VIII.
The Berlin population had followed the various phases of the crisis with tremendous interest, but with no outward show of patriotic fervour. Those fine summer days passed as tranquilly as usual. Only in the evenings did some hundreds of youths march along the highways of the central districts, soberly singing national anthems, and dispersing after a few cries of “Hoch!” outside the Austro-Hungarian and Italian Embassies and the Chancellor’s mansion. On the 2nd of August I watched the animation of the Sunday crowd that thronged the broad avenue of the Kurfürstendamm. It read attentively the special editions of the newspapers, and then each went off to enjoy his or her favourite pastime—games of tennis for the young men and maidens, long bouts of drinking in the beer-gardens for the more sedate citizens with their families. When the Imperial motor car flashed like a streak of lightning down Unter den Linden, it was hailed with loud, but by no means frantic, cheers. It needed the outcries of the Press against Russia as the instigator of the war, the misleading speeches of the Emperor and the Chancellor, and the wily publications of the Government, to kindle a patriotism rather slow to take fire. Towards the close of my stay, feeling displayed itself chiefly by jeers at the unfortunate Russians who were returning post-haste to their native country, and blackguardly behaviour towards the staff of the Tsar’s ambassador as he was leaving Berlin.
That the mass of the German people, unaware of Russia’s peaceful intentions, should have been easily deluded, is no matter for astonishment. The upper classes, however, those of more enlightened intellect, cannot have been duped by the official falsehoods. They knew as well as we do that it was greatly to the advantage of the Tsar’s Government not to provoke a conflict. In fact, this question is hardly worth discussing. Once more we must repeat that, in the plans of William II. and his generals, the Serbian affair was a snare spread for the Northern Empire before the growth of its military power should have made it an invincible foe.
There is no gainsaying that uncertainty as to Britain’s intervention was one of the factors that encouraged Germany. We often asked ourselves anxiously at Berlin whether Germany’s hand would not have been stayed altogether, if the British Government had formally declared that it would not hold aloof from the war. We even hoped, for a brief moment, that Sir Edward Grey would destroy the illusions on which the German people loved to batten. The British Foreign Secretary did indeed observe to Prince Lichnowsky on 29th July that the Austro-Serbian issue might become so great as to involve all European interests, and that he did not wish the Ambassador to be misled by the friendly tone of their conversations into thinking that Britain would stand aside. If at the beginning she had openly taken her stand by the side of her allies, she might, to be sure, have checked the fatal march of events. This, at any rate, is the most widespread view, for a maritime war certainly did not enter into the calculations of the Emperor and Admiral von Tirpitz, while it was the nightmare of the German commercial world. In my opinion, however, an outspoken threat from England on the 29th, a sudden roar of the British lion, would not have made William II. draw back. The memory of Agadir still rankled in the proud Germanic soul. The Emperor would have risked losing all prestige in the eyes of a certain element among his subjects, if at the bidding of the Anglo-Saxon he had refused to go further, and had thus played into the hands of those who charged him with conducting a policy of mere bluff and intimidation. “Germany barks, but does not bite” was a current saying abroad, and this naturally tended to exasperate her. An ominous warning from the lips of Sir Edward Grey would only have served to precipitate the onslaught of the Kaiser’s armies, in order that the intervention of the British fleet might have no influence on the result of the campaign, the rapid and decisive campaign planned at Berlin.
We know, moreover, from the telegrams and speeches of the British Foreign Minister, how carefully he had to reckon with public feeling among his countrymen in general and among the majority in Parliament. A war in the Balkans did not concern the British nation, and the strife between Teuton and Slav left it cold. It did not begin to be properly roused until it grasped the reality of the danger to France’s very existence, and it did not respond warmly to the eloquent appeals of Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey until the day when it knew that the Germans were at the gates of Liège, where they threatened both Paris and Antwerp—Antwerp, “that pistol pointed at the heart of England.”
Looking at the matter from a purely moral point of view, we must recognize that the majority of the British have a deeply religious spirit, but a Christian ideal that is utterly at variance with the warlike pietism of the Kaiser and his subjects. Their unsophisticated ideas and their Puritan principles lead them to condemn all statecraft that lets loose the scourge of war. Their reluctance to take part in a Continental war was only overcome through the dastardly attack of Germany upon a little free people, too weak to parry the blow. Then followed an irresistible impulse to punish and avenge, when news was brought of the atrocities committed by the German soldiery in Belgium.
It is this nation, dowered with a true moral greatness, that enemy speakers and pamphleteers accuse to-day of having formed the coalition that bars the way to their ambitious schemes. It is England that they denounce as having woven a web of intrigue to enmesh their country. They know the British nation no better than Treitschke and his followers knew it, when they proclaimed that it was a mere rabble of shop-keepers, greedy of pelf and destitute of warrior virtues. They misjudged it as hopelessly as Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, who was indignant at its setting so much store by an antiquated treaty. The events leading up to the present war have revealed to us the honesty and scrupulousness of British diplomacy, side by side with the bad faith of German diplomacy; and they have thrown ample light upon the loyalty of Great Britain and her ministers, as contrasted with the double-dealing of Germany and her Imperial functionaries.