No, I said to myself at this time, the German nation sets no value upon civil liberty; its Protestantism is mere window-dressing; its Reformation, in contradistinction to that of Calvin, was solely the work of its princes (cujus regio hujus religio); if there were any logic in events, the Germans ought to be Roman Catholics, whilst we ought to be members of the reformed church and modernists; Catholicism flourishes, and socialism is so successful, in Germany, only because both the one and the other correspond to a general need for regimentation and tutelage, furnishing an equivalent for military discipline to all those who come forth from barrack life. I noted, in fact, that German socialism had nothing in common with our own; that it did not represent the proletariat at all; that it was a sort of sub-bourgeoisie, comfortable, well-off, placid, and lacking that revolutionary fervour which arises from an outraged conscience; that it constituted a bureaucracy, a hierarchy, a church based upon Marxist dogma; and that it owed its unbroken unity to the complete absence of thought and passion among its members.
At such times it seemed to me that the Prussian army was precisely suited to the German nation, desirous, not of self-respect, but of material well-being, friendly to that which controlled it, a people loving to be led. Yes, I said, such a nation needs such an army. And how fond the people is of the army. The bourgeois look upon it with fatuous affection. The kinglets of the empire are all eager to Prussianize themselves within the framework of this army; they all long to secure high command for themselves, if possible to become army inspectors, considering that the red band confers as much distinction as their crowns. I even went so far as to tax with duplicity the liberals of the great commercial and manufacturing world, comparing them to some territorial chief, who in outward aspect was pious and good-mannered, but who in an out-of-the-way court of his castle kept a number of hungry bears, prepared to loose them, as a final argument, upon any one who ventured to annoy him. At Dresden I had received a letter from M. Lichtwark, containing the following phrase: “The two finest types of modern man are the English gentleman and the German officer.” It is too plain, I exclaimed, Germany worships her army; Germany worships herself in her army; the army is Germany; the army dominates the entire country, just as the colossal figure of stone which commemorates the iron chancellor dominates with its huge symbolic sword the port of Hamburg and the forest of masts in the Elbe!
This doubt concerning the future of my young liberals returned periodically to sadden me. It was like an intermittent fever.
Was it possible to believe that they had the remotest chances of success, the Teuton Vergniauds who thought of renewing, after the lapse of a century, the adventure of the constituent assembly? Had they any clear idea of the terrible power of absolutism incarnate in the junkers and in the Prussian officers? These had no resemblance whatever to our eighteenth-century seigneurs, light-hearted, winning, generous, and philosophic—such men as Noailles, d’Aiguillon, and Montmorency, who spontaneously despoiled themselves on the 4th of August. I foresaw that it would be crushed without pity, this liberal impulse, so fragile even in its strength, the instant it transcended the sphere of art and letters.
“Give us ten years,” the Munich socialist frequently said. “By that time the crown prince of Bavaria, who is a liberal, will have become king; the Prussian electoral system, the Bastille of the autocracy, will have been destroyed. But if we fail in Prussia, we shall have done with legal methods, and our watchword will be Vive la Révolution! For the death of William II will mean the regime of the sabre.”
“Ten years,” I rejoined, “is a long time in an epoch of tense and threatening rivalries. Are you not afraid that before this period comes to an end fear of democracy, ambition, and economic needs may force your government to declare war against us?
“You will all be famous soldiers of the Kaiser, should that happen, you good liberals and socialists. You imagine yourselves opposed to militarism. But, without knowing it, you are its best resource, its great accomplice. You are such ardent patriots. You have so fanatical a belief in the destiny of Germany. How trifling is the difference between you and the pangermanists. You desire hegemony without war; they desire it at all costs, even if they have to fight for it. What does this distinction matter? It will be so easy, when the right moment comes, to befool you. It will be so easy for the wolf to appear in sheep’s clothing; to masquerade as a victim; to pretend that Germany has been invaded; to give to a war of aggression and conquest the sacred aspect of a war of national defence!
“Let us suppose that, through ill-luck, the war ends in a German success. Good-bye, then, to your dreams, to European idealism, to democratic dogmas. Great will be the discomfiture of your Tugendbund. The days of the Holy Alliance will return. When peace comes under these conditions your ‘borns,’ on their manorial estates, will luxuriate in the pious certitude that they are essentially different from the ‘not-borns,’ and that God has predestined them to be masters and leaders of men, just as, in the beginning, He created the white elephant and the royal tiger. Then, perhaps, in our defeat, we shall regretfully recall Sembat’s formula, Faites un roi, sinon faites la paix; then we shall hail Maurras as a prophet; inspired with a sense of renewed virtue, we shall mock at the civic dream which was our chief glory; and we shall fill the world, again become feudal, with the clamour of our repentance. A fine spectacle indeed would be such a repudiation by France of the great vision of fraternal justice with which she intoxicated the nations. What will you do in those days, you German democrats, when the mother of all democracy is vanquished, when the only disinterested champion of your ideal has perished at your hands?
“But you may rest easy in your minds, for we have no intention of dying. We have agreed to three years’ military service. We should agree, if needs must, to four years or to five. And do not, for this reason, accuse us of militarism. Our militarism is the militarism of Valmy. Full well do you know that we have no hidden thoughts of aggression or oppression. When we consented to the increase of our army, it was doubtless with a sincere desire to witness the overthrow of the barbarism of the kaisers and the crown princes, but we have never ceased to be faithful to the revolutionary watchword: ‘Let us vote for war upon the tyrants and for peace with the peoples!’”
The socialist of Munich, Wichert, the president of the Freistudenten, Moritz von Bethmann—how far away does it all seem now. They have killed; we have killed. Their glances full of youth and intelligence, which, when I was a free traveller, I received frankly, face to face, man to man; our conversations; our blossoming friendship; our common hope; the ideal, dear to Nietzsche, of the “good European”—what fragile things you are, beautiful creations of the mind!