I.—Bismarck
What is the Devil’s Gospel? I take it that the three main articles are violence, intellect, and a certain malign splendour of domination. If that is the formula of the Courts of Hell, it is certainly the formula of Prussianism.
There is here no question of mere instinctive egotism. We are in presence of an Evangel of Conquest, fully worked out, and completely conscious of itself. Later in this series we shall have an opportunity of examining the wild work of some of the Berlin theorists of blackguardism. But before there was a theory, there was a fact. In the world of action Prussia had thrown up two huge mountain-peaks of achievement: Frederick the Great, so grossly flattered by Carlyle, and Bismarck. Between them yawns that Valley of Purification to which Jena marks the entrance. For that interregnum of humility Prussia is truly great: your heart beats with Körner, with Fichte, even with the cloudy Hegel. But two generations later the type is once more master: Frederick, reincarnated, calls himself Otto Eduarde Leopold Bismarck Schönhausen. He is the modern Wotan to whom Germany has built her altars.
In that curious non-moral mode of writing history for which that German “moralist,” Carlyle, was chiefly responsible Bismarck was a “great man.” He changed the map of Europe. He stole Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark; euchred Austria out of her share of the spoils; and taking, as his raw materials, the old free German States, the blood of France, and the imbecile bluff of Napoleon, he produced Modern Germany. Let us observe the light of idealism in which he worked. It is not literature, or imagination, or mere phrase-spinning to say that Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament. I am anxious to make this study as objective and free from prejudice as possible. It is Bismarck who speaks for himself in 1849—
“It is desirable and necessary to improve the social and political condition of Germany; this, however, cannot be brought about by resolutions, and votes of majorities or speeches of individuals, but by blood and iron.”
If this was Bismarck’s own guiding star, there were others who recognised it as clearly as himself. When the list of a suggested new Cabinet was presented to Frederick William IV in just that year, 1849, he drew a thick line through Bismarck’s name and wrote opposite it in the margin—
“Red-hot reactionary. Likes the smell of blood. May be employed later on.”
When employed later on—in France—he did not belie the nostril diagnosis. I quote from Hoche’s Bismarck Intime—
“Apropos of the burnt villages and the peasants who were burnt, Bismarck remarked that the smell from the villages was ‘like the smell of roast onions.’ Favre remarked to Bismarck that ladies were to be seen strolling on the boulevards, and pretty, healthy children were playing around. ‘You surprise me,’ said Bismarck; ‘I thought you had already eaten all the children.’
“Favre complained to Bismarck that his soldiers had fired on a hospital, L’Hospice des Quinze-Vingts: ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘The French fired on our soldiers who were vigorous and strong.’”
The Prussia, to whose tradition he succeeded, lives in the irony or indignant protest of the great humanists. I cite but two. “War,” said Mirabeau, “is the national industry of Prussia.” And Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a superb essay, published when Germany was hammering at the gates of Paris in 1870–71, drew out a sound digest of title—
“Prussia is the sole European kingdom which has been built up province by province on the battlefield, cemented stone by stone in blood. Its kings have been soldiers; sometimes generals, sometimes drill-sergeants, but ever soldiers; its people are a drilled nation of soldiers on furlough; its sovereign is simply commander-in-chief; its aristocracy are officers of the staff; its capital is a camp.”
He went on to characterise in words that bite deeper since Liége, Louvain, and Antwerp—
“Unhappily the gospel of the sword has sunk deeper into the entire Prussian people than any other in Europe. The social system being that of an army, and each citizen drilled man by man, there is no sign of national conscience in the matter. And this servile temper, begotten by this eternal drill, inclines a whole nation to repeat as if by word of command, and perhaps to believe, the convenient sophisms which the chief of its staff puts into their mouths.”
His central belief was that power consists in bullying. Had he thought things over he might, perhaps, have noticed that it costs more strength to lift a man up than to knock him down. He chose the other way. His spiritual successors tell you that the meaning of the black, red, and white of the German tricolour is: “Through night and blood to the light.” Germany had legitimate ambitions. There are ways of influencing the world that do not involve war: it was not powder, or bayonets, or even howitzers that laid Europe in intellectual bondage to Kant. Bismarck chose the formula of “Blood and Iron.” What it cost he himself will tell us, speaking out of the shadows and desolation of old age. The quotation is from Busch, his less discreet Boswell—
“‘There is no doubt, however,’ said Bismarck, ‘that I have caused unhappiness to great numbers. But for me three great wars would not have taken place. Eighty thousand men would not have been killed, and would not now be mourned by parents, brothers, sisters, and widows.’ ‘And sweethearts,’ I added somewhat prosaically and inconsiderately. ‘And sweethearts,’ he repeated. ‘I have settled that with God, however. But I have had little, if any, pleasure from all that I have done, while on the contrary, I have had a great deal of worry, anxiety, and trouble.’”
He sought power, and, in seeking it, he had little regard for scraps of paper. Frederick the Great had taught him that, if a ruler is sometimes bound to sacrifice his life, he is often bound to sacrifice his honour to the greatness of the State. Maturely, coldly, with ashes fallen over all the flames of passion, he tells us in his Reflections and Reminiscences how he forced on the Franco-German War. There are versions of the story more vivid and so far more vile. The Ems telegram has arrived. Bismarck is dining with von Moltke and Roon, and all three fail to find anything resembling war in it. But the Prince has a “conviction”—
“Under this conviction I made use of the royal authorisation communicated to me through Abeken, to publish the contents of the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering....
“The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems telegram as compared with that produced by the original was not the result of stronger words but of the form which made this announcement seem decisive, while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded as a fragment of a negotiation still pending, and to be continued at Berlin.
“After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’”
Bismarck then explained what he would do with his “concentrated edition.”
“This explanation brought in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in disgrace.’ Moltke so far relinquished his passive equanimity that, glancing up joyously towards the ceiling, and abandoning his usual punctiliousness of speech, he smote his hand upon his breast and said: ‘If I may but live to lead our armies in such a war, then the devil may come directly afterwards and fetch away the “old carcase.”’”
If the God of Roon, the God of falsified telegrams, was the same God with whom Bismarck “settled matters” regarding his eighty thousand slain, that strange compact of reconciliation is readily intelligible. Otherwise, no!
If Bismarck made cruelty his sacrament, in the gross, he was far from neglecting details. No torch lit a village in France, no finger pulled a trigger against non-combatants, that was not sped by his counsel. I first read his words in Belgium as the stories of Liége, and Visé, and Aerschot, and Louvain poured in—
“True strategy consists in hitting your enemy and hitting him hard. Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded towns the maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of the struggle, and may bring pressure to bear on their government to discontinue it. You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with.
“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population so that it may sue for peace.”
And when Favre, coming out from the heroic defence of Paris, appealed to him in name of that “brotherhood which binds the brave of all the earth,” the Wotan of modern Germany replied—
“‘You speak of your resistance! You are proud of your resistance. Well, let me tell you, if M. Trochu were a German general, I would shoot him this evening. You have not the right—do you understand?—in the face of God, in the face of humanity, for mere military vainglory, to expose to the horrors of famine a city of two millions.... Do not speak of your resistance, it is criminal!’”
Abeken, who was called “Bismarck’s Pen,” wrote of his chief—
“Goethe’s saying, ‘Faithful to one aim, even on a crooked road,’ suits him well.”
Such was the founder of the German Empire, and such the methods by which he founded it.