The Colorado statesman., 1918-09-14
Kaiser's Writers Prove to Be
Very Poor Prophets.
fHINK IN TRUE KULTUR VEIN
Forecast Only Short and Merry War,
at End of Which Great German
Hosts Will BE conquerors
Of the World.
BY EARL DERR BIGGERS.
From tho,committee on Public Informa-

ton, Washington, ID. Co
Speaking of Germans-as who is not
these days?-a celebrated French poet,
Jean Aicard, has hit upon a rather
neat and happy figure of speech. In a
long and eloquent poem about the war,
after he has described how the Ger
man horde, coming forward with
God" as they put it, swept down on
Paris, and has pictured them bafiied
and beaten by the miracle of the
Marne, he further recalls how-"hav-
ing prepared themselves in France a
terriers hole"-they
lntrenched themselves therein, defeated.
driven. hurled
Back by the sword of France and scorned
by all the world.
And then what happened? Let Al
card tell it:
There, in their filthy holes. their natural
habitat,
AS lives the hunted boar, the crouching
soldiers sat;
And. a putrid pool exhales an evil
SMELL
They poured their poisons forth straight
from the nav of hell,
Dehled the blue of heaven and made the
virgin air
A party to the crime they perpetrated
there.
The choking gas that rose, mephitic, from
their holes,
Was very like the breath and odor of
their souls.
The odor of their soulsl The pres
ent writer must confess that this
simile strikes him as a remarkably
fit and appropriate one.
Today we know only too well the
odor of their souls, and we are deter
mined to send our men over to those
holes in France, to disinfect them with
the only serviceable antiseptlcs-the
bayonet and the bullet. Everything
that keeps that odor strong in our nos
trils will be of help in the salvation
of our country, since it will keep us
firm in our determination to do or die.
So one is inclined to feel that Prof.
III. C. Grumbine of Clark university,
who has recently translated into very
readable English the war poetry of
France and Germany, has done this
country a patriotic service. Professor
Grumbine knows that nowhere are the
ideals of a nation more clearly re-
vealed than in its literature, and he
adds that literature in its purest form
is poetry. So he has gone to the poets
of the two countries to discover what
was in their minds in the early days of
the war. With an ardent desire to be
fair, he has not chosen verses which
prove any particular point for him,
but has sought to confine himself to
the leading and the representative
bards.- In Germany such men as Su-.
dermann. Lissauer, and Herzog; in
France, Boutrel and Aicard, the for
mer laureate and the latter mem
Der of the French academy. And hav-
ing translated the verses of these men
he has drawn some logical and illu-
minating conclusions regarding the
German god and the French god, the
German soul and the soul of the
French. r.
Grumbine's Deductions.
Let us glance for moment over
Professor Grumbine's shoulder at the
TRANSACTIONS he has made; then briefly
let us consider his conclusions. If the
matter strikes you, dear reader, as
academic and-dread word-literary,
be assured that it will not be treated
here in either academic or literary
fashion. Professor Grumbine opens
the door for you, and you wander with
him through that dark hinterland-the
German mind; he leads you on to the
heights where the French thinker sits.
When, much to the surprise of
everybody in Germany, war was de-
clared the German soldier immediate
ly rushed to his locker, where every
thing was ready for him, including
canteen filed with fresh water. Stimuli
taneously the German poet rushed to
his fountain pen which-God and the
kaiser forgot nothing-was also filed,
not with water, but with a venomous
liquid that flowed red, like blood. This
war has reminded us that it is not the
man who fights in the field who is the
true master of hate and bitterness; 1t
is the highly educated and cultured
thinker Mt home who screams loudest
md foams most freely at the lips.
If the German poets had been for q
moment at Il loss as to what view TO
take of the war, of course the German
government would have set them right.
(There was that naive newspaper in
Munich which at the start pleaded
pathetically for the government to
'take charge of public opinion.D One
could fancy some such advertisement
in the Berlin papers: German poets
will call at the Wilhelmstrasse be-
tween two and four on Thursday to
secure their points of view on the
war" However, it is improbable the
German poets needed any instruction.
They thought about the war just what
the kaiser wanted them to think, what
he and his kind had been training the
whole German nation, poets included,
for 30 years, to think. They greeted
the catastrophe with mighty cry,
o,,, ,,ortly of bofa for GprnOny'S enc