortion of the Triple Alliance. If he
could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least
he was avowedly _neutralista_, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to
hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically,
with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige. A clever American,
long resident in Rome in sufficient intimacy with the political powers to
make his words significant, told me,--"The country does not know what it
wants. But Giolitti will tell them. When he comes we shall know whether
there will be war!" That was May 9--a Sunday. Giolitti arrived in Rome
the same week--and we knew, but not as the political prophet thought....

Meanwhile, there were mutterings of the thunder to come out of this
stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano
in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son
in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian _Granatieri_, ordinarily
stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little
hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their
attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent
street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses
and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile.
I read the word "_Socilismo_" scrawled in chalk over the walls and
half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk
scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were
against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not
want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the
fields.

Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war.
"We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before
the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the
North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national
doubt of Calabria, Sicily,--the weaker, less certain members of the
family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi,
which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also
the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few
weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and
more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government.
No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the
Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the _quid pro quo_ they
would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan
situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those
national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security
without jeopardizing the nation's future. Italy needed the wisdom of
patriots if ever in her history.

The Salandra Government kept admirable order during these dangerous
days, suppressing the slightest popular movement, pro or con. That was
the wise way, until they knew themselves which road to take and had
prepared the public mind. And they had plenty of troops to be occupied
somehow. The exercise of the firm hand of authority against popular
ebullitions is always a marvel to the American. To the European mind
government means power, and power is exercised practically, concretely,
not by writs of courts and sheriffs, but by armed troops. The Salandra
Government had the power, and apparently did not mean to have its hand
forced by the populace....

The young officer at Genzano had no doubt that war was coming, nor
had the handsome boy whom we at last ran to ground in an old Franciscan
convent. He talked eagerly of the "promise" his regiment had received "to
go first." His mother's face contracted with a spasm of pain as he spoke,
but like a Latin mother she made no protest. If his country needed him,
if war had to be.... On our way back to Rome across the Campagna we saw a
huge silver fish swimming lazily in the misty blue sky--one of Italy's new
dirigibles exercising. There were soldiers everywhere in their new gray
linen clothes--tanned, boyish faces, many of them fine large fellows,
scooped up from villages and towns all over Italy. The night was broken
by the sound of marching feet, for troop movements were usually made at
night. The soldiers were going north by the trainload. Each day one saw
more of them in the streets, coming and going. Yet Baron Macchio and
Prince von Bülow were as busy as ever at the Consulta on the Quirinal
Hill, and rumor said that at last they were offering real "compensations."

       *       *       *       *       *

The shops of Rome, as those of every city and town in Europe, were
hung with war maps, of course. In Rome the prevailing map was that highly
colored, imaginative rearrangement of southern Europe to fit the national
aspirations. The new frontier ran along the summits of the Alps and took
a wide swath down the Adriatic coast. It was a most flattering prospect
and lured many loiterers to the shop windows. At the office of the
"Giornale d'Italia" in the Corso there was displayed beside an irredentist
map an approximate sketch of what Austria was willing to give, under
German persuasion. The discrepancy between the two maps was obvious and
vast. On the bulletin boards there were many news items emanating from the
"unredeemed" in Trent and Trieste, chronicling riots and the severely
repressive measures taken by the Austrian masters. The little piazza in
front of the newspaper office was thronged from morning to night, and the
old woman in the kiosk beside the door did a large business in maps.

And yet this aspect of the Italian situation seems to me to have been
much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular
fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the
hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers--no
great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious
that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many
unredeemed Austrians and other folk as redeemed Italians! No; it was
rather a high point of propaganda--as we should say commercially, a good
talking proposition. Deeper, it represented the urge of nationalism,
which is one of the extraordinary phenomena of this remarkable war. The
American, vague in his feeling of nationalism, refuses to take quite
seriously agitation for the "unredeemed." Why, he asks with naïveté, go
to war for a few thousands of Italians in Trent and Trieste?

I am not attempting to write history. I am guessing like another,
seeking causes in a complex state of mind. We shall have to go back.
Secret diplomacy may be the inveterate habit of Europe, especially of
Italy. The new arrangement with the Allies has never been published,
probably never will be. One suspects that it was made, essentially, before
Italy had broken with Austria, before, perhaps, she had denounced her old
alliance on the 5th of May at Vienna. And yet, although inveterately
habituated to the mediaevalism of secret international arrangements, Italy
is enough filled with the spirit of modern democracy to break any treaty
that does not fulfill the will of the people. The Triple Alliance was
really doomed at its conception, because it was a trade made by a few
politicians and diplomats in secret and never known in its terms to the
people who were bound by it. Any strain would break such a bond. The
strain was always latent, but it became acute of late years, especially
when Austria thwarted Italy's move on Turkey--as Salandra revealed later
under the sting of Bethmann-Hollweg's taunts. It was badly strained,
virtually broken, when Austria without warning to Italy stabbed at Serbia.
Austria made a grave blunder there, in not observing the first term of the
Triple Alliance, by which she was bound to take her allies into
consultation. The insolence of the Austrian attitude was betrayed in the
disregard of this obligation: Italy evidently was too unimportant a factor
to be precise with. Italy might, then and there, the 1st of August, 1914,
very well have denounced the Alliance, and perhaps would have done so had
she been prepared for the consequences, had the Salandra Government been
then at the helm.

There is another coil to the affair, not generally recognized in America.
Austria in striking at Serbia was potentially aiming at a closer
envelopment of Italy along the Adriatic, provision for which had been made
in a special article of the Triple Alliance,--the seventh,--under which
she had bound herself to grant compensations to Italy for any disturbance
of the Balkan situation. Austria, when she was brought to recognize this
commission of fault,--which was not until December, 1914, not seriously
until the close of January, 1915,--pretended that her blow at Serbia was
chastisement, not occupation. But it is absurd to assume that having
chastised the little Balkan state she would leave it free and independent.
It is true that in January Austrian troops were no longer in Balkan
territory, but that was not due to intention or desire! They had been
there, they are there now, and they will be there as long as the Teutonic
arms prevail. It is a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as
Austria moved against Serbia. The response she must have known also, but
she had not the power to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on her
right under the seventh clause of the Triple Alliance to open negotiations
for "compensations" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans, and finally
with the assistance of Berlin compelled the reluctant Emperor to admit her
right.

These complexities of international chess, which the American mind
never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the
street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have
to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can
profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in shop windows,
as I studied them for hours in default of anything better to do in
the drifting days of early May. The maps will show at a glance that
Italy's northern frontiers are so ingeniously drawn--by her hereditary
enemy--that her head is virtually in chancery, as every Italian knows
and as the whole world has now realized after four months of patient
picking by Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks. And there
is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question
was not as important as it has since become. The east coast of the
Adriatic was a wild hinterland that might be left to the rude peoples
of Montenegro and Albania. But it has come into the world since then.
Add to this that the Italian shore of the Adriatic is notably without
good harbors and indefensible, and one has all the elements of the
strategic situation. All fears would be superfluous if Austria, the old
bully at the north, would keep quiet: the Triple Alliance served well
enough for over thirty years. But would Austria play fair with an
unsympathetic ally that she had not taken into her confidence when
she determined to violate the first term of the Triple Alliance?

All this may now be pondered in the "Green Book," more briefly and
cogently in the admirable statement which Italy made to the Powers when
she declared war on Austria. That the Italian Government was not only
within its treaty rights in demanding those "compensations" from Austria,
but would have been craven to pass the incident of the attack on Serbia
without notice, seems to me clear. That it was a real necessity, not a
mere trading question, for Italy to secure a stronger frontier and control
of the Adriatic, seems to me equally obvious. These, I take it, were the
vital considerations, not the situation of the "unredeemed" Italians in
Trent and Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum of concession
which she finally offered to Italy's minimum of demand, insisted upon
taking the sentimental or knavish view of the Italian attitude: she would
yield the more Italianated parts of the territory in dispute, not the
vitally strategic places. Nor would she deliver her concessions until
after the conclusion of the war--if ever!--after she had got what use
there was from the Italians enrolled in her armies fighting Russia. For
Vienna to regard the tender principle of nationalism is a good enough
joke, as we say. Her persistence in considering Italy's demands as either
greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of imagination. The Italians
are sentimental, but they are even more practical. It was not the woes of
the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Government to reject the final
offering of Austria, and to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather
the very practical consideration of that indefensible frontier, which
Austria stubbornly refused to make safe for Italy--after she had given
cause, by her attack upon Serbia, to render all her neighbors uneasy in
their minds for their safety.

So much for the sentimental and the strategical threads in the Consulta
negotiations. It was neither for sentiment nor for strategical advantage
solely that Italy finally entered the war. Nevertheless, if the German
Powers had frankly and freely from the start recognized Italy's position,
and surrendered to her _immediate_ possession--as they were ready to do
at the last moment--sufficient of those national aspirations to safeguard
national security, with hands off in the Adriatic, Italy most probably
would have preferred to remain neutral. I cannot believe that Salandra
or the King really wanted war. They were sincerely struggling to keep
their nation out of the European melting-pot as long as they could. But
they were both shrewd and patriotic enough not to content themselves with
present security at the price of ultimate danger. And if they had been as
weak as the King of Greece, as subservient as the King of Bulgaria, they
would have had to reckon with a very different people from the Bulgars and
the Greeks--a nation that might quite conceivably have turned Italy into a
republic and ranged her beside her Latin sister on the north in the world
struggle. The path of peace was in no way the path of prudence for the
House of Savoy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lack of imagination is surely one of the prominent characteristics of
the modern German, at least in statecraft. Imagination applied to the
practical matters of daily living is nothing more than the ability to
project one's own personality beneath the skin of another, to look
around at the world through that other person's eyes and to realize
what values the world holds for him. The Prince von Bülow, able diplomat
though they call him, could not look upon the world through Italian
eyes in spite of his Italian wife, his long residence in Rome, his
professed love for Italy. It must have been with his consent if not
by his suggestion that Erzburger, the leader of the Catholic party in
the Reichstag, was sent to Rome at this critical juncture. The German
mind probably said,--"Here is a notable Catholic, political leader of
German Catholics, and so he must be especially agreeable to Italians,
who, as all the world knows, are Catholics." The reasoning of a stupid
child! Outwardly Italy is Catholic, but modern Italy has shown herself
very restive at any papal meddling in national affairs. To have an
alien--one of the "_barbari_"--seat himself at the Vatican and try to
use the papal power in determining the policy of the nation in a matter
of such magnitude, was a fatal blunder of tactless diplomacy. Nor could
Herr Erzburger's presence at the Vatican these tense days be kept secret
from the curious journalists, who lived on such meager items of news. No
more tactful was it for Prince von Bülow to meet the Italian politician
Giolitti at the Palace Hotel on the Pincian. There is no harm in one
gentleman's meeting another in the rooms of a public hotel so respectable
as the Palace, but when the two are playing the international chess
game and one is regarded as an enemy and the other as a possible traitor,
the popular mind is likely to take a heated and prejudiced view of the
small incident. Less obvious to the public, but none the less untactful,
was the manner in which the German Ambassador tried to use his social
connection in Rome, his family relationships in the aristocracy of Italy,
to influence the King and his ministers. He might have taken warning from
the royal speech attributed to the Queen Mother in reply to the Kaiser:
"The House of Savoy rules one at a time." He should have kept away from
the back stairs. He should have known Italy well enough to realize that
the elements of Roman society with which he was affiliated do not
represent either power or public opinion in Italy any more than good
society does in most modern states. Roman aristocracy, like all
aristocracies, whether of blood or of money, is international in its
sympathies, skeptic in its soul. And its influence, in a decisive question
of life and death to the nation, is nil. The Prince von Bülow was wasting
his time with people who could not decide anything. As Salandra said, with
dignified restraint in answer to the vulgar attack upon him made by the
German Chancellor,--"The Prince was a sincere lover of Italy, but he was
ill-advised by persons who no longer had any weight in the nation"--as
his colleague in London seems to have been ill-advised when he assured
his master that Englishmen would not fight under any circumstances! The
trouble with diplomacy would seem to be that its ranks are still recruited
from "the upper classes," whose gifts are social and whose sympathies
reflect the views and the prejudices of a very small element in the
state. Good society in Rome was still out on the Pincian for the afternoon
promenade, was still exchanging calls and dinners these golden spring
days, but its views and sympathies could not count in the enormous complex
of beliefs and emotions that make the mind of a nation in a crisis. Prince
von Bülow's motor was busily running about the narrow streets of old Rome,
the gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably open,--guarded by
_carabinieri_,--but if the German Ambassador had put on an old coat and
strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a little marble-topped
table in some obscure café, or had traveled second or third class between
Rome and Naples, he might have heard things that would have brought the
negotiations at the Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the other.
For Italy was making up its mind against his master.

       *       *       *       *       *

Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very
beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite
of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some
well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood
of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might
occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's,
and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the
steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild,
empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the
past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of
lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part
and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to
recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of
bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that
once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this
richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in
the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less
than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply
laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle
fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition
the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down
into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much
of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the
conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Bülow ever
spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from
the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that
leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts
the newer city? Probably not.

       *       *       *       *       *

Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the
day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came
over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of
northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways
in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the
invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to
absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made
in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's
place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German.

When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine barrier and poured himself
lustfully out over the fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally
a place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages since then his lust has
changed its form: now it is economic privilege that he seeks for his
people. In order to maintain that level of industrial superiority, of
material prosperity, to which he has raised himself, he must "expand"
in trade and influence. He must have more markets to exploit and always
more. It is the same lust with a new name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely
was written for nations as well as for individuals. But our modern
economic theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the belief: "Thou
shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that
race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark
tangle.  The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing
himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It
is conscious Darwinism--the survival of the fittest, materially, which
he is applying to the world--Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will.
And the non-Germanic world--the Latin world, for it _is_ a Latin world in
varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany--rejects the theory and
the practice with loathing--when it sees what it means.

       *       *       *       *       *

What makes for the happiness of a nation? I asked myself in the mellow
silence of ancient Rome. Is it true that economic conquest makes for
strength, happiness, survival for the nation or for the individual?

This Italy has always been poor, at least within modern memory--a literal,
actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family
pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for
bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily
cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make her rich, to support her
growing population according to the modern standards of comfort. The
Germans despise the Italians for their little having.

Yet the Italian peasant--man, woman, or child--is a strong human being,
inured to meager living and hardship, loving the soil from which he digs
his living with an intense, fiery love. And poverty has not killed the
joy of living in the Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly
laborious lives which the majority lead, the privations in food, clothing,
housing, the narrowness,--in the modern view,--of their lives, no one
could consider the Italian people unhappy. Their characters, like their
hillside farms, are the result of an intensive cultivation--of making
the most out of very little naturally given.

A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these, not to be despised in the
_kaiserliche_ fashion even as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a
human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making the
Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing
aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic opportunity--the want
of coal and factories and other sources of wealth--has kept most of these
people close to the soil, where one feels the majority of any healthy,
enduring race should be. Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with
little, and able to wring the most out of that little. It has cultivated
them intensively as a people, just as they have been forced to cultivate
their rock-bound fields foot by foot.

There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and
in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition,
all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin
civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now
fighting....

       *       *       *       *       *

I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the
economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that
our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite
premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic
development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany has
been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless exponent
of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state depends
primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has exalted
an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical appeals.
She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death in order
that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her citizens
at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her inferiors in
the science of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more abhorrent
when dressed out with the phrases of Christianity!

All modern states are more or less tainted with the same
delusion--ourselves most, perhaps, after Germany. "We have all sinned,"
as an eminent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as well as England
and Germany." It is time to revise some of the fundamental assumptions
of political philosophers and statesmen. Let us admit that peoples may
be strong and happy and contented without seeking to control increasingly
those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on the earth's surface,
without cutting one another's throats in an effort for national expansion.
The psychology of states cannot be fundamentally different from that of
the individuals in them. And the happiness of the individual has never
been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his economic prosperity.

Because the Latin soul divines this axiomatic belief, because the
Latin world admits a larger, finer interpretation of life than
economic success, all civilization waits upon the great decision of
this war.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly in the calm of these drifting, hesitant days, when nobody
knew what the nation desired, there came a bolt of lightning. I have
said that the German people lack imagination by which to understand
the world outside themselves. They do not coördinate their activities.
Otherwise, why commit the barbarism of sinking the Lusitania, just at
the moment when they were straining to keep Italy from breaking
completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never
entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution
of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the
Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft
sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a
large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision
to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or
whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first
woke to her own mind at the shock of the Lusitania murders....

The news came to me in my peaceful room above the Barberini Gardens.
The fountain was softly dripping below, the spring air was full of the
song of birds as another perfect day opened. The warm sunshine reached
lovingly up the yellowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the
little, old, familiar things of a long past, which pull so strongly
here in Rome at the human heart, were moving in the new day. The life
of men, so troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May morning, with
the suave beauty of ideals that for centuries have coursed through the
blood of Italy.... Luigi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad who brought
the morning coffee and newspapers, was telling me of the horrid crime.
With his outstretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he said the
words, then, dropping the paper with its heavy headlines, cursed it as
if it too symbolically represented the hideous thing that Germany had
become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We shall fight them, the
swine!" A few days afterward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on
some Alpine pass.

Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was typical of all
Rome, all Italy. The same burst of execration and horror was in every
mouth. "Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-German sheet
that was appearing in Rome: it got a new significance as it hung in
the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry
of the street. I am not simple enough to believe that the sinking of
the Lusitania of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no more
than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough to sacrifice themselves
simply for their moral resentments. But this fresh example of cynical
indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at the critical point
of decision for the Italian people, had much to do with the rousing of
that war fury without which no government can push a nation into war.
First there must be the spirit of hate, a personal emotion in the hearts
of many. It must be remembered also that Italy had felt with the entire
civilized world the outrage of Belgium. It has even been rumored that
one of the hard passages between Italy and her German allies was the
condition that Germany wished to attach to any Austrian concessions,
by which Italy at the peace conference should uphold Germany's "claims"
to Belgium. No one knows the truth about this, but if true it is in
itself an adequate explanation of the failure of the negotiations. And
now the Lusitania came with a fresh shock as an iterated example of
German state policy. It proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men
what the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world. The Latin has
been cruel and bloody in his deeds, like all men, but he has never made
a cult of inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of statecraft.
Italians, prone to hate as to love, prone especially to hate the Teuton,
those aliens who have lusted after their richness and beauty all these
centuries, felt the Lusitania murders to the depths of their souls. It
was like a red writing on the wall, serving notice that in due season
Germany and Austria would tear Italy limb from limb because of her
"treachery" in not abetting them in their attack upon the peace of
the world.

Prince von Bülow and Baron Macchio might as well have discontinued
their daily visits to the Consulta after the 7th of May. Whatever
they might have hoped to accomplish with their diplomacy to keep Italy
neutral had been irretrievably ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral
von Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a boot-heel on stone,
can set off a powder magazine. The Lusitania was a goodly sized match.
If the King and his ministers were waiting for the country to declare
itself, if they wanted the excuse of national emotion before taking
the final irrevocable steps into war, they had their desire. From the
hour when the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came over the wires,
Italy began to mutter and shout. The months of hesitation were ended.
There were elements enough of hate, and Germany had given them all
focus. "Fuori i Barbari!" I bought a sheet from the old woman who
went hurrying up the street shouting hoarsely,--"Fuori i Barbari!" ...
"Fuori i Barbari!" ... "Barbari!"....




II


_The Politician Speaks_

Giovanni Giolitti came to Rome, a few days after the Lusitania affair.
Ostensibly he had come to town from his home in little Cavour, where he
had been in retirement all the winter, to visit a sick wife at Frascati.
Montecitorio, home of politicians, began to hum. Rome quivering with the
emotions of its great decision muttered. What did Giolitti's presence at
this eleventh hour signify? Remember what the shrewd American observer
had said the week before,--"Giolitti will tell the Italians what they
want."

The master politician, the ex-Premier, the heir to Crispian policies,
was received at the railroad station by a few faithful friends, much
as Boss Barnes or Boss Penrose, returning from a voluntary exile in
New York or Pennsylvania, might be received by a few of the "boys."
They were Deputies from Montecitorio frock-coated and silk-hatted,
like politicians all the world over, not a popular throng of a hundred
thousand Romans singing and shouting, such as a few days later was to
gather in the piazza before the same station to greet the poet,
D'Annunzio. It is well to understand the significance of this
unobtrusive coming of the political leader at the moment, to realize
what sinister meaning it had for the existing Government, for the
Italian nation, for the Allies--for the world.

The Italian Deputies who had been elected two years before, long before
even the astutest politician had any suspicion of the black cloud that
was to rise over Europe, were Giolittian by a great majority. Giolitti
was then the chief figure in Italian politics and controlled the Chamber
of Deputies. The Giolitti "machine," as we should say, was the only
machine worth mention in Italy. Rumor says that it was buttressed with
patronage as American machines are, and, more specifically, that Giolitti
when in power had diverted funds which should have gone into national
defense to political ends, also had deferred the bills of the Libyan
expedition so that at the outbreak of the war Italy found herself badly
in debt and with an army in need of everything. Soldiers drilled in the
autumn of 1914 in patent leathers or barefooted and dressed as they could,
while the Giolittian clubs and interests flourished. Also it was said
that the prefects of the provinces, who in the Italian system have large
powers, especially in influencing elections, were henchmen of the
politician. I do not know how just these accusations may be, nor how
true the more serious accusation shortly to be hurled abroad that
Giolitti had sold himself for German gold. The latter is easy to say
and hard to prove; the former is hard to prove and easy to believe--it
being the way of politicians the world over.

However dull or bright Giolitti's personal honor may have been,
the Parliamentary situation was difficult in the extreme--one of
those absurd paradoxes of representative government liable to happen
any time. Here were five hundred-odd elected representatives of the
people owing allegiance, really, not to the King, not to the nation,
not to the responsible ministers in charge of the state, but to the
politician Giolitti. If they had been elected under the stress of
the war, after the 1st of August, 1914, they might not have been the
same personal representatives of Giovanni Giolitti. We cannot say.
Democracies are prone to be deceived in their chosen representatives:
they discover them mortgaged to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra
Government knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in favor of Italy's
old allies, disguised as patriotically _neutralista_ sympathies. He
had discreetly retired to little Cavour in Piedmont all the winter,
maintaining a disinterested aloofness throughout the prolonged
negotiations. Yet he knew, the Salandra Government and the King knew,
the people knew, that Giovanni Giolitti must be reckoned with before
Parliament could be opened to ratify the acts of the ministers, to
support them in whatever measures they had prepared to take. It would
be simple political insanity to open the Chamber before Giolitti had
been dealt with, leading to acrid discussions, scandal, the inevitable
downfall of the ministry, and political chaos. The nation must be united
and express itself unitedly by its legal mouthpieces before the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has been said, I do not know with what truth, that Prince von Bülow had
informed the ex-Premier of Austria's ultimate concessions even before they
were presented to Salandra and Sonnino, and consequently that Giolitti was
precisely aware of the situation when he reached Rome. It is easy to
believe almost anything of a diplomacy that dealt with Giolitti in the
private rooms of a hotel after the downfall of the Salandra Government....
At any rate, Giolitti went through the forms correctly: he called on the
Premier Salandra, the Foreign Minister Sonnino, who laid before the
ex-Premier the situation as it had shaped itself. Even the King received
him in private audience. So much was due to the leading politician of
Italy, who controlled, supposedly, a majority of the existing Parliament.
In a sense he held the Salandra Government in his hand, after the opening
of the Chamber, which could not be long delayed.

Then the politician spoke. Rather, to be precise, he wrote a little note
to a faithful intimate, which was meant for the newspapers and got into
them at once. It was a very innocent little note of a few lines in which
he confided to "Caro Carlo" his opinion on the tense national situation:
better stay with the old allies--the Austrian offers seemed sufficiently
satisfactory. This may well have been a sincere, a patriotic judgment, as
sincere and patriotic as Bryan's resignation from the American Cabinet a
few weeks later. But Italians did not think so. Almost universally they
gave it other, sinister interpretations. Giolitti had been "bought," was
nothing more than the knavish mouthpiece of German intrigue. Giolitti
became overnight _traditore_, the arch-conspirator, the enemy of his
country! It must have staggered the politician, this sudden fury which
his innocent advice had roused. And, to condemn him, it is not necessary
to believe him to have been a knave bought by German gold.

It is important to realize what happened overnight. Giolitti had
become the most hated, most denounced man in all Italy, and in so far
as he represented honest _neutralista_ sentiment the cause was dead.
If that was what the Salandra Government wanted to achieve, they had
got their desire. If, as the politicians say, they were "feeling out"
popular sentiment, they need no longer doubt what it was. Columns of
vituperation appeared in the anti-German newspapers, crowds began to
form and shout in the streets. "_Traditore_," hissed with every accent
of hate and scorn, filled the air. Giolitti's life was seriously in
danger--or the Government preferred to think so. The great apartment
house on the Via Cavour in which he lived was cordoned off by double
lines of troops. Cavalry kept guard, all day and half the night, before
the steps of Santa Maria Maggiore, ready to sweep through the crowded
streets in case the mob got out of hand. Other troops poured out of the
barracks over the city, doing _piquet a mato_ on all the main streets
and squares of the city.

Giolitti had, indeed, swayed events,--"told the people what they
wanted,"--but not in the expected manner. He had revealed the nation
to itself, drifting on the verge of war, and they knew now that they
wanted nothing of Giolitti or neutrality or German compromises. They
wanted war with Austria. The remarkable fact is that a nation which had
submitted in passivity to absolute ignorance of the diplomatic exchanges,
waiting dumbly the decision that should determine its fate,--of which it
could be said that a large number, perhaps a majority, were neutral at
heart,--suddenly overnight awoke to a realization of the political
situation and rejected the prudent advice of their popular politician,
denounced him, and inferentially proclaimed themselves for war. At last
they had seen: they saw that the Salandra Government in which they had
confidence had come to the parting of the ways with Austria, and they
saw the hand of Giolitti trying to play the game of their ancient enemy.

Then the Salandra Government did a bold, a dramatic thing: it resigned
in a body, leaving the King free to choose ministers who could obtain
the support of the Giolitti following in Parliament. It was inevitable,
it was simple, it was sincere, and it was masterly politics. The public
was aghast. At the eleventh hour the state was left thus leaderless
because its real desires were to be thwarted by a politician who took
his orders from the German Embassy.

Thereupon the "demonstrations" against Giolitti, against Austria and
Germany, began in earnest.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first popular "demonstration" which I saw in Rome was a harmless
enough affair, and for that matter none of them were really serious.
The Government always had the situation firmly in hand, with many
regiments of infantry, also cavalry, to reinforce the police, the secret
service, and the _carabinieri_, who alone might very well have handled
all the disorder that occurred. Never, I suspect, was there any more
demonstrating than the Government thought wise. The first occasion was
a little crowd of boys and youths,--not precisely riff-raff, rather like
our own college boys,--and they did less mischief than a few hundred
freshmen or sophomores would have done. They marched down the street from
the Piazza Tritone, shouting and carrying a couple of banners inscribed
with "Abasso Giolitti." They stoned a few signs, notably the one over the
empty office of the Austrian-Lloyd company, then, being turned from the
Corso and the Austrian Embassy by the police, they rushed back up the
hill to the Salandra residence, to hang about and yell themselves hoarse
in the hope of evoking something from the former Premier. The two poles
of the following "demonstrations" were the Salandra and the Giolitti
residences with occasional futile dashes into the Corso....

For the better part of a week these street excitements kept up, not
merely in Rome, but all over Italy: for that one week, while the King
sent for various public men and offered them the task of forming a
new ministry, which in every case was respectfully declined--as was
expected.

       *       *       *       *       *

Why did the King not send for Giovanni Giolitti, the one statesman
who under ordinary circumstances might have expected a summons?
Neither Giolitti nor any of his intimates was invited to form a cabinet
and reëstablish constitutional government. Nothing would appear to be
more natural than that the leader of the Opposition, controlling a
majority of the Deputies, who avowedly represented a policy opposed
to that of the ministers who had resigned, should be asked himself to
take charge. But Giolitti was never asked, and daily the shouting in
the streets grew louder, more menacing, and the mood of the public more
tense. Nothing was plainer than that if Giolitti had a majority of the
Deputies, the people were not for him and his policies. The House of
Savoy, as the King so well put it, rules by expressing the will of the
people. Each day it was more evident what that will was. Giolitti, the
master politician, was being outplayed by mere honest men. They had used
him--as Germany had used him--to try out the temper of the nation. With
him they drew the _neutralista_ and pro-German fire beforehand, prudently,
not to be defeated by hostile party criticism in the Chamber. And when
they got through with the politician, they threw him out: literally they
intimated through the Minister of Public Safety that they would not be
responsible any longer for his personal safety. There was nothing for
him but to go--before Parliament had assembled!

As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary
violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after
another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the
proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of
the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared on
the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that
last day. Where was all the _neutralista_ sentiment so evident the first
months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so
strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians
were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating
multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels
along the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it prudent to retire
over the Alps, were closed. Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian
and German consulates, also the embassies when they could get through
the cordons of troops on the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days might
very well give rise to pessimistic reflections on the folly of popular
government to politicians like Giolitti and the Prince von Bülow, whose
obviously prudent policies were thus being upset by the "voice of the
piazza" led by a very literary poet! No doubt at this moment they would
point to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece as enlightened
monarchs who know how to secure their own safety by ignoring the will
of their peoples. But the end for Ferdinand and Constantine is not yet.

       *       *       *       *       *

The trouble with the politician as with the trained diplomat is that
he never goes beneath the surface. He takes appearances for realities.
He has often lost that instinct of race which should enable him to
understand his own humanity. To a Giolitti, adept in the trading game
of political management, it must seem insane for Italy to plunge into
the war against powerful allies, who at just this time were triumphing
in West and East alike--all the more when the sentimental and trading
instincts of the populace might be partly satisfied with the concessions
so grudgingly wrung from Austria. It was not only rash: it was bad
politics!

But what Giolitti and men of his stripe the world over cannot
understand is that the people are never as crafty and wise and mean as
their politicians. The people are still capable of honest emotions, of
heroic desires, of immense sacrifices. They love and hate and loathe
with simple hearts. The politician like the popular novelist makes the
fatal mistake of underrating his audience. And his audience will leave
him in the lurch at the crisis, as Italy left Giolitti. Italy was never
enthusiastic, as its enemies have charged, for a war of mere aggression,
for realizing the "aspirations" because Austria was in a tight place,
even for redeeming a million and a half more or less of expatriated
Italians in Austrian territory. Politicians and statesmen talked of
these matters, perforce; the people repeated them. For they were tangible
"causes." But what Italians hated was Austrian and German leadership--were
the "_barbari_" themselves, their ancient foe; and when told that they
had better continue to make their bed with the "_barbari_," they revolted.

There are many men in every nation,--some of the politician type, some
of the aristocratic type, some of the business type,--who by interest
and temperament are timid and fundamentally cynical. They are pacifists
for profit. About them gather the uncourageous "intellectuals," who
believe in the potency of all established and dominating power whatever
it may be. But these "leading citizens" fortunately are a minority in
any democracy. They do most of the negotiating, much of the talking, but
when the crisis comes,--and the issue is out in the open for every one
to see,--they have to reckon with the instinctive majority, whose
emotional nature has not been dwarfed. That majority is not necessarily
the "rabble," the irresponsible and ignorant mob of the piazza as the
German Chancellor sees them: it is the great human army of "little
people," normal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish stake
in the community is not large enough to stifle their deepest instincts.
In them, I believe, lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain
virtues and its abiding strength.

The Italian situation was a difficult one, obviously. Public opinion
had been perplexed. There were the classes I have just mentioned, by
interest and temperament either pro-German or honestly neutral. There
was the radical mob that the year before had temporarily turned Italy
into republics. There was the unreliable South. And the hard-ground
peasants who feared, justly, heavier taxes and the further hardships
of war. And there were the millions of honest but undecided Italians
who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were intelligent enough to
realize the exposed situation of Italy, who felt the call of blood for
the "unredeemed," and the vaguer but none the less powerful call of
civilization from their northern kin--above all who responded to the
fervid historical idealism of the poet voicing the longing of their
souls to become once more the mighty nation they had been. These were
the people whose change of hearts and minds surprised Giolitti and the
Germans.

What had been going on in those hearts of the plain people all these
months of the great war, Giolitti could not understand. It was another
Italy from the one he had charmed that rose at his prudent advice and
threw the bitter word "_traditore_" in his teeth and howled him out of
Rome. Traitor, yes! traitor to the loftier, bolder, finer longings of
their hearts to take their stand at all cost with their natural allies
in this last titanic struggle with the barbarians. It was this sort of
public that spoke in the piazza and whose voice prevailed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The diplomat deals too exclusively with conventional persons, with the
sophisticated. The politician deals too exclusively with the successful,
with the commercial and exploiting classes. Giolitti's associations
were of this class. Like any other _bourgeoisie_ of finance and trade,
"big business" in Italy was on the side of the big German battalions,
who at this juncture were winning victories. Italy was peculiarly under
the influence of German and Austrian finance. One of its leading lending
banks--the Banca Commerciale--was a German concern. Most of its newer
developments had been accomplished with German capital, were run by German
engineers, equipped with German machines. Germany has bitterly reproached
her former ally for the "ingratitude" of siding against the people who had
brought her prosperity. Gratitude and ingratitude in business transactions
are meaningless terms. The lender gets his profit as well as the borrower,
usually before the borrower. If Italy has needed German capital, Germany
has needed the Italian markets and Italian industries for her capital. The
Germans surely have used Italy as their commercial colony. Italy bought
her bathtubs, her electric machines, her coal, and her engines from
Germany. For the past generation the German commercial traveler has been
as common in Italy as the German tourist. In fact, was there ever a German
tourist who was not in some sense a commercial agent for the Fatherland?

To the international financier all this is simply intelligible--a matter
of mutually desirable exchange. No debtor nation should feel aggrieved
with a creditor nation: rather it should rejoice that it has attracted
the services of foreign capital. Is the international economist right
in his reasoning? Why does the delusion persist among plain people that
the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent
delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered
illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance
the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am
fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it
too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural
resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow money to
"develop" itself. But granting for the moment that material exploitation
of a country is as desirable as our modern notions assume it to be, even
then there are reasons for grave suspicion of foreign lenders. Take abused
Mexico. Its woes are in good part traceable to the pernicious influence
upon its domestic politics of the foreign capital which its riches have
attracted. One might instance the United States as an example of
beneficial exploitation by foreign capital, but with us it must be
remembered the lender has had neither industrial nor political power.
We have always been strong enough to manage our affairs ourselves and
satisfy our creditors with their interest--if need be with their
principal. We have drawn on the European horde as upon an international
bank, but we have absolutely controlled the disposition of the moneys
borrowed. A weak country can hardly do that. Mexico could not. It had
to suffer the foreign exploiter, with his selfish intrigues, in person.
Italy has never been as weak as Mexico: it has maintained its own
government, its own civilization. But the increasing amount of foreign
investment, the increasing number of foreign "interests" in Italy, has
been evident to every Italian. The hotels, the factories, the shops all
testify patently to the presence of the stranger within the gates looking
after his own interests, breeding his money on Italian soil.

But why not? the dispassionate internationalist may ask. Why should not
the Italian hotels be in the hands of Austrians, Germans, and Swiss; the
new electrical developments be installed and run by Germans; the shops
for tourists and Italians be owned by foreigners? There we cross the
unconscious instinct of nationality, which cannot be ignored. Assuming
that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in
the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too
much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect
influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the
insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the
foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism,
but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian
the German article should be undesirable, especially if its possession
means accepting the German and his way of life along with his goods. The
small merchant and the peasant express their resentments of foreign
competition rawly, no doubt. Consciously it is half envy of the more
efficient stranger. Unconsciously they are voicing the deep traditions
of their ancestors, vindicating their race ideals, cherishing what is
most enduring in themselves. They would not see their country given over
to the stranger, whose life is not their life.

One unpleasant aspect of the commercial invasion of Italy by the Teuton
was his liking to live there, and consequently the amount of real estate
which he was collecting on the Latin peninsula--so much that the lovely
environs of Naples were fast becoming a German principality! These
invaders were not traders, nor workers, but capitalists and exploiters.
The process is known now as "infiltration." The German had filtered into
Italy in every possible way, was supplanting its own native life with the
Teutonic thing, as it had in France so largely. Italy could well profit
from that experience of its sister nation. The Germans who filtered into
French life, commercial, industrial, social, were German first and last.
When the crisis came they turned from their adopted land, where they had
lived on terms of cordial hospitality for ten, twenty, thirty years, and
took themselves back to Germany, in many cases to reappear as the invader
at the head of armed troops. The experience of France proved that the
peaceful German resident was a German all the years of his life, not a
loyal, vital factor in his adopted country--too often something of a spy
as well. Therefore Italy might well be disturbed over the presence of so
much Teutonic "infiltration" in her own beloved land. And why should
Germany call her ungrateful when she sought to rid herself of her
unwelcome creditors? German capital had made its five per cent on its
investments, and better: it should not expect to absorb the life of the
nation also.

       *       *       *       *       *

In every debtor nation there must be an element which profits directly
from the creditor relation. It assumes, naturally, the aspects of
"progress," and consists of the richer trading class and bankers,
sustainers of politicians. Such, I take it, were the followers of
Giolitti, and such was Giolitti himself, a sincere admirer of Teutonic
success and believer in the economic help which Germany could render
to his kind of Italian. Such men as Giolitti are easily impressed by
evidences of German superiority: they identify progress with the rapid
introduction of German plumbing, German hotel-keeping, German electric
devices, German banks. All these, they believe, help a "backward country"
to come forward. They do not understand the finer spiritual risks that
such material benefits may involve. They are not as sensitive as the
humble peasant, as simpler citizens, to the gradual sapping of the
precious national roots, of the internal debasement that may be going
on through the process of "infiltration." They are too prosperous, too
cosmopolitan to feel losses in national individuality. They realize
merely the better hotels, the better railways, the improved plumbing
in their country. Their souls are already half-Teutonized.

In his dignified answer to the German Chancellor's vulgar attack on him
in the Reichstag, Salandra referred to the long history of the Italian
people, who "were civilized and leaders of the world" when the Teuton
hordes were still savage. It was the spirit of that ancient civilization
which did not consist primarily of industrial development that stirred
in the souls of true Italians and made them scorn the advice of the
Teutonized politician. He was "_traditore_" to all that nobler Italians
hold dear--to the Latin tradition.




III


_The Poet Speaks_

The poet prophet has so long abdicated his rights among us moderns
that we are incredulous when told that he has again exercised his
function. That is the reason why the story of a poet's part in leading
the Italian people toward their decision is received by Americans with
such skeptical humor. And Gabriele d' Annunzio in the rôle! A poet who
is popularly supposed to be decadent, if not degenerate, gossipingly
known for his celebrated affair with a famous actress, whose novels and
plays, when not denounced for their eroticism, are very much caviar to
the "wholesome" man, so full are they of a remote symbolism, so purely
"literary." "Exotic" is the chosen word for the more tolerant American
minds with which to describe the author of "Il Fuoco" and "San Sebastian."

In recent years the Italian poet has abandoned his native land, living
in Paris, writing his last work in French, having apparently exiled
himself for the rest of his life and renounced his former Italianism.
Circumstances were stronger than the poet. The war came, and D'Annunzio
turned back to his native land.

       *       *       *       *       *

He came to Italy at a critical moment and characteristically he filled
the moment with all the drama of which it was capable. His reappearance
in Italy, as every one knows, was due to the ceremonies in connection
with the unveiling of a monument to the famous Garibaldian band,--the
Thousand,--in the little village of Quarto outside of Genoa, from which
Garibaldi and his Thousand set forth on their march of liberation
fifty-five years ago. The monument had been long in the making. The
opportunity for patriotic instigation was heightened by the crisis of
the great war. The King and his ministers had indicated, previously,
their intention of participating in this national commemoration, but
as the day grew near and the political situation became more acute,
it was announced that the urgency of public affairs would not permit
the Government to leave Rome. It may have been the literal fact that
the situation precipitated by the presence of Giolitti demanded their
constant watchfulness. Or it may well have been that the King and the
Salandra Government had no intention of allowing their hand in this
dangerous game to be forced by any reckless fervor of the poet. They
were not ready, yet, to countenance his inflammation. At any rate,
they left the occasion solely to the poet.

How he improved it may best be gathered from his address. To the
American reader, accustomed to a blunter appeal, the famous _Sagra_
will seem singularly uninflammatory--intensely vague, and literary.
One wonders how it could fire that, vast throng which poured out along
the Genoa road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But one must
remember that nine months of hesitation had prepared Italian minds for
the poet's theme--the future of Italy. He linked the present crisis of
choice with the heroic memories of that first making of a nation, "_Oggi
sta sulla patria un giorno di porpora; e questo é un ritorno per una
nova dipartita, o gente d'Italia!_"--A purple day is dawning for the
Fatherland and this is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!
The return for the new departure--to make a larger, greater Italy, just
as the Thousand had departed from this spot to gather the fragments of
a nation into one. "All that you are, all that you have, and yourselves,
give it to the flame-bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in a
new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who must bear their country to
these new triumphs: "O happy those who have more because they can give
more, can burn more.... Happy those youths who are famished for glory,
because they will be appeased.... Happy the pure in heart, happy those
who return with victory, because they will see the new face of Rome,
the recrowned brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy."

The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_
was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the
cities. The voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial idealism,
of patriotism, that glows in the hearts of all real Italians. He tied
their heroic past with the heroic opportunity of the present. And he
did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the "aspirations." Instead,
"This is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!"

The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of his advice to choose
the safe path, must have wondered, as too many Americans wondered,
how this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by his fine figures
of birds and sea! But there was a spirit abroad in Italy that would
not be appeased with "compensations": the poet had the following of
all "young Italy."

       *       *       *       *       *

D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A whole week elapsed after the
_Sagra_ at Quarto, the 5th of May, before he reached Rome--a week of
growing tumult, of anti-Giolitti demonstrations, in which his glowing
words could sink like hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay
was well considered. If the poet had seized the occasion of Quarto, he
made his appearance on the larger scene after the interest of the whole
nation had been heightened by reading his address.

I was one of the immense throng that awaited the arrival of the train
bringing D'Annunzio to the capital. The great bare place before the
terminal station was packed with a patient crowd. The windows of the
massive buildings flanking the square were filled with faces. There
were faces everywhere, as far as the recesses of the National Museum,
around the flamboyant fountain, up the avenues. There were soldiers
also, many of them, inside and outside of the station, to prevent any
excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which
the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed.
The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not
rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There
was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was
natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained
a "mob" as one might find in Berlin.

The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to
shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident
merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence
of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of
throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight
figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd
broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian
where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred
and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto
and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza
Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince
von Bülow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words
from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight
air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the
throng....

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the effect of what D'Annunzio
said. His words fell like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one,
with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity that made them vibrate
through the mass of humanity. They were filled with historical allusions
that any stranger must miss in part, but that touched the fibers of his
hearers. He seized, as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance of the
liberating Thousand and recounted the inspiring incidents of that day
fifty years and more ago. As I stood in that huge crowd listening to the
poet's words as they fell into the thirsty hearts of the people,--who
were weary with too much negotiation,--I realized as never before that
speech is given to man for more than reason. The words were not merely
beautiful in themselves: they flamed with passion and they touched into
flame that something of heroic passion in the hearts of all men which
makes them transcend themselves. The crowd sighed as if it saw visions,
and there rose instinctively in response the familiar strains of the
Garibaldian Hymn.

Italy had found its voice! The poet did not speak of "compensations,"
a little more of Trent and Trieste, of a more strategic frontier. He
stirred them with visions of their past and their future. He voiced
their scorns. "We are not, we will not be a museum, an inn, a picnic
ground, an horizon in Prussian blue for international honeymoons!...
Our genius calls us to put our imprint on the molten matter of the new
world.... Let there breathe once more in our heaven that air which flames
in the prodigious song of Dante in which he describes the flight of the
Roman eagle, of your eagle, citizens!... Italy is arming, not for the
burlesque, but for a serious combat.... _Viva, viva Roma_, without shame,
_viva_ the great and pure Italy!"

That was the voice which called Italy into the war: the will that
Italy should live "ever grander, ever purer, without shame." The poet
spoke to the Latin in the souls of his hearers.

       *       *       *       *       *

He spoke again a number of times. In those feverish days when the
nation was in a ferment, the restless youth of Rome would rush in
crowds to the hotel on the Pincian and wait there patiently for their
poet to counsel them. He gratified their desire, not often, and each
time that he spoke he stung them to a fuller consciousness of will.
He spoke of the larger Italy to be, and they knew that he did not mean
an enlargement of boundaries. He spoke clearly, briefly, intensely.
It was once more the indubitable voice of the poet and prophet raised
in the land of great poetry.

D'Annunzio grew bolder. He recognized openly his antagonist--the traitor.
The most dramatic of his little speeches was at the Costanzi Theater
where a trivial operetta was being given, which was quickly swept into
the wings. After the uproar on his entrance had been somewhat stilled,
he spoke of Von Bülow and Giolitti and their efforts to thwart the will
of the nation.

"This betrayal is inspired, instigated, abetted by a foreigner. It is
committed by an Italian statesman, a member of the Italian Parliament
in collusion with this foreigner to debase, to enslave, to dishonor
Italy.".... _Traditore!_ I never thought to hear the word off the
operatic stage. From D'Annunzio's lips it fell like a wave of fire
upon that inflammable audience. A grizzled, well-dressed citizen
suddenly leaped to his feet, yelling,--"I will drink his blood, the
traitor.... Death to Giolitti!"....

While the big theater rocked and stormed with passion, outside on
the Via Viminale barricades were being hastily thrown up. The cavalry,
that had been sitting their mounts all day before Santa Maria Maggiore
guarding the unwelcome Giolitti from the angry mob, had charged the
packed street, sweeping it clear with the ugly sound of horses' hoofs
on pavement and cries of hunted men and women. That was the end. The
next morning, be it remembered, the politician sneaked away, and two
days afterwards the Salandra Government returned to power. Rome, all
Italy, became suddenly calm, purged of its passion, awaiting confidently
the reopening of Parliament.

The Government had won. The people had won. The poet had beaten the
politician. For his was the voice to which the great mass of his
countrymen responded.

       *       *       *       *       *

D'Annunzio spoke again admirably at those great gatherings of concord
when the citizens of Rome assembled in the Piazza del Popolo and in the
Campidolgio. The poet had made himself the spokesman of the new Italy
which had found itself in the storm of the past agonizing weeks, and as
such he was recognized by the Government. The King and the ministers
accorded him audiences; he was given a commission in the army and
attached to the general staff. Wherever he appeared he was received
with acclamations, with all the honor that is accorded the one who can
interpret nobly the soul of a nation. And the poet deserved all the
recognition which he received--the throngs, the flowers, the _vivas_,
the adoration of Italian youths. For he alone, one might say, raised
the crisis from the wallow of sordid bargaining, from the tawdriness
of sentiment, to a purer passion of Latin ambition and patriotism. He
loftily recalled to his countrymen the finer ideals of their past. He
made them feel themselves Latin, guardians of civilization, not traders
for safety and profit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Germans, naturally, have had bitter things to say about D'Annunzio.
German sympathizers in America as well as the German Chancellor have
sneered at the influence wielded in Italy's crisis by a "decadent"
poet. Even among American lovers of Italy there has been skepticism
of the sincerity of a national mind so easily swayed by a man who "is
not nice to women." A peculiarly American view that hardly needs
comment!

Is it not wiser to assume that the case of D'Annunzio was really
the case of Italy itself--conversion? The deepest passion in the
poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed
the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger.
Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of
the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the
heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw
with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips with, what the
Allies were fighting for, was not territorial gains or glory or even
altogether selfish self-preservation, but rather, more deeply, for
the existence of a certain humanity. This world war he realized is no
local quarrel: it is the greatest of world decisions in the making.
And the man himself was transfigured by it: he found himself in his
greatest passion as Italy found herself at her greatest crisis. Latin
that he is, he divined the inner meaning of the confused issues presented
to the puzzled world. He was fired with the desire to light from his
inspiration his own hesitant, confused people, to voice for them the
call to the Latin soul that he had heard. For Italy, most Latin of all
the heirs of Rome, with her tragic and heroic past, the war must be not
a winning of a little Austrian territory, the redeeming of a few lost
Italians, but a fight for the world's best tradition against the forces
of death. Once more it was "_Fuori i barbari_," as it had been with her
Latin ancestors.

It seems to me no great mystery.

In the poet's writing there are passages of a large historical
understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in
knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition.
Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold
may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the
tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first
fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to
proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, should be the
ardor of fighting in his own manner with his weapon of inspired words
the world battle? So it seemed to me as I listened to his voice in
the stillness of that May night. The voice of Roman glory, of ancient
ideals awoke an answering passion in the hearts of the thousands who
had gathered there. "_Una grande e pura Italia ... sensa onta_." And
it would be a lasting shame for Italy to keep out of the struggle
that the allied nations were making, to take her "compensations"
prudently and shrink back within a cowardly neutrality. Better any
other fate.

So it seemed to that throng of eager, soul-hungry Italians who stood
beneath the balcony of the hotel on the Pincian and drank the poet's
fiery message like a full-bodied wine. At last they had found
themselves.




IV


_The Piazza Speaks_

"The voice of the piazza prevailed," the German Chancellor sneered
in his denunciation of Italy at the conclusion. It can easily be
imagined, the picture he made to himself, in his ugly northern office
on Friedrichstrasse, of the influence that upset all German pressure
and sent Italy into the war on the side of the Allies; that defeated
the industry of the skilled ambassador, the will of the wily politician.
The Chancellor saw one of those large public squares in which Latin
countries abound, open centers in their close-built cities, where so
much of the common life of the people goes on, now as it has for hundreds
of years. For the piazza, descending in direct tradition from the ancient
Forum, is the public hall of citizens, where they trade, gossip, quarrel,
plot, love, and hate, from the crone sunning herself in a sheltered nook
over her bag of chestnuts to the grandee whose palace windows open above
the noisy commonalty. The Chancellor saw this common meeting-ground, this
glorified street, filled with a ragged mob of "the baser quality," as on
the operatic stage, emptily vocal or evilly skulking for mischief, like
the _mafia_, the _apache_. He saw this loose gathering of irresponsibles
suddenly stirred to evanescent passion against the real benefactors of
their country by the secret agents of the Allies, "corrupted by English
gold," in the mechanical melodrama of the German imagination, marching
to and fro, attacking the shops and homes of worthy Germans, howling and
stoning, by mere noise drowning the sober protests of reflecting citizens,
intimidating a weak king, connived at by a bought government, pushing a
whole nation into the bloody sacrifice of war out of mere recklessness of
rioting--a piazza filled with the rabble minority who have nothing to lose
because they neither fight nor pay.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such a picture, reflected in Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase,
is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the
real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night,
and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German
Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations"
did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince
von Bülow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's
intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for
war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the
violence of what a third-class strike in an American mill town can
produce. Such as it was the Government showed the determination and
ability to keep it strictly within bounds. Rome was filled with troops.
Alleyways and courtyards oozed troops at the first shouts from the
piazza: the danger points of the Corso, especially the Piazza Colonna
on which the Chigi Palace, the residence of the Austrian Ambassador,
fronts, were kept almost constantly empty by cordons of troops. All
told, the destruction done by the mobs could not have amounted to
several hundred dollars--a few signs and shop windows smashed, a few
pavements torn up in the Via Viminale. It is true that after war was
declared upon Austria there was some pillage of Austrian and German
shops in Milan, which has been greatly exaggerated by the German and
pro-German press; it was nothing worse than what happened in Berlin
to English residents in August, 1914. And the Italian Government
immediately took severe measures with the officials who had permitted
the disorders--removing the prefect and the military commander of
Milan.

There is no saying, of course, what might have happened had the King
offered the premiership to Giolitti, and had that astute politician
been rash enough to accept the responsibility of forming a government
in accord with his own _neutralista_ sympathies. It is more than
likely that revolution would have ensued: possibly Italy would have
entered the war as a republic. For the Italians are not Greeks, as
has been amply proved. But the King of Italy, whatever his own
sympathies may have been, showed plainly that he had enough political
understanding not to run counter to the expressed will of his people,
to deal with the "traitor." After a week of tempestuous inter-regnum,
in which the piazza expressed itself passionately, the Salandra
Government returned to power with all which that implied in foreign
policy. Then the piazza became quiet. If the piazza must shoulder the
responsibility of Italy's decision, it must be credited with knowing
marvelously well its own mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

The constitution of this "mob" is worth attention. I saw it at
many angles. I followed its first erratic flights through the streets
when Salandra resigned and a gaping void opened before the nation. I
waited for the poet's arrival at the Roman station, for hours, while
the dense throng of men and women pressed into the great square and
swelled like a dark pool into the adjoining streets. And I followed
with the "piazza" in its instinctive rush to the hotel on the Pincian
Hill to hear the voice of its spokesman. Again I was in the Corso when
the plumed cavalry cleared the surging mass from the Piazza Venezia to
the Piazza Colonna. I heard the people yell, "Death to the traitor
Giolitti!" and "_Fuori i barbari!_" and sing Mameli's "L'Inno." I saw
the uproar melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman nights, leaving
the cavalry at their vigil before Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the
repose of Giovanni Giolitti.

I can testify that the "piazza" was composed very largely of perfectly
respectable folk like myself. It varied more or less as chance gatherings
of men will vary. Sometimes there were more workingmen in dirty clothes,
sometimes more youths and boys with their banners, sometimes more
shouters and fewer actors. But the core of it was always that same mass
of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day
goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago,--plain men,
rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of
affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and
to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex
emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the
depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally
shy bricks at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes, but not
"riff-raff," not anarchist, nor _mafia_, nor _apache_. Nothing of that
did I see those days and nights.

The greeting to D'Annunzio was made by men of the professional and
intellectual classes I should say, having wormed my way in and out
of that vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before the poet's
hotel were composed chiefly of youths, at school or college, others
in working dress. The noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs
was that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of D'Annunzio's appearance
there. They were citizens--and their wives--who could afford to pay
the not inconsiderable price charged--and seats were at a premium.
The men around me in evening dress, who were by no means silent, came
from the "classes" rather than the masses. The crowds that hung about
the Corso and the adjacent squares were more mixed, but they held a
goodly proportion of the frequenters of the Café Arragno. The worst
that could be said against these casual gatherings was their youth.
It is the way of youth to vent its passion in speech, to move and not
to stand. Middle age stood on the sidewalks and watched, sympathetically.
Old age looked down from the windows, contemplatively. But both old
age and middle age consorted with youth in the great meetings of
consecration in the Piazza del Popolo and the Campidolgio, after the
will of the people had prevailed. And after all, youth must fight the
wars, and pay for them for long years afterwards--why should it not
have its say in the making of them as well as middle age and old age?
The youths in the ranks of the patient, good-natured soldiers who did
_piquet a mato_ all day and half the night in the Roman streets during
that vocal week while the piazza spoke, were openly sympathetic with
the mobs they were holding down. I knew some of the gray-clad boys.
I strolled along the lines and saw the smiles, heard the chaffing
give-and-take of citizen and soldier as the mob tried to rush through
the double ranks that cordoned the streets. There was no hatred there,
no violent conflict with authority. Each understood the other. The young
officers seemed to say to the crowd,--"You may howl all you like, you
fellows, but you mustn't throw stones or make a mess.... What's the
good! War is coming anyway in a few days--they can't talk it away!"
And the crowd replied heartily,--"You are all right. We understand
each other. You are doing your duty. Soon you will be doing something
better worth while than policing streets and saving that  traitor
Giolitti's skin from us. You will be chasing the Austrians out of
Italian territory, and many of us will be with you then!" And the
young officers looked the other way when the members of the "mob"
offered the tired soldiers cigarettes and chocolate, and sometimes
slipped through the cordon on private business within the forbidden
area. Only once, once only in all the excitement did the long-haired
horsemen clatter through the streets in a serious charge, scattering
the shrieking pedestrians. That was by way of warning, possibly as
much to the Government as to the populace.

Then the decision was made, and after the Salandra Ministry, in
whom the people had confidence, had returned to power, the ministry
that had broken with Austria and refused her grudging compromises,
the piazza purred like doves and listened to long patriotic speeches
from "representative citizens." No soldiers were needed to keep order
in these immense gatherings. For all were citizens, then, piazza and
palace alike in the face of war.

       *       *       *       *       *

One easily understands the German Chancellor's scorn over any irregular
expression of public opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the
streets dares to vent any emotion or will other than that suggested to
it by a strong government, above all daring to voice it passionately.
In a nation such as Germany, where the franchise is so hedged about
that even those who have it cannot effectively express their wills,
where political opinion is supplied from a central fount of authority,
where the nation goes into war at the command of the Kaiser and his
military advisers, where a war of "defense" and all other national
interests are controlled by the "high commandment," consisting at the
most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of
the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the
popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order
of the "high commandment,"--now against this enemy, now against that
one,--first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of
Americans--it is natural that a high government functionary should
despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as
merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in
the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably
corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the
close organization of Germany, no political expression whatever: all
good citizens are instructed by a carefully controlled press how to
think and feel and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the glory of
the Latin temperament that it cannot be throttled and guided like the
more docile Teuton nature, that when it feels vividly it will express
itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in international
concerns. The Latin cannot be made to march in blind obedience into
the jaws of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy had come to
feel, that Teutonic domination would be intolerable, that at all cost
the Austro-German ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradition
vindicated and made to endure. It was proved by the marvelous content,
the fervid unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy, once the
great decision had been made.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since those full May weeks the world has had an example of what no
doubt the Imperial Chancellor considers the suitable method of dealing
with popular sentiment. The sympathies of Greeks and Rumanians have
been, since the opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet
their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both countries from declaring
themselves in favor of the Allies. The King of Greece has stretched
the constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality, which, if it
were not for the failure of the Allies to make impressive gains in
the first year of the war, would have doubtless cost him his crown.
The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer
acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German
agents, more successfully than Prince von Bülow, has thus far kept the
people of Rumania and Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria
is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The
piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of
Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at
least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin,
against its best interest. But the thing had all been "arranged"
between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through
"negotiation." Germany had been successful in buying the coöperation
of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of
Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked
to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the
piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other
words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud
that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of
rule in a constitutional state and executes the will of his people--who
listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of
the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke
at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German
arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were
not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote,
as German threats too plainly showed.

The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the
circumstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The
piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for me is against
me," and execrated the professed _neutralista_ Giolitti. But the Greeks,
it seems, are more easily managed by a "strong" government and a German
king. The end, however, is not yet in sight. It remains to be seen
whether the path of prudent passivity is the safe one, even selfishly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for the voice of the piazza?
All popular government, even in the limited form of a constitutional
monarchy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair. "The House of Savoy
rules by executing the will of the Italian people." Good! But how is that
popular will to be determined? Not, surely, by taking a poll of the five
hundred-odd Deputies of the Italian Parliament elected two years before
the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule. Those Deputies were
chosen, as we Americans know only too well how, by mean intrigues of party
machines, by clever manipulation of trained politicians like Giovanni
Giolitti, who by their control of appointed servants--the prefects of the
provinces--can throw the elections as they will, can even disfranchise
unfriendly elements of the population. Manhood suffrage is not a precise,
a scientific method of getting at public opinion. It is possibly the least
accurate method of gauging the will of a people. Something other than the
poll is needed to resolve the will of a nation. And when that will is
determined it makes little odds what instrumentality expresses it. Even
the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to the urn for a secret vote on the
Salandra measures a week after the lively expression of popular will in
the piazza, voted--secretly--against their neutral leader, in favor of
war! They had been converted by the voice of the piazza--by other things
also in all likelihood. If their votes had been taken ten days before,
when Giolitti first arrived in Rome, the result would have been far
different: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In the end the Italian
Parliament merely registered the will of the people, both men and women,
which expressed itself, as it always must, in diverse ways, through the
press, by the voice of the piazza, in public and private discussion,
flightily, weightily, passionately, timidly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious force. What enters into
that act of decision which results in will is never wholly apparent, from
the least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of government, which
admits the right of the individual citizen, plain and exalted alike,
to be heard and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of polling this
collective will of the nation. Our electoral representative method and
majority vote is surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian way. That
right to vote, for which our women are so eagerly striving, as thinking
men realize only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of a people is
inaccurately registered, not made, by the vote. The voice of the piazza
when deep enough and strong enough is as good as any other way, perhaps,
of determining the collective will of a nation in a crisis; surely far
better than the secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further, the reason
of the piazza on any vital fundamental matter, such as war, which means
life or death, is as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly surer,
because the piazza, having less to lose or gain, feels and believes and
acts more simply, basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy,
reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atrocities committed on
priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,--all
deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after
centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous
perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their
own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them
from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians
condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against their
friends. They responded also to the glory of Garibaldi's Thousand, who had
liberated their fathers from foreign domination and made a nation out of
Italy, and they responded to the great past of their people from whom the
essential elements of what men know to-day as civilization has spread over
the world. All these emotions were hidden in that one cry,--"Out with the
barbarians!"

The voice of the piazza, with its simple unanimity, its childlike
psychology, came nearer to expressing the soul of Italy than the German
Chancellor can comprehend, than any sophisticated diplomat, who has
associated only with "thinking" and "leading" people, can believe. The
Latin soul of Italy which cursed its politician and thrilled at the words
of its poet! That soul of a people which is greater than any individual,
which somehow expresses itself more authoritatively through the simple
people who must suffer for their faiths than through the intellectuals
and the protected members of a society....

"_Viva Italia!_" the tanned conscript leaning from the car window at
Subiaco shouted back to his friends and home. And the old men and girls
left in the fields raised their hats as the train passed and shouted in
reply,--"_Viva Italia!_" It was not English gold, nor the desire for
Trent and Trieste, that brought that cry to the boy's lips!




V


_Italy Decides_

Whatever one may think of the piazza voice, whether the disposition is
to sneer with the German or to trust with the democrat in its spontaneous
expression, it is a matter of history now that Italy's decision had been
made before the question came to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, a
fortnight or more before the reluctant ambassadors of the ex-Alliance
backed into their waiting trains and departed homeward across the Alps.
It is a significant fact of personal psychology that the crisis of a
decision takes place before action results to calm the disturbed mind. So
it was with Italy. Her decision had really been taken when the Lusitania
sank, when the politician, in face of this fresh outrage, advised the
safer course of neutrality, which would amount to a connivance with her
former associates in their predatory programme. _Traditore!_ meant but
one thing--a betrayal of the nation's soul. In the light of more recent
events, since Italy entered the war, there are probably many Italians who
secretly wish that the safer counsel had prevailed, that, like Greece and
Rumania, Italy had "preserved a benevolent neutrality" in the great war,
even possibly that she had concluded to make her bed in the Teutonic camp.
If the world is to be Teutonized, they would argue, why put one's head in
the wolf's jaw! There are prudent people of that stripe in every nation,
but since the end of May they have kept silence in Italy. And it should be
forever remembered to her honor that Italy made her decision in face of
Teutonic successes. If the military situation did not look so black for
the Allies at the end of May as it does this December, it looked black
enough with the crumbling Russian resistance before Mackensen's phalanx.
Neuve Chapelle had been a costly and empty victory. There had been no
successful drive in Champagne and Artois to encourage those who bet only
on winning cards. There were heavy clouds in the east, merely a sad
silence along the western wall. It was long past Easter, when England
had boastfully expected to open the Dardanelles and the truth was
beginning to appear that Constantinople might never be reached by the
allied operations in Gallipoli. Italy threw in her lot with the Allies
in a dark hour, if not the darkest.

The great decision which had lain in solution in the hearts of the
people was evoked by events and made vocal by the flaming words of
D'Annunzio, interpreted by a faithful king, who resisted the temptation
to dethrone himself by calling Germany's hired man to power, and finally
registered by the Deputies at Montecitorio on May 19. It was virtually
made, I say, the tumultuous week that came on the resignation of the
Salandra Government. What followed the return of the ministry to power
was merely automatic, as peaceful as any day's routine. Parliament was
called to meet on Wednesday, the 19th. The Sunday afternoon before, the
piazza, and the palace and all other elements of Roman citizenship met
in a great gathering of content and consecration at the foot of the
Pincian Hill in the Piazza del Popolo, again the day after in the
Campidolgio above the Forum. How fortunate a people are to have such
hallowed places of meeting, steeped in associations of great events!

It was a warm, brilliant, sunny day, that Sunday, and in the afternoon
every one in Rome, it seemed, was as near the Piazza del Popolo as he
could get. The meeting was addressed by a number of well-known Romans
of varied political affiliations. But the high note of all the speeches
was a fervid patriotism and harmony. Rome was calm, believing that it had
chosen nobly if not wisely. On the Campidolgio, D'Annunzio again sounded
the tocsin of the heroic Thousand, and lauded the army which had been
belittled by the followers of Giolitti. Already the troops were leaving
Rome.... Then Parliament opened. The meeting of the Deputies if memorable
was short. The square and streets about Montecitorio had been carefully
cleared and held empty by cordons of troops. There was to be no shouting,
no demonstration within hearing of Parliament. Long before midday the
Chamber was crowded with all the notables who could gain admission. The
proceedings were extremely brief, formal. All knew that the die had been
cast: what remained was for the army to accomplish. The Premier Salandra
made a brief statement summarizing the diplomatic efforts that his
Government had undertaken to reach a satisfactory understanding with
Austria, the record of which could be followed in the "Green Book,"
which was then given to the public. He informed the Chamber, what was
generally known, that the Triple Alliance had already been denounced on
the 5th of May, and he offered a "project of law," which was tantamount
to a vote of confidence in the Government and which also gave the King
and his ministers power to make war and to govern the country during the
period of war without the intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized
both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The
measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of
more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the
negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some
were out-and-out _neutralistas_, and some few were Socialists who had
the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians
must have voted for war. Had they seen a great light since the piazza
raised its voice, since their leader had fallen from his high place?
Possibly they had never been with Giolitti on this vital national
question. At least, the fact illustrates how representative government
does roughly perform the will of its people when that will is clear
enough and passionate enough: the will registers itself even through
unwilling instruments.

After the vote had been taken, the Chamber adjourned, and when the
following day the Senate ratified, unanimously, the action of the
Chamber of Deputies, Parliament was dissolved. Many of the members
enlisted and went to the front. Since the end of May Italy has been
autocratically governed. The decrees of the King and his ministers
are law--an efficient method of governing a country at war, avoiding
those legislative intrigues that latterly have threatened the concord
of France.

It is noteworthy that the Italian Senate voted unanimously for war.
The Senate is not an elective body. It is composed of dignitaries, old,
conservative men from the successful classes of the nation, who are not
easily swayed by the emotions of the piazza. From this unrepresentative
body might have been expected a show of resistance to the Government's
measure, if, as Giolitti and the German party asserted, there was a
serious sentiment in the country in favor of neutrality which had been
howled down by the mobs. It is inconceivable that such a body could have
been completely cowed by rioting in the streets. The unanimous vote of
the Italian Senators is sufficient refutation of the Bethmann-Hollweg
slur.

       *       *       *       *       *

As I crossed the Piazza Colonna the morning Parliament opened, my
attention was caught by a small crowd before a billboard. First one,
then another passer-by stopped, read something affixed there, and,
smiling or laughing, passed on his way. In the center of the board was
a small black-bordered sheet of paper, with all the mourning emblems,
precisely resembling those mortuary announcements which Latin countries
employ. It read: "Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself by the
Devil, lamented by his faithful friends"; and there followed a list of
noted Giolittians, some of whom even then were voting for war with
Austria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that ebullition of the
piazza disdained by the German Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have
bit through the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his safety
was not among the Deputies voting at Montecitorio. Later I read in a
Paris newspaper that Giolitti was to spend the summer as far away from
the disturbance of war as he could get, in the Pyrenees, but it was
rumored in Paris that the French Government, having intimated to its
new ally that it did not wish to harbor Giolitti, the Italian politician
was forced to remain at home. I believe that once since the "Caro Carlo"
letter he has spoken to his countrymen, a patriotic interview in which
he announced that he had been converted to the necessity of the war with
Austria! Thus even the politician comes to see light. But Giovanni
Giolitti, as the black-bordered card said, is dead politically.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the votes of Parliament the Roman part in the drama, the
civil part, was ended. Rome began to empty fast of soldiers, officers,
officials. The scene had shifted to the north, where the hearts of all
Italians were centered. There was a singular calm in the city. One
other memorable meeting should be recorded, on the Saturday afternoon
following the Parliamentary decision. If popular manifestations count
for anything, the dense throng in the Campidolgio and later the same
afternoon before the Quirinal Palace demonstrated the enthusiasm with
which the certainty of war with Austria was accepted.

There are few lovelier spots on earth than the little square of the
Campidolgio on the Capitoline Hill and none more laden with memories
of a long past. Led by a sure instinct the people of Rome crowded up
the steep passages that led to the crest of the hill, by tens of
thousands. In this hour of the New Resurrection of Italy, the people
sought the hearthstone of ancient Rome on the Capitoline. About the
pillars of the Cancelleria, which stands on Roman foundations, up the
long flight of steps leading to the Aracoeli, even under the belly of
the bronze horse in the center of the square, Italians thrust themselves.
Rome was never more beautiful than that afternoon. Little fleecy clouds
were floating across the deep blue sky. The vivid green of the cypresses
on the slope below were stained with the red and white of blooming roses.
In the distance swam the dome of St. Peter's, across the bend of the
Tiber, and through the rift between the crowded palaces one might look
down upon the peaceful Forum. The birthplace of the nation! Here it was
that the people, the decision having been made to play their part in the
destiny of the new world now in the making, came to rejoice. The spirit
of the throng was entirely festal. And these were the people, working-men
and their wives and mothers from the dark corners of old Rome, neither
hoodlums nor aristocracy, the people whose men for the most part were
already joining the colors.

The flags of the unredeemed provinces together with the Italian
flag were borne through the crowd up the steps of the municipal palace
to wave beside Prince Colonna, as he appeared from within the palace.
Mayor of Rome, he had that afternoon resigned his position in order to
join the army with his sons. Handsome, with a Roman face that reminded
one of the portrait busts of his ancestors in the Capitoline Museum
close by, he stood silent above the great multitude. The time for oratory
had passed. He raised his hands and shouted with a full voice--"_Viva
Italia!_" and was silent. It was as if one of the conscript fathers had
returned to his city to pronounce a benediction upon the act of his
descendants. The people repeated the cry again and again, then broke
into the beautiful words of Mameli's "L'Inno,"--"_Fratelli d' Italia._"

Then the gathering turned to cross the city to the Quirinal, where the
King had promised to meet them. The way led past one of the two Austrian
embassies in the Piazza Venezia--a danger spot throughout the agitation;
but this afternoon the crowd streamed by without swerving, intent on
better things. On the Quirinal Hill, between the royal palace and the
Consulta, where the diplomatic conferences are held, the people packed
in again. The roofs of the neighboring palaces were lined with spectators
and every window except those of the royal palace was filled with faces.
On the balcony above the palace gate some footmen were arranging a red
velvet hanging. Then the royal family stepped out from the room behind.
The King, with his little son at his side, stood bareheaded while the
crowd cheered. On his other side were the Queen and her two daughters.
King Victor, whose face was very grave, bowed repeatedly to the cheering
people, but said no word. The little prince stared out into the crowd
with serious intensity, as if he already knew that what was being done
these days might well cost him his father's throne. The people cried
again and again,--_"Viva Italia, viva il re"_; also more rarely, _"Imperio
Romano!"_ At the end the King spoke, merely,--_"Viva Italia, mi!"_

Perhaps the presence of the German and the Austrian Ambassadors,
who that very hour were at the Consulta vainly trying to arrange a
bargain, restrained the King from saying more to his people then.
Possibly he felt that the occasion was beyond any words. His face was
set and worn. The full passion of the decision had passed through him.
His people had desired war, and he had faithfully followed their will.
Yet he more than any one in that crowd must know the terrible risk, the
awful cost of this war. Those national aspirations for which his country
was to strive,--Trent and Trieste, Istraia and the Dalmatian coast, in
all a few hundred miles of territory, a few millions of people,--the
well informed were saying would cost one hundred and fifty thousand
Italian soldiers a month, to pick the locks that Austria had put along
her Alpine frontier! No wonder the King of Italy met his people after
the great decision in solemn mood.

       *       *       *       *       *

The crowd melted from the Quirinal Square in every direction, content.
Some stopped to cheer in front of the Ministry of War, which these days
and nights was busy as a factory working overtime and night shifts.
People were reading the newspapers, which in default of more vivid news
contained copious extracts from the "Libro Verde." Yet the "Green Book"
was not even now completed!

The politician had spoken, the poet had said his fiery word to the
people, the piazza had hurled its will, Parliament had acted and gone
its way, the army staff was hastening north. Yet the Austrian Ambassador
and his German colleague had not taken the trains waiting for them outside
the Porta Pia with steam up. It was a mystery why they were lingering on
in a country on the verge of hostilities, where they were so obviously
not wanted any longer. Daily since Parliament had voted they had been at
the Consulta--were there now in this solemn hour of understanding between
the King and his people! Singly and together they were conferring with
Baron Sonnino and the Premier. What were they offering? We know now that
at this last moment of the eleventh hour Austria had wakened to the real
gravity of the situation, and with Teutonic pertinacity and Teutonic
dullness of perception made her first real offer--the immediate cession
and occupation of the ceded territories she had set as her maximum, a
thing she had refused all along to consider, insisting that the transfer
be deferred to the vague settlement time of the "Peace." I do not know
that if she had frankly started the negotiations with this essential
concession, it would have made any real difference. I think not. Her
maximum was insufficient: it nowhere provided for that defensible
frontier, and it was but a meager satisfaction of those other aspirations
of nationality which she despised. It still left a good many Italians
outside of the national fold, and it still left Italy exposed to whatever
strong hand might gain control on the east shores of the Adriatic. At all
events, in this last moment of the eleventh hour, if the ambassadors had
been authorized to yield all that Baron Sonnino had begun by asking, it
would not have kept Italy from the war--now.

Elsewhere I have dealt with the legal and strategic questions involved
in the "Green Book." These diplomatic briefs, White or Yellow or Orange
or Green, seem more important at the moment than in perspective. They
are all we observers have of definite reason to think upon. But nations
do not go to war for the reasons assigned in them--nothing is clearer
than that. Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case, they are
but the intellectual counters that men use to mask their passions, their
instincts, their faiths. According to the briefs both sides should win
and neither. And the blanks between the lines of these diplomatic briefs
are often more significant than the printed words.

While Baron Macchio and Prince von Bülow, the Ballplatz and
Friedrichstrasse, Baron Sonnino and his colleagues were making the
substance of the "Green Book," the people of Italy were deciding the
momentous question on their own grounds. The spirit of all Italy was
roused. Italian patriotism gave the answer.

       *       *       *       *       *

"_Viva Italia!_" the boy conscript shouted, leaning far out of the
car window in a last look at the familiar fields and roof of his
native village. "_Viva Italia!_" the King of Italy cried, and his
people responded with a mighty shout,--"_Viva Italia!_" What do they
mean? In the simplest, the most primitive sense they mean literally
the earth, the trees, the homes they have always known--the physical
body of the mother country. And this primal love of the earth that
has borne you and your ancestors seems to me infinitely stronger,
more passionate with the European than with the American. We roam:
our frontiers are still horizons.... But even for the simple peasant
lad, joining the colors to fight for his country, patriotism is
something more complex than love of native soil. It is love of life
as he has known it, its tongue, its customs, its aspects. It is love
of the religion he has known, of the black or brown or yellow-haired
mother he knows--of the women of his race, of the men of his race,
and their kind.

Deeper yet, scarce conscious to the simple instinctive man, patriotism
is belief in the tradition that has made you what you are, in the ideal
that your ancestors have seeded in you of what life should be. Therefore,
patriotism is the better part of man, his ideal of life woven in with
his tissue. Men have always fought for these things,--for their own
earth, for their own kind, for their own ideal,--and they will continue
to give their blood for them as long as they are men, until wrong and
unreason and aggression are effaced from the earth. The pale concept
of internationalism, whether a class interest of the worker or an
intellectual ideal of total humanity, cannot maintain itself before
the passion of patriotism, as this year of fierce war has proved beyond
discussion.

Italian patriotism, which in the last analysis Italy evinced in
making war against Austria, was composed of all three elements. Italian
patriotism is loyalty to the Italian tradition, hence to the Latin ideal
which is fighting a death battle with the Teutonic tradition and ideal.
Teutonism--militaristic, efficient, materialistic, unimaginative,
unindividual--has challenged openly the world. Italy responded nobly
to that challenge.




VI


_The Eve of the War_

Rome became still, so still as to be oppressive. Her heart was
elsewhere,--in the north whither the King was about to go. Rome, like
all the war capitals, having played her part must relapse more and more
into a state of waiting and watching, stirred occasionally by rumors and
rejoicings. The streets were empty, for all men of military age had gone
and others had returned to their normal occupations. Officers hurried
toward the station in cabs with their boxes piled before them. And the
sound of marching troops also on the way to the station did not cease at
once.

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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




PART TWO--FRANCE


I


_The Face of Paris_

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marché Saint-Honoré
as usual, and I could not see that prices of food had risen abnormally
in spite of complaints in the newspapers and the discussion about
cold storage in the Chamber of Deputies. Restaurant portions were
parsimonious and prices high as usual, but the hotels made specially
low rates, "_pendant la guerre,_" which the English took advantage of
in large numbers. The Latin Quarter seemed harder hit by the war than
other quarters, emptier, as at the end of a long vacation; around the
Arch there was a subdued movement as between seasons. The people were
there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinner _à la
guerre_ at an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were
too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for
forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even
for the sophisticated. In these surface ways living in Paris was like
going back a century or so to a society much less highly geared than
the one we are accustomed to. I liked it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness,
hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were
moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets.
It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of
business--there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement.
Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which
ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris
on Sunday--except in the rue de la Paix--as I remembered Paris Sundays.
No, it was something quite new--the physical expression of that inner
silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces
that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond--_là-bas_, all along
those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges,
where for nine months their men had faced the invader.

Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some
sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had
not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the
faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few
outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring
silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose
immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one
felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their
personal woe into devotion to others....

There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers
in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something
important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober
silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles.
Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the
hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through,
even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been
too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit
recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint!
One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply
to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden
in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound
he had received, and that night he was going back to his _dépôt_. For
they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful
Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be
endured in silence.

There were not many troops on the streets,--at least French soldiers
and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches
of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front
or in their _dépôts_ outside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when
the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the _Marseillaise_, were
brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback
and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the
Champs Élysées behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes.
There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in
the theaters, at the cafés, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they
seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to
keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down
the Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the
cafés, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces
had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long
road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful
often in their silent eyes.

To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of refugees and destitute,
Paris was filled with relief organizations. The sign of some "_oeuvre_"
decorated every other building of any size, it seemed. Apart from the
numerous hospitals, there were hostels for the refugee women and
children, who earlier in the war had poured into Paris from the north
and east, workrooms for making garments, distributing agencies, etc.
All civilian Paris had turned itself into one vast relief organization
to do what it could to stanch the wounds of France. Of the relief and
hospital side of Paris I have the space to say little: much has been
written of it by those more competent than I. But in passing I cannot
refrain from my word of gratitude to those generous Americans who by
their acts and their gifts have put in splendid relief the timid
inanities of our official diplomacy. While the President has been
exchanging futile words with the Barbarian over the murders on the
Lusitania, to the bewilderment and contempt of the French nation,
the American Ambulance at Neuilly has offered splendid testimony
to the real feelings of the vast majority of true Americans, also
an excellent example of the generous American way of doing things.
That great hospital, as well as the American Clearing-House and the
individual efforts of many American men and women working in numberless
organizations, encourage a citizen from our rich republic to hold up
his head in spite of German-American disloyalty, gambling in munitions
stocks, and official timidity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies
for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large
numbers of seriously wounded--to find for them suitable labor and
to reëducate their crippled faculties so that they could support
themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the
blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I
remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with
one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service
Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room
by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up
her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiancé back to life and
hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the
blind.

In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their
hearts out in grief and anxiety.

       *       *       *       *       *

At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communiqué_ was
given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of
the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted.
They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away,
as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The
newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening
than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery
and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is
what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large,
heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _là-bas_.

There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for
"demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic
crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of
the "_grands blessés_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at
last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic
sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long
trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_"
those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after
nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great
throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until
at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward
and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and
kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last
_poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris.

       *       *       *       *       *

Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several
times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard
into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of
children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely
natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet
even the school children were learning history in a way they will never
forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all
the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He
suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always
rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in
one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she
said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,--"Do you see that
legless man? The _Boches_ did that--remember it!" In these ways the new
generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it
for many years to come.

       *       *       *       *       *

At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz
of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the
clear June sky--one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch
over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark
streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping
like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp
glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling
from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the
persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony
into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant
watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide
circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and
breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins
have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no
attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded
in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one
bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,--for which they have less excuse than
even for Louvain or Rheims,--and in making a big hole close to the
Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What
they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of
petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians
the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship
and curiosity among them--at first they had a real _réclame!_

Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary
activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or
sat at the tables in front of the cafés, more shops opened--even the
great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to
restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the
city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes.
Considering that less than a year before the national government had
left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the
battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it
was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had
been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris
almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with
which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris--as had
been the case with Italy--had returned under the stress of its tragedy
to its best self--a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation
conquers--and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution
possible--victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It
will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering--a
deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that
matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so
totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities.
She has lived too long in the face of death.




II


_The Wounds of France_

The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies
for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the
Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest
provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of
the whole.

The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of
nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne;
the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches.
Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to
see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of
the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been
described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while
to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape
of France.

       *       *       *       *       *

To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris
reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer
older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of
Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp
whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances,
it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais
stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral.
Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the
midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other
curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed,
just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of
pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled
Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its
right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.

What happened to Senlis when the German troops visited it can be
seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of
the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly
road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings
is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were
burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of
the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical
fear of _francs-tirailleurs_ that characterized them from the time
they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was
made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct
of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on
in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief
hotel. While he was busy with these commands,--most of the inhabitants
had fled that morning,--shots were exchanged in the lower end of the
town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual
order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main
thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens,
gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the
town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in
the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic
of the German method, but need not be repeated here.

The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately
escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black
scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance
of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and
foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by
comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial.
The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German
scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten
lesson in the German method of making war.

       *       *       *       *       *

As every one knows, the Germans breaking into France at Namur and
Mons came on with unexampled rapidity from the north and east toward
the south and west, circled somewhat to the west as they neared Paris,
and then the 5th of September recoiled under the shock of the French
offensive. For the better part of a week two millions of men struggled
on a thousand different battlefields from Nancy and Verdun on the east
to Coulommiers, Meaux, and Amiens on the south and west. This was the
great battle of the Marne, which checked the German invasion. The
pressure of this human cyclone, in general from northeast to southwest,
was more intense in some places than others. One of the bloodiest storm
centers lay east and west from the town of Vitry-le-François--from
Sermaize-les-Bains on the east to Fère-le-Champenoise, Montmirail, and
Esternay on the west. For fifty miles there in the heart of Champagne
the path of the cyclone can be traced by the blackened villages, the
gutted churches, the countless crosses in the midst of green fields.

One thinks of Champagne as a land of vineyards, but here in the
center and south of the fertile province there are few vines, mostly
fields of ripening wheat, green alfalfa, or beets--long undulating
swales of rich fields, cut by little copses of thick woods and by
white poplar-lined highways as everywhere in France. It has peculiarly
that smiling and gracious air of _la douce France_--gently sloping
fields and woods and little gray stone villages each with its small
church ornamented by the square tower and spire of Champenoise Gothic.
And it was here that the blast struck hardest, along the little streams,
in the thick copses, up and down the straight roads whose deep ditches
lent themselves to entrenchment, and in almost every village and
crossroads hamlet.

It is a country of few towns, of many small villages, farm and manor
houses. The buildings cluster in the hollows or about the crossroads,
and sometimes they escaped the storm because the shells exchanged
from hill to hill went quite over their roofs; again, as was the
case with Huiron just outside Vitry or with Maurupt near by, they
could not escape because they were perched on hills, and they were
almost completely razed by the fierce fire that raked them for days.
Sometimes they escaped shell and machine gun to be burned to the
ground vengefully with incendiary bombs, as at Sermaize-les-Bains,
where of nine hundred buildings less than forty were left standing
after the Germans retreated. These instances are the saddest of all
because so wanton! There was scarcely a single collection of houses
in that fifty miles which I traversed which did not bear its ugly
scar of fire and shell, scarcely a farmhouse that was not crumbled
or peppered with machine-gun bullets. Miles of desolation may be
seen in a couple of hours' drive around Vitry-le-François,--Favresse,
Blesmes, Écrinnes, Thiéblemont, Maurupt, Vauclerc,--with acre upon
acre of ruined buildings, a chimney standing here and there, heaps
of twisted iron that once were farm machines, withered trees--and
graves, everywhere soldiers' graves.

The churches suffered most, probably because they were used for
temporary defense. At Huiron the upper half of the thirteenth-century
Gothic church had been shaved off--in the ten-foot deep mass of débris
lay the richly carved capitals of the massive pillars. At Écrinnes near
by the apse of the exquisite little church had been blown off, leaving
the front and spire intact. At Maurupt the whole edifice, which commanded
the rolling countryside for miles, was riddled from end to end. Again,
I would enter an apparently sound building to find a pile of rubbish in
the nave, a gaping hole in the roof. And the same thing was true about
Bar-le-Duc to the east and Meaux to the west. It is safe to say that in
a fifty-mile wide stretch from Nancy to the English Channel not one
village in ten has escaped the scourge.

       *       *       *       *       *

I speak of the churches because of their irreplaceable
beauty, the human tenderness of their relation with the earth.
But even more poignant, perhaps, were the wrecks of little country
homes--the stacks of ruined farm machinery, the gutted barns, the
burned houses. In many cases not a habitable building was left after
the cyclone passed. In one hamlet of thirty houses near Esternay I
remember, all but seven had been devastated--by incendiary fire.
Indeed, it was clearly distinguishable--the "legitimate" wrack of
war, from the deliberate spite of incendiarism. Maurupt was the one
case, Sermaize-les-Bains (where there was no fighting) the other. If
it had been simple war, shell and machine gun, probably fifty per cent
or more of the devastation would have been saved. But the German makes
war against an entire country, inanimate as well as animate.

The inhabitants of these ruins had come back in many instances--where
else had they to go? Swept up before the blast of the cyclone, they had
fled south over the fields and hard white roads, then crept back a few
days after the cyclone had passed to find their homes pillaged, burned,
their villages blackened scars on the earth. But they stayed there! The
English Society of Friends has given some money with which to put up
wooden huts, on which old men and Belgian refugees were working when I
passed that way. There is a French charity that tries to outfit these
new homes in the devastated districts, one of the numberless efforts of
the French to put their national house in order. But for all that charity
can do, the lot of these villagers is a bitter one: their strong men have
gone to the front; old men, women, and children are left to scratch the
fields, and exist miserably in the cellars, underneath bits of corrugated
iron roof, in tiny wooden huts. But they have planted their potatoes, in
the ruins in some cases, and have taken up sturdily the struggle of
existence in the wreck of their old homes. The children play among the
crumbling walls, the women go barefoot to the public well for water. The
fields have been sown and harvested somehow. Until the Germans can kill
off the French peasant women, they can never hope to conquer France.

Compared with the burning of homes, the razing of villages, mere
pilfering and looting seem commonplace, unreprehensible crimes. Yet
the loss of property by plain theft is no inconsiderable item in that
bill which France expects to present some day. The old châteaux that
were fouled and gutted by the invader, the trainloads of plunder that
went back to German cities, the emptied cellars and ransacked houses
have fed the fire of disgust and loathing which the French feel for
their foe. Yet they should not begrudge the invader the extraordinary
quantity of good wine which he consumed on his raid, because the
victory of the Marne was doubtless won in part by the aid of the
champagne bottle!

       *       *       *       *       *

When I passed through the Marne valley the fields were being harvested
for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the
harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' _képi_,
who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant.
The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had
yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ruins
of the villages one might have forgotten the fact of war were it not for
the graves. Here and there the corner of some wood where a battery had
been placed was mowed as if cut by a giant reaper. The tall poplars
along the roadsides had been ripped and torn as by a violent storm. Some
hillsides were scarred with ripples from burrowing shells, and hastily
made trenches had not yet been ploughed completely under. But over the
undulating golden fields it would be difficult to trace the course of
the tempest were it not for the crosses above the graves, thousands upon
thousands of them,--singly, in clumps, in long lines where the dead
bodies had been brought out of the copses and buried side by side in
trenches, or where at a crossroads a little cemetery had been made to
receive the dead of the vicinity.

Often as you crawled along in a train you could follow the battle by
the bare spots left in the fields around the graves. They will never
be ploughed under and sown, not even the graves of Germans, not in
the richest land. Generally they were carefully fenced off, almost
always with a simple cross on the point of which hung the soldier's
_képi_ whenever it was found with the body. It is remarkable, considering
the scarcity of hands, the desolation of the country, the difficulty of
existence, what tender care has been given these graves of the unknown
dead. Many of them were decorated with fresh flowers or those metal
wreaths that the Europeans use, and where a company lay together a
little monument had been erected with a simple inscription. It would
seem that these Champenoise peasants still retain some of that pagan
reverence for the dead which their Latin ancestors had cultivated,
mingled with passionate love for those who gave themselves in defense
of _la patrie._

So for years to come the beautiful fields of France will be strewn
with these little spots of sanctuary where Frenchmen died fighting
the invader. The fields are already green again: Nature is doing her
best to remove the scars of battle from this land where so often in
the past ages she has been called upon to heal the wounds inflicted
by men. Nature will have completed her task long before the ruined
villages can be restored, long, long before the scars in men's hearts
made by this ruthless invasion can be healed. Another generation,
that of the little children playing in the ruins of their fathers'
homes, must grow up with hate in their hearts and die before the
wounds can be forgotten.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Germans were shelling Rheims the day I was there. From the
little Mountain of Rheims, five miles away on the Épernay road, I
could see the gray and black clouds from bursting shells rise in the
mist around the massive cathedral. An observation balloon was floating
calmly over the hill beyond, directing the fire on the desolated city.
It was necessary to wait outside the town until a lull came in the
bombardment, and when our motor at last entered, it was like speeding
through a city of the dead, with crushed walls, weed-grown streets,
and empty silence everywhere save for the low whine of the big shells.
With the five or six hundred large shells hurled into Rheims that one
day, the Germans killed three civilians, wounded eighteen more, and
knocked over some hollow houses already gutted in previous bombardments.
They did not damage the cathedral that day, though several explosions
occurred within a few feet of the building.

There were no soldiers, no artillery in Rheims--there have not been
any for many months. Of its one hundred and thirty thousand people,
only twenty thousand were left hiding in cellars, skulking along the
walls, clinging to their homes in the immense desolation of the city
with that tenacity which is peculiarly French. In the afternoon when
the fire ceased the boys were playing in the streets and women sat in
front of their cellar homes sewing. They have adapted themselves to
sudden death. They move about from hole to hole in the wilderness of
shattered buildings. For the city had been gutted by the acre: street
after street was nothing but an empty shell of walls that crumpled up
from time to time and tottered over. Within lay an indescribable mass
of household articles, merchandise, all that once had been homes and
stores and factories. Around the cathedral there was a peculiar silence,
for this quarter of the city which received most of the shells is
absolutely deserted. The grass grew high between the stones in the
pavement all about. The sun was throwing golden cross-lights over the
battered walls as I came into the deserted square and stood beside the
little figure of Jeanne d'Arc before the great portal. As seen from
afar, now in the full nearer view, the amazing thing was the majesty
of the windowless, roofless, defaced cathedral. Acres of other buildings
have crumbled utterly, but not even the German guns have succeeded in
smashing the dignity out of this ancient altar of French royalty. It
still stands firm and mighty, dominating its ruined city, as if too old,
too deeply rooted in the soil of France to be crushed by her enemies.
After a year of bombardment it still raised its mutilated face in dumb
protest above the crumbling dwellings of its people, whom it could no
longer protect from the barbarian.

Not that the Germans have spared the cathedral in their senseless
bombardment of Rheims! From that first day, when their own wounded
lay within its walls and were carried out of the burning building
by the French, until the morning I was there, when a shell tore at
the ground beneath the buttresses hitherto untouched, the Germans
seem to have taken a special malignant delight in shelling the
cathedral. They have already damaged it beyond the possibility of
complete repair, even should their hearts at this late day be
miraculously touched by shame for what they have done and their guns
should cease from further desecration. The glorious glass has already
been broken into a million fragments; many of the finely executed
mouldings and figures--irreplaceable specimens of a forgotten art--have
been crushed; great wall spaces pounded and marred. It is as if a huge,
fat German hand had ground itself across a delicately moulded face,
smearing and smudging with vindictive energy its glorious beauty.
Rheims Cathedral must bear these brutal German scars forever, even
should the vandal hand be stayed now. It can never again be what it
was--the full, marvelous flowering of Gothic art, precious heritage
from dim centuries long past. Like a woman at the full flower of her
life who has been raped and defiled, all the perfection of her ripened
being defaced in a moment of lust, she will live on afterward with a
certain grandeur of horror in her eyes, of tragic dignity that can
never utterly be erased from her outraged person....

A French officer, speculating on the German intentions with that
admirably dispassionate intelligence with which the French consider
these brutal manifestations of the German mind, remarked, "At present
they seem engaged in ringing the cathedral with their fire, as if to
see how close they can come without hitting the building itself, but
of course from that distance they must sometimes miss." One theory
why the enemy pursues this unmilitary monument with such peculiarly
relentless ferocity is that they enjoy the outcry which their vandalism
creates. Moreover, it is a way of boasting to the world that they have
not yet been expelled from their positions behind Rheims, are not being
driven back. If any special explanation were needed, I should find it
rather in the fact that Rheims is peculiarly associated with French
history,--minster of her kings,--and its destruction would be especially
bruising to French pride. William the Second probably swells with
magnitude at the thought of destroying with his big guns this sanctuary
of French kings. Some of the graven kings still cling to their niches
in the lofty façade. Two have been taken to the ground for safety and
look out with horror in their blind eyes at the ruin all about them.
The little figure of Jeanne d'Arc, rescuer of a French king, still
stands untouched before the great portal, astride her prancing horse,
bravely waving her bronze flag. Around her were heaped garlands of
fresh flowers, touching evidence that the city of Rheims still holds
stout souls with faith in the ultimate salvation of their great church,
who lay their tribute at the feet of the virgin warrior. Once she
protected their ancestors from a less barbarous enemy.

What use to enumerate the wounds and outrages in minute detail? For
by to-day more of this unique beauty has gone to that everlasting
grave from which no German skill can resurrect it.... Within, the
cathedral has been less spoiled, but is even sadder. One walked over
the stone pavement crunching fragments of the purple glass that had
fallen from the gorgeous windows, now sightless. Once at this hour
it was all aglow with color, radiating a mysterious splendor into
the vaults of transept and nave. A shell had blasted its way into
one corner, another had rent the roof vaulting near the crossing of
transept and nave. The columns and arches were blackened by the smoke
of that fire which caught in the straw on which the German wounded
lay. There was something peculiarly forlorn, ghostly within the dim
ruins of what was once so great, and I was glad to escape to the old
hospital in the close, now turned into a hospital for the cathedral
itself. Here on benches and in piles about the floor of the low-vaulted
room had been gathered those fragments of statue and moulding that a
pious search could rescue from the débris around the cathedral. In this
room, while the German guns were still raining shells upon Rheims, an
old man in workman's apron was already moulding casts of the faces and
lines of the shattered stones so that in some happier day an effort to
reproduce them might be made. I saw between his trembling old fingers
the fine features of a stone angel which he was covering with clay. I
know of nothing more beautifully eloquent of the French spirit than
this labor of preservation. Within range of shell fire this old man
was calmly working to save what he might of the beauty that had been
so prodigally murdered. If spiritual laws are still operative in this
mad world of ours, the Latin must endure and conquer because of his
unshakable faith....

At the hill on the Épernay road I looked back for a last view of the
cathedral. The evening mist was already creeping over its scarred
walls. With the two towers lifting the great portal to the sky, it
dominated the valley, the ruined city at its feet, a monument of men's
aspirations raising its head high into the sky in spite of the unseen
missiles that even then were beginning once more their attack. I would
that these words might go to swell that cry which has gone up from all
civilized peoples at the sacrilege to Rheims! Even now something of its
majesty and its glory might be saved if the German guns were silenced--if
within the German nation there were left any respect for the ancient
decencies and traditions of man. But I know too well with what contempt
the Germans view such pleas for beauty, for old memories and loves. They
are but "sentimental weakness," in the words of the "War Book," along
with respect for defenseless women and children. The people who gloried
in the sinking of the Lusitania will hardly be moved to refrain from the
destruction of a cathedral. Rheims--unless saved by a miracle--is doomed.
And it is because neither beauty nor humanity, neither ancient tradition
nor common pity can touch the modern German, that this war must be fought
to a real finish. There is not room in this world for the German ideal
and the Latin ideal: one must die.

       *       *       *       *       *

The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again--at Soissons,
at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened
band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of
exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere
destruction.

The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of
the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the
record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,--the
lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,--for
almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going
on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a
rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule
forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners
of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as
prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front
as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen--in a quarry near
Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon
them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part
of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most
serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor
has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the
German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general
explained,--"They hope to make peace with us--_quelle sale race!_"

These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as
well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat,
make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are
still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman
exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly
scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a
crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned
a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable,
unforgivable wounds of France!

The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own
tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality
done to their _"douce France."_ To the French, quite as much as to
the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it
becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid
waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent
destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and
inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are
certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his
enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire
world of space.




III


_The Barbarian_

The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a
person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient
peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization.
The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals
in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could
lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture.
The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his
values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized"
as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations
were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the
force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their
destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called
fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily
life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in
sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known
as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate
such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by
non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's
instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more
sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.

What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean
of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered
social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest
possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his
own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts
of beings--the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other
is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies
from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community
fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy
of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many
barbarians,--American life is full of them,--and my knowledge of
them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my
understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.

       *       *       *       *       *

Real truth often underlies popular nomenclature. It is neither accident
nor a desire to abuse that has given the German the name of barbarian
in the Latin nations. Just as the Latin peoples are the inheritors of
Greek ideals, so the German peoples seem to be the active modern
protagonists of all that the Greeks meant by their term "barbarian."
The French before the war regarded the Germans as not wholly well-bred
persons, lacking in some of those niceties of feeling and conduct which
seemed to them important--"_parvenus_" as a French officer characterized
his feeling about the race, and added the descriptive adjective
"_sale_"--dirty. Since the war there has been ground into the French the
more awful inhumanities of which these _parvenus_ are capable. Therefore,
when they think of the German, there comes instinctively to their lips
the ancient term of complete distinction,--_les barbares_,--by which is
meant a person and a nation who are not governed by ideals of taste,
honor, humanity, what to the non-barbarian are summed up in the one
word "decency." The adjective that the officer used--"_sale_"--does
not imply necessarily literal physical dirt, but a moral callousness
and unrefinement of soul which in the spiritual realm corresponds with
the term "dirty" in the physical. He sees the soul of the German as a
dirty soul, unclean, unsqueamish. And this conception of the enemy has
given to the French soldier something of that crusader spirit which has
sustained him through his terrible conflict. As M. Émile Hovelaque has
expressed it,--"France is fighting the battle of humanity, of the world,
of America, of every nation, man, and child who are resolved to live
their own life in their own way, under the dictates of their conscience,
within the limits of the laws they have accepted." The battle of the
world to push back once more the pest of barbarism! It is that which
has roused French chivalry, French heroism, not merely the love of
the _patrie_. Indeed, for the higher spirits the _patrie_ is closely
identified with the non-barbaric ideals of humanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The whole conscious world has had the manifestations of the new
barbarism before its eyes for an entire year and more. It has recoile

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