“True strategy consists in hitting your enemy and hitting him hard. Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded towns the maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of the struggle, and may bring pressure to bear on their government to discontinue it. You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with.
“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population so that it may sue for peace.”
And when Favre, coming out from the heroic defence of Paris, appealed to him in name of that “brotherhood which binds the brave of all the earth,” the Wotan of modern Germany replied—
“‘You speak of your resistance! You are proud of your resistance. Well, let me tell you, if M. Trochu were a German general, I would shoot him this evening. You have not the right—do you understand?—in the face of God, in the face of humanity, for mere military vainglory, to expose to the horrors of famine a city of two millions.... Do not speak of your resistance, it is criminal!’”
Abeken, who was called “Bismarck’s Pen,” wrote of his chief—
“Goethe’s saying, ‘Faithful to one aim, even on a crooked road,’ suits him well.”
Such was the founder of the German Empire, and such the methods by which he founded it.
II.—Nietzsche
It is in no way surprising to find defenders of the calamitous prophet of Hohenzollernism active to prove that he meant this fine thing, and that, and did not mean blood and domination. The truth is that only too many English writers allowed themselves to be tarred with the Nietzschean brush. They made him a cult, a boom, a pinnacle of superior vision. Now that the Moloch, whose high priests were beyond all others Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is exacting his awful tribute, the worshippers, once so self-confident, begin to fear a little for their own reputations. For the issue of this war is to kill Prussianism, not only in Germany, but in the whole life and philosophy of Europe. The universal watchword is: “Never again!”
The vogue of the Supermaniacs is, perhaps, best explained by the curious lack of seriousness in dealing with ideas which is characteristic of the English mind in its worst periods. Great journals flatter the Harnacks and the Euckens and the rest in their attempt to deny all authenticity to the “scraps of paper” on which Christian belief is founded, and wonder, in the next column, why people are not going to church. Professor Cramb—who, by the way, is painfully German in his “anti-German” book—touches upon this inexplicable unreality of English thought. He suggests that it has counted for much in producing in Germany that professorial contempt which one finds, especially, in a writer like Treitschke. When your Prussian says: “Fill me a bath of blood!” he means blood. When your English critic reads it, he says, too often: “What a vivid image!”