Forced contributions (Kriegschatzungen) are denounced as “a form of plundering” rarely, if ever, to be justified, as requisitions may be, by the plea of necessity. The victor has no right, the Book adds, to practise them in order to recoup himself for the cost of the war, or to subsidize an operation against the nation whose territory is in his occupation. To extort them as a ransom from the violence of war is equally unjustifiable: thus out of its own mouth is the German staff condemned and its “buccaneering levies” upon the forlorn inhabitants of Belgium held up to reprobation.
Still more significant are the remarks on the right and duty of neutrals. The inviolability of neutral territory and the sanctity of the Geneva Convention are the only two principles of international law which the German War Book admits to be laws of perfect obligation. A neutral State, it declares, not only may, but must forbid the passage of troops to the subjects of both belligerents. If either attempts it, the neutral State has the right to resist “with all the means in its power.” However overwhelming the necessity, no belligerent must succumb to the temptation to trespass upon the neutral territory. If this be true of a neutral State it is doubly true of a neutralized State. No one has been so emphatic on this point as the German jurists whose words the War Book is so fond of praying in aid. The Treaty of London guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is declared by them to be “a landmark of progress in the formation of a European polity” and “up till now no Power has dared to violate a guarantee of this kind.”[16]
“He who injures a right does injury to the cause of right itself, and in these guarantees lies the express obligation to prevent such things.... Nothing could make the situation of Europe more insecure than an egotistical repudiation by the great States of these duties of international fellowship.”[17]
The reader will, perhaps, hardly need to be cautioned against the belligerent footnotes with which the General Staff has illuminated the text. They are, as he will observe, mainly directed towards illustrating the peculiar depravity of the French in 1870. They are certainly suspect, and all the more so, because the notorious malpractices of the Germans in that campaign are dismissed, where they are noticed at all, with the airy remark that there were peculiar circumstances, or that they were unauthorized, or that the “necessity of war” afforded sufficient justification. All this is ex parte. So too, to a large extent, is the parade of professors in the footnotes. They are almost always German professors and, as we shall see later, the German professor is, and is compelled to be, a docile instrument of the State.
The book has, of course, a permanent value apart from the light it throws upon contemporary issues. Some of the chapters, such as that on the right and duties of neutrals, represent a carefully considered theory, little tainted by the cynicism which disfigures the rest of the book. It should be of great interest and value to those of us who are engaged in studying the problem of bringing economic pressure to bear upon Germany, by enclosing her in the meshes of conditional contraband. So, too, the chapter on the treatment of Prisoners of War will have a special, and for some a poignant, interest just now. The chapter on the treatment of occupied territory is, of course, of profound significance in view of the present state of Belgium.
CHAPTER II
GERMAN DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT
Bismarck, wrote Hohenlohe, who ultimately succeeded him as Imperial Chancellor, “handles everything with a certain arrogance (Uebermut), and this gives him a considerable advantage in dealing with the timid minds of the older European diplomacy.” This native arrogance became accentuated after the triumphs of 1870 until, in Hohenlohe’s words, Bismarck became “the terror” of all European diplomatists. That word is the clue to German diplomacy. The terrorism which the Germans practise in war they indoctrinate in peace. It was a favorite saying of Clausewitz, whose military writings enjoy an almost apostolic authority in Germany, that War and Peace are but a continuation of one another—“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.”[18] The same lesson is written large on every page of von der Goltz[19] and Bernhardi.[20] In other words, war projects its dark shadow over the whole of German diplomacy. The dominant postures in “shining armor” at critical moments in the peace of Europe, and the menacing invocations of the “mailed fist” are not, as is commonly supposed, a passionate idiosyncrasy of the present Emperor. They are a legacy of the Bismarckian tradition. To keep Europe in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension by somber hints of war was, as we shall see, the favorite method by which Bismarck attained his diplomatic ends. For the German Chancellerie rumors of wars are of only less political efficacy than wars themselves. After 1870, metaphors of war became part of the normal vocabulary of the German Government in times of peace. Not only so but, as will be seen in the two succeeding chapters, a belligerent emotion suffused the temperament of the whole German people, and alike in the State Universities, and the stipendiary Press, there was developed a cult of War for its own sake. The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.
Now War is at best but a negative conception and its adoption as the Credo of German thinkers since 1870 explains why their contributions to Political Science have been so sterile. More than that, it accounts for the decline in public morality. Politically, Germany, as we shall see, has remained absolutely stagnant. She is now no nearer self-government than she was in 1870; she is much farther removed from it than she was in 1848. The inevitable result has been, that politics have for her come to mean little more than intrigues in high places, the deadly struggle of one contending faction at court against another, with the peace of Europe as pawns in the game. The German Empire, like the Prussian kingdom, has little more than a paper constitution, a lex imperfecta as Gneist called it. The Reichstag has little power and less prestige, and its authority as a representative assembly has been so enervated by the shock tactics practised by the Government in forcing, or threatening to force, a series of dissolutions to punish contumacious behavior, that it is little better than a debating society. A vote of censure on the Government has absolutely no effect. Of the two powers, the Army and the Reichstag, the Army is infinitely the stronger; there is no law such as our Army Annual Act which subjects it to Parliamentary control. Even the Bundesrath[21] (or Federal Council), strong as it is, is hardly stronger than the German General Staff, for the real force which welds the German Empire together is not so much this council of plenipotentiaries from the States as the military hegemony of Prussia and the military conventions between her and the Southern States by which the latter placed their armies under her supreme control. In this shirt of steel the body politic is enclosed as in a vice.