The World Decision

The World Decision, by Robert
Herrick

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Title: The World Decision
Author: Robert Herrick
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THE WORLD DECISION
BY
ROBERT HERRICK

CONTENTS
PART ONE--ITALY
I. ITALY HESITATES
II. THE POLITICIAN SPEAKS
III. THE POET SPEAKS
IV. THE PIAZZA SPEAKS
V. ITALY DECIDES
VI. THE EVE OF THE WAR

PART TWO--FRANCE
I. THE FACE OF PARIS
II. THE WOUNDS OF FRANCE
III. THE BARBARIAN
IV. THE GERMAN LESSON
V. THE FAITH OF THE FRENCH
VI. THE NEW FRANCE
PART THREE--AMERICA
I. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO US?
II. THE CHOICE
III. PEACE

THE WORLD DECISION
PART ONE--ITALY
I
Italy Hesitates
Last April, when I left New York for Europe, Italy was "on the verge"
of entering the great war. According to the meager reports that a strict
censorship permitted to reach the world, Italy had been hesitating for
many months between a continuance of her precarious neutrality and
joining with the Allies, with an intermittent war fever in her pulses. It
was known that she was buying supplies for her ill-equipped
army--boots and food and arms. Nevertheless, American opinion had
come to the somewhat cynical belief that Italy would never get further

than the verge of war; that her Austrian ally would be induced by the
pressure of necessity to concede enough of those "national aspirations,"
of which we had heard much, to keep her southern neighbor at least
lukewarmly neutral until the conclusion of the war. An American
diplomat in Italy, with the best opportunity for close observation, said,
as late as the middle of May: "I shall believe that Italy will go into the
war only when I see it!"
The process of squeezing her Austrian ally when the latter was in a
tight place--as Italy's negotiating was interpreted commonly in
America--naturally aroused little enthusiasm for the nation, and when
suddenly, during the stormy weeks of mid-May, Italy made her
decision and broke with Austria, Americans inferred, erroneously, that
her "sordid" bargaining having met with a stubborn resistance from
Vienna, there was nothing left for a government that had spent millions
in war preparation but to declare war. The affair had that surface
appearance, which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world.
Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the
piazza having prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a
complete misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the
underlying motives that led to an inevitable step. No one who
witnessed, as I did at close range, the swift unfolding of the drama
which ended on May 23 in a declaration of war, can accept such a base
or trivial reading of the matter. Like all things human the psychology of
Italy's action was complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless
at its base simple and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial
postulates. Old impulses stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy
repeated according to the modern formula the ancient defiance by her
Roman forefathers of the Teutonic danger. "Fuori i barbari"--out with
the barbarians--has lain in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to
be roused to a fresh heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded
France, by the Lusitania murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less
mighty as a moving force than this personal antagonism was the
spiritual antagonism between the Latin and the German, between the
two visions of the world which the German and the Latin imagine and
seek to perpetuate. That in a large and very real sense this world agony
of war is the supreme struggle between these two opposed traditions of

civilization--a decision between two competing forms of