The psychology of the day, however, was a bit too involved for these aspirants. The body politic of the nation found itself betrayed by its own platitudes. A moral frenzy began to animate the horizon. But it was the frenzy of an idea that had escaped control; an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct any longer. The idealization of itself before which the crowd had worshipped became now a Frankenstein. The virtues of America had gone to war. And the nation looked on, aghast and uncomprehending. The flattering and grandiose image of itself that the bête populaire had been creating in its law books, text books, and hymnals had suddenly stepped from its complicated mirror and was marching like a Mad Hatter to the front. A swarm of guides and interpreters had leaped to its side. They danced around it chanting its nobilities, proclaiming its grandeur. The spirit of Democracy, the Rights of Man, the One and Only God—the Golden Rule, the Thou Shalt Nots, the Seven Virtues, the Mann Act, the Hatred for All Variants of Evil,—the mythical incarnation of these and kindred illusions—the Idealization—was off for the front.
The confusion arose when the nation found itself attached as if by some gruesome umbilical cord to this crazed Idealization, off with a Tin Sword on its shoulder. And it must follow this Virtue-snorting monster. It must lie down in trenches in behalf of a Fairy Tale with which it had been shrewdly deceiving itself for a century.
But while the elocutionists fumbling for pedestals were exhorting the nation to hoist itself by its boot-straps, to become overnight a belligerent hierarchy around its God, there were others whose spirit raised an authentic battle shout. One of these was Basine.
He appeared to return to himself. The Basine he had walked away from raised itself amid the disgusts and hatreds in which it had lain abandoned. A rage gathered in his voice. Eloquence and flashing eyes were his. The amiable fuddy-duddy playing little politics in Washington became a gentleman of war.
The horizon bristled with gentlemen of war. But the terrified crowd casting about for leaders, as the draft shovelled it toward the trenches, eyed them with suspicion. There must be authentic gentlemen of war—men above suspicion. Men maddened with a desire to fight and destroy were wanted. Basine was one of these. His tirades against the enemy left nothing in doubt. They were not concerned with idealisms. The enemy must be destroyed, he began to cry, or else it would destroy civilization.
Huns, he cried, vandals and scoundrels. Gorillas, demons, soulless monsters. His phrases drew frightful caricatures of the enemy. His orations were among the few that stirred terror. The Germans were not enemies of an ideal—not a rabble of Nietzsches at theological grips with a rabble of Christs. They were Huns, said Basine, barbarians, fiends, hacking children to pieces, pillaging, raping, destroying.
This was a language the nation understood. It contained in it the inspiration to heroism and sacrifice. Out of it arose the grisly cartoon which awakened fear. Terrified by the possibilities of Hun domination and massacres, the crowd patriotically bared its bosom to the lesser horror—war. It marched forth behind its idiot Idealization not to defend that absurdity but to save itself from the clutches of massacring savages.
The energies which came to life abruptly in Basine focused into a strange passion against the Germans. He was vicious, intolerant, unscrupulous in his denunciations. This established him instantly as a leader.
The crowd, casting about for leaders, seized upon men more terrified than themselves. And upon these abject ones who raved and howled from the pulpit, stage and press, they heaped rewards and canonizations.
There was one phase of Basine's hatred that offered a curious explanation. From the beginning he devoted himself to describing the hideous immorality of the Huns. He loaned himself passionately to all rumors celebrating the wholesale rape of women committed by the invaders of Belgium. Deportations, well-poisonings, child-murders figured extensively in his eloquence. But gradually he appeared to concentrate upon what he called the ultimate horror—"fair Europe overrun by this horde of seducers and immoral blackguards." Schroder was a German.