An unexpected movement followed. Most of the foreign diplomats and soldiers pressed round the Royal throne, and paid homage to both spiritual and temporal power by kissing first the crucifix and then the Monarch’s hand.
This gesture was neither premeditated nor prompted by a spirit of Erastianism. It was the act of men under the influence of deep emotion. Something had touched their hearts; something, perhaps, which brought back memories of boyhood, when belief was ready, and young imaginations glowed, and youth was vowed to noble needs; something which stirred feelings numbed by contact with worldliness and cruelty on life’s rough way; something still fragrant and redolent of innocence, which they had lost long since and found awhile.
To the peasant soldiers, the music, the incense and the vestments combined to make a beatific vision, a light to those who walked in darkness, and whose simple faith was strong and real. They believed implicitly in the second advent of a man who had been, and would be again—Wonderful, a Counsellor, a Good Shepherd, and a Prince of Peace. They had known sorrow and defeat, the enemy was in their land, famine and pestilence were ravaging their homes, but they were soldiers of the Cross and undismayed. More battles would be fought, battles without the pomp and circumstance of those in theatres less remote. The last heroic stand at Marasesti[39] would be made by humble men, who, this night throughout Moldavia, were met together for a festival of their Church, not to sing songs of lamentation, but to cry Hallelujah and Hosanna, to tell the joyful tidings—“Christ is risen.”
CHAPTER XIV
“Westerners” and “Easterners”
For many years before the “Great World War,” the German Army had been the most formidable fighting machine in existence. It had filled professional soldiers in all countries with envy and admiration, as the supreme expression of a warlike and disciplined race.
When the war began the Allied Armies were unprepared, and were unable to withstand an offensive which was a triumph of scientific organization and almost achieved complete success. The partial success of this first German offensive had two important results: it carried the war on the Western Front into French and Belgian territory, and more than confirmed the worst fears of Allied military experts as to the efficiency of the German Army.
After the Battle of the Marne, a mood of extravagant optimism prevailed. One British general prophesied in September, 1914, that by the end of March, 1915, the Russians would be on the Oder and the French and British on the Rhine. With the advent of trench warfare on the Western Front and the retreat of the Russians in East Prussia and Poland, the outlook became less rosy, and the Allies settled down to a form of war which was to last, with slight variations, until the armistice.
Generally speaking, this form of war involved the subordination of Policy to Grand Tactics. Policy had for its object the protection of vital interests, more especially in the East, and aimed at securing the co-operation of neutral States with a view to strengthening the Alliance. Grand Tactics demanded the sacrifice of every consideration to ensuring victory on the Western Front. The failure of the expedition to the Dardanelles put statesmen, for a time at least, at the mercy of professional soldiers, of whom the vast majority, both French and British, were so-called “Westerners.”