The catastrophe has fallen, but the foes of Europe have been those of her own household, and we have discovered with a shock of dismay that the comity of European nations has harboured a Power which is European in nothing but in name, and is more completely alien to Western ideals than the tribes of Afghanistan. A hybrid nation of this type which is intellectual without being refined, which can discipline its mind but cannot control its appetites, which can acquire the idiom of Europe and yet retain the instincts of Asia or rather of some pre-Asiatic horde, presents the greatest problem that has ever perplexed the civilisation of man. It is like an intellectual savage who has learnt the language and studied the dress and deportment of polite society, but all the while nurtures dark atavisms and murderous impulses in the centres of his brain. The subtle danger of the presence of such a nation in the European comity is that it uses the language of that international society, and yet all the while means something different, and that with every appearance of solemn subscription to its forms and treaties it is making mental reservations and “economies” which strike at the very root of them.
The Casuistry of the Intellectual Savage.
In the hands of such a nation an international convention is not merely idle and impotent; the convention itself becomes positively dangerous, simply because it can be perverted. It can be used to invest the most barbarous acts with a specious plausibility, and can be turned against the very people whom it was designed to protect. Any one who takes the trouble to study the official proclamations of the German military authorities, or the introductory memorandum to the German White Book, cannot fail to be struck by this. A civilian who fires on the enemy forfeits under international law the privileges of a non-combatant. The rule means as much as it says, and no more; it does not impose on a civil community the obligation to prove that it is a non-combatant. But in nine out of ten German proclamations the rule is invoked as an excuse for involving a whole community in responsibility with their lives for the acts or omissions, real or alleged, of single individuals—“the innocent will suffer with the guilty”[68]—and the “law of nations” is invoked to put a whole population “outside the pale” of it.[69] At one stroke we are carried back to the days of the blood-feud and of vicarious punishment, and the law of nations is perverted from an instrument of progress to an organon of bloody sophistries. So, too, the Hague Convention which requires that requisitions of supplies should not be made without giving receipts is observed in the letter and violated in the spirit; receipts are given, but they are forged. The obligation of a treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is admitted, but a false charge and a falsified document is advanced to justify its breach. A brigade order to kill all prisoners is first denied, and then when denial becomes futile, a fictitious order of a prior date is alleged against us in order to dignify the real order with the sanction of “reprisals.” Defenceless merchantmen are attacked and sunk at first sight, and then when they carry guns for their protection their precautions for defence are used as a retrospective pretext for attack. The same curious casuistry is invoked to excuse the attacks on Scarborough and London, and the Hague Convention is interpreted, in defiance of its authors, to support the plea that whatever barbarity is not expressly prohibited is thereby condoned.
Germany as a Moral Pervert.
It is this terrible perversion, this prostitution of words until, to quote a classical expression of Thucydides, they have lost their meaning in relation to things, that seems to me the most intractable problem that we have to face. To my mind it is this pathological aspect of the German temperament which presents a far more serious obstacle to a restoration of the European comity based on the readmission of Germany to membership than the German dogma of war. You may, perhaps, extirpate a dogma but you cannot alter a temperament. To regard Germany as the misguided pupil of a military caste which alone stands in the way of her reformation seems to me to ignore the volume of evidence as to the complicity of officers and men in those orgies of outrage. I cannot avoid the conclusion that the whole people is infected with a kind of moral distemper.
“Look, Madame,” said a German soldier to a French woman who witnessed the execution of three poor travellers who with their hands tied behind their backs with napkins were led into a field close to her house and shot by six soldiers under the command of a German officer, “Look! isn’t it fine! See them shoot some French civilians. A fine feat that! All the others ought to be killed in the same way.”[70]
The sentiment is typical; German diaries are full of such things. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that the kind of teaching which has made Clausewitz and Treitschke and Bernhardi the gospel of the German people, and has found authoritative expression in the German War Book, could have commanded the prestige which it does command in Germany if it had not found a people apt and eager by temperament to receive it. Germany stands alone among modern nations in extending its official conception, and even its academic analysis[71] of war, to include the deliberate “terrorization” of non-combatants. She alone has taught, both by precept and example, that there are no limitations to what is justifiable by the exigencies of war. “C’est la guerre” is the common answer of German officers when implored by the victims to stop the lust and rapine of their men.[72] It follows from all this that war as taught and practised by the Germans exceeds in savagery even the practices of the ancient world, in which it was thought the mark of barbarism to poison wells, desecrate temples and murder priests—practices which the Germans have not hesitated to pursue. Incitement to assassination, which was thought a mean and dishonourable thing by the Roman mind,[73] is specifically recommended in the German War Book.
In the ancient world the vanquished were regarded as rightless, and whole populations were sold into slavery after they had been decimated by the slaughter of their leading citizens. The German practice is not intrinsically different; municipal magistrates, parish priests, and one in three of the civil population have been butchered, many civilians carried off to Germany to work in the fields, and those who are left behind forced to dig trenches for their captors while their wives and daughters are handed over to the lust of the soldiery, and their movable property transported. It is difficult to see how this differs in anything but name from the tragic fate of those unhappy communities who in the laconic phrase of the ancient world passed sub corona and were sold by auction. All this differs from the practices of the ancient world in nothing except a certain affectation, the one concession to modern sentiment being a studious defamation by the Germans of the people whom they ravish and despoil. It seems to me that bad as the German crimes are the German justification for them is even worse. For it betrays a real corruption of mind. The ancients were often brutal but they were never hypocritical.
The Bankruptcy of The Hague Conventions.
What hope then can there be of a restoration of the comity of European nations, and the re-establishment of the Hague Conventions? I confess I can see none. The German Empire was conceived in duplicity and brought forth in war, and three times within living memory, as Sir Edward Grey has reminded us, she has wantonly provoked war in Europe in pursuance of her predatory designs. I can see no way out of the present travail except an armed peace, with the elimination as its basis for a long time to come of Germany from the councils of Europe. What hope of understanding can there be with a nation which does not observe the ordinary rules of diplomatic intercourse, that jus fetiale which even the ancient world regarded as sacred? The world has seen with stupefaction—there has, I think, been no such case for hundreds of years—the Ambassador of the Austrian Government taking advantage of his immunities and sovereign character to suborn seditious conspiracy in the State to which he was accredited?[74] It is difficult to believe that this case now stands alone. Conventions with such a Power are both a delusion and a snare. They delude us with an appearance of agreement where none exists. In unscrupulous hands, the more precise and technical they are, the more do they lend themselves to casuistry, adding, as some one has said, the terrors of law to the horrors of war. I am afraid that such conventions are now hopelessly discredited. I doubt if we shall hear very much in future of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or of the sanctity of the levée en masse as a medium of lawful transition from the one to the other; he who studies the German White Book on hostilities in Belgium will see how easily a belligerent, if he be so minded, can dispose with a quibble of the obligations to respect an improvised force which has “no time” to organise. A belligerent contemplating a sudden attack and a belligerent having to meet it will entertain very different conceptions as to what is meant by “no time.” War has, indeed, come to be, as von der Goltz prophesied it would be, a war not between armies but between peoples, and we are further than ever from the oft-quoted maxim of Rousseau that “War is not a relation of Man to Man but of States to States,” in which particular individuals are enemies only by the accident of a uniform. That was the voice of Individualism; but States grow more and more collectivist, and never so collectivist as in war. If, as an eminent writer has remarked, “out of the inner life of a nation comes its foreign policy,” so, we may add, out of its municipal law, its military usages, and its economic necessities will come its construction of international law.