The Wrack of the Storm | Page 6

wrung a cry of admiration from the
most indifferent, an ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one
of those things of beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy
forever.

2
I cannot believe that it no longer exists; and yet in this horrible war we
have to believe everything and, above all, the worst. Now, fatally and
inevitably, it will be the turn of the Belfry of Bruges; and then the tide
of barbarians will rise against Ghent and Antwerp and Brussels; and
there will forthwith disappear one of those portions of the world's
surface in which was hoarded the greatest wealth of beauty and of
memories and of the stuff of history. We did what we could to preserve
it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies are powerless to
prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from murdering the
women and children or from deliberately and uselessly destroying all
that they find along their path of retreat. There is only one hope left us:
the immediate and imperious intervention of the neutral powers. It is
towards them that we turn our tortured gaze. Two great nations
notably--Italy and the United States--hold in their hands the fate of
these last treasures, whose loss would one day be reckoned among the
heaviest and the most irreparable that have been suffered in the course
of long centuries of human civilization. They can do what they will; it
is time for them to do that which it is no longer lawful to leave undone.
By its frantic lies, the beast from over the Rhine, standing at bay and in
peril of death, shows plainly enough the importance which it attaches to
the opinion of the only nations which the execration of all that lives and
breathes have not yet armed against it. It is afraid. It feels that all is
crumbling under foot, that it is being shunned and abandoned. It seeks
in every direction a glance that does not curse it. It must not, it shall not
find that glance. It is not necessary to tell Italy what our imperilled
cities are worth; for Italy is preeminently the land of noble cities.
Our cause is her cause; she owes us her support. When a work of
beauty is destroyed, her own genius and her own eternal gods are
outraged. As for America, she more than any other country stands for
the future. She should think of the days that will follow after this war.
When the great peace descends upon the earth, let not the earth be
found desert and robbed of all its jewels. The places at which the earth
is beautiful because of centuries of effort, because of the successful
zeal and patience and genius of a race, are not so many. This corner of

Flanders, over which death now hovers, is one of those consecrated
spots. Were it to perish, men as yet unborn, men who at last, perhaps,
will achieve happiness, would lack memories and examples which
nothing could replace.
* * * * *

PRO PATRIA: I

V
PRO PATRIA: I[2]
1
I need not here recall the events that hurled Belgium into the depths of
distress most glorious where she is struggling to-day. She has been
punished as never nation was punished for doing her duty as never
nation did before. She saved the world while knowing that she could
not be saved. She saved it by flinging herself in the path of the
oncoming barbarians, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in
order to give the defenders of justice time, not to rescue her, for she
was well aware that rescue could not come in time, but to collect the
forces needed to save our Latin civilization from the greatest danger
that has ever threatened it. She has thus done this civilization, which is
the only one whereunder the majority of men are willing or able to live,
a service exactly similar to that which Greece, at the time of the great
Asiatic invasions, rendered to the mother of this civilization. But, while
the service is similar, the act surpasses all comparison. We may ransack
history in vain for aught to approach it in grandeur. The magnificent
sacrifice at Thermopylæ, which is perhaps the noblest action in the
annals of war, is illumined with an equally heroic but less ideal light,
for it was less disinterested and more material. Leonidas and his three
hundred Spartans were in fact defending their homes, their wives, their
children, all the realities which they had left behind them. King Albert

and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew full well that, in barring the
invader's road, they were inevitably sacrificing their homes, their wives
and their children. Unlike the