When we were officially notified that the Kaiser would proceed next morning by special train to Berlin, we made our own preparations to depart. The British squadron had still a day and a half of its scheduled visit to complete, and Vice-Admiral Warrender told us he would remain accordingly. The German Admiralty had extended him the hospitality of the new War Canal for the cruise of his fleet into the North Sea, but he decided to send only the light cruisers by that route and take his battleships home, as they had come, by the roundabout route of the Baltic.
On Monday noon, June 29, I went back to Berlin, to live through five weeks of finishing touches for the grand world blood-bath.
CHAPTER IV
THE STAGE MANAGERS
Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is not. It is not a party in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach.
When the German War Party pressed the button for the Great Massacre, the Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand Germans really wanted war. They were the "War Party." Sixty-six millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed, longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1914, the wife of Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be nameless. The Frau Generalstabschef was in a state of obvious mental excitement.
"Ach, what a day I've been through, Kinder!" she began. "My husband came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"
There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct, fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced" into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence. No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army." Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization order." Die Post, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into the reluctant hand of William II.
The Kaiser was constitutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter. Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand. He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He sent the Panther to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not, and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered. Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before God and history my conscience is clear. I did not will this war. One year has elapsed since I was obliged to call the German people to arms." Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915. Herewith I place Frau Generalstabschef von Moltke on the stand as chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.