England and Germany

by Emile Joseph Dillon

Everything that human foresight could think of was carefully studied, everything that human ingenuity could provide for was thoroughly effected and systematized. Royal dynasties were founded abroad by German princes. German colonies settled in Russia, Poland, Palestine and Brazil. German schools were opened in Roumania, Spain, Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire, the Tsardom. Foreign newspapers were bought or subsidized. Protestant sects with pro-German tendencies were encouraged. Banks were founded with Entente capital and employed to ruin the trade of the nations that subscribed it. Colonies of mechanics, clerks, middlemen were settled in every European country and colony and obtained control of the nation’s industries and trade. Special legislation was enacted in Berlin to enable the German to become a foreign subject in externals while bound by all the duties of a citizen of his own country.

As the hour for the military and naval struggle was drawing near intestine strife was industriously stirred up in all those countries whose rivalry the Germans had reason to apprehend. Emissaries were despatched to Egypt who made common cause with the disaffected and restless elements of the population, cultivated friendship with the Senussi and smuggled in arms to would-be African rebels. In India German “scientific explorers” hobnobbed with the natives, criticized the state of “serfage” to which British rule had reduced one of the most highly civilized races of mankind, and made overtures to the Afghans. To Abyssinia another “scientific expedition” was despatched, which consisted of a number of German officers and one explorer. After a circuitous and difficult journey it arrived at Massaua in March 1915, and requested the authorization of the Italian Governor of Erithea, the Marquess Salvago-Raggi, to push on to Adis Abeba, in order to re-establish communications between the German Legation there and the Berlin Foreign Office. The real object of the expedition, as the Italian Government well knew, was to incite the young Negus to attack the British in the Sudan and the French in Djibuti. But Italy, although still neutral, understood too well how difficult it would have been for her to limit Abyssinia’s warlike operations to the French and British possessions and ward them off from her own colonies. Baron Sonnino accordingly declined to accord the permission asked for, and consented only to allow a large consignment of “correspondence” to be sent on.[107]

Later on Turkish officers were sent to Libya to egg on the Arabs to harass the Italians there. The Kaiser himself despatched a letter in Arabic to the Senussi which was intercepted on a Greek sailing vessel near Tripoli. It is said to have been enclosed in an embossed casket, and was found on board together with £4000 in gold and a number of oriental gifts. The letter, if genuine, is worth recording. Wilhelm II., the Supreme Head of the Protestant Church in Germany, gives himself therein, among other high sounding titles, those of Allah’s Envoy and Islam’s Protector, and states explicitly that it is his will that the Senussi’s doughty warriors should drive the “infidels” from the land which is the heritage of the true believers and their chief. This, from the “supreme Bishop” of one of the Christian Churches, is characteristic.

In Asia Minor Germany’s machinations were carried on with a much greater measure of success. Her former opponents had withdrawn their opposition and undertaken to lend her positive assistance to attain ends which were directed against themselves. This chapter of Entente diplomacy is marked by broad streaks of farcical comedy calculated to bewilder the serious student. France was converted to political orthodoxy on the subject of the Baghdad Railway and its cultural significance. Some of her publicists frankly repented that she had so long looked upon it with disfavour, and threw the blame on Russia, for whose sake they had kept aloof. At Potsdam the Tsar’s Minister abandoned his objections to the Baghdad enterprise and undertook to build a railway line from Persia, which would allow another stretch of country to be tapped by the German Railway Company. Great Britain, acknowledging the error of her ways, agreed that Koweit should not be the terminus and made valuable concessions to the Teuton, the realization of which was hindered by the outbreak of the war. Turkey, through Enver, who had imported from the Fatherland a band of military “instructors” under Liman von Sanders, became the âme damnée of Germany. In Persia every warlike and predatory tribe was courted by the Teuton intruder, and the German mission at Teheran, as well as the Consulates in the chief towns of the Shahdom, became centres of agitation against Britain and Russia and branches of the German General Staff.

In the Tsar’s dominions German agents organized a series of strikes in the various works belonging to their countrymen, paid the strikers and fostered a subversive political movement which bade fair to culminate in a real revolution. In Belgium the Flemings, who had for years been protesting against the refusal of their Government to give them a Flemish University in Ghent, were incited against the Walloons, whose dialect is of French origin and whose sympathizers were the entire French people. And one of the joint acts of the German administration in Brussels has been to appoint a commission to submit a scheme for the creation of a Flemish high school in Ghent and accentuate the differences between the two elements of the population.[108]

Meanwhile, in Germany the work of organization went steadily forward. While British Ministers were on the look-out for reasons or pretexts for diminishing expenditure on shipbuilding, Germany, under von Tirpitz, was stealing a march on us and increasing hers. And over and above this, she was arranging a surprise in the shape of submarines and aircraft which, had the war been deferred for another couple of years, might have not only removed the odds in our favour but given her a decided superiority over us. And, by way of intensifying the value of her fleet, she set to work to deepen the Kiel Canal and thus to confer a sort of ubiquity on her battleships, which can now concentrate in the North Sea or the Baltic without let or hindrance from the enemy. When the epoch of the Dreadnoughts was opened German armoured ships had a displacement of no more than 13,000 tons. The larger type of battleship, which was afterwards constructed, could not pass through the Canal, which had to be deepened. The necessary work was so thoughtfully and opportunely taken in hand that it was terminated in July 1914, just when the harvest for that year was also ingathered. Asphyxiating gas had been manufactured in the year 1911, as the Russians have discovered on certain of the machines. Thus when the fatal hour struck, everything was ready.

In the financial sphere, too, we find the same comprehensive survey, the same eye for detail, the same forethought and combination. When hostilities broke out British banks held about £1,100,000,000 of their depositors’ money. A large percentage of this had been employed to discount foreign, and in especial German bills, so that the paper remained in Great Britain and the gold was transferred to Germany, where it plays its part against us. But those marvellous efforts put forth with such effect by our enemies made no appeal to our rulers. Nowhere in the British Empire was there any man of mark thinking and acting for the community. The political pilots who had charge of the state-ship possessed neither chart nor compass nor rudder. Neither did they feel the need of these things. The Government disbelieved in war and was minded, if a struggle should be precipitated, to keep out of it. Nobody envisaged the needs and interests of the Empire as aspects of a single problem. Nobody had any clear-cut plan for the working out of the destinies of the British people. The interests of party, the expediency of local reforms, the squabbles between this faction and that, constituted the burning topics of the hour, and there were none other. And it was while we were thus wrangling with and threatening each other that the blast of the clarion ushered in the day of doom.

The secrets of nature, revealed by science to a nation which acknowledges no restraints, then became weapons of wholesale destruction to be used to subjugate all civilization. Now, there are some reasons for assuming that civilization will escape the thraldom, but there are unhappily equally cogent grounds for apprehending that some of its most precious achievements will be irrecoverably lost and others greatly impaired. Had there been a master mind at the helm of the British state-ship before the war or at its opening, we might have been spared the necessity of signing one day a temporary peace amid the ruins of European culture.

But no puissant genius in any of the allied countries towered above the dead level of mediocrity. Great Frenchmen, Britons and Russians were said to be available, but there was no great man in evidence. And this want proved disastrous. In Germany, on the other hand, it was hardly felt. For it was compensated by the existence of a vast human machine, adaptable to every change of circumstance, capable of assuming countless Protean forms simultaneously, ready with a solution for the most unexpected problems, provided with organs suited to the discharge of every conceivable function, all directed to the same end. It was the same organism that had worked with such brilliant success for over thirty years, growing and perfecting itself steadily until it became the concrete manifestation of a whole system of thought, sentiment and co-ordinated action. Germany had developed into a powerful national State in which the spirit of self-surrender for the good of the community animates all sections alike, all of which co-operate effectively, through the organizations which they spontaneously created, for the realization of their common objects. And therein lay her force.