Fighting For Peace | Page 8

luncheon, at the beginning of June, I saw a
curious confirmation of Eyschen's hint. Having gone just over the
German border for a bit of angling, I was following a very lovely little
river full of trout and grayling. With me were two or three
Luxembourgers and as many Germans, to whom fishing with the
fly--fine and far off--was a new and curious sight. Along the east bank
of the stream ran one of the strategic railways of Germany, from Koln
to Trier. All day long innumerable trains rolled southward along that
line, and every train was packed with soldiers in field-gray--their
cheerful, stolid bullet-heads stuck out of all the windows. "Why so
many soldiers," I asked, "and where are they all going?" "Ach!" replied
my German companions, "it is Pfingstferien (Pentecost vacation), and
they are sent a changing of scene and air to get." My Luxembourg
friends laughed. "Yes, yes," they said. "That is it. Trier has a splendid
climate for soldiers. The situation is kolossal for that!"
When we passed through the hot and dusty little city it was simply
swarming with the field-gray ones--thousands upon thousands of
them--new barracks everywhere; parks of artillery; mountains of
munitions and military stores. It was a veritable base of operation,
ready for war.
Now the point is that Trier is just seven miles from Wasserbillig on the
Luxembourg frontier, the place where the armed German forces entered
the neutral land on August 2, 1914.
The government and the "grande armee" of the Grand Duchess
protested. But--well, did you ever see a wren resist an eagle? The
motor-van (not the private car of Her Royal Highness, as rumor has
said, but just an ordinary panier-a-salade), which was drawn up across
the road to the capital, was rolled into the ditch. The mighty host of
invaders, having long been ready, marched triumphantly into the
dismantled fortress, and along their smooth, unlawful way to France. I
had caught, in June, angling along the little river, a passing glimpse of
the preparation for that march.
But what about things on the French side of the border in that same
week of June, 1914? Well, I can only tell what I saw. Returning to

Holland by way of Paris, I saw no soldiers in the trains, only a few
scattered members of the local garrisons at the railway stations, not a
man in arms within ten kilometres of the frontier. It seemed as if France
slept quietly at the southern edge of Luxembourg, believing that the
solemn treaty, which had made Germany respect the neutrality of that
little land even in the war of 1870, still held good to safeguard her from
a treacherous attack in the rear, through a peaceful neighbor's garden.
Longwy--the poor, old-fashioned fortress in the northeast corner of
France--had hardly enough guns for a big rabbit-shoot, and hardly
enough garrison to man the guns. The conquering Crown Prince
afterward took it almost as easily as a boy steals an apple from an
unprotected orchard. It was the first star in his diadem of glory. But
Verdun, though near by, was not the second.
From this little journey I went home to The Hague with the clear
conviction that one nation in Europe was ready for war, and wanted
war, and intended war on the first convenient opportunity. But when
would that be? Not even the most truculent government could well
venture a bald declaration of hostilities without some plausible pretext,
some ostensible ground of quarrel. Where was it? There was none in
sight. Of course the danger of a homicidal crisis in the insanity of
armaments was always there. And of course the ambition of Germany
for "a place in the sun" was as coldly fierce as ever. The
Pan-Germanists were impatient. But they could hardly proclaim war
without saying what place and whose place they wanted. Nor was there
any particular grievance on which they could stand as a colorable
ground of armed conflict. The Kaiser had prepared for war, no doubt.
The argument and justification of war as the means of spreading the
German Kultur were in the Potsdam mind. But the concrete and
definite occasion of war was lacking. How long would that lack hold
off the storm? Could the precarious peace be maintained until measures
to enforce and protect it by common consent could be taken?
These questions were answered with dreadful suddenness. The curtain
which had half-concealed the scene went up with a rush, and the
missing occasion of war was revealed in the flash of a pistol.

IV
On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the
Austro-Hungarian crowns, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenburg,
were shot to death in the street at Serajevo, the capital of the annexed
provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina,