A GERMAN TOUR
“In small, truckling States, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence: but a great State is too much envied, too much dreaded to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded.”—Edmund Burke, Letter I on A Regicide Peace.
In the late summer of 1908, at the end of the parliamentary session, Mr. Lloyd George traversed Germany from west to east and from south to north. It was a very thorough and systematic motor-tour. He was the travelling guest of Mr. (now Sir) Charles Henry,[[55]] a Member of Parliament of great public spirit and strong Liberal views, who invited me also to accompany the party. It was a journey of profound interest for us all. The object of the tour was to investigate the German system of National Insurance. Parliament had just passed the Old Age Pensions Act; and Mr. Lloyd George had already publicly promised to round off the British pension system by a general scheme of national insurance. Before drafting the actual Bills he wished to make a complete study of that very comprehensive system which had been operating in Germany since 1893. The German Government gave us access to all their Central State Insurance Offices, and gave us facilities for interviewing all their leading Insurance civil servants. We visited most of the largest towns of the German Empire, and had conversations with employers and workmen—Socialists and trade unionists—as well as with officials. Never was a statesman’s holiday spent in a more thorough investigation of a great problem of the lives of the people.
We started the motor-tour in France. We trained to Amiens, where the motor met us, and travelled on the great northern French national roads through the very region where so much of the fighting has taken place during the last three years—through Compiègne, Soissons, along the valley of the Aisne to Rheims, where we visited the Cathedral—that great masterpiece of Gothic architecture which has since suffered such sacrilegious injury. Thence we travelled south by Châlons-sur-Marne, following the river valley by Vitry and Bar-le-Duc. We crossed the Meuse and passed through Nancy, that most lovely of valley frontier towns, which has since so bravely borne such fierce enemy attacks. Nancy looked very peaceful on that August day when we passed through her pretty streets and pressed on towards the Vosges Mountains, hoping to reach Strassburg that evening.
At that point we made a happy miscalculation in our time; and we were benighted in a little French village just on the edge of the frontier at the very summit of the Vosges. We found that we could get supper and beds at one of those clean little auberges which are scarcely ever lacking in the smallest French village. As we supped on the excellent meal of bouillon and cutlets improvised by the ready hostess, she stood and talked to us. She spoke to us of the memories of 1870-71, when the tide of war had so swiftly passed by that little village. She was a school-child at that time, and she had missed two years of her schooling. For the Germans had remained in occupation of that part of the country on the Vosges frontier for fully a year after the end of the war. The withdrawal of the army took place, Department by Department, as the indemnity was paid; and this Department was the last to be evacuated. Before the war she was living well within France; at the end she found herself on the edge of the new frontier.
We asked her how she managed to make an inn pay at such a spot. “Oh, quite easily,” she said. “We are kept going by the people of French birth who come up on Sundays from Alsace!” “Why?” “Oh, just to feel the joy of living for a day on French soil!”
Next day we motored down to Strassburg, climbed the towers, and saw the marks of the German shells fired nearly forty years before, and spent a pleasant afternoon in the picturesque streets of that ancient town. As far as man could do it Alsace had been painted black, white and red with Teuton colours. Nowhere in the streets of Strassburg did we observe any sign or notice in any language but German. Everywhere were German soldiers, and in the evening we attended a concert of massed German bands at which the music was purely Teuton, and Teuton of the most patriotic kind. But the people seemed to us to listen with a certain strange dull indifference to all this brazen wooing; and beneath the surface we seemed to hear the whisper of a coming storm. Next day, motoring across the country, we had occasion to ask the way from an Alsatian peasant. The question was asked in German, but one of the party slipped in with French. The peasant’s face instantly lighted up. “Ah! do the gentlemen speak in French?” he said. “Ah! I prefer to speak in that language myself.” So little had all the arts of suppression succeeded in crushing the spirit of that race.
At Stuttgart we were witnesses of a strange event, which comes now back to memory with a significance which was then hidden. Count Zeppelin was then experimenting with his airships, and one of those new miracles had been advertised to start on a voyage from a spot near Stuttgart. The whole town had flooded out in a vast multitude to see the airship make a start; but at the critical moment there arose a hurricane of wind. The ship was torn from its moorings and fell in utter wreckage and confusion in the midst of the crowd. We arrived on the scene just after this had happened, and met the people returning from witnessing the disaster. What was notable about that multitude was the passion of grief which at that moment was sweeping over them. It was as if they had all suffered some acute personal loss. Men and women were gesticulating, some were almost weeping; all their faces were troubled and perplexed. As the people coming from the city met those returning we could hear exclamations of sorrow and almost of anguish. “Ah!” they cried, “is the airship down? What a horrible calamity!” We heard afterwards that the crowd surrounding the airship had just sung that famous national hymn, “Deutschland über alles.” They had been worked up to ecstasy when the airship crashed.
So we motored through that land in that happy peace time, little foreboding all the great calamities that were to break from that storm-centre on to an unsuspecting world.
Bethmann-Hollweg was at that time “Home Secretary,” a vigorous, amiable Minister of the official kind, sincerely keen on social reforms; a Junker of the better type. He treated Mr. Lloyd George with great courtesy. He returned from his holiday, and specially entertained him and his party in the famous restaurant at the Zoological Gardens at Berlin. He invited many eminent members of the German Civil Service to meet us. Every one was very gracious and polite—almost too polite for comfort. After dinner we went into a large reception-room, and there we remained standing all the evening talking and looking at one another. Towards the end of the evening we began to feel very fatigued. I ventured to ask one of the German officials whether it would be the correct thing to sit down. “Oh!” he said. “We have all been waiting for you to sit down! We, too, are very tired!”
In the middle of this rivalry in fatigue, they brought round great glasses of foaming beer in Prussian fashion. Mr. Lloyd George, who is almost a teetotaler, looked at the glasses with a scared expression. Then suddenly his face grew resolute. “We must show that Great Britain is not to be left behind!”
Bethmann-Hollweg did not talk politics until towards the end of dinner. The conversation drifted to King Edward’s visit to the Russian Czar at Réval. That visit had caused a great ferment in Germany, and grave suspicions of British intentions. Bethmann-Hollweg voiced those suspicions in the frankest manner. “You are trying to encircle us!” he cried to Mr. Lloyd George. “You and France and Russia are attempting to strangle us!”
Mr. Lloyd George assured him of the friendliness of Great Britain towards all the great Powers; but for the moment he refused to be appeased. He thumped the table with his hand. “The Prussian Government has only to lift a finger,” he cried, “and every living Prussian will die for the Fatherland!”
Mr. Lloyd George listened to all this with his characteristic calmness and good-humour. “But what about the other Germans?” he put in at this point.
A shadow passed over the face of the Prussian Minister.
“Oh! they?” he said with a gesture. “They, too, will come along!”
But this was only a flash. On the whole, Bethmann-Hollweg was very friendly; and the facts of his family life showed him Anglophile. He had sent his son to an English University; and admiration for English education was, curiously enough, just at that moment almost as much a fashion in Germany as admiration for German education in England. When we were lunching with a judge at Frankfort Mr. Lloyd George discovered that the daughter of the house had actually been at school along with his own daughter at the famous English girls’ school near Brighton—Roedean.
Of course, it is always foolish to imagine that social courtesies seriously affect the grave pursuit of national interests in any country. But they produce a friendly atmosphere; and he would be a criminal who, with all the causes of difference and conflict in the world, did not always try to improve the human atmosphere.
The people of Hamburg were remarkably friendly to us. The merchants trading with England gave us an especially enthusiastic reception. They feasted us at a banquet at which sat the Hamburg Prussian Minister—for Berlin keeps a Ministry in the “Free Towns” as a last relic of their former independence.
It was on the occasion of that banquet that Mr. Lloyd George threw out the idea of regulating armaments by a Plimsoll “Load-line” fixed according to population. It is strange to-day to remember with what enthusiasm that suggestion was received by the Hamburg merchants.
The authorities of Hamburg provided a launch to take us into every corner of their famous port, so as to show us all the power and pride of their new creation—with all its marvellous up-to-date devices for handling ships and cargoes, its wonderful new docks and elevators, its ingenious and multifarious resources for expediting sea-traffic. It was good to see that port; if only to realise the wisdom of the King’s advice to us at home—“Wake up, Britain!”
It is difficult to exaggerate the part played by the personality of the Kaiser in German imperial politics at that moment. If one probed any great German question to the bottom, one always came back to that fact. Take the question of the Navy—that vital Anglo-German problem of the early century. The Army chiefs were, I think, quite ready to contemplate a naval “deal,” if only to keep England out of the land-wars of the Continent. The Social Democrats, of course, were more than willing; they were anti-naval as well as anti-militarist. But to the Kaiser the Navy was always prime favourite; it was his toy, his darling dream, his cherished ambition. His sincerest belief and hopes were expressed in the phrase, “Our future lies on the ocean.” He stimulated the popular zeal for the Navy in every possible way. The Nord Deutsche Lloyd Liners had elaborate pictures comparing the respective navies, and showing the smallness of the German in comparison with ours; the great German Navy League was constantly pushed forward; and no Minister could long remain in power who did not sympathise with this cult. The curious thing was that the German populations along the sea-board were not half so enthusiastic for the Navy as the inland populations, who seemed enthusiastic in proportion to their ignorance of the sea.
Many Germans used to put down the Kaiser’s passion for the Navy to his English blood. He was a very enthusiastic yachtsman; and, as most yachtsmen are Englishmen, that threw him into constant relations of intimacy with English sailor-men. The English yachtsmen on the North Sea found him almost excessive in his friendliness. I remember an instance given to me by a famous English yachtsman, fond of cruising in northern waters. A German torpedo-boat had accidentally one evening broken the bowsprit of his yacht. During the night, while the owner was asleep, a body of carpenters came on board of the English yacht and mended the bowsprit. In the morning, after breakfast, the Kaiser arrived himself. He had sent the carpenters. “Well!” he said, “how do you like your new bowsprit?” Then he looked at it whimsically. “When you go back to England,” he said, “tell them it was ‘made in Germany’!”
And yet at that very time this friendliness towards English yachtsmen—of which this was only one example—was not preventing the Kaiser from regarding the British naval power with a haunting jealousy that led him into the constant intrigues against England, of which we gain a glimpse in the secret correspondence discovered in the palace of the Russian Czar.
The Kaiser, indeed, was at that time always a great trouble to all the diplomats. He was like a perpetual cracker explosively zig-zagging about in all the Foreign Offices of Europe. Nobody ever knew what he would do or say—to whom he would talk, and with whom he would correspond. He had a touch of freakish irresponsibility. “I always knew that Willy would come to no good,” sighed an English Princess of the old school; and she seemed to have an eye for character. After Agadir, he calmly protested that the British Government had no right to object, as he had told some one of his intentions when he was visiting the British Court! His telegram to President Wilson seems to show that he carried this view of the British Constitution right up to the eve of the Great War.
“He is a bad neighbour,” said an official of the British Foreign Office at that time; and that really seemed to sum it up.
His constant changes of mood made German foreign policy very difficult to forecast, and I do not think that any one can claim to have foreseen the future.
The German officials told me that they had never had a visitor with a quicker mind than Mr. Lloyd George. After a long day spent in the Central Insurance Office at Berlin, the men who went round with us were very enthusiastic. “He grasps the system more rapidly than any student we have ever had.” Mr. Lloyd George, indeed, made a very exhaustive study of the German system. But in his Act he improved upon it and added to it in many important respects.[[56]]
It was a strange visit, curious to look back upon at this distance of time. Our days were filled with the insistent calls of a great social inquiry. But we could not ignore another aspect. After all, there was a greater problem darkening the air than insurance against individual sickness and unemployment. What about insurance against another and greater human sickness—the sickness of war? The thought of that kept recurring, like a secondary theme in some piece of music.
The impressions gained during this tour (1908) partly account, no doubt, for the firmness of Mr. Lloyd George’s language in that famous City speech with which, after consultation with Sir Edward Grey, he faced the German Agadir threat in 1911. He himself always contended at the time that that speech saved Europe from war. A firm, clear, real attitude—an attitude that would convince Germany that we meant what we said—that is what he always in those days advocated. He argued that here was the most positive realistic Power in the world—with no regard for sentimentalism or even humanity where the interests of Germany were concerned. Very well; let us treat them as they treated us. Let them know definitely where we stood. Let our language to them be plain and frank. They would respect us all the more for it.
He was very fiercely attacked for this speech by the pacifists at the time, both in public and private. He made a characteristic reply to their pin-pricks. “Perhaps it would have been better if I had not made the speech! There would have been war, and the Prussian bully would have got the thrashing he deserves!”
Then, as since, nothing irritated and angered him more than the attitude of Germany to France. “It is simply persecution!” he used to say. “The world cannot be carried on along these lines!”
So he had already a dim perception of the great issue which was so soon to divide the world.
Between 1908 and 1914 came that “Turtle Dove” period (1912-1914) during which Germany wooed us. Never had Germany been more friendly to Great Britain than she was in the spring of that fatal year, 1914; never had our relations been more smooth; never had her protestations of affection been more numerous. The change from 1911 was almost startling.
Perhaps it ought to have startled us more. It is so easy to be sages after the accomplished fact. But it is not often that the architects of suspicion build wisely; their day comes once in a while, and they rejoice exceedingly. It is, perhaps, the worst crime of Germany that she has strengthened that sinister creed of doubt, and lowered faith between man and man.
[55] Died January, 1920.
[56] He raised the level of the sick benefit; he added several new benefits; and he paid the doctors better.