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"Speaking of Prussians--"




BY IRVIN S. COBB


FICTION

 THOSE TIMES AND THESE
 LOCAL COLOR
 OLD JUDGE PRIEST
 FIBBLE, D. D.
 BACK HOME
 THE ESCAPE OF MR. TRIMM


WIT AND HUMOR

 "SPEAKING OF OPERATIONS----"
 EUROPE REVISED
 ROUGHING IT DE LUXE
 COBB'S BILL OF FARE
 COBB'S ANATOMY


MISCELLANY

 "SPEAKING OF PRUSSIANS----"
 PATHS OF GLORY


 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
 NEW YORK

[Illustration: TURNING THE EAGLE LOOSE]




 "_Speaking of Prussians----_"

 _By_

 _Irvin S. Cobb_

 _Author of
 "Back Home," "Europe Revised,"
 "Speaking of Operations----", Etc._

 [Illustration]

 _New York
 George H. Doran Company_




 COPYRIGHT, 1917,

 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


 DEDICATED
 BY PERMISSION
 TO
 WOODROW WILSON
 PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES




"_Speaking of Prussians--_"




I


I believe it to be my patriotic duty as an American citizen to write
what I am writing, and after it is written to endeavour to give to it as
wide a circulation in the United States as it is possible to find. In
making this statement, though, I am not setting myself up as a teacher
or a preacher; neither am I going upon the assumption that, because I am
a fairly frequent contributor to American magazines, people will be the
readier or should be the readier to read what I have to say.

Aside from a natural desire to do my own little bit, my chief reason is
this: Largely by chance and by accident, I happened to be one of four or
five American newspaper men who witnessed at first hand the German
invasion of Belgium and one of three who, a little later, witnessed
some of the results of the Germanic subjugation of the northern part of
France. I was inside Germany at the time the rush upon Paris was checked
and the retreat from the Marne took place, thereby having opportunity to
take cognisance of the feelings and sentiments and the impulses which
controlled the German populace in a period of victory and in a period of
reversals.

I am in the advantageous position, therefore, of being able to recount
as an eyewitness--and, as I hope, an honest one--something of what war
means in its effects upon the civilian populace of a country caught
unawares and in a measure unprepared; and, more than that, what war
particularly and especially means when it is waged under the direction
of officers trained in the Prussian school.

Having seen these things, I hate war with all my heart. I am sure that I
hate it with a hatred deeper than the hate of you, reader, who never saw
its actual workings and its garnered fruitage. For, you see, I saw the
physical side of it; and, having seen it, I want to tell you that I
have no words with which halfway adequately to describe it for you, so
that you may have in your mind the pictures I have in mine. It is the
most obscene, the most hideous, the most brutal, the most malignant--and
sometimes the most necessary--spectacle, I veritably believe, that ever
the eye of mortal man has rested on since the world began, and I do hate
it.

But if war had to come--war for the preservation of our national honour
and our national integrity; war for the defence of our flag and our
people and our soil; war for the preservation of the principles of
representative government among the nations of the earth--I would rather
that it came now than that it came later. I have a child. I would rather
that child, in her maturity, might be assured of living in a peace
guaranteed by the sacrifices and the devotion of the men and women of
this generation, than that her father should live on in a precarious
peace, bought and paid for with cowardice and national dishonour.




II


A few days before war was declared, an antimilitarist mass meeting was
held in New York. It was variously addressed by a number of well-known
gentlemen regarding whose purity of motive there could be no question,
but regarding whose judgment a great majority of us have an opinion that
cannot be printed without the use of asterisks. And it was attended by a
very large representation of peace-loving citizens, including a numerous
contingent of those peculiar patriots who, for the past two years, have
been so very distressed if any suggestion of hostilities with the
Central Powers was offered, but so agreeably reconciled if a break with
the Allies, or any one of them, seemed a contingency.

It may have been only a coincidence, but it struck some of us as a
significant fact that, from the time of the dismissal of Count Von
Bernstorff onward, the average pro-peace meeting was pretty sure to
resolve itself into something rather closely resembling a pro-German
demonstration before the evening was over. Persons who hissed the name
of our President behaved with respectful decorum when mention was made
of a certain Kaiser.

However, I am not now concerned with these weird Americans, some of whom
part their Americanism in the middle with a hyphen. Some of them were in
jail before this little book was printed. I am thinking now of those
national advocates of the policy of the turned cheek; those professional
pacificists; those wavers of the olive branch--who addressed this
particular meeting and similar meetings that preceded it--little
brothers to the worm and the sheep and the guinea pig, all of them--who
preached not defence, but submission; not a firm stand, but a complete
surrender; not action, but words, words, words.




III


Every right-thinking man, I take it, believes in universal peace and
realises, too, that we shall have universal peace in that fair day when
three human attributes, now reasonably common among individuals and
among nations, have been eliminated out of this world, these three being
greed, jealousy and evil temper. Every sane American hopes for the time
of universal disarmament, and meantime indulges in one mental
reservation: He wants all the nations to put aside their arms; but he
hopes his own nation will be the last to put aside hers. But not every
American--thanks be to God!--has in these months and years of our
campaign for preparedness favoured leaving his country in a state where
she might be likened to a large, fat, rich, flabby oyster, without any
shell, in a sea full of potential or actual enemies, all clawed, all
toothed, all hungry. The oyster may be the more popular, but it is the
hard-shelled crab that makes the best life-insurance risk.

And when I read the utterances of those conscientious gentlemen, who
could not be brought to bear the idea of going to war with any nation
for any reason, I wished with all my soul they might have stood with me
in Belgium on that August day, when I and the rest of the party to which
I belonged saw the German legions come pouring down, a cloud of smoke by
day and a pillar of fire by night, with terror riding before them as
their herald, and death and destruction and devastation in the tracks
their war-shod feet left upon a smiling and a fecund little land.
Because I am firmly of the opinion that their sentiments would then have
undergone the same instantaneous transformation which the feelings of
each member of my group underwent.

Speaking for myself, I confess that, until that summer day of the year
1914, I had thought--such infrequent times as I gave the subject any
thought at all--that for us to spend our money on heavy guns and an
augmented navy, for us to dream of compulsory military training and a
larger standing army, would be the concentrated essence of economic and
national folly.

I remember when Colonel Roosevelt--then, I believe, President
Roosevelt--delivered himself of the doctrine of the Big Stick, I, being
a good Democrat, regarded him as an incendiary who would provoke the
ill will of great Powers, which had for us only kindly feeling, by the
shaking in their faces of an armed fist. I remember I had said to
myself, as, no doubt, most Americans had said to themselves:

"We are a peaceful nation; not concerned with dreams of conquest. We
have the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans for our protection. We are not
going to make war on anybody else. Nobody else is going to make war on
us. War is going out of fashion all over the planet. A passion for peace
is coming to be the fashion of the world. The lion and the lamb lie down
together."

Well, the lion and the lamb did lie down together--over there in Europe;
and when the lion rose, a raging lion, he had the mangled carcass of the
lamb beneath his bloodied paws. And it was on the day when I first saw
the lion, with his jaws adrip, coming down the highroads, typified in
half a million fighting men--men whose sole business in life was to
fight, and who knew their business as no other people ever have known
it--that in one flash of time I decided I wanted my country to quit
being lamb-like, not because the lion was a pleasing figure before mine
eyes, but because for the first time I realised that, so long as there
are lions, sooner or later must come oppression and annihilation for the
nation which persists in being one of the lambs.

As though it happened yesterday, instead of thirty months ago, I can
recreate in my mind the physical and the mental stage settings of that
moment. I can shut my eyes and see the German firing squad shooting two
Belgian civilians against a brick wall. I can smell the odours of the
burning houses. Yes, and the smell of the burning flesh of the dead men
who were in those