“In small, truckling States, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence: but a great State is too much envied, too much dreaded to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded.”—Edmund Burke, Letter I on A Regicide Peace.
In the late summer of 1908, at the end of the parliamentary session, Mr. Lloyd George traversed Germany from west to east and from south to north. It was a very thorough and systematic motor-tour. He was the travelling guest of Mr. (now Sir) Charles Henry,[[55]] a Member of Parliament of great public spirit and strong Liberal views, who invited me also to accompany the party. It was a journey of profound interest for us all. The object of the tour was to investigate the German system of National Insurance. Parliament had just passed the Old Age Pensions Act; and Mr. Lloyd George had already publicly promised to round off the British pension system by a general scheme of national insurance. Before drafting the actual Bills he wished to make a complete study of that very comprehensive system which had been operating in Germany since 1893. The German Government gave us access to all their Central State Insurance Offices, and gave us facilities for interviewing all their leading Insurance civil servants. We visited most of the largest towns of the German Empire, and had conversations with employers and workmen—Socialists and trade unionists—as well as with officials. Never was a statesman’s holiday spent in a more thorough investigation of a great problem of the lives of the people.
We started the motor-tour in France. We trained to Amiens, where the motor met us, and travelled on the great northern French national roads through the very region where so much of the fighting has taken place during the last three years—through Compiègne, Soissons, along the valley of the Aisne to Rheims, where we visited the Cathedral—that great masterpiece of Gothic architecture which has since suffered such sacrilegious injury. Thence we travelled south by Châlons-sur-Marne, following the river valley by Vitry and Bar-le-Duc. We crossed the Meuse and passed through Nancy, that most lovely of valley frontier towns, which has since so bravely borne such fierce enemy attacks. Nancy looked very peaceful on that August day when we passed through her pretty streets and pressed on towards the Vosges Mountains, hoping to reach Strassburg that evening.
At that point we made a happy miscalculation in our time; and we were benighted in a little French village just on the edge of the frontier at the very summit of the Vosges. We found that we could get supper and beds at one of those clean little auberges which are scarcely ever lacking in the smallest French village. As we supped on the excellent meal of bouillon and cutlets improvised by the ready hostess, she stood and talked to us. She spoke to us of the memories of 1870-71, when the tide of war had so swiftly passed by that little village. She was a school-child at that time, and she had missed two years of her schooling. For the Germans had remained in occupation of that part of the country on the Vosges frontier for fully a year after the end of the war. The withdrawal of the army took place, Department by Department, as the indemnity was paid; and this Department was the last to be evacuated. Before the war she was living well within France; at the end she found herself on the edge of the new frontier.
We asked her how she managed to make an inn pay at such a spot. “Oh, quite easily,” she said. “We are kept going by the people of French birth who come up on Sundays from Alsace!” “Why?” “Oh, just to feel the joy of living for a day on French soil!”
Next day we motored down to Strassburg, climbed the towers, and saw the marks of the German shells fired nearly forty years before, and spent a pleasant afternoon in the picturesque streets of that ancient town. As far as man could do it Alsace had been painted black, white and red with Teuton colours. Nowhere in the streets of Strassburg did we observe any sign or notice in any language but German. Everywhere were German soldiers, and in the evening we attended a concert of massed German bands at which the music was purely Teuton, and Teuton of the most patriotic kind. But the people seemed to us to listen with a certain strange dull indifference to all this brazen wooing; and beneath the surface we seemed to hear the whisper of a coming storm. Next day, motoring across the country, we had occasion to ask the way from an Alsatian peasant. The question was asked in German, but one of the party slipped in with French. The peasant’s face instantly lighted up. “Ah! do the gentlemen speak in French?” he said. “Ah! I prefer to speak in that language myself.” So little had all the arts of suppression succeeded in crushing the spirit of that race.
At Stuttgart we were witnesses of a strange event, which comes now back to memory with a significance which was then hidden. Count Zeppelin was then experimenting with his airships, and one of those new miracles had been advertised to start on a voyage from a spot near Stuttgart. The whole town had flooded out in a vast multitude to see the airship make a start; but at the critical moment there arose a hurricane of wind. The ship was torn from its moorings and fell in utter wreckage and confusion in the midst of the crowd. We arrived on the scene just after this had happened, and met the people returning from witnessing the disaster. What was notable about that multitude was the passion of grief which at that moment was sweeping over them. It was as if they had all suffered some acute personal loss. Men and women were gesticulating, some were almost weeping; all their faces were troubled and perplexed. As the people coming from the city met those returning we could hear exclamations of sorrow and almost of anguish. “Ah!” they cried, “is the airship down? What a horrible calamity!” We heard afterwards that the crowd surrounding the airship had just sung that famous national hymn, “Deutschland über alles.” They had been worked up to ecstasy when the airship crashed.
So we motored through that land in that happy peace time, little foreboding all the great calamities that were to break from that storm-centre on to an unsuspecting world.
Bethmann-Hollweg was at that time “Home Secretary,” a vigorous, amiable Minister of the official kind, sincerely keen on social reforms; a Junker of the better type. He treated Mr. Lloyd George with great courtesy. He returned from his holiday, and specially entertained him and his party in the famous restaurant at the Zoological Gardens at Berlin. He invited many eminent members of the German Civil Service to meet us. Every one was very gracious and polite—almost too polite for comfort. After dinner we went into a large reception-room, and there we remained standing all the evening talking and looking at one another. Towards the end of the evening we began to feel very fatigued. I ventured to ask one of the German officials whether it would be the correct thing to sit down. “Oh!” he said. “We have all been waiting for you to sit down! We, too, are very tired!”
In the middle of this rivalry in fatigue, they brought round great glasses of foaming beer in Prussian fashion. Mr. Lloyd George, who is almost a teetotaler, looked at the glasses with a scared expression. Then suddenly his face grew resolute. “We must show that Great Britain is not to be left behind!”