The One-Sided Prussian Duel.
What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of which we hear numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might be called the one-sided duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword—a waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of the Kaiser in the affair at Zabern was found industriously hacking at a cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing, but pursue the strict psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the defenseless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any theory of honor mixed up with such things, any more than with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian, or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as "honor" must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call "prestige."
Absence of the Reciprocal Idea.
The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea. The Prussian is not sufficiently civilized for the duel. Even when he crosses swords with us his thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we both glorify war we are glorifying different things. Our medals are wrought like his, but they do not mean the same thing; our regiments are cheered as his are, but the thought in the heart is not the same; the Iron Cross is on the bosom of his King, but it is not the sign of our God. For we, alas! follow our God with many relapses and self-contradictions, but he follows his very consistently. Through all the things that we have examined, the view of national boundaries, the view of military methods, the view of personal honor and self-defense, there runs in their case something of an atrocious simplicity; something too simple for us to understand; the idea that glory consists in holding the steel, and not in facing it.
If further examples were necessary it would be easy to give hundreds of them. Let us leave, for the moment, the relations between man and man in the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we shall find that other Christian civilizations aim at some kind of equality, even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of comradeship, in France the compensation of courtesy. In America it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joy ride; but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a grandmother she is a holy terror.
By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality; America by similarity, France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest. This is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and the tradesmen. "Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip," said Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say "poker," which might come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.
Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril, and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it. Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could come.
But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest point to which the German culture has risen.
"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."
The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is the man who cannot love—no, nor even hate—his neighbor as himself.