Raemaekers shows it to us at work in Belgium. We see the Germans who have conquered the land carrying out those beneficent functions described by the German preacher. Having brought agriculture, commerce, and industry to a state of unprecedented prosperity, they are watching, with benevolent satisfaction, the signs of gain and comfort among the inhabitants. If the emaciated peasants, leaving their roofless cottage, limping down the empty street with the few odds and ends of rubbish not worth looting which they still possess, or stopping to poke about in the gutter for a scrap of food—if they seem to be at the last extremity of misery, that is, no doubt, because they are too dull to appreciate the blessings of Kultur.
Truly this is a terrible picture, a veritable nightmare. There is nothing more poignant in the whole series. It would be a relief to be able to believe Herr Tolzien’s account, but we fear that the ghastly contrast drawn by the neutral artist is only too well founded on fact.
Poor Old Thing
AN old English proverb, disdaining to be cramped by so feeble and academic a thing as grammar, tells us that “courtesy is cumbersome to him that kens it not.” It is one of the essential signs of breeding that courtesy is natural and not cumbersome; and if we may take the saying of the German naval officer as true, that the English will always be fools and the Germans will never be gentlemen (though it is true that the maker of such a saying must be a gentleman himself), we shall be able to understand much about the Central Powers that is otherwise puzzling. Despite their aristocracies and their history, and this applies especially to Austria, those Powers have a streak of cheapness running through them. They are cads. They snarl and bicker with each other like a grocer’s family in a back parlor. Unlike Lamb’s “party in a parlor,” they are not all silent; possibly the rest of the sentence holds true. Where was Wilhelm? Why doesn’t Franz Joseph do better? But for him we’d have done such and such. Why didn’t the fellow do better?
They growl about each other to all the winds of heaven. Some of their griefs are legitimate. Between allies of different race there must always be grounds of difference and even of acute divergence of opinion. For generations the Austrians have disliked the Germans with a hearty and vigorous dislike. If ten years ago you called a German an Austrian, he corrected you with superciliousness; if you called an Austrian a German, he corrected you with fury. Germans called Austrians “stuck-up”; Austrians called Germans merely “those Germans.” And now that they are fighting side by side for their existence, now that their whole history and homogeneity as European Powers are at stake, they carp and snap like fretful sick puppies.
We—the Allies—are Latin and Slav and Saxon and Celt, and we shall never understand each other really well. The friendship of England with France is new, and has been grafted on centuries of clean warfare and honorable hostility; but on the many points on which we think differently, do we reproach each other? We have all retreated since the war began, and in each case our Allies have hurried up to tell us that our retreat was a masterpiece, as honorable as a victory. Why?
Because: Noblesse oblige.