XIV
ON 12th October, President Wilson’s reply to the German peace plea was made known to us, and its brief dignity, its firm, just, and benevolent strength, stirred every American heart with pride, and awoke among the Belgians enthusiasm only kept with difficulty within the limits their rulers ordained. Peace then, for the first time, began to be spoken of as a still vague but now conceivable possibility. The poor were eager for it at almost any price—that is, the uneducated and uncomprehending poor. The thoughtful wanted it that further carnage might be checked; but those whose wounds were too deep for forgetting, whose life-interest had been buried in some innocent grave, cried: “They shall not have peace until they are on their knees!” And to the argument that such satisfaction could only be attained at cost of Belgium’s total destruction the unhesitating reply came “Qu’importe? France has sacrificed her cities, why should not we? Better see even Brussels razed to the ground, than not achieve to the full that aim for which we have already sacrificed so much!”
Their determination to go on was not that of Germany, impelled by greed and pride; but desire to risk all in order to be rid for ever of an unscrupulous neighbour; to eradicate the smallest trace of that neighbour’s control, and see it finally broken. This, more even than a righteous and excusable desire for vengeance, was their reason for wishing to continue a conflict that had so injured them, while Germany’s object was merely to avoid punishment and the loss of her gains!
Those without work, without hope or ambition, the poor, famished, soup-kitchen folk, would not believe that the Germans really wanted peace: “There is a trick under it; we shall wait and see!” was all their comment. And it seemed as though theirs was the voice of prophecy when news of Prince Max von Baden’s famous and seemingly treacherous letter reached us. How this affected the outer world we had no means of judging, but it caused in Brussels mingled anger and fear.
In those days the feeling was very high and enthusiastic for America. “Ce sont les Américains qui nous out sauvés!” was the popular sentiment, although America’s deeds at the front were never given in our papers. America, according to the German censorship, was even more negligible than England; only the French armies were allowed a certain amount of credit in regard to the “victorious alteration of our front” which the puissances centrales were so often obliged to acknowledge in those later days. People, nevertheless, were not so intoxicated by present events as to forget the first thrilling days, when Belgium alone held back that overwhelming tide, and sowed the seed of the victory now approaching; nor those later ones when France and England so marvellously achieved the real, the all-important defeat of Prussia at the Marne. Nor were those still more terrible days forgotten, following Russia’s withdrawal—those weeks of anguish when new hordes of Germans rushed through Brussels toward the front, and wiped out all the Allied advances we had been following so patiently, so eagerly, step by step over the torn and blood-soaked regions of France. That period was more appalling even than that of the first onslaught, more annihilating to hope. Looking back on it, recalling the almost crazing tension of anxiety, the reigning conviction that Germany was rushing on to conquest, the second stand before Paris, that wonderful, all-glorious victory, shines out as more brilliant, more soul-thrilling, even than the first. And yet of the imperishable, recklessly heroic charge of the American marines before Chateau-Thierry, that outburst of fresh and determined energy, which refired the Allies and helped once and for all to turn the tide of war, we knew nothing until after the Allied troops had entered Brussels. We knew only that the enemy was stronger both in numbers and in his determination to win at any cost, despite the hypocritical peace offer that gave him excuse to cry: “You will not have peace on our terms? Then bear the consequences!” and to make those consequences—already prepared—throw into shadow all the horrors of his first Massenschlacht.
No, glorious England, France, and Belgium! no plea of overwhelming numbers, no whine of enforced surrender before the entire world, can rob you of laurels won in the first awful years—that vast, unequalled victory which America’s generous hand helped at the critical moment to assure you!
The realization that victory was in sight came upon us in Brussels with the dazing suddenness of a comet in a starless night. The first evidence of Germany’s collapse was the sudden and astonishing independence of soldiers toward their superiors. We wondered at this for a day or two; then the truth burst on us with an avalanche of disbanded troops, from the étape regions, who, flinging off all control, arrived in groups of twenty, more or less. No red flag could be seen among them, nothing explained their strange advent save their look of desperate weariness. So quietly they came that at first everyone believed they were returning on furlough, bearing with them booty seized on the way from the houses and farms of fugitives. Until the time when their increasing numbers attracted even the puzzled attention of children, there was no relaxation of the iron hand.
Even when the red flag of rebellion was glaring defiance of the Kaiser and his flatterers, the daily papers offered us their usual official lies. William the Second’s “invincible armies” were represented as still resisting the world; the Allies had been checked at this point or that; and the Belgians again were called upon to consider the dire consequences to themselves and their country of continuation of the war. And this when the war was virtually ended!