Now the reason that each of these must at all costs be preserved from invasion is, as I have said, different in each case, and we shall do well to examine what those reasons are; for upon them depends the political hesitation they inevitably, cause to arise in the plans of the Great General Staff.
1. Belgium. The military annexation of Belgium has been a result of the war, and, from the German point of view, an unexpected result. Germany both hoped and expected that her armies would pass through Belgium as they did, in fact, pass through Luxembourg. The resistance of Belgium produced the military annexation of that country; the reign of terror exercised therein has immobilized about 100,000 of the German troops who would otherwise be free for the front; the checking of the advance into France has turned the German general political objective against England, and, to put the matter in the vaguest but most fundamental terms, the German mind has gradually come, since October, to regard the retention of Belgium as something quite essential. And this because:—(a) It gives a most weighty asset in the bargaining for peace. (b) It gives a seaboard against England. (c) It provides ample munition, house-room, and transport facility, without which the campaign in North-eastern France could hardly be prolonged. (d) It puts Holland at the mercy of Germany, for she can, by retaining Belgium, strangle Dutch trade, if she chooses to divert her carriage of goods through Belgian ports. (e) It is a specific conquest; the Government will be able to say to the German people, "It is true we had to give up this or that, but Belgium is a definite new territory, the occupation of which and the proposed annexation of which is a proof of victory." (f) The retention of Belgium has been particularly laid down as the cause of quarrel between Great Britain and Germany; to retain Belgium is to mark that score against what is now the special enemy of Germany in the German mind. (g) Antwerp is the natural port for all the centre of Europe in commerce westward over the ocean. (h) With Belgium may go the Belgian colonies—that is, the Congo—for the possession of which Germany has worked ceaselessly year in and year out during the last fifteen years by a steady and highly subsidized propaganda against the Belgian administration. She has done it through conscious and unconscious agents; by playing upon the cupidity of French and British Parliamentarians, of rum shippers, upon religious differences, and upon every agency to her hand.
We may take it, then, that the retention of Belgium is in German eyes now quite indispensable. "If I abandon Belgium," she says, "it is much more than a strategic retreat; it is a political confession of failure, and the moral support behind me at home will break down."
If I were writing not of calculable considerations, but of other and stronger forces, I should add that to withdraw from Belgium, where so many women and children have been massacred, so many jewels of the past befouled or destroyed, so wanton an attack upon Christ and His Church delivered, would be a loss of Pagan prestige intolerably strong, and a triumph of all that against which Prussia set out to war.
2. Alsace-Lorraine. But Alsace-Lorraine is also "indispensable." We have seen on an earlier page what the retention of that territory means. Alsace-Lorraine is the symbol of the old victory. It is the German-speaking land which the amazingly unreal superstitions of German academic pedantry discovered to be something sacredly necessary to the unity of an ideal Germany, though the people inhabiting it desired nothing better than the destruction of the Prussian name. It is more than that. It is the bastion beyond the Rhine which keeps the Rhine close covered; it is the two great historic fortresses of Strassburg and Metz which are the challenge Germany has thrown down against European tradition and the civilization of the West; it is something which has become knit up with the whole German soul, and to abandon it is like a man abandoning his title or his name, or surrendering his sword. Through what must not the German mind pass before its directors would consent to the sacrifice of such a fundamentally symbolic possession? There is defeat in the very suggestion; and the very suggestion, though it has already occurred to the Great General Staff, and has already, I believe, been mentioned in one proposal for peace, would be intolerable to the mass of the enemy's opinion.
3. East Prussia. East Prussia is sacred in another, but also an intense fashion. It is the very kernel of the Prussian monarchy. When Berlin was but a market town for the Electors of Brandenburg, those same Electors had contrived that East Prussia, which was outside the empire, should be recognized as a kingdom. Frederick the Great's father, while of Brandenburg an Elector, was in Prussia proper a king, a man who had emancipated that cradle of the Prussian power. The province in all save its southern belt (which is Polish) is the very essence of Prussian society: a mass of serfs, technically free, economically abject, governed by those squires who own them, their goods, and what might be their soil. The Russians wasted East Prussia in their first invasion, and they did well though they paid so heavy a price, for to wound East Prussia was to wound the very soul of that which now governs the German Empire. When the landed proprietors fled before the Russian invasion, and when there fled with them the townsfolk, the serfs rose and looted the country houses. In a way quite different from Belgium, quite different from Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia is essential. Forces will and must be sent periodically to defend that territory, however urgently they may be needed elsewhere, as the pressure upon Germany increases. The German commanders, if they forget East Prussia for a moment in the consideration of the other essential points, will, the moment their eyes are turned upon East Prussia again, remember with violent emotion all that the province means to the reigning dynasty and its supporters, and they will do anything rather than let that frontier go. The memory of the first invasion is too acute, the terror of its repetition too poignant, to permit its abandonment.
4. Silesia. Silesia, for quite other reasons (and remember that these different reasons for defending such various points are the essence of the embarrassment in which German strategy will find itself), must be saved. It has been insisted over and over again in these pages what Silesia means. Its meaning is twofold. If Silesia goes, the safest, the most remote from the sea, the most independent of imports of the German industrial regions, is gone. Silesia is, again, the country of the great proprietors. Amuse yourselves by remembering the names of Pless and of Lichnowsky. There are dozens of others. But, most important of all, Silesia is what Belgium is not, what Alsace-Lorraine is not, what East Prussia is not—it is the strategic key. Who holds Silesia commands the twin divergent roads to Berlin northwards, to Vienna southwards. Who holds Silesia holds the Moravian Gate. Who holds Silesia turns the line of the Oder, and passes behind the barrier fortresses which Germany has built upon her Eastern front. Who holds Silesia strikes his wedge in between the German-speaking north and the German-speaking south, and joins hands with the Slavs of Bohemia. Not that we should exaggerate the Slav factor, for religion and centuries of varying culture disturb its unity. But it is something. The Russian forces are Slav; the resurrection of Poland has been promised; the Czechs are not submissive to the German claim of natural mastery, and whoever holds Silesia throws a bridge between Slav and Slav if his aims are an extension of power in that race. For a hundred reasons Silesia must be saved.
Now put yourself in the position of the men who must make a decision between these four outliers—Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, East Prussia, and Silesia—and understand the hesitation such divergent aims impose upon them. Hardly are they prepared to sacrifice one of the four when the defensive problem becomes acute, but its claims will be pressed in every conceivable manner—by public sentiment, by economic considerations, by mere strategy, by a political tradition, by the influence of men powerful with the Prussian monarchy, whose homes and wealth are threatened. "If I am to hold Belgium, I must give up Alsace. How dare I do that? To save Silesia I must expose East Prussia. How dare I? I am at bay, and the East must at all costs be saved. I will hold Prussia and Silesia, but to withdraw from Belgium and from beyond the Rhine is defeat." The whole thing is an embroglio. That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent, and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will determine first some one retirement and then another. It may be—though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament—that a defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted even with inferior numbers, and that, as circumstances may dictate, Alsace-Lorraine or Belgium, Silesia or East Prussia will be the first to be deliberately sacrificed; but one must be, and, it would seem, another after, and in the difficulty of choice a wound to the German strategy will come.
The four corners are differently defensible—Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium only by artifice, and with great numbers of men; Silesia only so long as Austria (and Hungary) stand firm. East Prussia has her natural arrangement of lakes to make invasion tedious, and to permit defence with small numbers.