I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany minority rules. It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War Party insisted upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or abdication.
Assertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a multitudinous mob mad for war.
I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the accumulation of a war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.
In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, Germany's Next War, as classic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world, dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship, but because of its innate authoritativeness. The result was the translation of Germany's Next War into the English language, and subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him the name of an American translator and publisher for his books. Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before Die Post, the Deutsche Tageszeitung and other organs of blood-and-iron were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that the German masses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.
The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles, January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism, the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible. "World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.
In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear God, and nothing else in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that Furor Teutonicus was a power which, when it went forth to slay and conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear of God. Nouveau riche Germany, with France's one billion two hundred and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political brutality as a new national Leit-motif. "We, not the Jews, are God's chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority make German Weltmacht manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad career.
During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi. Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon. These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the culminating effects of their devilry.
Prince Bülow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen, will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck's aphorisms are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite Shakespeare. Bülow's name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War Party's demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck's blasphemous bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Bülow in 1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and, being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this war.
Like all the War Party's dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun" for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world, thus summarized Germany's "place in the sun":
"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895. The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.