Perhaps I had grown negligent of modern signs and portents, or the web of Diplomacy had veiled them from all but privileged eyes.... Now I saw, looming on the eastern horizon, a cloud in the shape of a man's clenched fist in a gauntleted glove of mail.
For days previously the frames of the open windows that look across the garden seaward, had leaped and rattled in answer to the incessant thud-thudding of big naval guns at sea. One opal dawn showed the grim shapes of super-Dreadnoughts, Dreadnoughts, pre-Dreadnoughts and war-cruisers, strung out in battle-line along the glittering-green line of the horizon, escorted by a flotilla of destroyers and a school of submarines. Night fell, and sea, land, and sky alternately whitened and blotted in the wheeling ray of the searchlights. Electric balls dumbly gibbered in Admiralty Secret Code. Gulls cradled on the glassy waters of the Channel must have been roused by outbursts of full-throated British cheering, and the crash of the Fleet bands striking into the National Anthem, as the sealed orders of the Supreme Admiral were signalled from the Flagship commanding the Southern Fleet. No sound reached us ashore but the hush of the waves, the whisper of the night-wind, and the plaintive ululation of the mousing owls on Muttersmoor. Yet what we saw that night was the awakening of Great Britain to the knowledge that her greatness is not past and gone.
Since then, the menacing cloud in the east has assumed solidity. The mailed fist has fallen, imprinting Ruin on the soil of a neutral country, demolishing the matchless heirlooms of Art and the priceless treasures of Literature, bringing down in gray fragments the glories of Gothic architecture, everywhere destroying the Temple of God and shattering the House of Life. The galleries and cabinets of noble and burgher, the treasure-houses of a nation are plundered.
We have lived to see the War of Nations. We are in it: fighting as our Allies of Belgium, France, and Russia are fighting; for racial name, national existence, social independence, and freedom of bodies and souls. And this being so, I see no cause to blot a line that I have written. For the Germany of 1870 was not the Germany of 1914. The New Spirit of Teutonism had not shown itself in those dead days I have tried to vivify.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was waged sternly and mercilessly, but not in defiance of the Rules that govern the Great Game. Treaties were held as something more sacred than scraps of paper. Blood was lavishly poured out, gold relentlessly wrung from the coffers of a vanquished and impoverished State. Things were done—as in the instances of Bazeilles and Châteaudun that made the world shudder, but not with the sickness of mortal loathing. Kings and nobles made War like noblemen and Kings.
Yet that great Minister whose prodigious labor reared up stone by stone the German Empire was, unless biographers have lied, haunted and obsessed in his declining days by remorse of conscience and terrors of the soul. "But for me," he is reported to have said, "three great wars would not have been made, nor would eight hundred thousand of my fellow men have died by violence. Now, for all that I have to answer before Almighty God!" ... Could the relentless exponent of the fierce gospel of blood and iron have foreseen the imminent, approaching disintegration of his colossal life-work, under the hands of his successors—might he have known what Dead Sea fruit of ashes and bitterness his fatal creed, grafted upon the oak of Germany, was fated to bring forth—he would have drunk ere death of the crimson lees of the Cup of Judgment; he would have seen in the shape of his pupil the grotesque, distorted image of himself.
RICHARD DEHAN.
SOUTH DEVON, November, 1914.
THE MAN OF IRON