Postcards were sold and eagerly bought all over Germany showing the Zeppelins bombing towns. When some German father sits by the hospital bed of his dying daughter, who sobs out her life torn with a fatal wound, let him tack one of these postcards over the bed and in looking on it remember that "he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword," that it was at the command of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince when they thought only the German Zeppelins could make a successful air raid that these massacres were ordered and that the German people at the time yelled their approval of deliberate dastardly murder.
"Te Deum" has been always the favourite psalm sung in cathedrals for all Christian conquerors, but neither psalms nor the paid pastor's praises of the Emperor will satisfy the German people, who have made awful sacrifices for intangible victories.
CHAPTER XXV
THE ERRORS OF EFFICIENT GERMANY
The Yankee finding himself, like Mark Twain's hero, suddenly transported back to King Arthur's Court is landed in a surprising and unknown world. But one of King Arthur's knights brought to life at the court of the present German Emperor aside from steam, electricity, gun powder, telegraph and telephones would find the system as despotic as in the days when the enchanter, Merlin, wove his spells and the sword Excalibur appeared from the depths of the magic lake. But while the system is as royal and as despotic as in King Arthur's day, while the king and his military nobles look down on the merchants and the toilers and the plain people, no knights ride forth intent upon good deeds, to protect the poor or avenge the wrongs of the innocent.
It was the cold realists of the General Staff who battered down the defences of Belgium and the forts of France, destroyed the monuments of art and levied a tax of sixty million francs a month upon a little country deprived of its means to produce wealth, took the food from the inhabitants, shipped the machinery and raw material into Germany, deported the men and insulted the women and drove whole populations from their homes to work as slaves for the conquerors.
But while they can plan military successes in the first rush of assault on the chessboard of Europe they have failed to understand other nations—failed even to learn the lessons of history. They did not know that in every land, in every walk of life, there are men who will "reject a bribe and who will die for an idea."
Imagine a German Staff officer reporting in Berlin that over a hundred thousand Alsatians were armed and organised and that they threatened, unless certain proposed legislation uniting them, for example, with Baden, was withdrawn, to resist forcibly any attempt to incorporate them in that Grand Duchy. Would not this look to a German officer like real revolution and nothing else? And when, in addition, there came news of the landing of arms for the Nationalists in Ireland and of the organisation of the Nationalist army, the Germans, without knowledge of the psychology of other peoples, believed that Great Britain had her hands full and that the moment had come when they could go to war and leave Great Britain out of all calculations. So studying only the German mind, believing that all peoples in national character are like the Germans, the Great General Staff, the greatest military aggregation the world has ever seen, failed lamentably, whenever the human element became the factor in the situation. Its military successes have been marvellous; its judgments of mankind ridiculous. Its errors of judgment may be arranged as follows:
Error Number One.