The Policy of Boycotting Thought.
We find it impossible to shut out German music. “Germany, it must be said to its credit,” I read in the daily Press, “is not boycotting foreign art.” In the autumn of 1915 the Royal Theatres of Berlin announced Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” and Scribe’s “Glass of Water.” “Shakespeare, one hears,” writes a reviewer in the Daily News, of December 4, 1915, “is still being played in the German theatres. If you go to a theatre in London you are more likely to see a performance with a title like ‘I don’t Think!’ or ‘Pass the Mustard, Please!’ Shakespeare, to tell the truth, is in England left largely to professors and schoolboys.”
A silly crusade was started in this country against German thought in general, a crusade so petty that it made some of us wince for shame. The upholders of creeds joined in hastily, for German investigators had given our beliefs many uncomfortable shocks. We remember how it came about that the President of the Training College in Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography could with such satisfaction to himself destroy the “infidel.” “The President’s task was all the easier because he knew nothing of German literature; and, indeed, the word ‘German’ was a term of reproach signifying something very awful, although nobody knew exactly what it was.” The obscurantist and opponent of free thought has shown signs of hope that the German’s reputation for awfulness may turn us from his evil companionship into the restful paths of British piety. The Englishman (especially, I believe, the Saxon element) has too often been prone to make a stronghold of ignorance. This stronghold has certainly in industry proved to be a house of cards, and I think it has proved to be equally a house of cards in religion. It would, indeed, be a disastrous outcome of the war if it led us still more to emphasise our insularity. Unless we are readier after the war to learn from everyone, we shall, as a nation, be mentally moribund. It matters not in the least whether the thought be German, French, Austrian, Swiss, Russian, or any other. Miss Petre, in her “Reflections of a Non-Combatant,” has finely stated the wider view:
Thought and learning, art and music, may bear certain characteristics of the country in which they are begotten; but they are also the products of humanity itself, or they would make no appeal to the world at large. The monuments of the German mind are no more robbed of their intellectual value by the national crime of this war than German mountains are robbed of their natural grandeur, German forests of their solemnity, or German rivers of their width and volume.
Any other attitude is extremely likely to degenerate into a petty jealousy that is bred of fear. This is how Mr. H. G. Wells wrote of our attitude towards Germany years ago:
We in Great Britain are now intensely jealous of Germany. We are intensely jealous of Germany, not only because the Germans outnumber us, and have a much larger and more diversified country than ours, and lie in the very heart and body of Europe, but because in the last hundred years, while we have fed on platitudes and vanity, they have had the energy and humility to develop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science and art and literature, to develop social organisation, to master and better our methods of business and industry, and to clamber above us in the scale of civilisation. This has humiliated and irritated rather than chastened us.
Such jealousy is a strangely short-sighted mistake. No valuable or lasting peace will come till jealousy is exorcised. There are ominous signs of the possible triumph of a deadly Saxon insularity, but there are other signs that give us hope. When so ardent a combatant as Mr. Lloyd George can speak well of the services of Germany to the world, all is not lost. It is pleasant to be able to quote these passages from an interview reported in the Daily News of January 25, 1916:
“Mr. Lloyd George is not among those who imagine they are doing their country a service by decrying everything German. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that America and all of us should realise that there were two Germanies before the war. On the one hand, there was the industrial, the commercial, and the intellectual Germany, and in a most remarkable way she had blended the three elements. That Germany was rendering a great service to civilisation. It was conquering the world by the success of its methods and of its example, and that conquest would have proved a very genuine blessing. It would have been the means of saving some of the terrible waste from which most of the social evils of humanity spring. As an ardent social reformer, I freely confess that I myself was learning a good deal from that side of Germany, particularly in the direction of municipal and national organisation.’” Mr. Lloyd George goes on to say that the other Germany, the military Germany, had overthrown the Germany from which he had drawn inspiration. Our task then surely is to help to reduce military dominance everywhere and to help to set free that Germany whose peaceful conquest of the world “would have proved a very genuine blessing.”
That Germany was, and still is, a Germany of simple hearts, of men and women who can love well. I have talked to many British-born wives of interned men. Over and over again I have heard the same story. “I could not have had a better husband, and the children could not have had a better father.” That is why many English wives have already gone to Germany to their husband’s families.
It is time we got rid of grotesque caricatures of the German people. Such caricatures always represent the outlook of war-time, but they do not make for a lasting peace. There is a great German people, and that people and ours should find each other’s hearts. I am not so much concerned as to the Germany of brilliant science and industrious commerce. That is good, but there is something better: It is the Germany of loving husbands and true comrades, of true wives and devoted mothers. It is the heart that rules the world, and we need the true hearts in Germany, England, France, and over all the world to recognise each other. The one prayer for us all in every land in these days surely is, “Lord, that our eyes may be opened!” When we can pray that prayer, we shall begin to see the war to a peace of the heart—the only peace that will not be a “patched-up peace.”
Footnotes:
[40] Lieut. Dr. Kutscher writes with obvious pleasure of the grande loterie de Noël shared out by the officers to the children of C. in France. The children’s parties went on, too, in the New Year. (Int. Review, 10th Aug., 1915).
[41] Cf. p. [161]. These are simply examples of the wild passions war engenders, and there is not always the sergeant at hand who says “Drop that or I shoot you.” One side may be decidedly worse than the other (as seems, e.g., to have been the case in the American Civil War), but this does not alter the character of what war does for human nature.
[43] “An English Girl’s Adventures in Hostile Germany,” pp. 58 and 124. For other incidents see p. [212].
[44] See above, p. [55]. For further examples of civilian kindness see pp. [212] ff.
[45] It is disconcerting to one’s pride to learn that while the sale of German newspapers in England was entirely “verboten” in 1916, English newspapers may still be readily obtained in Germany in the autumn of 1918. Why are we so afraid of the other side being known?
[47] The war has greatly increased that number.
[48] My aim is not political, and I do not, therefore, touch upon the many later utterances. The protests, for example, against the unfairness of the Brest-Litovsk Peace have in Reichstag and Press been numerous and emphatic. For such facts the reader should consult the “Cambridge Magazine.”
[49] We were allowed to suppose that the Lusitania carried no munitions, the Germans were encouraged to believe that she carried mounted guns. Both views were incorrect. The New York Evening Post (quoted by the Labour Leader) published the “manifest” of the number of cases of ammunition carried.
[50] Ernest Poole in “Cassell’s Magazine,” No. 42.
[51] This seems unavoidable. “At last things quieted down a bit, but many wounded had to be brought in between the firing lines—dangerous work, as both sides are liable to fire if they are seen.”—An R.A.M.C. Officer in the Times.
[52] From “The Pageant of War,” by Lady Margaret Sackville.
[54] “There is no reason to suppose that he had seen Germany.” wrote Mr. George Long in Sir William Smith’s “Dictionary of Greek Biography and Mythology.”
[55] Further, we must remember that “The Red Cross on a white field is not a magic mantle that can ward off shells fired by an artillerist at a target which he cannot see, nor against flyers dropping bombs from thousands of feet in the air. ‘Bomb-dropping flyers are the terror of the doctors and wounded behind the lines,’ remarked a doctor to me.”—Karl von Wiegand, in the New York World, August 17, 1916. (“Cambridge Magazine,” Oct. 7, 1916.)
[56] “Church towers in a flat country are the only observation points, and so they are used, and so they are shelled.”—Ernest Poole, in “Cassell’s Magazine,” No. 42, p. 27.
[57] From “Is It To Be Hate?” (Allen and Unwin), a pamphlet which I wrote in 1915. On many points there dealt with my second thoughts are different, as are those of many others. We have learned much since then.
[58] The public is extraordinarily innocent as regards this kind of information. It would form an interesting subject for post-war analysis.
[60] From “Is It To Be Hate?” by the Author.
[61] La guerre devant Le Palais. Par Gabriel Mourey. Paris. Ollendorff 2f.—Times Literary Supplement, Aug. 19, 1915.
[62] Cf. M. Mourey on the Uhlans at Compiègne, p. [206].
[65] “England,” “Germany,” “France,” etc., in these connections actually stand for a very small group of diplomats controlling foreign policy. The association of the names unfortunately makes us think of the countries as a whole, a word fallacy that leads to illimitable disaster.
[67] The variability of war stories may be observed also in the columns of the Times during the Crimean War. The truth is, no doubt, that great local differences of treatment occur, and that stories to the discredit of an enemy are more welcomed than stories in his favour.
[68] In the International Review of August 10, 1915, an Austrian lady, Charlotte Frankl, gives an account of the warm-hearted help she received in France, and the even greater kindness she and others received in England: “Not one of us had had unhappy experiences in England.”
[69] War was declared upon Austria May 23, 1915, and though formal declaration of war against Germany was delayed for more than a year, the obvious fact was that Italy had taken sides with the enemy.
[71] The British Chemical Society expelled its honorary German and Austrian Fellows, men who had worked for the whole of humanity. The German Chemical Society was asked by some of its members to expel an English Honorary Fellow who had attacked German men of science with exceptional virulence. The Society adopted the dignified course of taking no action amidst the passions of war.
[72] “Whatever Mr. Ernest Lissauer and his fellows may have set before themselves in their Tyrtæan poems of hate, in any case it can be said of them that they knew not what they did.... They did not know, though they should have known ... that the solidarity of the nations ... has to-day already become such that no great nation can aim at the very conditions of existence of another without damaging itself at the same time.”—Ed. Bernstein in Das Forum Jan., 1915.
[73] This is one view. Others who have seen German life during the war report a real solidarity of the people, a solidarity which later developments and revelations of Entente proposals has certainly not diminished.
[74] From “Is It To Be Hate?” by Harold Picton (Allen and Unwin). See [footnote] p. [203].
APPENDIX
Mme. F. L. Cyon had some rather important experiences at Lille at the time of the German attack and during the German occupation. She is a woman of singularly cool mentality, and her evidence may be compared with that of Dr. Ella Scarlett-Synge in a widely distant war area.
Mme. Cyon has very kindly placed her notes of her experiences at my disposal. As the notes record also a point of view as to war in general, it has seemed more fitting to print them as an appendix. No statement of this kind is unbiased, for the pacifist has his own bias. Yet I am quite certain that everything set down by Mme. Cyon has been set down in complete sincerity and with unusual absence of mental distortion. The record is that made by a quiet worker amidst circumstances where few people remained sane.