CHAPTER VII
GERMAN IDEALS AND ORGANIZATION
When wars begin between nations we usually see the leaders of thought on each side busy developing distrust among their own citizens for the people against whom they are fighting. In accordance with this fact, the people of the United States have read a great deal since August, 1914, to make them think very unkindly of Germany.
This chapter is not a plea for the Germans, and I agree that they did unnecessarily cruel and impossible things in Belgium. It is not to be denied that they played a most unwise part in the war game, when they tried to steal a march on France by invading through Belgium, a thing they were pledged not to do. It pays to keep faith; and when a nation does not keep faith other nations have no recourse but to treat it as if it were a pirate. If they do otherwise, the whole game will become a pirate’s game, and good faith will disappear from international relations. If Germany may violate Belgium at will, why may she not violate Switzerland, Holland, or any other state that stands in her way; and who would not expect her to do it, if no powers faced her that were willing and able to dispute her will?
It is not improbable that German leaders understood this as well as we who now pass it under review. They must have made their calculations on arousing the opposition of the world and proceeded with the expectation that they would gain so much by their sweep through forbidden Belgium that they could defy the world. And if things had gone well for them, the calculation would have been well made. For if Germany had carried France off her feet and placed her in a position to offer no further menace during the next ten years, and if she had dealt a similar blow to Russia, what power could have checked her in the future decade? By glancing at the situation in Europe today we may see how an intrenched Germany defies the united and unwhipped world. How much more might she not have had her way, if the thrust through Belgium had succeeded!
Let us suppose that the game of bad faith had proved successful as planned, what would have been the result? Probably Great Britain would have wakened slowly to her peril, but her position was such that she could have done nothing. Her fleet would have been useless against an enemy that rules on land. Her army could not have met the combined Teutonic armies, and she would have had no allies. Meanwhile, Germany and Austria at their leisure could have digested the Balkans and drawing Turkey into their net could have established a “Mittel-Europa” that would have left the rest of the world at their mercy. These were alluring stakes to play for, and it is not hard to see how a nation whose leaders have thrown aside the homely motto that “Righteousness exalteth a nation” would be willing to take a chance in order to obtain them.
When we think of such things as these we are in danger of concluding that they represent the real Germany. We look back to that Germany of the past which we saw in our youth, whose music we have heard all our lives, whose Goethe we have read, whose scholarship we have built upon, and whose toys have amused us and our children through many decades and ask ourselves whether or not we were mistaken in our ideas of Germany. Are there two Germanies, and if so, which is the true Germany? Probably the answer is that each is the real Germany manifesting herself in different moods. Fundamentally we have an intense and emotional people, swayed in one instance by artistic emotions, in another by the love of exact research for facts, in another by the feeling of domesticity, and in still another by the powerful impulse of a great national egoism. They are a people who can love much, hate much, play much, sacrifice much, and serve well when called into service. In their war-maddened mood they have stained a fair reputation, and they are now trying to think that the stain will not matter if they can only fight through to victory. But nations are like men in this that however successful one may become personally he never gets to be so great that he can afford to carry a tarnished reputation.
Let us turn to the Germany of old and see if we cannot observe the process by which she came to her present state of mind. While I realize that it is absolutely necessary for the world to crush her attempt to rule Europe, I cannot find it in my heart to hate her. She has risen to such a state of efficiency in social organization and in the capacity to spread the light of civilization that she commands respect from thinking foes. It is the duty of the world to chasten the spirit of arrogance out of her, but to leave her sound and able to deal with the future in that way in which she is so well fitted to play a strong and beneficial part. If ever a great people needed the discipline of disaster to teach them that nations, like men, should do to others as they wish others to do to them, that nation is the Germany of today. To understand in what way this splendid state has run away from its past we shall have to glance at its history in the recent past.
For a point of departure let us take the Seven Years’ War. This struggle was the result of the ambition of young Frederick, a strong and unethical king of Prussia. When he came to the throne he found that a parsimonious father had left him a full treasury, an excellent army, and a united kingdom, while fate had sent the neighboring state Austria, a young woman for ruler and an army that was not formidable. It was a favorable opportunity to seize Silesia, which Prussia considered necessary to her welfare, and to which she had the flimsiest pretense of right. The rapacity of Frederick, her king, cannot be justified on moral grounds, and it threw Europe into commotions for which nearly a quarter of a century was needed for settlement. The last phase of this quarter-of-a-century was the Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763. By the time it began Frederick of Prussia was looked upon by his neighbors as a menace to Europe; and Austria, France, and Russia united to crush him. He had a friend in Great Britain, who was generally found among the foes of France. In the great war he waged through seven years he fought off foes first on one side and then on the other until the war ended at last with Prussia still unconquered.
If hard and valiant fighting and solicitude for the welfare of his country could redeem the error of the invasion of Silesia the Seven Years’ War would relieve Frederick, whom posterity calls “Frederick the Great,” of all odium on account of the thoughtless way in which he began his wars. Unlike the present kaiser, he began a long reign rashly and ended it wisely. Administrative reforms and a policy of peace with his neighbors made his last years a period of happiness for Prussia.