In similar vein, the noted German historian Eduard Meyer[123] predicted that Armageddon was only the first of a long series of Anglo-German “Punic Wars” in which modern civilization would retrograde to a condition of semi-barbarism. Germany, according to this prophecy, would be the victor—but a Pyrrhic victor, for the colored races, taking advantage of white decadence, would destroy European supremacy and involve all the white nations in a common ruin.
The ulcerated state of European war-psychology did, in fact, lend ominous emphasis to these gloomy prognostications. Before 1914, as we have seen, imperialistic trafficking with common race-interests usually roused wide-spread criticism, while even more, the use of colored troops in white quarrels always roused bitter popular condemnation. In the darkest hours of the Boer War, English public opinion had refused to sanction the use of either black African or brown Indian troops against the white foe, while French plans for raising black armies of African savages for use in Europe were almost universally reprobated. Before Armageddon there thus existed a genuine moral repugnance against settling domestic differences by calling in the alien without the gates.
The Great War, however, sent all such scruples promptly into the discard. Not only did the belligerent governments use all the colored troops they could equip, but the belligerent peoples hailed this action with unqualified approval. The Allies were of course the more successful in practice, but the Germans were just as eager, and the exertions of the Prussian General Liman von Sanders actually got Turkish divisions to the European battle-fronts.
The psychological effect of these colored auxiliaries in deepening the hatred of the white combatants was deplorable. Germany’s use of Turks raised among the Allies wrathful emotions reminiscent of the Crusades, while the havoc wrought in the Teutonic ranks by black Senegalese and yellow Gurkhas, together with Allied utterances like Lord Curzon’s wish to see Bengal lancers on the Unter den Linden and Gurkhas camping at Sans Souci, so maddened the German people that the very suggestion of white solidarity was jeeringly scoffed at as the most idiotic sentimentality.
Here is a German officer’s account of a Senegalese attack on his position, which vividly depicts the mingled horror and fury awakened in German hearts by these black opponents: “They came. First singly, at wide intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish. Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in the cloud. Entire bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking in the shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing their grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks stretched forward. Some with bayonets on their rifles. Many only armed with knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings. Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance of their beastly malice. Behind them came the first wave of the attackers, in close order, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless.”[124]
Here, again, is the proposal of a British officer, to raise a million black savages from England’s African colonies for use on the Western Front. Major Stuart-Stephens exults in Britain’s “almost unlimited reservoir of African man-power.” In northern Nigeria alone, he remarks, there are to-day more than 700,000 warlike tribesmen. “Let them be used!” says the major. “These ‘bonny fechters’ are now engaged in the pastoral arts of peace. But I would make bold to assert that a couple of hundred thousand could, after six months’ training, be usefully employed in daredevil charges into German trenches.” Major Stuart-Stephens hopes that at least the Sudanese battalions will be transferred en masse to the Western Front. “This,” he concludes, “would mean the placing at once in the trenches of, say, 70,000 big, lusty coal-black devils, the time of whose life is the wielding of the bayonet, and whose advent would not be regarded by the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same sort.”[125]
The military possibilities are truly engaging! There are literally tens of millions of fighting blacks and scores of millions of fighting Asiatics now living under white rule who could conceivably be armed and shipped to European battle-fields. After which, of course, Europe, the white homeland, would be—a queer place.
Fortunately for our race, the late war did not see this sort of thing carried to its logical conclusion. But the harm done was bad enough. The white world grew accustomed to the use of colored mercenaries and to the contracting of alliances with colored peoples against white opponents as a mere matter of course.
The German war-mind, in particular, teemed with colored alliance-projects. Unable to compete with the Allies in getting colored troops to Europe, Germans planned to revenge themselves in other fields. The Turkish alliance and the resulting “Holy War” proclamation were hailed with delight. “Over there in Turkey,” wrote the well-known German publicist Ernst Jaeckh, “stretch Anatolia and Mesopotamia: Anatolia, the ‘Land of the Sunrise’; Mesopotamia, the region of ancient paradise. May these names be to us a sign: may this World War bring to Germany and Turkey the sunrise and the paradise of a new time; may it confer upon an assured Turkey and a Greater Germany the blessing of a fruitful Turco-Teutonic collaboration in peace after a victorious Turco-Teutonic collaboration in war.”[126]
The scope of Germany’s Asiatic aspirations during the war is exemplified by an article from the pen of the learned Orientalist Professor Bernhardt Molden.[127] Germany’s aid to Turkey, contends Professor Molden, is merely symptomatic of her policy to raise the other Asiatic peoples now crushed beneath English and Russian domination. Thus Germany will create puissant allies for the “Second Punic War.” Germany must therefore strive to solidify the great Central Asian bloc—Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China. Professor Molden urges a “Pan-Asian railroad” from Constantinople to Peking. This should be especially alluring to Afghanistan, which would thereby become one of the great pivots of world-politics and trade. In fine: “Germany must free Asia.” As another prominent German writer, Friedrich Delitzsch, wrote in similar vein: “To renovate the East—such is Germany’s mission.”[128]