The Better Germany in War Time Part 25

The _Daily News_ of March 10, 1919, has the following:

From a staff sergeant in Germany: "Here, in Germany, an English officer with the 'flu was nursed by his landlady, who, when her patient was better, succ.u.mbed to its ravages. Her daughter caught it from the mother, and is now lying at death's door. But merely 'Huns,' I suppose."

The roll of honour in the chapel at New College, Oxford, includes the names of three Germans, and the words of charity: _Pro patria-Memento fratres in Christo_.

THE WAY OF NEW RUSSIA.

In reprisals of good we may learn something from the new Russia. When the German prisoners were set to work Kerensky said, "Prisoners or not, they shall be paid at the same rate as other men," and they were. What was the result? Again the movement of grat.i.tude, which is so potent a force, if only we would believe it. _The German prisoners presented half their wages to the Russian Red Cross._ I have to rely on private information for this.

THOUGHTS FROM THE OTHER SIDE.

The thoughts of the others are much like our own-that is the difficult truth we have to learn. It is a truth that is absolutely essential to any peace that is to be more than an armistice of fools.

The war has produced in the public opinion of the nations a state of mind which formerly would not have been regarded as possible in our age of internationalism and intellectuality.

National egotism and the effort to a.s.sert one's own national interests by all and every means are dominating so exclusively each belligerent group that it forms for itself a closed circle of ideas, and under its influence conclusions are drawn which are so contradictory that one is almost inclined to think that logic and common sense have been entirely eliminated from the thinking capacity of the warring nations....

We Germans, among the others, are subject to this war-suggestion. We do not wish to say, after the manner of the Pharisees, beating their b.r.e.a.s.t.s: "We thank Thee, Lord, that we are not like these publicans." We know that we, too, are prisoners of our circle of ideas, and must remain so, for we, too, are ruled by our national egotism and by our desire to win the war.-_Kolnische Zeitung_, as quoted by the _Daily News_, September 3, 1915.

Ideas imprisoned, narrowed (beschrankt, as the Germans say), become putrescent through lack of free air. It is in this putrescence that the gospel of hate is bred. Here is a German officer's protest against the infamy of this gospel. It is quoted from the _Kolnische Zeitung_ by Mr.

A. G. Gardiner in his book, "The War Lords":

Perhaps you will be so good as to a.s.sist, by the publication of these lines, in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly. I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French, English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion. The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy. Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary, every one expresses his displeasure.

This is quite natural when one considers the position. We know how victories are won. We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained. We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield. We rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.

And our enemies have, in an overwhelming majority of cases, truly not deserved to be derided in such a way. Had they not fought bravely we should not have had to register such losses.

Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect here on the battlefields, in face of our dead and wounded, is only calculated to cause disgust. Such postcards are as much out of place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards sent to our troops.

Personally, I believe this to express the soul of the real Germany and the soul of the real England. The soul of any people is the _best_ that is in it.

The following is from a lecture delivered by Prof. H. Gomperz in Vienna, early in 1915:

"Ladies and gentlemen, in our day all sorts of speakers and writers feel called upon to preach to us the doctrine of hate, in prose and even in verse, more especially against one of the countries opposing us. I do them the honour of a.s.suming that even they do not mean that we are to translate this feeling into action; rather, even they do not dream of doing the slightest harm to any individual Englishman in so far as it is not necessary or inevitable for the purposes of victory. What then does this preaching of hatred mean, if indeed it means anything at all, and is not the mere empty clamour of some people anxious to attract attention without rendering useful service? Do they mean us to nurse and cherish the feeling of hate? Truly a strange demand after nearly two thousand years of training in the teaching of the gospel! And besides, whom are we to hate?

The individual doing his duty in the service of his country, just as we are? Or the responsible governors of the destinies of that country, and the irresponsible leaders of its public opinion?" Hatred of the individual serving his country and governed by others Prof. Gomperz does not stop to discuss. It can obviously be the product only of what with etymological correctness we may term _insanity_. The governors and leaders imagined an irreconcilable antagonism. If they were right their case is justified; if they are wrong we must no more hate them than we should hate a patient suffering temporarily from delusion.-_International Review_, August, 1915.

Magnus Schwantje spoke very plainly at a meeting of the Schopenhauer Society at Dusseldorf in June, 1915. He allows that the state has a right to wage a war of defence, but _not to force anyone to serve in the army_. Schopenhauer, he tells us, "esteems sympathy with all that lives and suffers more highly than love for the Fatherland.... During a war a n.o.ble man desires such an issue as may be most beneficial to the whole world.... With all our readiness to recognise the merit of patriotic self-denial, we, the admirers of Schopenhauer, have to warn our compatriots, especially during a war, of the danger of patriotism degenerating into injustice, or even hatred and malicious joy at the misfortune of other nations.... Not one of the European peoples can be suppressed without heavy loss to the whole world, and not one has the right to force its special character on the others." (_International Review_, September, 1915.)

WAR LITERATURE.

It is the elderly gentlemen on both sides who exude vitriol. It is a pity that they are so much in evidence. But even some of them retain their sanity. The following is from the _Cambridge Magazine_ of May 15, 1915:

Those who, at the beginning of the war, were induced by the Press to wonder whether any elderly German professor had retained his mental equilibrium will now be disposed to wonder whether the proportion of serious cases is after all larger there than here. At any rate the Schopenhauer Society is a very important learned body, and Prof. Deussen, of Kiel, is one of the most distinguished of German scholars. And this is how he writes in the fourth year book of the Schopenhauer Society-apparently in terms of contempt for a loquacious minority (the translation is taken from the April number of the _Open Court_, and the italics are ours, especially the concluding shot at the Lady Patriot):

"'Not to my contemporaries,' says Schopenhauer, 'not to my countrymen, but to humanity do I commit my work which is now completed, in the confidence that it will not be without value to the race. Science, and more than every other science, philosophy is international.' ... Foolish, very foolish, therefore is the conduct of _certain German professors_ who have renounced their foreign honours and t.i.tles. And what shall we say of a member of our society who demanded that citizens of those states which are at war with us should be excluded from the Schopenhauer Society, and who, when it was pointed out that our foreign members certainly condemned this infamous war as much as we Germans, protested that she could not belong to an a.s.sociation in which Frenchmen, Englishmen and Russians took part, and announced her withdrawal from our society, indeed, even published her brave resolution in the columns of a local paper in her provincial town. _We shall not shed any tears_ for her having gone."[71]

Romain Rolland bears out the idea that "in all countries the extremest views have been expressed by writers already past middle age." So it is in Germany, Rolland tells us. Dehmel, the enemy of war, has enlisted at 51; Gerhart Hauptmann, "the poet of brotherly love," cries out for slaughter. But Fritz von Unruh has, from the battlefield, written "Das Lamm": "Lamb of G.o.d, I have seen Thy look of suffering; lead us back to the heaven of love." Rudolf Leonhard, who was caught up in the storm, wrote afterwards on the front page of his poems: "These were written during the madness of the first weeks. That madness has spent itself, and only our strength is left. We shall again win control over ourselves and love one another."

"Menschen in Not ...

Bruder dir tot ...

Krieg ist im Land ..."

No "glory" of war is in these simple, poignant words of Ludwig Marck-simply a dire evil that we have not the sanity to avoid. "Whether you gaze trembling into the eyes of the beloved, or mark down your enemy with pitiless glance, think of the eye that will grow dim, of the failing breath, the parched lips and clenched hands, the final solitude, and the brow that grows moist in the last pangs.... Be kind....

Tenderness is wisdom. Kindness is reason.... We are strangers all upon this earth, and die but to be reunited." Thus Franz Werfel. Since these words cannot be called barbaric, they will perhaps be called sentimental. It is true that to those of us who have loved our comrades, of whatever nation, the sentiment of brotherhood does just now make a somewhat tragic appeal. If that appeal, in these days of decimated ideals, be at times strained and feverish, it scarcely lies in the mouths of the apostles of hate to deride us. The sentimentality of hatred is uglier and more fatuous than the sentimentality of brotherhood.

Hermann Hesse is living at Berne. He has implored the writers of all nations not to join with their pens in destroying the future of Europe.

From a poem of later date come these words: "All possessed it, but no one prized it. Like a cool spring it has refreshed us all. What a sound the word peace has for us now. Distant it sounds, and fearful, and heavy with tears. No one knows or can name the day for which all sigh with such longing."

Do not let us forget that almost everything that is most militarist is _old_. It is only the old who affect still to glory in war-the old newspapers, the old reviews, the old statesmen, and some, perhaps, of the old soldiers-it is to what is newest, youngest, most creative, most living that we look not in vain for an unshaken belief in brotherhood, for a clear acknowledgment that any other belief would throw us back into the ape and tiger struggle of world beginnings, but with the ape ten thousand times more cunning and the tiger ten thousand times more cruel. To some German publications the war is a stupid eruption of barbarism into a workshop where work was being done. _Die Aktion_ scoffs mercilessly at the Chauvinists and at Lissauer with his Hymn of Hate.[72] Even Lissauer, be it remarked, has published his repentance, and, personally, I respect him for it. The man who can say that he spoke too strongly is always worth knowing. The man who insists elaborately on his consistency (as the politicians do) is usually singularly devoid of any appreciation of truth. _Die Aktion_ (1915) goes on steadily with its appreciation of French artists, as if no war were in progress. There may be some affectation in this att.i.tude, but it is to be preferred, I think, to the complete ostracism of work of the enemy called for by a noisy but, I believe, small section on this side. _Die Weissen Blatter_ appeared in January, 1915, with the following announcement:

It seems good to us to begin the work of reconstruction in the midst of the war. The community of Europe is at present apparently destroyed. Is it not the duty of all of us who are not bearing arms to live from to-day onwards according to the dictates of our conscience, as it will be the duty of every German when once the war is over?

Evidently the editor has in his mind a contrast between the dictates of conscience and the dictates of officialism. He was born in Alsace, so he may well know this contrast. We are learning it here. In the February number the _Krieg mit dem Maul_ (war with the mouth) was most vigorously condemned:

If journalists hope to inspire courage by insulting the enemy, they are mistaken-we refuse such stimulants. We dare to maintain our opinion that the humblest volunteer of the enemy, who, from an unreasoned but exalted sentiment of patriotism, fires upon us from an ambush, knowing well what he risks, is much superior to those journalists who profit by the public feeling of the day, and under cover of high-sounding words of patriotism do not fight the enemy, but spit on him.

I am reminded of words used by one of my Swiss friends: "As soon as soldiers must get their fighting force from suggestions of puerile besmirching of the enemy, then war indeed becomes intolerably base."

Annette Kolb, daughter of a German father and a French mother, had the courage to proclaim openly in a public lecture at Dresden that _she was faithful to both sides_, and to express her regret that Germany should fail to understand France. After all, German intolerance must have its limits for such a bold speech to be possible.

Wilhelm Herzog in the Munich _Forum_ has attacked the intellectual fire-eaters, the patriots who insult other peoples and the Chauvinists generally. He defends France, the French army and French civilisation, against the brilliant novelist, Thomas Mann. Above all does he condemn the intellectual babble: "The wrong that these privy councillors and professors have done us with their 'Aufklarungsarbeit' can hardly be measured. They have isolated themselves from humanity by their inability to realise the feelings of others."

Mr. Lowes d.i.c.kinson has called attention in the _Hibbert_ of October, 1915, to a pamphlet by Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, ent.i.tled "Deutschlands Jugend und der Weltkrieg." The same pamphlet is quoted in _The Ethical Movement_ of the same date. Here are some extracts:

"Hate disorganises, love disciplines. Fill yourselves with deepest sympathy for all who suffer in war, whose hearts are crushed, whose bodies are broken, whose homes are burned ...

and win a peace which shall make the recurrence of such things for ever impossible. Such a purification from the pa.s.sion of hate is often easier on the field than at home. Those who remain behind have an abstract enemy in view. The soldier sees living men who suffer and die like himself." It will startle the English reader to find Dr. Forster pleading earnestly that the English soldier is not responsible for the ways of his government or of his leaders. The Germans are to remain true to themselves whatever the others may do. Each side, observe, accuses the other of barbarous methods, and impartiality is impossible. The most that one can expect of the ardent partisan is perhaps that he should, like Dr. Forster, urge those on his side to remain true to their ideals, whatever the enemy may do.

"England has given us also the Salvation Army, and invaluable higher points of view for the treatment of Labour questions and social work. She has taught our revolutionary spirits and moderated our party pa.s.sions. Let us always remember this, and in that remembrance grasp again in the future the proffered hand." For Dr. Forster it is for this better England that Germany now fights, just as for many an Englishman it is for the better Germany that England is fighting. "And it is better for us to fight for that better England than to rage and spit upon ... Grey and his followers. In sleepless nights kindle the eternal light of Christ in your souls and try to love your enemies. Think of that great William Booth and of all the English greatness and goodness embodied in him; of Florence Nightingale, the heroine and saint, whose pioneer work is still binding up to-day unnumbered wounds; and think of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Toynbee and of those mighty forces of conscience which spoke in their words and gave to us Germans, and will give us yet, so much that is great."

Again:

"Christ stands against war and above war. He who loses sight of this truth slays that deep conscience of civilisation which is meant to goad us unceasingly on to allay this fury of war. We know well that if we were Christians there would be no war."

Forster denounces the bawling haters "who must open their mouths 42 centimetres wide," and think that he who does not do it is no patriot.

"To conquer and silence them must be your first task, young men of the new Germany; you who have been purified by sacrifice and suffering. For what would it profit our people if it gained the whole world and lost its own soul?" May we not, _mutatis mutandis_, take this appeal to heart ourselves?

Again:

"The essence and foundation of the State is precisely the opposite of power, viz., law, treaty, fellowship between opposed interests, and the whole outer strength of a State rests upon the depth and firmness of these, its inner conditions and links.

Therefore the first commandment of life for the State is not to create for itself might but to care for the ethical unity of its members, for the supremacy of the conscience and the sense of law above rude self-interest."-(Quoted in the _Ethical Movement_, October, 1915.)

Granted that voices such as those of Herzog, Forster, Schucking, Schwantje are a minority, it is yet plain that they represent more than themselves. The existence of such reviews and utterances implies the existence of at least many thousands who have not been deluded by their governors. Of those who have been deluded into enmity, but who have never dreamed of world dominance, there are, I am convinced, many millions. Bernhardi was introduced to Germany by England. There were four million Social Democrats. They have defended their country, but they have never dreamed of aggression. The time will come to claim the help of these men and the many others of the wiser Germany. That wiser Germany will yet live to be, not an army of destruction, but an army of progress.

Henrietta Thomas, of Baltimore, Maryland, went early in 1915 with a message of fellowship from English people to German people. There was some surprise, some tendency to view the message as Utopian, but always a cordial acknowledgment and a real goodwill. Dr. Siegmund Schulze was most heartily in sympathy. "He feels that the ultimate hope of peace lies in the increasing use of arbitration." "One very sweet-spirited elderly gentleman in Berlin said that when he prayed things looked different-he seemed to see things through G.o.d's eyes-but as a man he had to fight." "At Stuttgart and Frankfurt I found the peace people more thoroughgoing in their sentiments." The secretary of the Stuttgart Peace Society said: "The armed peace of Europe is an exploded idea. As long as we have armies we shall use them. We must educate the people to realise this, and to work for disarmament."

_Lichtstrahlen_ was originally founded as an independent monthly periodical by a Socialist, Julian Borchardt. The periodical was unofficial and had a difficult struggle for existence. This was before the war. When the war broke out the editor took as strong a line against it as the censor allowed. The circulation rose so much that Borchardt was able to convert the monthly into a weekly. Rosa Luxembourg and Frank Mehring, greatly daring, started the _Internationale_ with the object of rebuilding the International Labour and Socialist movement during the war. The review was instantly suppressed, but was reprinted afterwards at Berne. Among the contributors is the well-known Clara Zetkin. She refers enthusiastically to the Christmas message sent by British women to the women of Germany and other belligerent countries. (_Labour Leader_, June 17, 1915.) Marie Engelmann, of Dresden, has protested with equal strength.