Up and Down

by E. F. Benson

[FEBRUARY, 1917]

Germany has proposed a toast. She drinks (Hoch!) to the freedom of the seas. And she couples with it the freedom (of herself) to torpedo from her submarines any vessel, neutral or belligerent, at sight, and without warning.

So now at last we know what the freedom of the seas means. The seas are to be free in precisely the sense that Belgium is free, and Germany is free to commit murder on them.

This declaration on the part of Germany was followed three days later by a declaration on the part of the United States. Diplomatic relations have been instantly severed, and President Wilson only waits for a "clear overt act" of hostility on the part of Germany to declare war.

America has declared her mind with regard to the freedom of the seas, and that abominable toast has led to the severance of diplomatic relations between her and Germany. Count Bernstorff has been dismissed, and in Berlin Mr. Gerard has asked for his passports. There is no possible shadow of doubt what that means, for we all remember August 4th, 1914, when we refused to discuss the over-running of Belgium by Germany. War followed instantly and automatically. "You shan't do that," was the equivalent of "If you do, we fight." It is precisely the same position between America and Germany now. Germany will torpedo neutrals at sight, just as Germany would overrun Belgium. The rest follows. Q.E.D.

But it is impossible to overstate the relief with which England has hailed this unmistakable word on the part of the United States. Many people have said: "What can America do if she does come in?" But that was not really the point. Of course she will do, as a matter of fact, a tremendous lot. She will finance our Allies; she is rich, beyond all dreams of financiers, with the profits she has reaped from the war, and the loans she will float will eclipse into shadow all that England has already done in that regard. "But what else?" ask the sceptics. "What of her army? She has no army." Nor for that matter had England when the war began. But even the sceptics cannot deny the immense value of her fleet. In the matter of torpedo-boats and of light craft generally, which we so sorely need for the hunting down of those great-hearted champions of the freedom of the seas, the German submarines, she can double our weapons, or, as the more enthusiastic say, she can more than double them. All the Government munition factories will be working like ours, day and night; she may even bring in conscription; she will devote to the cause of her Allies the million inventive brains with which she teems. This is just a little part of what America could have done, when first the Belgian Treaty was torn over, and it is just a little part of what America will do now.

But all that she can do, as I said, is beside the point. The point is, not what America can do, but what America is. Now she has shown what she is, a nation which will not suffer wrong and robbery and piracy. The disappointments of the past, with regard to her, are wiped off. She was remote from Europe, and remote from her was the wrong done to Belgium.... There is no need now to recount the tale of outrages that did not exhaust her patience. She waited—wisely, we are willing to believe—until she was ready, until the President knew that he had the country behind him, and until some outrage of the laws of man and of God became intolerable. It has now become intolerable to her, and if she is willing to clasp the hands of those who once doubted her, and now see how wrong it was to doubt, a myriad of hands are here held out for her grasping.

The splendour of this, its late winter sunrise, has rendered quite colourless things that in time of peace would have filled the columns of every newspaper, and engrossed every thought of its readers. A plot, unequalled since the days of the Borgias, has come to light, the object of which was to kill the Prime Minister by means of poisoned arrows, or of poisoned thorns in the inside of the sole of his boot. Never was there so picturesque an abomination. The poison employed was to be that Indian secretion of deadly herbs called curare, a prick of which produces a fatal result. A party of desperate women, opposed to conscription, invoked the aid of a conscripted chemist, and Borgianism, full-fledged, flared to life again in the twentieth century, with a setting of Downing Street and the golf-links at Walton Heath. To the student of criminology the Crippen affair should have faded like the breath on a frosty morning, compared with the scheme of this staggering plot. But with this Western sunrise over America to occupy our public minds, no one (except, I suppose, the counsel in the case and the prisoners) gave two thoughts to this anachronistic episode. And there was the Victory War Loan and National Service as well.

But though the public mind of any individual can be satiated with sensation, my experience is that the private mind "carries on" much the same as usual. If the trump of the Last Judgment was to sound to-morrow morning, tearing us from our sleep, and summoning us out to Hyde Park or some other open space, I verily believe that we should all look up at the sky that was vanishing like a burning scroll, and consider the advisability of taking an umbrella, or of putting on a coat. Little things do not, in times of the greatest excitement, at all cease to concern us; the big thing absorbs a certain part of our faculties, and when it has annexed these, it cannot claim the dominion of little things as well. And for this reason, I suppose, I do not much attend to the Borgia plot, since my public sympathies are so inflamed with America; but when work is done (or shuffled somehow away, to be attended to to-morrow) I fly on the wings of the Tube to Regent's Park, and, once again, ridiculously concern myself with the marks that it is possible to make on ice with a pair of skates, used one at a time (unless you are so debased as to study grape-vines). There is a club which has its quarters in that park, which in summer is called the Toxophilite, and in winter "The Skating Club" ("The" as opposed to all other skating clubs), and to the ice provided there on the ground where in summer enthusiastic archers fit their winged arrows to yew-wood bows, we recapture the legitimate joys of winter. Admirals and Generals, individuals of private and public importance, all skulk up there with discreet black bags, which look as if they might hold dispatches, but really hold skates, and cast off Black Care, and cast themselves onto the ice. An unprecedented Three Weeks (quite as unprecedented as those of that amorous volume) have been vouchsafed us, and day after day, mindful of the fickleness of frost in our sub-tropical climate, we have compounded with our consciences, when they reminded us that it was time to go back to work, on the plea that skating was so scarce, and that in all probability the frost would be gone to-morrow. To snatch a pleasure that seldom comes within reach always gives a zest to the enjoyment of it, and we have snatched three weeks of this, under the perpetual stimulus of imagining that each day would be the last. Indeed, it has been a return to the Glacial Age, when we must suppose there was skating all the year round. Probably that was why there were no wars, as far as we can ascertain, in that pacific epoch of history. Everyone was so intent on skating and avoiding collisions with the mammoths (who must rather have spoiled the ice) that he couldn't find enough superfluous energy to quarrel with his fellows. You have to lash yourself up, and be lashed up in order to quarrel, and you are too busy for that when there is skating.... Was it to the Glacial Age that the hymn referred, which to my childish ears ran like this:

That war shall be no more;
And lusto, pression, crime
Shall flee thy face before.