Now, when a Power like Germany, with such a record on the sea, attires itself in the garb of a missionary, and begins to preach the gospel of ‘the freedom of the sea,’ the phenomenon appeals to the literary imagination by its exquisite absurdity; to the alienist it suggests the urgent need of medical treatment.
That the Power which has scorched with fire and splashed red with blood the little State it had sworn to protect, which sank the Lusitania and shot Nurse Cavell, should complain to high heaven that Great Britain had broken the regulations of the Hague Convention, is an audacity which paralyses the sane intelligence. It is as though Jack the Ripper published a tract against vivisection, or Deeming wrote a pious homily on ‘How to Make Home Happy.’
Another illustration of this lunatic quality in the German mind is found in the furious complaints against Great Britain for starving—or for even trying to starve—Germany, including its women and children. And yet it was Germany that in 1870 drew lines of blockade around Paris, and waited for starvation to bring the ‘gay city’ to surrender! No German city yet has known the horrors of starvation as the German armies compelled Paris to know them. The death-rate of little children during those sad months rose to 5000 a week, and Bismarck, when he rode into Paris after its surrender, expressed his surprise at seeing any children yet alive. Von Hindenburg, when told quite recently that Russian peasants were starving in Poland, said ‘It is just as well that it should be so; we cannot make war sentimentally.’ Then he repeated the formula which is the true credo of every Prussian soldier: ‘The more ruthlessly war is waged, the more humane does it really become; for that is the best way to bring it to a rapid conclusion.’ But what more complete proof of the one-sidedness of the German mind can be discovered than the fact, say, that at the present moment it is itself starving Belgium, so that its inhabitants have to be fed by the pity of the world, and at the same time it is screaming aloud to the whole universe because the meat ration in Berlin has to be reduced in consequence of the British blockade? The puzzle is not so much that Germany acts with such gaping inconsistency; it has not the faintest notion that it is inconsistent. This is a mental condition rare outside, and not even always found inside, a lunatic asylum.
The delirious self-complacency of the Prussianised German, again, leaves the whole outside world speechless. There is no other such instance of megalomania in history. No other people pay such loud compliments to themselves, and pay them with such unashamed diligence. They decorate themselves with compliments as a savage decorates himself with bits of broken glass. A philosopher like Hegel set the example of proclaiming in German accents and to German ears the ‘godlike glory’ of the German nation. The ‘spiritual nature of Germanism,’ we are assured seven days a week by German editors, makes it the standard-bearer of Christian Europe. Morality, we are warned, ‘depends on the preservation of the Christian Germanic spirit and on the political power of Germany. Civilisation and Christianity are unthinkable without the Germans.’
‘Germany,’ says Professor Lamprecht, ‘is now the protector and pillar of European civilisation; and after bloody victories the world will be healed by being Germanised.’ ‘We Germans are singled out by Providence to march at the head of all Kultur people.... We have the highest mental creative gifts; we form the crown of Kultur in the whole of creation.’ Can anyone doubt, after reading through pages like this, that Germany is self-hypnotised? There must be some morbid condition in the character which thus exudes compliments to itself through every pore in its skin. It is the sign of a disordered intelligence.
The doctrine of ‘frightfulness,’ as a method in war, is the special contribution of Germany to the present conflict. It is curious, however, to remember that the most terrible example of ‘frightfulness,’ as far as Europe is concerned, was supplied by Germany 300 years ago in the famous, or rather infamous, Thirty Years’ War; and a chapter from its grim pages reads like nothing so much as a page from the German performances in Belgium in 1914-15. The slaughter in Germany during that period was so huge that in 1648 the country had only a third of the population of 1618; in some districts the depopulation was so great that every man was allowed to have two wives! It is a German historian who says that ‘even now the injury done to the psychology of the German people by the moral and intellectual decay of the Thirty Years’ War has hardly been repaired.’ Those words were written before the present war broke out, but there are some pages in the performances of Germany to-day that justify that statement.
What makes the folly of Germany to-day absolutely unique, however, is the fact that, in its adoption of ‘frightfulness’ as a war measure, it takes the performances of the Thirty Years’ War, translates them into modern terms, practises them on a new scale, and enjoins them as virtues! The German soldier is instructed, for reasons of humanity, to be as inhuman as possible; and the German War Book gives grim details of what can be done, and supports its instructions by logic which, if it is dreadful, is certainly plausible. If war is made more frightful, it is argued, it will be made shorter; so it is a service to humanity to bombard defenceless towns, burn whole villages, shoot unarmed citizens, including women and children. One German divine, indeed—and German divines during this war have done and said some wonderful things—preached a sermon to show that ‘frightfulness’ carried to the nth was a form—a German form—of fulfilling the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ‘If you love your neighbour, you will do your best to prevent him being caught in the red tide of war—or to get him out of it—as early as possible; and you will achieve this best by making war as terrible as you can.’
The committee which inquired into German atrocities in Belgium, and is responsible for the Bryce Report, had on it such shrewd, practical, hard-headed men as Lord Bryce, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollock, and their report is the most dreadful indictment ever drawn up against any nation, civilised or uncivilised.
It says: ‘In the minds of Prussian officers, war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feeling.... Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory.’ Then a very pregnant sentence is added: ‘It is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession, and been hypnotised by its spirit.... If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible, though not less pernicious.’
The use of ‘frightfulness’ as a method of war, in other words, is the result of diseased psychological conditions. To have ‘brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war’ is a process which might well result in an evil obsession as real, and as devilish in its spirit and its fruits, as possession by the devil himself. But the most astonishing thing in this whole astonishing story is that Germany betrays no sense that it has done anything worthy of blame. It learns with a bewildered exasperation that the outside world disapproves of this example of German ‘culture.’ The Kaiser is quite sure that he has the Divine approval in this, and everything else he does. From the wireless station at Berlin an official ‘explanation’ of this stupendous crime of a destroyed city was sent to the newspapers of the world: