LXXIX
London October 6, 1918
It is Sunday morning. As I write the newsboys in the Strand are calling an extra-special. Before entering the Savoy for lunch I purchased a copy, which I read as I sat in the great gold and crimson lounge while I waited for a table. You know what the Savoy is like, crowded with actresses, would-be-taken-for actresses, officers on leave, chaps hobbling out of hospitals like myself, and a sprinkling of Jews with huge noses and a magnificent disregard for the fact that they are not in khaki. The orchestra was being kept up to the right pitch of frenzy in their efforts by a gentleman who is reported to get in more extra beats to the minute than any other person of his colour in London. The feet of the girls tripped into an unconscious one-step as they entered, as though they acted independently of their owners. At the end of the rather pompous hall, with its false air of being too respectable for naughtiness, lay the terrace and beyond that the Thames, benevolent and drowsy in the October sunshine. Everything was gay and normal as though nothing except the war had happened or would ever happen. I should like Berlin to have seen us—Berlin which waited breathless for the detonation of the latest Big Bertha which she had fired on the world.
I opened my paper. Across the top of it, in one-inch type headlines, ran the message:
GERMANY PLEADS FOR PEACE
I am sorry to have to disappoint Germany, but the truth is I didn't blink an eyelid or turn a hair. I was scarcely mildly interested. I gazed round the crowd; their eyelids had not blinked and their hair had not turned. The Kaiser's Big Bertha of peace had not roused them; she must have fired a dud. Everyone looked quite contented and animated, as if the war was going to last for ever.
My eye slipped down the two columns of close printing in which the mercy of the All Highest was revealed to the world. I learnt that the All Highest's new Imperial Chancellor was celebrating his new office by playing a little trick on his own credulity; he was pretending that by Christmas Germany would have sponged out all her debts of infamy with words. Prince Max of Baden was in such a hurry to bring good-will upon earth that he had cabled to President Wilson proposals for a lasting peace; he had gone to this trouble and expense not because of anything that was happening on the Western Front, but solely “in the interests of suffering humanity.” Glancing at a parallel column I read words which would have led me to doubt the sincerity of any one less august: “Germans Defeated in All-day Battle. Tanks do Great Execution among Hun Infantry. 1000 Prisoners Taken.”
Then I turned back to see what this spokesman of a nation of humanitarians had to say for himself. I learnt that Germany had always been keen on the League of Nations: that she was anxious, as she had always been anxious, to rehabilitate Belgium; that her armies were still invincible, and that the Western Front was still unbroken; that the Kaiser was God's latest revelation of His own perfection and His magnanimous shadow upon earth.
Liars! Blasphemous liars! How can one treat with a nation which has not even the sense to make its shamming decent and plausible? On the Western Front to-day in their ignominious retreat the Germans are showing their ancient ferocity for destruction. I know, for I have just come from before Cambrai. Cities are being levelled before they make their exit; civilian populations are being carried away captive; trains piled high with loot precede their departure; they leave behind them the desolation of death. While with “incomparable heroism” their armies are executing these brutalities, their Chancellor recalls us to a lost humanity and presupposes that we shall accept his professions at their face value.