V
If I can say anything good of the war, it is this: Since seemingly it must have come anyway, sooner or later, so far as Susan is concerned it came just in time. A letter from Phil to Susan, received toward the close of July, 1914, at the château of the Comtesse de Bligny, near Brussels, will tell you why.
"Dear Susan: If the two or three notes I've sent you previously have been brief and dull, I knew you would make the inevitable allowances and forgive me. In the first place, God didn't create me to scintillate, as you've long had reason to know; and since you left us I've been buried in a Sahara of work, living so retired a life in my desert that little news comes my way. But Jimmy breaks in on me, always welcomely, with an occasional bulletin, and last night Hunt came over and we had a long evening together. He's worried, Susan, not without great cause, I fear; he looks tired and ill; and after mulling things over, with my usual plodding caution—I've thought best to explain the situation to you.
"It can be put in very few words. The deserved success of your play and the poems, following a natural law that one too helplessly wishes otherwise, has led to a crisis in the gossip—malicious in origin, certainly—which has fastened upon you and Hunt; and this gossip lately has taken a more sinister turn. More and more openly it is being said that the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Hunt's death ought to be probed—'probed' is just now the popular word in this connection. The feeling is widespread that you were in some way responsible for it.
"I must use brutal phrases to lay the truth before you. You are not, seemingly, suspected of murder. You are suspected of having killed Mrs. Hunt during a sudden access of mental irresponsibility. It is whispered that Hunt, improperly, in some devious way, got the matter hushed up and the affair reported as an accident. As a result of these absurd and terrible rumors, Hunt finds himself a pariah—many of his oldest acquaintances no longer recognize him when they meet. It is a thoroughly distressing situation, and it's difficult to see how the mad injustice of it can be easily righted.
"The danger is, of course, that some misguided person will get the whole matter into the newspapers; it is really a miracle that it has not already been seized on by some yellow sheet, the opportunity for a sensational story is so obviously ripe. Happily"—oh, Phil! oh, philosopher!—"the present curious tension in European politics is for the moment turning journalistic eyes far from home. But as all such diplomatic flurries do, this one will pass, leaving the flatness of the silly season upon us. This is what Hunt most fears; and when you next see him you will find him grayer and older because of this anxiety.
"He dreads, for you, a sudden journalistic demand for a public investigation, and feels—though in this I can hardly agree with him—that such a demand could end only in a public trial, in view of the peculiar nature of all the circumstances involved—a veritable cause célèbre.
"How shocking all this must be to you. The sense of the mental anguish I'm causing you is a horror to me. Nothing could have induced me to write in this way but the compulsion of my love for Hunt and you. It seems to me imperative that your names should be publicly cleared, in advance of any public outcry.
"So I urge you, Susan—fully conscious of my personal responsibility in doing so—to return at once and to join with Hunt and your true friends in quashing finally and fully these damnable lies. It is my strong conviction that this is your duty to yourself, to Hunt, and to us all. If you and Hunt, together or separately, make a public statement, in view of the rumors now current, and yourselves demand the fullest public investigation of the facts, there can be but one issue. Your good names will be cleared; the truth will prevail. Dreadful as this prospect must be for you both, it now seems to me—and let me add, to Jimmy—the one wise course for you to take. But only you, if you agree with me, can persuade Hunt to such a course. . . ."
It is unnecessary to quote the remaining paragraphs of Phil's so characteristic letter.
No doubt Susan would have returned immediately if she could, but, less than a week after the receipt of Phil's letter, the diplomatic flurry in Europe had taken a German army through Luxemburg and into Belgium, and within less than two weeks Susan and Mona Leslie and the Comtesse de Bligny were in uniform, working a little less than twenty-four hours a day with the Belgian Red Cross. . . .
It is no purpose of mine to attempt any description of Susan's war experience or service. Those first corroding weeks and months of the war have left ineffaceable scars on the consciousness of the present generation. I was not a part of them, and can add nothing to them by talking about them at second hand. It might, however, repay you to read—if you have not already done so—a small anonymous volume which has passed through some twenty or thirty editions, entitled Stupidity Triumphant, and containing the brief, sharply etched personal impressions of a Red Cross nurse in Flanders during the early days of Belgium's long agony. It is now an open secret that this little book was written by Susan; and among the countless documents on frightfulness this one, surely, by reason of its simplicity and restraint, its entire absence of merely hysterical outcry, is not the least damning and not—I venture to believe—the least permanent.
There is one short paragraph in this book of detached pictures, marginal notes, and condensed reflections that brought home to me, personally, war, the veritable thing itself, as no other written lines were able to do—as nothing was able to do until I had seen the beast with my own eyes. It is not an especially striking paragraph, and just why it should have done so I am unable to say. Certain extracts from the book have been widely quoted—one even, I am told, was read out in Parliament by Arthur Henderson—but I have never seen this one quoted anywhere; so I am rather at a loss to explain its peculiar influence on me. Entirely individual reactions to the printed word are always a little mysterious. I know, for example, one usually enlightened and catholic critic who stubbornly maintains that a very commonplace distich by Lord De Tabley is the most magical moment in all English verse. But here is my paragraph—or Susan's—for what it is worth:
"This Pomeranian prisoner was a blond boy-giant; pitifully shattered; it was necessary to remove his left leg to the knee. The operation was rapidly but skillfully performed. He was then placed on a pallet, close beside the cot of a wounded German officer. After coming out of the ether his fever mounted and he grew delirious. The German officer commanded him to be silent. He might just as well have commanded the sun to stand still, and he must, however muzzily, have known that. Yet he was outraged by this unconscious act of insubordination. Thrice he repeated his absurd command—then raised himself with a groan, leaned across, and struck the delirious boy in the face with a weakly clenched fist. It was not a heavy blow; the officer's strength did not equal his intention. 'Idiot!' I cried out; and thrust him back on his cot, half-fainting from the pain of his futile effort at discipline. 'Idiot' was, after all, the one appropriate word. It was constantly, I found, the one appropriate word. The beast was a stupid beast."