Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

The young German did not think so. “When I was in England I said, there are three things that these English do not properly understand to use, they are the map or index, the school, and—the sword. Those three things are the triangle of German life....”

That hung most in Oswald’s mind. He had gone on talking to the young German for a long time about the differences of the British and the German way. He had made Peter and the youngster compare their school and college work, and what was far more striking, the difference in pressure between the two systems. “You press too hard,” he said. “In Alsace you have pressed too hard—in Posen.”

“Perhaps we sometimes press—I do not know,” said the young German. “It is the strength of our determination. We are impatient. We are a young people.” For a time Oswald had talked of the methods of Germany in the Cameroons and of Britain on the Gold Coast, where the German had been growing cacao by the plantation system, turning the natives into slaves, while the British, with an older experience and a longer view, had left the land in native hands and built up a happy and loyal free cultivation ten times as productive mile for mile as the German. It seemed to him to be one good instance of his general conception of Germany as the land of undue urgency. “Your Wissmann in East Africa was a great man—but everywhere else you drive too violently. You antagonize.” North Germany everywhere, he said, had the same effect upon him of a country, “going hard.”

“Germany may be in too much of a hurry,” he repeated.

“We came into world-politics late,” said the young German, endorsing Oswald’s idea from his own point of view. “We have much to overtake yet.”...

The Germans had come into world-politics late. That was very true. They were naïve yet. They could still feed their natural egotism on the story of a world mission. The same enthusiasms that had taken Russia to the Pacific—and to Grand Ducal land speculation in Manchuria—and the English to the coolie slavery of the Rand, was taking these Germans now—whither? Oswald did not ask what route to disillusionment Germany might choose. But he believed that she would come to disillusionment. She was only a little later in phase than her neighbours; that was all. In the end they would see that that white-cloaked heroic figure in the automobile led them to futility as surely as the skulking Tsar. Not that way must the nations go....

Oswald saw no premonition of a world catastrophe in this German youngster’s devotion to an ideal of militant aggression, nor in the whole broad spectacle of straining preparation across which he and Peter travelled that winter from Aix to Wirballen. He was as it were magically blind. He could stand on the Hanover platform and mark the largeness of the station, the broad spreading tracks, the endless sidings, the tremendous transport preparations, that could have no significance in the world but military intention, and still have no more to say than, “These Germans give themselves elbow-room on their railways, Peter. I suppose land is cheaper.” He could see nothing of the finger of fate pointing straight out of all this large tidy preparedness at Peter and their fellow-passengers and all the youth of the world. He thought imperialistic monarchy was an old dead thing in Russia and in Britain and in Germany alike.

In Berlin indeed in every photographer’s was the touched-up visage of the Kaiser, looking heroic, and endless postcards of him and of his sons and of the Kaiserin and little imperial grandchildren and the like; they were as dull and dreary-looking as any royalties can be, and it was inconceivable to Oswald that such figures could really rule the imagination of a great people. He did not realize that all the tragedy in the world might lie behind the words of that young German, “we came into world-politics late,” behind the fact that the German imperialist system was just a little less decayed, a little less humorous, a little less indolent and disillusioned than either of its great parallels to the east and west. He did not reflect that no system is harmless until its hands are taken off the levers of power. He could still believe that he lived in an immensely stable world, and that these vast forms of kingdom and empire, with their sham reverences and unmeaning ceremonies and obligations, their flags and militancy and their imaginative senility, threatened nothing beyond the negative evil of uninspired lives running to individual waste. That was the thing that concerned him. He saw no collective fate hanging over all these intent young faces in the Moscow Art Theatre, as over the strutting innocents of patriotic Berlin; he had as yet no intimation of the gigantic disaster that was now so close at hand, that was to torment and shatter the whole youth of the world, that was to harvest the hope and energy of these bright swathes of life....

He glanced at Peter, intent upon the stage.

Peter lay open to every impulse. That was Oswald’s supreme grievance then against Tsars, Kings, and Churches. They had not been good enough for Peter. That seemed grievance enough.