New York Times Current History The European War, Vol 1, No. 1 Part 22

So much for the events which have led us to war. Now for a moment let us glance at what we may have to hope for, what we may have to fear, and, above all, what we must each of us do that we win through to a lasting peace.

What have we to gain if we win? That we have nothing material to gain, no colonies which we covet, no possessions of any sort that we desire, is the final proof that the war has not been provoked by us. No nation would deliberately go out of its way to wage so hazardous and costly a struggle when there is no prize for victory. But one enormous indirect benefit we will gain if we can make Germany a peaceful and harmless State. We will surely break her naval power and take such steps that it shall not be a menace to us any more. It was this naval power, with its rapid increase and the need that we should ever, as Mr. Churchill has so well expressed it, be ready at our average moment to meet an attack at their chosen moment--it was this which has piled up our war estimates during the last ten years until they have bowed us down. With such enormous sums spent upon ships and guns, great ma.s.ses of capital were diverted from the ordinary channels of trade, while an even more serious result was that our programmes of social reform had to be curtailed from want of the money which could finance them. Let the menace of that lurking fleet be withdrawn--the nightmare of those thousand hammers working day and night in forging engines for our destruction--and our estimates will once again be those of a civilized Christian country, while our vast capital will be turned from measures of self-protection to those of self-improvement. Should our victory be complete, there is little which Germany can yield to us save the removal of that shadow which has darkened us so long. But our children and our children's children will never, if we do our work well now, look across the North Sea with the sombre thoughts which have so long been ours, while their lives will be brightened and elevated by money which we, in our darker days, have had to spend upon our ships and our guns.

Consider, on the other hand, what we should suffer if we were to lose.

All the troubles of the last ten years would be with us still, but in a greatly exaggerated form. A larger and stronger Germany would dominate Europe and would overshadow our lives. Her coast line would be increased, her ports would face our own, her coaling stations would be in every sea, and her great army, greater then than ever, would be within striking distance of our sh.o.r.es. To avoid sinking forever into the condition of a dependant, we should be compelled to have recourse to rigid compulsory service, and our diminished revenues would be all turned to the needs of self-defense. Such would be the miserable condition in which we should hand on to our children that free and glorious empire which we inherited in all the fullness of its richness and its splendor from those strong fathers who have built it up. What peace of mind, what self-respect could be left for us in the remainder of our lives! The weight of dishonor would lie always upon our hearts.

And yet this will be surely our fate and our future if we do not nerve our souls and brace our arms for victory. No regrets will avail, no excuses will help, no after-thoughts can profit us. It is now--now--even in these weeks and months that are pa.s.sing that the final reckoning is being taken, and when once the sum is made up no further effort can change it. What are our lives or our labors, our fortunes or even our families, when compared with the life or death of the great mother of us all? We are but the leaves of the tree. What matter if we flutter down today or tomorrow, so long as the great trunk stands and the burrowing roots are firm. Happy the man who can die with the thought that in this greatest crisis of all he has served his country to the uttermost, but who would bear the thoughts of him who lives on with the memory that he had shirked his duty and failed his country at the moment of her need?

There is a settled and a.s.sured future if we win. There is darkness and trouble if we lose. But if we take a broader sweep and trace the meanings of this contest as they affect others than ourselves, then ever greater, more glorious are the issues for which we fight. For the whole world stands at a turning point of its history, and one or other of two opposite principles, the rule of the soldier or the rule of the citizen, must now prevail. In this sense we fight for the ma.s.ses of the German people, as some day they will understand, to free them from that formidable military caste which has used and abused them, spending their bodies in an unjust war and poisoning their minds by every device which could inflame them against those who wish nothing save to live at peace with them. We fight for the strong, deep Germany of old, the Germany of music and of philosophy, against this monstrous modern aberration the Germany of blood and of iron, the Germany from which, instead of the old things of beauty, there come to us only the rant of scolding professors with their final reckonings, their Weltpolitik, and their G.o.dless theories of the Superman who stands above morality and to whom all humanity shall be subservient. Instead of the world-inspiring phrases of a Goethe or a Schiller, what are the words in the last decade which have been quoted across the sea? Are they not always the ever-recurring words of wrath from one ill-balanced man? "Strike them with the mailed fist."

"Leave such a name behind you as Attila and his Huns." "Turn your weapons even upon your own flesh and blood at my command." These are the messages which have come from this perversion of a nation's soul.

*A Mighty Despotism.*

But the matter lies deep. The Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs have used their peoples as a great landowner might use the serfs upon his estate.

It was, and is, their openly expressed theory that they were in their position by the grace of G.o.d, that they owed no reckoning to any man, and that kingdom and folk were committed for better or worse to their charge. Round this theory of the Dark Ages there gathered all the forces of the many courts of the empire, all the n.o.bility who make so huge a cla.s.s in Germanic countries, all the vast army to whom strict discipline and obedience were the breath of life, all the office-holders of the State, all the purveyors of warlike stores. These and their like were the natural setting to such a central idea. Court influence largely controlled the teaching at school and universities, and so the growing twig could be bent. But all these forces together could not have upheld so dangerous and unnatural a theory had it not been for the influence of a servile press. How that press was managed, how the thoughts of the people could be turned to the right or the left with the same precision as a platoon of grenadiers, has been shown clearly enough in the memoirs of Bismarck. Public opinion was poisoned at its very roots. The average citizen lived in a false atmosphere where everything was distorted to his vision. He saw his Kaiser, not as an essentially weak and impetuous man with a dangerous entourage who were ever at his ear, but as Germany personified, an angel with a flaming sword, beating back envious a.s.sailants from the beloved Fatherland. He saw his neighbors not as peaceful nations who had no possible desire to attack him, but on the contrary lived in constant fear of him, but as a band, of envious and truculent conspirators who could only be kept in order by the sudden stamp of the jackboot and the menacing clatter of the sabre. He insensibly imbibed the Nietzsche doctrine that the immorality of the Superman may be as colossal as his strength and that the slave-evangel of Christianity was superseded by a sterner law. Thus, when he saw acts which his reason must have told him were indefensible he was still narcotized by this conception of some new standard of right. He saw his Kaiser at the time of a petty humiliation to Great Britain sending a telegram of congratulation to the man who had inflicted this rebuff.

Could that be approved by reason? At a time when all Europe was shuddering over the Armenian ma.s.sacres he saw this same Kaiser paying a complimentary visit to the Sultan whose hands were still wet with the blood of murdered Christians. Could that be reconciled with what is right? A little later he saw the Kaiser once again pushing himself into Mediterranean politics, where no direct German interest lay, and endeavoring to tangle up the French developments in Northern Africa by provocative personal appearances at Morocco, and, later, by sending a gunboat to intrude upon a scene of action which had already by the Treaty of Algeciras been allotted to France. How could an honest German whose mind was undebauched by a controlled press justify such an interference as that? He is or should be aware that, in annexing Bosnia, Austria was tearing up a treaty without the consent of the other signatories, and that his own country was supporting and probably inciting her ally to this public breach of faith. Could he honestly think that this was right? And, finally, he must know, for his own Chancellor has publicly proclaimed it, that the invasion of Belgium was a breach of international right, and that Germany, or, rather, Prussia, had perjured herself upon the day that the first of her soldiers pa.s.sed over the frontier. How can he explain all this to himself save on a theory that might is right, that no moral law applies to the Superman, and that so long as one hews one's way through, the rest can matter little? To such a point of degradation have public morals been brought by the infernal teachings of Prussian military philosophy, dating back as far as Frederick II., but intensified by the exhortations of press and professors during our own times. The mind of the average kindly German citizen has been debauched and yet again debauched until it needed just such a world crisis as this to startle him at last from his obsession and to see his position and that of his country in its true relation with humanity and progress.

*The Final Stakes.*

Thus I say, that for the German who stands outside the ruling cla.s.ses, our victory would bring a lasting relief, and some hope that in future his destiny should be controlled by his own judgment and not by the pa.s.sions or interests of those against whom he has at present no appeal.

A system which has brought disaster to Germany and chaos to all Europe can never, one would think, be resumed, and amid the debris of his empire the German may pick up that precious jewel of personal freedom which is above the splendor of foreign conquest. A Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern may find his true place as the servant rather than the master of a nation. But apart from Germany, look at the effects which our victory must have over the whole wide world. Everywhere it will mean the triumph of reasoned democracy, of public debate, of ordered freedom in which every man is an active unit in the system of his own Government, while our defeat would stand for a victory to a priviliged cla.s.s, the thrusting down of the civilian by the arrogance and intolerance of militarism, and the subjection of all that is human and progressive to all that is cruel, narrow, and reactionary. This is the stake for which we play, and the world will lose or gain as well as we.

You may well come, you democratic oversea men of our blood, to rally round us now, for all that you cherish, all that is bred in your very bones, is that for which we fight. And you, lovers of freedom in every land, we claim at least your prayers and your wishes, for if our sword be broken you will be the poorer. But fear not, for our sword will not be broken, nor shall it ever drop from our hands until this matter is forever set in order. If every ally we have upon earth were to go down in blood and ruin, still would we fight through to the appointed end.

Defeat shall not daunt us. Inconclusive victory shall not turn us from our purpose. The grind of poverty and the weariness of hopes deferred shall not blunt the edge of our resolve. With G.o.d's help we shall go to the end, and when that goal is reached it is our prayer that a new era shall come as our reward, an era in which, by common action of State with State, mutual hatreds and strivings shall be appeased, land shall no longer be estranged from land, and huge armies and fleets will be nightmares of the past. Thus, as ever, the throes of evil may give birth to good. Till then our task stands clear before us--a task that will ask for all we have in strength and resolution. Have you who read this played your part to the highest? If not, do it now, or stand forever shamed.

*Conan Doyle on British Militarism*

Early last year, in the course of some comments which I made upon the slighting remarks about our army by Gen. von Bernhardi, I observed: "It may be noted that Gen. von Bernhardi has a poor opinion of our troops.

This need not trouble us. We are what we are, and words will not alter it. From very early days our soldiers have left their mark upon Continental warfare, and we have no reason to think that we have declined from the manhood of our forefathers." Since then he has returned to the attack.

With that curious power of coming after deep study to the absolutely diametrically wrong conclusion which the German expert, political or military, appears to possess, he says in his "War of Today": "The English Army, trained more for purposes of show than for modern war,"

adding in the same sentence a sneer at our "inferior colonial levies."

He will have an opportunity of reconsidering his views presently upon the fighting value of our oversea troops, and surely, so far as our own are concerned, he must already be making some interesting notes for his next edition, or, rather, for the learned volume upon "Germany and the Last War," which will, no doubt, come from his pen. He is a man to whom we might well raise a statue, for I am convinced that his frank confession of German policy has been worth at least an army corps to this country. We may address to him John Davidson's lines to his enemy:

Unwilling friend, let not your spite abate.

Spur us with scorn and strengthen us with hate.

There is another German gentleman who must be thinking rather furiously.

He is a certain Col. Gadke, who appeared officially at Aldershot some years ago, was hospitably entertained, being shown all that he desired to see, and on his return to Berlin published a most deprecatory description of our forces. He found no good thing in them. I have some recollection that Gen. French alluded in a public speech to this critic's remarks, and expressed a modest hope that he and his men would some day have the opportunity of showing how far they were deserved.

Well, he has had his opportunity, and Col. Gadke, like so many other Germans, seems to have made a miscalculation.

*Germans Untried in War.*

An army which has preserved the absurd parade schritt, an exercise which is painful to the bystander, as he feels that it is making fools of brave men, must have a tendency to throw back to earlier types. These Germans have been trained in peace and upon the theory of books. In all that vast host there is hardly a man who has stood at the wrong end of a loaded gun. They live on traditions of close formations, vast cavalry charges, and other things which will not fit into modern warfare. Braver men do not exist, but it is the bravery of men who have been taught to lean upon each other, and not the cold, self-contained, resourceful bravery of the man who has learned to fight for his own hand. The British have had the teachings of two recent campaigns fought with modern weapons--that of the Tirah and of South Africa. Now that the reserves have joined the colors there are few regiments which have not a fair sprinkling of veterans from these wars in their ranks. The Pathan and the Boer have been their instructors in something more practical than those imperial grand manoeuvres where the all-highest played with his puppets in such a fashion that one of his Generals remarked that the chief practical difficulty of a campaign so conducted would be the disposal of the dead.

Boers and Pathans have been hard masters and have given many a slap to their admiring pupils, but the lesson has been learned. It was not show troops, General, who, with two corps, held five of your best day after day from Mons to Compiegne. It is no reproach to your valor, but you were up against men who were equally brave and knew a great deal more of the game. This must begin to break upon you, and will surely grow clearer as the days go by. We shall often in the future take the knock as well as give it, but you will not say that we are a slow army if you live to chronicle this war, nor will your imperial master be proud of the adjective which he has demeaned himself in using before his troops had learned their lesson.

*The South African Lesson.*

The fact is that the German Army, with all its great traditions, has been petrifying for many years back. They never learned the lesson of South Africa. It was not for want of having it expounded to them, for their military attache--"'im with the spatchc.o.c.k on 'is 'elmet,'" as I heard him described by a British orderly--missed nothing of what occurred, as is evident from their official history of the war. And yet they missed it, and with all those ideas of individual efficiency and elastic independent formation which are the essence of modern soldiering. Their own more liberal thinkers were aware of it. Here are the words which were put into the mouth of Guntz, the representative of the younger school, in Beverlein's famous novel:

"The organization of the German Army rested upon foundations which had been laid a hundred years ago. Since the great war they had never seriously been put to the proof, and during the last three decades they had only been altered in the most trifling details. In three long decades! And in one of those decades the world at large had advanced as much as in the previous century.

"Instead of turning this highly developed intelligence to good account, they bound it hand and foot on the rack of an everlasting drill which could not have been more soullessly mechanical in the days of Frederick.

It held them together as an iron hoop holds together a cask, the dry staves of which would fall asunder at the first kick."

Lord Roberts has said that if ten points represent the complete soldier, eight should stand for his efficiency as a shot. The German maxim has rather been that eight should stand for his efficiency as a drilled marionette. It has been reckoned that about two hundred books a year appear in Germany upon military affairs, against about twenty in Britain. And yet, after all this expert debate, the essential point of all seems to have been missed--that in the end everything depends upon the man behind the gun, upon his. .h.i.tting his opponent and upon his taking cover so as to avoid being hit himself.

After all the efforts of the General Staff, the result when shown upon the field of battle has filled our men with a mixture of admiration and contempt--contempt for the absurd tactics and admiration for the poor devils who struggle on in spite of them. Listen to the voices of the men who are the real experts. Says a Lincolnshire Sergeant: "They were in solid square blocks, and we couldn't help hitting them." Says Private Tait (Second Ess.e.x): "Their rifle shooting is rotten. I don't believe they could hit a haystack at 100 yards." "They are rotten shots with their rifles," says an Oldham private. "They advance in close column, and you simply can't help hitting them," writes a Gordon Highlander.

"You would have thought it was a big crowd streaming out from a cup tie," says Private Whitaker of the Guards. "It was like a farmer's machine cutting gra.s.s," so it seemed to Private Hawkins of the Coldstreams. "No d.a.m.ned good as riflemen," says a Connemara boy. "You couldn't help hitting them. As to their rifle fire, it was useless."

"They shoot from the hip, and don't seem to aim at anything in particular."

*Not Books That Count.*

These are the opinions of the practical men upon the field of battle.

Surely a poor result from the 200 volumes a year and all the weighty labors of the General Staff! "Artillery nearly as good as our own, rifle fire beneath contempt." That is the verdict. How will the well-taught parade schritt avail them when it comes to a stricken field?

But let it not seem as if this were meant for disparagement. We should be sinking to the Kaiser's level if we answer his "contemptible little army" by pretending that his own troops are anything but a very formidable and big army. They are formidable in numbers, formidable, too, in their patriotic devotion, in their native courage, and in the possession of such material, such great cannon, aircraft, machine guns, and armored cars as none of the Allies can match. They have every advantage which a nation would be expected to have when it has known that war was a certainty, while others have only treated it as a possibility. There is a minuteness and earnestness of preparation which are only possible for an a.s.sured event. But the fact remains, and it will only be brought out more clearly by the Emperor's unchivalrous phrase, that in every arm the British have already shown themselves to be the better troops. Had he the Froissart spirit within him he would rather have said: "You have today a task which is worthy of you. You are faced by an army which has a high repute and a great history. There is real glory to be won today." Had he said this then, win or lose, he would not have needed to be ashamed of his own words--the words of ungenerous spirit.

It is a very strange thing how German critics have taken for granted that the British Army had deteriorated, while the opinion of all those who were in close touch with it was that it was never so good. Even some of the French experts made the same mistake, and Gen. Bonnat counseled his countrymen not to rely upon it, since "it would take refuge amid its islands at the first reverse." One would think that the cause which makes for its predominance were obvious. Apart from any question of national spirit there is the all-important fact that the men are there of their own free will, an advantage which I trust that we shall never be compelled to surrender. Again, the men are of longer service in every arm, and they have far more opportunities of actual fighting than come to any other force. Finally they are divided into regiments with centuries of military glories streaming from their banners, which carry on a mighty tradition. The very words the Guards, the Rifles, the Connaught Rangers, the Buffs, the Scots Greys, the Gordons, sound like bugle calls. How could an army be anything but dangerous which had such units in its line of battle?"

*History Repeating Itself*.

And yet there remains the fact that both enemies and friends are surprised at our efficiency. This is no new phenomenon. Again and again in the course of history the British armies have had to win once more the reputation which had been forgotten. Continentals have always begun by refusing to take them seriously. Napoleon, who had never met them in battle, imagined that their unbroken success was due to some weakness in his Marshals rather than in any excellence of the troops. "At last I have them, these English," he exclaimed as he gazed at the thin, red line at Waterloo. "At last they have me, these English," may have been his thought that evening as he spurred his horse out of the debacle. Foy warned him of the truth. "The British infantry is the devil," said he.

"You think so because you were beaten by them," cried Napoleon. Like von Kluck or von Kluck's master, he had something to learn.

Why this continual depreciation? It may be that the world pays so much attention to our excellent right arm that it cannot give us credit for having a very serviceable left as well. Or it may be that they take seriously those jeremiads over our decay which are characteristic of our people, and very especially of many of our military thinkers. I have never been able to understand why they should be of so pessimistic a turn of mind, unless it be a sort of exaltation of that grumbling which has always been the privilege of the old soldier. Croker narrates how he met Wellington in his later years, and how the Iron Duke told him that he was glad he was so old, as he would not live to see the dreadful military misfortunes which were about to come to his country. Looking back, we can see no reason for such pessimism as this. Above all, the old soldier can never make any allowance for the latent powers which lie in civilian patriotism and valor. Only a year ago I had a long conversation with a well-known British General, in which he a.s.serted with great warmth that in case of an Anglo-German war with France involved the British public would never allow a trained soldier to leave these islands. He is at the front himself and doing such good work that he has little time for reminiscence, but when he has he must admit that he underrated the nerve of his countrymen.

*a.s.surance Beneath Pessimism.*

And yet under the pessimism of such men as he there is a curious contradictory a.s.surance that there are no troops like our own. The late Lord Goschen used to tell a story of a letter that he had from a Captain in the navy at the time when he was First Lord. This Captain's ship was lying alongside a foreign cruiser in some port, and he compared in his report the powers of the two vessels. Lord Goschen said that his heart sank as he read the long catalogue of points in which the British ship was inferior--guns, armor, speed--until he came to the postscript, which was: "I think I could take her in twenty minutes."

With all the grumbling of our old soldiers, there is always some reservation of the sort at the end of it. Of course, those who are familiar with our ways of getting things done would understand that a good deal of the croaking is a means of getting our little army increased, or at least preventing its being diminished. But whatever the cause, the result has been the impression abroad of a "contemptible little army." Whatever surprise in the shape of 17-inch howitzers or 900-foot Zeppelins the Kaiser may have for us, it is a safe prophecy that it will be a small matter compared to that which Sir John French and his men will be to him.

But above all I look forward to the development of our mounted riflemen.

This I say in no disparagement of our cavalry, who have done so magnificently. But the mounted rifleman is a peculiarly British product--British and American--with a fresh edge upon it from South Africa. I am most curious to see what a division of these fellows will make of the Uhlans. It is good to see that already the old banners are in the wind, Lovat's Horse, Scottish Horse, King Edward's Horse, and the rest. All that cavalry can do will surely be done by our cavalry. But I have always held, and I still very strongly hold, that the mounted rifleman has it in him to alter our whole conception of warfare, as the mounted archer did in his day; and now in this very war will be his first great chance upon a large scale. Ten thousand well-mounted, well-trained riflemen, young officers to lead them, all broad Germany, with its towns, its railways and its magazines before them--there lies one more surprise for the doctrinaires of Berlin.