 6 Hamlet and the Danes In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of Germany, I do not mean foused, but grim as fairy tales, there is a gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was sitting by the fireside, and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards, the rest fell down and joined up. But this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very charming and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly what wild adventures the traveler confined by stopping at home. But it also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and gradually turned to bad. It began as a literary influence in the lurid tales of Hoffmann, the tales of Sintrim, and so on, the re-visualizing of the dark background of forest behind our European cities. That old German darkness was immeasurably livelier than the new German light. The devils of Germany were much better than the angels. Look at the teutonic pictures of the three Huntsmen and observe that while the wicked Huntsman is effective in his own way, the good Huntsman is weak in every way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is more in these forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does not shudder. They are made fearful that he may be made fearless, not that he may fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent, and though individuals like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it with worse things, such as opium, they kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole. But the one disadvantage of a forest is that one may lose one's way in it, and the one danger is not that we may meet devils, but that we may worship them. In other words, the danger is always associated by the instincts of folklore with forests. It is enchantment, for the fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity or spiritual servitude. And in the evolution of Germanism, from Hoffmann to Hauptmann, we do see this growing tendency to take horror seriously, which is Diabolism. The Germans begin to have an eerie abstract sympathy with the force and fear he describes, as a distinct from their objective. The German is no longer a boy. There goes with it, as always, goes with idolatry, a dehumanized seriousness. The men of the forest are already building upon a mountain the empty throne of the Superman. Now it is just at this point that I for one, and most men who love truths, as well as tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for going out into the world to seek my fortune, but I do not want to find it, and find it is only being chained forever among the frozen figures of the Siege's allies. I do not want to be an idolater, still as an idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also for coming back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetized either by mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's fairy tales, but if there is such a thing as Grimm's law, I would break it if I knew what it was. I like the Prussians' legs in their beautiful boots to fall down the chimney and walk about my room, but when he procures ahead and begins to talk I feel a little bored. The Germans cannot really be deep because they will not consent to be superficial. They are bewitched by art and stare at it and cannot see round it. It will not believe that art is a light and a slight thing, a feather, even if it be from an angelic wing. Only the slime is at the bottom of the pool. The sky is on the surface. We see this in that very typical process, the Germanizing of Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Germans forgetting that Shakespeare was an Englishman. I complain of their forgetting that Shakespeare was a man, that he had moods, that he made mistakes and above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of deity. That is, what is the matter with the Germans? They cannot ring fancy's knell. Their knells have no gaiety. The phrase of Hamlet about holding the mirror up to nature is always quoted by such earnest critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic. But it really means, or at least its author really thought, that art is nothing if not artificial. Realists, like other barbarians, really believe the mirror and therefore break the mirror. They also leave out the phrase, as tour, which must be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and especially every remark of Hamlet. What I mean by believing the mirror and breaking it can be recorded in one case I remember, in which a realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove that Hamlet had a particular psychopathological abnormality which is admittedly nowhere mentioned in the play. The critic was bewitched. He was thinking of Hamlet as a real man, with a background behind him three dimensions deep, which does not exist in a looking-glass. The best in this kind are but shadows. No German commentator has ever made an adequate note on that. Nevertheless Shakespeare was an Englishman. He was nowhere more English than in his blunders. But he was nowhere more successful than in his description of very English types of character. And if anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave weakness of both characters. The chief English fault, especially in the nineteenth century, has been the lack of decision. Not only lack of decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in thought, which some call dogma. And in the politics of the last century, this English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a great part, or rather refused to play it. There were then two elements in the German influence, a sort of pretty playing with terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism. The first point is to Elfland, and the second to, shall we say, Prussia? And by that unconscious symbolism with which all this story develops, it was soon to be dramatically tested by a definite political query, whether what we really respected was the Teutonic fantasy or the Teutonic fear. The Germanism of England, its transition and turning point, was well typified by the genius of Carlisle. The original charm of Germany had been the charm of the child. The Teutons were never so great as when they were childish. In their religious art and popular imagery, the Christ child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly a man. The self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is half redeemed by the unconscious grace which is called the school, not a seed plot of citizens, but merely a garden of children. All the first and best forest spirit, its infancy, its wonder, its wilfulness, even its innocent fear. Carlisle marks exactly the moment when the German child becomes the spoiled child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism, and mere mysticism always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into pessimism or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism. Carlisle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all this by the mental interval between his French Revolution and his Frederick the Great. In both he was Germanic. Carlisle was really as sentimental as Goth, and Goth was really as sentimental as Werther. Carlisle understood everything about the French Revolution except that it was a French Revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man should die or do murder for the first proposition of Euclid, should relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle, or should defend the Pawn's Asinorum, as codes defended the Tiber Bridge. But anyone who does not understand that does not understand the French Revolution, nor for their matter the American Revolution. We hold these truths to be self-evident. It was the fanaticism of truism, but Carlisle had no real respect for liberty. He had a real reverence for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it. While a wig like Macaulay respected the Girondist, but deplored the mountain, a tori like Carlisle rather like the mountain and quite unduly despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless forces belongs, of course, to the forest to Germany. But when Carlisle got there, there fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy, and the English tragedy, and in no small degree the German tragedy too. The real romance of the two-tons was largely a romance of the southern two-tons with their castles which are almost literally castles in the air, and their river which is walled with vineyards and rimes so naturally to wine. But as Carlisle's was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary. There is a great deal more poetry in Bricson than in Berlin. Stella said that Swift could write charmingly about a broomstick, and poor Carlisle had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesqueness of Germany, but who saw what was their enemy and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets. It is proved by the more deadly fact that it did. The actual written poetry of Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but simply feeble, and French. Thus Carlisle became continually gloomier as his fits of the blues deepened into Prussian blues. Nor can there be any wonder. His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was the first of Germans, and therefore the first of men. No wonder he looked at the rest of us with little hope. But a stronger test was coming both for Carlisle and England. Prussia, plotting, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England, had rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the two most important events were the Polish National Revival, with which Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably coercionist, and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany by the king of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered by a free German convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans, she wanted to conquer the Germans, and she wanted to conquer other people first. She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment in Bismarck, and he began with a scheme full of brutality, and not without humor. He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of the Prince of Austenburg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of the land of Denmark. In support of this small pretender he enlisted two large things, the Germanic body, called the Bund, and the Austrian Empire. It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of Austenburg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Saddowah. He was a good husband and a good father. He did not paint in watercolors, and of such is the kingdom of heaven. But the symbolic intensity of the incident was this. The Danes expected protection from England, and if there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of Artutanism, they ought to have had it. They ought to have had it even by the pedantries of the time which already talked of Latin inferiority and were never weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the country of Napoleon could not fight. But if it was necessary for whosoever would be saved to be a Tutan, the Danes were more Tutan than the Prussians. If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the Prussians were descended from Mongol Slavonic savages. If Protestantism be progress, the Danes were Protestant, while they had attained quite peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive cultivation, which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They had, in quite a resting degree, what was claimed for the Germanics, as against the Latin Revolution. Quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple love of fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that coincidence which dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epic, had found their freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the works of a Danish man of genius whose stories and sketches were so popular in England as almost to have become English. Good as Grimm's fairy tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern German. They were a museum of things older than any nation, of the dateless age of once upon a time. When the English Romantics wanted to find the folktale's spirits still alive, they found that in the small country of one of those small kings, with whom the folktales are almost comically crowded, there they found what we call an original writer, who was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen, more than to any of their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that domesticity is not dull, but rather fantastic, a sense of the fairyland of furniture and the travel and adventure of the farmyard. His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward allegory, it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are. Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast domestic fowl, and feel common doors like great mouths that open to utter welcome. In the story of the fir tree he transplanted to England a living bush that can still blossom into candles, and in his tail of the tin soldier he uttered the true defence of romantic militarism against the prigs who would forbid it, even as a toy for the nursery. He suggested in the true tradition of the folktales that the dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of larger and lower things. These things alas were an allegory. When Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into France as well as Denmark, Carlisle and his school made some effort to justify their Germanism by pitting what they called the piety and simplicity of the German against what they called the cynicism and rivalry of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more pious and simple than Hans Endersen. Yet the Carlisleians looked on with silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a toy. Here again it is enormously probable that England would have struck upon the right side if the English people had been the English government. Among other coincidences the Danish princes who had married the English heir was something very like a fairy princess to the English crown. The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the sea-kings, and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal figure in England. But whatever our people may have been like, our politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity, and the fear of force to which they have ever sunk. The tin soldier of the Danish army and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away down the great gutter, down that colossal kaloka that leads to the vast cesspool of Berlin. Why, as a fact, did not England interpose? There were a great many reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one reason. Indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results of what we have called the Germanization of England. First the very insularity on which we insisted was barbaric in its refusal of a seat in the central centre of the nations. What we called our splendid isolation became a rather ignominious sleeping partnership with Prussia. Next we were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians, Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible dissent from King Arthur's nameless enemies and not from King Arthur. King Arthur might not be historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist and Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur. He was bound to be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be Horsy. It was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon program that the contemporary English really carried out. Then in the very real decline from Kabat to Khabden, that is, from abroad to a narrow manliness and good sense, it had grown up the cult of a very curious kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims but by peddlers. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace, but they added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the Khabdenite's line. And again there was the positive praise of Prussia, to which steadily worsening case the Carlisleians were already committed. But beyond these there was something else, a spirit which had more infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave the grand name of evolution to a notion that things do themselves. Our wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith had so dazed us that the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not quite believe. An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality, not without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself. Am I a coward? It cannot be, but I am pigeon-libered and lack all. To make oppression bitter or air this I should have fatted all the region kites with this slave's awful. We may dumb our anger and our honour, and it has not brought us peace. Chapter 7 The Midnight of Europe Among the minor crimes of England may be classified the shallow criticism and easy abandonment of Napoleon III. The Victorian English had a very bad habit of being influenced by words and at the same time pretending to despise them. They would build their whole historical philosophy upon two or three titles and then refuse to get even the titles right. The solid Victorian Englishman with his whiskers and his parliamentary vote was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon and William of Prussia both became emperors, by which he meant autocrats. His whiskers would have bristled with rage and it would have stormed at you for hair-splitting and lingo if you had answered that William was German emperor, while Napoleon was not French emperor, but only emperor of the French. What could such mere order of the words matter? Yet the same Victorian would have been even more indignant if he had been asked to be satisfied with an art-master when he had advertised for a master of arts. His irritation would have increased if the art-master had promised him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea, or if during the decoration of his house the same aesthetic humorous had undertaken to procure some Indian red and produced a red Indian. The Englishman would not see that if there was only a verbal difference between the French emperor and the emperor of the French. So, if it came to that, it was only a verbal difference between the emperor and the republic, or even between a parliament and no parliament. For him an emperor meant a despotism. He had not yet learned that a parliament may mean merely oligarchy. He did not know that the English people would soon be made impotent not by the disenfranchising of their constituents, but simply by the silencing of their members, and that the governing class of England did not now depend upon rotten morals, but upon rotten representatives. Therefore he did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not less, when it turned all France into one constituency, which elected one member. He did not understand that many dragged down the republic because it was not republican, but purely senatorial. He was yet to learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can become. Yet in England today we hear that a client of the parliament talked about and taken for granted by the best parliamentarians. Mr. Belfour, for instance, and we hear the one-party French and Holy Jacobin, historian of the French Revolution, recommending for the English evil a revival of the power of the crown. It seems that, so far from having left Louis Napoleon far behind in the gray dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments may end where Louis Napoleon began. In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words emperor of the French. The type of title was deliberately chosen to express the idea of an elective and popular origin as against such phrase as the German emperor which expresses an almost transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as king of Prussia which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory. To treat the coup d'etat as unpardonable is to justify a riot against despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy. Yet the idea expressed in the emperor of the French is not dead, but rather risen from the dead. It is the idea that while a government may pretend to be a popular government, only a person can be really popular. Indeed the idea is still the crown of American democracy, as it was for a time the crown of French democracy. The very powerful official who makes the choice of that great people for peace or war might very well be called not the President of the United States, but the President of the Americans. In Italy we have seen the king and the mob prevail over the conservatism of the parliament, and in Russia the new popular policy sacramentally symbolized by the Tsar riding at the head of the new armies. But in one place at least the actual form of words exists, and the actual form of words has been splendidly justified. One man among the sons of men has been permitted to fulfill a courtly formula with awful and disastrous fidelity. People in geographical ruin have written one last royal title across the sky. The laws of palace and capital and territory have but isolated and made evident the people that has not been lost. Not laws, but the love of exiles, not soil, but the souls of men still make certain that five true words shall yet be written in the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of mankind. The King of the Belgians It is a common phrase recurring constantly in the real if rabid eloquence of Victor Hugo, that Napoleon III was a mere ape of Napoleon I. That is, that he had, as the politician says in La Agnion, that is he was merely a bad imitation. This is extravagantly exaggerative, and those who say it more over often miss the two or three points of resemblance which really exist in the exaggeration. One resemblance there certainly was. In both Napoleons it has been suggested that the glory was not so great as it seemed, but in both it can be emphatically added that the eclipse was not so great as it seemed either. Both succeeded at first and failed at last, but both succeeded at last even after the failure. If at this moment we owe thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of United France, we also owe some thanks to Louis Bonaparte for the armies of United Italy. That great movement to a freer and more chivalrous Europe which we call today the cause of the Allies, has its forerunners the first victories before our time, and it not only won at Arcola, but also at Sulphurino. Men who remember Louis Napoleon, when he mooned about the Blessington Salon and was supposed to be almost mentally deficient, used to say he deceived Europe twice, once when he made men think him an imbecile, and once when he made them think him a statesman. But he deceived them a third time when he made them think he was dead, and had done nothing. In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo, and the even more unbridled prose of King's Lake, Napoleon III is really and solely discredited in history because of the catastrophe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of lightning on Louis Napoleon, but he threw very little light on him. Some passage in the Châtiments are really caricatures carved in internal marble, and will always be valuable in reminding generations to vague and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabulus, or King John, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon. They bear no trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims and his quite comprehensible contempt for the fat-sold senatorial politicians. And if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the revolutionary element in Caesarism, it need hardly be said that a rather primrose-league Tory like Tennyson did not. King Lake's curiously accurate insistence upon the coup d'etat is, I fear, only an indulgence in one of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one which, afterwards all together, ran away with us over the Dreyfus case. It is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people's sins. If this came easy to an Englishman like King Lake, it came, of course, still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's husband than even to Queen Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by him. But insofar as the sensible masses of the English nation took any interest in the matter, it is probable that they sympathized with Palmerston, who was as popular as the Prince Consort was unpopular. The black mark against Louis Napoleon's name until now has simply been sedan, and it is our whole purpose today to turn sedan into an interlude. If it is not an interlude, it will be the end of the world. But we have sworn to make an end of that ending, warring on till, if only by purgatory of the nations and the mountainous annihilation of men. The story of the world ends well. There are, as it were, valleys of history quite close to us, but hidden by the closer hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold in the soft, surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps with his stillborn English Revolution. Another is under that height called the spy of Italy, where a new Napoleon brought back the golden eagles against the black eagles of Austria. Yet that French adventure in support of the Italian insurrection was very important. We are only beginning to understand its importance. It was a defiance to the German reaction, and 1870 was a sort of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory was a defiance of the German reaction, and 1914 was the attempted revenge for it. It is true that the French liberation of Italy was incomplete. The problem of the Papal states, for instance, being untouched by the peace of Villa Franca. The volcanic but fruitful spirit of Italy had already produced that wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipresent personality whose red shirt was to be a walking flag, Garibaldi. And many English liberals sympathized with him and his extremists as against the peace. Palmerston called it the peace that passes all understanding, but the profanity of that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than he knew. There were really present some of those deep things which he did not understand. The quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with him, was an instinct with the Bonaparts. An instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be expected to understand. They knew the truth that anti-clericalism is not a Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood. And after all, the English liberals could not get their own government to risk what the French government had risked, and Napoleon III might well have retorted on Palmerston, his rival in international liberalism, that half a war was better than no fighting. Swinburne called Villa Franca the halt before Rome, and expressed arrhythmic impatience for the time when the world shall ring to the roar of the lion proclaiming Republican Rome. But he might have remembered after all that it was not the British lion, that a British poet should have the right to say so imperiously. Let him roar again. Let him roar again. It is true that there was no clear call to England from Italy, as there certainly was from Denmark. The great powers were not bound to help Italy to become a nation, as they were bound to support the unquestioned fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the great Italian patriot was to experience both extremes of the English paradoxes, and curiously enough in connection with both the two national and anti-German causes. For Italy he gained the support of the English, but not the support of England. Not a few of our countrymen follow the rich hurt, but not in the red coat. And when he came to England, not to plead the cause of Italy, but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found he was more popular with the English than any Englishman. He made his way through a forest of salutations which would willingly have turned itself into a forest of swords. But those who kept the sword kept the cheat. For the ruling class, the valor of the Italian hero, like the beauty of the Danish princess, was a thing to be admired. It is enjoyed like a novel or a newspaper. Palmerston was the very type of pacifism because he was the very type of jingoism. In spirit, as restless as Garibaldi, he was in practice as cautious as Cobden. England had the most prudent aristocracy, but the most reckless democracy in the world. It was and is the English contradiction which has so much misrepresented us, especially to the Irish. Our national captains were carpet knights. Our knights errant were among the dismounted rabble. When an Austrian general who had flogged women in the conquered provinces appeared in the London streets, some common draman off a cart behaved with the directness of Sir Lancelot or Sir Gala Head. He had beaten women and they beat him. They regarded themselves simply as avengers of ladies in distress, breaking the bloody whip of a German bully, just as Cobbett had sought to break it when it was wheeled over the men of England. The borishness was in the Germanic or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses and spurs. The gallantry was in the gutter. English Raymond had more chivalry than two-ton aristocrats or English ones. I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment because it lights up Louis Napoleon, as what he really was, before the eclipse, a politician, perhaps an unscrupulous politician, but certainly a democratic politician. A power seldom falls, being wholly faultless, and it is true that the Second Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such Democrats as Rochefort as well as Hugo. But there was no French inefficiency that weighed a hair in the balance compared with the huge and hostile efficiency of Prussia, the tall machine that had struck down Denmark and Austria, and now stood ready to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world. There was a hitch before the hammer-stroke, and Bismarck adjusted it, as with his finger, via forgery, for he had many minor accomplishments. France fell, and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. The crowning of the first modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an allegory, like an allegory on those versail walls, for it was at once the lifting of the old despotic diadem, and its descent on the low brow of a barbarian. Louis XI had returned, and Europe was to know that scepter on which there is no dove. The insistent evidence that Europe was in the grip of the savage was as simple as it was sinister. The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was signed with the Cross. To the naked pride of the new men, nations simply were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric town. France was fine for having pretended to be a nation, and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such impossible injustice, France cried out to the Christian nations one after another, and by name. Her last cry ended in a stillness like that which had encircled Denmark. One man answered, one who had quarreled with the French and their emperor, but who knew it was not an emperor that had fallen. Garibaldi, not always wise, but to his end a hero, took his station, sword in hand, under the darkening sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate of France. A curious record remains in which the German commander testifies to the energy and effect of the last tropes of the wounded lion of Aspermonte. But England went away sorrowful, for she had great possessions. CHAPTER 8 THE WRONG HORSE In another chapter I mentioned some of the late Lord Salisbury's remarks with regret. But I trust with respect. For in certain matters he deserved all the respect that can be given him. His critic said that he thought aloud, which is perhaps the noblest thing it can be said of a man. He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts. And he had one yet finer quality which redeemed a hundred lapses of anarchic cynicism. He could change his mind upon the platform and could repent in public. He could not only think aloud, he could think better aloud. And one of the turning points of Europe had come in the hour when he avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into which his dexterous oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him, and declared that England had put her money on the wrong horse. When he said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Russia. But I cannot but think that if he had lived much longer he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long diplomatic support of the Turk's great ally in the north. He did not live, as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with us, and rush on through wilder and wilder places until we knew that we were riding on the nightmare. What was this thing to which we trusted, and how may we most quickly explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the hare's breath escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it seems to be hurling the Turk? It is a certain spirit, and we must not ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses disown logic, and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion of thought. Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in the word Teutonism, or Pan-Germanism, and with this, which was what appeared to win in 1870, we had better begin. The nature of Pan-Germanism may be allegorized and abbreviated somewhat thus. The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself. It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less graceful than the cat, that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to make a noise all night like the nightingale, that when submerged for some long time underwater he is less happy than the Haddock, and that when he is cut open, pearls are less often found in him than in an oyster. He is not content to answer, though being a muddle-headed horse. He does use this answer also, that having an undivided hoof is more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a few years on the subject of cats, and at last discovers in the cat the characteristic equine quality of codality, or a tail, so that cats are horses, and wave on every treetop the tail which is the equine banner. Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power of song. Hadocks are vertebrates, and therefore are sea horses, and though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature might of the same horse-moving energy sustained. Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps going too far to say that this horse is a donkey, for it is obviously within even the intellectual resources of a Haddock to answer. But if a Haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me? Why should that singing horse commonly called a nightingale, or that climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you, because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the accomplishments of a horse, why then you are only another horse without any accomplishments? When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the Haddock, and pursues the nightingale. And that is how the war began. This epilogue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the Teutonic claim. The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only sea Germans, as our Haddocks were only sea horses. They do really say that the nightingales of Tuscany, or the pearls of Hellas, must somehow be German birds or German jewels. They do maintain that the Italian Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when they are hairdressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not well. If you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten. But about the Italian Renaissance, they are less general and we'll go into detail. They will discover in their researches into history, as Mr. Ghandish said, that Michelangelo's surname was Bunaroti, and they will point out that the word wroth is very like the word wroth, which in one sense is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content to say it is all wroth and pass it on. It is all of a peace with a preposterous Prussian history, which talks for instance about the perfect religious tolerance of the Goths, which is like talking about the legal impartiality of chickenpox. He will decline to believe that the Jews were Germans, though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews. But deeper than any such practical reply lies the deep inconsistency of the parable. It is simply this, that if Tutanism be used for comprehension, it cannot be used for conquest. If all intelligent peoples are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans. If the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfurt, we can only say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans, who are in the right against the Germans, who are in the wrong. Thus in Alsace the conquerors are forced into the comic posture of annexing the people for being German and then persecuting them for being French. The French Tutans, who built reams, must surrender it to the South German Tutans, who have partly built Cologne. And these in turn surrender Cologne to the North German Tutans, who never built anything, except the wooden ant sally of Old Hindenburg. Every Tutan must fall on his face before an inferior Tutan, until they all find in the vowel marshes towards the Baltic the very lowest of all possible Tutans, and worship him. And find he is a Slav. So much for Pan-Germanism. But though Tutanism is indefinable, or at least it is by the two-tons undefined, it is not unreal. A vague but genuine soul does possess all people who boast of Tutanism and has possessed ourselves in so far as we have been touched by that folly. Not a race, but rather a religion. The thing exists, and in 1870 its son was at noon. We can most briefly describe it under three heads. The victory of the German arms meant before Leipzig and means now the overthrow of a certain idea. That idea is the idea of the citizen. This is true in a quite abstract and courteous sense and is not meant as a loose charge of oppression. Its truth is quite compatible with a view that the Germans are better governed than the French. In many ways the Germans are very well governed, but they might be governed ten-thousand times better than they are or than anybody ever can be and still be as far as ever from governing. The idea of the citizen is that his individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in altering the state. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as dangerously revolutionary. Every citizen is a revolution. Yet as he destroys, devours, and adapts his environment to the extent of his own thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort from the non-human. The bee creates the honeycomb, but he does not criticize it. The German ruler really does feed and train the German as carefully as a garden waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly began to water the gardener, he would be much surprised. So in Germany the people really are educated, but in France the people educates. The French not only make up the state but make the state. Not only make it but remake it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, always painting the happy German like a portrait. In France the Frenchman is the artist, always painting and repainting France like a house. No state of social good that does not mean the citizen choosing good, as well as getting it, has the idea of the citizen at all. To say that the Germanies are naturally at war with this idea is merely to respect them and take them seriously. Otherwise their war on the French Revolution would be only an ignorant feud. It is this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the critical and creative citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate under United Germany under the undivided hoof. Nevertheless when the German says he has or loves freedom what he says is not false. He means something and what he means is the second principle which I may summarize as the irresponsibility of thought. Within the iron framework of the fixed state the German has not only liberty but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or rather because, nothing can be done. Philosophy is really free. But this practically means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell that it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems so that it looks like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Saralia in his brilliant book Between the Wildness of German Theory and the Tamedness of German Practice. The Germans sterilize thought, making it active with a wild virginity which can bear no fruit. But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root and depend upon one assumption. It matters little whether we call it, with the German socialists, the materialist theory of history, or with Bismarck, blood and iron. He can be put most fairly thus, that all important events of history are biological, like a change of pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves. Professors are still tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the crusaders were migrating for food, like swallows, or that the French revolutionists were somehow only swarming like bees. This works in two ways, often accounted opposite, and explains both the German socialist and the junker. For first it fits in with the Teutonic imperialism, making the blond beasts of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such lambs as the French. The highest success of this notion in Europe is marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and fighting breed, but which is frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended to rule, the Turk, whom some Tories called the gentlemen of Europe. The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronize the cross. It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed. That English guns, helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete, cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece, or considering the crimes of England. But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the Germans quiet, and prevent socialism being the practical hope or peril it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways, first by a curious fallacy about the time not being ripe, as if time could ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forest had infected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the Zetergeist, perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is tricked by a biological parallel by which the chicken always comes out of the egg at the right time. He does not. He comes out when he comes out. The Marxan Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes and the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the theory of all history, as a search for food, makes the masses content with having food and physics, but not freedom. The best working model in the matter is the system of compulsory insurance, which was a total failure and a dead letter in France, but has been in the German sense a great success in Germany. It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower caste who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who had studied its operations in Germany, and by the Prussian prestige in social reform was passed. These three tendencies cohere, or are cohereing in an institution which is not without a great historical basis, and not without great modern conveniences. And as France was the standard bearer of citizenship in 1798, Germany is the standard bearer of this alternative solution in 1915. The institution which our father's called slavery fits in with, or rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them. He can give the individual workers everything except the power to alter the state, that is, his own status. Finality, or what's certain eluthoromaniacs would call hopelessness of status, is the soul of slavery, and of compulsory insurance. Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty that has always been given to a slave. The liberty to think, the liberty to dream, the liberty to rage, the liberty to indulge in any intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state, such as have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of epictetus to the sky-larking fairy tales of Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged by all defenders of slavery that if history has merely a material test, the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good rather than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely the model village of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer indignity that he had provided baths, playing grounds, a theater, etc. for his workers. He would probably have thought it odd to hear a planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymns, books, and places suitable for the cake walk. Yet the planter must have provided the banjos for a slave cannot own property. And if this Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle was fought in the wilderness, men who had the courage to fight for it, the courage to die for it, and above all, the courage to call it by its name. With the acceptance by England of the German Insurance Act, I bring this sketch of the past relations of the two countries to an end. I have written this book because I wish once and for all to be done with my friend Professor whirlwind of Prussia, who has long despaired of really defending his own country, and has fallen back upon abusing mine. He has dropped amid general division his attempt to call a thing right when even the chancellor who did it called it wrong. But he has an idea that he can show that somebody from England somewhere did another wrong. The two wrongs may make a right. Against the cry of the Roman Catholic Poles, the Prussian has never done or even pretended to do anything but harden his heart. But he has, such are the lovable inconsistencies of human nature, a warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish. He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but he still has many wise, reproachful words to utter about the campaign in South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed and never in need of a whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my countrymen not to hide behind thin official excuses which the sister kingdoms and the subject races can easily see through. We can confess that our crimes have been as mountains and still not be afraid of the present comparison. There may be in the eyes of some a risk in dwelling in this dark hour on our failures in the past. I believe profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I believe that the most deadly danger to our arms today lies in any whiff of that self-praise, any flavor of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of that impudent and ultimate impenitence that may make one bore or Scott or Welshman or Irishman or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path for a second Prussia. I have passed the great part of my life in criticizing and condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country. I think it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no illusions either about our past or our present. I think our whole history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the crucifix expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African war was a dirty work which we did under the whips of moneylenders. I think Michaelstown was a disgrace. I think Denshoi was a devilry. Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of our wickedness. In one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the holy anger of Maria Theresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God, as we have served their kings, there would not be today one remnant of them in our path, either to slander or to slay us. The Crimes of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 9 The Awakening of England In October 1912, silent and seemingly uninhabited crags and chasms in the high western region of the Balkans echoed and re-echoed with a single shot. It was fired by the hand of a king, real king, who sat listening to his people in front of his own house, for it was hardly a palace, and who in consequence of his listening to the people, not infrequently imprisoned the politicians. It is said of him that his great respect for Gladstone, as the Western advocate of Balkan freedom, was slightly shadowed by the fact that Gladstone did not succeed in affecting the bodily capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch knew that if a mal-factor were the terror of the mountain helmets, his subjects would expect him personally to take arms and pursue the Ruffian, and if he refused to do so would very probably experiment with another king. And the same primitive conception of a king being kept for some kind of purpose led them also to expect him to lead in a foreign campaign. And it was with his own hand that he fired the first shot of the war which brought down into the dust the ancient empire of the Grand Turk. His kingdom was little more than the Black Mountain, after which it was named. We commonly refer to it under its Italian translation of Montenegro. It is worthwhile to pause for a moment upon his picturesque and peculiar community, because it is perhaps the simplest working model of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic social machine I have described in the last chapter. Stood in its path and was soon to be very nearly destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the Serbian stock which had climbed into this almost inaccessible eerie, and thus for many hundred years had mocked at the predatory empires of the Turks. The Serbians in their turn were but one branch of the peasant Slavs, millions of whom are spread over Russia and subject on many sides to empires with which they have less sympathy. And the Slavs again, in the broad features important here, are not merely Slavonic, but simply European. But a particular picture is generally more pointed and intelligible than tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with subtler tendencies. And of this unmixed European simplicity, Montenegro is an excellent model. Moreover, the instance of one small Christian state will serve to emphasize that this is not a quarrel between England and Germany, but between Europe and Germany. It is my whole purpose in these pages not to spare my own country where it is open to criticism, and I freely admit that Montenegro, morally and politically speaking, is almost as much in advance of England as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no millionaires, and therefore, next to no, socialists. As to why there are no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft, a curious thing was discovered. That if you kill every Yerserer, every Forstaller, every adulterator, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without dwelling further on this dark matter, we may say that this great gap in the Montegren experience explains the other great gap, the lack of socialists. The class-conscious proletarian of all lands is curiously absent from this land. The reason I have sometimes fancied is that the proletarian is class-conscious, not because he is a proletarian of all lands, but because he is a proletarian with no lands. The poor people in Montenegro have lands, not landlords. They have roots, for the peasant is the root of the priest, the poet, and the warrior. And this, not a mere recrimination about acts of violence, is the ground of the age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish conqueror. Montenegrens are patriotic for Montenegro. But Turks are not patriotic for Turkey. They never heard of it, in fact. They are better ones as homeless as the desert. The wrong horse of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed only stable in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule vagabond people like the Gypsies. To be ruled by them is impossible. Nevertheless, what was called the nineteenth century and named with a sort of transcendental faith as in a Pythagorean worship of number was wearing to its clothes with reaction everywhere. And the Turk, the great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle, the most civilized of the Christian nations, overshadowed by the crescent, dared to attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as unanswerable as hidden. In England Gladstone and Gladstoneism were dead, and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlisle, was expending a type of praise upon the British army, which would have been even more appropriate to the Prussian army. The Prussian army ruled Prussia. Prussia ruled Germany. Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the appliances of that new survival machinery, which was her secret. The absolute identification of national subordination with business employment. So that Krupp could count on Kaiser on Krupp. Every other commercial traveler was pathetically proud of being both a slave and a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken hands. The sack of the boss was as silent and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus and the dream of the citizen was at an end. It was under a sky so ledden and on a road so strewn with bones that the little mountain democracy went out first and before all its friends on the last and seemingly the most hopeless of the rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens seemed other than disastrous and even that was doubtful. For the successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli, while proving the gallantry of the Italians if that ever needed proving could be taken into ways and was seen by many most sincere liberals as a mere extension of the imperialist reaction of Bosnia and Parderburg and not as the promise of newer things. Italy, it must be remembered, was still supposed to be the partner of Prussia and the Heppsburgs. For days that seemed like months the microscopic states seemed to be attempting alone what the Crusades had failed to accomplish. And for days where up behind the great powers were thunderstruck again and yet again by the news of Turkish forts falling Turkish cohorts collapsing the unconquerable crescent going down in blood the Serbians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks had gathered and risen from their lairs and men knew that these peasants had done what all the politicians had long disparate of doing and that the spirit was already standing over the city that is named after his name. For Germany this quite unexpected rush was a reversal of the whole tide of the world. It was as if the Rhine itself had returned from the ocean and retired into the Alps. For a long time past every important political process in Europe had been produced or permitted by Prussia. She had pulled down ministers in France and arrested reforms in Russia. The ruler was acclaimed by Englishmen like Rhodes and Americans like Roosevelt as the great Prince of the Age. One of the most famous and brilliant of our journalists called him the Lord Chief Justice of Europe. He was the strongest man in Christendom and he had confirmed and consecrated the crescent. And when he had consecrated it a few hill-pribes had risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other things about the same time less important in themselves struck in the Prussia's ear the same new note of warning and doubt. He sought to obtain a small advantage on the northwest coast of Africa and England seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in insisting on its abandonment. In the Councils over Morocco England agreed with France with what did not seem altogether an accidental agreement. But we shall not be wrong at the crucial point of the German surprise and anger at the attack from the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not only did it menace the Key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of German commerce not only did it offer the picture of one army trained by France and victorious and another army trained by Germany and beaten there was more than the material victory of the Crusote over the Kruppgun. It was also the victory of the peasant's field over the Krupp factory. By this time there was in the North German brain an awful inversion of all the legends and heroic lives that the human races loved. Prussia hated romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neglected. It was a thing that tormented her as any bully is tormented by an unanswered challenge. That weird process was completed of which I have spoken on an earlier page whereby the soul of this strange people was everywhere on the side of the dragon against the knight of the giant against the hero. Anything unexpected the Forlorn Hopes the Eleventh Hour inspirations by which the weak can elude the strong and which take the hearts of happier men like trumpets fill the Prussian with a cold fury as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian felt as a Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs not only refused to pass through his machine but turned into romantic wild boars raging and rending calling for the old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests of kings. The Prussians saw these things and his mind was made up. He was silent but he labored. Labored for three long years without intermission at the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for ever such romantic accidents or random adventure. A machine that should cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings. That he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him anticipating and overwhelming any resistance is now even in the documents he has himself published a fact of common sense. Suppose a man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well. Suppose in the division of the effects of an old friend he particularly asks for his razors. Suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends back the trunk but keeps the cord. And then suppose we hear that a rival of his has been lassoed with a rope. His throat then cut apparently with a razor and his body hidden in a well. We do not call in Sherlock Holmes to reject the preliminary suspicion about the guilty party. In the discussions held by the Prussian government with Lord Heldain and Sir Edward Gray we now see quite as plainly the meaning of the things that were granted and the things that were withheld. The things that would have satisfied the Prussian plotter and the things that did not satisfy him. The German Chancellor refused an English promise not to be aggressive for an English promise to be neutral. There is no meaning in the distinction except in the mind of an aggressor. Germany proposed a pacific arrangement which forbade England to form a fighting alliance with France but permitted Germany to retain her old fighting alliance with Austria. When the hour of war came she used Austria, used the old fighting alliance and tried to use the new idea of English neutrality. That is to say she used the rope, the razor, and the well. But it was either by accident or by individual diplomatic skill that England, at the end of the three years, even had her own hands free to help in frustrating the German plot. The mass of the English people had no notion of such a plot and indeed regarded the occasional suggestion of it as absurd. Nor did even the people who knew best know very much better. Thanks and even apologies are doubtless due to those who in the deepest lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a partner but a potential enemy. Such man as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart Kennedy or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made. Few, even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost exception of Dr. Saralia, saw Germany as she was, occupied mainly with Europe and only incidentally with England. Indeed in the first stages not occupied with England at all. Even the anti-Germans were too insular, even those who saw most of Germany's plans saw too much of England's part in it. They saw it almost wholly as a commercial and colonial quarrel and saw its issue which is even now not very probable. This fear of Germany was indeed a very German fear of Germany. This also conceived the English as sea Germans. It conceived Germany as at war with something like itself, practical, prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to cut us up in battle as she cut us out in business. The time of our larger vision was not yet when we should remember things quite unlike herself, things from which we also had sadly strayed. Then we should remember what we were and see whence we also had come and far and high up on that mountain from which the Crescent was cast down, behold what was everywhere the real enemy of the Iron Cross, the Peasants Cross which is of wood. Even our very slight ripples of panic therefore were provincial and even shallow and for the most part we were possessed and convinced of peace. That peace was not a noble one. We had indeed reached one of the lowest and flattest levels of all our undulating history. And it must be admitted that the contemptuous calculation with which Germany countered on our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alliances against freedom had come. The meek acceptance of culture in our books and schools had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear. By a queer irony even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism pivoted upon the importance The wrestle of the two great parties had long slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied and the pretense was still made that no pact existed beyond a common patriotism but the pretense failed altogether for it was evident that the leaders on either side so far from leading in divergent directions were much closer to each other than to their own followers. The power of these leaders had enormously increased but the distance between them had diminished or rather disappeared. It was said about 1800 in derision of the Foxite Rump that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in a four-wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and the Tory Party came to Parliament in a handsome cab. It was not a case of two towers rising into different roofs or spires but founded in the same soil. It was rather the case of an arch of which the foundation stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings but the stones nearest to the Keystone would know there was only one. This two-handed engine still stood ready to strike not indeed the other part of itself but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so. We were ruled as it were by a wonderland king and queen who cut off our heads not for saying they quarreled but for saying they didn't. The libel law was now used not to crush lies about private life but to crush truths about public life. Representation had become mere misrepresentation. A maze of loopholes. This was mainly due to the monstrous presence of certain secret monies on which alone many men could win the runeous elections and which were contributed and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the lowest trade or club. Only one or two people attacked these funds. Nobody defended them. Through them the great capitalists had the handle of politics as of everything else. The poor were struggling hopelessly against rising prices and their attempts at collective bargaining by the collective refusal of badly paid work discussed in the press, liberal and Tory as attacks upon the state. And so they were upon the survival state. Such was the condition of England in 1914 when Prussia, now at last armed to the teeth and secure a triumph, stood up before the world and solemnly like one taking a sacrament consecrated her campaign with a crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself forbidden pushing upon France through neutralised Belgium where every step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted as indeed they like ourselves were pledged to do. Instantly the whole invasion was lit up with the flame of moral lunacy that turned the watching nations white who had never known the Prussians. The statistics of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stunned the imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by the Prussian March. One saw a tabernacle containing the sacrament patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a rocking horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of the name of the spirit that has passed. And then a strange thing happened. England that had not in the modern sense any army at all was justified of all her children. Respected institutions and reputations did indeed waiver and collapse on many sides. Though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from the foreign bully, the politicians were sufficiently wild and weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention. One was set to restrain the journalists and had to be restrained himself for being more sensational than any of them. Another scolded the working classes in the style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. But England was saved by a forgotten thing, the English. Simple men with simple motives. A chief one, of the state of injustice, which grows simpler the longer we stare at it, came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields and their suburbs and their factories and their rookries and asked for the arms of men. In a throng that was at last three million men the islanders went forth from their island as simply as the mountaineers had gone forth from their mountain with their faces to the dawn. The end of Chapter 9 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Crimes of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 10 The Battle of the Marn The impression produced by the first week of war that the British contingent had come just in time for the end of the world or rather for any sensitive and civilized man touched by the modern doubt but by the equally modern mysticism that old theocratic vision fell far short of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a day of judgment in which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherry-bum sat not God but another. The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the Allied line in the north. The other end rested on the secure city and fortress of Nemor. Their end rested upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that loose end in a strange land with only the sad fields of northern France between them and the sea. For it was really round that loose end that the foe would probably fling the lasso of his charge. It was here that death might soon be present upon every side. It must be remembered that many critics including many Englishmen doubted whether rust had not eaten into this as into other parts of the national life. Feared that England had too long neglected both the ethic and the technique of war and would prove a weak leak in the chain. The enemy was absolutely certain that that was so. To these men standing disconsolently amid the hedgeless plains and poplars came the news that Nemor was gone, which was to their captains one of the four corners of the earth. The two armies had touched and instantly the weaker took an electric shock which told of electric energy deep into deep Germany. Battery behind battery of abysmal force. In the instant it was discovered that the enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed. He was actually more numerous even than they discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled as in a drunkard's vision and they were soon striving without speech in a nightmare of numbers. That all the allied forces at the front were overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons and began that black retreat in which so many of our young men knew war first at its worst in this terrible world. And so many never returned. In that blackness began to grow strange emotions long unfamiliar to our blood. Those six dark days are as full of legend as the six centuries of the Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated fancies. One was certainly in avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more difficult to dissipate in daylight. But one curious fact remains about them even if they were all lies or even if they were all deliberate works of art. Not one of them referred to those close, crowded and stirring three centuries which are nearest to us and which alone are covered in this sketch. The centuries during which the Teutonic influence had expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were there perhaps but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors. Nobody saw Cromwell or even Wellington. Nobody so much has thought about Cecil Rhodes. Things were either seen or said among the British which linked them up in matters deeper than any alliance with the French who spoke of Jehovah and heaven above the faded city or any Russians who dreamed of the mother of God with her hand pointing to the west. They were the visions or the inventions of a medieval army. And the prose poet was in line with many popular rumors when he told of ghostly archers crying, Aray, Aray, as in that long disbanded Yeomanry, which I have fancy cobbett as carrying a bow. Other tales, true or only symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor of Blenheim or even the black prince, but a faint figure out of far-off martyrologies. St. George One soldier is asserted to have claimed to identify the saint because he was on every quid. On the coins St. George is the Roman soldier. But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly flickerings of an old world order now finally wounded to the death. That which was coming on with the whole weight of a new world that had never been numbered among the seven champions of Christendom. Now in more doubtful and more hopeful days it is almost impossible to re-picture what was. For those who understood, the gigantic finality of the first German strides. It seemed as if the forces of the ancient valor fell away to right and left and there opened a grand, smooth granite road right to the gate of Paris, where many a moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx whose pride could destroy all things and survive them. In her train moved like moving mountains, cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled cities melted like wax. Their mouths said insolently upwards as if threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the new and new environments, for the soul of Germany was really expressed in colossal wheels and cylinders, and her guns were more symbolic than her flakes. Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted that the German superiority has been in a certain thing, and a certain kind. It is not unity, it is not in the moral sense, discipline. Nothing can be more united than a French, British or Russian regiment. Nothing for that matter could be more united than a Highland clan at Kilkrenki or a rush of religious fanatics in the Sudan. What such engines in such size and multiplicity really meant was this. They meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale in consuming larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities. They meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed repetition and dehumanized division of labor to which no man born would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat his plowshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to surrender to the Kaiser. They were to surrender to Krupp. His master and theirs, the French, the British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp as the Germans themselves after a few swiftly broken strikes had already surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron ending chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist. An artist's hands are never idle through dreaming, or drawn back in disgust, or lifted in wonder or in wrath, but sure and tireless in their touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery of life. That artist was there in triumph but he had no name. The ancient world called him the slave. From this advancing machine of millions the slighter array of the Allies and especially the British at their ultimate outpost saved themselves by a succession of hair's breath escapes and what must have seemed to the soldiers the heart-rending luck of a mouse before a cat. Again and again von Klux cavalry supported by artillery and infantry clawed round the end of the British force, which eluded it as by leaping back again and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to speak, so much on top of his prey that it could not even give way to him but had to hit such blows as it could in hope of checking him for the instant needed for escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that a small individual accident the capture of one man would mean the washing out of a whole battalion. For day after day this living death endured and day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed. Bit by bit certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians quite possibly to the surprise of the French and quite as possibly to the surprise of themselves that there was something singular about the British soldiers. That singular thing may be expressed in a variety of ways but almost certainly be expressed insufficiently by anyone who had not had the moral courage to face the facts about his country in the last decades before the war. It may perhaps be best expressed by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were dead and that England was not. The fortress of Maubers had gait, so to speak offering a refuge for the unresting and tormented retreat. The British generals had refused it and continued to fight a losing fight in the open for the sake of the common land. At night an enormous multitude of Germans had come unexpectedly through the forest and caught a smaller body of the British in land receipts, failed to dislodge them and lost a whole battalion in that battle of the darkness. At the extreme end of the line Smith Dorian's division to be nearly caught or cut off had fought with one gun against four and so hammered the Germans that they were forced to let go their hold and the British were again free. When the blowing up of a bridge announced that they had crossed the last river something other than that bettered remnant was saved it was the honour of the thing by which we live. The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of Paris and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed to stand open and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and last time for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested the last hope of the seemingly hopeless alliance stood unruffled as a rock in every angle of his sky blue jacket and his bulldog figure. He had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the invasion at Geis he had silently digested the responsibility of dragging on the retreat as in despair to the last desperate leaks before the capital and he stood and watched and even as he watched the whole huge invasion swerved. Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris other men in dim blue coats swung out in long lines upon the plane slowly folding upon van Cluck like blue wings Van Cluck stood an instant and then flinging a few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him dashed across the allies line at a desperate angle to smash it in the center with a hammer. It was less desperate than it seemed for he countered and might well count on the moral and physical bankruptcy of the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of him which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves red stain, dust-hued and tattered they lay there as if swept into a corner but even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards their bugles blew the charge and the English went forward through the wood that is called Creasy and stamped it with their seal for the second time in the highest moment of all secular history of man but it was not now the Creasy in which English and French knights had met in a more colored age in a battle that was rather a tournament it was a league of all knights for the remains of all knighthood of all brotherhood in arms or in arts against that which is and has been radically un-nightly and radically un-brotherly from the beginning much was to happen after murder and flaming folly and madness in earth and sea and sky but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian thrust had failed and Christendom was delivered once more the empire of blood and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness of the northern forests and the great nations of the west went forward where side by side as after a long lover's quarrel went the ensigns of St. Denis and St. George note on the word English the words England and English is used here require a word of explanation if only to anticipate the ire of the inevitable scot to begin with the word British I have tried to use it in the one or two cases that refer to such things as military glory and unity though I am sure I have failed a full consistency in so complex a matter the difficulty is that this sense of glory and unity which should certainly cover the scotch should also cover the Irish and while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman on northern Britain despite the just protest of Stevenson it is very unsafe indeed to call an Irishman a West Britain but there is deeper difficulty I can assure the scot that I say England not because I deny Scottish nationality but because I affirm it and I can say further that I could not here include Scots in the thesis simply because I could not include them in the condemnation this book is a study not of a disease but rather of a weakness which has only been predominant partner it would not be true for instance to say either of Ireland or Scotland that the populace lacked a religion but I do think that British policy as a whole has suffered from the English lack of one with its inevitable result of plutocracy and class contempt the end of chapter 10 the end of The Crimes of England by G. K. Chesterton