



Produced by David Widger








THE DRAMA OF THREE HUNDRED & SIXTY-FIVE DAYS

SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR

By Hall Caine

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY - 1915


      DEDICATED

      TO THE YOUNG MANHOOD

      OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE





THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS




THE INVISIBLE CONFLICT

Mr. Maeterlinck has lately propounded the theory {*} that what we call
the war is neither more nor less than the visible expression of a vast
invisible conflict. The unseen forces of good and evil in the universe
are using man as a means of contention. On the result of the struggle
the destiny of humanity on this planet depends. Is the Angel to prevail?
Or is the Beast to prolong his malignant existence? The issue hangs on
Fate, which does not, however, deny the exercise of the will of man.
Mystical and even fantastic as the theory may seem to be, there is no
resisting its appeal. A glance back over the events of the past year
leaves us again and again without clue to cause and effect. It is
impossible to account for so many things that have happened. We cannot
always say, "We did this because of that," or "Our enemies did that
because of the other." Time after time we can find no reason why things
happened as they have--so unaccountable and so contradictory have they
seemed to be. The dark work wrought by Death during the past year has
been done in the blackness of a night in which none can read. Hence
some of us are forced to yield to Mr. Maeterlinck's theory, which is, I
think, the theory of the ancients--the theory on which the Greeks
built their plays--that invisible powers of good and evil, operating
in regions that are above and beyond man's control, are working out his
destiny in this monstrous drama of the war.

     * The Daily Chronicle.

And what a drama it has been already! We had witnessed only 365 days of
it down to August 4, 1915, corresponding at the utmost to perhaps three
of its tragic acts, but what scenes, what emotions! Mr. Lowell used
to say that to read Carlyle's book on the French Revolution was to
see history as by flashes of lightning. It is only as by flashes of
lightning that we can yet hope to see the world-drama of 1914-15.
Figures, groups, incidents, episodes, without the connecting links
of plots, and just as they have been thrown off by Time, the
master-producer--what a spectacle they make, what a medley of motives,
what a confused jumble of sincerities and hypocrisies, heroisms and
brutalities, villainies and virtues!

As happens in every drama, a great deal of the tragic mischief had
occurred before the curtain rose. Always before the passage of war over
the world there comes the far-off murmur of its approaching wings. Each
of us in this case had heard it, distinctly or indistinctly, according
to the accidents of personal experience. I think I myself heard it for
the first time dearly when in the closing year of King Edward's reign I
came to know (it is unnecessary to say how) what our Sovereign's feeling
had been about his last visit to Berlin. It can do no harm now to
say that it had been a feeling of intense anxiety. The visit seemed
necessary, even imperative, there-fore the King would not shirk his
duty. But for his country, as well as for himself, he had feared for his
reception in Germany, and on his arrival in Berlin, and during his drive
from the railway station with the Kaiser, he had watched and listened
to the demonstrations in the streets with an emotion which very nearly
amounted to dread.

The result had brought a certain relief. With the best of all possible
intentions, the newspapers in both capitals had reported that King
Edward's reception had been enthusiastic. It hadn't been that--at least,
it hadn't seemed to be that to the persons chiefly concerned. But it had
been just cordial enough not to be chilling, just warm enough to carry
things off, to drown that far-off murmur of war which was like the
approach of a mighty wind. Then, during the next days, there had been
the usual banqueting, with the customary toasting to the amity of the
two great nations, whose interests were so closely united by bonds of
peace! And then the return drive to the railway station, the clatter of
horsemen in shining armour, the adieux, the throbbing of the engine,
the starting of the train, and then.... "Thank God, it's over!" If the
invisible powers had really been struggling over the destiny of men, how
the evil half of them must have shrieked with delight that day as the
Kaiser rode back to Potsdam and our King returned to London!




PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE KAISER

Other whisperings there were of the storm that was so soon to burst on
the world. In the ominous silence there were rumours of a certain change
that was coming over the spirit of the Kaiser. For long years he had
been credited with a sincere love of peace, and a ceaseless desire
to restrain the forces about him that were making for war. Although
constantly occupied with the making of a big army, and inspiring it with
great ideals, he was thought to have as little desire for actual warfare
as his ancestor, Frederick William, had shown, while gathering up his
giant guardsmen and refusing to allow them to fight. Particularly it was
believed in Berlin (not altogether graciously) that his affection for,
and even fear of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, would compel him to
exhaust all efforts to preserve peace in the event of trouble with Great
Britain. But Victoria was dead, and King Edward might perhaps be smiled
at--behind his back--and then a younger generation was knocking at the
Kaiser's door in the person of his eldest son, who represented forces
which he might not long be able to hold in check. How would he act now?

Thousands of persons in this country had countless opportunities before
the war of forming an estimate of the Kaiser's character. I had only
one, and it was not of the best. For years the English traveller
abroad felt as if he were always following in the track of a grandiose
personality who was playing on the scene of the world as on a stage,
fond as an actor of dressing up in fine uniforms, of making pictures,
scenes, and impressions, and leaving his visible mark behind him--as in
the case of the huge gap in the thick walls of Jerusalem, torn down (it
was said with his consent) to let his equipage pass through.

In Rome I saw a man who was a true son of his ancestors. Never had
the laws of heredity better justified themselves. Frederick William,
Frederick the Great, William the First--the Hohenzollerns were all
there. The glittering eyes, the withered arm, the features that gave
signs of frightful periodical pain, the immense energy, the gigantic
egotism, the ravenous vanity, the fanaticism amounting to frenzy, the
dominating power, the dictatorial temper, the indifference to suffering
(whether his own or other people's), the overbearing suppression of
opposing opinions, the determination to control everybody's interest,
everybody's work--I thought all this was written in the Kaiser's
masterful face. Then came stories. One of my friends in Rome was an
American doctor who had been called to attend a lady of the Emperor's
household. "Well, doctor, what's she suffering from?" said the Kaiser.
The doctor told him. "Nothing of the kind--you're entirely wrong. She's
suffering from so and so," said the Majesty of Germany, stamping up and
down the room. At length the American doctor lost control. "Sir," he
said, "in my country we have a saying that one bad practitioner is worth
twenty good amateurs--you're the amateur." The doctor lived through
it. Frederick William would have dragged him to the window and tried to
fling him out of it. William II put his arm round the doctor's shoulder
and said, "I didn't mean to hurt you, old fellow. Let us sit down and
talk."

A soldier came with another story. After a sham fight conducted by the
Kaiser the generals of the German army had been summoned to say what
they thought of the Royal manoeuvres. All had formed an unfavourable
opinion, yet one after another, with some insincere compliment, had
wriggled out of the difficulty of candid criticism. But at length came
an officer, who said:

"Sir, if it had been real warfare to-day there wouldn't be enough wood
in Germany to make coffins for the men who would be dead."

The general lived through it, too--at first in a certain disfavour, but
afterwards in recovered honour.

Such was the Kaiser, who a year ago had to meet the mighty wind of War.
He was in Norway for his usual summer holiday in July 1914 when affairs
were reaching their crisis. Rumour has it that he was not satisfied
with the measure of the information that was reaching him, therefore
he returned to Berlin, somewhat to the discomfiture of his ministers,
intending, it is said, for various reasons (not necessarily
humanitarian) to stop or at least postpone the war. If so, he arrived
too late. He was told that matters had gone too far. They must go on
now. "Very well, if they must, they must," he is reported to have said.
And there is the familiar story that after he had signed his name on the
first of August to the document that plunged Europe into the conflict
that has since shaken it to its foundations, he flung down his pen and
cried, "You'll live to regret this, gentlemen."




PEN-PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE

And then the Crown Prince. In August of last year nine out of every ten
of us would have said that not the father, but the son, of the Royal
family of Germany had been the chief provocative cause of the war.
Subsequent events have lessened the weight of that opinion. But the
young man's known popularity among an active section of the officers of
the army; their subterranean schemes to set him off against his father;
a vague suspicion of the Kaiser's jealousy of his eldest son--all these
facts and shadows of facts give colour to the impression that not least
among the forces which led the Emperor on that fateful first of August
to declare war against Russia was the presence and the importunity of
the Crown Prince. What kind of man was it, then, whom the invisible
powers of evil were employing to precipitate this insensate struggle?

Hundreds of persons in England, France, Russia, and Italy must have met
the Crown Prince of Germany at more or less close quarters, and
formed their own estimates of his character. The barbed-wire fence of
protective ceremony which usually surrounds Royal personages, concealing
their little human foibles, was periodically broken down in the case
of the Heir-Apparent to the German Throne by his incursion every winter
into a small cosmopolitan community which repaired to the snows of the
Engadine for health or pleasure. In that stark environment I myself, in
common with many others, saw the descendant of the Fredericks every day,
for several weeks of several years, at a distance that called for no
intellectual field-glasses. And now I venture to say, for whatever it
may be worth, that the result was an entirely unfavourable impression.

I saw a young man without a particle of natural distinction, whether
physical, moral, or mental. The figure, long rather than tall; the
hatchet face, the selfish eyes, the meaningless mouth, the retreating
forehead, the vanishing chin, the energy that expressed itself merely in
restless movement, achieving little, and often aiming at nothing at all;
the uncultivated intellect, the narrow views of life and the world; the
morbid craving for change, for excitement of any sort; the indifference
to other people's feelings, the shockingly bad manners, the assumption
of a right to disregard and even to outrage the common conventions on
which social intercourse depends--all this was, so far as my observation
enabled me to judge, only too plainly apparent in the person of the
Crown Prince. 21

Outside the narrow group that gathered about him (a group hailing,
ironically enough, from the land of a great Republic) I cannot remember
to have heard in any winter one really warm word about him, one story of
an act of kindness, or even generous condescension, such as it is easy
for a royal personage to perform. On the contrary, I was constantly
hearing tales of silly fooleries, of overbearing behaviour, of
deliberate rudeness, such as irresistibly recalled, in spirit if not in
form, the conduct of the common barrator in the guise of a king, who, if
Macaulay's stories are to be credited, used to kick a lady in the open
streets and tell her to go home and mind her brats.




SOME SALUTARY LESSONS

Only it was not Prussia we were living in, and it was not the year 1720,
so the air tingled occasionally with other tales of little salutary
lessons administered to our Royal upstart on his style of pursuing the
pleasures considered suitable to a Prince. One day it was told of him
that, having given a cup to be raced for on the Bob-run, he was wroth
to find on the notice-board of entries the names of a team of highly
respectable little Englishmen who are familiar on the racecourse; and,
taking out his pencil-case, he scored them off, saying, "My cup is for
gentlemen, not jockeys," whereupon a young English soldier standing by
had said: "We're not jockeys here, sir, and we're not princes; we are
only sportsmen."

I cannot vouch for that story, but I can certainly say that, after a
particularly flagrant and deliberate act of rudeness, imperilling the
safety of several persons in the village street, the Crown Prince of
Germany was told to his foolish face by an Englishman, who need not be
named, that he was a fool, and a damned fool, and deserved to be kicked
off the road.

And this is the mindless, but mischievous, person, the ridiculous
buccaneer, born out of his century, who was permitted to interfere
in the destinies of Europe; to help to determine the fate of tens of
millions of men on the battlefields, and the welfare of hundreds of
millions of women and children in their homes. What wild revel the
invisible powers of evil must have held in Berlin on