GERMAN AND FRENCH

I AM German, they say, and he is French. But we met at school in old Louvain, where now smoke blows through the empty sockets of ruined walls, and we knew no nations.

What to us were states, traditions, flags, clashing patriotisms, and all the artificialities of pride that divide men?

We loved. One day by the low fence, where the honeysuckle bloomed, he suddenly took my hand, and the divine fire invaded me; I was blind, deaf, dumb with joy.

When he kissed me my heart went out through my lips. And his heart entered into me. We were no more German, French; we had become as gods.

We were married and went to live in my native town. When our boy came, beautiful, heavenly bright, he was not French, he was not German, he was a child of God, who is of no nation.

Now I am with my parents in Dusseldorf. My lover is in the French trenches.

All day long I hear talk of statecraft, of German destiny, of English cunning, of French revenge. What does it mean to me, sitting in my corner knitting, seeing in my mind ever that burning vision of my lover?

God! I cannot bear it. Sometimes I see him lying wounded, his sweet hair matted with blood; that mouth, those dear lips I would die to kiss again, crushed hideously.

Sometimes at night I hear him cry as he lies in a forgotten field; he is burning with fever and thirst; he calls my name; I start up shrieking, till my mother comes and puts me again to bed.

My boy, my lover, so strong, so full of undaunted cheer, so loyal, so deeply passionate to me to me, now a woman no more, but a living moan, a quivering heartbreak!

I hear them talk and talk, father and the neighbors. They talk of nations.

It seems to me as if they were not human beings, but ghouls. The things they talk of are dead and damned.

It is as if I lived on the edge of the cesspool of the past. From it come the stinking vapors of dead ideas. Oh, how they sicken me! Monarchies, nations, races, military glory,

patriotic enthusiasms, kill-lust-how they stew and rot and send up poison gases!

I am smothering. I shall go mad. They do not understand me here.

I am but one of a hundred thousand women choked, drowned in the filthy vats of mediævalism.

I cannot write to him, my love. I can get no news, nor give.

Merciful Jesus! If he is still alive make him know that I love him so that every day is night to me and every night a ghastly day.

Rulers, statesmen, I register my curse against you at the judgment day. Need ye to have stepped on my heart to mount your ambitions?

My lover, my boy, my husband! God brought us together and said: "Ye are both human."

Hell, hell, hell separated us and said: "You are French. You are German."

Thursday, October 22, 1914.

A TWENTIETH CENTURY
MACHIAVELLI

MANY people in this country will be surprised to learn that there are those who do not look upon war as a calamity, but believe that it does good. A very interesting, also amazing, book is "Germany and the Next War," written by a German, F. von Bernhardi, and published in English by Longmans, Green and Company.

Bernhardi may be called the modern Machiavelli. He calmly assumes that anything like personal morality has no place in the councils of states; and argues grandly upon the necessity of human butchery in order to advance culture, ideals, and all great vir

tues.

I can do no better than to make some literal quotations from his book, which might have been written by the devil himself.

"War," he assures us, "is an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized na

tion finds the highest expression of vitality." It is to be hoped that the people of Antwerp appreciate this.

"The desire for peace has rendered most civilized nations anæmic and marks a decay of spirit. This aspiration is directly antagonistic to the great universal laws which rule all life."

"War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development would follow, which excludes all advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. 'War is the father of all things,' said Heraclitus."

In other words, there can be no racial progress unless we get out and shoot each other every so often.

Among nations, he says, "right is respected so far only as it is compatible with advantage." This is pure Machiavellianism.

Nothing but war can "secure to the true elements of progress the ascendency over the spirits of corruption and decay."

"Might is the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war." Hence, duelling is right, and trial by fire, doubtless.

War alone develops the ideal, he holds.