New-York tribune., 1920-04-25
Cold Facts About the War
Philip Gibbs Says the Time Has Come to Dron
the Romantic Atmosphere

belongs on that list. 1t seems to Us.
70 be sure, that much which Gibbs tells
might have been even more useful s;x
years ago. certainly before the max
ing OF the peace treaty. Gibbs can
nardiy clear himself Of the charge
that he was among those who helped
to sentimentalize the war He wrote
no "Glory Of the Trenches" but he
d'd say too much about poppies and
zoo little about blood. Terrific difficult
ties stood in tho way Of any man who
wished to do otherwise. Gibbs quotes
Shaw himself as saying, "While the
war lasts one must put ones own
soul under censorship"
But censorship has passed now. in
some countries, and truth telling tims
has come. 1t Is no easy task. even
with barriers let down. In our
opinion "Now 1t Can Be Told" Ia a
magnificent achievement which steers
clear course between Dawson and
Barbusse. There was poetic Justice
in the fact that after "The Glorv of
tho Trenches" there came an "Under
FIRE." but we always felt that the
t'renchman, for all his sincerity. had
plotted out everything which did not
suit his case. Beyond the sentimental
twaddIe there was a high purpose in
the war. Many men fought with the
idea not only of baking the German
threat but Of making all other wars
impossible, or at least as remote a con-
tingency as human fallibility permits.
1t was not their fault that this chance
was muddled at Versailles. It was
not the men who saw the war from
the inside who insisted that hate was
the only sound emotional guide for
treaty making.
When Philip Gibbs records in his
chapter on his observations in Cologne
after the armistice. "Face to face.
British soldiers found that every Ger
man had two eyes, nose and mouth.
in spite of being 'Hun,'" he lays
himself open to the charge of being
pro-German. We believe the accusa-
tlon already has been made by some
reviewers. And yet he is by no means
unaware or silent in regard to German
guilt. In his plea for a new under
standing there is sound sense rather
than sentiment.
"The German people," he writes, ode
served punishment for their share in
the guilt of the war. They had been
punished by frightful losses of life. by
multitude of cripples, by the ruin of
their empire. When they told me Of
their hunger l could not forget the
hungry wives and children of France
and Belgium, who had been captives
in their own land behind German lines.
nor our prisoners who had been starved
until many of them died When I
walked through German villages and
pitied the women who yearned for
their men, still prisoners in our hands,
nearly a year after the armistice and
long after peace "a cruelty which
shamed us. think, remembered
hundreds of French villages broken
into dust by German gun-fre, burned
by incendiary shells, and that vast
desert of the battlefelds in France
and Belgium which never in our time
will regain its life as a place of human
habitation. When Germans said Our
industry is ruined, our trade killed.
thought of the factories in Lille and
many towns from which all machinery
had been taken or in which all ma
chinery had been broken. / thought of
the thousand crimes Of their war, the
agony of millions Of people upon whose
liberties they had trampled and upon
whose necks they had imposed a brutal
yoke. Yet even with all those memories
of tragic scenes which in this book arc
but lightly sketched I hoped that the
peace we should impose would not be
one Of vengeance, by which the inno-
cent would pay for the sins Of the
guilty, the children for their fathers
lust, the women for their war lords,
the soldiers who hated war for those
who drove them to the shambles; but
that this peace should in justice and
mercy lead the working people of Eu
rope out of the misery in which all
were plunged. and by a policy no higher