‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity, and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.’
Now, as an example of inverted ethics, this is almost worthy of a place in De Quincey’s essay on ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ‘The German Government,’ says Secretary Hay, ‘is generally brutal, but not often silly.’ Here, however, it is at once both silly and brutal in a quite superlative degree. It is, of course, exactly this doctrine of ‘frightfulness’ which has made Germany the outlaw of the civilised world.
Perhaps nothing in this war will so sharply arrest what we have called the literary imagination as the uncertainty, the dim half-lights as to its reasons and issues, with which it began.
Some of the ‘explanations’ of the war are foolish; some are cynical. The Hon. Bertrand Russell, for example, has written a book on the war in which he says the nations of Central Europe are fighting for much the same reason dogs do—because ‘they don’t like each other’s smell‘! Would anyone quote now, as an explanation of the war, that couple of pistol-shots in a street in Serajevo which slew the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife? It is like offering the bursting of a soda-water bottle as the explanation of a Niagara, or tracing an earthquake to the explosion of a cracker. The Austrian ultimatum to Servia seems to be the match which fired the magazine; but if there had been no ‘magazine’ the ‘match’ would have been quite innocent.
For Great Britain, the first reason of the war was something immediate and concrete—the German invasion of Belgium. Great Britain was pledged, both by express treaty and by its historic policy, to maintain that neutrality; and when the German columns crossed the Belgian frontier war was inevitable. It was a simple question of good faith; England, Mr. Asquith declared, must keep her pledged word. But when the war was begun it was quickly realised that the existence of the Empire depended on its result; and so Mr. Bonar Law told the House of Commons, ‘This is a fight for our national existence.’ That is certainly true, and it applies with greatest force to the Dominions. If the British Empire goes into liquidation, the most coveted assets will be Australia, with its 12,000 miles of girdling sea, its radiant climate, its mineral wealth, its vast pastures, or New Zealand, the Great Britain of the Pacific. The men in the French and Flemish trenches are certainly fighting for—amongst other things—the safety of every home in Australia and New Zealand. But the war raised the question of the value of the treaty relations which bind civilised States together; so, as Lord Rosebery put it, we are fighting for ‘the sanctity of public law in Europe.’ A German victory would turn every treaty throughout Christendom into a ‘scrap of paper.’ In the first message, again, King George addressed to the Empire, he said, ‘We are fighting for the continuity of civilisation;’ and that also is true. The defeat of the Allies would put not only Europe, but Christendom, back into the Dark Ages.
In this way, as the war went on, its ‘reasons’ expanded: the obligation of the pledged word; our national existence; the sanctity of public law; the continuity of civilisation. Yet even these reasons all put together are inadequate. There remains something in the war differentiating it from any other ever fought; some intangible and invisible element not easy to define. In his famous speech in the Guildhall Mr. Asquith expressed this by saying ‘This is not so much a material as a spiritual conflict.’ It is a conflict, in other words, not racial, political, dynastic, or a mere wrestle of political ideals. It is a battle of opposing ethical codes. We are fighting not merely a nation, but a doctrine—something that steel cannot pierce nor high explosives wreck. And it is a doctrine armed, disciplined, terrible; fighting with 17-inch howitzers and poisonous gases, with submarines.
But what exactly is the ‘doctrine’ against which we are fighting? It is customary to quote Nietzsche at this point, and find in his teaching the germ of the ‘doctrine’ for which to-day Germany fights, and against which the rest of the world is in arms. But for one thing it is difficult to discover any single sustained and intelligible ‘doctrine’ in the structure of Nietzsche’s works. He died in a lunatic asylum, and had a strain of lunacy in his writings, if not in his blood, long before his insanity came under medical treatment. He had a touch of genius, but thin partitions divided his genius from madness. If Germany took its creed from Nietzsche it would be not only furiously anti-Christian and furiously atheistic, but even furiously non-moral. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche said, ‘ought to be shot at. Pangs of conscience were indecent.’ In that dim realm into which his half-insane mind wandered—the ‘twilight of the gods’—evil and good had no existence. As for Christianity, he called it ‘the greatest of all conceivable corruptions,’ the ‘one immortal blemish of mankind.’ Jesus Christ, for Nietzsche, was ‘a knave, a charlatan.’ Everyone knows how Nietzsche took the Beatitudes and inverted them. His creed combined the theology of a lunatic asylum with the ethics of a gaol. Now the Germany against which the world is fighting to-day is certainly not atheistic, and it at least thinks itself to be intensely Christian.
What makes the tragedy of Germany in this war, the thing which puzzles even those who are fighting against it, is the fact that Germany is acting on a doctrine stranger and more terrible than Paganism itself. It undertakes to be both Christian and Pagan at the same time; Christian in the individual life, Pagan as a nation. It has two eternally hostile codes of ethics: one for the individual and the other for the State. As a private citizen the German may be a Christian, and ought to be one; but the moment he puts on a spike-helmet, or sits at a Government desk, he strips himself of all Christian morals; vice and virtue change their names for him. As a soldier he can clothe himself with ‘frightfulness’; can rape, plunder, kill, burn, with the entire approval of his official—that is to say, his Paganised—conscience. As a diplomatist, he can lie and cheat and forswear himself, and leave his Christian self-respect untouched. For Germany acts on the theory that the State is a non-moral, predatory entity, for which the distinction betwixt good and evil does not exist. It stands in no relation to God; it has no more morals than a tiger; it acts on the law of the jungle. Might, in its dreadful code, is right.
In the Prussianised Germany against which we are fighting we have, in brief, a double personality. When it acts as a nation it undergoes a transformation more terrible than that in R. L. Stevenson’s tale when Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. All the separate individualities of Germany melt into one gigantic Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde in a spike-helmet. Or, to change the figure, they become the ‘great blond beast’ of Nietzsche, lawless, predatory, invincible, the superman, a non-moral monster. The supermen, says Nietzsche, ‘where a foreign country begins, revert to the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters who come with bravado from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture.... The nation becomes a magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.’
Treitschke, the little stone-deaf professor of history, proclaimed the doctrine that the State is a non-moral entity, for which an ethical code has no meaning. Bernhardi puts the matter more explicitly. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘came into the world to establish a society founded on love; but that principle does not extend to the State’; in all that concerns the State, Jesus Christ has no authority. His laws do not extend to that realm. When before in history have we this doctrine proclaimed from the iron lips of 17-inch howitzers? Here lies the explanation of all that puzzles us in the present war—the strange perversities discoverable in German policy: its contempt for truth, its capacity for cruelty; its blindness to moral distinctions. We are fighting with a nation which, taken individually, believes itself to be Christian; but, taken as a nation, it is by deliberate choice Pagan.