The Lost Fruits of Waterloo

by John Spencer Bassett

When the present war began the kaiser became its leader, as was his duty and privilege. Opinion in hostile countries pronounced him the agent responsible for its outbreak. Around his striking personality have collected many stories of dark complexion. At this time it is not possible to test their accuracy, but it is safe to say that many of them are chiefly assumption. On the other hand, it is undoubted that he is now a firm friend of the military party, and that he supports the autocracy in its purpose to carry the war to the bitter end. He has been a diligent war lord and he has shown a willingness to share the sacrifices of the people. Stories of apparent reliability that have come out of Germany in recent months imply that he has steadily gained in popularity during the conflict, while most of the other members of his family have lost.

If it is important to clear thinking to see the kaiser in an impartial light, it is equally necessary to understand the German Kultur. This term is used in Germany to indicate the mass of ideas and habits of thought of a people. It applies to art and industry, to religion and war, to whatever the human mind directs. From the German’s standpoint we have a Kultur of our own. We have no corresponding term, nor concept, and we cannot realize all he means in using the term if we do not put ourselves in his place. Now it is true that the German has won great success in intellectual ways. Scholarship, scientific invention, the application of art to industry, and well planned efficiency in social organization are his in a large degree. He is proud of his achievements; and when the war began he felt that it was the German mission to give this Kultur to other peoples. From his standpoint, a Germanized world would be a world made happy. It was an honest opinion, and it went far to support his desire for expansion.

The Germans are a docile people with respect to their superiors, and this trait is a condition of their Kultur. It is traditional in Germany for the peasant to obey his lord, the lord to obey his over-lord, and the over-lord to obey his ruler. To the kaiser look all the people in a sense which no citizen of the United States can understand without using a fair amount of imagination. The lords and over-lords constitute the Junkers, who in the modern military system make up the officer class. A high sense of authority runs through the whole population, the upper classes knowing how to give orders and the lower classes knowing how to take them.

Before the battle of Jena, 1806, the Prussian army was made up of peasants forced to serve under the nobles, who took the offices. Townsmen were excluded from the army. The peasant’s forced service lasted twenty years. The system was as inefficient as it was unequal, and a commission was appointed to reform it. The result was the modern system of universal service, put into complete operation in 1813. After a hundred years it is possible to see some of the effects of the system on the ideals of the people. It has taught them to work together in their places, formed habits of promptness and cleanliness, and lessened the provincialism of the lower classes. It has been a great training school in nationalism, preserving the love of country and instilling in the minds of the masses a warm devotion to the military traditions of the nation.

It has also produced results of a questionable value. By fostering the military spirit it has developed a desire for war, on the same principle that a boy in possession of a sharp hatchet has a strong impulse to hack away at his neighbor’s shrubbery. It is probable that the temptation to use a great and superior army was a vital fact in bringing on the present war. Furthermore, the wide-spread habit of docility leaves a people without self-assertion and enables their rulers to impose upon them. As to the influence of universal service in promoting militarism, that has been frequently mentioned.

On the other hand, it should be borne in mind that not all states that have had universal military training have been saddled with these evils. France, for example, has had universal training without becoming obsessed with the passion for war and without the loss of popular individualism. It seems well to say that universal training itself does not produce the evils sometimes attributed to it. In Germany, at least, it seems that it was the purpose for which the army existed, and not the army itself, that developed militarism and brought other unhappy effects.

Probably the German army before the war was the most efficient great human machine then in existence. There was less waste in it and less graft than in any other army. Since the army included all the men of the empire at some stage or other of their existence, it was a great training school in organization. Its effects on German history are hardly to be exaggerated.

I have said that military organization alone was not sufficient to make the modern Germany. It was also necessary to give the nation a definite national purpose, and this was the task of its intellectual leaders. The purpose itself was expressed in the idea of German nationality. By a bold stretch of fancy every part of Europe that had once been ruled by Germans, that spoke the German language, or that could be considered as a part that ought to speak that language was fixed upon as territory to be brought within the authority of the Fatherland. It was in accordance with this principle that Schleswig-Holstein was taken from Denmark in 1864 and Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. Here the march of annexation paused. Bismarck was too wise to carry the theory to an extreme; but a growing number of writers and speakers in the empire took up the idea and kept it before the people with winning persistence. It is thus that Pan-Germanism has come to be one of the great facts in German public opinion. By preaching race unity with patriotic zeal the intellectual leaders have established a powerful propaganda of expansion.

Of the men most prominently associated with this movement especial attention must be given to Heinrich von Treitschke, for years professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Berlin, whose remarkable influence reached all classes of people. He was a handsome man with an open face that invited admiration without appearing to care whether it was given or not. When he spoke the auditor heard “a raucous, half-strangled, uneasy voice” and noticed that his movements were mechanical and his utterances were without regard to the pauses that usually stand for commas and periods, while his pleasant facial expression had no apparent relation to what he was saying. The explanation was that he was so deaf that he did not hear himself speak. That such a speaker could fire the heart of a nation is evidence that he was filled with unusual earnestness and sympathy.

He had great love of country, and if he exalted royalty and strong government it was because he thought that Germany would reach her highest authority through them. It was no selfish or incompetent king that he worshiped, but one that lived righteously and sought diligently to promote the interest of the people. He held that the nobility should serve as thoroughly as the common men. Strong government in his idea did not mean privilege, as ordinarily understood, but vital energy in all the organs of administration, efficiently directed by a will that was not hampered by the contrarywise tugging of individual opinions.