Is “German militarism” alone responsible? We say the German people, for it would be a mistake not to recognise as the authors of these crimes merely the army which performed them, the officers who tolerated them, approved them or ordered them—in a word, only the German military element known as “militarism.” For this militarism is in very truth the offspring of the whole nation, as well as of causes which have nothing military about them—to wit, the teaching in the universities, which has been shaping it for a hundred years.
The cult of force which to the German is the cult of brutal force imposed without mercy, goes down to the very roots of his thought. This must not be confounded with the spirit of violence to which, at all ages of the world, barbarian conquerors have given way. This cult proceeds from the fact that Germany considers herself the only nation worthy of the name, as the people par excellence upon whom, by law of nature, devolves the management of the modern world, around which it is the historic and philosophic duty of Europe to rally until absorbed in it, and until the civilised world is only one vast Germany in fact. When the German declares that force is superior to right, he does not mean force in itself, any force whatever, but his own force, which is right.
Such are the notions taught by the members of the German cabinet, by its professors, by the universities of Berlin, Munich, Halle, and Bonn for one hundred years. Such is the teaching promulgated in Fichte’s famous “Addresses to the German Nation,” uttered in 1808. We shall easily understand that a nation which incarnates in itself all law, all history, all the future, all rational truth, all philosophic influence, hardly needs to think of the means by which it puts itself forward. From the relative point of view of human interest, as from the impartial point of view of eternal ideas, one thing alone matters and that is that Germany should triumph, and that Germanism should grow.
To this there is only need to add one point, that this perverted refinement of thought, this sophism, grows and is developed among a nation which is brutal and barbarous among all others, so that the inclinations of flesh and blood are in it ready to respond to the suggestions of a corrupt philosophy. In Germany the sophist unchains the beast: the man of letters lets slip the barbarian, or, as was forcibly said by Hugo, an old admirer of Germany, when he had become enlightened by the sinister glare of the events of 1870, the pedant is the ally of the trooper. The fusion of these two elements, the intimate union of German thought and of its military counterpart, welding together the whole of the classes intermediate between them: in a word, that is to say, the whole of Germany—all this must not be forgotten in any just appraisement of the foregoing events. So we see that in fact all Germany approves the actions of which we have just told the story, and the German intellectuals have taken the course of identifying themselves with them in their well-known but shameful “appeal to the civilised world.”
Conclusion
The theoretic responsibility for German cruelties, therefore, falls upon the military writers of Germany directly; but fundamentally, and probing more deeply, upon her professors, historians, and philosophers. Then come the heads of the army, who were the first to carry out these teachings.
But the verdict of mankind condemns the whole of Germany; for all her citizens, from the highest to lowest, appear in the eyes of the world, which was at first amazed and then indignant, as identifying themselves with the work of devastation, murder, pillage, and cowardice by which, in the judgment of history, the war that Germany launched upon the world will be noted.
We, at least, who are neutral of nationality and impartial in judgment, lump them all together, in the feeling of contempt and of disgust which they have roused in our indignant breast, and in the stern but just judgment which our reason, bitterly disappointed as it has been, has meted out to them.
THE END