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The tragedy of Rheims has been repeated again and again—at Soissons, at Arras, at Ypres, in every town and village throughout that blackened band of invaded France from the Vosges to the sea. Also the tragedy of exiled and imprisoned country folk, of ruined farms and houses, of mere destruction.
The wounds of France are so many, the outward physical bleeding of the land is so vast, that volumes have been written already as the record. Very little can be said or written about another wound,—the lives of those in the invaded provinces behind the German lines,—for almost nothing is known as to what has happened there, what is going on now. A word now and then comes from that dead, no man's land; a rare fugitive escapes from the conqueror's hand. The military rule forbids any correspondence through neutrals, as is permitted prisoners of war, to those held "behind the lines." The inhabitants are kept as prisoners. Worse, they have been used at certain places along the front as bucklers against the fire of their countrymen—in a quarry near Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel. It is known that heavy imposts are laid upon them, as at Lille, and that the invader is exploiting this richest part of France's industrial territory. This last wound is, perhaps, the most serious of all for France, in this modern, machine war. Latterly rumor has it that the treatment of the inhabitants imprisoned behind the German lines has become less rigorous, because, as a French general explained,—"They hope to make peace with us—quelle sale race!"
These wounds are still bleeding. They cannot be ignored. They, as well as the death, suffering, and agony of the long trench combat, make the faces of the French tense, silent. "To think that they are still here after a whole year since this happened!" a young Frenchman exclaimed in bitterness of soul as we looked out over the thickly scattered graves in the fields around Bercy. To him it was as if a crazed and drunken marauder had taken possession of his house, burned a part of it, and still caroused in another wing. The unforgettable, unforgivable wounds of France!
The French, so clear-seeing, so reasonable even about their own tragedies, are bitter to the soul when they think of the brutality done to their "douce France." To the French, quite as much as to the Bryanited American, war is a senseless, inhuman thing; but it becomes direfully necessary when the home has been burned and laid waste. The Gallic spirit cannot understand that spirit of malevolent destruction which vengefully wreaks its spite against defenseless and inanimate works of age to be reverenced, of art to be loved. There are certain scrupulosities of soul in the Latin that divide him from his enemy, more effectually than a thousand years of life and an entire world of space.
III
The Barbarian
The barbarian, as the Greeks used the word, was not necessarily a person or a people without civilization. Indeed, certain ancient peoples known as barbarians had a high degree of luxury, civilization. The Persians under the barbarian Xerxes were probably quite the equals in the mechanics of civilization of the Greeks, and the Egyptians could lay claim to a large amount of what even the Greeks considered culture. The barbarian was a person or a nation without a spiritual sense in his values. The barbarian was often strong, able, intelligent, "organized" as we say, but he was incapable of self-government: the barbarian nations were ruled despotically. Their position in the world depended upon the force and the ability of the particular despot who got control of their destinies. The barbarian peoples were often crude in what is called fine art. They neither believed in nor practiced those amenities of daily life which express themselves superficially in manners, more deeply in sensitive inhibitions, nor those amenities of the soul which are known as honor, justice, mercy. The barbarian despised as soft and degenerate such persons as permitted themselves to be trammeled in their conduct by non-utilitarian considerations. In his primitive state the barbarian's instinct was to destroy what he could not understand; as he became more sophisticated, his instinct was to imitate what he could not create.
What, above all, the barbarian cannot appreciate is the suave mean of life, the ideal of individual human excellence, of a tempered social control, the liberty of the individual within the fewest possible restrictions to work out his own scheme of existence, his own civilization. For the barbarian mind recognizes only two sorts of beings—the master and the slave. One is a tyrant and the other is a docile imitation of manhood. The barbarian never totally dies from the world. In every race, in every nation, in every community fine examples of the barbarian instinct, the barbarian philosophy of existence can be found. I have known personally a great many barbarians,—American life is full of them,—and my knowledge of them, of their strengths and their limitations, has given me my understanding of the modern German as manifested in this world war.
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