Philip Gibbs

“ I have seen your holiness, your charity, every day for four years, nursing German prisoners, and English, with equal tenderness, with a great pity. Not shrinking from any horror or the daily sight of death, but offering it all as a sacrifice to God. And now, after our liberation, when we ought to be uplifted by the Divine favour that has come to us, you would turn away that poor child who lies bleeding at our feet, another victim of war’s cruelty. ”

“ In London, after a journey to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces, strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look of recognition, and the sound of a remembered voice. ”

“ It was Franz von Kreuzenach who spoke now. He was standing at the table, facing his father, and it was to his father that he talked. He said that Elsa was right about love. In spite of the war, the souls of men and women were not separated by racial boundaries. When two souls touched and mingled, no hatred of peoples, no patriotic passion, could intervene. Elsa’s love for an English gentleman was but a symbol of the peace that was coming, when all countries would be united in a Society of Nations with equal rights and equal duties, and a common brotherhood. ”

“ The most supreme chance that any race has had since the beginning of the world. All nations are looking to President Wilson to help them out of the abyss and to make a peace which shall lead the people out of the dark jungle of Europe. My God!... If Wilson will be noble and wise and strong, he may alter the face of the world, and win such victory as no mortal leader ever gained. If not—if not—there will be anguish unspeakable, and a worse darkness, and a welter of anarchy out of whose madness new wars will be bred, until civilisation drops back to savagery, or disappears.... ”

“ The Prince of Wales was there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of Staff-officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets and presented them to the Prince and his fellow-officers. The Prince laughed and blushed, like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even war could cure.
Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for Armistice. ”

“ They did not recognise his presence.
“My daughter,” he said (if Brand remembered his words) , “the German people have been brought to ruin and humiliated by one nation in Europe who was jealous of our power and genius. That nation was England, our treacherous, hypocritical enemy. Without England, France would have been smashed. Without England our Emperor would have prevailed over all his enemies. Without the English blockade we should not have been weakened by hunger, deprived of the raw material necessary to victory, starved so that our children died, and our will to win was sapped. ”

“ It was very German, too, in its meek reverence, as of a mediæval maid to knighthood. I prefer the way of French womanhood, convinced of intellectual equality with men, and with their abiding sense of humour; or the arrogance of the English girl, who makes her lover prove his mettle by quiet obedience. Elsa followed Brand with her eyes wherever he moved, touched his hard, tanned hand with little secret caresses, and whenever he spoke her eyes shone with gladness at the sound of his voice. ”

“ As our first squadron rode into the great Cathedral Square on the way to the Hohenzollern bridge many people in the crowds turned their heads away and did not glance at the British cavalry. We were deliberately ignored, and I thought that for the Germans it was the best attitude, with most dignity. Others stared gravely at the passing cavalcade, showing no excitement, no hostility, no friendliness, no emotion of any kind. Here and there I met eyes which were regarding me with a dark, brooding look, and others in which there was profound melancholy. ”

“ But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.
“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man—a Feldwebel. “Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany is kaput?”
The German shrugged his shoulders.
“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us.”
“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.” ”

“ There was no defeat. The German Armies were invincible to the last. They never lost a battle. They fell back not because of their own failure but because the heart of the German people was sapped by the weakness of hunger, caused by the infamous English blockade, which starved our women and children. Ja, even our manhood was weakened by starvation. Still more, our civilians were poisoned by a pestilential heresy learnt in Russia, a most damnable pacifism, which destroyed their will to win. Our glorious Armies were stabbed in the back by anarchy and treachery. ”

“ The mob was sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him, and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry, before they killed him like a rat.
Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. ”

“ Brand groaned, in a whimsical way.
“I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood—if the German army will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our own sakes—for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved.” ”

“ This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation—the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house—the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen—and I craved for a touch of home-life and children’s company, after so long an exile in the war-zone always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out. ”

“ They need a peace of reconciliation for their own sakes, because no new frontiers may save them from sharing the ruin of those they destroy, nor the disease of those they starve. America alone comes out of the war strong and rich. For that reason we have the power to shape the destiny of the human race, and to heal, as far as may be, the wounds of the world. It is our chance in history. ”

“ I believe the German people are ready to turn over a new leaf and start a fresh chapter of history, if we will help them and give them a chance. They have an immense hope that England and America will not push them over into the bottomless abyss, now that they have fulfilled Wilson’s demand to get rid of their old rulers and fall into line with the world’s democracy. If that hope fails them they will fall back to the old philosophy of hatred with vengeance as its goal—and the Damned Thing will happen again in fifteen—twenty—thirty years. ”

“ The war is over and we can be friends again! That sentence in the young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity. Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell, the air-raids over London—all the range and sweep of German frightfulness? ”

“ I saw Fifth Avenue filled with triumphal arches, strung across with jewelled chains, festooned with flags and trophies of the home-coming of the New York Division. The heart of the American people was stirred by the pride of its achievement on the way to victory and by a new sense of power over the destiny of mankind. But already there was a sense of anxiety about the responsibilities to which Wilson in Europe was pledging them without their full and free consent. ”