Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

“Gnädige Frau,” I said in a firm loud voice, “wake up. We are in the middle of the devastated area, you had better look at it.” Sounds as though a person had been disturbed from deep sleep issued from the top berth. Personally I do not like to think what I should have said or done had a strange woman in the train woke me up at 3 A.M. But Prussian docility responded to an order. Gnädige Frau got down meekly from her berth and established herself at the window. A suitable flow of exclamations and adjectives then took place: “entsetzlich,” “furchtbar,” “schrecklich,” “böse,” and so on. Comfortably wrapped up in my bunk I surveyed the scene with virtuous satisfaction, feeling that I was bringing home the war to one Prussian at least in an entirely right spirit and manner. Gnädige Frau, however, turned my flank with the military efficiency of her race. To my intense disgust I found that the text I had provided by this view of the Somme only led to an elaborate sermon on the devastations of the Russians in East Prussia. “You cannot imagine what awful things were done by those terrible Cossacks,” said the lady, “and how our poor cities were ruined. The rich German towns have had to become godparents to whole districts in the devastated area.” She rattled on in this sense as though the German legions had never set foot in France. I replied tartly that I hoped the trifling inconveniences experienced in East Prussia might afford some scale by which she could measure the sufferings of France, but I could only feel my moral lesson had miscarried sadly. Still, I got her out of her bunk at 3 A.M. and the morning was not only wet but chilly.

I have mentioned this story because it is very typical of the average German obtuseness which has an exasperating effect on their former enemies. We are bound, however, to try and study patiently the root causes of this vast moral myopia, because in it lies the key to the whole German attitude to the war. This myopia cannot be appreciated without some grasp of the real points of failure in the German character. During the war they haunted our imaginations as wily and strenuous children of the devil. In fact they are a very stupid, very insensitive, very docile people. Their ideas are as limited and often as absurd as those which people the nursery. Still worse, they are incapable apparently of understanding what other races think and feel. They have many excellent qualities, and an admirable capacity for hard work and patient research. But they do, I believe, possess three more skins than the ordinary man. Mixed up with the docility and unlimited power for submission to authority, runs a considerable strain of brutality which throws back to the unpleasant habits of the remote Germanic tribes. They can be and are very brutal to each other, as well as to their enemies. People so constituted were doomed to become the tools of miscreants in high places.

The average German, for all his powers of hard work and his marvels of applied science, is at bottom little better than a stupid child. His docility, his credulity, his lack of any real subtlety of spirit have left him at the mercy of the monstrous theories preached and practised by the ruling military class. Like a child he believed all he was told; like a child he was immensely proud of the vainglorious bombast of military trappings. Children too, it must be remembered, can be both cruel and callous. Unless this attitude of mind is realised, the riddle of German mentality appears as insoluble. But granted a docile and stupid people, governed by a ruthless military class endowed with the same practical diligence and ability as the mass of the nation, and no less insensitive to the finer issues of the spirit, all that has happened falls into place.

For years past a certain view of England as a sinister and aggressive power was preached steadily for their own ends by the military party. On the outbreak of war the German people were told that England was bent on the destruction of their country. They were fed on tales of atrocities and horrors. It was represented to them that Germany was fighting for her life a war of defence. Even in a country like our own, in which liberty is an old-established principle, the censorship and other conditions imposed by war resulted in a great darkening of truth and knowledge. But in a country like Germany, with no representative government, with no freedom, with a Press wholly subservient to the ruling junta, it is not astonishing that the people as a whole blundered on to ever lower depths of ignorance and prejudice.

I have described the sort of food on which the German school child is reared. No less instructive are the German memoirs which have been published recently, for they show in turn the view impressed on the adult population. Bethmann-Hollweg, Admiral von Tirpitz, Ludendorff, Bernstorff, Hindenburg, have all had their say on the war. With the exception of Hindenburg, who observes a generous reticence about his colleagues, the general tone of these memoirs is one of acrimonious controversy. One is reminded of a group of naughty schoolboys caught out in some misdeed, each saying, “Please, teacher, it was the other fellow.” Admiral von Tirpitz’s Recollections is the longest and most garrulous of these volumes. It is a book of absorbing interest, and throws a flood of light on the origins of the war. Here we see laid bare the whole spirit which provoked the conflict. Here, too, we see that even among the German governing class, this spirit in the extreme form represented by Admiral Tirpitz himself met in some quarters with opposition. If one person deserves to be hanged in connection with the war, then the halter should surely be placed round the neck of the old Admiral.

Von Tirpitz reveals himself in these pages as an able but most unsympathetic figure. He lays the lash generously about his colleagues, and the Emperor in particular is not spared. Creator of the German Navy, he lays bare the whole ruthless spirit animating the German war lords. English readers will notice with interest, and perhaps some surprise, the view of themselves and their country on which the Admiral enlarges. According to Von Tirpitz, the growth of the German Navy was not only directed towards making any English attack on German trade risky, but served the philanthropic purpose of supporting the non-Anglo-Saxon races in their struggle for freedom against the intolerable dictatorship of British sea-power. It was, in fact, the special mission of the German Empire to free the world from the strangling tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons. The English reader learns with surprise as he makes his way through these volumes how ruthless was the spirit in which England marked Germany down for destruction. Finally, through craft and Machiavellian principles of the worst kind, she accomplished her end. While German statesmen were weak, vacillating, and hopelessly pacific, a succession of English Governments, Radical no less than Conservative, animated one and all by the same fell purpose, only waited for the appropriate moment to fall on the European Simon Pure.

Lord Haldane during his visit to Berlin in 1912 figures as a skilled and determined mock negotiator, adamant as to concessions on the English side, but bent on sowing discord among German statesmen and reducing the fleet to impotence. Tirpitz accuses him of an evil conscience. Did not Lord Haldane shut his eyes to the wholly pacific intentions of Germany and invent a Berlin war party with which to inflame public opinion in England?

The Admiral speaks feelingly of the “armed battue” against Germany. He lays his hand on his heart and declares that in 1914 the German Empire was “the least preoccupied of all the Great Powers with possibilities of war.” Yet in spite of “our suicidal love of peace” the world would persist in laying the guilt of all that had happened on Germany. “It is really extraordinary how unpopular we are,” cries the Admiral naïvely in one of his letters. But he sticks to his point. The historical guilt of England is irrefutably clear. The “old pirate state” has once again torn Europe to pieces. Thanks to the most brutal methods she has secured a victory, and liberty and independence have perished. But the Admiral is not only concerned to abuse England. He deals faithfully with his own countrymen. If on the one hand English readers obtain a fresh insight through German eyes into their own villainies, they obtain information possibly less fantastic as to the discord which raged inside the German war-machine. If in the interests of truth we are compelled to say that the Germans overrated our powers of conducting a war with supreme efficiency, it is clear that we were no less at fault in attributing super qualities to our enemies.

When these various memoirs are read side by side and compared, they reveal strife, division, and hesitation of a remarkable kind in the higher direction of the war. Tirpitz, as head of the war party, writes with extraordinary bitterness of Bethmann-Hollweg the Chancellor. No words are bad enough for the man who had struggled sincerely enough, according to his lights, for the preservation of peace between England and Germany. His hesitations, vacillations, errors of policy are dealt with in a ferocious spirit. But the Army and even the Navy do not escape severe criticism. “The end of July 1914 found us in a state of chaos,” writes the Admiral. The generals made “frightful mistakes,” the war was one of “missed opportunities,” the Navy in particular was never allowed to do its work. The troops were heroic, but “the hereditary faults of the German people and the destructive elements among them” led to the downfall of the whole nation.

The popular view of Germany, which most English people held during the war, was that for forty years the German nation from the Emperor downwards had pursued the definite and determined end of the destruction of England. The real situation appears to have been far more complex. To credit the Emperor and his entourage with an inflexibility of purpose so great is to rate their capacity far too high. The mediocre statesmen of our own generation were not Bismarcks. They were incapable of the far vision, the sinister purpose, the iron will of the old Chancellor. Unlike him they did not know when to stop. An influential section among the soldiers was certainly bent on a war of aggression and pursued this end with unfaltering determination. They had considerable influence both among the Press and the professors. Consequently they loomed large in the public eye. But even among the governing class, as Tirpitz’s angry complaints reveal, there were certain weak-kneed statesmen who were anxious to pursue a pacific policy. As for the German nation as a whole, the unparalleled growth of the Socialist party during recent years proves that the views of the German militarists were meeting with considerable opposition among sections of their own countrymen.