The Soul of the War | Page 6

the newspapers. Did these people want war with England or with anyone? The laughter of the clerks and shop-girls swarming down the Friedrichstrasse, the peaceful enjoyment of the middle-class crowds of husbands and wives, lovers and sweethearts, steaming in the heat of brilliantly lighted beer-halls seemed to make my question preposterous. The spirit of the German people was essentially peaceful and democratic. Surely the weight of all this middle-class common sense would save them from any criminal adventures proposed by a military caste rattling its sabre on state occasions? So I came back with a conflict of ideas....

9

A little bald-headed man came into London about two years ago, and his arrival was noted in a newspaper paragraph. It appeared that he was a great statistician. He had been appointed by the Governments of Canada and the United States jointly to prepare a "statistical survey of Europe," whatever that may mean. I was sent down to call upon him somewhere in the Temple, and I was to get him to talk about his statistics.
But after my introduction he shut the door carefully and, with an air of anxious inquiry through his gold-rimmed spectacles, asked a strange question:
"Are you an honest young man and a good patriot?"
I could produce no credentials for honesty or patriotism, but hoped that I might not fail in either.
"I suppose you have come to talk to me about my statistics," he said.
I admitted that this was my mission.
"They are unimportant," he said, "compared with what I have to tell you. I am going to talk to you about Germany. The English people ought to know what I have learnt during a year's experience in that country, where I have lived all the time in the company of public officials. Sir, it seems to me that the English people do not know that the entire genius of intellectual Germany is directed to a war against England. It dominates their thoughts and dreams, and the whole activity of their national intelligence."
For an hour the little bald-headed man spoke to me of all he had heard and learnt of Germany's enmity to England during twelve months in official circles. He desired to give this information to an English newspaper of standing and authority. He thought the English people had a right to know.
I went back to my office more disturbed than I cared to admit even to myself. There had been a kind of terror in the voice of the little man who had found time for other interests besides his "statistical survey of Europe." It seemed that he believed himself in the possession of an enormous and terrible secret threatening the destiny of our Empire. Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however fervently. My editor would not believe him, and none of his words were published, in my paper or any other. But sometimes I used to remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words. Meanwhile the Foreign Office did not reveal its secrets or give any clear guidance to the people as to perils or policy--to the people who would pay in blood for ignorance.
10
When I stood on the deck of the Channel boat in Dover Harbour looking back on England, whose white cliffs gleamed faintly through the darkness, a sense of tragic certainty came to me that a summons of war would come to England, asking for her manhood. Perhaps it would come to-night. The second mate of the boat came to the side of the steamer and stared across the inky waters, on which there were shifting pathways of white radiance, as the searchlights of distant warships swept the sea.
"God!" he said, in a low voice.
"Do you think it will come to-night?" I asked, in the same tone of voice. We spoke as though our words were dangerous.
"It's likely. The German fleet won't wait for any declaration, I should say, if they thought they could catch us napping. But they won't. I fancy we're ready for them--here, anyhow!"
He jerked his thumb at some dark masses looming through the darkness in the harbour, caught here and there by a glint of metal reflected in the water. They were cruisers and submarines nosing towards the harbour mouth.
"There's a crowd of 'em!" said the second mate, "and they stretch across the Channel. . . . The Reserve men have been called out-- taken off the trams in Dover to-night. But the public has not yet woken up to the meaning of it."
He stared out to sea again,