Face to Face with Kaiserism

by James W. Gerard

I did not sit next to Briand as I ranked after the Ambassadors accredited to France, but after lunch I sat alone with him before the fire in one of the large and beautiful salons and there we had a long talk, as, naturally, he wanted to know about the situation in Germany. He impressed me as a strong man, with the vigour of an orator, a man of temperament, a man endowed by nature to become a leader of the French—as the French were before the war.

Lord Esher, at the request of General Lyautey, then at the head of the military force of France, took me to see that General. I had to wait for him some time, as he was appearing before a committee of the Chamber of the Senate. His inability to agree with the Chamber caused his resignation not long afterwards.

I was struck in France by the fact that the leaders, civil, military and naval, seemed older than those in similar positions in other countries.

The present Premier, Clemenceau, is an example of this fondness of the French for government by old men. Clemenceau is seventy-six years old, but is a vigorous fighter.

Mrs. Gerard and I lunched with Gabriel Hanotaux and his attractive wife at their home. Cambon was there, and Ribot, since become Premier of France, a good old man; also the Secretary of the Navy and several learned French philosophers and members of the Academy and one of the heads of the Credit Lyonnais, perhaps the greatest financial institution of France.

War, war—who could talk of anything else? Hanotaux said that in our time we had been unusually fortunate, unusually free from war, that there was underneath France, underneath even the fair city of Paris, under the smiling sunlit fields, another France, a France of caves and catacombs, excavated by the poor people, the plain people who, during the One Hundred Years' War, had sought in marching armies, the far-riding plunderers and the depths of the earth refuge from the harassing, camp followers, the roving bands of "White Companies," the robber barons who, English and French, Gascon and Norman, harried the lands of France.

I said that I had heard the statement made, and there seemed no reason to doubt it, that since the birth of Christ the world has only in one year out of every thirteen enjoyed a rest from war.

Mr. Fabre-Luce, Vice-President of the Credit Lyonnais, told us of an interesting book written by a Russian and published before the war which predicted much that has happened in this war with almost the foresight of a Cassandra. I was so impressed that I secured a copy.

This book, "The Future War," by Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch, counsellor of the Russian Empire, and published in 1892, had so great an effect on the Czar of Russia that it was the reading of it which impelled him to call the Peace Conference at The Hague. In the course of his book the author explains that it is impossible for the Powers to continue longer in the path of armaments and that they ought to look each other in the face and demand where these great armaments and this extension of forces are conducting them. He writes:

"How can one believe it possible to solve international questions by means of the veritable cataclysm which will constitute, with the present means of destruction, war waged between the five great Powers, by ten millions of soldiers?... In this war explosives so powerful will be employed that every grouping of troops on the flat country or even under the protection of fortifications will become almost impossible and that, therefore, the preparations of this character made in expectation of the war will become useless....