to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on.
4
We have forces here quite different from those on the surface, forces that are secret, irresistible and profound. It is these that we must judge, these that we must crush under our heel, once and for all; for they are the only ones that will not be improved or softened or brought into line by experience or progress, or even by the bitterest lesson. They are unalterable and immovable, their springs lie far beneath hope or influence; and they must be destroyed as we destroy a nest of wasps, since we know that these never can change into a nest of bees. And, even though individually and singly the Germans were all innocent and merely led astray, they would be none the less guilty in the mass. This is the guilt that counts, that alone is actual and real, because it lays bare, underneath their superficial innocence, the subconscious criminality of all.
5
No influence can prevail on the unconscious or the subconscious. It never evolves. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, a thousand years of peace, with all possible refinements of art and education, the subconscious element of the German spirit, which is its unvarying element, will remain absolutely the same as it is to-day and would declare itself, when the opportunity came, under the same aspect, with the same infamy. Through the whole course of history, two distinct willpowers have been noticed that would seem to be the opposed, elemental manifestations of the spirit of our globe, the one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny and suffering, while the other strives for liberty, the right, radiance and joy. These two powers stand once again face to face; our opportunity is now to annihilate the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we may have no more need for pity. It is a measure of organic defence. It is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that for half a century had disturbed and polluted its days. The health of our planet is in question. To-morrow the United States of Europe will have to take measures for the convalescence of the earth.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Translated by Alfred Sutro.
KING ALBERT
II
KING ALBERT
1
Of all the heroes of this stupendous war, heroes who will live in the memory of man, one assuredly of the most unsullied, one of those whom we can never love enough, is the great young king of my little country.
He was indeed at the critical hour the appointed man, the man for whom every heart was waiting. With sudden beauty he embodied the mighty voice of his people. He stood, upon the moment, for Belgium, revealed unto herself and unto others. He had the wonderful good fortune to realize and bestow a conscience in one of those dread hours of tragedy and perplexity when the best of consciences waver.
Had he not been at hand, there is no doubt but that all would have happened differently; and history would have lost one of her fairest and noblest pages. Certainly Belgium would have been loyal and true to her word; and any government would have been swept away, pitilessly and irresistibly, by the indignation of a people that had never, however far we probe into the past, played false. But there would have been much of that confusion and irresolution inevitable in a host suddenly threatened with disaster. There would have been vain talking, mistaken measures, excusable but irreparable vacillations; and, above all, the much-needed words, the precise and final words, would not have been spoken and the deeds, than which we can picture none more resolute, none greater, would not have been done at the right moment.
Thanks to the king, the peerless act shines forth and is maintained complete, unfaltering; and the path of heroism is straight and clearly defined and splendid as that of Thermopylæ indefinitely extended.
2
But what he has suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero: the most sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children than as a son loves his adoring mother. Of all that cherished kingdom, his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his love and his security, there is left intact but a handful of cities, which are threatened at every moment by the foulest invader that the world has ever borne.
All the others—so quaint or so beautiful, so bright, so serene, happy to be there, so inoffensive—jewels in the crown of Peace, models of pure and upright family life, homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the natural welcome, the ever-proffered hand and the ever-open heart: all the others are dead cities, of which not one stone is left upon another; and the very country-side, one of the fairest in this world, with its gentle pastures, is now no more than one vast field of horror.
Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are doomed to poverty and hunger.
But that remainder has but one soul, which has taken refuge in the spacious soul of its king. Not a murmur, not a word of reproach! But yesterday a town of thirty thousand inhabitants received the order to forsake its white houses, its churches, its ancient streets and squares, the scene of a light-hearted and industrious life. The thirty thousand inhabitants, women and children and old men, set forth to seek an uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city, which is threatened almost as directly as their own and which to-morrow, it may be, must in its turn set forth, but whither none can say, for the country is so small that its boundaries are quickly reached, its shelter soon exhausted.
No matter: they obey in silence and one and all approve and bless their sovereign. He did what had to be done, what every one in his place would have done; and, though they are all suffering as no people has suffered since the barbarous invasions of the earliest ages, they know that he suffers more than any of them, for in him all their sorrows find a goal; in him they are reflected and enhanced. They do not even harbour the idea that they might have been saved by a sacrifice of honour. They draw no distinction between duty and destiny. To them that duty, with its frightful consequences, seems as inevitable as a natural force against which we cannot even dream of struggling, so great is it and so invincible.
3
Here
