Compared to disarmament, all remaining questions whatsoever affecting peace are simple and secondary. Indemnities for France or Russia, or both, a Polish Kingdom, a Balkan United States, the precise number of nations into which Austria-Hungary is to be shattered, the ownership of the east coast of the Adriatic, even the reparation of the infamy by which Denmark was robbed of Schleswig-Holstein—what are these but favorable ground for the art of compromise? The vital points, at any rate for us Westerners, are only three: Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and disarmament. * * * Stay, there is another. It is vital to Great Britain's reputation that she should accept nothing—neither indemnity, nor colonies; not a single pound, not a single square mile.
Many persons, I gather, find it hard to believe that Prussia will ever admit that she is beaten or consent to her own humiliation. Naturally her conduct will depend upon the degree to which she is beaten. She has admitted defeat and swallowed the leek before, though it is a long time ago. Meanwhile she has forgotten, and her opponents seem to have forgotten also, that though her name is Prussia she is subject to the limitations of the human race. Out of her prodigious score off little Denmark, her thrashing of Austria—a country which never wins a war—and her victory over France, there grew a legend that Prussia, and therefore Germany, was not as other nations. This legend is contrary to fact. Every nation must yield to force—here, indeed, is Germany's contribution to our common knowledge.
If in July, 1870, it had been prophesied that France would give up Alsace-Lorraine and pay two hundred millions to get rid of a foreign army of occupation, France would have protested that she would fight to the last man and to the last franc first. But nations don't do these things. If Germany won the present war and fulfilled her dream of establishing an army in this island, we should yield, and we should submit to her terms, we who have never been beaten save by our own colonies—that is a scientific certainty. And Germany's terms would not be amusing; in their terribleness they would outrun our poor Anglo-Saxon imagination. Similarly, if Germany is beaten, she will bow the head, and to precisely the extent to which she is walloped. We need not worry about that. Were she recalcitrant we need not even murmur in her ear: "What would you have extorted if you'd won?" A gesture of the still uplifted sword would suffice to convince her that facts are facts.
Assuming that the tide turns not again, the chances of a thorough, workmanlike common sense peace can only be imperiled by one thing—the deep desire of France and of Belgium for repose and recuperation. We in England do not know what war is. We have not lived in hell. Our plains have not been devastated, nor our women and children shot, nor our ears deafened by the boom of cannon, nor our cathedrals shelled, nor our land turned into a vast and bloody hospital; and we have not experienced the appalling terror and shame of the foe's absolute dominion in our streets and lanes. We have suffered; we shall suffer; but our suffering is nought and less than nought weighed against the suffering on the Continent. Why, in the midst of a war of unparalleled horror, we grumble if a train is late! We can talk calmly of fighting Germany to a stand-still, even if the job takes two years, and it behooves us to talk so, and to prepare for the task; and for myself I am convinced that we could make good the word. But France and Belgium will not use that tone, if Russia does. Once the German armies are across the frontiers, the instinctive pressure in favor of peace would be enormous, and considerations of the distant future, of the welfare of our descendants and the progress of mankind, would count little in the scale. In that moment, if it happily comes, our part and Russia's would be to sustain and encourage and salve the supreme victims of fate. A tremendous factor in our favor would be the exhaustion of Germany; and the measure of our power and of the fear we inspire is the furious intensity of Germany's anger against our inconvenient selves. Without us the war could not last beyond the end of this year, and the peace would be unsatisfactory.
And even with us, insisting on our own terms of reconciliation, I do not see how it can last over six months more on anything like the present scale, for the Kaiser, despite his kinship with Deity, can neither create men nor extract gold coins out of an empty hat. Military arguments, in Germany as elsewhere, hold good only for a certain period.
Barrie at Bay: Which Was Brown?
An Interview on the War.
From The New York Times, Oct. 1, 1914.
As our reporter entered Sir James Barrie's hotel room by one door, the next door softly closed. "I was alone," writes our reporter. "I sprang into the corridor and had just time to see him fling himself down the elevator. Then I understood what he had meant when he said on the telephone that he would be ready for me at 10:30.