"Speaking of Prussians—"

BY IRVIN S. COBB

FICTION

WIT AND HUMOR

MISCELLANY

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK

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TURNING THE EAGLE LOOSE

"Speaking of
Prussians——"

By

Irvin S. Cobb

Author of
"Back Home," "Europe Revised,"
"Speaking of Operations——", Etc.

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

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"Speaking of Prussians—"

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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