CHAPTER IV.
SPECIAL FEATURES GIVEN TO THE WAR BY THE PANGERMAN PLAN.
I. All the great political questions of the old world are raised and must be solved.
II. As the war is made by Germany in order to achieve a gigantic scheme of slavery, it follows that it is waged by her in flagrant violation of international law.
III. A struggle of tenacity and of duplicity on the side of Berlin versus constancy and solidarity on the side of the Allies.
The Diplomatic Corps, having ignored the Pangerman plan for reasons already shown (pp. 19 et seq.), it is quite natural that the General Staffs and the public opinion of Allied countries should have been equally ignorant. From this general absence of knowledge there has resulted a vagueness and inadequacy in the view taken of the ultimate aims of Germany in the war; and in consequence the co-ordination of the Allied efforts has remained for a long while very imperfect. Each of the Allied nations, in fact, was at first so taken up with its own interests that they all lost sight of what ought to have been the common object of their common action.
The Russians entered into the struggle against the Germans especially to prevent Serbia from being crushed, and at the same time to put an end to those veiled but profoundly humiliating ultimatums which Berlin for some years has delivered to Petrograd. The Italians, specially fascinated by Trent and Trieste, have long thought that they could limit their war to a conflict with the house of Hapsburg, when in reality the only and true enemy of the Italian people—as now the latter is more and more clearly aware—is Prussian Pangermanism. As for the English, they entered the lists for two fundamental reasons: the violation of Belgium’s neutrality aroused their indignation, and a just sense of their own interests has convinced them that they could not allow France to be crushed without at the same time acquiescing in the ultimate disappearance of Great Britain. Completely unprepared for Continental war, England has very well understood from the beginning of hostilities that these might be very much prolonged, but she had not the slightest notion that British interests would be as completely threatened as they have been in Central Europe, in Turkey, in Egypt, and in India. As to the French, the German aggression immediately raised in their minds and in their hearts the question of Alsace-Lorraine. This has hypnotized them to such a degree, to their own loss, that they have too long considered the fight merely a Franco-German war, whereas they ought to have viewed the European conflagration in its full dimensions.
This piece-meal way of looking at the facts has been of the greatest disservice to all the Allies. Indeed it has had the effect of preventing them from discerning at the right time the special character which the extraordinary extent of the Pangerman plan must necessarily give to the war.
I.
The very vastness of the Pangerman plan of 1911, demonstrated beyond dispute by the facts that have come to light, suffices to prove that Berlin meant to solve for her own profit, at one single blow, all the great political questions latent in the old world.
