Various - The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

V >> Various >> The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915

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"I had been in London for some time. I had sketched in Westminster, in
St. Bartholomew's. Everything peaceful and quiet. It seems now as if we
ought to have felt--all of us, the people on the streets, I,
shopkeepers, every one--the approach of this tremendous war. But we
didn't, of course. No one in England had the faintest suspicion that
this terrible inhuman thing was going to happen.

"I went on to France. I sketched Notre Dame, over which they exploded
shells a month or so later. I did some work in the beautiful St.
Etienne. I sauntered down into South Normandy and was stopping for a
little color work at the Inn of William the Conqueror before going on to
Rheims."

These water colors of French farms, French inns, and French gardens are
glimpses caught at the very eleventh hour before France put on a totally
different aspect.

"The war broke out. There at the quiet little French inn everything
suddenly changed color. It was quick, it was quiet. There was a complete
change in the snap of a finger. All the chauffeurs and the porters and
the waiters--men who had been there for years and with whom we who visit
there Summer after Summer have grown familiar--suddenly stopped work,
gave up their jobs, were turned into soldiers. One hardly recognized
them.

"We were all stunned. I realized that I could not go on to Rheims, that
I probably should not get down into Italy. I scarcely realized at first
what that meant. I could not conceive, none of us could conceive," Mr.
Smith exploded violently, "that any one, under any necessity whatsoever,
should lay hands on the Rheims Cathedral. It's too monstrous! The world
will never forgive it, never!

"The world is divided, I tell you! It is not a Double Alliance and a
Triple Entente; it is not a Germany and a Russia and a United States and
an Italy and an England. That is not the division of the world just now.
There are two sides, and only two sides. There is barbarism on the one
hand, civilization on the other; there is brutality and there is
humanity. And humanity is going to win, but the sacrifices are
awful--awful!"

"How about the feeling in France, Mr. Smith?"

"I can't tell you how overwhelmingly pathetic it is--the sight of these
brave Frenchmen. Every one has remarked it. Once and for all the
tradition that the French are an excitable, emotional people with no
grip on their passions and no rein on their impulses--that fiction is
dead for all time.

"I saw that whole first act of France's drama. I saw the French people
stand still on that first day and take breath. Then I saw France set to
work. She was unprepared, but she was ready in spirit. There was no
excitement, there were no demonstrations. The men climbed into their
trains without any exhibitions of patriotism, without any outbursts.
There were many women crying quietly, with children huddled about their
skirts.

"The spirit of England is different, but there is the same lack of
excitement. I chartered a motor bus when the war broke out and got to
Paris, and then went back to London, where I sketched for a month, saw
my friends, and talked war.

"Making sketches in war time is very different, by the way, from making
sketches in time of peace. It is a business full of possibilities, when
all manner of spy suspicions are afloat. I made up my mind to do a
sketch of the Royal Exchange. Not as I should have done it a year
before, mind you, nor even three months before, but now, with the
thought of bomb-dropping Zeppelins in the back of my mind. It occurred
to me when I was hurrying along one rainy evening in a taxi past the
Stock Exchange, the Globe Insurance, the Bank of England. Everywhere
cabs drawn up along the curbing, cabs slipping past, people, great
moving crowds of people with their umbrellas up, moving off down
Threadneedle and Victoria.

"A lot of human life and some very beautiful architecture and a good
part of the world's business, all concentrated here. And I thought to
myself what might happen should the cultured Germans get as far as
London, and should the defenders of the world's civilization drop a bomb
down into the heart of things here. I pictured to myself what havoc
could be wrought.

"And I thought, too, of places like Southwark. Ever been in Southwark?
Horrible. A year before, when I was making the sketches for my Dickens
book, I spent a great deal of time in the Southwark section. Now, with
the prospect of Zeppelins, I thought again of Southwark. A bomb in a
Southwark street! Good Lord, can you imagine the horror of it! There
fifty or sixty families are packed into a single tenement, and the
houses in their turn are packed one against the next along streets so
narrow that the buildings seem to be nodding to each other, touching
foreheads almost. Desperately poor people, children swarming every
moment of the day and night up and down these dark stairways, up and
down these hideously dark streets. Now drop a bomb in the midst of it
all. That is what Englishmen are thinking of now.

"I didn't go over into Southwark; I couldn't stand it. The next day I
went back to the Stock Exchange to make my sketch. I've done sketches in
London before--every nook and cranny of it--but this time I felt a
little nervous when I got there with my umbrella and my little tools.
But I managed it. I said to the bobby, I said--"

And then Mr. Smith, getting up from his chair and relapsing into the
frown that always means he is going to tell a story, showed how he
managed it. It is impossible to reproduce Mr. Smith's inimitable manner.

"'Are you, now?' said I.

"'Well, 'ow can I tell?' said he.

"'But if you're the excellent English bobby that I believe you to be,'
said I, 'you'll see at once that I'm an honest American artist just here
to do a little sketching.'

"'I tell you,' said he. W'y don't you just pop hup and see 'Is Lordship
the Mayor?'

"And so I did pop up and I told the Lord Mayor my troubles, and he waved
me a hearty wave of his hand and said he'd do anything to oblige an
American, and I came down again, and here was the bobby still very
upright but watching my approach from the tail of his eye. And I
pretended I had never seen him, but as I went past I slipped him a
cigar, and when I passed back again he twinkled his eye. Stuck between
the buttons of his coat, there being no other place, was my fat cigar.

"I made my sketch of the Royal Exchange. I want Americans to see what
can happen if His Imperial Lowness over on the Continent sees fit to
send his Zeppelins to England. Not being big enough nor strong enough to
injure England vitally, he can take this method of injury, he can injure
women and children and maim horses, destroy business and works of art
and blow up the congested districts.

"We have seen what the Savior of the World's Culture could do in France
and Belgium; it is small wonder that all England has in the back of her
head surmises as to what he might accomplish if some of his air craft
crossed the Channel. By which I do not mean to say that the English are
apprehensive. They are not nervous. I have spent more than a month with
them, among my own friends, learning the general temper of the country.

"There are no demonstrations, there is no boasting, no display. London
is much the same as it always was. At night London is darkened, in
accordance with the order of Oct. 9, but that is about all the
difference. It is so dark that you can hardly get up Piccadilly, but
London takes her amusements about as usual. The theatres are not
overcrowded, but neither are they empty. For luncheons and for dinners
Prince's is full, the Carlton is full. The searchlights are playing over
the city looking for those Zeppelins. That is a new wrinkle to me; the
idea of blinding the men up there at the wheel with a powerful light is
a good one.

"These Englishmen have their teeth set. They know perfectly well that
they are fighting for their existence. All this talk of the necessity of
drumming up patriotism in England is bosh. England has no organized
publicity bureau such as Germany, and in contrast she may have seemed
quiet to the point of apathy. But don't fancy that Englishmen are
apathetic. They are slow and they are sure. They are just beginning to
realize that they have these fellows by the back of the necks. Before I
left London I saw every day in the Temple Gardens, down by the
Embankment, that steady drill of thousands of young men in straw hats,
yellow shoes, and business suits. I felt their spirit.

"There is a great fundamental difference between the spirit of Germany
and the spirit of the Allies, and the whole world has recognized it.
With the Allies there has been no boasting, even now when they realize
that the top is reached and this war is on the down grade. There is
determination, but there is no cock-sureness, no goose-step. There is
no insolence.

"Why, in the last analysis, is the whole world against Germany? Because
of her insufferable insolence. It is an insolence which has been fairly
bred in the bone of every German soldier. I can give you a little
concrete instance. My daughter-in-law had been serving in one of the
Paris hospitals ever since the war broke out. She was finally placed on
a committee which was to meet the trainloads of wounded soldiers when
they first arrived.

"In one of the cars one day there was a wounded officer, a German. He
spoke no French, and a young French Lieutenant, very courteous, was
trying to make him understand something. My daughter, too, had no
success. Finally a young German, a common soldier who was in the same
car, said to this German officer: 'I am an Alsatian; I can interpret for
you.'

"'How dare you!' And the German officer turned to him in perfect fury.
'How do you, a common soldier, dare to speak to me, an officer!' And
with that he struck the Alsatian full in the face with what little
strength he had left.

"Now there is an example of the attitude to which the German military
has been trained.

"On another occasion, when a French officer, after one of the battles,
came courteously to the commanding German officer of the division and
said, 'Sir, you are my prisoner,' the German spat in his face. That is
all very dramatic and you may say that he showed much spirit, but you
could hardly call it a sporting spirit, surely not a civilized spirit.

"It is this domineering spirit that the whole world is resenting.
Nothing that Germany can do through her well-organized press agents can
conceal that insolence which has been a continuous policy for many
years. American opinion is almost unanimous in its opposition to Germany
for this one reason.

"Sir Gilbert Parker recently sent me a whole bundle of papers asking me
to judge England's case fairly and ask my friends in America to do the
same. I wrote back and asked him: 'Why do you waste stamps sending
evidence to America? America has the evidence, and if there has been any
anti-English feeling in America, von Bernstorff and Dernburg long since
demolished it.'

"The world has never witnessed anything so far-reaching as this policy
of insolence. Men who in daily life are cultured and fine, whose ideals
are high and noble, who have achieved names for themselves in
literature, art, and science--we all have many friends among them--have
become unconsciously tinctured with this policy. They are intelligent
men, but, by the gods, when they get on this subject of Germany's place
in the sun, they become paranoiacs! This idea of their pre-eminence has
become a disease with Germany. Germany is actually sick with it, and the
medicine that will cure her will be pretty bitter.

"I see that George Bernard Shaw presumes to announce that this policy of
insolence, this extreme militarism, has been just as prominent in
England and in France. Mr. Shaw is great fun and very wise about a lot
of things; moreover, he has lived in England a great deal longer than I
have, but just the same he is dead wrong when he makes such a statement.
I have many old friends in the army and the navy, many in politics, and
some of them are of the pronounced soldier, the militarist type. Not one
of them would ever dare to write such a book as Bernhardi has written,
and I don't believe there's one of them that would take any stock in a
man like Nietzsche. Mr. Shaw is dead wrong here; worse than that, he is
writing nonsense.

"We live from day to day hoping that the end will be the absolute
annihilation of the militarist principle, this get-off-the-earth
attitude.

"And what has all this," concluded Mr. Smith suddenly, "to do with art?
I'm sure I don't know. No one is thinking about art now."

"But you haven't told me where your sympathies are in this war, Mr.
Smith."

"Hey? I don't have any sympathies, as you see. I'm neutral as President
Wilson bids me be; I don't care who licks Germany, not even if it is
Japan."

*The Helpless Victims*

*By Mrs. Nina Larrey Duryee.*

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 9, 1914.]

Hotel Windsor.

DINARD, France, Sept. 1, 1914.

_To the Editor of The New York Times_:

This is written in great haste to catch the rare boat to England. The
author is an American woman, who has spent nine happy Summers in this
beautiful corner of France, where thousands of her compatriots have
likewise enjoyed Brittany's kindly hospitality.

Yesterday I saw issuing through St. Malo's eleventh century gates 300
Belgian refugees, headed by our Dinard Mayor, M. Cralard. I try to write
calmly of that procession of the half-starved, terror-ridden throng, but
with the memory of those pinched faces and the stories we heard of
murder, carnage, burning towns, insulted women, it is difficult to
restrain indignation. They had come from Charleroi and Mons--old men,
women, and little children. Not a man of strength or middle age among
them, for they are dead or away fighting the barbarians who invested
their little country against all honorable dealings.

Such a procession! They had slept in fields, eaten berries, carrots dug
from the earth by their hands; drunk from muddy pools, always with those
beings behind them who had driven them at the point of their bayonets
from their poor homes. Looking back, they had seen flames against the
sky, heard screams for pity from those too ill to leave, silenced by
bullets.

Here are some of the tales, which our Mayor vouches for, which I heard:

One young mother, who had seen her husband shot, tried to put aside the
rifle of the assassin. She was holding her year-old baby on her breast.
The butt of that rifle was beaten down, crushing in her baby's chest. It
still lives, and I heard it's gasping breath.

Another young girl, in remnants of a pretty silk dress, hatless, her
fragile shoes soleless, and her feet bleeding, is quite mad from the
horrors of seeing her old father shot and her two younger brothers taken
away to go before the advancing enemy as shields against English
bullets. She has forgotten her name, town, and kin, and, "like a leaf in
the storm," is adrift on the world penniless.

I saw sitting in a row on a bench in the shed seven little girls, none
of them more than six. Not one of them has now father, mother, or home.
None can tell whence they came, or to whom they belong. Three are
plainly of gentle birth. They were with nurses when the horde of
Prussians fell upon them, and the latter were kept--for the soldier's
pleasure.

There is an old man, formerly the proud proprietor of a bakery, who
escaped with the tiny delivery cart pulled by a Belgian dog. Within the
cart are the remains of his prosperous past--a coat, photos of his dead
wife, and his three sons at the front, and a brass kettle.

I heard from an aged man how he escaped death. He, with other villagers,
was locked into a room, and from without the German carbines were thrust
through the blinds. Those within were told to "dance for their lives,"
and the German bullets picked them off, one by one, from the street. He
had the presence of mind to fall as though dead, and when the house was
set on fire crawled out through a window into the cowshed and got away.

Now, these stories are not the worst or the only ones. Nor are these 300
refugees more than a drop of sand on a beach of the thousands upon
thousands who are at this moment in like case. They are pouring through
the country now, dazed with trouble, robbed of all they possess.

Who can help them, even to work? No one has money. Even those rich
villa people, Americans, are unable to pay their servants. There is no
"work" save in the fields garnering crops, for which no wages are paid.
Their country is a devastated waste, tenanted by the enemy, who spread
like a tidal wave of destruction in all directions. We take the better
class into our homes, clothe them and feed them gladly, that we may in a
minute way repay the debt civilization owes their husbands, sons, and
fathers. France, too, is invaded, and now thousands more of French are
homeless and penniless.

We in this formerly gay, fashionable little town see nothing of the
pageantry of war--only its horrors, as trains leave with us hundreds of
wounded from the front. In their bodies we find dumdum bullets, and we
hear tales which confirm those of the refugees.

Will America help them? I, an American woman, could weep for the
inadequacy of my pen, for I beg your pity, your compassion, and your
help. Not since the days of Rome's cruelty has civilization been so
outraged.

I beg your paper to print this, and to start a subscription for this far
corner of France, where the tide of war throws its wreckage. The Winter
is ahead, and with hunger, cold, lack of supplies, and isolation will
create untold suffering. Paris, too, is now sending refugees from its
besieged gates. Every corner is already filled, and hundreds pour in
every day. The garages, best hotels, villas, and cafes are already
filled with "those that suffer for honor's sake." The Croix Rouge does
splendid work for the wounded soldiers, but who will help these victims
of war? Fifty cents will buy shoes for a baby's feet. Ten cents will buy
ten pieces of bread. A dollar will buy a widow a shawl. Who will give?
Deny yourselves some little pleasure--a cigar, a drink of soda water, a
theatre seat--and send the price to these starved, beaten people,
innocent of any crime.

You American women, who tuck your children into their clean beds at
night, remember these children, reared as carefully as yours, without
relatives, money, or future. They will be placed on farms to do a
peasant's work with peasants. These women bereft of all that was dear
face a barren future. These aged men anticipate for their only remaining
blessing death, which will take them from a world which has used them
ill.

America is neutral. Let her remain so, but compassion has no
nationality. We are all children of one Father. Send us help. These poor
creatures hold out to you pleading hands for succor.

NINA LARREY DURYEE.

P.S.--I beg you to publish this. I am the daughter-in-law of the Gen.
Duryee of the Duryee Zouaves, who fought through our civil war with
honor. Our Ambassador, Mr. Herrick, and his wife know me socially. Any
funds you can gather please send to M. Grolard, Marie de Dinard,
Municipality de Dinard, Ille-et-Vilaine, France, or to Le Banque Boutin,
Dinard, France.

*A New Russia Meets Germany*

*By Perceval Gibbon.*

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, Oct. 26, 1914.]

VILNA, Russia, Sept. 28.--For a fact as great as Russia one needs a
symbol by which to apprehend it For me, till now, the symbol has been a
memory of Moscow in the Winter of 1905, the Winter of revolution, when
the barricades were up in the streets and the dragoons worked among the
crowds like slaughtermen in a shambles. Toward that arched gateway
leading from the Red Square into the Kremlin came soldiers on foot,
bringing with them prisoners dredged out of the turmoil, two armed men
to each battered and terrified captive, whose white and bloodstained
face stared startling and ghastly between the gray uniform greatcoats.
The first of them came to the deep arch, in whose recess is a lamplit
shrine; I stood aside to see them go past. The soldiers were wrenching
the man along by the arms, each holding him on one side; I recall yet
the prisoner's lean, miserable face, with the suggestion it had of
dissolute and desperate youth; and as they came abreast of the faintly
gleaming ikon in the gate they let him go for a moment. His dazed eyes
wandered up to the shrine; he was already bareheaded, and with a
shaking, uncertain hand he crossed himself in the intricate Russian
fashion. The soldiers who guarded him, too--they shuffled their rifles
to a convenient hold to have a right hand free; they crossed themselves
and their lips moved. Then they were through the arch and out upon the
snow within the walls, and once again they had hold of their man and
were thrusting him along to the prison which for him was the antechamber
of death.

That was Russia then. Prisoner and captors, soldiers and
revolutionaries, blinded and bewildered by the rush and dazzle of
affairs, straining asunder yet linked, knitted into a unity of the
spirit which they neither understood nor questioned.

But a week ago, on those still, dreary lands which border the Prussian
frontier, there was evidence of a Russia that has been born or made
since those hectic days in Moscow. The Germans who had forced Gen.
Rennenkampf to withdraw to the border were making an attempt to envelop
his left wing. Their columns, issuing from the maze of lakes and hills
in Masurenland, came across the border on both banks of the little River
Amulew, and fell upon him. There is a road in those parts that drifts
south along the frontier, an unmade, unholy Russian road, ribbed with
outcrops of stone, a purgatory to travel upon till the snow clothes it
and one can go by sledge. Away to the southwest, beyond the patches of
firwood and the gray, steeply [Transcriber: original 'steply'] rolling
land, there toned the far diapason of artillery; strings of army
transport, Red Cross vehicles, and miscellaneous men straggled upon the
road.

From beyond the nearest shoulder of land sounded suddenly some gigantic
and hoarse whistle, an ear-shattering roar of warning and urgency. There
was shouting and a stir of movement; the wagons and Red Cross vans began
to pull out to one side; and over the brow of the hill, hurtling into
sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great,
gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was
going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock
ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note
its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in
their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind
it. A hundred and odd of them, each with thirty men on board--three
battalions to reinforce the threatened left wing--a mighty instrument of
war, mightily wielded. It was Russia as she is today, under way and
gathering speed.

At Rennenkampf's headquarters at Wirballen, where formerly one changed
trains going from Berlin to Petersburg, one sees the fashion in which
Russia shapes for war. Here, beneath a little bridge with a black and
white striped sentry box upon it, its muddy banks partitioned with
rotten planks into goose-pens, runs that feeble stream which separates
Russia from Germany. Upon its further side, what is left of Eydtkuhnen,
the Prussian frontier village, looms drearily through its screen of
willows--walls smoke-blackened and roofless, crumbling in piles of
fallen brick across its single street, which was dreary enough at its
best. To the north and south, and behind to the eastward, are the camps,
a city full, a country full of men armed and equipped; the mean and ugly
village thrills to the movement and purpose. On the roof of the
schoolhouse there lifts itself against the pale Autumn sky the cobweb
mast and stays of the wireless apparatus, and in the courtyard below and
in the shabby street in front there is a surge of automobiles, motor
cycles, mounted orderlies--all the message-carrying machinery of a staff
office. The military telephone wires loop across the street, and spray
out in a dozen directions over the flat and trodden fields; for within
the dynamic kernel to all this elaborate shell is Rennenkampf, the
Prussian-Russian who governs the gate of Germany.

[Illustration: GEN. PAUL PAU
Commanding one of the French Armies
(_Photo from Underwood & Underwood._)]

[Illustration: GEN. D'AMADE
Commanding One of the French Armies
(_Photo from Bain News Service._)]

Here is the brain of the army. Its limbs go swinging by at all hours, in
battalions and brigades, or at the trot, with a jingle of bits and
scabbards, or at the walk, with bump and clank, as the gun wheels clear
the ruts. It is the infantry--that fills the eye--fine, big stuff, man
for man the biggest infantry in the world.

Their uniform of peaked cap, trousers tucked into knee-boots, and khaki
blouse is workmanlike, and the serious middle-aged officers trudging
beside them are hardly distinguishable from the men. They have not yet
learned the use of the short, broad-bladed bayonets; theirs are of the
old three-cornered section type with which the Bulgarians drove the
Turks to Chataldja; but there is something else that they have learned.
Since the first days of the mobilization that brought them from their
homes there is not a man among them that has tasted strong drink. In
1904 the men came drunk from their homes to the centres; one saw them
about the streets and on the railways and in the gutters. But these men
have been sober from the start, and will perforce be sober to the end.

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