FOOTNOTES

[2] Battery Commander.

[3] This jar was afterwards found to contain lime-juice!

THE BICENTENARY OF GRAY.
BORN DECEMBER 26, 1716.

BY THE DEAN OF NORWICH.

It is a mere chance, but none the less suggestive, that Shakespeare’s commemoration this year should be followed by that of Gray. Shakespeare, of course, would cut up into many poets, but one of them would have been not unlike Gray; a man of a fastidious and somewhat melancholy temper but with a rare affectionateness, and a sincere love of his kind, which mingled with his critical faculty to produce a fresh and very delightful humour. However this may be, the lesser poet was drawn to the greater by a sure instinct from school-days. In a letter to Horace Walpole, written when he was just eighteen, he finds it natural to disguise his boyish affection in terms borrowed from Mrs. Quickly: ‘I have born and born, and been fub’d off and fub’d off,’ &c.; and he does so again later: ‘If I don’t hear from you this week, I shall be in a thousand Tyrrits and Frights about you.’ To his more literary friend, Richard West, another member of the ‘Quadruple Alliance,’ whose early death he was to mourn in the most exquisite of elegies, he writes with enthusiasm about Shakespeare’s language.

‘Every word in him is a picture. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics:

“But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass:

I, that am rudely stampt, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph:

I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”—

and what follows. To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case our language is greatly degenerated.’

‘Every word in him is a picture.’ He said the same thing in a fine quatrain of the poem to Richard Bentley, contrasting the great masters of old with the poets of his own day, especially with himself, whose poems Bentley was illustrating:

‘But not to one in this benighted age

Is that diviner inspiration giv’n

That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,

The pomp and prodigality of heaven.’

In another letter to West of the same year he defends the practice of ‘judiciously and sparingly’ inserting phrases from Shakespeare into modern poetry because of their greater energy; a practice which he himself was to adopt in his later odes. Gray’s Shakespearian borrowings are always judicious, but it may be questioned whether the effect of such quotations from a greater writer by a less is not to create an impression of poverty in the borrower. It is more important to inquire how far Gray was successful in emulating the Shakespearian ‘pomp and prodigality’ of imagination. The prodigality clearly was beyond even his ambition. His Pegasus always required the spur rather than the reins. But the pomp, it must be admitted, he did not infrequently achieve. No one can be blind to the magnificence of the lines about Pindar in the ‘Progress of Poesy’:

‘Oh! Lyre divine, what daring Spirit

Wakes thee now? Tho’ he inherit

Nor the pride, nor ample pinion,

That the Theban eagle bear

Sailing with supreme dominion

Thro’ the azure deep of air.’

And in the ‘Elegy’ we have many imaginative pictures that have the true Shakespearian quality:

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’

‘And shut the gates of Mercy on mankind.’

‘Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death.’

‘Along the cool sequester’d vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.’

‘Left the warm precincts of the chearful day,

Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind.’

‘Even in our Ashes live their wonted Fires.’

It will be remembered that in the ‘Progress of Poesy’ English poetry is represented by three names—Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Dryden is praised for the energy of his heroic couplet, symbolised by the

‘Two coursers of ethereal race

With necks in thunder cloath’d and long-resounding pace,’

who draw his car, and also for his one great lyrical achievement, the Ode on St. Cecilia’s day. Gray’s admiration for Shakespeare and Milton as models was tempered by his recognition of what Dryden had done for the English language, in rendering it more ‘refined and free.’ To Beattie he wrote, ‘Remember Dryden and be blind to all his faults,’ and he told him in an interview (according to Mason) that ‘if there was any excellence in his own numbers he had learned it wholly from that great poet; and pressed him with great earnestness to study him, as his choice of words and versification were singularly happy and harmonious.’ If Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ be compared with the ‘Progress of Poesy’ we can see how successfully Gray has blended the qualities he most admired in his several masters. From Dryden he has caught the smoothness and strength of his line; but Gray’s rhythm owes more to ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Comus’ than to the commonplace movement of Dryden’s ode; while the imaginative beauty of its many pictures was part of his debt to the greatest of them all. There is one other great English poet to whom Gray was ready to acknowledge a debt. He told Norton Nicholls that he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously. I do not remember that Gray ever incorporates a Spenserian phrase in his own verse; his instinct would have told him that the two styles would not agree. But his instinct would also tell him that to bathe himself in Spenser before entering the temple of his Muse was a sure way of freeing himself from any pollution of mind or spirit.

The ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ was composed at intervals between 1746 and 1750, and sent to Walpole in June of that year. Walpole showed it to many friends and in some way it got into the hands of a publisher, who wrote to Gray announcing his intention of printing it, and begging his ‘indulgence.’ Gray wrote at once to Walpole desiring him to let Dodsley print it without delay from his copy, and it accordingly appeared in February 16, 1751, in a quarto pamphlet, priced sixpence, and entitled ‘An Elegy wrote in a Country Church Yard.’ The fashionable solecism must be attributed to Walpole, who saw the poem through the press, and prefixed this short ‘advertisement’:

‘The following Poem came into my hands by Accident, if the general Approbation with which this little Piece has spread, may be call’d by so slight a Term as Accident. It is this Approbation which makes it unnecessary for me to make any Apology but to the Author: As he cannot but feel some Satisfaction in having pleas’d so many Readers already, I flatter myself he will forgive my communicating that Pleasure to many more. The Editor.’

In his letter thanking Walpole for his ‘paternal care’ of the poem Gray speaks of the advertisement as ‘saving his honour’; which can only mean that he thought the poem unworthy of being offered to the public by its author. That this was not a mere affectation is shown by his annoyance at its instant popularity, which he thought to be due to its subject. He said it would have been equally popular if written in prose. He writes to his friend Dr. Wharton, after speaking of ‘A Long Story,’ which had been ‘shew’d about in Town, and not liked at all’:

‘On the other hand the Stanzas have had the Misfortune by Mr. W.’s fault to be made still more publick, for wᶜʰ they certainly were never meant, but is too late to complain. They have been so applauded, it is quite a Shame to repeat it. I mean not to be modest; but I mean it is a Shame for those, who have said such superlative Things about them, that I can’t repeat them.’

Gray’s modesty was still further tried in the autumn of the same year by Walpole’s insistence that he should allow his still unpublished odes, on Spring, on Eton College, and on Walpole’s cat, with whatever else he had to furnish a volume, to appear with illustrations by Walpole’s protégé, Richard Bentley, a son of the great Master of Trinity. The negotiations, so far as we have them in Gray’s correspondence, are diverting. Gray discovered that it was in contemplation to prefix his own portrait; this he forbade, though it was already half engraved. He objected to the proposed title and insisted that it should be ‘Designs by Mr. R. Bentley for six poems of Mr. T. Gray,’ on the ground that ‘the verses were only subordinate and explanatory to the Drawings and suffered to come out thus only for that reason.’ Lastly, he objected to Dodsley’s proposal to omit the ‘Mr.’ before the names of the poet and artist, as being ‘an uncommon sort of simplicity that looks like affectation.’ This modesty may have been excessive, but it is not ridiculous when we reflect that Gray had not yet produced his finest work, and knew that he had it in him to write something more worthy of himself and English poetry than the occasional pieces which Walpole wished to publish, or even than the deservedly popular Elegy.

In 1757 Walpole issued, as the first book from his new printing-press at Strawberry Hill, a quarto pamphlet entitled ‘Odes by Mr. Gray,’ with a vignette on the title-page of his Gothick castle, and a motto from Pindar ΦΩΝΑΝΤΑ ΣΥΝΕΤΟΙΣΙ which Gray englished as ‘vocal to the intelligent alone.’ It contained two odes, here called simply Ode I and Ode II, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard.’ The first of these odes is undoubtedly Gray’s masterpiece, and deserves all the study that can be given to it. The subject, that of the great power of poetry, was one very near to Gray’s heart as well as to his mind, and the scheme is well thought out. There is no feeling of strain in any part of it. Personification, with Gray generally a sign of strain, is kept within the limits approved by the great masters. Thus we have ‘antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures’ just as in the ‘Allegro’ we have ‘Jest and youthful Jollity’; but there is no elaborate series of abstract figures like that in the two stanzas on the Passions in the Ode on Eton College. This fashionable personification perhaps justified itself to Gray as a combination of the imaginative method of Shakespeare with the clear definition of Dryden. What in Shakespeare would have been a metaphor, hinted at and immediately succeeded by another, becomes too often with Gray a substantial allegorical personage. There seems to us to-day something essentially unpoetical, because artificial, in the posturing groups of Furies and Graces, and we wonder that Gray with his fine critical sense did not feel this. We must recognise, however, that whenever he is deeply moved he escapes from the snare. Two consecutive stanzas in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude’ show how his verse becomes more direct as it deepens in feeling.

‘Still, where rosy Pleasure leads,

See a kindred Grief pursue;

Behind the steps that Misery treads,

Approaching Comfort view:

The hues of Bliss more lightly glow,

Chastised by sabler tints of woe,

And blended form, with artful strife,

The strength and harmony of Life.

See the Wretch, that long has tost

On the thorny bed of Pain,

At length repair his vigour lost,

And breathe and walk again:

The meanest flowret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale,

The common Sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise.’

When the two odes were reissued they were styled Pindaric, and they justify their title, being constructed in a series of strophe, antistrophe, and epode like the odes of Pindar. Ben Jonson had furnished one example in the ode to the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, one strophe of which is the often-quoted stanza beginning, ‘It is not growing like a tree.’ But the name ‘Pindarique’ had been abused by Cowley, who, holding the theory that ‘the lost excellences of another language’ should be supplied by others of our own, had substituted an expansive eloquence, one might almost say loquacity, for the terse musical phrase of his model, and had entirely ignored the interrelation of strophe and antistrophe. Gray recovered for the Pindaric ode both the music of phrase and the balance of its parts.

Gray’s second ode cannot be reckoned as unequivocal a success as its companion. It is founded on a tradition of the murder of the Welsh bards by Edward I, and the earlier portion, which consists of the spirited and justifiable curses of the last survivor on the king’s progeny to the third and fourth generation, is proper to the subject, and contains much fine rhetoric and a few passages of a nobler quality. But having written the first three groups of stanzas, Gray held his hand for a couple of years; and the conclusion does not carry out the scheme originally proposed. From the argument, which Mason printed from Gray’s commonplace book, we learn that the Bard was to predict that all the king’s cruelty ‘shall never extinguish the noble ardour of poetic genius in this island; and that men shall never be wanting to celebrate true virtue and valour in immortal strains, to expose vice and infamous pleasure, and boldly censure tyranny and oppression.’ When Gray resumed the Ode he had changed his plan, and the present conclusion can appeal to none but Welshmen, for whom it is certain that Gray did not specially write. The consolation which the Bard finds in the future is the prospect of a line of Welsh kings, the Tudors, culminating in Elizabeth:

In the midst a Form divine

Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line;

Her lyon-port, her awe-commanding face,

Attemper’d sweet to virgin-grace.’

Elizabeth’s reign is to be marked by a revival of poetry in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and an unending line beyond them. It must be allowed that the skill of the poet has disguised the weakness of the argument. For to make the consolation effective the efflorescence of poetry should have occurred under the first Tudor sovereign, in which case it might poetically have been presumed to be due to him; and the Bard should not have overlooked Chaucer, who flourished under the sway of Edward’s direct descendant Richard II, of whose accession the Bard sings in the only passage of the Ode which has passed into popular currency:

‘Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the Zephyr blows,

While proudly riding o’er the azure realm,

In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes;

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;

Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind’s sway,

That, hush’d in grim repose, expects his evening-prey.’

The ‘Elegy’ is an expression of the common heart, though of that common heart purified and ennobled, and therefore it is of universal appeal; of the Odes it is true to-day as in Gray’s lifetime that they are vocal only to the intellectuals. But apart from its merits all Gray’s poetry has a special interest owing to its place at the meeting-point of the Augustan and Romantic schools. On the one hand it retains the notion of poetry as a happy combination of words. Gray, in a letter to Mason, says: ‘Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyric poetry’; adding ‘this I have always aimed at and could never attain.’ Gray’s instrument was always the file; he had no taste for the verse cast at a jet; and so he could accuse Collins of having a bad ear. In the second place, there are signs in Gray of that first-hand interest in nature and that respect for the whole of human nature, and not only its intellect, which was soon to inspire Cowper and Wordsworth. Perhaps Gray is at his modernest in the ‘Ode on Vicissitude,’ and in that impromptu couplet which Norton Nicholls preserved:

‘There pipes the woodlark, and the song-thrush there

Scattering his loose notes in the waste of air’—

if not most modern of all in that quatrain of the ‘Elegy’ which Gray’s feeling for unity expunged, but which we cannot spare:

‘There scatter’d oft the earliest of the year,

By Hands unseen, are show’rs of violets found:

The red-breast loves to build and warble there,

And little footsteps lightly print the ground.’

Leslie Stephen says happily about Gray and his friends that ‘they were feeling round vaguely for a new mode of literary and artistic enjoyment.’ This feeling after something more satisfying to the whole range of thought and emotion than was afforded by the critical school of Pope had already given evidence of itself in several ways. Thomson and Dyer, following each his particular bent, had found inspiration for poetry in country life and landscape. Gray welcomed the venture of both these poets. We know from his letters how attentive was his own observation, and how he took long journeys in search of the picturesque, especially in mountain scenery; but the evidence of this in his poetry is only incidental, as in the reference to ‘Snowdon’s shaggy side.’ Another form taken by this dissatisfaction was the revival of interest in the popular ballad literature. The discovery by Thomas Percy of his famous folio started a new form of poetry in which Goldsmith led the way. But though Gray had seen Percy’s book as early as 1761, it came too late to influence his production; and we may guess that his mind was too erudite to have found expression in the simplicity of the ballad. Of far more interest to him was Macpherson’s discovery of fragments of Highland poetry. He describes himself as ‘extasié with their infinite beauty’; on which the late Mr. Tovey, to whom a great debt is owed for his scholarly edition of Gray’s letters, makes the dry comment that some of the fragments were worked up from passages in ‘The Bard.’ We may be glad that Macpherson’s discovery came, like Percy’s, too late to influence Gray’s own poetry. His interest in the early literature of the European nations has given us a few fragments from the Norse and Welch. The remark of Leslie Stephen quoted above referred to the interest that Gray and Walpole took in Gothic architecture. This influenced Gray’s poetry only indirectly; but it had some effect in the way it was presented to the public. When Walpole undertook to convert his newly purchased house at Twickenham into a Gothick castle, the artist he employed to help him in his designs was Richard Bentley; and when Gray had sprung suddenly into fame by the ‘Elegy,’ Walpole urged him to publish his other poems with designs by Bentley. Whether these deserve the poetical encomium Gray made upon them, I will not presume to say; but they are undoubtedly very ‘Gothick.’

It is as a poet that we celebrate Gray’s bicentenary, but those persons who do not care for poetry may celebrate him as a man and a letter-writer. As a man he is secure of our affection as soon as we get to know him, and any one may know him who will read his letters, of which there is a great store; and still more have come to light lately, and have been well edited by Mr. Paget Toynbee. There are few men of letters of so attractive a nature as Gray. Perhaps he is the most lovable of all except Charles Lamb, and with Lamb, despite many obvious differences, he has many points in common. They were both solitary creatures living a recluse life, in the world but not of it, their best companions among the dead; they were both exquisite critics; they were both a prey to melancholy, or rather, as Gray said, to ‘leukocholy’; white bile not black; they had both a delicate and delightful humour; they were both the soul of gentle goodness. And so it comes about that the letters of both, in which they live to us, are among the few external goods which are necessary to happiness. The charm of a letter of Gray’s lies partly in this interest of his character, and partly in the perfect felicity with which everything is said. There is nothing slovenly, or far-fetched, or pompous, or makeshift; even in the shortest and apparently most hasty note, his touch is perfectly sure and his taste faultless; if we except some Hogarthian passages which smack of the age rather than the individual. It might not seem probable beforehand that the letters of a man whose days went ‘round and round like the blind horse in the mill’—‘swinging from chapel or hall home and from home to hall or chapel’—could have much to say that would be of general interest. Occasionally, indeed, he goes a journey—the grand tour with Walpole, or to the Highlands, or to see his friend Wharton at Old Park, or to Stoke Poges to his relations, and then we get lively enough descriptions. But these are episodes. The main topics of his every-day correspondence are his melancholy or his indolence, Mason’s poetry, Cambridge and Church news, the British Museum, politics, criticism of current literature,—Rousseau, or Sterne, or Dodsley’s poets,—his dab of musick and prints,’ gothick, hyacinths, and the weather. Occasionally, only occasionally, he allows himself to slip out a little town gossip, ‘as a decayed gentlewoman would a piece of right mecklin or a little quantity of run tea, but this only now and then, not to make a practice of it.’

THE REAL THING: ‘S. O. S.’

BY WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON.

Copyright, 1917, by William Hope Hodgson, in the United States of America.

‘Big liner on fire in 55.43 N. and 32.19 W.,’ shouts the Captain, diving into his chart-room. ‘Here we are! Give me the parallels!’

The First Officer and the Captain figure busily for a minute.

‘North, 15 West,’ says the Master; and ‘North, 15 West,’ assents the First Officer, flinging down his pencil. ‘A hundred and seventeen miles, dead in the wind!’

‘Come on!’ says the Captain; and the two of them dash out of the chart-room into the roaring black night, and up on to the bridge.

‘North, 15 West!’ the Master shouts in the face of the burly helmsman. ‘Over with her, smart!’

‘North, 15 West, Sir,’ shouts back the big quartermaster, and whirls the spokes to starboard, with the steering-gear engine roaring.

The great vessel swings round against the night, with enormous scends, smiting the faces of the great seas with her seventy-feet-high bows.

Crash! A roar of water aboard, as a hundred phosphorescent tons of sea-water hurls inboard out of the darkness, and rushes aft along the lower decks, boiling and surging over the hatchways, capstans, deck-fittings, and round the corners of the deck-houses.

The ship has hit the fifty-mile-an-hour gale full in the face, and the engine telegraph stands at full speed. The Master has word with that King of the Underworld, the Chief Engineer; and the Chief goes below himself to take charge, just as the Master has taken charge on deck.

There is fresh news from the Operator’s Room. The vessel somewhere out in the night and the grim storm is the S.S. Vanderfield, with sixty first-class passengers and seven hundred steerage and she is alight forrard. The fire has got a strong hold, and they have already lost three boats, smashed to pieces as they tried to launch them, and every man, woman, and child in the boats crushed to death or drowned.

‘Damn these old-fashioned davits!’ says the Master, as he reads the wireless operator’s notes. ‘They won’t lift a boat out clear of the ship’s side, if she’s rolling a bit. The boats in a ship are just ornaments, if you’ve not got proper machinery for launching them. We’ve got the new derricks, and we can lower a boat, so she strikes the water, forty feet clear of the side, instead of bashing to pieces, like a sixty-foot pendulum, against our side!’

He shouts a question over his shoulder, standing there by the binnacle:

‘What’s she doing, Mister Andrews?’

‘Twenty and three-quarter knots, Sir,’ says the Second Officer, who has been in charge. ‘But the Chief’s raising her revolutions every minute.... She’s nearly on to the twenty-one now.’

‘And even if we lick that we’ll be over five hours reaching her,’ mutters the Master to himself.

Meanwhile the wireless is beating a message of hope across a hundred miles of night and storm and wild waters.

‘Coming! The R.M.S. Cornucopia is proceeding at full speed in your direction. Keep us informed how you are....’

Then follows a brief unofficial statement, a heart-to-heart word between the young men operators of the two ships, across the hundred-mile gulf of black seas:

‘Buck up, old man. We’ll do it yet! We’re simply piling into the storm, like a giddy cliff. She’s doing close on twenty-one, they’ve just told me, against this breeze; and the Chief’s down in the stokeholds himself with a fourteen-inch wrench and a double watch of stokers! Keep all your peckers up. I’ll let you know if we speed-up any more!’

The Operator has been brief and literal, and has rather under-stated the facts. 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.

The Chief is young again; young and a King to-night, and the rough days of his youth have surged back over him. He has picked up the wrench unconsciously, and he walks about, twirling it in his fist; and the stokers work the better for the homely sight of it, and the sharp tang of his words, that miss no man of them all.

And the great ship feels the effect. Her giant tread has broken into an everlasting thunder, as her shoulders hurl the seas to port and starboard, in shattered hills of water, that surge to right and left in half-mile drifts of phosphorescent foam, under the roll of her Gargantuan flanks.

The first hour has passed, and there have been two fresh messages from that vessel, flaming far off, lost and alone, out in the wild roar of the waters. There has been an explosion forrard in the burning ship, and the fire has come aft as far as the main bunkers. There has been a panic attempt to lower two more of the boats, and each has been smashed to flinders of wood against the side of the burning ship, as she rolled. Every soul in them has been killed or drowned, and the Operator in the burning ship asks a personal question that has the first touch of real despair in it; and there ensues another little heart-to-heart talk between the two young men:

‘Honest now, do you think you can do it?’

‘Sure,’ says the Operator in the Cornucopia. ‘We’re doing what we’ve never done at sea before in heavy weather. We’re touching within a knot of our “trials” speed—we’re doing twenty-four and a half knots; and we’re doing it against this! Honour bright, old man! I’ll not deceive you at a time like this. I never saw anything like what we’re doing. All the engineers are in the engine-room, and all the officers are on the boat-deck, overhauling the boats and gear. We’ve got those new forty-foot boat derricks, and we can shove a boat into the water with ’em, with the ship rolling half under. The Old Man’s on the bridge; and I guess you’re just going to be saved all right.... You ought to hear us! I tell you, man, she’s just welting the seas to a pulp, and skating along to you on the top of them.’

The Operator is right. The great ship seems alive to-night, along all her shapely eight hundred feet of marvellous, honest, beautiful steel. Her enormous bows take the seas as on a horn, and hurl them roaring into screaming drifts of foam. She is singing a song, fore and aft, and the thunder of her grey steel flanks is stupendous, as she spurns the mutilated seas and the gale and the bleak intolerable miles into her wake.

The second and third hours pass, and part of the fourth, in an intermittent thunder of speed. And the speed has been further increased; for now the Leviathan is laying the miles astern, twenty-nine in each hour; her sides drunken with black water and spume—a dripping, league-conquering, fifty-thousand-ton shape of steel and steam and brains, going like some stupendous Angel of Help across the black Desolation of the night.

Incredibly far away, down on the black horizons of the night, there shows a faint red glow. There is shouting along the bridge.

‘There she is!’ goes the word fore and aft. ‘There she is!’

Meanwhile the wireless messages pulse across the darkness: The fire is burning with terrible fury. The fore-part of the Vanderfield’s iron skin is actually glowing red-hot in places. Despair is seizing everyone. Will the coming Cornucopia never, never come?

The young Operators talk, using informal words:

‘Look out to the South of you, for our searchlight,’ replies the man in the wireless-room of the Cornucopia. ‘The Old Man’s going to play it against the clouds, to let you see we’re coming. Tell ’em all to look out for it. It’ll cheer them up. We’re walking along through the smother like an express. 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.

And what a sight it is, in the glare of the great light, as it descends and shows the huge seas! A great cliff of black water rears up, and leaps forward at the ship’s bows. There is a thunderous impact, and the ship has smitten the great sea in twain, and tossed it boiling and roaring on to her iron flanks; and is treading it into the welter of foam that surrounds her on every side—a raging testimony, of foam and shattered seas, to the might of her mile-devouring stride.

Another, and another, and another black, moving cliff rises up out of the water-valleys, which she strides across; and each is broken and tossed mutilated from her shapely, mighty, unafraid shoulders.

A message is coming, very weak and faint, through the receiver:

‘We’ve picked up your searchlight, old man. It’s comforted us mightily; but we can’t last much longer. The dynamo’s stopped. I’m running on my batteries....’ It dwindles off into silence, broken by fragments of a message, too weakly projected to be decipherable.

‘Look at her!’ the officers shout to one another on the bridge; for the yell of the wind and the ship-thunder is too great for ordinary speech to be heard. They are staring through their glasses. Under a black canopy of bellied storm-clouds, shot with a dull red glowing, there is tossed up on the backs of far-away seas, a far-off ship, seeming incredibly minute, because of the distance; and from her fore-part spouts a swaying tower of flame.

‘We’ll never do it in time!’ says the young Sixth Officer into the ear of the Fifth.

The burning ship is now less than three miles away, and the black backs of the great seas are splashed with huge, ever shifting reflections.

Through the glasses it is possible now to see the details of the tremendous hold the fire has got on the ship; and, away aft, the huddled masses of the six hundred odd remaining passengers.

As they watch, one of the funnels disappears with an unheard crash, and a great spout of flame and sparks shoot up.

‘It’ll go through her bottom!’ shouts the Second Officer; but they know this does not happen, for she still floats.

Suddenly comes the thrilling cry of ‘Out derricks!’ and there is a racing of feet and shouted orders. Then the great derricks swing out from the ship’s side, a boat’s length above the boat-deck. They are hinged, and supported down almost to the draught line of the ship. They reach out forty feet clear of the ship’s side.

The Leviathan is bursting through the final miles of wild seas; and then the telegraph bell rings, and she slows down, not more than ten or twelve hundred yards to wind’ard of the burning hull, which rises and falls, a stupendous spectacle on the waste of black seas.

The fifty-thousand-ton racer has performed her noble work, and now the work lies with the boats and the men.

The searchlight flashes down on to the near water, and the boats shoot out in the ‘travellers,’ then are dropped clear of the mighty flanks of the Mother Ship.

The Leviathan lies to windward of them, to break the force of the seas, and oil bags are put out.

The people in the burning ship greet the ship with mad cheers. The women are hove bodily into the seas, on the ends of lines. They float in their cork jackets. Men take children in their arms, and jump, similarly equipped. And all are easily picked up by the boats, in the blaze of the rescuer’s searchlights that brood on leagues of ocean, strangely subdued by the floods of oil which the big ship is pumping on to the seas. Everywhere lies the strange sheen of oil, here in a sudden valley of brine, unseen, or there on the shoulder of some monstrous wave, suddenly eased of its deadliness; or again, the same fluorescence swirls over some half-league of eddy-flattened ocean, resting between efforts—tossing minor oil-soothed ridges into the tremendous lights.

Then the Leviathan steams to leeward of the burning ship, and picks up her boats. She takes the rescued passengers aboard, and returns to windward; then drops the boats again, and repeats the previous operations, until every man, woman, and child is saved.

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.

THE WAR IN PERSPECTIVE.

BY DR. W. H. FITCHETT.

The present war is the biggest event in secular history—so big indeed that its scale evades the imagination. Its cause cannot be condensed into a formula or its story told in a volume. But every war, sooner or later, finds literary expression; and the present gigantic struggle needs, and will create, a new literature of its own, beside which all the rest of secular literature will seem petty. A hundred years hence professional soldiers will be spelling out its strategy; toiling historians will be collating and recording its events; philosophers will be analysing its causes, moralists in spectacles will be assessing its spiritual elements. What a literature—strategic, scientific, political, financial, geographical, legal, medical, personal—it will be!

And when all such questions are dealt with there will yet remain that aspect of the war which has nothing to do with strategy, or politics, or finance. It deals with the purely human interests and emotions of the struggle; its picturesqueness; its dramatic incidents; the strophe and antistrophe of moral forces it reveals; its literary aspects, in a word; things in it which would have arrested the imagination of Shakespeare, and supplied the text for mightier dramas than ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Hamlet’; incidents that Scott would have woven into romance; follies which might have given Swift the text for keener satire than even his ‘Tale of a Tub’; heroisms that a greater Byron may set to more resounding music than even those famous lines which tell of Waterloo. And, it may be added, it is possible already to see in this amazing war some aspects which will do more than merely challenge the literary imagination, the sense of the wonderful.

To begin with what is nearest: the new scale of the war, the strange temper, the terrific weapons with which it is being fought, will certainly prove, for centuries to come, an irresistible challenge to the literary imagination. When the first shot in this war was fired, the whole familiar and accepted arithmetic of battle went suddenly to wreck. It was a war, not of armies, but of nations. As a result we have to think of the contending forces in terms of millions.

Australia, for example, supplies a proof of the enormously expanded scale of this war. The standing army of Imperial Rome consisted of 260,000 men. Australia is a community of only five million people; war to it is a totally new experience. Yet it has raised, equipped, and sent to a battlefield 12,000 miles distant an army equal in number to the standing army of the Caesars, at the time the Caesars were the masters of the civilised world. Great Britain affords another example of the amazingly expanded realm of the war. She hates standing armies, hates them so much that she will only pass the Mutiny Act, which makes an army of any sort possible, for a year at a time. The British formula is a big fleet and a little army. 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. But Great Britain, having raised by voluntary effort those 5,000,000, has actually passed a Conscription Bill for the remainder of its population.

The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights, king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other, and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area three miles by two, and lies open to a single glance. Waterloo itself began at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ended before 9 o’clock at night; it might have been fought under the Factories Act.

Let there be set beside it the great siege-battle of the Aisne, which began on September 15, 1914, and is going on still, with louder thunders and vaster slaughter than ever. Its field has lengthened into a ribbon of contorted trenches stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a distance of 500 miles, and from, or in, those strange, vast, far-running ditches, now for nearly two years, some 3,000,000 men, the best fighters in history, armed with an artillery which suggests nothing so much as the weapons with which Milton equipped Satan and his hosts in their war with the angels, have been slaying each other. 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. They lasted six years. The British forces under Wellington seldom approached, and never exceeded, 50,000 men. Napier condenses the story into a single sentence of stately and resonant prose. In that great struggle the British forces ‘fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten sieges, took four great fortresses; killed, wounded, and took 200,000 enemies, etc.;’ and the cost of all this is to be found in ‘the bones of 40,000 British soldiers’ which ‘lie scattered on the plains and mountains of the Peninsula.’ But Sir John French’s army in France lost in three weeks more than Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula lost in six years! In a single episode of the siege-battle beyond the Aisne Valley—say, the second battle of Ypres, which lasted four days—the British employed greater forces, and sustained greater losses, than in Wellington’s six campaigns in the Peninsula.

The most brilliant, desperate, and bloody siege of those campaigns was that of Badajos, in 1812. No one who has read the story Napier tells of how, on the night Badajos was stormed, the men of the Light Division died on its dark breach, can ever forget the tale. Now the siege of Badajos lasted twenty days; it cost Wellington 5000 men. The storming parties were let loose at 10 o’clock on the night of April 6; when morning dawned Badajos was won. Compare this with Verdun. The German attack began on February 23. Some 3000 guns—amongst them the great howitzers that destroyed Namur—poured for days and nights an unceasing tempest of high explosives on the French lines. Then the assault was launched. For nearly six months the thunder of the German guns has risen and sunk, but never ceased; again and again, now on one point, now on another, the vast grey waves of the German infantry have flung themselves in bloody ebb and flow on the French position. 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 he is still the most famous of all who have led the fleets of Great Britain into battle. But if we turn to the recent battle in the North Sea—a battle so splendidly fought, and so ill-told—it is clear that, in quickness of vision to read the iron alphabet of sea-battle, and in the dash and fire with which he dared all risks to turn and hold his enemy, Sir David Beatty is of Nelson’s school, and has ‘the Nelson touch.’ Nelson himself, indeed, could hardly have done better on that foggy afternoon in the North Sea than Sir David Beatty did. For seamanship, for technical skill, and for pure valour, the North Sea fight, in brief, will compare with Trafalgar. But in its general aspect, in the scale of the forces engaged, and in the amount of destruction achieved—and the terrifying speed of that destruction—the two battles are utterly unlike each other. A comparison betwixt them shows how completely the whole physiognomy of sea-battle is changed. Beatty’s six battle-cruisers carried only 9-inch armour, but they had the hitting-power of Dreadnoughts and the pace of destroyers; and speed was the great feature of the North Sea fight. The ships engaged under both flags were amongst the swiftest afloat, and the battle was fought at full speed. At the critical moment of the fight the ships of Beatty’s squadron were travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, firing as they raced. They could head, and turn, the line of German ships because they outpaced them. But if the ships were swift, death was swifter. It was as they whirled around across the head of the German line that the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable, in turn, were destroyed, and destroyed in a space of time to be reckoned in minutes—whether by the concentrated fire of the big German Dreadnoughts, or by the misadventure of striking a floating mine, is not clear.

It is exactly at the two points of furious speed and of destructive energy that the contrast betwixt Trafalgar and the fight in the North Sea is greatest. At Trafalgar, as everyone knows, the Franco-Spanish fleet was drawn up, or had drifted, into a straggling crescent four miles from tip to tip—thirty-three great line-of-battle ships, armed with more than 3000 guns, a curving forest of masts and flags. The British in two columns—Nelson in the Victory leading one column, Collingwood in the Royal Sovereign the other—bore down on the enemy, but there was no speed in the movement. They drifted, rather than sailed, at the rate of less than two miles an hour—less than a walking-pace, that is—into this curve of hostile guns; and the coolness of the British crews and their officers was in keeping with the deliberation with which their ships approached the enemy. The Royal Sovereign was a quarter of a mile ahead of its column, and was certain to receive the concentrated fire of the enemy’s line for nearly half an hour without support, yet Collingwood was not only nibbling but paring an apple on the quarter-deck while waiting for the great game to begin.

Nelson’s three-deckers, compared with the modern Dreadnought or battle-cruiser, were tiny ships. They had an average tonnage of a little over 2000 tons—the Victory herself was of 2223 tons. Now, a ship of the Queen Elizabeth class is of 27,000 tons, equal to the tonnage of the whole column of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar. The Victory carried 101 guns, about one-third being 32-pounders; there were only two carronades firing a shot of sixty-two pounds. If every gun on the Victory had been fired in one sudden broadside, the entire weight of metal would have been 2296 pounds, or a little over one ton of iron, and the effective range would be less than half a mile. But the Queen Elizabeth, with her 15-inch guns, could discharge, in a single broadside, twenty-seven tons of steel, and could strike her mark with that tempest of flying metal—a swarm of aerolites—once every thirty seconds, a dozen miles away.

The number of men killed at Trafalgar, leaving out the wounded, was only 449. On the Victory itself 57 were killed, on the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire 47, on the Royal Sovereign 47, on the Belle Isle 33, or a total of 184 killed in the four leading ships. But the Cressy, the Aboukir, and the Hogue were sunk in fifteen minutes—without seeing the submarine that sank them—and 680 seamen were drowned, a loss fifty per cent. greater than that of the whole of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar. Sir David Beatty’s two battle-cruisers, the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable, were sunk in a time as brief as the three unfortunate cruisers, and sunk when travelling at their highest speed, and firing as they raced. Each carried a complement of 900 men, and when they went down the loss of life was four times as great as that of Trafalgar.

A century hence what may be called the German psychology, as revealed in this war, will still puzzle the curiosity and challenge the imagination of unborn generations. 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. 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.

In its essence what we are watching is the spiritual bankruptcy of a great nation; but the whole story bristles with psychological problems. Its spiritual landmarks have shifted. Good and evil are terms in its politics which have not merely lost, but—a much more terrible thing—have exchanged their significance. It mistakes might for right. It labels its vices as virtues.

In one sense, Germany is rich in intellectual ability—the Germany to which Beethoven sang, and Goethe discoursed philosophy, for which Kant moralised, and at which Heine jested. It has a list of names great in poetry, philosophy, and scholarship. Germany, too, has done great things in science, though not so much in the realm of scientific discovery. It adapts rather than discovers; it excels in translating the scientific discoveries of other races into practical terms. Noticeable, also, is the fact that the great names in German literature, philosophy, and scholarship are not Prussian; and it is Prussia, and the Prussianised form of Germany, which is troubling the world. Luther came from Eisleben; Leibnitz was a Czech; Kant was of Scottish blood; Bismarck, it is amusing to remember, told Prince Napoleon, ‘I am not a German; I am a Prussian, a Wend’—that is, a Slav. Both Nietzsche and Treitschke came of a Slav stock; most of the great ‘German’ musicians came of a Jewish strain; Heine was, of course, a pure Jew.

Nearly all the public documents issued by the German Government during this war, and all the speeches of its statesmen, are thick-inlaid with statements which, if not blank lies, and known by the speaker or writer to be lies, are yet proofs of some disordered quality in the mind of the speaker or writer. Sometimes the speaker seems to be self-hypnotised, so that he really believes a lie as big as a mountain to be the truth; or he suffers from some eccentric paralysis of the memory which enables him to forget what he has said, or written, only a moment before.

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. Had both agreed to dismiss as a mere ‘scrap of paper’ the treaty that guards the neutrality of Belgium, the sanctity of all treaties would have disappeared at a breath.

But that dismissal into space as a mere scrap of paper of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, which bore the name of Germany, was to Germany herself a worse disaster than the loss of a pitched battle. It was a form of suicide. It destroyed her public credit; it dismissed her from the realm of good faith. When, at the end of the war, the representatives of the nations now in conflict sit around some table in London or in Paris to draw up terms of peace, the ghost of this scrap of paper will cost Germany much, for she has stripped herself of all title to be trusted. Now, a blunder so unspeakably stupid on the part of men so able shows that at that moment, and in that act, the brains of the men who were the representatives of Germany were in some curious state of paralysis.

But this gigantic blunder is to this day being pursued by Germany with explanations and justifications which, as examples of unreason, suggest nothing so much as the logic employed in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The German Chancellor himself some time afterwards asked the world to believe that what he meant was that ‘a scrap of paper’ represented the British idea of the value of a treaty, while Germany ‘took her responsibility towards neutral States seriously.’ And Bethmann-Hollweg offered this explanation after Germany had actually violated Belgian neutrality, and Great Britain had gone to war to maintain it!

The German Chancellor offered, in the very same speech, yet another explanation in open quarrel with the explanation just given. At the time he described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper,’ he had ‘reason to believe,’ he told the Reichstag, that the Belgians themselves had destroyed their own neutrality by a convention they had made with England for the introduction of British troops; but as he lacked formal proof of the circumstance, he did not mention it at the time. Since then they had captured Brussels, and found, in the archives there, the actual text of the convention with England, by which Belgium violated its own neutrality. As a matter of fact, the guilty document which the German Chancellor quoted was not a ‘convention’ at all, but notes of a ‘conversation’ betwixt the British military attaché and Major-General Ducalme, a Belgian officer. It was an academic discussion of what might be done ‘after Germany had entered Belgian territory’; and it was endorsed as ‘not binding’ on either of the two nations. And the German Chancellor quotes this discussion of what might be done to guard its neutrality against German attack as a surrender of its neutrality. This is very much as though a burglar, caught in the act of plundering a house, claimed that his burglary was justifiable, as he found—after he had broken into the house—that its owner had a revolver under his pillow.

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 Germany that has made the sea terrible by sowing it with drifting mines and making it a field for the performances of its submarines. Great Britain has supreme power on the sea, Germany has—or had—supreme military power on land; and what Germany means by ‘the freedom of the sea’ is that Great Britain’s advantage should be cancelled out of existence, while her own advantage should remain undiminished.

It is worth quoting the words in which, in his clear-cut, sword-edged prose, Mr. A. J. Balfour analyses and describes this new German doctrine. ‘The most simple-minded,’ he says, ‘must feel suspicious when they find that these missionaries of maritime freedom are the very same persons who preach and who practise upon the land the extremest doctrines of military absolutism.

‘She poses as a reformer of international law, though international law has never bound her for an hour. She objects to “economic pressure” when it is exercised by a fleet, though she sets no limit to the brutal completeness with which economic pressure may be imposed by an army. She sighs over the suffering which war imposes upon peaceful commerce, though her own methods of dealing with peaceful commerce would have wrung the conscience of Captain Kidd. She denounces the maritime methods of the Allies, though in her efforts to defeat them she is deterred neither by the rules of war, the appeal of humanity, nor the rights of neutrals.’

Now, when a Power like Germany, with such a record on the sea, attires itself in the garb of a missionary, and begins to preach the gospel of ‘the freedom of the sea,’ the phenomenon appeals to the literary imagination by its exquisite absurdity; to the alienist it suggests the urgent need of medical treatment.

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. It is as though Jack the Ripper published a tract against vivisection, or Deeming wrote a pious homily on ‘How to Make Home Happy.’

Another illustration of this lunatic quality in the German mind is found in the furious complaints against Great Britain for starving—or for even trying to starve—Germany, including its women and children. And yet it was Germany that in 1870 drew lines of blockade around Paris, and waited for starvation to bring the ‘gay city’ to surrender! No German city yet has known the horrors of starvation as the German armies compelled Paris to know them. The death-rate of little children during those sad months rose to 5000 a week, and Bismarck, when he rode into Paris after its surrender, expressed his surprise at seeing any children yet alive. Von Hindenburg, when told quite recently that Russian peasants were starving in Poland, said ‘It is just as well that it should be so; we cannot make war sentimentally.’ Then he repeated the formula which is the true credo of every Prussian soldier: ‘The more ruthlessly war is waged, the more humane does it really become; for that is the best way to bring it to a rapid conclusion.’ But what more complete proof of the one-sidedness of the German mind can be discovered than the fact, say, that at the present moment it is itself starving Belgium, so that its inhabitants have to be fed by the pity of the world, and at the same time it is screaming aloud to the whole universe because the meat ration in Berlin has to be reduced in consequence of the British blockade? The puzzle is not so much that Germany acts with such gaping inconsistency; it has not the faintest notion that it is inconsistent. This is a mental condition rare outside, and not even always found inside, a lunatic asylum.

The delirious self-complacency of the Prussianised German, again, leaves the whole outside world speechless. There is no other such instance of megalomania in history. 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. Morality, we are warned, ‘depends on the preservation of the Christian Germanic spirit and on the political power of Germany. Civilisation and Christianity are unthinkable without the Germans.’

‘Germany,’ says Professor Lamprecht, ‘is now the protector and pillar of European civilisation; and after bloody victories the world will be healed by being Germanised.’ ‘We Germans are singled out by Providence to march at the head of all Kultur people.... We have the highest mental creative gifts; we form the crown of Kultur in the whole of creation.’ Can anyone doubt, after reading through pages like this, that Germany is self-hypnotised? There must be some morbid condition in the character which thus exudes compliments to itself through every pore in its skin. It is the sign of a disordered intelligence.

The doctrine of ‘frightfulness,’ as a method in war, is the special contribution of Germany to the present conflict. It is curious, however, to remember that the most terrible example of ‘frightfulness,’ as far as Europe is concerned, was supplied by Germany 300 years ago in the famous, or rather infamous, Thirty Years’ War; and a chapter from its grim pages reads like nothing so much as a page from the German performances in Belgium in 1914-15. The slaughter in Germany during that period was so huge that in 1648 the country had only a third of the population of 1618; in some districts the depopulation was so great that every man was allowed to have two wives! It is a German historian who says that ‘even now the injury done to the psychology of the German people by the moral and intellectual decay of the Thirty Years’ War has hardly been repaired.’ Those words were written before the present war broke out, but there are some pages in the performances of Germany to-day that justify that statement.

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; so it is a service to humanity to bombard defenceless towns, burn whole villages, shoot unarmed citizens, including women and children. One German divine, indeed—and German divines during this war have done and said some wonderful things—preached a sermon to show that ‘frightfulness’ carried to the nth was a form—a German form—of fulfilling the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ‘If you love your neighbour, you will do your best to prevent him being caught in the red tide of war—or to get him out of it—as early as possible; and you will achieve this best by making war as terrible as you can.’

The committee which inquired into German atrocities in Belgium, and is responsible for the Bryce Report, had on it such shrewd, practical, hard-headed men as Lord Bryce, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollock, and their report is the most dreadful indictment ever drawn up against any nation, civilised or uncivilised.

It says: ‘In the minds of Prussian officers, war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feeling.... Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory.’ Then a very pregnant sentence is added: ‘It is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession, and been hypnotised by its spirit.... If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible, though not less pernicious.’

The use of ‘frightfulness’ as a method of war, in other words, is the result of diseased psychological conditions. To have ‘brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war’ is a process which might well result in an evil obsession as real, and as devilish in its spirit and its fruits, as possession by the devil himself. But the most astonishing thing in this whole astonishing story is that Germany betrays no sense that it has done anything worthy of blame. It learns with a bewildered exasperation that the outside world disapproves of this example of German ‘culture.’ The Kaiser is quite sure that he has the Divine approval in this, and everything else he does. From the wireless station at Berlin an official ‘explanation’ of this stupendous crime of a destroyed city was sent to the newspapers of the world:

‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity, and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.’

Now, as an example of inverted ethics, this is almost worthy of a place in De Quincey’s essay on ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ‘The German Government,’ says Secretary Hay, ‘is generally brutal, but not often silly.’ Here, however, it is at once both silly and brutal in a quite superlative degree. It is, of course, exactly this doctrine of ‘frightfulness’ which has made Germany the outlaw of the civilised world.

Perhaps nothing in this war will so sharply arrest what we have called the literary imagination as the uncertainty, the dim half-lights as to its reasons and issues, with which it began.

Some of the ‘explanations’ of the war are foolish; some are cynical. The Hon. Bertrand Russell, for example, has written a book on the war in which he says the nations of Central Europe are fighting for much the same reason dogs do—because ‘they don’t like each other’s smell‘! Would anyone quote now, as an explanation of the war, that couple of pistol-shots in a street in Serajevo which slew the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife? It is like offering the bursting of a soda-water bottle as the explanation of a Niagara, or tracing an earthquake to the explosion of a cracker. The Austrian ultimatum to Servia seems to be the match which fired the magazine; but if there had been no ‘magazine’ the ‘match’ would have been quite innocent.

For Great Britain, the first reason of the war was something immediate and concrete—the German invasion of Belgium. Great Britain was pledged, both by express treaty and by its historic policy, to maintain that neutrality; and when the German columns crossed the Belgian frontier war was inevitable. It was a simple question of good faith; England, Mr. Asquith declared, must keep her pledged word. But when the war was begun it was quickly realised that the existence of the Empire depended on its result; and so Mr. Bonar Law told the House of Commons, ‘This is a fight for our national existence.’ That is certainly true, and it applies with greatest force to the Dominions. If the British Empire goes into liquidation, the most coveted assets will be Australia, with its 12,000 miles of girdling sea, its radiant climate, its mineral wealth, its vast pastures, or New Zealand, the Great Britain of the Pacific. The men in the French and Flemish trenches are certainly fighting for—amongst other things—the safety of every home in Australia and New Zealand. But the war raised the question of the value of the treaty relations which bind civilised States together; so, as Lord Rosebery put it, we are fighting for ‘the sanctity of public law in Europe.’ A German victory would turn every treaty throughout Christendom into a ‘scrap of paper.’ In the first message, again, King George addressed to the Empire, he said, ‘We are fighting for the continuity of civilisation;’ and that also is true. The defeat of the Allies would put not only Europe, but Christendom, back into the Dark Ages.

In this way, as the war went on, its ‘reasons’ expanded: the obligation of the pledged word; our national existence; the sanctity of public law; the continuity of civilisation. Yet even these reasons all put together are inadequate. There remains something in the war differentiating it from any other ever fought; some intangible and invisible element not easy to define. In his famous speech in the Guildhall Mr. Asquith expressed this by saying ‘This is not so much a material as a spiritual conflict.’ It is a conflict, in other words, not racial, political, dynastic, or a mere wrestle of political ideals. 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. But for one thing it is difficult to discover any single sustained and intelligible ‘doctrine’ in the structure of Nietzsche’s works. He died in a lunatic asylum, and had a strain of lunacy in his writings, if not in his blood, long before his insanity came under medical treatment. He had a touch of genius, but thin partitions divided his genius from madness. If Germany took its creed from Nietzsche it would be not only furiously anti-Christian and furiously atheistic, but even furiously non-moral. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche said, ‘ought to be shot at. Pangs of conscience were indecent.’ In that dim realm into which his half-insane mind wandered—the ‘twilight of the gods’—evil and good had no existence. As for Christianity, he called it ‘the greatest of all conceivable corruptions,’ the ‘one immortal blemish of mankind.’ Jesus Christ, for Nietzsche, was ‘a knave, a charlatan.’ Everyone knows how Nietzsche took the Beatitudes and inverted them. His creed combined the theology of a lunatic asylum with the ethics of a gaol. Now the Germany against which the world is fighting to-day is certainly not atheistic, and it at least thinks itself to be intensely Christian.

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. 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’; can rape, plunder, kill, burn, with the entire approval of his official—that is to say, his Paganised—conscience. As a diplomatist, he can lie and cheat and forswear himself, and leave his Christian self-respect untouched. For Germany acts on the theory that the State is a non-moral, predatory entity, for which the distinction betwixt good and evil does not exist. It stands in no relation to God; it has no more morals than a tiger; it acts on the law of the jungle. Might, in its dreadful code, is right.

In the Prussianised Germany against which we are fighting we have, in brief, a double personality. When it acts as a nation it undergoes a transformation more terrible than that in R. L. Stevenson’s tale when Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. All the separate individualities of Germany melt into one gigantic Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde in a spike-helmet. 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. Bernhardi puts the matter more explicitly. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘came into the world to establish a society founded on love; but that principle does not extend to the State’; in all that concerns the State, Jesus Christ has no authority. His laws do not extend to that realm. When before in history have we this doctrine proclaimed from the iron lips of 17-inch howitzers? Here lies the explanation of all that puzzles us in the present war—the strange perversities discoverable in German policy: its contempt for truth, its capacity for cruelty; its blindness to moral distinctions. We are fighting with a nation which, taken individually, believes itself to be Christian; but, taken as a nation, it is by deliberate choice Pagan.

‘They chose new gods ... then was war in the gate;’ so runs an ancient Hebrew psalm, explaining a dark page in a dark history. In those words, cause and effect are set side by side. 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. ‘Blessed,’ he said, ‘are’—not the meek—but ‘the strong, for they shall inherit the earth.’ ‘Blessed are’—not the peacemakers—but ‘the war-makers, for they shall be called the sons of Odin.’ Cramb said that in Europe two great spiritual forces, Napoleon and Christ, oppose each other, and their conflict is ‘the most significant spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century.’ He adds that, in Germany, ‘Corsica has conquered Galilee’; Napoleon, or what Napoleon represents, is worshipped; not Christ, or what Christ teaches.

But the Germans do not understand even the Napoleon they accept as their ideal. That great master of the art of war himself said that ‘in war moral forces were to material forces as three to one.’ It is true that by ‘moral’ Napoleon did not exactly mean ‘ethical’; but the ethical is an essential part of the moral. Germany forgets—or inverts—the ethical; and that is the most fatal of blunders. For, as Carlyle teaches, this is a world of facts, and the first condition of success in any realm is fidelity to facts. And certainly the most important kinds of ‘facts’ are in the ethical order. They have the quality of eternity in them. This world has been so constructed by its Maker that a falsehood is in quarrel with the very system of things, and the Prussianised Germany, which has set the world in a flame with its greeds, and hates, and envies, is fighting against the ‘system of things.’

We, on our part, have greater allies than the nations knitted to us by formal treaties. With the change of a single word we can adopt Wordsworth’s memorable lines:

‘... Thou hast great allies,

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And Love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’

But in this war we have still mightier allies than these. All the forces that make for truth, for humanity, for honour, for justice, for freedom, are our allies. These are the enduring forces of the universe; and the Maker and Ruler of these forces, of whose character they are the reflex and of whose will they are the servants, is on our side too.