The Telegraph Book of Readers' Letters from the Great War (21 page)

Shells are necessary, but they are useless without the energy in the gun to propel them. Guns are required, but the man behind the gun is more important than the gun. Millions of men are wanted, but their value is in their spirit, and in the spirit of the nations which sends them and upholds them. It is the spirit that matters. And the spirit of the nation should be the affair of its spiritual leaders.

Especially in the present war is attention to the spirit called for. As the Prime Minister says, it is a spiritual conflict – a conflict between the German spirit and the spirit which animates us. The future of the world is at stake. If the Germans win, the German spirit will dominate human affairs for ages to come. German necessity will know no law. Belgiums will be trampled on;
Lusitania
s will be submarined. All who oppose will be either poisoned, or, with liquid fire, scorched off the earth. No considerations of honour, of humanity, or of anything else will stand in the way. ‘Woe to
the vanquished,' the Kaiser has said. The German will and German
Kultur
alone will be permitted.

What we are fighting for is that German necessity shall know law – the law of right – and, what is more, shall obey it. We are fighting that the rights of Serbia, Belgium and every other state, small or great, shall be respected. We are fighting that the ordinary human rights of defenceless women and children and of unarmed civilians shall be preserved. We are engaged in a spiritual conflict – a holy war – the Fight for Right.

This fight we have to win. But to win those of us who are able must stir the spirit of the people, summon up all the spiritual forces of the nation, collect those energies together and direct them on to the one great end we have in view – the maintenance of human right.

And not merely quantity of spiritual energy is required, but quality also. The Germans have unsurpassed organisation and immense spirit behind it. But the quality of their spirit is gross. It is the spirit of the beast, not of the man. Ours must be different, and our finest spirits must refine it till it is of the best. And, fortunately, the finest is also the strongest and most enduring.

What I would urge, then, is that on Sundays meetings should be held (at times not interfering with the usual church services) on ground common to the whole community – in the open air, the town hall or other public building – and that the spiritual nature of this conflict be impressed upon the people. And these meetings might be addressed by laymen as well as by ministers; by women as well as by men; by members of the congregation as well as by occupants of the platform. The whole idea would be to make the call felt by each and to let the spirit come out where and when it will that it may communicate itself to others.

Every means – music, speech, song, the recital of the great words of others, the examples of men and women of today – should be used to arouse the spirit of the people, and appeal be made to their highest and not to their lowest sentiments – not to self-interest, fear, hate, revenge, but to self-sacrifice and that devotion to country and to kind which gives up all that the world may be a better place for those who follow after.

And that something practical might eventuate, those who are willing to offer themselves for service to their country might be asked to present themselves at the close of the
meeting, and they might then be directed by competent advisers to where their own particular services might be used with fullest effect. Recruits – and free and willing recruits – for every department of the country's service would then come forward, and every single one would have felt the great call on him and his spirit rising to the call. He would ever after feel an abhorrence of all that hindered his answering it to the full, and he would be possessed of a determination to do his best in his own little line to carry the great cause forward till the Fight for Right is won.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Francis Younghusband
3 Buckingham Gate, S.W.

First, of course, the mere badness of the story is almost too big to be held in the mind. There have been stories of a woman or a child actually robbed of reason for life by the mere ocular shock of some revolting cruelty done in their presence. There was really a danger of something of the kind paralysing our protest against the largest and, by the help of God, the last of the crimes of the Prussian kings. The onlookers might have been struck into a sort of gibbering imbecility, and even amiability, by the full and indefensible finality of the foul stroke. We had no machine that could measure the stunning directness of the blow from hell. We could hardly realise an enormous public act which the actor did not wish to excuse, but only to execute. Yet such an act was the occupation of Belgium; almost the only act in history for which there was quite simply and literally nothing to be said. Bad history is the whole basis of Prussia; but even in bad history the Prussians could find no precedent and no palliation, and the more intelligent Prussians did not try. A few were so feeble-minded as to say they had found dangerous documents in Brussels, as if what they had done could possibly be excused by things they did not know when they did it. This almost piteous lapse in argument was, however,
covered up by the cleverer Prussians as quickly as might be. They preferred to stand without a rag of reason on them than with such a rag as that. Before we came to the monstrous material suffering, there is in the existing situation an abstract unreason, nay an abstract insanity, which the brain of man must not bear. A nightmare must not abide to the end. The tiniest trace of Prussian victory that remains will make us think of something which is not to be thought of, of something like the victory of the beasts over mankind.

Second, it must be remembered that this murder has been done upon a people of such proximity and familiarity that there cannot be any mistake about the matter. There is some shadowy justification for the comparative indifference to the wrongs of very remote people, for it is not easy for us to guess how much slavery shocks a negro or cannibalism a cannibal. But the innkeepers and shopkeepers of Ostend felt exactly as the innkeepers and shopkeepers of Dover would feel. We have to imagine a prehistoric cruelty coming suddenly upon a scene which was civilised and almost commonplace. Imagine tigers breaking out of the Zoological Gardens and eating all the people in Albany Street, imagine Red Indians exhibited at Olympia literally scalping every passer-by from that place to Hammersmith Broadway; imagine Jack the Ripper crowned King of Whitechapel and conducting his executions in broad daylight outside the tube station at Aldgate; imagine as much as you can of what is violent and contradictory in an overturn of all modern life by troglodytes, and you are still falling short of the fearful Belgian scene in that familiar Belgian scenery. It is idle to talk of exaggerations or misrepresentations about a case so close
to us. Chinese tortures may not be quite so fantastic as travellers tell us; Siberia may not be so desolate as its fugitives say it is; but we could no more invent such a massacre in Belgium than we could a massacre in Balham. The things of shameless shame that have been done are something worse than prodigies, worse than nightmares, worse than devilries; they are facts.

Third, this people we have heard of daily have endured this unheard of thing, and endured it for us. There are countless cases for compassion among the bewildering and heart-rending by-products of this war; but this is not a case for compassion. This is a case for that mere working minimum of a sense of honour that makes us repay a poor man who has advanced his last penny to post a letter we have forgotten to stamp. In this respect Belgium stands alone, and the claims even of other Allies may well stand aside till she is paid to the uttermost farthing. There has been self-sacrifice everywhere else, but it was self-sacrifice of individuals, each for his own country; the Serbian dying for Serbia, or the Italian for Italy. But the Belgian did not merely die for Belgium. Belgium died for Europe. Not only was the soldier sacrificed for the nation, the nation was sacrificed for mankind. It is a sacrifice which is I think, quite unique even among Christians; and quite inconceivable among pagans. If we even privately utter a murmur, or even privately grudge a penny for binding the wounds of so solitary and exceptional a martyr, we ourselves shall be something almost as solitary and exceptional. We shall perhaps be nearest to the state of that unspeakable sociologist who persuaded his wife to partake of a simultaneous suicide, and then himself cheerfully lived on.

Fourth: If there be anyone on this earth who does not find the final success of such crime more than the mind can bear; if there be anyone who does not feel it as the more graphic since it walks among the tramway lines and lamp-posts of a life like our own; if there be anyone who does not feel that to be caught napping about Belgium is like being caught robbing one's mother on her deathbed; there still remains a sort of brutal compassion for bodily pain, which has been half-admitted here and there even by the oppressors themselves. If we do not do a great deal more even than we have already done, it may yet be said of us that we left it to the very butchers of this nation to see that it did not bleed to death.

I, therefore, plead for further help for the members of the national committee who have taken this duty upon themselves. All subscriptions can be addressed to the treasurer at Trafalgar Buildings, Trafalgar Square, London, or to local committees where they have been formed.

Yours faithfully,

G.K. Chesterton

Overroads, Beaconsfield, Bucks

Our society permits me to publish one recommendation which I have made, and which is to be acted upon at once. It relates to bread. There is no doubt whatever that most of the bread sent from this country to our prisoners through Holland arrives in an uneatable condition. I have seen hundreds of postcards to that effect, and have heard sufficient oral evidence to convince me that this is the fact.

On the other hand, the British section of the Prisoners' Help Society at Berne bakes and sends hundreds of loaves a week to our prisoners. These consignments reach the furthest camps in Germany in under five days, and always in first-rate condition. This is accounted for by the advantage in geographical position which Berne occupies, by the rapidity and regularity of transport, and by the special method of baking adopted by the bakers in Switzerland.