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 M AT H E M AT I C A L A S P E C T S O F D E E P L E A R N I N G

In recent years the development of new classification and regression algorithms based on
deep learning has led to a revolution in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning,
and data analysis. The development of a theoretical foundation to guarantee the success of
these algorithms constitutes one of the most active and exciting research topics in applied
mathematics.
This book presents the current mathematical understanding of deep learning methods
from the point of view of the leading experts in the field. It serves both as a starting point for
researchers and graduate students in computer science, mathematics, and statistics trying
to get into the field and as an invaluable reference for future research.

p h i l i p p g r o h s is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Vienna and

Group Leader of Mathematical Data Science at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
g i t ta k u t y n i o k is Bavarian AI Chair for Mathematical Foundations of Artificial
Intelligence at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Adjunct Professor for
Machine Learning at the University of Tromsø.
M AT H E M AT I C A L A S P E C T S O F
DEEP LEARNING

Edited by

P H I L I P P G RO H S
Universität Wien, Austria

G I T TA K U T Y N I O K
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316516782
DOI: 10.1017/9781009025096
© Cambridge University Press 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2023
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-316-51678-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

Contributors page xiii

Preface xv
1 The Modern Mathematics of Deep Learning
Julius Berner, Philipp Grohs, Gitta Kutyniok and Philipp Petersen 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.1.1 Notation 4
1.1.2 Foundations of Learning Theory 5
1.1.3 Do We Need a New Theory? 23
1.2 Generalization of Large Neural Networks 31
1.2.1 Kernel Regime 31
1.2.2 Norm-Based Bounds and Margin Theory 33
1.2.3 Optimization and Implicit Regularization 35
1.2.4 Limits of Classical Theory and Double Descent 38
1.3 The Role of Depth in the Expressivity of Neural Networks 41
1.3.1 Approximation of Radial Functions 41
1.3.2 Deep ReLU Networks 44
1.3.3 Alternative Notions of Expressivity 47
1.4 Deep Neural Networks Overcome the Curse of Dimensionality 49
1.4.1 Manifold Assumption 49
1.4.2 Random Sampling 51
1.4.3 PDE Assumption 53
1.5 Optimization of Deep Neural Networks 57
1.5.1 Loss Landscape Analysis 57
1.5.2 Lazy Training and Provable Convergence of Stochas-
tic Gradient Descent 61
1.6 Tangible Effects of Special Architectures 65
1.6.1 Convolutional Neural Networks 66

v
vi Contents
1.6.2 Residual Neural Networks 68
1.6.3 Framelets and U-Nets 70
1.6.4 Batch Normalization 73
1.6.5 Sparse Neural Networks and Pruning 75
1.6.6 Recurrent Neural Networks 76
1.7 Describing the Features that a Deep Neural Network Learns 78
1.7.1 Invariances and the Scattering Transform 78
1.7.2 Hierarchical Sparse Representations 79
1.8 Effectiveness in Natural Sciences 81
1.8.1 Deep Neural Networks Meet Inverse Problems 82
1.8.2 PDE-Based Models 84
2 Generalization in Deep Learning
K. Kawaguchi, Y. Bengio, and L. Kaelbling 112
2.1 Introduction 112
2.2 Background 113
2.3 Rethinking Generalization 116
2.3.1 Consistency of Theory 118
2.3.2 Differences in Assumptions and Problem Settings 119
2.3.3 Practical Role of Generalization Theory 121
2.4 Generalization Bounds via Validation 121
2.5 Direct Analyses of Neural Networks 122
2.5.1 Model Description via Deep Paths 123
2.5.2 Theoretical Insights via Tight Theory for Every Pair
(P, S) 125
2.5.3 Probabilistic Bounds over Random Datasets 127
2.5.4 Probabilistic Bound for 0–1 Loss with Multi-Labels 130
2.6 Discussions and Open Problems 131
Appendix A Additional Discussions 133
A1 Simple Regularization Algorithm 133
A2 Relationship to Other Fields 135
A3 SGD Chooses Direction in Terms of w̄ 135
A4 Simple Implementation of Two-Phase Training
Procedure 136
A5 On Proposition 2.3 136
A6 On Extensions 137
Appendix B Experimental Details 137
Appendix C Proofs 138
C1 Proof of Theorem 2.1 139
C2 Proof of Corollary 2.2 139
 Contents vii
C3 Proof of Theorem 2.7 140
C4 Proof of Theorem 2.9 141
C5 Proof of Theorem 2.10 142
C6 Proof of Proposition 2.5 143
3 Expressivity of Deep Neural Networks
Ingo Gühring, Mones Raslan, and Gitta Kutyniok 149
3.1 Introduction 149
3.1.1 Neural Networks 151
3.1.2 Goal and Outline of this Chapter 154
3.1.3 Notation 154
3.2 Shallow Neural Networks 155
3.2.1 Universality of Shallow Neural Networks 156
3.2.2 Lower Complexity Bounds 159
3.2.3 Upper Complexity Bounds 160
3.3 Universality of Deep Neural Networks 161
3.4 Approximation of Classes of Smooth Functions 163
3.5 Approximation of Piecewise Smooth Functions 167
3.6 Assuming More Structure 172
3.6.1 Hierachical Structure 172
3.6.2 Assumptions on the Data Manifold 174
3.6.3 Expressivity of Deep Neural Networks for Solutions
of PDEs 175
3.7 Deep Versus Shallow Neural Networks 177
3.8 Special Neural Network Architectures and Activation Functions 180
3.8.1 Convolutional Neural Networks 180
3.8.2 Residual Neural Networks 184
3.8.3 Recurrent Neural Networks 185
4 Optimization Landscape of Neural Networks
René Vidal, Zhihui Zhu, and Benjamin D. Haeffele 200
4.1 Introduction 201
4.2 Basics of Statistical Learning 205
4.3 Optimization Landscape of Linear Networks 206
4.3.1 Single-Hidden-Layer Linear Networks with Squared
Loss and Fixed Size Regularization 207
4.3.2 Deep Linear Networks with Squared Loss 212
4.4 Optimization Landscape of Nonlinear Networks 214
4.4.1 Motivating Example 215
4.4.2 Positively Homogeneous Networks 221
4.5 Conclusions 225
viii Contents
5 Explaining the Decisions of Convolutional and Recurrent Neural
Networks
Wojciech Samek, Leila Arras, Ahmed Osman, Grégoire Montavon,
Klaus-Robert Müller 229
5.1 Introduction 229
5.2 Why Explainability? 231
5.2.1 Practical Advantages of Explainability 231
5.2.2 Social and Legal Role of Explainability 232
5.2.3 Theoretical Insights Through Explainability 232
5.3 From Explaining Linear Models to General Model Explain-
ability 233
5.3.1 Explainability of Linear Models 233
5.3.2 Generalizing Explainability to Nonlinear Models 235
5.3.3 Short Survey on Explanation Methods 236
5.4 Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation 238
5.4.1 LRP in Convolutional Neural Networks 239
5.4.2 Theoretical Interpretation of the LRP Redistribution
Process 242
5.4.3 Extending LRP to LSTM Networks 248
5.5 Explaining a Visual Question Answering Model 251
5.6 Discussion 258
6 Stochastic Feedforward Neural Networks: Universal Approxima-
tion
Thomas Merkh and Guido Montúfar 267
6.1 Introduction 268
6.2 Overview of Previous Works and Results 271
6.3 Markov Kernels and Stochastic Networks 273
6.3.1 Binary Probability Distributions and Markov Kernels 273
6.3.2 Stochastic Feedforward Networks 274
6.4 Results for Shallow Networks 276
6.4.1 Fixed Weights in the Output Layer 277
6.4.2 Trainable Weights in the Output Layer 278
6.5 Proofs for Shallow Networks 278
6.5.1 Fixed Weights in the Output Layer 279
6.5.2 Trainable Weights in the Second Layer 283
6.5.3 Discussion of the Proofs for Shallow Networks 285
6.6 Results for Deep Networks 286
6.6.1 Parameter Count 288
6.6.2 Approximation with Finite Weights and Biases 288
 Contents ix
6.7 Proofs for Deep Networks 289
6.7.1 Notation 289
6.7.2 Probability Mass Sharing 290
6.7.3 Universal Approximation 293
6.7.4 Error Analysis for Finite Weights and Biases 296
6.7.5 Discussion of the Proofs for Deep Networks 298
6.8 Lower Bounds for Shallow and Deep Networks 299
6.8.1 Parameter Counting Lower Bounds 299
6.8.2 Minimum Width 301
6.9 A Numerical Example 302
6.10 Conclusion 306
6.11 Open Problems 307
7 Deep Learning as Sparsity-Enforcing Algorithms
A. Aberdam and J. Sulam 314
7.1 Introduction 314
7.2 Related Work 316
7.3 Background 317
7.4 Multilayer Sparse Coding 320
7.4.1 ML–SC Pursuit and the Forward Pass 321
7.4.2 ML–SC: A Projection Approach 323
7.5 The Holistic Way 324
7.6 Multilayer Iterative Shrinkage Algorithms 327
7.6.1 Towards Principled Recurrent Neural Networks 329
7.7 Final Remarks and Outlook 332
8 The Scattering Transform
Joan Bruna 338
8.1 Introduction 338
8.2 Geometric Stability 339
8.2.1 Euclidean Geometric Stability 340
8.2.2 Representations with Euclidean Geometric Stability 341
8.2.3 Non-Euclidean Geometric Stability 342
8.2.4 Examples 343
8.3 Scattering on the Translation Group 346
8.3.1 Windowed Scattering Transform 346
8.3.2 Scattering Metric and Energy Conservation 349
8.3.3 Local Translation Invariance and Lipschitz Continu-
ity with Respect to Deformations 351
8.3.4 Algorithms 354
8.3.5 Empirical Analysis of Scattering Properties 357
x Contents
8.3.6 Scattering in Modern Computer Vision 362
8.4 Scattering Representations of Stochastic Processes 363
8.4.1 Expected Scattering 363
8.4.2 Analysis of Stationary Textures with Scattering 367
8.4.3 Multifractal Analysis with Scattering Moments 369
8.5 Non-Euclidean Scattering 371
8.5.1 Joint versus Separable Scattering 372
8.5.2 Scattering on Global Symmetry Groups 372
8.5.3 Graph Scattering 375
8.5.4 Manifold Scattering 383
8.6 Generative Modeling with Scattering 384
8.6.1 Sufficient Statistics 384
8.6.2 Microcanonical Scattering Models 385
8.6.3 Gradient Descent Scattering Reconstruction 387
8.6.4 Regularising Inverse Problems with Scattering 389
8.6.5 Texture Synthesis with Microcanonical Scattering 391
8.7 Final Remarks 393
9 Deep Generative Models and Inverse Problems
Alexandros G. Dimakis 400
9.1 Introduction 400
9.2 How to Tame High Dimensions 401
9.2.1 Sparsity 401
9.2.2 Conditional Independence 402
9.2.3 Deep Generative Models 403
9.2.4 GANs and VAEs 404
9.2.5 Invertible Generative Models 405
9.2.6 Untrained Generative Models 405
9.3 Linear Inverse Problems Using Deep Generative Models 406
9.3.1 Reconstruction from Gaussian Measurements 407
9.3.2 Optimization Challenges 409
9.3.3 Extending the Range of the Generator 410
9.3.4 Non-Linear Inverse Problems 410
9.3.5 Inverse Problems with Untrained Generative Priors 412
9.4 Supervised Methods for Inverse Problems 414
10 Dynamical Systems and Optimal Control Approach to Deep Learn-
ing
Weinan E, Jiequn Han, and Qianxiao Li 422
10.1 Introduction 422
10.1.1 The Problem of Supervised Learning 423
 Contents xi
10.2 ODE Formulation 424
10.3 Mean-Field Optimal Control and Pontryagin’s Maximum
Principle 425
10.3.1 Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle 426
10.4 Method of Successive Approximations 428
10.4.1 Extended Pontryagin Maximum Principle 428
10.4.2 The Basic Method of Successive Approximation 428
10.4.3 Extended Method of Successive Approximation 431
10.4.4 Discrete PMP and Discrete MSA 433
10.5 Future Work 435
11 Bridging Many-Body Quantum Physics and Deep Learning via
Tensor Networks
Yoav Levine, Or Sharir, Nadav Cohen and Amnon Shashua 439
11.1 Introduction 440
11.2 Preliminaries – Many-Body Quantum Physics 442
11.2.1 The Many-Body Quantum Wave Function 443
11.2.2 Quantum Entanglement Measures 444
11.2.3 Tensor Networks 447
11.3 Quantum Wave Functions and Deep Learning Architectures 450
11.3.1 Convolutional and Recurrent Networks as Wave
Functions 450
11.3.2 Tensor Network Representations of Convolutional
and Recurrent Networks 453
11.4 Deep Learning Architecture Design via Entanglement Measures 453
11.4.1 Dependencies via Entanglement Measures 454
11.4.2 Quantum-Physics-Inspired Control of Inductive Bias 456
11.5 Power of Deep Learning for Wave Function Representations 460
11.5.1 Entanglement Scaling of Deep Recurrent Networks 461
11.5.2 Entanglement Scaling of Overlapping Convolutional
Networks 463
11.6 Discussion 467
 Contributors

Aviad Aberdam Electrical Engineering Department, Technion – Israel Institute

of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel
Leila Arras Department of Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz
Institute, Einsteinufer 37, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Julius Berner Faculty of Mathematics, University of Vienna, Universitätsring 1,
1010 Wien, Austria
Yoshua Bengio University of Montreal, 2900 Edouard Montpetit Blvd, Montreal,
QC H3T 1J4, Canada
Joan Bruna Courant Institute and Center for Data Science, New York University,
251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012, USA
Nadav Cohen Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Weiz-
mann Institute of Science Rehovot 7610001, Israel
Alexandros G. Dimakis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Texas, Austin TX 78712, USA
Weinan E Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544–
1000, USA.
Philipp Grohs Faculty of Mathematics and Research Platform Data Science,
University of Vienna, Oskar Morgenstern Platz 1, 1090 Wien, Austria
Ingo Gühring Institut für Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des
17. Juni 136, 10623 Berlin
Benjamin D. Haeffele Mathematical Institute for Data Science, Department of
Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street,
Baltimore MD 21218, USA
Jiequn Han Center for Computational Mathematics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th
Ave. New York, NY 10010, USA
Leslie Pack Kaelbling Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science
& Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, MA 02139,
USA

xiii
xiv Contributors
Kenji Kawaguchi Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Ave,
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Gitta Kutyniok Mathematisches Institut der Universität München, Theresien-
straße, 80333 München, Germany
Yoav Levine School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew Univer-
sity of Jerusalem, 91904 Jerusalem, Israel
Qianxiao Li Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, 10
Lower Kent Ridge Road, Singapore 119076.
Thomas Merkh Department of Mathematics and Department of Statistics, UCLA,
Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Grégoire Montavon Institute of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer
Science, TU Berlin, D-10587 Berlin, Germany
Guido Montúfar Department of Mathematics and Department of Statistics,
UCLA, CA 90095, USA and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the
Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
Klaus-Robert Müller Institute of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer
Science, TU Berlin, D-10587 Berlin, Germany
Ahmed Osman Department of Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz
Institute, Einsteinufer 37, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Philipp Petersen Faculty of Mathematics and Research Platform Data Science,
University of Vienna, Oskar Morgenstern Platz 1, 1090 Wien, Austria
Mones Raslan Institut für Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des
17. Juni 136, 10623 Berlin, Germany
Wojciech Samek Department of Artificial Intelligence, Fraunhofer Heinrich
Hertz Institute, Einsteinufer 37, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Or Sharir School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, 91904 Jerusalem, Israel
Amnon Shashua School of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem, 91904 Jerusalem, Israel
Jeremias Sulam Biomedical Engineering Department & Mathematical Institute
for Data Science, Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Campus, Baltimore
MD 21218, USA
René Vidal Mathematical Institute for Data Science and Department of Biomed-
ical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Clark 302B, 3400 N. Charles
Street, Baltimore MD 21218, USA
Zhihui Zhu Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of
Denver, 2155 E. Wesley Avenue, Denver CO 80208, USA
 Preface

We currently are witnessing the spectacular success of “deep learning” in both

science (for example, in astronomy, biology, and medicine) and the public sector,
where autonomous vehicles and robots are already present in daily life. However,
the development of a rigorous mathematical foundation for deep learning is at an
early stage, and most of the related research is still empirically driven. At the same
time, methods based on deep neural networks have already shown their impressive
potential in mathematical research areas such as imaging sciences, inverse prob-
lems, and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, sometimes far
outperforming classical mathematical approaches for particular classes of problem.
This book provides the first comprehensive introduction to the subject, highlighting
recent theoretical advances as well as outlining the numerous remaining research
challenges.
The model of a deep neural network is inspired by the structure of the human
brain, with artificial neurons concatenated and arranged in layers, leading to an (ar-
tificial feed-forward) neural network. Because of the structure of artificial neurons,
the realization of such a neural network, i.e., the function it provides, consists of
compositions of affine linear maps and (non-linear) activation functions % : R → R.
More precisely, the realization of a neural network with L layers, and N0 , NL , and
N` , ` = 1, . . . , L − 1, the number of neurons in the input, output, and `th hidden
layer, as well as weight matrices and bias vectors, W (`) ∈ R N` ×N`−1 and b(`) ∈ R N` ,
respectively, is given by

Φ(x, θ) = W (L) ρ(W (L−1) · · · ρ(W (1) x + b(1) ) + · · · + b(L−1) ) + b(L), x ∈ R N0 ,

L
with free parameters θ = (W (`), b(`) ) `=1 . Given training data

(z (i) )i=1
m
:= ((x (i), y (i) ))i=1
m
,

which arise from a function g : R N0 → R N L , the parameters are then learned by

xv
Another Random Scribd Document
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light-hearted preparation for the journey. What was it but just a rush
through Germany to get over as quickly as possible?
It is the part of the earth’s solid surface of which I know the least. In my
life I had been across it only twice. I may well say of it, “Vidi tantum,” and
that very little I saw through the window of a railway carriage at express
speed. Those journeys were more like pilgrimages when one hurries on
towards the goal without looking to the right or left for the satisfaction of
deeper need than curiosity. In this last instance, too, I was so uncurious that
I would have liked to fall asleep on the shores of England and open my eyes
only, if it were possible, on the other side of the Silesian frontier.
Yet in truth, as many others have done, I had “sensed it,” that promised
land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in
the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of
Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or mere niggers, and with a feeling of
superiority freeing their hands of all moral bonds and anxious to take up, if
I may express myself so, the “perfect man’s burden.” Meantime in a
clearing of the Teutonic forest their sages were rearing a Tree of cynical
wisdom, a sort of Upas tree, whose shade may be seen lying now over the
prostrate body of Belgium. It must be said that they laboured open enough,
watering it from the most authentic sources of all evil, and watching with
bespectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. The
sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and I verily believe, words of
abasement even, if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would
have been wasted on their ecstasy. For when a fruit ripens on a branch, it
must fall. There is nothing on earth that can prevent it.

II

For reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my

companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in
an unusual way by the crossing of the North Sea. We should proceed from
Harwich to Hamburg. Besides being thirty-six times longer than the usual
Dover-Calais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in
better keeping with the romantic feeling of this Polish journey, which for so
many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and
promise, but always retreating, elusive, like an enticing mirage.
 And, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. No wonder they were
excited. It’s no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. The day of
departure had come, the very hour had struck. The luggage was coming
downstairs. It was most convincing. Poland then, if erased from the map,
yet existed in reality; it was not a mere “pays du rêve,” where you can
travel only in imagination. For no man, they argued, not even father, an
habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist’s art of
make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a
voyage “au pays du rêve.”
As we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful
nook in Kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its
blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the parched
fields. A pearly blurr settled over them; a light sifted of all glare, of
everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled
skies. All unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, I carried off
in my eye this tiny fragment of Great Britain: a few fields, a wooded rise, a
clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a
gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in
soft mist and peace. And I felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as
the embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not
as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which
a woman is conquered—by love, which is a sort of surrender.
Those were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand,
which was the simplest sort of a Continental holiday. And I am certain that
my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but the
suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. The forms and the spirit
of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest—
which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the more precious, possessing
you if only by the fear of unworthiness, rather than possessed by you.
Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were
looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt more and more plainly
that what I had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful
enough prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had not known
how to preserve against his impulses the order and continuity of his life—so
that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals—
still more dreadful.
 I confess here my thoughts so exclusively personal to explain why there
was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I
don’t mean to say I ignored the possibility. I simply did not think of it. And
it made no difference; for, if I had thought of it, it could only have been in
the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and I am
sure that nothing short of intellectual certitude—obviously unattainable by
the man in the street—could have stayed me on that journey which now that
I had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-
respect.
London—the London of before the war, flaunting its enormous glare as
of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—received us with its
best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet, asphalted streets lying
with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of
the city towering all dark like empty palaces above the reflected lights of
the glistening roadway.
Everything in the subdued incomplete night life around the Mansion
House went on normally, with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city
of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable night life of millions
streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.
In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous
line of taxicabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an
endless chain of dredger-buckets pouring in the passengers, and dipping
them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the
clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour of the
boat trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of
people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places.
The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of
evening papers in the multitude of hands, there were no signs of
extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing in
them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that I
should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence. For this
was the station at which, thirty-six years ago, I arrived on my first visit to
London. Not the same building, but the same spot. At eighteen years of age,
after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as
ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from
Lowestoft—my first long railway journey in England—to “sign on” for an
Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. Straight from a railway carriage I
had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller
penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have
been more lonely. I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all
around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I
was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple.
I was elated. I was pursuing a clear aim. I was carrying out a deliberate plan
of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service,
good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and
in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a
tacit moral pledge. Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort.
How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early
September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.
From that point of view—youth and a straightforward scheme of
conduct—it was certainly a year of grace. All the help I had to get in touch
with the world I was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than
the palm of my hand—in which I held it—torn out of a larger plan of
London for the greater facility of reference. It had been the object of careful
study for some days past. The fact that I could take a conveyance at the
station had never occurred to my mind, no, not even when I got out into the
street and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of
twenty thousand cabs. A strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction
that one cannot approach an important moment of one’s life by means of a
hired carriage? Yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. And
indeed I was to make an Australian voyage and encircle the globe before
ever entering a London hansom.
Another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address
of an obscure agent, was in my pocket. And I needed not to take it out. That
address was as if graven deep in my brain. I muttered its words to myself as
I walked on, navigating the sea of London by the chart concealed in the
palm of my hand; for I had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from
any one. Youth is the time of rash pledges. Had I taken a wrong turn I
would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge I might have remained
lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered
bleaching in some blind alley of the Whitechapel district, as had happened
to lonely travellers lost in the bush. But I walked on to my destination
without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, something
of that faculty to absorb and make my own correctly the imaged topography
of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate
navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. And the place I
was bound to was not so easy to find, either. It was one of those courts
hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost amongst the thick
growth of houses, like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by
an inconspicuous archway, as if by a secret path; a Dickensian nook of
London, that wonder-city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent
design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy which the great
Master knew so well how to bring out by magic of his great and
understanding love. And the office I entered was Dickensian too. The dust
of the Waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early
Georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. By the light
of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling I saw an elderly man,
in a long coat of black broadcloth. He had a grey beard, a big nose, thick
lips, and broad shoulders. His longish white hair and the general character
of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the “barocco” style of Italian
art. Standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles
pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton chop, which had
been just brought to him from some Dickensian eating-house round the
corner.
Without ceasing to eat he turned to me his barocco apostle’s head with
an expression of inquiry.
I produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne
sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of English speech; for his face broke
into a smile of comprehension almost at once.—“Oh it’s you who wrote a
letter to me the other day from Lowestoft about getting a ship.”
I had written to him from Lowestoft. I can’t remember a single word of
that letter now. It was my very first composition in the English language.
And he had understood it; because he spoke to the point at once, explaining
that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who
wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for
officers. But he gathered that this was not my object. I did not desire to be
apprenticed. Was that the case?
It was. He was good enough to say then, “Of course I see that you are a
gentleman too. But your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an Able
Seaman if possible. Is that it?”
It was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could
not help me much in this. There was an Act of Parliament which made it
penal to procure ships for sailors. “An Act—of—Parliament. A law,” he
took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while
I looked at him in consternation.
I had not been half an hour in London before I had run my head against
an Act of Parliament! What a hopeless adventure! However, the barocco
apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round
the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. Yet, strictly speaking, it
was not the conduct of a good citizen. And in retrospect there is an unfilial
flavour about that early sin. For this Act of Parliament, the Merchant
Shipping Act of the mid-Victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a
father and mother to me. For many years it had regulated and disciplined
my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had
looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal
safety in a risky calling. It isn’t such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil
and plain duty within the four corners of an honest Act of Parliament. And I
am glad to say that its severities have never been applied to me.
In the year 1878, the year of Peace with Honour, I had walked as lone as
any human being in the streets of London, out of Liverpool Street Station,
to surrender myself to its care. And now, in the year of the war waged for
honour and conscience more than for any other cause, I was there again, no
longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that
time, of work done, of words written, of friendship secured. It was like the
closing of a thirty-six years’ cycle.
All unaware of the War Angel already waiting with the trumpet at its lips
the stroke of the fatal hour, I sat there, thinking that this life of ours is
neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining,
and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into
one half-hour of retrospective musing.
I felt, too, that this journey so suddenly entered upon was bound to take
me away from daily life’s actualities at every step. I felt it more than ever
when presently we steamed out into the North Sea, on a dark night fitful
with gusts of wind, and I lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship’s
passengers. That sea was to me something unforgettable, something much
more than a name. It had been for a time the schoolroom of my trade. On it,
I may safely say, I had learned, too, my first words of English. A wild and
stormy abode, sometimes, was that fine, narrow-waters academy of
seamanship from which I launched myself on the wide oceans. My teachers
had been the coasting sailors of the Norfolk shore. Coast men, with steady
eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice. Men of very few words, which, at
least, were never bare of meaning. Honest, strong, steady men, sobered by
domestic ties, one and all as far as I can remember.
That is what years ago the North Sea, I could hear growling in the dark
all round the ship, had been for me. And I fancied that I must have been
carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar
than those short, angry sounds I was listening to with a smile of affectionate
recognition.
I could not guess that before many days my schoolroom would be
desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves,
hiding under the waters. Perhaps while I am writing these words the
children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in
drifters under the naval flag, dredging for German submarine mines.

III

I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of seamanship
before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined as it is in
comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, I did not know it in
all its parts. My classroom was the region of the English East Coast which,
in the year of Peace with Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes
belonging to its maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural,
industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many towns
played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant
pools above the ink-black outline of the shore. On many a night I have
hauled at the braces under the very shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors
will, the people ashore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound of the
sea. I imagine that not one head on these envied pillows was made uneasy
by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime
of one generation was to bring to their peaceful shores.
Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a
part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the
familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day, and the aspects
of nature don’t change, unless in the course of thousands of years—or,
perhaps, centuries. The Phœnicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the
first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different
in the wintry quality of the light even on that July afternoon, from anything
they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For myself, a very late
comer into that sea and its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to
the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training. The
same old thing. A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at
one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy,
apparently made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine
rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats,
very few, very scattered, very solid and motionless against an ever
dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the
emptiness of the decks favouring my reminiscent mood.
It might have been a day of five-and-thirty years ago, when there was on
this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet,
thanks to the unchangeable sea, I could have given myself up to the illusion
bringing the past close to the future, if it had not been for the periodical
transit across my gaze of a German passenger. He was marching round and
round the boat-deck with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys
gambolled round him in his progress like two small disorderly satellites
round their parent planet. He was bringing them home from their school in
England for their holiday. What could have induced him to entrust his
offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and
criminal country, I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from motives
of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that decadent
British ship with a scornful foot, while his breast (and to some extent his
stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior
destiny. Later, I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the
racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, the first that passed
through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian Army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed,
the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an
officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine, active boys are
orphans by now. Thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time. A
citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six million of
fighting particles, still tossed East or West in the lurid tempest, or already
snapped up, an unconsidered trifle, in the jaws of war, his very humanity
was not consciously impressed on my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he
was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner of the deck-house, a white
yachting-cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes
and the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-green North Sea. He was but a
shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for far away there to the West, in
the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily
bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my
own in the winter of 1881, not of war truly, but of a fairly lively contest
with the elements which were very angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night—
or a night of hate (it isn’t for nothing that the North Sea is also called the
German Ocean)—when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated
on one ship which could do no better than to float on her side in an
unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner.
There were on board besides myself, seventeen men, all good and true,
including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset
and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became
as it were deflated, and thereafter for a long time moved in our midst
wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering
of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-
ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display
of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he
developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate
whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was
much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses, than the green
overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger circling the deck
indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.
“That’s a very nice gentleman.” This information, together with the fact
that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was
communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At intervals through the day
he would pop out of his cabin and offer me short snatches of conversation.
He owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, and he was,
without malice and, I believe, quite unconsciously, a warm Germanophil.
And no wonder! As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that
run, and spent almost as much of his life in Germany as in England.
 “Wonderful people they are,” he repeated from time to time, without
entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy. What
he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and small
merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German genius
has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds.
There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised mediocrity.
Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much under the spell
of German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt for France was
equally general and unbounded. I tried to advance some arguments against
this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile to myself. “I
believe you are a Frenchman yourself,” he snarled at last, giving me an
intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off communications with a
man of such unsound sympathies.
Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge
of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their
colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black
uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water
and clouds in the eastern board; tops of islands fringing the German shore.
While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves—and for all their
manifest solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light—another
passenger came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap.
The yellow leather strap of his binocular-case crossed his chest. His elderly
red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end
of his nose was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of
his physiognomy. Indeed, nothing else in it had the slightest chance to
assert itself. His disposition, unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and
humane. He offered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some
small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought that they
were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the decks
somewhere.
“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar
tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful people,”
and proceeded to give me the history of the family’s crossing the Atlantic in
a White Star ship. They remained in England just the time necessary for a
railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths
of the ship, I suppose) were naturally a little tired.
 At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us
from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. “Hurrah!” he cried under his
breath, “The first German light! Hurrah!”
And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest
fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink
of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The shade of
the night had settled on the North Sea.
I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The great
change of sea-life since my time was brought home to me. I had been
conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They went on
and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of
Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head-sea and
bound for the gateway of Dover Strait. Singly, and in small companies of
two or three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances
ahead, as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were
inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store, away there, below the grey
curve of the earth. Cargo steam-vessels have reached by this time a height
of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that this is the product of
human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. These dismal creations look
still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous.
Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork
nodding in a seaway, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under
sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of low parody
directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull,
mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.
When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo-tanks carried tame
lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps
they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there,
and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea.
Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam,
infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.
I remained on deck till we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so over-
lighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided
across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar, as a working
implement, shall become presently as obsolete as the sail. The pilot boarded
us in a motor dinghy. More and more is mankind reducing its physical
activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. Progress! Yet the older
methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally
fine readiness of wits. And readiness of wits working in combination with
the strength of muscles made a more complete man.
It was really a surprisingly small dinghy, and it ran to and fro like a
water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.
Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe Lightship floated all dark and silent
under its enormous, round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow
watching the broad estuary full of lights.
Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace
already spread for a flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our
visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely
difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over
there, that the Elbe Lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the
triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or
turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. And obviously it
must be so.
Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping
along cautiously, with the unlighted, war-blighted, black coast close on one,
and sudden death on the other hand. For all the space we steamed through
on that Sunday evening must be now one great mine field, sown thickly
with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot,
perhaps, where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much
fussy importance. Mines, submarines. The last word in sea warfare!
Progress—impressively disclosed by this war.
There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of the
stake, and in the fierce animosity of feelings. During that one which was
finished a hundred years ago, it happened that while the English fleet was
keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps Fulton himself, offered to
the maritime Prefect of the port and to the French Admiral, an invention
which would sink the unsuspecting English ships one after another—or at
any rate, most of them. The offer was not even taken into consideration; and
the Prefect ends his report to the Minister of Marine in Paris with a fine
phrase of indignation: “It is not the sort of death one would deal to brave
men.”
 And, behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like
proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues,
the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those
self-denying words. Mankind had been demoralised since by its own
mastery of mechanical appliances. Its spirit apparently is so weak now, and
its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of
destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous
contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own detestable
ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic times another sort of war
doctrine has been inculcated to a nation, and held out to the world.

IV

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress but a
retracing of footsteps on a road travelled before, I had no beacons to look
out for in Germany. I had never lingered in that land, which, as a whole, is
so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies
and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible provincialism of
envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment.
Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively, as
from a threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in their
innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and
coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space, without
sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my voluntary
abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary, after all! Each of us is a
fascinating spectacle to himself, and I had to watch my own personality
returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old
moons. Considering the condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much
to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of
our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.
We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I said to my
eldest boy, “I can’t go to bed. I must go out for a look round. Coming?”
He was ready enough. For him all this was part of the interesting
adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of the hotel
into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. I was indeed
revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I felt so much like a ghost that the
discovery that I could remember such material things as the right turn to
take and the general direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful
surprise.
The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Central Square of the
town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. We could see
at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. At the corner an
unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a
pair of white gloves, which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned
his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue
to a youth on whose arm he leaned.
The square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight.
The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the bottom
of a bluish pool. I noticed with intimate satisfaction that the unnecessary
trees the Municipality persisted in sticking between the stones had been
steadily refusing to grow. They were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I
could remember. Also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the
same point at which I left them forty years before. There were the dull, torn-
up patches on that lighted expanse, the piles of paving material looking
ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea. Who was it that said
Time works wonders? What an exploded superstition! As far as these trees
and these paving-stones were concerned it had worked nothing. The
suspicion of the unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to
my senses by our rapid drive from the railway station and by the short walk,
was agreeably strengthened within me.
“We are now on the line A.B.,” I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time to that side of the square by the
senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics. The
common citizens knew nothing of it, and even if they had, would not have
dreamed of taking it seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged
to the Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the
invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to my boy I
experienced again that sense of privilege, of initiation. And then, happening
to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-
iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised black letters, thus:
“Line A.B.” Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town
urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any
wandering Boetian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on the line
A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It had become a mere
name in a directory. I was stunned by the extreme mutability of things.
Time could work wonders, and no mistake. A Municipality had stolen an
invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of
cast iron.
I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the
profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste. And this,
too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a bare minute had worked that
change. There was at the end of the line a certain street I wanted to look at,
I explained to my companion.
To our right the unequal massive towers of St. Mary’s Church soared
aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides,
glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. In the distance the
Florian Gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with
the square shoulders of the old city wall. In the narrow brilliantly pale vista
of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood
out small but very distinct.
There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our
ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued out of
my aroused memory a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast,
to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house
down from Florian Gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight
o’clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian
Street. But of the school I remember very little. I believe that one of my co-
sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical
documents. But I didn’t suffer very much from the various imperfections of
my first school. I was rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private
gnawing worm of my own. This was the time of my father’s last illness.
Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I walked all
the way to a big old house in a quiet little street a good distance beyond the
Great Square. There, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with
heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two
candles in a desert of dusk, I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all
over till the task of preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall
white double door which was kept closed; but now and then it would come
ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through, glide across
the room and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns.
Their voices were seldom heard. For indeed what could they have to say!
When they did speak to me, it was with their lips hardly moving, in a
claustral clear whisper. Domestic matters were ordered by the elderly
housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a Canon of the
Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She too spoke but seldom. She wore a
black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. And
though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never
let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me
was all piety, resignation and silence.
I don’t know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading
boy. My lessons done I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the
awful stillness of the sick-room flow out through the closed white door and
coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile childish way I
would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy. There were many books
about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had not
had time to settle down. I read! What did I not read! Sometimes the eldest
nun gliding up and casting a mistrustful glance at the open pages would lay
her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper: “Perhaps it
isn’t very good for you to read these books.” I would raise my eyes to her
face mutely and with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away.
Later in the evening, but not always, I would be permitted to tiptoe into
the sick-room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed which often
could not recognise my presence but by a slow movement of the eyes, put
my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the coverlet, and tiptoe out
again. Then I would go to bed, in a room at the end of a corridor, and often,
not always, cry myself into a good, sound sleep.
I looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. I turned
my eyes from it, sometimes with success; and yet all the time I had an
awful sensation of the inevitable. I had also moments of revolt which
stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the universe.
But when the inevitable entered the sick-room and the white door was
thrown wide open, I don’t think I found a single tear to shed. I have a
suspicion that the Canon’s housekeeper looked upon me as the most callous
little wretch on earth.
 The day of the funeral came in due course, and all the generous “Youth
of the Schools,” the grave Senate of the University, the delegations of the
trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) de visu evidence of the
callousness of the little wretch. There was nothing in my aching head but a
few words, some such stupid sentences as: “It’s done,” or “It’s
accomplished” (in Polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort,
repeating itself endlessly. The long procession moved on out of the little
street, down a long street, past the Gothic portal of St. Mary’s between its
unequal towers, towards the Florian Gate.
In the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and
tragic memories I could see again the small boy of that day following a
hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an
enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the
chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers passing
under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the
pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population had turned out on
that fine May afternoon. They had not come to honour a great achievement,
or even some splendid failure. The dead and they were victims alike of an
unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and glory.
They had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man
whose life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of a creed
which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand.
It seemed to me that if I remained longer there in that narrow street I
should become the helpless prey of the Shadows I had called up. They were
crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent, in their clinging air of the grave
that tasted of dust and in the bitter vanity of all hopes.
“Let’s go back to the hotel, my boy,” I said. “It’s getting late.”
It will be easily understood that I neither thought nor dreamt that night of
a possible war. For the next two days I went about amongst my fellow men,
who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but
unanimously derided my fears of a war. They would not believe in it. It was
impossible. On the evening of the second day I was in the hotel’s smoking-
room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds
of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed
than any club reading-room I’ve ever been in. Gathered into a small knot,
we were discussing the situation in subdued tones suitable to the genius of
the place.
A gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an
impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me.
“What I want to know is whether, should there be war, England would
come in.”
The time to draw a breath, and I spoke out for the Cabinet without
faltering.
“Most assuredly. I should think all Europe knows that by this time.”
He took hold of the lapel of my coat and, giving it a slight jerk for
greater emphasis, said forcibly:
“Then if England will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can
be no war. Germany won’t be so mad as that.”
On the morrow by noon we read of the German ultimatum. The day after
came the declaration of war and the Austrian mobilisation order. We were
fairly caught. All that remained for me to do was to get my party out of the
way of eventual shells. The best move which occurred to me was to snatch
them up instantly into the mountains to a Polish health resort of great repute
—which I did (at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last
civilian train permitted to leave Cracow for the next three weeks.
And there we remained amongst the Poles from all parts of Poland, not
officially interned, but simply unable to obtain permission to travel by train
or road. It was a wonderful, a poignant two months. This is not the time,
and perhaps not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the
situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final
catastrophe, unable to trust any one, to appeal to any one, to look for help
from any quarter; deprived of all hope, and even of its last illusions, and
unable in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences to take refuge
in stoical acceptance. I have seen all this. And I am glad I have not so many
years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable Fate,
tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread,
murmuring with iron lips the final words: “Ruin—and Extinction.”
But enough of this. For our little band there was the awful anguish of
incertitude as to the real nature of events in the West. It is difficult to give
an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there. Belgium
knocked down and trampled out of existence, France giving in under
repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and England involved
in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic! Polish
papers, of course, had no other than German sources of information.
Naturally, we did not believe all we heard, but it was sometimes excessively
difficult to react with sufficient firmness. We used to shut our door, and
there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up
discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally
cheering each other up. But it was a beastly time. People used to come to
me with very serious news and ask, “What do you think of it?” And my
invariable answer was, “Whatever has happened or is going to happen,
whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain that England will not
make it, not for ten years, if necessary.”
But enough of this, too. Through the unremitting efforts of Polish friends
we obtained at last the permission to travel to Vienna. Once there, the wing
of the American Eagle was extended over our uneasy heads. We cannot be
sufficiently grateful to the American Ambassador (who all along interested
himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable
assistance, and the real friendliness of his reception in Vienna. Owing to
Mr. Penfield’s action we obtained permission to leave Austria. And it was a
near thing, for his Excellency has informed my American publishers since
that a week later orders were issued to have us detained until the end of the
war. However, we effected our hair’s-breadth escape into Italy and,
reaching Genoa, took passage in a Dutch mail-steamer, homeward bound
from Java, with London as a port of call.
On that sea route I might have picked up a memory at every mile if the
past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. We saw the signs of
it in the emptiness of the Mediterranean, the aspect of Gibraltar, the misty
glimpse in the Bay of Biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in
the presence of British submarines in the Channel. Innumerable drifters
flying the naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two naval officers
coming on board off the South Foreland piloted the ship through the
Downs.
The Downs! There they were, thick with the memories of my sea life.
But what were to me now the futilities of individual past! As our ship’s
head swung into the estuary of the Thames a deep, yet faint, concussion
passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which, missing my ear,
found its way straight into my heart. Turning instinctively to look at my
boys, I happened to meet my wife’s eyes. She also had felt profoundly,
coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom
of the big guns at work on the coast of Flanders—shaping the future.
Joseph Conrad
 LIBERTÀ NELLA VITA

Da un’ anno, l’orror della guerra, e l’affanno della coscienza, per

comprenderne la inevitable necessità. L’Antico Libro dice: “La spada
levata per uccidere guarisce talvolta,” e a nostri giorni, una povera donna
del popolo firmo una carta questo affirmando: “Sia la guerra, per
distrugger la guerra;” e la povera donna del popolo ha due figlioli al fronte.
—Infinita è la strage, e in ogni terra, disperazione e protesta!
—Per tanto dolore nel mondo, per ogni giovane esistenza troncata, sia
conquista e diritto, per ogni Patria, il somme dei beni: La libertà nella Vita.
Eleonora Duse
Il Cerro,
Boscolungo Pistoiese
 THE RIGHT TO LIBERTY
[TRANSLATION]

For the past year the horror of war, and the struggle of our minds to
comprehend its inevitable necessity!—Holy Writ says: “For all they that
take the sword shall perish with the sword,” and now in our day a poor
woman of the people ends her letter with these words: “There must be war,
that war may perish”—and this poor woman of the people has two sons at
the front.
Infinite is the suffering, and over the earth wailing and despair!
Through all this sorrow in the world, through all these young lives cut
short, may victory bring to every land the crown of life—the right to
Liberty.
Eleonora Duse
Il Cerro,
Boscolungo Pistoiese
 AUGUSTE RODIN
TWO WOMEN
FROM AN ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR SKETCH
JOHN GALSWORTHY
 HARVEST

The sky to-night looks as if a million bright angels were passing—a

gleaming cloud-mesh drawn across the heaven. One star, very clear, shines
beside a full moon white as the globe-campion flower. The wan hills and
valleys, the corn-stooks, casting each its shadows, the grey boles of the
beeches—all have the remoteness of an ineffable peace. And the past day
was so soft, so glamorous; such a hum, such brightness, and the harvest
going on....
This last year millions have died with energy but one third spent;
millions more unripe for death will yet herald us into the long shades before
these shambles cease—boys born just to be the meat of war, spitted on each
others’ reddened bayonets, without inkling of guilt or knowledge. To what
shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this green, unripe corn, field
on field, being scythed by Death for none to eat? There is no solace in the
thought: Death is nothing!—save to those who still believe they go straight
to Paradise. To us who dare not to know the workings of the Unknowable,
and in our heart of hearts cannot tell what, if anything, becomes of us,—to
us, the great majority of the modern world—life is valuable, good, a thing
worth living out for its natural span. For, if it were not, long ere this we
should have sat with folded arms, lifting no hand till the last sighing breath
of the human race had whispered itself out into the wind, and a final
darkness come; sat, like the Hindu Yogi, watching the sun and moon a little,
and expired. The moon would be as white, and the sun as golden if we were
gone, the hills and valleys as mysterious, the beech-trees just as they are,
only the stooks of corn would vanish with those who garner them. If life
were not good we should make of ourselves dust indifferently—we human
beings; quietly, peacefully; not in murderous horror reaped by the curving
volleys, mown off by rains of shrapnel, and the long yellow scythe of the
foul gases. But life is good, and no living thing wishes to die; even they
who kill themselves, despairing, resign out of sheer love of life; out of
craving for what they have found too mutilated and starved, out of yearning
for their meed of joy cruelly frustrated. And they who die that others may
live are but those in whom the life-flame burns so hot and bright that they
can feel the life and the longing to live in others as if it were their own—
more than their own. Yea, life carries with it a very passion for existence.
To what then shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this harvest
of too young deaths, the harvest of the brave, whose stooks are raised
before us, casting each its shadow in the ironic moonlight? Green corn!
Green corn!
If, having watched those unripe blades reaped off and stacked so
pitifully, watched the great dark Waggoner clear those unmellowed fields,
we let their sacrifice be vain; if we sow not, hereafter, in a peaceful Earth
that which shall become harvest more golden than the world has seen—then
Shame on us, unending, in whatever land we dwell....
This harvest night is still. And yet, up there, the bright angels are passing
over the moon. One Star!
John Galsworthy
August 28, 1915

CLAUDE MONET
BOATS ON A BEACH
FROM AN EARLY CRAYON DRAWING
EDMUND GOSSE
 THE ARROGANCE AND SERVILITY OF GERMANY

We abound, while the war progresses, with examples of the calculated

ferocity of the Germans, of their lack of humanity, of their scorn of the
generous convention of behaviour. But there is a great danger that on
reflection, we may be tempted to regard these developments of savagery as
due to the fact of war itself, to a sudden madness of blood-lust, to rage in
the face of unanticipated resistance, even to alarm, the emotion of terror
being a fruitful source of cruelty as well as of cowardice. It is well,
therefore, lest we be tempted to excuse the barbarism of the enemy, to cast
our eyes backward and to endeavour to recall what he was in times of
peace, in his domestic surroundings, unassailed by anger or fear or ill-
humour. I make no apology, then, for recounting an anecdote which
illustrates, I think, certain qualities which distinguish the German mentality
from that of all the other races which call themselves civilised. The incident
which I will proceed to describe was a trifling one, but the impression it left
upon my memory was profound.
In the early summer of 1911 my wife and I joined our dear friends, the
Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens and his daughter, in a motor-trip through
parts of the Rhine Province, and in particular the romantic and volcanic
districts of the Eiffel. Maarten Maartens (who died in Holland so lately as
the 3rd of August, 1915) was the most delightful travelling companion, and
the perfection of his linguistic gifts—for he spoke English, French, Italian
and German in each case like a native—made the face of Europe one wide
home to him. Our tour was nearly over; we had descended the Moselle, and
had paused where the Benedictine Abbey of Laach, on the edge of its serene
and wood-encircled crater-lake offers hospitality to the stranger; and then
we went down to the Rhine and reached Königswinter late one afternoon.
At Königswinter, as travellers know, there is an hotel which Germans brag
of as “the best in the world.” It is, in fact, or was then, very large,
sumptuously furnished, nobly situated on the bastion of the Rhine, looking
right over to Drachenfels. The service was rapid and noiseless, the cooking
as good as a Teuton kitchen can produce. It had the air of highly-organised
prosperity, of a machine exactly suited to harmonise with wealth. To call it
“the best hotel in the world” is to show a false conception of excellence as
applied to hotels, but it presented everything that German luxury could
demand.
We were given a row of excellent rooms on the first floor, with long
windows opening on to a terrace which roofed the great restaurant, and
whence there was a noble prospect. We went to bed early, and soon the
whole vast establishment seemed wrapped in velvet silence. Not a sound
broke in the dark warm summer night, not even a whisper from the river.
Suddenly an amazing, an unintelligible riot woke the row of us from
slumber. The electric light, switched hurriedly on, revealed that the hour
was three. In front of us, apparently on our terrace, a turmoil was
proceeding of a character to wake the dead. Explosions of glass, what
seemed the deeper note of crockery, strange shrieks of metal, bassoon-like
and drum-like noises, a deafening roar. Turning off the light, with face
pressed to the window, there were dimly to be distinguished phantom-
objects descending from above our heads, a shower of vague orbs and
bosses, splinters of light, a chaos of the indescribable. Presently the hubbub
ceased, deep silence reigned again, and after whispered and bewildered
confabulation from door to door, we fell again to dreamless sleep.
In the morning, the riot of the night was our only subject. The terrace in
front of our windows showed not the slightest evidence of any disturbance,
and we almost doubted our senses. At breakfast, the man who served us
knew nothing; he had not wakened all night, he declared. Maarten
Maartens, more and more intrigued, insisted on asking the headwaiter. The
answer of that worthy was, “There was no disturbance at any time last
night. If there had been, I could not have failed to hear it.” Maarten
Maartens broke from this sturdy liar, and went off to the bureau of the
Hotel. Here he found the manager, with whom he was personally
acquainted, seated at his desk; two or three other people were near. To the
Dutch novelist’s inquiry the manager answered—“There was no noise in
any part of the hotel at any time last night. You were dreaming,—you had a
nightmare.” Maarten Maartens, now thoroughly baffled, almost began to
think that the noise must have been a delusion of the brain; when the
manager, coming to him along a passage, and glancing hither and thither to
make sure no one was listening, said, “The officers of a crack regiment
from Cologne were supping last night here, in the large private room on the
second floor. At three o’clock, as they were leaving, they threw everything
that was on the table,—glass, china, silver, everything,—out of window on
to the terrace below. But before four o’clock my waiters had removed every
trace of what the officers had done. I tell you the facts because you are so
persistent, but I must beg you to ask no more questions and make no more
remarks. If it were known to the authorities that any complaints had been
made, my licence would be withdrawn. My people are so well disciplined,
that not a single man or woman employed in the hotel would admit that any
incident had taken place.” Maarten Maartens said, “But would you allow
civilians to behave like that?” “Civilians!” exclaimed the manager; “in their
case I should telephone to the police at the crash of the first wine-glass.”
Before we left Königswinter that day we went with Maarten Maartens to
call on the publisher of the German edition of his writings, which had a
very large sale. We were received with much ceremony in a modern house,
sumptuously furnished, and set in an enchanting park which goes down to
the Rhine. The civility of the great publisher and of his family was extreme.
In the course of conversation Maarten Maartens, in whom the nocturnal
bombardment of his bed-room rankled, told the story with a great deal of
humour and liveliness. When he had finished there was a silence, and then
the publisher said, very sententiously, “We never criticise the Army! Allow
me to show you that part of the garden which has been finished since your
last visit!”
This, then, is the spirit in which Germany has arrived at her present
amazing development. It renders her unique. Can any one conceive a party
of English officers, dining at the Ritz, and hurling all their plates and dishes
into the street below? Can any one conceive a party of French civilians, of
all classes, accepting a tyranny of arms so humiliating? The arrogance and
wantonness of a military aristocracy balanced by an unquestioning servility
of the great bulk of the nation. A Kultur of which the watchword is, “We
never criticise the Army!” An army in which the qualities of self-respect
and respect for others are totally ignored. An amalgam of these contrasted
elements makes up the atrocious and formidable temperament of our
enemy.
Edmund Gosse
 MAX BEERBOHM
A GRACIOUS ACT. (CARICATURE)
FROM A WATER-COLOUR SKETCH