Blood and Iron Part 39

It is an amiable fiction that men "recognize" each other's work, in politics, and "urge" on them rulership over nations. They, too, have to get out and fight for it!

-- This necessity for turbulent striving to carry out political ideas was especially true of Germany during the period of which we write.

Complex conditions long made National Unity a profound problem, not only in politics but in human nature.

-- All manner of blacklegs were at work with here and there an honest man; national oratory was at once visionary, ludicrous and tragical; fanatics of the bomb, the knife and the poison-cup for years were abroad in the land. These situations, growing from times past, compel you to hold with Bismarck that ultimate appeal to the sword was after all the only hope for a new Germany.

-- Bismarck did it grossly, but at least he went through with it--call it militarism or what you please.

-- For that matter, neither Britain, France, Belgium, (nor the United States with her 186-odd variants of Christianity in her 186-odd religious sects), grew out of political cynicism, least of all out of some aloof system of esoteric idealism.

-- The King of Britain owes his crown to the sword; the President of France his high office to the sword; the Belgian King traces his legitimacy to revolution; likewise, to revolution the President of the United States owes his right to rule during his brief hour of official authority.

-- But what would you in this imperfect world?

German Unity sprang from the needs of human hearts--fighting bravely for what they hold important!--even as you fight for your rights, or consent to remain a slave. And Germans never will be slaves.

-- Therefore, know it now and be done with it, or make the most of it if you are inclined to snarl at realities: The Kaiser's crown came by the sword. Surely, you did not expect that it fell from Heaven? As long as men are men, they must fight for what they achieve; and the German Empire is no exception;--nor is there any good reason to expect that history can possibly be other than the record of human nature, in action.

-- Up to his downfall in 1890, Bismarck was an uncompromising Royalist, scoffed at the common people as a source of political sovereignty.

-- No man knows what is, ultimately, for the glory of G.o.d; but when in bitter retirement, thrown off by the grandson of William I, Bismarck, replying to the old dispute about the interior causes of the Franco-Prussian war, to which William owes his t.i.tle German Emperor, it is a fact that Bismarck proceeded to weaken the royalist tradition by forcing the government to produce the Ems dispatch; and it was then made clear to the common people that there was behind it all the under-play of politics, thus dispelling the religious and patriotic glamour that the war had been entered upon to protect the Fatherland against the land-l.u.s.t of Napoleon the Little.

Had now the military right been used not to express the will of G.o.d, but the ends of human expediency?

-- Bismarck certainly knew all this before the great war, but for reasons of political expediency suppressed the facts till in a moment of indignation he dropped the mask and called on all honest men to know the truth.

Bismarck, twenty years before, had with equal indignation set up before the Prussians that their King had been grossly insulted, and that Napoleon wanted the left bank of the Rhine.

-- But let us forget all this, in a broad acknowledgment of the fact that human beings at various times, for their own ends, do indeed wear various masks; and let us not keep up the fight forevermore;--but here and now let us grant to Bismarck final absolution, not claiming for him the perfection of the demiG.o.d.

-- After all is said, history is not the record of some far-off manifest destiny, but instead is merely the sordid story of human nature in action, reciting at best the littleness that appertains to men's ways, with now and then the unrealized expression of some fleeting larger hope.

62

His Versailles masterpiece reduced to its final a.n.a.lysis, in terms of human nature; wherein it is made clear that Bismarck knew his German peasant as well as his Prussian King.

-- The core of human interest around which Bismarck shaped his stupendous politico-military drama, in order that, in the end, William might become German Emperor, was neither an appeal to parliaments nor to armies, but a reply to a peculiar psychological something in the Teuton character that makes respect for the strong hand.

It is only in the largest way that this fact may be made clear. It escapes categorical statement;--and can best be glimpsed behind the history of events, from the psychological rather than the physical side.

-- Bismarck manipulated an invisible but very real human force, made it the breath of life for his plans!

-- That he warped on the Nineteenth Century the old Holy Roman Empire conception of Divine-right is an amazing politico-military fact.

It was only after many brilliant achievements that, at the height of his power, Caesar linked himself with the G.o.ds. Caesar's earlier life knew no such pretensions, but as he climbed the dizzy heights of fame, at last the day came when his kinship with the immortal G.o.ds themselves alone satisfied his inordinate ambitions; and from that time forth Divine-right became an established fact in the theological-political code of kings; and thus on, down through the Middle Ages, until the French Revolution destroyed confidence in the old-line absolute monarch, as vicegerent of Christ on this earth.

-- However, that Otto von Bismarck, the blond Pomeranian giant, warped on the Nineteenth Century the Imperial Caesarian idea of the Divine-right of kings is not the final fact of his work. The inner fact is that he urged the King's authority as a foil against the mob-idea of the French Revolution. The liberty-crazed ma.s.ses needed a strong hand at this time.

-- What made possible the coming of the Empire was not, after all, traceable entirely to the political side of Bismarck's hotly contested struggles.

The innate craving of the German people for a strong ruler has a subtle inner meaning, too easily overlooked.

-- In the final a.n.a.lysis, Bismarck's position expresses Prussian sense of National security in a powerful war lord, rather than supports the conception of master and man. His was not the position of lord and servant; rather it means a manly, intelligent admission of the necessity of a strong central authority in the nation.

-- By the force of years of tedious repet.i.tions, building on the plain laws of mental suggestion, Bismarck at last created certain dominating ideas; but the germ of these ideas already existed in Prussia's consciousness.

The Prussian character supporting Divine-right represents a singular compound of cadet, blind confidence in aristocratic leadership, religious radicalism, worship of ancestors approximating the Chinese sentiment, and finally, a racial psychology of rulership, based on the rattan of Frederick the Great. On this total combination, the astute Bismarck played for thirty long years, warring for his lord and master, the Hohenzollerns.

A careful reading of Bismarck's speeches, letters, dispatches, will show that whatever political expediency he may at various times have followed, and however often he may have changed front, there is still in his great labor a tireless repet.i.tion of ideas commanding respect for vested authority, for ancestry, for a ruling cla.s.s as against the ruled, and always for absolute dog-like obedience to some central commanding power.

-- The psychological something on which Bismarck builded his German Empire is Bismarck's recognition of the peculiarities of his German peasant, as well as of his Prussian King. We come now to some great central racial facts.

Bismarck's unending eulogies of military glory, now extolled in the high language of a victorious commander-in-chief, again as a drill-sergeant sharply criticising the squad, are not to be dismissed as the expressions of one in large authority, speaking from the steps of the throne.

Bismarck's work would have failed had he not linked it to some secret craving of the Teutonic heart, far deeper than conquering the jealousies, intrigues and selfishness that compose the long story of the rise of the German Empire.

-- Historians may talk as much as they please about Bismarck's executive and administrative genius, but these, great as they are, are overshadowed by his power of political spirit-healing, as it were; through practice of his peculiar psychotherapy he cured sick Germany of many of her ills; at the same time bringing about German brotherhood in a way that added to the great glory of Prussia.

-- Appealing to the solemn religious side of Prussian character that expresses itself in upholding authority, in church or state, Bismarck incessantly lauds the descendants of n.o.ble families, and sets up that Prussian military aristocracy alone reared up Prussian political legitimacy.

He presents likewise the idea that the supreme quality of German manhood is courage; and to Bismarck's mind the sovereign German virtue is revealed in strong-willed eager soldiers.

While in these lofty moods, Bismarck displays enormous family pride for his beloved aristocrats of Brandenburg, is never weary of telling of their military prowess.

He avows on many occasions his life-long regret that he did not enter the army as a career, instead of taking up the civil service; he digs into his family records and proudly numbers each Bismarck who carried arms, even down to distant cousins, and is never so happy as when telling of Bismarcks on many blood-drenched fields.

Above all else, he everlastingly insists that behind his demands for his King is the direct will of G.o.d.

-- There is not the slightest doubt that as time pa.s.sed and Bismarck kept telling over and over for years that the King represented G.o.d's will on this earth, true Prussians came at last to believe it more and more; for the reason that it was in their blood to believe, as it is the nature of a bull-dog to fight, a glutton to eat, a thief to steal, the sun to shine.

-- Bismarck called on heaven to send its avenging lightnings on the heads of those who deserted their monarch, to their perpetual dishonor; could think of no crime more monstrous than ingrat.i.tude to his King, especially to a king by the grace of G.o.d.

And Bismarck declared again and again, as his deepest conviction, that the Prussian crown was encircled by a heavenly aureole. In short, Bismarck revived in its purest and most uncompromising form the doctrine of Divine-right.

-- In an age seemingly out of touch with this iron-bound mold of the Feudal past, Bismarck would have failed miserably were it not that he touched a responsive side of Prussian character--dog-like loyalty to authority, compounded of military glory and a pale shimmering ghost of religious aspiration.

The governing fact of the whole situation was psychological rather than physical; and all this stupendous cannonading at Gravelotte, Sedan, Koeniggraetz, and the magnificent drama in the Hall of Mirrors, were after all merely so many evidences that Bismarck better than all the tribe of his objectors knew the psychological core of Prussian character.

-- Bismarck brought down the wrath of G.o.d on those rival leaders who dared to be disloyal to his Divine-right King, and flew into frenzy at the very thought that a genuine Prussian should expect wisdom from the common people. Behind all this, was always the solid appeal to Prussian military-cadet idea of loyalty and strong politico-religious instincts.