Arthur Gleason

“ IX AN APPEAL TO THE SMALLER AMERICAN COMMUNITIES
Burned villages are like ruins of an ancient civilization. To wander through them was as if I were stepping among the bones of a dead age. Only the green fields that flowed up to the wrecked cottages and the handful of sober-faced peasants—only these were living in that belt of death that cuts across the face of France, like the scar from a whip on a prisoner's cheek. French soil is sacred to a Frenchman. ”

“ Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town where we lived—a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh, and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? ”

“ I wish to say to you, and I beg you to make it known to your noble nation: it is not with serenity that we see our French soldiers do that work. It is with profound sadness that we resign ourselves to those reprisals. Those methods of defense are imposed upon us. Since all considerations of humanity are to-day alien to the German soul, we are reduced for the protection of our wives and our children to the policy of reprisals and to the assassination in our turn of the children and the women in Germany. The Germans have vociferously rejoiced in the crimes committed by their soldiers ”

“ The local storekeeper, the village doctor, the farmer, these are the men who make the real America—the America which responds slowly but irresistibly to a sound presentation of facts. The alert newspaper editor, the hustling real-estate man, the booster for a better-planned town, these citizens shape our public opinion. If once our loyal Middle Westerners know the wrong that has been done people just like themselves, they will resent it as each of us resents it that has seen it. ”

“ But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of development. There are diseases of nationalism—the lust for power and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to organized aggression, there is catastrophe. ”

“ The Great German Staff believe these things are buried deep in burned cottages and village graves. They believe an early peace will wipe out the memory of that insolence. They have forgotten the thousands of eye-witnesses, of whom I have met some dozens, and of whom I am one. They cannot kill us who live to tell what we have seen them do. They cannot destroy a thousand diaries of German soldiers that tell the abominations they committed. This record will become a part of history. They thought to wipe out their cruelty in success. ”

“ What! you are in the midst of the uprising, not of a town, but of the whole human race; you see brute force on the one side, and right on the other ... whole nations are struggling under oppression ... men die in hundreds, by thousands, fighting for or against an idea. This idea is either good or evil; and you continue to call yourselves men and Christians, you claim the right of remaining neutral? You cannot do so without moral degradation. Neutrality—that is to say, indifference between good and evil, the just and the unjust, liberty and oppression—is simply Atheism. ”

“ VI THE GOOD CURÉ
What was true of Joan of Arc is true to-day. There is no leadership like the power of a holy spirit. It lends an edge to the tongue in dealing with unworthy enemies. It gives dignity to sudden death. Religion, where it is sincere, is still a mighty power in the lives of simple folk to lift them to greatness. Out beyond Rheims, at the front line trenches, the tiny village of Bétheny is knocked to pieces. ”

“ Why do their accomplishments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. [224] Their fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through which the thistle thrusts. ”

“ Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy. The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new current of ideas. ”

“ But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations. It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every action. ”

“ The altar of their church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.
Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are more living than the faces of strangers in cities. ”

“ Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world.... The policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag.... The genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. ”

“ There remains a shame to us that we held aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts needed to convince France that we were fighting for human rights in our Revolution. Three thousand miles of water did not drown the appeal of our extremity. But to-day our leaders are so bewildered by dreams of universal brotherhood that they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our common people have their eyes to their work, and do not look up, as the workers of Lancashire looked up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the balance of 1863. ”

“ But that hysteria which greets a German officer, indirectly helping in the job of perpetuating the official German system of murder and arson, is accepted as American vivacity, a sort of base-ball enthusiasm, and pleasant revelation of sporting spirit.
We believe we are not un-American, in being Pro-Ally. We believe we are holding true to the ideas which created our country—ideas brought across from the best of England, and freshened from the soul of France. ”

“ They burn, plunder, murder, with a light heart.
There are noble souls among them who look on with sad and wondering eyes. What manner of men are these, they ask themselves in that intimacy of the diary, which is like the talk of a soul with its maker. These men, our fellow-countrymen, who behave obscenely, who pour out foulness—what a race is this of ours! ”

“ Village and town along its route turn out and throng the station to see the "Train Americain." The exterior of the cars carries a French flag at one end, and, at the other, the American flag. I like to think of our flag, painted on the brown panel of every car of the great train, and brightly scoured each day, riding through France from Verdun to Paris, from Biarritz to Revigny, and the thousands of simple people watching its progress, knowing its precious freight of wounded, saying, "Le train Americain," as they sight the painted emblem. ”

“ The great generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying. There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in the greatness of France. ”

“ It is the old old story of the conflict between human instincts and social institutions. The human soul can strike no roots in the America of to-day. I watched the workings of that ruthless economic process sometimes described as 'the miracle of assimilation.' I watched the steam-roller of American industrialism—so much more terrible to me in its consequences than Prussian or Magyar tyranny—grinding out the spiritual life of the immigrant proletariat, turning honest, primitive peasants into the helpless [331] and degraded tools of the Trust magnate and the Tammany boss. ”

“ The misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.
At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality, internationalism crumbles—the internationalism, I mean, that disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences. Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists, dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom of the disease of a false internationalism. ”

“ No feeble dreams of peace, entertained by loose thinkers and fluent phrase makers, no easy conciliations, will be tolerated. France has made her sacrifice. It remains now that it shall avail. She will fulfill her destiny. Time has ceased to matter, Death is only an incident in the ongoing of the nation. No tortures by mutilation, no horrors of shell fire, no massing of machine guns, can swerve [vi] the united will. The "Sacred Union" of Socialist and royalist, peasant and politician, is firm to endure. ”

“ The road is a thing of mounds and pits, blown up and dug out by a four months' rain of heavy shells. The little American cars are like rabbits. They dip into an obus hole, bounce up again and spin on. They turn round on their own tails. They push their pert little noses up a hill, where the road is lined with famous heavy makes, stalled and wrecked. They refuse to stay out of service.
We rode back through the partially destroyed city of Verdun, lying trapped and helpless in its hollow of hills. ”

“ If you blame America for Christian Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson and Whitman were our teachers. If you blame America for not taking part in the European war, you must remember that Washington told us to keep out of 'entangling alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly material, out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its importation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always lies behind us, and nothing is commoner than finding Paradise in the past."
What I have tried to say is that the tradition of a nation is not a dead thing, locked in the past. ”

“ They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness, between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the consciousness of sin. ”

“ I seek to show the fire and vigor of German nationality, and how that force has been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic militarists in control. There has been no instance of a noble force so diverted since the days of the Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power of religion was used by a clever organization to torture and kill. Every instinctive element in our being is at times turned awry. Nationalism suffers just as sex love suffers from the perversions of evil institutions. ”

“ But I found that not even the cheery first line men, not even the democratic officers, are the best of France. They are lovable and wonderful. But the choicest persons in France are the women in the devastated districts. They can make or break morale. What the people back of the trenches are feeling, the talk that they make in the village inn—these are the decisive factors that give heart to an army or that crumble its resistance. No government, no military staff can continue an unpopular war. ”

“ The modern Germany is the victim of an obsession. Under its sentimental domestic life, its placid beergarden recreation, its methodical activities, its reveries, its emotional laxity fed on music, it was generating destructive forces. Year by year it was thinking the thoughts, inculcated by its famous teachers, until those ideas, pushed deep down into the subconscious, became an overmastering desire, a dream of world-grandeur. For once an idea penetrates through to the subconsciousness, it becomes touched with emotional life, later to leap back into the light of day in uncontrolled action. ”

“ His ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which cost sacrifice to maintain. ”

“ If the Allied Governments had released facts to the representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual material on which to work.
If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. ”

“ This new joy-riding generation has struck out a fresh philosophy of life, which holds that many of the old responsibilities can be passed by, that the great divide has been crossed, on the hither side of which lay poverty, war, sin, pain, fear: the ancient enemies of the race. On the further side, which it is believed has at last been reached, lie, warm in the sun, prosperity and peace, a righteousness of well-being. ”