WILHELM LAMSZUS
BY
OAKLEY WILLIAMS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY ALFRED NOYES
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1913
INTRODUCTION
There is one thing that will certainly be said about this book by some of its readers. It will certainly be said to exaggerate the horrors of modern war; and, just as certainly, that is a thing which this book does not do. It is appallingly reticent; and, for every touch of horror in its pages, the actual records of recent warfare could supply an obscure and blood-stained mass of detail which, if it were once laid before the public, would put an end to militarism in a year. It is not the opponents of militarism who are given over to "cant" and "hypocrisy" and "emotionalism." It is the supporters of militarism who on the eve of a great war go about crying for suppression of facts, censorship of the facts not only of military plans, but of human suffering. For if there is one thing that the military journalist dreads it is the sight and smell of blood. "Let us enjoy this pleasant compaign. Let us present our readers with a little military music played upon the brass bands of the press. But for God's sake do not waft over Europe the smell of iodoform, or of the slaughter-house. Man is a fighting animal; let us enjoy the fight. And—pollice verso!"
Unfortunately for these gentlemen, whose good taste is so impeccable that they shrink from the whole truth, man is also a fighting god. 'And the next thing we are going to fight is militarism. There is hardly a great commander in the history of modern warfare who has not described his own profession as "a dirty trade" and war itself as hell. The party of "bad taste" which is going to destroy militarism is not likely to reject the testimony of Wellington, Grant and Napier in favor of the sensational journalist. This book deals chiefly with the physical and mental horrors of war. It presents just that one side of the case; but it must not be forgotten that there are vast battalions of logic and common sense on the same side. From a logical point of view a war between civilized peoples is as insane as it is foul and evil. The pacificists are fighting the noblest battle of the present day. They are not going to win without a struggle; but they will win. And they will win because they have on their side the common good of mankind, common sense, common justice, and common truth.
ALFRED NOYES.
CONTENTS
[INTRODUCTION]
[WILHELM LAMSZUS]
[LETTER FROM THE CONGRES UNIVERSEL DE LA PAIX]
[CHAPTER I] MOBILIZATION
[CHAPTER II] SOLDIER
[CHAPTER III] OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN
[CHAPTER IV] THE LAST NIGHT
[CHAPTER V] THE DEPARTURE
[CHAPTER VI] LIKE THE PROMISE OF MAY
[CHAPTER VII] BLOOD AND IRON
[CHAPTER VIII] THE SWAMP
[CHAPTER IX] THE WHIRLING EARTH
[EPILOGUE]—WE POOR DEAD
WILHELM LAMSZUS
Few books of its size—one hundred and eleven pages in the original edition—can perhaps of recent years claim the striking and instantaneous success of Wilhelm Lamszus's "Menschenschlachthaus." In appraising this success, I am less concerned with the number of copies sold (which now, three months after publication, approximates, I believe, one hundred thousand) than with the impression it has left on the mind of its readers in Germany and elsewhere on the Continent. Within a few days of its publication the author awoke to find himself famous—or infamous, according to the point of view adopted—in his own country. The fact that his book has been, or is being, translated into no less than eight European languages is evidence that its appeal is not confined to the conditions of one country, or of a single nationality.
Its appeal is broad-based. It is addressed to the conscience of civilized humanity, and as was to have been expected, the conscience of the individual has reacted to its stimulus in various ways.
The first evidence the author received of the success of his work was drastic. By profession he is a master at one of the great German public schools. He was at once "relieved" of his duties, but has now, I understand, been reinstated. The schoolmaster in Germany, it must be borne in mind, is primarily a state official. His most important function is to educate, not only the rising generation of citizens, but the future levies of conscripts. For a schoolmaster to write a book "with a tendency" to strip the pomp and circumstance of war of its traditional glamour—an integral factor in the German educational system—must, in the eyes of the orthodox of the "State-conserving" parties, have savored of an unholy alliance between blasphemy and high treason. The sale of the book was interdicted in the town of its first publication—the "free" city of Hamburg. The interdict had the effect of stimulating its sale elsewhere. It challenged a hearing. Even the "State-conserving" journals were unable to ignore it entirely.
A short time ago, in an open letter addressed to the German press, the author replied to the criticisms and strictures of his professional reviewers. As may be conceived, these criticisms and strictures lacked nothing in virulence or acrimony. "A peril to the public safety," "an hysterical neuropath," "a morbid phantasy," "a socialist-anarchic revolutionary," "a cowardly weakling," "a landless man," "an imported alien draining the marrow of patriotic backbone," may serve as an anthology (for which I am mainly indebted to the Hamburger Nachrichten) of the compliments showered on the author and his work. As this reply discloses what was in the author's mind when he wrote his book, definitely explains its purport and its purpose, it may be worth some consideration. It may serve to differentiate "The Human Slaughter-House" from the itch of mere literary sensationalism and enable the foreigner to understand the light in which the Commission for Instruction, Education, etc., of the nineteenth Universal Peace Congress at Geneva regarded it when last year it wrote officially to congratulate its author on having placed "a weapon of the greatest importance" in the hands of the pacificists.
At all times and at all places, Lamszus points out, patriotism has been of two kinds. The one sort takes its stand on the public market-place, with its hand on its manly chest, to advertise the public spirit that inflates it. In season and out of season, it never fails to invite the public gaze to dwell on the integrity of its patriotic sentiments. Its main strength lies in the spectacular and oratorical. As such it not infrequently deteriorates into the idle sound and fury of Junkerdom, Chauvinism and Jingoism.
There is that other type of patriotism that, no less loyal to its own country, believes in the dignity and worth of humanity, that believes in the patriotism of quiet, unadvertised, productive work and in the virtue of a sense of moral responsibility. It is sanguine enough to believe that it may yet be the destiny of a great nation to serve the cause of humanity by eliminating the hideous necessity for war. It finds its highest representative in the patriot of the type of the late Emperor Frederick the Noble, who, himself a soldier proven on the stricken field, found the courage to say, "I hate the business of blood. You have never seen war. If you had ever seen it you would not speak the word unmoved. I have seen it, and I tell you it is a man's highest duty to avoid war if by any means it can be avoided."
The issue Lamszus raises at the bar of public opinion of the civilized world is whether the patriot of this type must necessarily be either a "neuropath" or a "landless alien," as compared with him of the other sort; whether he be necessarily lacking in civic spirit, virility, and even soldierly virtues.
If the matter be of any concern, I gather that the author himself, so far from being physically a weakling, is a trained gymnast (of the type that our representatives will have to take into account at the next Olympic games) given to athletic exercises. He has also had sufficient medical training to have passed through a school of comparative anatomy. There are, therefore, no grounds for assuming offhand that he is of the nerveless type that faints at the first sight of blood; yet he writes of war with a shudder that the reader can feel in every line.
Yet—a contradiction his critics have not been slow to underline—this same man, who abhors the very thought of war, has written to the praise and glorification of war "like a professional panegyrist." While he was writing "The Human Slaughter-House," he was also engaged in etching some literary silhouettes, embodying the Dutch folk-songs, of the revolt of the Netherlands. The contrast is so striking that one or two of these "prose poems" may be worth quoting.
I
A reign of terror has dawned on the Netherlands. The Netherlands, ever proud of their freedom, are henceforward to be Spanish provinces. But the Netherlander has no mind for the honor. He cleaves obstinately to his chartered rights and to his nationality.
Then the Duke of Alva has come into the country in the Emperor's stead. He has brought in his train an army of Spanish soldiers, the gallows, and the executioner's axe. He has turned the country into a cemetery. A graveyard stillness reigns over it. For where three men foregather in the streets they smell out conspiracy in their midst. An ill-considered word, and the gallows, lowering in the background, silences the foolish mouth.
Setting their teeth, the Netherlander have to suffer it. The Spanish sword reaches the remotest village. Only in secret do they dare clench their fists. For the hangman's rack has a way of smoothing out clenched fists.
Terror lies on its chain like a wild beast. Only when it believes itself to be unobserved does it rise and sees the people lying on their knees, and hears a tortured country crying up to Heaven.
II
A star has risen against the sky of despair. The saviour of the Fatherland has been found. Egmont and Hoorn, the darlings of the people, have walked into the trap and have been beheaded in the market-place. But Orange has escaped. He has taken flight to Germany.
Orange, a clever brain! More clever than Spanish guile.
Orange, a brave heart! Braver than Spanish death and swords.
How calm was his countenance! How confident his speech! He is not the man to rush anything, to spoil anything. He will return in his own time. They are already whispering it stealthily in one another's ear. The whisper is already passing from ear to ear, increasing to joyous certainty:
He is already in our midst. As yet he is in hiding. But on the morrow his call will ring out, and his confidence glow through every man's heart.
William of Orange!
III
The call has come. They are flocking in on every road. Groups of peasants and artisans. Masters, and apprentices among them. And the greybeards have taken their old weapons from the wall.
Halberds flash in the sunlight. Old-fashioned furniture of war. But still more ardently do their eyes flash. All are of one mind. All driven on irresistibly by one single impulse.
So they pass singing along the highroads. They had almost forgotten how to sing. But now it breaks out the more joyously in the sunlight—the solemn chant.
Dumfounded, the Spanish outpost, under cover of a hedge, gapes after them. Let them run, the spies. The spell is broken. Let them hear of it till their ears ring again.
The morning sun is shining. But we are marching to death and singing:
"Happy is he who knows how to die for God and his dear Fatherland."
IV
A pleasant farm hidden away in a garden. It is springtide. The garden is a blaze of white. Apple-trees in blossom. Beneath their boughs a man and a girl are standing close intertwined.
Beyond, on the other side of the hedge, they are passing along the village street. Their friends of the village. Their hour has come.
The girl's head is resting heavily on his breast, and her arm trembling round his neck. "Stay with me, only stay one day more. The wedding was to have been tomorrow. You will never come back! And we are so young—so very young. Look, how the blossom is falling. You, too, will lie on the ground like that, so dead and white. And I shall waste away and fade."
Then he looks into her eyes—sad unto death and fearful. "So you wish me to stay behind, and the others to go and die for us?"
She shakes her head without a word, and looks up at him with a smile amid her tears. Then he kisses her, and clasps her hand in farewell.
V
The groups have assembled. They have grown from day to day, and drawn nearer and nearer to the enemy.
And now the two armies are arrayed against each other—eye to eye. On the plain yonder you can see them—the Spanish troops flashing in steel—so close that you can distinguish their yellow faces in the sunlight.
What is their quest here on foreign soil? They are selling their blood for a hireling's wage, and turning themselves into hangmen to lay a free people in chains.
A distant glow is still glowering to the heavens. The last villages through which the Spanish dogs passed. They have left smoke and ruin behind them. Mangled corpses, the wailing of children. What do the strangers care? They have come into the country for loot.
There they stand, the destroyers! Splendidly harnessed, practised in war, and used to victory. Callously, as if at their handicraft, without much shouting, or much running about and movement, the array over there falls into line. A dangerous foe in its uncanny quiet.
Over against them the Netherlanders are a people assembled at haste. They are ignorant of drill, are ignorant how they ought to fight in ranks, and on horseback. But on the issue they are staking hearts filled with indomitable hate, filled full with undying love of country.
Beggars, the Spaniards once called them. And the Beggars are mindful of their nakedness. Their fists clench. Their teeth are set. And their lips are mumbling curses and hot prayers.
VI
It came to fighting. It came to murder. Death leaped up, and raced neighing across the battlefield, until it dripped blood—until at even, blinded with blood, it fled away into the darkness.
The battle is over now. The daylight is dying behind Bergen's towers. The shadows of night are blending with the shadow of Death.
It was a glorious fight. The wrath of a people is mightier than all the guile and strategy on earth.
But the victors are exhausted. Watch fires are ablaze. They all crowd round them to comfort themselves in their warmth.
Dark figures are whispering in groups. "Ha! How they ran! Whoever was overtaken was cut down—without mercy. They will remember the day. Will they come on again? How will the sinister Emperor take it? How far does his power reach? They will come on again. A bigger army! A bigger fleet!"
Look how the stars are gleaming. The air is clear. Even now you can see the heavens opening. And the Milky Way is glimmering down to meet you.
The sound of singing rises in the distance. An old hymn. A prayer of thanks of the days of our fathers. Those nearest by take it up. The chant leaps from fire to fire. The darkling field is singing. The night is singing. A choir raising their hands to Heaven, their voices to the stars.
Lord! Grant us freedom!
Where then lies the truth? In these "prose poems" aglow with martial enthusiasm, and ringing with the soldier's spirit, or in the relentless anatomical realism of "The Human Slaughter-House"? Or are both lies—"both deliberate conscious untruths, written under the inspiration of a social democratic lawyer?"
The explanation, as Lamszus see it, lies in the condition of the times. No one, he claims, could write of the revolt of the Dutch Republics otherwise than in the brave setting of flashing eyes, glittering steel, and the stirring clash of men-at-arms. But it is equally untrue to tell of modern warfare waged with picric acid and electric wires in the same spirit. The romance and glamour of warfare in the past are grinning lies when transferred to latter-day warfare, where long-drawn fronts of flesh and blood are opposed to machines of precision and the triumphs of the chemical laboratory. The anachronism becomes nothing less than the deliberate falsification of history. Dynamite and machine-guns, not the writer, have turned the "Field of Honor" into a "Human Slaughter-House," where regiments are wiped out by pressing an electric button.
In the hideousness of these scenes of future warfare the charge of exaggeration, of painting carnage red, is easy to raise, and difficult to rebut. Lamszus does not shirk it.
"What I have written was worked out empirically. It is a sum that is, mathematically, so incontestable that no one has hitherto ventured to dispute it. For the second factor in this sum is the albuminous substance of human brain and marrow. And when we hear that in the Russo-Japanese war thousands went mad, who would care to maintain that the nervous system of the civilized mid-European is hardier and tougher than that of Asiatics and semi-civilized Russians? 'The material has become softer,' says the authority of the staff-general. What now, when the sum total of acoustic and visual stimuli, of physical and psychic shocks, to which this 'softer material' is exposed, has, with every new invention, become more destructive in quality and quantity? To find the answer to such a simple problem did not assuredly call for a mathematical genius."
With the answer before us, the question rises whether it is more patriotic to blink it, to go on pretending that war is what it used to be—a soldier's death on the field of honor, or senseless automatic slaughter by machinery. It is against this latter mechanical aspect of war that the instinct of humanity, to which Lamszus has given voice in vivid words, revolts. Does it become a man better to look, with the full sense of his moral and ethical responsibility, the hideous fact in its face, or to continue to disguise it under a veil of romance woven round the pomp and circumstance of glorious war? In this sense "The Human Slaughter-House" of Lamszus' invention stands, as the Universal Peace Congress read it, for the revolt of the spirit of humanity, the spirit of progress and evolution, against the cumulative horror of the mechanics of modern warfare.
"For just as there is no room for the uncouth monsters of primeval times, for Mastodon and Brontosaurus, on the green earth today, so little will a nation of Krupp's steel plates be able to continue to live in the community of civilized nations."
None the less, a nation of men of virile breed will, he believes, be no less prompt to take up arms in defence of its heritage of culture than Prussia was in 1813, and to fight in its defence to the last gasp. For in the War of Liberation it was not drill, but the spirit of the people that saved the country.
"Thus the people in which we have belief will be irresistible in the council of nations, and be destined before every other to lead the nations to the work for which Nature has fashioned them.... Worthless indeed is the nation that would not stake its all for its honor. The only question that remains is what the spirit of this honor be; whether the appetite of savages and barbarians, hungry for spoils, impels me, or whether moral honor, the blood-stained desecrated face of God, inspires me."
With these bold words Lamszus concludes his apologia for the brutality of "The Human Slaughter-House."
OAKLEY WILLIAMS.
[Translation.]
XIXme Congres Universel de la Paix a Geneve.
Geneve,1912.
DEAR SIR,
I have great pleasure in acquitting myself of the duty of expressing to you, in the name of "The Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.," composed of delegates of the most varied nations assembled at the World's Peace Congress, and, further, in the name of all Pacificists, our thanks for the distinguished word-picture of rare artistic originality and of gripping effectiveness of the wholesale murders of the future in "The Human Slaughter-House," for having furnished the cause of peace with a weapon of considerable importance, and for having more especially made a very valuable gift to the cause of every Pacificist.
May the blessing of its work be great!
On behalf of the Congress Commission for Education, Instruction, etc.
DR. A. WESTPHAL, Secretary.