Behind him stands the embodiment of all that Prussian kultur and efficiency mean, wooden uninventiveness, clockwork accuracy of movement—without soul or inspiration. He himself is thin and scraggy—Raemaekers has intensified these characteristics, but even so the caricature of the reality is more accurate than unkind. Many months ago, this vacuous heir of the house of Hohenzollern set to work on the task of overcoming France, and the result ... may be found in bundles of four, going back to the incinerators beyond Aix, in the piled corpses before the French positions at and about Verdun; some of the results, the swag of the decadent burglar, went back in sacks from the châteaux that this despicable thing polluted and robbed as might any Sikes from Portland or Pentonville.
He is the embodiment, himself, of the last phase of Prussian kultur. Somewhere back in the history of Prussia its rulers had to invent and to create, and then kultur brought forth hard men; later, it became possible to copy, and then kultur brought forth mechanical perfection rather than creative perfection, systematised its theories of life and work, and brought into being a class of men just a little meaner, more rigid, more automaton-like, than the original class; having reduced life to one system, and that without soul or ideal, kultur brought forth types lacking more and more in originality. Here stands the culminating type; he will copy the good German Gott—he is incapable of originating anything—and will “do the same to France.”
As far as lies in his power, he has done it; in the day of reckoning, Germany will judge how he has done it, and it is to be hoped that Germany will give him his just reward, for no punishment could be more fitting. The rest of the world already knows his vacuity, his utter uselessness, his criminal decadence. As his father was stripped of the Garter, so is he here shown stripped of the attributes to which, in earlier days, he made false claim. There remains a foolish knave posturing—and that is the real Crown Prince of Germany.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN
GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND!
“Father says I have to do the same with France.”
Piracy
In the summer of 1914 Germany stood before the world, a nation of immense, and to a great extent of most honourable, achievement. Her military greatness had never been in dispute. But in the previous twenty years she had developed an internal industry and an external commerce on a scale and with a rapidity entirely unprecedented. She had to build a navy such as no nation had ever constructed in so short a time. She seemed destined to progress in the immediate future as she had progressed in the immediate past.
What has the madness for world conquest done for her now? She has made enemies of all, and made all her enemies suffer. Like the strong blind man of history, she has seized the columns of civilisation and brought the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid the ruins? Her industry is paralysed, her commerce gone. Her navy is dishonoured. Some force she still possesses at sea, but it is force to be expended on sea piracy alone. And it is not piracy that can save her. At most, in her extremity, it will do for her what a life belt does for a lone figure in a deserted ocean. It prolongs the agony that precedes inevitable extinction. It is the throw of the desperate gambler that Germany has made, when she flings this last vestige of her honour into the sea.