German Military Writers’ Theory of War
German military writers have paid no attention to that. In the picture which they have drawn of force, they have left no room for justice and moderation, which alone make it worthy of respect and bring about lasting results. The triumph, such as it is, of violence, bounds their whole horizon. Clausewitz, an author who has the ear of Germany, writes, “War knows only one means: force. There is no other: it is destruction, wounds, death, and this resort to brutal force is absolutely imperative. As for that right of nations, about which its advocates talk so much, it imposes on the purpose and right of war merely insignificant and, so to speak, negligible, restrictions. In war every idea of humanity is a blunder, a dangerous absurdity. The violence and brutality of combat admit no kind of limitation.”
“Let France reflect upon the words of one who has been called ‘an immortal teacher,’” says a celebrated commentator of the same Clausewitz, Baron Bronsard de Schellendorf, a former Prussian Minister of War, in another work (France under Arms). And this author adds, “If civilised nations do not scalp the vanquished, do not cut their prisoners’ throats, do not destroy towns and villages, do not set fire to farms, do not lay waste everything in their path, it is not from motives of humanity. No, it is because it is better policy to ransom the vanquished and to make use of productive territories.”
The author does not ask himself if, always from this point of view, no other limitations to the brutalities of war are imposed upon thoughtful people, limitations which are in conformity with well-understood interest, and which at the same time would win the approbation of righteousness and humanity. Wholly obsessed by the coarse intoxication of his principle of absolute violence, he adds—
“The style of old Clausewitz is a feeble affair. He was a poet who put rosewater into his inkpot. But it is only with blood that you can write about the things of war. Besides, the next war will be a terrible business. Between Germany and France it can only be a question of a duel to the death. To be or not to be: that is the question, and one, too, which will only be solved by the destruction of one of the combatants.”
Such is the tone of German military authors. Their responsibility is of the highest importance in the story we have to tell. It is they, it is their principles disseminated through Germany, which have set up like a dogma in that country the cult of force in and for itself, divorced from all the moral elements with which the thought of civilised people surrounds it. And, having been taught by such masters, the German nation can in matters of war only thirst for murder and violence.
The German State of Mind on the Eve of War
These principles had their full effect as soon as the Germans thought that war was inevitable.
Do not let us here discuss the excitement which people naturally feel under such circumstances, nor the emotions of wild enthusiasm and patriotic hatred into which the rush of events leads them. If these emotions lead to excesses, we can neither wonder nor complain at it. Excess is in the nature of things and is part and parcel of a system in which material forces work for a just end—namely, the safety of the country. The general upheaval which accompanied a declaration of war cannot fail to rouse the masses and to lead to extravagant and blustering demonstrations. Nevertheless, even in that respect, there are limits which a nation will never exceed, unless it is being exploited in the interests of the gospel of frightfulness, unless the love of destruction for its own sake is the aim of its leaders and its preceptors, and is the basis of the nation’s conception of war.
That is the case with the Germans. The instincts of blind violence which men carry naturally within them and which education alone restrains, had been so carefully fostered by the Clausewitz and Schellendorf schools in the mind of the German people that, once the restraint of peace has been removed, we could postulate in them the symptoms of the most dangerous impulses: symptoms which, in the eyes of every impartial judge, appeared like the dismal omens of an appalling thirst for blood.