Recruiting "rallies," recruiting advertisements, reproaches of the "slacker" and the "shirker" in the press, on the platform, in the parks and from the pulpit, have signally failed to shame lower-class Britain into doing its duty as the upper and middle classes have so gloriously done. In consequence, the Voluntary system is on its last legs. Early in October Lord Kitchener appointed Lord Derby "Director of Recruiting." In assuming the thankless job, Derby said he felt like taking over the receivership of a bankrupt concern. He proposed granting Voluntaryism a six weeks' respite. He would give the stay-at-homes one more chance. The Government (which enacted the National Register for the purpose--hated Prussian system which card-indexed every male and female in the realm between fifteen and fifty-five!) knew exactly who and where they were. "Push and Go," said one of the last-ditch poster appeals, "But It's Better to Go than Be Pushed." Lord Derby intimated that "pushing" would set in on December 1. It was estimated that, by hook or crook, not less than thirty thousand fresh men a week would be needed to keep the British armies in Europe and Africa at effective strength in 1916, and, if they did not come forward voluntarily, Kitchener was determined to "fetch" them. That means Conscription. Northcliffe calls it National Service. Shepherd's Bush calls it National Servility. If Labor means what it says, "Compulsion" will not be established until Trafalgar Square and Whitechapel, Clydebank and South Wales, have run red with the organized proletariat's "freeman" blood. On Britain's recreant past, then, rather than on her embattled present, will lie, in my judgment, the real responsibility for that dread triumph of ignorance and indolence over the elementary dictates of patriotism and self-preservation.
If I have emphasized British Labor's influence in blocking National Service, I must, in all fairness, point out that brows not accustomed to sweat and hands never grimy from toil have joined their frowns and their strength with Trade-Unionism and Socialism against Conscription. The professional pacifists, the "anti-militarists," the statesmen and the newspapers which for years prior to 1914, and even during the weeks immediately preceding August of that year, ridiculed the idea of "war with Germany," were all mobilized against the revolutionary idea of converting able-bodied Britons by law into defenders of the realm. From these quarters the men who have dared to advocate Conscription have been besmirched with abuse no less torrential than that which was heaped upon them at the Trade-Union Congress in Bristol or from week to week in the columns of Socialist-Labor organs. It will not be only certain famous proletariat leaders who prevented Britain from rising in the great war to her full military stature--if prevented she be--but the party-hack editors, authors and anything-for-office politicians who preferred the fetish of "our unenslaved Democracy" and "Voluntaryism" to the system under which every other single one of Britain's Allies is fighting and under which, if the opinion of professional soldiers is to be trusted, victory alone can be made to perch on the Union Jack.
CHAPTER XX
THE EMPIRE OF HATE
Though the end of the carnage is not even approximately in sight, a synoptic view of Germany in war-time is feasible to a more comprehensive extent than is possible in Britain. Armageddon found the Fatherland completely caparisoned for war, with her people so steeped in discipline that it was the merest formality to harness their peace-time habits to Mars' Juggernaut and drive the entire nation to battle as one would a well-trained team. "Team-work," in fact, exactly describes Germany's war-time performances. They are achievements in national unison without parallel in history. Britain, on the other hand, having been overtaken by war, except for her navy, in a state of naked unpreparedness, was plunged forthwith into the melting-pot. Traditions, customs, institutions, hobbies, prejudices, fetishes, even cherished laws, had to be abandoned, upset or reconstructed to fit a world of iron conditions unsuited to a dreamland of comfortable theories. The remaking of Britain, after sixteen months of war, is not yet ended. It has, indeed, hardly commenced. The time to write an accurate history of these isles during the Great Test will come not when peace is signed, but perhaps a decade later, when the New England will have begun to assume, in misty outline at least, the physical, moral and intellectual dimensions in which war, with its scars and its cleansings, left her.
Organized for war, body and soul, as Germany has been for generation upon generation, and never more so, of course, than in the living generation, the country slid into the bloody groove as neatly as if it had never had its being elsewhere. The prospect of "starvation," for instance, quite apart from the fact that it was a German-invented bogy trotted out to deceive the enemy and extort the commiseration of neutrals, never seriously disturbed the Germans' equanimity, for from the cradle up frugality has been instilled in them as a virtue sister to patriotism. No people in the world could overnight descend to a war standard of living so rapidly as the Germans. Accustomed to the affluence of sudden prosperity as the nation, as a whole, was, it had yet only to return to familiar inculcated habits, when the Kaiser called. The grand German bluff of the first year of the war was the introduction of the bread-ticket ration system. How the grain-shippers of Chicago and Duluth must have chuckled over it, when they recalled the gigantic advance purchases of wheat made for German and Austrian account in May, 1914--three full months before "the Russian mobilization menace!" Germany can never be starved, and she knows it. Von Tirpitz knew it when he proclaimed submarine piracy as a "reprisal" for British "attempts to starve us out." The grip of the British Fleet around Germany's neck has inconvenienced the Germans, but it can never cause them to famish. The "starvation" myth which the German propagandists in the United States so assiduously circulated was devised, purely and simply, for the purpose of arousing the compassion of the generous-hearted American people, in the hope that our most sentimental of governments would intervene, in humanity's name, to lift from Germany's throat a yoke which she herself was powerless to remove. That is the long and short of the "starvation" story.
As inborn and cultivated habits of frugality and thrift enabled the introduction of the bread-ticket without marked disturbance to normal German life, so the nation resorted willingly and easily to all the other new conditions which war imposed. A people goose-stepped and policed from the nursery to the grave, bred in docility, with wills of their own eternally broken before they have left the Kinderstube, with initiative and self-reliance knocked out of them with the rod at home and in school, and with blind unyielding subordination to discipline literally pounded into their bones in barracks, provides no astonishing spectacle in making war, when war comes, as one man obeying one supreme will. War is the ultima ratio, indeed, which this national system of self-suppression has in mind. The surprising thing is not that the world has witnessed so colossal an exhibition of team-work in Germany. The unexpected would have been if Germany had given any other account of herself. When we speak, as we all do, and especially the English, of "Germany's years of preparation," we should eliminate the notion that these preparations were confined to shells, guns, fortifications, battleships and legions. No single other "preparation" of the German war gods measured up, in my judgment, to the unseen and unnoticed, yet all-engulfing, decade-old, national scheme of molding the minds of men, women, children and babes along the line of unresisting, complete slavery to Superiority, uniformed as the State. When you dilute this super-subjugation with the wine of true patriotism which, despite their Socialism, their police, their burdensome taxes, their goose-step, their powerless parliaments and all the other concomitants of an autocratic monarchy, flows red and joyously through the soul of the Germans, you secure a spiritual admixture which approaches invincibility. You discover the ingredients of what Lloyd-George christened the "potato-bread spirit," which he truly described as a greater danger for Germany's enemies than Hindenburg's strategy. The former will survive long after the latter has broken down.
For a full year, interrupted only by six weeks in the United States at the end of the winter of 1914-15, I have kept in as close touch with Germany in war-time as if I were at my old lookout in the Friedrichstrasse. My professional task in London all that time has been to study the German Press. Day in and day out I have done so. I have read the Government-controlled Lokal-Anzeiger, the radical Berliner Tageblatt, the venerable Vossische Zeitung, Count Reventlow's organ of Frightfulness, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Pan-German Tägliche Rundschau, the Thunderer of Prussian conservatism, the Kreuz-Zeitung, and Maximilian Harden's vitriolic Zukunft. The voice of paralyzed Hamburg has come to me morning and night through the malevolent Hamburger Nachrichten and Fremdenblatt. Vorwärts has kept me informed of German Socialism's invertebrate vagaries. The cultured Cologne Gazette, the property of Doctor Neven-Dumont, whose wife is half-English and whose son is proud of his Oxford degree, and yet has almost led the German Press in the violence of its Anglophobism, has told me what semi-official Germany wanted the world to believe was its views from hour to hour. In the Frankfurter Zeitung I have been able to glean the news and opinion of the great German financial and commercial classes for which it speaks. Catholic Bavaria, the land of Crown Prince "Rupprecht, the Bloody," has been interpreted to me by the Munich Neueste Nachrichten. The Dresdner Anzeiger has mirrored Saxony day by day. And, as the Stimmung of no country in the world is so faithfully reproduced by its comic press as is opinion in Germany, my readings have been amplified, as well as lightened, by heartlessly ironic Simplicissimus, artistic Jugend, Fliegende Blätter and Lustige Blätter. My German literary diet, which was ruining my eye-sight, has been almost more opulent than when in Berlin, has finally been enriched from week to week by the incessant grist of pamphlets and booklets which has poured from the German mill even in more copious and overwhelming measure than in peace-times. If the printed word is the index of a nation's thought, little of moment in Germany since August, 1914, has escaped me. I have had the inestimable advantage of being able to absorb it in the light of its relationship to the situation outside of Germany--an opportunity of which the Germans themselves, though I would not try to make them believe it, have been cruelly deprived.
Telescopic observation of Germany, as reflected by its press, a little knowledge of what Doctor Münsterberg would call the Fatherland's "psychology," and the actual deeds of the German army, navy and Government have provided me, I think I may make so bold as to say, with a fairly complete and accurate picture. Germany, thus visualized, stands out to me in bold, clear-cut relief. It is a strange and terrible composite of forces generally considered incongruous and mutually destructive--Efficiency, Malice and Intolerance. The world ought to have known that in war Germany would reveal titanic powers of scientific organization. It did not expect to find her an Empire of Hate. It hardly imagined that the land of Goethe and Wagner, Koch, Behring and Ehrlich, Siemens, Rathenau and Ballin, Hauptmann, Strauss and Reinhardt, Eucken, Haeckel and Harnack, could be turned even by the devouring blasts of war into a community capable of elevating to the dignity of a national anthem such a ferocious song as Lissauer's Hymn of Hate Against England, whose soul is best breathed by its closing stanza:
"Take you the folk of the Earth in pay,
With bars of gold your ramparts lay,
Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,
Ye reckon well, but not well enough now.
French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,
We fight the battle with bronze and steel,
And the time that is coming Peace will seal.
You will we hate with a lasting hate,
We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy millions, choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe, and one alone--
ENGLAND!"