Various

“ The doctrine of the freedom of the sea which Germany has suddenly begun to preach at the top of its voice is yet another proof of either the entire absence of any sense of humour in the German mind, or of a morbid condition of the German conscience. For Great Britain, the geographical distribution of her Empire makes an overwhelming superiority in naval power a condition of its existence; but the seas of the planet, under her supremacy, have been free to every flag—except the black flag of the pirate. She has never abused her sea-power. ”

“ It is a battle of opposing ethical codes. We are fighting not merely a nation, but a doctrine—something that steel cannot pierce nor high explosives wreck. And it is a doctrine armed, disciplined, terrible; fighting with 17-inch howitzers and poisonous gases, with submarines.
But what exactly is the ‘doctrine’ against which we are fighting? It is customary to quote Nietzsche at this point, and find in his teaching the germ of the ‘doctrine’ for which to-day Germany fights, and against which the rest of the world is in arms. ”

“ The Leviathan is now hurling all her fifty-thousand-ton length through the great seas at something approaching a twenty-two knot stride; and the speed is rising.
Down in the engine-room and stokeholds, the Chief, minus his overalls, is a coatless demi-god, with life in one hand and a fourteen-inch wrench in the other; not that this wrench is in any way necessary, for the half-naked men stream willing sweat in a silence broken only by the rasp of the big shovels and the clang of the furnace-doors, and the Chief’s voice. ”

“ What makes the folly of Germany to-day absolutely unique, however, is the fact that, in its adoption of ‘frightfulness’ as a war measure, it takes the performances of the Thirty Years’ War, translates them into modern terms, practises them on a new scale, and enjoins them as virtues! The German soldier is instructed, for reasons of humanity, to be as inhuman as possible; and the German War Book gives grim details of what can be done, and supports its instructions by logic which, if it is dreadful, is certainly plausible. If war is made more frightful, it is argued, it will be made shorter ”

“ One large house, of château pretensions, is a complete wreck, having been bombed out of existence by German shells, but the beautiful and curious church, with its twelfth-century octagonal tower and its rudiments of earliest Gothic ornament, is, so far as the eye can judge, intact. At Acy a prodigious number of French soldiers are buried in a vast cemetery, which seems to have been improvised for the occasion. The piety of relatives and friends keeps these graves so lavishly covered with nosegays that the cemetery looks like a flower-garden. ”

“ Man! Man! we’re doing our “trials” speed, twenty-five and a half knots, against this. Do you realise it—against this! Look along to the South. Now!’
There is a hissing on the fore-bridge, quite unheard in the roar of the storm; and then there shoots out across the miles of night and broken seas the white fan-blaze of the searchlight. It beats like an enormous baton against the black canopy of the monstrous storm-clouds, beating to the huge, thundering melody of the roar and onward hurl of the fifty-thousand-ton rescuer, tossing the billows to right and left, as she strides through the miles. ”

“ Good-natured Maurice began to feel that Forsyth had been a trifle inconsiderate, saddling him with a virago whom he was quite at a loss how to appease.
‘Well—compliment or no, she’s free to refuse him,’ he remarked soothingly; ‘and after all, it’s the natural thing.’
Miss O’Neill pounced on the words almost before they were out. ‘Of course it’s the natural thing for a man like Sir Mark—spoilt by his mother, one can see with half an eye—to snatch at a beautiful woman. And where does a girl’s freedom come in when a man dazzles her brain with extravagant lover’s talk? Besides—he’s rich. ”

“ Germany has certainly chosen ‘a new god’; a god of war; the god of high explosives, of poison gases, of submarines; a god of material forces, of battles and bloodshed—as ultimate arbiter in the struggle to spread the Pan-German ideal. Everyone remembers how Nietzsche inverted the Beatitudes. ”

“ Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off, and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers, a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. ”

“ The deep thunder of the guns, the tumult of fighting men, have never ceased to sound at one point or another along those five hundred miles for nearly two years. Verdun, with all its passion and slaughter, its six months’ wrestle of guns and infantry, is a mere episode in this tremendous siege-battle; a score of Waterloos and Marengos have been fought during its progress, and have scarcely found a record.
The most brilliant chapter in British military history before the present war was certainly Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula. ”

“ As the last boat swings up at the end of the great derricks aboard the Cornucopia there is a final volcano of flame from the burning ship, lighting up the black belly of the sky into billowing clouds of redness. There falls the eternal blackness of the night.... The Vanderfield has gone.
The Leviathan swings round through the night, with her six hundred saved; and begins to sing again in her deep heart, laying the miles and the storm astern once more, in a deep low thunder. ”

“ No other people pay such loud compliments to themselves, and pay them with such unashamed diligence. They decorate themselves with compliments as a savage decorates himself with bits of broken glass. A philosopher like Hegel set the example of proclaiming in German accents and to German ears the ‘godlike glory’ of the German nation. The ‘spiritual nature of Germanism,’ we are assured seven days a week by German editors, makes it the standard-bearer of Christian Europe. ”

“ The famous ‘scrap of paper’ incident, taken as a whole, has the office of a searchlight as showing the morbid condition both of German morals and of German intelligence. Anybody with a touch of literary imagination will look back upon that scene in a room in Berlin, when the German Chancellor complained to Sir Edward Goschen, ‘You are going to war with us over a scrap of paper,’ and recognise it as one of the most picturesque, as well as the great and critical, moments in history. The German represented the greatest military Power in the world, the Englishman the greatest naval Power. ”

“ From dawn to sunset not a cloud rose in the sky; there reigned a soft continual radiance in which the colour of every object took peculiar intensity. The first hamlet we reached, Charny, brought us to the only disappointment of our day; for we failed, after much inquiry, to find the place of death, or even of burial, of the poet Charles Péguy, who has been the intellectual mascot of this war to France. His gallant death opened the battle of the Marne. Under the shelter of a slope, he and his men fought until they were driven into the open. ”

“ It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good which is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results from want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military capacity alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all beginning to know each other, to value each other, to make allowances for each other, to an extent which was impossible before steamers multiplied the coming and going of men, and turned uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured communication. ”

“ The rattle and splutter of rifle fire swelled to what one might have thought an alarming nearness when the road twisted in towards the firing line, or a falling away of the ground or change in the wind allowed the sound to carry better, dropped away again to no more than a distant crackle as a belt of wood shut it off or the road ran wide out from the battle line. ”

“ It undertakes to be both Christian and Pagan at the same time; Christian in the individual life, Pagan as a nation. It has two eternally hostile codes of ethics: one for the individual and the other for the State. As a private citizen the German may be a Christian, and ought to be one; but the moment he puts on a spike-helmet, or sits at a Government desk, he strips himself of all Christian morals; vice and virtue change their names for him. As a soldier he can clothe himself with ‘frightfulness’ ”

“ That the Power which has scorched with fire and splashed red with blood the little State it had sworn to protect, which sank the Lusitania and shot Nurse Cavell, should complain to high heaven that Great Britain had broken the regulations of the Hague Convention, is an audacity which paralyses the sane intelligence. ”

“ Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with us, of Lord Howe.
It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source of strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all co-operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community which we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the British race itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed different types in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. ”

“ And what heightens the wonder is the circumstance that it mistakes its very lunacy for culture. To make the tragedy complete, it is an insanity organised, armed, disciplined, terrible, equipped with all the resources of science, and having borrowed from science new engines and subtleties of destruction without precedent in the history of war. ”

“ What the German losses have been can only be guessed; they must reach half a million men. And still the tricolour flies over Verdun.
If we take the fighting on the sea, again, there is the same tremendous increase of scale. Trafalgar is—or was, till May 31 of the present year—the greatest sea-fight under the British flag, and it is curious to set it in contrast with the fight in the North Sea. The resemblances and differences of the two great battles are alike most striking. That little, one-eyed, one-armed, weather-beaten, sun-tanned figure, Nelson, is the dominating figure in Trafalgar ”

“ And yet it is precisely at Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer, with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock, forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches, through which the rivers wind. ”

“ Or, to change the figure, they become the ‘great blond beast’ of Nietzsche, lawless, predatory, invincible, the superman, a non-moral monster. The supermen, says Nietzsche, ‘where a foreign country begins, revert to the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters who come with bravado from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture.... The nation becomes a magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.’
Treitschke, the little stone-deaf professor of history, proclaimed the doctrine that the State is a non-moral entity, for which an ethical code has no meaning. ”

“ What makes the tragedy of Germany in this war, the thing which puzzles even those who are fighting against it, is the fact that Germany is acting on a doctrine stranger and more terrible than Paganism itself. ”

“ In the midst of the delicious Ile de France there lies an open piece of country roughly bounded by three rivers—the Marne, the Ourcq, and the Nonette. It is a high plateau, with rolling hills and winding valleys, fertile and smiling. It forms the northern extremity of the famous district of Brie, richly productive, the kitchen-garden of Paris, which lies to the west of it—surprisingly, alarmingly near. ”

“ The next morning we left on the last lap of our journey through Germany rather late, slightly after eleven o’clock, owing to the [69] encouraging friendliness of the previous night. This day was August 4 and in honour of its high destiny was one of sunlit splendour. Our innkeeper, in the smallness of his bill and his obvious readiness to give credit until the end of the war in case our money had run short, showed that some Germans are not devoid of the kindlier instincts of humanity. Human nature is the same the world over by whatever title the races may be labelled. ”

“ For the first time in history we have the spectacle of a nation of seventy million people, Christian in faith, highly civilised, strong on the practical side, of shrewdest business capacity, with a genius for business and for organisation, a nation that has given to education, or what it thinks is education, a larger place in its life than any other in history, yet which somehow is smitten with a sort of insanity, an insanity partly moral and partly intellectual. ”

“ When this war broke out the regular forces of Great Britain consisted of only 186,000 men. When the war was not yet two years old, the British fleet had taken a scale without precedent in history; in addition Great Britain had raised an army which approached 5,000,000 and in which every man was a volunteer. If the average Liberal member of Parliament had been told, say, three years ago, that Great Britain, in addition to having a fleet in scale so tremendous, would have a land force of 5,000,000, he probably would have assaulted his interlocutor. ”

“ Most leisured readers require a considerable length of time to assimilate that work; Jan, who had practically no leisure between sunrise and sunset, got through it in a week. He read it, as he read most works, with only a dim comprehension but with great contentment. Contentment, in fact, was the blessing bestowed upon him by Miss Haseldine’s happy inspiration; so that he spoke no more of joining the Army, while she was rewarded by the respectful thanks of his parents. From Jan himself she received something more than thanks and respect. ”

“ There was pain as well as anger in Mark’s tone. He knew very well what Maurice thought—what others were likely to think: and although Lady Forsyth did not guess it, his sensitiveness on Sheila’s account almost equalled her own. It hurt him horribly that by any act of his he should seem to cast even the slightest slur on her. ”