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THE CHATTANOOGA DAILY TIMES Chattanooga, Tennessee, U.S.A. 17 January 1915 (page 23)
Terrific Excoriation of All Things Anti-German By a Pro-British Poet Who Deals in Drastic Terms.
The Belgian Described as a “Cowardly Cur”— French History “Mean and Most Unintelligle Squabble”—Russia a Land of Bigotry—Servians, “Swineherds”—Japanese “Thieves and Pirates”— English and Atrocities.
“Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see ourselves as ithers see us!”—Burns
In point of fact, gallant little Germany is against a world in arms. Austria has been torn for many years by internal divisions; only a part of her population is of German stock. But against Germany and this one friend are arrayed Russia, France, England, Servia, Montenegro, and Japan; and every one of these nations is throwing its whole diplomatic weight into the task of getting Roumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Holland, Denmark, and the United States of America to join in. We are only about six to one at present, and feel insecure.
My own view is simpler. We have waited for a long while to smash Germany and steal her goods. We have taken a first-class opportunity, and we shall never regret it.
II. We thank God that we are not as other men. There are no stained glass windows bright enough for us. Our haloes are top heavy.
We have quite forgotten that the Belgian is the most cruel, mean, and cowardly cur in Europe, that we have demonstrated till all are blue against him as assassin, torturer, mutilator, and cannibal. We have dined in our thousands to acclaim his disgrace. We heard of nothing but “Red Rubber;” of niggers with hands, and feet, and indeed all that was off-choppable, off-chopped; of rape, robbery, murder, anthropophagy, and so on, until even our sanest etymologists began to derive Belgium from Belial and Belphegor and other leading Lucifuges of the hierarchy of the Pit. King Cléopolde, who was really a foolish kindly old gentleman with a taste in petticoats, the spit of a hundred vieux marcheurs in any Pall Mall Club, was compared to all the Roman Emperors from Caligula and Nero to Justinian and Diocletian. And now it is Gallant Little Belgium, and Les Braves Belges, and enough about heroes and martyrs to make any decent man vomit!
Anything the Belgians may have got they asked for.
III. We thank God that we are not as other men. Humph! If the French are being beaten, they have only themselves to blame. Does one expect a Leonidas from France?
Outside the sacred Mount of Parnassus, where dwell Rodin, and Anatole France, and a few more, what names does one know but names of scandal? Eiffel, and Reinach, and Dreyfus, and Henry, and du Paty de Clam, and de Lesseps, and Meyer, and Mme. Humbert, and Mme. Steinheil, and Mme. Caillaux. Since 1870 the history of France is a history of mean and mostly unintelligible squabble, fringed with Jesuitry and pseudo-Mason intrigue, a viler, an obscurer money-grubbery than even that of Haussmann and the Second Empire. In all the labyrinth of French group-politics is there a name unsmirched by what in any other country would be felony?
What sort of an army is it whose officers conspire wholesale against the state and have to be brought over by a Bourse-ridden republic, bribe beating bribe? What sort of republic whose chief magistrate can be smacked publicly in the face at a racecourse and not dare to retaliate, the pretenders to whose throne can allow their conspirators to culminate and at the last moment fear to show themselves, so that all their followers are thrown into prison—when a single bold push would have set them on the throne?
Calmette, the Bel-ami journalist, who by trickery and treason makes himself the greatest power in French journalism, threatens to expose the master-blackmailer, to unmask the “impregnable” frontier fortresses that are still armed with the guns of 1872; he is murdered by a woman who in England would be considered as a doubtful starter in any concourse of moderately respectable demimondaines—and a jury is found to declare that she did not commit the act to which she openly confesses!
England has spent about nine centuries in hating and despising France, in crying out on her for atheism and immorality and all the rest of it; Edward the Seventh, one night upon Montmartre, shwears the French are jolly good shportsh, bigod, and lo! the Angel of the Entente Cordiale. Mimi Tete-Beche is Sainte-Genieviüve, and Jésus-la-Caille becomes the Saviour of Protestant England.
Is it a nation in which abortion has become a national danger that will freely give her sons to the Republic?
If so, only because the French people is not corrupted, even by their politicians.
I love the French—I will not yield precedence to Edward VII, though I prefer Montparnasse to Montmartre, and pay for my own dinner at Lapérouse’s where he accepted £20,000 to dine at the Café Anglais—and I want to see them victorious and prosperous. But I shall not mistake France for Sparta.
IV. As to Russia, we have had nothing but whole-hearted abuse since 1850. Even their ridiculous fear of having their children stolen by Jews for the purposes of ritual murder—as they most fixedly believe—has been represented as religious bigotry, when it is at the worst but peasant ignorance like the belief in witchcraft.
We have received and fêted the would-be assassins of their Tsar; we have imagined Red Sunday in St. Petersburg, and fulminated against pogroms, and preached against vodka and brutal Cossacks till anyone who has even been to Russia wants to go away quietly and die; and the next thing is that we hold up our railways and smuggle 150,000 of the brutal Cossacks aforesaid to fling them on the flank of the German armies in Normandy and Picardy. Well, no! it was only a Secret Service lie. But how dearly we all wished it true!
Have we not wept and yelled over Poland? And has not the Tsar promised autonomy to Poland once and again, and tricked?
My own view of Russia is that it is the freest country in the world; but it is a little sudden for our Nonconformists who have denounced her as a tyrant for the last sixty years, to hail her thus incontinently as the Champion of European Liberty.
V. It is disgusting to have to foul clean paper with the name of Servia.
These swineherds who murdered and mutilated their own king and queen; whose manners make their own pigs gentlefolk; these assassins who officially plot and execute the dastard murder of the Crown Prince of a nation with whom they are at peace; these ruffians so foul that even cynical England hesitates to send a minister to their court of murderers — these be thy gods to-day, O England!
“Heroic little Servia!”
VI. I have not a word to say against the Montenegrins. They are decent, honest cutthroats.
VII. And now we come to the treacherous monkeys of Japan, the thieves and pirates of the East. Who makes the shoddy imitations of European and American machinery, forges the names of famous firms, sticks at no meanness to steal trade? Who, under cover of alliance with England, fostered in China a boycott of all English goods?
Only yesterday Japan was at the throat of Russia—or at least trod heavily on one big toe. Today in Tokio they sing the Russian national anthem, and cheer the ambassador whenever he appears.
Why not? of course. It is natural, it is human; it is all in order. But it is fickleness and treachery; it is hypocrisy and humbug. Diplomacy is of necessity all this; but at least let us mitigate the crime by confession!
Human nature is never so bad when it is not shackled by the morality of emasculate idealists.
Does any person who knows the Far East believe even in an opium dream that Japan had any quarrel with Germany, or any care for her alliance with England? Kaio-Chau was an easy enough prey; well, then, snatch it, and chance the wrath of schoolmarmed America and the egregious Wilson. But for God’s sake, and by the navel of Daibutsu, and the twelve banners of the twelve sects of Buddha, let us spew out the twaddle about honor, and justice, and oppressed China, and the sanctity of alliance!
VIII. And England! England the Home of Liberty, the Refuge of the Oppressed, the Star of Hope of the Little Nations. I suppose that any other nation about whom they sang
“They’re hanging men and women too For wearing of the green.”
would suppress the song by yet more hangings. The English are cynical enough to sing it themselves!
The English are ever on the lookout for atrocities. Bulgarian atrocities, Armenian atrocities, Tripolitan atrocities, Congo atrocities, and now German atrocities. One notices that the atrocity of the atrocitators varies with their political objectionability.
The parable of the mote and the beam was made for England, surely.
German atheism! from the compatriots of Shelley, Thomson, Bradlaugh, Morley, and John Burns.
German sensuality! from the fellow-citizens of Swinburne, Rossetti, Keats, and a dozen others.
German blasphemy! when the Kaiser invokes the God of Battles. As if the success of British arms were not prayed for daily in the churches, the name of God invoked in the addresses to the soldiers, and the very motto of England, Dieu et mon droit! It is true the Kaiser was first to make emphatic an insistence that God was his ally; it seems that England has the old literary grievance against those qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!
Indeed saevita!
German militarism! A strange rebuke from a nation whose saner citizens at this hour are cursing themselves that they did not have conscription twenty years ago, from a nation which has by a sham Insurance Act riveted heavier fetters on their slave-class than were ever ball and chain.
And it is England that can produce a firm of piano manufacturers to start a boycott of German pianos—their own pianos being all German but the cases!—and a boycott of German music. And it is England that can show a composer who writes to the papers that he will now “try harder than he ever tried before” to beat Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Straus and Wagner! In the meantime he will refrain from the wicked and unpatriotic luxury of Vienna steak! And since Kant thought two and two make four, for all true Englishmen they must make five in future.
Have Englishmen forgotten their own Royal family?
“The very dogs in England’s court They bark and howl in German.”
Edward VII spoke English with an accent; and at the first hour of war with Germany we found the first Lord of the Admiralty a German Prince!
Until this year England has never been at war with Germany in the course of history since the Conquest. Our very speech, half German, betrayeth us.
All this is finished. The German is a Hun, and a Vandal, and a monster, and a woman-torturer, and a child-murderer, and runs away in his millions at the sight of a Territorial from Hoxton. And the British Army has won victory after victory against enormous odds, some sixtyfold, and some eightyfold, and some a hundredfold, and has retreated (for strategic purposes, luring the hosts of the Kaiser to their doom) nearly as fast as a frightened man can run, and exactly as fast as a victorious host can pursue them.
It is not a quarter of a million against 60,000 as it was in the Boer war. And even then the British were so handsomely beaten that in a few years they were obliged to hand back the government to the “defeated” enemy, who now treats the “rooinek” a great deal worse than ever Kruger did. But he professes “loyalty” whenever it suits him, and we all boast of pacified and united South Africa, and shoot down British miners and deport their leaders, in flat violation of their own constitution. In short, all parties have acted throughout with that good sense which in themselves they call Truth and Righteousness, and in others cynical immorality.
IX.
But more shameful and silly than all is our attitude to the diplomatic situation. Even papers normally sane are found perverting truth, and distorting facts, and misrepresenting motives, and misinterpreting plain words, in a way that would bring a blush to the cheek of a non-conformist. The common hack newspapers call the flight of the British from Mons to Paris “the greatest military feat of modern times,” and one feels that Xenophon must be shivering in the Elysian Fields (while President Poincaré finds the Champs Elysées too hot for him) at the news of how the Retreat of the Ten Thousand has been eclipsed. But this sort of lie is common to every country, and indeed the Germans are as keen to publish stories of the murder of their wounded, treacherous attacks by civilians, and any other violation of the rules of war which the imagination of their journalists can invent, as any other nation.
With parallel cant, they represent Cossacks as cannibals, and Highlanders as naked savages; but the most fair-minded of critics can hardly cavil at their complaint that in order to swamp their brave little army the world has been ransacked of every tribe, race, kingdom, principality, and power. Germania delenda est, and the end justifies the means.
Algerians, not only of Arab, but of negroid and even negro stock, have been hurled into the line; India has gushed out a venomous river of black troops—the desperate Ghoorka, whose kukri is thrust upwards through the bowels, the Pathan, whose very women scavenge the battlefield to rob, murder, and foully mutilate the dead, the fierce Sikh, the lithe Panjabi, the Bengali even, whose maximum of military achievement is The Black Hole of Calcutta! |