Maurice Maeterlinck - The Wrack of the Storm
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Maurice Maeterlinck >> The Wrack of the Storm
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You are as familiar with this truth as I am. At the moment when her
soil was invaded, Belgium numbered seven million seven hundred
thousand inhabitants. It is estimated that between two hundred and
fifty and three hundred thousand have perished in battle or massacre,
or as the result of misery and privation; and I am not speaking of the
infant children, the sacrifice of whom, owing to the dearth of milk,
has, it appears, been frightful. Five or six hundred thousand
unfortunates have fled to Holland, France or England. There remain
therefore in the country nearly seven million inhabitants; and more
than half of these seven millions are living almost exclusively on
American charity. In what is above all an industrial country,
producing normally, in time of peace, less than a third part of the
wheat necessary for home consumption, the enemy has systematically
requisitioned everything, carried off everything, for the upkeep of
his armies, and has sent into Germany what he could not consume on the
spot. The result of so monstrous a proceeding may readily be divined:
on all that soil, once so happy and so rich, to-day taxed and pillaged
and pillaged again, ravaged and devastated by fire and the sword,
there is nothing left. And the situation of suffering Belgium is so
cruelly paradoxical that her best friends, her dearest allies, even
those whom she has saved, are powerless to succour her. Isolated as
she is from the rest of the world, she would have starved even though
nothing had been taken from her. Now she has been despoiled of all
that she possessed, while France and England can send her neither
money nor provisions, for they would fall into the hands of those
engaged in torturing her, so much so that every attempt on their part
to alleviate her sufferings would but retard her deliverance still
further. Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate
tragedy? It is a fact that in the midst of this war we are constantly
finding ourselves confronted with events such as history hitherto has
never beheld. A people resembling an enormous beast of prey, in order
to punish a loyalty and heroism which, if it retained the slightest
notion of justice and injustice, the smallest sense of human dignity
and honour, it ought to worship on its knees: this vast predatory race
stealthily resolved to exterminate an inoffensive little nation whose
soul it felt was too great to be enslaved or reduced to the semblance
of its conqueror's. It was on the point of succeeding, amid the
silence, the impotence, or the terror of the world, when from beyond
the Atlantic a generous nation took that heroic little people under
its protection. It understood that what was involved was not merely an
act of justice and elementary pity, but also and more particularly a
higher duty towards the morality and the eternal conscience of
mankind. Thanks to this great nation's intervention, it will not be
said, in the days to come, that justice, loyalty, honesty and heroism
are no more than dangerous illusions and a fool's bargain, or that
evil must necessarily, at all times and places, conquer whenever it is
backed by force, or that the only reward which duty magnificently done
may hope to receive on this earth is every manner of grief and
disaster, ending in death by starvation. So immense and triumphant an
example of iniquity would strike the ideals of mankind a blow from
which they would not recover for centuries.
3
But already this help is becoming exhausted; it cannot be indefinitely
prolonged; and very soon it will be insufficient. It is, moreover, at
the mercy of the slightest diplomatic or political complication; and
its failure will be irreparable. It will mean utter famine, unexampled
extermination, which till the end of the world will cry to heaven for
vengeance. It is no longer a question of weeks or months, but one of
days. That is where we stand; and these are the last hours granted by
destiny to an inactive Europe wherein to expunge the shame of her
indifference.
These hours belong almost solely to you, for others have not your
power. Whatever may happen, however long you may postpone the issue,
one of these days you will be obliged to join in the fray. Everything
advises, everything orders you to do so; and I can see nothing on the
side of honour, justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the
centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and
self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more
worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty
bargainings of diplomacy?
The one hour, the peremptory hour has struck when your aid can break
the balance between the powers of good and evil which, for more than
two hundred days, have kept the future of Europe hanging over the
abyss.
Fate has granted you the magnificent boon, the all but divine
privilege, of saving from the most horrible of deaths four or five
millions of innocent human beings, four or five millions of martyrs
who have performed the finest action that a people could perform and
who are perishing because they defended the ideals which your fathers
taught them. I know that we are faced by duties which until to-day had
never entered into the morality of States; for it is but too true that
this morality still lags a thousand miles behind that of the meanest
peasant. But, if such a thing has never yet been done, it is all the
more glorious to be the first to do it, to make an effort that will
raise the life of nations to a level which the life of the individual
has long since attained. And no people is better qualified than the
Italian to make this effort which the world and the future are
awaiting as a deliverance.
But I will say no more. I have been reproached for speaking of matters
which, as a foreigner, I ought not to discuss. I believed that these
great questions of humanity interested the whole human race. Perhaps I
was wrong. I will respect the profound silence in which great actions
are developed; and I leave to the meditation of your hearts that which
I am constrained to leave unsaid. They will tell you very much better
than I could all that I had to say to you.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: Delivered in Rome, before the Associazione della Stampa,
13 March, 1915.]
* * * * *
PRO PATRIA: III
VIII
PRO PATRIA: III[4]
1
Although nothing entitles me to the honour of addressing you in the
name of my refugee countrymen, nevertheless it is only fitting, since
a kindly insistence brings me here, that I should in the first place
give thanks to England for the manner in which she welcomed them in
their distress. I am but a voice in the crowd; and, if my words exceed
the limits of this hall and lend to him who utters them an authority
which he himself does not possess, it is only because they are filled
with unbounded gratitude.
In this horrible war, whose stakes are the salvation and the future of
mankind, let us first of all salute our wonderful sister, France, who
is supporting the heaviest burden and who, for more than eleven
months, having broken its first and most formidable onslaught, has
been struggling, foot by foot, at closest quarters, without faltering,
without remission, with an heroic smile, against the most formidable
organization of pillage, massacre and devastation that the world or
hell itself has seen since man first learnt the history of the planet
on which he lives. We have here a revelation of qualities and virtues
surpassing all that we expected from a nation which nevertheless had
accustomed us to expect of her all that goes to make the beauty and
the glory of humanity. One must reside in France, as I have done for
many years, to understand and admire as it deserves the incomparable
lesson in courage, abnegation, firmness, determination, coolness,
conscious dignity, self-mastery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity
and utter charity and self-sacrifice which this great and noble
people, which has civilized more than half the globe, is at the
present moment teaching the civilized world.
Let us also salute boundless Russia, with her wonderful soldiers,
innocent and ingenuous as the saints of old, ignorant of fear as
children who do not yet know the meaning of death. Yonder, along a
formidable front running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with silent
multitudinous heroism, amid defeats which are but victories delayed,
she is beginning the great work of our deliverance, Lastly let us
greet Servia, small but prodigious, whom we must one day place on the
summit of that monument of glory which Europe will raise to-morrow to
the memory of those who have freed her from her chains.
So much for them. They have a right to all our gratitude, to all our
admiration. They are doing magnificently all that had to be done. But
they occupy a place apart in duty's splendid hierarchy. They are the
protagonists of direct, material, tangible, undeniable, inevitable
duty. This war is their war. If they would not accept the worst of
disgraces, if they were not prepared to suffer servitude, massacre,
ruin and famine, they had to undertake it; they could not do
otherwise. They were attacked by the born enemy, the irreducible and
absolute enemy, of whom they knew enough to understand that they had
nothing to expect from him but total and unremitting disaster. It was
a question of their continued existence in this world. They had no
choice; they had to defend themselves; and any other nation in their
place would have done the same, only there are few who would have done
it with the same spirit of self-abnegation, the same devotion, the
same perseverance, the same loyalty and the same smiling courage.
2
But for us Belgians--and we may say as much for you English--it was
not a question of this kind of duty. The horrible drama did not
concern us. It demanded only the right to pass us by without touching
us; and, far from doing us any harm, it would have flooded us with the
unclaimed riches which armies on the march drag in their wake. We
Belgians in particular, peaceable, hospitable, inoffensive and almost
unarmed, should, by the very treaties which assured our existence,
have remained complete strangers to this war. To be sure, we loved
France, because we knew her as well as we knew ourselves and because
she makes herself beloved by all who know her. But we entertained no
hatred of Germany. It is true that, in spite of the virtues which we
believed her to possess but which were merely the mask of a spy, our
hearts barely responded to her obsequiously treacherous advances. For
the German, of all the inhabitants of our planet, has this one and
singular peculiarity, that he arouses in us, from the onset, a
profound, instinctive, intuitive feeling of antipathy. But, even so
and wherever our preferences may have lain, our treaties, our pledged
word, the very reason of our existence, all forbade us to take part in
the conflict. Then came the incredible ultimatum, the monstrous demand
of which you know, which gave us twelve hours to choose between ruin
and death or dishonour. As you also know, we did not need twelve hours
to make our choice. This choice was no more than a cry of indignation
and resolution, spontaneous, fierce and irresistible. We did not stay
for a moment to ponder the extenuating circumstances which our
weakness might have invoked. We did not for a moment consider the
absolution which history would have granted us later, on realizing
that a conflict between forces so completely disproportioned was
futile, that we must inevitably be crushed, massacred and annihilated
and that the sacrifice of a little people in its entirety could
prevent nothing, could barely cause delay and would have no weight in
the immense balance into which the world's destinies were about to be
flung. There was no question of all this; we saw one thing only: our
plighted word. For that word we must die; and since then we have been
dying. Trace the course of history as far back as you will; question
the nations of the earth; then name those who have done or who would
have done what we did. How many will you find? I am not judging those
whom I pass over in silence, for to do so would be to enter into the
secret of men's hearts which I have not the right to violate; but in
any case there is one which I can name aloud, without fear of being
mistaken; and that is the British nation. This people too entered into
the conflict, not through interest or necessity or inherited hatred,
but simply for a matter of honour. It has not suffered what we have
suffered; it has not risked what we have risked, which is all that we
possessed beneath the arch of heaven; but it owes this immunity only
to outside circumstances. The principle and the quality of the act are
the same. We stand on the same plane, one step higher than the other
combatants. While the others are the soldiers of necessity, we are the
volunteers of honour; and, without detracting from their merits, this
title adds to ours all that a pure and disinterested idea adds to the
noblest acts of courage. There is not a doubt but that in our place
you would have done precisely what we did. You would have done it with
the same simplicity, the same calm and confident ardour, the same good
faith. You would have thrown yourselves into the breach as
whole-heartedly, with the same scorn of useless phrases and the same
stubborn conscientiousness. And the reason why I do not shrink from
singing in your presence the praises of what we have done is that
these praises also affect yourselves, who would not have hesitated to
do the selfsame things.
3
In short, we have both the same conception of honour; and a like idea
must needs bear like fruits. In your eyes as in ours, a formal
promise, a word once given is the most sacred thing that can pass
between man and man. Now far more than the valour of a man--because it
rises to much greater heights and extends to much greater
distances--the valour of a people depends upon the conception of its
honour which that people holds and, above all, upon the sacrifices
which it is capable of making for the sake of that honour. We may
differ upon all the other ideas that guide the actions of mankind,
notably upon the religious idea; but those who do not agree on this
one point are unworthy of the name of man. It represents the purest
flame, the ever more ardent focus of all human dignity and virtue.
You have sacrificed yourselves wholly to this idea; and, in the name
of this idea, which is as vital and as powerful in your souls as in
ours, you came to our aid, as we knew that you would come, for we
counted on you as surely as you counted on us. You are ready to make
the same sacrifices; and already you are proudly supporting the
heaviest of sacrifices. Thus, in this stupendous struggle, we are
united by bonds even more fraternal than those which bind the other
Allies. Our union is more lofty and more generous, for it is based
wholly upon the noblest thoughts and feelings that can inspire the
heart. And this union, which is marked by a mutual confidence and
affection that grow hourly deeper and wider, is helping us both to go
even beyond our duty.
For we have gone beyond it; and we are exceeding it daily. We have
done and are doing far more than we were bound to do. It was for us
Belgians to resist, loyally, vigorously, to the utmost of our
strength, as we had promised. But the most sensitive honour would have
allowed us to lay down our arms after the immense and heroic effort of
the first few days and to trust to the victor's clemency when he
recognized that we were beaten. Nothing compelled us to immolate
ourselves entirely, to surrender, in succession, as a burnt-offering
to our ideals, all that we possessed on earth and to continue the
struggle after we were crushed, even in the last torments of
starvation, which to-day holds three millions of us in its grip.
Nothing compelled us to this course, other than the increasingly lofty
ideal of duty held by those who began by putting it into practice and
are now living in its fulfilment.
As for you English, you had to come to our assistance, that is to say,
to send us the troops which you had ready under arms; but nothing
compelled you either, after the first useless engagements, to devote
yourselves with unparalleled ardour and self-sacrifice, to hurl into
the mortal and stupendous battle the whole of your youth, the fairest
upon earth, and all your riches, the most prodigious in this world,
nor to conjure up from your soil, by a miracle which was thought
impossible, in fewer months than the years that would have seemed
needful, the most gallant, determined and tenacious armies that have
yet been marshalled in this war. Nothing compelled you, save the
spirit of emulation, the same mad love of duty, the same passion for
justice, the same idolatry of the given word which, that it may be
sure of doing all that it promised, performs far more than it would
have dared to promise.
4
Now, during the last few weeks, a new combatant has entered the lists,
one who occupies a place quite apart in the sacred hierarchy of duty
and honour and in the moral history of this war. I speak of Italy; and
I pay her the tribute of homage which is her due and which I well know
that you will render with me, for you of all nations are qualified to
do so.
Italy had no treaty except with our enemies. Her first act of
justice, when confronted with an iniquitous aggression, was to discard
this treaty, which was about to draw her into a crime which she had
the courage to judge and condemn from the outset, while her former
allies were still in the full flush of a might that seemed unshakable.
After this verdict, which was worthy of the land where justice first
saw the light, she found herself free; she now owed no obligations to
any one. There was nothing left to compel her to rush into this
carnage, which she could contemplate calmly from the vantage of her
delightful cities; and she had only to wait till the twelfth hour to
gather its first fruits. There was no longer any compact, any written
bond, signed by the hands of kings or peoples, that could involve her
destiny. But now, at the spectacle, unforeseen and daily more
abominable and disconcerting, of the barbarian invasion, words
half-effaced and secret treaties written by unknown hands on the
souls and consciences of all men revealed themselves and slowly
gathered life and radiance. To some extent I was a witness of these
things; and I was able, so to speak, to follow with my eyes the
awakening and the irresistible promulgation of those great and
mysterious laws of justice, pity and love which are higher and more
imperishable than all those which we have engraved in marble or
bronze. With the increase of the crimes, the power of these laws
increased and extended. We may regard the intervention of Italy in
many ways. Like every human action and, above all, like every
political action, it is due to a thousand causes, many of which are
trifling. Among them we may see the legitimate hatred and the eternal
resentment felt towards an hereditary enemy. We may discover an
interested intention to take part, without too much risk, in a
victory already certain and in its previously allotted spoils. We may
see in it anything that we please: the resolves of men contain factors
of all kinds; but we must pity those who are able to consider none but
the meaner sides of the matter, for these are the only sides which
never count and which are always deceptive. To find the real and
lasting truth, we must learn to view the great masses and the great
feelings of mankind from above. It is in them and in their great and
simple movements that the will of the soul and of destiny is asserted,
for these two form the eternal substance of a people. And, in the
present case, the movement of the great masses and the great feelings
of the people took the form of an immense impulse of sympathy and
indignation, which gradually increased, penetrating farther and
farther into the popular strata and gathering volume as it
progressed, until it urged a whole nation to assume the burden of a
war which it knew to be crushing and merciless, a war which each of
those who called for it knew to be a war which he himself must wage,
with his own hands, with his own body, a war which would wrest him
from the pleasant ways of peace, from his labours and his comforts,
which would weigh terribly upon all those whom he loved, which would
expose him for weeks, perhaps for months, to incredible sufferings and
which meant almost certain death to a third or a half of those who
demanded the right to brave it. And all this, I repeat, occurred
without any material necessity, from no other motive than a fine sense
of honour and a magnificent surge of admiration and pity for a small
foreign nation that was being unjustly martyred. We cannot repeat it
too often: here, as in the case of the sacrifice which Belgium and
England offered to the ideal of honour, is a new and unprecedented
fact in history.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: Delivered in London, at the Queen's Hall, 7 July, 1915.]
* * * * *
BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY
IX
BELGIUM'S FLAG DAY
1
To-day our flag will quiver in every French hand as a symbol of love
and gratitude. This day should be a day of hope and glory for all
Belgium.
Let us forget for a moment our terrible distress; let us forget our
plains and meadows, the fairest and most fertile in Europe, now
ravaged to such a degree that the utmost that one can say is powerless
to give any idea of a desolation which seems irremediable. Let us
forget--if to forget them be possible--the women, the children, the
old men, peaceable and innocent, who have been massacred in their
thousands, the tale of whom will amaze the world when once the grim
barrier is broken behind which so many secret horrors are being
committed. Let us forget those who are dying of hunger in our country,
a land without harvests and without homes, a land methodically taxed,
pillaged and crushed until it is drained of the last drop of its
life-blood. Let us forget those remnants of our people who are
scattered hither and thither, who have trodden the path of exile, who
are living on public charity, which, though it show itself full of
brotherhood and affection, is yet so oppressive to those supremely
industrious hands, which had never known the grievous burden of alms.
Let us forget even those last of our cities to be menaced, the
fairest, the proudest, the most beloved of our cities, which
constitute the very face of our country and which only a miracle could
now save. Let us forget, in a word, the greatest calamity and the most
crying injustice of history and think to-day only of our approaching
deliverance. It is not too early to hail it. It is already in all our
thoughts, as it is in all our hearts. It is already in the air which
we breathe, in all the eyes that smile at us, in all the voices that
welcome us, in all the hands outstretched to us, waving the laurels
which they hold; for what is bringing us deliverance is the wonder,
the admiration of the whole world!
2
To-morrow we shall go back to our homes. We shall not mourn though we
find them in ruins. They will rise again more beautiful than of old
from the ashes and the shards. We shall know days of heroic poverty;
but we have learnt that poverty is powerless to sadden souls upheld by
a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with
heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our
magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the
littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of
which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish
but as readily come to live again. And in their place we shall have
acquired those riches which shall not again perish within our hearts.
Our eyes were closed to many things; now they have opened upon wider
horizons. Of old we dared not avert our gaze from our wealth, our
petty comforts, our little rooted habits. But now our eyes have been
wrested from the soil; now they have achieved the sight of heights
that were hitherto unnoticed. We did not know ourselves; we used not
to love one another sufficiently; but we have learnt to know ourselves
in the amazement of glory and to love one another in the grievous
ardour of the most stupendous sacrifice that any people has ever
accomplished. We were on the point of forgetting the heroic virtues,
the unfettered thoughts, the eternal ideas that lead humanity. To-day,
not only do we know that they exist: we have taught the world that
they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost while faith is left,
while honour is intact, while love continues, while the soul does not
surrender and that the most monstrous of powers will never prevail
against those ideal forces which are the happiness and the glory of
man and the sole reason for his existence.
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