“I said I am an American,” I broke in, “but do not misunderstand me. We Chileans are quite as truly Americans as those grasping Yankees who have been fighting against you.”
To my astonishment, the entire group sprang instantly to the defense of my real countrymen as against those I had falsely adopted. All the silly slanders I had once heard in Chile they discarded as such, and advanced proofs of Yankee integrity which even I could not have assembled.
“You Chileans have nothing to fear from American aggression,” the possessor of the twenty-mark sausage concluded, reassuringly, as the rumble of the train crossing the Spree set us to gathering our traps together. “The North Americans are a well-meaning people; but they are young, and England and France have led them temporarily astray, though they have not succeeded in corrupting their simple natures.”
IX
THUS SPEAKS GERMANY
Lest he talk all the pleasure out of the rambles ahead, let us get the German’s opinion of the war cleared up before we start, even if we have to reach forward now and then for some of the things we shall hear on the way. I propose, therefore, to give him the floor unreservedly for a half-hour, without interruption, unless it be to throw in a question now and then to make his position and his sometimes curious mental processes clearer. The reader who feels that the prisoner at the bar is not entitled to tell his side of the story can easily skip this chapter.
Though I did not get it all from any one person—no resident of the Fatherland talked so long in the hungry armistice days—the German point of view averaged about as follows. There were plenty of variations from this central line, and I shall attempt to show the frontier of these deviations as we go along. We shall probably not find this statement of his point of view very original; most of his arguments we have heard before, chiefly while the question of our coming or not coming into the war was seething. Fifteen years ago, when I first visited him at home, I did not gather the impression that every German thought alike. To-day he seems to reach the same conclusions by the same curious trains of thought, no matter what his caste, profession, experience, and to some extent his environment—for even those who remained far from the scene of conflict during all the war seem to have worked themselves into much the same mental attitude as their people at home. But then, this is also largely true of his enemies, among whom one hears almost as frequently the tiresome repetition of the same stereotyped conclusions that have in some cases been deliberately manufactured for public consumption. One comes at times to question whether there is really any gain nowadays in running about the earth gathering men’s opinions, for they so often bear the factory-made label, the trade-mark of one great central plant, like the material commodities of our modern industrial world. The press, the cable, the propagandist, and the printer have made a thinking-machine, as Edison has made a talking-machine, and Burroughs a mechanical arithmetic.
The first, of course, if not the burning question of the controversy was, who started the war, and why? The German at home showed a certain impatience at this query, as a politician might at a question that he had already repeatedly explained to his constituents. But with care and perseverance he could usually be drawn into the discussion, whereupon he outlined the prevailing opinion, with such minor variations as his slight individuality permitted; almost always without heat, always without that stone-blind prejudice that is so frequent among the Allied man in the street. Then he fell into apathetic silence or harked back to the ever-present question of food. But let him tell it in his own way.
“The war was started by circumstances. War had become a necessity to an over-prosperous world, as bleeding sometimes becomes necessary to a fat person. Neither side was wholly and deliberately guilty of beginning it, but if there is actual personal guilt, it is chiefly that of the Allies, especially England. We understand the hatred of France. It came largely from fear, though to a great extent unnecessary fear. The ruling party in Russia wanted war, wanted it as early as 1909, for without it they would have lost their power. It was a question of interior politics with them. But with England there was less excuse. In her case it was only envy and selfishness; the petty motives that sprout in a shopkeeper’s soul. We were making successful concurrenz against her in all the markets of the world—though by our German word ‘concurrenz’ we mean more than mere commercial competition; she saw herself in danger of losing the hegemony of Europe, her position as the most important nation on the globe. She set out deliberately to destroy us, to vernichten, to bring us to nothing. We hate”—though come to think of it I do not recall once having heard a German use the word hate in describing his own feelings, nor did I run across any reference to the notorious “Hymn of Hate” during all my travels through the Empire—“we dislike, then, we blame England most, for it was she more than any other one party in the controversy who planned and nourished it. How? By making an Entente against us that surrounded us with a steel wall; by bolstering up the revanche feeling in France; by urging on the ruling class in Russia; by playing on the dormant brutality of the Russian masses and catering to the natural fanaticism of the French, deliberately keeping alive their desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine. Edward VII set the ball rolling with his constant visits to Paris.”
“I had much intercourse and correspondence with Frenchmen before the war,” said a German professor of European history, “and I found a willingness among those of my own generation, those between thirty and fifty, to drop the matter, to admit that, after all, Alsace-Lorraine was as much German as French. Then some ten years ago I began to note a change of tone. The younger generation was being pumped full of the revanche spirit from the day they started to school; in foreign countries every French text-book incited crocodile tears over the poor statue of Strassburg, with its withered flowers. It was this younger generation that brought France into the war—this and Clemenceau, who is still living back in 1870.”
“But the despatches, the official state papers already published, show that England was doing her best to avoid....”