SUPPORT THE PRESIDENT
On the other hand there was a strong element that counseled coolness and restraint. “This is not a time,” declared the Albany Knickerbocker Press, “to suggest to President Wilson what ought to be done. It is not a time to become impatient. It is a time for restraint. Nothing can be gained now by playing upon the strings of excitable public opinion in America. The President must find his way out and every true American must support him loyally.” Echoing this sentiment, the Springfield Republican added, “but the German government may fairly be required to give definite assurances that during the period of the negotiations no more torpedo attacks on passenger ships which may be carrying American citizens will be permitted.”
CHAPTER X
SWIFT REVERSAL TO BARBARISM
By Vance Thompson
[CULTURE SWEPT AWAY] — [BREAKING POINT OF CIVILIZATION] — [BARBARISM AND WOMEN] — [AFTER BARBARISM, WHAT?]
[The following article is reproduced by the courtesy of the New York Times.]
There is in Brussels—if the Uhlans have spared it—a mad and monstrous picture. It is called “A Scene in Hell,” and hangs in the Musée Wiertz. And what you see on the canvas are the fierce and blinding flames of hell; and amid them looms the dark figure of Napoleon, and around him the wives and mothers and maids of Belgium scream and surge and clutch and curse—taking their posthumous vengeance.
And since Napoleon was a notable emperor in his time, the picture is not without significance today. Paint in another face, and let it go at that.
War is a bad thing. Even hell is the worse for it.
War is a bad thing; it is a reversal, sudden and complete, to barbarism. That is what I would get at in this article. One day there is civilization, authentic, complex, triumphant; comes war, and in a moment the entire fabric sinks down into a slime of mud and blood. In a day, in an hour, a cycle of civilization is canceled. What you saw in the morning was suave and ordered life; and the sun sets on howling savagery. In the morning black-coated men lifted their hats to women. Ere nightfall they are slashing them with sabres and burning the houses over their heads. And the grave old professors who were droning platitudes of peace and progress and humanitarianism are screaming, ere today is done, shrill senile clamors for blood and ravage and rapine.
A reversal to barbarism.
Here; it is in the tea-room of the smartest hotel in Munich; war has come; high-voiced women of title chatter over their teacups; comes swaggering in the Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria; he has just had his sabre sharpened and has girt his abdomen for war. His wife runs to him. And she kisses the sabre and shouts: “Bring it back to me covered with blood—that I may kiss it again!” And the other high-voiced women flock to kiss the sword.
A reversal to barbarism.
It has taken place in an hour; but yesterday these were sweet patrician ladies, who prattled of humanity and love and the fair graces of life; and now they would fain wet their mouths with blood—laughingly, as harlots wet their mouths with wine.
The unclean and vampirish spirit of war has swept them back to the habits of the cave-dwelling ages of the race. In an hour the culture so painfully acquired in slow generations has been swept away. Royalty, in the tea-room of the “Four Seasons,” is one with the blonde nude female who romped and fought in the dark Teutonic forests ere Caesar came through Gaul.
Reversal to barbarism.
War is declared; and in Berlin the Emperor of Germany rides in an open motor car down Unter den Linden; he is in full uniform, sworded, erect, hieratic; and at his side sits the Empress—she the good mother, the housewife, the fond grandmother—garmented from head to foot in cloth the color of blood.
Theatricalism? No. The symbolism is more significant. The symbol bears a savage significance. It marks, as a red sunset, the going down of civilization and the coming of the dark barbarism of war.