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قراءة كتاب The German War Some Sidelights and Reflections

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The German War
Some Sidelights and Reflections

The German War Some Sidelights and Reflections

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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distrust and anger which such policy has aroused in the neutral countries—yes, it really is a thing complete.

But the German soldier may prove himself as good as ever. That he will be as brave as ever I have no doubt at all. That he will be as hardy as ever is less likely, as the population of the Fatherland has drifted largely from fields to factories, and as the standard of comfort, and even luxury, have greatly increased. The Westphalian artisan of William is very different material from the Brandenburg peasant of Frederick, even as the short-service soldier of 1914 is very different from the ten-year man of 1750. I should expect to see the German as good, but no better than his neighbours. But the whole issue of this campaign depends, from his point of view, upon his being better. He has to win against superior numbers. He must not only win, but win quickly. If an equilibrium were established, the strangulation from England must bring victory to the Allies. It is a great deal that the Kaiser has asked from his men.

And there is his much-vaunted military organisation. An American friend of mine, who had means of forming an opinion, remarked to me, “Yes, it is a huge and smooth-running machine, with delicate adjustments. Like all such machines, if a few cogwheels stuck the whole might racket itself to pieces.” A cogwheel stuck at Liége, another may stick before long, and it all depends on how the machine can adjust itself. The lesson of history is ominous. The Prussians of Jena and Auerstadt were men who had been swollen up by the tradition of Frederick’s prowess. Yet in a single day their defeat was so great and their power of recuperation so slight that they were utterly dispersed, and their country for seven years ceased to exist as a factor in European politics. They have always been great winners. They have not always been great in adversity. How will they now stand this test if it should come their way?



III

THE DEVIL’S DOCTRINE

I have been interesting and exasperating myself, during a most untimely illness, [2] by working through a part of the literature of German Imperial Expansion. I know that it is only a part, and yet when I look at this array—Treitschke and Bernhardi, Schiemann and Hasse, Bley, Sybel, “Gross-Deutschland” and “Germania Triumphans”—it represents a considerable body of thought. And it is the literature of the devil. Not one kindly sentiment, not one generous expression, is to be found within it. It is informed with passionate cupidity for the writer’s country and unreasoning, indiscriminate hatred and jealousy towards everything outside it—above all, towards the British Empire. How could such a literature fail to bring about a world-coalition against the country which produced it! Were there no Germans who foresaw so obvious a result? The whole tendency of the doctrine is that Germany should, artichoke fashion, dismember the world. Not a word is said as to the world suddenly turning and dismembering her. But was not that the only protection against such monstrous teaching as these books contain?

You may object that these Imperialists were but a group of monomaniacs and did not represent the nation. But the evidence is the other way. They represented that part of the nation which counts in international politics—they represented the Kaiser and his circle, Von Tirpitz and the Navy men, Krupp, von Bohlen and the armour-plated gang, the universities where such doctrines were openly preached, the Army, the Junkers—all the noisy, aggressive elements whose voice has sounded of late years as the voice of Germany. All were infected by the same virus of madness which has compelled Europe to get them once for all into a strait-jacket.

The actual policy of State was conducted on the very lines of these teachings, where the devilish doctrine that war should be for ever lurking in a statesman’s thoughts, that he should be prepared to pounce upon a neighbour should it be in a state of weakness, and that no treaty or moral consideration should stay his hand, is repeated again and again as the very basis of all state-craft. At the time of the Agadir crisis we have the German Minister of Foreign Affairs openly admitting that he took the view of the fanatical Pan-Germans. “I am as good a Pan-German as you,” said Kiderlen-Waechter to the representative of the League. Each was as good or as bad as the other, for all were filled with the same heady, pernicious stuff which has brought Europe to chaos.

Where, now, is that “deep, patient Germany” of which Carlyle wrote? Was ever a nation’s soul so perverted, so fallen from grace! Read this mass of bombast—learned bombast of professors, vulgar bombast of Lokal-Anzeigers and the like, but always bombast. Wade through the prophetic books with their assumption that Britain must perish and Germany succeed her; consult the scolding articles and lectures, so narrow, ungenerous, and boastful in their tone, so utterly wanting in the deeper historical knowledge or true reading of a rival’s character; see the insane Pan-German maps, with their partitions of Europe for the year 1915 or thereabouts; study the lectures of the crazy professors, with their absurd assumption of accurate knowledge and their extraordinary knack of getting every fact as wrong as it could possibly be—take all this together, and then say whether any nation has ever in this world been so foolishly and utterly misled as have the Germans.

I have alluded to their knack of getting everything wrong. It is perfectly miraculous. One would not have thought it possible that people could be always wrong. So blinded have they been by hate that everything was distorted. Never even by accident did they stumble upon the truth. Let us take a list of their confident assertions—things so self-evident that they were taken for granted by the average journalist:

“The British Army was worthless; its presence on the Continent, even if it could come, was immaterial.

“Britain herself was absolutely decadent.

“Britain’s commerce could be ruined by the German cruisers.

“The United States would fall upon us if we were in trouble.

“Canada and Australia were longing to break away from the Empire.

“India loathed us.

“The Boers were eager to reconquer South Africa.

“The Empire was an artificial collection of States which must fly to pieces at the first shock.”

This was the nonsense which grave Berlin Professors of History ladled out to their receptive students. The sinister Treitschke, who is one of half a dozen men who have torn down Imperial Germany just as surely as Roon, Bismarck, and Moltke built it up, was the arch-priest of this cult. Like Nietzsche, whose moral teaching was the supplement to the Pan-German Material doctrine, Treitschke was not, by extraction, a German at all. Both men were of the magnetic Slav stock, dreamers of dreams and seers of visions—evil dreams and dark visions for the land in which they dwelt. With their magic flutes they have led the whole blind, foolish, conceited nation down that easy, pleasant path which ends in this abyss.

Nietzsche was, as his whole life proved, a man upon the edge of

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