Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy—and what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "for ever and ever." But no words fill the abyss of it—nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of man. There it was—and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries—even now—tries to get something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that that will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and ever—and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally, by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this hour begun: how can't they be as a tremendous force fighting on the side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too somehow—though I don't know why, practically—of how nothing conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great art-loving country!
...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present, but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your Englishry—it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first signal to him again—and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you, dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old
H. J.
To Mrs. T. S. Perry.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
September 22nd, 1914.
My dear Lilla,
Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think, we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on, disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer, is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I couldn't talk—and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is intensely with us—and that the appalling and crowning horror of the persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.