The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-06
(continued.1

of the various sovereign states" and the conception of general predoEni- nance in human affairs on the part of some one particular. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost in the human ina gination-it bore into the human brain like some grisly para site and filled it with disordered thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the French system exhausted its vitality in belligerent rconvulsions, and then the infection passed to the German speaking peo- pies, who were the heart and center of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite knowingnesses of the political writer the cunning refusa1s to accept plain facts, the strategic devices, the tactical maneuvers, the records of mobiliza- lions and counter mobi1izations. It ceased to be credible almost as soon as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new age their state crafts men sat with their historical candles burning, and, in spite of strange new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
  to rearrange the maps of Europe and the world s
 It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of men and women outside the world of these specialists sympathized and agreed with their portentfous activities. One school of psychologists inclined to minimize this participation, but the balance of evidence goes to show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of the be1ligerent schemer. Primitive man had been hercely conn bative animal. Innumeratle genera tons had passed their lives in tribal warfare, and the weight of tradition. the example of history, the ideals of loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the indictments of the in ternatfonal mischief maker. The polit1- cal ideas of the common man were picked up haphazard, there was prac- tical1y nothing in such education Hs he was given that was ever intended to it him for citizenship as such Chat conception only appeared, indeed, with the development of modern state ideas), and it was therefore a com paratively easy matter to ill his va. cant mind with the sounds and fury of exasperated suspicion and national aggression.
 For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic when presently his battalion came up from the depot to London to entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children and women and lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung with the flags of the allied powers, of real enthusi- asm even among the destitute and un- employed. The labor bureaus were now partially transformed into enroll ment offices and were centers of hotly patriotic excitement. At every con venient place upon the line on either side of the channel tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feel ing in the regiment, if a little stfened and darkened by grim anticipations, was none the less warlike-
 But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without established ideas It was with most of them, Bar net says, as it was with himself, nat uraI response to collective movement and to martial sounds and colors and the exhiiarating challenge of vague dangers. And people had been so long oppressed by the threat of and prepa- rati8s lr war that it's arrival came
 
 The plan of campaign of the allies assigned the defense of the lower Mouse to the English. and the troop trains were run direct from the various British depots to the points in the Ar dennes where they were intended to intrench themselves.
 1 Most of the documents bearing upon 1 the campaign were destroyed during | inc war From the first the scheme of the allies seems to have been confused, but it is highly probable that the for l nation of an aerial park in this region from which attacks could be made upon the vast industrial plant of the | lower Rhinc and a. danking raid through Holland upon the German na- l val establishments at the mouth of the Elbe were integral parts of the original l project Nothing of this was known to such pawns in the game as Barnet and l his company, whose business it was 60 do what they were told by the myste- l 'rious intelIigences at the direction of things ing Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had also been trans ferred. From first to last these direct | ing intelligences remained mysterious to the body of the army, yelled under the name of Orders" There was nc Napoleon, no Caesar, to embody enthu siasm. Barnet says: t'We talked o1 them. They are sending us up into Luxemburg. They are going to turI the central European right"
 Behind the veil of this vagueness thu little group of more or less worthy mer which constituted headquarters wa. beginning to realize the enornaity O ahe thing 1t was supposed to control.
 In the great hall of the war control whose windows looked out across thi seine to the Trocadero and the palace. of the western quarter, series of bil scale relief maps were laid out upol tables to display the whole seat of wal and the staff officers of the contre