GERMANY
BEFORE THE WAR

BY

BARON BEYENS
LATE BELGIAN MINISTER AT THE COURT OF BERLIN

Translated by Paul V. Cohn, B.A.

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS, Ltd.
London, Edinburgh, and New York

First published March 1916.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

At the close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth, several efforts were made, both in Europe and America, towards the prevention of future wars, by substituting legal methods for brute force in the settlement of international disputes. It is worth while to recall the preliminary steps that some high-minded rulers took in this direction. Tsar Nicholas invited foreign governments to the first of those peace conferences which met at the Hague. Successive presidents of the United States, for their part, strove to obtain an immediate practical result by means of treaties concluded with various nations. The object of these treaties was to submit to a court of arbitration any disputes that might arise among the signatories. The two Hague Conferences failed, indeed, to realize the ideal aims which their promoters had in view. They were unable to establish compulsory arbitration. On the other hand, they organized procedure, and set up machinery, such as the permanent court of arbitration, to facilitate the peaceful settlement of disputes. They succeeded, to some extent, in regulating the employment and checking the abuse of certain weapons and methods of warfare, and in drawing up a sort of legal code for belligerents. The international Hague Conventions have justly been called a charter of rights for the nations in war time. Unfortunately, the observance of these rules cannot be enforced by any court of justice, and depends entirely upon the honesty or good will of the Powers that have accepted them.

Apart from all this State action, several valiant efforts were made by private individuals, inspired with the noblest ideals. Politicians who had grown gray in the public service, such as M. Beernaert, a Belgian Minister of State, devoted all their remaining vigour of body and mind to the task of spreading the influence of peace conferences and leagues, by making them more numerous. In meetings at which many eloquent speeches were delivered they tried to discover means of superseding the ultima ratio of a resort to arms by the permanent use of arbitral tribunals. Baron D’Estournelles de Constant and Lord Weardale—to mention only the most energetic apostles of their creed—preached with unflagging zeal the gospel of pacifism, which, by smoothing over international differences, was to lead mankind towards the Golden Age of universal peace.

In all countries except Germany, the Socialists, Collectivists, Labour Party, or whatever they might style themselves, could not stand aloof from a movement which aimed at the abolition of war. The pacifist movement, though indeed striving towards a different goal, was quite in harmony with the teachings of Socialists, and would have helped them to secure one of the main planks in their platform—that is, to remove national barriers and frontiers by creating an international solidarity among the workers, in place of the old particularist notions of country and fatherland behind which the capitalists and the middle classes remain entrenched. Inspired by pacifist ideas, some of the leaders of French Socialism, notably Jaurès, even made overtures to the Social Democrats of Germany, with a view to bringing about an understanding between the two countries. Two congresses, held at Berne in 1912 and 1913 respectively, were attended by a large number of French parliamentary deputies; but the group of delegates from the Reichstag, Socialists for the most part, was insignificant. Their good intentions were frustrated by the problem of Alsace-Lorraine, which barred all further progress. Neither side could find a means of removing this obstacle without wounding the sensitive patriotism of the two nations.

The thunder of the guns in the Balkan War, while revealing to pacifists the grim realities of the battlefield, did not awake them from their dreams. On the contrary, the pacifists persisted all the more in their illusions. After all, they urged, this war was not a European conflict, but an episode in the eternal Eastern question. Throughout the crisis, the Great Powers, by the conferences of their ambassadors and the utterances of their statesmen, had shown their earnest desire for peace. The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, those two good-natured giants, both showed the same conciliatory disposition. The balance of power between these two groups compelled them, even had they wished otherwise, to maintain a pacific attitude, while the Balkan conflagration, being thus localized, was dying out at their feet. After so searching a test, the prospect for the future seemed bright indeed.

Life in the clouds of pacifism was not conducive to the realization of the ever-growing danger. It was enough to live in Berlin, amid such circles as were in touch with the Imperial Government and the foreign embassies. The heart of the German capital was indeed the meeting-place for the principal wires of world-politics. During the last few years, the air that one breathed there was strangely oppressive; the ground quaked beneath one’s feet, as in the neighbourhood of a volcanic eruption. One never ceased gazing anxiously at the horizon, now towards the Vosges, now towards the Balkans, wherever the storm-clouds, charged with electricity, were gathering at the moment. A gust of fresh wind would scatter these clouds, but they would gather again after the briefest interval. As one felt only too clearly, the peace was so fragile that the slightest incident might serve to break it. Should Greece and Turkey wrangle over the possession of a few barren rocks in the Ægean, should a Zeppelin once more come to earth in some town of Lorraine, or should a party of Teuton tourists be again molested by some discourteous French students, the artificial security that reigned in Central Europe would be at an end.

These recurring attacks of fever were bound to result in a fatal crisis. War has at last broken out, sooner than the most gloomy pessimists anticipated, and in a more terrible form than they dared to imagine—a war that has set three-fourths of Europe ablaze, and has spread like wildfire to other continents and other seas. What was the immediate cause of this general outbreak? “A political murder of unexampled brutality, and the need for severely punishing a little nation of conspirators,” say the two Germanic empires with one voice. “Mere pretexts,” is the convincing reply of the Entente Powers. The origins of the war, of course, go much further back, and the causes lie deeper and are less obvious to the eye. The German intellectuals, now that they have cast aside their official servility and are discoursing freely on the lot that awaits their nation, have the honesty to admit as much themselves.

In the present work I have endeavoured, as others have done before me, to trace these causes and to assign the responsibility for the disastrous events that we are witnessing. My conclusions are based mainly on the personal observations that I made during a stay of two years in Berlin immediately before the war. At the same time, I have attempted to sketch the psychology of the principal German actors in the tragedy of 1914. I can sincerely say that I have taken every care to remain strictly impartial, to render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to make due allowance for the policy imposed upon Germany during the last fifteen years, and for external events that have had their influence since the beginning of the century.

Moreover, these pages, which have been written during the melancholy leisure forced upon me by the calamities of Belgium, have a further object in view. I have desired to do a service to my beloved country, the first victim—and an innocent victim—of a ruthless design. I have desired to contribute something towards requiting her for those monstrous charges with which her torturers have sought to belittle her stainless loyalty and to tarnish her unparalleled heroism.

May my labours bring some small light to those who search for truth! May they furnish a document of some service to future writers, to those who, with an authority that the passage of time alone can give, will describe a period of the world’s history which Christian civilization will some day shudder to recall!

GERMANY BEFORE THE WAR.

CHAPTER I.

THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.

I.

NO one who has not had the opportunity in recent years of approaching the Emperor William and of conversing with him can realize the favourable impression that he at first creates. To have a conversation with him means to play the part of a listener, to allow him to unfold his ideas in lively fashion, while from time to time one ventures upon a remark on which his quick mind, flitting readily from one subject to another, seizes with avidity. While he is talking, he looks one squarely in the face, his left hand resting on his sword-hilt in an attitude that has become a habit with him. His voice, very guttural in tone, and almost hoarse, is disagreeable; but he has a mobile, expressive face, with magnificent eyes that keep it always bright and animated. At a first meeting, it is these eyes that impress one more than his words: eyes of light blue, now merry and smiling, now hard and stern, with sudden gleams that flash like steel. Yet when we come away from an interview of this kind, we begin to feel doubts as to the sincerity of this dangerous talker. We ask ourselves, with a touch of anxiety, whether the man whom we have just seen is really convinced of what he says, or whether he is the most striking actor that has appeared on the political stage of our day.

In his mother-tongue, William II. has a natural eloquence, with a pompous style, full of metaphors and similes. Hardly had he been seated on the throne before his love of speaking had revealed itself in oratorical displays of all kinds—after-dinner speeches, answers to addresses, and soldierly harangues to military and naval recruits. All these have been delivered during the continual journeys in which he delights, whether rushing to and fro about his own empire, or navigating all the seas of Europe in his yacht, or paying visits to his fellow-monarchs. Some of his orations are models of the Imperial style, but his self-assurance has led him more than once to utter, in the heat of improvisation, some tactless or inopportune phrase which has aroused a feeling of uneasiness or disgust in Germany no less than in foreign countries: bold ideas, presented in an original form, but the unripe products of an over-impulsive temperament, and entirely at variance with public feeling. With advancing years, he has become slightly more discreet in his language. Moreover, the text of his speeches is nowadays revised and expurgated by his civil Cabinet before being issued to the public. Together with this impulse to trumpet forth his ideas, he has a decided propensity for striking a theatrical pose, whenever he knows that he is the cynosure of every eye—that is to say, whenever he appears in public; whereas, in the privacy of his home, he is by no means lacking in geniality or even in simplicity.

Undoubtedly the Emperor is a man of many gifts, intelligent and well-informed. For all that, one gets an impression, when talking to him, that he has but a superficial acquaintance with certain subjects on which he loves to dilate.

This is not surprising. In spite of his uncommon capacity for assimilating knowledge, William II. is not a man of universal mind, able to discourse with equal aptness upon politics, industry, commerce, agriculture, music, painting, architecture—one may as well say, upon every branch of human knowledge, for he does not even shrink from venturing on the steep path of the exact sciences. Perhaps he would have acted more wisely if, instead of spreading his mental activities over so many different fields, he had centred them in the study of foreign politics, and had endeavoured to find out for himself, at first hand, the real state of public opinion in the countries surrounding Germany. Had he adopted this course, those who conversed with him would not have had to record the disquieting fact that he accepted, as articles of faith, many prejudiced and utterly wrong-headed notions that were current in the German Press and among the German public.

His confidence in himself has always made it impossible for him to endure, in the governance of the Empire, the co-operation of a superior mind or an independent will. When he had been on the throne two years, he impatiently shook himself free from the leading-strings—irksome, no doubt, but still necessary—held by the man to whom he owed his Imperial crown. In order to enjoy a long spell of service, his ministers must either adopt his ideas or possess the art of presenting theirs as if he had inspired them. After the dismissal of Bismarck, his chancellors were nothing but executors, more or less skilful, of his divine will, and heads of an army of bureaucrats. For an Imperial chancellor, to govern means not to foresee, but to obey a headstrong and unstable master.

In other aspects of his character the Emperor is a very modern ruler. He has always had a fondness for the society of noted scholars and scientific men. Having some artistic pretensions himself, he likes to surround himself with artists who follow his advice and carry out his suggestions. In Prussia, building has always been a noble pastime for princes, a pastime that Frederick the Great pursued, with admirable results, in the intervals between his wars. William II. is a great builder: in the course of twenty-five years his architects have erected more monuments and palaces in Berlin than their fellow-craftsmen in other capitals have produced throughout a whole century. Too often, however, these constructions bear the imprint of his taste for the massive, the colossal, and the overloaded. Under his inspiration, German artists are making laborious efforts to create a style that may deserve to be called the “William II. Style.” In spite of this, the most pleasing monuments of the Imperial residence are still those which were raised under the earlier kings, and to which Herr von Ihne, an artist who is an ardent admirer of eighteenth-century French art, has made some fine additions. One observes with some surprise, by the way, that the old palace of the first King of Prussia is still large enough to contain the first German Emperors. May we imagine that the haughty son of the Great Elector, with the limitless ambition of the Hohenzollerns, foresaw the remote future destiny of his house?

From the sculptors, William II., faithful to the same æsthetic principles, has ordered statues, gigantic in size or cast into stiff, formal attitudes, representing the heroes of his line and the great men who served his ancestors. Surely they do not deserve such barbarous treatment! His infatuation for official painting has prevented him from appreciating artists of original talent, such leaders of schools as Max Liebermann, whom he looks upon as revolutionaries. The same remark applies to men of letters. The most noted living novelists and playwrights of Germany, a Hauptmann or a Sudermann, are nowhere less understood than at the Court of Berlin.

For a long time past the Emperor has delighted in the society of agreeable dilettante, poets, and musicians—for he adores music and poetry—the companions of the famous “Round Table.” The scandalous Eulenburg case brought these intimacies to an abrupt close. Evil has been whispered, quite without justification, of his friendship with that attractive but unhappy figure, Prince Philip von Eulenburg. It would be more to the point to note his weakness for rich men, for the founders of vast fortunes. In this respect he has shown, like some other crowned heads, that he has a sense for present-day realities—that he appreciates the services rendered to modern society by wealth. Americans visiting Berlin are assured of a warm welcome at the Imperial Court, provided they bear names to conjure with in the money-market of the United States. It is only fair to add that, in paying these flattering attentions to opulent Yankees, William II. is partly actuated by what has been called his “American policy”—that is to say, his desire for a close understanding with the Great Republic. His admiration for the power conferred by money has been similarly displayed in his method of bestowing honours on his loyal nobility. In creating an exalted aristocracy of princes and dukes, who before his time were very few and far between in Prussia, he has sometimes shown less regard for ancient lineage and services claiming the gratitude of the State than for the territorial possessions of those concerned. Nobles who have remained poor have not been much favoured, even when they inherit the most honoured names in the military history of the kingdom.

Brought up by a father whose “liberal” ideas have been overpraised (such is the view of those who knew him best), the Emperor, at the outset of his reign, felt an impatient eagerness to improve the lot of the labouring classes and—as he announced at the opening of the Reichstag in 1888—to continue, in accordance with the principles of Christian morality, the legislative work of social protection inaugurated by his grandfather. In 1890 an international conference held by his orders in Berlin, for the purpose of studying industrial legislation. On the other hand, he came to the throne with a youthful hatred of Socialists and freethinkers—a hatred that grew in intensity as the years went by, and as the advance of Social Democracy became more menacing at each election to the Reichstag. Nothing has occupied his mind more than the fear of Socialism, the struggle with this elusive Proteus. In a speech delivered at Königsberg in 1894, he denounced the enemy in no measured terms: “Let us arise, and fight for religion, morality, and order, against the partisans of anarchy!” In 1907 he even entered the lists against the foe, to such good purpose that on the balcony of his palace in Berlin he was hailed with cheers from the bien pensants after the electoral verdict which for the time being thinned the ranks of the Social-Democratic delegates. As ruler of a great empire containing some millions of Socialists, would he not have acted more wisely by holding aloof from the feuds of classes and of parties, and by dwelling serenely above the turmoil?

William II., without sharing all the reactionary ideas of the Prussian Conservatives, has anything but a liberal turn of mind. He is a monarch by divine right—one who considers himself, like his predecessors, entrusted with the mission of governing his States and of moulding the happiness of his subjects, even though it be against their own immediate wishes, in accordance with the principles of religion and the monarchical tradition; an unbending champion of the sacred privileges of kingship, limited solely by the barriers of modern constitutionalism.

It is not within the scope of the present study to enter into a more detailed analysis of so complex a character, one that has already furnished material for numerous portraits, and, with all its twists and turns, will severely test the powers of future biographers. I will merely endeavour, at the end of this chapter, to summarize the most striking features of the Imperial temperament, and to indicate the aspect under which he must appear to us hereafter in the light of an appalling war. After all, in the man who sways the destinies of Germany, it is the statesman who claims our chief interest, because of his attempt to give a new direction to the destinies of Europe. From this standpoint, it is impossible to overlook the part that religion plays in his life. He has always been an ardent Protestant. For him, as for Treitschke, the historian of modern Prussia, Protestantism is not only the true faith, but the corner-stone of German unity, the strong rampart behind which the language and customs of the German race have been kept intact from the shores of the Baltic to the borders of Transylvania. William II.’s creed, however, though sincere, is decidedly too garrulous and too nationalistic. It is paraded before the world with an intolerable lack of reticence. It is revealed in his speeches by startling invocations to the Deity, a Deity who is exclusively German, who confines his love to the Germans and rejoices in their exploits. At the threshold of the twentieth century, this defender of the faith, modelling himself upon the Biblical heroes and the champions of the Reformation had come to regard himself as the right hand and sword of the Almighty, as the predestined being on whom the Spirit from on high had descended. How can we be astonished if, under the sway of such a creed, he has embarked upon a war that recalls the merciless struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a sort of crusade against the enemies of God’s chosen people, embodied to-day in the Germanic race? This theory and practice of religion will explain why the head of the pious German nation, after solemnly invoking upon his arms the blessing of the Christian God—a God of peace and good will!—has ordered, without any qualms of conscience, the bombardment of defenceless cities and the destruction of the architectural triumphs of Catholic art, the old historic cathedrals.

II.

During the decade preceding the war, too much confidence was placed abroad in the pacifism and sincerity of William II. It was forgotten that, after all, he is a descendant of Frederick the Great, and that, where politics are concerned, he must have studied the lessons taught by his unscrupulous ancestor. He claims for himself, not altogether without justice—for in his early years he might well have fallen a victim to the glamour of military laurels—the merit of having maintained the peace of Europe, in spite of unwearied efforts to perfect the organization of the German army, or rather by virtue of those accessions of strength which made an attack upon it almost impossible. This claim was accepted in all good faith by a world which failed to realize that the competition in armaments must inevitably lead to war, just as every fever that becomes acute results in a violent crisis. Apart from the peaceful intentions of the Emperor, it was felt that the Triple Alliance, formed by Bismarck and renewed from time to time after his day, might well calm the fears of the smaller nationalities. The old Chancellor and his successors always represented the Triplice as an insurance policy against the danger of a widespread conflagration. Safely ensconced in this impregnable fortress, the forces of the three allies could defy any coalition; hence other Powers were careful not to challenge them, not to do anything that might disturb the ordered state of Europe. But from the day that the Cabinet of Berlin, in order to support the claims of the Cabinet of Vienna, forced the Slav nations and the other Powers, taken off their guard, to recognize the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Triple Alliance wore a new aspect. The policeman of Europe, impelled by a restless greed, was beginning to fail in his duties as guardian. The confidence hitherto placed in the honesty of his intentions grew sensibly weaker.

It is true that for twenty-five years—longum aevi spatium—William II. kept the promise he had made to the German people, at Bismarck’s advice, in his first speech from the throne—the promise that he would have a peaceful reign. Throughout that period his one idea was to make Germany the first country in the world through the development of her commerce and industry, to enrich every class in the community, to dethrone Paris and London in favour of Berlin. “Our future lies on the water!” he said to his subjects, with a clear view of the goal towards which he was to direct their energies—the creation of a powerful navy, which would ensure in all the markets of the world a predominant place for the products of German labour. During this quarter of a century Germany indeed made remarkable strides, and her progress filled other nations with amazement. William II. consorted chiefly with the great bankers, manufacturers, and armament-makers of the Empire, and constantly took their advice. He was on intimate terms with Herr Krupp, whose private life scarcely entitled him to this honour. He did all he could to encourage Herr Ballin, the clever and enterprising director of the Hamburg-Amerika line. He presided in person at the launching of the transatlantic giants of this powerful company. In the speech delivered by him when the last of these leviathans left the dock—a vessel of fifty thousand tons, christened by him “Bismarck,” as a tardy act of homage to the genius of the Iron Chancellor—he gave vent to an extraordinary outburst of patriotic pride. It was a pæan of triumph in honour of the German shipyards, which had built the largest liner in the world, far surpassing anything that the maritime art of England had so far attempted.

The long spell of peace imposed by this ruler of a military nation had no doubt other causes than the desire to ensure the economic prosperity of Germany. Although William II. from his early youth has taken a keen interest in his army, he does not possess the martial spirit inherent in several princes of his house. Like Frederick William I., he is fond of the barracks, without having a taste for the battlefield. Since the age of twenty-nine, when he became the supreme commander of the army, the “War Lord,” he has performed with scrupulous care all the military ritual prescribed for a King of Prussia; he has regularly been seen taking part in his officers’ mess, appearing from daybreak in the midst of his cavalry regiments on the drill-ground at Döberitz, inspecting every army corps in turn, and presiding at the “Imperial” autumn manœuvres, where his criticism of the operations raised a smile among professional soldiers. All along the streets of Berlin the shop windows are filled with photographs of the Emperor in every naval and military uniform of his forces, in every character of his repertory; his moustaches fiercely turned up, his glance firm and threatening, his field-marshal’s baton in his hand. These portraits do their utmost to give us an impression of an exceedingly warlike sovereign. But is he really a soldier?

At the opening of hostilities, the German newspapers announced that His Imperial Majesty, in visiting the theatres of war, would be followed by a special train, carrying a collapsible wooden house, including materials for a floor, in order that the Emperor should not be exposed to the damp. We know, indeed, that this need of ease and comfort is partly due to a fear of colds and throat maladies, for William II. can take no liberties with his health. Still, precautions of this kind are hardly what we expect from a true soldier.

The true royal soldier of this war is not to be found among the crowned Germans who only follow it at a safe distance; he stands at the head of the little Belgian army that is making a desperate struggle to defend its homes. The true soldier is he who has faced danger in the firing-line and the trenches, in order to inspire his youthful troops with his own coolness and heroism, the heroism of a soul that no terror can daunt. The true soldier is he who has shown his mettle on the battlefields of Louvain, Antwerp, and the Yser as a great general and a great king—His Majesty King Albert.

Perhaps, too, William II. remained pacific for so long because he lacked confidence as to the result of a fresh struggle, although in his speeches he extolled the prowess of his forbears, and often recommended his soldiers to keep their powder dry. Perhaps he dreaded the uncertain fortune of battle, remembering the words of Bismarck on the subject of preventive wars, of wars inspired solely by the aim of crushing an opponent before he is ready: “We cannot get a glimpse of the cards that Providence holds.” Perhaps, again, he feared the unknown factors that may wreck the best-laid political schemes, those imponderabilia or incalculable elements which the same statesman regarded as so important. That a young sovereign, such as the Emperor in the first few years of his reign, should not wish to imperil the heritage of glory and conquest bequeathed by his grandfather is perfectly natural and intelligible. He liked to rattle his sabre, always at the wrong moment, but not to draw it from its sheath, for he had no inborn love of war. Yet these peaceful sentiments—or shall we rather say this unwillingness to face the hazards of fortune?—disappeared in course of time, and gave place in that restless mind to feelings of quite another order. The transformation, however, was not a sudden one; it was a gradual conversion, keeping pace with the changes that supervened in Germany herself, with the increase in her population, her needs and her appetites. The influence of Bismarck, a satisfied, sobered, and prudent Bismarck, not to be confused with the bold gambler of the war period, had long outlasted his retirement. For ten years more, ten years of internal conflict, during which the German people seemed to be angry with the Emperor for having broken its idol, the Bismarckian policy of consolidation and defence had been kept up by the mediocre successors of the irascible recluse of Varzin. After this, other ambitions came into play, and the counsels of the ex-Chancellor were gradually forgotten by the new generation of politicians, diplomats, professors, writers, and soldiers who aspired to lead Germany towards loftier goals. Their successful influence upon the mind of the Sovereign became perfectly apparent at the moment when he reached the zenith of his career.

This moment coincides with the end of the first twenty-five years of his reign, which had dowered the German people with an unexampled prosperity. The Imperial Jubilee of 1913 was an epoch-making date. Germany, in fact, was not content with celebrating that year the peaceful conquests achieved since the accession of her third Emperor; she commemorated, at the same time, the centenary of the wars of liberation, while the members of the Reichstag patriotically voted for a military law more burdensome and more crushing than any previous measure of the kind. Thus Germany associated the superb results of her national energy for the past quarter of a century, which no real menace of war had ever threatened to wreck, with the glowing memories of her emancipation from the Napoleonic yoke, and with feverish preparation for a fresh struggle, which the condition of Europe by no means appeared to warrant. This triple coincidence aroused serious misgivings in the minds of foreign observers. The patriotic memories of 1813 seemed like low rumblings of thunder, the harbingers of an approaching storm. As if the passions of his subjects were not heated enough already, the Emperor in his public speeches did not cease from fanning their flame. He must have said to himself then that the first part of his task was over, and that the second was about to begin. He had launched his people upon a career of prosperity and progress in which it could no longer cry halt, and a new war, far from checking this marvellous economic advance, would only act as a fresh stimulus. Germany, having trebled her commerce and almost doubled her population, with millions of workers who no longer left their country to seek a living elsewhere, needed new fields for expansion, and thirsted for an unquestioned supremacy in every sphere. It would be the glory of William, while still in the full vigour of his years, to realize these splendid ambitions.

With implicit faith in the historians of his house, he had already come under the spell of dreams that took their rise in a remote past. Although heir to a modern empire, entirely different from the Germanic empire of Otto and Barbarossa, he had sedulously set himself to link up the creation of Bismarck and Moltke with that of the Middle Ages, to re-forge the chain of historic tradition, to proclaim himself the heir of the old elected Cæsars. It is obviously with this intention that the Siegesallee was laid out through the Thiergarten in Berlin, with its double row of marble statues, symmetrical and funereal, more suited to a royal family vault than to a public park. There, almost shoulder to shoulder, stand Emperors of Germany, ancient and modern, Electors of Brandenburg and Kings of Prussia—a significant Pantheon! At Vienna, the princes of the Hapsburg house avenged the defeats of 1866 by treating the Hohenzollerns as upstarts. At Berlin, however, the descendant of these upstarts aimed at nothing less than reviving the monarchy of Charlemagne. He set up in his capital a monument to the mythical Roland, as a symbol of the bond between past and present, and dreamed of re-establishing a Carlovingian hegemony over the Continent of Europe.

III.

I will deal later with those European events and those features of the internal situation in Germany which reacted upon the mind of William II. and helped to bring about his moral transformation. The point that must be emphasized here is that he fancied at first that he would only have to fight France, the old, implacable enemy. The coming war seemed to him nothing but a mere duel between the Empire and the Republic.

For a long time he hoped to sow dissensions between his opponents, and to secure the inaction of Russia. At the Court of Berlin the Franco-Russian alliance was not regarded as a rock that nothing could shatter. The Potsdam agreement, concluded by M. Kokovtzow, and restricted in its scope (so far as we can tell) to Western Asia, seemed to open up a promising vista. Repeated advances were made to Tsar Nicholas; interviews took place, such as the one at Baltic Port, where William II. exercised all the seductive wiles at his command to cajole the Russian sovereign and win the confidence of his ministers. The Emperor himself remarked to me, only a few months before the war, that false ideas were current in France regarding the stability of the Dual Alliance; he was well informed as to the true feeling of the Tsar’s Court, for some exalted Russian personages, in passing through Berlin, had not scrupled to indicate the side on which their sympathies lay.

One of the main axioms of Bismarck’s policy was that Germany must always strive to maintain friendly relations with her great northern neighbour. This sound advice, which the Chancellor himself had not acted upon at the Congress of Berlin, was neglected by his successors. In March 1909, William II., in full accord with the views of Prince von Bülow, did not hesitate to inform St. Petersburg that he would give unswerving support to Austria, if the diplomatic debate on the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina should culminate in a war. The threatening front that Count de Portalès was ordered to show rankled in the hearts of Russian patriots, who were compelled to retreat before this menace. But at the Court of Berlin the memory of it soon faded, for it is characteristic of the Emperor to forget any ill-feeling of which he is the cause. He is always ready to pardon those whom he has insulted.

Even the Balkan War did not entirely dispel his illusions, although it showed clearly that France and Russia were firmly united, and determined to face the same risks hand in hand. The expert fingers of M. Delcassé, who was sent as ambassador to St. Petersburg during the events of 1912, tied the knot of the alliance more tightly than ever. After this, it is true, the Emperor paid great attention to Russian military activity on his eastern frontier; but it must have cost him much to abandon his dream of a neutral or inactive Russia in the event of a war with France. On March 2, 1914, the semi-official Kölnische Zeitung,[1] under the guise of a letter from its St. Petersburg correspondent, issued a final warning to the Tsar! This document denounced the increase of armaments and the ingratitude with which Russia was repaying the services that Germany had rendered to her at the time of the Macedonian war. The Russian newspapers replied in an acrimonious tone, hinting that the commercial treaty with Germany would not be renewed. Herr von Jagow, in a statement on foreign affairs read to the Reichstag some weeks later, confined himself to a general censure of these Press campaigns, the responsibility for which he assigned to the Pan-Slavic journals.

IV.

In William II.’s eyes France has always been the chief enemy. In spite of this, the idea of a reconciliation with her has repeatedly flitted across his romantic brain. Not for one moment, however, has he thought of restoring Alsace-Lorraine to her or of making it neutral territory. He regarded these questions as settled for good and all by the victories of 1870 and the Treaty of Frankfort, and would not even humour France to the extent of granting a more liberal constitution to the conquered provinces. Some Frenchmen, anxious to promote a better understanding between France and Germany, wished to see Alsace-Lorraine enjoy a complete autonomy, after the pattern of a federal State like Bavaria or Saxony. This suggestion, impressed Berlin as an unwarrantable interference in the internal affairs of the Empire.

Nevertheless, the Emperor has often believed in all sincerity that he might improve the relations between the two countries, ease the tension between Paris and Berlin, and even pave the way for an eventual friendship, by paying flattering attentions to Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, celebrities in politics, art, and society, who visited Germany. He considered that in paying these attentions to individuals and in supplementing them by smiles and compliments addressed to the Republican Government and to prominent people he was making real advances. His conversations with Coquelin and Mlle. Granier amused the Parisians, who thanked him with neatly turned paragraphs in the newspapers, and held themselves free of all further obligations. Those who thought that these displays of Imperial graciousness might be followed by a more favourable trend in Germany’s policy towards France were doomed to disappointment. Offers of association in commercial enterprises between subjects of the two countries in Morocco were made (without any success, by the way) after the agreement of 1909, but they must not be taken as instances of William II.’s good will towards a neighbour whom in reality he detested. He fancied that he could conquer the French by his winning ways, and in this his vanity deceived him, although at certain times, partly owing to his reputation as a pacifist, he was a not unpopular figure in Paris.

For some time previous to the war he had been cured of these fits of benevolence, after discovering that they were practically useless. In fact, during the last few months before the cataclysm he went to the other extreme, and when any French visitor was presented to him, his manner was unusually brusque and haughty. At a Court ball one evening in February 1914, while conversing with my friend and fellow-countryman Baron Lambert, he gave vent in my presence to the following epigram, more picturesque than true (it was one that he loved to repeat, for he had already uttered it to other diplomats): “I have often held out my hand to France; she has only answered me with kicks!” He followed this up with a diatribe against the Parisian Press, which, he said, attacked Germany day after day with unreasoning violence. He ended in a grave tone, exclaiming with those expressive gestures that added so much weight to his words: “They had better take care in Paris—I shall not live for ever!” While he was holding forth in this style, his mind, as will be seen later on, was already made up for war. Was he playing a part? Or should we rather see in all this a desire to heap up grievances, in order to justify his later acts?

Since he procured a regular supply of cuttings from the French nationalist organs, in which his Government was pilloried, why did he not read their German counterpart—the daily attacks of the Pan-Germanic Press upon France in general and President Poincaré in particular? Undoubtedly this warfare of pens was not merely regrettable, but dangerous in the interests of peace; still, it was carried on by each side in the tone and style characteristic of the two races. In order to form a conception of the haughtiness, insolence, and bad faith of certain German publicists, it would be enough to wade through some of the articles with which Dr. Schiemann, who had his little hour of favour and popularity at the Court of Berlin, regaled the Gallophobe and Russophobe readers of the Kreuzzeitung in his political notes of the week every Wednesday morning.

After Agadir, William II. came to regard a war with France as inexorably decreed by Fate. On the 5th and 6th of November 1913, the King of the Belgians was his guest at Potsdam, after returning from Lüneburg, where he had paid his usual courtesy visit to the regiment of dragoons of which he was honorary colonel. On this occasion the Emperor told King Albert that he looked upon war with France as “inevitable and close at hand.” What reason did he give for this pessimistic statement, which impressed his royal visitor all the more strongly since the belief in the peaceful sentiments of the Emperor had not yet been shaken in Belgium? He pointed out that France herself wanted war, and that she was arming rapidly with that end in view, as was proved by the vote on the law enacting a three years’ term of military service. At the same time he declared that he felt certain of victory. The Belgian monarch, who was better informed as to the real inclinations of the French Government and people, tried in vain to enlighten him, and to dispel from his mind the false picture that he drew from the language of a handful of fanatical patriots, the picture of a France thirsting for war.

On the 6th of November General von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff, after a dinner to which the Emperor, in honour of his guest, had invited the leading officials present in Berlin, had a conversation with King Albert. He expressed himself in the same terms as his Sovereign on the subject of war with France, asserted that it was bound to come soon, and insisted still more emphatically on the certain prospect of success, in view of the enthusiasm with which the whole German nation would gird up its loins to beat back the traditional foe. General von Moltke used the same blustering language that evening to the Belgian military attaché, who sat next to him at table. I have been told that later in the evening he showed a similar lack of reserve towards other military attachés in whom he was pleased to confide, or whom he wished to impress.

The real object of these confidential outbursts is not hard to discover. They were an invitation to our country, face to face with the danger that threatened Western Europe, to throw herself into the arms of the stronger, arms ready to open, to clasp Belgium—yes, and to crush her. When we think of the ultimatum issued to Belgium on the following 2nd of August, we realize to what an act of servility and cowardice William II., through this Potsdam interview, would fain have driven King Albert.

The conversation between the two sovereigns was reported to the French ambassador, as is shown by a dispatch from M. Cambon, inserted in the French Yellow Book of 1914. This was done solely from a hope that the disaster of a Franco-German war might still be averted. In the higher interests of humanity, it was essential for France to learn that the Emperor had ceased to be an advocate of peace, and was calmly facing the prospect of a new war as something inevitable. The French Government, who, whatever William II. might think, were still anxious for peace, had now to guard carefully against the occurrence of incidents that might prove difficult to smooth over, because they would be regarded as provocations at Berlin.

May we suppose that the mental condition of the Emperor, who had become very nervous and irritable, had made him blind to evidence and deaf to persuasion? William II. would not admit the truth that is as clear as daylight to all impartial observers: that France, with a neighbour whose overwhelming military strength was a perpetual menace to her security, had armed with the main purpose of not being left at the mercy of unexpected events or ruthless designs. He had no doubt whatever that the desire for a war of revenge haunted the brain of every Frenchman. The recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, an achievement which most sons of France had banished to the limbo of their patriotic dreams, and only saw now and then as a distant mirage, seemed to him, in his obstinate self-deception, the secret aim towards which most French statesmen were striving. The sanguine and gullible pacifism of the French Radicals and Socialists, which had come so plainly to the fore in their opposition to the three years’ term of military service, was entirely left out of his calculations.

When a man persists in a view that is so palpably opposed to the truth, one is inclined to doubt his sincerity. Was the Kaiser misinformed as to the real intentions of France, or, in crediting her with these hostile schemes, was he only looking for a pretext that might seem to justify an attack on his part? This is a question that we have a right to ask to-day.

V.

Up to the last moment the Emperor counted on the neutrality of England, whatever might be the cause of the struggle between the Triple and the Dual Alliance. He had too readily forgotten all the grievances that the United Kingdom had against him, although they had not vanished from the memories or the hearts of Britons: the famous telegram to President Kruger in 1896, in connection with the Jameson Raid, an ill-timed manifesto, which completely deceived the old patriot of Johannesburg as to the likelihood of support from the Kaiser; the campaign of slander against England carried on in Germany from the outset of the Boer War, three years later; and, last but not least, the tremendous expansion of the German navy, heralded by Prince von Bülow and Admiral von Tirpitz immediately after the first British reverses at the hands of the Boers.

Had William II. also forgotten the resolutely hostile front shown by the British Cabinet during the Algeciras Conference, and, more recently, during the Franco-German negotiations after the Agadir affair? No doubt he fancied, like many Germans, that the support given by England to France would not go beyond certain moral and geographical limits. He felt that it would be enough to pave the way for a solution of the Moroccan problem (since it had been decided in London to help in setting up a French protectorate in Morocco), and of certain Mediterranean questions in which the two countries held similar views. It was generally believed in Germany that the Cabinet of St. James’s, realizing the frankly pacific outlook of its Liberal majority in Parliament, would remain a patient spectator in a Continental war that did not involve any vital British interests. How often did the Berlin Press dwell on this theme, and, during the brief Austro-Serbian crisis preceding the war, embroider it with fulsome flatteries of Great Britain! There was high financial authority to support this conviction among the German public. These potentates of the purse carried on their intrigues in London up to the very end, not only in the business world but even in political circles. In the parliamentary lobbies at Westminster, financiers of German origin took steps with a view to preventing any participation by England in a Continental struggle. Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, Herr Ballin, the Kaiser’s confidential servant, came to London with orders from his master to make all his arrangements for war and to hoodwink his English friends into the belief that Germany’s intentions were peaceful, when in point of fact all was ready for hurling the thunderbolt.

William II.’s political blunders have often proceeded from his trusting too much to his own adroitness and powers of judgment. After 1911, he was exceedingly anxious to promote a better understanding between the Anglo-Saxon and the Germanic nations, linked together as they were by ties of blood and by common historical memories. In the following year the tension was somewhat relaxed, but William II. overrated this increase of warmth in the relations between the two Governments and peoples. Confident that he held the winning cards, he showed his hand too soon, with the result that the British Cabinet decided to abandon the game.

At a meeting held in Cardiff on the 2nd of October 1914, the Prime Minister made a most interesting disclosure regarding the 1912 attempt to arrive at an understanding.[2] “We said, and we communicated this to the Berlin Government: ‘Britain declares that she will neither make nor join in any unprovoked attack upon Germany. Aggression upon Germany is not the subject and forms no part of any treaty, understanding or combination to which Britain is now a party, nor will she become a party to anything that has such an object.’” But that, Mr. Asquith went on to say, was not enough for German statesmanship. “They wanted us to go further. They asked us to pledge ourselves absolutely to neutrality in the event of Germany’s being engaged in war, and this, mind you, at a time when Germany was enormously increasing both her aggressive and defensive resources, and especially upon the sea. They asked us, to put it quite plainly, for a free hand, so far as we were concerned, when they selected the opportunity to overbear and dominate the European world. To such a demand but one answer was possible, and we gave that answer.”

Thus the arrogant demands of William II.’s diplomacy lost him an excellent opportunity of banishing the suspicions of the British Cabinet, and of re-establishing cordial relations with the Island Kingdom. In spite of this set-back, he did not abandon hope, and when the situation arising out of the Balkan War brought the two nations together, he again imagined that he could rely implicitly upon British neutrality.

Once more appearances deceived him. He ascribed too much value to the dexterity of his new ambassador. Prince Lichnowsky, who was a persona grata in London society, and to the influence of the friends whom Germany had even in the Asquith Cabinet, men like Haldane, Burns, and Harcourt. The language of the Germanophile organs of the English Press also did something to mislead him as to the true feelings of the English people towards its chief maritime and commercial rival; but these journals were not, as the Emperor thought, the real voice of England.

In his conversations with foreigners he was fond of ridiculing the French for their belief in the reality of the Triple Entente, and for their fruitless efforts to turn it into an effective alliance. The visit of King George and Queen Mary to Paris can have caused him no anxiety on this score. But his most serious blunder, it would seem, was to imagine, on the strength of reports which can only have come from his Ambassador, that in the early summer of 1914 England was hopelessly distracted by the Irish quarrel, trembling on the verge of civil war, and therefore totally incapable of armed intervention on the Continent.

It appeared to him the moment for the great throw of the dice. Had the Emperor not felt so certain on this point, would he have exposed the thriving trade of Germany and her unfinished fleet, the very apple of his eye, to the terrible ordeal of a naval war with England? Would he have been ready to endanger the economic prosperity of his Empire, a prosperity in which the mercantile marine was an indispensable factor?

Cruel was his awakening, and savagely did he resent the blow. We have a proof of this in the message conveyed by one of his aides-de-camp to Sir Edward Goschen, after the scandalous demonstration of the Berlin mob against the British Embassy, on the arrival of the news that England had declared war.[3]

“The Emperor,” said the aide-de-camp, “has charged me to express to your Excellency his regret for the occurrences of last night, but to tell you at the same time that you will gather from these occurrences an idea of the feelings of his people respecting the action of Great Britain in joining with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo.”

William II. added that he was divesting himself of his titles of British Field-Marshal and British Admiral, of which he had formerly been so proud. To any one who knows the value and importance attached in Germany to these honorary distinctions—which we should be inclined to regard as mere trivialities—this act of the Emperor’s will convey more than any words of anger and indignation.

VI.

Astonishment has been expressed at his having gone so far astray in his judgment of public opinion and of the real intentions of the Governments of the countries of the Triple Entente. He was no better acquainted with the outlook of Italian statesmen, for the Quirinal’s decision to hold aloof from the conflict, instead of taking part as a member of the Triplice, undoubtedly caused him no little surprise and irritation. This ignorance proceeds from his bad selection of men to represent him abroad, and from his claim to be his own Foreign Minister, just as he is his own Chancellor. The ambassadors are appointed by the Emperor himself, often on the strength of a mere fancy that he has taken to some particular person. Positions of the highest importance have accordingly been given to men of very little experience. His ambassadors, since their tenure depends on his will and pleasure, make it their chief object to find favour in his sight, to chime in with all his theories, and to send him reports that are in harmony with his own opinions. With such scanty information from diplomatic sources, the Imperial Government could not form a precise idea as to what Russia, France, England, Japan, and Italy would do in the event of a war between Austria and Servia, a war which was fated not to remain localized. The same uncertainty, the same illusions prevailed as regards the loyalty of the British dominions, the devotion of the Indian princes, the acquiescence of Egypt, and the fidelity of the Moslems in the French colonies. We cannot suppose, moreover, that the German military attachés, official spies accredited at the headquarters of foreign Governments, were any more clear-sighted than their chiefs. The inferiority of the German diplomatic staff was nowhere more glaringly shown up than by their own countrymen in Berlin, whether in the debates on the Foreign Office estimates, or in the columns of the Liberal Press, to say nothing of Socialist organs. Liberal journalists were fond of contrasting the failures of German diplomats with the successes of their French and English colleagues; but these writers were wrong in ascribing the shortcomings of their compatriots to their status as nobles of ancient lineage or men of the middle classes who had recently been ennobled. The fault lay in the Emperor’s capricious methods of selection.

William II. directed the foreign policy of Germany in person. From the first, he liked to chat with ambassadors and Foreign Secretaries, and to utter his thoughts freely upon the most delicate questions, knowing well that none of his words would be wasted. His formidable jokes, like his unexpected fits of frankness—whether they have been thought out beforehand, or come as sudden flashes of his impatient temper—have more than once disconcerted his hearers. Nor did he rest content with talking; he took up the pen as well, to express his ideas to foreign correspondents, such as Lord Tweedmouth—inspirations that were nearly always unlucky! A notorious affair was that of the interview with the Emperor published by the Daily Telegraph in November 1908, after being submitted to Prince von Bülow, who did not take the trouble to inspect it personally. It brought about a crisis that must have had the salutary effect of teaching the Sovereign to tread more warily and with less self-confidence upon the shifting sands of foreign politics. The German public simmered with indignation, and the Reichstag refused to keep quiet. In the end the Chancellor had to intervene, and a promise was exacted from the Emperor that he would be more discreet in future. “The profound sensation and the painful impression created by these disclosures,” said the Chancellor in the Reichstag, “will lead His Majesty to maintain henceforth, in his private conversations, that reserve which is no less essential for a continuous policy than for the authority of the Crown.”

William II. accordingly promised to be more reticent, and for several years he kept his word, but he never forgave Prince von Bülow for not having defended him at the bar of the Reichstag and of public opinion. Until the death of Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter, at the end of 1912, he refrained from any open interference in foreign affairs. No more sensational speeches were made, no more long conversations on questions of the day were held with ambassadors. It is true that Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter, the strongest personality that has appeared at the Wilhelmstrasse since the departure of Prince von Bülow—less clever than the latter in the art of concealing his thoughts, but more inclined to stand on his dignity, so much so that he could not tolerate any interference by the Emperor in his domain—would rather have resigned his post than be led about on a leash by his master, like some submissive bulldog. Rightly or wrongly he was regarded as the only man who could put into practice the treaty that he had concluded with France. That treaty had been made with pacific intentions; for, brutal as he was, this statesman was no lover of war. Had he lived, his peculiar knowledge of the Near East would probably have ensured his being kept in office throughout the period of the Balkan conflict, if not longer. When Kiderlen-Wächter vanished from the scene, the Emperor began once more to direct foreign policy, and resumed his freedom of language with the diplomats of other countries. The Turkish ambassador, Osman Nizami Pasha, who had previously been in high favour, was marked out as a special victim; he was told some cruel home-truths by the great friend of Turkey, after the first disasters of the Thracian campaign.

VII.

It often happens that a monarch or a statesman is made up of several distinct personalities, which come to the fore in turn at the various stages of his career. Few are those who remain unchanged from early youth to the grave, as if hewn from a block of granite. In rulers who are conscious of their responsibilities, the years as they roll by assuage or curb the passions of their springtime. Maturity and experience lead them to take a less confident view of enterprises to which they would like to apply their energies and their resources. In William II., a contrary process has taken place. Such relative wisdom as he can boast has been shown in his middle age, not in his youth.

I have heard it suggested that the state of his health may have had something to do with his moral deterioration. In spite of his taking constant exercise in the open air, or perhaps because of his excessive travelling and of the exhaustion that it involved, his overstrained nerves became considerably weaker as time went on. In the end, the daily rest that he forced himself to take, lying down on his bed for at least an hour every afternoon, was not enough to restore his physical balance. His drawn face and ashen complexion were tell-tale signs of wear and tear. His subjects, who did not often get a chance of seeing him, were shocked to discover how their Sovereign was growing old before his time. Who knows, it has been asked, whether the decline in his powers of resistance has not reacted upon his mental condition? Physiologists and doctors, accustomed to trace connections between physical and moral states, would be inclined to confirm this theory. Personally, I do not believe that fatigue and exhaustion have played their part in determining William II.’s actions. That his nervousness has increased of late, that his growing irritability has made him more trying to his personal attendants, more liable to insist upon unquestioning obedience—these facts are supported by so many independent witnesses, that we cannot question their truth. But his schemes have been drawn up with perfect mental calm, and not in that state of morbid over-excitement which the world has been too ready to regard as his normal mood.

What manner of a man, then, is William II.? An ambitious ruler of the stamp of Charles V., Louis XIV., or Napoleon—that Napoleon who is popular to-day in Berlin, where his portrait is exhibited in the shop windows more often than those of the Prussian kings, with the exception of “Old Fritz”? A great prince who has studied the lessons of his professors in history, and has striven to realize the ancient aspirations of his people? “The Hohenzollerns,” his teachers tell him, “after centuries of waiting, are destined to build up that great Empire of the West for which the heirs of Otto laid out the plans and the Hohenstaufen reared the scaffolding. Germany, united at last under the Hohenzollern sway, in vigour, in population, in intelligence, in power of production and expansion, superior to the decadent nations that surround her, must go forth resolutely to conquer Europe, and after that to dominate the world.” Such, I think, will be the flattering verdict that future German historians will pass on William II. In the world outside Germany, the Belgians, at any rate, will hold a different view. They will not subscribe to the accuracy of this idealized portrait, which omits those hitherto unsuspected features that the war has brought to their notice. In one who had motives for watching him during the last years before the catastrophe, the Emperor aroused a sense of perplexity and fear, like some momentous riddle that no man may read. To-day we cannot study his character without reference to the actions that have displayed it in a ghastly light. His dramatic figure is lit up for his victims by the flames of Louvain and other ill-starred cities, and in that same lurid glare they behold their country writhing beneath the blows that his insensate rage has dealt it.

We must picture to ourselves, the Belgians will say, a monarch mighty in rank and power, effusively cordial to strangers whom he wished to charm and dazzle, but liable to disappoint those who were rash enough to trust in his kindness of heart; always able to give the impression of complete frankness, and using this as a means of seduction; really admiring nothing but strength, and ready to abuse his own; looking with utter contempt on small States and petty princes, yet never loath to flatter them when occasion demanded; a wooer of public opinion, especially that of other countries, but resolved to defy it in order to attain his ambitions; a ruler who enjoyed a false reputation for chivalry, while he has shown himself relentless in his malice; of a faith that was sincere, if superficial, yet did not prevent him from setting his interests above his most solemn engagements, and ruthlessly tearing up any treaty that had become inconvenient; always careful to play his part, and clever in staging his effects; accustomed, unfortunately, to seeing everything bow to his will; such a spoilt child of fortune that he came to the point of thinking himself infallible; one whom Nietzsche might have called a superman, and the Romans a demigod.

It has been asserted that this “demigod” was merely an exalted type of the ill-balanced or decadent man. What a mistake! He was in full possession of all his faculties when he ordered that hasty mobilization which made the cataclysm inevitable. Some have maintained that he was, beyond all question, the tool of a caste and a party for whom war was the sole means of consolidating their power. He did indeed listen to their advice, but only because their views were in harmony with his own. Without any hesitation, the verdict of history will make him answerable for the disasters that have overwhelmed Europe. If we carefully read and compare the documents relating to the brief negotiations carried on during the Austro-Serbian crisis, we find ample proof that it was within William II.’s power, up to the last moment, to say the word that would have prevented war. So far from doing this, he sent his ultimatum to Russia, and thus let loose the deluge at the moment which he had chosen.

One would like to believe that he hesitated a long time before venturing upon a path beset with so many terrors. One would fain imagine that his conscience revolted at the thought of the streams of blood and the heartrending misery which the coming struggle would involve, but that he was swept along, in spite of himself, by an irresistible fate. Idle speculations! The blow had been planned several months in advance, the scheme had been prepared down to its minutest details, and the Emperor deliberately hastened on the signal for attack, cutting short in his impatience the discussions which the Entente Powers were desperately anxious to continue. The projects that he was carrying out had matured at leisure. Posterity will regard this point as settled, and will brush aside the charge of provocation trumped up against his opponents by himself, by his Chancellor, and by his Press, in order to gain the suffrages of public opinion at home and abroad.

When all is said and done, history will not forgive William of Hohenzollern for having initiated an appalling war, carried on in his name. Why these frightful devastations, this systematic destruction of towns, villages, and country-houses, this methodical vandalism directed against secular and religious monuments, these wholesale executions of innocent civilians, these unpardonable murders of priests, women, and children, this raping and looting, all this useless cruelty that recalls the native barbarism of the primitive Germanic tribes? For such methods of warfare posterity, like the present generation, will find no excuse. It will say that the campaign of 1914 in Belgium and in Northern France, where these harrowing scenes occurred over and over again, brought dishonour both to the German army and to its Emperor.

CHAPTER II.

THE IMPERIAL FAMILY, COURT, AND GOVERNMENT.

I.

IT is generally admitted that the family and personal associates of a sovereign, either by their counsels and intrigues, or merely by the fact of living together with him and constantly exchanging ideas, often exercise an influence, for good or evil, on his political decisions. To this rule, however, there are notable exceptions; among recent rulers, Leopold II. is a case in point. The old Belgian monarch, with his haughty and unsocial spirit, his scorn of advice and his consciousness of superiority, loved to work out his boldest African designs in the seclusion of his palace, without any help from civil or military officials. But the difference between the founder of the Congo Free State and the German Emperor is the difference between a great man and one who is merely talented, and they cannot be said to resemble each other in any particular. Did the family of the Kaiser, the old dignitaries of his Court, the chosen companions of his travels and his shooting parties, wield any influence upon his decisions before the war, and can they be made to some extent answerable for its origin? An interesting question, which to-day we are at Liberty to discuss.

Women, with the sole exception of the Empress, play no part in the Emperor’s life. His marriage was due to reasons of State, having been suggested by Bismarck as an act that would soothe the feelings of the bride’s family. It will be remembered that in 1864, with a view to supporting the claims of her father, the Duke of Augustenburg, to the Schleswig-Holstein succession, the Diet of the Germanic Confederation declared war on Christian IX. of Denmark. By the final settlement of the Treaty of Prague, Prussia acquired the two Duchies for herself. Later on, the Duchess of Augustenburg had the barren honour of seeing her daughter invited to share the Hohenzollern throne. This political match has proved a well-assorted one, in the middle-class sense of the term. Its happiness seems to have been assured by the usual law of contrasts, by temperamental differences: the one partner being entirely lacking in reserve, passionately fond of noise and publicity; the other, quiet, modest, and well-balanced.

Neither in her physical nor in her mental attributes does the Empress bear any resemblance to the celebrated Louisa, the wife of Frederick William III. of Prussia, that vain and commonplace ruler, of whom Napoleon, always contemptuous of the Hohenzollerns, said that he looked like a tailor in the midst of kings. The two queens are alike only in the large number of princes with whom they have enriched a stock that is nowhere near extinction. Madame de Staël, while staying in Berlin, described Queen Louisa in a letter to her father as the most beautiful woman of her Court. Yet some years later this beauty, more appealing than ever through the unkind strokes of fate, was unable to soften the marble heart of the victor of Jena. No figure is more popular in modern Germany, more glorified by her admirers, historians and poets, painters and sculptors. Will the same fortune befall the Empress Augusta Victoria? We may be pardoned for doubting this. At the utmost, she will attract only the official brush or chisel. But should dark days come for the Imperial house, should Germanic Cæsarism, after a premature blaze of glory, suffer a “Twilight of the Gods” and a stormy downfall, the Empress, with her steadfast devotion, will no doubt, like Queen Louisa, find words of comfort for her disconsolate husband; she will help him to endure the misfortunes that he will have deserved only too well.

It is in the vast white ball-room of the palace, when a Court ball is being given, that the “august lady” (as the Berlin newspapers reverently call her) shows up to the best advantage. The function is drawing to a close. The couples, officers of the Guards and high-born damsels, who have been performing the intricate old-world dances with military precision, assemble for a last figure, before dispersing merrily into the supper-rooms. At the sound of the royal march they bow several times respectfully, each time drawing closer together in their semi-circular rows, in front of the platform on which stands the solitary figure of the Empress. She gives no little impression of majesty as she receives the homage and thanks of her youthful guests—still erect in bearing and well-proportioned, with her white hair set off by a diamond tiara, a rope of priceless pearls around her neck, the yellow ribbon of the Black Eagle athwart her bosom, and a kindly smile playing on her lips.

At the same time she is an excellent mother and a good German housewife, carefully looking after her husband’s health, and more absorbed in her children than in her subjects. As mistress of the house she has a great deal to do. Her task it is to allay the petty storms that arise at Court, to reconcile the Crown Prince with his father after each fresh escapade of that unruly heir, or to secure the Emperor’s consent to the morganatic marriage of another son, who has fallen madly in love with a mere maid-of-honour. Every December it is her chief delight to prepare the Christmas tree in the Muschelsaal, the grotto in the rococo palace at Potsdam. Her great aim is to make the family life in the royal residences as cosy and homely (gemütlich) as that of a humble Prussian squire. Like other royalties, she looks upon works of patronage and Christian benevolence as a formal duty, and this duty she carries out to the full. She even presides at charity bazaars, where her presence adds a spur to the generosity of the more laggard purchasers. But it is no use to expect from her any of those charming acts of impulse or of delicate sympathy that distinguish such a sovereign as the Queen of the Belgians, when some misfortune or some talent has attracted her notice. The Empress’s artistic tastes are faithfully modelled on those of her husband; she sees only through his eyes, and cannot sincerely admire anything unless he deigns to signify his approval.

The distinctive feature of her character is a rigid, uncompromising Protestantism, which will not tolerate the presence of any Catholic, either among her ladies-in-waiting or among the household servants of the palace. As a staunch defender of a creed that is steadily losing ground even in the country of Luther, she has set herself to stem the rising tide of atheism, to combat the free thought that wraps itself like a winding-sheet about the expiring faith of the great cities. The uprooting of the religious sense is partly due to Social Democracy, which pursues the work with great success among the labouring classes, while at the same time it undermines monarchical institutions. The Empress endeavours to beat back this relentless foe of the old German beliefs by building a large number of churches. One sees them rising in the principal squares of the new quarters of Berlin, red brick temples of a vague or distorted Gothic, hopelessly void of architectural distinction. In no single instance does the architect succeed in giving a faithful reproduction of the beautiful Christian models. The finest modern church in Berlin, the “Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church” (this edifice, for once in a way, is built entirely of stone), is nothing but a rather unwieldy mixture of Roman and Byzantine. Nor can it be said that, with all this wealth of new sanctuaries, religion has gained what art has lost. In the manufacturing towns, to the great grief of the Empress, the march of atheism and of indifference in matters of faith keeps pace with that of Socialism.

It would be a mistake to suppose that this admirable wife and mother, this incarnation of Protestant Germany on the Imperial throne, is in any way a pacifist. When the Emperor, after twenty-five years of his reign had passed, abruptly left the straight and tranquil path that he had marked out for the happiness of his subjects, his consort, we may be quite sure, made no effort to hold him back. In spite of her placid femininity, German patriotism, with its dreams of domination, continually haunts her brain. The horrors of war, that bane to mothers—bella matribus detestata—do not dismay the wife of William II. During the crisis of Agadir, when the Court of Berlin was chafing with impatience to measure its strength with France on another field than that of diplomacy, the Empress shared the impulse which she felt throbbing in the air around her. In a tone of reproach she said to Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter, whom she disliked: “Are we always going to retreat before the French and put up with their insolence?”

II.

For some years past the Crown Prince has been talked about a great deal, a fact which has certainly not been displeasing to him. He has been credited with a decisive influence on the course of events at the moment when the threatenings of war became critical. It was alleged that this young man of thirty-two, acting behind the scenes, was the real deus ex machina of the whole drama; that he, the idol of the army, had imposed his will and that of the officers’ corps on his father, while the latter’s mind was not yet made up. The Crown Prince deserves

“Nor such wild honour nor such brand of shame.”[4]

In physique, he is an officer of light infantry: slender of waist and narrow of chest, he cuts a smart figure, especially on horseback. He does not in any way resemble the usual Hohenzollern type, with its broad shoulders and regular features. His face is extremely youthful, with a certain vagueness in its outlines; his forehead recedes; his eyes show no sign of a lively intelligence, and his body has a look of suppleness rather than of strength and fitness for war. Appearances in this case are deceptive. The Prince is a tough soldier and an ardent sportsman. Polo, tennis, football, hockey, golf, yachting—there is no sport that he does not practise. Before the war, he liked to imitate the English, and posed as a German Anglomaniac. His father had to forbid him to ride in steeplechases, because an heir-apparent must on no account run the risk of a dangerous fall, but was unable to prevent him from going in for aviation. Of all William II.’s sons, the Crown Prince seems to be the most soldierly; but this does not mean that he will ever make a capable army leader.

At a first glance he does not seem to bear any resemblance to the Emperor, but after a time one finds out several parallel traits in their characters. Less well-informed, less cultured, less versatile, but just as self-willed, the son has inherited his father’s impetuous spirit and incurable propensity for freely uttering his thoughts. A line of impulsive rulers is what the modern Hohenzollerns, very different from their ancestors, have given to Germany.

The Crown Prince has the soul of a fighter, or at any rate he prides himself on that quality. At an official dinner, where he sat next to the wife of an ambassador from one of the Entente Powers, he could not think of anything more clever and gallant to say than that it was his cherished dream to make war and to lead a charge at the head of his regiment. His militarism, however, does not prevent him from venturing into certain intellectual and even literary fields. A diary of his hunting-tour in India, published in his name, has given us a detailed account of his feats as a Nimrod. Less commonplace and more personal is a brief passage, eagerly reproduced in the German Press, in which, on leaving Danzig, he bade farewell to his regiment of Death’s Head Hussars. His spirit reveals itself here in a certain vein of martial poetry. If any German pacifists—of whom there is a very large number, whatever the world may think—read this rhapsody in honour of Bellona, they must have felt considerable misgivings.

The relations between the Emperor and his son ceased to be very cordial from the day when the young Prince, brimming over with ambition and desire for popularity, tried to get himself talked about by dabbling in politics. His first open interference in State affairs is worth recalling, because it is a striking testimony to his feelings with regard to France. It took place in 1911, at that meeting of the Reichstag where Herr von Heydebrand, the spokesman of the Prussian Junkers, delivered a trenchant criticism of German policy in Morocco, of the treaty of 4th November, and of the way in which the Chancellor had defended the interests of the Empire. During this philippic, the Crown Prince, sitting by himself in the Imperial box, made repeated signs of approval. Since then he has become the hope of the reactionary party and of the military caste. Encouraged by this success, he has never omitted, on any important occasion, to express his ideas or to convey them by some mouthpiece, even when these ideas were in conflict with those of his father, as represented by the Chancellor. It would be superfluous to quote these various demonstrations. A congratulatory telegram to the hero of the Zabern affair finally won for the Prince the hearts of those who in Prussia wear the “King’s garb”—in other words, the officers of the army.

If only he had always remained on the neutral ground that lies between politics and the army! His want of tact and good feeling in this respect is shown by the way in which he tried to baulk the efforts of the Imperial Government in the settlement of the Brunswick succession. The oath of loyalty to the Emperor tendered by Duke Ernest of Cumberland, heir to the Duchy and son-in-law to His Majesty, on entering the army, did not seem to the Crown Prince (or, for the matter of that, to a good many typical Prussians) sufficient reason for admitting his brother-in-law to the last Guelph inheritance, to which he was the legitimate successor. The Crown Prince held that Duke Ernest should further be required to make a formal renunciation of his claims to the Hanoverian throne. The Emperor proved more shrewd and more politic, and the young ducal couple was enabled to enter Brunswick amid general acclamation. A section of the German Press, disgusted at the Crown Prince’s perpetual meddling with affairs that did not concern him, drily reminded him that he had no special status under the Prussian or Imperial constitution, and that he could only claim the right, enjoyed by every citizen, of stating his opinion as a mere private individual.

This endless hunting after personal popularity led to family scenes which the palace walls in Berlin and Potsdam, impenetrable though they are as a rule, could not altogether keep secret from an inquisitive public. The banishment of the Crown Prince to Danzig was solely due to his intemperate language in speech and writing. The Emperor sent him, for his sins, to a remote corner of Prussia, under the pretext of making him learn his duties as a regimental commander. After a time it became evident that in his distant fortress he was more embarrassing and less easy to watch than in Berlin. He was therefore recalled and put upon the General Staff, nominally that he might be initiated into the mysteries of Prussian strategy and tactics, really that he might remain under his father’s eye. In point of fact, we must not make too much of his escapades, which are traditional among heirs to the Hohenzollern throne. Frederick the Great, famous before his accession for his quarrels with his brutal sire, was not the first Prussian heir-apparent who rebelled against paternal authority. Later on, in the last century, the Emperor William I., when he was next in the line of succession to his brother, Frederick William IV., held, during the latter’s reign, a little princely Court that was a hotbed of criticism and opposition. And the present Emperor? Who will believe that in his passionate self-assertiveness he would not have caused just as much vexation and embarrassment to his father, if the Emperor Frederick had reigned for more than a few months?

We should misjudge William II. if we attributed to him any jealousy of his son’s growing popularity. He has too exalted an idea of his own worth for that, and he cannot cherish any illusions as to the real capacity of his heir. To insinuate that the Emperor took time by the forelock owing to his fear of this popularity, which threatened to eclipse his own, would be tantamount to saying that the Crown Prince was the causa causans, the prime mover of the appeal to arms; and this would be assigning to him an importance and an influence which he has never at any time possessed. His incitements to war and his martial ardour would never have succeeded in making any impression on the Emperor, if the latter had not himself resolved to forge ahead, and to risk the great gamble in which the fate of Germany and of Europe was at stake.

The German Empire as Bismarck conceived it, with a single minister bearing on his own shoulders, like some Atlas, the whole weight of the vast governmental machine, was cut to the measure of its founder. If this system is to last, the nation must always have at its head either a great Chancellor, or a great monarch under whom the Chancellor merely acts as his deputy. So long as Bismarck was at the helm, he steered the ship of Empire with an unfaltering hand through all the reefs of internal politics—Kulturkampf, anti-Socialist legislation, party divisions, unstable majorities in the Reichstag. After the dismissal of the great man, and under the powerful impetus that he had given her, the vessel kept on her course for some time, having for her pilot the Sovereign himself, who made up for his lack of genius by his ample self-confidence. In this way she safely passed many rocks, borne along by the swelling tide of national prosperity, but occasionally threatened with disaster for want of a submissive majority to vote credits in the Imperial Parliament.

It is not difficult to imagine what would become of the Empire under the Crown Prince’s rule. He too, like his father, but with less intelligence, will wish to be at the helm, and, by the sheer force of his will as monarch by divine right, to stem the rising tide of popular demands, growing ever hungrier and stormier under the sweeping blast of Socialism. The conception of liberty that Treitschke shadowed forth for his countrymen about 1870—a liberty having its roots in the idea of duty, that is to say, where politics are concerned, in obedience to the powers that be—will not prevail in the Germany of the future. In my opinion, it is not even accepted by the majority of Germans to-day. Their conception is that of a liberty based on the idea of justice rather than of duty: in other words, on the nation’s right to share, through its representatives, in the government of the Empire. Thus there is a prospect of bitter struggles between a ruler of the Crown Prince’s type and a Reichstag that is half or three-fourths Socialist, assuming indeed that these struggles do not begin long before he comes to the throne.

III.

The five remaining sons of the Emperor give little food for public discussion. Like happy nations, they have no history. Political ambitions and the chase for popularity they leave to their eldest brother. Their lives are passed in a pleasant round of military service (less arduous for princes than for ordinary officers), social amusements, and sport. Only one of them has entered the navy, where work is certainly harder than in the army. Three others, as officers of the Guards, used to do garrison duty at Potsdam, spending the season of festivities in Berlin. One, on leaving the University of Strassburg, was sent off to a provincial station.

From time to time, in winter, one or more of the young princely couples were to be seen in diplomatic drawing-rooms. It must not be imagined, however, that they were anxious to consort with ambassadors and foreign ministers. They have no particular respect for those who represent the countries of the Old World or the New, and in general, like Alfred de Musset’s hero, they profess

“A high disdain for peoples and for kings.”

Their horizon is bounded by Germany, nay it is even restricted to the frontiers of Prussia. The idea of gaining enlightenment, from good sources, as to the political institutions, the internal situation, or the state of public opinion in other countries, leaves them entirely cold, just as it fails to attract the Crown Prince. As a rule, a quick hand-shake, without words, was all that they accorded to the heads of foreign legations. But as soon as one of our confraternity got together a small band of musicians for a ball or an informal dance, the princes were glad to do him the honour of letting themselves be invited. The diplomatic drawing-rooms were in their eyes nothing but rendezvous for dancing and flirtation.

Their stiffness showed itself most plainly of all in their relations with the other German princes. Any one who watched them at official functions, weddings, funerals, the unveiling of monuments or the laying of foundation-stones, when members of the royal or princely families of the Empire were present, must have been struck with their attitude. They did not mix with the others, but formed a group apart, as if to impress the public with the fact that they were the dominant race, and the rest mere vassals or creatures of the herd. This lofty opinion that they had of themselves and of the greatness of their house did not indeed prevent them from sometimes behaving quite humanly towards the scions of certain families that enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being connected by blood with the Hohenzollerns.

The foreigner who is interested in the future of Germany is naturally inclined to raise the question: Is it an advantage or merely a burden for the Prussian State to possess so large a royal family? He need only ask any honest German who is not afraid to say what he thinks, whether princes who live a life apart, cut off from modern ideas and interests, and antagonistic to every Liberal tendency, are a blessing or a curse to their dynasty and their country. There can be little doubt as to the answer he will receive.

A more interesting personality is that of Prince Henry, the Emperor’s brother. One can say of this capable second fiddle to the Kaiser, that he is a model of fraternal devotion. In appearance he exhibits a striking contrast with his brother, and in mental qualities the difference between them is still more marked. Taller, slimmer, and stronger, with a complexion tanned by the Baltic breezes, he is simple and frank in intercourse. He has a natural affability, and shows no trace of haughtiness or affectation. He never stayed long at Court; hardly had he been announced there before he was off again to resume, at Kiel, his duties as Grand Admiral and Inspector-General of the Fleet, since the sedentary life of the capital has no charm for his active spirit.

Sailor, diplomat, and sportsman—these are the three phases in which he has appeared before the world. As squadron commander, he devoted himself chiefly to training the infant German navy, to making the “High Sea Fleet” of Dreadnoughts, torpedo-boats, and submarines a formidable arm in the power of its ships, the efficiency of its officers, and the discipline of its crews. His connection with the royal family of Great Britain afforded him a pretext for frequent visits to the neighbour island; there he learnt something of the strong and the weak points of that British navy which he was preparing to fight one day. He liked to call himself the comrade and admirer of English sailors—until he had a chance of torpedoing their vessels and of attempting to destroy their maritime supremacy.

In sending Prince Henry on a special mission to the United States, under delicate circumstances—a coolness had arisen between the two countries, owing to an incident in the Philippines during the Hispano-American War—William II. entrusted him with the task of inaugurating his American policy of conciliation and friendship. No other Prussian royalty would have been so skilful as Prince Henry in winning the sympathies of the journalists of New York and Chicago by his democratic simplicity and frankness of manner. He acquitted himself with equal success in his difficult missions to Russia and Japan. Quite recently the Emperor sent him to the South American Republics, this time to prepare the way for flooding the markets of Brazil, Argentina, and Chili with the innumerable products of German industry.

The Prince has also become a zealous propagandist of the sports which aim at training the German youth for war. A motorist from the earliest days of motoring, he has applied himself to spreading the use of this rapid means of transport. His alert brain was one of the first to grasp the military value of aviation. While he has had no obvious place among the Emperor’s advisers, all his efforts have been directed towards equipping the nation for a struggle which he himself regarded as imminent. In this way he has borne his share in making it inevitable.

IV.

When a ruler, like some conspicuous star, rivets the attention of the civilized world, his satellites, careful not to shed any light that may dim the radiance of their lord, are content to remain in modest obscurity. This principle holds good at the Court of Berlin. The high executive posts are filled by competent men of suave manners. None of them enjoys any special prominence, although they all are or have been members of the army, and belong to the landed gentry. They have always espoused the doctrines of the Prussian military caste and Conservative party, and share the hatred of these reactionaries for France and for the Powers that have thrown in their lot with the Republic. In their conversation with their master, it was inevitable that Delenda est Gallia should be the perpetual refrain. This harmony of feeling among those around him would have impressed the mind of William II., even if he had not been so ready to assimilate their views. The Court functionary who, before the war, was said to possess most credit with the Kaiser was the Mistress of the Empress’s Household, a stern guardian of Prussian etiquette and tradition. There is no likelihood that she used her power to counteract the baneful influence of her fellow-courtiers of the other sex.

The same truth applies to a high-born aristocrat of Austrian origin, Prince Max Egon von Fürstenberg, who to-day, in the Emperor’s circle of friends, holds the place formerly occupied by the fascinating but depraved Philip von Eulenburg. He is the obvious favourite, the Kaiser’s indispensable confidant, addressed by his master with the “thou” of intimacy. He was given one of the great ornamental Court posts, that of Grand Marshal, as a prelude, it was whispered, to a far more important position in the Government. But how could this newcomer, half German and half Austrian, who migrated to Berlin after inheriting vast estates from Karl Egon, his cousin of the elder branch, ever have undertaken anything but a sinecure, since he was unable to manage his own property? Instead of quietly enjoying the princely income derived from his patrimony, Prince Egon took it into his head that he had a genius for business, like Herr von Gwinner, the director of the Deutsche Bank, or Herr Ballin, the king of Germany’s mercantile marine. With another moneyed grandee of equal inexperience, Prince von Hohenlohe-Oeringen, he founded the famous Princes’ Trust, a unique example, I believe, of an aristocratic ring boldly competing with the lords of finance, industry, and commerce. In a few years this trust piled one enterprise upon another, beginning with magnificent hotels in Berlin and Hamburg. The crash was not long in coming; to-day, Prince von Hohenlohe is ruined, and his associate has been compelled to mortgage his ancestral estates to the tune of over £1,000,000.

Like many of his peers—laughter being an attribute of kings as of other mortals—William II. requires to be amused. Prince Egon is a sparkling companion, with a happy knack in telling good stories; he has all the untiring fluency of the Viennese. This, obviously, is enough to explain his success. In certain circles, however, people persist in crediting him with a mysterious sway over his Imperial master, and in regarding him as the power behind the throne who whispers advice into the Sovereign’s ear. That he may have served now and then as a link between Vienna and Berlin, between the Archduke Ferdinand and William II., is not unlikely. At the close of the Balkan War, the Kaiser seemed to have abandoned his ally during the latter’s vain efforts to secure the revision of the Treaty of Bucharest. Fürstenberg may have been used immediately afterwards to set the connection upon its former footing of intimacy and confidence; before the murder of the Archduke, he may have acted as a go-between for the two cronies, when they drew up the plan of a war of revenge which, while compensating Austria for her disappointments, was to set up the supremacy of Germany in Continental Europe. To assign Prince Egon a more important rôle would be overrating his mental capacity. We may safely acquit him of any share in the direct responsibility for the war.

V.

By the terms of the 1871 Constitution, the Empire is a congeries of federated States. The Emperor, at the head of the other reigning princes, should properly be nothing but the primus inter pares, the first among his peers, invested with very wide prerogatives and powers. At a banquet given by the German Chamber of Commerce on the occasion of Tsar Nicholas’s coronation, the present King of Bavaria (Prince Ludwig as he then was) made a vigorous attack upon a speaker who had alluded to the royalties attending this function as being in the retinue of Prince Henry of Prussia, representing his august brother. In emphatic terms, Prince Ludwig reminded his hearers that the German princes were not the vassals, but the federal partners of the Emperor. The incident has not yet been forgotten in Berlin, and this spirited protest won great popularity for its author in South Germany. But was he justified in what he said?

In sober truth, the King of Bavaria, who under a homely exterior hides a most keen and subtle mind; the King of Saxony, with his loud voice, sonorous laugh, and martial gait; the King of Würtemberg, that model of a polished gentleman; the amiable Grand Duke of Baden, and the other lesser gods of the modern German Valhalla—all these rulers are the very humble servants of the Kaiser. In vain do they assume a tone of equality when exchanging with him telegrams in which the affectionate “thou” is part of the official style; in vain do they flit like busy bees about their dominions, make a vast quantity of speeches to their subjects, and honour public ceremonies with their presence; in the eyes of German statesmanship, they are mere instruments of the will of their master who lives in Berlin. Similarly, in the Federal Council, their delegates receive the word of command from the Chancellor and the Imperial Ministers, and on every important occasion vote submissively with their Prussian colleagues. The shadow of the Emperor lies over all Germany; the work of unification proceeds, gradually draining the life-blood from the moribund body of separatism, while the Reichstag, by its encroachments on the powers and privileges of the local Diets, strives to become the sole deliberative assembly that can boast any real authority.

Must we infer from this that the reigning houses are useless, and that the first Emperor would have done well to suppress them, if such had been his will and pleasure, after the victories of 1870? I do not think so. When Bismarck, setting his face against the plea for centralization put forward by the Prussian heir-apparent, succeeded in inducing old King William to adopt his plan of a federal Empire such as exists to-day, he did not foresee, perhaps, that these potentates, although retaining but a shadow of their sovereignty, would be the solid pillars of the monarchical principle in the new Germany. If they had been entirely dispossessed, the Socialist and republican propaganda would have made giant strides wherever the Prussian régime was detested. The peoples of the different States, having been governed in paternal fashion for some centuries by these local dynasties, have for the most part maintained their loyalty to the ruling houses. The Hohenzollerns, in their capacity as Emperors, have not yet struck their roots deep into the country; they are loved only as Kings of Prussia, in their ancestral provinces to the east of the Elbe.

It is difficult to believe that the news of the declaration of war was received with delight by all these pseudo-sovereigns, who had not been consulted as to its necessity. For form’s sake, the rulers of Bavaria, Saxony, Würtemberg, and Baden were apprised throughout of the hurried march of events. For some, the war interfered with old, comfortable habits; so long as it lasted, there was no possibility of travels abroad, of visits to watering-places, or even of hunting parties. Almost all were faced with the prospect of family losses. Yet each of them, from discipline or from a thrill of genuine patriotism, thought it his duty to hail the news with enthusiasm. The Kings of Bavaria and Saxony delivered speeches no less warlike than those of the Emperor. All hastened to swim with the stream. It is worth while pointing out, indeed, since some have wrongly held the contrary view, that the war was greeted with no less acclamation in the rest of Germany than in Prussia itself. The earliest demonstrations in Munich were as noisy as those in Berlin. In Dresden, the mob, with at least as much frenzy as the good folk of the Prussian capital, broke the windows of the British legation. This state of feeling shows, in the first place, that in southern Germany, with its placid inhabitants, a section of public opinion (the section that made itself so prominent) had been quite as much perverted, quite as deeply tainted with the pan-Germanic virus, as the corresponding class in northern Germany, who had long been infatuated with the notion of their own military superiority; and, in the second place, that German unity is now considered by all Germans to be an essential condition of their national existence.

It was Bismarck who, in order to win popular approval for that German unity which he had forged, conceived the masterly idea of tempering it in a war with a foreign enemy. An attempt to break the chain would, in my opinion, be unwise; the links, if snapped asunder for the moment by an external force, would become welded again of their own accord. In a conquered Germany, however, the federal rulers, who yesterday bowed down low before the Emperor, would to-morrow perhaps be the first to raise their heads, and to deny their humbled Cæsar that pre-eminence which he had used so ill.

VI.

The rise of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg to the position of Chancellor of the Empire has been a triumph for the bureaucracy. In looking for shoulders strong enough to bear the massive heritage of Bismarck, the Emperor, after applying in turn to the army, to the higher aristocracy, and to diplomacy, was bound to fall back upon the Prussian official caste. The fifth Chancellor has passed his whole career in the Civil Service, beginning as assessor, and advancing through the grades of district president, Prussian Minister of the Interior, and Imperial Secretary of State for Home Affairs, a post that carries with it the duties of Chancellor’s deputy. In less than twenty-five years he has thus managed to climb every rung of the administrative ladder, and to become the greatest man in the State after the Emperor. The fact that he was a fellow-student of William II.’s at Bonn University has presumably done nothing to retard this rapid promotion. Just as in France every conscript carries a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack, so in Prussia, if the example of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg is anything to go by, every official at the outset of his career will be able to say that he carries with him his nomination to the post of Chancellor.

What are the striking qualities that determined the Emperor’s choice and gained for this favoured mandarin the honour of succeeding the brilliant Prince von Bülow? So far as his mind is concerned, when we have praised his honesty, his application to work, his intellectual culture and his strict religious principles, there is nothing more to say. If we add to this a frank, open face, a gigantic frame, and a genial manner, the portrait will be complete. Friend and foe alike declare that his private life is irreproachable, and all were sincerely sorry for the Chancellor when his wedded bliss was cut short by death. It must be admitted, however, that for a statesman who has to play the leading part among his colleagues in Europe, all the above qualities are of secondary importance. Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg is certainly not without his personal views on politics, although they are far from easy to discover. They might perhaps be defined as follows: for home affairs, a Conservatism tempered with doctrinaire leanings, or, if you prefer, a Conservative system that does not exclude some very moderate Liberal tendencies; and as regards foreign policy, an extensive development of German influence, culture, and language, in rivalry with the French and the English, who—as he stated in an “inspired” letter published by the Berlin newspapers—know better than the Germans how to spread their national civilization beyond their own borders. The Chancellor lacks two gifts that would seem to be essential to his functions: a native eloquence and a firm will.

He is first and foremost the Emperor’s right-hand man, or rather the Emperor’s proxy; for the real Chancellor, although the fact is disguised by constitutional fictions, is the Sovereign himself. Caprivi, with his independent nature, and Bülow, with his keen desire to maintain his personal prestige, had disappointed William II. From Bethmann-Hollweg, it would seem, there is nothing of the sort to fear. He will always attempt to shield the Emperor’s actions with his own constitutional responsibility. He would cheerfully go to the stake and become a burnt-offering to public opinion, if such a sacrifice were needed for the saving of his master’s reputation. In Berlin he is known as the philosopher of Hohen-Finow, this being the name of his estate. A philosopher, if you will, in the equanimity with which he bears the failures of his administration, and with which he will arm himself in his retirement, when the hour of disgrace has struck; but above all a philosopher in his indifference or want of resolution where ethics and politics are concerned. His readiness to bow to the fiats of the Imperial will might more properly earn him the name of courtier-philosopher. For the matter of that, they are all courtiers in Berlin—all, that is to say, who on any rung of the ladder seek to be honoured with the favour or the confidence of the Sovereign.

In his position with regard to the Reichstag and his influence on that heterogeneous assembly, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg cannot be compared with his predecessor. He has lived and still lives as a being apart, amid the indifference or hostility of the middle-class (otherwise known as monarchical) parties. The Liberals expected him to carry out a promised reform of the Prussian electoral law; but, finding the measure indefinitely postponed, they view him with suspicion, in the Landtag (or Prussian Diet) no less than in the Imperial Parliament. The Catholic Centre cannot forgive this unbending Protestant for his refusal to restore the right to teach to the Jesuit Order, and on the other hand he is not reactionary enough to please the Conservatives. The latter reproached him most bitterly of all, three years ago, for the weakness with which he abandoned his scheme for the financial working of the recent military law and supported the Radical counter-scheme put forward by the Reichstag Committee. In fact, at the beginning of 1914, it seemed that Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg’s days as a minister were numbered, when suddenly the war came to interrupt all party strife, and the roar of the guns drowned the voice of criticism both in Press and in Parliament.

Officially, the Chancellor is Foreign Minister for the Empire. But the domain of world-politics as conceived by Prince von Bülow is so vast that his successor, better versed in the handling of home affairs, would have lost himself in it, had he not let himself be guided by an expert professional diplomat invested with the title of Secretary of State. The first of these guides was Baron von Schoen, followed by Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter, and the present Foreign Secretary is Herr von Jagow. On certain occasions, however, the Chancellor was compelled to make a statement on the foreign situation in the Reichstag. He painted his pictures with a broad brush, and presented the leading events of the day in a carefully thought out chiaroscuro well distributed over the canvas. His speeches, which he had learnt by heart, seemed tame and colourless, as is no doubt inevitably the case with this type of literary effort. They were entirely lacking in that singular clearness and note of sincerity that marked the kindred utterances of Sir Edward Grey in the House of Commons.

Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg is a man of conciliatory temper, and a large blend of pacifism certainly enters into his nature. The need of a long spell of peace, to complete the splendid commercial and industrial expansion of Germany, could not have escaped his clear vision. This explains why he was the object of frequent appeals, outside the formal discussions, from the eminent diplomat who opposed Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter in the dangerous game that was being played in connection with Morocco. The French Yellow Book for 1911 contains a report of some conversations that M. Jules Cambon had with the Chancellor, and the impression they give is that the latter really wished to arrive at a final understanding. It was to the Chancellor, again, that the Ambassador turned when the time came for settling other thorny questions, such as the delimitation of railway concessions and spheres of influence in Asia Minor, and when the German negotiators proved too refractory. In other quarters, a genuine improvement in his country’s relations with Great Britain was Bethmann-Hollweg’s most cherished dream, without any latent thought (such as would perhaps have occurred to Prince von Bülow) of afterwards giving the death-blow, at the favourable moment, to England’s naval supremacy. There is no reason to believe that Herr von Jagow was not speaking the language of sincerity, when he expressed to Sir Edward Goschen,[5] in the course of their last, painful interview, “his poignant regret at the crumbling of his entire policy and that of the Chancellor, which had been to make friends with Great Britain, and through Great Britain to get closer to France.”

Is this regret compatible with Bethmann-Hollweg’s wavering attitude in the Austro-Serbian crisis? I think so. His personal preferences made him lean towards a peaceful solution, but this weak man let his hand be forced by the war party, and bowed, as usual, to the will of the Emperor. He was all the more ready to take this course in that he was nothing but a tool, and probably unaware of the real designs at the back of the Imperial brain. When he saw where this reckless policy was leading Germany, he should have stood out and protested; instead of this, his wrath turned against England, who had shattered the fond illusions of Berlin by refusing to look on quietly while the neutrality of Belgium was violated. The philosopher of Hohen-Finow was transformed into an irascible Teuton; all the Prussian violence that ran in his veins, mingled with his Frankfort blood, suddenly came to the surface, and the professional calm of the statesman, accustomed to control his nerves, gave place to a dramatic outburst of anger.

From the spirited account given by Sir Edward Goschen in his dispatch to Sir Edward Grey, we can readily picture to ourselves the historic scene that took place in the Chancellor’s room at the German Foreign Office on the 4th of August 1914, after England had declared war. We can call up the attitude of the two actors: the Chancellor, his gray-bearded face purple with rage, his tall form leaning towards the British Ambassador, while the latter’s pale features maintain the habitual coolness of his race. In voicing his indignation, the German hit upon phrases more vivid and picturesque than would have been expected from him.

“Belgian neutrality, a scrap of paper!” These unlucky words will stick for ever to the memory of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg. This man of wide culture, with a more exalted sense of justice than many of his countrymen, has shown us that respect for treaties no longer existed for him, so long as strategic considerations demanded that they should be broken. The inviolability of small States, their independence and their right to live, had no more value in his eyes than the international agreements that sanction these principles. On the same day, in the Reichstag, the Chancellor admitted, without any subterfuges—a frankness which he regrets to-day—that the Imperial Government, by the invasion of Belgium, had transgressed the law of nations. But, he pointed out, necessity knows no law, and he tried to excuse himself by attributing, without any probability or material proof, a similar design to the French. Belgium should quietly have let herself be invaded; she would have been indemnified later on!

It was a sad disillusion for those who, thinking that they knew Bethmann-Hollweg, would never have regarded him as an unscrupulous politician. If he could not be a great minister, he might at least have endorsed Prussia’s signature and guarded the honour of the young German Empire. A mere nod from the Emperor was enough to make him the zealous vindicator of a crime. His language in this tragic crisis was that of a court sycophant without courage or conscience, not that of a statesman. In spite of his philosophy, he resigned himself to an act that disgraced Germany, and thus played the part, not of a patriotic and independent thinker, but of a courtier-philosopher.

VII.

To leave Rome for Berlin; to exchange the fine Caffarelli Palace on the Capitol for the modest residence that houses the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; to pass from the cloudless skies and bright sunshine of the Roman Campagna to the chill mists of the Spree; and, worst of all, to lose an almost independent position, and become the hard-working servant of the Kaiser and the recognized mentor of the Chancellor—all this is a severe test of self-denial for a German diplomat who, while still in the prime of life, has reached the height of his ambitions and the zenith of his career. We can realize, therefore, that Herr von Jagow did not accept ministerial honours without a struggle, and that he only assumed the mantle of Kiderlen-Wächter in obedience to repeated orders from his master.

The new Secretary of State appears to have been the spoilt child of Roman society. One may question, however, whether he possessed the difficult art of reading the souls of Italian statesmen and fathoming their secrets. The expedition to Tripoli was planned without the knowledge of the ambassador from the most important member of the Triplice. Like his colleagues, he did not learn of the scheme until it was beyond the range of discussion, so greatly did the Consulta dread that the Imperial Government would place its veto upon this first step towards the dismemberment of Turkey, the client and protégée of Germany. In spite of this, after Herr von Jagow’s return to Berlin, the credit of Italy there seemed on a firmer basis than ever. She now possessed, it was said, two representatives in Berlin instead of one: the ambassador of His Majesty King Victor Emmanuel, and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who adhered faithfully to his Italian sympathies.

This great friendship between Rome and Berlin did not prevent the Cabinet of the Quirinal from remaining neutral at first in the world-war, before resolutely opposing the Central Empires. It is true that Herr von Jagow had paid the Italians in their own coin, by not informing them of the plot hatched against Serbia, a plot that was certain to endanger their interests in the Balkan Peninsula, and to disturb the balance between Austrian ambitions and their own aspirations. Vienna and Rome were bound by a clause in the alliance to come to an understanding beforehand with regard to any alteration of the status quo in the Balkans. Italy protested against this neglect of treaty obligations, while at the same time pleading that the defensive character of the Triplice justified her in holding aloof from a struggle in which the aggressors were indubitably her allies.

At the Wilhelmstrasse, Herr von Jagow at first appeared to be slightly out of his element. His manner towards the foreign diplomatic corps was reserved; he almost stood on the defensive, as if fearing indiscreet questions. In point of fact, the European situation was full of uncertainty and danger. The Balkan War was at its height. The Imperial Government, in response to German public opinion, seemed anxious to maintain harmony between the Great Powers, which were acting as uneasy spectators of Turkey’s collapse. The Foreign Secretary’s wits were set vigorously to work, first of all in restraining and reprimanding Austria, and then in helping her, in concert with Italy, to obtain compensations that would look like diplomatic triumphs: the exclusion of Serbia from the Adriatic, the abandonment of Scutari by Montenegro, and the setting-up of an independent Albania. He did not part company with Austria until the moment when she tried in vain to raise trouble once more in the Balkans, after the treaty of peace had been definitively signed at Bucharest.

In relation to France Herr von Jagow, presumably in compliance with orders from above, showed himself far from cordial. When a question was asked in the Reichstag about the Nancy incident, his reply went beyond the legitimate tone of official displeasure. In his hasty and uncharitable judgment of facts that were not yet established, we may perhaps trace a secret desire to humour the hostile feelings towards France entertained by the majority in the Reichstag, and to win the favour of that majority. The maiden speech of the new Secretary of State fell rather flat. He himself openly confessed his nervousness at having to speak in public. Like most of his colleagues in the diplomatic profession, he lacks the gift of eloquence, and is readier with his pen than with his tongue.

This sagacious little man, with his strikingly youthful appearance (although he is now well on in the fifties), his carefully groomed person, his marked politeness of manner, and his artistic tastes, is the antithesis of Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter. The latter, a broad-shouldered Suabian, very deficient in breeding, but thoroughly good-natured, had a disconcerting abruptness that was sometimes redeemed by a flash of genial humour. In one aspect of their characters, however, these two Germans, the Prussian and the Würtemberger, were alike: in their disregard of small nationalities and their profound contempt for second-rate Powers. Punctually every Thursday, there used to arrive at each legation a letter written by the Secretary of State’s own hand, expressing his deep regret that he could not receive the minister on the Friday, which was the day set apart for the reception of envoys extraordinary. In other countries, no distinction is made between ambassadors and ministers plenipotentiary; the latter have the same access as their great colleagues to the head of the Foreign Office, whose time is quite as precious as that of the Foreign Secretary for the German Empire. “What is the use,” Herr von Jagow no doubt said to himself, as Herr von Kiderlen-Wächter had said before him, “of receiving this small fry of the diplomatic world? If they have any urgent business to transact, let them telephone to ask for an audience. But when it comes to discussing the condition of Europe with them every week, having to listen to their questions and to make replies—what a waste of time! How can the broader aspects of politics interest these gentry? As for asking them about what is going on in their paltry capitals, there is no need for me to do that; I get all I want from the excellent reports sent me by our agents at the inferior Courts.”

“No, sir,” one of those diplomats might object, “you were wrong in relying solely on those agents of yours. If you had been better acquainted with the state of feeling in Belgium, with the passionate devotion of the Belgians to their free institutions, with their unflinching resolve to resist all external pressure, from whatever source it might come, and to fight to the death for their neutrality and their independence, as precious in their eyes as national unity in those of the Germans—if you had known all this, you would perhaps have put your Emperor on his guard against miscalculations, against the danger of hastily invading a friendly little neighbour-country. You, personally, are not supposed to be of a pugnacious turn. On the other hand, you have too much insight and experience not to have seen, better than the professional soldiers of the General Staff, to what developments in the European crisis their policy would lead. You will say, perhaps, that you were not summoned to Berlin in order that you might give advice. Your function was to carry out the instructions of your Sovereign. It is just because you consented to play so self-effacing a rôle in the world-wide upheaval set in motion by the Emperor’s statesmanship, that you will be severely blamed, when the responsibility of each actor in the drama is finally settled.”

There is one matter on which Herr von Jagow could never see eye to eye with the representative of Belgium—to wit, the colonial question, which gave the German Foreign Office much food for anxious thought. One day, some months before the war, the Secretary of State, in the course of an informal conversation, expressed the opinion that King Leopold had been treated too indulgently over the partition of Central Africa at the Berlin Conference. Bismarck had been too generous; Belgium was not rich enough properly to develop the vast empire bequeathed her by her great king; it was an enterprise beyond her powers of expansion and her financial means, and she would find herself compelled to give it up. Germany, on the other hand, in view of her capacity for colonizing, her boundless resources, and her commercial requirements, had obtained far too small a share of African territory, and a fresh partition therefore seemed to be necessary. Herr von Jagow, in dilating upon this theme, tried to imbue his visitor with his own contempt for the title-deeds of small States. According to him, only the great Powers had the right and the ability to colonize. He even revealed what lay at the back of his mind—that in the changes which were passing over Europe to the advantage of the stronger nationalities, the small States could no longer enjoy the independent existence that they had hitherto been allowed to lead; they were doomed to disappear, or to gravitate towards the orbit of the Great Powers.

These disquieting suggestions were not made, of course, to the Belgian minister, but to the ambassador of another country. At the back of the diplomatic stage in a great capital, however, everything leaks out sooner or later; the personal views of the man who nominally directs foreign policy cannot be kept secret from interested parties. This was especially the case in Berlin, where, among the heads of legations, a certain number held more or less closely together, according as their countries were more or less exposed to the menace of the German colossus, whose growth and appetites they watched with a very natural vigilance.

If we append these remarks of Herr von Jagow to those made at his final interview with Sir Edward Goschen, in which he lamented the bankruptcy of his plans for friendship with England and reconciliation with France, we can readily guess what terms he and Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, those two pacifists, would have demanded for the formation of such an agreement. The two Western Powers would have been forced cheerfully to abandon to Germany the little States which obstruct her development along the North Sea coast and prevent her from breathing freely. They would have been compelled to allow Germany eventually to make these States, willing or unwilling, enter the Germanic federation, which would thus have become the great Empire, the heir of its remote mediæval prototype, ever present in the dreams of the German intellectuals.

VIII.

As you walk along the Wilhelmstrasse, coming from Unter den Linden, you see, to the right, a long building of only one story, in the obsolete style of the early nineteenth century. It looks very bare and unpretentious by the side of the eighteenth century mansions that flank it right and left and the palatial Government offices, of more recent construction, that lie opposite. This venerable edifice is no other than the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Auswärtiges Amt, of the Empire. Here, fifty years ago, were planned the changes that the Hohenzollerns wrought with their swords in the map of Europe; here is the real starting-point of their Imperial power. As you enter and go up the marble staircase, you catch the musty smell that comes from masses of papers and documents in an old and ill-ventilated building. Follow the main corridor which cuts it in half, and a polite attendant will escort you to a room that is scarcely any larger than a monastic cell. You go in, and find yourself face to face with the Under-Secretary of State.

Herr Zimmermann is a blond Teuton, with a military moustache and a pleasant smile that gives promise of a cordial welcome. This high official is a self-made man in the full sense of the term. He won such distinction by his services as consul in the Far East that the authorities recalled him and gave him an appointment at Foreign Office headquarters. Here, by sheer merit, he has risen to the exalted post in which his capacity for work and his sound judgment have won him the confidence of the Chancellor and of two successive Foreign Secretaries, as well as the good graces of the Emperor. Every one in Berlin thinks that Herr Zimmermann, who has gone so far, is likely to go still further.

He might reasonably be called a godsend to diplomats. Heads of legations and chargés d’affaires, looking for news or short of information, apply to him, in order to be able to apprise their Government of matters in which they are interested. The Under-Secretary of State merely says what has to be said, without betraying any secrets of the Imperial Chancellery; but this is enough to put his hearers on the right track, for his communications are always accurate.

Is it possible for us to divine his personal feelings with regard to the war? Would it be impugning his patriotism to doubt whether he was firmly convinced of its necessity? These questions are not easy to answer, for on this topic no German capable of frankness, unless he is hopelessly saturated with Pan-Germanism, will speak out nowadays before a stranger. What I can say, without fear of contradiction, is this: that the Under-Secretary of State was not a wholehearted supporter of the policy of alliances bequeathed by Bismarck, since he realized all the entanglements and dangers that they involved. How often, during the Balkan crisis, was he seen to express his impatience with the Cabinet of Vienna, when the latter turned a deaf ear to the good advice telegraphed from Berlin! When I took leave of him, before returning to my unhappy country, which had already been invaded by the advance-guard of the German army, he said to me, in a tone of unfeigned regret: “Ah, this war means the end of the policy of alliances!” What a world of sorrow and disappointment lay in this avowal!

His constant relations with the directors of great companies, with commercial and industrial magnates, who were invited to his bachelor table together with foreign diplomats, led the latter to suppose that their host shared the pacific ideas of their fellow-guests. A prolonged era of peace was required, if the vigorous development of the national resources was to continue. This is an incontestable truth, which cannot be repeated too often. Moreover, a prolonged era of peace would have enabled the Germans, by virtue of their genius for organizing, their methodical ways, and their capacity for hard work, to become the leading nation in almost every sphere of international competition, owning the main sources of industrial production, and holding the unquestioned economic supremacy of Europe. Yet they have been mad enough to make a bid for this supremacy by a war that is utterly at variance with the progress of civilization! It is difficult to see how so enlightened a man as Herr Zimmermann, one so closely in touch with the needs of industrial Germany, could have been anything but a pacifist.

The principal task of those who direct foreign affairs is the same in all great capitals. One must be a Bismarck to plan one war after another a long time in advance, while conducting the foreign policy of the State. Bismarck’s excuse lies in the fact that these wars were essential for German unity. Once his end was gained, the all-powerful minister put Prussia’s sword back in its sheath, and devoted himself to consolidating the glory and the conquests that had been won. The Berlin Foreign Office cannot really be suspected of having worked in the dark against the maintenance of a peace policy, such as was pursued during the last twenty years of the Iron Chancellor. To avoid needless conflicts, to scatter the clouds as soon as they gathered at any point on the horizon, to ward off the frightful perils of a European conflagration—this has been the noble duty and the thankless task of diplomats throughout the last few years, in the positions of watchmen or pilots which they have held in foreign countries or at the head of the home department. At the Wilhelmstrasse, as elsewhere, the officials were faced with the duty of trying to fulfil these lofty moral obligations; they did so with a mixture of civility and gruffness, and their changes of mood were too obvious, but they undoubtedly meant well.

Here arises a difficult question. In view of the definite aspirations of a large element in the German nation, with their manifest desire for expansion, how did the Foreign Office propose to satisfy them? Was it merely aiming at a vague peace policy, or had it any tangible schemes in view?

A book and a pamphlet published in 1913, when a festival was held to celebrate the twenty-fifth year of William II.’s reign, gives us the key to the riddle. They throw a discreet but sufficient light upon the policy of expansion recommended at the Wilhelmstrasse.

The book—Imperial Germany—is by Prince von Bülow, who thus broke the silence he had observed since the day of his retirement. He reviews the political history of the Empire for the past quarter of a century, and points to the path which it ought to follow in the future both at home and abroad.

According to the ex-Chancellor, the Germany of to-day can no longer cling to Bismarck’s Continental policy or obey the precepts handed down by him to his successors. She must open out for herself new and broader tracks, corresponding to the progress achieved in the last thirty years. During this period, the population has increased by twenty million souls, and her industry, fostered by an enormous growth in labour-power, has crossed the seas in order to distribute over the entire globe those products which the home markets were no longer capable of absorbing. This vast industrial output has made it necessary to build a mercantile marine, to which more and more units are added every year, and this commercial fleet has brought in its train the construction of an imposing navy. The last-named enterprise was fraught with difficulties; for we could not avoid exciting the jealousy of England, and in order to succeed it was essential to beware of arousing her hostility. England looks with no friendly eye on the rise of a foreign naval power, which might seek one day to contend with her the mastery of the seas. Germany has no intention of issuing such a challenge to England, as the France of Louis XIV. and the United Provinces did in days gone by. Although the German navy has become, in the course of a few years, the second in the world, its sole mission is to watch over German trade and German interests, to see that they are not obstructed in any way. Just as German industry, after being exclusively domestic and national not long since, has become world-wide, so German statesmanship, which was exclusively European in the days of Bismarck—for it then had no other object than to secure for Germany her rightful place in the first rank of Continental Powers—has likewise been raised to a world-wide plane. Prince von Bülow is careful to insist upon the purely defensive rôle that the Imperial fleet has marked out for itself, and, in order to reassure us as to the peaceful aims of the new statesmanship, he quotes the following passage from a speech made by him in the Reichstag on 6th November 1906: “It is the duty of our generation to uphold our position on the Continent, which is the basis of our international position; to protect our interests abroad; and to pursue a sober, judicious, and far-sighted international policy, limited in such a way that the safety of the German people shall incur no risks and the future of the nation shall not be jeopardized.”

Sage counsels these! But to our Latin mind, with its passion for clearness, the phrases “international policy,” “transmarine policy,” “world policy,” which are so plentifully sprinkled about the ex-Chancellor’s pages, convey no very precise meaning. Was it world-policy that involved, for instance, the sending of a few cruisers to the Mexican coast to protect German trade and German residents during the war between Huerta and Carranza? Was it the same policy that brought about the dispatch of a squadron to the China Seas, in order to seize Kiauchau and Tsingtau, and to obtain by main force from the Chinese Government the concession of a naval station and a rich mining territory, with the right of erecting formidable defence-works? Prince von Bülow has himself felt the need of throwing a little light for his readers upon the dark recesses of his thought. He gives us to understand that Germany now possesses the means, not only of safeguarding her interests, of resisting any attack, but also of extending her influence everywhere, especially in Asia Minor and Africa.

The pamphlet entitled Die Weltpolitik und kein Krieg (“A World-policy without War”) is more explicit. It bears no signature, but according to the view generally accepted in the best-informed political circles in Berlin, it was issued under the auspices of the Foreign Office. The latter has not denied its paternity.

The nameless author first of all sets forth the reasons why a Continental war is apparently no longer to be feared. The Balkan League has dissolved in blood, and, no less than Turkey, those allies of yesterday who are implacable foes to-day will need time for healing their wounds and recruiting their strength. France has her hands so full with the pacification of Morocco that she does not wish to cause any complications in Europe. Russia is turning her eyes more and more towards Central Asia. Anglo-German relations are improving every day. Germany is devoting herself to the expansion of her commercial and industrial power; she has invested large sums of capital in her railway enterprises in Asia Minor, but she must not extend these enterprises indefinitely, since it might not be feasible for her to protect them in the event of war. Germany is not yet a Mediterranean power; to defend the concessions granted to her subjects in Syria and Asia Minor, her fleet would have to pass under the guns of Gibraltar, Malta, and Bizerta.

There remains Africa. Sir Edward Grey has stated in Parliament that Britain will not oppose the advance of German colonization, for she herself has no thought of acquiring fresh colonies. Portugal and Belgium are not in a position to colonize their African territories: the former, because of her financial weakness and her internal dissensions; the latter, because she does not wish to spend the sums needed for developing the Congo, which she annexed in the delusive hope that it would cost her no sacrifices. German capital and the aptitude of the German race for colonizing, its commercial ability, and its spirit of enterprise, are the only factors capable of spreading civilization in the heart of the Dark Continent and exploiting its wealth. The co-operation of Germany, therefore, is essential both for the Belgians and for the Portuguese. She might occupy a position in their colonies similar to that of France in Tunis and Morocco, or to that of Russia in Persia. It would be a peaceful penetration and development, in which the Belgians, with their keen business instinct, would be willing to take part, even if the Portuguese did not clearly understand its necessity.

This is something definite to go upon. The international or world policy, as conceived by the Wilhelmstrasse in 1913, was a colonial expansion, proceeding on peaceful lines.

In the ensuing winter the Imperial Government opened negotiations with the London Cabinet for the demarcation of British and German spheres of influence in the African colonies of Portugal; the former was to have comprised Mozambique, the latter Angola. Without waiting for the conclusion of these negotiations, a committee of research was formed in Hamburg, for the purpose of investigating the agricultural and mineral wealth of Angola, and great German banks tried to obtain control of the Lobito Bay railway, which runs from the coast of the Portuguese colony to Katanga in the Belgian Congo.

In the foregoing pages, while sketching the portraits of those who direct Germany’s foreign policy, I have tried to summarize the views of each, as they appear to me in the light of their acts, their private statements, and their occasional public declarations. We have seen how the Chancellor nursed the hope of maintaining friendly relations with England, come what might; how Herr von Jagow set little store by the national life of small States; and how the more practical minds of the Under-Secretary and the Foreign Office staff contented themselves with immediate colonial expansion and the opening up of new fields for the activities of the German race. All these individual aspirations, however, were overshadowed by the will, as yet inscrutable, of the Emperor. When that will was revealed in the tragic last days of July, these men all hastened to obey its bidding with equal alacrity.

CHAPTER III.

THE ARMY AND NAVY—THE WAR PARTY.

I.

PRUSSIA is before all else a military State, and since 1871 Prussian militarism has laid its heavy hand upon Southern Germany, the inhabitants of which were formerly noted for their peaceful ways. The warlike spirit of the Prussians is the fruit of the statesmanship pursued by their rulers, those Electors of Brandenburg who afterwards became Kings of Prussia. The Elector of the Thirty Years’ War period, George William, had played but a humble part in that struggle. His sole desire was to keep his States independent, free from the grasp of the Swedes and of the Imperial troops, and he trimmed ingloriously between Gustavus Adolphus and Ferdinand II. The Great Elector, Frederick William, was the first to embody the territorial ambitions of his house. In order to realize them, he saw the necessity of a powerful standing army, out of all proportion to the size and status of his Electorate. These troops enabled him to figure among the adversaries of Louis XIV., and, at the Battle of Fehrbellin, to strike a deadly blow at the power and reputation of the Swedes in Germany. The Prussian army had now vindicated itself as an effective fighting force. It was the means by which this martial prince extended his territory and made it large enough to be converted into a kingdom under his successor, Frederick I., who obtained a royal crown from the Emperor Leopold as the price of his military and financial support.

The second King of Prussia, Frederick William I., although not of an enterprising nature, applied himself to enlarging and perfecting the instrument which, in the hands of his son Frederick II. (the Great), was destined to become the finest army in Europe and the model that other nations did their best to copy. After fighting victoriously, however, under the command of a great leader, against a coalition of three powerful monarchies, and showing itself more than a match for the best troops that Russia, Austria, and France could muster, the Prussian army suddenly lost its pre-eminent position. The eclipse was so complete that it seemed at first to be final.

The Prussians were repulsed at Valmy, and afterwards proved helpless against the conscripts of the Republic. In spite of this, their military prestige was not yet seriously impaired. Thanks to the genius of Napoleon and the wonderful efficiency of his soldiers, it was entirely shattered in the campaign of 1806. It was not only the battle of Jena, but another humiliating defeat, inflicted the same day by one of Napoleon’s subordinates on the King of Prussia’s troops, that proved the decadence of the latter and the incapacity of their generals, trained in the school of Frederick the Great. The disaster of Jena is readily acknowledged in Berlin, but the German historians have little to say about the day of Auerstädt, the true Nemesis for Rossbach.

Prussian militarism raised its head once more during the war of liberation. It was the life and soul of the resistance to Napoleon, and contributed its share towards the final deliverance. Still, we must beware of overrating the part played by Blücher, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Yorck, Bülow, and the other generals of Frederick William III. in 1813 and 1814 The Corsican was vanquished by his own blunders—the exhausting war in the Peninsula, where the best blood of France was spilt to no purpose, and the ill-fated Russian campaign. During the early summer of 1813, the Russians and the Prussians, in several hard-fought battles, met with nothing but defeat. The emancipation of Germany would have been far from assured, if Austria, who had completed her preparations, had not joined hands with Russia and Prussia to overwhelm Napoleon. During the wars of the French Empire, it is the Archduke Charles and the Austrian troops, not the Prussian armies, that can claim the honour of having offered the most stubborn resistance to the great conqueror. In the same way, during the Hundred Days, old Blücher—“Marshal Forward,” as the Germans call him—is not entitled to the first place among the heroes of Waterloo. The chief glory may fairly be assigned to Wellington and to the bulldog tenacity of the British.

A long second period of decadence set in for Prussian militarism after 1815, under the peaceful reigns of Frederick William III. and William IV. Its decline was particularly apparent at the time of the inglorious Convention of Olmütz. To William I. fell the task of re-forging the chain of great Hohenzollern warrior-princes, broken at the death of Frederick the Great. Not that he himself was endowed with the talents of a commander-in-chief; when it came to actual fighting he was merely a soldier. But he had a faculty more precious in a king than the art of leading an army: he was an excellent judge of men, and could choose the most suitable tools for carrying out the plans he had sanctioned. William I. made Bismarck head of the Prussian ministry, leaving him a free hand for conducting the bold policy that was to establish the greatness of the Prussian royal house on the basis of German unity, and then gave him two indispensable fellow-workers—Roon, the reorganizer of the army, and Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff. Strictly speaking, the future Field-Marshal did not evolve any new system of strategy, but he had absorbed the teachings of Frederick the Great and the object lessons of Napoleon so thoroughly that he became in his turn a master in the art of war.

As for Prussian militarism, or, in other words, the military caste, the victories of 1866 and 1870 completely turned its head. It came to regard itself as the very embodiment of the nation. Never had it been more powerful or more domineering than in the generation preceding the present war. Woe to the civilian who ventured to criticise the army, or got in an officer’s way on the pavement, or did not cringe before the fiat of a corps commander! The recent Zabern affair showed us that the German military can allow themselves anything. On this occasion, public opinion finally gave its verdict in their favour, notwithstanding the protests (speedily silenced!) of the Reichstag.

II.

In striving to maintain the whole German army at the high level attained by the Prussian, William II. has followed in the footsteps of his grandfather. He has not, however, been so happy in his choice of men; Moltkes and Roons are hard to find at any time. During his reign, as during that of William I., the Great General Staff and the War Office have worked in close unison. The former, to which officers are appointed after a careful sifting, has to make elaborate plans for strategical operations against whatever enemy the German army may have to face; the latter’s task is to organize and improve the forces, and to introduce and defend in the Reichstag the war budget and any military measures that may be required. To these two bodies we must add a third, more secret in its workings, less easy to trace, but in certain cases a decisive factor—the Emperor’s war Cabinet. The promotion and retirement of officers is one of its most formidable functions. After the annual manœuvres, it carries out the sentences passed by the sovereign upon those who have failed through incapacity, illness, or bad luck. In the Emperor’s name it may intervene in any question that concerns the service. Its influence is even extended to foreign affairs, if the army is called upon to play a part in their shaping.

Soon after the opening of the twentieth century there began to appear, chiefly in Prussia, a steady drift of opinion in favour of fresh European conflicts. The adherents of this creed were known abroad under the comprehensive name of “war party.” They were drawn, in the first place, from the field-marshals and “colonel-generals” (Generalobersten), the generals on the active list, the aides-de-camp of the Emperor, the hotheads of the Staff, and the more ambitious officers of all grades. To these must be added the retired army men, reactionary squireens who lived on their estates, and saw the ever-growing taxation accompanied by a rise in the national wealth, in the standard of comfort and luxury, while their own incomes could not show a corresponding advance. These malcontents held that a little blood-letting would be of great service in purifying and strengthening the social body, and in restoring to the patrician caste that preponderance which was its due, and which seemed likely to be usurped by the self-made plutocrats of industry and commerce.

Apart from the military element, which naturally carried most weight, the war party included a large number of civilians—the majority of the high Prussian officials; the true-blue Conservatives in the Reichstag and the “Conservative Imperialists,” together with the members of other middle-class groups; and the patriotic writers, the journalists, the intellectual cream of the universities and schools. All these were obsessed with the vision of a Germany subjugating the world by her arms, as she thought to have already conquered it by her superior culture and her incomparable science. Their unhealthy ambitions were encouraged by a cantankerous Press, jealous of the races that embody the civilization of the past, and choosing to regard them as decadent rivals of the noble Germanic stock, which was destined to give an enslaved world the opportunity of enjoying the civilization of the future.

The war party was faithfully supported by the Wehrverein (Union of Defence), a military league which in the space of a few years spread its powerful roots over the whole of Germany. The Wehrverein did not confine itself to the task of defending the lawful interests of the army. The proposals put forward at its periodical meetings dealt not only with reforms that seemed desirable in the supply of munitions, in the organization of troops, and in the technical departments, but also with the political designs that the army would be called upon to carry out. Finally, the warlike spirit was kept alive among the lower classes by numerous associations of veterans, the Kriegsvereine (War Leagues). Their ominous name is enough to show that they strove their hardest to counteract the growing force of pacific tendencies among a nation in which the amazing development of its industry and commerce had bred a feverish desire to amass wealth.

The demands of the war party found expression in a literature that was half political, half military. The writers openly advocated a European conflict as the only means of completing the work of Bismarck—that is to say, of giving Germany her rightful place at the head of the nations. A typical product of this school is the now celebrated book by the retired cavalry general, Friedrich von Bernhardi, entitled Germany and the Next War. In spite of the lofty moral and philosophical tone that he often adopts, the author is more daring and outspoken than any of his fellow-scribes. Among all that has been published in the last few years regarding the crucial question of Germany’s future, this book of Bernhardi’s has proved the most prophetic, for war has been declared for the very reasons to which he drew attention and for the very objects which he advocated. The foreign public was unwise in not paying more attention at the time to these danger-signals. The work of the military philosopher has become a text-book for German patriots; his sophisms have poisoned the mind of the present generation.

The hothouse atmosphere in which politics were carried on for three years before the war was calculated to force the growth of the war party, and these fanatics never ceased egging on the Imperial Government towards the goal of their multifarious efforts. There is no doubt, moreover, as to their sway over the mind of a monarch who lends a willing ear to advice that chimes in with his own ambitions. Although the party has no regular organization, although it has worked in the dark, trying to disclaim all responsibility, it must be regarded, after the Emperor, as one of the chief agents in the present catastrophe.

III.

Before the war, the Chief of the General Staff, after the retirement of Count von Schlieffen, was General von Moltke, nephew of the great Field-Marshal. Was it merely his professional merits that determined the Emperor’s choice, or had he partly to thank the famous name that he bears? Those who know him lean towards the latter view. Defects and vices, however, are more often inherited than talents, and a name is not a fetish that brings victory. Physically, General von Moltke does not resemble his uncle, the spare old man of the most familiar portraits. He is tall, massive, and powerfully built, with a haughty face and a disdainful expression. Notwithstanding his chilly politeness, the scorn that every typical Teuton feels for foreigners can be read in his eyes.

As to the moral outlook of this leading figure in the military world, a passage from a report by M. Jules Cambon, dated 6th May 1913, will suffice to give an idea: “‘We must throw overboard,’ said General von Moltke before some of his countrymen, ‘all the stock commonplaces about the responsibility of the aggressor. As soon as there is a ten-to-one chance in favour of war, we must forestall our opponent, commence hostilities without more ado, and mercilessly crush all resistance.’” It was not merely a rapid assault that the General recommended, but a surprise attack before the declaration of war, as if, in a duel, one were to strike one’s opponent before he had had time to assume a posture of defence. The sudden violation of Belgian neutrality, after our Government had been allowed one night to think matters over, was one of these murderous blows approved by the Chief of the General Staff.

In the summer of 1913 General von Heeringen, who was far from popular in Parliament, gave up his post as head of the War Office. His successor, General von Falkenhayn, is exceptionally young for his rank and position. Who would have foretold such a rapid rise for this officer at the time when, heavily in debt and threatened with dismissal from the army, he had the good fortune to become attached to the China expeditionary force of 1900? His luck being backed by intelligence, he came under the favourable notice of Marshal von Waldersee, the leader of the expedition. Falkenhayn’s debts were paid, and he recovered his place in the good books of the Emperor. A finely chiselled face, brilliant but disconcerting eyes, great fluency of speech (as he showed by getting a hearing in the Reichstag for his defence of the outrages committed by officers at Zabern)—these are the most salient features of this newcomer in the political world of Berlin. His restless ambition and his rivalry with General von Moltke, who was apt to lord it over him in his early days at the War Office, have only come to light since the outbreak of the war.

On the evening of November 6, 1913, at a dinner given to King Albert at Potsdam, the Chief of the General Staff said to the Belgian military attaché: “War with France at an early date is inevitable, and the victory of the German army is certain, even if it is purchased by tremendous sacrifices and by a few preliminary set-backs. Nothing can stop the furor teutonicus once it has been let loose. The German nation will rise as one man to take up the gauntlet which the French people will have the insane foolhardiness to throw down.” The General omitted to add—the remark was, from his point of view, too trite a one to make—that the war of 1870, with its relatively small armies, would be mere child’s play in comparison with the struggle which Germany was preparing. He also forbore to speak of the ferocious methods which the German generals would be ordered to employ.

It was not unknown abroad, however, at any rate among jurists familiar with the work of the Hague Conferences, that there existed in Germany a “Code for War on Land” (Kriegsgebrauch im Landeskriege), published in Berlin by the Staff in 1902. The handbook, it was realized, had been written in quite a different spirit from that which animated the labours of the two Conferences. This special war-code for the use of German officers openly condemned all humanitarian ideas, all tender regard for persons or property, as incompatible with the nature and object of war; it authorized every means of attaining that object, and it left the choice and practice of those means to the entire discretion of the corps commanders. Still, however uneasy the exponents of international law may have felt as to the spread of such theories in Germany, they were reassured by the Imperial Government’s solemn acceptance of the 1907 Hague Convention and of the moral principles laid down therein. Accordingly it is with feelings of surprise and horror, shared by the whole civilized world, that they look on at the war waged in the Emperor’s name.

The conduct of this war has indeed been ruthless in the extreme. Almost from the very outset the invader has worked as much havoc as possible, in order to terrorize the inhabitants and to reduce them more quickly to submission. The Germans of 1870 had shown too much tenderness towards the civilian, too much respect for historic monuments, too much consideration for private property. Murder, arson, and pillage have followed in the wake of their descendants. We have learnt how detachments of soldiers, specially drafted for this purpose from the engineers’ corps, used various incendiary appliances to destroy unoffending little towns and villages—Louvain, Tamines, Rethy, and other places in Belgium, and Orchies in France. Belgium was the first victim of this furor teutonicus of which General von Moltke boasted—Belgium, who, after putting up a heroic fight against her violators, expected to be treated as a conquered country, but not to be flung as a prey to the disciplined brutes of the invading army. This is one of the processes on which the General relied for winning an early victory, that victory of which he spoke with the faith of a zealot. It has turned out, however, that these abominable methods, instead of forcing the Belgians to confess themselves beaten, have only steeled them to a more vigorous resistance.

Were there not other secret processes, other revelations of frightfulness, that the German General Staff had up its sleeve? Among the hidden weapons that it has wielded with the greatest effect is its vast network of spies, established among Germany’s neighbours, among all her supposed enemies, at every point where it could be of any service. The foresight displayed in this system, the perfection to which it was brought, were marvellous. Even the level-headed English were almost thrown off their balance, when they found out how well these emissaries had done their work, not only round the coast of Britain, but even at the uttermost ends of the Pacific, on the distant shores of Chile.

IV.

But the advantages which, according to our opponents, were destined to ensure their triumph, were the superiority of their strategy and tactics, and the careful preparation of their army down to the last detail, far beyond anything that their rivals had achieved.

“The idea is prevalent abroad,” said General von Moltke in 1910 to General Jungbluth, the commander of King Albert’s household troops, “that our General Staff is constantly preparing plans of campaign, with an eye to all the possibilities of a European war. This is a mistake. We occupy ourselves with the question of the transport, concentration, and provisioning of our troops, and the employment of the new means of communication. You would be astonished if you saw the offices of our General Staff. They look like the head offices of a railway.” The only conclusion to be drawn from these words is that the plan of the 1914 campaign, the plan for an invasion of France and a rapid onslaught, had long since been worked out, and was reposing in a secret drawer somewhere in the Königsplatz building. We may even surmise that the march on Paris, pursued across the central plains of Belgium and the valley of the Meuse in order to turn the defences of the French frontier, had been traced by the aging, but still steady, hand of Marshal von Moltke. It is characterized by those wide-sweeping movements that he loved; in fact, the whole scheme bears the impress of his personality. Nevertheless, the methods by which it was carried out and the idea of an ultimatum to an unsuspecting neutral country must be ascribed to his nephew. I have good grounds for believing this, in view of Herr Zimmermann’s last words to me on the 5th of August: “Since the mobilization, all the power has been in the hands of the military authorities; all the decisions issue from them.” By this statement he implied that the responsibility for the invasion of Belgium lay with the General Staff and with its chief.

The General Staff and the War College for the training of officers had clung faithfully to the strategy which had led to the victories of the past—that of bringing up superior forces with all speed to a given point, and in this way breaking the enemy’s line of defence; or that of outflanking and surrounding one of his wings, and thus overcoming his resistance by a flank attack. This method of going to work presupposes an offensive. Moltke, like Napoleon, held that merely by taking the offensive one has gone halfway towards winning the battle. These maxims were in harmony with the old Prussian traditions, as well as with the qualities instilled into the Prussian or Prussianized soldier, and, finally, with the speedy mobilization of the Imperial army. The decisive victories which in the space of a fortnight had brought the Bulgarians almost to the gates of Constantinople, once more bore witness, so the Germans asserted, to the value of this strategy. Had not the King of Greece, it was added, publicly paid a tribute to the instruction received by him at the Berlin Staff College, on the day when, like a good pupil at a prize-giving, he had been presented with a field-marshal’s baton by the Emperor in person?

The Manchurian campaign, it is true, had warned the world—as was noted at the time by military writers—that a revolution was taking place in the art of war. It revealed a new system of strategy and tactics, applied by the Russians and Japanese on a front of enormous length—long parallel lines of trenches, where both sides burrowed themselves in for weeks, before there was any possibility of striking a decisive blow. The experts of Berlin, however, would not hear of this war of moles. They were confident, even now, of making an attack on France with a rapidity that nothing could withstand. They went on dreaming only of whirlwind offensives, of whole armies forced to capitulate, of fresh Sadowas and Sedans.

While the German strategy was still looked upon with general admiration, the case was different as regards the tactics, particularly the use of infantry, which was much discussed by foreign officers resident in Berlin. One of them, on returning from the great manœuvres of 1913, confessed to me his astonishment at the fighting methods to which the infantry were trained. “They still go in for the assault in close formation,” he said, “the Sturmangriff, which used to be successful. But nowadays, on a battlefield swept by artillery and machine-guns, these close formations would give the other side as good a target as they could wish for. If an attack were led in this way against an enemy who is under cover or is himself determined not to give ground, there would soon be nothing left of it but a heap of dead bodies.”

To judge by opinions that I heard on all sides in Berlin, German strategy and tactics have made no advance since 1870; it would seem that in the eyes of the General Staff they reached their acme at that date. In the equipment and technical preparation of units, on the other hand, Germany can point to a continuous record of progress.

V.

During the first years of William II.’s reign, the work of maintaining Germany’s military superiority bore a twofold aspect—to preserve for Germany her place in the front rank of European Powers, the place she had won at the price of two great wars; and to ward off attack, to keep all possible foes at bay. The army, apparently, was not looked upon as an instrument of conquest. It did not seem in any real sense to threaten the Empire’s neighbours, although, with its arrogant demeanour, it had an air of openly defying them to make any aggressive move. Has it been the same for the last ten years or so? A mere study of the most recent military laws will dispel any such notion. The army has been enlarged, equipped, and trained with a view to making war at no distant date.

In 1871, it had a peace establishment of eighteen corps or 401,000 men, excluding commissioned and non-commissioned officers. This force remained unchanged until 1880. Five army bills, passed between 1880 and 1889, aimed at increasing and perfecting its equipment, but the advance in its numbers, slow at the outset, cannot be said to have kept pace with the very rapid growth in the population. Before 1913, a portion of the available contingent had received no military training. Financial motives and the difficulty of raising new taxes prevented the successive War Ministers—so the Government declared—from calling up as many men as they would have liked, and from enlarging the cadres to a greater extent. These motives suddenly disappeared, as soon as William II.’s warlike designs took definite shape. Acting under the Emperor’s orders, the Chancellor did not hesitate to resort to extraordinary financial measures, such as no other country has ever adopted in time of peace.

In 1905, the two years’ term of service, which had already been tried experimentally, was made a permanent institution for the infantry, and the establishment rose to 505,000 men. In 1911, the bill for the military quinquennium anticipated only the small increase of 10,000 men even by 1915, but it introduced important technical improvements in machine-guns, artillery, supply and transport, and so forth. In 1912, when the 1911 act had scarcely begun to take effect, a fresh army bill was proposed. Public opinion was still in a ferment over the events of the past summer and the aftermath of the Agadir episode. The new act, taking advantage of this wave of patriotism, at once embodied, for working purposes, the measures anticipated by the bill of 1911. It created two new army corps, one for the western frontier, the other for the eastern, and raised the peace establishment to 544,000 men.

The character of the 1911 and 1912 acts is different from that of the preceding measures. Their primary object was to improve the quality of the army. They both tended to make it a more effective instrument for fighting, and one more ready for immediate use at the outbreak of hostilities.

One might have supposed that after such marked progress the War Office would have rested on its laurels. It did nothing of the kind. Towards the end of 1912, when the Balkan League was winning its first victories, there set in a current of opinion, strongly encouraged by the Imperial Government, in favour of demanding reinforcements to fill up the gaps that still existed. The Wehrverein distinguished itself by its frantic propaganda on behalf of new armaments. A Press campaign was organized. The Emperor gave his sanction to the movement, and in a speech at Königsberg declared that the principle of compulsory service should be applied on a uniform basis. The Chancellor, following in his master’s footsteps, announced in February, at the annual meeting of landed proprietors, that the country must be prepared for fresh military burdens.

After this official flourish of trumpets, the bill was laid on the table of the Reichstag on March 18, 1913. It fixed the peace establishment, officers and non-commissioned included, at 815,000; the additions were estimated at 4,000 officers, 15,000 N.C.O.’s, and 117,000 men. The increase applied to every arm—infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and supply and transport corps. It was a mighty leap! The measures anticipated by the law of 1912 were to come into force by the end of 1913. Finally, the bill contained a clause trebling the war treasure kept in reserve for the first requirements of a mobilization: it was raised from 150,000,000 to 300,000,000 marks (£15,000,000) in gold, besides 150,000,000 (£7,500,000) in silver.

Was the danger really so pressing? Was the storm already brewing on the frontiers of the Empire? If not, it was hard to justify these hasty measures, especially the financial part of the scheme, the forced levy, to cover the enormous expenses, £50,000,000, which these measures would entail. The explanatory statement, indeed, was far from convincing. It confined itself to remarking that passing events in the Balkans had altered the balance of power in Europe. In the war that she might be compelled to wage, Germany would have only herself to rely upon, and would have to guard, perhaps against several opponents, frontiers of great length and largely unprovided with natural defences. Hence the vital need of employing and organizing all the forces at her disposal.

The main ideas of the bill were: to introduce a uniform system of military service, with numbers increasing at the same rate as the population; to improve the quality of the first-line troops—in other words, the younger section of the army; to arrange for a more speedy mobilization; and—an object that had always been kept in view—to perfect the technical equipment. In round numbers, an increase of 63,000 men each year was expected. The 1913 act is full of suggestive references to telegraphs, telephones, balloons, aeroplanes, and motor-cars; but it volunteers no information regarding the heavy artillery and the siege-guns which were destined to startle the world in 1914. This formidable addition to the destructive power of the German army was carefully kept secret. The military authorities had for a long time firmly believed that their army was invincible, and the possession of such irresistible weapons must have served to strengthen their confidence.

The Chancellor, in supporting the bill, dwelt more fully on the ideas set forth in the explanatory statement. In vague phrases, he hinted that peace was far from secure, raising up bogeys to frighten his audience—the French jingoes, now more heated than ever, and the Russian Pan-Slavists, with their ceaseless intrigues. The War Minister maintained in all seriousness that the new law had no aggressive aim, that it must be construed, not as a threat to other nations, but as a guarantee of peace. General von Heeringen was asking us to swallow a good deal!

As soon as the debate opened at the Budget Committee, it was evident that the bill was certain to pass. A month later, the committee approved it, without examining the financial side, and the Government had to abandon all hope of seeing both parts of the bill, the military and the financial, passed by the same majority. In the Reichstag, only the Poles, the Socialists, and the Alsace-Lorrainers ventured to vote against the military proposals.

The Wehrverein, however, was not satisfied. In a meeting held at Leipzig on May 18, it suggested that two new army corps should be formed, and recommended, “in order that no enemy should ever again set his foot on the soil of the Fatherland,” that every care should be taken to foster the martial and patriotic spirit of the community, the spirit of the army being that of the nation.

However much we may wish to shut our eyes to the fact, we can hardly fail to see in the 1913 act a preparation for making war at no distant date. Its call to arms is as clear as the note of a bugle that summons men to the fight. Yet Europe, with her eyes riveted on other visions—the second Balkan War was imminent—paid far too little attention to the Reichstag debates. Perhaps she was still misled by the spurious pacifism of the Kaiser. The Triple Entente continued to harbour the most peaceful intentions, as is attested by impartial observers who were well-informed as to the state of public opinion in the three countries and as to the ideals of their statesmen. The desire to provoke a war, therefore, can only be imputed to that Government and that nation which were arming to the teeth for battle and for conquest.

VI.

When one met Grand Admiral von Tirpitz in some official drawing-room in Berlin, and had a talk with him, one felt oneself in the presence of an interesting personality—what in England is known as “a strong man.” Among all the advisers of William II., there was no one who gave such an impression of strength and authority. With his fan-shaped beard, his broad forehead and thinning hair above it, his eyes, hard and piercing even behind double eye-glasses, his imposing figure, that showed a tendency to stoutness, he would have looked like a great manufacturer or financial magnate rather than a sailor, but for the numerous decorations pinned all over his chest. As a matter of fact, he is an office man, an organizer who had never held any high command at sea before he attracted the Emperor’s discerning eye and was appointed head of the Admiralty. He was at the time director of the naval station at Kiel, the first military port of the Empire. This station he had entirely transformed, in the teeth of criticism and jobbery, dominating all with his iron will, and making a clean sweep of disorder and red tape. The German fleet owes to him the organization of its torpedoboat section—which has not revealed its prowess during the war, although its creator cannot be blamed for that—and of the quite recently formed flotilla of submarines.

Tirpitz has been head of the Admiralty for eighteen years, a ministerial length of life that no Chancellor or Secretary of State has yet reached under William II. In order to remain so long in the Imperial favour, he has had to show an unusual degree of tact and intelligence. The Emperor was intensely eager to possess a most powerful fleet. He had put his own lips to the foghorn; by his speeches and by an incessant personal propaganda, he had made the public interested in the development of the navy, in the idea of acquiring the mastery of the seas. (“Our future lies on the water.”) But the man who had to carry out the Sovereign’s will was doomed to encounter several obstacles. The first difficulty for an Admiralty chief was to put his schemes before the Sovereign in such a way that the latter should regard himself as their author. In this respect, Tirpitz displayed more skill than any of his civilian or military colleagues. In the second place, he had to overcome the opposition that the Reichstag, always anxious to save the public money, had hitherto raised against any increase in the naval estimates. With singular adroitness Admiral von Tirpitz, profiting by various incidents abroad and by the wave of patriotic feeling they produced in the nation, worked upon public opinion, and won over many restive or wavering minds in Parliament. Nor was this all. The bills that he introduced would not have emerged safe and sound, without any mutilations, from the clutches of the Budget Committee, had not their framer been gifted with eloquence, with a power of clear and persuasive speech, which found a responsive audience in the middle-class parties. No minister has ever been so successful in winning the ear of the Reichstag, while managing to retain the confidence of the Emperor.

But why did Germany need so large a navy? Prince von Bülow says in his book, Imperial Germany: “The sea has become a more important factor in our national life than at any previous period, not excepting the great days of the Hanseatic League; it has become a vital nerve, which we must never lose, if the young German nation, which is still growing vigorously, is to be kept from suddenly lapsing into a decrepit old age. We should have been exposed to this danger as long as our foreign trade and our mercantile marine had no State protection at sea against the stronger fleets of other nations.” True, but it would seem that this end might have been attained by building a few divisions of cruisers, strong enough to protect German shipping and at the same time to threaten the commerce of the enemy.

From the earliest years of his reign, as is well known, William II.’s first thought has been for his fleet. The navy is his own creation, his favourite child. Nevertheless, the tremendous growth of Germany’s naval power coincides, in point of fact, with the entry of Bülow and Tirpitz on the scene, and with the inauguration of that “world-policy” for which the former of these two men—according to his own confession, at any rate—must be regarded as primarily responsible. I have already pointed out how elastic is the sense of this term “world-policy.” For the most peacefully inclined of Germans it meant a policy of colonial expansion. But the formation of a great navy gave the phrase a more sinister force: it now meant intervention in every part of the globe, acquisitions and settlements in distant regions, without recoiling from bloody encounters, such as could not be avoided in European waters. It is from the year 1897, when both Prince von Bülow and Admiral von Tirpitz took up office, that we may date these first ambitious schemes of conquest, which were embodied in the rapid construction of a formidable naval force, and reached their inevitable climax in the war of 1914.

Fifteen years were enough for Tirpitz to make the German navy the second in the world. He advanced by several stages, by successive leaps and bounds. The bill that was brought in on November 27, 1897, demanded that seven new ships of the line, two first-class and seven second- and third-class cruisers should be put on the stocks, and fixed the end of the financial year as the date by which these units should be completed. While limiting the period for which ships should be kept on the effective list, and determining the number and strength of the squadrons that were to remain on permanent service, the bill ensured the construction, within a given time-limit, of units to replace the vessels that were scrapped. In the autumn of 1899, during the South African War, the seizure of a German mail-boat by a British warship, and the resentment that this action aroused in Germany, were exploited in masterly fashion by Tirpitz in order to introduce a new navy bill. The patriotic furore of the nation enabled this bill to triumph over all financial obstacles. The explanatory statement called for the creation of a fleet so strong that the greatest naval Power of the world might feel uncertain as to the outcome of a struggle with Germany. This was a palpable thrust at Great Britain. In 1906, after Germany had met with such disappointment at the Algeciras Conference, the Reichstag, cleverly manipulated by the Admiral, and with the pressure of national sentiment behind it, passed the supplementary navy bill, raising the number of cruisers and providing for the construction of vessels of the Dreadnought type. The two first German Dreadnoughts, the Nassau and the Westphalen, were laid down in July 1907, launched in 1908, and completed within three and a half years. Their three successors were built with still greater speed, being finished within two years. The naval estimates, which in 1898 amounted to £6,250,000, in 1913 reached the sum of £23,350,000. The honours and decorations showered upon the fortunate Admiral after each of his parliamentary triumphs bore striking witness to the gratitude of his Sovereign.

Prince von Bülow indicates in his book the difficulty of carrying out such a programme and at the same time avoiding a rupture with England. The most critical moment came in 1908. It had been shown in the House of Commons, with figures to support the statement, that Germany, by virtue of her last navy bill, would by the end of 1916 have thirty-six vessels of the Dreadnought type. This, it was remarked, would compel England to build forty-four Dreadnoughts within that period. In 1911, Germany would have thirteen and England only twelve. The German menace to England’s naval supremacy excited serious alarm in the Island Kingdom. The Emperor thought he was making a very skilful move in writing a letter to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the Admiralty, a personal letter, half private, half open in character, in which he insisted on the purely defensive nature of the German programme, and tried to remove British apprehensions in regard to the development of the Imperial navy. But the shot missed its mark. By taking part in the discussion, by endeavouring to banish from the minds of English sailors the spectre of the German danger, William II., as soon as his unconventional step came to light through its disclosure in the Times, only added fuel to the fire of public feeling, and drove the British Parliament to get ships built all the faster, in reply to the German challenge.

The members of the Asquith Cabinet, seeing the approach of the Dreadnought era, which would involve an enormous maritime outlay at the very moment when they wished to devote all their available surplus to social reform, made an ineffectual attempt to check this frenzied competition. Their public speeches and their private efforts did not induce Admiral von Tirpitz to deviate for a single instant from the steady course he had marked out for the execution of his programme. If for a brief interval in 1913 he seemed to look with favour on the “two to three standard” (i.e., two German to three British Dreadnoughts) proposed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill, he turned a deaf ear to the suggestion that the two countries should suspend the construction of ships (“a naval holiday”) for the space of a year. The haughty spirit of the German Admiral would make no concessions, and those who pleaded for a limitation of armaments, that vanished dream of the British taxpayer, found that they were dashing themselves against a wall of granite.

No one in Germany was louder in his praises of the English sailors. He declared that they were his masters and his models. But, like the good German he was, he concealed, under the mask of admiration, a stubborn resolve to conquer them, to strip them of their insufferable superiority. The fleet that he was mustering was beyond all doubt an offensive weapon, an instrument fashioned with elaborate care for inflicting a deadly wound. Hostilities, however, have broken out sooner than he had foreseen or desired, and before he was ready for the attack.

A few years more, and Tirpitz would assuredly have surprised his opponent with a war quite different from anything that the latter expected—a treacherous war of aeroplanes and submarines, which would have made up for his inferiority in numbers. The blockade of England, which he has tried to carry out to-day with inadequate means, enables us to gauge his audacity, as well as his utter lack of humanitarian scruples. What would have been the result of such a struggle under the sea, if the German effort had been backed by a patient and methodical preparation?

Still, even if England had been vanquished, Germany would have been drawn into other naval wars. In the process of establishing her world-power, she would have had to force other rivals to lower their flag. It would have been essential for her to destroy the United States navy, in order to confine the Americans to the northern half of their continent, and to keep the markets of South America open exclusively to her own trade. After this, would she have been content to leave to the Japanese the mastery of the Pacific, and to be thwarted or driven out by them in the Far East? What a vista of conflicts for the organizer of the German navy, what a task for his own tireless energies and for those of his successors! Such are the inevitable results of the first step on the endless track of Weltpolitik.

Admiral von Tirpitz has been helped in his labours by a host of nameless fellow-workers, grouped together under the title of “German Navy League” (Deutscher Flottenverein). This society of 1,250,000 members, with branches all over Germany, forms a loyal and well-trained army, acting under the orders of Admiral von Koester, a former Commander-in-Chief of the fleet. By its manifold propaganda, its public meetings, its periodicals, its pamphlets, its cinematograph films, its arrangements for pleasure-trips to naval ports, the League has spread among the people, in great towns and tiny villages alike, from the sandy plains of Brandenburg to the picturesque valleys of the Hartz Mountains, a knowledge and appreciation of the work that William II. and Admiral von Tirpitz have achieved. During the darkest hours of the Moroccan crisis, the League’s overflowing patriotism expressed itself in scurrilous pamphlets and shameless lies, scattered broadcast, at the expense of England and France. It is therefore among the elements that have served to kindle a wrath and foment a hatred for which war alone could provide an outlet.

CHAPTER IV.

THE REICHSTAG AND POLITICAL PARTIES.

I.

IT is difficult for a foreigner to form any proper notion of the political groups represented in the Reichstag, if he yields to the temptation of looking for parallels with the party-system of his own country, and if he confuses the political institutions of Germany with those of a nation possessing a parliamentary government.

In the first place, perhaps, it will be desirable briefly to sketch the mechanism of the 1871 constitution, which, apart from slight changes needed for the Imperial framework, is merely a replica of the constitution drawn up by Bismarck for the North German Confederation.

The Empire is a federal and constitutional State, with a sovereign who not merely reigns, but governs, his status being a modern evolution from the old absolute monarchy of Prussia. The Emperor is the war-lord, he commands the army and regulates its organization; he has the supreme direction of foreign affairs, both diplomatic and commercial, and, at home, appoints the Imperial functionaries; he sanctions the bills approved by the Bundesrat (or Federal Council) and passed by the Reichstag. He dispenses the executive power, and imposes his sovereign will, through the medium of a Chancellor.

This ministerial figure represents the Emperor in the Reichstag and assumes the responsibility for the acts of the Government. This nominal responsibility is entirely unlike that of a minister in a parliamentary country; for it does not bind him at all in relation to Parliament, but only in relation to his master, and also, in a certain measure (whatever some may allege), to public opinion. The Chancellor, however, holds a plurality of dignities and functions. He is Jack-of-all-trades to the monarchy: President of the Prussian Ministry, President of the Bundesrat, and Imperial Minister for Foreign Affairs. These complex duties might well prove too exacting for a genuine statesman; how much more so for a mere politician! Owing to the difference of spirit between the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and the Reichstag, he has to appear before the former in the stern guise of a rigid Conservative, while in the latter his face wears a more attractive mask, being set off with a tinge of Liberalism. The Chancellor is thus compelled, by the very nature of his functions, to be an opportunist in internal politics.

The Bundesrat, composed of representatives sent to it by the individual States, is a pliable tool in the hands of the Emperor and the other German rulers, who themselves obey the Imperial will. It shares the legislative power with the head of the Empire and with the Reichstag.

Bismarck held that the best way of uprooting the particularism of the small States and clearing the ground for final unification was to invite all citizens of twenty-five years and upwards to elect representatives for the central Parliament. The Reichstag, chosen by universal suffrage, is the popular assembly, the real mouthpiece of public opinion. Its powers are limited to voting upon the budget and upon laws for the Empire, which must be taken as meaning laws of national interest.[6] This democratic Parliament, however, controls, so far as it can, the administration of public affairs. Its best weapon of defence against the arbitrary power of the Crown is the opposition it can raise to any Government proposals for expenditure or taxation. It has often used this weapon; but if it presses its opposition too far, it runs the risk of being dissolved by a mere decree of the Emperor’s, to make room for an assembly that will prove more open to compromise.

By the side of the Empire are the federal States and the three free cities, which possess local executives and Diets. In order to furnish these States with the means of a separate existence, Bismarck, while instituting a special budget for the Empire, left to them the revenue obtained from direct taxes. The Imperial budget draws its nutriment from the customs, the excise, and the postal service. The amount derived from these sources being insufficient, it also receives the “matricular contributions” (Matrikularbeiträge), paid by each State on a scale that keeps the balance of the budget properly adjusted.

II.

Prince von Bülow, in his Imperial Germany, asserts that the German race, although richly endowed with great qualities, has no talent for politics. This charge is quite unfair, the real motive for it being the dread with which a Prussian statesman views the prospect of a parliamentary system. The Germans are late-comers in the field of political life. Those of the South entered it much earlier than the Prussians; Bavaria received a written constitution from its ruler in 1818, Baden in the same year, Würtemberg in 1819, and Hesse-Darmstadt in 1820. It was not till 1850 that Frederick William IV., impelled by the sanguinary riots in Berlin two years earlier, granted his people the constitution promised by his father a few weeks before Waterloo. Even to-day, popular representation as it exists among the Germans is in many ways incomplete. In this respect they are a backward people—they, who pride themselves on marching in the forefront of civilization. They look from afar at the little nations, which they despise, boldly advancing on the road of parliamentarism, of progress in the sphere of political institutions, the road that England, as pioneer, has opened up for other countries. Yet there is nothing to prove that, if they were given the chance, they would not shake off their political torpor and set out upon that road with admirable results.

Under the present constitution, the political parties in the Reichstag have no hope of ever securing the reins of power. The Chancellor and his underlings, the Secretaries of State, are functionaries who cannot be removed, so long as it pleases the Emperor to keep them in office. When the popular assembly formally records its lack of confidence in them, the vote is like a harmless shower of rain, from which they can shelter themselves under the cloak of the constitution. If these hostile downpours came very often, indeed, the Emperor would have to take notice of them and to effect a change in the high executive staff, but he would not on that account draw his ministers from the parliamentary majority. The party chiefs, never having the responsibility of power, are far less keen for the interests of the State than for those of their party. In a theoretical, doctrinaire fashion, they defend the political programme comprising all the demands which they and their predecessors have artistically put together, a nosegay with whose delusive fragrance they charm their electors from time to time; but they know perfectly well that this ideal programme can never be carried out. Some, as skilled tacticians and leaders of men, like Windthorst and Bebel, have displayed talents of the first order. Why should it be impossible to find, among the various party leaders, the stuff of which good parliamentary ministers are made? We have never seen them put to the test, but we can very well imagine Herr Bassermann at the head of a Liberal Ministry or Herr Spahn in a coalition Conservative Cabinet, a “blue and black”[7] Cabinet, such as has been tried in Holland.

A remark one cannot help making is that the Imperial Parliament does not contain a Prussian majority, a fact which increases the difficulties of the Government’s task in no small degree. Prussia achieved German unity by the sword; it is by far the most populous of the German States, for in 1913 its inhabitants numbered 40,000,000 out of a total of 67,000,000. Nevertheless, Prussia proper is confined to the right bank of the Elbe. The rest of the mighty Hohenzollern kingdom is merely Prussianized, a group of provinces incorporated by conquest, and in each province the old particularist spirit still survives. A great national Prussian party will probably never come into being. It has been said with justice that in the Reichstag the parties, generally speaking, have remained separatist, in so far as they are identified with separate regions. The Conservatives embody the reactionary tendencies inherent in the Protestant population of the eastern marches; the deputies of the Centre represent the Catholic masses of the west, the Liberals the commercial and manufacturing towns. The Socialists alone succeed in spreading, like a sheet of oil, all over the domains of the older parties.

Other reflections occur to the mind of one who is confronted with this motley Diet of federal partners. First of all, this: that the Government, in its relations with the Reichstag, would gain in prestige, in influence, and in freedom of action, if it were not so liable to confuse the Imperial Diet with that of Prussia, if the Prussian minister were not constantly peeping out behind the mask of the Imperial Chancellor. Secondly, that the Reichstag seems inevitably destined to play a more important part on a stage that is really parliamentary. The structure reared by Bismarck, although it has been in existence for forty-four years, still has a look of incompleteness. It seems to need finishing touches from the hand of a workman more Liberal than the Iron Chancellor, one who can adapt himself better to modern requirements.

As regards the responsibility for the events of 1914, the Reichstag must be saddled with its share. The spirit of Prussian militarism, with its ideas of European domination, had made unmistakable headway in that body during recent years. Whether this was primarily due to the dispute with France over Morocco, or to colonial aspirations, or to the world-policy inaugurated by Prince von Bülow, is of little consequence. Up to 1907 the increases in the army had met with so stubborn a resistance in Parliament that, in order to secure a majority for each fresh army bill, the Imperial Government had to make prolonged strategical efforts, like a general who tries to capture a fortress with ill-disciplined troops under his command. But the opposition to the army bill of 1913 was of a negligible character; it consisted only of the nationalist malcontents and the Socialists, the former being anti-German, the latter anti-militarist.

The Reichstag includes not less than ten parties and groups, each having a special designation. The most sharply defined political conceptions are to be found among the Conservatives, to whom we must add—while regarding it as distinct, in view of its religious character—the Catholic Centre; the Liberals; and the Socialists. Thus we have three great monarchical or middle-class parties, and a Social-Democratic party of apparently republican tendencies.

III.

I will not linger over the Conservative Imperialists, a group of great manufacturers, landowners, and officials, all being, by their very nature, supporters of the Government.

The Conservative party proper, consisting of only forty-three members in the present Reichstag, is drawn almost entirely from the agricultural population of the provinces to the east of the Elbe; it is under the iron rule of the landed gentry. This is the genuinely national Prussian party, indissolubly attached to the principles inscribed on its flag: loyalty to the throne, to the Protestant faith, and to monarchical institutions, the chief of which is the army. To this we may add a rooted aversion for nations which Prussia and Germany regarded with distrust, above all for France. I am speaking here of the feelings prevalent among the Conservatives before the war; to-day the first place in their hatred is presumably filled by England or by Italy.

The Prussian aristocrats who direct this party have behind them a long past history of glory and devotion. Their ancestors played their part, no less than Frederick the Great, in building up the greatness of the monarchy. In no European country have the nobles rendered such splendid services to the reigning dynasty or shed more blood to cement the fabric of its power.

In the Prussian Diet, from 1862 to 1866, the Conservative party stood alone in supporting the adventurous and unconstitutional policy of Bismarck. It has never ceased supplying the Government with officers and civil servants in such large numbers that it constitutes one of the great driving forces of the German army and administration. Its leaders, although inveterate foes of Socialism, have realized the timeliness of the social legislation begun under William I. and completed under William II. Accordingly they have voted for these laws in docile fashion, though without enthusiasm. The weak joint in the otherwise flawless armour of their patriotism is that they are apt to put the interests of the agrarian section before those of the country as a whole. The protection of agriculture, one of the vital sources of a nation’s prosperity, ought to be, according to the Conservative doctrines, the first duty of the Imperial Government.

The loyalty to the throne displayed by the Prussian squires, those Junkers who are the real nobles in a kingdom where the feudal aristocracy is almost extinct save in Silesia and on the banks of the Rhine, shows no trace of servility. More royalist than the King, they think fit to dictate to him the policy that he ought to pursue. A satirical version of the Prussian national anthem “for the use of Conservatives” contains the following distich:

“Unser König absolut,

Wenn er unseren Willen tut!”

“Let our King be absolute, if only he does what we want!”

The leader of the Conservative party, both in the Prussian Diet and in the Reichstag, is Herr von Heydebrand, often called “the uncrowned King of Prussia.” He is no Teuton giant, like some of the rough and boorish gentleman-farmers of the eastern provinces, but a little old man, very simple and retiring, whose usual posture is one of silent attention. The Conservative chief does not speak very often: when he does, his incisive eloquence and his terse, logical way of putting things produce a sensational effect. His speech against the Convention of 4th November 1911 and the policy of an accommodation with France, is still fresh in the memory of every German. In the caustic questions he addressed to the Chancellor—asking what was the use of the colossal land and sea armaments of the Empire, if Germany was forced to beat a retreat at the critical moment, and why the German sword had been flourished at Agadir, only to be ignominiously put back in its sheath from fear of perfidious Albion—Herr von Heydebrand revealed to us the swelling chorus that the war-song of his party had reached. After this speech the Conservative party clamoured incessantly, both with tongue and with pen, for revenge on France and her accomplices.

IV.

The Centre has almost as much claim as the Conservative party to be ranged with the Right. It was formed in the Rhine provinces, where many prince-bishops once held their court, in Bavaria, in Baden, and in Silesia, with the object of counteracting, in the name of the Catholic minority, the intolerant spirit of the Protestant majority, and of securing for the Church the liberty that is her due. Although some official party-writers have tried hard to make us believe the contrary, the Centre is a religious party. It regards the interests of the Church as paramount. Still, like the rest, it has been won over to the nationalist idea, and it works towards maintaining the federal character of the Empire.

The deputies of the Centre number eighty-nine. This figure is low, if we consider that in 1911 Germany contained about 24,000,000 Catholics as against 40,000,000 Lutherans and Evangelicals. The way in which the electoral districts have been parcelled out is no doubt the reason why this party has fewer representatives than it might fairly expect. For all that, it seems to have reached its zenith, and while for the time being it does not lose its principal seats at the battles of the polls, on the other hand it no longer gains any from its rivals. Among the working-classes its great enemy is Socialism. Hence, in order to retain its adherents in the manufacturing centres, the Catholic Right has considerably broadened its Conservative programme. It is feeling the influence of that Christian Democracy which reigns supreme in the southern States. As the Protestant journals have taken good care to point out, it is quite obvious to-day that the party contains two opposite currents, and that a certain antagonism exists between the controlling bodies in Cologne and in Breslau, the latter being more conservative and more amenable to the dictates of Rome, while the former tries to shake off the Vatican leading-strings in internal politics. This cleavage came to light in the discussion that arose among German Catholics over the setting-up of mixed labour syndicates, composed of Catholic and Protestant workmen.

For seventeen years, from 1890 to 1907, the Centre in the Reichstag laid down its conditions and even issued its commands, as the price of letting those bills pass which the Government considered of vital importance. Defeated by Prince von Bülow’s bloc,[8] it took its revenge two years later, by wrecking the Chancellor’s scheme for financial reform. If after this the Centre did not hold undisputed sway in divisions, it remained a doubtful ally for the Government, and in momentous conflicts its desertion could still affect the issue.

No one can deny that the German Centre and the Belgian Catholic party have many points in common. Both acknowledge the same ideal, and fight with the same energy to protect the consciences of the faithful from the inroads of advanced teachings and the ravages of free thought. The electoral successes of the Belgian Clericals were greeted by the Catholic Press of Germany with no less enthusiasm than their own. The Belgians, who for the most part cling to the same beliefs as the German Catholics, might have expected some sympathy from their brethren in the faith, when their country was outraged in such dastardly fashion. Yet no cry of Christian pity went up from the deputies of the Centre when their Protestant Emperor pounced upon his victim; no plea for mercy was uttered by them on behalf of our stricken people; no protest against the murder of our priests or against the destruction of our old churches, where many of them had knelt in pious reverence when they came to visit our land. If they spoke of Belgium at all, it was only to propose annexation as was done by the deputy Erzberger, one of their leading men in the Reichstag, in a manifesto that was eagerly recorded by the whole German Press. In vindicating his hateful suggestion, this good Catholic appealed to no right but the brutal right of the conqueror, to no interest but the interest which the German Empire has in possessing the seaboard of Flanders with its splendid port on the Scheldt. He thought to cover the nakedness of his greed by means of those lying charges with which, like his Protestant colleagues, he tried to sully the heroic resistance of the Belgians.

V.

As in most countries, the Liberal party falls into two divisions: the moderate or “national” Liberals, and the progressive or “ultra” Liberals. Their forces are of about equal strength in the Reichstag. The former section stands for the manufacturing interests, the latter for the commercial, and both for the monarchist middle class, which is opposed to any interference by a religious authority, whatever creed it may represent.

The National Liberals can point to a glorious past, for during the first years of the Empire they formed the solid kernel of the majority which faithfully voted for all the bills brought in by Bismarck. Notwithstanding some passing fits of ill-humour and sulkiness, they have continued to register their votes for laws of national interest and for world-policy, for the increase of armaments and for colonial expenditure. One might have imagined that a certain affinity of thought, a similar leaning towards a secular régime which would entirely prevent the clergy from directing moral education, a like distaste for aristocratic influences, would have made them look with a less unfriendly eye upon a foreign Liberal Government such as that of the French Republic. One might have been tempted to believe that they would make some effort, now and then, to bridge the gulf of hatred that kept the two countries apart. As a matter of fact, they have bent their energies towards widening that gulf. The German suspicions as to the revengeful designs of the French Republic were never more strongly encouraged than by the speeches of the National Liberal leader, Herr Bassermann, on foreign affairs, a subject on which he was one of the most popular speakers in the Reichstag. These utterances were a series of indictments, no less unjust than spiteful, against a nation which he had never taken the trouble to study, or which he had only seen through the spectacles of an aggravated Germanism. Thus the war must have satisfied the heartfelt desires of Herr Bassermann and his followers.

For a long time the Progressive Democrats, who opposed the spread of militarism, voted against any increase of military burdens. It was the triumph of Prince von Bülow’s tactical skill that he induced these extremist representatives of the middle classes to change front and to swell the ranks of the Conservatives and National Liberals, so as to form a Governmental and militarist majority. Henceforth the Progressives were always meek supporters of any increase in the Imperial forces. That they adopted this course at first in the interests of national defence is fairly obvious; but they cannot have been blind to the aggressive character of the 1913 army bill. They accepted in advance all the consequences of this measure, because they too had rallied to the cause of world-policy and colonial expansion. These ideas were floating in the atmosphere of the Reichstag, as well as in the air that all who were concerned with statecraft breathed in Berlin.

VI.

In 1884 the Socialist party comprised, in round numbers, 550,000 electors; in 1912 it had 4,250,000 out of a total of nearly 12,000,000 for the whole country. In 1884 the party was represented in the Reichstag by 24 deputies, in 1912 by 110 out of 397. These figures tell their own tale as to the progress made by Socialism in Germany.

Every German statesman looked upon the Socialists as a great danger, and, taking his cue from the Emperor, expressed his fears somewhat too loudly in speech and writing. What was the use of sounding the fire-alarm, as if the house were already in flames, when as a matter of fact it was not even threatened? Why all this scare, which seems to us rather absurd to-day? German political science had tried every remedy against the Socialist taint and found it wanting, from the repressive system of Bismarck to the social reform policy of Posadowsky. In reality, however, the microbe of Social Democracy was perfectly harmless. Prince von Bülow, in his book, comes to the conclusion that the danger would become serious if Socialism, after making havoc among the proletariate, wormed its way into the middle classes, those steadfast bulwarks against all change. In point of fact it had already made considerable advance in this direction, and it drew its leaders from the intellectuals of the struggling bourgeoisie. I have heard it prophesied in Berlin that the Empire would be lost on the day that the Socialist propaganda pierced the chain-armour of Prussian discipline and found its way into the army. But some fifty per cent. of the young soldiers were adherents of Socialism; have they fought any the less sturdily on that account? This exaggerated fear, or rather this annoyance, felt by the Emperor was surely due to the unceremonious behaviour of Socialist deputies in the Reichstag and their refusal to shout the traditional “Hoch!” in his honour—a mere piece of schoolboy impertinence.

It needed no profound study of the movement to realize that Social Democracy was becoming transformed from day to day. It had passed through several phases since those heroic times when, in spite of the threat of imprisonment, it had boldly declared war upon capitalist society and the imperialist system. The generation of veteran revolutionaries, of Liebknecht, Bebel, and Engels, had passed away. Those who took their place, men like Franck, Bernstein, Heine, and Sudekum, became opportunists or “revisionists.”[9] The change grew more perceptible than ever when Bebel, the last apostle of the Marxian gospel, was snatched away by a heart-attack from the benches of the Reichstag and the leadership of the party. It was he who had been its patient organizer, finding an invaluable ally in that spirit of discipline for which the Germans are peculiarly noted. The heirs of this great speaker and great fighter ostensibly retained the teachings of Karl Marx: the class struggle, the acquisition of political power in order to bring about a social revolution and establish a collective ownership of the means of production. But their actual programme aimed at more practical reforms, especially in the way of guarantees for the worker against the employer, and of rates and taxes.

Social Democracy had become a wealthy middle-class institution, with funds amounting to £5,000,000, several powerful unions, and 4,216 local committees, paying subsidies, not merely to its numerous children, but even to foreigners, on condition that they accepted its edicts. With such resources, the battle against the rich employer class was far from unequal, and the propaganda went on apace. No revolutionary step was taken, no general strike was declared, no attack was made on the sacrosanct person of the Emperor. The Socialist tactics consisted in penetrating further and further into parliamentary life, not in order to raise a futile opposition to the Government, but in order to use the effective sounding-board of the Reichstag as a means of obtaining a wider audience for the Socialist message. The uninterrupted climb of Social Democracy, its remarkable gains at each general election, gave its leaders every right to anticipate a glorious future. They saw themselves, at no distant date, heading a parliamentary majority and forcing the Imperial Government to come to terms.

Their conduct at the declaration of war, which they had done nothing to prevent, was a source of profound amazement to the world outside Germany. Not the least indignant were those foreign Socialists who had been accustomed to revere their German colleagues as unfailing oracles. Had not the latter held undisputed sway at all the international congresses, imposing their theories and their decrees with that masterful and uncompromising spirit that they showed in no less degree than the capitalist classes whom they were fighting? As a matter of fact, there was no reason to feel surprise or indignation. The Reichstag deputies, like their electors, are Germans first and Socialists afterwards. Before leaving school, they are fully convinced that theirs is a superior race. Moreover, for the labouring masses of Germany the war—a brief and triumphant war, such as they confidently expected—was a good stroke of business, just as it was for their masters. It would enable the products of German industry to flow more abundantly into the conquered countries, it would win rich colonies for the Empire, it would ensure the final supremacy of the German Labour party in the sphere of international Socialism. It might have been remembered that the disciples and successors of Marx had always turned a deaf ear to the proposal of foreign comrades, that a declaration of war should be answered by a general strike; and that when charged by their opponents in the Reichstag with lack of patriotism, they had replied that, if Germany were attacked, every German Socialist would put a rifle to his shoulder as readily as his middle-class countryman.

It was quite in the nature of things, then, that the body of Socialist deputies, instead of raising an outcry against the war, should have voted as one man for the military credits demanded by the Chancellor on the 4th of August, and that it should have accepted without a murmur the Government’s statements as to an attack by Russia and by France. In spite of some individual protests, it will continue to grant the necessary milliards of marks, just as its electors, enrolled under the Imperial banner, will continue to shed their proletarian blood like water, in order to secure the triumph of imperialism and aristocracy. Still, we have a right to be astonished when we read the pronouncements made at Stuttgart last winter by one of the prominent Socialist members of the Reichstag, Herr Wolfgang Heine. They reveal a new trend in the party, a rallying to the Empire and to those great centralizing forces, the clamps of the mighty German framework—the army and the monarchy. Conservative writers had given us to understand that a yawning chasm had always existed and always would exist between kingship and social democracy. The Imperial Government would not disarm until its enemy surrendered and swore allegiance to the monarchy and to the order of things for which the monarchy stands. And now, through the agency of war, the miracle has come to pass! Social democracy will no longer sap the dynastic and military foundations of the State; it has declared itself imperialistic.

Will the miracle last long? Will the old revolutionary demon never again seize the soul of the new convert? When peace returns—we shall see. There is every reason to think that the truce between the two inveterate foes rests on an uncertain basis. As the price of its assistance in the European conflict, Socialism will exact concessions in the shape of political reforms, involving a change in the Imperial constitution and in that of the Prussian State. The grant of universal suffrage to Prussia is the least that it can ask for. Then will come the day of reckoning for the Hohenzollern autocrat. Let us suppose that William II., his position weakened by a disappointing war, should find no strength to resist the clamours of the German proletariate. The power would pass from his enfeebled hands to those of a Reichstag brimming over with enthusiasm and consumed with ambition. And if, in spite of the failure of his bold enterprises, he should reject the popular demands, what a struggle we can foresee between a shrunken Cæsar and a party swollen in numbers through all the mistakes, all the suffering, all the ruin that the war has accumulated! Victory alone (and even that for how long, and by what compromises?) could seal the reconciliation between two such rivals as autocracy and Socialism. Defeat, or merely a profitless peace, would have prolonged effects upon the internal situation in Germany.

VII.

Since the creation of the Empire, the Chancellors have had to govern the Reichstag with coalition majorities. This system has great advantages, but still greater drawbacks. On the one hand, the Government does not commit itself to the policy of any one party; on the other hand, to carry the bills which it regards as important, it is compelled to be eternally bargaining with parties and groups.

Bismarck at first relied upon the National Liberals, who were the most numerous in the earlier assemblies of his ministry; they were his allies in his campaign against Rome. After a time he became dissatisfied with the Liberals, who were considerably reduced in numbers at the general election following upon the attempts to assassinate William I., and made overtures to the Conservatives, both Protestant and Catholic. The latter having been defeated, together with the Progressives, over the so-called “act for the military septennium,” the Chancellor, with an eye to the 1887 elections, formed the famous Kartell,[10] composed of Conservatives and National Liberals. This was the first attempt to arrange a marriage of convenience between the two opposite principles of government, immobility and progress. The experiment was as quickly dropped in Germany as elsewhere.

Twenty years later Prince von Bülow, faced with the same difficulties, and always compelled to reckon with the Centre, came to grief through the latter’s stubborn refusal to grant the necessary credits for additions to the colonial forces. He thought it a master-stroke to confront the Centre and the Socialists with a majority composed this time of Conservatives, National Liberals, and Progressives. This combination was invested with the French name of “bloc.” The 1907 elections gave him a short-lived triumph over the Socialists alone, for the Centre came out unscathed from the ordeal of the polls. But the team of three which the Chancellor hoped to drive with a sure hand was too ill-assorted to keep together for very long. The horse on the right, summoned by the neigh of his stable-companion, the Centre, on the Opposition meadows, was the first to kick over the traces and escape. Protestant and Catholic Conservatives then formed a new bloc, “blue” and “black,” against the financial reforms of the Government. It was essential for Prince von Bülow to carry his bill in the Reichstag, for this was the only way in which he could make himself appear indispensable to the Emperor, whose feelings towards him were anything but friendly after the affair of the Daily Telegraph interview. Accordingly, he treated the matter as a test case, as if he had been a mere parliamentary minister, threatening to resign if his bill were thrown out. The result of the voting made this threat a reality. He handed in his resignation to the Emperor, who was graciously pleased to accept it.

If the Centre, in accordance with its conventions, has so far been the factor most capable of shifting the balance in the Reichstag, the party which has had most influence on the trend of the Government’s home policy is the Conservative party. A study of German history since Bismarck’s dismissal teaches us that a Chancellor cannot retain his power very long in the teeth of the agrarians, although they are less numerous than the other parliamentary groups. Caprivi and Bülow, each in his turn, attempted the impossible. The former injured the interests of the eastern landowners by his concessions to foreign States, in that he lowered the import duties on cereals, with a view to concluding with them commercial treaties that would favour the development of national industries. The latter tried to saddle the agrarians with a proportional share of the burdens involved in his financial reforms—a perfectly equitable scheme, supported by all the Liberal elements.

On the other hand, as we have seen, a Chancellor who is backed by the Conservatives can defy public opinion and parliamentary opposition. Such was the experience of Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg in the debate over the Zabern affair, in which he championed (not very eloquently, by the way) the inalienable right of the army to take the law into its own hands. He received an overwhelming vote of censure with philosophic calm, telling the majority that its vote did not affect him, because he was responsible for his acts, not to Parliament, but to the Emperor. What really made him feel proof against their attacks was the similarity of his views to those of the Junkers and of all those Prussian reactionaries who resisted tooth and nail whenever any one dared to assail the privileges of the army.