XVII
One day in 1913, I was asked by Robert Donald to call on a Canadian professor who had been engaged in “a statistical survey of Europe,” whatever that may mean, and might have some interesting information to give.
When he received me, I found him a little, mild-eyed man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, behind which I presently discovered the look of one obsessed by a knowledge of some terrific secret. That was after he had surprised me by declining to talk about statistics, and asking abruptly whether I was an honest young man and a good patriot. Upon my assuring him that I was regarded as respectable by my friends and was no traitor, he bade me shut the door and listen to something which he believed it to be his duty to tell, for England’s sake.
What he told me was decidedly alarming. In pursuit of his “statistical survey of Europe” on behalf of the Canadian and American governments, he had spent two years or so in Germany. He had been received in a courteous way by German professors, civil servants, and government officials, at whose dinner tables he had met German celebrities, and high officers of the German army. They had talked freely before him after some time, and there was revealed to him, among all these people, a bitter, instinctive, relentless, and jealous hatred of England. They made no secret that the dominant thought in their souls was the necessity and inevitability of a conflict with Great Britain, in order to destroy the nation which stood athwart their own destiny as their greatest commercial competitor, and as the one rival of their own sea power, upon which the future of Germany was based. For that conflict they were preparing the mind of their own people by intensive propaganda and “speeding up” the output of their naval and military armament. “England,” said my little informant, “is menaced by the most fearful struggle in history, but seems utterly ignorant of this peril, which is coming close. Is there no one to warn her people, no one to open their eyes to this ghastly hatred across the North Sea, preparing stealthily for their destruction? Will you not tell the truth in your paper, as I now tell it to you?”
I told him it would be difficult to get such things published, and still more difficult to get them believed. I had considerable doubt myself whether he had not exaggerated the intensity of hatred in Germany, and, in any case, the possibility of their daring to challenge Great Britain, as long as our fleet maintained its strength and traditions. But I was disturbed. The little man’s words coincided with other warnings I had heard, from Lord Roberts, from visitors to Germany, from Robert Blatchford—to say nothing of W. T. Stead and his German “spooks.” ... Robert Donald, of The Daily Chronicle, laughed at my report of the conversation. “Utter rubbish!” was his opinion, and he refused to print a word.
“Go to Germany yourself,” he said, “and write a series of articles likely to promote friendship between our two peoples and undo the harm created by newspaper hate-doctors and jingoes. Find out what the mass of the German people think about this liar talk.”
So I went to Germany, with a number of introductions to prominent people and friends of England.
It was not the first time I had visited Germany, because the previous year, I think, I had been to Hamburg with a party of journalists, and we were received like princes, fêted sumptuously, and treated with an amazing display of public cordiality. There was private courtesy, too, most kind and amiable, and I always remember a young poet who took me to his house and introduced me to his beautiful young wife who, when I said good-by, gathered some roses from her garden, put them to her lips, and said, “Take these with my love to England.”
But something had happened in the spirit of Germany since that time. The first “friend of England” to whom I presented a letter of introduction was a newspaper editor in Düsseldorf, a man of liberal principles who had taken a great part in arranging an exchange of visits between German and British business men. He knew many of the Liberal politicians in England and could walk into the House of Commons more easily than I could.
He seemed to be rather flustered when I called upon him and explained the object of my visit, and he left me alone in his study for a while, on pretext of speaking to his wife. I think he wanted me to read his leading article, signed at the foot of the column, in a paper which he laid deliberately on his desk before me. I puzzled through its complicated argument in involved German, and through its fog of rhetoric there emerged a violent tirade against England.
When he came back, I tackled him on the subject.
“I understood that you were an advocate of friendly relations between our two peoples? That article doesn’t seem to me very friendly or helpful.”
He flushed a hot color, and said, “My views have undergone a change. England has behaved abominably.”
The particular abomination which he resented most deeply was the warning delivered by Lloyd George—of all people in England!—that Great Britain would support French interests in Morocco, and would not tolerate German aggression in that region. That was at the time of the Agadir incident. The British attitude in that affair, said the Düsseldorf editor, was a clear sign that Great Britain challenged the right of Germany to develop and expand. That challenge could not be left unanswered. Either Germany must surrender her liberty and deny her imperial destiny, at the dictation of Britain, or show that her power was equal to her aspirations. That, anyhow, was the line of his argument, which we pursued at great length over pots of lager beer, in a restaurant where we dined together.
I encountered the same argument, and more violent hostility, from a high ecclesiastic in Berlin, who was a great friend of the Kaiser’s and formerly a professed lover of England. He was a tall, thin, handsome man, who spoke English perfectly, but was not very civil to me. Presently, as we talked of the relations between our two nations, he paced up and down the room with evident emotion, with suppressed rage, indeed, which broke at last through his restraint.
“English policy,” he said, “cuts directly across our legitimate German rights. England is trying to hem in Germany, to hamper her at every turn, to humiliate her in every part of the world, and to prevent her economic development. During recent days she has not hesitated to affront us very deeply and deliberately. It is intolerable!”
He spoke of an “inevitable war” with startling candor, and when I said something about the duty of all Christian men, especially of a priest like himself, to prevent such an unbelievable horror, he asked harshly whether I had come to insult him, and touched the bell for my dismissal.
Such conversations were alarming. Yet I did not believe that they represented the general opinion of the great mass of German people. I was only able to get glimpses here and there in Düsseldorf and Frankfort, Hanover, Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden of middle-class and working-class thought, but wherever I was able to test it in casual conversation with business men, railway porters, laborers, hotel waiters, and so on, with whom I exchanged ideas in my very crude German, or their remarkably good English (in the case of commercial men and waiters), I found utter incredulity regarding the possibility of war between England and Germany, and a contempt of the sword-rattling and “shining armor” of the Kaiser and the military caste.
I was, for instance, in a company of commercial men at Abendessen in a hotel at Leipzig, when the topic of conversation was the Zabern affair, in which Lieutenant von Förstner had drawn his sword upon civilians—and a cripple—who had jeered at him for swaggering down the sidewalk like a popinjay. The Crown Prince had sent him a telegram of approbation for his defense of his uniform and caste. But, one and all, the commercial men with whom I sat expressed their loathing of this military arrogance, and were indignant with those who defended its absurdity. I remember the German who sat next to me had been a designer in a porcelain factory in the English potteries for many years. With him I talked quietly of the chance of war between England and Germany. “What is the real feeling of the ordinary folk in Germany?” I asked. He answered with what I am certain was absolute sincerity—though he was wrong, as history proved. He told me that, outside the military caste, there was no war feeling in Germany, and that the idea of a conflict with England was abhorrent and unbelievable to the German people. “If there were to be war with England,” he said, “we should weep at the greatest tragedy that could befall mankind.”
There were many people I met who held that view, without hypocrisy, and their sincerity at that time is not disproved because when the tocsin of war was sounded, the fever of hate took possession of them.
It was Edward Bernstein, the leader of the Socialists, who warned me of the instability of the pacifist faith professed by German democrats. “If war breaks out,” he said, “German Socialists will march as one man against any enemy of the Fatherland. Although theoretically they are against war, neither they nor any other Socialists have reached a plane of development which would give them the strength to resist loyalty to the Flag and the old code of patriotism, when once their nation was involved, right or wrong.”
I tried to get the ideas of German youth on the subject of war with England, and I had an excellent opportunity and an illuminating conversation with the students of Leipzig University. A group of these young men, who spoke excellent English, allowed me to question them, and were highly amused and interested.
“Do you hate England?” I asked.
There was a rousing chorus of “Yes!”
“Why do you hate England?”
One young man acted as spokesman for the others, who signified their assent from time to time. The first reason for hatred of England, he said, was because when a German boy was shown the map of the world and when he asked what all the red “splodges” on it signified, he was told that all that territory belonged to England. That aroused his natural envy. Later in life, said this young man, he understood by historical reading that England had built up the British Empire by a series of wars, explorations, and commercial adventures which gave her a just claim to possession. They had no quarrel with that. They recognized the strength and greatness of the English people in the past. But now they saw that England was no longer great. She was decadent and inefficient. Her day was done. They hated her now as a worn-out old monster who still tried to grab and hold, and prevent other races from developing their genius, but had no military power with which to defend their possessions. England was playing a game of bluff. Germany, conscious of her newborn greatness, her immense industrial genius, her vital strength, needing elbow room and free spaces of the earth, would not allow a degenerate people to stand across her path. Germany hated England for her arrogance, masking weakness, and her hypocritical professions of friendship, which concealed envy and fear.
All this was said, at greater length, with admirable good humor and no touch of personal discourtesy. But it made me thoughtful and uneasy. The boy was doubtless exaggerating a point of view, but if such talk were taking place in German universities, it boded no good for the peace of the world.
I returned to England, perplexed, and not convinced, one way or the other. As far as I could read the riddle of Germany, public opinion was divided by two opposing views. The military caste, the old Junker crowd, and their satellites, ecclesiastical and official, with, probably the Civil Service, were beating up the spirit of aggression, and playing for war. The great middle class, and the German people in the mass, desired only to get on with their work, to develop their commerce, and to enjoy a peaceful home life in increasing comfort. The question of future peace or war lay with the view which would prevail. I believed that, without unnecessary provocation on the part of England, rather with generous and friendly relations, the peaceful disposition of the German people would prevail over the military caste and its intensive propaganda....
I was wrong, and the articles I wrote in an analytical but friendly spirit were worse than useless, though I am still convinced that the German people as a whole did not want war, until their rulers persuaded them that the Fatherland was in danger, called to their patriotism, and let loose all the primitive emotions, sentiments, ideals, passions, and cruelties which stir the hearts of peoples, when war is declared.
After that visit to Germany, I went several times to Ireland, and although there seemed to be no link between these two missions, I am certain now that in the mind of German agents, politicians, and military strategists, the situation in Ireland was not left out of account in their estimate of war chances. With labor “unrest” from the Clyde to Tonypandy, with suffragette outrages revealing a weakness and lack of virility (from the German point of view) in English manhood, and with Ireland on the edge of civil war which would involve great numbers of British troops, England was losing her power of attack and defense. So as we know, German agents, like the Baron von Zedlitz, were writing home in their reports.
Sir Edward Carson, afterward Lord Carson, with F. E. Smith, afterward Lord Birkenhead (so does England reward her rebels!) were arranging a bloody civil war in Ireland, which, but for a Great War, would have spread to England, without let or hindrance from the British government.
When the Home Rule Bill, under Asquith’s premiership, was nearing its last stages, Carson raised an army of Ulstermen and invited every Protestant and Unionist to take a solemn oath in a holy league and covenant to resist Home Rule to the very death. I was an eyewitness of many remarkable and historic scenes when “King Carson,” as he was called in irony by Irish Home Rulers, inspected his troops, made a triumphal progress through Ulster, stirring up old fires of racial and religious hatred.
There was a good deal of play-acting about all this, and Carson was melodramatic in all his speeches and gestures, with a touch of Irving in the rendering of his pose as a grim and resolute patriot and leader of Protestant forces, but there was real passion behind it all, and the sincerity of fanaticism. If it came to the ordeal of battle, these young farmers and shopkeepers who paraded in battalions before Carson and his lieutenants, marching with good discipline, a strong and sturdy type of manhood, would fight with the courage and ruthlessness of men inspired by hatred and bigotry.
The British government pooh-poohed Carson’s “army” and described it as an unarmed rabble. But a very brief inquiry convinced me that large quantities of arms were being imported into Belfast and distributed through Ulster. There was hardly a pretense at secrecy, and the Great Western Railway authorities showed me boxes bearing large red labels with the word “Firearms” boldly printed thereon. The proprietor of one of the Belfast hotels led me down into his cellars and showed me cases of rifles stacked as high as the ceiling. He told me they came from Germany. I went round to the gunsmith shops, and I was told that they were selling cheap revolvers “like hot cakes.” There was hardly a man in Ulster who had not got a firearm of some kind or other. “It’s good for business,” said one of the gunsmiths, laughing candidly, “but one of these days the things will go off, and there will be the devil to pay. Why the British government allows it is beyond understanding.”
The British government did not acknowledge the truth of it. I made a detailed report of my investigations to Robert Donald, who passed it on to Winston Churchill, and his comment was the incredulous remark, “Gibbs has had his leg pulled.” But it was Churchill’s leg that was pulled, very badly, and he must have had a nasty shock when there were full descriptive reports of a gun-running exploit, done with perfect impunity, by the conspiracy of Ulster officers and leaders, military advisers, and men of all classes, down to the jarveys of the jaunting cars. Carson had armed his troops—with German rifles and ammunition.
In view of later history, there must have been some gentlemen of Ulster whose consciences were twinged by those dealings with Germany, and by allusions made in the heat of political speeches to their preference for the German Emperor rather than a Home-rule House of Parliament in Dublin.
Religious fanaticism was at the back of it all in the minds of the rank and file. Catholic laborers were chased out of the shipyards by their Protestant fellow workers, and hardly a day passed without brutal assaults on them, as was proved by the list of patients in the hospitals suffering from bashed heads and bruised bodies. I saw with my own eyes gangs of Ulster Protestants fall upon Catholic citizens and kick them senseless. Needless to say, there was retaliation when the chance came, and woe betide any Ulsterman who ventured alone through the Catholic quarter.
The mediæval malignancy of this vendetta was revealed to me among a thousand other proofs by a draper’s assistant in a shop down the Royal Avenue. I was buying a collar stud or something, and recognizing me as an Englishman, he began to talk politics.
“If they try to put Home Rule over us,” he said, “I shall fight. I’m a pretty good shot, and if a Catholic shows his head, I’ll plug him.”
He pulled out a rifle, which he kept concealed behind some bundles of linen, and told me he spent his Saturday afternoons in target practice.
“What do you think of this? Good shooting, eh?”
He pulled out a handful of pennies and showed me how at so many paces (I forget the range) he had plugged the head of His Majesty, King George V. It seemed to me a queer way of proving his loyalty to the British crown and Constitution.
Carson’s way of loyalty was no less strange. By what method of logic this great lawyer could justify, as a proof of loyalty and patriotism, his raising of armed forces to resist an Act of Parliament passed by the King with the consent of the people, passes my simple understanding. I can understand rebellion against the law and the Crown, for Liberty’s sake, or for passion’s sake, or for the destruction of civilization, or for the enforcement of any kind of villainy. But I cannot understand rebellion against the law and the Crown in order to prove one’s passionate loyalty to the law, and one’s ardent devotion to the King.
Nor can I understand how those who condemn the “direct action” of Labor in the way of general strikes and other methods of demanding “rights” (as Lords Carson and Birkenhead and Londonderry condemned such revolutionary threats), can uphold as splendid heroism the menace of bloody civil war by a minority which refused to accept the verdict of the government and peoples of Great Britain and Ireland.
Sir Edward Carson was an honest man, a great gentleman in his manner, a great lawyer in repute, but his blind bigotry, some dark passion in him, made him adopt a line of action which has caused much blood to flow in Ireland and made one of the blackest chapters in modern history. For it was the raising of the Ulster Volunteers which led to the raising of the Irish Republican Army, and the armed resistance to Home Rule which led to Sinn Fein, and a thousand murders. It might have led, and very nearly led to civil war in England as well as in Ireland. When the British Officers in the Curragh Camp refused to lead their troops to disarm Ulster, and resigned their commissions rather than fulfil such an order, the shadow of civil war crept rather close, and there were politicians in England who were ready to risk it, as when Winston Churchill raised the cry, “The Army versus the People.”
But another shadow was creeping over Europe, and fell with a chill horror upon the heart of England, when, as it were out of the blue sky of a summer in 1914, there came the menace of a war which would call many great nations to arms, and deluge the fields of Europe in the blood of youth. Ireland—suffragettes—industrial unrest, how trivial and foolish even were such internal squabbles when civilization itself was challenged by this abomination!
In June of 1914—June!—there was a great banquet given in London to the editors of German newspapers, where I renewed acquaintance with a number of men whom I had met the previous year in Germany. Lord Burnham, of The Daily Telegraph, presided over the gathering, and made an eloquent speech, affirming the unbreakable ties of friendship between our two peoples. There were many eloquent speeches by other British journalists, expressing their admiration for German character, science, art, and social progress. A distinguished dramatic critic was emotional at the thought of the old kinship of the German and English peoples. The German editors responded with equal cordiality, with surpassing eloquence of admiration for English liberty, literature, and life. There was much handshaking, raising of glasses, drinking of toasts.... It was two months before August of 1914.