Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

IV

Polling day came and went. Despite a certain amount of nervous chatter beforehand of disturbances and riots, the elections took place in complete tranquillity. Not a dog barked through the length and breadth of Germany. In Cologne, at least, no one would have suspected that any event of importance was taking place. The ordinary Sunday crowds promenaded peacefully, as is their habit, to and fro along the Rhine. The Independent Socialists, with singular delicacy and nice feeling, plastered the outer walls of the cathedral during the night with their electioneering placards, and in gigantic red letters painted the words “Wahlt Liste Fries” on the threshold of the west door. Otherwise everything about the town was quiet and normal.

As for the result of the Election, it was very much what was to be expected under the circumstances—a result in the highest degree unsatisfactory, if they but knew it, to the British democracy. The reactionaries and the extreme Socialists gained at the expense of the moderate men. The Independent Socialists—the Unabhängige—negligible at the last election, increased their strength four-fold, and instead of twenty-two hold eighty-one seats in the new Reichstag. They swept the great industrial districts of the west, an ironical commentary on the hysterics of the English papers which insisted that the Ruhr disturbances were a put-up job by the German Government destined to veil a new attack on France. No less striking were the gains of the Deutsche Volkspartei, who increased their numbers from twenty-one to sixty-two seats. The Zentrum with sixty-eight instead of eighty-eight seats lost substantially, but while yielding ground was not routed. The Christliche Volkspartei was beaten off the field. The discomfiture of Father Kastert and the upholders of the Rhineland Republic was complete. The serious feature of the Elections was the downfall of the Social Democrats, the largest and most influential of the three parties forming the Müller Government. Their numbers fell from one hundred and sixty-three to one hundred and twelve. No less complete was the discomfiture of the Demokraten or Moderate Radicals—the left wing of the Bourgeois parties—who at the best lived cramped and uncomfortable lives between the Social Democrats on the one hand and the Conservative groups on the other. Their numbers fell from seventy-five to forty-five seats. Secrecy of the ballot does not in Germany prohibit analysis of the totals polled, and the women’s vote taken as a whole was clearly thrown on the reactionary side. Gratitude is not a factor which counts in political life, and the Social Democrats to whom the women owe their enfranchisement suffered severely at their hands.

On the morrow of the poll, therefore, the Müller Government then in power found that its majority had disappeared, and that the Bourgeois groups reckoned together were in a majority as compared with the two Socialist parties. In the good old days for which many Germans sigh, nothing would have happened in the seats of the mighty, whatever the complexion of a Reichstag returned at a General Election. But under the new constitution established by the revolution, a Government in power must hold its authority from the elected representatives of the people. Since, however, both the Zentrum and the Demokraten had been associated with the Müller Government, a political deadlock of great difficulty at once arose. For some days the hitherings and thitherings between the various groups kept political Germany on the tiptoe of excitement. The Independent Socialists held aloof and refused entirely to be associated in any Government with the Majority Socialists. The Majority Socialists refused with equal firmness to have anything to do with a Cabinet in which their deadly enemies the Volkspartei would necessarily play a leading part. The Zentrum with its sixty-eight seats and Liberal leanings clearly held the balance of power between the conflicting parties. The political crisis lasted for a fortnight, during which period Germany was practically without a Government. This state of affairs was considerably aggravated by the approach of the Spa Conference and the necessity to have a German Cabinet in existence with whom negotiations could be carried on. Finally, after many days of uncertainty, a new Coalition Government emerged with Herr Fehrenbach, the Zentrum leader, as Chancellor. The new Government is largely Zentrum with a dash of Demokraten, but the sinister influence of the Volkspartei is dominant in its counsels. The Government can command no clear majority. It is confronted with a solid block of Socialist opposition. The Social Democrats, whatever the attitude of the Independents, are not likely to hamper the new Cabinet in vital questions of external politics. But in daily life it will be forced to lead the uneasy existence of playing off the various groups against each other. It is a weak Government at a moment when strength is essential, and such strength as it possesses is largely of the wrong kind.

This upshot, as I see it, is wholly devoid of comfort to any one who desires the rehabilitation of Germany on right lines. The election is the writing on the wall which even at the eleventh hour should command the attention of the little ring of politicians who control the Entente policy. This shifting of German opinion to the right and to the left is an ominous sign. The party standing for ordered democratic development has been knocked out. The British public should try to realise it has been killed by the Allied policy. That it was worth supporting is proved by the fact that, despite heavy losses, the Social Democrats still remain the largest individual group in the new Reichstag. We have refused to discriminate between the good and bad elements in political Germany. Our hand has rested as heavily on a democratic as it would rightly have done on a Junker Government. The shackles forged by the Allies have in the first place reduced the only administration to impotence to which they could look for the fulfilment of the just demands of a revised Treaty. Economic and political recovery has been made an impossibility owing to the policy pursued. As a result, hunger, despair, and general misery have driven large sections of the working-classes into the arms of the Communists. They have lost faith and hope in a constitutional party whose weakness has been so great. They are out for the short cut of violent means in order to better conditions which they regard as intolerable.

Meanwhile the Deutsche Volkspartei and all the wealthy and reactionary elements in the country have been no less eager to stamp upon the smoking flax of a democratic Germany. On the Friday and Saturday before the poll I attended meetings respectively of the Volkspartei and the Social Democrats. In each case speeches were made typical of the two sets of ideas at war in Germany to-day. On this occasion the Volkspartei speakers hardly took the trouble to camouflage their real opinions, though one pastor spoke eloquently of the “Liberalisms” of which they were the guardians—a claim which moved me to secret mirth. The arguments were developed on the same lines as those I have described above, only on this occasion the cloven hoof was still more obvious. The revolution and the Republic were the root causes of Germany’s present misery. The view of the Volkspartei that a Constitutional Monarchy was the best form of government was unchanged, though they “accepted” the Republic. Soon they hoped the old red and white and black colours would wave over them again—a remark which roused frantic applause from the large and enthusiastic audience. Internationalism and the League of Nations were condemned in unsparing terms. Who were the Allies to advance these principles? Let them cease to boycott Germans in all parts of the world, and let France bring to an end the scandal of her black troops in the Occupied Areas. Then they might begin to talk about internationalism. As for England, no country pursued its policy with more consistent and single-eyed devotion to its own interests. Germany could only be remade on the basis of a strong and efficient nationalism. A new spirit was abroad in the land and, granted the defeat of the Socialists and Social Democrats, all that had been lost might be regained.

Very different was the tone and temper of the meeting of the Social Democrats on the following night. From first to last not one word was said with which I, as an English Liberal, was out of harmony. Any democratic audience in Great Britain would have found itself in entire sympathy with the general views expressed. The audience was typically working-class; quiet, orderly people, who made on me an unmistakable impression of underfeeding and suffering. The shabby field-grey uniforms converted to civilian use served to heighten the curious earthen look noticeable on so many faces here. Food is plentiful now in the Occupied Area, but the cost of living is so high, many families remain ill-nourished. Fresh milk is unobtainable; during the many months I have been in Cologne I have never seen a drop. Over and over again the same question is driven home with overwhelming force: can even the most volatile and opportunist of politicians imagine that the unspecified millions of the indemnity, or, indeed, any indemnity at all, can be collected from a nation which is not in a position to eat or work?

Herr Meerfeld, the leader of the Social Democrats in Cologne, and Frau Röhl were the principal speakers at this final gathering. Both were members of the National Assembly; Frau Röhl unfortunately has not survived the deluge which has overwhelmed many of her colleagues. A capable-looking woman with golden hair, she reminded me a little of Mary Macarthur, though lacking in the magnetism and stature, moral no less than physical, of the English trade-union leader. Herr Meerfeld’s speech was a merciless indictment of the former militarist Government and its colossal blunders in connection with the war. In his first words he struck the keynote of all that followed: “We will have no more war. What we want in future is a ‘Peace-Kultur’”—that untranslatable word which in so many varied forms finds its place in the political utterances of all parties—“we seek a revision of the Treaty of Versailles, but we seek it through a policy of reconciliation and understanding with the democracies in other countries.” The failures of the military party to make peace when an honourable peace was still possible, the rejection of President Wilson’s offers of mediation, the folly and crime of the unrestricted U-boat campaign—all these subjects were handled in a spirit which astonished me. A pamphlet on sale at the meeting, “Wer trägt die Schuld an unserem Elend?” (Who bears the responsibility for our misery?), of which I bought a copy, was packed with a damning array of facts, many of them unknown to me, as to the part played by the Kaiser’s Government during the war. “The German people have been lied to, and deceived, and betrayed,” cried the speaker. “We were told that the U-boat campaign would bring England to her knees in three months!” German mentality is a baffling thing, but I hardly expected that this remark would be received with shouts of good-natured laughter. The long arm of England’s sea-power has been no laughing matter for Germany, but throughout this campaign I was specially struck with the absence of hostility shown to England. Even at the Volkspartei meetings I listened in vain for the note which shows itself unmistakable when an audience is deeply roused. The justice and fair dealing which have marked the British Occupation have contributed primarily to this end.

A quaint little woman dressed in black came on to the platform to make a few remarks during the discussion. At first she was almost inaudible, but her voice gathered force and courage as she proceeded. She had been a Red Cross nurse during the war, so she said. Nothing could have been more scandalous than the pilfering by the officers in charge of stores and comforts destined for wounded men. She had to stand by helplessly and watch robbery and corruption of all kinds going on at the expense of the sufferers. “These heroes who filled their pockets,” she concluded naïvely, “always declared they were great patriots. Please vote to-morrow for the patriotism of the Social Democrats, which won’t rob sick men.” Even more pathetic was the appeal of a working-man on whom disease had clearly laid a fatal hand. He addressed the meeting as “dear brothers and sisters,” which raised a laugh. But there was nothing comic about the few words spoken. He had starved, so he said, during the war. Wars meant nothing but misery and starvation. Let them support the Social Democrats and then there would be no more war. He was followed by a Communist youth, who in languid and superior tones struck the first note of dissent by adjuring those present at the meeting not to vote at all. If, however, they felt irresistibly driven to the polls, the only mitigation of a bad act would be to vote for the Independent Socialists. General uproar resulted from this advice, a fat man near me rising from his seat and shouting with fury, “I know how you’ll vote. You’re the sort that votes Zentrum.” The Communist highbrow did not stop to see the end of the storm he had provoked, but, having said his say, discreetly fled before Herr Meerfeld could deliver a highly chastening reply. He left the hall pursued by the execrations of my neighbour, who showed signs of vaulting over the chairs and continuing the argument in more forcible fashion in the street. The general tone of the meeting, apart from this incident, was serious and appreciative, but it lacked any of that electric quality which thrills a party on the eve of victory. I came away uneasy as to the result—an uneasiness more than justified by the issue.

As for the future, it lies, as I write, on the knees of dark and doubtful gods. The British people found it hard to acquire the habit of war and to make war thoroughly. To-day it seems as hard a task to recover the habit of peace and make peace thoroughly. As I have said before, so long as we persist in regarding Germany as a political unit solidly inspired by the old military spirit, and of using a sledge-hammer to it on all occasions, the resettlement of Europe becomes an impossibility. The moral of the Kapp Putsch has been completely ignored in Allied countries. Yet it was highly suggestive as to the changed conditions which now rule. A militarist plot was nipped in the bud by the German working-classes who retaliated with the weapon of a general strike. I do not know what better proof of good faith the German democrats could have given as to their determination to have no more to do with the old régime. The cry of “give us back our Junkers” will never arise unless democracy itself is wholly discredited. We can take no risks with Germany, and there is no question of her escape from the penalties of the war she provoked, and the burdens which in consequence she must bear. Common-sense points, however, to the Allies giving a fair chance to the democratic elements from whom, and from whom alone, we have anything to hope as regards the future. We may make Germany’s burden impossible, in which case, sooner or later, general collapse and chaos must follow—chaos and collapse which will certainly not be confined within the borders of this country. Or we may make the burden possible, and not deny a place for repentance to the men and women who are struggling against heavy odds to remake their country on principles which are the basis of our own freedom.

CHAPTER XIV
HATRED

It is, I fear, true that national hatreds are in the main created and kept alive by the educated and upper classes. Working men and women throughout the world, absorbed as they are in daily toil and often preoccupied about the next meal, have no leisure for the cultivation of abstract sentiments. With a greater simplicity of outlook they take people and things as they find them and do not theorise about their faults. The scholastic attitude as regards hatred is an ironical commentary on some of the byways into which education is apt to stray. Professors—German professors in particular—are notorious for their bloodthirstiness. The ordinary fighting soldier, who has been over the top half a dozen times, is a man of peace compared with certain ferocious persons of academic distinction. The brandishing of quills has apparently a more permanently disturbing effect on character than the hurling of hand grenades. The man in the trench has, after all, a certain tie of fellowship with the man in the trench opposite. They are linked together by a common sense of duty fulfilled and of horrors equally endured. Each knows that the other is a man very much like himself, sick with the misery and dirt of the whole business, whose heart in all probability is yearning just in the same way for a wife, and home, and child. Men under these circumstances do not give themselves up to abstract hatreds.

But among civilians, a man or woman’s gift of warlike talk is often in inverse ratio to any sort of personal capacity to shoulder the responsibilities of battle. Women are always apt to be more bitter than men because their measure of personal sacrifice in the war has been invariably less. They have seen their loved ones perish and the light of happiness quenched in their own lives. It is not easy for them to think steadily of the great ideals for which men died, and to realise that bitterness breeds a spirit which makes the fulfilment of such ends impossible. The case of the professors is even worse. In Germany the subservience of high academic authorities to the most abominable doctrines of the militarists was a grave and sinister feature in the history of the years preceding the war. The beating of tom-toms by men presumably of education goes a long way to justify the jibe of the “New Ignorance” applied to education by Mr. James Stephens. Education left to itself is just a force, and if it throws off the right sort of moral controls, becomes, as the whole history of latter-day Germany proves, a very dangerous force. Probably in Germany to-day there is no class more bitter, no class more full of hatred and the desire for revenge, than that of the professors. But a similar attitude may often be found among well-to-do people of all races, people who, whether or not they have been educated in the real sense of the term, have had the opportunities and advantages which spring from worldly status and prosperity.

No side of the Occupation has been more interesting than the points of contact it has provided between the English and the Germans. Social intercourse on the upper levels is non-existent. Germany and England were at war when the Rhineland was occupied, and the relations then inevitable between conqueror and conquered have remained unaltered. Many of the English families now living in Cologne can hardly be conscious that they are in a foreign country. The English military community lives a life apart. At hardly any point, except in the shops, do they come in contact with the Germans. The large majority of English people, men and women alike, do not speak the language, and few make any effort to learn it.

It is not easy to say what impressions of Germany and the Germans many of these people will bring away. Opinion on the subject varies considerably, and the views expressed are as wide asunder as the poles. Some people admit frankly that their judgment and outlook have been modified considerably by all they have seen and heard. Others brought a stock-in-trade of prejudices from England and have guarded it jealously from any contact with facts. If an Occupation following on a war has any moral value, it is that necessarily it brings the enemies of yesterday in touch, and so helps to break down a certain amount of prejudice and to soften bitter feeling. Thus the way is paved to the resumption, sooner or later, of normal relations. It is easy to hate the abstract entity Germany. It is less easy to hate individual Germans who may prove on acquaintance to be estimable people. Little of this modifying influence has made itself felt on the Occupation. Many women, and some officers, declare that the behaviour of the Boche is rude and insolent; that he jostles English women in the streets, and is generally lying and dishonest in all his ways. Circumstantial stories are related in this sense. It has been stated in my presence that a certain lady could not use the trams owing to the gross incivility of the conductors. I am left wondering how far people who have these experiences provoke them by trailing their coats. Obviously, English women who talk loudly in a tram about “the beastly Boche” may find themselves in trouble with their fellow-passengers, the German ignorance of foreign languages not being as great as their own.

Speaking for myself, I have never received one rude or uncivil word from man, woman, or child during the year I spent in Germany. I went about sometimes wearing the official arm-band, and therefore obviously English; sometimes not. I have never noticed the smallest difference in the behaviour of the people on the pavements or in the street cars. Tram conductors I have found almost without exception a polite and efficient body of men. All great cities contain a proportion of gross and undesirable people. Cologne is no exception to this rule, but the particular elements are not more conspicuous here than elsewhere. So far from hostility, I have received much courtesy and consideration from Germans with whom I came into casual touch. I am not denying the reality of other people’s contrary experiences. I can only state my own. Temperament is a mirror which deflects the passage of facts, and some of the English in Cologne have arrived at fixed judgments about Germany before setting foot in the country. If they find the inhabitants civil they at once call them servile, if they show spirit they denounce them as insolent. In Cologne drawing-rooms English women will sometimes discuss the Germans much in the spirit of the Mohammedans who sat in a circle and spat at a ham. I have never been able to understand on what grounds they founded that extreme view. Upper-class Germany has vanished from the Occupied Areas, and no one regrets their disappearance. But as regards the humbler classes with whom we of the Occupation come in touch, the working-men and country-folks, the shopkeepers, small business people and minor bureaucracy, I have no hesitation in saying that they are, generally speaking, hard-working civil people, correct in their attitude and bearing. Reasonable people should find no difficulty in maintaining the superficial amenities of life with them, even under the abnormal conditions which have thrown us together.

However varied the views among the officer class, the rank and file of the Army have settled down to friendly relations with the Germans—too friendly many people think. Men who have never understood the French temperament or outlook find themselves very much at home in Germany. From time to time agitated articles appear in the English papers deploring the fact that English soldiers are “getting to like Germans,” and calling on some one to do something drastic. The fact that the bow of hatred does not remain tense and strung, as desired by some people, will certainly cause no regret to those who are appalled by the perils of the present state of Europe. Better relations between nations will, I believe, be built up ultimately on working-class levels. The diplomacy of the politicians in power is too bitter and too tortuous to further the cause of European reconstruction. From this point of view the Occupation has been wholly to the good, inasmuch as tens of thousands of Englishmen who have passed through the country have gone home with a saner appreciation of the situation.

German households, on whom many of these men were quartered, found to their amazement that instead of proving, as they feared, demons incarnate, the British soldiers were good-hearted, good-tempered fellows who shared the family life, peeled potatoes, and played with the children. The soldiers on their side appreciated the kindly treatment they received and were touched by the many evidences of hunger and suffering among the working-classes. Some day I hope we shall have a “Book of Decent Deeds” showing that among all belligerents there is another side to war besides that of atrocities. We may smile at the true story of the British Tommy writing home to his mother to send him a feeding-bottle, with tubes and apparatus complete, for a German baby in his billet who was in a poor way owing to the lack of these things. The German mother burst into tears when she was given the bottle which meant the difference between life and death to the child. But such an act and the Spirit it breathes is a ray of light in the darkness.

Loud protests are sometimes made by well-fed, well-to-do people as to the impropriety of helping the starving children of Central Europe. Very different was the attitude of the soldiers who had overthrown the German military power. It is to the eternal honour of the conquering army which marched into the Rhineland, that its first act was one of pity and mercy to the hungry women and children of Cologne. It was necessary for the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Plumer, to telegraph to the Peace Conference that, unless supplies were forthcoming for the underfed German civilians, he could not be responsible for the effect on the discipline of the Army. The soldiers were up in arms at the spectacle of starvation, and nothing could prevent them, contrary to orders, from sharing their rations with the enemy.

I think the question of hatred is one which calls for clear thinking at the present crisis in the world’s history. Many people imagine that when they have abused the Boche in round terms they have “done their bit” towards squaring the accounts of devastated France or Belgium. All that they have done is to feed and sustain the spirit which led in the first place to the devastations. Whatever enormities Germany may have committed during the war, the task of punishment is not the problem of supreme urgency which here and now confronts us all. What we are face to face with is the question as to whether civilisation as a whole can survive the blows rained on it. The responsibility of Germany for this state of affairs is at the moment less important than the rescue of civilisation from the brink of the chasm on which it is trembling. It is useless to go on saying that Germany must be punished or that Germany must pay, if in fact the actual policy pursued is calculated to involve conquerors and conquered alike in common ruin. At times it is difficult to avoid the gloomy conclusion that we are approaching the end of a cycle of history, and that a period of darkness and chaos bids fair to overwhelm a world incapable of saving itself. The economic and political condition of Europe is grave in the extreme. In every country wild forces are surging upwards, the peril of which lies in the absence of any powers of moral and spiritual counteraction. The strain of the war has swallowed up the spiritual reserves of the world, and its moral credit is not only exhausted but overdrawn.

No nation ever went to war in a spirit more grave and more responsible than that in which the British people accepted the German challenge. The call to arms is invariably a great and inspiring moment. At such a time men and women realise that they are caught up and raised on the wing of ideals greater than themselves. But it is part of the evil of war that the longer it lasts the more black and the more bitter the spirit it breeds. From August 1914 and the hush of consecration which fell on the nation, to December 1918 and what was well described by a distinguished publicist as the “organized blackguardism” of the General Election, is a falling away in temper and standard almost unbearable to contemplate.

I have often wondered whether the men and women who lent themselves casually to “hatred stunts” during the war ever realised what cruel suffering was caused to a large number of humble and obscure folk. Now that the spirit of sanity and moderation is making itself heard again, English people must surely look back with shame on the treatment meted out to inoffensive enemy aliens. Busybodies obsessed by spy mania were merely a source of nuisance and ridicule to the Secret Service. That Service was highly efficient, and its agents were quite capable of doing their work without the interference of officious amateurs. The German wife and the English woman with a German husband were in many cases treated as outcasts. Years of residence in England, even the fact of children fighting with the British Army, did not serve in many cases to mitigate the violence and hatred of their neighbours. The German wives of English subjects, and the English wives of Germans, were naturally in a painful and trying position and one which was bound to excite prejudice. The degree, however, to which a group of men within Parliament, and a section of the Press without, sought deliberately to inflame the lowest passions of the mob in this matter, is the most sordid page in the history of the war. Helpless, friendless, without money, unable to make their voices heard, these unhappy people, treated as pariahs both in the land of their birth and in that of their adoption, were hunted from pillar to post.

Periodically “intern-them-all” campaigns were worked up which led to obscure Germans of proved respectability being locked up. Many of these people had English wives and families, who suffered severely through the removal of the breadwinner. English women were forced to take refuge in Germany from the persecutions of their own countrymen. What are we to think of the spirit and policy which could drive from the shores of England—England the home of Liberty, England the safe asylum of the oppressed—women of our own race who found the treatment meted out to them too hard to be endured?

Wives and families landed in Germany not speaking one word of the language, to be welcomed naturally by a spirit as hard and bitter as any they had left. The lot of English wives resident in Germany was unenviable. But I do not gather that enemy aliens were treated with a greater measure of harshness in Germany during the war than what occurred in England. Many English women living in Germany throughout the war did not suffer in any marked degree from the hostility of their neighbours. Naturally these would-be pogroms never catch the right person. Rich people who may be really mischievous escape; the poor man is hunted. The Junkers whom it would be satisfactory to punish are living in comfort and prosperity on their estates. The poor starve and are driven down into inconceivable depths of misery both of body and soul.

Even to-day the position of many English women in Germany who are married to Germans is most pitiful. Under the Peace Treaty the Allies reserved the power to retain and liquidate all property belonging to German nationals. I am not concerned at this point to raise the question as to how far this precedent of confiscation may prove a double-edged weapon in the capitalist world. But again, it is not the rich man who suffers. Large fortunes can always take care of themselves. The people who have been ground to powder by this provision are women with tiny incomes or annuities, the complete stopping of which has meant literal starvation. Most painful cases of this character came to my notice in the Rhineland. In some instances women are told that if they leave their husbands and return to England the money will be paid. Is a war fought for “truth and justice” to eventuate in alternatives of such a character? Are women, at the end of an agonising experience, to choose between husbands they may love and the stark fact of starvation? I heard of one English woman, too proud to beg or receive alms, who came by stealth and searched the swill-tubs of a mess in order to pick out food from it. The British military authorities have shown invariable sympathy and kindness to these unfortunates. They have done what lay in their power to mitigate the circumstances. Soldiers do not fail in compassion to the poor and needy. The little group of politicians conspicuous for their Hun-hunting activities have not served with the colours. The British Army fights its enemies in the field. It does not persecute women and decrepit old men. But the soldiers cannot alter the confiscation clauses of the Treaty which press with such peculiar hardship on people of small incomes. If these clauses are directed to searching the pockets of the Stinnes and the Krupps, let exceptions at least be made on the lower levels. The Treaty of Versailles in many of its provisions merely reflects the current hatreds of the hour. Modification of these clauses is inevitable when the wave of passion has subsided.

Not sorrow, loss, and suffering, but the temper born and bred of war, is its real and essential evil. The ruthless and cruel spirit which dominated the German war-machine and the many crimes committed are mainly responsible for the bitterness which was developed among the British peoples during the struggle. However natural the growth of this temper, its survival to-day is a menace to the future of the world. Hatred when it takes possession of the soul of a man or woman is a wholly corroding and destructive force. Where hatred abides the powers of darkness have their being, ready to sally forth and work havoc anew. Meanwhile the breaking of this coil promises to be no easy task. The war let loose in every country a new and evil force called propaganda—in plain language, organised lying. It is one of the foibles of propagandists that they insist on speaking of themselves as super-George Washingtons. But during the war any fiction which came to hand was good enough so long as it served to inflame national hatreds. Propaganda during the last years of the struggle did a great deal to obscure the moral issues for which we were fighting. It corrupted both character and temper. But the propaganda genie, having emerged from its bottle in clouds of smoke and dirt, entirely refuses to subside now the struggle is over. It is one of the horrid forces with vitality derived from the war which continues to pursue an independent existence. It is the weapon-in-chief for keeping open sores and exasperating passions which good sense would try to allay. Nations catch sight of each other dimly through mists of misrepresentation and bitterness. Truth and justice disappear in the welter, and without truth and justice the practical affairs of the world drift daily towards an ultimate whirlpool of chaos.

Great, therefore, as I see it is the responsibility of all who to-day throw their careless offerings on the altars of hatred, so that the flames of discord flare up anew. The men and women who talk and act thus must try to realise that the world is reaching its limit of endurance, and the situation calls not for any post-war fomenting of the terrible legacy of strife, but for a truce of God between victors and vanquished. No prejudices are harder to shift than those which ignorance has exalted into moral principles of the first order. Thought is apt to be an unpleasant and disturbing process; the clichés of hatred are easy to use—why alter them when they round off a sentence so well? But unless some movement can develop between nations, unless the forces of destruction can be checked, then civilisation in the form we know it would appear to be doomed.

Germany has still a whole volume of bitter truth to learn as to the part she has played in the world catastrophe provoked by her rulers. Until she recognises and admits the evil done she cannot regain her place in the fellowship of nations. But after the great bartering of ideals represented by the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies are hardly in a position to preach sermons to her day in and day out on moral failures. The practical fact which confronts us all is that the world is in ruin, and that where the politicians have failed hopelessly the decent people of all nations have to get together and make it habitable again. To dismiss the German nation as a gang of criminals unfit for human intercourse may be a magnificent gesture on the part of the thoughtless. But it is not business. There are good Germans and bad Germans, Germans animated by a quite detestable spirit, others who are conscientious and high-minded. The wholesale indictment of a nation is as absurd as the wholesale indictment of a class. Human nature falls into types of character far more than into social and racial divisions. In the ultimate issue society is divided into two sets of people: those who behave decently and those who do not. People of the first type have a common kinship whatever their race or colour, and the need for asserting that kinship was never more urgent than at present.

If the world is to survive, tolerable social, economic, and political relations must be resumed sooner or later between enemy countries. It is of the first importance that the better elements in Germany should be encouraged and strengthened, so that through their influence a new spirit should animate the general German outlook on life. When no effort is made to discriminate, when good and bad are branded alike in one sweeping condemnation, hope of improvement vanishes. A nation to whom all place for repentance is denied loses heart and ceases to try. Reasonable men cannot make their voices heard under such conditions. Anger and bitterness at what is considered unfair treatment surge upwards again, and from them the desire for revenge is born anew. It is foolish to kick a man repeatedly in the face and then to complain that he does not behave like a gentleman. If the spirit of hatred is to rule in Europe we are heading straight for another war. This eventuality should, I think, be recognised clearly by the hotheads of all nations.

Germany cannot continue indefinitely to fulfil the function of the whipping-boy of Europe. The Junkers and soldiers who made the war, and were responsible for all that was cruel and brutal in its conduct, have disappeared. Owing to gross mismanagement in connection with the war criminals, many Germans guilty of specific acts of cruelty who should have been dealt with severely have slipped through the net. But where statesmanship has blundered inexcusably, it is unjust to visit vicariously on a whole community the sins of a class or of individuals. To do so is to destroy any chance of the growth of a better spirit among the German people as a whole. I recall the words of farewell addressed to me by a saleswoman in a Cologne shop to whom I was saying good-bye: “When you go back to England, tell your countrymen that we are not such dreadful people as they think, and ask them also to remember that we too have our pride and our self-respect.”

Many Germans are as much blinded by hatred as to our actions and motives as we are about theirs. We recognise with angry exasperation the measure of their misconceptions about ourselves. Is it not possible that misconceptions may exist on our side as to the character and attitude of, anyway, some Germans? We are sore, and sad, and bitter. So are countless Germans who are convinced that their lives have been ruined by our jealousy and ambition. Is it humanly possible to carry on the business of life in a nightmare world, where millions of human beings view each other through glasses so distorted? The moral deadlock at the moment is complete. It can only be solved by the spread of a new spirit of truth and charity. That cannot arise till reasonable men and women of all nations, realising the perils which confront us one and all, try and form unbiassed judgments, not only of each other’s actions, but what is perhaps even more important, of each other’s motives and principles. In all this there is no question of slurring over evil where evil exists, or condoning wrong where wrong has been done. It is a question of seeing these things in their true scale and right proportion. Righteous anger may rouse a sense of repentance where hatred only hardens and embitters. The wrath of man has had its full play through years of strife and horror. Judged as a constructive force, its fruits up to the present have been meagre. Is it possible that, after all, Paul of Tarsus was right, and that the fruits of the spirit, joy, peace, and righteousness, do not lie along this particular path? In so far as the spirit of hatred is cultivated and encouraged, it perpetuates all that is worst in war, without any of the redeeming qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice which make war tolerable. Hatred breeds hatred, strife further strife, violence yet more violence. From this vicious circle, so long as we allow ourselves to turn in it, there is no escape. Faith, hope, and charity alone can break the wheel of torment in which at present we revolve, and bring about the necessary moral and spiritual détente without which the world must surely perish.

Peace is not a question of documents and treaties. The world is still in a condition of bitter strife, because the spiritual values which make peace in the real sense possible are at present wholly lacking in the relations of the respective nations. I am driven to the conclusion that in this, as in other respects, the instinct of the great mass of the people throughout Europe is sounder and better than that of their rulers. Whatever the schemes and intrigues of a tortuous diplomacy, it is already clear that the working-classes are determined not to be made pawns in any fresh war of aggression. The German working-man is saturated with the misery of war. He will have no more of it unless some policy of oppression, suicidal in its character, re-creates the temper and spirit of the post-Jena period. Among my memories of Germany I dwell on none with more hope than an incident which befell us one spring evening in the Eifel. We were spending Sunday at Nideggen, a village perched high on its red volcanic cliffs above the valley of a delectable trout stream. We stopped in the course of our walk to admire a cottage garden where peas and beans were growing with mathematical diligence and regularity. Care had obviously been lavished on every plant and flower of the little plot, which lay on a sunny slope facing south. The owner who was hard at work among the peas, seeing our interest, asked if we would like to go over his garden. We accepted the invitation willingly, and he conducted us with pride from one end to the other of his tiny kingdom. He was an admirable type of peasant, a tall grave man with honest eyes and courteous manners. He combined some market-gardening with his business of stone-mason. The conversation drifted as usual to the war. He had served in a pioneer corps but had come through, “Gott sei dank,” unscathed. Of war or the possible recurrence of war he spoke with that intense horror which marks all the German working-classes. Never must such a thing happen again, he said; never must there be another war. My mind fled across the seas to a corner of Kent where I was well assured on this fine spring evening, another friend of mine, one William Catt, a son of the soil, just as honest and simple, just as devoted to his home and family, was also attending to peas and runner beans. William Catt too had served in the war. What crazy system could send those two good men with rifles in their hands to shoot each other? The Nideggen peasant had reflected to some purpose on “Earth’s return for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin.” Spade in hand he looked across the fair landscape at our feet, where the river lay like a silver streak winding among woods and meadows. Then he turned to me and said very seriously, “For a thousand years men have been mad; now we must all learn to be more reasonable.”

Would that the diplomatists of all countries could take to heart words so true and so wise! Here was the spirit which alone can create and sustain the League of Nations. While the political wire-pullers of Europe seek to make of the League the unhappy pushball of their own intrigues, this German working-man had the root of the matter in him. May his vision of a world in which men are learning to be “reasonable” wax from dim hope into full and perfect realisation.

CHAPTER XV
THE GERMAN VIEW OF ENGLAND

Personally I am under considerable obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. His Präparationen zu deutschen Gedichten for the purposes of instruction in schools has been a lantern to my way and a light unto my path on the somewhat rugged slopes of the German Parnassus. August Lomberg’s is the hand which has stayed my often stumbling feet when I first aspired to Goethe and Schiller, deities sitting enthroned aloft and remote. Guides to poetry are irritating books in one’s own language. What a poet has to say, and what he means, are strictly private matters between the reader and himself. The views of a third person may even be regarded as an intrusion, not to say an impertinence. But when you are struggling with the verbal intricacies of a new tongue, guides to knowledge assume a very different light. So, I repeat, I am under many obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. As so often happens with German authors, he has taught me more incidentally than the surface content of his works. The Rektor has clearly a complete and painstaking acquaintance with the whole range of German literature. But his observations concerning the poets were, to me at least, of less value than the revelation of his own type of mind and general outlook on life.

August Lomberg is a garrulous writer. His explanations are largely historical as well as literary. Every line breathes a narrow and aggressive patriotism of the type which has made the name of Germany detested. The great poets of the Liberation period have sung both of freedom and oppression on a note which rings clear and true to any lover of liberty. The Elberfeld Rektor, commenting on this verse long before 1914, can only do so in terms of abuse of France. To him a poet is really important, not for some immortal gift to the sum-total of the world’s truth and beauty, but for the degree to which he may have added new stops to the full-sounding organ swelling the note of German excellence. The ironical anti-patriotic strain in Heine fills the Rektor with undisguised horror. So great is his reprobation of Heine as a world citizen, that he can with difficulty begin to do justice to him as a poet. And though like Wordsworth’s Nun he is breathless with adoration before the genius of Goethe, I more than suspect that at heart Goethe’s indifference to patriotic questions is a sore trial to him.

These volumes of Lomberg’s are well-known school-books in Germany. Hence their value as indicating a certain trend of thought. If the English are ever to form a reasoned judgment of the Germans, it is essential to understand something of that peculiar herbage on which the minds of teachers and pupils alike have been pastured. But Herr Lomberg has not been content to rest on his laurels as regards a critical study of the German classics. War poetry has also claimed his attention and his explanations. One afternoon in a bookshop I stumbled by chance on a volume of German war poetry. I bought it and went on my way rejoicing. I knew something by then of the general outlook of my friend the Rektor’s mind, and felt sure that his observations on the World-War would be worth reading. So indeed they proved.

The poems themselves were of very poor quality. Nothing remotely comparable to the verse of Rupert Brooke or Julian Grenfell or of half a dozen other English writers adorned these drab pages. Unless Germany has produced something better than the mediocre collection brought together by the Rektor, her inferiority in one respect at least to England is outstanding. Leaving literary values aside, the normal note struck was one of a boastful and irritating patriotism. The early poems, written in the days when Germany was still flushed by hopes of a speedy and overwhelming victory, are noisy and aggressive. One writer exults over the air raids. “We have flying ships, they have none,” he shouts stridently. No less great is the enthusiasm for the U-boat exploits. The limits of degradation were reached by a poem about a pro-German fish in the North Sea. The fish kept company with a U-boat and followed the various sinkings with great interest. One day the U-boat sank first a cargo of sugar, next of lemons, thirdly of rum. The fish brewed a toddy of these various ingredients, and drank tipsy toasts to the U-boat. I suppose the poem was intended to be funny. Of humour it had none. The mentality it revealed was amazing.

As the first hopes of easy victory evaporated, a note of stress and anguish replaces that of the original bluster. A poem on Ypres was noticeable in this respect. But the particular interest of the book lay to me in the Rektor’s explanations about the English. A fount of venom overflows whenever the name of Britain is mentioned. He sets forth in his own inimitable way how England, owing to her acute jealousy of Germany, had deliberately provoked the war. England’s sordid anxieties about her menaced commercial supremacy lay at the root of this action. Having plotted war and declared it at her own time, she then proceeded to wage it on the most barbarous lines. English soldiers murdered the wounded, concealed machine guns in their Red Cross wagons, and immolated whole platoons of innocent German soldiers by an abominable misuse of the white flag. The wickedness, the perfidy, the treachery of England, the outrages committed by her against every law of God and man—the Rektor lashes himself into a white heat on these themes. No less fulsome and subservient is the writer in his praise of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. Germany’s passion for peace, a peace destroyed only by the intrigues of a jealous and wicked world, is enlarged on over and over again.

This book, like its predecessors, is intended for use in schools. We can form some judgment, therefore, of the facts and fancies which writers of the Lomberg type thrust as historical truth on the rising generation. The influence of such statements can hardly be exaggerated, and much similar poison has flowed through the whole German school system. German school literature is a real mine of information to any one who wants to study the root causes of latter-day German mentality. Little wonder that animosities and misunderstandings rend nations in twain when truth is subordinated to the worst purposes of political and interested propaganda. Children are malleable stuff, and certain long-sighted Teutons realised perfectly that what is driven into a child in the first impressionable years abides through life.

The accident of improving my limited knowledge of the German language brought me in contact with primers and readers covering all standards and classes. In making my way from the Child’s First Reader to the volumes in use in High Schools, I learnt a good deal more than the actual study of words and grammar. From the Infants’ to the Upper Standards one note was struck again and again with monotonous regularity—praise of the Army, glorification of the Hohenzollerns. I came into rapid conflict with my Child’s First Reader when on the first page I was confronted with a little poem saying that, though a tiny child, my great aim in life should be to shoot straight and grow up into a fine soldier. Then came a fulsome hymn to the Kaiser swearing lifelong fidelity to that noble man. Then followed a series of short stories, no less fulsome, about the goodness and greatness of the Royal Family. The book of course included other material, but glorification of the Hohenzollerns permeated its pages, and the same thing repeated itself exactly in all the following standards.

Thoroughly bored with the Child’s Reader, I tried some of the more advanced books only to find an elaborated edition of the same theme. One priceless story in a middle-standard book told a marvellous tale about the adventures of a humble family in Berlin, the Empress, the Emperor’s daughter, and a cow. The curtain rises on a child weeping bitterly in a Berlin park. The beautiful and tender-hearted Princess drives by in a glittering phaëton lined with plush and drawn by two spanking ponies. Flinging the reins to a groom, she hastens to the assistance of poverty in distress. A tale of woe is in due course unfolded. A family, humble but virtuous, have lost a cow on which the entire prosperity of the household pivoted. The Princess comforts the weeping child, gives her money, and says that though the matter lies beyond her powers, her mother will certainly call and deal with the cow situation. The Princess is as good as her word. To the stupefaction of the district, a royal carriage containing the Empress visits the humble home the next day. The Empress administers more consolation; virtue is to be upheld in the hour of trial. A cow is following immediately from the royal farm; indeed it is on its way, lowing, so to speak, at the moment in the streets of Berlin. The anxieties of the family consequently will be at an end. The paralysed couple, falling flat on their faces, stammer suitable words of gratitude and praise. Thanks to the cow and the prestige attaching to it, the family fortunes prosper exceedingly. The whole district tumbles over itself in the effort to drink a glass of Imperial milk. But unhappily one day the woman is knocked down and mortally hurt in a street accident. Lying in the hospital at the point of death, the matron sees there is something on her mind. On inquiry the patient replies that if only once again she could see her benefactress, the Empress, and hold her hand, she would die content. The matron, being apparently a person of ample leisure, sets off at once to the palace to find the Empress. She is interviewed by a lady-in-waiting, who declares it is impossible for her to see the august one. Unfortunately it happens to be Prince Joachim’s birthday and the festivities in connection with it are about to begin; the Empress cannot possibly be disturbed. But the stout-hearted matron is not to be daunted by any lady-in-waiting or any birthday party. She gives battle vigorously on behalf of her dying patient. “Who are you,” she says reprovingly, “to stand between the mother of her country and the humblest of her children.” The lady-in-waiting, routed and overwhelmed, retires hastily to tell the Empress. Her discomfiture is completed by grave reprimands from the august one that any time should have been wasted at so critical a moment in bringing the facts to her knowledge. Poor Prince Joachim is caught in the backwash of these events. His birthday party is wrecked. The Empress hurries off to the bedside of the dying woman, but not before the table groaning under the weight of Joachim’s birthday cakes and flowers has been stripped of half its adornments. With her arms full of roses the Empress enters the hospital ward. The expiring patient gives a cry of joy and, after an exchange of suitable sentiments, dies, holding the Kaiserin’s hand. Even after death the connection of the humble family with the Hohenzollerns is maintained. Even more permanent than the prestige conferred by the cow is the prestige of the tombstone, erected in the cemetery at the Imperial expense, with an inscription bearing the Empress’s name.

Other stories no less grotesque redound to the credit of the Emperor or the gallantry of the Crown Prince. Home workers were marked down as the special preserve of the Crown Princess. Sweated industries in Berlin might in fact exist to afford a channel for the altruistic impulses of the royal lady. One by one the various key points of the Hohenzollern family were dealt with in this fashion. The glorification of the Army went on as steadily side by side.

All this, of course, is systematic propaganda carried out with characteristic thoroughness and, be it added, clumsiness. For even among the Germans it failed in many cases to carry conviction. I remonstrated with my Fräulein—herself a school teacher: “How can you bring your children up on this wretched stuff; with a country like yours so rich in history and legend, surely there is something more inspiring to teach than this nonsense about cows and sweated workers?” Fräulein shrugged her shoulders. The ferment of the revolution was working in her naturally liberal mind, and the unaccustomed liberty of thought and action which the revolution had brought in its wake moved her not a little. But she found it difficult to part with the sheet anchors of the past, and respect for the Imperial family was screwed very tightly into the average professional German. She admitted the stories were stupid, but said that the Kaiser was the symbol of Germany’s greatness and they had always been taught to revere him. Since the revolution the Social Democrats have made an end of Kaiser worship in the schools. Pictures and portraits have vanished. All totems of the faith have disappeared. Apparently the children were very much upset when they were first forbidden to sing hymns to the Kaiser. There were tears when the portraits were removed. The German mind, naturally docile, yearns for some concrete expression of faith to which it can rally. Of all fields schools offer the greatest scope to the corrupting influence of propaganda. And through the schools Imperial Germany twisted and distorted the spirit of the people with consequences no less dire to themselves than to the rest of the world.

One of the irritating facts about Germany to-day is that she refuses to say she is sorry. We English are outraged by the fact that no sense of guilt or of moral responsibility appears to have touched the spirit of the people. It is not a question of dragging Germany about in a white sheet and a candle from shrine to shrine, but of some guarantee that there shall be no repetition of events so lamentable. The best guarantee for the future is a clear recognition of what was wrong in the past. Truth permeates very slowly through German mentality, and few Germans seem to realise that they or their rulers have brought the world to the very brink of ruin; that millions of lives have perished as the result of their insensate ambitions. They are conscious, painfully conscious of the miseries of Germany to-day. But that civilisation as a whole is staggering under the blow they dealt it—this aspect of the situation apparently never strikes them. Facts which jump to our eyes as English people make no more impression on them than they would on a blind man. Over and over again I have been baffled by coming up against a blank wall of non-comprehension as regards circumstances about which there is no dispute.

A personal experience in this sense, at once exasperating and amusing, overtook me on a journey between Cologne and Paris. I shared my cabin in the sleeping-car with a German lady from Cassel, a typical fair-haired, solid-looking Prussian. We exchanged the ordinary politenesses of travellers thrown together on the road. I was interested to hear that not only did the lady conduct a large business enterprise in Cassel, but that she was a prop of the Volkspartei and took a keen interest in politics. She spoke of Bolshevism and the Red Peril with the fear and disgust always noticeable in the German Bourgeoisie. The train by which we were travelling crossed the devastated area in the night. Before going to bed my companion asked me whether we should see anything of the ravaged districts. I replied that I thought it would be too dark for any view of the country. It happened, however, that I woke up at 3 A.M. and, drawing the blind, found we were just moving out of Péronne. It was a grey July dawn, with driving rain, which intensified the unspeakable desolation of the Somme. Tragic beyond words were the massacred orchards. In some cases the stumps of trees not wholly cut through were throwing up fresh leaves in a painful effort after new life. My heart was stirred at the thought of my Prussian stable companion slumbering peacefully in the bunk above. She had wanted to see devastations; devastations she should see.

“Gnädige Frau,” I said in a firm loud voice, “wake up. We are in the middle of the devastated area, you had better look at it.” Sounds as though a person had been disturbed from deep sleep issued from the top berth. Personally I do not like to think what I should have said or done had a strange woman in the train woke me up at 3 A.M. But Prussian docility responded to an order. Gnädige Frau got down meekly from her berth and established herself at the window. A suitable flow of exclamations and adjectives then took place: “entsetzlich,” “furchtbar,” “schrecklich,” “böse,” and so on. Comfortably wrapped up in my bunk I surveyed the scene with virtuous satisfaction, feeling that I was bringing home the war to one Prussian at least in an entirely right spirit and manner. Gnädige Frau, however, turned my flank with the military efficiency of her race. To my intense disgust I found that the text I had provided by this view of the Somme only led to an elaborate sermon on the devastations of the Russians in East Prussia. “You cannot imagine what awful things were done by those terrible Cossacks,” said the lady, “and how our poor cities were ruined. The rich German towns have had to become godparents to whole districts in the devastated area.” She rattled on in this sense as though the German legions had never set foot in France. I replied tartly that I hoped the trifling inconveniences experienced in East Prussia might afford some scale by which she could measure the sufferings of France, but I could only feel my moral lesson had miscarried sadly. Still, I got her out of her bunk at 3 A.M. and the morning was not only wet but chilly.

I have mentioned this story because it is very typical of the average German obtuseness which has an exasperating effect on their former enemies. We are bound, however, to try and study patiently the root causes of this vast moral myopia, because in it lies the key to the whole German attitude to the war. This myopia cannot be appreciated without some grasp of the real points of failure in the German character. During the war they haunted our imaginations as wily and strenuous children of the devil. In fact they are a very stupid, very insensitive, very docile people. Their ideas are as limited and often as absurd as those which people the nursery. Still worse, they are incapable apparently of understanding what other races think and feel. They have many excellent qualities, and an admirable capacity for hard work and patient research. But they do, I believe, possess three more skins than the ordinary man. Mixed up with the docility and unlimited power for submission to authority, runs a considerable strain of brutality which throws back to the unpleasant habits of the remote Germanic tribes. They can be and are very brutal to each other, as well as to their enemies. People so constituted were doomed to become the tools of miscreants in high places.

The average German, for all his powers of hard work and his marvels of applied science, is at bottom little better than a stupid child. His docility, his credulity, his lack of any real subtlety of spirit have left him at the mercy of the monstrous theories preached and practised by the ruling military class. Like a child he believed all he was told; like a child he was immensely proud of the vainglorious bombast of military trappings. Children too, it must be remembered, can be both cruel and callous. Unless this attitude of mind is realised, the riddle of German mentality appears as insoluble. But granted a docile and stupid people, governed by a ruthless military class endowed with the same practical diligence and ability as the mass of the nation, and no less insensitive to the finer issues of the spirit, all that has happened falls into place.

For years past a certain view of England as a sinister and aggressive power was preached steadily for their own ends by the military party. On the outbreak of war the German people were told that England was bent on the destruction of their country. They were fed on tales of atrocities and horrors. It was represented to them that Germany was fighting for her life a war of defence. Even in a country like our own, in which liberty is an old-established principle, the censorship and other conditions imposed by war resulted in a great darkening of truth and knowledge. But in a country like Germany, with no representative government, with no freedom, with a Press wholly subservient to the ruling junta, it is not astonishing that the people as a whole blundered on to ever lower depths of ignorance and prejudice.

I have described the sort of food on which the German school child is reared. No less instructive are the German memoirs which have been published recently, for they show in turn the view impressed on the adult population. Bethmann-Hollweg, Admiral von Tirpitz, Ludendorff, Bernstorff, Hindenburg, have all had their say on the war. With the exception of Hindenburg, who observes a generous reticence about his colleagues, the general tone of these memoirs is one of acrimonious controversy. One is reminded of a group of naughty schoolboys caught out in some misdeed, each saying, “Please, teacher, it was the other fellow.” Admiral von Tirpitz’s Recollections is the longest and most garrulous of these volumes. It is a book of absorbing interest, and throws a flood of light on the origins of the war. Here we see laid bare the whole spirit which provoked the conflict. Here, too, we see that even among the German governing class, this spirit in the extreme form represented by Admiral Tirpitz himself met in some quarters with opposition. If one person deserves to be hanged in connection with the war, then the halter should surely be placed round the neck of the old Admiral.

Von Tirpitz reveals himself in these pages as an able but most unsympathetic figure. He lays the lash generously about his colleagues, and the Emperor in particular is not spared. Creator of the German Navy, he lays bare the whole ruthless spirit animating the German war lords. English readers will notice with interest, and perhaps some surprise, the view of themselves and their country on which the Admiral enlarges. According to Von Tirpitz, the growth of the German Navy was not only directed towards making any English attack on German trade risky, but served the philanthropic purpose of supporting the non-Anglo-Saxon races in their struggle for freedom against the intolerable dictatorship of British sea-power. It was, in fact, the special mission of the German Empire to free the world from the strangling tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons. The English reader learns with surprise as he makes his way through these volumes how ruthless was the spirit in which England marked Germany down for destruction. Finally, through craft and Machiavellian principles of the worst kind, she accomplished her end. While German statesmen were weak, vacillating, and hopelessly pacific, a succession of English Governments, Radical no less than Conservative, animated one and all by the same fell purpose, only waited for the appropriate moment to fall on the European Simon Pure.

Lord Haldane during his visit to Berlin in 1912 figures as a skilled and determined mock negotiator, adamant as to concessions on the English side, but bent on sowing discord among German statesmen and reducing the fleet to impotence. Tirpitz accuses him of an evil conscience. Did not Lord Haldane shut his eyes to the wholly pacific intentions of Germany and invent a Berlin war party with which to inflame public opinion in England?

The Admiral speaks feelingly of the “armed battue” against Germany. He lays his hand on his heart and declares that in 1914 the German Empire was “the least preoccupied of all the Great Powers with possibilities of war.” Yet in spite of “our suicidal love of peace” the world would persist in laying the guilt of all that had happened on Germany. “It is really extraordinary how unpopular we are,” cries the Admiral naïvely in one of his letters. But he sticks to his point. The historical guilt of England is irrefutably clear. The “old pirate state” has once again torn Europe to pieces. Thanks to the most brutal methods she has secured a victory, and liberty and independence have perished. But the Admiral is not only concerned to abuse England. He deals faithfully with his own countrymen. If on the one hand English readers obtain a fresh insight through German eyes into their own villainies, they obtain information possibly less fantastic as to the discord which raged inside the German war-machine. If in the interests of truth we are compelled to say that the Germans overrated our powers of conducting a war with supreme efficiency, it is clear that we were no less at fault in attributing super qualities to our enemies.

When these various memoirs are read side by side and compared, they reveal strife, division, and hesitation of a remarkable kind in the higher direction of the war. Tirpitz, as head of the war party, writes with extraordinary bitterness of Bethmann-Hollweg the Chancellor. No words are bad enough for the man who had struggled sincerely enough, according to his lights, for the preservation of peace between England and Germany. His hesitations, vacillations, errors of policy are dealt with in a ferocious spirit. But the Army and even the Navy do not escape severe criticism. “The end of July 1914 found us in a state of chaos,” writes the Admiral. The generals made “frightful mistakes,” the war was one of “missed opportunities,” the Navy in particular was never allowed to do its work. The troops were heroic, but “the hereditary faults of the German people and the destructive elements among them” led to the downfall of the whole nation.

The popular view of Germany, which most English people held during the war, was that for forty years the German nation from the Emperor downwards had pursued the definite and determined end of the destruction of England. The real situation appears to have been far more complex. To credit the Emperor and his entourage with an inflexibility of purpose so great is to rate their capacity far too high. The mediocre statesmen of our own generation were not Bismarcks. They were incapable of the far vision, the sinister purpose, the iron will of the old Chancellor. Unlike him they did not know when to stop. An influential section among the soldiers was certainly bent on a war of aggression and pursued this end with unfaltering determination. They had considerable influence both among the Press and the professors. Consequently they loomed large in the public eye. But even among the governing class, as Tirpitz’s angry complaints reveal, there were certain weak-kneed statesmen who were anxious to pursue a pacific policy. As for the German nation as a whole, the unparalleled growth of the Socialist party during recent years proves that the views of the German militarists were meeting with considerable opposition among sections of their own countrymen.

The militarists largely controlled the machine and were therefore in the stronger position. An autocratic form of government and an Executive divorced from all control by Parliament made the Socialist vote, large though it was, of no practical value in determining policy. The General Election of 1912, when the Socialists and Progressives who had definitely challenged the Chauvinism of the Government secured considerable gains in the Reichstag, caused dismay in military circles. It is clear that the dread of democratic control was one of the causes which impelled the soldiers to bring matters to a head. A shadow had fallen on their power which a successful war, so they thought, would dispel. Had Germany possessed a democratic constitution which would have given due weight and place to the anti-military elements, it is difficult to believe that the war would ever have occurred. It was a race between the forces making respectively for peace and for aggression, and time was on the side of the former.

The military party consequently forced the pace and precipitated the conflict. That on the outbreak of war the whole German nation, Socialists included, closed its ranks and presented a united front to the enemy is natural enough. The view of the defensive war was widespread, and German myopia could not see straight about the threatening character of the armaments which had been piled up. But between the guilt of the rulers, which is black indeed, and the guilt of the nation as a whole, wide discriminations should in justice be made. If it were not so the future outlook, dark as it is at the moment, would be quite hopeless.

The part played in the middle of this welter by the arrogant and inferior figure on the throne is not easy to determine. The Emperor was not necessarily insincere when he expressed his abstract desire for peace. But his vanity was flattered by the vision of himself as Supreme War Lord ashore and afloat of a submissive Europe. He did not necessarily want to fight. He wanted very much to be in a position which enabled him to bully. Probably the governing classes in Germany held much the same view. The Emperor lent himself to the creation of huge armies and a threatening fleet, and then expressed surprise that his perpetual sabre-rattling and histrionic performances created anger and alarm throughout Europe. Other nations refused to think that Dreadnoughts were built as pets, or that armaments were piled up for the purposes of ceremonial salutes. Having surrounded himself with material of this character, he was in all probability genuinely appalled when the inevitable explosion occurred. He had no real wish to trade with the devil, but he was always in and out of the shop, turning over the wares and listening to the flatteries of the salesman. A man of his type was bound, sooner or later, to become the tool of villains with a purpose clearer than his own.

Lord Haldane in his book Before the War has given an account, both sane and dispassionate, of the causes and forces which led up to the struggle. He analyses with admirable clarity the weakness and the strength of the German machine. In a striking passage he draws attention to a fact too little realised by the vast majority of English people, namely, that highly organised though the German nation might be on its lower levels, on the top storey not only confusion but chaos existed. Instead of a Cabinet representing the majority of an elected Parliament to whom it was bound to submit its policy, the governing body in Germany was an irresponsible group of men animated by wholly divergent ideas.

In the centre of this group was a vain, feather-headed monarch, not devoid of good impulses, and at times of generous feeling, but cursed with an instability of character which made him lend an ear first to the promptings of one counsellor and then of another. The Emperor swayed from side to side according to the fancy of the moment; at one time drawing close to the war party, at another inclining to the more sober counsels of the peace party. Such a temperament does not improve with the flight of years. Time only deepened in the Emperor’s mind the sense of his own importance in the eyes of God and man. His unstable brain was more and more bemused with ideas of power and infallibility. Already in 1891 he had caused deep resentment throughout working-class Germany by a speech to young recruits at Potsdam. He referred in acrimonious terms to the Socialist agitations, and went on to say: “I may have to order you to shoot down your relations, your brothers, even your parents—which God forbid!—but even then you must obey my commands without murmuring.” Criticism was treasonable; criticism was therefore not audible, but the words were never forgotten nor forgiven. Vanity and megalomania steer an erratic course, and the consequent vagaries of German high diplomacy kept Europe in a chronic state of nerves which deepened the general sense of anxiety and suspicion.

Since the revolution the diplomatic documents in the Berlin archives relating to the plot against Serbia, together with the Emperor’s marginal notes, have been published by order of the new German Government. The war has produced no volume more painful than that of Karl Kautsky in which these documents are set forth. The revelation is of the blackest, so far as the Emperor is concerned. His personal responsibility for creating the situation which led to the war is established beyond question. His marginal notes, always foolish and often vulgar, are almost incredible in their criminal levity. The Emperor comments, for instance, on the most solemn and impressive of Sir Edward Grey’s warnings to the German Ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, in the words “the low cur!” We watch this vain unstable figure flitting with a lighted torch round the powder magazine of Europe. With the lives of millions in his hand, the mediocre intelligence of the Emperor seemed unable to forecast the elementary consequences of his own acts. At the start his sole object in view was the dismemberment of Serbia and the creation of a new Balkan situation. The German Ambassador in Vienna, who counselled moderation in the demands made on the Serbian Government, was reprimanded severely. William was concerned to stir up his more sluggish ally, Austria, to warlike purpose. If Russia objected—well, never mind about Russia. The implications of a general European war do not seem to have occurred to him. When as huntsman he laid on the hounds, the magnitude of the quarry was not apparent. Later on, when the chasm into which he had dragged the world dawned before him in its appalling immensity, he shrank back aghast on the brink. But too late. The terrible vitality of deeds had taken charge of the situation and hurried on the tragedy to its final consummation.

A curious point arises not only from the study of the Kautsky documents, but of the various German memoirs which have appeared. The primary responsibility of the Emperor for staging the scene is proved beyond doubt. But he was away yachting in the weeks before the war, and it is not clear with whom the further responsibility rests for converting the Serbian intrigue into the wider act of world aggression. At this point history has further secrets to reveal. The Great General Staff were in all probability determined not to let slip so golden an opportunity, and engineered matters in the sense of war during the Emperor’s absence.

Strangely enough, Tirpitz, though ultimately more responsible for the war than any one else in Germany, did not want to fight in August 1914. His fleet was not ready and had yet to attain its maximum strength. He denounces Bethmann-Hollweg’s refusal of Sir Edward Grey’s proposed conference as a capital blunder. War at that moment should in his opinion have been averted. Germany was not sufficiently prepared. Further, the old Admiral with great shrewdness deplores the sabre-rattling against England on various occasions. Do not irritate your enemy until you are ready to fight him, was his principle.

It is a strange fact that Bethmann-Hollweg, who had always desired peace, seems to have lost his head completely in the crisis and showed a fatal obduracy which might have been expected from Tirpitz. The conference for which Sir Edward Grey pressed would in all probability have avoided the war. Bethmann-Hollweg wanted peace, yet he banged the door on the one possibility of maintaining it. One gathers the impression of a group of men groping blindly on the edge of a precipice over which finally they hurl themselves. But the hand which pushed them into decisions, certainly unwelcome to some of the actors, has yet to be revealed. We know it must in effect have come from a man or group of men among the military party. The exact personalities are not at present clear.

The German memoirs written by statesmen of the old régime, which throw so much light incidentally on the tragedy of Europe, must be read in detail in order to obtain any real appreciation of their atmosphere. Their great value lies in the fact that they make the German view of England more intelligible. We are able to measure the vast distortion of truth as it has reached the average German, and the profound misconceptions under which he labours. Exasperated though we may feel by such aberrations, we begin to understand why the rank and file of the German nation, trained from their youth in subservience to the ruling house, still believe they were the attacked, not the attackers, in the war. I have heard recently of Germans meeting pre-war English friends with personal feelings quite unchanged. The English found, however, to their bewilderment that the Germans, out of delicacy to their feelings, would not discuss the war—it must be, so they hinted, terrible for them to realise the crimes England had committed both in her unjustifiable attack on Germany and in her practical conduct of the war. Naturally as English they would desire to avoid any reference to so painful a subject.

Hence Germany’s reluctance to say she is sorry. So far she will not admit there is anything to be sorry for. Never was there a nation more exasperatingly devoid of the spirit of self-criticism. Everything German is perfect in the eyes of a German. In the crash which has overtaken the nation little realisation exists of the moral issues involved. Among the Socialist party alone would much difficult and unpalatable truth appear to be permeating. At the meeting of the Second International held in Geneva during August 1920, the responsibility of the Kaiser’s Government for the outbreak of the war was admitted in precise terms by the German Socialists. The wrong done to France in 1870 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, the wrong done to Belgium in 1914 and the just claims of reparation, were all acknowledged and incorporated into a formal resolution. Though the Bourgeoisie may clasp their hands tightly over eyes and ears, the Socialists at least have no illusions as to the crimes and follies of the Imperial Government. But, crushed as they are by the heavy burthens of the Peace, they are more concerned to dwell on the trials of the present than the failures of the past.

What we should remember, I think, is that the bulk of the German nation did its duty in the war just as we did ourselves. Alongside the organised atrocities and brutalities which disgraced the higher direction of the military machine, must be set the courage and self-sacrifice of large numbers of humble people. The average German fought for his Fatherland with a conviction just as great as that of the average Frenchman or Englishman. In view of the rigid censorship which ruled, it is clear that the rank and file knew little or nothing of many deeds which outraged the conscience of the civilised world. They served a bad cause with a fortitude from which it would be ungenerous to withhold praise. The future peace of the world lies in the hope that their powers of loyalty and service may be turned to other and better ends.

Meanwhile the existing veils of ignorance and misconception can only be raised by a frank and free contact of men and women of both nations who are not afraid to come together and face facts however unpalatable. These distorted values can only be redressed through a determined effort to seek truth for itself undeterred by false conceptions of national honour. A nation which claims to be great should be great enough to admit the wrong she has done. Germany must learn to see straight about herself before peace in the real sense can be restored between her and nations who have suffered grievously through her action. Peace is here and now the urgent need of the world, but peace cannot live if perpetually pelted by prejudices and ignorances. The Supreme Charity has not left us without guidance in this matter, and as on another famous occasion, let the man or woman in the happy position of having no fault come forward to cast the first stone.

CHAPTER XVI
WATCHMAN—WHAT OF THE NIGHT?

It is probable that at no moment in the history of the world has a spirit of disillusion been so widespread and so profound as at the present time. Not only apparently have the high ideals which sustained us during the war evaporated completely, but they have yielded place to a sullen exasperation and ill-will dangerous in its temper and purpose. Moral war-weariness has sapped mind and body to such an extent that no powers of resilience remain. Suspicion as between class and class and nation and nation corrodes the foundations of life. Surly ill-will and a wholly anti-helpful attitude permeates the grudging performance of essential social services. People and classes pursue their own ends with complete disregard as to their reactions on other sections of society. Self-interest reigns supreme. The joy as of comrades of the open road faring together in a spirit of common service and brotherhood appears to have vanished. In England unrest and discontent wholly refuse to yield to the opportunist devices of a Government to whom all principles are mere questions of expediency. But England, mercifully for herself, whatever her spiritual sickness, knows nothing of the stark levels of practical misery and starvation on to which millions of continental people have been driven. We have no standard with which to gauge misery and hunger on a scale so appalling as that which has overtaken the dwellers of Eastern Europe. At times one wonders how it is that England, so great, so generous, so magnanimous in her traditional policy, has apparently neither eyes to see nor ears to hear what is going on. The voice of Gladstone could once rouse the country to a white flame of indignation over the sufferings of an oppressed people. But with the tragedy of Europe before our eyes; with women and children perishing by the thousand; with a volume of discontent growing and surging among every nationality, England, always the world’s hope in matters of practical justice, seems incapable of rousing herself to action worthy of her own great tradition. Instead of some fine and generous appreciation of the world’s woes, she looks on dully and from afar.

America has for the moment withdrawn from the European chaos. Her reasons for doing so are intelligible, but the result has been a disaster for the rest of the world. It is not a question, as so many Americans think, of a desire to exploit the better financial position of the United States. It is because America with many faults and crudities has a driving power of idealism behind her—the same motive force which brought her into the war. Some American business men and supporters of the great financial interests have sought—as is the habit of their kind—to exploit the post-war situation to their own profit. As against this must be set qualities of a very different character among the mass of the people. America’s absence from the European council-chamber involves the loss of a great influence at once restraining and constructive. We cannot measure fully as yet the infinite damage caused by her withdrawal from the task of Reconstruction. We know, however, that no blow since the Peace has been so severe. America was particularly fortunate in some of the representatives sent to Europe during the war—men of the highest capacity and honour. Through her absence every undesirable force or principle has gathered weight. Conversely every force working for good has been weakened.

The rest of the world looks on in an attitude as helpless as that of the former combatants, as month by month the shattered fabric of European life sags yet wider. The post-war chaos appears so complete that men turn from it in despair. Moral disillusion and weariness have their counterparts in recklessness and wild extravagance. There is a sense of an approaching Twilight of the Gods; of a collapse of the foundations of society. Therefore let us eat, drink, and be merry, on the brink of the chasm though it be, before the darkness swallows us up.

How is it that a war fought for principles and ideals so clear and so noble as those which animated us at the outset of the struggle can have resulted in a condition of practical moral bankruptcy? Of that moral bankruptcy the Treaty of Versailles is the sign and witness. On the plane of practical politics it may be said that the world could have survived the war, but it is doubtful whether it can survive the Peace. Yet the Peace only registers the sickness which has invaded our souls. Indeed, from one aspect it may be asserted that the present situation, dark and threatening though it be, is not devoid of consolation of a lofty and austere character. The moral bankruptcy which has overtaken the world is in itself the most august testimony to the inexorable truth of moral principle. Because the light in the spirit of man has burned so low, we are able to estimate what darkness falls when the lamp is untrimmed. The very chaos we deplore is the result of outraged moral laws, neglect of which brings a sure Nemesis in its train. Just in so far as the world has forsaken abiding standards of justice, truth, and mercy, the world has been stricken down. We are perishing to-day owing to failures in principle, and health can only return when principle is no longer flouted but resumes its reign over men’s souls. The tricks and turns of an opportunist policy cannot stem the rising flood of restlessness and disgust. The world grows daily more sick of men who have not sufficient character to make their cleverness tolerable. Thus viewed, our present confusion is fraught with profound spiritual significance.

In this, despite grave present peril, lies the chance of salvation. History has never known so great and so terrible a testimony to the inexorable character of moral law, and the reality of Divine Truth which it is death to challenge. Docet umbra, and in the darkness which has fallen, we who stand in the shadow may learn anew of the vision which shines behind all earth-drawn clouds; and so, may be, lay firmer hold on those forgotten truths which, alike to men and nations, bring peace at the last. If even now the better side of human nature will rally to the task of rescue, the future may yet be saved. The terrible sufferings of those who have fallen by the way cannot be made good. But if the nations will rouse themselves to make a determined moral effort, any repetition of such sufferings may be checked.

The greatest and gravest charge which can be brought against Germany is not so much that she killed men’s bodies and laid waste their houses and lands, as that she has poisoned the soul of Europe. The evil spirit let loose by the Prussian theory of life has reacted throughout the world. It has darkened counsel and silenced the voice of charity and moderation. Not to be dragged down to the level of the person who has wronged you is the hardest of all moral tests. It was one which proved too hard for the conquerors in this war. The Peace was bound to have been very stern towards Germany and very exacting in its demands. Severity was inherent in the situation. Wrongs had been committed which called for judgment; balances had to be redressed. The more necessary was it, in view of these stern measures, to adhere strictly to principles of justice and honour in our treatment of Germany; to give neither history nor a defeated foe any justification for the charge that in the hour of victory we cast behind us principles for which we fought.

The degree to which the Terms of Peace violated both the letter and spirit of conditions laid down in the Armistice is a blot on the Treaty which must be painful to all honourable men. The Allies would have been within their rights in insisting on the unconditional surrender of Germany. But conditions having been permitted, they should have been adhered to. Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson had indicated on various occasions that peace made with a democratic Germany would be of a different character from a peace made with the Hohenzollerns still in power. But Germany, having rid herself of her Emperor and of her former Government, found that the treatment meted out to the new Republic differed in no particular from what would have been justifiable had the Emperor remained on the throne. The conscience of the world has been troubled by these things, and by an uneasy sense of undertakings given but not fulfilled.

Those of us who see in the Peace a supreme failure in constructive statesmanship do not take that view because we are pacifists or have some sentimental wish “to be kind to Germany.” So long as the issue of the war hung in doubt it was our duty to make war to the last man and the last shilling. With the evil spirit dominating Imperial Germany, neither truce nor parley was possible. The effort frequently made in pacifist circles to represent the war as a general dog-fight, for which all the nations involved have a common responsibility, is not only bad history but bad morality. Victory creates, however, a wholly new situation. War, in certain terrible cases, is the necessary prelude to a settlement. But of itself it settles nothing, any more than an operation essential to check the spread of disease is a natural or healthy process. The surgeon’s knife is merely a means to an end—the recovery of normal life by a normal and healthy body. The knife is not kept flourished permanently over the patient’s head or turned periodically in the wound.

The great charge against the Peace is its failure to envisage a normal and healthy life for Europe. Our quarrel against its provisions is that they are in many cases fully as short-sighted and as lacking in imagination as what Prussians themselves might have evolved. The precedents of Brest-Litovsk, at which we raised our hands in justifiable horror, are not agreeable ones to follow. The fatal flaw of the Peace is that it does not look beyond the period of punishment and reparation to an ultimate pacification of Europe. It lays down no principles for the establishment of good relations between nations. Its economic provisions are a nightmare calculated to lay a strangle-hold on any possible recovery of European trade and commerce. With a world crying out for goods and that increased production which can alone bring about a drop in prices, the Peace Treaty is directed to keeping one of the greatest producers, namely Germany, in chains, while a group of little states, erected as military buffers of the most futile character, are allowed to distract themselves and their neighbours by the erection of tariff walls behind which they carry on crazy forms of economic guerilla warfare.

Let us admit that the difficulties of the Peace were quite enormous and that mistakes and blunders were inevitable. Criticism is roused not so much by the practical provisions of the Treaty as by the general spirit animating it. It is, in effect, a peace of revenge uninspired by one generous gesture as regards the future. It is a peace of tired old men with their eyes fixed on the hatreds and animosities of the past, and their minds obsessed by the territorial jealousies of the old diplomacy. Consequently it has outraged and disgusted the young generation just stepping from school and college into the political arena. Youth is generous and impulsive; it is the age of chivalry and high ideals. The younger men and women ask what this Treaty is doing for the future, at what point it is binding up the wounds of Europe, what contribution it makes towards creating that “new world” of which politicians discoursed so eloquently. The rising generation has a right to demand an answer to these questions. It is their future which is at stake in the matter. The provisions of the Peace are burthens laid upon their shoulders. Naturally they are concerned with the contents of the load. But from no direction comes any satisfactory reply to these inquiries, only the dull echo returned by barriers of hatred and negation.

Yet another consequence results from this state of affairs, the seriousness of which has not, I think, been fully grasped. The failures of democratic statesmen, so called, in this matter of the Peace have jeopardised the whole principle of democratic government. “If this is the best that the statesmen of the three great democracies can produce, then away with such a sham and failure as democracy has proved itself to be. Let us try something else.” This spirit is stirring in many quarters. It leads young minds, at once eager and disappointed, to explore the alternatives of anarchism, direct action, Bolshevism, and the rest. We may deplore the direction in which their ideas are moving. Let politicians in power recognise, however, that this spirit of revolt is rooted in the vast failures of the old diplomacy. Is there yet time to recognise the hopeless dead end into which we have blundered and to retrace our steps along a better way? The first condition is to purge our minds from some of the illusions which run riot among the men who control the machine. The peace of Europe cannot be secured by any variation of the old tortuous adjustments concerned with the balance of power. Strategical frontiers, military dispositions, the creation of buffer states, leave the problem exactly where it stood. Neither will the effort to reduce a feared and hated enemy to a condition perilously akin to that of economic servitude dispel the menace of a future appeal to arms. No nation can lay enduring shackles on the life of another, as the history of Germany from Jena to Leipzig proves conclusively. But as that suggestive period also shows, the effort to oppress and dominate, so far from crushing the spirit of a people, rouses it to the highest point of effort and endeavour. The German poets of the Liberation period have sung in vain if they have not taught that lesson to an unheeding world.

The peaceful relations of nations cannot be achieved through the strategy of force and the tactics of hatred. A change of heart, a new moral orientation are essential if the world is not once again to become a shambles. Such a spirit can only permeate the existing welter little by little. We cannot afford to take risks with the ruthless and wicked people who in many instances control the destinies of nations. But the touchstone of statesmanship at the present time is the degree to which it is helping or it is hindering the forces which make for sanity and reconciliation; the degree to which it clears away barriers or helps to erect them. Nations, like individuals, can only live and grow through what is highest and best in themselves. Further, unless nations are prepared to treat each other with some measure of confidence and goodwill, and to have some sort of faith in each other’s good intentions, the moral chaos remains insoluble.

It is my earnest wish in this matter to write with complete understanding and sympathy of the position of France. French fears regarding the future are largely responsible for the tone and temper of the Peace. The fact is so well known that I cannot feel any useful purpose is served by a refusal frankly to face the issues involved. The Entente, if it is to flourish, must draw its strength from truth and candour. It cannot live on shams and make-believes. The better mind of England is disturbed increasingly over the policy pursued by the Entente, and feels that the influence of France is dragging us along a path remote from the traditional views of the British democracy. We must recognise this fact and face its implications, if sooner or later a point of sharp collision is to be avoided between the two countries. France and England are united by ties of a sacred and abiding character. Side by side have they upheld the torch of liberty while the foundations of the world rocked. The blood of their sons has been poured out on hundreds of battlefields in a common defence of liberty. The courage and the fortitude of France during the struggle was an example and an inspiration to the whole Alliance. Why are we conscious, therefore, to-day of so heavy a fall in all those values which made France heroic during the war? Again we must bring patience and understanding to a situation fraught with possibilities so grave of future trouble.

France to-day is dominated by two sentiments, one is hatred, the other is fear. Both are evil counsellors, both are destroyers of life. France through fear is pursuing a policy the only result of which can be to make the confirmation of her fears inevitable. Now, it is not for us English while recognising these facts to pass any sort of censorious judgment on them. Had we suffered like France, had we endured what she has been called upon to endure, in all probability our own spirit would have been even more black and more bitter. Such powers of detachment as we may possess do not imply the least merit on our part. It is only because relatively we have suffered less that we can afford possibly to be more broad and more generous in our outlook. France for the last fifty years has lived under the shadow of a nightmare. Enticed into war in 1870 by the devilish skill of Bismarck, she was forced to drink to the full of the German cup of humiliation. Marvellous though her economic and political recovery after the war, she could feel no security about her eastern frontier. The aggressive character of German diplomacy cast a deepening shadow on her life. Periodically she was threatened; periodically she was insulted. Finally came a climax of horror—the invasion of her soil, the devastation of town and country, the agony of four and a half years of a war unparalleled in its ghastliness. Little wonder, therefore, that France sees red all the time and that she demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

I often think that if in the course of the war it had so happened that a strip of German soil near the Rhine had been laid waste, it might in the long run have promoted the peace of Europe. I do not say this from any desire to destroy German homes or cause suffering to German women and children. But one of the difficulties in dealing with France to-day is that she feels that her wounds gape wider than those of any other nation. She is haunted by the horror of her own experience, to which no enemy country affords a parallel. Her devastated areas do not, so to speak, cancel out. Had they cancelled out, even in a limited measure, she would have lost something of the sense of unique and peculiar outrage which fills France to-day with a bitterness as of death. Let me repeat it is not for us to pass any censorious judgment on this attitude. Unlike France, we are not up against the fence of a land frontier with an hereditary foe on the other side. But we fail in our duty if in a spirit of entire friendliness and understanding we do not urge her to consider where this policy is leading.

The quarrel between Germany and France is a very old story. It did not start, as many people imagine carelessly, in 1870. Long before that date a barrier of bitter memories had already been piled up between the two countries. Germany too has had her grievances, heavy grievances, in the past against France. Louis XIV. carried fire and sword through the Rhineland and Palatinate during the wars of the Spanish Succession. His generals left an imperishable memory of outrage. The Napoleonic occupation laid a hand of iron subsequently on the German people. Read the poets of the Liberation period, Arndt, Rückert, Körner, Schenkendorf, and realise how deep that iron bit into the soul of the nation. Travel among the Rhineland towns and study their history. It is one long record of French occupation and destruction either in the seventeenth or early nineteenth century—Mainz, the cathedral used as a magazine and barracks; Cologne, horses stabled in the cathedral nave; Speyer, town and cathedral ravaged with fire and sword by the generals of Louis XIV., ruffians who exhumed and scattered to the winds the bones of eight German emperors; Worms, reduced in 1689 to a smouldering heap of ruins; Aachen, Bonn, Coblenz, Baden, all with bitter memories of military conquest and occupation.

If I draw attention to these old unhappy far-off things it is not from any desire to rake gratuitously among painful memories of the past. But the German attitude towards France can never be understood unless due weight is given to these black and bitter pages in their earlier relations. France must face candidly the historical truth that Prussian militarism came into being as a reply to the aggressions first of Louis XIV., then of Napoleon. The sins of older generations of French rulers have been visited on innocent heads, but the sins were there. The memory of French tyranny in former years was the driving force which welded the German states together. To the average German 1870 appeared the vindication of his national honour, the signal proof that the humiliations of the Napoleonic period were wiped out. Once again the old coil of evil is seen unfolding itself in a monotonous succession of wrongs done and revenge exacted, the revenge creating new wrongs which in turn lead to further strife.

Are we prepared to weave yet further sequences of this disastrous character? Or shall the spirit of man rise up and say the coil must be broken?

It is this problem that has to be faced with both tact and candour so far as the French are concerned. We sympathise to the full with their sufferings and their wrongs. All that is best, however, in the British democracy will neither sympathise with nor support policies which if pursued to their logical ends can only work fresh havoc for Europe. It is strange that the French, after their bitter experience of 1870, seem unable to apply lessons wholly learnt by themselves as to the strength of national feeling. It is impossible to stifle the spirit of a people whatever it may be. Germany failed completely in her effort to crush France. It is no less hopeless for France to think that she can crush Germany. Yet at bottom the destruction of Germany is the aim of the Chauvinists, who have considerable influence at the moment in the direction of French policy. For people of this type the European situation is the same to-day as it was in 1912. It is as though the years 1914-1918 had not happened. The German nightmare oppresses them as much as it has ever done. They still envisage Germany as a great military power whose existence is one long menace to the security of France. They want to see Germany crippled beyond the hope of restoration, though with an entire lack of logic they also want Germany to pay them large sums of money. Many French soldiers and politicians feel it is a great mistake to miss the present golden opportunity for making, as they think, a complete end of a formidable enemy. Among them are men who would welcome any pretext which might justify the further crushing of Germany. Theory reacts of course on practice. The actual policy pursued in the Occupied Area is often irritating and exasperating in the highest degree. Feeling between the Germans and the French has to my knowledge grown more sore and more bitter during the last year. But pinpricks will not produce the indemnity, and an atmosphere of general exasperation does not promote the best interests of France. Judged by rough-and-ready standards of expediency, it ought to be clear that less than forty millions of people cannot coerce indefinitely more than sixty millions of tough, hard-working men and women. This blunt truth governs the present situation. Such a policy if pursued is bound to fail. But before it breaks down in the turmoil of another war it may extinguish the last hope of saving European civilisation. Europe presents to-day common needs and common problems. It will recover as a whole or collapse as a whole. No illusion can be more fatal than the theory that the safety and prosperity of one member of the European family can be secured by the dismemberment and destruction of another. Statesmanship, while securing for France necessary material guarantees of safety, should have sought to win her round to a wiser appreciation of the principles on which her future security must rest. Similarly as regards Germany; while exacting adequate reparation and reducing her militarists to impotence, statesmanship should no less seek to encourage the growth of a new temper among her people which will, by making them decent and responsible members of the European family, render any repetition of past horrors impossible.

Lamentable indeed was the failure of the Peace Conference to make any contribution to these fundamental principles. The Peace Treaty registers accurately the violences and hatreds of the war. To the creation of a better state of affairs in the future it makes no contribution of any kind. Whatever the attitude of France, the moral failure of England and America as regards the exercise of any restraining influence is far more culpable. The collapse of President Wilson, a man of high ideals but without the power of dealing with facts needful to give them practical effect, is one of the most tragic chapters in history. Mr. Lloyd George, gifted as he is with vision and imagination, could have thrown the light of his indisputable qualities had he so willed over the chaos of Europe. Unhappily he became involved in a sordid chapter of domestic politics, the consequences of which hung round his neck like a millstone. The present chaos of Europe is in no small degree a consequence of the General Election of December 1918 and the temper and policies it inculcated. The British nation was rushed on that occasion with fatal results to the cause of permanent peace. The Peace Conference met at Paris in an atmosphere charged with passion, and passion weighted the scales at every critical issue. Meanwhile the democracies of the world, impotent to control peace negotiations the spirit and policy of which became increasingly unacceptable to all thinking people, looked on helplessly while the unwieldy vessel of the Conference, buffeted first by one influence and then by another, drifted on a stormy sea of opportunism towards the rocks of strife. As for the result, it was well denounced as the Peace of Dragon’s Teeth by Mr. J. L. Garvin, who throughout the tests of war and peace devoted his eloquence and great powers of idealism to the cause first of victory and then of European appeasement.

The Treaty as it stands has sown the world with fresh discord, and ultimately can lead to nothing but repudiation and revenge. Still further, the Treaty as it stands is unworkable. Already it shows signs of breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions. By demanding too much it bids fair to create a situation in which nothing will be obtainable. It is not business to tell a bankrupt he must pay thirty shillings in the pound, and at the same time sit on his head so as to make it impossible for him to earn thirty pence. If a bankrupt is to discharge his debts, he must be put into a position to earn. If he is to be loaded with chains, that spectacle may have its own satisfaction, but it will not produce money on the credit side. A hungry bankrupt Germany cannot work to pay off the indemnity on which France has just claim. If Europe crumbles further; if Bolshevism finds a new recruiting ground in the anger and despair of a whole people—where is France likely to stand in this matter of payment?

We must in common fairness recognise how serious are the difficulties even of a well-intentioned German Government in carrying out the demands it has to meet. The people as a whole are inexperienced politically. The nation has had no training in self-government. It has been run in the past by a highly efficient bureaucracy saturated in autocratic and Bismarckian traditions. To-day the old machinery of government is in ruins. We cannot expect that Germany with a wave of the wand can suddenly produce public men and civil servants of the type with which we are familiar. The cry that the government is in the hands of men “steeped in militarism” is far from untrue. The real problem, however, is to find men of any sort of training or experience in government work outside the close ring of Prussianism. Inevitably the public has to rely, anyway for the present, on officials trained in the old theory that a lie was a virtue so long as it served the State.

From this grave disadvantage there is no immediate escape, and the circumstance calls for special vigilance and care in our relations with the German official classes. We can, however, help or hinder the growth of another spirit. In so far as we support a democratically constituted German Government and give it some encouragement and consideration, we shall tend to produce men of a new type. But if these early steps in democratic government are at each stage to be associated with rebuffs and humiliations, we play straight, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, into the hands of the military party. The old gang, though they dare not raise their heads at the moment, are a compact body among themselves, and desire nothing so ardently as the failure of constitutional government in Germany. We cannot expect German mentality to be changed in a night. The new forces must be given time and space in which to develop.

Further, they must be given encouragement. The situation in Germany to-day is in many respects dark and difficult. The reactionary forces are entrenched strongly in more than one direction. We must not ignore the evil influence of some tens of thousands of embittered and irreconcilable soldiers and of certain officials of the old régime, whose careers have been broken and who have nothing to hope from any constitution acceptable to the democratic mind of Europe. Again, the old fire-eating doctrines are still to the fore at many centres of education and have an unfortunate influence on the student life—a serious fact borne out by much evidence. Thirdly, there is the danger of the irrecoverable rifle in the back garden—an impossible administrative problem, as we have found to our cost in Ireland. Undesirable factors of this character will have proportionate weight in Germany just so far as the spirit of unrest and despair spreads through the people. They can only be reduced to insignificance through the establishment of an ordered and settled government which is in a position to maintain a decent level of life for the nation, and a life consistent with a fair measure of national self-respect.

The revision of the Peace Treaty on lines which will bring it into harmony with enduring principles of justice and right is the crying need of the hour. A practical point in connection with the present situation should not be overlooked. The Germans know as well as we do that modifications of the Treaty are inevitable. So long, however, as the present unhappy instrument holds the field, the doubtful clauses offer a most undesirable scope for duplicity and intrigue. The men of the old tradition to whom I have just referred are experts in fishing in troubled waters. They have sufficient skill to play off Allied scruples and hesitations one against another. What we should aim at is a Treaty just and reasonable in its demands, stripped of provisions which involve exasperating administrative problems. Above all, the Treaty should be revised to command the moral assent of the Allied democracies, an assent wholly lacking in the case of the Treaty of Versailles. Then the provisions should be enforced rigidly, and the German Government made plainly to understand that there is to be neither humbug nor shirking about their fulfilment. There cannot be two opinions about Germany making the fullest material restitution in her power for injuries done. Opinions may and do differ fundamentally as to the manner and spirit in which these claims should be put forward.

If politicians and statesmen turn a deaf ear to the cry of a world in distress and to a growing demand that the policies pursued should be reasonable and constructive, the voice of the people themselves swelling in volume bids fair to overwhelm all triflers with peace. For despite the bluster of the fire-eaters and a Press which encourages their empty violence, the world is sick of blood and strife. Germany has suffered such a defeat as history has never known. Sixty millions of people, however, virile, disciplined, hard-working, cannot be obliterated from the map. Greatly though certain zealots may desire the complete annihilation of the German tribes, vapourings of this kind are remote from the realm of practical politics. The statesmanship which at the moment haunts the Chancellories of Europe would not appear to be of very high quality. But statesmanship of an order infinitely higher might well recoil appalled from such problems as would result from any general collapse of the German Government and people.

A far-sighted policy, which while never failing in fairness is withal generous and reasonable, is as the poles removed from that of a weak sentimentality which refuses to face the difficult facts of the present situation. The withdrawal of any great nation from the urgent task of work and production means loss and detriment to the world at large. Hence the need to let Germany both eat and work; more, the need to help her start afresh. She lies a beaten and prostrate nation to-day. We may push her over the brink and so precipitate new catastrophes. Or without sentiment and without illusion we may take a longer view; we may direct our policy towards ultimate ends of appeasement, towards the establishment of a saner and a better Europe unhaunted by the menace of vast aggressive forces, towards the recovery by Germany herself of her old birthright of music, poetry, and philosophy bartered by her for evil dreams of world power and domination. That new order cannot be founded on any basis of enduring hatred. We cannot offer the ideal of the League of Nations with the one hand, and policies which resolve themselves into starvation and oppression with the other. The policies are incompatible, and we must choose between them.

The miserable suggestion frequently advanced, that as a victorious Germany would have ground us to powder, we should do to her as she would have done to us, cannot be sustained for a moment. Is our policy to be directed by German standards and influenced by German principles? All along we have proclaimed loudly that the war was fought so that the spirit and the principles of Germany should no longer terrorise the world. To adopt her principles, even in some modified form, is to give her in defeat a victory lost by her in the field. Our moral pretensions in this struggle have been very high ones, and moral pretensions are intolerable unless some effort is made to live up to them.

Not all the dark and sordid happenings which wait inevitably on five years of world conflagration, not all the dragging in the mire of many a noble idea, should make us forget the great principles of liberty and justice which drew us originally into the war. It was no idle phrase that England staked everything for an ideal when the wrong done to Belgium brought her into the field. At no moment in her history has she risen to moral heights so great as when she stepped forth in August 1914 to vindicate the cause of the oppressed. The principles to which she consecrated herself in that supreme moment of testing demand a service no less inexorable from us to-day, though to hold by them steadily in the dark and stony ways of peace is proving, as we all know to our cost, a test of endurance greater far than that of the actual conflict. Yet surely failure at this point is to fail our dead most miserably—the men who died with the light of a great vision in their eyes: that vision of a world purged from evil through their sacrifice. No miracles of leadership won the war. It was won by the grit and by the endurance of the great mass of the British peoples. And where statesmanship has failed, we look to the rank and file of the nation to win the peace. It rests with our countrymen to see that there is no further deepening of the ruts of hatred and mutual ignorance, for what England wills in this matter is decisive as regards the future.

And France—France who was in such a special sense the soul of the war? Is it too much to ask that France, despite her sufferings and sacrifices, should brace herself for one supreme effort, nobler than all which have gone before—the effort to make herself greater than the wrong done to her? Then would her triumph over the dark and evil forces which brought about the war be supreme indeed. France who means so much to the mind of Europe, who has given to it eternal principles of truth and liberty—will not France in this matter rise to the level of her own heroic stature?

The established democracies of the world have in these troubled times to hold up each others arms. So long as the great Republic of the West stands aloof, the chain of brotherhood and common effort is broken at a vital point. The darkness is greater, the task infinitely more hard, because she has withdrawn her companionship from what should have been a united purpose. The intervention of America led to the complete overthrow of Germany. Without her great resources flung on the Allied side the war must have had a very different end resulting in compromise, not victory. We appreciate her difficulties; we do not presume to dictate. We would, however, beg her to remember she too has responsibilities as regards the burthen of Europe. But though the action of the United States may have made the goal of European appeasement more remote, more difficult to attain, the goal itself is clear.

The Watch on the Rhine is of value just so far as it helps to clear our minds as to the true objectives that we are seeking. The soldiers have done their work well and truly in the war. Their task accomplished, its results have now passed largely into other hands. Our unworthiness and unfitness to carry so great a responsibility are but too painfully apparent. Yet the responsibility is there. The dead have in special measure left a sacrifice to be perfected. The torch fell lighted from their hands. Supreme shame would it be if it suffers extinction through the sordid ambitions and mean desires of men who live because other men have died. The threat of moral bankruptcy, real as it is, can only be averted through a steady devotion to ideal ends. Those ideal ends have been sung by one of our younger poets in words which, to me at least, sum up the faith I have endeavoured haltingly to express as regards the future:

“This then is yours; to build exultingly

High and yet more high

The knowledgeable towers above base wars

And sinful surges, reaching up to lay

Dishonouring hands upon your work, and drag

From their uprightness your desires to lag

Among low places with a common gait.

That so Man’s mind not conquered by his clay,

May sit above his fate

Inhabiting the purpose of the stars,

And trade with his Eternity.”

THE END

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Section iv. Part iii.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber using the original cover and is entered into the public domain.