The World Decision Part 8

But--and just here lies the profound significance of it all--the French realized at once that in order to conquer the German machine they must create an equally efficient and powerful machine, which with that plus of human spirit and the inspiration of their cause would carry them over into victory. So while the English were berating the barbarian for his atrocious misconduct, advertising "business as usual," and filching what German trade they could, bungling at this and that, until they have become a spectacle to themselves, the French nation concentrated all its energies upon preparing an organization fit to meet the German organization. While General Joffre held the Germans behind the four hundred miles of trenches, France made itself over into a society organized for war--the new business kind of war which is waged in factory and railway terminal, not by gallant charges.

"_Organiser_" has become in the Frenchman's vocabulary the next most popular word to "_patrie_." One implies, these days, the other.

It is said that when Germany invaded France, the French had not a ton of their chief high explosive on hand. Some of its ingredients they had been getting from Germany! France lost her coal and iron mines and her largest factories the first weeks of the war and has not regained them. Yet early in last April, according to the official announcement, France was turning out six times as much ammunition as was deemed, before the war, the maximum requirement, and would shortly turn out ten times as much, which has ere this probably been greatly exceeded. Meanwhile, by April the artillery had been increased sevenfold. In attaining these results, France has accomplished a greater marvel relatively speaking than the most boasted German efficiency. She has had to get her coal from England, her ores from Spain, her machines for making guns and sh.e.l.ls from us. She has had to improvise sh.e.l.l factories and gun plants from automobile factories, electric plants, railway repair shops--from anything and everything.

I visited a small tile factory that was being utilized to make hand grenades. Innumerable small shops in Paris are engaged in munition work. The amount of ammunition bought in America by France has been grossly exaggerated by the German press. Latterly, France has employed American engineers to build large munition plants in France that will become the property of the Government.

Throughout the spring the Paris newspapers appeared every morning with large headlines: "More guns! More ammunition!!" And they got them, made them. The headlines are no longer needed, for the superiority in sh.e.l.l and guns rests with the French, not with the Germans, on the western front.

France, industrially crippled, has accomplished this marvel in one short year. The country has become one vast workshop for war.

The Latin genius for organization on the small scale has met the German genius for organization on the large scale. The industrial transformation has been facilitated by the system of conscription over which the English have wrangled so long and so futilely to the mystery of their keener-witted allies. To the Frenchman conscription means merely the most effective method of applying patriotism, of cooperation for the common cause. France has mobilized not only her men, but her women and children, it might be said, so thoroughly have the civilian elements worked into the shops and other non-military labor. To sort out their labor and put it where it was most effective, to subst.i.tute women workers for men wherever possible, were the first steps in the huge work of social reorganization. There were no labor troubles to contend with, thanks to the conscription system and to the awakened patriotism of every element in society. France looked on aghast when her necessary supplies of coal were threatened by the strike of Welsh miners, averted only by the personal pleadings of a popular minister! To the Latin, more disciplined and more alive to the real dangers of the situation than the Anglo-Saxon, the English att.i.tude was simply incomprehensible. Also France has not had her efficiency so seriously threatened by the liquor problem as has England: the military authorities have taken stern measures against this danger and have carried them out firmly. So far as the army itself is concerned, the drink evil does not exist.

The manufacture of ammunition and cannon is but one element in the new warfare. France has had to feed, clothe, and maintain her armies under the same handicap, to meet all the unexpected requirements in material of the trench war. The French have rediscovered the hand grenade and developed it into the characteristic weapon of the war, have unearthed all their old mortars from the a.r.s.enals and adapted them to the trench, and created the best aerial service of all the combatants. Incidentally they have effectually protected Paris from air raids since the first months of the war by their careful aerial patrol. All this is aside from the task of putting the nation socially and economically on the war basis--in providing for the wounded, the dependent women and children, and also for a perpetual stream of refugees from Belgium and the invaded provinces, a burden that Germany has not yet had to carry.

Not all this huge work of reorganization could be done immediately with equal success. The sanitary service suffered grievously, especially at the beginning,--needed all the help that generous outsiders could give,--still needs it. The percentage of death among the wounded is too high, of those returned to the army too low. There have been wastes in other directions due to haste, inexperience, political interference, but nothing like the wastes that England has suffered from the same causes, infinitely less than we should suffer judging from the inept.i.tudes we displayed in our little Spanish War.

Probably France is not as well organized to-day for the war business as is Germany. Very possibly she never will be, which is not to the discredit of her people. The nation has had to do in one short year, grievously handicapped at the start, what Germany has done at her leisure during forty years. Moreover, the Latin temperament is intolerant of the mechanical, the routine, which is the glory of the German. Although the French have realized with marvelous quickness the necessity of war organization and have adapted themselves to it,--have learned the German lesson,--they are spiritually above making it the supreme ideal of national effort. Without argument they have accepted the conditions imposed upon them, but they do not regard the modern war business as the flower of human civilization.

Mere preparation, no matter how scientific and thorough, is by no means the whole of the German lesson. The first months of the war we heard too much about German preparedness, too little about German character. By this time the world is realizing that military preparation is but one manifestation of that German character, and the real danger is German character itself. According to reports in her own newspapers Germany found herself running short of war materials after the first weeks of this extraordinarily prodigal war, which exceeded even her prudent calculations. But Germany had the habit of preparation and the social machinery ready to enlarge her war product. Without advertising her situation to the world, she provided for the new requirements so abundantly that she has not yet betrayed any deficiency in material.

And while she was sweeping victoriously across northern France toward Paris, with the belief that the city must fall before her big guns, nevertheless her engineers took pains to prepare the Aisne line of defense, which saved her armies from disaster and enabled them to keep their tenacious grip on Belgium and northern France. This is the real strength of Germany, the real import of the bitter lesson she is teaching the world--the habit of preparation, discipline, organization, thrift. On the specifically military side the French seem to have learned this lesson well. They have fortified the ground between the present front and Paris with line after line of defensive works. The fields are gray with barbed wire. A few miles outside of the suburbs of Paris may be seen as complete a system of trenches as on the front, and the _kepi_ of the territorial digging a trench is a familiar sight almost anywhere in eastern France. It is inconceivable that any "drive" on the western front could be successful. The confidence of the French rests in part on these precautions.

Whether the French can apply the inner meaning of the German lesson, can incorporate it into their characters and transmit it to their children, is a larger question for us as well as for them, for the whole world. But their success in applying it in this war is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the failure of their two great allies, who were not invaded, not handicapped at the start, as was France. The failure of Great Britain and of Russia to master the lesson is so obvious, so lamentable, that it needs no emphasis here.

France, with the brunt of invasion only a few miles from the gates of Paris, her factories and mines lost, has provided herself very largely, has supplied Serbia with ammunition, Italy with artillery, Russia, England, and Italy with aeroplanes. For many months the thirty miles of the western front held by the English was defended with the a.s.sistance of French artillery.

The Slav one expected to fail in getting his German lesson, for obvious reasons, especially because of his reactionary and corrupt bureaucracy. But not the Anglo-Saxon! As a clever French staff officer remarked,--"The two disappointments of the war have been the Zeppelins and the English." Without making a _post mortem_ on the English case, the Latin superiority is a phenomenon worth pondering. For the Anglo-Saxon, cousin to the Teuton, would supposably be the better fitted to receive the German lesson of organization and discipline. But that ideal of individual liberty, which England surely did not inherit from her Germanic ancestors, seems to have degenerated into a license that threatens her very existence as a great state. The English still talk of "muddling through somehow"!

If the end of autocracy is barbarism, the end of liberty is anarchy.

The Latin has kept the mean between the two extremes. The French, having fought more desperately in their great revolution for individual freedom than any other people, seem able to recognize its necessary limits and to subordinate the individual at necessity to the salvation of the nation. In the Latin blood, however modified, there remains always the tradition of the greatest empire the world has known, which for centuries withstood the a.s.saults of ancient barbarism. The wonderful resistance and adaptability of the French to-day is of more than sentimental importance to mankind. All the world, including their foes, pay homage to the gallantry and greatness of the French spirit in their dire struggle, but what has not been sufficiently recognized is the significance to the future of the recovery by the Latin peoples of the leaders.h.i.+p of civilization. We Americans who have both traditions in our blood, with many modifications, are as much concerned in this world decision as the combatants themselves.

So much has become involved in the t.i.tanic struggle, so many subordinate issues have risen to cloud the one cardinal spiritual issue at stake, that we are likely to forget it or deny that there is any. Is the world to be barbarized again or not?

This reiterated use of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world tragedy has been the pa.s.sionate verbal battles over the claims of respective "_Kulturs_" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the barbarian can have a very superior form of "_Kultur_" and yet remain a barbarian in soul? These pages on the German lesson are a tribute to Germany's special contribution to the world. Social and industrial organization, systematic instead of loose ways of doing things, prudence, thrift, obedience and subordination of the individual to the state, discipline--in a word, an efficient society. It is a great lesson! No one to-day can belittle its meaning. Possibly the remote, hidden reason for all this seemingly useless b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice in our prosperous modern world is to teach the primary principles of the lesson. G.o.d knows that we all need it--we in America most after the Russian, and next to us the English. If the world can learn the lesson which Germany is pounding in with ruin, slaughter, and misery,--can discipline itself without becoming Teutonized,--the sacrifice is not too great. If the non-Germanic peoples cannot learn the lesson sufficiently well, then the Teuton must rule the world with "his old German G.o.d." His boasted superiority will become fact, destiny.

That is the momentous decision which is being wrought out these days in Europe with blood and tears--the relative importance to mankind of discipline and liberty. The ideal is to have both, as much of one as is consistent with the other. In this country and in England may be seen the evil of an individualism run into license--the waste, the folly of it. And in Germany may be seen the monstrous result of an idolatrous devotion to the other ideal--the man-made machine without a soul. Between the two lies the fairest road into the future, and that road, with an unerring instinct, the Latin follows.

The German lesson is not the whole truth: it is the poorer half of the truth. An undisciplined world is more in G.o.d's image than a world from which beauty, humanity, and chivalry have been exterminated. But discipline is the primal condition of survival. Between these two poles, between its body and its soul, mankind must struggle as it has always struggled from the beginning of time....

When I looked on the sensitive, suffering faces of Frenchwomen in their mourning, the wistful eyes of crippled youths, the limp forms of wounded men, the tense, bent figures of dirty _poilus_ in their muddy trenches, I knew that through their souls and bodies was pa.s.sing the full agony of this struggle.

V

_The Faith of the French_

I do not mean religious faith, although that too has been evoked, reaffirmed by the trials and griefs of the war, but I mean faith in themselves, in their cause, in life. The unshakable faith of the French is the one most exhilarating, abiding impression that the visitor takes from France these days. It is so universal, so pervasive, so contagious that he too becomes irresistibly convinced, no matter how dark the present may be, how many victories German arms may win, that the ultimate triumph of the cause is merely deferred.

There has never been the slightest panic in France, not during the mobilization when white-faced men and women realized that the dreaded hour had struck, not even in those days of suspense when the public began to realize that the first reports of French victories in Alsace were deceptive and that the enemy was almost at the gates of Paris.

A million or so people left the city with the Government in order to escape the expected siege, but there was no panic, not even among the wretched creatures driven from their homes in the provinces before the blast of the German cyclone.

Ever since the battle of the Marne the tide of confidence has been steadily rising, in spite of the tedious disappointments of trench warfare, the small gains of ground, the steady toll of lives, in spite of reverses in Galicia and Poland and the mistakes in the Dardanelles, in spite of English sluggishness and Russian weakness.

Each reverse has been courageously accepted, a.n.a.lyzed, and found not decisive, merely temporary. Victory must come to the ones who can endure to the end, and the French know now that they can endure.

"We can do it all alone, if we have to!" Again, "The Germans know that they are beaten already: they know it in Berlin as well as we do." This confidence is based on realities--first on the success with which France has learned the German lesson and completely reorganized her life for the business of war. "We were not ready last August--but we are now." Her machine is growing stronger in spite of the daily waste of life, while the German machine is weakening steadily.

The farther one gets into the military zone, the more fervent and evident is this confidence, until on the front it is an irresistible conviction that inspires men and officers alike. Even a novice like myself began to understand why the army is sure of ultimate victory, and the longer one stays at the front the more this faith of the French seems justified. In the first place, they have so well got that German lesson! The supply of sh.e.l.l and gun is so abundant, also of fresh troops in reserve thanks to "Papa" Joffre's frugality with human lives; the first, second, third lines--on _ad infinitum_ to Paris--are so carefully fortified, so alertly held against any "drive"!

And the troops are so fit! They have made themselves at home in their new camping life behind the lines of dugouts and caves; they have become gnomes, woodsmen, cavemen, taking on the earth colors of the primitive world to which they have been forced to return in order to free the soil of their country. Then one sees the steady creeping forward of the front itself, not much as it looks on a small-scale map, but as the officers point out the blasted woods, or the brow of a hill over which the trenches have been slowly pushed metre by metre throughout the interminable weeks of constant struggle, one sees that gradually the French have got the upper hand, the commanding positions in long stretches of the trench wall. They are on the hills, their artillery commands the level fields before them. It is like the struggle between two t.i.tanic wrestlers who have swayed back and forth over the same ground so long that the spectator can see no advance for either.

But one wrestler knows that the inches gained from his adversary count, that the body in his grasp is growing weaker, that the collapse will come soon--with a rush. He cannot tell fully why he feels this superiority, but he knows that his adversary is weakening.

Perhaps a colonel on the front will tell you with elation,--"We know that the Boches across the way are discouraged, because our prisoners say so,--we take prisoners more easily than we did,--and they are all mixed up in their formations. We know that they have to drive their men to the job, that the lines about here are stripped as bare as they dare keep them. There used to be a lot of reserve troops behind their lines, but our aviators say there aren't any in X----any more! And they aren't as free with their _obus_ as they used to be, and they are 'old nightingales,' not first quality." Perhaps the staff officers will smile, knowing that the enemy is ma.s.sing his forces elsewhere on the long front, but this trick of rapid change is becoming harder to perform, and more exhausting. At any rate, the plain _poilus_ in the front trenches are instinctively sure: "We'll have 'em now soon!" They have watched that grim gray wall opposite so long that, like animals, they can feel what is going on there on the other side.

At staff headquarters in a more contained, reserved way there is the same air of vital confidence. "Have you seen the new pump?" the general asked me. "We are pumping good water all over this sector into the front trenches, too.... Oh, we are _bien installe!_ ... It may be another year, two, perhaps more, but the end is certain. There is one man in the trenches, another just behind in reserve, still another resting somewhere in the woods for his week off, and more, all the men we want back in the _depots_!" And he turns the talk to the good health of his men, their fine spirit. For one of the human, lovable qualities of the officers whom I met is that they prefer to talk about the comfort, the _morale_, the _esprit_, of their men to discussing "operations."

Just here I see where the French have risen above the machine idea of the German lesson. There is a something plus, over and above "preparation," "organization," "efficiency," which the Latin has and on which his confidence in ultimate victory largely rests. That is his belief in the individual, his reliance on the strength of the individual's spirit. To the French officer this seems the all-important factor in the army: military force depends ultimately upon the _esprit_ of the individual which creates the _morale_ of the whole. Of course, the army must be equipped in the modern way and fought in the modern way with all the resources of science, with aeroplanes, bombs, motor transport, and heavy artillery. But without the full devotion of the individual, without the cooperation of his _esprit_, the army would be a dead machine, especially in this nerve-rending endurance contest of the trenches. Here is the Latin idea, which is absolutely opposed to the German machine theory of war.

The German staff has done marvels with its machine. It hurls armies over the map of Europe of initiative and devotion in the common soldier, who in the Latin conception of the word remains a human being with a soul. An officer remarked to me, "We cannot have our men come from the trenches glum and downcast--a Frenchman must laugh and joke or something is wrong with him. So we started these vaudevilles behind the lines, and sports." Instead of more drill they give their men "shows," so that they may laugh and forget the horrors of the trench. Good psychology!

The civilian s.h.i.+nes through every French soldier--the civilian who is a human being like you or me, with the same human needs. The officers chat and joke familiarly with their men. Comrades.h.i.+p is subst.i.tuted for tyranny. France, one comprehends, is a real democracy, and still takes the ideal of equality seriously. When I asked an officer at Rheims why he had not had a day's leave in ten months while English officers went home on leave, he said, with a shrug,--"France is a republic: our men must get their leaves first."

The machine system gives startling results--in a short campaign. But when it comes to an endurance contest, to the long, long strains of trench warfare, something other than drill and organization is necessary, something that will rouse the human being to the last atom of effort that he has in him. When men must stand up to their waists in icy water, live in the inferno of constant bombardment, not for hours and days, but for weeks and months, something other than discipline is needed to keep them sufficiently alive to be of use. Doctors tell how willingly, unquestioningly, the wounded go back to the h.e.l.l they have escaped,--not once, but twice, three times. To evoke the capacity for heroism in the individual soldier has been the triumph of the Latin system.

The faith of the French rests justly on their heroic resolution, their ability to endure as individuals, more than on the lesson learned of preparation and organization.

Faith is a belief in the evidence of things unseen. French faith is of many kinds, not purely material, not military. They believe so profoundly in the perfect justice and high importance of their cause that it would seem as if they counted upon the cause alone to win the victory. No nation, they say, ever spent itself in a better cause. Victims of an unprovoked attack, unprepared, which is the best evidence of peaceable will, witnesses of the outrage of a neighbor people, bleeding from the wounds of their own country,--what better cause for war could men have? And the Latin intelligence of the French enables them from the humblest to the highest to perceive the universality of the principles for which they are called upon to die.

It is no selfish, not even a merely national, cause--it is the cause of nothing less than humanity in which they fight.

The philosopher Bergson expressed this sublime confidence in the cause thus (I give the substance of his words from memory): "Not all wars can be avoided--perhaps nine out of ten can. But this one, no!

For it is a war of principles. It will be a long war because the enemy is strong and we were unprepared. But we can wait the end confident in the result. The Germans have created a false belief, a wrong idea, and have carried that idea into action with extraordinary thoroughness. But the belief rests upon error. When the day comes that they meet reverses, when their idol of force no longer works miracles for them, then they will collapse, from within. There will be a general breakdown of personality from realizing the falsity of their idea. There lies our victory."

The philosopher's belief is based on the faith that the principles of justice, of law, of humanity are stronger, more enduring than any organization of force no matter how efficient, for this is a moral world. And the individual or nation who relies upon might to enforce wrong must in the end, perceiving the irrationality of his world, collapse. The grinding of the mill may be heart-breakingly slow, but the grist is as sure as life itself.

Similarly, the statesman Hanotaux has expressed "The Moral Victory": "It is the n.o.blest, the highest of causes which has been submitted to the arbitrament of arms. Its grandeur justifies the terrible extent of the drama and the immense sacrifices it imposes. The material results of victory will be immense, the moral results will be even greater....

Moral forces are superior to physical forces, and in spite of all they will have the last word.... Our youth has gone to the front in the serene conviction that it was fighting not only for the _patrie_, but for humanity, that this war was a sort of crusade, that they could claim place beside St. Louis and Jeanne d'Arc."