Even Barbara Henderson's brilliant translation of this epic of spleen, the first version of which to be published in Great Britain it was my privilege to reprint in The Daily Mail from the columns of the New York Times, fails to do justice to the innate rancor and gall of Lissauer's original verses. Americans who visited Germany during the war were unanimous in agreeing that no rendering of the Hymn of Hate in English could possibly interpret its consuming spirit. You had to hear it rasped with the ferocity of snarling, guttural German, they would say, to gain even an approximate idea of its power. You had to watch a man or woman recitationist or singer, for it was set to music, too, bawl it out, in a crescendo of passionate fury as the final word of each stanza, England! was reached. You had to sit in the midst of a theater, café or music-hall audience, or even in a drawing-room, and note all around you the frenzied countenances, the clenched fists, the whole enraged being, of men, women and children, to know how Lissauer's ballad of gall had burnt itself into a people's soul. There have been more or less sincere efforts in Germany to banish the Hymn of Hate. Lissauer having previously received the Iron Cross for poetic gallantry, and from the pulpit and the school rostrum the unrighteousness of hate had been sanctimoniously proclaimed. But Lissauer only put into verse the spirit which maddened Berlin on the night of August 4, 1914, which grew in intensity as the magnitude of British intervention in the war slowly dawned, and which, surface manifestations to the contrary notwithstanding, lingers deep and ineffaceable in the German breast, and will remain there, barring a miracle, for generations after the war is over.
While the Hymn of Hate was at the zenith of its glory, some genius whose name, unfortunately, will be lost to posterity, invented Gott strafe England! (God punish England) as the most patriotic form of greeting which one German could exchange with another. Friends meeting in the suburban trains or street-cars, or in the streets, no longer lifted their hats as usual and said Guten Morgen. They shook hands solemnly and exclaimed Gott strafe England! When they parted at night, it was not Guten Abend, but Gott strafe England! Then they began stamping it--with a rubber-stamp which was sold by the thousand for the purpose--on their letters to correspondents at home and abroad. It was even adopted, now and then, as an epitaph for a fallen soldier, whose relatives would end up the customary obituary in the advertising columns of the newspapers with Gott strafe England. Now postcards blossomed forth with the new national motto. Scarf-pins made their appearance in the windows of cheap-jewelry stores, inscribed Gott strafe England! The legend was reproduced in a score of different designs on cuff-links, brooches, and even wedding-rings, while hardly a schoolchild was without a badge or button emblazoned with the Fatherland's holiest war prayer. Handkerchiefs were embroidered with it, pocket-knives had it enameled on their handles, and many a Liebesgabe to a dear one in the trenches went forth with a pair of black-white-red braces imprinted Gott strafe England! On a medal which doubtless decorated thousands of German breasts--a sample reached England--was engraved:
"Give us this day our daily bread; England
would take it from us. God punish her!"
Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was beaten by Sir John French's "contemptible little army" at Neuve Chapelle and Artois, placed Royal approval on the Gott strafe England cult in his notorious battle-order in the winter campaign to "annihilate the British arch-foe in front of us at any and all cost."
Englishmen, and especially English soldiers, perhaps measured the Gott strafe England sentiment at below its real value as a German fighting asset when they decided to treat it as a joke. That was the spirit, at any rate, which animated a group of young Eton men at the front, who sent a postcard to the Headmaster of their historic school rival reading: Gott strafe Harrow! And on April Fool's day British Tommies across a certain meadow of death in Flanders expelled from a mine-thrower something which looked murderously like a bomb. When it bounced in front of the German lines, and bounced again, without exploding, a "Boche" ventured out of the trenches and picked it up. He found it was a football, and on it was inscribed:
April Fool!
Gott strafe England!
"A PRUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD AT THEIR MORNING HATE--From London Punch"
Mr. Punch and his lesser confrères in British humor have almost lived through the war on Gott strafe England! The sentiment has not struck terror into John Bull's heart, but it has very materially added to his war-time gaiety.
Next to the Hate epidemic, the mystifying account of themselves which the German Social Democrats have given during the war stands out as the main phenomenon. I have asked myself more than once what might have been if Bebel, the brains, or Singer, the fists, of the old-time Socialistic movement had been alive in August, 1914. Certainly the utter failure of the Socialists to hamper the operation of the German war-machine will remain forever one of the amazing episodes of the war. It will rank, of course, also, as one of the blazing miscalculations of the Fatherland's enemies. It is true that Bebel, the long-time autocrat of the German "Reds," proclaimed often enough that when Germany was in peril, he and his Genossen would shoulder the musket with a will. Yet the suspicion always lurked that when the German War Party's time came and it essayed to drag the German people across the Rubicon, the Social Democracy, with 4,250,000 voters, 111 members of parliament and German trades-unionism almost solidly behind it, would be found standing like an insuperable barrier against the powers of aggression. There had been more than one hint that working-class Germany, in that hour, would not shrink from utilizing the potent weapon of the General Strike to stay the hand of the war zealots. Opinion on that score amounted to almost positive conviction in non-Socialistic Germany and throughout Europe, in case the test were to be forced by a German war of manifestly provocative character. It therefore was of prime importance to the clique which engineered the war that the Social Democracy be made to believe, forthwith and implicitly, that the impending conflict was a "defensive war," to which Socialist leaders had always pledged the proletariat's unswerving support. Categorical and lachrymose assurances to that effect were accordingly given to the Social Democratic group of the Reichstag by the Imperial Chancellor in the confidential conferences with the parties, which preceded the public session of the House on August 4, 1914. The once-despised "Reds," so often denounced by William II as "men without a country," but whose votes in the national legislature were now so essential to the show of Imperial unity with which Germany desired to go to war, were supplied with ample "evidence" that Germany's cause was "just." She had been "fallen upon" by ruthless, envious enemies, the struggle about to begin would be waged by the Fatherland in "defense" of its holiest national interests, and the support of all classes was essential to the waging of the fight with which nothing short of "the Empire's existence" was was bound up. The Socialists listened, patriotically, to this siren song. They believed its tale of woe. They bade the Chancellor to be assured that they would not be found wanting in Germany's moment of peril. And a few hours later Herr Haase, the chairman of the party, was on his feet in the Reichstag, uttering glittering platitudes about Socialism's constitutional abhorrence of war and all its works, but proclaiming that the party's full strength and support were at the Government's disposal for the purpose of repelling the invader! Sic transit gloria mundi! August Bebel might well have remarked, could his shade have hovered over this abject surrender to Mars by his supine heirs of the fundamental principles to which he had consecrated a life-time.