E. Phillips Oppenheim

“ Hannaway Wells declared. “If the Labour Party in Germany were as strong as ours, they would be strong enough to overthrow the Hohenzollern clique, to stamp out the militarism against which we are at war, to lay the foundations of a great German republic with whom we could make the sort of peace for which every Englishman hopes. The danger, the real danger which we have to face, would lie in an amalgamation of the Labour Party, the Socialists and the Syndicalists in this country, and in their insisting upon treating with the weak Labour Party in Germany.” ”

“ I am not going to cast about in my mind for flowery phrases or epigrams. We are plain men here together, with our country’s fate in the balance. For God’s sake, realise your responsibilities. I want peace. I ache for it. But there will be no peace for Europe while Germany remains an undefeated autocracy. We’ve promised our dead and our living to oust that corrupt monster from his throne. We’ve promised it to France our glorious Allies. We’ve shaken hands about it with America, whose ships are already crowding the seas, and whose young manhood has taken the oath which ours has taken. ”

“ Furley continued, “just as much as you are, although you are a son of the Earl of Maltenby, and you fought in the war. You must listen to me without prejudice. There are thoughtful men in England, patriots to the backbone, trying to grope their way to the truth about this bloody sacrifice. There are thoughtful men in Germany on the same tack. If, for the betterment of the world, we should seek to come into touch with one another, I do not consider that treason, or communicating with an enemy country in the ordinary sense of the word.” ”

“ I believe that Freistner is an honest man, as honest as any of you, but I think that he is mistaken. I do not believe that the German people are with him. I am content to believe that those signatures are genuine. I will even believe that Germany would welcome those terms of peace, although she would never allow them to proceed from her own Cabinet. But I do not believe that the clash and turmoil which would follow their publication would lead to the overthrow of the German dynasty. You give me no proof of it, gentlemen. You have none yourselves. ”

“ As I think I told you, I know your anarchist friend, Miles Furley.”
“I shouldn’t call Furley an anarchist,” protested Julian.
“Well, he is a Socialist. I admit that we are rather lax in our definitions. You see, there is just one subject, of late years, which has brought together the Socialists and the Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the greatest surprise of its existence.” ”

“ Stenson said slowly. “We set out to fight for democracy—your cause. That fight would be a failure if we allowed the proudest, the most autocratic, the most conscienceless despot who ever sat upon a throne to remain in his place.”
“But that is just what we shall not do,” Fenn interrupted. “Freistner has assured us of that. The peace is not the Kaiser’s peace. It is the peace of the Socialist Party in Germany, and the day the terms are proclaimed, democracy there will score its first triumph.” ”

“ Her tone was steady but full of repressed passion.
“Julian,” she cried, “we have been deceived—tricked! I have come to you for help. Are the telegrams sent out yet?”
“They go at eight o’clock in the morning,” he replied.
“Thank God we are in time to stop them!”
Julian looked at her for a moment, utterly incredulous.
“Stop them?” he repeated. “But how can we? Stenson has declared war.”
“Thank heaven for that!” she exclaimed, her voice trembling. “Julian, the whole thing is an accursed plot. The German Socialists have never increased their strength except in their own imaginations. ”

“ Bright stepped back and adjusted his own gas mask, while Fenn followed suit. Then the former drew from his pocket what seemed to be a small tube with perforated holes at the top. He leaned over Julian and pressed it. A little cloud of faint mist rushed through the holes; a queer, aromatic perfume, growing stronger every moment, seemed to creep into the farthest corners of the room. In less than ten seconds Julian opened his eyes. In half a minute he was sitting up. His eyes were bright once more, there was colour in his cheeks. Bright spoke to him warningly. ”

“ Why, our rotten government for the last twenty years! Our politicians, Mr. Julian, that are prating now of peace before their job’s done! Do you think that if we’d paid our insurance like men and been prepared, this war would ever have come? Not it! We asked for trouble, and we got it in the neck. If we make peace now, we’ll be a German colony in twenty years, thanks to Mr. Stenson and you and the rest of them. A man can be a pacifist all right until his head has been punched. ”

“ You must come and talk to me presently about art.”
Julian, with his hand on the back of his chair, watched the women pass out of the soft halo of the electric lights into the gloomier shadows of the high, vaulted room, Catherine a little slimmer than most of the others, and with a strange grace of slow movement which must have come to her from some Russian ancestor. Her last words lingered in his mind. He was to talk to her about art! A fleeting vision of the youth in the yellow oilskins mocked him. He remembered his morning’s tramp and the broken-down motor-car under the trees. ”

“ Catherine laughed softly.
“Not outrageous really, dear Lord Maltenby,” she said. “I do not quite know of what I have been suspected, but I am sure Colonel Henderson would not have asked me these questions if it had not been his duty.”
“If you had not been a guest in this house, Miss Abbeway,” the Colonel assured her, with some dignity, “I should have had you arrested first and questioned afterwards.”
“You come of a race of men, Colonel Henderson, who win wars,” she declared graciously. “You know your own mind.” ”

“ Furley confessed gloomily. “There is something about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do things he’s not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst people who are not his people. ”

“ His argument was that Germany alone, of all the nations in the world, possessed an extra quality or an extra sense—I forget which he called it—the sense of discipline. It’s born in their blood. Generations of military service are responsible for it. Discipline and combination—that might be their motto. Individual thought has been drilled into grooves, just as all individual effort is specialised. The Germans obey because it is their nature to obey. ”

“ I defy you—you, Paul Fiske—to impugn our scheme, our aims, the goal towards which we strive. All that we needed was a leader who could lift us up above the localness, the narrow visions of these men. They are in deadly earnest, but they can’t see far enough, and each sees along his own groove. It is true that at the end the same sun shines, but no assembly of people can move together along a dozen different ways and keep the same goal in view. ”

“ Yet here, within two years, you have made yourself one of the champions of democracy. Why? The people are not ill-treated. On the contrary, I should call them pampered.”
“You do not understand,” she explained earnestly. “In Russia it was the aristocracy who oppressed the people, shamefully and malevolently. In England it is the bourgeoisie who rule the country and stand in the light of Labour. It is the middleman, the profiteer, the new capitalist here who has become an ugly and a dominant power. ”

“ But to Hell with every one of those who are responsible for the poison which has crept throughout all ranks in Germany, which, starting from the Kaiser and his friends, has corrupted first the proud aristocracy, then the industrious, hard-working and worthy middle classes, and has even permeated to some extent the ranks of the people themselves, destined by their infamous ruler to carry on their shoulders the burden of an unnatural, ungodly, and unholy ambition. There is much that I ought to say, but I fancy that I have said enough. Germany must be broken, and you can do it. ”

“ Be yourself. Your Ministers can’t end the war. Your Government can’t. They opened their mouth too wide at first. They made too many commitments. Ask Stenson. He’ll tell you that I’m speaking the truth. So it goes on, and day by day it costs the world a few hundred or a few thousand human lives, and God knows how much of man’s labour and brains, annihilated, wasted, blown into the air! Somehow or other the war has got to stop, Julian. If the politicians won’t do it, the people must. ”

“ There is nothing else in my life. And you, with all those thousands and millions of your fellow creatures toiling, watching and waiting for a sign from you—oh, I can’t imagine how your thoughts can ever wander from them for a moment, how you can ever remember that self even exists! I should like to be trusted, Mr. Fenn, as you are trusted. ”

“ Furley looked straight ahead of him. His eyes seemed caught by the glitter of the lamplight upon the cut-glass decanter.
“You know my opinion of war, Julian,” he said. “It’s a filthy, intolerable heritage from generations of autocratic government. No democracy ever wanted war. Every democracy needs and desires peace.” ”

“ Julian asked suspiciously.
“Neutrals, of course, but neutrals of discretion are very useful people. The military party in Germany is making a brave show still, but it is beaten, notwithstanding its victories. The people are gathering together in their millions. Their voice is already being heard. Here we have the proof of it.”
“But even if these proposed terms are as favourable as you say,” Julian objected, “how can you force them upon the English Cabinet? There is America-France. Yours is purely a home demand. A government has other things to think of and consider.” ”

“ Yet I am not sure that I cannot see a glimmering of what is at the back of Stenson’s mind. There are a good many millions in the country who honestly believe that war is primarily an affair of the politicians; who believe, too, that victory means a great deal more to what they term ‘the upper classes’ than it does to them. Yet, in every sense of the word, they are bearing an equal portion of the fight, because, when it comes down to human life, the life of the farm labourer’s son is of the same intrinsic value as the life of the peer’s.”
Lord Maltenby moved a little in his chair. ”

“ On the other hand, you must know that any movement towards peace, except through the authorised channels, is treason to the country.”
“If only you were not the Honourable Julian Orden, the son of an English peer!” she groaned. “If only you had not been to Eton and to Oxford! If only you were a man, a man of the people, who could understand!”
“Neither my birth nor my education,” he assured her, “have affected my present outlook upon life.”
“Pooh!” she scoffed. “You talk like a stiffened sheet of foolscap! I am to leave here to-morrow, then, without my packet?” ”

“ Furley pronounced. “High politics becomes too much like a game of chess, hedged all around with etiquette and precedent. It’s human life we want to save, Julian. People don’t stop to realise the horrible tragedy of even one man’s death—one man with his little circle of relatives and friends. In the game of war one forgets. Human beings—men from the toiler’s bench, the carpenter’s bench, from behind the counter, from the land, from the mine—don khaki, become soldiers, and there seems something different about them. So many human lives gone every day ”

“ Ours is the greatest power the world has ever evolved. We shall use it for the greatest cause the world has ever known—the cause of peace.”
“This, in a way, was inevitable,” Julian observed. “You remember the conversation, Bishop,” he added, “down at Maltenby?”
“Very well indeed,” the latter acquiesced.
“The country went into slavery,” Julian pronounced, “in August, 1915. That slavery may or may not be good for them. To be frank, I think it depends entirely upon the constitution of your Council. It is so much to the good, Bishop, that you are there.” ”