Pan-Germany

by André Chéradame

THE SIX LEADING PACIFIST GERMAN INTRIGUES

1. A separate peace between Germany and one of the Entente Allies. The Alsace-Lorraine coup

It is evident that the defection of one of the principal Allies would inevitably place all the others in a situation infinitely more difficult for continuing the struggle. If we assume such a defection, the Germans might well hope to negotiate concerning peace on the basis of their present conquests.

That is why they have multiplied proposals for a separate peace with the Russians. At Berlin they are especially apprehensive of a continuance of the war by Russia because of the inexhaustible reserves of men possessed by the former Empire of the Tsars. The time will probably come when they will attempt also to lure Italy from the coalition by offering her the Trentino, and if necessary, Trieste, at Austria’s expense, this last-named cession, however, being destined, in the German plan, to be temporary only.

The desire to break up the coalition at any cost is so intense among the Germans, that we must anticipate that, at the psychological moment, they will even go so far as to offer to restore Alsace-Lorraine to France. As for the sincerity of such an offer, these words of Maximilian Harden, written early in 1916, enable us to estimate it:—

‘If people think in France that the reëstablishment of peace is possible only through the restitution of Alsace-Lorraine, and if necessity compels us to sign such a peace, the seventy millions of Germans will soon tear it up.’

Moreover, nothing would be less difficult for Germany, thanks to the effective forces of Central Pan-Germany, than to seize Alsace-Lorraine again, very shortly, having given it up momentarily as a tactical manœuvre.

2. A separate peace between Turkey, Bulgaria, or Austria-Hungary, and the Entente

A particularly astute manœuvre on the part of Berlin consists in favoring, under the rose, not perhaps a formally executed separate peace, but, at least (as has already taken place), semi-official negotiations for a separate peace between her own allies named above and the Entente.

The particular profit of this sort of manœuvre in relation to the definitive consummation of the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme, is readily seen if we imagine the Allies signing a treaty of peace with Turkey, for instance. In such a hypothesis the Allies could treat only with the liegemen of Berlin at Constantinople, for all the other Turkish parties having any political importance whatsoever have been suppressed. Now, if the Allies should treat with the Ottoman government, reeking with the blood of a million Armenians, Greeks, and Arabs, massacred en masse as anti-Germans and friends of the Entente, the following results would follow from this negotiation: the Entente, agreeing not to punish the unheard-of crimes committed in Turkey, would renounce its moral platform: it could no longer claim to be fighting in the name of civilization. The Turkish government, which is notoriously composed of assassins, would be officially recognized; and thus the self-same group of men who sold the Ottoman Empire to Germany would be confirmed in power—the group whose leader, Talaat Pasha, declared in the Ottoman Chamber in February, 1917, ‘We are allied to the Central Powers for life and death!’ The control by Germany of the Dardanelles, a strategic position of vast and world-wide importance, guarded by her accomplices, would be confirmed; the numerous conventions signed at Berlin in January, 1917, which effectively establish the most unrestricted German protectorate over the whole of Turkey, would accomplish their full effect during a Pan-German peace.

The Bulgarian intrigues for a so-called separate peace with the Allies have been at least as numerous as those of the Turks of the same nature. In reality, the Bulgarian agents who were sent to Switzerland to inveigle certain semi-official agents of the Entente into negotiations, were there by arrangement with Berlin for the purpose of sounding the Allies, in order to determine to what degree they were weary of the war. The Bulgarians have never been really disposed to conclude peace with the Entente based on compromise upon equitable conditions. They desire a peace which will assure them immense acquisitions of territory at the expense of the Greeks, the Roumanians, and, especially, the Serbians, for at Sofia they crave, above all things, direct geographical contact with Hungary. Thus the great Allied Powers could treat with the Bulgarians only by being guilty of the monstrous infamy of sacrificing their small Balkan allies, and of assenting to a territorial arrangement which would permit Bulgaria to continue to be the Pangermanist bridge between Hungary and Turkey over the dead body of Serbia—an indispensable element in the functioning of the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme, and hence of Central Pan-Germany.

Now, this is precisely the one substantial result of the war to which Bulgaria clings above all else. So it is that a peace by negotiation—in reality a peace of lassitude—between the Allies and Bulgaria, would simply give sanction to this state of affairs.

In the same way, such a peace with Austria-Hungary could but give definitive shape to the Hamburg-Persian Gulf scheme. From the financial and military standpoint, the monarchy of the Hapsburgs, considered as a state, is to-day absolutely subservient to Germany. The reigning Hapsburg, whatever his private sentiments, can no longer do anything without the consent of the Hohenzollern. Any treaty of peace signed by Vienna would be, practically, only a treaty of which the conditions were authorized by Berlin. There must be no illusion. Nothing less than the decisive victory of the Allies will avail to make Germany loosen her grip upon Austria-Hungary, for that grip is to Germany the substantial result of the war. In truth it is that grip which, by its geographic, military, and economic consequences, assures Berlin the domination of the Balkans, and of the East, hence of Central Pan-Germany, hence of Hamburg-Persian Gulf, and the vast consequences which derive therefrom.

Let us make up our minds, therefore, that all the feelers toward a separate peace with Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary, which have been put forth and which will hereafter be put forth, have been and will be simply manœuvres aimed at a so-called peace by negotiation, which would cloak, not simply a German, but a Pan-German peace.

3. The democratization of Germany

Certain Allied groups having apparently made up their minds that the ‘democratization’ of Germany would suffice to put an end automatically to Prussian militarism and to German imperialism, it was concluded at Berlin that a considerable number, at least, of their adversaries, being weary of the war, might be willing to content themselves with a merely formal satisfaction of their demands, in order to have an ostensibly honorable excuse for bringing it to an end. That is why, with the aim of leading the Allies off the scent and inducing them to enter into negotiations, Berlin devoted herself during the first six months of 1917, with increasing energy, to the farce called ‘the democratization of Germany.’ Meanwhile the most bigoted Pangermanists put the mute on their demands. They ceased to utter the words ‘annexations’ or ‘war-indemnities.’ They talked of nothing but ‘special political arrangements’—a phrase which in their minds led to the same result but had the advantage of not embarrassing the peace-at-any-price men in the Allied countries. The device of democratization of Germany was complementary to the Stockholm trick, which, as we know, was intended to convince the Russian Socialists that Russia had no further advantage to expect from continuing the war, since Germany in her turn, was about to enter in all seriousness upon the path of democracy—and so forth.

We must acknowledge that many among the Allied peoples allowed themselves to be ensnared for the moment by this manœuvre, and honestly believed that Germany was about to reform, of her own motion and radically. But when the German tactics had achieved the immense result of setting anarchy loose in Russia,—a state of affairs which was instantly made the most of in a military sense by the Staff at Berlin,—the farce of the democratization of Germany was abandoned. Von Bethmann-Hollweg was sacrificed to the necessity of dropping a scheme which he had managed, and Michaelis—Hindenburg’s man, and therefore the man of the Prussian military party and of the Pangermanists—succeeded him.

As a matter of fact, the Germans have, for all time, had such an inveterate penchant for rapine that they are quite capable of setting up a great military republic and submitting readily enough to Prussian discipline, with a view to starting afresh upon wars for plunder.

We must bear this truth constantly in mind: if the Hohenzollerns have succeeded, in accordance with Mirabeau’s epigram, in making war ‘the national industry,’ it is because, ever since the dawn of history, the Germans have always subordinated everything to their passion for lucrative wars. The same is true of them to-day. Especially in the last twenty years the secret propaganda of the Berlin government has convinced the masses that the creation of Pan-Germany will assure them immense material benefits. It is because this conviction is so firmly rooted among them that substantially the entire body of Socialist workingmen are serving their Kaiser without flinching, and are willing to endure the horrors of the present conflict so long as it may be necessary and so long as they are not conquered in the field.

4. Peace through the International

This is another of the tricks conceived at Berlin. In reality the International, having always followed the direction of the German Marxists, has been the chief means employed for thirty years to deceive the Socialists of the countries now in alliance against Germany by inducing them to believe that war, thanks to the International alone, could never again break out. In a report on ‘the international relations of the German workingmen’s unions’ (1914), the Imperial Bureau of Statistics was able to proclaim as an undeniable truth: ‘In all the international organizations German influence predominates.’

The conference at Stockholm, initiated by German agents, and that at Berne, upon which they are now at work, are steps which German unionism is taking to reëstablish over the workingmen of all lands the German influence, which has vanished since the war began. The idea now is to force the proletariat of the whole world into subjection to the guiding hand of Germany. The object officially avowed is to rehabilitate the International in the interest of democracy. In reality, it is proposed, above all else, to replace in the front rank the struggle between classes in the Allied countries, in order to destroy the sacred unity that is indispensable to enable the most divergent parties to wage war vigorously against Pangermanist Germany. As the Berlin government is well aware that it has nothing to fear from its own Socialists, the vast majority of whom, even when they disown the title of Pangermanists, are partisans of Central Pan-Germany, the profit of the manœuvre based on the International would inure entirely to Germany, who would retain her power of moral resistance unimpaired, while the Allied states, once more in the grip of the bitterest social discord, would find their offensive powers so diminished by this means that peace would in the end be negotiated on the basis of the present territorial occupations of Germany.

5. The armistice trick

All the schemes hitherto discussed, whether employed singly or in combination, are intended, first and last, to assist in playing the armistice trick on the Allies. This is based upon an astute calculation, still founded on the weariness of the combatants, which is so easily understood after a war as exhausting as that now in progress. At Berlin they reason thus—and the reasoning is not without force: ‘If an armistice is agreed upon, the Allied troops will say, “They’re talking, so peace is coming, and, before long, demobilization.” Under these conditions our adversaries will undergo a relaxation of their moral fibre.’

The Germans would ask nothing more. They would enter upon peace negotiations with the following astute idea. If, hypothetically, the Allies should make the enormous blunder of discussing terms of peace on bases so craftily devised, Germany, being still intrenched behind her fronts which had been made almost impregnable, would end by saying, ‘I am not in accord with you. After all is said, you cannot demand that I evacuate territory from which you are powerless to expel me. If you are not satisfied, go on with the war.’

Inasmuch as, during the negotiations, everything essential would have been done by German agents to accentuate the moral relaxation of the country which was most exhausted by the conflict, as they succeeded in doing in Russia in the first months of the Revolution, the immense military machine of the Entente could not again be set in motion in all its parts. The result would be the breaking asunder of the anti-German coalition, and, finally, the conclusion of peace substantially on the basis of existing conquests. Thus Berlin’s object would be attained.

6. The ‘status quo ante’ trick

The last of the German schemes, and the most dangerous of all, is that concealed under the formula, ‘No annexations or indemnities’—a formidable trap, which, as I have pointed out in earlier chapters, has for its object to confirm Germany in the possession of the gigantic advantages which she has derived from the war, and which would assure her the domination of the world, leaving the Allies with their huge war-losses, whose inevitable economic after-effects would suffice to reduce them to a state of absolute servitude with respect to Berlin.