PRUSSIAN HUMOUR

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 52, 26 November 1918, Page 5

PRUSSIAN HUMOUR

THE PROPHET DANIEL AT METZ V

• To-day the ancient and famous city of Metz is tho headquarters of General Potain, Commander-in-Chief of the Frenoli armies. When the following remarkable article was written, however, tho "Allies were many'marches from the great fortress, which was then Gorman and had been German for forty-three-years. "At Metz two years ago" (wrote Sir Janiea Yosall, ; M.P., in "T.P.'s Weekly" of September 11, 1915) "in a small shop near the cathedral, I spoke- to the elderly woman behind the counter in German, and she answered in French. I therefore begged her -pardon; excusing niyselt by the belief that Metz people were required to speak German only. 'Maybe, maybe!' she said passionately; 'but this is a bit of France, all tho same!' Quandmenie! Forty-threo .years her patriotic .faith had lasted, patient though impassioned; the that symbol of faith and endurance, always within her ken.. But we? Wo here, we impatient, Eomo of U3 with not faith enough to move a mole-hill let alono a mountain, deserve Tennyson's condemnation, for "'Expecting all things in an hour.' "There is anothor sort of impatience, which refuses to listen to any unpleasant war news, and that is a dangerous sort, too, of course. But I think the Jeremiahs are worse. 'Why do we sit still?' the original Jeremiah cried. p 'Assemble yourselves; enter into tho defenced cities! The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved!' To reject all faith, disregard all history, nnd assume ihat Germans are superis stupid, and onr stupids | will soon have cowardico enough- to cry out that the Germans are divine! Joseph Conrad says that German characteristics have 'a hypnotising power over halfbaked souls and half-lighted minds'; Sir Frederick Pollock thinks history will write that 'tho modern.Gemnans were a people with an infinite capacity-, for foreseeing everything except what happened'; but (these are outside opinions, just as the-Jeremiahs are. That good'wife at Metz knew Qermans well, firsthand, however; and they had neither cozened her nor cowed her, all those forty-three years. . ,

■ "During those forty-three years this experienced old world of ours had turned round and round very calmly, though between the battles of Sedan and the Marne it had heard a .thousand' times the' optimists of War and the pessimists of Peace. The; steadiest, most phlegmatic port of thb world has always been England; in that lies our strength. TTou don't tako the struggle seriously enough!' people say. Perhaps we did /'not, at first. IJut did /England ever take her' wars very seriously, ■I'Mvonder? - Even when they were fought upon our own soil?, Not tho war. between the Stuarts and Cromwell, at any rate, nor yet the Wars of the Roses;'just before tho Battle of Naseby the armies saw a merry hunting-party go larking along the vale."- People to-day read with surprise that the real estate marketis doing well just now, but thati is nothing new; hundreds of fait manorhouses and farmsteads .were- rebuilt in stone here during, the struggles of York and Lancaster, our Thirty Tears' War. "If records and styles aro trustworthy, it was then that the change from mud to stonework, froin Clay-dabberDick to Jack Mason and Will Quarrier, took place; Wat Tyler was an earlier figure; pantiles .were used even when houses were built •of timber and dab. Through all our wars Tom Thatcher . worked on, as he does yet in many rustic goodness, weaving his khaki , 'British ■warm'; Bill Wright and John Plough-, man wjjrked on, too, cutting their jokes and singing their ditties, though battles . .were handy, just as Thomas Atkins does himself. 'Tommy' is .a. misnomer, by the tray—tho typical name ought to be Private .Mark Tapley. For Mark, 'you remember, 'always pame out under disadvantageous circumstances/ and eaid 'There's some credit in beimj jolly when' 6uch fellows as "him" is going about!' ." 'Him' is now—well, you know whom— and we fiercely begrudge him his victims; we give our sons—our only sons, or' our Benjamins—and our poor eavings against him; and we bitterly sorrow for oiir dead. But meanwhile let the nation as a whole keep "as cool andjclieery. as'it'can.. What fools of patriotism they are who depress Private Hark Tapley by their ranting or fault-finding newspapers! His spirit ie our most precious national possession, for it is evidence of the unchanging indefeasible old race. So were fair churches and manor houses built calmly in wartime, and jokes cut in wood and stone in our churches, tfhile battles were going on. Consider Kit Carver's work, seen in our abbeys and cathedrals; nowadays our architects can only raise smiles unintentionally, : but Kit delighted to laugh and •make laugh, even in time of war. "Which ia why English gargoyles often grin good-liumouredly; not glaring' with 'frightfulness' as German gargoyles and the. Kaiser do; English finials set you, joyous riddles often,, and even the miserere seats were mirthful in old English choir stalls..-, People prayed just as devoutly then, and for 'peace in our time, 0 Lord!' all the same. ' Our Gothic masons, being human and not Prussian, English and noi too systematic, took care that their work should never be 'icily regular, splendidly null,' and they could not be too serious and solemn even when building a church,- in tho very time of war. So far as this was. done with any conscious purpose, I daresay it.meant a protest against •' too much formalism, against e.trait-lacednesa that would else have strait-waistcoated much that. was ■wholesome and sane.

"In a hundred cathedrals and lesser churches you may note marks of dßch merry nonconformism as, that; I never saw any in Prussian churches, however, but what would you? The Prussian is only dirtily humorous, sardonyx,is the one native Prussian gem. The sterile;.' soriof devout have deplored our cathedral jests as profane; but no, it was; honest mirth and good-natured, it was hardly even irony, it was never really bitter even when it satirised the cowl. You do not find fun in German churches, I say, but there is one exception io that; a capital stroke of the comic was done upon the west front of Metz Cathedral a few years ago. A stone figure of Daniel had stood there, defying the lions of the i weather for six centuries or so, but gradually he had peeled away, and at last he fell. So what did the sycophant boobies do but set up a Wilhe'lmDaniel in his place! , "The humour of that! Wilholm II to represent Daniel, tho seer, him of the 'Apocalyptic visions, the Prophet whose very name meani 'God is the judge!' Here was profanity if you like-the natnral and racial blasphemy of folk who •deify their IlohenzoUenis and talk about 'that good old German God of ours , ! There at Motz tho statue still stands, I suppose, as I saw it two years ago; the cowl, (which a Latin proverb said did Jiot make a monk) overshadowing the pompous features, but not making him n. prophet; and the moustaches still retrousse, not dropping—not yet. But , what a droop there is at nighl, when the man is alone with himself. O Daniel of misjudgment, one would like to set finjer on his wrist, watch in hand: as Milton wrote:—

"'To sit a guest with Dnniel at his . pulse.'

"No prophet he, and no judge, for he hits, bonnd together more firmly the fosces of the very British Empire which lie meant to disrupt. He.is known to !bo superstitious, so I hope he opens the Book of Daniel sometimes, in his bloodhaunted sleeplessness. I have quoted from Jeremiah; let me quote from Daniel now.- 'In tho latter time of 'their■ kingdom, when tho transgressors are come; to the full, a king of a fierce countenance sliall stand up. And his power shall bo mighty, and ho shall destroy wonderfully. Through, his policy he shall cniise craft to prosper, and shall magnifr himself; but he shall be broken ".without hand "!