THE INVISIBLE CONFLICT
Mr. Maeterlinck has lately propounded the theory[1] that what we call the war is neither more nor less than the visible expression of a vast invisible conflict. The unseen forces of good and evil in the universe are using man as a means of contention. On the result of the struggle the destiny of humanity on this planet depends. Is the Angel to prevail? Or is the Beast to prolong his malignant existence? The issue hangs on Fate, which does not, however, deny the exercise of the will of man.
Mystical and even fantastic as the theory may seem to be, there is no resisting its appeal. A glance back over the events of the past year leaves us again and again without clue to cause and effect. It is impossible to account for so many things that have happened. We cannot always say, "We did this because of that," or "Our enemies did that because of the other." Time and again we can find no reason why things happened as they have—so unaccountable and so contradictory have they seemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year has been done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hence some of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which is, I think, the theory of the ancients—the theory on which the Greeks built their plays—that invisible powers of good and evil, operating in regions that are above and beyond man's control, are working out his destiny in this monstrous drama of the war.
And what a drama it has been already! We had witnessed only 365 days of it down to August 4, 1915, corresponding at the utmost to perhaps three of its tragic acts, but what scenes, what emotions! Mr. Lowell used to say that to read Carlyle's book on the French Revolution was to see history as by flashes of lightning. It is only as by flashes of lightning that we can yet hope to see the world-drama of 1914–15. Figures, groups, incidents, episodes, without the connecting links of plot, and just as they have been thrown off by Time, the master-producer—what a spectacle they make, what a medley of motives, what a confused jumble of sincerities and hypocrisies, heroisms and brutalities, villainies and virtues!
As happens in every drama, a great deal of the tragic mischief had occurred before the curtain rose. Always before the passage of war over the world there comes the far-off murmur of its approaching wings. Each of us in this case had heard it, distinctly or indistinctly, according to the accidents of personal experience. I think I myself heard it for the first time clearly when in the closing year of King Edward's reign I came to know (it is unnecessary to say how) what our Sovereign's feeling had been about his last visit to Berlin. It can do no harm now to say that it had been a feeling of intense anxiety. The visit seemed necessary, even imperative, therefore the King would not shirk his duty. But for his country, as well as for himself, he had feared for his reception in Germany, and on his arrival in Berlin, and during his drive from the railway station with the Kaiser, he had watched and listened to the demonstrations in the streets with an emotion which very nearly amounted to dread.
The result had brought a certain relief. With the best of all possible intentions, the newspapers in both capitals had reported that King Edward's reception had been enthusiastic. It hadn't been that—at least, it hadn't seemed to be that to the persons chiefly concerned. But it had been just cordial enough not to be chilling, just warm enough to carry things off, to drown that far-off murmur of war which was like the approach of a mighty wind. Then, during the next days, there had been the usual banqueting, with the customary toasting to the amity of the two great nations, whose interests were so closely united by bonds of peace! And then the return drive to the railway station, the clatter of horsemen in shining armour, the adieux, the throbbing of the engine, the starting of the train, and then … "Thank God, it's over! "If the invisible powers had really been struggling over the destiny of men, how the evil half of them must have shrieked with delight that day as the Kaiser rode back to Potsdam and our King returned to London!
PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE KAISER
Other whisperings there were of the storm that was so soon to burst on the world. In the ominous silence there were rumours of a certain change that was coming over the spirit of the Kaiser. For long years he had been credited with a sincere love of peace, and a ceaseless desire to restrain the forces about him that were making for war. Although constantly occupied with the making of a big army, and inspiring it with great ideals, he was thought to have as
little desire for actual warfare as his ancestor,
Frederick William, had shown, while gathering
up his giant guardsmen and refusing to allow them
to fight. Particularly it was believed in Berlin
(not altogether graciously) that his affection for,
and even fear of, his grandmother, Queen
Victoria, would compel him to exhaust all efforts
to preserve peace in the event of trouble with
Great Britain. But Victoria was dead, and
King Edward might perhaps be smiled at—behind
his back—and then a younger generation
was knocking at the Kaiser's door in the person
of his eldest son, who represented forces which
he might not long be able to hold in check. How
would he act now?
Thousands of persons in this country had countless opportunities before the war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had only one, and it was not of the best. For years the English traveller abroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiose personality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage, fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures, scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him—as in the case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn down (it was said with his consent) to let his equipage pass through. In Rome I saw a man who was a true son of his ancestors. Never had the laws of heredity better justified themselves. Frederick William, Frederick the Great, William the First—the Hohenzollerns were all there. The glittering eyes, the withered arm, the features that gave signs of frightful periodical pain, the immense energy, the gigantic egotism, the ravenous vanity, the fanaticism amounting to frenzy, the dominating power, the dictatorial temper, the indifference to suffering (whether his own or other people's), the overbearing suppression of opposing opinions, the determination to control everybody's interest, everybody's work—I thought all this was written in the Kaiser's masterful face.
Then came stories. One of my friends in Rome was an American doctor who had been called to attend a lady of the Emperor's household. "Well, doctor, what's she suffering from?" said the Kaiser. The doctor told him. "Nothing of the kind—you're entirely wrong. She's suffering from so and so," said the Majesty of Germany, stamping up and down the room. At length the American doctor lost control. "Sir," he said, "in my country we have a saying that one bad practitioner is worth twenty good amateurs—you're the amateur." The doctor lived through it. Frederick William would have dragged him to the window and tried to fling him out of it. William II put his arm round the doctor's shoulder and said, " I didn't mean to hurt you, old fellow. Let us sit down and talk." A soldier came with another story. After a sham fight conducted by the Kaiser the generals of the German army had been summoned to say what they thought of the Royal manoeuvres. All had formed an unfavourable opinion, yet one after another, with some insincere compliment, had wriggled out of the difficulty of candid criticism. But at length came an officer, who said:
"Sir, if it had been real warfare to-day there wouldn't be enough wood in Germany to make coffins for the men who would be dead."
The general lived through it, too—at first in a certain disfavour, but afterwards in recovered honour.
Such was the Kaiser, who a year ago had to meet the mighty wind of War. He was in Norway for his usual summer holiday in July 1914 when affairs were reaching their crisis. Rumour has it that he was not satisfied with the measure of the information that was reaching him, therefore, he returned to Berlin, somewhat to the discomfiture of his ministers, intending, it is said, for various reasons (not necessarily humanitarian) to stop or at least postpone the war. If so, he arrived too late. He was told that matters had gone too far. They must go on now. "Very well, if they must, they must," he is reported to have said. And there is the familiar story that after he had signed his name on the first of August to the document that plunged Europe into the conflict that has since shaken it to its foundations, he flung down his pen and cried, "You'll live to regret this, gentlemen."
PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE
And then the Crown Prince. In August of
last year nine out of every ten of us would have
said that not the father, but the son, of the
Royal family of Germany had been the chief
provocative cause of the war. Subsequent events
have lessened the weight of that opinion. But
the young man's known popularity among an
active section of the officers of the army; their
subterranean schemes to set him off against his
father; a vague suspicion of the Kaiser's jealousy
of his eldest son—all these facts and shadows of
facts give colour to the impression that not least
among the forces which led the Emperor on that
fateful first of August to declare war against
Russia was the presence and the importunity of
the Crown Prince. What kind of man was it,
then, whom the invisible powers of evil were
employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?
Hundreds of persons in England, France,
Russia, and Italy must have met the Crown
Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters,
and formed their own estimates of his
character. The barbed-wire fence of protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winter into a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of the Engadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, in common with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day, for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for no intellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever it may be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression.
I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whether physical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; the hatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreating forehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely in restless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all; the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; the morbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifference to other peoples' feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumption of a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions on which social intercourse depends — all this was, so far as my observation enabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of the Crown Prince.
Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing, ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot remember to have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story of an act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easy for a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantly hearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, of deliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not in form, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, if Macaulay's stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the open streets and tell her to go home and mind her brats.
SOME SALUTARY LESSONS
Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and
it was not the year 1720, so the air tingled
occasionally with other tales of little salutary
lessons administered to our Royal upstart on
his style of pursuing the pleasures considered
suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of
him that, having given a cup to be raced for on
the Bob-run, he was wroth to find on the noticeboard
of entries the names of a team of highly
respectable little Englishmen who are familiar on
the racecourse; and, taking out his pencil-case,
he scored them off, saying, "My cup is for
gentlemen, not jockeys," whereupon a young
English soldier standing by had said: "We're
not jockeys here, sir, and we're not princes; we
are only sportsmen."
I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after a particularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling the safety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince of Germany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not be named, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kicked off the road.