by Owen Wister
What do words, or propaganda, what does anything count in the face of such facts as these?
Agreeable Germany!—who addresses her God, “Thou who dwellest high above the Cherubim, Seraphim and Zeppelin”—Parson Diedrich Vorwerck in his volume Hurrah and Hallelujah. Germany, who says, “It is better to let a hundred women and children belonging to the enemy die of hunger than to let a single German soldier suffer”—General von der Goltz in his Ten Iron Commandments of the German Soldier; Germany, whose soldier obeys those commandments thus: “I am sending you a ring made out of a piece of shell…. During the battle of Budonviller I did away with four women and seven young girls in five minutes. The Captain had told me to shoot these French sows, but I preferred to run my bayonet through them”—private Johann Wenger to his German sweetheart, dated Peronne, March 16, 1915.
Germany, whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszettung deplored the doings of her Kultur on land and sea thus: “Much as we detest it as human beings and as Christians, yet we exult in it as Germans.”
Agreeable Germany!—whose Kaiser, if his fleet had been larger, would have taken us by the scruff of the neck.
“Then Thou, Almighty One, send Thy lightnings!
Let dwellings and cottages become ashes in the heat of fire.
Let the people in hordes burn and drown with wife and child.
May their seed be trampled under our feet; May we kill great and small in the lust of joy.
May we plunge our daggers into their bodies, May Poland reek in the glow of fire and ashes.”
That is another verse of Germany’s hymn, hate for Poland; that is her way of taking people by the scruff of the neck; and that is what Senator Walsh’s resolution of sympathy with Ireland, Germany’s contemplated Heligoland, implies for the United States, if Germany’s deferred day should come.
Chapter XVIII: The Will to Friendship—or the Will to Hate?
Nations do not like each other. No plainer fact stares at us from the pages of history since the beginning. Are we to sit down under this forever? Why should we make no attempt to change this for the better in the pages of history that are yet to be written? Other evils have been made better. In this very war, the outcry against Germany has been because she deliberately brought back into war the cruelties and the horrors of more barbarous times, and with cold calculations of premeditated science made these horrors worse. Our recoil from this deed of hers and what it has brought upon the world is seen in our wish for a League of Nations. The thought of any more battles, tenches, submarines, air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let us have no more of this! We have at least put it into words. That such words, that such a League, can now grow into something more than words, is the hope of many, the doubt of many, the belief of a few. It is the belief of Mr. Wilson; of Mr. Taft; Lord Bryce; and of Lord Grey, a quiet Englishman, whose statesmanship during those last ten murky days of July, 1914, when he strove to avert the dreadful years that followed, will shine bright and permanent. We must not be chilled by the doubters.
Especially is the scheme doubted in dear old Europe. Dear old Europe is so old; we are so young; we cause her to smile. Yet it is not such a contemptible thing to be young and innocent. Only, your innocence, while it makes you an idealist, must not blind you to the facts. Your idea must not rest upon sand. It must have a little rock to start with. The nearest rock in sight is friendship between England and ourselves.
The will to friendship—or the will to hate? Which do you choose? Which do you think is the best foundation for the League of Nations? Do you imagine that so long as nations do not like each other, that mere words of good intention, written on mere paper, are going to be enough? Write down the words by all means, but see to it that behind your words there shall exist actual good will. Discourage histories for children (and for grown-ups too) which breed international dislike. Such exist among us all. There is a recent one, written in England, that needs some changes.
Should an Englishman say to me:
“I have the will to friendship. Is there any particular thing which I can do to help?” I should answer him:
“Just now, or in any days to come, should you be tempted to remind us that we did not protest against the martyrdom of Belgium, that we were a bit slow in coming into the war,—oh, don’t utter that reproach! Go back to your own past; look, for instance, at your guarantee to Denmark, at Lord John Russell’s words: ‘Her Majesty could not see with indifference a military occupation of Holstein’—and then see what England shirked; and read that scathing sentence spoken to her ambassador in Russia: ‘Then we may dismiss any idea that England will fight on a point of honor.’ We had made you no such guarantee. We were three thousand miles away—how far was Denmark?
“And another thing. On August 6, 1919, when Britain’s thanks to her land and sea forces were moved in both houses of Parliament, the gentleman who moved them in the House of Lords said something which, as it seems to me, adds nothing to the tribute he had already paid so eloquently. He had spoken of the greater incentive to courage which the French and Belgians had, because their homes and soil were invaded, while England’s soldiers had suffered no invasion of their island. They had not the stimulus of the knowledge that the frontier of their country had been violated, their homes broken up, their families enslaved, or worse. And then he added: ‘I have sometimes wondered in my own mind, though I have hardly dared confess the sentiment, whether the gallant troops of our Allies would have fought with equal spirit and so long a time as they did, had they been engaged in the Highlands of Scotland or on the marches of the Welsh border.’ Why express that wonder? Is there not here an instance of that needless overlooking of the feelings of others, by which, in times past, you have chilled those others? Look out for that.”
And should an American say to me:
“I have the will to friendship. What can I personally do?” I should say: “Play fair! Look over our history from that Treaty of Paris in 1783, down through the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manila Bay; look at the facts. You will see that no matter how acrimoniously England has quarreled with us, these were always family scraps, in which she held out for her own interests just as we did for ours. But whenever the question lay between ourselves and Spain, or France, or Germany, or any foreign power, England stood with us against them.
“And another thing. Not all Americans boast, but we have a reputation for boasting. Our Secretary of the Navy gave our navy the whole credit for transporting our soldiers to Europe when England did more than half of it. At Annapolis there has been a poster, showing a big American sailor with a doughboy on his back, and underneath the words, ‘We put them across.’ A brigadier general has written a book entitled, How the Marines Saved Paris. Beside the marines there were some engineers. And how about M Company of the 23rd regiment of the 2nd Division? It lost in one day at Chateau-Thierry all its men but seven. And did the general forget the 3rd Division between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans? Don’t be like that brigadier general, and don’t be like that American officer returning on the Lapland who told the British at his table he was glad to get home after cleaning up the mess which the British had made. Resemble as little as possible our present Secretary of the Navy. Avoid boasting. Our contribution to victory was quite enough without boasting. The head-master of one of our great schools has put it thus to his schoolboys who fought: Some people had to raise a hundred dollars. After struggling for years they could only raise seventy-five. Then a man came along and furnished the remaining necessary twenty-five dollars. That is a good way to put it. What good would our twenty-five dollars have been, and where should we have been, if the other fellows hadn’t raised the seventy-five dollars first? “
Chapter XIX: Lion and Cub
My task is done. I have discussed with as much brevity as I could the three foundations of our ancient grudge against England: our school textbooks, our various controversies from the Re
volution to the Alaskan boundary dispute, and certain differences in customs and manners. Some of our historians to whom I refer are themselves affected by the ancient grudge. You will see this if you read them; you will find the facts, which they give faithfully, and you will also find that they often (and I think unconsciously) color such facts as are to England’s discredit and leave pale such as are to her credit, just as we remember the Alabama, and forget the Lancashire cotton-spinners. You cannot fail to find, unless your anti-English complex tilts your judgment incurably, that England has been to us, on the whole, very much more friendly than unfriendly—if not at the beginning, certainly at the end of each controversy. What an anti-English complex can do in the face of 1914, is hard to imagine: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Boers, all Great Britain’s colonies, coming across the world to pour their gold and their blood out for her! She did not ask them; she could not force them; of their own free will they did it. In the whole story of mankind such a splendid tribute of confidence and loyalty has never before been paid to any nation.
In this many-peopled world England is our nearest relation. From Bonaparte to the Kaiser, never has she allowed any outsider to harm us.
We are her cub. She has often clawed us, and we have clawed her in return. This will probably go on. Once earlier in these pages, I asked the reader not to misinterpret me, and now at the end I make the same request. I have not sought to persuade him that Great Britain is a charitable institution. What nation is, or could be, given the nature of man? Her good treatment of us has been to her own interest. She is wise, farseeing, less of an opportunist in her statesmanship than any other nation. She has seen clearly and ever more clearly that our good will was to her advantage. And beneath her wisdom, at the bottom of all, is her sense of our kinship through liberty defined and assured by law. If we were so farseeing as she is, we also should know that her good will is equally important to us: not alone for material reasons, or for the sake of our safety, but also for those few deep, ultimate ideals of law, liberty, life, manhood and womanhood, which we share with her, which we got from her, because she is our nearest relation in this many-peopled world.
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