The Assault Part 17

If I have emphasized British Labor's influence in blocking National Service, I must, in all fairness, point out that brows not accustomed to sweat and hands never grimy from toil have joined their frowns and their strength with Trade-Unionism and Socialism against Conscription. The professional pacifists, the "anti-militarists," the statesmen and the newspapers which for years prior to 1914, and even during the weeks immediately preceding August of that year, ridiculed the idea of "war with Germany," were all mobilized against the revolutionary idea of converting able-bodied Britons by law into defenders of the realm. From these quarters the men who have dared to advocate Conscription have been besmirched with abuse no less torrential than that which was heaped upon them at the Trade-Union Congress in Bristol or from week to week in the columns of Socialist-Labor organs. It will not be only certain famous proletariat leaders who prevented Britain from rising in the great war to her full military stature--if prevented she be--but the party-hack editors, authors and anything-for-office politicians who preferred the fetish of "our unenslaved Democracy" and "Voluntaryism" to the system under which _every other single one of Britain's Allies_ is fighting and under which, if the opinion of professional soldiers is to be trusted, victory alone can be made to perch on the Union Jack.

CHAPTER XX

THE EMPIRE OF HATE

Though the end of the carnage is not even approximately in sight, a synoptic view of Germany in war-time is feasible to a more comprehensive extent than is possible in Britain. Armageddon found the Fatherland completely caparisoned for war, with her people so steeped in discipline that it was the merest formality to harness their peace-time habits to Mars' Juggernaut and drive the entire nation to battle as one would a well-trained team. "Team-work," in fact, exactly describes Germany's war-time performances. They are achievements in national unison without parallel in history. Britain, on the other hand, having been overtaken by war, except for her navy, in a state of naked unpreparedness, was plunged forthwith into the melting-pot. Traditions, customs, inst.i.tutions, hobbies, prejudices, fetishes, even cherished laws, had to be abandoned, upset or reconstructed to fit a world of iron conditions unsuited to a dreamland of comfortable theories. The remaking of Britain, after sixteen months of war, is not yet ended. It has, indeed, hardly commenced. The time to write an accurate history of these isles during the Great Test will come not when peace is signed, but perhaps a decade later, when the New England will have begun to a.s.sume, in misty outline at least, the physical, moral and intellectual dimensions in which war, with its scars and its cleansings, left her.

Organized for war, body and soul, as Germany has been for generation upon generation, and never more so, of course, than in the living generation, the country slid into the b.l.o.o.d.y groove as neatly as if it had never had its being elsewhere. The prospect of "starvation," for instance, quite apart from the fact that it was a German-invented bogy trotted out to deceive the enemy and extort the commiseration of neutrals, never seriously disturbed the Germans' equanimity, for from the cradle up frugality has been instilled in them as a virtue sister to patriotism. No people in the world could overnight descend to a war standard of living so rapidly as the Germans. Accustomed to the affluence of sudden prosperity as the nation, as a whole, was, it had yet only to return to familiar inculcated habits, when the Kaiser called. The grand German bluff of the first year of the war was the introduction of the bread-ticket ration system. How the grain-shippers of Chicago and Duluth must have chuckled over it, when they recalled the gigantic advance purchases of wheat made for German and Austrian account in May, 1914--_three full months before_ "the Russian mobilization menace!" Germany can never be starved, and she knows it. Von Tirpitz knew it when he proclaimed submarine piracy as a "reprisal" for British "attempts to starve us out." The grip of the British Fleet around Germany's neck has inconvenienced the Germans, but it can never cause them to famish. The "starvation" myth which the German propagandists in the United States so a.s.siduously circulated was devised, purely and simply, for the purpose of arousing the compa.s.sion of the generous-hearted American people, in the hope that our most sentimental of governments would intervene, in humanity's name, to lift from Germany's throat a yoke which she herself was powerless to remove. That is the long and short of the "starvation" story.

As inborn and cultivated habits of frugality and thrift enabled the introduction of the bread-ticket without marked disturbance to normal German life, so the nation resorted willingly and easily to all the other new conditions which war imposed. A people goose-stepped and policed from the nursery to the grave, bred in docility, with wills of their own eternally broken before they have left the _Kinderstube_, with initiative and self-reliance knocked out of them with the rod at home and in school, and with blind unyielding subordination to discipline literally pounded into their bones in barracks, provides no astonishing spectacle in making war, when war comes, as one man obeying one supreme will. War is the _ultima ratio_, indeed, which this national system of self-suppression has in mind. The surprising thing is not that the world has witnessed so colossal an exhibition of team-work in Germany.

The unexpected would have been if Germany had given any other account of herself. When we speak, as we all do, and especially the English, of "Germany's years of preparation," we should eliminate the notion that these preparations were confined to sh.e.l.ls, guns, fortifications, battleships and legions. No single other "preparation" of the German war G.o.ds measured up, in my judgment, to the unseen and unnoticed, yet all-engulfing, decade-old, national scheme of molding the minds of men, women, children and babes along the line of unresisting, complete slavery to Superiority, uniformed as the State. When you dilute this super-subjugation with the wine of true patriotism which, despite their Socialism, their police, their burdensome taxes, their goose-step, their powerless parliaments and all the other concomitants of an autocratic monarchy, flows red and joyously through the soul of the Germans, you secure a spiritual admixture which approaches invincibility. You discover the ingredients of what Lloyd-George christened the "potato-bread spirit," which he truly described as a greater danger for Germany's enemies than Hindenburg's strategy. The former will survive long after the latter has broken down.

For a full year, interrupted only by six weeks in the United States at the end of the winter of 1914-15, I have kept in as close touch with Germany in war-time as if I were at my old lookout in the Friedrichstra.s.se. My professional task in London all that time has been to study the German Press. Day in and day out I have done so. I have read the Government-controlled _Lokal-Anzeiger_, the radical _Berliner Tageblatt_, the venerable _Vossische Zeitung_, Count Reventlow's organ of Frightfulness, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_, the Pan-German _Tagliche Rundschau_, the Thunderer of Prussian conservatism, the _Kreuz-Zeitung_, and Maximilian Harden's vitriolic _Zukunft_. The voice of paralyzed Hamburg has come to me morning and night through the malevolent _Hamburger Nachrichten_ and _Fremdenblatt_. _Vorwarts_ has kept me informed of German Socialism's invertebrate vagaries. The cultured _Cologne Gazette_, the property of Doctor Neven-Dumont, whose wife is half-English and whose son is proud of his Oxford degree, and yet has almost led the German Press in the violence of its Anglophobism, has told me what semi-official Germany wanted the world to believe was its views from hour to hour. In the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ I have been able to glean the news and opinion of the great German financial and commercial cla.s.ses for which it speaks. Catholic Bavaria, the land of Crown Prince "Rupprecht, the b.l.o.o.d.y," has been interpreted to me by the _Munich Neueste Nachrichten_. The _Dresdner Anzeiger_ has mirrored Saxony day by day. And, as the _Stimmung_ of no country in the world is so faithfully reproduced by its comic press as is opinion in Germany, my readings have been amplified, as well as lightened, by heartlessly ironic _Simplicissimus_, artistic _Jugend, Fliegende Blatter_ and _l.u.s.tige Blatter_. My German literary diet, which was ruining my eye-sight, has been almost more opulent than when in Berlin, has finally been enriched from week to week by the incessant grist of pamphlets and booklets which has poured from the German mill even in more copious and overwhelming measure than in peace-times. If the printed word is the index of a nation's thought, little of moment in Germany since August, 1914, has escaped me. I have had the inestimable advantage of being able to absorb it in the light of its relationship to the situation outside of Germany--an opportunity of which the Germans themselves, though I would not try to make them believe it, have been cruelly deprived.

Telescopic observation of Germany, as reflected by its press, a little knowledge of what Doctor Munsterberg would call the Fatherland's "psychology," and the actual deeds of the German army, navy and Government have provided me, I think I may make so bold as to say, with a fairly complete and accurate picture. Germany, thus visualized, stands out to me in bold, clear-cut relief. It is a strange and terrible composite of forces generally considered incongruous and mutually destructive--Efficiency, Malice and Intolerance. The world ought to have known that in war Germany would reveal t.i.tanic powers of scientific organization. It did not expect to find her an Empire of Hate. It hardly imagined that the land of Goethe and Wagner, Koch, Behring and Ehrlich, Siemens, Rathenau and Ballin, Hauptmann, Strauss and Reinhardt, Eucken, Haeckel and Harnack, could be turned even by the devouring blasts of war into a community capable of elevating to the dignity of a national anthem such a ferocious song as Lissauer's _Hymn of Hate Against England_, whose soul is best breathed by its closing stanza:

"Take you the folk of the Earth in pay, With bars of gold your ramparts lay, Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow, Ye reckon well, but not well enough now.

French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot, We fight the battle with bronze and steel, And the time that is coming Peace will seal.

You will we hate with a lasting hate, We will never forego our hate, Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hate of the hand, Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions, choking down.

We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone-- ENGLAND!"

Even Barbara Henderson's brilliant translation of this epic of spleen, the first version of which to be published in Great Britain it was my privilege to reprint in _The Daily Mail_ from the columns of the _New York Times_, fails to do justice to the innate rancor and gall of Lissauer's original verses. Americans who visited Germany during the war were unanimous in agreeing that no rendering of the _Hymn of Hate_ in English could possibly interpret its consuming spirit. You had to hear it rasped with the ferocity of snarling, guttural German, they would say, to gain even an approximate idea of its power. You had to watch a man or woman recitationist or singer, for it was set to music, too, bawl it out, in a crescendo of pa.s.sionate fury as the final word of each stanza, _England!_ was reached. You had to sit in the midst of a theater, cafe or music-hall audience, or even in a drawing-room, and note all around you the frenzied countenances, the clenched fists, the whole enraged being, of men, women and children, to know how Lissauer's ballad of gall had burnt itself into a people's soul. There have been more or less sincere efforts in Germany to banish the _Hymn of Hate_.

Lissauer having previously received the Iron Cross for poetic gallantry, and from the pulpit and the school rostrum the unrighteousness of hate had been sanctimoniously proclaimed. But Lissauer only put into verse the spirit which maddened Berlin on the night of August 4, 1914, which grew in intensity as the magnitude of British intervention in the war slowly dawned, and which, surface manifestations to the contrary notwithstanding, lingers deep and ineffaceable in the German breast, and will remain there, barring a miracle, for generations after the war is over.

While the _Hymn of Hate_ was at the zenith of its glory, some genius whose name, unfortunately, will be lost to posterity, invented _Gott strafe England!_ (G.o.d punish England) as the most patriotic form of greeting which one German could exchange with another. Friends meeting in the suburban trains or street-cars, or in the streets, no longer lifted their hats as usual and said _Guten Morgen_. They shook hands solemnly and exclaimed _Gott strafe England_! When they parted at night, it was not _Guten Abend_, but _Gott strafe England_! Then they began stamping it--with a rubber-stamp which was sold by the thousand for the purpose--on their letters to correspondents at home and abroad.

It was even adopted, now and then, as an epitaph for a fallen soldier, whose relatives would end up the customary obituary in the advertising columns of the newspapers with _Gott strafe England_. Now postcards blossomed forth with the new national motto. Scarf-pins made their appearance in the windows of cheap-jewelry stores, inscribed _Gott strafe England_! The legend was reproduced in a score of different designs on cuff-links, brooches, and even wedding-rings, while hardly a schoolchild was without a badge or b.u.t.ton emblazoned with the Fatherland's holiest war prayer. Handkerchiefs were embroidered with it, pocket-knives had it enameled on their handles, and many a _Liebesgabe_ to a dear one in the trenches went forth with a pair of black-white-red braces imprinted _Gott strafe England_! On a medal which doubtless decorated thousands of German b.r.e.a.s.t.s--a sample reached England--was engraved:

"Give us this day our daily bread; England would take it from us. G.o.d punish her!"

Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was beaten by Sir John French's "contemptible little army" at Neuve Chapelle and Artois, placed Royal approval on the _Gott strafe England_ cult in his notorious battle-order in the winter campaign to "annihilate the British arch-foe in front of us at any and all cost."

Englishmen, and especially English soldiers, perhaps measured the _Gott strafe England_ sentiment at below its real value as a German fighting a.s.set when they decided to treat it as a joke. That was the spirit, at any rate, which animated a group of young Eton men at the front, who sent a postcard to the Headmaster of their historic school rival reading: _Gott strafe Harrow_! And on April Fool's day British Tommies across a certain meadow of death in Flanders expelled from a mine-thrower something which looked murderously like a bomb. When it bounced in front of the German lines, and bounced again, without exploding, a "Boche" ventured out of the trenches and picked it up. He found it was a football, and on it was inscribed:

April Fool!

_Gott strafe England!_

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A PRUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD AT THEIR MORNING HATE--From _London Punch_"]

Mr. Punch and his lesser _confreres_ in British humor have almost lived through the war on _Gott strafe England_! The sentiment has not struck terror into John Bull's heart, but it has very materially added to his war-time gaiety.

Next to the Hate epidemic, the mystifying account of themselves which the German Social Democrats have given during the war stands out as the main phenomenon. I have asked myself more than once what might have been if Bebel, the brains, or Singer, the fists, of the old-time Socialistic movement had been alive in August, 1914. Certainly the utter failure of the Socialists to hamper the operation of the German war-machine will remain forever one of the amazing episodes of the war.

It will rank, of course, also, as one of the blazing miscalculations of the Fatherland's enemies. It is true that Bebel, the long-time autocrat of the German "Reds," proclaimed often enough that when Germany was in peril, he and his Genossen would shoulder the musket with a will. Yet the suspicion always lurked that when the German War Party's time came and it essayed to drag the German people across the Rubicon, the Social Democracy, with 4,250,000 voters, 111 members of parliament and German trades-unionism almost solidly behind it, would be found standing like an insuperable barrier against the powers of aggression. There had been more than one hint that working-cla.s.s Germany, in that hour, would not shrink from utilizing the potent weapon of the General Strike to stay the hand of the war zealots. Opinion on that score amounted to almost positive conviction in non-Socialistic Germany and throughout Europe, in case the test were to be forced by a German war of manifestly provocative character. It therefore was of prime importance to the clique which engineered the war that the Social Democracy be made to believe, forthwith and implicitly, that the impending conflict was a "defensive war," to which Socialist leaders had always pledged the proletariat's unswerving support. Categorical and lachrymose a.s.surances to that effect were accordingly given to the Social Democratic group of the Reichstag by the Imperial Chancellor in the confidential conferences with the parties, which preceded the public session of the House on August 4, 1914. The once-despised "Reds," so often denounced by William II as "men without a country," but whose votes in the national legislature were now so essential to the show of Imperial unity with which Germany desired to go to war, were supplied with ample "evidence"

that Germany's cause was "just." She had been "fallen upon" by ruthless, envious enemies, the struggle about to begin would be waged by the Fatherland in "defense" of its holiest national interests, and the support of all cla.s.ses was essential to the waging of the fight with which nothing short of "the Empire's existence" was was bound up. The Socialists listened, patriotically, to this siren song. They believed its tale of woe. They bade the Chancellor to be a.s.sured that they would not be found wanting in Germany's moment of peril. And a few hours later Herr Haase, the chairman of the party, was on his feet in the Reichstag, uttering glittering plat.i.tudes about Socialism's const.i.tutional abhorrence of war and all its works, but proclaiming that the party's full strength and support were at the Government's disposal for the purpose of repelling the invader! _Sic transit gloria mundi!_ August Bebel might well have remarked, could his shade have hovered over this abject surrender to Mars by his supine heirs of the fundamental principles to which he had consecrated a life-time.

From that moment forth the Kaiser needed to give himself no concern as to "the internal foe," the nickname of reproach always saddled on the Social Democracy by the Military Autocracy. The wing-clipped "Reds"

were even allowed a certain lat.i.tude of free speech and thought about the war. They were permitted to indulge in their favorite academic discussions about the propriety of Socialist votes for war credits, and even Haase himself, having gradually come to realize that the Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg had sold the Social Democracy a political gold brick, was not locked up for sedition for issuing, together with two fellow-leaders, Bernstein and Kautsky, a courageous manifesto against support of limitless war grants. _Vorwarts_, the Socialist organ, and other party newspapers were from time to time suppressed by the military censor for airing war opinions too freely, but as successive war measures were presented for the approval of the Reichstag, a safe majority of Socialist votes was on each occasion cast in their favor.

The myth of a "war of defense" was never broken down. The King of Bavaria and the National Liberal Party gave the game away during the spring and summer of 1915, by bl.u.s.tering about the necessity for sweeping "rectifications of our frontiers," or, in other words, wholesale annexation of conquered territory, but Germany's war was well into its second year finding the Social Democracy, for the purposes and needs of the Government at least, entirely harmless. Food shortage and high prices churned proletariat Germany into growing discontent, as the war proceeded. b.u.t.ter and meat riots have occurred in Berlin, and there have been ominous suggestions that the military authorities are alive to the possibility of "revolutionary" manifestations. But the day of Germany's Commune is not yet. No better evidence of the completeness with which the Socialist party was hypnotized from the outset could have been supplied than by the action of Doctor Ludwig Frank, one of its brilliant young leaders, in volunteering for military service. Frank fell in the earliest fighting in France, in August, 1914, and now fills a hero's grave. A Jewish lawyer in Baden, he was commonly looked upon as the future chieftain of Social Democracy. The war interfered with a cherished plan of his--to visit and lecture in the United States--and I suppose the last interview he ever gave was one I had with him, in which he spoke with enthusiasm of the American impressions he hoped to gather.

He was keenly interested in the corporation problem, recognized that it contained evils with which Germany before long would have to cope, and wanted to equip himself with first-hand knowledge of its ramifications in the home of its highest development. Frank was not a fire-eating German Social Democrat. He belonged to the moderate or "revisionist"

wing of the party. He was obsessed with no illusions as to the future possibilities of Socialism in Germany and acknowledged that sane democrats had long since abandoned hope of accomplishing anything more than the establishment of a truly const.i.tutional monarchy and Parliamentary government. It is a thousand pities that Ludwig Frank has not been spared to play his capable part in the political reconstruction of Germany which, win or lose, is almost inevitably certain to follow the war. Doctor Karl Liebknecht, that stormy petrel of German Socialism, remained the one man to utter anti-war sentiment day in and day out. Even the Government's action in sticking him into field-gray and dispatching him to the front for intermittent service failed to check the flow of his invective. Liebknecht represents the Imperial borough of Potsdam, of all places in the world, in the German Parliament, but, though he has talked incessantly and voted rebelliously, the voice of the representative of the Kaiser's congressional district was destined to remain as one crying in the wilderness.

I have said that the triumphs of Germany behind the firing-line--the fort.i.tude with which she has borne her hideous losses in life, the magnificently effective demonstration of unity, economy, self-sacrifice, industrial and financial organization, and adaptability to all the domestic conditions of war--were only things which those of us who knew the Germans expected to come to pa.s.s. They were as inevitable, in their paternalized State, the Empire of System, as were the early cannon-ball successes of the German army. We who were aware, as eye-witnesses, of Germany's prodigious preparations for "the Day," never doubted that, having chosen her own moment for launching her thunderbolts, they would accomplish precisely the staggering blows and strangle-holds which August and September, 1914, brought forth. Although (including myself) there was not one man in ten thousand in Berlin who knew who Hindenburg was--I have merely a faint recollection of having once read his name as an army commander in _Kaiser Maneuvers_--a good many of us had an abiding impression that the Russian army was no match for the German war machine, however easily the Czar might roll up the Austrians. The victories of the German armies in the war are no surprise to the German people. They have been raised in the belief that their military power was invincible, even against a world of foes. Events in the first year and a half of the war, even though Paris and Calais remained untaken, were certainly such as to convince Germans that their traditional and child-like confidence in their armed prowess was justified.

But in addition to Hate and Socialist impotence, two things which astounded those who knew and admired the German people, were their callousness toward the deeds which have been committed by their army and navy and their savage intolerance of any other point of view except their own. I am not one of those who believe that all Germans have cloven hoofs. Bitterly as I oppose their cause in this war and fully as I hold their War Party responsible for the war, I am not prepared to believe that the Germans are either a decadent or a lost race. What I do believe is that the war has, temporarily at least, annihilated the moral qualities of the Germans and dragged them from the high estate of ethical and discriminating intelligence in which they lived in antebellum times. The Germans of Louvain, of the _Lusitania_, asphyxiating gas, liquid fire, submarine piracy, airship a.s.sa.s.sination and General Frightfulness are not the Germans among whom I spent thirteen happy, fruitful years. They are not the Germans whose main concern, as it is that of the average run of men and women in other climes, was to prosper, raise families, educate children, live comfortably, acquire a competence and enjoy life generally. These Germans no longer exist. They have been succeeded by a race of war-maddened Germans, who were told by their Imperial Chancellor that "necessity knows no law," that treaties are "sc.r.a.ps of paper," and who have been made to believe that, in war, there is but one thing to do--"to hack our way through"--and that, as Bismarck and the German War Book said, the enemy must be left with nothing except eyes to weep with.

The Germans have been steeped in all this by their overlords, living and dead, and, being children of discipline, they have looked with unmoistened eye upon all and sundry done in the holy name of these bedrock German principles.

The Fatherland's heartlessness toward such events as the rape of Belgium becomes less inexplicable when one recalls the cult of brutality which pursues the German from the nursery upward. As a child in swaddling clothes, he is taught that he has no right to a will of his own, and if he attempts to cultivate one, it is promptly beaten out of him. I recall, with more amus.e.m.e.nt than the episode inspired in me at the time, the struggle we had with our beloved family physician in Berlin, Doctor Keiler, to allow us to bring up our three or four-year-old son as a boy and not as a machine. "_Das Kind darf keinen Willen hoben!_" I remember dear old Keiler shrieking in Wilmersdorf more than once, as he labored in vain to convince us that if Frightfulness was necessary to break the youngster's inborn initiative and self-reliance, we must not shrink from resorting to it. And when the German escapes the _Kinderstube_ with its unfailing rod and enters _Gymnasium_, he is once more under the cruel lash of Efficiency, which drives scores of lads to suicide at each recurring Easter-time because they have failed in examinations for the higher grade, notwithstanding a term's unceasing hounding by their drill-sergeant of a teacher and cla.s.s-room and home cramming which have kept his frame thin and his cheek pallid. A whole literature has come into existence in opposition to the intellectual brutality to which German schoolboys between the ages of eight and sixteen are subjected, but the consensus of opinion is that the system's advantages outweigh its deficiencies, and that youthful suicides are part of the price the Fatherland must pay for what Professor La.s.son of Berlin calls its "cultural superiority" over the rest of mankind.

Thrashed in the nursery, tormented in school, the German lad must then face a period of bullying in barracks, for, if he has managed to survive his _Gymnasia_ years in health, he will enter the army. It is not necessary in this narrative to dilate upon the cruelties committed in German barracks in the sacrosanct name of Discipline and Thoroughness.

There is a literature in Germany on that subject, too, and the penal records of the military and civil courts comprise the bulk of it. It is only with the lesson of the system with which we need to concern ourselves here; and that is, that the German man who emerges from the army comes out with notions about the efficacy and justifiability of brute force and brutality which are certain, under the red license which war confers, to find expression in terrible deeds. In other words, a German who has himself perhaps been a.s.saulted by his regimental sergeant on scores of occasions (such cases are plentiful), who has seen the b.l.o.o.d.y saber-duel elevated in his university days to the level of the manliest art, who has throughout his life been a supine victim of police violence, who holds womankind in semi-contempt, who thinks it sportsmanlike to shoot birds alight, who rejoices in his prowess as a slaughterer of wild game, who beats his horses, who is as unfamiliar with the ethics of sport and play as he is with the lingo of a Choctaw dialect--such a man, I say, is bound, when he is sent forth with his Kaiser's mandate to "hack his way through," to stagger humanity as the Germans have never ceased to stagger it on land, on sea and in the air since August, 1914. Given a nation of non-combatants who have been instructed to believe that these things _must_ be because otherwise their existence will be imperiled, and you have to do with a community which, however delightful its qualities as individuals, is no longer capable of measuring right and wrong, by normal standards and which is ready to tolerate any and everything, as long as it is part and parcel of the general scheme to "preserve the Fatherland." If one considers all these things, which I set down in no spirit of venom, but purely in an attempt to diagnose German war callousness, one will begin to be able to understand why German sensibilities remain unshocked in the presence of things which have horrified civilization. One's understanding will be complete if it is remembered that not one in a million Germans believes that these things have happened at all!

Philosophy, logic, metaphysics and psychology are cultivated sciences in Germany. It is even sometimes claimed--in Berlin and in certain regions of Harvard--that they were "made in Germany." Yet as applied sciences they have given a woefully sorry exhibition of themselves in the Fatherland during the war. They have, as a matter of fact, entirely disappeared. They have been supplanted by a new doctrine, for which the Germans themselves have an old and incomparable word--_Rechthaberei_. I learned that precious term from an American colleague in Berlin, a South Carolinian and profound student of German character named William C.

Dreher. Dreher, who is an able journalist specializing in economics, has held forth to me on countless occasions about "Prussian _Rechthaberei_"--the unquenchable conviction of the average Teuton that he not only is "right" about everything, but that everybody else whom he permits to have a thought or a word on the same subject is essentially, inherently and incorrigibly "wrong." I can hardly credit the report that Dreher himself has fallen a victim to the insidious influence of _Rechthaberei_. It is something that presupposes omniscience and mental aristocracy on the part of the propounder of a given theory, and senility or utterly misguided stubbornness on the part of the opponent.

Germany has wallowed in _Rechthaberei_ since August 1, 1914. It has sucked into the mire of intolerance everybody who has dared to cherish a contrary view. It has refused the right of independence of thought to every living soul, unless that thought is pro-German. It has swallowed whole anything the German Government and its muzzled press have said, and it has condemned as criminal falsehood anything published in enemy countries. It allows British, French and Russian newspapers, in a lordly way, to circulate freely in Germany, as of yore, thumping its chest and saying "We are not afraid of the truth"--but only after having drilled the country into believing that _nothing_ printed abroad about the war is or can be true! So the German who finds _The Daily Mail_ or the _New York Times_ on its accustomed file at his favorite cafe, just as he used to do in peace days, _knows in advance_ that he is to read "lies," and he digests them, leaving his patriotism unpolluted.

"Ma.s.s-suggestion" has thus worked wonders in War Germany. It has driven me for example--I hope not forever--from the ranks of my oldest and best friends in Germany--Americans, as well as Germans. It impelled my wife's dearest friend, the Philadelphia-born wife of a German, to write a letter early in the war, formally "canceling" the friendship, because "your husband, instead of choosing to identify himself with an honest cause, has thrown in his lot with England, and, with her, will share the downfall toward which that nation is headed." That would be funny, if it were not so tragically pathetic. I hear that a great many good people in Berlin, wasting upon me breath and choleric energy which deserved to be spent on a far worthier object, fairly splutter when they hear or read my name. I have been the target of absurd and filthy personal abuse in the German press. I have won undying execration, for I have dared, in a most un-German way, to have a view of my own on the question which is agitating men's minds and searching their hearts as never was done before.

Yet all the millstones of hate and intolerance are not preventing the Germans from conducting a fight which challenges, in its efficiency, barring its inhuman aspects, the admiration of foe and neutral the world over. They are, indeed, a nation in arms. Their Spartan qualities behind the front, their contempt of death in the enemy's fire, will not easily be conquered. Exhaustion, economic and human, must tell against them in the long run, though the process of attrition will be vastly slower, I fancy, than armchair war critics in England think. The Germans will fight to the last man and the last pfennig, as I know them, and when they are beaten, they will furl their tattered standards after a combat which, stripped of its horrors, will yet have been marked by deeds of patriotism, courage and glory fit to take their place alongside the heroic traditions of mankind.

CHAPTER XXI

THE NEW ENGLAND

Rome was not built in a day, but England has been made over in a year.

Personal liberty is gone. A free press no longer exists. Extravagance is "bad form." Economy has become respectable. Dukes' sons and cooks'

sons are "pals." Drunkenness is disappearing. Conscription looms on the horizon. The Irish are loyal. Suffragettes are making sh.e.l.ls and bandaging wounds instead of smashing windows and going to jail. Pride is humbled, though not crushed. Still ringed by Kipling's "leaden seas," Britain is no longer an island, for Zeppelins have maimed and killed and wrecked in the heart of London. Tolerance is a lost art.

British have learned to hate. The link-boy has come back into his own; the streets at night, that Admiral Sir Percy Scott, defender of London by air, may blind the "sky-Huns," recall the gloom of the Cimmerian Regency. Though Waterloo was won a hundred years ago, a terror worse than the Napoleonic scourge has overtaken the descendants of Nelson and Wellington. Britannia rules the waves, but the blood of a half million of her best sons fertilizes the soil of France, Belgium, Turkey, Serbia and Africa; and the flow is far from checked. The "shopkeeper of the world" has become a nation in arms. Only one phase of its multifarious life, immutable as the sphinx, has survived the crucible of war in pristine glory--British calm. Ships may sink, men may fall, bombs may annihilate and treasure be sapped, but British imperturbability, like Time itself, pursues the even tenor of its way, Himalayan in its imperviousness.

a.s.suredly it has been for no lack of cause that England has ridden the sea of Armageddon without capsizing. Squalls, typhoons, storms and barometric disturbances of every form of violence have beset her from the outset of the voyage. But though there has been tempest, there is no shipwreck. She enters upon another lap of a seemingly endless journey, battered indeed, but keel down and full steam ahead. It is still night. Stokers and crew, nor even the captains and commodores, are not a completely united band, but their differences concern only the methods of cleaving through darkness to the port, to gain which, at any cost, all are grimly determined. Failure to reach the waters of their desire as soon as the unthinking majority hoped and believed would be possible has sobered the vision and intensified the resolve of crew and commanders alike. It has not reconciled their antagonisms, but it is making surer than ever that they will land their craft in the appointed harbor, though the d.a.m.nations of all the powers of destruction are buffeted against her in the attempt.

My name for Armageddon is the War of Miscalculations, for it is a t.i.tle which indicts every belligerent without exception. The Germans expected their army to be in Paris by the end of September, 1914. The English and the French reckoned that Russian Cossacks would be hacking souvenirs from the sepulchral statues in the Berlin _Sieges-Allee_ about the same time. The British thought that Jellicoe would starve the Germans. Von Tirpitz imagined that U-boats would paralyze Britain's life-line. The British pounded vainly at the Dardanelles for nine months, and when they couldn't get Calais the Germans started out to crush Serbia. Sir Edward Grey thought Bulgaria and Greece were only waiting like ripe fruit to drop into the Allies' lap and cry for marching orders. He was about as near right as the German political professors who always a.s.sured William II that India, Egypt, Canada, South Africa and Australia were itching to revolt when the Motherland was immersed in a vast European war. The great war has been a rude awakening for all concerned. In addition to killing its millions of men and squandering its billions of money, it has annihilated theories, expectations, plans and aspirations so cruelly that the "war expert" has become a deathless laughing-stock. If "experts" have learned anything from the war, they will henceforth prefer history to prophecy.

"Business as Usual"--life generally in the old rut, in other words--was adopted by Britons as their war motto. Truly did a politician of renown exclaim a year later that no unhappier, because no more unfortunate, maxim was ever foisted upon or accepted by a patriotic people. The nation made no inconsiderable attempt to convert "Business as Usual"

from an aphorism into an actuality. Seven or eight months of unrealized objectives had to pa.s.s over English men and women's resolute heads before they began even to doubt the efficacy of the complacent principle they had laid down for themselves. But the mills of Mars, like those of his colleagues, keep on grinding, and England was to learn that, while invasion had not seared her soil as it had scotched that of all her European allies, war yet had terrors capable of burning into the soul, saddening the homes and despoiling the pockets of even an unravished land.

I fix the date when Great Britain began to face the iron logic of events with sterner realization and to doubt the efficacy of "muddle" for purposes of war as May, 1915. In the two preceding months there had been a series of episodes of more climacteric magnitude than was apparent at the moment of their occurrence. In March Sir John French's army made a vigorous attempt to break through the German lines, and the much-heralded "victory" of Neuve Chapelle resulted. Thousands of British soldiers, and half a hundred Americans fighting in the Canadian contingent, died gallantly in an action which, when its terrible cost was eventually counted, could not be catalogued as anything but a glorious failure. In April two affairs of purely German origin were recorded, each predestined to leave a deep impress on the British public mind: the employment of poison gas by the enemy in sanguinary engagements around Ypres, and the flinging of thirty-nine British officers, captives in Germany, into felons' cells by way of "reprisal"

for the segregation in England of captured German submarine crews.