And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter attack on British journalism (“The scaremongering of that paper is doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and England”), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year’s truce in the building of battleships (“Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and we’ll mind ours”), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany’s object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but merely to keep the seas open to her trade. “Why,” said one of the men, “nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month.” “Quite so,” said another, “and so far as German people go that’s the beginning and end of the whole matter.”
WE BELIEVED IT
We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my countrymen who through many years believed that story—that the accident of Germany’s disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to break British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlarge her navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through the Kiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced to shoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threatening fortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of the Bight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I did my best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and the darkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from gigantic furnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day when frail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns. I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of the scholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription and of the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafés, and the hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than military necessity.
And then there was the human charm of some German homes to soothe away suspicion—the scholar’s quiet house (beyond the clattering parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank “to all good friends in England,” and the sweet simplicity of the little town in Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, where the nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musical societies, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was so difficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-power and dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall those German homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to do so. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were already approaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmur long before ourselves—heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much less and worse than nothing.
THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT
Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war came down on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it. On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smaller things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914, when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had already gathered in the sky.
Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke’s assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of comprehending the cause and the measure of it.
“What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God’s name should we have to fight about it?” we thought. Or perhaps, “We’ve always been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war.”