Fighting For Peace | Page 8

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, to which they were paying a visit of ceremony. The news of this murder filled all thoughtful people in Europe with horror and dismay. It was a dark and sinister crime. The Crown Prince and his wife had not been "personae gratae" with the Viennese court, but the brutal manner of their taking off aroused the anger of the people. Vengeance was called for. The two wretched murderers were Austrian subjects, but they were Servian sympathizers, and in some kind of connection with a society called Narodna Obrana, whose avowed object was to work for a "Greater Servia," including the southern Slavic provinces of Austria. The Government of Austria-Hungary, having conducted a secret inquiry, declared that