Читать книгу A Straight Deal; Or, The Ancient Grudge - Owen Wister - Страница 6

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There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing—side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not “high-brows” only.

May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting words, “there is such a thing as being too proud to fight.” The British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.

Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our country—oh, more than half!—in different or incredulous, nothing prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt’s and Leonard Wood’s almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes—would stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions—do you remember? For our future’s sake may everybody remember, may nobody forget!

What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes had been leaking out for all who chose to understand them. A great many did not so choose. The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now more than ever before, because he intended that we should pay his war bills. Let him once get by England, and his sword would cut through our fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through cheese.

A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said, “Well, I like the French. But I’ll not cry much if England gets hers. What’s England done in this war, anyway?”

“Her fleet’s keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,” retorted another voice.

With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the first speaker protested, “Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as any Kaiser.”

“Aw, get your facts straight!” It was said with scornful force. “Don’t you know George III was a German? Don’t you know it was Hessians—they’re Germans—he hired to come over here and kill Americans and do his dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work the Kaiser’s are doing now. We’ve got a letter written after the battle of Long Island by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And they stripped him and they stole his things and they beat him down with the butts of their guns—after he had surrendered, mind—when he was surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some more. That’s Germans for you. Only they’ve been getting worse while the rest of the world’s been getting better. Get your facts straight, man.”

A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian his ingenious promptness—I have none—and I hoped for more of this timely debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to silence. Either he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what is so pithily termed “come-back.” The latter, I incline to think; for come-back needs no facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in the anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German. Germans do not come back when it goes against them, they bleat “Kamerad!”—or disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy—a poor one, to be sure—yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making friends enemies, just as his breed has worked to set enmity between ourselves and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy, England and Russia, between everybody and everybody else all the world over, in the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the Kaiser. Thus has his breed, since we occupied Coblenz, run to the French soldiers with lies about us and then run to us with lies about the French soldiers, overlooking in its providential stupidity the fact that we and the French would inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his breed, at the moment I write these words, infesting and poisoning the earth with a propaganda that remains as coherent and as systematically directed as ever it was before the papers began to assure us that there was nothing left of the Hohenzollern government.