CHAPTER XVTHE GERMAN VIEW OF ENGLAND
PersonallyI am under considerable obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. HisPräparationen zu deutschen Gedichtenfor the purposes of instruction in schools has been a lantern to my way and a light unto my path on the somewhat rugged slopes of the German Parnassus. August Lomberg’s is the hand which has stayed my often stumbling feet when I first aspired to Goethe and Schiller, deities sitting enthroned aloft and remote. Guides to poetry are irritating books in one’s own language. What a poet has to say, and what he means, are strictly private matters between the reader and himself. The views of a third person may even be regarded as an intrusion, not to say an impertinence. But when you are struggling with the verbal intricacies of a new tongue, guides to knowledge assume a very different light. So, I repeat, I am under many obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. As so often happens with German authors, he has taught me more incidentally than the surface content of his works. The Rektor has clearly a complete and painstaking acquaintance with the whole range of German literature. But his observations concerning the poets were, to me at least, of less value than the revelation of his own type of mind and general outlook on life.
August Lomberg is a garrulous writer. His explanationsare largely historical as well as literary. Every line breathes a narrow and aggressive patriotism of the type which has made the name of Germany detested. The great poets of the Liberation period have sung both of freedom and oppression on a note which rings clear and true to any lover of liberty. The Elberfeld Rektor, commenting on this verse long before 1914, can only do so in terms of abuse of France. To him a poet is really important, not for some immortal gift to the sum-total of the world’s truth and beauty, but for the degree to which he may have added new stops to the full-sounding organ swelling the note of German excellence. The ironical anti-patriotic strain in Heine fills the Rektor with undisguised horror. So great is his reprobation of Heine as a world citizen, that he can with difficulty begin to do justice to him as a poet. And though like Wordsworth’s Nun he is breathless with adoration before the genius of Goethe, I more than suspect that at heart Goethe’s indifference to patriotic questions is a sore trial to him.
These volumes of Lomberg’s are well-known school-books in Germany. Hence their value as indicating a certain trend of thought. If the English are ever to form a reasoned judgment of the Germans, it is essential to understand something of that peculiar herbage on which the minds of teachers and pupils alike have been pastured. But Herr Lomberg has not been content to rest on his laurels as regards a critical study of the German classics. War poetry has also claimed his attention and his explanations. One afternoon in a bookshop I stumbled by chance on a volume of German war poetry. I bought it and went on my way rejoicing. I knew something by then of the general outlook of my friend the Rektor’smind, and felt sure that his observations on the World-War would be worth reading. So indeed they proved.
The poems themselves were of very poor quality. Nothing remotely comparable to the verse of Rupert Brooke or Julian Grenfell or of half a dozen other English writers adorned these drab pages. Unless Germany has produced something better than the mediocre collection brought together by the Rektor, her inferiority in one respect at least to England is outstanding. Leaving literary values aside, the normal note struck was one of a boastful and irritating patriotism. The early poems, written in the days when Germany was still flushed by hopes of a speedy and overwhelming victory, are noisy and aggressive. One writer exults over the air raids. “We have flying ships, they have none,” he shouts stridently. No less great is the enthusiasm for the U-boat exploits. The limits of degradation were reached by a poem about a pro-German fish in the North Sea. The fish kept company with a U-boat and followed the various sinkings with great interest. One day the U-boat sank first a cargo of sugar, next of lemons, thirdly of rum. The fish brewed a toddy of these various ingredients, and drank tipsy toasts to the U-boat. I suppose the poem was intended to be funny. Of humour it had none. The mentality it revealed was amazing.
As the first hopes of easy victory evaporated, a note of stress and anguish replaces that of the original bluster. A poem on Ypres was noticeable in this respect. But the particular interest of the book lay to me in the Rektor’s explanations about the English. A fount of venom overflows whenever the name of Britain is mentioned. He sets forth in his own inimitable way how England, owing toher acute jealousy of Germany, had deliberately provoked the war. England’s sordid anxieties about her menaced commercial supremacy lay at the root of this action. Having plotted war and declared it at her own time, she then proceeded to wage it on the most barbarous lines. English soldiers murdered the wounded, concealed machine guns in their Red Cross wagons, and immolated whole platoons of innocent German soldiers by an abominable misuse of the white flag. The wickedness, the perfidy, the treachery of England, the outrages committed by her against every law of God and man—the Rektor lashes himself into a white heat on these themes. No less fulsome and subservient is the writer in his praise of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. Germany’s passion for peace, a peace destroyed only by the intrigues of a jealous and wicked world, is enlarged on over and over again.
This book, like its predecessors, is intended for use in schools. We can form some judgment, therefore, of the facts and fancies which writers of the Lomberg type thrust as historical truth on the rising generation. The influence of such statements can hardly be exaggerated, and much similar poison has flowed through the whole German school system. German school literature is a real mine of information to any one who wants to study the root causes of latter-day German mentality. Little wonder that animosities and misunderstandings rend nations in twain when truth is subordinated to the worst purposes of political and interested propaganda. Children are malleable stuff, and certain long-sighted Teutons realised perfectly that what is driven into a child in the first impressionable years abides through life.
The accident of improving my limited knowledge of theGerman language brought me in contact with primers and readers covering all standards and classes. In making my way from the Child’s First Reader to the volumes in use in High Schools, I learnt a good deal more than the actual study of words and grammar. From the Infants’ to the Upper Standards one note was struck again and again with monotonous regularity—praise of the Army, glorification of the Hohenzollerns. I came into rapid conflict with my Child’s First Reader when on the first page I was confronted with a little poem saying that, though a tiny child, my great aim in life should be to shoot straight and grow up into a fine soldier. Then came a fulsome hymn to the Kaiser swearing lifelong fidelity to that noble man. Then followed a series of short stories, no less fulsome, about the goodness and greatness of the Royal Family. The book of course included other material, but glorification of the Hohenzollerns permeated its pages, and the same thing repeated itself exactly in all the following standards.
Thoroughly bored with the Child’s Reader, I tried some of the more advanced books only to find an elaborated edition of the same theme. One priceless story in a middle-standard book told a marvellous tale about the adventures of a humble family in Berlin, the Empress, the Emperor’s daughter, and a cow. The curtain rises on a child weeping bitterly in a Berlin park. The beautiful and tender-hearted Princess drives by in a glittering phaëton lined with plush and drawn by two spanking ponies. Flinging the reins to a groom, she hastens to the assistance of poverty in distress. A tale of woe is in due course unfolded. A family, humble but virtuous, have lost a cow on which the entire prosperity of the householdpivoted. The Princess comforts the weeping child, gives her money, and says that though the matter lies beyond her powers, her mother will certainly call and deal with the cow situation. The Princess is as good as her word. To the stupefaction of the district, a royal carriage containing the Empress visits the humble home the next day. The Empress administers more consolation; virtue is to be upheld in the hour of trial. A cow is following immediately from the royal farm; indeed it is on its way, lowing, so to speak, at the moment in the streets of Berlin. The anxieties of the family consequently will be at an end. The paralysed couple, falling flat on their faces, stammer suitable words of gratitude and praise. Thanks to the cow and the prestige attaching to it, the family fortunes prosper exceedingly. The whole district tumbles over itself in the effort to drink a glass of Imperial milk. But unhappily one day the woman is knocked down and mortally hurt in a street accident. Lying in the hospital at the point of death, the matron sees there is something on her mind. On inquiry the patient replies that if only once again she could see her benefactress, the Empress, and hold her hand, she would die content. The matron, being apparently a person of ample leisure, sets off at once to the palace to find the Empress. She is interviewed by a lady-in-waiting, who declares it is impossible for her to see the august one. Unfortunately it happens to be Prince Joachim’s birthday and the festivities in connection with it are about to begin; the Empress cannot possibly be disturbed. But the stout-hearted matron is not to be daunted by any lady-in-waiting or any birthday party. She gives battle vigorously on behalf of her dyingpatient. “Who are you,” she says reprovingly, “to stand between the mother of her country and the humblest of her children.” The lady-in-waiting, routed and overwhelmed, retires hastily to tell the Empress. Her discomfiture is completed by grave reprimands from the august one that any time should have been wasted at so critical a moment in bringing the facts to her knowledge. Poor Prince Joachim is caught in the backwash of these events. His birthday party is wrecked. The Empress hurries off to the bedside of the dying woman, but not before the table groaning under the weight of Joachim’s birthday cakes and flowers has been stripped of half its adornments. With her arms full of roses the Empress enters the hospital ward. The expiring patient gives a cry of joy and, after an exchange of suitable sentiments, dies, holding the Kaiserin’s hand. Even after death the connection of the humble family with the Hohenzollerns is maintained. Even more permanent than the prestige conferred by the cow is the prestige of the tombstone, erected in the cemetery at the Imperial expense, with an inscription bearing the Empress’s name.
Other stories no less grotesque redound to the credit of the Emperor or the gallantry of the Crown Prince. Home workers were marked down as the special preserve of the Crown Princess. Sweated industries in Berlin might in fact exist to afford a channel for the altruistic impulses of the royal lady. One by one the various key points of the Hohenzollern family were dealt with in this fashion. The glorification of the Army went on as steadily side by side.
All this, of course, is systematic propaganda carried out with characteristic thoroughness and, be it added,clumsiness. For even among the Germans it failed in many cases to carry conviction. I remonstrated with my Fräulein—herself a school teacher: “How can you bring your children up on this wretched stuff; with a country like yours so rich in history and legend, surely there is something more inspiring to teach than this nonsense about cows and sweated workers?” Fräulein shrugged her shoulders. The ferment of the revolution was working in her naturally liberal mind, and the unaccustomed liberty of thought and action which the revolution had brought in its wake moved her not a little. But she found it difficult to part with the sheet anchors of the past, and respect for the Imperial family was screwed very tightly into the average professional German. She admitted the stories were stupid, but said that the Kaiser was the symbol of Germany’s greatness and they had always been taught to revere him. Since the revolution the Social Democrats have made an end of Kaiser worship in the schools. Pictures and portraits have vanished. All totems of the faith have disappeared. Apparently the children were very much upset when they were first forbidden to sing hymns to the Kaiser. There were tears when the portraits were removed. The German mind, naturally docile, yearns for some concrete expression of faith to which it can rally. Of all fields schools offer the greatest scope to the corrupting influence of propaganda. And through the schools Imperial Germany twisted and distorted the spirit of the people with consequences no less dire to themselves than to the rest of the world.
One of the irritating facts about Germany to-day is that she refuses to say she is sorry. We English are outraged by the fact that no sense of guilt or of moral responsibilityappears to have touched the spirit of the people. It is not a question of dragging Germany about in a white sheet and a candle from shrine to shrine, but of some guarantee that there shall be no repetition of events so lamentable. The best guarantee for the future is a clear recognition of what was wrong in the past. Truth permeates very slowly through German mentality, and few Germans seem to realise that they or their rulers have brought the world to the very brink of ruin; that millions of lives have perished as the result of their insensate ambitions. They are conscious, painfully conscious of the miseries of Germany to-day. But that civilisation as a whole is staggering under the blow they dealt it—this aspect of the situation apparently never strikes them. Facts which jump to our eyes as English people make no more impression on them than they would on a blind man. Over and over again I have been baffled by coming up against a blank wall of non-comprehension as regards circumstances about which there is no dispute.
A personal experience in this sense, at once exasperating and amusing, overtook me on a journey between Cologne and Paris. I shared my cabin in the sleeping-car with a German lady from Cassel, a typical fair-haired, solid-looking Prussian. We exchanged the ordinary politenesses of travellers thrown together on the road. I was interested to hear that not only did the lady conduct a large business enterprise in Cassel, but that she was a prop of the Volkspartei and took a keen interest in politics. She spoke of Bolshevism and the Red Peril with the fear and disgust always noticeable in the German Bourgeoisie. The train by which we were travelling crossed the devastated area in the night. Before goingto bed my companion asked me whether we should see anything of the ravaged districts. I replied that I thought it would be too dark for any view of the country. It happened, however, that I woke up at 3A.M.and, drawing the blind, found we were just moving out of Péronne. It was a grey July dawn, with driving rain, which intensified the unspeakable desolation of the Somme. Tragic beyond words were the massacred orchards. In some cases the stumps of trees not wholly cut through were throwing up fresh leaves in a painful effort after new life. My heart was stirred at the thought of my Prussian stable companion slumbering peacefully in the bunk above. She had wanted to see devastations; devastations she should see.
“Gnädige Frau,” I said in a firm loud voice, “wake up. We are in the middle of the devastated area, you had better look at it.” Sounds as though a person had been disturbed from deep sleep issued from the top berth. Personally I do not like to think what I should have said or done had a strange woman in the train woke me up at 3A.M.But Prussian docility responded to an order. Gnädige Frau got down meekly from her berth and established herself at the window. A suitable flow of exclamations and adjectives then took place: “entsetzlich,” “furchtbar,” “schrecklich,” “böse,” and so on. Comfortably wrapped up in my bunk I surveyed the scene with virtuous satisfaction, feeling that I was bringing home the war to one Prussian at least in an entirely right spirit and manner. Gnädige Frau, however, turned my flank with the military efficiency of her race. To my intense disgust I found that the text I had provided by this view of the Somme only led to an elaborate sermon onthe devastations of the Russians in East Prussia. “You cannot imagine what awful things were done by those terrible Cossacks,” said the lady, “and how our poor cities were ruined. The rich German towns have had to become godparents to whole districts in the devastated area.” She rattled on in this sense as though the German legions had never set foot in France. I replied tartly that I hoped the trifling inconveniences experienced in East Prussia might afford some scale by which she could measure the sufferings of France, but I could only feel my moral lesson had miscarried sadly. Still, I got her out of her bunk at 3A.M.and the morning was not only wet but chilly.
I have mentioned this story because it is very typical of the average German obtuseness which has an exasperating effect on their former enemies. We are bound, however, to try and study patiently the root causes of this vast moral myopia, because in it lies the key to the whole German attitude to the war. This myopia cannot be appreciated without some grasp of the real points of failure in the German character. During the war they haunted our imaginations as wily and strenuous children of the devil. In fact they are a very stupid, very insensitive, very docile people. Their ideas are as limited and often as absurd as those which people the nursery. Still worse, they are incapable apparently of understanding what other races think and feel. They have many excellent qualities, and an admirable capacity for hard work and patient research. But they do, I believe, possess three more skins than the ordinary man. Mixed up with the docility and unlimited power for submission to authority, runs a considerable strain of brutality which throws back to the unpleasant habits of the remote Germanic tribes. They can be andare very brutal to each other, as well as to their enemies. People so constituted were doomed to become the tools of miscreants in high places.
The average German, for all his powers of hard work and his marvels of applied science, is at bottom little better than a stupid child. His docility, his credulity, his lack of any real subtlety of spirit have left him at the mercy of the monstrous theories preached and practised by the ruling military class. Like a child he believed all he was told; like a child he was immensely proud of the vainglorious bombast of military trappings. Children too, it must be remembered, can be both cruel and callous. Unless this attitude of mind is realised, the riddle of German mentality appears as insoluble. But granted a docile and stupid people, governed by a ruthless military class endowed with the same practical diligence and ability as the mass of the nation, and no less insensitive to the finer issues of the spirit, all that has happened falls into place.
For years past a certain view of England as a sinister and aggressive power was preached steadily for their own ends by the military party. On the outbreak of war the German people were told that England was bent on the destruction of their country. They were fed on tales of atrocities and horrors. It was represented to them that Germany was fighting for her life a war of defence. Even in a country like our own, in which liberty is an old-established principle, the censorship and other conditions imposed by war resulted in a great darkening of truth and knowledge. But in a country like Germany, with no representative government, with no freedom, with a Press wholly subservient to the ruling junta, it is notastonishing that the people as a whole blundered on to ever lower depths of ignorance and prejudice.
I have described the sort of food on which the German school child is reared. No less instructive are the German memoirs which have been published recently, for they show in turn the view impressed on the adult population. Bethmann-Hollweg, Admiral von Tirpitz, Ludendorff, Bernstorff, Hindenburg, have all had their say on the war. With the exception of Hindenburg, who observes a generous reticence about his colleagues, the general tone of these memoirs is one of acrimonious controversy. One is reminded of a group of naughty schoolboys caught out in some misdeed, each saying, “Please, teacher, it was the other fellow.” Admiral von Tirpitz’sRecollectionsis the longest and most garrulous of these volumes. It is a book of absorbing interest, and throws a flood of light on the origins of the war. Here we see laid bare the whole spirit which provoked the conflict. Here, too, we see that even among the German governing class, this spirit in the extreme form represented by Admiral Tirpitz himself met in some quarters with opposition. If one person deserves to be hanged in connection with the war, then the halter should surely be placed round the neck of the old Admiral.
Von Tirpitz reveals himself in these pages as an able but most unsympathetic figure. He lays the lash generously about his colleagues, and the Emperor in particular is not spared. Creator of the German Navy, he lays bare the whole ruthless spirit animating the German war lords. English readers will notice with interest, and perhaps some surprise, the view of themselves and their country on which the Admiral enlarges. According toVon Tirpitz, the growth of the German Navy was not only directed towards making any English attack on German trade risky, but served the philanthropic purpose of supporting the non-Anglo-Saxon races in their struggle for freedom against the intolerable dictatorship of British sea-power. It was, in fact, the special mission of the German Empire to free the world from the strangling tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons. The English reader learns with surprise as he makes his way through these volumes how ruthless was the spirit in which England marked Germany down for destruction. Finally, through craft and Machiavellian principles of the worst kind, she accomplished her end. While German statesmen were weak, vacillating, and hopelessly pacific, a succession of English Governments, Radical no less than Conservative, animated one and all by the same fell purpose, only waited for the appropriate moment to fall on the European Simon Pure.
Lord Haldane during his visit to Berlin in 1912 figures as a skilled and determined mock negotiator, adamant as to concessions on the English side, but bent on sowing discord among German statesmen and reducing the fleet to impotence. Tirpitz accuses him of an evil conscience. Did not Lord Haldane shut his eyes to the wholly pacific intentions of Germany and invent a Berlin war party with which to inflame public opinion in England?
The Admiral speaks feelingly of the “armed battue” against Germany. He lays his hand on his heart and declares that in 1914 the German Empire was “the least preoccupied of all the Great Powers with possibilities of war.” Yet in spite of “our suicidal love of peace” the world would persist in laying the guilt of all that hadhappened on Germany. “It is really extraordinary how unpopular we are,” cries the Admiral naïvely in one of his letters. But he sticks to his point. The historical guilt of England is irrefutably clear. The “old pirate state” has once again torn Europe to pieces. Thanks to the most brutal methods she has secured a victory, and liberty and independence have perished. But the Admiral is not only concerned to abuse England. He deals faithfully with his own countrymen. If on the one hand English readers obtain a fresh insight through German eyes into their own villainies, they obtain information possibly less fantastic as to the discord which raged inside the German war-machine. If in the interests of truth we are compelled to say that the Germans overrated our powers of conducting a war with supreme efficiency, it is clear that we were no less at fault in attributing super qualities to our enemies.
When these various memoirs are read side by side and compared, they reveal strife, division, and hesitation of a remarkable kind in the higher direction of the war. Tirpitz, as head of the war party, writes with extraordinary bitterness of Bethmann-Hollweg the Chancellor. No words are bad enough for the man who had struggled sincerely enough, according to his lights, for the preservation of peace between England and Germany. His hesitations, vacillations, errors of policy are dealt with in a ferocious spirit. But the Army and even the Navy do not escape severe criticism. “The end of July 1914 found us in a state of chaos,” writes the Admiral. The generals made “frightful mistakes,” the war was one of “missed opportunities,” the Navy in particular was never allowed to do its work. The troops were heroic, but“the hereditary faults of the German people and the destructive elements among them” led to the downfall of the whole nation.
The popular view of Germany, which most English people held during the war, was that for forty years the German nation from the Emperor downwards had pursued the definite and determined end of the destruction of England. The real situation appears to have been far more complex. To credit the Emperor and his entourage with an inflexibility of purpose so great is to rate their capacity far too high. The mediocre statesmen of our own generation were not Bismarcks. They were incapable of the far vision, the sinister purpose, the iron will of the old Chancellor. Unlike him they did not know when to stop. An influential section among the soldiers was certainly bent on a war of aggression and pursued this end with unfaltering determination. They had considerable influence both among the Press and the professors. Consequently they loomed large in the public eye. But even among the governing class, as Tirpitz’s angry complaints reveal, there were certain weak-kneed statesmen who were anxious to pursue a pacific policy. As for the German nation as a whole, the unparalleled growth of the Socialist party during recent years proves that the views of the German militarists were meeting with considerable opposition among sections of their own countrymen.
The militarists largely controlled the machine and were therefore in the stronger position. An autocratic form of government and an Executive divorced from all control by Parliament made the Socialist vote, large though it was, of no practical value in determining policy. TheGeneral Election of 1912, when the Socialists and Progressives who had definitely challenged the Chauvinism of the Government secured considerable gains in the Reichstag, caused dismay in military circles. It is clear that the dread of democratic control was one of the causes which impelled the soldiers to bring matters to a head. A shadow had fallen on their power which a successful war, so they thought, would dispel. Had Germany possessed a democratic constitution which would have given due weight and place to the anti-military elements, it is difficult to believe that the war would ever have occurred. It was a race between the forces making respectively for peace and for aggression, and time was on the side of the former.
The military party consequently forced the pace and precipitated the conflict. That on the outbreak of war the whole German nation, Socialists included, closed its ranks and presented a united front to the enemy is natural enough. The view of the defensive war was widespread, and German myopia could not see straight about the threatening character of the armaments which had been piled up. But between the guilt of the rulers, which is black indeed, and the guilt of the nation as a whole, wide discriminations should in justice be made. If it were not so the future outlook, dark as it is at the moment, would be quite hopeless.
The part played in the middle of this welter by the arrogant and inferior figure on the throne is not easy to determine. The Emperor was not necessarily insincere when he expressed his abstract desire for peace. But his vanity was flattered by the vision of himself as Supreme War Lord ashore and afloat of a submissive Europe. Hedid not necessarily want to fight. He wanted very much to be in a position which enabled him to bully. Probably the governing classes in Germany held much the same view. The Emperor lent himself to the creation of huge armies and a threatening fleet, and then expressed surprise that his perpetual sabre-rattling and histrionic performances created anger and alarm throughout Europe. Other nations refused to think that Dreadnoughts were built as pets, or that armaments were piled up for the purposes of ceremonial salutes. Having surrounded himself with material of this character, he was in all probability genuinely appalled when the inevitable explosion occurred. He had no real wish to trade with the devil, but he was always in and out of the shop, turning over the wares and listening to the flatteries of the salesman. A man of his type was bound, sooner or later, to become the tool of villains with a purpose clearer than his own.
Lord Haldane in his bookBefore the Warhas given an account, both sane and dispassionate, of the causes and forces which led up to the struggle. He analyses with admirable clarity the weakness and the strength of the German machine. In a striking passage he draws attention to a fact too little realised by the vast majority of English people, namely, that highly organised though the German nation might be on its lower levels, on the top storey not only confusion but chaos existed. Instead of a Cabinet representing the majority of an elected Parliament to whom it was bound to submit its policy, the governing body in Germany was an irresponsible group of men animated by wholly divergent ideas.
In the centre of this group was a vain, feather-headed monarch, not devoid of good impulses, and at times ofgenerous feeling, but cursed with an instability of character which made him lend an ear first to the promptings of one counsellor and then of another. The Emperor swayed from side to side according to the fancy of the moment; at one time drawing close to the war party, at another inclining to the more sober counsels of the peace party. Such a temperament does not improve with the flight of years. Time only deepened in the Emperor’s mind the sense of his own importance in the eyes of God and man. His unstable brain was more and more bemused with ideas of power and infallibility. Already in 1891 he had caused deep resentment throughout working-class Germany by a speech to young recruits at Potsdam. He referred in acrimonious terms to the Socialist agitations, and went on to say: “I may have to order you to shoot down your relations, your brothers, even your parents—which God forbid!—but even then you must obey my commands without murmuring.” Criticism was treasonable; criticism was therefore not audible, but the words were never forgotten nor forgiven. Vanity and megalomania steer an erratic course, and the consequent vagaries of German high diplomacy kept Europe in a chronic state of nerves which deepened the general sense of anxiety and suspicion.
Since the revolution the diplomatic documents in the Berlin archives relating to the plot against Serbia, together with the Emperor’s marginal notes, have been published by order of the new German Government. The war has produced no volume more painful than that of Karl Kautsky in which these documents are set forth. The revelation is of the blackest, so far as the Emperor is concerned. His personal responsibility for creating thesituation which led to the war is established beyond question. His marginal notes, always foolish and often vulgar, are almost incredible in their criminal levity. The Emperor comments, for instance, on the most solemn and impressive of Sir Edward Grey’s warnings to the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, in the words “the low cur!” We watch this vain unstable figure flitting with a lighted torch round the powder magazine of Europe. With the lives of millions in his hand, the mediocre intelligence of the Emperor seemed unable to forecast the elementary consequences of his own acts. At the start his sole object in view was the dismemberment of Serbia and the creation of a new Balkan situation. The German Ambassador in Vienna, who counselled moderation in the demands made on the Serbian Government, was reprimanded severely. William was concerned to stir up his more sluggish ally, Austria, to warlike purpose. If Russia objected—well, never mind about Russia. The implications of a general European war do not seem to have occurred to him. When as huntsman he laid on the hounds, the magnitude of the quarry was not apparent. Later on, when the chasm into which he had dragged the world dawned before him in its appalling immensity, he shrank back aghast on the brink. But too late. The terrible vitality of deeds had taken charge of the situation and hurried on the tragedy to its final consummation.
A curious point arises not only from the study of the Kautsky documents, but of the various German memoirs which have appeared. The primary responsibility of the Emperor for staging the scene is proved beyond doubt. But he was away yachting in the weeks before the war,and it is not clear with whom the further responsibility rests for converting the Serbian intrigue into the wider act of world aggression. At this point history has further secrets to reveal. The Great General Staff were in all probability determined not to let slip so golden an opportunity, and engineered matters in the sense of war during the Emperor’s absence.
Strangely enough, Tirpitz, though ultimately more responsible for the war than any one else in Germany, did not want to fight in August 1914. His fleet was not ready and had yet to attain its maximum strength. He denounces Bethmann-Hollweg’s refusal of Sir Edward Grey’s proposed conference as a capital blunder. War at that moment should in his opinion have been averted. Germany was not sufficiently prepared. Further, the old Admiral with great shrewdness deplores the sabre-rattling against England on various occasions. Do not irritate your enemy until you are ready to fight him, was his principle.
It is a strange fact that Bethmann-Hollweg, who had always desired peace, seems to have lost his head completely in the crisis and showed a fatal obduracy which might have been expected from Tirpitz. The conference for which Sir Edward Grey pressed would in all probability have avoided the war. Bethmann-Hollweg wanted peace, yet he banged the door on the one possibility of maintaining it. One gathers the impression of a group of men groping blindly on the edge of a precipice over which finally they hurl themselves. But the hand which pushed them into decisions, certainly unwelcome to some of the actors, has yet to be revealed. We know it must in effect have come from a man or group of men among the militaryparty. The exact personalities are not at present clear.
The German memoirs written by statesmen of the old régime, which throw so much light incidentally on the tragedy of Europe, must be read in detail in order to obtain any real appreciation of their atmosphere. Their great value lies in the fact that they make the German view of England more intelligible. We are able to measure the vast distortion of truth as it has reached the average German, and the profound misconceptions under which he labours. Exasperated though we may feel by such aberrations, we begin to understand why the rank and file of the German nation, trained from their youth in subservience to the ruling house, still believe they were the attacked, not the attackers, in the war. I have heard recently of Germans meeting pre-war English friends with personal feelings quite unchanged. The English found, however, to their bewilderment that the Germans, out of delicacy to their feelings, would not discuss the war—it must be, so they hinted, terrible for them to realise the crimes England had committed both in her unjustifiable attack on Germany and in her practical conduct of the war. Naturally as English they would desire to avoid any reference to so painful a subject.
Hence Germany’s reluctance to say she is sorry. So far she will not admit there is anything to be sorry for. Never was there a nation more exasperatingly devoid of the spirit of self-criticism. Everything German is perfect in the eyes of a German. In the crash which has overtaken the nation little realisation exists of the moral issues involved. Among the Socialist party alone would much difficult and unpalatable truth appear to be permeating.At the meeting of the Second International held in Geneva during August 1920, the responsibility of the Kaiser’s Government for the outbreak of the war was admitted in precise terms by the German Socialists. The wrong done to France in 1870 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, the wrong done to Belgium in 1914 and the just claims of reparation, were all acknowledged and incorporated into a formal resolution. Though the Bourgeoisie may clasp their hands tightly over eyes and ears, the Socialists at least have no illusions as to the crimes and follies of the Imperial Government. But, crushed as they are by the heavy burthens of the Peace, they are more concerned to dwell on the trials of the present than the failures of the past.
What we should remember, I think, is that the bulk of the German nation did its duty in the war just as we did ourselves. Alongside the organised atrocities and brutalities which disgraced the higher direction of the military machine, must be set the courage and self-sacrifice of large numbers of humble people. The average German fought for his Fatherland with a conviction just as great as that of the average Frenchman or Englishman. In view of the rigid censorship which ruled, it is clear that the rank and file knew little or nothing of many deeds which outraged the conscience of the civilised world. They served a bad cause with a fortitude from which it would be ungenerous to withhold praise. The future peace of the world lies in the hope that their powers of loyalty and service may be turned to other and better ends.
Meanwhile the existing veils of ignorance and misconception can only be raised by a frank and free contactof men and women of both nations who are not afraid to come together and face facts however unpalatable. These distorted values can only be redressed through a determined effort to seek truth for itself undeterred by false conceptions of national honour. A nation which claims to be great should be great enough to admit the wrong she has done. Germany must learn to see straight about herself before peace in the real sense can be restored between her and nations who have suffered grievously through her action. Peace is here and now the urgent need of the world, but peace cannot live if perpetually pelted by prejudices and ignorances. The Supreme Charity has not left us without guidance in this matter, and as on another famous occasion, let the man or woman in the happy position of having no fault come forward to cast the first stone.