CHAPTER IV.

[11]Quoted by W. H. Dawson inGerman Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle, ch. 15.

Vorwärts, central organ of German Socialism, wrote on July 1, 1892:

"We would fight churches and preachers even if the preachers and curates were the most conscientious of men."

Vorwärtscontrived also to add insult to the statement by using the wordPfaffenfor preachers, a word having a contemptuous implication in this sense throughout Northern Germany.

Karl Kautsky, for years one of the intellectual leaders of the Socialist movement in Germany and one of its ablest and most representative publicists, said:[12]

"The one-sided battle against the congregations, as it is being carried on today in France, is merely a pruning of the boughs of the tree, which then merely flourishes all the more strongly. The ax must be laid to the roots."

[12]Die neue Zeit, 1903, vol. i, p. 506.

GenosseDr. Erdmann, writing after the war had begun, said:

"We have no occasion to conceal the fact that Social-Democracyis hostile to the church—whether Catholic or Evangelical—and that we present our demands with special decision because we know that we shall thus break the power of the church."[13]

[13]Sozialistische Monatshefte, 1915, vol. i, p. 516.

Vorwärtsheadlined an article in January, 1918: "All religious systems are enemies of women." (The Socialists nevertheless had the effrontery during the campaign preceding the election of delegates to the National Assembly at Weimar in January to put out a placard saying: "Women, protect your religion! Vote for the Social-Democratic party of Germany!").

The initial activities of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils in Hamburg and Brunswick following the revolution were correctly described in a speech made in the National Assembly on March 11, 1919, by Deputy Mumm. He said:

"The revolutionary government in Hamburg has retained the bordells and abolished religious instruction. In Brunswick the school children of the capital, 1,500 in number, were assembled in the Cathedral by the people's commissioners for an anti-Christian Christmas celebration."

At the same session, Deputy Hellmann, a member of the Majority (parent) Socialist party, said in a speech in answer to Mumm:

"The church, like all social institutions, is subject to constant change, and will eventually disappear."

Quotations like the preceding could be multiplied indefinitely, as could also acts consistent with these anti-religious views. The first Minister of Cults (Kultusminister) appointed by the revolutionary government in Prussia was Adolf Hoffmann, a professed atheist, although this ministry has charge of the affairs of the church.

The Socialist literature and press in all countries abound in anti-religious utterances. To quote one is to give a sample of all. TheSocial-Demokratenof Stockholm, official organ of the Swedish Socialists and reckoned among the sanest, ablest and most conservative of all Social-Democratic press organs, forgets, too, that religion is a private matter. It reports a sermon by Archbishop Söderblom,wherein the speaker declared that the church must have enough expansive force to conquer the masses who are now coming to power in various lands, and adds this characteristic comment:

"The Archbishop is a brave man who is not afraid to install a motor in the venerable but antiquated skiff from the Lake of Genesareth. If only the boat will hold him up!"

This attitude of Socialism is comprehensible and logical, for no student of world history can deny that an established church has been in all ages and still is one of the strongest bulwarks of an autocratic state. From the very dawn of organized government, centuries before the Christian era, the priesthood, where it did not actually govern, has powerfully upheld the arm of civil authority and property rights. Even in democratic England it teaches the child to "be content in the station whereto it has pleased God to call me," and is thus a factor in upholding the class distinctions against which Socialism's whole campaign is directed. In opposing the church as an institution Social-Democracy is thus merely true to its cardinal tenets. If the power of the church be destroyed or materially weakened, a serious blow is dealt to the government which that church supported. People who, at the command of the church, have been unquestioningly rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, begin to ask themselves: "But what things are Cæsar's?" And when the people begin seriously to consider this question, autocracy is doomed.

The effect of the Socialist campaign against the church began to make itself felt a decade or more before the war began. Withdrawals from the church became so frequent that the government was seriously concerned. The number of those who termed themselvesDissident(dissenter) orreligionslos(without any religion) increased rapidly. Clergymen preached the doctrines of Christ to empty benches;religionslose Genossenpreached the doctrines of class warfare and disloyalty to state to Socialist audiences that filled their meeting-places.

Thus the cancer ate its way into the vitals of the Empire.

The men whose duty it was to take every measure to increase Germany's preparedness for war and her ability to carry on an extended conflict had long realized that the Empire had one very vulnerable point. This was her inability to feed and clothe her inhabitants and her consequent dependence on imports of foodstuffs and raw materials.

Germany in the days of her greatness occupied so large a place in the sun that one is prone to forget that this mighty empire was erected on an area much less than that of the State of Texas. Texas, with 262,290 square miles, was 53,666 square miles greater than the whole German Empire. And Germany's population was two-thirds that of the entire United States! Germany was, moreover, comparatively poor in natural resources. The March (Province) Brandenburg, in which Berlin is situated, is little more than a sandheap, and there are other sections whose soil is poor and infertile. Nor was it, like America, virgin soil; on the contrary, it had been cultivated for centuries.

Driven by stern necessity, the Germans became the most intelligent and successful farmers of the world. Their average yields of all crops per acre exceeded those of any other country, and were from one and a half to two times as large as the average yield in the United States. The German farmer raised two and one half times more potatoes per acre than the average for the United States. He was aided by an adequate supply of cheap farm labor and by unlimited supplies of potash at low prices, since Germany, among herfew important natural resources, possessed a virtual monopoly of the world's potash supply.

Try as they would, however, the German farmers could not feed and clothe more than about forty of Germany's nearly seventy millions. Even this was a tremendous accomplishment, which can be the better appreciated if one attempts to picture the State of Texas feeding and clothing four of every ten inhabitants of the United States. Strenuous efforts were made by the German Government to increase this proportion. Moorlands were reclaimed and extensive projects for such reclamation were being prepared when the war came. The odds were too great, however, and the steady shift of population toward the cities made it increasingly difficult to cultivate all the available land and likewise increased the amount of food required, since there is an inevitable wastage in transportation. What this shift of population amounted to is indicated by the fact that whereas the aggregate population of the rural districts in 1871 was 63.9 per cent of the total population, it was but 40 per cent in 1910. During the same period the percentage of the total population living in cities of 100,000 population or over had increased from 4.8 to 21.3.

In the most favorable circumstances about three-sevenths of the food needed by Germany must be imported. The government had realized that a war on two fronts would involve a partial blockade, but neither the German Government nor any other government did or could foresee that a war would come which would completely encircle Germany in effect and make an absolute blockade possible. Even if this had been realized it would have made no essential difference, for it must always have remained impossible for Germany to become self-supporting.

Another factor increased the difficulties of provisioning the people. The war, by taking hundreds of able-bodied men and the best horses from the farms, made it from the beginning impossible to farm as intensively as under normal conditions, and resulted even in the second summer of the war in a greatly reduced acreage of important crops. Livestock, depleted greatly by slaughtering and by lack of fodder, nolonger produced as much manure as formerly, and one of the main secrets of the intelligent farming-methods of the Germans was the lavish use of fertilizer. And thus, at a time when even the maximum production would have been insufficient, a production far below the normal average was being secured.

Germany's dependence on importations is shown by the import statistics for 1913. The figures are in millions of marks.

Cereals1037.Eggs188.2Fruits148.8Fish135.9Wheaten products130.3Animal fats118.9Butter118.7Rice103.9Southern fruits101.2Meats81.4Live animals291.6Coffee219.7Cacao67.1

It will be observed that the importations of cereals (bread-stuffs and maize) alone amounted to roughly $260,000,000, without the further item of "wheaten products" for $32,500,000.

Fodder for animals was also imported in large quantities. The figures for cereals include large amounts of Indian corn, and oilcakes were also imported in the same year to the value of more than $29,600,000.

Germany was no more able to clothe and shoe her inhabitants than she was to feed them. Further imports for 1913 were (in millions of marks):

Cotton664.1Wool511.7Hides and skins672.4Cotton yarn116.2Flax and hemp114.4Woolen yarn108.

Imports of chemicals and drugs exceeded $105,000,000; of copper, $86,000,000; of rubber and gutta-percha, $36,500,000; of leaf-tobacco, $43,500,000; of jute, $23,500,000; of petroleum, $17,400,000.

Of foodstuffs, Germany exported only sugar and vegetable oils in any considerable quantities. The primarily industrial character of the country was evidenced by her exportations of manufactures, which amounted in 1913 to a total of $1,598,950,000, and even to make these exportations possible she had imported raw materials aggregating more than $1,250,000,000.

The war came, and Germany was speedily thrown on her own resources. In the first months various neutrals, including the United States, succeeded in sending some foodstuffs and raw materials into the beleaguered land, but the blockade rapidly tightened until only the Scandinavian countries, Holland, and Switzerland could not be reached directly by it. Sweden, with a production insufficient for her own needs, soon found it necessary to stop all exports to Germany except of certain so-called "compensation articles," consisting chiefly of paper pulp and iron ore. A continuance of these exports was necessary, since Germany required payment in wares for articles which Sweden needed and could not secure elsewhere. The same was true of the other neutral countries mentioned. Denmark continued to the last to export foodstuffs to Germany, but she exported the same quantity of these wares to England. All the exports of foodstuffs and raw materials from all the neutrals during the war were but a drop in the bucket compared with the vast needs of a people of seventy millions waging war, and they played a negligible part in its course.

Although the German Government was confident that the war would last but a few months, its first food-conservation order followed on the heels of the mobilization. The government took over all supplies of breadstuffs and established a weekly ration of four metric pounds per person (about seventy ounces). Other similar measures followed fast. Meatwas rationed, the weekly allowance varying from six to nine ounces in different parts of the Empire.[14]The Germans were not great meat-eaters, except in the cities. The average peasant ate meat on Sundays, and only occasionally in the middle of the week, and the ration fixed would have been adequate but for one thing. This was the disappearance of fats, particularly lard, from the market. The Germans consumed great quantities of fats, which took the place of meat to a large extent. They now found themselves limited to two ounces of butter, lard, and margarine together per week. Pork, bacon, and ham were unobtainable, and the other meats which made up the weekly ration were lean and stringy, for there were no longer American oilcakes and maize for the cattle, and the government had forbidden the use of potatoes, rye or wheat as fodder. There had been some twenty-four million swine in Germany at the outbreak of the war. There were but four million left at the end. Cattle were butchered indiscriminately because there was no fodder, and the survivors, undernourished, gave less and poorer meat per unit than normally.

[14]This allowance had dropped to less than five ounces in Prussia in the last months of the war.

How great a part milk pays in the feeding of any people is not generally realized. In the United States recent estimates are that milk in its various forms makes up no less than nineteen per cent of the entire food consumed. The percentage was doubtless much greater in Germany, where, as in all European countries, much more cheese is eaten per capita than in America. What the German farmer callsKraftfutter, such concentrated fodder as oilcakes, maize-meal, etc., had to be imported, since none of these things were produced in Germany. The annual average of such importations in the years just preceding the war reached more than five million metric tons, and these importations were virtually all cut off before the end of 1917.

The result was that the supply of milk fell off by nearly one half. Only very young children, invalids, women in childbed and the aged were permitted to have any milk atall, and that only in insufficient quantities and of low grade. The city of Chemnitz boasted of the fact that it had been able at all times to supply a quarter of a liter (less than half a pint!) daily to every child under eight. That this should be considered worth boasting about indicates dimly what the conditions must have been elsewhere.

The value of eggs as protein-furnishing food is well known, but even here Germany was dependent upon other countries—chiefly Russia—for two-fifths of her entire consumption. Available imports dropped to a tenth of the pre-war figures, and the domestic production fell off greatly, the hens having been killed for food and also because of lack of fodder.

Restriction followed upon restriction, and every change was for the worse. TheKriegsbrot(war bread) was directed to be made with twenty per cent of potatoes or potato flour and rye. Barley flour was later added. Wheat and rye are ordinarily milled out around 70 to 75 per cent, but were now milled to 94 per cent. The bread-ration was reduced. The sugar-ration was set at 1-3/4 pounds monthly. American housewives thought themselves severely restricted when sugar was sold in pound packages and they could buy as much heavy molasses, corn syrups and maple syrup as they desired, but the 1-3/4-pound allowance of the German housewife represented the sum total of all sweets available per month.

By the autumn of 1916 conditions had become all but desperate. It is difficult for one who has not experienced it personally to realize what it means to subsist without rice, cereals such as macaroni, oatmeal, or butter, lard or oil (for two ounces of these articles are little better than none); to be limited to one egg each three weeks, or to five pounds of potatoes weekly; to have no milk for kitchen use, and even no spices; to steep basswood blossoms as a substitute for tea and use dandelion roots or roasted acorns as coffee for which there is neither milk nor sugar, and only a limited supply of saccharine. Germany had been a country of many and cheap varieties of cheese, and these took the place of meatto a great extent. Cheese disappeared entirely in August, 1916, and could not again be had.

In common with most European peoples, the Germans had eaten great quantities of fish, both fresh and salted or smoked. The bulk of the salted and smoked fish had come from Scandinavia and England, and the blockade cut off this supply. The North Sea was in the war-zone, and the German fishermen could not venture out to the good fishing-grounds. The German fishermen of the Baltic had, like their North Seacoast brethren, been called to the colors in great numbers. Their nets could not be repaired or renewed because there was no linen available. Fresh fish disappeared from view, and supplies of preserved fish diminished so greatly that it was possible to secure a small portion only every third or fourth week. Even this trifling ration could not always be maintained.

No German will ever forget the terribleKohlrübenwinter(turnip winter) of 1916-17. It took its name from the fact that potatoes were for many weeks unobtainable, and the only substitute that could be had was coarse fodder-turnips. The lack of potatoes and other vegetables increased the consumption of bread, and even in the case of the better-situated families the ration was insufficient. The writer has seen his own children come into the house from their play, hungry and asking for a slice of bread, and go back to their games with a piece of turnip because there was no bread to give them. The situation of hard manual laborers was naturally even worse.

The turnip-winter was one of unusual severity, and it was marked by a serious shortage of fuel. Thus the sufferings from the cold were added to the pangs of hunger. There was furthermore already an insufficiency of warm clothing. Articles of wear were strictly rationed, and the children of the poorer classes were inadequately clad.

The minimum number of calories necessary for the nourishment of the average individual is, according to dietetic authorities, 3,000, and even this falls some 300 short of a full ration. Yet as early as December, 1916, the caloric value of the complete rations of the German was 1,344, and, ifthe indigestibility and monotony of the fare be taken into account, even less. To be continuously hungry, to rise from the table hungry, to go to bed hungry, was the universal experience of all but the very well-to-do. Not only was the food grossly insufficient in quantity and of poor quality, but the deadly monotony of the daily fare also contributed to break down the strength and, eventually, the very morale of the people. No fats being available, it was impossible to fry anything. From day to day the Germans sat down to boiled potatoes, boiled turnips and boiled cabbage, with an occasional piece of stringy boiled beef or mutton, and with the coarse and indigestibleKriegsbrot, in which fodder-turnips had by this time been substituted for potatoes. The quantity of even such food was limited.

A little fruit would have varied this diet and been of great dietetic value, but there was no fruit.Wo bleibt das Obst(what has become of the fruit?) cried the people, voicing unconsciously the demands of their bodies. The government, which had imported $62,500,000 worth of fruit in 1913, could do nothing. The comparatively few apples raised in Germany were mixed with pumpkins and carrots to make what was by courtesy called marmalade, and most of this went to the front, which also secured most of the smaller fruits. A two-pound can of preserved vegetables or fruits was sold to each family—not person—at Christmas time. This had to suffice for the year.

A delegation of women called on the mayor of Schöneberg, one of the municipalities of Greater Berlin, and declared that they and their families were hungry and must have more to eat.

"You will not be permitted to starve, but you must hunger," said the mayor.[15]

[15]The mayor's statement contains in German a play on words:Ihr sollt nicht verhungern, aber hungern müsst Ihr.

The other privations attendant upon hunger also played a great part in breaking down the spirit of the people. In order to secure even the official food-pittance, it was necessary to stand in queues for hours at a time. The trifling allowanceof soap consisted of a substitute made largely of saponaceous clay. Starch was unobtainable, and there is a deep significance in the saying, "to take the starch out of one." The enormous consumption of tobacco at the front caused a serious shortage at home, and this added another straw to the burdens of the male part of the population. The shortage of cereals brought in its wake a dilution of the once famous German beer until it was little but colored and charged water, without any nourishment whatever.

The physical effects of undernutrition and malnutrition made themselves felt in a manner which brought them home to every man. Working-capacity dropped to half the normal, or even less. Mortality increased by leaps and bounds, particularly among the children and the aged. The death rate of children from 1 to 5 years of age increased 50 per cent; that of children from 5 to 15 by 55 per cent. In 1917 alone this increased death rate among children from 1 to 15 years meant an excess of deaths over the normal of more than 50,000 in the whole Empire. In the year 1913, 40,374 deaths from tuberculosis were reported in German municipalities of 15,000 inhabitants or more. The same municipalities reported 41,800 deaths from tuberculosis in the first six months of 1918, an increase of more than 100 per cent. In Berlin alone the death rate for all causes jumped from 13.48 per thousand for the first eight months of 1913 to 20.05 for the first eight months of 1918.

According to a report laid before the United Medical Societies in Berlin on December 18, 1918, the "hunger blockade" was responsible for 763,000 deaths in the Empire. These figures are doubtless largely based on speculation and probably too high, but one need not be a physician to know that years of malnutrition and undernutrition, especially in the case of children and the aged, mean a greatly increased death rate and particularly a great increase of tuberculosis. In addition to the excess deaths alleged by the German authorities to be directly due to the blockade, there were nearly 150,000 deaths from Spanish influenza in 1918. These have not been reckoned among the 763,000, but it must beassumed that many would have withstood the attack had they not been weakened by the privations of the four war-years.

The enthusiasm that had carried the people through the beginnings of their privations cooled gradually. No moral sentiments, even the most exalted, can prevail against hunger. Starving men will fight or steal to get a crust of bread, just as a drowning man clutches at a straw. There have been men in history whose patriotism or devotion to an idea has withstood the test of torture and starvation, but that these are the exception is shown by the fact that history has seen fit to record their deeds. The average man is not made of such stern stuff.Mens sana in corpore sanomeans plainly that there can be no healthy mind without a healthy body. Hungry men and women who see their children die for want of food naturally feel a bitter resentment which must find an object. They begin to ask themselves whether, after all, these sacrifices have been necessary, and to what end they have served.

The first answer to the question, What has compelled these sacrifices was, of course, for everybody, The war. But who is responsible for The War? Germany's enemies, answered a part of the people.

But there were two categories of Germans whose answer was another. On the one side were a few independent thinkers who had decided that Germany herself bore at least a large share of the responsibility; on the other side were those who had been taught by their leaders that all wars are the work of the capitalistic classes, and that existing governments everywhere are obstacles to the coming of a true universal brotherhood of man. These doctrines had been forgotten by even the Socialist leaders in the enthusiasm of the opening days of the struggle, but they had merely lain dormant, and now, as a result of sufferings and revolutionary propaganda by radical Socialists, they awakened. And in awakening they spread to a class which had heretofore been comparatively free from their contagion.

Socialism, and more especially that radical Socialism which finds its expression in Bolshevism, Communism andsimilar emanations, is especially the product of discontent, and discontent is engendered by suffering. The whole German people had suffered terribly, but two categories of one mighty class had undergone the greatest hardships. These were theUnterbeamtenand theMittelbeamten, the government employees of the lowest and the middle classes. This was the common experience of all belligerent countries except the United States, which never even remotely realized anything of what the hardships of war mean. Wages of the laboring classes generally kept pace with the increasing prices of the necessaries of life, and in many instances outstripped them. But the government, whose necessities were thus exploited by the makers of ammunition, the owners of small machine-shops and the hundreds of other categories of workers whose product was required for the conduct of the war, could not—or at least did not—grant corresponding increases of salary to its civil servants. The result was a curious social shift, particularly observable in the restaurants and resorts of the better class, whose clientele, even in the second year of the war, had come to be made up chiefly of men and women whose bearing and dress showed them to be manual workers. The slender remuneration of theBeamtenhad fallen so far behind the cost of living that they could neither frequent these resorts nor yet secure more than a bare minimum of necessaries. The result was that thousands of these loyal men and women, rendered desperate by their sufferings, began in their turn to ponder the doctrines which they had heard, but rejected in more prosperous times. Thus was the ground further prepared for the coming of the revolution.

There was yet another factor which played a great part in increasing the discontent of the masses. Not even the genius of the German Government for organization could assure an equitable distribution of available foodstuffs. Except where the supply could be seized or controlled at the source, as in the case of breadstuffs and one or two other products, the rationing system broke down. The result of the government's inability to get control of necessaries of life was the so-calledSchleichhandel, literally "sneak trade,"the illegitimate dealing in rationed wares. Heavy penalties were imposed for this trade, applicable alike to buyer and seller, and many prosecutions were conducted, but to no avail. The extent of the practice is indicated by a remark made by the police-president of a large German city, who declared that if every person who had violated the law regarding illegitimate trade in foodstuffs were to be arrested, the whole German people would find itself in jail.

It has often been declared that money would buy anything in Germany throughout the war. This statement is exaggerated, but it is a fact that the well-to-do could at all times secure most of the necessaries and some of the luxuries of life. But the prices were naturally so high as to be out of the reach of the great mass of the people. Butter cost as much as $8 a pound in this illegitimate trade, meat about the same, eggs 40 to 50 cents apiece, and other articles in proportion. The poorer people—and this, in any country, means the great majority—could not pay these prices. Themselves forced to go hungry and see their children hunger while the wealthybourgeoisiehad a comparative abundance, they were further embittered against war and against all governments responsible for war, including their own.

The German soldiers at the front had fared well by German standards. In the third year of the war the writer saw at the front vast stores of ham, bacon, beans, peas, lentils and other wares that had not been available to the civil population since the war began. Soldiers home on furlough complained of being continuously hungry and returned to the lines gladly because of the adequate rations there.

With the coming of the fourth year, however, conditions began to grow bad even at the front, and the winter of 1917-18 brought a marked decrease of rations, both in quantity and quality. Cavalrymen and soldiers belonging to munition or work columns ate the potatoes issued for their horses. They ground in their coffee-mills their horses' scant rations of barley and made pancakes. A high military official who took part in the drive for the English Channel that started in March, 1918, assured the writer that the chief reason for the failure to reach the objective was that theGerman soldiers stopped to eat the provisions found in the enemy camps, and could not be made to resume the advance until they had satisfied their hunger and assured themselves that none of the captured stores had been overlooked. Ludendorff, hearing of this, is said to have declared: "Then it's all over." This, while probably untrue, would have been a justified and prophetic summing-up of the situation.

Not only were the soldiers hungry by this time, but they were insufficiently clad. Their boots were without soles, and they had neither socks nor theFusslappen(bandages) which most of them preferred to wear instead of socks. A shirt issued from the military stores in the summer of 1918 to a German soldier-friend of the writer was a woman's ribbed shirt, cut low in the neck and gathered with a ribbon.

The military reverses of this summer thus found a soldiery hungry and ill-clad, dispirited by complaints from their home-folk of increasing privations, and, as we shall see in the following chapter, subjected to a revolutionary propaganda of enormous extent by radical German Socialists and by the enemy.

No people ever entered upon a war with more enthusiasm or a firmer conviction of the justice of their cause than did the Germans. Beset for generations on all sides by potential enemies, they had lived under the constant threat of impending war, and the events of the first days of August, 1914, were hailed as that "end of terror" (ein Ende mit Schrecken) which, according to an old proverb, was preferable to "terror without end" (Schrecken ohne Ende). The teachings of internationalism were forgotten for the moment even by the Socialists. The veteran August Bebel, one of the founders of German Socialism, had never been able entirely to overcome an inborn feeling of nationalism, and had said in one famous speech in the Reichstag that it was conceivable that a situation could arise where even he would shoulderdie alte Büchse(the old musket) and go to the front to defend the Fatherland.

Such a situation seemed even to the extremest internationalists to have arisen. At the memorable meeting in the White Hall of the royal palace in Berlin on August 4, 1914, the Socialist members of the Reichstag were present and joined the members of thebourgeoisparties in swearing to support the Fatherland. The Kaiser retracted his reference tovaterlandslose Gesellen. "I no longer know any parties," he said. "I know only Germans." Hugo Haase, one of the Socialist leaders and one of the small group of men whose efforts later brought about the German revolution and the downfall of the empire and dynasty, was carried away like his colleagues by the enthusiasm of the moment. He promised in advance the support of his party to the empire's war measures, and when, a few hours later, the first war-appropriationmeasure, carrying five billion marks, was laid before the deputies, the Socialists voted for it without a dissenting voice, and later joined for the first time in their history in theKaiserhoch, the expression of loyalty to monarch and country with which sessions of the Reichstag were always closed.

Nothing could testify more strongly to the universal belief that Germany was called upon to fight a defensive and just war. For not only had the Socialist teachings, as we have seen, denounced all warfare as in the interests of capital alone, but their party in the Reichstag included one man whose anti-war convictions had already resulted in his being punished for their expression. This was Dr. Karl Liebknecht, who had been tried at the Supreme Court in Leipsic in 1907 on a charge of high treason for publishing an anti-military pamphlet, convicted of a lesser degree of treason and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment. Haase himself had bitterly attacked militarism and war in a speech in the Reichstag in April, 1913, in opposition to the government's military bills, and only his parliamentary immunity protected him from sharing Liebknecht's fate. One of the strongest defenders of the war in Bavaria was Kurt Eisner, already an intellectual Bolshevist and Communist, who had been compelled earlier to leave the editorial staff of theVorwärtsbecause of his far-going radicalism and dreamy impracticality.

All these men were subsequently bitterly attacked by Socialists of enemy lands for their surrender of principles. The feeling that dictated these attacks is comprehensible, but adherents of the my-country-right-or-wrong brand of patriotism are precluded from making such attacks. It cannot be permitted to any one to blow hot and cold at the same time. He may not say: "I shall defend my country right or wrong, but you may defend yours only if it is right." To state the proposition thus baldly is to destroy it. Unquestioning patriotism is applicable everywhere or nowhere, and its supporters cannot logically condemn its manifestation by the German Socialists in the opening months of the World War.

The first defection in the ranks of the Socialists came in the second war session of the Reichstag in December, 1914, when Liebknecht, alone among all the members of the house, refused to vote for the government's war-credit of five billion marks. Amid scenes of indignant excitement he tried to denounce the war as imperialistic and capitalistic, but was not permitted to finish his remarks.

There has been observable throughout the allied countries and particularly in America a distinct tendency to regard Liebknecht as a hero and a man of great ability and moral courage. But he was neither the one nor the other. He was a man of great energy which was exclusively devoted to destroying, and without any constructive ability whatever, and what was regarded as moral courage in him was rather the indifferent recklessness of fanaticism combined with great egotism and personal vanity. Liebknecht's career was in a great degree determined by his feeling that he was destined to carry on the work and fulfil the mission of his father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, the friend of Marx, Bebel and Engels, and one of the founders of the Socialist party in Germany. But he lacked his father's mental ability, commonsense and balance, and the result was that he became theenfant terribleof his party at an age when the designation applied almost literally.

Educated as a lawyer, the younger Liebknecht devoted himself almost exclusively to politics and to writing on political subjects. Last elected to the Reichstag from the Potsdam district in 1912, he distinguished himself in April, 1913, by a speech in which he charged the Krupp directors with corrupting officials and military officers. He also named the Kaiser and Crown Prince in his speech. The result was an investigation and trial of the army officers involved. In making these charges Liebknecht performed a patriotic service, but even here his personal vanity asserted itself. Before making the speech he sent word to the newspapers that he would have something interesting to say, and requested a full attendance of reporters. He delayed his speech after the announced time because the press-gallery was not yet full.

A consistent enemy of war, he attacked the international armament industry in a speech in the Reichstag on May 10, 1914. In the following month he charged the Prussian authorities with trafficking in titles. But in all the record of his public activities—and he was forty-three years old when the war broke out—one will search in vain for any constructive work or for any evidence of statesmanlike qualities.

Liebknecht visited America in 1910. When he returned to Germany he attacked America in both speeches and writings as the most imperialistic and capitalistic of all countries. He declared that in no European country would the police dare handle citizens as they did in America, and asserted that the American Constitution is "not worth the paper it is written upon." In Berlin on December 17, 1918, he said to the writer:

"The war has proved that your constitution is no better today than it was when I expressed my opinion of it nine years ago. Your people have been helpless in the face of it and were drawn into war just like the other belligerents. The National Assembly (Weimar) now planned will bequeath to us a charter equally as worthless. The workingmen are opposed to the perpetuation of private ownership."

In the face of this, it must be assumed that American glorification of Liebknecht rests upon ignorance of the man and of what principles he supported.

For a few months after the beginning of the war Liebknecht stood almost alone in his opposition. As late as September, 1914, we see Haase heading a mission of Socialists to Italy to induce her to be faithful to her pledges under the Triple Alliance and to come into the war on Germany's side, or, failing that, at least to remain neutral. Haase, who was a middle-aged Königsberg (East Prussia) lawyer, had for some years been one of the prominent leaders of the Social-Democratic party and was at this time one of the chairmen of the party's executive committee. He was later to play one of the chief rôles in bringing about the revolution, but even in December, 1914, he was still a defender of the war, although already insistent that it must not end in annexations or the oppression of other peoples.It was not until a whole year had passed that he finally definitely threw in his lot with those seeking to weaken the government at home and eventually destroy it.

The real undermining work, however, had begun earlier. Several men and at least two women were responsible for it at this stage. The men included Liebknecht, Otto Rühle, a former school teacher from Pirna (Saxony), and now a member of the Reichstag, and Franz Mehring. Rühle, a personal friend of Liebknecht, broke with his party at the end of 1914 and devoted himself to underground propaganda with an openly revolutionary aim, chiefly among the sailors of the High Seas fleet. Mehring was a venerable Socialist author of the common idealistic, non-practical variety, with extreme communistic and international views, and enjoyed great respect in his party and even among non-Socialist economists. The two women referred to were Clara Zetkin, a radical suffragette of familiar type, and Rosa Luxemburg.

The Luxemburg woman was, like so many others directly concerned in the German revolution, of Jewish blood. By birth in Russian Poland a Russian subject, she secured German citizenship in 1870 by marrying aGenosse, a certain Dr. Lübeck, at Dresden. She left him on the same day. Frau Luxemburg had been trained in the school of Russian Socialism of the type that produced Lenin and Trotzky. She was a woman of unusual ability—perhaps the brainiest member of the revolutionary group in Germany, male or female—and possessed marked oratorical talent and great personal magnetism. Like all internationalists and especially the Jewish internationalists, she regarded war against capitalistic and imperialistic governments, that is to say, against allbourgeoisgovernments, as a holy war. Speaking Russian, Polish and German equally well and inflamed by what she considered a holy mission, she was a source of danger to any government whose hospitality she was enjoying. She became early an intimate of Liebknecht and the little group of radicals that gathered around him, and her contribution to the overthrow of the German Empire can hardly be overestimated.

The first of the anti-war propaganda articles whose surreptitious circulation later became so common were the so-called "Spartacus Letters," which began appearing in the summer of 1915. There had been formed during the revolution of 1848 a democratic organization calling itself the "Spartacus Union." The name came from that Roman gladiator who led a slave uprising in the last century of the pre-Christian era. This name was adopted by the authors of these letters to characterize the movement as a revolt of slaves against imperialism. The authorship of the letters was clearly composite and is not definitely known, but they were popularly ascribed to Liebknecht. His style marks some of them, but others point to Frau Luxemburg, and it is probable that at least these two and possibly other persons collaborated in them. They opposed the war, which they termed an imperialistic war of aggression, and summoned their readers to employ all possible obstructive tactics against it. Revolution was not mentioned in so many words, but the tendency was naturally revolutionary.

Despite all efforts of the authorities, these letters and other anti-war literature continued to circulate secretly. In November, 1915, Liebknecht, Frau Luxemburg, Mehring and Frau Zetkin gave out a manifesto, which was published in Switzerland, in which they declared that their views regarding the war differed from those of the rest of the Socialists, but could not be expressed in Germany under martial law. The manifesto was so worded that prosecution thereon could hardly have been sustained. The Swiss newspapers circulated freely in Germany, and the manifesto was not without its effect. The Socialist party saw itself compelled on February 2, 1915, to expel Liebknecht from the party. This step, although doubtless unavoidable, proved to be the first move toward the eventual split in the party. There were already many Socialists who, although out of sympathy with the attitude of their party, had nevertheless hesitated to break with it. Many of these, including most of Liebknecht's personal followers, soon followed him voluntarily, and the allegiance of thousands of others to the old party was seriously weakened.

Outwardly, however, what was eventually to become a revolutionary movement made no headway during the spring and summer of 1915. The shortage of food, although making itself felt, had not yet brought general suffering. The German armies had won many brilliant victories and suffered no marked reverse. Mackensen's invasion of Galicia in May and June revived the spirits of the whole nation, in which, as among all other belligerent nations, a certain war-weariness had already begun to manifest itself.

The open break in the Socialist party first became apparent at the session of the Reichstag on December 21, 1915. The government had asked for a further war-credit of ten billion marks. Haase had a week earlier drawn up a manifesto against the war, but the newspapers had been forbidden to print it. At this Reichstag session he employed his parliamentary prerogatives to get this manifesto before the people in the form of a speech attacking the war as one of aggression, and announced that he would vote against the credit asked. Fourteen other members of his party voted with him. The German people's solid war-front had been broken.

The motives of most of those who thus began the revolt against the government and who were later responsible for the revolution are easy to determine. Many were honest fanatics, and some of these, chief among them Liebknecht, carried their fanaticism to a degree calling for the serious consideration of alienists. Others again were moved by purely selfish considerations, and some of them had criminal records. Haase presented and still presents a riddle even for those who know him well. Judged by his speeches alone, he appears in the light of an honest internationalist, striving to further the welfare of his own and all other peoples. Judged by his conduct, and particularly his conduct in the months following the revolution, he appears in the light of a political desperado whose acts are dictated by narrow personal considerations. He was particularly fitted for leadership of the government's opponents by the absence from his makeup of the blind fanaticism that characterized the majority of these, and by an utter unscrupulousness in his methods. Hewas free also from that fear of inconsistency which has been called the vice of small minds.

The questions growing out of the manner of conducting the submarine warfare became acute in the first months of 1916. The government was determined to prevent any open debate on this subject in the Reichstag, and the deputies of all parties bowed to the government's will. Haase and his little group of malcontents, however, refused to submit. They carried their opposition to the authority of their own party to such an extent that a party caucus decided upon their exclusion. The caucus vote was followed on the same day—March 24, 1916—by the formal secession from the party of Haase and seventeen other members, who constituted themselves as a separate party under the designation of "Socialist Working Society" (Arbeitsgemeinschaft). The seceders included, among others, Georg Ledebour, Wilhelm Dittmann, Dr. Oskar Cohn, Emil Barth, Ernst Däumig and Eduard Bernstein. Liebknecht, who had been excluded from the party a year earlier, allied himself to the new group. All its members were internationalists.

The formation of the new party furnished a rallying point for all radical Socialists and also for the discontented generally, and the numbers of these were increasing daily. Under the protection of their parliamentary immunity these members were able to carry on a more outspoken and effective agitation against the war. Haase, Ledebour and other members of the group issued a manifesto in June, 1916, wherein it was declared that the people were starving and that the only replies made by the government to their protests took the form of a severe application of martial law. "The blockade should have been foreseen," said the manifesto. "It is not the blockade that is a crime; the war is a crime. The consolation that the harvest will be good is a deliberate deception. All the food in the occupied territories has been requisitioned, and people are dying of starvation in Poland and Serbia." The manifesto concluded with an appeal to the men and women of the laboring-classes to raise their voices against the continuance of the war.

The underground propaganda against the war and thegovernment assumed greater proportions, and encouraged the revolutionaries in the Reichstag. Grown bold, Haase announced that a pacifist meeting would be held in Berlin on August 30. It was prohibited by the police. Sporadic strikes began. Rühle had staged the first avowedly political strike at Leipsic on May Day. It failed, but set an example which was followed in other parts of the empire.

Liebknecht, who had been mustered into the army and was hence subject to military regulations, was arrested on May Day in Berlin for carrying on an anti-war and anti-government agitation among the workingmen. On trial he was sentenced to thirty months' imprisonment and to dishonorable dismissal from the army. This was the signal for widespread strikes of protest in various cities. There was serious rioting in Berlin on July 1st, and grave disorders also occurred at Stuttgart, Leipsic and other cities. Liebknecht appealed from the conviction and the appellate court raised the sentence to four years and one month, with loss of civil rights for six years. This caused a recrudescence of July's demonstrations, for a sentence of this severity was most unusual in Germany. Liebknecht's personal followers and party friends swore vengeance, and many others who had theretofore kept themselves apart from a movement with which they secretly sympathized were rendered more susceptible to radical anti-war propaganda.

The autumn of 1916 brought the government's so-calledHilfsdienstgesetz, or Auxiliary Service Law, intended to apply military rules of enrollment and discipline to the carrying out of necessary work at home, such as wood-cutting, railway-building, etc. This law produced widespread dissatisfaction, and Haase, by attacking it in the Reichstag, increased his popularity and poured more oil upon the flames of discontent. In March, 1917, he declared openly in the Reichstag that Germany could not win the war and that peace must be made at once.

The Russian revolution of this month was a factor whose influence and consequences in Germany can hardly be exaggerated. Not even the wildest dreamer had dared to believe that a revolution could be successfully carried throughin war-time while the government had millions of loyal troops at its disposal. That it not only did succeed, but that many of the Tsar's formerly most loyal officers, as, for example, Brussiloff, immediately joined the revolutionaries, exerted a powerful effect. And thus, while Germans loyal to their government hailed the revolution as the downfall of a powerful enemy, the masses, starving through this terribleKohlrübenwinter, cold, miserable, dispirited by the bloody sacrifices from which few families had been exempt, infected unconsciously by the doctrines of international Socialism and skillfully propagandized by radical agitators, began to wonder whether, after all, their salvation did not lie along the route taken by the Russians.

The radical Socialists who had left the old party in 1916 organized as the Independent Socialist Party of Germany at a convention held in Gotha in April, 1917. Eighteen men had left the party a year earlier, but one hundred and forty-eight delegates, including fifteen Reichstag deputies, attended the convention. Haase and Ledebour were chosen chairmen of the executive committee, and a plan of opposition to the further conduct of the war was worked out. Party newspaper organs were established, and some existing Socialist publications espoused the cause of the new party. Revolution could naturally be no part of their open policy, and there may have been many members of the party who did not realize what the logical and inevitable consequences of their actions were. The leaders, however, were by this time definitely and deliberately working for the overthrow of the government, although it may be doubted whether even they realized what would be the extent of thedébâclewhen it should come.

Reference has already been made to strikes in various parts of the empire. These had been, up to 1918, chiefly due to dissatisfaction over material things—hunger (the strong undercurrent of all dissatisfaction), inadequate clothing, low wages, long hours, etc. They were encouraged and often manipulated by radical Socialists who perceived their importance as a weapon against the government, and were to that extent political, but the first great strike with revolutionas its definite aim was staged in Berlin and Essen at the end of January, 1918. The strength of the Independent Socialists and of the more radical adherents of Liebknecht, Ledebour, Rosa Luxemburg and others of the same stamp, while it had increased but slowly in the rural districts and the small towns, had by this time reached great proportions in the capital and generally in the industrial sections of Westphalia. Two great munition plants in Berlin employing nearly a hundred thousand workers were almost solidly Independent Socialist in profession and Bolshevist in fact. The infection had reached the great plants in and around Essen in almost equal degree. A great part of these malcontents was made up of youths who, in their early teens when the war broke out, had for more than three years been released from parental restraint owing to the absence of their soldier-fathers and who had at the same time been earning wages that were a temptation to lead a disordered life. They were fertile ground for the seeds of propaganda whose sowing the authorities were unable to stop, or even materially to check. Even Liebknecht, from his cell, had been able to get revolutionary communications sent out to his followers.

The January strike assumed large proportions, and so confident were the Berlin strikers of the strength of their position that they addressed an "ultimatum" to the government. This ultimatum demanded a speedy peace without annexations or indemnities; the participation of workingmen's delegates of all countries in the peace negotiations; reorganization of the food-rationing system; abolishing of the state of siege, and freedom of assembly and of the press; the release of all political prisoners; the democratization of state institutions, and equal suffrage for women. The strikers appointed a workmen's council to direct their campaign, and this council chose an "action commission," of which Haase was a member.

The authorities, in part unable and in part unwilling to make the concessions demanded, took determined steps to put down the strike. Their chief weapon was one that had been used repeatedly, and, as events proved, too often and too freely. This weapon was the so-calledStrafversetzungen,or punitive transfers into the front-army. The great part of the strikers were men subject to military duty who had been especially reclaimed and kept at work in indispensable industries at home. They were, however, subject to military law and discipline, and the imminent threat of being sent to the front in case of insubordination had prevented many strikes that would otherwise have come, and the carrying into effect of this threat had broken many revolts in factories. Thousands of these men, who had been drawing high wages and receiving extra allowances of food, were promptly sent into the trenches.

Every suchStrafversetzungwas worse than a lost battle in its effect. The victims became missionaries of revolution, filled with a burning hatred for the government that had pulled them from their comfortable beds and safe occupations and thrown them into the hail of death and the hardships of the front. They carried the gospel of discontent, rebellion and internationalism among men who had theretofore been as sedulously guarded against such propaganda as possible. The morale of the soldiery was for a time restored by the successes following the offensive of March, 1918, and it never broke entirely, even during the terrible days of the long retreat before the victorious Allied armies, but it was badly shaken, and the wild looting that followed the armistice was chiefly due to the fellows of baser sort who were at the front because they had been sent thither for punishment.

Yet another factor played an important part in increasing discontent at the front. One can say, without fear of intelligent contradiction, that no other country ever possessed as highly trained and efficient officers as Germany at the outbreak of the war. There were martinets among them, and the discipline was at best strict, but the first article of their creed was to look after the welfare of the men committed to their charge. Drawn from the best families and with generations of officer-ancestors behind them, they were inspired by both family and class pride which forbade them to spare themselves in the service of the Fatherland. The mortality in the officer-corps was enormous. About fortyper cent of the original officers of career were killed, and a majority of the rest incapacitated. The result was a shortage of trained men which made itself severely felt in the last year of the war. Youths of eighteen and nineteen, fresh from the schools and hastily trained, were made lieutenants and placed in command of men old enough to be their fathers. The wine of authority mounted to boyish heads. Scores of elderly German soldiers have declared to the writer independently of each other that the overbearing manners, arbitrary orders and arrogance of these youths aroused the resentment of even the most loyal men and increased inestimably the discontent already prevailing at the front.

Even before the anti-war and revolutionary propaganda had attained great proportions there were indications that all was not well in one branch of the empire's armed forces. Rumblings of discontent began to come from the navy early in the second year of the war, and in the summer of 1916 there was a serious outbreak of rioting at Kiel. Its gravity was not at first realized, because Kiel, even in peace times, had been a turbulent and riotous city. But a few months later the rioting broke out again, and in the early summer of 1917 there came a menacing strike of sailors and shipyard and dock laborers at Wilhelmshaven. This was mainly a wage-movement, coupled with a demand for more food, but it had political consequences of a serious nature.

The first displays of mutinous spirit among the men of the fleet were not so much due to revolutionary and radical Socialist propaganda as to a spontaneous internal dissatisfaction with the conditions of the service itself. No continuously extensive use of the submarines had been made up to the middle of the winter of 1916. There had been spurts of activity with this weapon, but no sustained effort. By March, 1916, however, many U-boats were being sent out. At first they were manned by volunteers, and there had been a surplus of volunteers, for the men of the submarine crews received special food, more pay, liberal furloughs and the Iron Cross after the third trip. Within a year, however, conditions changed decidedly. The percentage of U-boats lost is not yet known, but the men of the fleet reckoned that a submarine rarely survived its tenth trip. The Admiraltynaturally published no accounts of boats that failed to come back, and this added a new terror to this branch of the service.

Volunteers were no longer to be had. The result was that drafts were resorted to, at the first from the men of the High Seas fleet, and later from the land forces. Such a draft came to be considered as equivalent to a death-sentence.[16]Disaffection increased in the fleet. The Independent Socialists were prompt to discover and take advantage of these conditions. The sailors were plied with propaganda, oral and written. The character of this propaganda was not generally known until October 9, 1917, when the Minister of Marine, Admiral von Capelle, speaking in the Reichstag, informed the astonished nation that a serious mutiny had occurred in the fleet two months earlier, and that it had been necessary to execute some of the ringleaders and imprison a number of others.

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