My Year of the Great War

by Frederick Palmer

Tears and laughter and moods and passions organised! Seventy million in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army to make war.

“With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth of the people,” as a German officer said, “when we go to war the people must all be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organisation is too small to have its effect.”

Compared to the French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician’s touch. A whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion, which spread to the trenches east and west. Something like the team work of the “rah-rah” of college athletics was applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that, or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra with the brasses predominant.

There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force. Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as side lights.

When Corey and I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five, who was helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey, lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the front.

Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was fighting to hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting on the enemy’s soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That was it—that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every conversation and every act.

The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward. The Englishman’s phrase is “stick it,” which means to hold what you have; the German’s phrase is “onward.” It was national youth against national middle age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The French were saying, What if we should lose? and the Germans were saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune at fifty.

It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a people. The English thought of his defence as keeping what he already had; the German was defending what he considered that he was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then Calais ought to be his. A nation with the “closed in” culture of the French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe, thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.

Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine guns. Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realisation of the long-promised day of the “place in the sun” for all the immense population drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and preparation.

When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the clerk at the desk said, “I will see, sir.” He ran his eye up and down the list methodically before he added: “Yes, we have a good room on the second floor.” Afterward, I learned that all except the first and second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room appear normal.