Golden Lads | Page 4

they to be charted out once again through years till their hidden weakness is accurately located, and then is an army to be let loose on them that will visit a universal outrage on their children and wives? Peace will be intolerable till this menace is removed. The restoration of territory in Belgium and Northern France and the return to the status quo before the war, are not sufficient guarantees for the future. The status quo before the war means another insidious invasion, carried on unremittingly month by month by business agents, commercial travelers, genial tourists, and studious gentlemen in villas. A crippled, broken Teutonic military power is the only guarantee that a new army of spies will not take the road to Brussels and Paris on the day that peace is signed. No simple solution like, "Call it all off, we'll start in fresh; bygones are bygones," meets the real situation. The Allied nations have been infested with a cloud of witnesses for many years. Are they to submit once again to that secret process of the Germans?
[Illustration: PEASANTS' COTTAGES BURNED BY GERMANS.
The separate flame in each cottage is clearly visible, proving that each house was separately set on fire. Radclyffe Dugmore took this photograph at Melle, where he and the writer were made prisoners.]
The French, for instance, want to clear their country of a cloud which has been thick and black for forty-three years. They always said the Germans would come again with the looting and the torture and the foulness. This time they will their fight to a finish. They are sick of hate, so they are fighting to end war. But it is not an empty peace that they want--peace, with a new drive when the Krupp howitzers are big enough, and the spies in Paris thick enough, to make the death of France a six weeks' picnic. They want a lasting peace, that will take fear from the wife's heart, and make it a happiness to have a child, not a horror. They want to blow the ashes off of Lorraine. Peace, as preached by our Woman's Peace Party and by our pacifist clergy and by the signers of the plea for an embargo on the ammunitions that are freeing France from her invaders, is a German peace. If successfully consummated, it will grant Germany just time enough to rest and breed and lay the traps, and then release another universal massacre. How can the Allies state their terms of peace in other than a militant way? There is nothing here to be arbitrated. Pleasant sentiments of brotherhood evade the point at issue. The way of just peace is by "converting" Germany. There is only one cure for long-continued treachery, and that is to demonstrate its failure. To pause short of a thorough victory over the deep, inset habits and methods of Germany is to destroy the spirit of France. It will not be well for a premier race of the world to go down in defeat. We need her thrifty Lorraine peasants and Brittany sailors, her unfailing gift to the light of the world, more than we need a thorough German spy system and a soldiery obedient to commands of vileness.
Very much more slowly England, too, is learning what the fight is about.
It is German violation of the fundamental decencies that makes it difficult to find common ground to build on for the future. It is at this point that the spy system of slow-seeping treachery and the atrocity program of dramatic frightfulness overlap. It is in part out of the habit of betraying hospitality that the atrocities have emerged. It isn't as if they were extemporized--a sudden flare, with no background. They are the logical result of doing secretly for years that which humanity has agreed not to do.
Some of the members of our Red Cross unit--the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps--worked for a full year with the French Fusiliers Marins, perhaps the most famous 6000 fighting men in the western line. They were sailor boys. They covered the retreat of the Belgian army. They consolidated the Yser position by holding Dixmude for three weeks against a German force that outnumbered them. Then for a year, up to a few months ago, they helped to hold the Nieuport section, the last northern point of the Allied line. When they entered the fight at Melle in October, 1914, our corps worked with one of their doctors, and came to know him. Later he took charge of a dressing station near St. George. Here one day the Germans made a sudden sortie, drove back the Fusiliers for a few minutes, and killed the Red Cross roomful, bayoneting the wounded men. The Fusiliers shortly won back their position, found their favorite doctor dead, and in a fury