Who Goes There!
Public-domain ebook
Who Goes There!
Language: en493 downloads on Project Gutenberg
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In: Historical Novels·Adventure·Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #40696.
The opening · free to read
To J. HAMBLEN SEARS
_Joseph! I've known you now for many years; You are the Hero of this pretty story; In him your every virtue reappears Lighting his way along the road to glory.
All you possess adorns this Hero gay, Your fatal beauty, curly hair, and so forth; Like you he's always ready, night or day, To pack his doggy clothes and ties and go forth.
No winsome maid beneath a summer sky, Innured to prudence, modesty, and duty Would dare demur or hesitate to fly With such a manly specimen of beauty.
Accept, my friend, this tribute to your worth As publisher, explorer, lover, fighter, For men like you were destined from their birth To make a millionaire of any writer._
R. W. C.
WHO GOES THERE!
_Not with indifferent or with flippant hand Draw the curtain's corner to disclose A rose, a leaf, a path through this sad land Untrampled yet by foes.
Out of the Past--the Heart's last Hermitage-- A wistful Phantom glides to me again Here where I pace that solitary cage They call, The World of Men. In vain she mirrors me the Golden Age; Vain is her Voice of Spring in wood and glen; The winter sunlight falls across my page Gilding a broken pen.
Withered the magic gardens which were mine; Eden, in embers, blackens in the sun; Rooting amid crushed roses the Wild Swine Still root, and spare not one.
Village and spire and scented forest path, Pastures and brooks, meadows and hills and fens Heard not the secret whispering in Gath There where the Gray Boar dens, Till burst his dreadful clamour on the Rhine And all the World shrank deafened by the roar Aghast before the out-rush of Wild Swine Led by the great Gray Boar._
Fallen the cloud-capped castles which were mine; Cities in ashes whiten in the sun; Rending the ruined shrines, the Rhenish Swine Still rend, and spare not one.
The Crown Prince is partly right; the majority in the world is against him and what he stands for; but not against Germany and the Germans.
He professes surprise at the attitude of the United States. That attitude is the natural result of various causes among which are the following:
Distrust of any aggressor by a nation inclined toward peace.
Disgust at the "scrap of paper" episode.
Resentment at the invasion of Belgium.
Contempt for the Imperial Government which is industriously screwing the last penny of "indemnity" out of a ruined nation, which the people of the United States are taxing their private means to keep from starvation.
Further back there are other reasons.
For thirty years the press of Germany has seldom missed an opportunity to express its contempt for Americans. Any American who has ever lived in Germany or who has read German newspapers during the last thirty years is aware of the tone of the German press concerning America and Americans. No innuendoes have been too vulgar, no sneers too brutal for the editors of these papers, and, presumably for the readers.
Also Americans do not forget the attitude of the Imperial Government during the Spanish war. The bad manners of a German Admiral are bearing fruit.
Imperialism we Americans do not understand, but it need not make us unfriendly to empires.
But we do understand when manners are bad, or when a military caste, which maintains its traditions of personal honour by violence, becomes arrogant to the point of brutality.
A false notion of personal honour is alone enough to prevent a sympathetic understanding between two peoples.
America is not an enemy to Germany, only is it inexorably opposed to any Government which breaks faith; and which enthrones above all other gods the god of violence.
For the German soldiers who are dying in this Hohenzollern-Hapsburg war we have only sympathy and pity. We know they are as brave as any soldiers; that cruelty in the German Army is in no greater proportion than it is in any army.
But also we know that the cause of Imperial Germany is wrong; her civilization is founded on propositions impossible for any American to accept; her aims, ambitions, and ideals antagonistic to the progress to communal and individual liberty as we understand the terms. And that settles the matter for us.
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