THE COMMON PEOPLE OF GERMANY AND THE WAR
July 7, 1915.
It has lasted for eleven months. How much longer will it continue?
Our sentries are even more impatient than we are ourselves. They grumble and faultfind. “It is too bad!” they exclaim. “Do you think it will be over in a month?” they ask us. “Pooh!” we answer; “in a year perhaps, or maybe two, when we have conquered the autocracy which tyrannizes over you!” They stare at us blankly, utterly disheartened.
These poor fellows are suffering. They have many children, six, seven, or eight. Their savings are exhausted, and the wolf is at the door. When we are marching to work, they recount their troubles to Brissot and to me, confidingly and deferentially, as they would to an elder brother. They are good by nature, simple-minded, somewhat subservient, weighted by innumerable centuries of silent submission. One perceives so clearly that they have not effected their revolution, and that despite parliamentary suffrage and the Reichstag they are still under the dominion of the feudal age.
Through studying them closely, and through talking with them, it seems to me that I am beginning to understand this huge and mysterious Germany. I knew something of the élite of the country, but was quite ignorant of the common people, workmen, peasants, and lower middle class. But these are the backbone of Germany.
How different is their world from ours! In France we read the paper; we have political ideas; we influence the appointment of ministers; we take sides passionately, for or against Pelletan, for or against Clemenceau, for or against Poincaré; every one of our village orators has good advice to give to our admirals, our generals, and our diplomats. How unlike Germany! Nothing can equal the ignorance of these folk in public matters. Think of a French agriculturist of the days of Louis XIV, hardworking and kindly, engrossed in domestic cares, knowing that it is hard to gain a livelihood and occupied in this pursuit by day and by night; accepting princes, seigneurs, taxes, corvées, and wars as one accepts sunshine, rain, hail, and frost, without venturing to pass any judgment upon them; saying that these things have been, are, and will be, that he himself is but a poor man, that every one has his own trade, that it is the king’s to govern and his to provide a living for his family; there you have the political essence of the German peasant and the German workman. Monarchy, republic, foreign relations, double alliance or triple alliance—don’t waste your time talking to him about these. Should you do so, he will listen, he will express a civil assent, and will fall asleep over his beer.
A Frenchman cannot understand how utterly indifferent are the common people in Germany to political ideas and to questions of state. A Frenchman, whether he knows it or not, and even if he believes himself to be a monarchist, reasons like a leader. He speaks as if he were himself a part of the king, and a considerable part. He eagerly discusses the affairs of the country. Militarist or anti-militarist, he is patriotic to the core—patriotic like the sovereign he is. Should the foreigner insult France, he is personally insulted; this is his own business; the offence is not offered to some distant prince; it touches himself, the individual king; it makes his own skin tingle. This was obvious at the mobilization; it remains obvious after a year of war. It is not simply a caste which detests the Kaiser and his satellites and wishes to subdue them; these feelings animate every Frenchman, be he minister or cobbler. For France, one and indivisible, is truly a free nation, a collection of autonomous individuals who have determined to live together, who know themselves to have been entrusted with the most exalted of human missions, and each one of whom makes the fulfilment of that mission a point of personal honour.
How different is Germany! The country possesses an élite of persons well equipped for administration and rule, and this endows her national life with a fine aspect of cohesion. But directly we examine more closely, doubts arise; we see that the cohesion is no more than apparent; there are those who theorize about Germany as a whole, but there is not one Germany; between the people and the leaders there is no intimate solidarity, no communion of love, hope, and will. Above, there is an empyrean of men who believe themselves superhuman, who utter claims, trace plans, issue orders (Befehle), who, as if at section drill, thunder out commands to Germany and to the world at large; below, there is a swarm of good and peaceable folk, all engaged in their insignificant private affairs, and making no attempt to interfere in the loftier mysteries.
Doubtless, in the lower regions, respect is felt for the empyrean; people tremble before it, as before the eye of God; but there is no risk that they will attempt to penetrate its designs. They are faithful subjects, and they obey. They are soldiers when the time comes for enrolment, and good soldiers; when the order for mobilization is issued, they go to the war; when the ritual demands it, they shout hurrahs “for king and country.” But at bottom, if words have any meaning, they are not patriots. Militarists, yes; easily regimented, yes; patriots, no.
It is true that they would be greatly astonished if any one were to say to them point-blank: “You don’t care a fig for your country!” They all believe themselves to be good, honest, and loyal Germans. Are they not obedient to the death? Certainly they are. But they would be equally obedient, with very little feeling of disturbance at the change, to George V or to Poincaré; and they would obey just as well in a republic as in a monarchy. It is not their business to be patriots (for this presupposes a degree of liberty, and of internal sovereignty, to which they have not yet attained), but to be good subjects. To obey, unfailingly and without discussion; to abase themselves devoutly before authority; to be subservient to their leader, whoever he may be; to carry out orders whencesoever derived, be they democratic or be they Cæsarian—this it is to be a good German. Active as he is in private affairs, he is passive in religion, with a sort of mystical fervour, and he is passive in his relationships to authority. The Germans hardly realize this, and yet to us it is so obvious.
Here is an example. On one occasion I, a prisoner of war, roundly reprimanded a sentry, reproaching him with disobedience to orders. Secretly I was laughing, but the sentry trembled. Standing at attention as if confronted by an officer, he trembled before the majesty of the command, the Befehl. I had issued an order, and that is why he stood to attention; there he was, submissive, stupefied with willingness; he forgot that I was a Frenchman, subject to his orders, that the regulations forbade me to speak to him, that he should have charged bayonet and touched me with the steel, even run me through. No, I had issued an order; the man who commands, who gives a Befehl, is sacrosanct for the German.
The reason is that the German has never emerged from private life. He lives in his house, on his land, in his factory, his tavern, his church; he lives with his family, with a few friends, with his professional associates. He makes his life there as agreeable as possible; he is an able domestic economist, knowing well how to adorn his residence, his table, his savings bank. The currents of modern life, socialism, liberalism, materialism, the religion of comfort and of hygiene, have developed his practical aptitudes to an unimaginable extent, to a degree unsuspected in France. But no current of modern life has induced him to touch the holy of holies, the government; to discuss the constitution, the bureaucracy, or the army; to investigate the essential problems of political life. Even the boldest among them does not lose his veneration for constituted authority. In fine, there is but one domain in which he is free, that of economic life. Here, therefore, his energy is concentrated, and within this sphere his thoughts are confined. Here he is master; here none can equal him in perseverance and tenacity; here he risks everything and makes trial of everything; unceasingly he innovates; he is hindered by no prejudice: the poverty of recent days spurs him on and makes wealth seem marvellously appetizing; in a decade he transforms a province; in three decades he makes of Germany a fragment of America in the heart of Europe. We are forced to recognize that Germany is the “Marius’s mule” of the economic world.
But this suffices him. Formerly he possessed the clouds, but he has bartered the inheritance for the markets of the world. He boasted of being Greek, but he is now content to be Carthaginian. He makes money, and he knows nothing more.
And authority? Does he not know authority? Yes, he knows it, but as something grand and remote, as a sort of divinity which might do him harm, and which he must render favourable or at least indifferent. He knows it as an average Christian knows the invisible. He believes in it, but continues to mind his own business; he is not jealous of it and has no desire to share its exercise; he gives it his confidence, and pays it a certain worship of an unexacting character; above all, he asks that authority should help him to make money; in that case he finds everything good—the Kaiser, the bureaucracy, the army.
This utilitarian loyalty is especially characteristic of the wealthy German. As far as those of small means are concerned, they recognize that outside private life, beyond the family, the factory, the tavern, and the trade-union, there exists something that is great, divine, and unknowable. In the highest degree of the unknowable, in close proximity to God, the saints, and the hero Siegfried, there exists authority: emperor, princes, generals, diplomatists, ministers. All this is an immense and unfathomable ocean, primitive and sacred; but he, poor mollusc, rooted to his rock, is concerned solely with the tiny region upon which his valves open. And when the terrible convulsion of the powers of the abyss, of the sceptred, gold-laced, and helmeted majesties, rages athwart him, shaking his frail habitation, he trembles, simultaneously inspired with dread and with love, and he murmurs his abjection and his devotion in inarticulate words. When all is over, forgetting the gods that have passed, the gods that glitter, shout at him, and sometimes kick and chastise him, he conscientiously resumes the task of loving his wife, of procreating as many children and of earning as many marks as possible.
After all, the German of no account is utilitarian in his loyalty. He does not, like the wealthy German, demand that his government shall deliver the universe into his hands, so that he may inundate it with wares great and small “made in Germany.” He is less exacting. He asks merely for work and a livelihood. But upon this his desire is firmly fixed. He has become accustomed to a certain degree of comfort—quite recently, it is true, but the newest pleasure is ever the most attractive. He wants to get his belly well-lined during the week, and to be able on Sundays to go with his gnädige Frau and his quiverful of children, all smartly dressed, to drain several dozen tankards of beer, and to spend the entire afternoon, laughing boisterously, in the arbours of neighbouring Wirtschaften. He likes to think proudly that his father lived in poverty, but that he lives at ease. He likes to imagine that no workman in the world is happier than the German workman. As long as he has a full stomach, he can believe that all is well. The government can do what it likes, can ally itself to Austria or to France, can be licentious or strait-laced, can obey or disobey the Reichstag. He himself, trusty Michael, is well off. Germany, therefore, is great, the world is perfect.
I have gradually been able to fathom this state of mind through more or less clandestine conversations with the soldiers who guard us and the peasants who employ us at twenty pfennig for the day of nine hours. Notwithstanding all the patriotic songs with which the recruits make the roads resound, and notwithstanding all the pratings of the pulpit and the school, I am now confident that the affairs of the fatherland are not Michael’s affairs. Whether it be that the degree of economic emancipation he has attained supplements or reinforces his ingrained instinct of submission to authority, in any case, the ancient sentiment, quasi-religious in nature, and the new sentiment, thoroughly utilitarian, lead to the same result, a concern with nothing but private affairs, political indifference, so that one can even say that in the world of politics the common German is a mere cipher.
This state of mind has its advantages. It is favourable to the maintenance of public order. Since everyone rests content in his own sphere, there is no friction, there is no waste of energy, no mutual suspicion between the classes. Authority, certain of its durability, can take long views, it has elbow-room. Whilst those in authority are loved, they can give themselves up to their natural bent, which is to regulate—to regulate the workman at home, the employer abroad; to wrap themselves in purple, to cut a dash, to astonish the universe. All these things are done for their own sake, for the pleasure they give, but they serve also to shed a reflected glory on German commerce. This political nullity of the crowd has hitherto had good results. But hitherto the crowd has consisted of fat kine. Association with the worthy Michael day after day in these times when every one is rationed, when poverty and death stalk abroad, has led me to think that the political nullity of the people, precious to those in authority, is hardly likely to produce a tenacious and trustworthy patriotism, and that in the long run it may well eventuate in disaster.
For nearly a year I have been studying life in this corner of Germany. I observe, I ask questions, and I listen. They are now quite tamed. No longer do they cry death on us. No longer do they call out kaput, except as a joke. In the villages, when the working gang arrives, the children flock to the scene from all directions, bare-footed, somewhat timid, at once shy and smiling. They have heard their fathers say that the French are splendid soldiers, “the only ones who can hold their ground against the grey-blues.” The description has raised us in these youngsters’ esteem. They know, too, that we receive parcels, many parcels. They believe us to be extraordinarily wealthy. The gossips even state with definite assurance that there are six millionaires and one multi-millionaire at Fort Orff; and, for what reason I know not, I am the multi-millionaire. This little world is astonished that persons of such eminence, terrible on the battlefield, should be so friendly with their humble selves. The German bourgeois and the junkers, we gather, have less agreeable manners. Finally, the villagers have been informed that our prison society is a true republic, that we have suppressed all distinctions of fortune, that the “sans-parcels” gain just as much advantage from the coming of the French mail as the “little-parcels” and the “big-parcels.” This communism, natural as it seems to us, touches and vanquishes them.
The fact is that the children and the members of the working gang fraternize. Some of the poor women secretly offer us an apple or an egg. The old men salute us humbly. One of us was addressed as “Most honoured sir,” another as “Highly well-born sir.” Even those who have been discharged from service on account of severe wounds, men with empty sleeves and horribly scarred faces, no longer glare at us with the murderous hatred they showed at the outset.
At Ingolstadt, when we are waiting for our parcels in the square in front of the Kommandantur, civilians come and go before our group and converse with us. The women are particularly attentive. They recognize monsieur Pierre, “who had a frightful wound, and who, God be thanked, is now quite well again”; monsieur Paul, “who …”; monsieur Jacques, “who …” They smile broadly when we call them to order, quoting to them the phrases in which one of the newspapers the night before has censured them for their friendliness to the prisoners. Little do they care what the papers say. The sentry growls at them, but they tell him to his face that the Franzosen are pre-eminently “cholis” and “chantils.” Some of the better educated go so far as to admit that “a red-trousers is worth quite as much as a Feldgrau,” and that “it is all nonsense to say, as people do, that France is decadent.”
Yesterday, some of the gang were talking to a hoary-headed postman.
“Well, daddy, how goes it?” said Bracke, who can speak the Franconian patois.
“Very well, gentlemen, very well!” There he stood, not knowing what to say. He had taken off his Mütze and was wiping his forehead to keep himself in countenance. Then, all at once:
“It grieves me,” stammering slightly, “to think that we are at war with you.…”
“Nou, nou, old chap, we’re not at war with you! Our quarrel is with the big guns of your country. They’re a bad lot; they oppress you, and would like to oppress the whole world. But you’re a poteau! (Du bist ein poteau).”
“Poteau, what’s that?”
“A comrade, a chum.”
The postman had tears in his eyes. “Ah,” he exclaimed, “it does me good to hear you say that. I love the French. You are so awfully nice to every one. You don’t despise the common people.”
“Here, old general, here’s a cheroot which my missus has sent me. Happily France keeps us supplied, as you know. All the same, we intend to give a good hiding to your old Kaiser and all your bigwigs. We are republican. Liberty, equality, and fraternity. Live and let live is our motto. But any one who meddles with us had better look out. Damn it all! why don’t you kick your dirty old Kaiser into the sewer? Never mind! We shall set you free, and be jolly quick about it.”
The postman, dumbfounded, lit his cigar at the wrong end.
Yes, they have changed greatly since our coming. The dogma of French decadence, with which they had been sedulously indoctrinated, no longer finds credence. They join with us in making fun of it. It is amusing to see these humble folk, who have always been treated with disdain by their superiors, whether civil or military, accept us as intimate friends. They feel flattered when they can talk to us on a footing of democratic equality, for they do not fail to recognize our superiority, and they are greatly touched that we never abuse it. They feel that we are sincere in our hatred of the pride of caste. They applaud our republican speeches. In return, they confide to us their grievances and their despair. The poor devils are absolutely unanimous in detesting this horrible butchery.
It is unquestionable that the terrible burden of the war—the most terrible burden of death, weariness, and misery, that has ever weighed humanity down—presses more heavily upon their shoulders than upon ours. We have been held up in the trenches since September. On their side, for a year they have had no respite. Alternately victors and vanquished, upon the eastern front there continually occurs some new gigantic action, like that of the Marne. Day after day there is a savage attack in full force. Day after day there is a massacre. More than three and a half million Germans are fattening the soil of Galicia and Poland; more than ten millions have been wounded. And why? In defence? “Ah,” they say to us, “if you only knew how little we care whether we are French or Prussian! Give us peace, give us peace!”
They no longer believe that the war is a war of defence. They have heard their non-commissioned officers, men of the middle class, cursing Austria for having led them into this hateful business. The idea has become current in the villages where the troops are quartered. Exasperated by their sufferings, the soldiers are murmuring. Many would like to desert. They understand perfectly that they are the victims of a caste of nobles and manufacturers mad with pride. They still obey, but they grumble. A German grumbler is a new phenomenon.
“Every one hates us,” declared in my hearing a young workman from Upper Franconia. “Every one in the world except the Pope and the Turks. There can be no doubt that our rulers wanted everything for themselves. They told us, too, that the French nation was crumbling and would fall to pieces at a touch. What rot! We know well enough that you are splendid soldiers.”
“I was in the Vosges,” said a sentry of the 13th Bavarians. “Your chasseurs alpins are perfect fiends!”
“I was on the Yser,” commented another. “I shan’t forget your colonial infantrymen in a hurry!”
He made me come near the lamp to see his wound.
“Old man,” I rejoined, “my younger brother, a colonial infantryman, was also wounded in the fight on the Yser.”
“We have been made fools of,” they declare without exception. “You are not decadent! Far from it! Nor are your cannon. Fine tales they fed us up with! If our leaders had been the humanitarians they claim to be, it is obvious that we should have a few friends somewhere in the world. We should not have every one against us. And we poor devils have to pay for the folly. It’s altogether too bad! Oh that peace may come quickly! Take Alsace-Lorraine if you like. What on earth does it matter? Take anything. What difference does it make to us whether we are governed from Paris or from Berlin?”
A fat Unteroffizier spoke as follows:
“I honestly prefer the French to the Prussians. The French are good fellows. They feel compassion; they share their bread with us. But the Prussians! It’s kicks we get from them. A pack of swelled-heads who imagine they can do anything they like, who want everything for themselves, who bamboozle their own people and refuse to give them any rights! There is but one thing we want: to live at peace with the world. Instead of that they make us go and kill. Why? Does any one know why? What do we gain by it? The villages are full of widows and disabled men. It is even worse in the towns, where lots of working-class families are positively starving. You fellows are lucky. France is rich. France can send parcels to her prisoners. All that we can do is to draw our belts tighter. They lead us to the slaughter while they leave our wives and children to suffer. And how it drags. Peace! Let’s have done with it! Peace at any price!”
For the last six months I have not heard a single German soldier use any other language than this. Wounded returning to the front, men of the Landwehr or the Landsturm on their way to the fighting-line, they are unanimous. If but the tenth part of their private grumblings were to be translated into action there would be revolution throughout the country.
To speak frankly, these mutterings do not evoke my admiration. They are not the fruit of an indignant conscience, they do not manifest the reaction of inner freedoms which have been outraged and deceived, and which come to their own again in the form of a reasserted dignity. One hears in them nothing but the cry of the beaten and overloaded mule. He wants his peaceful stable, bran, fresh water, warm and comfortable litter. But there is no occasion to be alarmed, for he dreads the whip, and his master is an adept in drubbing him all the way up the hill.
For Michael can hardly be said to have become more spiritual-minded since the empire was founded. In former days he was extremely poor. He was frugal. He was fond of music and of dreaming, and was addicted to a mystical piety. A serf before men, he felt free in the presence of God, his God of the gospels, gentle and affectionate, mein lieber Gott. To-day he is fairly well-to-do. He is still a serf, more of a serf than ever, in relation to those in authority, the nobility, officers in the army, and employers; but he no longer endeavours to find freedom at God’s hands. His new cult is that of a cosy fireside, with good victuals and a barrel of beer. In a word, he has become an egoist. He now thinks only of himself, of his personal interests, of his trade unions which protect his wages, of his co-operative societies which secure his comforts. Without realizing it, through ignoring politics, through taking no interest in the workings of authority, through thinking solely of his own private affairs, he has slipped into the acceptance of that base doctrine which finds expression in the ancient formula, Ubi bene, ibi patria—“My country is the place where I am well off!”
Last July, when he was luxuriating in his petty good fortune, he cried with his masters, “Deutschland über alles!” At his drinking parties he vociferated jingo songs. Some of the megalomania of the Olympians was fermenting in his body, indiscriminately mingled with beer and sausages. In this mood he saw himself mounting in company with his Germania, mounting continuously to attain the topmost summit of glory and strength. Then he loved his Germania. She was so powerful. It was thus that she had always been depicted to him, as a robust and formidable matron, not altogether amiable, imposing her will with peremptory fists, but providing her children with such good things to eat and drink, with all the comforts they could desire. How can one help loving a person like this when one is a poor devil who has only just emerged from poverty?
Now the war has begun. Germania is at length to become queen of the world. Forward! Good Michael sets out for Paris. It will soon be over. A fortnight or so. A simple wedding journey. Just think of it: Rheims, and champagne in floods; Paris, the little women, all the delights of Babylon. For, after all, France, as every one knows, is ours for the taking. Forward!
Forward! But, confound it all, there are some hard knocks! Paris is just over there, but what an inferno of fire to get through first! I say, we’re retreating now! We’re leaving a lot of good Germans on the stubbles and in the ponds of the Marne. What a massacre! They have been fooling us, it seems. The French can beat us after all: in fact, they have already given us a good licking.
“But there’s no end to it. How bitter winter seems in the trenches. Always more dead, and more, and more. My feet are freezing. I am badly fed. Oh, my slippers, my nice, comfortable slippers, my darling wife who used to light my long pipe for me, and who used to cuddle me warm in bed! Sakrament! What’s this horrible war about? They told me it would be such an easy matter. After all, what do I, good, honest Michael, care about ruling the world? Must I pay for this with my skin? No, no; I’m only a poor man. What business is it of mine, this ruling of the world? Oh, lieber Gott, let the war end soon, let me get back to my village, my pub, my bed, and my children!”
Thus has Michael reasoned, and thus he continues to reason. It is not heroic. Sancho Panza would shake him by the hand as a true comrade. Still, why should Michael be a Don Quixote? Has Germany ever claimed to be a Dulcinea? Has she manifested herself to him as charming, winsome, gentle, and maternal, as loving him unselfishly for his own sake? Nothing of the sort! On the contrary, Germany has terrorized him with rough orders, and has made him efface himself by her display of aggressive force. She has appealed to the traditional servility of his imagination, not to the nobility of his heart. She has desired obedience, not affection.
Now the great hour has arrived, the gloomy hour of sacrifice. It is not enough to sing:
Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein.…
No, one simply has to die so that the country one loves may live.
Love is an easy word to say. We have so often been told that the Germans loved Germany, that they were the true patriots, while we, the French, were nothing but anarchists. Yet, after a year of war, these Gallic “grumblers,” who are always wrangling, who take ideas into their heads, and who hold to these ideas so firmly that you sometimes hear them cry, “Perish countries, so long as principle lives and humanity becomes established”—these ungovernable and intractable “anarchists” remain a single body and soul, exhibit infinite patience, and continue the most formidable warlike efforts. Why? Are they inconsistent? Not for a moment. For them, France is justice; France is the human ideal. They save their souls by saving France. They can die, for they would not wish to go on living if beautiful Europe were to fall beneath the German yoke.
But why should you expect these little Michaels of Germany to die cheerfully? Why, as the slaughter increases, should they stand shoulder to shoulder round their leaders, firmly resolved to conquer or to perish? Is Germany really worth dying for?
This much is certain, that the mystical admirers of justice and liberty, who, in time of peace, filled the men of order with dismay, are to-day the most disciplined in the world; whilst the pillars of order, the singers of unity, the adorers of powerful Germania, those who made a mystical cult of force and force alone, have taken to grumbling, are reasoning like ill-conditioned individualists, have denied their faith.
I have noticed a thousand times that these Teuton soldiers who, through dread of their leaders, are not yet traitors in fact, are nevertheless traitors in soul.
This no longer surprises me. I understand why they regard us without hatred, why they long for peace at any price, and why, if the war is to continue, they look forward to being made prisoners. They suffer too much, and their suffering has overwhelmed their patriotism.
Those only who love greatly can accept great suffering. Their boasted affection for Germania was nothing more than a fever of the imagination, a fictitious suggestion, a sentiment for display. It was the fascination felt by the ignorant for everything that glitters and makes a brave noise. They loved Germania in her success. They loved her triumphant, colossal, brobdingnagian. They loved her as a parvenu loves wealth and a gourmand good cheer. They loved her carnally, a power of the flesh. Has any one ever seen such a love accept sacrifice cheerfully and outlast misfortune? No, the ideal alone is worth more than life. The ideal alone evokes that wonderful love which increases with suffering, the chaste and shy love which shuns display, and which does not chant its pæans or unfurl the beauties of its splendid wings until the hour of absolute surrender. Now Germany has long ere this ceased to be an ideal.
This is what it means to have nothing but force to depend upon. When we lose it, we have lost all. This is what it means to build upon egoism and the political nullity of the masses. When the hour strikes for an appeal to their heroism, we encounter nothing but a soft and melancholy passivity.
But what an astounding organization it is which is capable of neutralizing so much inadequacy of will, and is able to make tough and efficient armies out of this assemblage of worthless material!