iiNivFRSiTY or rjLiroRNis SAN Dircn 3 1822 01270 1934 cauforhA / 3 1822 01270 1934 D Central University Library University of California, San Diego Note: This item is subject to recall after two weeks. . - ^^W^ ^'^ S(\H i^ ^^^^ NOV 2 2001 \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ UCSD Lib. BETWEEN ST. DENNIS AND ST. GEORGE WHEN BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT An Analysis of Prussian Culture BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER 2/6 net "A lively, personal, and extremely persuasive indictment of modern Prussianism. ... A clever, penetrating, caustic style drives home every point, and a sharply whetted memory pro- vides him with perpetual material, which is continually em- ployed with great adroitness and resource. . . . Mr. Hueffer has done a public service by writing this book. ... It is a book of genuine importance and of a wide significance. It is to be hoped that it reaches Germany, as well as Great Britain and the United States." — Daily Telegraph. " No book that I have read — and I have read dozens— shows the making of war-mania so clearly as Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's remarkable volume ' When Blood is Their Argument.' After reading it one sees that this war will fix, once and for all, the fate of mankind. ... I hope Mr. Hueffer's book will be read in the United States, for Kultur has yet to be understood by the greatest Republic on earth. I hope it will be translated into all the neutral tongues, for the neutral nations have yet to learn what Kultur means for them and their children. I hope it will be digested by the workers of this country and every other country, for the workers have still to grasp what Kultur means for them and their offspring. Lastly, I hope it will be studied by business men, by men of letters, by artists, by the learned professions, for they also have yet to lay hold of the true meaning of Kultur." — James Douglas in The Star. "Nobody knows Prussia and its Prussianised dependencies better than Mr. Hueffer, and his indictment of the form of so-called civilisation which the flesh-and-blood mechanism of German militancy is now prepared to force on Europe and England is the most effective that has yet appeared. . . . Every patriotic Briton should read it to the end that he may be able to argue more effectively with the enemy inside the gates— an enemy who is often quite unconscious of his hostility to the cause of true civilisation." — Morning Post. HODDER AND STOUGHTON BETWEEN ST. DENNIS AND ST. GEORGE A SKETCH OF THREE CIVILISATIONS FORD MADOX HUEFFER f^c\ author of "when blood is their argument" "Shall not thou and I, between St. Dennis and St. George compound a boy, half-French, half-English, that shall go to Constantinople, and take the Turk by the heard?"— H£I\rRy V., Act v. Scene 2. HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO MCMXV Priniei in Great Briiain by Hazdl, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. PREFACE To Mrs. C. F. G. Masierman I AM afraid that this book will present the aspect of a number of essays thrown together. That is not the case ; it is owing simply to my want of ex- perience in the handling of controversial matter. What happened was that I set out to confront various pacifist writers or other writers who were opposed to the Government of this country entering upon a war side by side with France — to confront them with various facts and with various figures. But I dis- like denouncing my fellow-beings, even though they be pacifists, and it seemed to me to be only fair to present these gentlemen with my own constructive view of the state of Europe before the outbreak of the present war. Thus it has come about that the constructive portion of the work has overshadowed the controversial, so that the form of the book re- sembles somewhat a small cottage tacked on to a large greenhouse. I am sorry. But I hope that the uninstructed reader will pay attention specially to pages 251-273, which form the real crux of the book, and will thus, at least, gather some facts from these pages ; and that the reader of goodwill, but of not vi PREFACE very strong opinions, may have his opinions strength- ened and confirmed, since, as Novalis says, "It is certain that my conviction gains immensely as soon as another soul can be found to share it." I have to thank the Editor of the Outlook for per- mission to reprint the Epilogue, which appeared serially in the columns of that journal, and I have again to thank Mr. A. W. G. Randall for extremely valuable — and indeed indispensable — assistance in tlie com- pilation and checking of instances. F. M. H. September 19 15 CONTENTS PART I INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I • FACE THE historian's METHODS AND THE PRESENT SITUATION ^ CHAPTER II THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM ... 2$ PART II DRAMATIS PERSON M CHAPTER I AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD" . 2>7 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER II PAOB KEEPING fit" 43 CHAPTER III THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA . . . . 6l CHAPTER IV LANGUAGE 67 CHAPTER V RELATIVE MILITARISMS 80 PART III "THE SEA IS HIS" CHAPTER I FRIGATE WARFARE .... 89 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER II PAGE THE SEVENTH OF MAY . . . . -99 CHAPTER III " UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 112 CHAPTER IV THE UNDERGROUND WORK . . . . I28 CHAPTER V THE TWO NAVIES ...... 137 PART IV THE ROSE AND THE LILY CHAPTER I THE LAST OF GERMANY I49 CHAPTER II CORRECTITUDE 182 ^ ^ CONTENTS EPILOGUE PAOB FELICITE 193 APPENDIX A ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS .... 225 APPENDIX B MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR" 233 APPENDIX C COUNT YORCK VON WARTENBURG . . . 284 INDEX 287 PART I INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I THE historian's METHODS AND THE PRESENT SITUATION I ASK myself whether the time be not at hand when the historian and the historian's methods may not come into their own again. For it is a fact that the contemporary chronicle — the newspaper press — is, at any rate for the moment, dead, and that gossip sits upon a throne that was once occupied by Delane. Nothing else stands ; nothing else impresses itself upon the mind. If we read the official communiques of any of the belligerent Powers published in the daily press we may believe them as far as they go, but we certainly suspect them of reservations. If, for in- stance, we read that belligerent Power A captured the village of Hochsternudel on April 31st, and if, afterwards, we hear nothing more about the village of Hochsternudel in the communiques of that Power, we may weU believe that the village was captured, but we have absolutely no assurance that it was held. Similarly with the writings of the enterprising and heroic war-correspondents ; we know enough to be certain that the gallant officers and splendid privates writing from the trenches can give historical evidence only of what goes on exactly under their noses, and that the official correspondents of journals capture merely flying rumours. From the immense 3 4 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND foam of newspaper pages that covers the land at breakfast time and with recurrent up-surgings from hmch till bed, we feel in our bones we shall not cap- ture even as many facts as the longshoreman watch- ing upon the beaches will capture corks and marine treasures. Rumour then steps in. And we seem to live in an immense cavern, in an immense Hall of the Winds, in a vast Whispering Gallery — of rumour. W^hen I consider what remains in my mind of war-news of the last week, I find, prominently, the following items. I remember a lady with a deep and earnest voice — a quite serious lady, the daughter of a former Prime Minister of an allied Power, assuring a smaU group of people in an elegant room that she had it on the authority of an English General that the French and Belgian troops were behaving very badly. In every trench, she said she was assured, it had been found necessary to post two British Tommies to prevent the regiments of Allies from running away. Or again, at a regi- mental baU a young officer who had been invalided from the front a month or so ago assured me very earnestly that the British troops were fighting very badly, and that the Grenadier Guards had been weeping in the trenches for the last fortnight. Again, another officer assured me that Mr. Bernard Shaw had written the only sense that had been written about the war and that this country was merely lying hypocritically when it announced, through its official mouthpieces, that we had gone to war for the sake of Belgium. Again, an elderly Colonel who had seen much service in the past and is doing splendid service in the present, said that above all things, as chivalrous men, we must not, at the end of the war, demand the THE PRESENT SITUATION 5 partition of the German Empire or the humihation of the House of Hohenzollern. All these things have the appearance of trifles, but in the immense number of them, in the never-ceasing whisper of this gossip, a considerable and a very detrimental work is being achieved. That is a great misfortune. And I do not know how it can be well remedied unless the immense bulk of the population of these islands can be got to cultivate something of the historian's faculty. And the historian's faculty is nothing more or less than a habit of mind — culti- vated or innate — which from the uproar of a thousand sentences selects and retains only those things which are first-hand evidence. In the anecdote of the charming and earnest lady which I have just given the historian's mind would perceive at once that the lady's authority was a General, but the historian would remember that there are Generals and generals, and he would either reject the statement altogether as evidence as to the morale of the French forces, or, pur- suing his investigations still further, would discover that the General in question was a retired officer aged seventy-three with a deep hatred for the French which had persisted ever since Colonel Marchand's journey to Fashoda. And, with regard to the young officer's statement that the Grenadier Guards had been weeping in the trenches for the last fortnight, he would remember that the young officer, though charming and attractive, and with an excellent military record, had been back from the trenches a full ten weeks and was not in any case attached to the Grenadier Guards. Both these statements, then, are absolutely worthless. But the hearers of this lady and of this officer, 6 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND not choosing to exercise the historian's faculty which is in all men, went away from those social gatherings impressed with the fact that the lady was the daughter of a Prime Minister and had her information from a General, and that the officer was a gallant young man who had returned from the trenches. So that, at this moment, throughout London and in ever- widening rings, those two statements are being set about — that the French and Belgians are behaving very badly and that the Grenadier Guards are weep- ing in their trenches. And, when such members of the public as are influenced by these rumours read the despatches of General , talking of the ex- cellent bearing of such and such a regiment on such and such an occasion they will remember the saying of the young officer and will have, to a certain extent, the conviction that General is lying. There remain, then, the case of the officer who stated that Mr. Bernard Shaw had written the only sense that had been written about the war, and that this country was merely lying hypocritically when it announced through its official mouthpieces that we had gone to war for the sake of Belgium — and the case of the Colonel who said that, above all things, as chivalrous men we must not, at the end of the war, demand the partition of the German Empire or the humiliation of the House of Hohenzollern. It is to the public affected by arguments or by pleas of this type that the present work is addressed. To the historian certainly, and probably to the mere man of the world the arguments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw appear simply as the product of an idee fixe ending in what I so dislike to call imbecility that I will style it sheer intellectual dishonesty. Cato, we THE PRESENT SITUATION 7 are told, appeared day after day in the Roman Senate with a bunch of figs, which he assured the Senators had been plucked in Carthage, and, pointing to the fresh and satisfactory nature of the fruit as a proof that the realm of the Hamilcars was dangerously close to Rome, exclaimed : ' ' Delenda est Carthago ! ' ' Appearing daily before the British public, with fresh arguments plucked from the columns of the daily press, from the tree of gossip, or from amongst the leaves of Blue-books published during the fortnight before or the fortnight after the declaration of war of August 1914, Mr. Shaw throws his new fruit into the auditorium and exclaims, " Delendus est Sir Edward Grey" — "It is necessary that Sir Edward Grey should be attaindered." I held myself so very lately the view that it would be a good thing if any one other than Sir Edward Grey could direct the foreign affairs of this country that it would ill become me to attribute to Mr. Shaw and his colleagues, whom it is convenient to call the Intellectuals of this country, any base motives. And indeed I have no wish to attribute base motives to anybody. The worst that I should wish to say of these people at home, who by crying, as the saying is, " stinking fish," depreciate the cause of and dis- hearten the minds of the inhabitants of this country and of France, thus prolonging the duration of the war, thus being responsible for the deaths of many thousands of poor men — the worst that I should wish to say of these people is that they are guUty of in- tellectual dishonesty. Mr. Shaw's attacks upon Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Brailsford's, Mr. Ponsonby's and Mr. Bertrand Russell's attacks upon secret diplomacy, British diplomacy, or the motives that have inspired 8 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND the Allies, are intellectually dishonest because they perpetually change their grounds. At one moment, as I shall have to show you, secret diplomacy is, for the mouthpieces of the Union of Democratic Control, a matter of a restricted class entirely deaf to the voice of the people that perpetually demands peace. At the next moment diplomatists are unable to move without the bidding of a public opinion that is normally too bellicose. At one moment for Mr. Bernard Shaw, Sir Edward Grey is a ferocious chau- vinist, and the Emperor William II a gentle monarch goaded by the insults of the world into at last assum- ing some of the aspects of a sovereign. At the next moment, when Mr. Shaw desires to knock Mr. Winston Churchill on the head with a shillelagh. Sir Edward Grey is represented as being a mild and lachrymose pacifist, dragged into war by the exactions of per- manent officials at the Foreign Office, whilst the Kaiser becomes a blusterous autocrat, with a cool and cold, systematic policy. This is intellectual dis- honesty, for it is impossible that Sir Edward Grey can be both an autocratic chauvinist and a lachry- mose lover of peace, just as it is impossible for secret diplomacy to be at the same time deaf to the voice of the people and dependent upon popular opinion. It may, in fact, be moral to use any stick with which to beat a dog, but it is dishonest in a world so gravely circumstanced as is Europe of to-day to use the methods of the farcical dramatist or of the party politician when commenting upon affairs that are the province of the historian. Mr. Shaw, Mr. Brailsford, Mr. Bertrand Russell and their confreres employ, in short, in dealing with matters of real history, precisely the methods of the THE PRESENT SITUATION 9 " intellectual fictionists." They invent and clothe dummy figures with attributes which have some faint resemblance to the attributes of the persons or of the ideals that they pretend to portray, and then, getting these characters into circumstances of their own devising, they proceed to foil, confute, and hopelessly confuse their puppets according to the traditions of Adelphic melodrama. But let me repeat that a time like the present calls for different methods, and, in- deed, for differently disposed hearers. We must get down to the facts ; we must not listen to ex parte statements ; we must insist upon documentation, and not the most splendid of oratory must move us or we shall be false to our country, to humanity, to those who are to-day dying for us, and to those who to- morrow shaU be our children. If, in short, we are at all decent men, we shall either attempt to know some- thing of the ground facts of the case or we shall hold our tongues. I do not know which is the more difficult task. In compihng rather than writing this present work I am attempting to put before the reader a large body of what I may call ' ' ground facts ' ' or what the Germans caU Qiiellen. I have tried to show, or, indeed, I will boldly say that here I have proved, at least that the German peoples and the Prussian State are infinitely more bellicose than any other people and any other State of occidental Europe. If the reader considers that I have proved this matter I presume that he will follow me in these further deductions : The strength of a civilisation is the strength only of its weakest link. If one of a group of nations persistently assume and take as a chose donnee the necessity for war as a means of ultimate enrichment 10 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND none of the other States of that congeries of nations can possibly disarm. It is necessary, it is true, that after the conclusion of this war we must go on living with Germans. We cannot extirpate sixty-four mil- lion human beings, and it would be better for us ourselves to die than contemplate such an extirpa- tion. But it is not necessary for us to go on living with a Germany that is under the hegemony of Prussia, or with a Germany whose state-indoctrinated ideals are those of territorial aggrandisement and of industrial expansion based upon indemnities levied upon other States. It is, of course, a strong measure to enforce upon another people what shall be its form of government or what the ideals enjoined by its State. But, in the end, Europe is more important than any one State of Europe, and, in the past, in the case of the great Napoleon, Europe decreed that the Napoleonic Empire should not continue, and Europe had its will. So it may well be with the House of Hohenzollern and with the ideals of Prussianism, In a sense it is a waste of time to argue with men like Messrs. Shaw, Brailsford, Ponsonby, and RusseU, or with organisations like the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party. But, from another point of view, the effort is possibly worth while. These gentlemen are sufficiently acquainted with the defects of the English governmental system, which, being a human organisation, has defects enough. But of the working of German organisation or of the disadvantages of German life their ignorance is as profound as it is avowed. In the course of his pamphlet called "Common Sense about the War" Mr. Shaw, speaking as an expert, presents the reader with ten or fifteen instances of militarist and semi- THE PRESENT SITUATION ii militarist authors and organisations of this country. In the course of this work I present Mr. Shaw, in return, with one hundred German mihtarist utter- ances. The methods of Mr. Shaw have hitherto consisted in saying : ' ' The Germans are mihtarist ; true, but we are just as militarist as the Germans ! " I doubt whether, in face of the instances that I have gathered together, even Mr. Shaw can continue in this line of argument. To put Mr. Wells, Mr. Newbolt, and Mr. Kipling against Kant, Hegel, Treitschke, Del- briick, Mommsen, Ranke, von List, Bassermann, M. P., von Billow, D. F. Strauss, and the rest, would, I imagine, appear a profitless task even to Mr. Shaw and his confreres, and even supposing that Mr. Wells and Mr. Newbolt were militarist. And, once this is established, all the writings of Messrs. Shaw, Brailsford, Russell, and the others, all the inquiries into the motives of Sir Edward Grey, into the bellicosity of Mr. Winston Churchill, into the duplicity of Mr. Asquith, into the duplicity of the Opposition Front Bench, into the desirability of observing treaties — all these ingenious spinnings of words appear, as they really are — as mere cobwebs. War is a filthy thing, but war will continue as long as a people is to be found who will listen to Hegel, Mommsen, Ranke, and von List preaching that no sound national life can exist without war. War is the destruction of sanity, of decency, of order, and of things of the intellect ; but war will continue so long as a national organisation can be found which unceasingly puts forward the writings of Clausewitz, Moltke, von der Goltz, and even von Bernhardi. Of war there is no good to be said — it is an anachronism, it is a horror ; but war can never cease so long as any 12 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND one national organisation, supported by a national opinion, can be found to believe that war is a neces- sity. Why, even on July loth, 1914, Count Tisza, the Hungarian Premier, speaking in the Hungarian Chamber, stated that " Every State and nation must be able and willing to make war if it wishes to exist as a State and a nation." ^ Militarism is, in short, the greatest foe to humanity ; but militarism must be fought in the home of mili- tarism. It is no good for Mr. Shaw and his confreres to take as an axiom that all peoples are the same ; that all peoples have the same virtues, the same vices, and the same hypocrisies. They have not. The Germans have undoubtedly their virtues, but they are not the virtues of the English. The English have undoubtedly their vices, but they are not German vices. We are at war at the present moment because, from the earliest days to the present time, it has been the German state-doctrine that war is worth while, and the task that is before humanity is to prove to the German that peace pays better than war. If Mr. Shaw and his colleagues, with their persuasive oratory, can do anything to prove this to the inhabi- tants of Central Europe they will deserve better of humanity than if they demonstrated ten thousand times over that Sir Edward Grey is a liar and a hypo- crite — facts which they can have no possible means of ascertaining. But in the meantime the insidious game of attri- buting motives and of forming, out of gossip, history which can only be founded on documents, goes on. There is no department of life which it does not attack ; there is no public figure who is not accused * See The Times for July 17th, 1914. THE PRESENT SITUATION 13 of lying, of reservations — not very often of corruption, but almost always of class-prejudice, I do not mean to say that it is exclusively the intellectual leg that is in this particular boot. The non-intellectuals have their hands in the game too ; but the non-intellectuals' hands are so clumsy as to defeat themselves. These, in short, are the childish people who allege that a late Lord Chancellor was in the pay of a hostile Power. That is more clumsy, but it is a symptom of the same tendency. With the disappearance of the Press as an influence we have, in short, become what the Germans call Klein stddtisch. Village gossip is the dominant note of our intellects, and, as regards public matters, we are all like so many gossips in the village ale-house, like so many women at sewing-meetings, like so many housemaids in the servants' hall discussing the doings of the upper classes in their manor-houses. That, for instance, is pretty exactly the quality of Mr, George Bernard Shaw's imaginings when he writes about the present war. It is, indeed, the quality of the imagin- ings of the whole intellectual class for many years past. Partly it is a quality purely detrimental and fre- quently disgusting — as it will be found, for instance, in the mouth of a park orator who is trying to foment class hatred, or in the pages of such journals as print salacious gossip about the Court, the Stage, the Bar, the Bench. Partly this tendency is a tendency alto- gether artistic, and may be used for the highest ser- vices of humanity, Tolstoy used it when he gave us the picture of Napoleon looking at the portrait of the King of Rome and thinking absolutely nothing ; Ibsen used it when he invented the gentleman who went about saying " People don't do such things," 14 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND when people were doing the things all the time ; Flaubert used it when at the cattle-show he inter- rupted the romantic phrases of Emma Bovary and her lover with the voice of the Prefect reading out the catalogue of prizes that had been conferred on pigs, oxen, and geese. Or again, to return to our prevalent school of intellectuals, this is the method of, let us say, Mr. John Galsworthy when he gives you a picture of some kindly and amiable people, sitting upon a lawn and discoursing of Christian charity. A lady falls off her horse outside the hedge and breaks her leg ; the kindly and Christian people with their mouths still full of altruistic sayings, rush out to succour her ; on discovering that she is a divorced woman they rush away with exclamations of horror. And this also is the method of Mr. Granville Barker, of the late Mr. St. John Hankin, and, once more, of Mr. Bernard Shaw himself. In actual politics, whether internal or international, these also are the methods of Mr. Arthur Ponsonby, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, Mr. Brailsford, and the other supporters of that group, partly intellectual, partly socialist, who have formed themselves into a body known as the Union of Democratic Control. Since the beginning of the war this body, together with the Independent Labour Party, which is of an exactly similar com- plexion, has issued a great number of pamphlets, all nearly identical in method and having aU, apparently, the same aim. I hesitate very much to describe exactly what may be the aims of opponents to the cause in which I am interested. I hope, therefore, that I may be doing no injustice to these gentlemen and organisations if I say that the object of the Union of Democratic THE PRESENT SITUATION 15 Control is to remove diplomacy from diplomatists, and the object of the Independent Labour Party to stop the war at the earliest possible opportunity because we must continue to live with Germany. To Mr, Shaw, who stands outside these two groups, I do not presume to ascribe any object at all. The result of his methods, if we were to believe his statements, would be the universal discredit of public characters upon both sides of the conflict, the discredit limiting itself, however, to the actions of these characters for perhaps six weeks before the outbreak of war. A fairly close scrutiny of documents will present you with various quaint contrasts. Thus we have, on the one hand, the purely ex parte and unsupported generalisation of Mr. Arthur Ponsonby : " The exclusive management of international relations rests in the hands of a small number of men in each country, whose perspective is restricted, whose vision is narrow, and whose sense of proportion is vitiated by the very fact that their work is screened from the public eye. The people, whose greatest interest is peace, would be able to take a broader view on main principles, and their influence, were they in a position to exercise it, would, undoubtedly be pacific." ^ On the other hand, we have the Hon. Bertrand Russell, in another publication of the same organisa- tion, saying : "In modern Europe diplomatists alone cannot make a war ; they must have the support of public opinion, and ^ " Parliament and Foreign Policy," p. 2. By Arthur Pon- sonby, M.P. (Union of Democratic Control, Strand, W.C.) i6 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND it is public opinion that must be changed if there is to be any hope of secure peace hereafter." ^ These two gentlemen, it will be observed, flatly contradict each other. Or, again, we have an I.L.P. pamphlet talking of " the Tariff Campaign, during which commercial rivalries were turned into national enmity " ° ; or again, here is Mr. Brailsford : " The crime against Belgium admits of no palliation or excuse. It is not, however, without precedent or parallel, and similar cases suggest that it is not so much any special obliquity in the German governing caste which we must blame for it, as the whole system of mili- tarism and secret diplomacy. In 1807, during the Napo- leonic Wars, the British Government was guilty of a similar outrage on Denmark. Denmark was a neutral nation, but she had a considerable fleet. Canning be- lieved, or affected to believe, that Napoleon intended by pressure on Denmark to acquire the Danish fleet for his own use. He resolved, therefore, to do himself the very thing that he charged Napoleon with planning. He ordered our fleet to attack Denmark, and it blockaded Copenhagen, defeated the Danish ships, and captured and appropriated them for our own purposes." ^ Mr. Brailsford here entirely omits any justification of his statement that the bombardment of Copen- hagen was due to the ' ' whole system of militarism ^ " War, the Offspring of Fear," p. 4. By Hon. Bertrand Russell (Union of Democratic Control). 2 " How the War came," p. 4. (Labour and War Pamph- lets, No. I, published by Independent Labour Party.) 3 "Belgium and 'the Scrap of Paper,' " p. 3. By H. N. Brailsford. (Independent Labour Party, Salisbury Square, E.G.) THE PRESENT SITUATION 17 and secret diplomacy" ; omits the fact that, by the various Reform Bills that have been passed since 1807, the entire British governmental machinery has- been altered, and omits to observe that whereas Germany in 1914 had guaranteed the inviolability of Belgium as lately as in 1911, Great Britain in 1807 had done nothing of the sort for Denmark. Or again, in an even more irresponsible vein we have Mr. Shaw's statement that — " The Kaiser is a Junker, though less true blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an Ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign Allies by a stroke of his pen." ^ On this sheer imbecility, regarded as Pro-German propaganda, it is unnecessary to comment. It is choicely paralleled by the statement issued by " Foreign Office, Berlin, August 1914," to the effect that — " The investigation of the crime [the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand and his Consort] through the Austro- Hungarian authorities has yielded the fact that the con- spiracy against the life of the Archduke and successor to the throne was prepared and abetted in Belgrade with the co-operation of Servian officials, and executed with arms from the Servian State arsenal." ^ ^ " Common Sense about the War," p. 2. By George Ber- nard Shaw. (PubUshed by The New Statesman.) 2 " The German White Book," " The only authorised translation." " How Russia and her Ruler betrayed Ger- many's confidence and thereby made the European War," p. 3. (Druckund Verlag Liebheit undThiesen. Berlin.) The singular English of this German official document and the use of the word " yielded " imply nothing at all. They omit 2 i8 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND The methods, in short, of this whole school of con- troversialists are those of the artist — and of the irre- sponsible artist at that. Just as the novelist of a certain school will make all landowners appear to be oppressive and unimaginative, or just as novelists of another school will make all Socialists appear in the guise of wife-beaters or usurers, or all Christians fornicators and dipsomaniacs, so these writers treat of secret diplomacy, British diplomacy, Sir Edward Grey, or other prominent figures of the discussions which preceded the war. It does not much matter whether the artist in question be Mr. Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, or the ingenious author of an article in the Neues Wiener Journal, a semi-official organ, who states that — " The Zweibund is now fighting with seven nations. It is obvious that some of these do not count from the point of view of civilisation. Japan is a plague of moths. Menagerie peoples like the Servians and the Montenegrins are altogether out of the reckoning. ... As for France ... a people that never was in earnest, not even for an hour ; that never was modest, not even for an hour ; a people that has never believed in anything higher than sexual love, pleasure, the vanities of dilettantist art and the cheaply decked glories of the stage ; . . . a people incapable of wisdom, incapable of justice, incapable of repentance ; that to every one of its sins super-adds the sins of defiance or that of a lying denial ; a people that suffers from the worst of all national maladies, to point out that even the Austro-Hungarian trial of the murder of the Archduke did not take place until September and October 1914, and that therefore these investigations had, at the date of the publication of the " German White Book," " yielded " nothing at all. THE PRESENT SITUATION 19 epidemic falsehood — such a people is lost beyond the possibility of rescue." ^ But I ask myself the question whether the time for the use of the method of this school as an exclusive standard for judging life, ethics, carnage, diplomacy, economics and religion, has not gone by. It is no doubt valuable to point out, as Mr. Shaw does, in the opening act of Arms and the Man, that a soldier who has fought like the devil may be possessed by a passion for chocolate cream and for sleep. But, in the end, that is only a picturesque detail — and only a detail, however picturesque. And by obscuring the fact that the soldier was an efftcient soldier Mr. Shaw is not giving a true picture of life : he is really obscur- ing the issues. It is, in fact, mere "chatter about Harriet" all over again. And, by applying this method to international politics Mr, Shaw is as much obscuring the issue as if he were to insist that the main characteristic of Shakespeare was infidelity to Mrs. Shakespeare. The " Fall Shakespeare," as the Germans call it, is a very exact illustration simply because we know just as much about Shakespeare as we know of the main figures of the diplomatic contest that preceded the various declarations of war of August 1914. We know, in fact, nothing whatever about Shakespeare ; just as we know nothing whatever about Sir Edward Grey, M. Sasonoff, Count Tisza, the German Emperor, or M. Delcasse. We have, however, a general sense of Shakespeare's personality which we gather from his published works, including the bequeathing of his * Article by Egon Friedell, quoted in Foreign Opinion, March 31st, 1915. 20 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS AND second-best bed to his wife. But A, reading the works and will of Shakespeare, will have a totally different view of Shakespeare's character from the view gradually impressed upon the minds of B, C, D, and so on ad infinitum. We shall, that is to say, be always in doubt whether Shakespeare in his proper person speaks in the mouth of lago, of Portia, of the melan- choly Jaques, of Lear, or of Timon of Athens. My private conviction, for instance, may well be that the passionate inner ideas of Shakespeare are expressed, as regards life, in the worst ravings of Timon, and that his ideas as regards art are put down in the scene of Hamlet with the players. Shake- speare, in fact, according to this theory, would have liked to have written plays about " mobled queens" ; but he was forced by the demands of the commercial enterprise of which he was a director to put into the mouth of Lear the words, " And my poor fool is dead." This, however, is merely my private conviction, and, from an historical point of view, it is valueless. There is absolutely no more evidence to support it than there is to support Mr. Shaw's statement that Mr. Winston Churchill was dying to take off his coat in public, while Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Asquith were trying to avert war. Nevertheless, a reasonably bril- liant writer could make an exceedingly convincing picture of Shakespeare as a man unfaithful to Mrs, Shakespeare, as a friend passionately decrying friend- ship, and as a poet bearing a grudge against the world which would not buy passages of loose and violent rhetoric couched in windy and incomprehensible lan- guage. So our intellectuals have created for us fancy pictures of Sir Edward Grey, of Mr. Winston Churchill, THE PRESENT SITUATION 21 of the Prime Minister, of Lord Kitchener, of the Ger- man Emperor, of the Austrian Emperor, of the Russian Tsar, and of Count Berchtold. But these fancy pic- tures have absolutely no evidence to support them. Gossip in plenty there will be. I remember, for in- stance, in the year 1909, being at a function at the then German Ambassador's, Count Paul von Wolff - Metternich. I met there two people, a man and his wife, who asserted that they had just come from stopping with Sir Edward Grey at Howick (!), that Sir Edward Grey had uttered at the dinner-table senti- ments of an extreme fear, personal dishke, and dis- belief in the hona-fides of Germany. This, of course, is a perfectly absurd anecdote, because the persons who told it me, as I discovered afterwards, had never seen Sir Edward Grey ; and yet it is a perfectly true one, because I have simply recorded what I heard at Count Metternich' s ; nevertheless, it certainly coloured my own views of Sir Edward Grey right up to August 4th, 1914. Or again, in June 1913 I was assured by a certain individual that he had been taken round the room of the First Lord of the Admiralty at Whitehall, and had been shown by Mr. Winston Churchill portrait after portrait of bottle-nosed gentle- men in three-cornered hats, aU former First Lords of the Admiralty. And Mr. Churchill is said, ' ' gloat- ingly," to have pointed out First Lord after First Lord, such a one having been ruler of the Navy at the time of the glorious First of June, such a one in the day of Trafalgar, such another at Navarino. The implication was, of course, that Mr. Churchill expected or desired to see his own portrait take its place on those walls as that of the First Lord of the Admiralty in the day of Armageddon. That, of course, is again 22 THE HISTORIAN'S METHODS a pretty story, but as far as historical evidence goes it is the merest nonsense. It has the value of a park orator's account of the habits and ideals of Dukes, Judges of the High Court, and Archbishops. In peace-time it is no doubt a soothing and agree- able occupation to take away reputations, to besmirch public characters, and to ruin homes, as it were, for the love of God, or to get oneself the reputation of a brilhant conversationalist. But it seems to me that, in a time of war, when, whatever happens, the fate of humanity and of civilisation is to be decided for ever, somewhat graver methods, in the interest of intellectual honesty, should be adopted. One's scheme of life may be such that one may not care at all which side prevail so that one's reputation or one's profits shall be increased ; one may know that, by one's writing, one may depress one side and hearten up the other so that the war may be extremely prolonged, and a million or so of men in consequence meet their deaths. One may be cynical enough to disregard that fact — and cynicism is a quality of im- portance to the world. But few writers, I think, are sufficiently cynical to desire to be intellectually dis- honest. The intellect is their tool, and the workman who defiles his tool is apt to consider himself the basest of mankind. CHAPTER II THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM In the foregoing section I have paid only cursory attention to the writings of Mr. Shaw and the other gentlemen whom it is convenient to call ' ' pro-Prussian apologists." But, although my conscience is satisfied that my cursory generalisations are a perfectly fair diagnosis of these gentlemen's cases, I am aware that I may not have succeeded in convincing the reader to that effect. I have therefore prepared a very elaborate answer to Mr. Shaw, taking sentence by sentence a portion of his pamphlet called ' ' Common Sense about the War," and making such comments as appear to be necessary. I have also prepared moder- ately elaborate replies to what appear to me to be the main arguments of Mr. Brailsford and his colleagues. But, since these compilations may form somewhat heavy reading for many readers, and since, in any case, they can hardly be called literature, the production of which is one of my main interests, I have thought it better to print these somewhat elaborate compilations with a great number of cited documents, in two Appendices which will be found at the end of the volume. Let us now seek to define the limits to which honest criticism of personalities should be restricted. 23 24 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM This is perhaps the most important aspect of the present day ; perhaps it is the most important aspect of all historic times and of all historic judgments. It is perhaps a necessity, but in that case it is a lamen- table necessity, that popular judgments of history should be formed by rule-of-thumb statements, such as that King John was a villain, or King Henry VIII a Protestant hero. Probably we can know nothing at all about the personality of John ; certainly we can know so much about the personality of Henry VIII as to be utterly befogged. For the fact is that every public man has a dual personality ; is, that is to say, homo duplex in the strictest scientist's use of that term. He exists, on the one hand, with his private dislikes, his private passions, with all the incidental private relationships of any other man ; and, in addition, the most autocratic of public characters is forced to be modified by the traditions of the office which he fills. For the traditions of the office that one fiUs may vary in power and may vary in effect according to the given personality ; but they are always at work. And the real difficulty of the historian is to be found in the historian's own mind. The popular hatred felt in this country for the private personality of the Emperor William II is a stupid thing ; but it is not more stupid than the hatred for Sir Edward Grey which is shared and fostered by the German people and by Mr. Shaw and his intellectual colleagues. For it is fairly safe to say that 90 per cent, of the popular hatred of the Emperor William II is bestowed upon the empty shell of that potentate's official robes, necessities, and traditions. If I were writing loosely, or speaking colloquially, I should commit myself to uttering the private conviction. THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM 25 founded upon a great deal of gossip and upon two short personal conversations with the Emperor William II — that the man, William II from the very beginning hated the present war, desired nothing so much as amicable relations with this country, with France, and with the Empire of Russia. I have the very genuine conviction that in private life William II is a kindly, well-meaning, extremely stupid and infinitely too impulsive personality. On the two occasions when I had the honour of conversing with this sovereign he flatly contradicted himself, using on each occasion expressions of extreme vigour, though the matter itself was of no importance whatever. But all this personal information, whether direct or whether in the nature of gossip from persons in the position to communicate personal information, does not amount to a row of pins as far as the serious writ- ing of history is concerned. If, as I have been credibly informed, the Emperor broke in half the pen with which he signed the mobilisation order of July 1914, and violently threw the fragments upon the ground, it does not really affect the public character of Wil- liam II. For William II as an institution is more than William II the man. It is two forces, the one unknown to us, the other ascertainable enough, func- tioning at different angles and producing progress in one given direction. A wind blowing from due north-east to due south-west, impinging upon the sails of a ship may, according as those sails are set, send the ship on a due easterly course or a due westerly course ; but the only thing which the cargo in the hold can constater is that it is being carried east or west, as the case may be. And the only thing that we have a right to consider in writing about the 26 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM origins of the present war is the pubUc actions of the characters and their duly authenticated pubUc speeches or despatches. Let me labour and relabour this point. ^ ^ I will add the following further illustrative detail. I was, I believe, the first English writer to call the attention of this country to the fact that expressions of hostility to Eng- land were to be expected from the German Crown Prince. I had been informed, as early as 1903, by one of the Prince's tutors, a Professor of the University of Bonn, that this was certainly to be expected because the Emperor, either from genuine predilection or from policy, was an avowed friend of Great Britain. According to this gentleman the tradition of the House of Hohenzollern was always to have a successor to the throne in opposition to the reigning sovereign. In this way complete loyalty, if not to the reigning sovereign, then to the Royal House, was assured, since the supporters of the reigning sovereign would be satisfied because they were in the ascendency, whilst those opposing the sovereign would be more patient because they would have the expectation of coming into power with the ascent to the throne of the Heir- apparent. In 1909, in a leader to The English Review, I called attention to this fact in an article which — or, at least I was so informed by the proprietor who succeeded me in the possession of that organ — caused a great deal of annoyance at the German Embassy in London. Nor, indeed, did we have long to wait for the Crown Prince's public announcement that this was his policy, since, in 191 1, from a box in the Reichstag, the Crown Prince applauded words of violent hostility to England which were being uttered by Herr von Heydebrand. This speech will be found in Appendix A amongst the selection of one hundred German militarist utterances. I may add that the Professor who made this prophecy, and who was intimately acquainted with the Crown Prince personally, since he was the Prince's tutor, informed me that this hostility to England, when it came, would be purely platonic and dictated by reasons of State, the Crown Prince having quite cordial feelings towards at any rate those EngHsh whom he had met in England. I do not wish the reader, however, to draw any deduction from these statements. THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM 27 I have said that we can know so much about the personahty of Henry VIII as to become hopelessly befogged as to what was the real character of that potentate. In 1539 Henry VIII built castles at Deal, Walmer, Sandgate, and Winchelsea. The ac- counts of these castles he scrutinised apparently with jealous care, and thus we have him writing with his own hand upon the equivalent of an ironmonger's bill from Sandgate : ' ' 2^d. the dozen is too dear for flesh-hooks." ^ Nevertheless, the public records of Henry VIII show that person — in his public capacity — to have been of a prodigality so enormous and so reckless that although, when he came to the throne, he was by far the most wealthy monarch of Christen- dom, in a comparatively short space of time he was reduced to the expedient of selling leaden roofs off churches in order to keep going. I am not saying that researches into the private character of that first Defender of the Faith are not an agreeable form of occupation for the constructive artist or the analytical psychologist, or that the retail- ing of gossip about Sir Edward Grey and the German Emperor is not an agreeable pastime for those who care to engage in it. But the essential thing, the absolutely necessary thing for the historian, as for the which may be true or may be false. I simply wish to point out that all that, authentically and historically, we know is that the Crown Prince applauded Herr von Heydebrand, and that the Conservative Party to which Herr Heydebrand be- longed was at that time in opposition to the policy of the Imperial Government, the policy of the Imperial Government making at any rate ostensibly for reconciliation with Great Britain and with France. ^ Catalogue of State Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. xv., p. 393. 28 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM decent controversialist, is to cleanse all these matters out of his mind as carefuUy as he would cleanse a saucepan of onions before setting to work to boil milk in it. For him there should exist nothing but, at worst, the printed document, and, at best, the actual manuscript in the handwriting of the character to be analysed. And the public should place no credence whatever in a writer writing controversially upon such matters as the origins of a war unless either in foot- notes or in the text the exact references are given for the authority for statements of fact and the exact quotations of speeches or of written documents, with, again, exact references to the pages of the books, pamphlets, or official printed documents in which these things may be found by the reader himself if he care to take the trouble. All controversial writings that are not so documented are absolutely valueless. At the same time, the public should carefully guard its mind from the fallacy, purely German in origin, that the province of the historian is simply the amassing of documentations, or of what the Germans call Quellen. In another work I have pointed out that the great defect of German education has been that its energies were entirely devoted to researches, and that it entirely neglected constructive work. Let me then say boldly that the only cause for the existence of the historian is that he should be an artist — that he should re-create past times, even if that past be only distant by the space of ten minutes. My quarrel with Mr. Shaw, in fact, is not that he has written bril- liantly about facts, but that he has invented facts and has then written brilliantly about them. Without giving us any Quellen at all — any documents by THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM 29 which we may check his utterances — he has written many brilliant sentences with the object of inducing the reader to beHeve that the German national psy- chology is exactly the same as the British national psychology. That might form very fittingly the thesis for an amusing play like, say, John Bull's Other Island; but, regarded as matter of constructive historic art, it is sheer dishonesty. I am at least driven to this conclusion by the fact that Mr. Shaw claims no acquaintanceship with German life and exhibits no familiarity whatever with German docu- ments. In writing the pages that follow I am at- tempting to reconstruct from my own consciousness the psychologies of the three Western Powers chiefly engaged in the present contest. I am attempting, that is to say, to remedy some of the mischief that has been done in the world by these lazy and loose- thinking analogists who assert that German, British, and French are alike governed by flagitious and hereditary ruling classes, are alike inspired by in- sidious and concealed sentiments of militarism — are alike, in reality, buUdogs whilst desiring to present the aspect of gazelles. The service that I am about to try to do the reader is precisely this : I am about to give very exactly phrased first-hand evidence, not of the Englishman as he is or was, not of the Englishman as I have found him to be, but of that individual as I have found myself to be. And I am about to give exactly phrased first-hand evidence of the German as I have found him to be, and of the Frenchman. If the reader have ever been present in a British court of law he or she will have heard the Judge directing the jury as to what evidence they must keep in mind, and what, sup- 30 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM posing it to have crept in, they must omit altogether from their considerations. I will ask the reader, therefore, to bear in mind that I am about, as conscientiously as if I had been put upon my oath, to give evidence as to the relative civilisations of these three peoples. Let me here dwell for a moment upon the nature — and of course upon the limitations — of my experience as to, say, the relative bellicosities of the British and of the Germans. I am ready, then, to swear with the utmost solemnity, and in any form that is prescribed to me, to the fol- lowing facts : I have never in my life heard an Eng- lishman say that war, academically regarded, could be beneficial either to the British State or to the private individual. I have never in my life heard an English- man advocate war with any European nation, and I have never in my life read one word, sufficiently strongly put to remain in my mind, written by any modern English writer, responsible or irresponsible, that advo- cated either war as a panacea for humanity or the de- claration of war upon any European State or Great Power. Let me be explicit with the reader as to what this means, regarded as evidence. I do not wish to allege that no Englishman in modern times ever ad- vocated war or threats of war. Indeed, I will point to what is for me a very striking exception — to myself. For, in 1909, I expressed, as rousingly as I could, my conviction that an invulnerable British Fleet was a sole guarantee of the peace of the world, and that it was the duty of the British Government to threaten to declare war on Germany if Germany laid down so much as one single new battleship. Nevertheless, with the deepest emotion of conscientiousness, I can assert that those words were dictated by a sincere THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM 31 love of peace. I was convinced that such a declara- tion by the British Government would ensure that Germany would abandon her shipbuilding programme. Again, I do not wish to assert that, merely because I have never in my life come across English militarist speeches or writings, that such speeches or writings were absolutely non-existent. I have mixed in general conversation with almost every class of English society, but I do not claim to have mixed with every class, and I may confess to having been all my life impatient of the conversation of persons whom I have considered to be fools. And, until August 1914, I should have considered that sort of person to be a fool who advocated war as a remedy for the ills of humanity, or who desired a British declaration of war, in furtherance of British interests, against any one of the European States or Great Powers. I should have considered that person to be a fool, and I should have avoided his society, or I should not have listened whilst he was talking. But I do not remember ever having been under that necessity. Similarly, I have passed a large portion of my life in reading and in hearing about books, and, had any work of authority or any speaker of influence advo- cated war with any of the Great Powers or war as a remedy for human diseases, it is unlikely that it would have escaped my, at least, cursory attention. Indeed, the very fact that I myself should have written anything so apparently bellicose as the passage about the German Navy to which I have just referred, is evidence that I found the world of men in which I lived and the books which I read insufhciently aware of what to me was a patent fact — that an invulner- able British Navy was the chief guarantee of the 32 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM peace of the world. As a writer I have always bothered my head so little about politics that I have very rarely written about public matters. When I have so written I have always tried to say something that I did not know was being said elsewhere. Moreover, the journal in question was in opposition to the Government of that day, and, as far as I have been able to discover, the article attracted not the slightest attention in any quarter. For as much, then, as it is worth, I offer this nega- tive evidence. I will add to it the positive evidence that I have never met a German — with one exception, that of Professor Walther Schiicking, of Marburg — who did not, if the subject of war came up in general conversation, allege it as his opinion that war had very great advantages as a panacea for human and national diseases. A great many Germans also have in my hearing advocated the thorough beating down and humbling of the French nation and the complete extirpation of the British Navy. In addition, so great is the bulk of German militarist literature that I have read, before the war and without much interest, that the impression remains with me that, whereas every German serious writer takes the possibility of war as one of the resources of the German Empire, I have never read one single word in German which advo- cated peace as a constant and indestructible factor of the world. The philosophy of the State, whether the State be regarded merely as an ideal or whether that ideal be the present German Empire — philosophising, then, about the State is an occupation to which every German writer devotes a large portion of his energies. Whether it be historians like Ranke, Momrasen, and Treitschke, or whether it be eminent investigators into THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM 33 every other branch of human material or mental activity such as Professors Eucken, Oncken, von Wagner, von List, or whether it be the great who are great for quite other reasons — whether it be Wagner, Nietzsche, Kant, or Hegel — every one of these Teu- tonically eminent has accepted war as part of a theory of State about which they find it necessary to write. And it is impossible to have gone through life without having had some acquaintance with the writings of Ranke, Mommsen, Treitschke, Oncken, Fontane, von Wagner, von List, Richard Wagner, Nietzsche, Kant, and Hegel, since these have formed, at any rate until August 1914, the ordinary reading of a normally cultured man, I will put the matter in another way. Having, then, this normal acquaintance with German serious litera- ture I set myself to work to compile the one hundred militarist utterances from German serious literature that will be found in Appendix A. These were got together without any particular trouble. Having at the same time a naturally deeper acquaintance with English works of what is called serious literature, I attempted, for my own satisfaction, to collect a number of passages of a militarist tendency from English writers of my everyday acquaintance. And, using as much industry and a certainly greater in- timacy, I was utterly unable to coUect any instances at all from writers of anything like the weight of those Germans whose names I have just mentioned. Neither Darwin nor Huxley, neither Spencer nor Mill, neither Lord Acton nor Professor Gardiner, neither Pater nor D. G. Rossetti have yielded me any passages whatever which would go to prove that the basis of the State was the waging of war, or that war in itself is a sublime occupation without which nations suffer 3 34 THE LIMITS OF HONEST CRITICISM intellectual and material decay. On the other hand, every one of the German writers whom I have just mentioned have yielded such passages. If I were asked, then, to give my relative impres- sions of England or of Germany with regard to belli- cosity of attitude I should have no doubt whatever in saying that the English were unmartial to a degree that rendered them a danger to peace, whilst the Germans were martial to a degree that rendered them absolutely ridiculous. And I do not think that I can be accused, as an observer, of any partiality to this country. On the contrary, the normal German's ap- parent love of literature, the pursuit of which is my profession in life, and the normal Englishman's in- capacity to have any sense of the relative values of literature, predisposed me to take favourable views of many German manifestations. These last I can now perceive to have been symptoms of a disease which has caused the German nation to be the greatest menace to humanity that the world has ever seen, or that has, at least, been chronicled in recorded history. Such, then, is my very exactly recorded impression of the relative bellicosities of these two peoples. And, whilst warning the reader that they are only im- pressions and as such not as direct evidence as might be given in a murder case by a man who had seen a revolver fired off, I must at the same time remind him that the impressions of a man who has spent the great part of his life in recording impressions with an extreme exactitude are, say, of as much value, supposing him to have had sufficient opportunities to form conclusions, as the evidence, in a case of murder by poison, of the analytical chemist who finds traces in the body of a victim of a poison difficult of analysis. PART II DRAMATIS PERSON M CHAPTER I ' ' AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD ' ' Let us attempt to recapture, in as precise a phrase- ology as we may, what was the British psychology immediately prior to the outbreak of the present war, and what was the state of affairs in England then. So remote does that period seem that the task is one of some difficulty, and the field is singularly open to those who are anxious to prove that Great Britain at that date was a militarist menace to the rest of Europe. So absolutely are our minds now fixed upon the affairs of the present, so bellicose in consequence has every proper man become, that, if Mr. Bernard Shaw or Herr Dernburg choose to assert that before July 1914 every Englishman was a raging fire-eater, there are few of us with our minds sufficiently con- centrated upon the immediate past to be able to ques- tion, much less to confute, those generalisations. And that is partly a matter of shame. Because the neces- sities of the day are so essentially martial we are ashamed to think that we were ever pacifist ; because Germany — the German peoples as well as the Prussian State — have now put into practice precepts which they have been enjoining for the last century and a decade, I am ashamed to think that less than a year ago I had, for the German peoples, if not for the Prussian State, a considerable affection and some 37 38 "AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS esteem. By a coincidence, then, which I must regard as the most curious of my Hfe — though, indeed, in these kaleidoscopic days something similar may well have been the fate of many inhabitants of these islands — in the middle of July, 1914, I was in Berwickshire en- gaged in nothing less than tentative machinations against the seat in Parliament of — Sir Edward Grey ! In the retrospect this may well appear to have been a fantastic occupation, but how fantastic do not all our occupations of those days now appear! On the morning of July 20th, 1914, I stood upon the platform of Berwick-on-Tweed station reading the London papers. The London papers were exceedingly excited, and I cannot say that I myself was other than pessi- mistic — as to the imbecility of human nature, and, more particularly, as to the imbecility of the Liberal Party, and, more particularly again, as to that of the editors of the and the , which are Liberal party organs. These organs at that date were, in veiled language, calling for the abdication of the King of England. That, again, sounds fantastic. But there it is ; the files of the newspapers are there to testify to it. Those organs, then, reminded the world, the sove- reign, or what it is convenient to call the Court Party, that the day for the intervention of monarchs in public affairs was past ; that an immense and pas- sionate democracy, international in its functions and one-minded in its aspirations, had taken control of the world, and that the past, with its absolutisms, its oligarchisms, its so very limited monarchies, its dictatorships, and its wars was over and done with. We had had a very tiring London season ; I seem to recapture still very well the feelings of lassitude which AT THE WORLD" 39 made me dislike having to turn my mind again to excited political matters. By the middle of July in a properly constituted world the Eton and Harrow match and the Universities' match at Lord's have brought the interests of the world to an end. We seek brighter skies than those of London ; the Houses of Parliament may be expected to slumber for a few days more upon their benches and the Press devotes itself to the activities of the sea-serpent or to specula- tion as to ideal matrimonial states. We do not, as a rule, look for newspapers during August. Besides, I had got myself into a frame of mind for occupying my thoughts with past things — polished armour, shining swords, fortresses, conflagrations, the driving off of cattle, the burning of inhabitants within their dwellings — all those impossible things of the past which assuredly would never come again. For, on July 20th, 1914, it was impossible to think of war, though it might be desirable to eject Sir Edward Grey from the parliamentary representation of the town of Berwick-on-Tweed. Sir Edward Grey was un- doubtedly a nuisance. My own chief objection to him was that in 1909 he had not sufficiently backed up Russia when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herze- govina. I said to myself, and I said frequently to other people, that Great Britain had gained a lasting discredit from this instance of the pusillanimity of its rulers. What credit, indeed, I asked, could ever attach to Great Britain again in the councils of the nations ? As it appeared to me. Sir Edward Grey had not backed up Russia, but had ever since been attempting to propitiate that Empire by presenting her with little spiced cakes in the form of valuable spheres of influence — now it was bits of Persia, now 40 "AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS Mongolia, now it was some other pin-prick to Ger- many which Russia asked for, I regarded Sir Edward Grey's chief occupation, since he had lately announced that he never read the newspapers, as being that of delivering ceaseless pin-pricks to Germany. This roused Germany, which had always seemed to me a rather childish Power, to slightly absurd foamings at the mouth and threats of a war that was obviously impossible. People would not go to war ; public opinion was against it. Democracy, though it might be a nuisance as a too facile instrument in the hands of party politicians, and even a menace when voiced by the and the , would at least have the virtue of its defects, and, with no uncertain voice, would prohibit the firing of a single shot. War, anyhow, was impossible. I am, perhaps, attaching too much importance to my speculations as to war. For the fact is that I did not speculate as to war at all. It was one of the impossible things that we left out of our calculations altogether. It was like the idea of one's personal death which one dislikes contemplating and puts out of the mind ; but it had — the idea of war — none of the inevitability that attaches to the idea of death. Nevertheless, Sir Edward Grey was a nuisance. By his pin-pricks he fomented the absurd rages of Ger- many and thus brought Germany into the foreground of things. And, whatever the world needed, it par- ticularly did not need attention drawn to Germany. Germany, at that date, I hoped, was well on the road to national bankruptcy, and going faster and faster in that direction. And the sooner Germany was done for by those pacific means the better I should be pleased, since one might hope that the Germans would AT THE WORLD" 41 then return to their simple pastoral pursuits, leave off sitting in overheated red-plush restaurants, reading offensive and gross journals, and drinking chemical drinks that were not good for them. But, indeed, except for thinking that Sir Edward Grey paid a great deal too much attention to Germany, I bothered my head about that Power very little. It may even be possible that I am giving you too elaborate a picture of my frame of mind as I stood upon the platform of Berwick-on-Tweed station reading the daily papers on July 20th, 1914. And yet I do not think that I am over- exaggerating what passed through my mind. It is true that I had wanted to think about the Border warfare ; about Rokehope, which would have been a pleasant place if the false thieves would let it be ; about Edom o' Gordon ; about the Widdringtons, and about the little old bridge that goes across the Tweed into England from Berwick which is neither England nor Scotland, but just Berwick. And the quaint reflection crossed my mind that, if ever Eng- land went to war with Russia as her ally, we might well attainder Sir Edward Grey, since Sir Edward Grey sits for Berwick, and Berwick is still at war with Russia, the proclamation of peace after the Crimea having been omitted in the town of Berwick-on-Tweed, which is neither England nor Scotland. At any rate, there I was upon the long, narrow, crowded platform of the station, and I had an hour and a half to wait for the train that was to convey me to the town of Duns, in Berwickshire. I was sur- rounded and a good deal jostled by an alien, dark, foreign-spoken population ; mariners all, all loud- voiced, all discoursing rather incomprehensibly of the doings of the Ann and Nellie, of the Peter Smith and 42 " AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD " of the Last Hope. They talked, these dusky people, in the gloom of the covered platform, of singular feats of sailing, of nets, of rock-salt, and of the gutting of herrings. The situation, and the hour, were all the more proper for introspection and for taking stock of oneself, not only because of the intense solitude amongst that populace from whom I was certainly descended, as because of the fact that an immense public convulsion was about to overwhelm the people of at least one of these islands, and because, amidst threats of revolution in the other islands, a definite step had been taken. On July 19th, 1914, in fact. His Majesty the King had summoned a Conference to discuss the Home Rule problem. I was going, however, to have a good deal of golf, some billiards, some auction, and, I hoped, some riding amongst the Cheviots, and I am bound to confess that, if the golf and the auction were not the chief interests in my existence, for the moment, at any rate, the topography of that Border country was really the major interest of a period in which I was inclined mostly for what is known as " slacking." One doesn't know what one will find in a country-house to which one is going for the first time, so that, during such waitings at junctions, a certain amount of mental drifting is perhaps pardonable. CHAPTER II " KEEPING fit" The reader will by this time be aware that I am describing truthfuUy and as carefully as possible the frame of mind of the average Englishman of July 1914. I am attempting, therefore, to provide as exact an historical document as if I were reporting the proces verbal of the trial of Joan of Arc or the speeches and votes during a sitting of Parliament. I am presenting, perfectly accurately, the workings of a compara- tively normal English mind on an occasion which, for personal reasons, remains singularly clearly with me. This seems to me to be a method of controversy much more fair than that which w^ould consist in saying, "The Englishman is a militarist," or "The Englishman is a flannelled fool too indifferent to public matters to think of anything other than the problem of getting past 'silly point.'" And, indeed, repre- hensible as it may appear in that time of public tumult, this particular Anglo-Saxon did certainly meditate upon the fact that, the turf of Scottish greens being very velvety, and, as it were, sticky, it would probably be necessary, in making approaches, to use a clean niblick shot rather than that sort of half-topped mashie effect which results in ' ' running-up ' ' to the hole. That, as I say, may appear reprehensible. There were the North and the South ready to be at 43 44 "KEEPING FIT" each other's throats ; we were, very likely, on the verge of a disastrous civil and religious war ; the portentous incident of the Curragh might bode any- thing for the constitutional development of these islands — and there I was, thinking about how to hole out at Kelso or at North Berwick. I must plead, as an excuse, our national sense that it is a duty to keep "fit." Since my very earliest days, at school, at home, in the society of friends, and wher- ever I went, I had had enjoined upon me that par- ticular maxim. It was my duty to keep " fit " ; it was my duty to society, to the State, to my relatives, to my dependents, and to those to whom ultimately I should be the ancestor. From the earliest times that I can remember the first maxim that was im- pressed upon was that of Mens sana in corpore sano. My second maxim was Fiat justitia, ruat cesium. Armed, in fact, with these two guides to life, as if the one had been a shining spear and the other an impene- trable buckler, I was prepared to face journeys into an unknown Berwickshire and explorations of the precipitous Cheviots. On the one hand, as long as I got myself into condition, neither the steepest crags nor the longest rides need have any perils for me ; on the other hand, as long as my attitude to every human vicissitude that could arise was that of an absolute " correctness," I had nothing to fear from life. As regarded the State, its existence was hardly manifest to me ; as long as I kept myself fit, thus ultimately providing the State with healthy children, and as long as I did my duty, thus setting a good example in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me, I was doing all that the State could expect of me — as long, that is to say, as I made correct returns of "KEEPING FIT" 45 income-tax. I had possessed four votes in various constituencies, but I had only once recorded a vote. This was partly because, I being a pronounced Tory, no Conservative organisation had ever taken the trouble to canvass me ; partly it was because I had always felt a profound conviction that I did not know enough about public affairs to meddle in them. I had also a profound distrust of all legislation ; I thought that what the country needed was a rest from all Acts of Parliament for as long a period as possible. When it came to the Irish question, which on that day was immediately under my nose, on the one hand I could see no issue of any sort, on the other I was in profound disagreement with both parties in the State. I had never voted Tory because, as long as I can remember, I have been a passionate upholder of the right of the South of Ireland to govern itself. At the same time I was an equally passionate upholder of the right of the North to remain part of the English governmental machine, if the North so desired. Inas- much, in short, as I should passionately resent the right of any man to interfere with my personal actions or to give me any orders, so I passionately disliked the idea of any man giving orders to any other man unless, indeed, that man should be a member of a Church and thus voluntarily subject to a priest ; voluntarily enlisted in an army and thus subject to his officers ; or the member of the crew of a ship, whether naval or mercantile. With that review of the situation my mind aban- doned the subject, and I began to pay attention to what was being said by the crews of the fishing smacks around me. I remember wondering whether it would not be possible to make a short story out of an anec- 46 "KEEPING FIT" dote that was being retailed to unlistening ears by art exceedingly drunken old man with white hair and one bloodshot eye. I did not, you will understand, in the least contemplate making a story out of that now- forgotten anecdote. I could not contemplate setting a story in any atmosphere with which I was not intimately acquainted. This old man came from Eye- mouth, and I had not at that date done more than see the name of that beautifully situated fishing hamlet upon a sign-post. No, I was considering the matter purely platonically — considering, in fact, how the little affair would have been handled by such a genius as Guy de Maupassant, who could handle any subject or any theme in such a way as to render it not only absolutely convincing, but indeed a part of the life that oneself had lived. Let us now ascertain how this Englishman would have directly considered war if he had given the sub- ject prolonged consideration. Just before entering the train which was to take me one stage farther towards the township of Duns in Berwickshire, I noticed in the inconspicuous centre of a page of a newspaper an announcement in about nine lines to the effect that Austria-Hungary was going to do something in regard to the crime of Serajevo. That is precisely how the matter presented itself to my mind. I should say that, upon the whole, my sympathies at that date were with Austria ; at the same time, I think I must have considered that the Austrian parade of grief at the murder of the Arch- duke Franz Ferdinand and his consort was probably merely diplomatic, or, at the very most, official. I had the vague idea — largely owing to a conversation "KEEPING FIT" 47 with a member of the British Embassy Staff at Vienna whom I met by chance in a dihgence going from Saint Remy in Provence to Avignon — that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was personally disliked by the Austrian Emperor and was regarded with aversion by the blacker Cathohc members of the Viennese Court as well as by the ruling classes of Hungary. At that date I was at liberty to dislike Serbians and to feel sympathy for the Viennese. The main point, how- ever, is, as far as I was concerned, that I did not imagine there were any passions, whether national or tragic, engaged in the matter. I thought that the Austrians would use the murder as a convenient pawn in a long diplomatic game that would continue for the next fourteen or fifteen years. (You are to remember that it was a part of my absolute conviction that the German Empire would be bankrupt in about fourteen years. Indeed, I can quite well remember having assured a number of people that the dismemberment of Turkey in Europe and the arising of a new and formidable Slav force irremediably blocking the way on the strip of territory between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, meant the extinction of Germany. And I remember that, though I felt no personal grief at the thought of the disappearance of Germany, I nevertheless added platonically to that pronounce- ment something to the effect that Germany had con- tributed a little to civilisation and that Europe would probably be the poorer without some organised Teutonic leavening in the lump. I did not, you understand, believe this last statement with my heart, but I felt that a sense of aloof impartiality demanded it of me. It was part of a correctness of attitude !) 48 "KEEPING FIT" In somewhat the same way, at the moment of entering the train for Duns, it occurred to me to think that Austria might go to war with Serbia, and that in that case we might well have an international " con- flagration," and "Armageddon," or whatever cliche phrase it was that came into a mind much more occupied with golf-clubs and suit-cases than with the state of Europe. My mind, indeed, was singularly virgin as to any idea of war. Whenever I had dis- cussed war theoretically — and mostly I had always dismissed the subject with something like the French expression, Tout ca, c'est des blagues — I had abso- lutely denied that any good could come from war. Physical fitness, it had always seemed to me, could be procured by playing the game of cricket ; and, from the same game, taken up early enough and pursued with keenness, there could be enjoined upon the human mind all the self-sacrifice, loyalty, and devo- tion to the interests of a team, or of a whole, that could be demanded of the human race. As for such ex- tensions of territory, or such exchange of territorial jurisdiction, as the world might seem to need, these, I imagined, would be arranged by diplomatic action. The only thing which made me regret that war had disappeared for ever from the earth — except in such remote places as Mexico or the Balkans — was the fact that France would never get Alsace-Lorraine. I hated the thought that France would never get Alsace- Lorraine, I hated also the thought that Poland would, very likely, not be an independent nation for many decades to come ; I hated also the thought of the unwilling subjection of any one race to any other race. Being, as I was, a Roman Catholic in a country where my "KEEPING FIT" 49 co-religionists had been subject to very atrocious oppressions ; descended, as I was, from other Roman Cathohcs in two other countries — Russia and con- quered Prussian territory — where my ancestors of those nationahties had been subject to very bitter oppres- sions; imagining myself to be — or being — a member of the ruling class of a country that still interfered unimaginatively and stupidly with the affairs of a subject race (I am still thinking of Ireland), I was then, and am still, subject to moods of passionate resentment at the thought of racial or religious oppres- sions. These things appeal to me more really, per- sonally, and violently because I have in some chamber of my mind deep personal emotions and pictures of the results of these wants of imaginativeness. And it is the stupidities, rather than the cruelties, of these oppressions that enraged me — and that still enrage me. That Catholics should have burned and murdered Protestants in large numbers ; or that Protestants should have hanged, racked, and murdered Catholics in numbers probably larger, has never much troubled my imagination, perhaps because it is an imagination entirely unfamiliar with the idea of physical violence. But that one race or creed should interfere by peaceful means with the languages spoken by children, or should prevent the adults of another race or creed from performing public functions, filling public offices, possessing this or that object of worship or of neces- sity, building houses upon their own land or that one race should expropriate the lands of another race — those thoughts rouse me to a temper in which I lose all control of my ideas and of my words. To kill a man appeared to me to be relatively little at that date ; it was only closing one chapter of a book, which, 4 50 "KEEPING FIT" I considered, would be continued in a heaven that was beyond the control of armed police. But to deprive a race of the right to public employment and activities was, as far as my experience goes, to drive the adults of that race into madness and decay — into a madness and a decay that would descend upon the children and the children's children of that race until the last of them died out. This point of view may be very unfamiliar to my readers, but I would ask them to believe that the emotion is a very real one, and that this emotion will make me approach the question of subject races, when it becomes my business to deal with that subject, with at least as much genuineness of motive as can be felt by :.ny human being in the world. This brings me a little nearer to the subject of war considered in the abstract — and the consideration of war in the abstract is impossible without the considera- tion of the German Army. At that date I considered the German Army as an institution of absurdity and deception as far as it concerned international matters. I was obstinately and doggedly convinced that Ger- many would never go to war with any nation larger than one of the tribes of Damaraland. As it pre- sented itself to me, this army was a matter of internal police. It was there to prevent the Social Revolution and to aid in the oppression of the Prussian Poles, the Danes of Schleswig-Holstein, and possibly the Catholic South Germans and the French of Alsace- Lorraine. That it would ever come into contact or was ever intended to come into contact with men of equal armament seemed to me an absurd thought. I regarded it as a purely Jingo device, obsolete and gross, without any of the sacred traditions of the "KEEPING FIT" 51 Army of France, or the generous tradition of scramble, push, and irresponsibihty which have caused to be inscribed upon the standards of British regiments the names of Minden, Talavera, and Waterloo. The German Government, as I saw it then, was an institu- tion quite remarkably between the devil and the deep sea — the devil being the Socialist, Constitutionalist, and allied parties, and the deep sea national bank- ruptcy. By getting up war-scares such as that which occurred during the Agadir incident, I imagined that the German Government was merely trying to influ- ence the General Election that invariably followed such war-scares. It is true that such war-scares and such increases of armament would bring the German nation nearer to bankruptcy, and I did not well see how the German rulers proposed to escape from that inevitably approaching disaster. I attributed to them some plan ; what the plan might be I did not think. You are to remember that I was acquainted with certain details of German inter-State administration which were not usually considered by the public of those days. Thus, the finances of Saxony were in so bad a condition in 191 1 that the Saxon Finance Minis- ter called in the Saxon Socialist leaders to help him in framing a Budget ; thus the financial condition of the Kingdom of Bavaria was very bad ; the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg was precariously situated ; the Grand Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt was not in a posi- tion to pay its state officials their full salaries, and the German Empire was so short of money that it had to violate one of the provisions of the Imperial Con- stitution in order to raise a few millions.^ It had, that ^ I refrain from giving references for these statements at this point because they are part of an account of a frame of 52 "KEEPING FIT" is to say, forced through the Bundesrat or Supreme Council of the Empire a provision giving the Govern- ment the right to raise tolls upon the Rhine shipping. English readers can hardly understand how amazing and how arbitrary an act this was on the part of Prussia. It was as if the English section of the British Ministry should have modified the Act of Succession, in spite of the desperate opposition of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the overseas Dominions, in order to raise sufficient money to build five new Dread- noughts. For that the Rhine should be free was nearly as much an article of German faith as that the occupant of the British throne should be Pro- testant. As to what expedient the German Government would devise for raising sufficient money to carry on, I puzzled my head frequently. I imagined that it might take the form of mortgaging the immense forests and coal-fields that are the property of the German State. That the expedient would be war never entered my head. I do not mean to say that I thought the German Army would never be employed. There is a piece of gossip that was current enough in Germany in anti-Imperial and anti-Prussian circles to the effect that the real reason for Prince Bismarck's retirement was that Prince Bismarck had found the Reichstag an inefficient instrument of the governing party, and that he desired to close that body and to govern without it. The Emperor was reported to have said that that would cause a revolution ; that he would have to wade over his ankles in blood before mind. I do not, that is to say, ask the reader to beheve these statements of fact as statements of fact, but only to believe that, in 1914, I believed them. "KEEPING FIT" 53 it was successfully accomplished, and that he did not intend thus to soil the opening years of his reign. Prince Bismarck is reported to have answered : " Very well, then ; in twenty-five years you will have to close the Reichstag, and then you will have to wade over your hips in the blood of your subjects." I do not know whether this anecdote is true or false ; it is very likely untrue. But hearing it had made a great im- pression on my mind, and, when I thought of Prussian troops in action, I thought of them as shooting down Germans by the ten thousand. Blood was a thing of which in English life one had seen so little and of which one had hardly thought at all. It was much the same with death. At that date I might have seen eight or nine dead human beings all of whom had died peacefully in their beds ; but that is a small matter compared with the deaths of tens of thousands. Even of dead animals one sees very few, at any rate in London and the great towns. They are displayed in butchers' shops, but nowhere else do they intrude upon the attention. So that the image of the German Emperor wading up to his hips in blood was peculiarly vivid to me because it was so unfamiliar. That blood would be shed by the animally splendid persons in blue and silver that one had seen striding through the German streets seemed to me to be inevitable ; but the blood that they would shed would be German blood, and it would be shed in Germany. That ever a German rifle would be aimed against a non-German breast appeared to me to be impossible. I had so firmly in my mind the idea that a war for Germany would mean national bank- ruptcy, that, when I considered or talked about the possibility, I was accustomed to say or to think : 54 "KEEPING FIT" " The German rulers may be reactionary, may be brutal, may have carried the idea of organisation to the pitch of madness ; but they are not absolute fools. They are not such absolute fools as to enter upon a war which, whether the issue be successful or un- successful, would mean their inevitable downfall and ruin." I was, I suppose, indulging in false psychology. I dare say I was much too English in my way of looking at things. For I am not, even at this moment, sure that my premisses of that day were wrong. I dare say that the Prussian rulers really knew that a war, whether successful or unsuccessful, would mean the ruin of their State and their downfall from power. Very likely they may have known this. But English political values are so different from German ; in the one case tendencies have the aspect of being con- tinuous, in the other the machinery is cataclysmic. The EngUsh Liberal Party may in 1886 ride for such a fall that its disappearance from power may appear final ; nevertheless, by 1906 the Liberal Party may be back again so firmly in the saddle that the Tories may appear to have gone out for ever. But, all the same, the sagacious party-leaders know very well that in these matters there is no finality. The pendulum will swing ; the comparatively indifferent electors who sway the fate of General Elections will, in a sheep- like body, move over from one side to the other. There is, therefore, no need for desperate steps ; irrevocability is a thing to be avoided, and English politics wear a sempiternal mask of dilettantism and of unreality. The German, on the other hand, sees these things in terms of blood, cataclysm, and irre- mediable disappearance. If Mr. Asquith had fallen "KEEPING FIT" 55 in 1913 there would have been no particular reason why he should not be back again in power, or at any rate leading the party in the House of Lords, in 1920. And, even if he never came back to power, his dis- ciples and descendants would carry on the Whig tradi- tion, and, through the resounding halls of centuries, Mr. Asquith would remain the late revered leader. But if William II had fallen in 1913, the House of HohenzoUern, the whole Hohenzollern tradition, the whole HohenzoUern race, might well be expected to disappear for ever in a cloud of obloquy that would be enhanced by the writings of State-paid professors to all eternity. Seeing things in images rather than in the varying figures of the caucus and of the poll, it may well be that the leaders of the German Imperial and of the Prussian Royal State said : ' ' Very well, we may be doomed to disappearance either by national bankruptcy or by social revolution. Then let us at least go down amidst such waves of blood and such soundings of iron that future historians may at the least say we died splendidly true to our traditions. If we cannot keep the iron sceptre for ever in our grasp, let us at least imprint upon the page of history such gory finger-marks of our Mailed Fist as the tides of oblivion shall never wash out. If we cannot reign in the memory along with Marcus Aurelius and Con- stantine let us at least be remembered as are Attila and Genghis Khan." I will, however, confess to having been so English in my normal psychology that such a view of the values of life never so much as occurred to me. I have in my composition no heroics whatever ; I should rather dislike being a reigning sovereign be- cause of the necessity I should then be under of putting 56 "KEEPING FIT" on so much " side." I should disHke being even a Minister of the Crown because it would carry with it the title of Right Honourable, and I should feel myself rather ridiculous if I had to live up to such a title. And I should hate to die ; give me bankruptcy, dis- honour, calumny, the loss of office, and an eternally besmirched fame — but, oh, not death. Not even for the sake of that heaven which I hope to enter could I contemplate with equanimity the idea of an even temporary dissolution. And, indeed, even to die heroically, amidst clouds of glory, would at that date have savoured to me too much of what is known as " swank." Germans I know to be different; or, at least, I have met many Germans who thought of life in different values. I have met bespectacled, myopic, and unreasonably hirsute Professors, carrying in front of them considerable protuberances. Nevertheless, these amiable persons spoke of buckling on the shining armour and had visions of themselves in states of semi-nudity with bronze greaves, bronze shields, and nodding casques, casting whistling brazen spears against potential Agamemnons, or Hectors of Troy, according as they considered themselves Greeks or Trojans, Latins or Hellenes. English life, as I knew it then, was a matter of keying things down ; German, of tightening things up. The merit of the Englishman — my own merits as far as they went — consisted in concealing as far as pos- sible one's qualities. I might be an authority on Aryan dialects, or I might be plus one at golf ; but at dinner I should never mention the one fact to the aspiring lady seated next to me, or, when challenged to take a turn over the links, I should say that I was pretty rotten and hadn't had a club in my hands for six "KEEPING FIT" 57 months. That these things are irrevocably demanded of us by EngHsh society few people, I think — and not even Mr. Bernard Shaw — will be set to deny. That, on the other hand, German society demands of the Professor of Aryan dialects that he shall talk for ever about his special Fach so as to lend distinction to Society, and that the Amateur Association footballer, the skilful duellist, or even the colossal drinker shall bear the visible marks of his prowess and his suffer- ings, thus enhancing the masculine and physical tone of gatherings at which he may be present, I, at least, was fairly convinced. An Oxford Rowing Blue of my acquaintance kept his oar in a cupboard under the stairs ; such members of the Mainzer Ruderklub — and a very fine set of oarsmen they are ! — as I have known, had each a room consecrated to the oar which was the souvenir of the day when the club beat Jesus College, and these rooms were fuU of aquatic emblems, of pictures of every kind of German boat, from a light rowing skiff to a flagship of the North Sea Squadron ; photographs of the club oarsmen, of the individual oarsman himself, and so on ; and round each of the rooms in large, red, Gothic letters ran the inscription : " Unsere Zukunft liegt auf dem Wasser ! " I will leave for the moment the reader to draw what conclusions he likes from these phenomena, hoping only that his conclusions may not be too hastily and rashly unfavourable to the German sportsman. What I am trying to get at is that these national tendencies led on the one hand, in Germany, to a thoroughness of psychology of which the English- man — and I do not myself claim any exception from this general obtuseness — was remarkably unaware ; and, on the other hand, in these islands, to an appear- 58 "KEEPING FIT" ance of slackness which is remarkably deceptive and which may even be distinctly deleterious. Two Englishmen with whom I have been on terms of some intimacy for many years are, the one, the best revolver shot in England and possibly in the world, and the other one of the most famous of international lawn- tennis players. Till six months ago, I was absolutely unaware that either of these gentlemen had any such kind of distinction. This, in a sense, was no little misfortune, since the one of them might well have been an active propagandist in favour of lawn-tennis, which is an excellent pursuit for one's leisure hours, and the other might have made many people take up revolver-shooting, which is fine training for the hand and eye. Their value to the State, however, from this point of view, was not only absolutely nil ; they might even have been called positively deleterious, since their instincts or their training led them to adopt all the outward airs of what is called a " slacker," and thus such persons as they found to imitate them would imitate their slackness without knowing anything about their proficiencies. In Germany both would have been much-advertised men ; they would have been Presidents of Turnvereins; would have made grandiloquent speeches as to the national values of their pursuits, and so would have contributed to the keying-up of the nation. And, indeed, the gentleman who was proficient with the revolver might well, with State connivance and with the encouragement of Society, have developed into a braggart, a bully, and, from the English point of view, a murderer. On every occasion he might be found giving the counter- check quarrelsome and exclaiming that, to back up his opinion, he had his trusty sword upon his thigh ; by "KEEPING FIT" 59 which he would mean that his well-oiled revolver reposed at home in its case and that any morning he was prepared to drill through whichever lobe of your heart his fancy might choose to suggest the small, neat hole of a duellist's pistol-bullet. And, in speak- ing thus, he would have the approval of all his hearers. I do not mean to say that every German approves of duelling, of a masculine attitude, or of the man who is a bully. But in Germany there is no mixed society. Those who disapprove of duelling keep to them- selves ; those who approve meet only approvers ; Catholics do not mix with Protestants, anti-Semites with members of the Chosen People, or members of the Agrarian Party with supporters of the Extreme Left. Black there is black, and may never be seen, except on the national colours, in company with white or scarlet. In England, on the other hand, we can seldom ex- press our opinions at all because in one corner of the room there may be a Jew, in another an American, in another an advocate of Divorce Law reform, and, beneath the chandelier in the centre of the room, an Anglican Bishop. We do net talk, therefore, of blood, of adultery, of God, or even of the British Empire, because we might offend some one born be- neath the folds of Old Glory. And, what is infinitely more important — infinitely and absolutely infinitely, what is absolutely the difference between the two races and what severs them as acid is severed from alkali — is the fact that in these islands duelling is murder, any kind of physical violence a matter of the police-courts, and any appearance in the police- courts is social death. I have never, since I was twelve, struck a created 6o "KEEPING FIT" human being, and, until August 4th, 1914, the idea of striking a created human being was as abhorrent to me as the idea of committing the sin against the Holy Ghost. Or rather, it was more abhorrent, since I did not know what the latter crime might be. But I certainly think I would almost rather have stolen or committed forgery. From English life, as I have experienced it, the idea of physical violence has almost vanished except from amongst the lower classes. And indeed, as far as my sense of phrase- ology goes, I should be inclined, if I were trying to define to a foreigner or to an American what we English consider as the lower classes, to say that those alone were the lower classes who would use physical violence as a means for the relief of anger or to attain some private end. Even the physical violence upon which the criminal law must, in the end, I suppose, rest, is repugnant in idea, and I have felt as much disgust at seeing a policeman manhandle a recalci- trant and very troublesome drunkard as at seeing a brute kick a horse in the stomach. Indeed, I have felt disgusted to see a policeman with the collar of a pick- pocket in his grasp. The idea of the law as a moral force is so strong within me that, absurd as it may seem, I fancy I would rather see the criminal escape than an officer of the law use physical force to pre- vent that escape. That being so — and I imagine that the rudiments of these feelings distinguish almost every educated in- habitant of these islands — it must, I think, be obvious that any conception of war as a physical contact between large numbers of individual men is — or, at any rate, was until August 1914 — abhorrent to the English mind. CHAPTER III THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA Let me now apply to my knowledges of French and German life exactly the same methods of analysis as I have applied to my knowledge of myself qua English- man. The most sinister manifestation of German national psychology that I ever came across during my resi- dences in or visits to the German Empire always struck me as being the fact that what in England we should call an Italian warehouseman is in Germany styled a Kolonialwarenhdndler. This is a very minute matter, but there it is as a psychological fact. I never saw that word on the facia of a shop, or in the adver- tisements of a newspaper — and one sees the word frequently enough, heaven knows, in Germany! — ■ without feeling a minute sentiment of dismay. I used at one time to go frequently enough into the shop of such a dealer. I purchased there French claret, British blacking, English cigarettes, Spanish olives, Italian tunny-fish, and Brazilian coffee. And, although these things were always sold to me as " echt englisch," " echt franzosisch," or " echt spanisch " — "genuine English, French, or Spanish," or as the case might be — nevertheless, as I bore them out of the shop, over my head appeared the gilt letters of the word Kolonialwaren. And, I repeat, these words were always a worry to me. They were more 6i 63 THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA of a worry to me than absolutely any other militarist sentiment. I could, possibly, place two other pheno- mena beside them. One of these was seeing a Ger- man Army Corps march past the German Emperor, who took the salute not very far from where I was standing. It was not the panoply of war that worried me ; the golden Prussian standards, with their golden horns and golden eagles, appeared to me merely pic- turesque, since I thought, rightly or wrongly, that they were imitated from Roman models. The artillery looked to me sinister enough, but not more sinister than the one or two British guns that one used occa- sionally to see going about, unmilitarily enough, along dusty roads, say in the neighbourhood of Chiswick or of Isleworth. But, when the infantry marched past, the effect of all the feet, extended to the extreme length of the leg, and sharply striking, not merely reaching the ground, was really and actually to make the earth tremble. That is not a mere figure of speech ; I could feel the tremulousness of that dry, gravel soil in my heels and in my ankles. Now, nothing in the world is so striking or so astonishing as to find a figure of speech come really true — and find- ing that one, which one has seen used so often, becom- ing a physical symptom beneath one's boots, caused suddenly to flash into my mind the exact words : " Suppose those chaps really meant business ! " For you are to understand that, at that date, I was abso- lutely convinced that the German Army never could " mean business." I had the following things to go upon, to back me up in that positive preconception. I had just lately read an article by the sapient mili- tary correspondent of The Times to the effect that the personnel of the German Army was exceedingly THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA 63 deteriorated ; that their route-marching was ex- tremely poor, and that, in everything save the organisation of the commissariat, of pontoons, and the hke, the German Army was extremely inferior to the French, more particularly in the departments of morale and of artillery. One looks, I suppose, for signs of what one desires to see, and I added my personal observations to those of this distinguished military critic, whose opinions, anyhow, at that date, I was ready to take, as the saying is, " lying down." I had seen the men of those very regiments shuffling dispiritedly along the roads with a peculiar dragging of the foot-sole. It was impossible for me to escape from observing this every day and almost every hour of every day. In their dirty linen fatigue-uniforms, with their ignoble little round hats, these depressed men appeared to me to slouch over the ground with all the aspect of convicts being marched to perform so many weary evolutions of the crank. They never laughed ; they never joked or nudged one another ; they went about their work with fixed faces as if the drilling threw them mani- acally in upon themselves ; and when they sang they produced what seemed dull, uninspired, and gloomy sounds as if at the bidding of their officers, for no pleasure of their own. I had, moreover, seen a sergeant take a recumbent recruit by the ear, pull him right up to his legs by that member, throw him down some yards away and then kick him because he blubbered with pain. I had therefore got into my head that, with the exception of several crack regiments, the German soldier was a dispirited machine whom the great General Staff would never feel justified in sending into action. 64 THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA Nevertheless, on that day I saw that immense body of men, full of a taut, physical vigour, the heads raking back as if the glance was literally glued to the eyes of the sovereign beside the saluting-stand. And I felt the earth tremble. And, for a moment, I asked myself whether, if these beings and this organisation had brought about what I had always regarded as a physical impossibility, somewhere, hidden away in their obscure group-psychology, there might not be that other impossibility, that other reversion to bar- barism — the belief in the possibility of war, in its being practicable, in its being the thing that might almost be desired. The third fact that remains strongly in my mind dates back to the year 1900, which, you will remember, fell well in the middle of the period of the South African War. I was walking with an invalid in the public gardens of a German Kaltwasserheilanstalt. It was a very decorous and decorated spot ; there were oleander trees, cypresses, and smooth lawns, and classical statues in plaster. On the meticulously tidy gravel-walk we sat down upon a bench that was labelled " Nur fiir Kurgaste" ; just ahead of us was a bench labelled " Nur fiir Kinder," and just behind us was another bench labelled " Schulkinder verboten," In front of us was the round concrete basin of a foun- tain — a pool of water about twenty yards across in which it was rather a relief to observe that there was only one concrete dolphin disporting itself. Round this basin there were several children playing. They had a long strip of calico and they had paint-boxes and brushes and in the basin there were several clumsy toy-boats. It struck me as so remarkable to see children playing upon green turf in Germany that I THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA 65 remarked upon it to my companion. Indeed, right in front of us upon the edge of the grass, there rose up a painted placard to the effect that walking on the lawns was most strictly forbidden. The invalid re- plied that the children were probably there for some privileged purpose. I dozed in the sunlight, and, perhaps ten minutes later, looked up again. Con- fronting me, in red letters, upon a long strip of white that went right across the dolphin, the water, and the toy boats, was the inscription, " Unser Zukunft ist auf dem Wasser ! " The children had been paint- ing this patriotic aspiration upon the broad strip of white calico, and they had stretched it between two poles stuck into sockets one on each side of the con- crete basin. That is fifteen years ago now, but I still remember with exactitude the three thoughts that passed immediately through my mind : the one that the authorities must be extravagantly imbecile to permit the violation of the sanctity of their precious ' ' Rasen ' ' for such a ridiculous purpose ; the other that it was odd that children not old enough to write German correctly should yet not be sufficiently young not to ignore jingoism ; and the third, that, thank goodness, the German Navy consisted, figuratively speaking, of the sailing cock boat of the East Asian Station of 1897. But, as to why these things stick in my mind whilst, if I make an intellectual effort to remember I could draw up thousands of instances of vastly more sinister import ; or, if I prefer to leave it as a matter of impressions, I can have the very definite picture of Germany as a wearisome cavern in which under-ofiicers are perpetually howling military commands and fat men seated at restaurant-tables perpetually bawling 5 66 THE PERSONS OF THE DRAMA obscene abuse of their international neighbours — why these things only remain I do not know. Perhaps I was merely mad ; perhaps I am too much under the obsession of the eye, which, upon its retina, is inclined to find impressed only bright objects in the sunlight — the gilded word Kolonialwaren, the golden standards at the heads of the earth-shaking regiments, and the red letters of " Unser Zukunft ist auf dem Wasser," upon the white calico. I am very tired of Germany. I am tired of Germany with the intense weariness of a person who has been deceived and has willingly let himself be deceived. I feel as if the whole German nation had played upon me, personally, the shabbiest form of confidence-trick, and as if it were still going on howling about its virtue, its probity, and its love of honour. I wish Germany did not exist, and I hope it will not exist much longer. Burke said that you cannot indict a whole nation. But you can. Let us now consider France. CHAPTER IV LANGUAGE In the end, the relative values of civilisations come down always to being matters of scrupulosity of lan- guage. It is unnecessary to go back to the ancient Hellenes, to the classical Latins, to the troubadours of Provence, or the Minnesingers of mediaeval Germany, though, by remembering the achievements of these races, the truth of the immense importance of handling language exactly will be immensely emphasised. For language, since it is the very soul of the man, is almost always a very indifferent servant. It is the worst of masters. And it is probably not too much to say that if a man or a race do not exercise themselves as carefully in the use of phrases as in the use of their limbs, that man and that nation will go to the devil in a greater or a lesser degree. For the worst of the spoken or the written word is, that once spoken or once written, that word is a challenge to the world. It is this in the minutest particulars as in matters the most colossal. When Henry IV of France uttered the his- toric sentence : " Je veux que chaque paysan ait une poule au pot le dimanche," he probably contributed more to the downfall of the French monarchy than did all the Encyclopaedists writing together, for he set such a standard to French kings as no wearer of the lilies ever came or could come up to. The English genius who evolved the maxim that ' ' Honesty is the 67 68 LANGUAGE best policy" probably did more material service to Great Britain than all the inventors of all the spinning- jennies that ever were invented — and he probably did more than any other man to earn for us the wide- flung epithet of "hypocrites." And the French peasant who evolved the maxim that life never turns out to be as fortunate or as unfortunate as one ex- pects of it probably did more for France on the battle- fields of to-day than all the inventors of the Creusot firm working together. For it is because the French peasant, the French farmer, the French small handi- craftsman, and the French small trader do not expect vast things of life, do not strive after the immense fortunes of the modern industrial system, that they remain so much more largely than any other race, patiently and efficiently working on the acres that saw their births. And it is because these patient, efficient, sober, industrious, and splendid populations remain upon their acres that France will have saved Europe, if Europe is to be saved. By the madness of phrase-making, by the madness of the inexact and aspiring phrase-makings of the industrial system, of materialism, of false Napoleonism and the rest of the paraphernalia of life as we live it to-day, Europe, if it be lost, will have been lost. And it will have been lost very largely on account of German inexactitude. The worst that is to be alleged against this country is a certain clumsiness of lan- guage, a certain clinging to obsolescences of phrase, and a certain resultant stupidity and want of imagina- tion. The English are generally pretty right, though they blunder into rightness even more often than they achieve it by any self-consciousness of aim. But France is always exactly right according to her LANGUAGE 69 aspirations as she is true in her phraseology. It is always only Germany that is absolutely wrong; it is always only Germany that accepts with inevitable voracity every phrase that is bombastic and imbecile. The stupid English movement of last century for purging the English language of Latin-derived words, when, if the English language have a merit it is its fusion of many phraseologies — this indescribably stupid English movement of last century had abso- lutely no influence upon society, upon life, or upon government. In Parliament the phraseology re- mained " le Roy remercie ses bons sujets et ainsi le veult " ; at restaurants we still spoke of clear soup as consomme ; our leader-writers, our public speakers, our poets, and our preachers, if they wanted to pro- duce sonorous effects, still gave us sentences in which the assonance -ation appeared sixteen times to the sentence ; we continued to speak of mutton, of pork, of beef, of medicine, and of religion, whilst continuing also to talk of sheep, swine, oxen, heahng, and the Godhead. But, crossing over to Germany, this movement became a formidable affair, expressing itself in Sprachvereins, with thousands of uproarious and militant supporters. When I first visited Ger- many the guards, swinging themselves along the foot- boards of trains, would open the doors and ask very civilly for our " Billetten " or " Coupons." If it was on the Rhine or in South Germany they would add " S'il vous plait." In Germany of to-day a not invariably civil official marches along the corridors exclaiming ' ' Fahrkarten heraus ! ' ' which is a mili- tary order to "have out your fare-cards"; and a little later he introduces himself to your carriage saying as often as not only " Fahrkarten," but adding 70 LANGUAGE sometimes " Bitte." This is entirely due to the Sprachverein, since ' ' billets ' ' and ' ' coupons ' ' are French words ; but it will be observed that the poor dears have not got altogether away from the Latin influence, since one-half of the compound word ' ' fare-cards ' ' is derived from the Latin word carta. Similarly, the word changieren, meaning " to change carriages," has become umsteigen, which means "climb round." This tendency, with its self-conscious aim of making breaches between nations, is bad enough, but the influence of such comparative neologisms as my old friend the compound word Kolonialwaren is infinitely worse. In England we say "Italian warehouse" because in the eighteenth century olive-oil, flowering-shrubs, anchovies, sardines, capers and the like used to come from Sardinia and were imported by firms having traffic in those waters. And, although to-day all the methods of all those traders have altered, we still speak of an Italian warehouseman. This is obviously an inexactitude ; but it is an inexactitude of a mildly poetic description. It prompts no international rifts or self-consciousnesses. Our salad-oil to-day grows in the cottonfields of Louisiana, is exported in bulk to Genoa, where it is pumped into barrels bearing the word Lucca and so reaches the London market. But still, when over a shop-window in the November fogs of London, we just make out the words " Italian ware- houseman," we are reminded — though our anchovies come from Norway and from Sweden our sardines, and our oranges from California, and our macaroni from Islington — we are reminded for a moment of the purple seas, of the stone pines, and of the skies of Sappho. Kolonialwaren is quite another matter. In 1911 LANGUAGE 71 the German Empire had 1,000,000 square miles of colonies. The total population of these 1,000,000 square miles was 25,000 human beings, of whom 21,000 were Germans. Of these 21,000 about 9,000 were officials, missionaries, and wives of officials and mis- sionaries, and about 3,500 were children. The remain- ing 8,500 productive German souls spread over this territory of 1,000,000 square miles produced as com- modity the following objects and raw materials : uncut jewels, agave fibre, coffee, cocoa-beans, indiarubber, copra, palm-kernels, and phosphate of lime. The value of the annual produce of these 1,000,000 square miles imported into Germany was £4,281,000. The cost of the German colonies for administration, for war-loans, and for subsidies to balance deficits was, in 1908, £56,990,000. Nevertheless, the patient German mind, deluded by the idea that colonies could be made to pay in the hands of the German Imperial Govern- ment, idealistically invented for the type of shop that we call a general store the word Kolonialwaren- handlung (" Colonial- wares- trading-place "). In that way the good German, when purchasing his groceries, which he purchases just as freely as we purchase ours, was to be led to imagine that, although he purchased margarine, candles, soap, sultanas, and sauerkraut, he was aiding in the commerce of a vast overseas colonial trade, and that that vast overseas colonial trade already existed. Actually the only German colonial products which he could buy from the ' ' colonial- ware-trader ' ' were coffee, cocoa-beans, and palm-oil margarine. The amount of coffee pro- duced by the 1,000,000 square miles of territory had, according to the German Imperial Statistical Jahr- buch for 1910, the value of £26,000, whereas nearly 72 LANGUAGE £9,000,000 worth of coffee was drunk in Germany in that year. Of cocoa-beans the German colonies in that year produced £50,000 worth, whereas the total amount of cocoa imported into Germany in that year was of the value of £2,270,000. Palm-kernels we may take to be largely used in the preparation of palm-oil butter. The total value of the imports of palm- kernels into Germany in 1910 was £4,420,000 ; the share of the German colonial import of this trade was £119,000, It will thus be seen that Germany imported about three hundred and thirty times as much coffee from the rest of the world as from her own colonies, about forty times as much cocoa, and about forty times as many palm-kernels. Nevertheless, by the lying inscription over his grocer's shop the good Ger- man was led implicitly to believe that all this immense trade came from the German colonies. He was also commanded to believe that an immense navy was necessary for the preservation of this immense trade. There is no department of German life into which this fallacious use of language has not penetrated ; there is no range of human thought in which it has not been self-consciously employed to dig gulfs be- tween the German nation and the rest of the world, or to make fallacious and mischievous distinctions. Is it a question of race — the good German is taught that, because a certain percentage of English words are of Anglo-Saxon origin, therefore the British race is of pure Teutonic descent ; is it a question of great poets — the German nation is instructed that Dante Alighieri was a pure German because the syllable ' ' ger " is a word of Teutonic origin, and signifies a spear ^ ; 1 See " The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," by- Houston Stewart Chamberlain ; vol. i., pp. 538-541 and 544. LANGUAGE 73 or they are told that Shakespeare was also a pure German because the spear was a typically German arm ; Pan-German professors also declare that the real name of Boccaccio is Buchatz, and that Voltaire was a German because his eyes were blue.' The most militant concrete phenomenon that has ever moved me in France was the brown, faded, and rustling wreaths of immortelles, crepitating in a chilly wind round the base of the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. There are, of course, other atmospheres of other militarisms that one may recapture from place to place all over France. There is the Chateau Gaillard, there is the Citadelle at Carcassone, there is Mont St. Michel itself, there are the castle of Aigues Mortes, the harbours of Brest and Cherbourg. The standards droop over the tomb of Napoleon ; the equestrian statues of the Maid of Domremy shine in many places in the sun, and here and there between the dunes of the Pas de Calais and the Crau there are trophies set up and inscribed " Aux gloires de la France." And, if martial glories are to be commemorated and not buried, as it would be well if they could be, in oblivion, the French have gloriously enough, from their warlike coffers, given alms to the arts. And the arts have given such splendour back to the memory of French arms that, in incautious moments, one might say that war had been justified of her products. To look from one of the central windows of the Palace of the Louvre right over the emplacement of the vanished Tuileries ; right along the Champs Elys^es ; right beneath the Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile, and feel the glance ^ See " Die Germanen in Frankreich," by Ludwig Wolt- mann, pp. 102-107. 74 LANGUAGE descending the air along the great Avenue of the Grande Armee — right to Versailles ! To look from Versailles along the Avenue of the Grande Armee in under the Arc de Triomphe de I'Etoile, and so back down the Champs Elysees to the Palace of the Louvre ; to traverse this great vista, these grey, arid, and swept splendours going from Palace of the Administration to Palace of the Administration ; to feel sinking into you the consciousness of this tremendousness of elegance and elegance of tremendousness ; to think that these great spaces of the earth were devoted to the outgoing aspirations for glory, to the incoming triumphs, decorated with laurels, of those men with long, scarlet coats, tri-cornered hats, steenkirks, hal- berds and grenades, whose semi-deified commander was le Roi Soleil in his long curled wig, with his greaves, his thong-bound, besandalled feet, his cuirass embossed to present you with images of the wars of Troy and his truncheon tipped with the lilies ; to think that these great spaces of the earth were devoted to the incoming triumphs, headed with eagles, of dense masses in the blue coats, of dense masses of the splendid chargers with the brass helmets and the horsehair tails dependent behind ; to be for a moment at the Louvre or at Versailles and to have these images rise in your mind or to let this atmosphere creep like a gas all over your being, — that is, for the moment, to let war itself become as nearly deified as was le Roi Soleil by his painters, his sculptors, his abbes, his fiddlers, and himself. And I suppose that to be inspired by the glories of France, to dare, with a fine gesture, final dissolution for the sake of the traditions of France — that is to come as near making war a fine thing as war ever came near it from the LANGUAGE 75 days of Marathon and of Thermopylae until the day, so different, of the defence of the forts round Liege. To have died for France is very nearly to have secured eternal life — but not quite. And those glories are so absolutely and so inexor- ably things of the past. The rustling of the immor- telles as I first saw them, when a boy, in the icy December wind, in that most wind-swept of all open spaces — the rustling of those immortelles round the base of that crowned, enthroned stone figure seemed to commemorate a death as absolute and as irrevocable as that commemorated by the immortelles rustling over the grave of a dead and forgotten ploughman. That past, that glory, those splendours were things that, if one wished to realise them, one had, difficultly, to reconstruct as, in " Salammbo," Flaubert recon- structed the vanished immensities of the glory which was Carthage. There was the Paris that I knew as a boy ; a Paris of winter after winter spent in an immensely luxurious, gilded and absolutely tranquil appartement of a millionaire's house ; a Paris where life was the quietest thing in the world ; where ancient ladies and very old men spoke always in apparently saddened whispers ; a Paris where the most modern figure that one met was that of Emile Ollivier, the last Liberal Prime Minister of Napoleon IIL There were the extremely decorous, quiet promenades in the broad, gravel spaces of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne just before one drank the tea from the immensely heavy silver equipage — the slow walks with an im- mense red sun just touching the low trees of the Bois — those trees that were not yet twenty years old, because, in '70, the sapeurs-pompiers had burned down all that boscage by means of streams of petroleum 76 LANGUAGE blazing from the hose-mouths. On the Arc de Tri- omphe there were the shell-marks ; on the statue of Strasbourg immortelles ; the Palace of the Tuileries had vanished and, in the last sunlight of the winter day we made our half-hour promenade — millionaires, rastaquoudres, marquises of the Third Empire, old Brazilian duchesses and purveyors of lapdogs leading by six or seven strings six or seven tiny objects as large as rats. Against the sun all these beings were clear- cut silhouettes with long shadows ; with one's back to that copper-coloured orb they appeared indistinct, misty, fused. That was a Paris that I once knew very well. And I am bound to say that that France and that Paris, saddened, disillusioned, with fragments of the Third Empire like M. Ollivier or echoes of the Franco-Prus- sian War such as one discovered them in the stories of Uhlans and bloodshedding peasants of the pages of Guy de Maupassant ; with the inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain shut behind their high walls ; with the sham bull-fighting ring on the opposite side of the avenue — that Paris and that France singularly coloured my imagination and my ideas of what France was — until very lately. For all these people were extraordinarily aloof from questions of government, of administration, or of international relationships. I have never, even in the United States, met people so aloof from the public affairs of that day as were the French that then, every winter, I used to meet. Except where the Government incommoded them in some measure of taxation ; or except when a millionaire contractor mentioned that it had been necessary to pay a large bribe to secure a Govermnent contract — the Third LANGUAGE 77 Republic might never have existed, and the poHtics that were discussed were the pohtics of the closing years of the Third Empire. And, even later, the heroines of this class as I knew it were the upper-class women who threw pepper in the eyes of gendarmes and troops coming to dispossess the nuns of such and such a convent. It was at the Dreyfus trial at Rennes that I first had a glimpse of the fact that the Army might still be a sacred thing to France. A thing still sacred ! For it is a difficult thing for an EngHshman who reveres very few traditions and seldom comes in contact with any sacred thing, to realise that, in a country visible from his own shore there should still exist an army that is sacred. Nevertheless, in the changing lights and shadows, and amongst the perpetually swaying emotions in the court-room in the Palace of Justice at Rennes one had suddenly the glimpse of extraordinary possibilities of psychology. One had suddenly re- vealed to one the fact that, if one were a Frenchman, one might take up a position which, to an Englishman, with his love of justice as such, with his reverence for a decorously and silently moving law, would be monstrous and horrible. We say so often ' ' let the skies fall in so but justice prevail " that, after a time, we really begin to feel that aspiration. We should many of us, I fancy, have welcomed, in those days, the absolute collapse, disgrace, and discredit of the British Army, supposing that that collapse were necessary to secure a pedantic justice for any one individual officer or for any one individual private of a British regi- ment. In those days, I fancy, we should have pro- tested only platonically if Parliament had refused to vote the annual Army Bill. But Rennes was an 78 LANGUAGE entirely different matter. One felt that the prisoner on trial had a certain radiance of tears and suffering. That not very prepossessing figure had, nevertheless, endured, with the extreme toughness of a low vitality, tortures that would have crushed out of existence the lives of every one of us, his auditors. But I began to see a frame of mind in which it was possible to imagine that, from that figure, a radiance greater, softer, and more nearly divine might have proceeded had he endured those tortures in silence and had he taken, from the Heavenly Powers alone, his crown of martyr- dom. For, for a Frenchman, from within the Army, publicly to dishonour that sacred body by insisting on his own individual rehabilitation appeared, at least at Rennes, as a questionable proceeding. In that ancient part of the world one was too much surrounded by evidences of " les gloires de la France" to let any- thing that could even by implication besmirch those glories seem other than questionable. But it seemed as if abstract justice prevailed ; the Army appeared, as the phrase is, to go out. The Church, which sup- ported the Army, was beaten to its knees ; and the inscriptions of Collectivists, of Syndicalists, of sup- porters of the greve generale, of referendists seemed, on the walls of public buildings, to obliterate even the splendid words " Libert^, Egalite, Fraternite," and the letters R.F., which to even the most reactionary of us are still beautiful and significant. It was in other fields than in those of military glory that France seemed to be about to cull the laurels that will be always hers. It was in motor industries, in aviation, in field sports, and even in the breeding of horses that France was to find new glories, not so much as remotely connected with militarism, with religion, or even with LANGUAGE 79 the arts. What exactly we expected of this new France that fairly buzzed from the Garonne to the Oise with tidings of regeneration, I do not know. Cer- tainly the last thing that we awaited was the long and breathless struggle of trenches. Even the immortelles round the statue of Strasbourg were no longer there. They had disappeared from the calculations of all of us who loved France better than any other thing in the world. And even when, in the refectory of a regiment within the crumbling walls of an ancient fortress I caught sight of the inscription: " Soldats, deux etendards du — me Regiment sont dans le musee de Potsdam — n'oubliez jamais!" I did not imagine that a re- captured Alsace-Lorraine had figured in the mind of whoever it was that had caused that inscription to be set there. It seemed to me no more than a part of the general aspiration towards keeping oneself fit that pervaded the whole of my world as I knew it. CHAPTER V RELATIVE MILITARISMS There, then, for the moment, I will leave the case of France. Let me sum up once more my impressions of the relative militarisms of the three countries which most interest us in the enormous struggle. If I had to state precisely — and as conscientiously as I should have to do it if I were before the bar of Heaven — I should say that the Englishman ignored war, did not give a thought to its existence or to what it would mean if it came into existence ; I should say that the German desired war whilst paying a lip-service to peace, or at least whilst considering that peace might possibly pay better ; and I should say that the French- man dreaded and detested war whilst acknowledging it to be a sad necessity so long as Central Europe remained in the hands of its present rulers. Let me now subdivide these statements and analj^se them with greater particularity. In arriving at such impressions as these the writer or the observer makes use of a method that, in photo- graphy, used to be popular in the nineties of the last century. This was called making a composite photo- graph. Supposing that the photographer desired to get at a rendering of A Poet rather than of any one poet, he took upon the same plate photographs of 80 RELATIVE MILITARISMS 8i profile portraits of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. The result was a queer, blurred image, but the result was none the less striking, and the individual arrived at by this composite process had an odd but quite strong in- dividuality. In exposing, then, his more or less sensi- tised mind to life in this or that country the observer is subjecting his mind to precisely the same process as that to which the photographer in the 1890' s used to subject his plates when he was making a composite photograph. And the figures that I have analysed and am about to analyse for you are the results of such a process so far as my individual mental camera is concerned. There are, of course, extremes, but the resultant is the mean. There are, that is to say, in England eccentric types ; there are members of the Fabian Society as there are members of the White Rose League ; but the one and the other, though they may make their impression upon the plate, yet make impressions very faintly. I have, for instance, met a seaside rural policeman who remarked : ' ' The Garman Navy ! I don't take much stock of the Gar- man Navy. Reckon Hunnisett's shrimp-drifter would sink all the Garman Navy there is." Such an indi- vidual might make very little imprint on the sensitised plate ; nevertheless, such a remark might be sympto- matic of a very widespread national frame of mind. Indeed, if once more I had to sum up the most marked English characteristics with regard to the English- man's attitude towards international relationships I should say that he didn't "take much stock" of continental military forces or preparations before August 4th, 1914. The clarion voices of Mr. Bernard Shaw, of the more excitable daily papers, failed to 6 82 RELATIVE MILITARISMS rouse the great body of the nation to any sense of national danger, or to any desire for plucking the laurels of Mars in the fields of Bellona. Lord Roberts remained inefficient and unheard by comparison with the genius who fomented the agitation about the White Slave Traffic or the other gentleman who tried to increase the consumption in this country of stone- milled flour or to induce us to eat our meats out of paper-bags. I am not claiming that this indifference to national defence or to international relationships is any credit to the British nation ; but, if we acknowledge that the British nation is incomparably stupid in matters of defence, aggression, or diplomacy, we cannot at the same time allege that the British nation is incompar- ably bellicose. You cannot put two pints of differ- ently compounded liquors into one pint pot.^ Nor, looking at the matter from the point of view of results, can we arrive at any different conclusion. The German Empire has a very formidable Navy, and an army that is a menace to the entire world, whereas it is only in late years that the English Navy put itself on anything like a basis of efficiency and the British Army remained until August 1914 numerically con- temptible. Judged by similar standards the German comes out infinitely more bellicose. I have heard that there 1 Compare " Common Sense about the War," p. 5 : " Now please observe that I do not say that the agitation was un- reasonable. I myself steadily advocated the formation of a formidable armament, and ridiculed the notion that we, who are wasting hundreds of millions annually on idlers and wasters could not easily afford double, treble, quadruple our military and naval expenditure. I advocated the compulsion of every man to serve his country, both in war and peace." RELATIVE MILITARISMS 83 exist, and, indeed, I have seen in the distance, vege- tarians and wearers of " Reform-Kleider, " which are clothes simply cut out of sage-green material, and other individuals who, during certain months of the year, wore no clothes at all. And these individuals, inspired by an intense earnestness, were most obstin- ately opposed to war. And to parallel my case of the Sussex policeman I can present you with the image of an ancient German farmer in a three-cornered hat and knee-breeches, who, having taken part in the Franco-Prussian War, was yet of opinion that England could never go to war with Germany because in 1870 the Emperor of Germany had gone to war with the Emperor of France in order to rescue Queen Victoria, who was a prisoner in the Louvre. And I have met many Germans who considered that the English could never go to war with Germany because we were the cousins of those who inhabit the German Empire. The crime of making war upon a cousin they seemed to think uncompassable even by a nation of hypo- crites. They shuddered at the mere idea of Great Britain's committing such an outrage, as if it had been a sort of inverted incest. But, whilst for the old German peasant, England's hands would be tied by gratitude, and whilst for the German race-scientists even a decadent race like the British must shrink from committing an unnatural crime, for the old peasant as for the more highly educated personages there re- mained the agreeable thought that, the hands of Great Britain being tied, they themselves were envi- ably free to smash France out of existence. Great Britain would then sink into her proper place as a Power that had once been great. We might even, like Holland, keep some rich colonies, but not many. 84 RELATIVE MILITARISMS That it was the effect of this psychology making itself felt from across the Rhine as far as the very mouths of the Rhone, that kept alive in French hearts the passionate but depressed belief in the sacredness of the French Army, I have no doubt whatever.^ What it is exactly that one populace should fear from a threatened domination by another race I do not know. In England we have had so little cause to fear it that, as a bogey, its outlines and its atmosphere are alike almost impossible to capture. But that France dreaded being overwhelmed by the legions of Wil- liam II and that France has dreaded this, year in year out, day in and through every night ever since 1870, is absolutely certain. And, in speaking of France, I am speaking not so much of M. Delcasse, who so long and so manfully wrestled with the threatening and objurgating heads of departments in Unter den Linden ; and not so much of M. Briand, who almost concluded a treaty of lasting peace with William II ; and not even of M. Caillaux, who denounced that treaty because he did not wish to wear M. Briand' s policy like a scarf-pin in his neckerchief ; it was not so much that France with its changing ideals, its exciting daily occupations, its engrossing weekly tasks, its rumours and its outcries along the boulevards. It is rather of the other France with its long labours beneath the sun and the rain, the secretive, not very vocal France of the vineyards, the wheat-fields, the olive-hills, and the great plains. And perhaps it is also the France of the barrack-yards to which, yearly, the little recruits go weeping, and no doubt it is also that other France of Zabern, of Metz, and of Miil- hausen. For these people the French Army was no ^ See French quotations in Appendix B. RELATIVE MILITARISMS 85 longer a thing of laurels, of brazen helmets, of cuirasses and of glory. It was a thing of red worsted trousers, of dusty and ill-fitting blue-cloth coats, of little kepis with red knobs, of long absences from homes that are loved as no other homes are loved. It was this sacred army, a thing of effort, of patience, of fears, and of endurance. It was, above all else, a thing for de- fence, for defence against a power that, unless the intolerable strain were endured, would press down the very roof-trees of the long wine-barns, would take tolls in every vineyard, and forbid every ancient custom. And here again the question of exact and not merely figurative language would come in. For the English- man war was not a thing that we figured to ourselves at all. One said " Spion Kop," and one imagined an elderly gentleman in a top hat comfortably ensconced amongst rocks, and taking pot-shots at whatever figure in khaki appeared against a whitewashed rock to which the old gentleman had carefully measured the distance. Or one thought of war as a matter of innumerable gramophones, brass-bands, barrel-organs, and public performers braying out the melodies of ' ' The Absent-minded Beggar ' ' and ' ' The Soldiers of the Queen." Or one had a faint glimpse of the realities when one said that the percentage of nervous breakdowns during the South African campaign had been very high, and that many of the poor fellows who had been engaged upon it would never be any good again. But, for the German with his heated imagination and his heated imagery, war remained something mediaeval or classical — a matter of cleanness, of sharp spears, of nudity, of shining swords, of shining armour, of shining and mailed fists, of heroisms and of all the 86 RELATIVE MILITARISMS desirables such as they were known to Bertrand du GuescKn, to Hector of Troy, to Horatius Codes, or to Prince Eugen der edle Ritter. It was probably only in France that anything ap- proaching psychological realism was applied to war. In France at least they had realised that the days of individual glory were over ; that long strains and never-ceasing vigilancies might lead, with luck, to a promotion one-third as valuable as that which could be earned by a sleepy clerk going day in day out slackly through his office-work in the Customs House at Bordeaux. I never heard a French officer speak of any chance of glory in war. It would just be bureaucratic promotion, ceaseless patience, and end- less strain on the nerves. Let me add as a pendant the memorable words of the German Crown Prince : ' ' For him who has once ridden in a charge in peace, there is nothing better except another ride, ending in a clash with the foe. How often in the midst of a charge have I caught the yearning cry of a comrade : ' Donnerwetter ! If it were only in earnest ! ' " i ^ See " The Kaiser's Heir " (1913), pages 116-117, for quota- tions, including this passage from the Crown Prince's book, pubhshed in 191 3, " Deutschland in Waff en." PART III "THE SEA IS HIS" CHAPTER I FRIGATE WARFARE I HAVE attempted to give you as scrupulously and as exactly as I could my personal observations of the three most prominent participants in the present struggle on land. Let me attempt to do as much for the same peoples upon the great waters. As to mili- tarism one may speak with no uncertain voice ; it is branded with the mark of Cain and it is original sin. But as to navalism one must keep a more open mind. Militarism is purely destructive and accursed. The preoccupations of the world at this date should ex- clusively confine themselves to social and domestic rearrangements, to the readjustment of wages, the reconsideration of all forms of teaching, and to the other primary necessities of life. To all these things Prussianism is the enemy, and the consideration of these things cannot peacefully be carried forward whilst Prussian state-methods continue to impress upon the German peoples the idea of war as a means to the increase of wealth and the idea of threats of war as a means to obtaining territorial expansions. It is mathematically demonstrable that war is always wasteful. Blocking of roads and their destruction hinders the transport from place to place not only of merchandise, but of all mental food. The burning of libraries, whether of Alexandria or of Louvain, inflicts 90 FRIGATE WARFARE incalculable losses upon humanity, and in no way benefits those committing that arson ; the sacking or the bombardment of towns ruins many poor people and benefits little those who enrich themselves by the spoils. But the sea is an indestructible highway ; not all the shells of all the great guns of Krupp thun- dering at once upon one spot of the sea could for more than a few seconds prevent its surface from aiding in the passage of commodity or of civilisation. For passage upon land, highway rules can be observed and can be easily framed ; passage upon the waters is always opportunist, dangerous, uncertain, and de- pendent for its efficiency upon traditions. It must therefore be obvious that, whilst the consideration and appraisement of militarism is very easy, it is difficult to be certain that one is in possession of any true touchstone with which to test relative navalisms. It may be possible to write the history of the influence of sea-power upon the bare bones of history, but to write of the influence of maritime civilisation upon that terrestrial civilisation which you might call the filling-in between the bare ribs of historic events — that is one of the most difficult things in the world. Let me therefore search my conscience as closely as I may to discover exactly how life in this maritime nation has affected my views of navalism. The earliest anecdotes that I can remember were connected with the frigate-warfare of Napoleonic days. The first of them I cannot well correlate with any ethical cosmogony. It showed how my great-grand- father, Ford Brown, who was a naval officer, being prematurely grey and anxious to court my great- grandmother, dyed his hair with some patent prepara- tion, and, being rowed ashore from his ship in the FRIGATE WARFARE 91 bright sunlight, arrived in my great-grandmother's parents' respectable parlour, with his head the colour of the green grass in spring. This story, along with another, was related to me in my earliest years by my grandfather. Along with it went the other celebrated anecdote which caused me a good deal of amazement, and, I hope, made a better man of me. In fact, I am sure it did. My grandfather's father, then, was aboard the Arethusa when she fought her celebrated action with the Belle Poule. After the Belle Poule had sur- rendered, the French captain demanded a court-martial on the officers of the Arethusa on the grounds that they had fired pieces of glass from their guns. He alleged that fragments of this substance would be found sticking all over the timbers and in the very yards, shrouds, and cordage of the Belle Poule, the use of such missiles being forbidden by the laws of inter- national warfare and the dictates of common humanity. But, when the timbers, the yards, the shrouds, and the cordage of the Belle Poule were examined there were found sticking in them, not fragments of glass, but crown-pieces, guineas, half-guineas, and doub- loons. The crew of the Arethusa, in short, running out of chain, grape, and round shot, in the excite- ment of the action had crammed their guns full to the muzzle with the only objects which the laws of war- fare and the dictates of common humanity permitted them to employ. Thus were their reputations tri- umphantly and splendidly cleared. I am certain that, if I have ever since then refrained from striking, as the phrase is, an enemy beneath the belt, if I have ever thought what weapons it is fair and which unfair to employ against an opponent, the consideration of that anecdote counted for much in 92 FRIGATE WARFARE causing me to arrive at a conclusion. From that anecdote, and from the fact that after the bloody wars, after that period when, as Lord Nelson had said, it was the duty of every Englishman to hate a Frenchman as he would the devil, my great- grandfather could live peaceable years in the city of Calais, where indeed my grandfather was born — from that anecdote and from the other fact I learned many things as to correctitude of conduct in at least naval warfare and many things as to the recon- cilability of decently acting humanity outside periods of actual strife. My boyhood, and, I think, the boyhood of every man who was a boy along with me, was extraordinarily influenced by the traditions and the atmosphere of the frigate-warfare of the Napoleonic struggles. I, and the boys with whom I grew up, thought almost exclusively in terms of dashing frigates, corvettes, sending away the boats for cutting-out expeditions, and the highest dignity at which we could hope to arrive was that of a post-captain ; though to com- mand a seventy-four or to arrive at the degree of Rear-Admiral seemed almost like retiring from active life, and going, as it were, into the decorous atmosphere of the Upper House. Marryat, the Cooper of the "Two Admirals," the autobiography of Lord Dun- donald — these made up the greater part of our psy- chologies, and, certainly, the greater part of my own ethics. And I do not know that a better ethical schooling could be found for a nation whose chief business is, and must always remain, upon the great waters. One lost, in later days, a considerable part of the clarity of this view, as, in the cosmopolitan life of FRIGATE WARFARE 93 great cities, one loses sight of the ground-facts of existence. Where, that is to say, one is hourly lifted from story to story, or down to or up from great depths in the earth, one is apt to have the facts of the inexorable laws of gravity more obscured from one than if one lived always with, and had no experience of anything save, flights of stairs. And, when one receives one's spice in enamelled air-tight tins one is more apt to forget the bronzed mariner than if the same spices had reached one in bales woven out of esparto grass. But still the fact remains that the Port and City of London are very essentially the Port only secondarily the city, since the mUes and miles of streets, the immense administrative buildings, and the millions of humanity are merely parasitic and dependent upon the Docks. It is difficult fully to reahse to oneself what the Docks really are. One's view is so very much limited that one is apt to think of them as the one small por- tion of harbourage that one knows, by accident fairly well — a portion of harbourage that would be suffi- cient for a small seaside town. One man knowsTilbury for this or that reason — because he has gone to see off a friend there, or because there he has landed, coming from New York by the Minnetonka or the Minnehaha. Another may know the Victoria and Albert Docks for the same accidental reasons ; in the mind of a third the name of Galleons' Reach may stick because of the picturesqueness of the name or because he will have seen that great stretch of waters where the barges, like swift shuttles, thread the straight routes of the great liners. In the mind of a fourth man there may be vivid the term " Pool of London." Most of us have some such little coiip d'ceil that we 94 FRIGATE WARFARE carry about with us — an expanse of quayside and water more or less enclosed which can be literally scanned and taken in one glance of the eye. But actually, really to mark all the evidences of life, all the contrivances from the immense four-legged cranes down to the little bits of gilded woodwork, from the great steel hausers down to the delicate hempen cordage of the small sailing boats ; the immense stretches of arid quays ; the intercrossing lines — rightly to know and to appreciate the minutiae of all these miles and miles on the right bank and of all these miles and miles on the left — that would be a task for ten life-times, and you and I and the cabman at the corner and the Lord Mayor and the County Council and the Poet Laureate and the Prime Minister and your green-grocer are all alike dependent for our fame, for our wealth, for our sheets, and for our ultimate resting-places in suburban cemeteries, upon, not the City, but the Port of London. That is the ground-fact of our existence. We may ignore, and we do in fact ignore it pretty completely ; but still, implanted deep and ruling over the psychologies certainly of my own generation there remain those maritime similes, and, imbedded deeply in the very roots of our language which are the main- springs of our action, there remain the maritime words which are always words of a high standard of efficiency when it is a matter of work and of a high and not ignoble carelessness when it is one's turn ashore. If, in any of the common matters of life, I wish to exhort the gardener or the carpenter who are working for me, or any other man, young or old, who comes under my influence, I should beg them to "make a good job" of things. But if I wish to exhort myself or FRIGATE WARFARE 95 some one else to adopt a really high standard, keying the " good job " to something nearly within the realm of art, I should say : " Do it ship-shape." For, off the sea, you may be careless ; you may be, in fact, ' ' half seas over " or " several sheets in the wind " ; but, once aboard, all the implements of your craft must be in their exact place ; every stanchion, every bolt, every lifebelt, and even every holystone must be just there and just exactly there. It must be all ship-shape to a degree such as is unknown in any other trade, pro- fession, craft, calling, or pursuit of fame in these islands. And, for me at least, that all comes back to Percival Keene, to Midshipman Easy, to the black cook, Mesty, to Tom Cringle, to Southey's Nelson, to the old lieu- tenant, plastered with tallow, who welcomed Lord Cochrane as a midshipman aboard his craft, and, to a great, but still to a lesser degree, it comes back to the sinking of the Birkenhead, to the ballad of the ' ' Battle of the Baltic," to the sinking of the Royal George, and to " Black-eyed Susan." I don't know whether the " Battle of the Baltic " is fine poetry ; but I know it is an immense influence, and, like most immense in- fluences, has a fine cadence. I find myself now and then repeating its stanzas just for the pleasure of the sound : " ' Hearts of oak ! ' our captains cried, when each gun From its adamantine hps Spread a death-shade round the ships Like a hurricane ecHpse Of the sun." But these ballads, along with such more grandilo- quent matters as the end of Kingsley's " Westward 96 FRIGATE WARFARE Ho" with the Spaniard who was, after all, quite efficiently drowned being chivalrously forgiven by Amyas Leigh who was still alive and in the bright sunlight — these more grandiloquent matters were, as far as I can remember the psychology of a boyhood — a little bit above our heads. What " Piggy " Pearson and myself, playing truant from fagging at cricket on a hot afternoon and hidden away up in the top of one of the old trees in Epping Forest, used to imagine was rather the rough-and-tumble life of frigate-fighting. I don't think we were remarkably heroic, but we did grind our cutlasses to a sharp edge upon the grindstones, saw to it that the boarding-pikes were handy to come to, hated a Frenchman like the devil, and yet were sure that at the end of every engagement we should hand the French captain back his sword because, although he had had overwhelming odds on his side, against such dashing devils as myself and " Piggy" Pearson, whose English determination in some way positively forced the solid cannon-balls faster through the air, his gallantry had availed little. So we took him prisoner, returned him his sword, and packed him off to Edinburgh Castle, from which, in our heart of hearts, we hoped he would escape. Indeed, if, being off duty, we had met him, suspicious enough in aspect, at a hedge alehouse on the Great North Road, we should certainly have looked the other way. That, I think, was invariably the mixed way in which our combats were conducted. The foe was craven as long as he fought, and one of us was a match for any three of him. But the moment he struck his gallantry became evident ; we returned him his sword and we hoped he might escape from prison so that we might have another slap at his craven crew. FRIGATE WARFARE 97 It was, if you like, a muddled psychology, and, just where the standard of right and wrong came in is a little hard to distinguish. But I cannot discern much active badness about it, though it may have been high treason to have connived at the escape of our captive. When the war was over, being on half-pay, we should have had to settle down in one of the queer old streets of Calais or of Brussels ; we should go out daily to buy our provisions in the Rue du Pot d'Etain or the Rue Marche au Lait ; and, over our afternoon cordial, we should discover a certain faded majesty, a certain atmosphere of now impotent heroism about the scare- crow-like figures in blue coats and with deteriorated shakos — the officers of the Grande Armee, and of Vilieneuve's squadron. And, tottering back over the rough cobbles, we should thank God that we, and they, had been enabled to do our duty — though how exactly those other officers had been able to do their duty when it was common sense that Napoleon was a tyrant to whom no one owed duty — that was a question that we left to the winds and waves encircling the rock of St. Helena. The empire of the sea must always be a matter of traditions, since it is only by means of the experience of ages that we may counteract the contrivances of tides, of waves and of winds, which are the constant factors of that element. In one sense the immense liners, which with their whole town's populations and their macadamised streets seem safer than towns, since they have no chimney-pots to blow about your ears, have changed some of the aspect of seafaring. If the majority of us contemplated a voyage we should expect to set out in such a collection of whitened packing-cases crammed down on an unbreakable steel 7 98 FRIGATE WARFARE soup-dish. We should expect to be rammed through the water along known routes as definite as that from Hyde Park Corner to Charing Cross ; charts would be things outside our psychology, and we should grumble if the conveyance were an hour late. But in the im- mense scale of sea-faring these apparitions have as little to do as have Pullman Cars and trams de luxe with all the land-borne commodities of the earth. The sea is the property of, the sea exists for, the tramp- steamer, and 80 per cent, of the tramp-steamers of the world fly the British flag. These tramp-steamers are buffeted by the winds ; are at the mercy of pro- montories and headlands, pursue painful courses in dangerous tideways, are warped into nooks and corners, and, by means of charts, logs, and compasses, diffi- cultly make sedulously tended lights in Malaysia, in County Galway, or in the islands where Sappho sang. The lighting of these seas is British in devising ; so is the charting of them, and, down the ages, so is the clearing of them from pirates and the tradition that gives them their laws. If yesterday the drowned Admiral von Spec of the sunken German battleship off the Falkland Islands touched his cap on coming on to the quarter-deck before sailing on his last fatal cruise, that was because on the mainmast of the Harry Grace de Dieu there once hung the crucifix and to that, little as he may have known it, that Admiral was still touching his cap. That tradition is ancient, is quaint, and is possibly unnecessary, and yet probably it does none of us, admirals or others, any harm from time to time to be reminded that " the sea is His, and He made it" — even though we may question the state- ment. CHAPTER II THE SEVENTH OF MAY On May 7th, 1915, the German submarine U 39 sank by means of a torpedo and without warning the Cunard Uner Lusitania, thus sending to the bottom 1,134 souls, all non-combatant. I hope to be able to persuade the reader that this action was also due to the atmosphere engendered in England by the reading in the eighties of last century of works written by Captain Marryat and descriptions of commerce-de- stroying by frigates andprivateers during theNapoleonic Wars — the reader of these works and the person im- pressed by this atmosphere being, not an English public school-boy, but a German Emperor. The circumstances attendant upon death by sea have always created singular sentiments of horror in the human breast, and those sentiments of horror have had, as corollary, singular manifestations of humaneness. There can, in the whole of history, have been few in- stances of more callous indifference to suffering, and no instances of greater suffering than that exemplified by the lot of the galley-slave, whether the period of that galley-slave were that of the battle of Actium or the battle of Lepanto. These unfortunate beings were chained to immense oars, far away from the light of the sun, which, according to the ordinary vicissitudes 99 100 THE SEVENTH OF MAY of such human Hfe, they would never see again. One only exception was made in these circumstances, and for one alleviation alone could they hope. If their galley, struck in the ribs by another, were upon the point of foundering, the foreman slave-master and his assistants would undo such of the padlocks as were conveniently within their reach and would cast the keys down into the lower galleys, so that the slaves, passing the keys from bank to bank, might release themselves. They were to be given their chance of sinking or swimming. And this tradition existed upon galleys, whether in the days of Actium, of Lepanto, or as late as the last galleys rowed by slaves that existed in the Spanish Navy or in those of the Deys of Algiers, and the Sultans of Morocco. The same practice prevailed even in times of storm — the slaves were unchained and given their chance. This is an instance of a tradition of greater than terrestrial humanity existent upon the seas from the earliest times and persistent until the special circumstances became non-existent. That galley-slaves, stokers, non-combatants, women and children should be "given their chance" when they are upon the great waters is a very ancient tradition and one that has been observed by all maritime nations. In the direct hour of death most human factors fade into unimportance, and the sea is an ever-present symbol of death, thus imparting to such peoples as are familiar with it some of the frame of mind that attaches to watchers by a death-bed. On land, if we were present at the death-bed of our bitter- est enemy, we should say almost inevitably " Vex not his ghost." At sea, watching the death-struggles of his bitterest enemy, a man who has followed the sea THE SEVENTH OF MAY loi will almost inevitably attempt to save that enemy. This circumstance has given to the occupation of following the sea a certain sacredness that does not attach to any other calling pursued by humanity. Humanity, in fact, is not a very pleasant animal, and we should by so much the more treasure the tradi- tions of a craft whose circumstances lead to an almost universal fineness. We are most of us tender of old traditions, but almost all old traditions upon the land have about them something of evil. The traditions of nobility connote oppressions ; the tradition of paying your first footing in the hopping-field promotes un- necessary drinking. This tradition of saving life at sea alone is absolutely stainless and absolutely desir- able. We carry it even to extravagant lengths ; for, if any man of these islands were asked : ' ' Supposing Shakespeare had been upon the Titanic and could have given his place in a boat to save the life of a three-days '-old baby, should he have given it ? " there is hardly a man who would not answer: " It would be quite irrational ; the loss to the world would be very great; but he should give it." For certain actions are as poetic and certain traditions as neces- sary, value poetry how highly we will — as poetry. Commerce upon land is only commerce ; commerce upon the sea is commerce plus a very beautiful chivalry and a very real braveness — or so it was until May 7th. And this commerce of the great waters has reflected a certain mercy and decency even upon terrestrial commerce. You, being a city merchant, will ask me how you have benefited by this high tradition of the sea. I will answer : ' ' Did you ever know a man engaged in commerce, who, being in some straits to tide over a difficult period, was not saved because one 102 THE SEVENTH OF MAY of his creditors or several of his creditors said : ' We do not wish to overburden a sinking ship ' — or, if you hke, ' to throw stones at a drowning man ' ? " If those similes, taken from the traffic of the deep water, had not been universally in our minds, many of us who are now prosperous citizens would be broken creatures upon the workhouse bench and many of us who still walk the earth would have sought refuge beneath the waters, I have stuck to several friends in distress because I did not like the idea of being the rat that deserted the sinking ship. These statements are not merely fanciful, simply because these images are for ever present in our minds. From the sea, as from a well, we draw an infinite supply of examples and of similes enjoining pity, rectitude, order, and Christian kindness. For who of us could get through life with- out the help of some of its images ; who of us at given junctures could have got along much further without the hope that at the last the Lord should bring us into the haven that we had desired ? It is because of this that May 7th, 1915, is a very bad date for humanity. The husbandman has his virtues, but in the kindly comities of mankind he has none of the virtues or of the kindlinesses of the men that go down into deep waters. He has none of those necessities. The great winds will lay his grain and shake his fruit to the ground ; the hard frosts will nip his seedlings ; long drought will send the turnip-flea skipping among his roots with that little crepitating sound that may well turn the farmer's cheek pale. But these things must be endured in solitude. No man can help you against the sun, the wind, the frost, or murrains. You grow rich on your own luck, or you starve on your own misfortune ; in either case you brood over your own THE SEVENTH OF MAY 103 furrows and are turned inwards. You have neither the tradition of helping any man nor can you expect help from any. That is why the German papers, when they commented upon the sinking of the Lusi- tania, spoke of the dash and heroism of the submarine's crew. For the German, in the great historical millions of him, is a peasant, and is, in his modern develop- ment, a merchant who has never followed the seas nor had any traffic with those who have followed the seas. This holds true in minute particulars as in historic generalisations. What Germany, as a mari- time power, has chiefly distinguished itself by giving to the world is the subsidised liner. If, in short, you asked a German what the German Empire had given to the world of the sea, he would answer the Hamburg- Amerika Line, the Hamburg-South American Line, the North German Lloyd Line, the Pester Lloyd Line, and the Woermann Line. Without these great lines German mercantile marine would be a negligible matter and German overseas trade a thing to be reckoned on the fingers of a few hands. Without its great lines the British mercantile marine would hardly be affected in its world-pre-eminence. Created within the memory of man, without traditions, fostered by an impassionedly commercial State, the German mer- cantile marine has done nothing to give to the German nation anything of the feeling of the sea. German merchandising has no savour at all of sea-life about it. German synthetic jam is manufactured in Mann- heim, goes on time by rail to Hamburg put up in tin pails. It reaches Hamburg on the Wednesday, and, at a given hour on some subsequent Friday, reaches Buenos Ayres, part of the cost of the transit having been borne by the State, and the whole of it effected 104 THE SEVENTH OF MAY in despite of waves by means of pistons, cylinders, and steam-gauges. And that process began within the life-times of most of us. I can remember seeing two East Indiamen with the great spars and the black- and-white sides, painted to look like the gun-decks of a seventy-four, piled up by a south-wester upon the shores of Sandgate Bay. The Plassey and the Ben- venue they were called. I can remember seeing a full-rigged ship, four schooners, three brigs, and several smaller sailing craft piled up in the same place. I can remember also, within two miles of that place, the sinking of the Grosser Kurjiirst and the funerals of the German sailors who were brought ashore and buried in the little cemetery behind Shorncliffe Station, where their monument may still be seen. The sinking of that great cruiser seemed to put an end for ever to Germany's hopes of a navy. German maritime and naval history, indeed, though it goes back some distance, has never been a matter of a particular distinction, and in modern historical times has been a matter almost invariably distinguished by disaster, by political acrimony, and by dispiritude. It is true that the Navy of the Hanse towns preceded and rivalled for a time the navy of the Cinque Ports ; but, whereas the records of the Cinque Ports are full of action and daring and of order kept upon the seas, the records of the Hanse Towns' fleets are purely matters of commercial rings, trusts, and actions such as those which are popularly alleged against the Standard Oil Company of America. The merchants of the Hanse Towns, in fact, looked after themselves remarkably well, and are no doubt not to be blamed for it. But the proprietors of the Cog Christopher, flying the Red Cross of St. George, had accorded to THE SEVENTH OF MAY 105 them internationally the task of keeping the seas clear of corsairs like the celebrated " Nequissimus pirata Eustachio" who, in the thirteenth century was much accursed by the Governments of France, Burgundy, Scotland, and England, and who had his home in the Channel Islands. From there he was eventually burnt out, the Cinque Ports having received a charter for that purpose from all the four Governments. I am not of course saying that the men of the Cinque Ports were not rewarded for their public services. They had the privileges of infangthef, utfangthef. Court Baron, soccage, saccage, tunnage, lastage, and pound- age. They had the right to water their boats at any spring on the French coast before the ships of any other nation, and the ships of any other nation backed their topsails in salute whenever the red cross upon a white ground came in sight upon the narrow seas — until, at any rate, late into the seventeenth century. But these privileges, if frequently of monetary value, were frequently also purely honorary and the honours were as jealously stood out for as the privileges of value. Thus, because they had rid the sea of Eustace, the unspeakable pirate, the Barons of the Cinque Ports in the twentieth century brought their chancery suit against the Earl Marshal for the right to sit at the right hand of the King at the Coronation banquet — and won it. The Corporation of the Cinque Ports, in fact, entered deeply into the fabric of the constitution of these realms. The Hanse Towns jealously excluded them- selves from duties and services to, or from influence upon, the German nation. Indeed, such of them as remain still jealously exclude themselves from the German Customs Union, and remain not only free but io6 THE SEVENTH OF MAY even free trading cities. The presence of the Barons of the Cinque Ports at the Coronation of to-day sanctions the choice of sovereign that is then made. But, whereas to-day that sanction is only historic, in the Middle Ages it was a practical safeguard for the liberties of the subject. Without the presence of those barons the selection of the King was not valid ; and their sanction was regarded as a necessary safeguard for the laws and liberties of the realm because of the powers they had upon the sea, those powers having been granted to them because of their policing and keeping order upon the narrow seas. The three leopards, or, if you like, the three young lions of the coat-armour of the crown of England were dimidiated with ships not solely as an assertion of the naval strength of the British Crown, but also as an assertion of the rights and duties of the maritime populations of England, France, and Ireland, whereas the standard of the Great Cross of Lubeck, a great ship in her day, was a standard solely of exclusion and flew over many acts of barratry, if not of piracy itself. Similarly, when the King himself began to build great ships like the Harry Grace de Dieu he was found- ing a royal and a public Navy ; when, a hundred and fifty years later, Frederick, the Great Elector, attempted to found a navy and colonies, this navy and those colonies were farmed out to a Dutch mercenary and to a commercial company in which the Elector took a few shares. And the successor of the Great Elector was so parsimonious and so intolerant of naval trans- actions that he refused to continue subscribing to the commercial company, which fell into bankruptcy, whilst the German East African colonies, their popula- tion reduced to less than a score of Germans, fell into THE SEVENTH OF MAY 107 the hands of a native chief who governed them under the Prussian flag for some decades. That story of humihation is the maritime record of Germany during the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth it was no less a record of humihation. We may indeed say that the German peoples, under their separate rulers, showed, until 1848, or indeed until 1878, some desire for a national German Navy. Indeed, in the forties of last century, this idea was almost an idealism. During the sitting of the national German Confedera- tion at Frankfort relatively great sums were sub- scribed by the German peoples for the purchase of a war-navy ; these sums were placed in the hands of delegates, who by purchase acquired a certain number of ships of war. But, when Lord Palmerston, speak- ing possibly more caustically than considerately, pointed out that the delegates of an unauthorised convention had no rights to float a flag of war upon the sea, and that the subscribed-for German warships were, in fact, pirates — this infant German Navy was taken off the sea and finally sold by auction. The echo of this humiliation remained bitter in Germany for thirty years. Lord Palmerston and the British nation coming in for their share of the bitterness. And, after the Franco-Prussian War, when Ger- many at last presented the aspect of a nation, some of the aspirations for a national battle-fleet revived in the German breast. But, after 1870, as I have else- where pointed out, much of the idealism of the German national spirit died out and that decade — that of the seventies — was one of slackness, of discouragement, and disillusionment. The sinking of the battleship Der Grosse Kurfiirst by collision with another German io8 THE SEVENTH OF MAY warship off Folkestone in 1878 seemed to extinguish finally, in Germany, all naval aspirations. I can still remember the extreme bitterness with which elderly Germans spoke of the German Navy. They said : " We have talked for half a century about this institu- tion. But, no sooner do we get together a couple of miserable ships than one, in perfectly calm weather, must needs run into the other and sink it. Let us hear no more of the Deutsche Kriegsflotte. Our future, wherever it may be, is certainly not upon the water." The Admiral in command of the squadron was given six months in a fortress and the Grosser Kurjurst was not replaced in the German Navy, which continued to languish for nearly another quarter of a century — • until the year 1900, This is a perfectly true history of German naval affairs until the beginning of the present century. It is as impartial as I have been able to make it and it will be observed that the whole affair is dismissable in a very few lines. And, if we compare it with the immense and encyclopsedic volume that would be necessary for the treatment of the maritime history of Great Britain during five hundred years, even though the subject were dismissed in a summary scale, we can see how, of necessity, if not by any special virtues, British sea life must have evolved a tradition and a standard. For, when there are many and complicated traffickings of men, traditions must of absolute necessity arise, along with conventions of right and wrong, rules of the road, and the other things which are necessary to correlated travelling from place to place. Leaving virtue entirely out of the matter, it stands to reason that a man much of whose life is passed on the sea will be anxious to save from THE SEVENTH OF MAY 109 drowning those whom he observes to be in a less favourable position than himself — if only because he himself may very shortly come into such a position of danger, and he will therefore be anxious to do all he can to further the tradition of saving life at sea so that many men may desire to save his life in turn. But, though this tradition be founded on the veriest selfishness, none the less, because of the countless aspirations of the countless thousands who have journeyed from China to Peru and from Palembang to Pimlico ; who, since the days of Henry the Navigator, have rounded the one cape of the world and doubled the other ; because of the hopes and chances of life of so many thousands of men and so many deeds of self- sacrifice, of discipline, and of courage in the face of immediate and most awful death — though the deed on May 7th, 1915, may root its practice out from the face of the waters — this tradition remains and will always remain one of the most beautiful things in the world. It has arisen, this beautiful tradition, principally because Great Britain is an island with a long and indented coastline ; in the German Empire it has not arisen principally because Bohemia has no seaboard. The statement that " Britannia rules the waves " is a stupid statement ; but such ruling as Great Britain has applied to those restless and undisciplined things is in a certain sense beautiful. Even the blockade of towns by ships' crews in the distant offing is a feat intellectual when compared with the burning of Lou vain. H is watchfulness and the power to keep the seas set against patience and the power to endure the lack of commodity ; it is the measurement of psychological strain against psycho- logical strain. no THE SEVENTH OF MAY That Germany may resent this faculty of watch- fulness and this power to endure in silence great psychological strain is natural, and no doubt excus- able. The possibility of Great Britain's exercising this vigilance against the German seaboard may well have been naturally and excusably galling to a Ger- many whose power to acquire further seaboard de- pended upon its power to threaten with terrestrial invasion those nations whose lands lie south and west of the German Empire. The threat of the one possi- bility counterbalanced the threat of the other possi- bility, and was, for long, sufficient to maintain the peace of the world. At a given period the one pos- sibility seemed no longer to outweigh the other, and war came into existence. This is the saddest story in the chronicles of the world. For I do not think any one will deny that, for long centuries, the peace administration of the great waters by Great Britain has been efficient and has been honourable. It has been a record of free harbours and of seas free to the peaceful fleets of the world, of lighthouses set up on dangerous promontories, of rocks removed from dangerous tide-ways, of the compilation of charts for use in dangerous seas. Of these traditions Germany has of necessity none at all. Between the sailor and the sailor of every other country there has always been a second nationality ; when it has come to a matter of shipwrecks and drownings, between English and French, between Genoese and Venetian, between Castilian and North American there has always extended that nationality which extinguishes all terrestrial boundaries whether in peace or in war. The German has given you great subsidised lines ; and he has given you boats which. THE SEVENTH OF MAY iii rising from the depths of the waters, carry upon them cinematograph machines so that the actual struggles of drowning humanity may be spread and witnessed in the furthest confines and the smallest villages of Pomerania. That is the future that Germany offers to humanity upon the waters. CHAPTER III " UNSERE ZUKUNFT " The history of the rise of the German Navy encloses one of the great tragi-comedies of the world, and, as far as I can understand it, it arose because of the extremely subtle interplay of human weaknesses. It is, this history, a matter of extreme complications, and, being a novelist, I approach it with all the caution I should apply to a subtle and tragic affair in private human life. I will put it in the first place in several apparently paradoxical and startling lights so as most immediately to strike the imagination of the reader and the better to awaken his attention. In the first place, then, if St. Ignatius had never founded the Society of Jesus, the German Navy would never have been founded by its present founders. Or, again, if Captain Marryat had never written " Mid- shipman Easy ' ' the Lusitania would never have been sunk by a German submarine. And it might be added that if the German Emperor had not been inspired by a genuine admiration for Nelson, for Blake, and, let us say, for Frobisher and the men of the Birkenhead, he would not in May 1915 have made himself responsible for what I will call simply the un- imaginative murder of many hundreds of descendants and inheritors of the tradition of Nelson, of Blake, of "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 113 Frobisher, and of the men who went down at their stations, standing at attention and with drums beating. The first of these paradoxes has its origin in the confused nature of German pohtics — and in the fact that after the sinking of the Grosser Kurfiirst prac- tically no one in Germany could be found to take any interest at all in the subject of the German Navy. On the other hand the Upper Power of the German State can generally smash any single political group, by accusing it, just before a General Election, of want of patriotism. Let us take the extreme Conservative Party — the party that is indifferently known as the Agrarian, the Junker, or the Imperial Party ("Reichs- partei "). For various reasons, which I will afterwards explain, this Junker Party dislikes the idea of a large Navy or even of an extended Colonial Empire. It votes generally, but not invariably, for any measures introduced in the Reichstag or in either of the Prussian Houses, by the Ministers of the Crown. It prefers that the Emperor should be extremely strong when he is functioning as King of Prussia and dislikes any strengthening of his hands as German Emperor. It is rather important, for any comprehension of the Emperor's figure, that this dis- tinction should be firmly marked in the English mind. Roughly speaking, then, the German Emperor is a constitutional monarch very much in the hands of his Ministers, who might conceivably, though of course not very thinkably, be Socialists. The German Emperor approaches in position the English fiction of the Sovereign as the Crown. But the King of Prussia is a nearly absolute monarch relying for his authority upon and completely united in interest with this same Reichspartei, who would resemble in complexion the 8 114 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" English High Tory Party, if the EngHsh High Tory Party still existed.' This state of things presents the Imperial Admin- istration with an excellent stick by which they can bring the Junkers to heel. They have only, in fact, to accuse the extreme Conservatives of disloyalty, not to the Prussian Throne, but to the German Empire, regarded as a colonial affair — of disloyalty to the immense number of Kolonialwarenhd^idler and the trade that these "colonial shops" are supposed to represent — and immediately Count Yorck von Warten- burg and his followers will lose a certain number of votes either to nearly allied groups or to direct opponents. Let me now put another startling fact before the reader. The membership of the Reichstag, or Ger- man Imperial Parliament, is 397. Of these members only about sixty, the representatives of the Free Conservatives (fifteen in number) and of the National Liberal Party (forty-five in number), have been official supporters of the Government's naval proposals. The official programmes of every other party have all contained clauses of more or less direct opposition to naval expansion and the interests of the constituents represented by those parties have all been in opposi- tion to naval, and in many cases even to colonial, expansion. The parties in the Reichstag are as 1 This point is very fully brought out in the debates in the Prussian House of Representatives after the Zabern affair. I do not wish at this moment to refresh my memory with quotations from the speeches in this debate, because I am trying, as far as possible, to limit myself to my personal im- pression of affairs as they occurred at the time. The speech, upon this occasion, of Graf Yorck von Wartenburg I will, however, present to the reader in Appendix B. "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 115 follows, beginning with the Extreme Right : (i) the Conservative, Agrarian, or Junker, a small but dis- proportionately powerful party whose characteristics I have just roughly described ; (2) the Free Conserva- tives, or Reichspartei/ a very small group which has almost divested itself of any little power that it might have had by its consistent, unreasoning, and absolutely devoted support of any measures intro- duced by the Administration ; (3) the Centre, or Catholic Party, who are the real rulers of the German Empire in the sense that in England the Irish Party have been the rulers of the British Empire for many years past. The Centre Party is numerically the most powerful in the Chamber, its representatives fluctuat- ing in number between about 120 and 90 ; (4) the National Liberals, who might be described as Whig manufacturers. This party is perhaps the most voluble in the Reichstag, its tenets being officially somewhat like those of the Manchester School in England. Its criticism of the Government is fre- quently resonant, almost always rhetorical, and never dangerous, and it has alw^ays, in the end, come to heel in matters to which the authorities attached any importance. With this body, which, officially belong- ing to the Opposition, is nevertheless a faithful sup- porter of the authorities, we come definitely to the real Opposition. This consists of: (i) the " Frei- sinnige Volkspartei " or "Free-thinking People's Party," a numerically unimportant group of what in England we should call Radical complexion, differing from the National Liberals in that it is anti-ecclesias- 1 " Free Conservatives " is the name of this party in the Prussian Landtag. See Dr. H. Rehm : " Deutschlands Politische Parteien." ii6 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" tical, whether Cathohc or Protestant, avowedly pacifist, and definitely in favour of absolute Free Trade. This party represents the financially very powerful Jewish interests of the country. It votes nearly always, but not invariably, against Govern- ment proposals. The main body of the Opposition is, of course, formed by (2) the powerful and growing Socialist Party. Of assorted, eccentric, and not very powerful bodies there are the anti-Semites, who are chiefly distinguished by the eccentricities and violences of language, much as if they were supporters of the White Rose League in this country or the " Camelots du Roi ' ' in France. There are also the Guelphs, the Poles, the Danes of Schleswig-Holstein, and the Lor- rainers of the Reichsland. All these vote, as a rule, with the Centre Party, and number together from fifteen to twenty-five. The Reichstag, of course, differs slightly in com- plexion from year to year, but, as a fair average state- ment, we may give to the Right, or supporters of the Administration, the Conservatives with about 40 votes, the Reichspartei with about 15, the Centre and allied parties with about 135, and the National Liberals with 45. To the Opposition we may give about 40 for the Freisinnige Volkspartei, and about 120 for the Socialists. This gives you about 375 seats ; and the remaining 22 we may leave as affected at bye-elections by the swing of the pendulum. Still, whatever the state of the polls, the Imperial authorities could not count upon more than 60 supporters, either officially or by interest, for their programme of naval expansion. Let us now consider the reasons — the reasons of interest and of bread and butter — that bring about '*UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 117 this stat3 of things. The Conservatives, or Junkers, object to a large Colonial Empire because they are chiefly interested in maintaining a high price for agricultural produce ; a large Colonial Empire would mean, since within that Empire there must be Free Trade, very considerable competition in agricultural produce coming from within the Empire. On much the same grounds the almost all-powerful Centre Party objects to the founding of a large Colonial Empire or even to the promotion of great industrial expansion. For the Centre Party is faced with the fact that, whereas the agricultural populations of East Prussia, of Silesia, of Bavaria, of the Rhineland and of West- phalia are Black Catholic in complexion, and vote absolutely for the Centre Party candidates, the Catholic populations of the large new industrial towns are by no means so easily controlled. The only party in Germany that ever wins a considerable number of votes from the Centre is the Socialist Party, and these gains, when they do take place, are found in towns like Munich and Cologne, never in the country districts. To keep the country districts therefore rich, well- populated, and relatively powerful in the State is one of the main motives of the Centre Party ; moreover, the nature of the constituents of this party is such as to make them naturally and professionally indifferent, if not hostile, to any naval policy. To the rich, pros- perous, and contented peasant of Bavaria who has never seen a ship; to the rich, prosperous, and con- tented wine-grower of the Moselle who has never seen any waters save those of that river and of the Rhine, the idea of a great Navy or of great colonies presents neither romance nor financial attractiveness. It has, moreover, the definite objection that it exposes ii8 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" them not only to immediate burdens of taxation, but to potential and very costly wars. The population statistics of the German Empire reveal the following facts : there are in Germany 27,000,000 Roman Catholics, a body of an intense solidarity, set against 37,000,000 supporters of divers creeds and interests ; or, again, 6 per cent, of the population inhabits terri- tory of the German seaboard or is interested in marine pursuits, whilst 94 per cent, are agricultural or not much interested either in the sea or in ideas of oversea expansion. How, then, did the Govern- ment achieve the apparent miracle of forcing through an immense naval programme against this uninterested or this hostilely interested population ? The factors working on their side are various and complicated. During the first eight years in which the present Emperor enjoyed autocratic power he made impas- sioned struggles on behalf of what is called the " Blue Water School," without achieving any results what- ever. His methods ranged from those of rhetoric to those of political wire-pulling : the rhetoric inspired no one ; the wire-pulling was absolutely without political effect. In the Reichstag the measures intro- duced by the Secretary for Marine were not so much contemptuously as negligently rejected, as if the naval policy were an amiable but unimportant personal tic in the sovereign. In, I think, 1897, the picture ap- peared in an English illustrated paper, showing the naval vessels of the Great Powers in Asiatic waters. In this picture, though the other Great Powers were all represented by warships varying in weight and in number, the German naval banner was carried by an auxiliary-sailing gunboat alone. Before then, in the great hurricane in Samoan waters, H.M.S. Calliope "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 119 steamed out against the full force of the hurricane, the German war-vessels there present being lost with all hands. To these facts the Emperor was never tired of passionately alluding, more particularly when Samoa fell within the scope of German interest. The draw- ing from the English illustrated paper the Emperor caused to be reproduced and scattered broadcast through Germany, bearing, with a facsimile of his own sign-manual, the words: "How pitiful!" In the same decade the Emperor contributed to the equivalent of the exhibition of the Royal Academy a picture by his own hand showing light cruisers in action, exterminating an enemy's commerce. Let us attempt to be as just as possible to William II. It is open to us to contend — and we may well contend — that a picture such as that contributed by His Majesty to a public exhibition might be calculated to excite the cupidity of that ruler's subjects. I have myself, often enough in Germany, heard rather violent individuals, in private life, say that German light cruisers would make short work of British trading- vessels, and that the streets of Hamburg and Kiel would flow with prize-money, the proceeds of these raids. And, in the summer of 1900, it was familiar enough to me to hear school-children singing along the banks of the Rhine a song that might be roughly translated : " Wait till we have got our ships ; You shall see, old England skips." But we may well give the Emperor personally the credit, in so far as it is credit, of having motives more dashing and less purely financial. Prize-money, ex- cept in so far as it was a somewhat romantic com- 120 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" modity freely dispersed by Jack Tars in ale-houses, was probably less in his mind than the taking over of the glory of the English frigate tradition. The Emperor has himself recorded in many speeches and upon many occasions how he was brought up upon the writings of Marryat in his youth ; how one of his first toys was a model of an English frigate, in which he spent many hours sailing about upon artificial waters, and how much of his time as a boy was spent in watching the great battleships of England progress- ing up and down the Solent, near Hamoaze, or upon Portsmouth Hard. That his acquaintance, not only with the traditions of Nelson and the British Navy, but even with British naval slang, was very intimate the celebrated anecdote of the " long" ship may be taken to prove. At a momentous point in his career the Emperor was created a British Admiral, being the first foreigner ever granted that privilege. Being in the Mediterranean, he seized the opportunity of a British squadron's cruising in the neighbourhood of his yacht to hoist his flag upon the flagship, thus being the first foreigner to display his pennant above a British ship. The captain in command of the vessel had prepared what is usually called a sumptuous collation, expecting that the Emperor would sit down to a state meal and then depart. Instead, the Emperor took off his coat and asked to be conducted over every part of the ship, visiting even the stokeholes, the men's quarters, and the coal-bunkers. In the consequent excitement the flag-captain forgot his collation. The Emperor finished inspecting and resumed his coat. Upon the point of leaving, he remarked to the captain that his vessel must be the longest ship in the British Navy. The captain replied that His Majesty was "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 121 mistaken ; the So-and-so was 140 feet longer. The Emperor replied nevertheless that this vessel must be the longest ship in the British Navy, and was then rowed to his own yacht. It was only some time later that the captain remembered that, in British naval slang, a ' ' long ' ' ship is a ship that is niggardly in offering hospitality — a ship on which the intervals between drinks are long. He then wrote and apologised to the Emperor for not having given him drink, and the incident closed with various politenesses and with a banquet to commemorate the Emperor's birthday. That was in the nineties. This upbringing, these politenesses, this promotion, these hoistings of Admiral's pennants, and this quasi- naval heartiness, which are all authentic enough, may well strike one as being strong factors of an imperial tendency. And it is possible to disinter innumerable similar ana. The owner, for instance, of the yacht which the Emperor used to hire for his cruises be- fore he had a yacht of his own has told me what a nuisance the Imperial tenant was. It was his practice when coming on board to shake hands not only with the captain but with all the officers and any members of the crew that happened to be stand- ing about. In the early mornings he would sit in his pyjamas and with bare feet on the cabin skylight and chaff the crew as they washed down the decks. The Empress and two of the Princes slept upon the cabin floor, and so on — all things which, if hearty and amiable in themselves, were extremely inconvenient to the owners of the yacht when they resumed their occupancy. The crew, having been chaffed and shaken hands with by an Emperor in his pyjamas, were absolutely insubordinate when it came to taking 122 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" orders from mere civilian owners ; the yacht itself would be in an extremely dirty condition, whilst the Emperor bribed the chef and Herr Krupp, the chief steward, to leave the vessel and to enter their respective services. These anecdotes, I may state, are absolutely authentic and exactly reported. And, indeed, they are ominous enough. They show in the chief actor and his subordinates a plentiful appreciation of that breezy and rather lawless spirit which reasonably distinguishes the uncabined sailor ashore. They show, on the other hand, little enough appreciation of the traditions of that which is at sea most necessary — the ship-shape. You may take them, if you like, as symbols of what afterwards happened. That which gives you, metaphorically speaking, the right to be, ashore, three sheets in the wind, is the having seen for many months that your crew had every rope coiled down in its proper place. This, on the White Heather, the Em- peror neglected. That which gives you the right to destroy commerce is the control of the seas, since the right to destroy commerce carries with it the duty of saving the lives of non-combatants, and this can only be done when your depredations can be committed at leisure. This control of the seas the German Emperor not only never possessed but never much tried to obtain. His ideal of naval warfare was always that exhibited in his picture of cruiser-warfare — that of swift predatory vessels dashing out of harbours and committing acts of piracy. For it is an act of piracy to gut and to sink, or to sink without gutting, a mer- chant vessel when you are not in a position to secure the safety of the non-combatant crew. And the long struggle for the establishment of a "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 123 great Navy in Germany was distinguished by two main tides which were struggles within that struggle itself. These two main tides were represented by what in England we call the doctrine of the " Blue Water School ' ' and by what I will call the vain illusion of commerce-destroying. The one doctrine desires to promote the efficient control of the sea, thus securing that long, almost silent, and almost bloodless contest of endurances to which I have already referred. Those of the other school desire to promote dashing and impracticable cutting-out expeditions. By these cutting-out expeditions you are to spread dismay amongst your opponents by the fame of sinking merchant-ships and by depriving the community of occasional cargoes of cotton-wool, typewriters, oranges, or saffron. In the German agitation for a great Navy the one tendency, that of cutting-out expeditions, was represented by William II ; the other policy was brought somewhere near achievement by the chief, by the permanent officials, by the innumerable em- ployees, and by the Press Bureau of the German Admiralty, all working in comparative silence under the direction of Admiral von Tirpitz. I am under the impression — but no man can dogma- tise about the vast matter of populaces — that the efforts of William II counted for nothing at all. His manifestations, when they were not picturesque, were futile, and, when they were at their most picturesque, were not infrequently at their most futile. We may possibly say that the aspiration to the effect that Germany's future was upon the waters — " Unsere Zukunft liegt auf dem Wasser" — was largely spread through Germany by the influence of William II. And it may have counted for something. But I do 124 "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" not think that it really counted for very much. We have, I imagine, paid more attention to it in this country than was practically paid to it in the greater part of Germany itself, since to this country it was an actual and tangible threat, whereas, in Bavaria, in the Rhineland, in East Prussia, in Saxony, and in the Grand Duchy of Lippe-Detmold the announcement was merely a windy aspiration. Of course we must set against this statement the undoubted fact that windy aspirations have more power over the populaces of the German States than over those of civilised countries. So let us, whilst postulating that in utter- ing that aspiration the Emperor was the saviour of Great Britain, score to his account the fact that he may have influenced some hundreds of thousands of voters at the next election to the Imperial Parliament. His other contributions to the founding of German sea-power may be variously viewed by various minds. I have already mentioned the painting of cruisers in action and the spreading broadcast of the English illustration with the imperial holograph note. There remains, prominently, the "Song to Aegir " — a song poetically and musically inspired by the Imperial Muses — much as if the late Queen Victoria had written and composed an invocation to whoever may be the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Father Neptune. I have heard all these things laughed at in Germany, and laughed at immoderately ; but of course the Germans that I have known best were of the type who would laugh at such productions, and I ought to add that shortly after the production of the " Song to Aegir" German manufacturers produced innumerable "notions" labelled with the name of that mythical personage. Thus one might buy ' ' Aegir ' ' collars. "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 125 "Aegir" studs, " Aegir " underwear, and, particu- larly, ' ' Aegir ' ' lavatory fittings, much as if in Eng- land, on various occasions, we had had " Standard Bread" golf skirts, "Paper Bag" hats, or "White Slave " corsets. But the means by which the German Navy really was produced, in spite of the hostility of the Reichstag and of the indifference of the peoples, in spite of such ridicule as was excited by the Imperial proceedings, and in spite of the weariness which came over all Germans at the thought of the sale by auction of the first German national fleet, of the sinking of the Grosser Kurjiirst and the loss of German vessels and lives in Apia Harbour — the means by which the German Navy really was produced were matters cer- tainly of a greater dignity and equally certainly of a greater comprehension of the political subtleties of the German situation. The Emperor's methods in dealing with the Reichstag were as childish as his methods in dealing with his people. There is, for instance, the occasion of his famous reception to the members of that body. He invited the entire membership to a stand-up collation, and then kept the poor people waiting whilst he delivered a naval oration lasting two hours and a half before letting them have anything to eat, thus multiplying by nine times the proverbial mauvais quart d'heure. Nor did he neglect the members of the Imperial Diet or Bundesrat. Thus, in 1900, he sent a torpedo-boat division up the Rhine. And I can still remember that the various German rulers whose territory these vessels passed through sent numerous telegrams to the Emperor and to other high functionaries, expressive of the manner in which their bosoms swelled with patriotic feeling, when, for the first time, they stood 126 "UNSERE 2UKUNFT" upon a German warship in German waters. For, to celebrate this considerable German victory — which might indeed have been achieved at any time since the Rhine flowed or torpedo-boats could make progress along it — each ruler awaited the ship of war as it approached the territory on his bank and walked its deck until it had left his sphere of influence.' 1 I find, on referring to the Deiitscher Geschichtskalender for 1900, that : " On May 14th the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hessen- Darmstadt sends from Darmstadt the following telegram to the Emperor : ' I announce to Your Majesty that I have to-day received Your Majesty's Rhine Torpedo-boots-division at my boundary in Bingen, and have fared with the same to Mayence. For the first time united with German ships of war in my land I am forced to express to your Majesty what joy fills myself and my Hessenland at the sight of a part of our armed power w^hich therewith [dazu] is called upon to maintain the greatness of Germany — Ernst Ludwig.' On May 2 1st the Grand Duke of Baden receives the officers of the Torpedo-boats-division in Karlsruhe and sends the Em- peror a telegram. The Emperor replied with another tele- gram over two hundred words in length, which concludes : ' The joyful reception which the Torpedo-boots-division has everywhere found on its Rhine voyage strengthens me in the joyous confidence that my exertions to create for Germany also a strong war-fleet will be led to a consummation full of blessings [zu einem segensreichen Ziele fiihren werde] thanks to the friendly co-operation of the German people under the leadership of its enlightened princes ' {Deiitschev Geschichts- kalender, 1900, Part I., pp. 30-31). Nor were the Princes of the Hohenzollern family neglected. On the return of Prince Henry of Prussia on February 13th, igoo, at the end of a voyage from Kiel to Kiaou-Chou on board the cruiser Deutschland, the Emperor gave the Prince a banquet, during which, in the words of the Geschichtskalender , the Emperor brings out the following drinking-speech {bringt der Kaiser den folgenden Trinkspruch aus) ; this Trinkspnich ends : ' As the Emperor William the Great created for us "UNSERE ZUKUNFT" 127 the weapon with whose help we have again become black, white, and red, so the German people addresses itself to the task of forging for itself the instrument by which, by the will of God, to all eternity, both at home and abroad, it may remain black, white, and red. At your return you find a blooming little boy in the arms of your spouse. May you, as godfather to this increase in our young fleet, see the same under God's protection develop in full strength. Hurrah ! " {DG., 1900, Part I., p. 15). CHAPTER IV THE UNDERGROUND WORK In the meantime, working like an army of moles be- neath the soil, the Prussian Admiralty was preparing the way for the real and practical establishment of a fighting fleet. The predecessor of Admiral von Tir- pitz, Admiral von Hollmann, had been a Prussian officer with military rather than naval characteristics, whose method of dealing with the Reichstag had been, to use a cant phrase, of the "Big Bow-wow" order. He commanded the Reichstag to provide him with cruisers, and the Reichstag threw out his bills with little comment and by large majorities. And it is possibly significant that the series of naval disasters which had always characterised, at any rate in the minds of the German people, the German Navy, con- tinued right up to the appointment of Admiral von Hollmann's successor; there was an explosion on the Baden warship in the Baltic ; by the bursting of steam-pipes on board the Brandenburg, a first-class battle-ship, one hundred and forty- two men were killed ; the litis, a gun-boat, foundered off the Shantung Peninsula, with the loss of nearly all hands, shortly before the retirement of Von Hollmann. Von Tirpitz succeeded him in 1897, and on June 12th, 1900, the Reichstag passed the vague and elastic Naval Bill which has resulted in the establishment of the German Navy 128 THE UNDERGROUND WORK 129 as we know, or don't know, it. Perhaps the most definite thing about this Bill is the statement in the preamble to the effect that Germany must have a Navy capable of crippling, in the eventuality of war, the Navy of the most powerful maritime power. The provisions of the Bill, though apparently definite enough, are actually elastic in the extreme. They are this because of the indefiniteness of the German naval language which von Tirpitz, in some cases, invented, and of which, in other instances, he took very full advantage. For von Tirpitz' s problem was to de- ceive, not so much the British or any other people, as the German Imperial Parliament and the German peoples. It is very likely that public attention in this country might never have been attracted to the growth of the German Navy at all without the bom- bastic utterances of the Emperor ; it is, at any rate, certain that few people, either in this country or in Germany, could ever have, at any given moment, any precise view of the exact state of the German Navy. It might be too much to say that Admiral von Tirpitz ever laid down fifty Dreadnoughts whilst giving the impression that he was laying down merely forty second-class cruisers with ten auxiliaries. Neverthe- less, this could have been effected by the use of the singular word " Ersatzschiff," or " replacing-ship." In England a First Lord of the Admiralty must budget for a ship of such and such a class, of such and such a tonnage, of such and such a weight of gun-metal, and of such and such a cost. In Germany the Marine Minister has only to state that he desires an " Ersatz- schiff " — a "replacing-ship" — a ship, that is to say, to replace any other ship that has been sunken or that has become obsolete. And, amazing as it may seem, 9 130 THE UNDERGROUND WORK the first German Dreadnought was the " replacing- ship " of the Grosser Kurfurst that was sunk in 1878. The Grosser Kurfurst was a half-armoured battleship of 6,600 tons ; the Goehen which ' ' replaced ' ' her was a Dreadnought of 23,000. Yet, for all that was said by Admiral von Tirpitz in securing the warrant to build her, the Goehen might well have been only of the size of the Grosser Kurfurst, or she might have been a torpedo-boat. For the German vagueness of phraseology extends to every class of naval shipping. A British First Lord of the Admiralty, let me repeat, if he budgets for a torpedo-boat, gets a torpedo-boat, if for a destroyer, a destroyer. If Admiral von Tirpitz, on the other hand, requires a torpedo-boat, it is true that he gets no more. But if, in a semi-clandestine manner, he desires something larger, no matter what, he asks for one or two or three " Grosse Torpedo-boote," or "great torpedo-boats." This term, then, covers every vessel, of whatever size, that is capable of firing a torpedo. It might certainly imply a torpedo-destroyer ; but, since most Dreadnoughts carry torpedoes and are armed with torpedo-tubes, it might equally well imply a Dreadnought. The Naval Bill of 1900 placed, therefore, in the hands of this great and astute organiser what was, to all intents and purposes, a blank cheque. How, then, was the passing of the Naval Bill secured since, in a House radically opposed to naval extension, 201 members voted for it and only 103 for its rejection ? The answer is that its passage was entirely due to the underground spade-work of Admiral von Tirpitz and his many bureaus. With the Reichstag itself von Tirpitz adopted none of the methods of Admiral von THE UNDERGROUND WORK 131 Hollmann. He did not attempt to browbeat that assembly in the name of his august master ; his answers to interpellations, if they were usually evasive, were always absolutely polite. He inherited none of the gifts of rhetoric or of homely eloquence that dis- tinguished Bismarck, but he inherited and immensely enlarged upon Bismarck's tradition of employing the Press. Attached to his office he had a Bureau employ- ing over a hundred able writers whose province was to send out, on a given day in the week, articles all in the note required at the moment, to every German newspaper, of whatever complexion. Germany is a land bristling with local papers ; there is hardly a town of the size of an English market borough that has not its Zeitung, its Blatter, or its weekly journal. And, since most of these local papers are not vastly profitable affairs, their proprietors welcome anything in the nature of free " copy." The uninstructed reader might be astonished to find in the Munsterische Anzeiger an article exactly echoing the naval views of another article in the Munsterische Zeitung, another in the Kolnische Zeitung, and another in the Kolnische Volkszeitung. Each of these articles would comment from exactly the same standpoint, though in different phraseology, upon a naval event of the week, and such an article would appear in each of those papers once a week. Yet the MUnster Announcer is an organ of the Vatican ; the Miinster News is Protestant Demo- cratic ; the Cologne Gazette is official ; the Cologne People's Newspaper is Catholic Democratic. And, at special times, special attempts were made by the Press Bureau. Thus, just before the introduction of the Naval Bill of 1900, a great number of general writers, poets, novelists, and critics of one or other 132 THE UNDERGROUND WORK of the arts were approached in extremely cautious terms by the Admiral's Bureau ; were informed that such and such a piece of writing of theirs had attracted the favourable attention of the authorities, and it was suggested to them that if they would turn their powerful pens in favour of a policy of naval extension or in favour of the particular measure about to be introduced, they would deserve the gratitude of the country, or the approval of the authorities, or sub- stantial rewards. In any case they would be provided with documents or with arguments if these were needed. Nor was this proceeding confined to German writers alone. Many foreign journalists were ap- proached and provided with materials going to prove that the German Navy was an innocuous affair in- tended solely for the protection of the German Mercantile Marine against the Chilian, Colombian, or the Serbian Navies. ' How precisely such long and careful preparation of the public mind works upon the public mind I am not set dogmatically to define. Probably its action is somewhat as follows. For many months during 1900 there appeared in almost every one of the German provincial papers a statement to the effect that none of the inhabitants of Borkum, of Nordeney, or of any of the coast-towns and villages between the Jade and Schiermonrikoog had been able to sleep soundly of nights for many years past because of their fear of ^ Readers interested in the methods by which German organisations and the German Government disseminate pro- paganda might purchase for the price of ^d. No. 9 of Mis- cellaneous Foreign Office Papers, which is entitled "Des- patches from His Majesty's Ambassador at Berlin respecting an Official German Organisation for influencing the Press of other Countries." THE UNDERGROUND WORK 133 being awakened by the thunder of British naval guns. I am bound to say that none of the inhabitants of Borkum and the neighbourhood whom I have come across presented any appearance of having suffered from chronic sleeplessness. Nevertheless, on the Rhine, in that and succeeding years, I have met old ladies and peasants who expressed a certain fear that British torpedo-boats, following the example of the Emperor's " Torpedo-boots division," might steam up the Rhine and bombard the Lorelei rocks, Ehrenbreit- stein, and the large hotels on the Drachenfels. Simi- larly, at odd times, a flood of articles would be let loose upon Germany stating that the German breakfast- table might at any moment by the British fleet be deprived of its indispensable coffee, which, by implica- tion, was stated to have come from the million square miles of German colonial territory. These statements, silly in their way, bore, in times of tranquillity, no particular fruit. Nevertheless, they would be suffi- cient to leave, dormant at the bottom of the German mind, the suspicion that the British Navy was a serious menace to the homes and to the meal-tables of the German Empire. And the German, it must be remembered, pays a much more vivid, though I am not saying that it is a more reasonable, attention to foreign politics than do we. We have, of course, the advantage of being an island, and we can therefore afford to be insular. The German has not that good fortune. That is, no doubt, not his fault, but it cannot be helped. It is, at any rate, no fault of the British Empire that Brandenburg is not entirely sur- rounded by water. Nevertheless, it is the fault of some tendencies in Germany that all public con- troversies are, in that country, carried on with a 134 THE UNDERGROUND WORK violence and an indulgence in personalities that are always verging on the obscene. The German gets, if not his ideas, then, at least, his impressions of foreign politics very largely from the caricatures in his weekly journals. And, in these, caricatures of the President of the French Republic or of such French Foreign Ministers as M. Delcasse, dressed in ballet-dancer's skirts and in attitudes of indecency, go side by side with caricatures of the Kings of Italy, Montenegro, and Serbia, with ragged seats to their trousers and uniforms hanging in patches, carrying bags labelled " 50,000,000 Marks" which, by implication, they had received as bribes from wealthy Germany, whilst they cast into the straw large bones for which their famished courtiers, with their own bones sticking out of their clothes, fight in attitudes of exaggerated voracity. And side by side with these, in the department of home politics, will go hideous and obscene pictures of the leader of the Centre Party or the leader of the National Liberals, or, upon occasion, the German Emperor, or, when necessary, the Pope of Rome, having violent attacks of diarrhoea in the presence of God Almighty. These images impart a very consider- able violence to all German public utterances. They are characterised by an extreme technical skill, which none the less leaves them extremely ugly. The Presi- dent of the French Republic, M. Delcass6, the Kings of Italy and the Balkans, the German Emperor, the Pope, and the Almighty Himself, are all represented as beings of a hideousness that few human beings have yet compassed. And the average, non-thinking Ger- man really and naively imagines that the world outside his country, and, for the matter of that, the world outside his particular party or religion within the THE UNDERGROUND WORK 135 Empire, is made up of these hideous, venial, and obscure beings whom it is the task of the august Geimanic destiny, functioning solely in favour of himself and his own particular party, to wipe off the face of the earth in the fulness of time. The earth will then be left to be populated by the pro- geny of himself and of his party, whom, in his inner and romantic mind, he figures as so many Greek heroes, with nude torsi, in greaves and helmets of bronze, with brazen shields and swords of shining steel. Beneath this perpetual welter, ever since 1897, Admiral von Tirpitz and his bureaux have worked. Above it the Emperor William has attitudinised. And, on rare, but just sufficient occasions, the activities of the Emperor and of the Admiral have met. These rare but sufficient occasions have occurred when some public event has united all German parties and creeds in a common hatred for some one outside Germany. At these times, as, for instance, during the South African War, Admiral von Tirpitz has introduced a blank-cheque Bill into the Imperial Parliament. The Emperor has thundered about love of the country, and very few of the political parties have dared to resist the torrent of jingoism. That is how the Bill of 1900 was put through ; that is how the Bill of 1905 was put through ; that is how it has always been done. There remain, nevertheless, the two very powerful parties in the Reichstag — the Centre, and the Socialists. The Centre can nearly always afford to disregard Imperial utterances. The Socialists are not quite so immune. Thus, in such Socialist organs as the Sozialistische Monatshefte, at such times of violent patriotic excitement, there have always ap- peared articles announcing that the Socialist Party 136 THE UNDERGROUND WORK yields to no other in its devotion to the Germanic ideal of a free people ; or such utterances as the attack upon M. Jaures by Herr Bebel at The Hague have pointed the same moral. Socialism in Germany, in fact, has never yet felt itself strong enough to stand out abso- lutely against a wave of patriotism, since the Emperor, by ordering a dissolution in the middle of such a wave-period, can bring on a General Election that might result in the Socialists losing hundreds of thou- sands of votes which, in ordinary times, would be absolutely cast for them. To some, but to a lesser degree, the same fears beset the Centre Party. Nevertheless, this party has always remained fairly indifferent to threats since, even if it lost 25 per cent, of its membership, it would still be in a position to dominate the Reichstag. It has, therefore, usually employed its strength at such moments in forcing the Government to pay a consider- able price for its support. Thus, in igoo, a large part of the oppressive laws against the Society of Jesus were relaxed in return for the Centre Party's support of the Naval Bill ; and, in 1905, in return for the same support, nearly all the remaining restrictions against the Jesuits in the German Empire, were taken off. That is why I said, at the beginning of the fore- going section, that, if St. Ignatius had never founded the Company of Jesus, the German Navy could not have been secured by the means that were employed for thatjpurpose. CHAPTER V THE TWO NAVIES That the German Navy — the engine slowly and care- fully brought together by Admiral von Tirpitz — was intended directly and solely against this country, few people would deny. It was aimed against this country without much secrecy. Itwas founded and went through its various stages of evolution during periods of popular agitation against this country. And, since the begin- ning of the war, no German sentiment has been more frequently uttered than the statement that the pur- pose of the German Navy is to shake from off a shackled world the fetters of British control of the seas. I may have — and indeed I do have — some doubts as to the Emperor William's motives in his attempt to found a Navy consisting exclusively of commerce-destroyers. That Navy never came into existence ; its place was slowly taken by Admiral von Tirpitz' s slowly evolved and immense machine. I dare say that the Emperor, who is a very stupid visionary, really and sincerely imagined that his cruisers could be directed against some imaginary Power of an imaginary and unthinkable villainy. His ships, possibly even in collaboration with the battle- fleet of Great Britain, might, in some silly fairyland of his creation, be employed against the unspeakable 137 138 THE TWO NAVIES pirates, the nequissimi piratcB of some Yellow Peril that was yet to come. Nevertheless, I think we may still discern, in the sinking of the Lusitania, the last evil dregs of that Imperial romance. The Emperor, in the course of his career, has given many evidences — and I dare say they were sincere evidences — of friendship for Great Britain. I have little doubt that when, as he frequently did, and most particularly in the interview that he accorded to the Daily Telegraph in 1908, the Emperor expressed his aspirations to see Great Britain and the German Empire united in the rule of a peaceful world, he was sincere. Nevertheless, his post-war psychology may well have led, as it led in the case of poor Belgium, to a policy of probably uncalculated cruelty such as the world has seldom seen since the days of the Noyades de Nantes. Hell, according to the poet, has no fury like a woman scorned. Neither hell, heaven, nor yet Purgatory may provide a parallel for an always impulsive Em- peror whose visionary alliance has been rejected. The von Tirpitz policy of naval competition with this country had, however, quite another and a much more reasonable basis. I think we may find it suffi- ciently defined in the utterances of Prince Biilow, who was for so many years Imperial Chancellor. I think — and I must beg the reader to observe, once more, that I only say I think and that I am not setting out to dogmatise — that the policy of the serious German naval school which included the Minister of Marine, the Imperial Chancellor, the successive Foreign Minis- ters, and the successive Ministers of Finance — was that the German Fleet was a factor rather political than military. As I see it, the purpose of this organisa- tion was not so much in time of war to strike at Great THE TWO NAVIES 139 Britain or even to convoy an expeditionary force to these shores. Its existence was simply to be used as an argument against Great Britain's entering into an alHance with, or embarking upon a war in company with, any European Power save Germany. German naval theorists may conceivably have thought other- wise, but practical German naval men, as far as I have come across them, have never been under any delu- sions as to the relative values of the two fleets. Shortly after the heart of the crisis during the Agadir affair I met, upon a social occasion, at a German watering-place, the nephew of Admiral von Tirpitz himself, himself a naval officer, now, I believe, a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle. I asked this gentleman what was the reason of the Panther being sent to Agadir. Did Germany desire to establish a coaling- station in East Africa ? His answer, in his exact words, was : ' ' What for ? That Great Britain should have a coaling-station more within twenty-four hours of an outbreak of war ? ' ' His views, in fact, of the possibilities of the German Navy were gloomy in the extreme. In personnel he was of the opinion that German crews, consisting almost entirely of short service recruits, would not have the beginnings of a chance against English seamen, who were all long- service men, and whose nerves were attuned to service conditions. In warrant officers the German Navy was infinitely below the British, because the conditions of service on a German warship were so bad that the warrant-ofhcers, when their time is expired, always took service with the Hamburg-America Company or with other of the great transatlantic lines. British naval gunnery, in spite of published statistics, was much better than German naval gunnery, because 140 THE TWO NAVIES British naval gunnery tests took place on calendar days and German on selected days. This meant to say that the British ships fired at their targets in any kind of weather and German ships only when the sea was smooth. The only thing, in the opinion of this gentle- man, in which the German Navy might be expected to be superior to the British was in the quality of " dash " in the officers. A German lieutenant, he said, in command of a torpedo-boat at manoeuvres, would be possibly rewarded and would certainly not lose a step if he piled up his ship whilst performing some unusually risky evolution. An English post-captain, on the other hand, was likely to be dismissed his ship if he scratched a little gold paint off the poop-railings. Apart from that, according to this depressed gentle- man, the German Navy, in the slang phrase, wouldn't have an " earthly." And he recommended me to study the ofiicial navy lists of the two countries from which I should discover that every British ship of the same class was just a little larger, just a little more swift, and just a little more heavily gunned than its German contemporary. And, whereas the British heavy guns were equally distributed, pointing fore and aft, the greater proportion of German heavy guns upon battleships pointed permanently aft, this show- ing that the Germans never expected to fight except in retreat. These last facts will, I believe, be found to be correct on comparing the navy lists. As to the gentleman's other views I do not know whether he was sincere or whether he was anxious to delude me in my capacity, such as it was, of publicist, with the idea that German intentions were pacific. These, then, are my carefully recorded and con- THE TWO NAVIES 141 scientious personal impressions of naval matters, whether British or German, as they have come under my immediate observation or within my personal ex- perience. Let me, before passing to other matters, and before documenting them, as I propose to do, sum up the several points that I have made. Again, I wish to disclaim any possible aspect of dogmatising. What I have here set down are opinions, and opinions perfectly open to correction from any one who will take the trouble, who possesses greater knowledge of the subject or greater insight. What the reader may take as being absolutely correct are the statements that I will summarise as follows : (a) the German Emperor has always advocated cruiser-warfare ; (b) Admiral von Tirpitz and the German Admiralty have secured a powerful High Seas Fleet ; (c) cruisers, however numerous, could hardly challenge British naval supremacy on the high seas, though they might menace harbours and marine inlets ; (d) a powerful High Seas Fleet could be used as a strong political argument ; (e) the Emperor's direct and rhetorical methods effected nothing towards influencing the Reichstag to provide him with cruisers ; (/) Admiral von Tirpitz' s gerrymandering of the Reichstag and of the constituencies resulted in that statesman's being given what I have called a blank cheque for the con- struction of a High Seas Fleet ; (g) the policy of all but sixty members of a Reichstag numbering 397 was directly opposed to a policy of naval expansion ; (h) the interests and the sentiments of the immense majority of the German nation were directly opposed to the creation of a great Navy ; (i) Naval Bills were only passed in the Reichstag during periods of in- tense patriotic excitement ; (k) this patriotic excite- 142 THE TWO NAVIES merit, if it were not directly caused by, at least stirred up in the minds of the German peoples the allegations against foreign nations that had been spread for many years past by writers for the Press in the employment of the German Admiralty, It is the last three headings that, to me, seem the most worthy of attention. Whether or no the Em- peror is directly responsible for the murder of the passengers of the Lusitania ; whether or no von Tir- pitz and the German Admiralty opposed, faintly or with resolution, this abominable crime — these things are relatively unimportant, or are important only as sidelights upon the psychology of criminals. But the fact that a nation doggedly opposed to a policy of aggression can be gerrymandered at the polls and that its representatives can be blackmailed into sup- porting a policy of aggression to which, like their constituents, they, too, are doggedly opposed — this seems to me to be the most important fact in the world, in so far as the world is affected by political institutions. I dislike very much committing myself to extreme statements, and I dislike very much in- dicting my fellow-beings. But, try as I may, I cannot get away from the conclusion that the German political machine must be abolished by the force of arms of united Europe. It is no good saying that we have got to go on living with Germany after the war, because, if Germany exists after the war, she will not let us go on living. It would be preferable if the present German regime could be dissolved by action from within, but the German peoples are so absolutely incapable of, are so absolutely unprepared for, self- government that this desirable consummation is hardly to be expected. The German voter is a madman with THE TWO NAVIES 143 an obscene mind, and this obscene mind is perpetually lashed into maniacal fury by journalists of an un- speakable corruption. And over this unspeakable corruption and this turmoil of obscenity there watches for ever a band of cool and cynical beings who are the officers of State and the Princes. They have, of course, to wait for their opportunities, but their opportunities always come, and they do not have to wait very long. German public life is a sea of scandals, of corruption, and of affairs incredibly filthy. No sooner does one scandal cease to occupy the papers than another fills them.^ ^ Here, for instance, are the cases which immensely occupied the German mind from October 1900 to September 1903 : On October 8th, 1900, Maximihan Harden sentenced to six months' imprisonment for Icse-majeste; four other trials at the same date. On December 21st, the Sternberg Case. Sternberg, a Berlin banker, was sentenced to two and a half years' im- prisonment for offences against the law for the protection of girls, and widespread corruption in the police force was re- vealed during the trial. On the same day four directors of the Spielhagen banks were arrested on charges of fraud. February 15 th, 1901 Police Commissary Thiel was sen- tenced to three years' imprisonment for taking bribes in con- nection with the Sternberg case. During January 1901 the Reichstag was almost exclu- sively occupied with the discussion of duelling. On June 25th, 1901, there was a universal stoppage of banks at Leipsic and Dresden. In July 1 90 1 industrial crisis through speculation and over-production . On August 2oth, 1901, a non-commissioned officer named Martin was sentenced to death by court-martial for the murder of Captain von Krosigk. The evidence was very inconclusive, and universal indignation at the sentence was expressed by the papers of all parties. 144 THE TWO NAVIES Such being the preoccupations of its people, and such the preoccupations of the military ruling class, and such the poUtical organisation, I do not think In November 1901 Lieutenant Blaskowitz was killed by Lieutenant Hildebrand in a duel forced on him by a court of honour. Lieutenant Hildebrand was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but was released within six months. The whole of 1901 was characterised by violent anti-British agitations, culminating in January 1902 by a speech against Great Britain by Count Biilow. On February 7th, 1902, the Navy Estimates were adopted. On May 7th commercial losses in consequence of Anglo- phobia in Germany being reported to have become excessive. Count von Biilow made a speech in favour of Great Britain. On April 30th Sergeant Martin, the supposititious murderer of Captain von Krosigk, was tried for the third time and acquitted. On July 23rd the directors of the Spielhagen bank, who had been arrested in 1900, were tried and sentenced to im- prisonment. In April 1903 a general order on the subject of the mal- treatment of private soldiers by their superiors was issued. On May 26th Naval Lieutenant Hiissner was degraded and sentenced to four years' imprisonment for fatally stab- bing a marine. On September 20th the Army scandal came to a head. Fifty ofi&cers, 525 non-commissioned ofi&cers, and 52 others were convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for ill-treat- ment of soldiers. On the 25th Karl Leid and Julius Kaliski were sentenced to imprisonment for lese-majestS. On October 9th Dippold, a schoolmaster, was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for torturing and causing the death of a pupil by excessive flogging. On November nth Lieutenant Bilse was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for libelling officers in his novel " Aus einem kleinen Garnison." On December 15th Lieutenant Schilling was sentenced to fifteen months' imprisonment for 600 cases of maltreatment THE TWO NAVIES 145 that the world could be much the gainer if the lord- ship of the sea passed from the hands of Great Britain into those of Germany. of soldiers, and Franzky, a non-commissioned ofiScer, for 1,520 similar cases. I may add, as a comic footnote, that Lieutenant Withe, who figured as the villain in Bilse's novel, was sentenced to one year's penal servitude, dismissal from the army, and loss of civil rights for maltreating soldiers in seventeen cases, and for perjury. 10 PART IV THE ROSE AND THE LILY CHAPTER I THE LAST OF GERMANY " English civilisation, the Eng- lish language, EngUsh manu- factures, would still exist, and as a matter of practical politics it would be impossible for Ger- many to establish a tyranny in this country. " If the Germans, instead of being resisted by force of arms, had been permitted to estab- lish themselves wherever they pleased, the halo of glory and courage surrounding the bru- tality of military success would have been absent, and public opinion in Germany would have rendered any oppression im- possible. " The history of our own deal- ings with our colonies affords abundant examples to show that, imder such circumstances, the refusal of self-government is not possible. " In a word, it is the means of repelling hostile aggression which makes hostile aggression dis- astrous, and which generates the fear by which hostile nations come to think aggression justi- fied. " As between civilised nations, Fritz Hollmann " I. Escadron 2. Westph. Husaren Regiment, No. 11, 9 Kaval. Division, 7. Armee Korps : — " Frankreich, d. 11. 10. 13. [meaning, of course, 11. 10. 14. written from near Lille'] Das einzig gute man braucht nicht zu dursten. 5-6 Flaschen Sekt nehmen wir jeden Tag zu uns und Wasche nur Seiden. Hat man keine Wasche mehr, so geht in ein Haus rein und wird sicherst umgekleidet. Meistens zind ja keine Leute da sind aber welche da dann sagen Sie, Mosjo Laplii [sic) aber bei uns giebts kein Laplii. Ja wirkhch die armen Leute sind zu •bedauern aber es ist eben Krieg. ..." Jdger Hans Georg Harwart "Aug. 24. — Eine Frau sagte mir die Besitzerin des Geschaftes, eine Wittwe, habe gestern den Ort verlassen aus Furcht vor den Englandern. Eh bien ! Ich machte mich nun mit Hinrichs daran, eine Fenster der Hinter- front einzuschlagen. Wir ge- langten in die Kiiche und fanden 149 150 THE LAST OF GERMANY therefore, non-resistance would seem not only a distant religious ideal, but the course of prac- tical wisdom." (Hon. Bertrand Russell : Arti- cle in " International Journal of Ethics," January 191 5. hier ein rundes Brot. Von hier ging in den Keller wo wir 5 Flaschen Wein und 4 Flaschen Bier mitgehen hiessen. Dann schlugen wir oben, da alio Ver- bindungstiiren verschlossen waren, eine Tiirfiillung nach der andern ein. So gelangten wir in den Laden. Wir fanden hier nun so ziemleich alles. was wir suchten. Striimpfe, Hem- den, Hos, Cigarren und so weiter. Mindestens 12 Pfund Bonbons und 20 Pfund Apfelschnitte, ein sehr schones Zeug brachten wir zur Kompagnie. " AvESNEs, den 21st Aug. 1914 — . . . In Elamont pliin- derten wir (Hinrichs und ich) eine Villa, wobei uns allerdings ausser Briefpapier und Marken nichts Brauchbares in die Hande fiel.i 1 " Committee's Report on Alleged German Outrages," pp. 251, 247, and 248. The translations of these passages from the diaries of German soldiers in Belgium and France are as follows : " The only good thing is that one does not need to go thirsty. 5-6 bottles of champagne we take for ourselves every day and only silk under-things. If one has no more under-things one goes into a house and gets oneself changed at once. Mostly there are no people there at all ; but if some are there then they say. Monsieur il n'y a plus, but with us there is no such thing as il n'y a plus. Yes, really, the poor people are to be pitied, but it is just war. . ." "Aug. 24. — A woman said to me, the owner of the shop, a widow, has left the place yesterday from fear of the English. Eh bien I I set to work with Hinrichs to smash a window at the back of the shop. We got into the kitchen and found here a round loaf. From here it went into the cellar, where we commandeered five bottles of wine and four bottles of beer. Then we broke our way upstairs, since all passage doors were locked, one door after another. So we got into the shop. We found here pretty well everything that we were looking for. Stockings, shirts, trousers THE LAST OF GERMANY 151 To resume, then, the story of the adventure which was begun in Part II, Chapter I of this work : On arriving at the town of Duns in Berwickshire I discovered that the main cause for the promotion of opposition to the British Foreign Minister that was there going on was not so much personal antipathy to Sir Edward Grey as deep disHke for the French people. The French people I found to be considered as a dangerous race of cats and monkeys ; and I found that, in that spot at least, the world-ideal was that of a union between this country and Germany so as to secure the peace of the world. To these doctrines I could not well subscribe, and, even at that date, the idea of stumping the country in opposition to Sir Edward Grey deserted me. For, at any rate, as I saw it, the one satisfactory point in an otherwise un- satisfactory world was the union of the peoples of France and of Great Britain. I say, very expressly, the " peoples." The French Government, as it then existed, I could not call very satisfactory. Still thinking war to be an impossibility, I certainly con- sidered, until at least the passing of the French Three Years' Service Act, that the French Government was too pacifist in a doctrinaire sense. As it appeared to me, the whole military parade of the world was a monstrous nonsense and a monstrous nuisance. Nevertheless, it was one of the rules of the game ; it was part of the possibly precarious balance of things. War, as I saw it, was impossible, rebus sic stantibus — cigars, and so on. At least twelve pounds of bonbons and twenty pounds of apple-rings, a very jolly sort of stuff, we took to the Com- pany. " AsvESNEs, 21st Aug. 1914. — In Blamont we plundered (Hin- richs and I) a villa, where nothing any good except writing-paper and stamps came into our hands." 152 THE LAST OF GERMANY but only rebus sic stantibus. The unthinkable and impossible event of a European war would, as I saw it, destroy the gradual evolution of a state of peace that appeared to me to be then approaching — a state of peace in which the absurd setting up of army, which was never intended to be used, against army, which was never intended to be used, would be for ever unnecessary. But, in order to keep going that temporary and unsatisfactory state of peace until it should merge itself into a peace absolutely per- manent, it was necessary that France should bear her burden of self-sacrifice to the imbecile rules of the game. I have said in the opening chapter of this work that I did not in the least suspect Germany of any belli- cose intentions. I must add now that I did not suspect Germany of any bellicose intentions so long as France maintained an efiicient army. That Ger- many would lay hands upon and annex the ten northern departments of France the moment France showed any slackness of military preparations, I took for granted. I was therefore dissatisfied with the French Government, for it seemed to me that the French Government did not represent the stable heart of France ; French Ministries were very unstable affairs, and, although the Three Years' Act had been ratified both by the Chamber and the Senate, some party intrigue, though assuredly no change in the psychology of the French people might put into power a Ministry of a slightly changed personnel, and this Ministry might immediately reverse or modify that enactment. Of France herself I had no doubt ; of France I have never had any doubt. No form of French government that I have ever historically considered has ever THE LAST OF GERMANY 153 seemed to me to be satisfactory as an expression of the French people, except perhaps the form of govern- ment of the First Empire, which was pecuUarly adapted to letting the great men of France have some influence upon public actions. I am ready to admit that I was prejudiced against the Third Republic, at any rate in its later develop- ments. For I consider that one of the most necessary ingredients for a rational and satisfactory state of society is one form or other of dogmatic and altruist religious instruction for children. This had disap- peared from France by political evolution. But, on finding that my friends the opponents of Sir Edward Grey based their opposition to that statesman mainly on their antipathy to the French people, I began even then to revise my views of the English Minister for Foreign Affairs. The exact nature of the revision that my views have undergone since a fortnight later than July 20th, 1914, I can best illustrate by the following anecdote. I was once at an auction dinner, after a sale of underwood in the " Walnut Tree " at A . At this dinner, which was of a purely rustic complexion, there was present, amongst other workmen, a workman called Rangsley. Rangsley was a turbulent individual at times, and was always very morose and very brooding. When he was turbulent he would say that he would cut the b y throat of any one who happened to be within hearing. He had been threatening to cut the b y throats of people for the last twenty-five years, and his language, when he was irritated, was usually so violent that all his hearers laughed at him, more par- ticularly since his threats had never found issue in action. At the same dinner — it was, of course, a 154 THE LAST OF GERMANY farmers' ordinary at midday — there was also present a little anxious man who spent a good deal of his time in telling the rest of the company that Rangsley would do something one of these days. Indeed, Mr. Davis had spent a good deal of time during the last twenty-five years in saying that Rangsley would one day do something and that we ought to take care of ourselves. Rangsley was a great, formidable-looking brute, very dark, very large-boned, and with blood- shot eyes. Still, most of the inhabitants of the village, myself included, thought it very wrong of Mr. Davis to warn people against Mr. Rangsley. It did no good that we could see, since, in our properly policed and peaceful village, Mr. Rangsley certainly never would "do something" — and Mr. Davis's warnings would only irritate Mr. Rangsley if they came to his ears. That, you understand, was the settled view of the village. Well, at the wood-auction sale dinner, Rangsley ran a carving-knife into the eye of the man sitting next him, broke the back of Mr. Davis across a chair, and, before he could be pulled down, throttled the auc- tioneer. He was then removed to Chartham, and never came to trial because the rest of his life was spent in a padded cell. After that we agreed that Mr. Davis had been right, but that did not do Mr. Davis much good, because he was dead, and so was the gentleman who had sat next at table to Mr. Rangsley. The auctioneer recovered. That, it seems to me, is pretty much the case of Germany, of Sir Edward Grey, and of persons like myself who imagined that Mr. Davis, in begging us to keep an eye upon Rangsley, was pursuing a policy of pinpricks towards that person. And I do not see THE LAST OF GERMANY 155 that much further comment is called for. It is pos- sible to put the case for Prussia, but always only along one line — the line of sad necessity. Prussia is a poor and a barbarous country, cursed with poor soU and an unpropitious climate ; therefore it can only live by plunder. Plunder is, therefore, a necessity for Prussia. Or again, Prussia has no sea-board ; Prussia might grow much richer if it had a sea-board ; there- fore it is a necessity for Prussia to take some one else's sea-board. Or again, it would be of great advantage to Prussia to have the entire control of the seas, Prussia cannot well have control of the seas because of the Navies of Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. It becomes, therefore, a necessity for Prussia to frighten these Navies off the seas by the murder of thousands of non-combatants. Or again, Prussia would benefit very largely if she could have control of the ten northern departments of France. It becomes necessary, therefore, for Prussia to strike at the heart of France by passing through Belgium. Or again, in order that Prussia may continue her pre- parations for world-dominion, unobserved, it is neces- sary that no one shall observe her making those pre- parations. It becomes, therefore, necessary for Prussia and for those who are friends of Prussia to call Sir Edward Grey a villain. All these things are necessities for the existence of Prussia, and there are people who hold that the necessity for national existence outpasses the necessity for observing the ordinary laws or the common dic- tates of humanity. These things, then, are necessities for the existence of Prussia ; but what necessity is there for that existence ? No one outside Prussia desires that Prussia shall exist ; no human being out- 156 THE LAST OF GERMANY side Prussia has ever had anything but misery from that country. The existence of Prussia has helped no great or generous cause ; the existence of Prussia has lowered human standards through this wide and unhappy world. The only person outside Prussia who, so far as I know, has ever taken up the cause of that ugly and ungracious State, is Mr, Bernard Shaw, who, in his Preface to John Bull's Other Island, says that it would be a good thing for England if she were governed by Prussia. And Mr. Shaw is the chief indicter of Sir Edward Grey. I hope we are nearing the end of Germany, and I bitterly regret that our minds were ever burdened by the existence of that miserable Power. For our minds, for a generation past, have been burdened by the grossnesses, the imbecilities, and the materialisms of German minds to an extent that few of us realise. We have been browbeaten by the intolerable professors ; we have been hoodwinked by the perishing statesmen who represent a phase of humanity that was rotten already in the Middle Ages. Walter von der Vogel- weide and Wolfram von Eschenbach, who never heard of radio-telegraphy and deemed that flying would be accomplished by means of eagles' wings attached wdth wax to their ankles, were beautiful and enlightened gentlemen compared with Professors Haeckel and Harnack, and were splendid and immortal statesmen compared with Chancellors Biilow, Hollweg, and Bismarck. By heavens! when I remember that, low as I have always estimated the professional mind, I once thought that there was in the intolerable volumes of these pedagogues with the minds and morals of the worst type of schoolboy — when I remember that I once attributed to these intolerable volumes some THE LAST OF GERMANY 157 sort of subtle super-empiricism of statecraft that I was too dense to grasp, I wish I could cut out the whole third of my brain that has concerned itself with these affairs. If the reader will consider the extracts from the writings of these people which I am about to present to him, he will understand a little better what I mean. Here the paraphernaHa of useless documenta- tion dragged from obscure and frivolous sources has disappeared, and these people appear as the un- educated peasant-pedants that they really are. In a dark cavern Robinson Crusoe was once horrified by the sight of two blazing orbs ; when the owner of them came out into the daylight it appeared as a dying goat. Germany's professors should have re- mained in the cavernous recesses of the university aulas. Dealing with these particular controversialists is like striking at a crowd of moths in the dusk with a dueUing-sword. The controversialists divide them- selves into two bodies — the German pamphleteers and the English. And of these, one may be patrio- tically elated to observe, the English put up infinitely a better case. The poor Germans have absolutely nothing to say — nothing in the world. I have read with great attention the fifteen German pamphlets whose names are given below/ and I find myself un- 1 " Die weltgescliichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes " (The Universal Historical Significance of the German Mind). By Prof. Rudolf Eucken. " Gegen England " (Against England). By Prof. Adolf Wagner. " Ein Mitteleuropaischer Staatenverband " (A Central European State Union). By Franz von Liszt. " Warum es der deutsche Krieg ist ! " (Why it is the Ger- man war). By Paul Rohrbach. 158 THE LAST OF GERMANY able to discover any single argument which calls for an answer. One common line is pursued by all these gentlemen : German culture, German friendliness, German sentimentality, German kinship with the child-soul, and a Deity created in Germany are postu- lated as being desirable things. Anything which militates against these things is postulated as being evil ; Und dann geht's los. Then they start in. Such a method of controversy is unanswerable. If you like the whole catalogue of things from German culture to the German Deity, Germany will then be justified in aspiring to world-dominion. If you dislike them you will try to prevent Jager Hans Georg Harwart, of the Jager Guard Battalion, Fourth Company, and Fritz Hollmann, of the First Squadron of the Second West- phalian Hussar Regiment from getting into your cellar or changing into your silken undeflinen. And, inas- " Vom Geist des Krieges und des deutschen Volkes Bar- berei." (On the Spirit of the War and the German People's Barbarism). By Georg Misch. "England und Wir " (England and We). By Prof. W. Dibelius. " Der deutsche MiUtarismus " (German Militarism). By Prof. W. von Blume. " Der Weltkrieg " (The World-War). By Paul Heinsick. " Unsere Kulturellen Verantwortungen nach dem Kriege " (Our Cultural Responsibilities after the War). By Gustav Schiefler. " Der Deutsche und dieser Krieg " (The German and this War). By Kurt Engelbrecht. " Was bedeutet das deutsche Kaisertum ? " (What is the Significance of the German Imperial Monarchy ?) By Prof. J. Classen. "England und Wir" (England and We). By Jacob Riesser. " Was uns der Krieg bringen muss" (What the War must bring us). By a German. THE LAST OF GERMANY 159 much as these poor German professors and learned men are utterly unable to understand that there can be in this world created beings without horns and tails who will not love these things the main note of these effusions is one of pure pathos. It is as if a gentleman who had kicked you downstairs, gouged out your eyes, and bitten off your nose because you thought it was twenty-five past twelve when he said it was twenty to one should burst into tears because you said that he was unamiable. Perhaps the most intelligent of these pamphlets is that of my friend, Herr Georg Misch, of the University of Marburg. Yet, even this comparatively clear-sighted gentleman pre- sents his programme for a world reformed after the war in the following words : " In no single formula can the sense of the whole great uplifting be embraced ; that uplifting itself, coming to hfe, will develop into clearness by its fulfilment. ' The struggle for our existence.' ' The lasting security of our Kultur.' ' Once, after Hberation, came the struggle for unity, now, after unity, the struggle for world-power.' ' To give the German at last in his international relation- ships a free and sure demeanour which shall be as far from self- depreciation as from arrogance.' ' To achieve and to ensure for the industrial communities of civilised nations peace through the might and pure will of Germany.' No formula is sufficient to express what, clearly felt but dimly realised, grows towards accomplishment. . . . Victory is the only word that to-day must lighten our forward path. Exalted above the empty phraseology of the diplomatic comprehension of right and wrong the war, from the hour of its birth — since with us it has become an event of moral significance — preserves its inner truth, a higher truth of hfe, which, according to the very nature of its being, is necessarily victorious." i6o THE LAST OF GERMANY And after this programme — which must, I imagine, be read with mixed feeHngs by the " industrial com- munities ' ' of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — poor Mr. Misch continues in virtuous indignation : " And in this holy endeavour, in which no discordant note is to be discovered, bursts, shrill like a devil's pipe, a war-cry against us, which stirs us to the marrow — or, since that is to do it too much honour — makes us angry." And Mr. Misch proceeds to give instances of how the representatives of the industrial communities of the civilised nations have received his programme, as follows : " ' Die Hunnen stehen vor der Tiir ' (The Hun is at the gate). — KipHng. ' Our Academy, which devotes itself to the constatation of psychological questions, fulfils a simple duty in pointing out that in the brutaUty and cynicism of Germany hes a return to barbarism.' — Bergson. ' German miUtarism, Uke a poisonous toadstool which for half a century has disquieted humanity, must be rooted out.' — MaeterHnck. ' The 6Hte of Germany is subservient to the worst despotism, to the despotism which destroys masterpieces and murders the human soul.' — Romain Rol- land. ' The German name has to all eternity become an abomination. Who can any longer doubt that the Ger- mans are barbarians ? ' — Anatole France." Contemplating this enormous kick in the face, Pro- fessor Misch finds nothing to answer controversially ; all that he can write — and, indeed, what more could the poor man write ? — is : " The men who here cry out are not men harnessed to dull, daily tasks, but men who call upon the Eternal that THE LAST OF GERMANY i6i lies in humanity, poets and thinkers. We considered our- selves bound to them in aspiration after truth and human ideals ; they have cut the bond that united them to us." ^ And that, indeed, is the root of the whole matter, Germany, as I have elsewhere pointed out, cut itself off, once for all, long, long before the opening of the present war, from the international poets and thinkers of the world. And indeed, in his pamphlet called " Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes " (The Universal Historical Significance of the German Mind), the great and usually amiable Professor Eucken strikes this very note for himself. He elabor- ates the theory that the period during which the Germans were a nation of poets and thinkers was a period during which Germany was turning aside from her real road, which was that of materialism, and he emphasises the fact that the Germans were always really materialists. He is not very happy in either the nature or the number of his historic instances. In- deed, what follows is practically all that he can find to say : " We used to be a people of inventors ; we invented printing— at least for Europe ; we led the way in the industry of modern artillery, that now, with its immense developments, has become a foundation for our national hope. In the beginning of modern times the rhyme could run : " Nuremberg wit, Ulm shooting-implements, Augsburg money. Rule the world. ^ " Vom Geist des Krieges." By Georg Misch, pp. 5-6. i62 THE LAST OF GERMANY "To us must be credited the discovery of the modern spinning-wheel, of the pocket-watch, etc. As late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Frenchman Beyle, the great critic, celebrated us Germans for our numerous discoveries ; only in the eighteenth century did the leadership in this department fall into the hands of the English. Further, we were not lacking in organising capacity. Let us think only of the Order of Teutonic Knights, of that land which it won for German Kultur, and that to-day has so courageously fought for the Ger- man cause ! Let us also think of the Hanseatic League, and its ruHng of the sea ! The Eagle of Liibeck, that was the name of the largest ship of war of the eleventh century. So, during a long period, we were strong and successful in the visible world. And if we again address ourselves in this direction that is only a taking up again of our old fashion ; we have found the way back to ourselves, not fallen off." ^ It will be observed that poor Professor Eucken, to whom this is a new manner, is vastly poor in illustra- tions of German invention or of German organising faculty. In the words " the invention of the modern spinning-wheel, of the pocket- watch, etc.," an im- mense burden is left to be borne by the " etc." As for the Hanseatic League, I have already dealt with that organisation ; as to the Teutonic Order of Knight- hood I have no space here to go into its history. I can only say that yesterday I was rather soundly rated, in a letter from Professor Cook, the distinguished American Anglo-Saxon scholar, for not having else- where pointed out the brutal type of despotism that this organisation set up, and that still exists in the Slavonic territory of Prussia. ^ "Die weltgescbichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes, ' ' pp. 9-IO. THE LAST OF GERMANY 163 I have carefully guarded myself from quoting the more comic passages from the writings of these pro- fessors, though passages comic enough abound, how- ever great the names that sign the pronouncements. But I am trying to be moderate simply because I cannot help feeling that these are deeply unfortunate people. And these misfortunes arise from an obliquity of the senses that is shared, alas ! by most individuals. When, in the course of a plea that to himself appears sweetly reasonable. Professor Eucken states, as a ground for the world-dominion of Germany, the fact that Germany already possesses the whole toy- making trade of the world, or the fact that some Danish critic has stated that the Mass as celebrated in Notre Dame at Paris is not so emotionally stirring as the Mass as celebrated in Cologne Cathedral — these allegations, considered as reasons for world-domin- ance, are merely comic. But, since their comicality does not appear to a man so distinguished as Pro- fessor Eucken, they become, in very truth, pathetic. Here, then, is Professor Eucken on the subject of toys : " No people, not even the ancient Greeks, have so understood childhood as the Germans. It is we who have elevated children's hterature by means of Campe, and who are still leaders in this department ; we provide chil- dren's toys for the whole world. That is only possible because we have the power to identify ourselves with the child-soul, and this we could not do if we did not in our own innermost souls have something childlike, simple, and aboriginal." ^ Or here, again, is Professor Eucken on the subject of religion : 1 Ibid., p. 13. i64 THE LAST OF GERMANY " Once a prominent Danish theologian painted for me with hvely colours the difference between a religious ser- vice in Notre Dame de Paris and in the Cathedral of Cologne. There much ostentation without any participa- tion by the heart ; here a deep conviction on the part of the worshippers. And we may add the fact that German inwardness shows itself also in Judaism. For it is the German thinker Mendelssohn who brought this rehgion into close relationship with modern civihsation and thereby really helped it forward. This inner necessity, to base the exterior expression of religion on something within our- selves, has made us the people of religious philosophers." * This theory of religion is expressed in one stage further by Herr Kurt Engelbrecht in a pamphlet entitled " Der Deutsche und dieser Krieg " (The Ger- man and this War). Here, also, we find a further exposition of the child-soul theory. " There is inherent in our people some of that God- consciousness that inspired the prophets of the Old Testa- ment ; how child-like, it is true, but with what a deep inner sense did that little boy express himself, when, at the outbreak of this war, he could say to his playmates : * I have no fear ! The dear God will help us, for he is a German ! ' For sure, all those who beyond the bounds of the country are confronting the enemy, and of whose courage in the face of death and passion for self-sacrifice we receive daily information have this proud conscious- ness : ' God must adopt the German cause for which we fight as His own.' Alongside with this the rare courage of self-sacrifice which fills our warriors, and which is almost without example in history, takes on the radiance of a sacrament. It is no longer a matter of putting worldly * Ibid., p. 12. THE LAST OF GERMANY 165 advantage first or of averting the economic disaster which the enemy has conspired to inflict upon us. . . . '' ^ Let us contrast this with : " 24th Aug. — Before the village of Ermeton we took a thousand ; at least, 500 prisoners shot. . . . Whilst search- ing a house for beds we ate ourselves full to our heart's desire, bread, wine, butter, preserved fruits, and much more were the booty of our mouths. We washed the blood off ourselves and cleaned our side-arms. In the evening we got into quarters, the best up till now. Any amount of clean underclothing, pickles, wine, salt meat, and cigars." ^ The writer of this diary w^as in the First Battalion of the First Guard Regiment. The officers of this battalion were Lieutenant von Oppen, Count Eulen- burg, Captain von Roeder, First-Lieutenant von Boch und Pollack, and First Lieutenant Engelbrecht. I am not of course suggesting that First-Lieutenant Engel- brecht is the eloquent Mr. Kurt Engelbrecht whose glowing words formed the last quotation but one ; but, with those words said, I may leave any further comment to the reader. It seems to me that there you have the whole matter in a nutshell. The three pamphleteers from whom I have quoted are not obscure and eccentric people such as in England might write letters to the less desirable Press or advertise their opinions at con- siderable expense in the "agony columns" of The 1 " Der Deutsche und dieser Krieg." By Kurt Engel- brecht, p. 45. 2 " Committee's Report on Alleged German Outrages," pp. 261-2, i66 THE LAST OF GERMANY Times. No, the speech which, when printed, becomes the pamphlet of my acquaintance Professor Georg Misch, was dehvered in the Aula of the illustrious University of Marburg, and is, in consequence, the official pronouncement of that ancient home of learn- ing. Professor Eucken is a great official of the Prus- sian State ; Mr. Kurt Engelbrecht is one of the rising school of art-critics and of what are called " novelists of atmosphere." His essays in art-criticism have been praised by Professor Wolfstieg in the Literaturberichte der Comenius-Gcscllschafi, and his novel, " Wege und Umwege," has received the applause of cultured Germany. From these writers, then, one might expect perhaps not much balance, since their emotioris might well be stirred. It is no pleasant thing to find your cause assailed by the whole of Europe and damned by men of great name like Anatole France, Bergson, and Maeterlinck, whom hitherto you had cited as gods upon the earth. It is, in fact, no pleasant thing to have to cut yourself adrift from all culture, from all light and all fineness. The want of balance may therefore be pardoned. But such a want of balance as deprives a man not only of the power to put his case, but of the power to avoid putting the case of his opponents — such a want of balance argues an absolute want of mental development in the controversialist. And indeed I am tempted to go so far as to say that these eminent personages have never got beyond the mental development of schoolboys, having left behind them that clarity of vision, that power to put at least one side of a case with clarity, which is the power of the child. For the stupidity of German argumenta- tion, the curious inability in moments of emotion to arrange facts so as to make any sort of a show, is not THE LAST OF GERMANY . 167 childish ; it is schoolboy-Hke. The child is cruel and is remorseless, but does at least perceive one aspect or another. A child will tell a soldier whose jaw has been shot away that he is hideous, or a woman whose face is drawn with the pains of cancer that she looks bad-tempered ; and both statements will be true. The German Professor, the German man of letters, and the German schoolboy alike do not get beyond saying : " God is a German ; He is on our side. Yah, ugly people ! ' ' And indeed, these German protagonists sweep away altogether the carefully built up structures of the Enghsh pro-Prussian apologists. These are an alto- gether different proposition. They have little sense of proportion, and no knowledge whatever of the Germany they defend ; but they do at least keep cool enough to forge facts and to document their arguments with references to publications that few people will take the trouble to read. One common thesis unites all the British pro-Prussian pamphleteers — the thesis that the German peoples and the peoples of Great Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Serbia, Japan, and the United States are exactly the same, with the same ruling doctrines, ruUng passions, ruling classes. With this thesis once estabUshed they can start in to say what they like. But this thesis is in itself an absurdity. The British ruling class in no way resembles the Ger- man ruling class, any more than what was called the " Marconi scandal " in England resembled the " Eulen- burg scandal" in Germany, or any more than the affair of the Curragh Camp resembled the Zabern affair. The purchase of the shares of an American company kindred to a company that was about to make an advantageous contract with the British i68 THE LAST OF GERMANY Cabinet was regrettable. From my own point of view it was regrettable in the extreme ; from still more hostile points of view, it might be styled criminal. But the Eulenburg affair, which was a matter exciting about as much public attention and lasting for con- siderably longer, was a matter of nepotism, bribery of the police, rigging the market, brutality to private soldiers. Imperial favouritism and general sodomy, each of these charges being proved in courts of law and involving sovereign princes. Court Chamberlains, and members of the hereditary ruling class who really ruled Germany. For in Germany the ruling classes really rule and really are a class. This is one of the main facts which differentiates between Great Britain and Germany. From this, to a very large extent, arises the filth and obscenity that distinguish German political comments. The German, as a rule, may or may not object to being ruled. Germans are represented as being a docile people, and I will let it go at that. But, from time to time, during and after the trial of such cases as the Eulenburg case, the Wolff-Metternich case, or the matrimonial market scandals in which, during 1912, so many officers of the noble (adelige) regiments were involved — at such periods violent panics of rage and indignation sweep across these docilities. " These," the German, from the Roman Catholic peasant to the commercial National Liberal readers of the Frank- furter Zeitung, exclaims: "These are our rulers!" And, in the frantic realisation that this yoke is unshak- able, they seek reUef in the hideous articles in the Press, in the hideous caricatures, and in the hideous speeches in the red plush restaurants. This is a state of things that Mr. Shaw and his col- THE LAST OF GERMANY 169 leagues entirely fail to realise. There are, no doubt, abuses in the English administrative system, but they are abuses inherent in democracy. Wire-pulling may, for all I know, go on between the Front Benches of the House of Commons, and little cliques in the Ministry may secure too great a share of the profit- able jobs of the Administration. But the persons who will secure these jobs may be the sons of working men, of Petticoat Lane Jews, may be small attorneys, and, above all, may be barristers — and, indeed, they do belong to these classes much more often than to the class of landed gentry, which is the only but very faint equivalent that we have for the reigning and mediatised Princes of Germany, for the officers of noble descent, and for the omnipotent Ministers with the irrepressible Emperor at their head. And there is the other immense fact that in Eng- land, as in France, Italy, or the United States, politics have changing aspects. It is possible that, in these countries, a demagogue, by means of wirepulling and gerrymandering, may appear almost absolute. But, after a few years, a landslide in the constituencies will give him the appearance of being somewhat lower than the dust. And, not only will he fall, but the principles for which he stands, and the class with which he is identified will fall also. In Germany class, in- dividual, and principles are permanent, until that revolution shall come that has never yet come. The Ministry is always in the hands of the Right or Con- servatives, and whatever change may take place in public opinion there is no chance of its being reflected in the mirror of State. This is what makes so pitiful the idealism of such 170 THE LAST OF GERMANY writers as the Hon. Bertrand Russell, whose words I have set as a motto at the head of this part. This gentleman, from the secure fastness of his study, to which it is eminently unlikely that any member of the First Squadron of Westphalian Hussars will ever penetrate, utters with scholastic grace the dogma that we ought to allow Prussian troops to overrun Great Britain because German public opinion would prevent Prussia exercising any harshness in its ruling of these realms. Let us put aside altogether the con- sideration of what, from a philosophical point of view, are no doubt the mere transitory inconveniences of the process of occupation by German troops. I suppose that in the immense scale of things which in- cludes the contemplation of the solar system, the star Arcturus and the planet Soheil, the habits of Fora- minifera, and the theory of waves, it matters very little if five hundred of us in every village are taken and shot ; our wives bayoneted ; our daughters raped ; the champagne taken from our cellars, whilst Messrs. Hinrichs and Engelbrecht make quick changes into our silken vests and drawers. That will not affect, in the very minutest degree, any of the workings of the Higher Mathematics in which Mr. Russell is an ex- pert, nor will it affect that gentleman's demonstration of the existence of a Deity by means of mathematical infinities. But what is shocking in Mr. Russell is the assumption of a premiss when all the mathematical bases that there are make that premiss demonstrably wrong. The mathematical figures once again in this case are the 397 votes of the Reichstag. These ex- press, if only roughly, the state of public opinion in the German Empire. I have already shown how little effect public opinion had in preventing the building of THE LAST OF GERMANY 171 a great fleet to which it was opposed. Let us see what this pubHc opinion has done for subject-races. I will leave to Mr. Russell the contemplation of the whole history of Prussian Poland since I cannot write about it without more feeling than should be shown by a controversialist. I will therefore simply copy out from the " Deutscher Geschichtskalender," or German Annual Official Register, a few passages with regard to Poland under the general heading of " Party Activities," and the particular heading of " Party Activities in the Provinces of Posen and West Prussia," as follows : " Sept $th. — In the prosecution at Thorn against sixty secondary school teachers for the offence of belonging to a secret association [Geheimbun delei] fifteen were acquitted, ten threatened with deportation, and five-and-thirty com- mitted to prison. During the proceedings the following transpired concerning the minutes of the Maryania Union to which the secret associates [Geheimbiindler] belonged. " The minutes are headed : * We Maryanien live in hope. Minutes of the Literary Historic Union named Maryania.' The exact provisions of the minutes are the following : ' The object of the members of Union is to study the his- tory of their own (the Polish) nation with its Uterature, the perfection of themselves in the Polish language, and the exercise of moral influence on the young. The activities of the Union are carried on in ordinary, extraordinary, and anniversary meetings. Ordinary meetings take place twice a week, and last an hour. On these occasions, after listening to lectures, the rest of the time is devoted to the reading of Polish authors. Extraordinary sittings will be called by the President in the case of any pressing necessities, except at the end of the quarter, when those entrusted with office will render accounts. National holidays will be celebrated by special sittings. These 172 THE LAST OF GERMANY commemoration days are : the Partition of Poland, November 25th, the Union of Lublin, August nth, November 29th, January 27th, in memory of Prince Pribislaw, May 3rd, January ist, and the day of the foun- dation of the Maryania Union, September 2gth. At these hohday sittings the President and another member deliver speeches, the theme being the historical event whose celebration is undertaken. Another member at the end delivers a speech on some occasional theme, more particu- larly upon some vital question, touching on the mistakes which have been made, and how they should be rectified. The aspirant to membership takes the following oath : " I, N.N., swear, upon entering the Literary Historical Union, under pain of forfeiting the honourable name of Pole, that I will obey the laws of this Union, and always conscientiously and carefully act in accordance with them. This oath I regard as being as holy as the remembrance of our fatherland Poland is holy to me." To provide against the discovery of this organisation every new member, who is registered in a special book under a pseudonym by the President, undertakes even to the last extremity to de- clare that he knows nothing of the existence of the organisation. Each member pays monthly a subscription of one Polish gulden (about 6^.).'^ " Nov. igth. — The correctional chamber in Gnesen sen- tences one woman to two and a half years' penal servitude, another woman to one year's hard labour, and a number of other defendants to periods of imprisonment varying from four weeks to two years all on account of breaches of peace in Wreschen, in the following circumstances : The Government, in the well-founded conviction that the children in Wreschen understand sufficient German, ordered the use of the German language (which is to be introduced for other instructional purposes) for rehgious instruction. This change was undertaken with every caution : for weeks the children at the appointed hours ^ "D.G.," 1901, vol, ii, pp. 77-8. THE LAST OF GERMANY 173 were not catechised ; they were only lectured. In the end, nevertheless, they refused altogether to answer in the German tongue, and this not so much because they did not understand German, but with the obstinate determination that they would not [underhned in original] speak German. Keepings-in and birchings with which it was necessary to attempt to maintain discipline helped in no way ; one httle girl, for example, would only take hold of the German catechism with her apron, as if it had been something unclean. These punishments were the occa- sion for uproar in the streets. During these, men and women penetrated by force into the school- house, threat- ened the school-inspector and the teachers, and actually attacked the police force which had hurried to the place. The evidence brought out most plainly that the origin of the whole thing was to be looked for in national, not re- ligious motives." ^ Mr. Bertrand Russell will, however, answer that all this took place fourteen years ago, and that public opinion had nothing to do with this matter. I turn, therefore, to the last complete volume of the "Deutscher Geschichtskalender " (1913) that I possess and find under the heading: "Confiscation of Polish Landed Property " the following speeches of party-leaders in the Reichstag. " Jan. 2gth. — An interpellation of Brandys [a Polish deputy] supported by the Centre Party, concerning the confiscation of Polish landed property comes up for dis- cussion. The interpellation is as follows : The Prussian State Government has undertaken the confiscation of Polish landed property in order to further the aims of the Commission of [German] Immigration \_Ansiedliingskom- mission]. What steps does the Imperial Chancellor medi- 1 " D.G.," pp. 82-3. 174 THE LAST OF GERMANY tate taking in order to counteract these measures, which are irreconcilable with the Constitution and the legislation of the Empire, and which are provocative of the deepest feehng both in their political and social relations to the people ? " I omit the speech of the Polish leader, who might naturally be expected to object to the confiscation of his land ; the only noteworthy fact that he brings out is that the Imperial Parliament has twice passed a vote of censure on the Ministry over this matter. The debate continues, and I would ask the reader to observe that the party lines of the division are exactly those which distinguished the opposition to naval measures : Abg. Wendel (Soc). — " If the Ministry had had a clear conscience they would not have tried to avoid responsi- bility. This is a matter of the brutal application of a brutal and unconstitutional law [Ausnahmegesetzes], The expropriation is a piece of revolution. The Polish poHcy [of the Administration] only damages Germans. In plain German it is called Germanising [German isieren]. With tliis expropriation the present Ministry has struck at the roots of the civil community. The Conservatives with this expropriation have filled up the measure of their poli- tical crimes." Abg. Count Praschna {Centre leader). — " We regret that the Imperial Chancellor has taken refuge behind formalities. We do not hold it for right that an ancient population should be driven from its land and dwellings, and we shaU support unanimously the Polish resolution." Abg. Schlee {National Liberal). — " The expropriation is not contrary to the laws of the Empire. It must be applied everywhere where Germanism [Detitschtum] is in danger. Colonisation within our own boundaries must be THE LAST OF GERMANY 175 still more furthered. A class of small peasant proprietors, who are the backbone of the State, must come into being." Abg. Count v. Carmer (Conservative). — " We hold abso- lutely fast to the standpoint which we have always repre- sented, namely, that the consideration of this is not a matter within the province of the Reichstag. The Im- perial Constitution contains nothing in contradiction to the expropriation. We shall vote against the resolution." Abg. Dr. Pachnicke (People's Party). — " In German interest we regret the Polish pohcy, but Pohsh territory must remain German. A more extensive immigration of peasant proprietors might have furthered Germanism more than all the laws. The police regulations have produced great solidarity among the Poles. We shall refrain from casting our votes on the PoHsh resolution, since we must respect all that makes for stability." On the following day the House divided upon the interpellation, when a vote of censure on the Ministry was passed by 213 votes to 97, 43 members abstaining from voting. The Ministers took no notice w^hatever of the vote of censure, and the Polish expropriation continues until the present day. This should show Mr. Bertrand Russell how much effect German public opinion can have when it is a question of alleviating the lot of subject nationalities. Of course Mr. Russell may adopt the attitude of the Prussian Ministers and may say that the treatment of Poland was a Prussian domestic affair and that the German people has no voice in Prussian domestic affairs ; therefore the German people may disclaim responsibility as did the representative in the Reichstag of the Imperial Chancellor. Against this plea we may set the history of the Zabern affair, which may or may not remain in the reader's mind. It is 176 THE LAST OF GERMANY unnecessary to go into this case in detail. The main point is that Zabern, unlike Wreschen in Poland, lies in the Reichsland, or Imperial territory. The Zabern affair was a matter of ill-treatment of the civil popula- tion by a military garrison, the civil population being French and subject. On this occasion, too, there was little doubt of the trend of German public opinion. The Reichstag once more passed repeated votes of censure upon the Administration, the same parties taking part in the division. The Administration, once more, took no notice whatever of the vote of censure ; once more it took refuge in stating that the treatment of civilians in a subject population was no province for discussion in the Reichstag. The case of Poland could not be discussed by the Empire because Poland belonged to Prussia ; the case of Zabern could not be affected by the Reichstag because Alsace-Lorraine was subject to military authorities. I repeat that I cannot comment upon these matters, because to think of them causes me too much emotion. Let me set down the words of a very humble little newspaper of Zabern. I quote once more the " Deutscher Geschichts- kalender" ; under the heading of January loth, 1914, we have the following : " The Zaherner Wochenblatt writes resignedly : * We are speechless ; but we are weighed down by the feeling that we are without rights and without help — a feeling that has taken absolute possession of us after quietly thinking the matter over. Herr Landgerichtsrat Beemelmann [Advocate] declared before the court-martial that the people of Zabern could now look for help only to the Kaiser. We have given up even this hope." ^ ^ " D.G.," 1914, pp. 9-10. THE LAST OF GERMANY 177 The people of Zabern had forgotten — as well they might forget — the existence of an avenging but august destiny. It is a misfortune that Mr. Bertrand Russell should have meddled in these affairs. His colleagues in the attempt to bolster up Prussia are in the end merely party politicians. They pursue the ordinary course of small fry at little bye-elections. These are venial offences, or at least common malpractices. But Mr. Russell is not a politician ; he is a thinker, and thinkers must have higher standards and greater scrupulosities, or they forfeit their rights to existence before the face of God. That the lamentable and miserable Poles, that the lamentable and miserable Alsatians should suffer is a horrible thing ; but suffering is the lot of men, and there are few of us who do not in this life suffer at least from private tyrannies. But that a thinker should espouse the cause of the oppressors of Poland and of the subject French— that is the most horrible spectacle upon God's earth ; it is more horrible than the stupidity of the German administration ; it is more horrible than the brutality of the Prussian officers. For it is natural for German administrators to be stupid ; it is natural for Prussian officers to be brutal. These creatures have followed their instincts, as does the malarial parasite when it preys upon the anopheles mosquito, and the anopheles mosquito when it draws blood from the veins. But the thinker who bolsters up the cause of oppression by brutes and fools — the cause of the oppression of the two fine and noble civilisations of the world — those of Poland and of France — that thinker, falsely instruct- ing those who have been set under him on account of a superior intelHgence granted to him by destiny — 12 178 THE LAST OF GERMANY that thinker has poisoned the springs of knowledge and has sought to corrupt those less learned than him- self. I have no eloquence — but if I had I should not here seek to employ it in the effort to make the peoples of the world see that the first duty of every proper man is to set about the freeing of the subject world from the Central European domination. There is no need for eloquence. If you will take your atlas and will look at the map of Central Europe you will perceive one uniform, one sinister set of phenomena. On every boundary of the United Empires there is subject territory — on every boundary with one sinister excep- tion. East and West Prussia are populated by subject Poles, the borders of Denmark by subject Danes, the borders of France by subject French, the borders of Southern Austria by subject Italians, of Eastern Austria by subject Serbs, the northern borders of Austria by subject Croats, Ruthenians, and Galicians. This particular ring-fence round the Central Empires is absolutely complete save in the one little patch upon the borders of Belgium ; and, significantly and hor- ribly, the inhabitants of that borderland can tell you what it is to have Germany for a neighbour and Ger- man public opinion for sole protector. I do not think that anything else is needed to prove that, from the earliest historic times, the German peoples have been predatory peoples, and that German public opinion has, at the worst, supported, and, at the best, con- nived at, the spoliation of other races. ^ ^ From the following speech the reader will observe that at least a portion of German public opinion is in favour of completing the circle of subjected nationalities that sur- rounds the Central Empires : THE LAST OF GERMANY 179 Race-theorising is mostly nonsense. But there are certain broad demarcations that cannot be gainsaid. Slavs, Italians, and Danes, whether by blood, by climate, by civilisation, or by tradition, are very strongly differentiated from Prussians, Austrians, and Hungarians. And the nature of racial and traditional differences between such races makes the oppression of the one by the other more bitter, because it is more unimaginative than any of the other facts of hfe. In the broad scale of things it is no doubt absurd not to be as ready to worship God in one language as in another, or to resent not being allowed to study the hterature of your country ; but the worship of God, the words in which that worship goes forth, and the reading of your national literature are beset with peculiar and vibrating emotions. And the suppression of those emotions in humanity leads to insanity, to moral decay, and to racial death. Speech by Herr Schiffer, spokesman of the National Liberal Party (reported in Daily Mail, June 2nd, 1915) : " When it is said that we are waging no war of conquest I say that is also our standpoint. That we are pursuing Napoleonic aims there can be no question. But we say that we must have compensation for the colossal sacrifice of treasure and blood and we demand this — (prolonged cheers) — not in the sense that we think any strip of land or a handful of money can atone for the blood spilt. " Our object must be real and tangible guarantees [Sicher- heiten] that such an attack can never again be repeated at our expense. That we owe to those who have fallen. If these guarantees demand an extension of our frontiers, if military necessities require that these frontiers be developed in order to be better armed, and in future defended with less bloodshed, then we regard it as a moral duty to insist upon such extension." (Storm of long- continuing applause and cheers.) i8o THE LAST OF GERMANY Let me then, as humbly and as Httle dictatorially as possible, beg any one whom my words may reach to do, at the very least, nothing that may hinder the freeing of these poor peoples who may not worship God in their own tongues, may not read of the God of their fathers, may not dwell on their own lands, or upon those lands erect houses in which their children shall dwell. And let me again say that it is the duty of the peoples engaged in this struggle to prosecute this struggle to the very extent of their powers. In the name of God let no man say that we must make a speedy peace because we shall have to go on living with Germany after this war is over. Cancer, typhus, tuberculosis, and lunacy, must, I suppose, be always with us, but not the German Empire under the hegemony of Prussia, So that there, as far as I am concerned, is the last of Germany, and I hope and pray that, after I have written the paragraph that follows I shall never have occasion again to use my pen on the subject of Ger- many as it is. Germany as it might be is another affair. But this is not the place, nor am I perhaps the writer, to project a scheme for a Prankish — not a Teutonic — Utopia. It would indeed be to enter into a realm occupied by dogmatists much more loud- voiced than myself, though, as the poet wrote about the robin : " Whilst other birds sing mortal loud and swearing, When the wind lulls I try to get a hearing." But it is none the less a fact that there is no race barrier and no barrier of creed between the peoples of the South of Germany and the peoples of France. Racially and historically these people are Franks, THE LAST OF GERMANY i8i and it is only for a century or so that they have been united with Germany as represented by Prussia. Annexation by France or by Belgium is a thing no doubt to be deprecated, but I cannot myself see either in common sense, in humanity, or in the light of history any objection to a revival of the Confederation du Rhin under a French protectorate. That such con- federations of differently speaking peoples not racially very different can be successful, independent, and harmonious is proved by the Confederation of Switzer- land. And I do not mind hazarding the prophecy that in some such confederation the salvation of the world will eventually be found. As to that, I do not wish to dogmatise. But I dogmatise with serene confidence and a conscience absolutely untroubled when I say that no peace can be found in this world until Germany, as she is, is dismembered once and for all. Let that be the last of Germany. CHAPTER II CORRECTITUDE Let me now utter for what they are worth my own observations on the occasioning of this war. The three words which seem to me to characterise the British handhng of the international situation both before and after the declaration of war — these three words are correctness of attitude. And correctness of attitude seems to me to be the most desirable of all human virtues, at any rate, in civic and in social contacts. If I know that a person with whom I have dealings, whether diplomatic or material, will be correct in his attitude, I know exactly what to expect of him. And all the processes of diplomatic, as of social life, are immensely hastened and immensely eased the moment we know what we may expect of the persons with whom we are in contact. Of course, correctness of attitude can be stigmatised as implying frigidity. There is no denying that. I personally, with my immense Francophile tendencies and with my belief that, if any good is to come to the world, it can only come, strained and disciplined by the mental pro- cesses to which the French subject all phenomena — I, then, if I wished to blame Sir Edward Grey, or if I wished to blame the British Governments which have been in power ever since the first Entente Cordiale, should blame them for not having made a complete, CORRECTITUDE 183 diplomatic, military, naval, mercantile, and social treaty of defence and offence with France. For me the British nation and the French nation are, and always have been, one and indivisible — one by race, by tradi- tion, by civiHsation, and even, strained as the proposi- tion may sound, by construction of language. If I were to permit myself an image I should say that France, in her relation to England, has always seemed to me like a wise and charming elder sister, teaching a spirited, and upon the whole good youngster lessons in logic so as to fit him for the school of the world. In comparison with other wars — though perhaps I am unduly sentimental in writing this — the wars between France and England have been civilised affairs. That may simply be that the two nations have never been able so efficiently to " get at " each other as has been the case with continental nations. There have not been the same widespread laying waste of districts, the same starvations, pillages, murders, rapes, and arsons. Even the celebrated chevauchee of the Black Prince, in which he burned and plundered many towns and villages from Calais to the Pyrenees, was little more than the destructive ride of a schoolboy and has left as little trace upon the historic mind. For I ask myself how many of my readers will so much as have heard of the chevauchee of the Black Prince, So, in the schoolboy scale of things, Agincourt was an enlivening, clean, and cheerful geste ; the Chevalier Bayard, Bertrand du GuescHn, Eustache de St. Pierre, Villeneuve, Ney, Marmont, Wellington, and Casabianca — all these, at any rate in the schoolboy scale of things, are fine figures, giving us now and then fine phrases, standing out in rough-hewn history as models of duty, of self-sacrifice, and of loyalty to i84 CORRECTITUDE ideals. Horatio Nelson is the greatest genius that England ever produced ; Joan of Arc is a saint in heaven, and assuredly no Englishman, in the councils of the Vatican, desired to play the part of advocatus diaholi at her canonisation. So that, if I wished to blame Sir Edward Grey and his colleagues, it would be simply because their correct- ness of attitude led them into a certain frigidity to- wards France. But that their attitude was correct I think few people will deny. It was perhaps not abso- lutely inspired. The British Ministry had no man- date from the British nation to cement an offensive alliance with the French or to undertake to land troops on the Continent of Europe at the demand of the French Staff. But that the British nation would have given such a mandate had the occasion arisen I do not much doubt. In the clash of party politics, no occasion arose of asking for such a mandate. Party politics are a great curse, and secret diplo- macy may be responsible for much evil. But I do not see how they can be replaced by any other system — hominibus sic stantibus. They arise from the wire- pullings that are customary to humanity ; they arise just because of certain human virtues — just because of family solidarities, of friendships, and of loyalties. It is for this reason that, heartily as I am ready to agree that secret diplomacy is responsible for certain evils in the body politic, I do not think that an ideal State, a sort of international kissing-kindness land, would arise if Mr. Shaw, Mr. Brailsford, and Dr. Lieb- knecht, and, let us say, Mr. Upton Sinclair, were the dictators of the world. Their hearts might well be full of idealisms, but their practices would be in- evitably the self-stultificatory practices of every other CORRECTITUDE 185 committee that the world has ever seen. I was never more strikingly impressed with this fact than when once I asked one of the almost permanent officials of the Fabian Society what chances a certain revo- lutionist of that body had of succeeding in ejecting the elected officials of the Society, the elected official being commonly known as the Old Gang. This leader answered : " Oh, we shall ruin him. He has not got proper manners for handling the Committee." These words — and I have put them down exactly as they were uttered, though of course I cannot render the cold cruelty of the speaker's tones — disposed, as far as I was concerned, of any possibility of doing away with secret diplomacy. We require, in fact, special testimonials from those who are to replace our present representatives. And we certainly do not require persons who will say that they are prepared to down anybody who has not the knack of handling com- mittees. We have already too many people with the knack of handling committees. Theoretically speaking, public diplomacy is very desirable, and many arguments might be advanced in favour of the abolition of the present system. The subject indeed is much too technical for my pen. But the mere telling of lies about Sir Edward Grey is no more argument for the abolition of secret diplomacy than telling lies about Mr. Bernard Shaw would be an argument for the suppression of Socialism. And the telling of these lies at the present moment is so inopportune that it becomes more nearly criminal than even the usual devices of party politicians. I am not accusing Mr. Shaw and his colleagues of lack of patriotism, since patriotism, like love of parents, is a thing that you either have or haven't, and that you i86 CORRECTITUDE can't be blamed or praised for having or not having, though you may be Hked or dishked. Mr. Shaw has told us that he had reasons for disliking his father, and he has liberally besmirched the memory of that individual ; Mr. Shaw has told us that he has reasons for putting spokes in the wheel of Great Britain, and he has liberally besmirched this country. I am not seeking to indict Mr. Shaw upon that account ; that is a matter that he must settle with his conscience, his God, and the police. If they are satisfied, it is no affair of any one else. But the fact remains that England's attitude at the outbreak of the present war was one of absolute cor- rectness. There was the Treaty of Guarantee for Belgium, and Great Britain observed it. Great Britain could not have observed it without having previously had some military conversations with the Belgian Staff. Great Britain could not have landed 200,000 oxen in Belgium without some conversations passing between the State officials of the two countries. As for the object which inspired those who originally framed the treaty we cannot know what those objects were. It is obviously true that it would be disagree- able for Great Britain to have Netherland ports in the hands of a Power that might invade her, and very likely the motives of those who originally framed the Treaty were to avoid danger to Great Britain. I cannot see that this is a crime, or even that it is unworthy. Moreover, the representatives of the other signatories to the treaty were fuUy aware that it would be inconvenient for Great Britain to let the ports of Belgium be in the hands of a Power capable of invading Great Britain, and, being fully acquainted with that fact, those Powers set their signatures to the CORRECTITUDE 187 Treaty. It is not as if the representative of Great Britain in 1839 had put his hand over the map and had thus concealed the fact that Antwerp and Ostend were a few hours' saihng from the British coast. Moreover, the German guarantee of the existing Treaty was renewed as late as April 29th, 1913. ' Great Britain, in fact, had certain advantages from the Treaty ; had enjoyed these advantages with the consent of the Powers of Europe, and was enjoying them on August 3rd, 1914. And it is to be remembered that not only England, but France and Germany her- self enjoyed the benefit of Belgium's being a neutral State. Mr. Shaw and his colleagues talk of Great Britain's hypocrisy in this matter as if Great Britain alone enjoyed any benefit. But, had Belgium not been neutral during the last sixty-five years, Germany would have needed to support an immense chain of forts all along the Belgian frontier so as to counteract the possibility of invasion by Belgians in alliance with the French or the British, or both, and France would have had to maintain similar defences all along its Belgian frontier in order to minimise the danger of invasion by Belgians in alliance with the Germans or British. And both France and Germany had already benefited by neutral States upon their borders in war- time — the French in 1871 benefited by the fact that the Belgians prevented the passage of German troops through Belgian territory, and the Germans benefited by the fact of the disarmament of a whole French Army that, in 1871, was driven across the Swiss border. 1 The debate in the Budget Committee of the Reichstag on that date is reported in the Belgian Grey Book (English Edition), No. 12, p. 12, The " Deutscher Geschichtskalender " does not give reports of speeches in Committee. i88 CORRECTITUDE It is, to me, the most singular example of the lengths to which party politics will drive otherwise clear-sighted individuals, that the Peace Party of this country should decry the principle of guaranteed and neutral States. Whatever may be the immediate difficulties in the way, it seems to me that the ultimate and final peace of Europe can only arise from a Rhenish Confederation, and that peace could only be the more final if the integrity of that Confederation were guaranteed by the rest of the world. Guarantees are not everything, but they are worth a great deal, and will be worth a great deal more if Prussia's breach of the neutrality of Belgium leads to the downfall of Prussia. From that day onwards almost any Great Power would hesitate for long before it crossed a neutral border. That is why I do attach a great deal of importance to the fact of the correctness of attitude of Great Britain in regard to the inviolability of Belgium. It is disagreeable to write praise of one's own side : so I was taught at school, and so to-day I feel. So that, instead of writing glowing panegyrics of this country, I limit myself to a constatation of the facts as coldly stated as I can manage. And the fact does remain, more important and more weighty than any other fact of Hfe — that if Prussia's downfall comes because Prussia violated the neutrality of Belgium, any other militarist State that may arise in Europe will hesitate long before doing the like, through all the centuries to come. From the muddle of comparative moralities in which the Prussian and pro-Prussian apologists have involved this question one would be driven to think that it was Great Britain alone that had benefited CORRECTITUDE 189 from the neutrality of Belgium ; that Great Britain has obtained these benefits in some underhand manner, and that, in supporting Belgium in August 1914, Great Britain was continuing in secret to obtain benefits of which the rest of the world was ignorant. This is sheer nonsense. The only thing that can be said, the only thing that stands out is that the attitude of Great Britain was absolutely correct. For sixty-five years — from 1839 to 191 1 — Great Britain had been advantaged by the neutrality of Belgium ; on August 3rd, 1914, Great Britain decided to pay for the benefits she had received, the occasion for the payment having arisen. As far as I can understand moral problems, no possible blame can attach to Great Britain for this fact. I do not know that any con- siderable praise can be bestowed upon her. I do not know that any particular praise attaches to me be- cause I pay my butcher's bill when it is asked for. It is a commonplace of life, such as usually passes without comment. The detractors of this country continue their argu- ment as follows : by defending Belgium, Great Britain will continue to obtain the profit of having the Nether- land ports in the hands of a Power that cannot invade Great Britain, and, in case Belgium profits by the defence. Great Britain will probably share some of those profits. That may be true, or may be false, but I cannot see that any change is thus brought about in the moral aspect of the position. If Great Britain claimed enormous praise for her support of Belgium, those people who object to praising other people might then object that Great Britain was obtaining advan- tage. But, as far as I know, Great Britain has claimed no exaggerated praise. She has discharged a debt of igo CORRECTITUDE honour — so do many millions of men every day in the year. It is not an occasion for rhetoric, nor is it an occasion for any fine writing. We may write of it as composedly as we should of transactions between a livery-stable man and a corn-chandler. Supposing I were a corn-chandler and I saw a chance of consider- ably increasing my business if I could get in consider- able sums of money owing to me by a livery-stable man, and supposing, at the same time, that when I have increased my business I shall be able to put a con- siderable amount of extra work in the way of the livery-stable man, am I to expect to hear the livery- stable man say when I present my bill: "No, my friend, to pay you would be an act of hypocrisy, because, by increasing your business, I might possibly increase my own" ? I hope my readers will bear these arguments in mind when next they are confronted by one of those gentlemen who say cunningly that we are only sup- porting Belgium because it pays us to do so. As a matter of fact, we are supporting Belgium ; but whether it can pay us to do so is a matter a very long way from solution. In any case, the fact that Great Britain did support Belgium is a matter for congratulation to the whole world, since it is the final and immense instance of correctness of attitude. This, I repeat, is the most important of the virtues. For myself and such men as be of good-will, I do not ask more from the men that surround us than that they shall have a stan- dard and shall adhere to it. Given that, life will run smoothly in all such affairs as are suited for the smooth running of life. We shall know where we stand, and, although the fellow-beings with whom we have con- CORRECTITUDE 191 tacts may be limited in their benefactions to ourselves, they will at least not fail us in such things as we have a right to expect of them. Given as much as that, we shall not need pity, sympathy, generosity, or com- prehension on the earth. Or let us get the earth keyed up to at least that standard. It would be better if the world could be full of heroes, of poets, and of saints, but we have a long way to go before we achieve so much as a population even of poets and thinkers. I think that that is really why I have written this book — not to claim any great and special virtues for my country, but simply to point out that a country — some country, any one country — has been capable in very difficult times of no more than correctness of attitude. This is, beUeve me, a great step forward in the history of humanity. By the grace of God we are now fighting on the side of the French. Had I had my own way, being impulsive, visionary, or what you will, we should have been fighting on the side of the French long ago. Long ago we should have been marching side by side through the streets of Berlin. But perhaps destiny is more beneficent, is wiser and is kinder. More generous and splendid sentiments in our rulers might have precipitated us into earUer combats in a cause more fine. But perhaps the ultimate fineness may just be the finer because we have assumed the com- paratively humble role of mere correctitude. And with that I will leave these matters. There is, I think, no need to point any further morals with regard to Germany. That the attitude of Germany, the civilisation of Germany, is that of the schoolboy who has broken loose from all rules is evident enough. 192 CORRECTITUDE For a century or so we have gone somnolently through life under the impression that the nations of the world were adult and had certain codes. We may put it down, if we hke, to nothing more than cHmate. Prussia, we may say, has not a climate capable of supporting a non-predatory human race. We may put it down, if you Hke, to position. Over-sea trade is a necessity to support a nation in ease, culture, and leisure, Prussia has no sea-board. We may put it down, if you like, to education. The province of education is so to mould a man that, out of such materials as are at his easy disposal, he may lead a life of some industry, of some intellect, of some ele- gance, of some poetry, of some consideration for and some co-operation with his neighbours. The province of Prussian education has been to teach the Germans that the ideal man is a millionaire like a pig living in a vast and gilded hotel. EPILOGUE FELICITE And at the last let us consider in this year of the hundredth anniversary of Waterloo how we may best repay some of the debts that humanity owes to the country of the lihes. For, whether it be from Frois- sart or from Fontenelle, or from Flaubert, or from Jacques Anatole Thibaut, known as Anatole France, humanity, and more particularly the humanity of these islands, has nothing but indebtedness to France to show. And that we are aUied to these wonderful peoples, the men of the Midi, the men of the Middle and of the Northern departments — that alone should make us be glad of the days we Hve in ; that England should be at last the ally of France is the greatest privilege ever afforded by destiny to the descendants of Hengist and Horsa, or to the descendants of those barons who asserted their rights and privileges on the island of Runnymede. For in the whole world it is only France that incontestably matters. A word here and there may be said for other countries ; the Irish have had many grievances and have expressed them in vague and frequently alluring dialects ; the Scotch, by hanging together, have achieved entrance into, and ascendency over many Cabinets, town councils, and municipal bodies which have contracts to give ; the 13 ^93 194 FELICITE Germans have made many researches into original documents ; the English — well, we have always been complacent enough. Italy, too, had its day ; there was once a great Muhamadan civiUsation ; but it is only France that, since France was France, has always been the second home for every man not a Frenchman. This has been the case because of the honour, of the self-sacrifice, of the probity, and of the industry of the French people. Do you know why it is that every woman in the world, if she has the chance, gets her hats from Paris ? No doubt it is partly a matter of fashion, or of the French genius for design ; but these things change and are greater or less in degree. There is, however, one unvarying factor — the fact that only in Paris are feathers and trimmings so securely and intelligently sewn into a hat that that hat after five hours' wear or after two months' wear will have exactly the same line and the same aspect that it had when it left the stand in the hatmaker's atelier. That is France, and that is why France is really wonderful. For it means that when a leader of men arises in France he will find men — and that can be said of no other country, not even of this country, which, Dei gratia, stands nearest to France. Those little, extra drawings tight of the strong thread that keeps the feathers and the trimmings in their places are the symbols of all the greatness and all the beauty that France has given to the world — are the symbols of the spirit of Joan of Arc, of the Cathedral of Amiens, and of the city of Carcassonne. They are the symbols of free and proud human beings giving attention to detail because honour demands that this attention shall be given. This love of " finish " made France FELICITE 195 great at Waterloo in the minor matter of war- fare, and makes France still great on the Argonne to-day when warfare has become relatively of even less importance. The care with which a parcel is done up in one of the large bazaars of the street run- ning along the quays in Boulogne ; the care with which an omelette, a salad, and a slice of ham will be served up to you in any roadside inn near Beau- vais ; the care with which a long-haired person dressed like a rapin will turn out a little fragment of vers lihre on the south bank of the Seine ; the care with which the jeweller in the Rue de la Paix will set minute diamonds into the engine-turning of the case of a tiny watch ; the care with which beneath his immense screens of cypress and of yew the Provencal cultivator of first-fruits will set his seeds into the ground ; the care with which on the quays in Mar- seilles the cook will apportion the exact ingredients of his bouillabaisse — all these things are symbols of and in exact apostolic succession from the little bas-reliefs of David and Goliath, that are as exactly proportioned, as decorative, and as impressionist as any Japanese work, on the portals of the Cathedral of St. Gilles on the borders of the Camargue, near Aigues-Mortes. And all these things, again, are symbols of and in exact apostolic succession from, the proud boast of Joan of Arc before her judges, that, when it came to the use of needle and thread, she feared comparison with no woman in all her district of France. II The fact is that, with all these Httlenesses of finish, the French people, the French men and women, keep 196 FELICITE themselves singularly in contact with the realities of life. They know, extraordinarily and beyond the knowledge of most people, which things are real and which delusions. Beside such a Frenchman the aver- age Englishman is a sentimental and impracticable dreamer ; the German is a loud-mouthed and boastful romanticist. The exact causes of these international phenomena are difficult enough to descry. Why is it, for instance, that almost any fat Frenchman that you sit next to in a cafe of a public square in the city of Lyons will have a pretty exact knowledge of the values of life, whereas no EngHshman from Berwick Bridge to Kynance Cove has ever yet given any atten- tion to this important subject ? Hundreds of years ago the French peasant evolved from life the immense lesson that " la vie, voyez-vous, n'est jamais si bonne ni si mauvaise que Ton ne croit." And that great truth, along with the doctrine of chances which is also of French evolution, has had an immense influence on the moulding of French character. The highest and most subtle English leader of thought has never, within his- toric times, got much beyond the practical philosophy of Piers Plowman, who considered that in this world there were fortunate lives and unfortunate hves, and that in the end we should come before the final court where the poor shall dare to plead. In England, that is to say, we still see Ufe as a matter of careers, black and white, and we are apt to consider our careers so much that we neglect frequently the daily tasks by which those careers are created and directed. In France, on the other hand, by the great bulk of the people life is accepted as a grey, or at best a piebald, matter. In consequence, in the great bulk of the French people there is very Uttle restlessness. The FELICITE 197 farmer remains upon his acres ; the sabotier goes on turning out sabots ; the cantonnier is content to remain tending his little patch on the main road, and these men put their hope of glory in that curious, vague, and very definite thing they call Vhonncur. That form of honour has about it little of the English- man's commonplace picturesqueness. It has nothing to do with always telling the truth, with taking a cold bath every morning, or with asserting one's rights. It can subsist side by side with avarice, with mean- ness, with personal dilapidation, and with want of cleanUness. It can endure the oppressions of very bad forms of government ; nevertheless, without it the individual would die. For it is the honour of the metier, allied in some respect to the honour of the German super-man, and yet differing essentially, inasmuch as it is always a matter of personal discipline and of traditions. The sabotier may have the mean- nesses of the sabotier, and his want of personal cleanli- ness, but he must not have more than is in the tradition. He is, as it were, a member of the Honour- able Company of his craft, and he must keep up at once the traditions of his craftsmanship and the tradition of those craftsmen as members of society. It is because of that tenacious, rather than stern sense of rhonnetir that France, in spite of the worst of Governments, retains always, or recovers miraculously soon, her equilibrium. From the point of view of militarist, of politico-economic efficiency, the Second Empire was about as bad a form of government as could be imagined. " L'empire c'etait la paix." It was the dominion of a dreamer who permitted much dancing, who saw war spectacularly and romantically, who built castles in the air which included a gigantic 198 FELICITE Latin Union the world over. I have always liked the Second Empire and the Third Napoleon. But cer- tainly his was the worst form of government for a world that included Bismarck, Von Moltke, Von Roon, Von Treitschke, and those other formidable savages. Nevertheless, so little had this bad form of government affected the French people that France's recuperation after 1870 remains one of the national marvels of the world. I have heard it said that various ministries of the Third Republic have been unsatisfactory. I dare say they have been ; I dare say they haven't been ; as a Roman Catholic, I am not inclined to like an organisation that has produced MM. Combes, Cail- laux, Cruppi, and the other persecutors of the Church. But, whether the Third Republic have been corrupt or immaculate, the daily papers of the first week in May presented us with the remarkable diagram in black lines showing that on the Continent the British troops held relatively a little bit of line about as large as a black postage stamp and the French a great expanse figured by about a yard of black tape. That is France, in spite of all Governments, with her traditions of the little milliners who sew feathers into hats, and of the saint of Domremy who, when it came to her needle, feared no woman in France. That is the pro- duct of the farmers and the sabotiers and the can- tonniers, each with his quclques sous in a stocking up the chimney ; each sober, hard-working, without many illusions as to life, tenacious of the honour of his craftsmanship, of his village, of his arrondissement, of his Midi, or of his Nord, and able to say : " Les sabotiers, ce sont des bons enfants," or " Qui est-ce qu'il y a de plus heureux que les cantonniers ? " And behind all these men, these villages, these arrondisse- FELICITE 199 ments, these departments, this Nord and this Midi, sober, patient, and with no great illusions of any kind, there remains, uniting them all — France. Ill " Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de Pont- I'Eveque envierent a Mme. Aubain sa servante Feli- cite." This simple sentence is the beginning of the story which, at this moment, is of most significance to the world. It means that for fifty years the middle-class housewives of Pont-l'Eveque envied Mme. Aubain her servant Felicite. Nevertheless, exactly and rightly to translate that simple sentence is a task of almost unheard-of difficulty. Let us consider for a moment these verbal exactitudes. Let us take the words "Pendant un demi-siecle." If we say "During half a century," the words have not a quite English sound. If we say " For fifty years," the period is too exact in appearance. It would give the suggestion that Mme. Aubain was about to celebrate a golden jubilee. And the opening words of a story are of immense impor- tance because they strike a note in the reader's mind, so that if we start the reader anticipating the celebra- tion of a golden jubilee, and if no such celebration take place, the reader's mind will be a little confused. In the French the sentence suggests no event of any kind, not so much as the shadow of an event. The clear, cold sentence, with its cadence just sufficiently long to leave the reader wishing for the next syllables, dictatorially limits the mind to the consideration, firstly, of Mme. Aubain, and then, by the careful reservation of the servant's name to the last words, 200 FELICITE indicates with absolute precision that the main interest of the story will be the servant Felicite. The use of the word bourgeoises indicates that Pont-l'Eveque is a town, or a large village, of sufficient importance to contain several families in fairly comfortable circum- stances. The note thus exactly struck in the reader's mind amounts to this : that the story will concern itself with an affair lasting fifty years, that the affair will not contain any memorable events, and that it will centre round the life of a faithful servant — for Felicite was for fifty years in the service of her mis- tress, and the other housewives of the place envied Mme. Aubain. We must therefore not commence our rendering by saying " For fifty years." On the other hand, " During half a century " is not quite right. I do not know why it is not quite right — I fancy that the word ' ' during ' ' rather implies sequences of similar or dissimilar but not continuous actions spread over a given period. I think we should be using correct English — correct idiomatic English — if we said ' ' During the next two centuries the Danes made repeated attempts to break the power of the Heptarchy " ; but I think we should have to say ' ' For the last twenty-live years ' ' — or, if we wanted to be more literary — " For the last quarter of a century Admiral von Tirpitz was, or has been, unceasingly engaged in the long effort to raise a High Seas Fleet for the German Empire." Thus, in the case of Felicit6 we might say that for half a century the housewives, etc. On the other hand, " For half a century," is too literary a phrase to satisfy an absolutely delicate ear. Personally, if I were writing the story on these lines I should begin with an exact statement of the number of years. FELICITE 201 softening off the exactness with the qualificative " more nan." " For more than thirty-seven years," I should say, and I think I should arrive at about the sense of Flaubert's phrase. I am not, of course, suggesting that Flaubert is at fault in the matter. " Pendant un demi-siecle" is a phrase in general use amongst simple people in France to imply a long period — any- thing between thirty-seven and fifty years. Similarly with the word envierent. In English we should probably have to translate this : " Envied her her servant," and the phrase might possibly serve the turn. Nevertheless, some trace of the original meaning of the word " envy," which was a cardinal sin, still attaches to the dissyllable in cer- tain cases. Of course in such a phrase as " I envy So-and-So his good teeth" or " his sound digestion," the original sense of the word ' ' envy ' ' has completely disappeared. Nevertheless the necessity to use the phrase ' ' envied her her servant ' ' is regrettable, though I cannot think of any more advantageous synonym. In England, I fancy, we are accustomed to associate the word " housewives " to some extent with malicious gossip, so that the collocation of the words ' ' house- wife" and "envy" has a faint flavour of the dis- agreeable. In France, when a bonrgeoise of Pont- I'Eveque met Mme. Aubain in the market-place or came once a week to the salle of Mme. Aubain to play floral loto she would felicitate Mme. Aubain upon Felicite and would really mean what she said. This is the precise meaning of the word envierent. So that, if I had to translate Un Cceur Si?nple for publication, which God forbid that I should have to do, I should work out from the story as nearly as pos- sible how many years F61icite was in the service of 202 FELICITE Mme. Aubain, and I should begin: " For more than forty years the housekeepers of Pont-l'Eveque envied Mme. Aubain because of her servant Fehcite." I am aware of the objections to this rendering. In the first place, many reviewers might — and with some justice — object to the rendering " For more than forty years," and I do not know whether they would be right or whether they would be wrong. Still, I have the rather strong feeling that the business of a trans- lator is to take over rather the atmosphere than the exact wording of the original. For " housewife " it will be observed that I have substituted "housekeeper," and the word "housekeeper" generally implies a paid upper servant. That I should have to chance. I have got to imply that the persons who envied Mme. Aubain were in a position to keep servants; " house- wife " is a dangerous word because, in its proper pro- nunciation of " hussif," it sounds too like "hussy" to go near the word " envied." After the word " envied " I have inserted the words " because of," so as still further to get away from the implication of mortal sin. For it seems to me that if I say : "I envy So-and-So his position," that might mean that I was attempting to get him out of his job, and to obtain it for myself ; whereas, if I say that I envy him because of his position, it would at the most imply that I should like to have a similar one. IV The reader will say, " What is the use of all this fuss about the exact incidence of a few commonplace words? " I can only answer that the exact use of words seems to me to be the most important thing in FELICITE 203 the world. We are, in the end, governed so much more by words than by deeds. And I do stoutly maintain that this very exact examination and weighing of French words is of the most enormous importance to the inhabitants of these islands. It is of enormous importance to us to realise that they have in France these faithful servants, these market-towns where the housekeepers really go to market, these quiet, simple people contented with their humble and useful careers. If you will read with great care and assimilate with a humble intelli- gence — for humility is necessary in approaching the study of words, and your mind must be utterly cleared of any trace of preconception — if, then, with humility and attention you will read the following sentences you will know more of France than if you spend months and months and months in one of the large hotels near the Tuileries Gardens : " Un vestibule etroit separait la cuisine de la salle oii Mme, Aubain se tenait tout le long du jour, assise pres de la croisee dans un fauteuil de paille. Contre le lambris, peint en blanc, s'alignaient huit chaises d'acajou. Un vieux piano supportait, sous un barometre, un tas pyra- midal de boites et de cartons. Deux bergeres de tapisserie flanquaient la cheminee en marbre jaune et de style Louis XV. La pendule, au milieu, representait un temple de Vesta — et tout I'appartement sentait un peu le moisi, car le plancher etait plus bas que le jardin," You will know, then, something of France, for France is "la salle de Mme. Aubain," where she sits day after day against the white wainscoting ; there will be the eight mahogany chairs, an old piano under a barometer ; an arm-chair with a tapestry back will be on each side of the yellow marble mantelpiece, 204 FELICITE Louis Quinze in style. The clock in the centre of the mantelpiece will represent a temple of Vesta, and all the room will smell a little of mould because the floor is a little lower than the garden. And when you have this picture well before you, you will find that there will rise in your mind the reasonably correlated idea that there must be thousands and thousands of such houses all over France from Alsace to the mouth of the Rhone — ■ thousands and thousands of tranquil, useful households, where there is a touch of style in the tapestried arm- chairs, the yellow marble mantelpiece, Louis Quinze in tradition, the clock and barometer — where, in fact, life is quite decorous, sober, and more tenacious than the life of any other country in the world. Out of such small material indeed, and managing life with such frugality, these people achieve an existence of dignity and common sense. And that should be a great lesson to us. It is a lesson that we immensely need, and that only France can give us. Modern life, the modern life of our great cities, has got hideously too far from the quiet rooms where sit the mothers of the race — the quiet rooms that smell faintly of mould because they are a little below the level of the garden. And, if these are hideous days, with hideous occurrences devastating appalling nights, that is very much because the world has got too far away from Mme. Aubain and her servant Felicite. It is directly because of this. The Germans have devas- tated Belgium because every German has been taught to desire to be a pig of a millionaire in a vast gilded, modern hotel, with central heating and vast base- ments, far underground, filled with an army of sweated parasites. FELICITE 205 The salvation of the world, if it be to be saved, will come from Mme. Aubain and her servant Felicite — the moral as much as, or even more than, the military salvation. And, for my part, if I could have my way, I would introduce a conscription of the French language into this country and a conscription of the English language into France, so that every soul from County Galway to the Alpes Maritimes was trans- fused with the double civilisation. For it is only through language that comprehension and union can arise, and it is only by the careful and strained atten- tion to the fine shades of language in common use that comprehension of language can be reached. And it is perhaps only Flaubert who ever paid sufficient attention even to the French language to reach its thorough understanding, and thus to appreciate the value to the world of the mind of Felicite, who for more than forty years was the servant of Mme. Aubain of Pont-l'Eveque. The women of Kent say to their daughters, when advising them as to matrimonial policies or relations with persons of the opposite sex : " You see yon man. He comes from Sussex. He sucked in silliness with his mother's milk, and he's been silly ever since. But never 3^ou trust a man from the Sheeres." In that way do the Men of Kent acknowledge that the in- habitants of Sussex are human beings, or at least not foreigners Hke the inhabitants of the Shires. In Kent it is always a man from the " Sheeres " who is the villain of the piece. When Farmer Finn wished to level Aldington Knoll — a local sacrilege, since Aldington 2o6 FELICITE Knoll is watched and tended by the souls of the drowned let out of hell for the purpose so that it may continue to be a landmark to mariners for ever — Farmer Finn had to fetch a man from the " Sheeres " to tackle the job. The end of the man from the " Sheeres " was a very bad one, and Aldington Knoll is there to this day. Sussex, on the other hand, is proud of the Anglo-Saxon fact that her emblem is a hog and her motto " Wunt be druv." Nevertheless, the alliance between the Men of Kent and the Men of Sussex is very close. Between Hampshire and Sussex there is little contact ; between Sussex and Kent there are no boundaries. The Weald melts slowly from the one county into the other, and where pre- cisely the Romney Marsh and Denge Marsh melt into Gulland Marsh and Pett Level I have never been able to discover, though I have been along those roads countless times since I was eight. But there, at any rate, is the homogeneity of the two counties, with the curious survivals of primeval laws. Borough EngHsh, Gavelkind, Tail Female, and the rest. As the famous song has it : " When Harold was invaded. And, falling, lost his crown. And Norman William waded Through blood to pull him down. The counties round, in fear profound, To hide their grave condition, Their lands to save they homage gave. Bold Kent made no submission. Chorus Then sing in praise of Men of Kent, Both loyal, brave and free ; If any Briton doth excel A Man of Kent is he" — FELICITE 207 which, roared to the accompaniment of Kentish fire, has given many men to the " Buffs." And the Buffs from time immemorial claim their place in the van- guard of the British hosts. These things are historic and incontrovertible. The Conqueror never did conquer Kent ; the ancient laws are alive to this day to testify to it ; therefore deny it not. But, all the same, I am inchned to see the reason for the pre-eminence of Kent and the secondary eminence of Sussex in a certain cosmo- poHtanism. The " Sheeres " are just the " Sheeres " ; the battles of Edgehill and Naseby and Tewkesbury and Marston Moor were affairs of inland clans rising against inland clans. But when Caesar landed near Deal ; Agricola at the Portus Lemanis, now known as Lympne ; Augustine at Sandwich ; William the Con- queror at Pevensey ; when the Dutch Anabaptists landed at Rye ; the Huguenots, who still live at Canterbury, at Sandwich ; when all the mysterious businesses of owling, smuggling, the underground pas- sages for Jesuits, Jacobites, refugees, supporters of Napoleon, exporters of British gold to the camp at Boulogne, and so on took place between the North Foreland and Beachy Head — all these things gave a certain cosmopolitan flavour to the lives of the barons of the Cinque Ports and their uproarious descendants. Their names bear witness to it to this day : there are the Venesses, the Gassons, the Odinots, the Rangsleys, and the Finns, side by side with the innumerable Hogbens, the Hucksteps, the Fletchers, and the Foords — Venetians, Normans, Huguenots, Dutch, and Spanish, all living side by side with the pure Anglo-Saxons. And, right away up till the time of Napoleon, up till the time when, in the 'forties, the 2o8 FELICITE Rangsley Gang was dispersed, and indeed up till the present day, the inhabitants of these coasts were more familiar with the streets of Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe, and Havre de Grace than with the gold-paved ways of London City. All these owlers, coggers, smugglers, coiners, protectors of escaping French officers, of Jesuits, and of Jacobites made their constant trips to those French towns, frisked it with the girls there, spoke a passable, maritime French, and no doubt had a wife in every port. Indeed, a few years ago I came across a party of lookers, waggoners, and waggoners' mates from the neighbourhood of Elham who had just come back from spending a day and a night in Calais, though not one of them had ever spent an hour in London town or north of the Medway, VI For me, the finest view in the world is to be had from one of those Kentish localities that I have just named. And it is for me the finest view in the world, though I have seen the Camargue from Les Baux, the Seven Hills from a height in Rome, and the Hudson from West Point — because from that place in Kent one can best see into France. Nay, in that place one may be actually illuminated — physically illuminated — from France ; I have really, that is to say, suc- ceeded in reading a large-print book, on those shores of Kent at night, by the flashes from Grisnez. The light-keepers at Dungeness indeed grumbled at the superior brilliancy coming from the tower o\ er near Etaples, as if it were a boast flung in the teeth of Trinity House. Once I was breaking a window through the wall of FELICITE 209 a cottage on one of those Kentish flanks that run down to Dungeness Bay. I suppose when one is really engrossed in a job one does not look up ; and knocking a square through plaster, brickwork, and tiles laid on to brickwork is a sufficiently engrossing job, though one have the handiest of handy men to help one. At any rate, it was not until we had well squared out the space into which the window-frame would go that I stepped back into the room, much as an artist steps back from his canvas, to consider what might be the view that we had opened up. The room was lowish, coolish, and rather dark ; the day was astonishingly bright. It was one of those days when the sun diffuses an almost painful light from a blue sky that is like polished metal, whilst underneath it ran a cruel east wind. And suddenly, in a square before the eye hung a most astonishing picture — a belt of painfully vivid blue, a belt of painfully vivid pink, and above the pink another belt of blue. And, in the belt of pink, which was formed by the French cliffs, there were nacreous markings, for all the world like the little ruddled and bluish shadowings of pink mother-of- pearl — they were the Cathedral of Boulogne, the houses of Boulogne, and the column that Napoleon I erected to commemorate the invasion of Great Britain. It was a curious concatenation that the breaking of the window should coincide with the so exceedingly bright day ; in the thirty years or so precedent to that moment — in the thirty years when the aspect of the French shore, like a faint, pinkish fragment of mother-of-pearl, had been almost the most familiar object of my life, I have never seen that view so clearly, and I never expect so to see it again. Never- theless, times in which France, as it were, seems to 14 210 FELICITE come into England, are not unchronicled in history. Thus, by what was no doubt the effect of a mirage, Boulogne was once, in 1873, so plainly visible from Hastings that the people lounging on the quay where the boats came in were quite plainly to be made out by the naked eye ; and if, in those parts of the world, France sometimes seems to leap forward, in that part of the world too Great Britain almost literally seems to stretch out her hands to France ; since, by the constant accretion of pebbles which are borne east- ward from Kynance Cove and Chesil Beach, Dunge- ness Point moves out to sea and towards France at exactly the rate of a yard per year. A year or two ago this process seemed to be slow enough — this rapprochement between France and England, But we have one thing to thank the Prussians for — by their crime on August 3rd, 1914, this slow creeping near of a yard by the year has suddenly increased itself so that the two nations, by a happy force of circumstance, have been flung into each other's arms. I once wrote a poem, called it " The Great View," and showed it to a brother-novelist or a rival poet who is usually credited with seeing further through a millstone than most of us who are of more common clay. The poem begins : " Up here where the air's very clear And the hills slope away right down to the bay. It is very hke heaven ; For the sea's wine-purple and Hes half-asleep In the sickle of the shore. . . ." and so on. I was, in short, describing the view I have just been trying to recapture. And, as far as I can remember, the poem ended : FELICITE 211 " Like a cloud shell-pink, like the car of a girl. Like Venice glass mirroring mother-of-pearl ; " and then, after a line so literary that my pen blushes to set it down : " Where the skies drink the sea and the last light lies and lingers. There is France." My friend read the poem with an air of scrupulous and demanded attention, came to the end of it, and paused in a quite painful embarrassment. Then he said that he didn't see the point of it. He couldn't understand [a] why the lines should be so irregular, and (b) why one should exhibit so much emotion merely because one was seeing France. I wonder whether to-day he understands. At any rate, to me the sight of France always pro- duces a state of intense emotion — always has and always will. I remember when I was a quite small boy at school at Folkestone there were tremendous red sunsets, connected with the eruption of Krakatoa, I think. To walk along the Leas in the evening was like walking up against an orange wall. Not only the sky was orange, but the sea, the house-fronts, and the very beach-paths upon which one walked. Never- theless, subdividing this fiat pressure of colour there would be a long, dusky purple streak, from the one end of which there came at first a pinprick, and then a great blaze, and then a pinprick and then again another great blaze of light as Grisnez swung on its axis. That, again, was France. And, indeed, for me that strip of colour, set mid- way in the skies, always suggests a fragment of the 212 FELICITE rind of a pomegranate. If I could tear it away ; if I could come in behind it, there, beneath my eyes, closely packed as the pomegranate grains lie side by side, would be all the glories of France. They would begin with a little chap, wearing red worsted breeches, a blue coat with brass buttons, and a flapped cap, standing with fixed bayonet at the head of the quay, and they would go on right down to the terrace at Avignon, from which one looks out to see the great stretches and long sand-banks of the Rhone and the immense peak of the Mont Ventoux, with the observa- tory up amongst its snows. And when we had done gazing at that view we should return to the cafe in the Place de la Mairie and should drink very weak and tepid beer in the shadows of the Palace of the Popes. And, broken in half, across the great stream would stand the bridge of Avignon, where, as you know, " tout le monde danse en rond," and which, as you know, was erected owing to the miraculous stone-lifting feats of a little boy, who, because he so encouraged the disheartened bridge-builders, was afterwards canonised. VII I do not know whether you have ever watched a colony of lizards living upon a perpendicular, rough, white wall, over-topping which there will be three enormous stone-pines, pouring over which there will be branches bearing thickly young peach-blossoms, and behind the peach-blossoms the bright green shutters, the very white walls, and the very red peaked roof of a very little chateau de campagne. And over the whole there will be the absolutely translucent, hya- FELICITE 213 cinthine bowl of the sky ; and, absolutely occupying every possible attention of the ear, there will be the sounds oi the great mistral. The mistral is a wind more tremendous, and more overwhelming, a wind more endowed with personality than any other wind in the globe. We say a north- west wind ; we say a north-easter ; but the mistral is always the mistral, constant in its effects and direc- tions, enormous in its achievements, making life pos- sible by its results, since to face it is like having wine forced into your limbs by a nine-million horse-power hose. The sirocco is a parched nuisance ; the fohn a miasmic breath from an open oven ; the mistral is pain, exhilaration, and the vastest concert of wind- instruments in the world. In its voice as it rushes a hundred feet above the earth there is the scream from the dark-green tops of the stone-pines, and the wild creaking of the bright red limbs ; twenty feet below that is the steady, enormous roar from the gigantic primeval plane-trees ; twenty feet below that the settled hiss through the dark leaves of the holm-oaks ; and, crepitating perpetually in millions and millions of little sounds, the beat of leaf upon leaf in the gardens of olives. The emblem indeed of the proud city of Avignon is a mediaeval head with wild hair blown straight back from the forehead and face, since Avig- non is the city of the mistral. Nevertheless, in this immense, steady tumult, upon the perpendicular white wall the lizards, in the absolute tranquillity and sunlight of the hollowed-out and sunken ways, pursue their domesticities. If you are of a contemplative disposition, or if you find a sheltered spot in a sunken way, and treasure it up as a place where you may have the full warmth 214 FELICITE of the sun and shelter from the mistral ; and if in this place you will stop still for quite a time you will per- ceive the lizard in his domestic aspect. The whole colony of him will creep out of the blue shadows and tiny crannies ; in the immensely bright sunlight, on the dead white of the wall, there will be nothing of brightness about him and no metallic lights ; he will be dusty-grey, like the under-side of the leaves on the trees in the gardens of olives. He will be, as it were, in his smoking-cap and slippers, having put off the shining armour of the full-dress parade ; or perhaps the greyness is only his fatigue-uniform ; he will be going about his work, the work which renders him a benefactor to the world — his employment which con- sists, if not in " swotting," then at least in consuming — flies. In the particular place which I have in mind I have counted ninety-two lizards on a very small piece of wall, and, going there day after day to get out of the wind, we became extremely familiar with that family. There was the very large old gentleman, without a tail, and extremely grotesque because he hadn't got a tail. There was the young lady with only one eye. Nevertheless, her other eye with its golden rim could express extreme satisfaction when- ever a large fly was — no doubt agreeably — agitating various regions of her gentle interior ; there was the little lizard with the large white patch on the place where it would sit down, if lizards ever do sit down. And there were the eighty-nine other members of the family. There, hour in and hour out, suspended on the perpendicular white surface, they would hang, grey and protectively resembling the crannies of the wall itself ; drinking in, too, no doubt, the wonderful sunlight of Provence. FELICITE 215 If we went a little farther, round the corner, we should see what we took to be the white cascade, nine or ten miles away, but very clear in the clear atmo- sphere. Myriads of little sunken paths amidst the immense tufts of rosemary, between the sad grey trunks of those trees that witnessed the agony of a God — the myriads of little sunken, stony paths all lead upwards to the little hills of grey, bare stone. Here once pastured the " chevre de M. Seguin — la cabro de moussu Seguin qui se battegue touto le neui eme lou loup e piei lou matin lou loup la mange" — that little goat of M. Seguin, who fought all night against the wolf, and then in the morning the wolf ate her. For in the little, old Alpilles with their tufts of rosemary, wild lavender, and wild thyme, which the truant goats too much love, there are still wolves that come out when the cold shadows fall. But up on the great bare ex- panse of stone, suddenly and surprisingly, there rises the Roman triumphal arch which undoubtedly com- memorates the victory of Caius Marius over the bar- barians ; and the other great Roman monument which the peasants in the field around, with that truer know- ledge of inspired truth than is possessed by all us archseologians, will tell you was set up to commemorate the wedding-day of the said Caius Marius and St. Mary Magdalene. At any rate, from this great Roman Campus Martius, set on the bare sides of the most beautiful hills in the world, once more we could always see, clearly defined, that white cascade. But if we ask the peasants ploughing between the olive-trees or the stone-masons squaring out the great blocks that they got from the thirty-miles of subterranean quarries left by the Romans, they would never tell us what that white cascade was. Yet it was striking enough. 2i6 FELICiTt Nine or ten miles away, against the light-grey of that range of stone hills, it seemed to stand out perfectly white, quite clear, and rather square. And, down in the town where the planes go all round the ramparts and where there are little caf 6s and several old churches, and, no doubt less of the superstition that will not let the peasants mention the works of the good people — down in the town they would say, " C'est quelque chose — quelque chateau." And after persistent questioning — for I don't know whether the towns- people were simply indifferent to that particular glory of France or whether they also disliked talking about it — we elicited the definite statement that it was the Chateau d'Amour. You understand it was really and truly the authentic Chateau d'Amour — the castle where the Courts of Love were held. For myself it has a particular memory because — and this the true truth, not a fairy-tale! — there I caught the scorpion that for many months I cherished in my bosom only to see it die, at a congress of historians, at sight of Professor Oncken. VIII When I was a boy I was familiar with, though I never really liked, an historical character called Brennus. Brennus, you will remember, was respon- sible for various breaches of neutrality, and eventu- ally invested the city of Rome. From that city he demanded ransom. The ransom being agreed upon, and the gold weighed out in the scales, Brennus cast his sword into the scale and insisted on having its weight made up in gold. When the equivalents of the representatives of the Hague Conference of that FELICITE 217 day objected that this was not cricket, Brenniis repUed that that might well be so, but that it was at least the Brennic equivalent for pretty Fanny's ways. It was, as you might say, " Fanny's First Play " of the imagination. Now Pan-Germanists will tell you that, because he was fair and had a moustache that stood straight up at two ends. King Brennus was the founder of the House of Brandenburg, and the sword of Brennus, they will say, was that shining sword of their ancestors which to-day they have once more unsheathed. At any rate, that tradition has gone on sounding down the ages, and mightily inspired Count Bismarck in his arguments with M. Thiers before the walls of Paris. Indeed, if you will read Count Bismarck's account of his interviews with that statesman you will at once recognise what I will take the liberty of calling the Brennus " touch" just as you will, if you read the German diplomatic correspondence with the Grand- duchess of Luxemburg in August 1914. Personally, if a sense of unworthiness forbids my saying that I am on the side of the angels, I can firmly inscribe myself on the side of Caius Marius, his wife Mary Mag- dalene, and the occupants of the Chateau d'Amour. Being exactly midway between the immense castle of Les Baux and the cities of Avignon and Aries, the Chateau d'Amour was the most convenient meeting- place for those knights and ladies of those times and climes who delighted to discuss problems set to them by the gentle goddess. They would spend a whole summer afternoon seated in rows in a little amphi- theatre that is still discernible, discussing such points as (a) if a lady had a lover, was it not her duty, in true loyalty to him, to take a second lover so as to 2i8 FELICITE discover whether or no the first were the true perfec- tion of perfection ? or (b) if a gentleman's wife ex- pired, and immediately the soul of another lady entered her body, would the knight be unfaithful to his first wife if he continued to live with the recon- stituted personality ? These knights and ladies estab- lished between them what remains the most valuable tradition in the whole world — the tradition of chivalry. Bertran de Born, who loved too many ladies, and Peire Vidal who loved so unprofitably la Louve of Las Tours, could not only put up the finest " scraps" the world has ever seen — they could fight in the finest of spirits. If to-day we are, metaphorically speaking, " playing the game," it is due as much as anything to Bertran de Born. I do not suppose that the reader will remember the story of the siege of the Castle of Autaforte. Bertran de Born, with his wonderful but too abusive poems, had set against him all the kings of the earth and all the nobles of Provence. The King's sons of England he had set against their father, and those princes he had set against each other — Richard the Lionheart, John Without Land, and the Prince who had died in Bertran' s arms. So the kings of the earth and the King of England and the nobility of Provence besieged Bertran de Born in his strong Castle of Autaforte. And, because their commissariat was sadly defective, Bertran de Born sent them out food from his castle, so that between them they might make a good fight of it. Eventually they battered down his walls with stone shot, took him prisoner, and prepared to hang him. Bertran protested that, in the first place, the use of shot was contrary to the conventions of knightly war ; and that the friends FELICITE 219 whom he had fed had very discourteously pointed out a spot in his castle-wall that had not been repaired ; and that, contrary to all decency, the allies had turned their balls upon this spot. He also remarked that he intended to go to Aragon upon his good horse, and that there, with his battle-axe, he would batter in the skull of the King of Aragon, so that his brains, like paste, should run down all over his armour. The allies replied that the knights, friends of Bertran de Born, who had fed on the bread and beef that he had sent out, had had no hand in pointing out the weak place of Autaforte, but that, conformably with the rules of war and the dictates of humanity, their master of artillery had discovered that weak place for himself. They also said that Bertran de Born was very unlikely to batter in the skull of the King of Aragon, since they were going to hang him in ten minutes. But Bertran replied to the King of England so movingly with tidings of the King's son who had died in his arms that the King of England, beneath his tent, with the tears running down his face, set free the great maker of sirventeses and gave him his life, his castle, much gold, and many gentle and pitiful compliments. At any rate, one day we penetrated, pushing our way through briars and wild olives, into the Castle of Love that, for many centuries, no lovers had penetrated. In amongst these frowning heights we found rubbles of old walls, of Roman pottery, of Saracenic glass, and of mosaic-work of the troubadours — and the poor scorpion. This engaging, innocuous, and affectionate animal survived the voyage to Nice, to Marseilles, to Corsica, to Paris, and even the cross- ing of the British Channel. But, alas ! I happened to take it to that fatal congress, and the historians, 220 FELICITE coming mostly from the east of the Elbe, when they heard of the historic origins of its birthplace, were, Teutonically, wild to see it. They thought perhaps that the real name of Bertran de Born, since he had a red beard, was Bernstein von Bornhofen. And after one look at the then amiable visage of the Professor I have already named (he had ten minutes before come from his historic interview with the Lord Chancellor at Mr. Humphry Ward's), the poor scorpion up and died. Perhaps, coming from, the land of the traditions of Caius Marius, Mary Magdalene, and the Courts of Love, he could not stand that atmosphere vibrating with the Brennus " touch" and the scintillations, as it were, from the sword of Brennus, that seemed to play about that London drawing-room. The reader must pardon me if I thus put the case of France — without advocacy of the political rights of that great country, but with some little picture of the country itself. That is the way I should plead the cause of a friend, for that is how the pleasant passages of life and the pleasant countries of the world come up in the mind — in a picture or so, in some pages of a book, in a great view or two, in the remembrance of a few kindly people, who, like the sabotiers, " sont des bons enfants." In a sense this book is all about France — and this book has been, I can assure you, no small labour. As I have already said, it comes difficultly to me to praise my own team, and almost as difficultly to indict the other side. Neither the one proceeding nor the other are part of the correctness of attitude after which I have been taught to seek. Still, the labour had to be undertaken ; the picture had to be provided with a frame. If it is a very small picture in a very large FELICITE 221 frame the reader again must pardon me : I cannot do better work because I am not a better workman. Or it would be more true to say that I had not the courage to attempt a picture on a larger scale Chivalry is the most valuable thing in the world : I have given a little impression of how all the chivalry in the world came from France. Fine views and a generous climate breed a race that can afford to be genereux. I have tried to touch in the generous climate and the landscapes of bits of France. Faithful service is as fine as chivalry — so I have called this Epilogue Felicite. If, then, I had had the courage, I should have written much more about France. The other writing — the polemical — is labour enough : to praise one's friend is a labour too ; but it is a labour of love. Alas, what one writes with ease and joy in the heart is, I am sadly aware, only too frequently read with aversion. So I left it at Bertran de Born. All chivalry, then, all learning, all the divine things of life came from that triangle of the world which holds the Chateau d'Amour, midway between Les Baux, Aries, and Avignon. From there they spread up the Rhine, across the lie de France ; across the Pas de Calais, to the Port of London, to Oxford, to Edinburgh, to Dublin, and a little way — but, alas, such a little way ! — across the Rhine. The races affected by that Romance culture are all one race. That is the true truth of history, for all these races see God and the great archangels and the little angels of God, with much the same vision from much the same angle. For races outside that circle, God is Wodin, or Aegir, or Sad Necessity. I will tell you : I have written that at times some of us do not desert distressed friends because we 222 FELICITE read Marryat as boys and did nut wish to be the rats that deserted a sinking ship. That appeared to me to be reason enough why Great Britain should have the hegemony where men follow the sea. Then add this : Certain of us have had our enemies well defeated, and lying, as you might say, ready for the coup de grace. We have then let the enemies go. That is because the Angevin King of England and the King of Aragon and the nobles of Provence spared Bertran de Born when he was trussed up and ready for the gallows. France had given chivalry to the world. That appears to me to be the imperative reason why France should have the hegemony where men plough between the olive trunks or labour amongst vines. Not all of us are loyal servants, but in the lands of this comity there is some loyalty ; not all of us are chivalrous, but in the lands of this comity there is some chivalry ; not all of us are poets, but in the lands of this comity the mouthing of verbiage at least does not quite obscure truth. So, if in the world from now on, there is to be any of the pleasantness that we loved, any of the virtues that we have held made men and women gracious, the cause of France, which is our cause, must prevail. If it do not, there may well be in the world many more machines, many more gilded hotels — but assuredly there will be none of that civilisation of altruism and chivalry which, beginning in that triangle of Provence, has spread pleasantness and light upon the minds of men to the furthest confines of the earth. APPENDICES APPENDIX A ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS^ Let us now consider those apologists for Prussia who base their special pleadings upon accounts of the diplomatic negotiations between the Central Empires and the rest of Europe. Of these the most prominent, and, in a sense, the most dangerous, is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw is prominent because of his great gifts, dangerous because of his inconsequentiality. For this reason I have decided to deal with his account of the origins of the war by the only method possible when one is dealing with a controversialist whose arguments have no correlation. I have taken upon myself the task of answering Mr. Shaw sentence by sentence, and, from the sample of this answer with which he is here provided in Appendix B, I tliink the reader will agree with me in the following points. Mr. Shaw has absolutely no knowledge of German Ufe or of the German Imperial 1 (i) Published by the Union of Democratic Control : "War, the Offspring of Fear." By Hon. Bertrand Russell. "The Origins of the Great War." By H. N. Brailsford. " Parliament and Foreign Policy." By Arthur Ponsonby, M.P. "Shall this War end German Militarism ? " By Norman Angeil. "War and the Workers." By J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P. "The Morrow of the War." (2) Published by the Independent Labour Party : " Belgium and ' the Scrap of Paper.' " By H. N. Brailsford. " How the War Came." " Persia, Finland, and our Russian Alliance." " British Militarism." By C. H. Norman. (3) Published by the National Labour Press : " Britain and the War : a Study in Diplomacy." By C. H. Norman. " Is Britain Blameless ? " By A. Fenner Brockway. "The Causes of War." 15 225 226 ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS Administration. Mr. Shaw's acquaintanceship with the diplomatic negotiations that preceded the war exhibits no trace whatever of his having studied anything more than docimients connected with, at the most, five weeks before the outbreak of hostilities. Mr. Shaw has no settled convictions of any kind whatever as to the causes of the war, or as to the personalities who were in charge of the negotiations that preceded the war. I do not wish to say anything with regard to the private figure of Mr. Shaw and I do not conceive myself to be at liberty to animadvert in the least upon what may be this entertaining dramatist's private motives. But I do consider myself to be at liberty to point out that Mr. Shaw is a party politician like any other party politician. So are the Hon. Arthur Ponsonby, M.P., Mr. H. N. Brailsford, Mr. Fenner Brockway, and Mr. C. H. Norman. The Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party which publish the pro-Prussian pamphlets to which I am referring are party organisations, supported like any other party organisations by party funds, and Mr. Norman Angell and Mr. Bertrand Russell are party writers just like any other party writers. They cannot, therefore, lay any claim to indulgence on the score of their impartiality, and a certain suspicion must there- fore a priori attach to the writings of these gentlemen — a suspicion that could not attach to the writings of M. Bergson, of M. Maeterlinck, of Signer d'Annunzio, of Mr. Henry James, or even, lamentable as it is to have to write it, to the utter- ances of Professors Eucken, Oncken and Misch, and Herr En- gelbrecht. The German writers are imbecile because of moral obliquity ; the English writers are suspect because the force of party exigencies deprives them, of necessity, of the right to claim argumentative clean-handedness. It is very disagreeable to me to write that Mr. Brailsford, for instance, is not argu- mentatively clean-handed. Mr. Brailsford' s exertions in the cause of the political enfranchisement of women have earned my very deep respect. Nevertheless, as in the case of Mr. Shaw, Mr. Ponsonby, and the others, in the matter of the origins of the present war Mr. Brailsford' s hands are not clean. The sentences upon which I base this serious allega- tion — for I know of no allegation that can possibly be more ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS 227 serious — are taken from Mr. Brailsford's pamphlet " Belgium and the ' Scrap of Paper,' " pages 8-9, and are as follows : (i) " Sir Edward Grey has told us that war at that time, 1906, was probable and that he gave France an imdertaking to back her with armed force." The words underlined are a direct lie. (2) " We meant to resist a German invasion of Belgium, not neces- sarily because we felt any overwhelming moral indignation about it, but because we were bound as the ally of France to resist any attack aimed at her." The words not underlined in this sentence are mere writing. If by " we " Mr. Brailsford means the British nation, he has no means of judging ; if by " we " Sir Edward Grey, he has no means of judging. The words underlined are a direct lie. (3) " Secret conversations took place on our initiative between our military representatives and the Belgian Staff. The official reports of these discussions were found by the Germans when they captured Antwerp. The documents were in an envelope marked ' Conventions Anglo-Beiges.' " The word underlined is a forgery. The facsimiles of the envelope published by the German Government show that the word inscribed there is " Conversations " not " Conven- tions." Direct lying and forgery are, I suppose, the ordinary imple- ments of party politics, and, in the effort to get Sir Edward Grey out of office, Mr. Brailsford is possibly warranted in employing the usual weapons of party politics. Personally, I think that still more harm is done in the world by loose writing and by ascriptions of motives when the writer can have no possible evidence as to what may be the motives or aims of the individuals whose motives and aims he professes to depict. Personally, that is to say, I think the loose writing such as that in the two passages that follow does infinitely more harm than any number of crimes which are usually more seriously regarded. 228 ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS (i) " We were coldly contemplatitig an utterly unnecessary war with Germany, waged for no higher end than to assist France in a predatory colonial adventure, and we foresaw that this war might involve the Belgians in the horrors of invasion." Or again, Ibid., p. 2 : (2) " The motive which led the German Government into this crime against Belgium is not obscure. ... It is possible that the Germans may not have foreseen the consequences in detail, for they are not an imaginative race. Their object was not to conquer or annex Belgium." I ask myself in vain how a human being can have written the words underlined in these two passages — and I continue to ask myself in vain. For we have to consider that Mr. Brailsford is here arrogating to himself the claim to know the secret processes that went on inside the brain-pans of Sir Edward Grey and the permanent officials of the British Foreign Ofhce on the one hand and of Herren Bethmann- HoUweg, Jagow, and the officials of the Berlin Foreign Office on the other. I thought that this sort of writing was limited to pamphlets of injured councillors in village council elec- tions ; but it does not seem to be so limited. Let me remind my reader once more of the canons that I have laid down for the historical understanding of current events — that no historical controversialist has the right to base an argument on anything but direct evidence of fact, and that every person who comments controversially on current events of historic importance, must, in the face of destiny, who is august and avenging, regard himself as, and speak with the sobriety of, an historian. And the whole methods of Mr. Brailsford's whole school are characterised by the same argumentative dishonesty. I dislike belaboiTring people, and perhaps I have sufficiently belaboured the Union of Democratic Control and the Inde- pendent Labour Party. Let us, therefore, consider a publica- tion issvied by the National Labour Press and written by Mr. C. H. Norman. Mr. Norman's methods of attack are precisely similar to those of Mr. Brailsford. His pamphlet is called " Britain and the War : a Study in Diplomacy.'' ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS 229 Once more, Mr. Norman is obsessed by the idea that there is in existence a secret treaty between Sir Edward Grey and the French Government. But, unhke Mr. Brailsford, who is too skilful to bring his evidence and limits himself to assertion, Mr. C. H. Norman not only makes the assertion over and over again, but actually produces his evidence. Here are Mr. Norman's assertions : " Reports emanating from Paris soon began to circulate alleging the existence of this document. In February 19 13 Lord Hugh Cecil, in the debate on the Address, pointed out : ' There is a very general belief that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising out of an assurance given by the Ministry in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very la^ge armed force out of this country to operate in Europe.' Mr. Asquith intervened at once, saying : ' I ought to say that it is not true.' How can that denial be reconciled with the con- tents of the letter addressed to the Ambassador ? " (pp. 8-9). Mr. Norman gives the letter to the Ambassador, but he cannot let the matter go without comments of his own. Here, then, are letter and comments : " In his fatal speech of August 3rd, 1914, Sir E. Grey read th-e following document, technically known as an aide-tnemoire, which he had written to the French Ambassador in London on Novem- ber 22nd, 1912 : 'My dear Ambassador, — From time to time in recent years the French and British naval and military experts have consulted together. It has always been understood that such consultation does not restrict the freedom of either Government to decide at any future time whether or not to assist the other by armed force. We have agreed that consultation between experts is not and ought not to be regarded as an engagement that com- mits either Government to action in a contingency that has not yet arisen, and may never arise. The disposition, for instance, of the French and British Fleets respectively at the present moment is not based upon an engagement to co-operate in war. You have, however, pointed out that, if either Government had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, it might become essential to know whether it could, in that event, depend upon the armed assistance of the other.' Then comes the operative part, in which was an undertaking of the highest importance : ' / agree that, if either Government had grave reason to expect an 230 ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS unprovoked attack by a third Power, oy something that threatened the general peace ' (just observe how far-reaching those words might become in certain evcntuaUties) ' it should immediately discuss with the other whether both Governments should act together to prevent aggression, and, if so, what measures they would be pre- pared to take in common.' Between two private individuals an instrument so worded would be regarded as a contract in terms as well as in honour " (p. 8). It will be observed that the only obligation contained in this aide-memoire is an obligation to " discuss " certain points. Yet Mr. Norman treats this obligation as being one of absolute offensive and defensive alliance — as an absolute pledge, that is to say, that Great Britain will declare war if France chooses to declare war. On account of this obligation to discuss Mr. Norman writes the words : " That answer was an untruth " in the case of Mr. Asquith, and he writes the words, " That was a most disingenuous and tricky reply " as a comment upon Sir Edward Grey's answer of April 28th, 1 91 4. Sir Edward Grey was then asked : " Whether the policy of tliis country still remained one of freedom from all obligations to engage in military operations on the Conti- nent ? " He replied : " The position now remains the same as was stated by the Prime Minister in answer to a question on March 24th, 1913." Poor Sir Edward Grey can, in fact, do no right. From the quotations which follow the reader will judge that poor Sir Edward was incompetent because he had not got an agree- ment with Russia, whilst he was also villainous because he had, and a liar because he said he hadn't. " Sir Edward Grey admitted, in the same speech, that he did not know what the outcome of such a bargain might be, because, he continued : ' We are not parties to the Franco-Russian Alliance. We do not even know the terms of that Alliance.' That is a confession of incompetence, because no such letter should have been given to the French Ambassador until disclosure had been permitted of the obligations of France towards Russia (p. 8). " On June nth, 1914, Mr. Norman continues. Sir Edward Grey was asked : ' Whether any naval agreement had been recently entered into between Russia and Great Britain, and whether any negotiations with a view to a naval agreement have recently ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS 231 taken place or are now pending between Russia and Great Britain.' The Foreign Secretary dealt with the question in a most elaborate and formal manner : ' The Prime Minister replied last year to the question of the Hon. Member that if a war arose between European Powers there were no unpublished agreements which would hamper or restrict the freedom of the Government or of Parliament to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war. That answer covers both questions on the Paper. It remains as true to-day as it was a year ago. No negotiations have since been concluded with any Power that would make the state- ment less true. No negotiations are in progress, and none are likely to be entered upon, as far as I can judge.' All this time Sir Edward Grey had in his possession a copy of the letter he had himself written to M. Cambon that committed Britain to every kind of continental adventure into which Russia might drag France. The concluding sentence of this statement of Sir Edward Grey, in the circumstances, is a masterpiece of misrepresentation : ' But if any agreement were to be concluded that made it necessary to withdraw or modify the Prime Minister's statement of last year which I have quoted, it ought, in my opinion, to be, and I suppose it would he, laid before Parliament.' That is the mental state of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, whose appeals to heaven and to national honour read a little strangely in view of the falsity of their representations to Parliament, the custodian of national honour. It is a curious commentary upon these repudiations that the American Press, on June 20th, 19 14, before the assassination at Sarajevo, published a report that a naval convention had been signed between Russia and Britain under which, in the case of a Russo-German War, Britain would render assistance to Russia by naval operations. It is right to add that Sir Edward Grey has strenuously contradicted that report ; but the reader must judge what value he will attach to contradictions emanating from Sir Edward Grey " (pp. 9-10). I do not know that any comment of mine upon these extracts is needed. In a country town in which I once re- sided there lived two butchers, the one called Tomalin, the other called Short. Mr. Tomalin, by giving information against Mr. Short, secured the conviction of that individual for habitually selling putrid meat ; for ever afterwards Mr. Short, when any speech of Mr. Tomalin' s was reported to him, was in the habit of saying : ' ' Well, you know how much you can believe of what Tomalin says." When I read 232 ANGLO-PRUSSIAN APOLOGISTS those last-quoted words of Mr. Norman, I was irresistibly- reminded of Mr. Short. And the same words are frequently- used by authors of authors, by doctors of doctors, by soUcitors of soUcitors, by female beauties of female beauties, and by the jealous generally. They mean, these words, precisely nothing at all. And with that I will leave the matter of these pamphlets. If the reader is in any doubt as to the justice of the cause of the Allies he will perhaps give himself the trouble to read the pages devoted to Mr. Shaw's pamphlet in the next Appen- dix. I have selected Mr. Shaw for this minute attention rather than any other writer because Mr. Shaw, with his enormous versatility of commonplaceness, employs, in his pamphlet, every argument used by every other writer. At one moment you will read that the German Emperor is a bitterly ill-used sovereign, at the next that he is a spouting demoniac of militarism ; at one moment Sir Edward Grey is an autocrat bestriding a murmuring world, at the next a timid and lacrimonious individual in the clutches of the per- manent officials of the Foreign Of&ce ; at one moment we may read that M. Sasonoff, in the negotiations that immedi- ately preceded the war, was the only diplomatist who kept his head ; at the next it is the officials of Unter-den-Linden who alone possessed a clear and resolute policy. There is no argument used by any opponent or any supporter of Ger- many that Mr. Shaw does not use, and this makes his pamphlet not so much worthy of attention as convenient for analysis. APPENDIX B MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE WAR" It is my purpose to comment upon or to answer, sentence by sentence, as much of Mr. Shaw's complete writings about the present war as I imagine a fairly patient reader can bring himself to contemplate. I. MR. SHAW'S PERSONAL BIAS " Common Sense about the War," § i, page i, col. i : Besides, until Home Rule emerges from, its present suspended animation, I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticising Eng- land with something of the detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a certain slightly malicious taste for taking the conceit out of her. It should be remembered that the most pitiful case in the world at the present moment is the case of Prussian Poland, and, in ably advocating the cause of Prussia, Mr. Shaw is advocating, to the measure of his abilities, a very abominable oppression. And whilst it is extremely creditable in a des- cendant of those Scotch Presbyterians who formed the garri- son that Great Britain employed for the oppression of Ireland, to wish to atone for some of the religious murders and bri- gandage which his ancestors have committed upon the Irish, that propitiatory attitude is hardly sufficient excuse for advocating a cause which, if it succeeds, must perpetuate the religious murders and brigandages of Prussia upon the territories of Poland, Schleswig-Holstein, and Belgium. Whatever may have been the motives of the Allies in 233 234 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE undertaking the present war, it can never be sufficiently remembered that the success of the AlUes will bring about the freeing of a great many subject races. It cannot be sufficiently remembered that the oppressions to which these races are subjected are very real, very galling, and deliber- ately aimed at race murder. Whatever the motives of the Allies, their cause is the cause of Prussian Poland, of Austrian Poland, of Belgium, of subject Italians, Bosnians, Herzego- vinians, Croats, Rumanians, and Ruthenians. In perpetuat- ing the rule, particularly of the Hungarians over the subject races within the borders of that country, the Irish upholder of Prussia is riveting a yoke of very real martyrdom upon many thousand miserable necks. And whilst that Scotch Presbyterian who upholds the cause of oppressed Ireland may be a sufficiently gallant individual, that Irishman is a very scurvy knave, who, for the mere sake of " taking the conceit out of " any person or institution in the world, hammers another nail into the iron coffin in which Prussia, Austria, and Hungary have encased these poor peoples. I do not wish to shirk facing the fact that the Powers who make up the Allies have subject to them many races, and that several of these subject races are alleged to be cruelly ill-treated. And I do not yield to Mr. Shaw in a very genuine feeling that a condition of subjecthood of one race to another of different faith, traditions, language, and values of life, is the most horrible phenomenon in the present world. But the victory of the Allies will mean the certain freeing of several subject races and will mean that Mr. Shaw, myself, and many other men feeling alike, will, through our repre- sentatives, and to the measure of the power vouchsafed us, at any rate during the congress or the settlement of the terms of peace, have a voice in the fate, say, of Poland, or, say again, of Egypt. If, on the other hand, the Allies do not conquer, those peoples who would otherwise be freed will not be freed ; and neither Mr. Shaw nor myself, nor yet any single man of good-will towards subject races, will have any voice at all in the making of those dispositions. It seems to be, therefore, the duty of Mr. Shaw and the sympathisers, who are a formidable band, to see to acquiring, during the progress of the present war, as much influence as we can ; ABOUT THE WAR" 235 so that, in the end, we may have every possible grain of power in the making of those final dispositions — rather than, by irritating one or other of the Allied combatant Powers, or, by bringing down the cause of the Allies, to ensure the final subjection of all the now subject races throughout the world. II " Common Sense About the War," § i, page i, col. i : Having thus frankly confessed my bias, which you can allow for as a rifleman allows for the wind, I give my views for what they are worth. They will he of some use ; because, however blinded I may be by prejudice or perversity, my prejudices in this matter are not those which blind the British patriot, and therefore I am fairly sure to see some things that have not yet struck him. I have no comments to make. Ill "Common Sense about the War," § i, page i, col. i : And first, I do not see this war as one which has welded Governments and peoples into complete and sympathetic solidarity as against the common enemy. I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and defiance of the views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the German people stirred to the depths by a similar antipathy to English Junkerism, and anger at the apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made on them by us in their extremest peril from France and Russia. Sentences II and III of this paragraph flatly contradict Sentence I. In any case, it is misreading of psychology to say that the English people know anything at all about Junkerism. Mr. Shaw himself sets up a fictitious image which he labels Junkerism, and dislikes it. But the psychologist of a nation goes to work, of necessity, more subtly and must take into account many more facts. The Prussian is the enemy, as Gambetta put it, for almost every inhabitant of these islands, not because of a Junkerism of which, till the 236 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE outbreak of hostilities, they had never heard, but for forty- eight milUon shades of reasons and for half a dozen main reasons— firstly and mainly, because many men fear invasion, some fear trade competition, some few because they prize French civilisation above all else in the world. Some dishke paying for heavy armaments which they think are caused by the arming of Germany ; some dislike Militarism and imagine that the German Emperor is responsible for this ; some have met Germans in hotel corridors and have found them disagreeable. And all these people are united by a common, sentimental belief that the rule of Anglo-Saxondora is mild, gentle, constitutional, democratic, and beneficent. Similarly with the Germans : the Prussian Government has the support of that congeries of nations for sixty-four million shades and combinations of reasons, and for three or four main reasons. The inhabitants of Borkum have not passed many days for the last twenty- five years without thoughts of the possibility of hearing the guns of a British bombarding squadron ; various manufacturers, like the nickel workers of Bavaria, wish to see Great Britain crushed because British manufacturers have captured various nickel-trading industries of Europe which were formerly in their hands. ^ The granite workers of South Germany wish the defeat of Great Britain because the Scotch granite workers have lately entirely cap- tured the French stone trade which also was formerly in their hands. 2 The coal-miners and mine-owners of Rhenish West- phalia wished to see Great Britain crushed because lately, and more particularly owing to the complete breakdown of the Prussian-Hessian State Railway system in 191 2, British coal has poured down the Rhine in ever-increasing quantities.' Various learned and unlearned members of the German nation, from professors to foremen brewers, and from judges to SociaUst deputies, are united in thinking that, by support- ing Russian tyranny. Great Britain is perpetuating in this world a system of barbarism which will eventually blot out the, to them, undoubted glories of German culture. An immense number of unthinking, as well as an immense number of the educated docile of the North and South Germans, are 1 See Report of H.B.M.'s Consul- General for Bavaria, 1913. 2 See ditto. 3 See report of H.B.M.'s Consul- General for Diisseldorf, 191^. ABOUT THE WAR" 237 united in a common rage with the British for offering armed resistance, because, ever since the Imperial Education Edict of 1 89 1, they have been taught in every school and in every university, that the British were a decadent people, incapable of armed resistance. That last motive may be said to unite all the sixty- four million inhabitants of Germany in a common hatred of the English, since, from the fall of Bismarck on- wards, every inhabitant of Germany who has attended the schools or the universities has been officially taught that the English are a race expert in nothing but unnatural vice, sunk in sloth, and entirely lacking in patriotism. But there is one mean element which has influenced, not only the peoples of the German Empire, but the peoples of Austria-Hungary — that being the increased and ever-increas- ing difficulty of subsistence in those Empires, and the belief, deliberately fostered by the Imperial Authorities of both countries, that waging war is the only certain means of attaining to individual prosperity. Trade after trade in Germany has been lost in the last few years owing to the necessity for paying higher wages, this necessity being due to the increased cost of living and to the ever-increasing burden of taxation for the support of the ever-increasing armaments. And let me quote here the most terrible and cynical pronouncement that was ever made upon a people by one of its rulers : " It is our sacred duty to sharpen the sword that has been put into our hands and to hold it ready for defence as well as for oflence. We must allow the idea to sink into the minds of our people that our armaments are an answer to the armaments and policy of the French. We must accustom them to think that an offensive war on our part is a necessity in order to combat the pro- vocations of our adversaries. We must act with prudence so as not to arouse suspicion, and to avoid the crises which might injure our economic existence. We must so manage matters that, under the heavy weight of powerful armaments, considerable sacrifices, and strained political relations, an outbreak [Losschlagen] should be con- sidered as a relief, because after it would come decades of peace and prosperity, as after 1870."^ 1 Memorandum on the Strengthening of the German Army, Berlin, March 19th, 1913. Quoted in French Yellow Book, page 10 of English Government Version. 238 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE This is, I think, the most horrible betrayal of a race that was ever known. In the face of it can Mr. Shaw persist in his frivolous and epigrammatic antitheses of two peoples — who have never heard of each other's Junkerism — fearing each other's Junkerism ? IV " Common Sense about the War," § i, page i, cols, i and 2 : . . . And I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant Militarism in their own country. . . . The rest of this paragraph is mere forensic writing, clever enough but quite immaterial as evidence as to the origins of the present war. Mr. Shaw presents us, for a whole column, with a number of visions such as that in the sentence here enshrined. He has had these visions ; but the mere fact that Mr. Shaw has visions is not evidence of anything other than his visionary nature. I am concerned solely with evidence, / mention all this, not to make myself wantonly disagreeable, hut because military persons, thinking naturally that there is nothing like leather, are now talking of this war as likely to become a permanent institution , like the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's .... In addition, this paragraph contains sentences like the one here annexed. This is mere freakishness. Every military person, of whichever belligerent force or nationality, wishes for a speedy and crushingly victorious end to the war. Forgetting, I think, that the rate of consumption maintained by modern military operations is much greater relatively to the highest possible rate of production maintainable under the restrictions of war time than it has ever been before. This is the mere colloquialism of the non-historically- minded. To give only one instance to the contrary, Prussia, during its war of Liberation against Napoleon, made much greater sacrifices than she is making to-day. ABOUT THE WAR" 239 V. THE DAY OF JUDGMENT " Common Sense about the War," § 2, page i, col. 2 : The European settlement at the end of the war will be effected, let us hope, not by a regimental mess of fire-eaters sitting round an up-ended drum in a vanq^iished Berlin or Vienna, but some sort of Congress in which all the Powers {including, very im- portantly, the United States of America) will be represented. Congresses for the purpose of settHng terms of peace have never, in modern historical times, been conducted by regi- mental messes, nor is it likely that, in future, they will be so conducted. Thus the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars consisted of a debate between various states- men, Metternich, for instance, representing Austria, Harden- berg and von Humboldt representing Prussia, Stein and the Emperor Alexander representing Russia, and so on. This whole sentence is therefore nonsensical. Now I foresee a certain danger of our being taken by surprise at that Congress, and making ourselves unnecessarily difficult and unreasonable, by presenting ourselves to it in the character of Injured Innocence. We shall not be accepted in that charac- ter. Such a Congress will most certainly regard iis as being, next to the Prussians {if it makes even that exception), the most quarrelsome people in the universe. Similarly, the whole of this paragraph is entirely extraneous. The diplomatists representing Great Britain will not assume any airs of morality at all. At the final congress for settling terms of peace the representatives of Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Serbia, the German, Austro- Hungarian, and Turkish Empires will meet as business men and will discuss these matters on lines of pure expediency. VI. JUNKERS ALL " Common Sense about the War," § i, page 2, col i : What is a Jzinker ? Is it a German officer of twenty-three, with offensive manners, and a habit of cutting down innocent civilians with his sabre ? Sometimes ; but not at all exclusively 240 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE that, or anything like that. Let iis resort to the dictionary. I turn to the " Encyclopddisches Wortcrbiich " of Muret Sanders. Excuse its quaint German-English. Junker : Young nobleman, younker, lording, country squire, country gentleman, squirearch. Junkerherrschaft — squirearchy, landocracy. Junkerleben : Life of a country gentleman, {figuratively) a jolly life. Junkerpartei : country party. Junkerwirtschaft : doings of the country party. A Junker is a Prussian landowner whose property lies east of the Elbe. The Junkerpartei is not, as Mr. Shaw would seem to suggest, an agreeable country house-party, but the political, party organisation known as the Agrarian Party,^ which has existed in Prussia ever since the reform of the con- stitution by Stein and Hardenberg. Its first leader was von Marwitz. The Junkers and the Junkerpartei of Prussia desire to see enacted all such measures as may be of service or pro- fitable to Prussian landowners whose properties lie east of the Elbe. They desire the strictest possible protection for agricultural products, the limitation of the vote of the in- dustrial populations, the abolition of death duties on real estate, and the maintenance of the present system of binding contracts for agricultural labourers, so that the existing system of state serfdom in the Ostelbische territories may not be weakened. 1 The habit of irresponsibly flinging about the word Junker, though Mr. Shaw has extended its scope beyond the bounds of reason, was not first contracted by Mr. Shaw. The following quotation will go to prove my contention that the Junkerpartei is a perfectly definite political party with a perfectly definite programme : " When Bismarck was in the United Diet, and afterwards in the Prus- sian and Erfurt Parliaments, the opponents of the principles which he then represented denounced him as a ' Junker,' and Georg von Vincke went so far as to declare in a debate in the lower Chamber that he re- garded Bismarck as ' the incarnation of Junkerdom,' i.e. an extreme adherent of the party which was at that time opposing desperate resist- ance to the efforts made by the Prussian National Assembly and its parliamentary successors to abolish feudal rights, aristocratic privileges, and other relics of the Middle Ages. . . ." — Busch's " Bismarck," vol. ii. p. 354. Readers interested in the exact history of the Prussian Jxinker- partei might consult Hermann Kohler, " Landwirtschaft und Sozial- demokratie " ; Evert's " Der Deutsche Osten," or "Die wichtigsten Agrarfragen." ABOUT THE WAR " 241 Sir Edward Grey is a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes ; and Sir Edward is a charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord Cromer is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not disagreeable compound of Junker and Yankee : his frank anti-German pugnacity is enormously more popular than the moral babble {Milton's phrase) of his sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bwnptious and -jolly Junker, fust as Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out the list. In these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop. I know nothing about Sir Edward Grey's hair or toes ^ ; but Sir Edward Grey does not advocate the strictest possible protection for agricultural products, the limitations of the industrial franchise, the abolition of death duties on real estate, or a system of serfdom for agricultural labourers. Certainly he does not desire to benefit Prussian landowners whose lands lie east of the Elbe. Mr. Winston Churchill does not advocate any of these things. Lord Curzon may or may not be a Protectionist, but he was not a member of the British Cabinet who embarked upon the present war. It is very difficult for any one who is not either a Jttnker or a successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which party is in power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker ; all who are not Junkers are riff-raff, whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort : mostly ability to make money. Let us, however, put it that by " Junker " Mr. Shaw means merely an hereditary landowner. Of the eighteen members of the British Cabinet who delivered to Germany the ulti- matum of August 3rd, 1914, only four belonged to the here- ditary landowning class, and only one owns any considerable 1 " I recognise the good-will of the gentleman who has assured us of his friendship. Mr. Grey has also declared that he will do everything in his power to better the relations of England and Germany." (Speech of Graf Westarp, Jimker leader during Agadir debates in the Reichstag, December 5th, 1911), (" D.G.," vol. liv. p. 8q.) 16 242 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE quantity of land. If we water down still further the term " Junker," and let it mean what in English is called " County Family/' we find that still only four members belong to county families. The mere fact of the immense preponder- ance of lawyers in the British Cabinet shows how essentially, taking the term " Junker " either at its narrowest or at its broadest sense, the British Cabinet is a non-Junker Cabinet. It is, in fact, mainly distinguished by its urban complexion ; it contains hardly any representative of agricultural interests, and the excursions of its Chancellor of the Exchequer into agricultural matters have been productive of nothing but jocularity. The sentence beginning " Our governing classes " is the merely slovenly epigrammatic writing of the dramatist. It might have been true in the days of Thackeray. Good birth, which is the same thing as membership of a county family, is hardly any longer a passport even into social gather- ings. If I wished to perpetrate a similar epigram to Mr. Shaw's I might say: "Our governing classes are overwhelm- ingly Jewish; all who are not Jews are riff-raff." That would not be true, but it would be just as true as Mr. Shaw's epigram. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker, though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an A mbassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies by a stroke of his pen. How does Mr. Shaw know what the Kaiser is ? Or the Crown Prince ? Presumably from tittle-tattle. It is almost impossible to know anytliing about the inner sentiments of royal personages of to-day, except from rumours and possibly scabrous anecdotes. I have myself been personally assured by the German Emperor that he desired peace. I do not know whether he did or did not. He was speaking officially. One can know nothing about these personages except from their public utterances, and it is purposely misleading to write about them except from that point of view. It is a deliberate lie to say that the German Emperor is less auto- fj^tic thau Sir Edwajrd Gxej. Sir Edwaj-d Grey did not ABOUT THE WAR" 243 declare war, which is the only interpretation one can put upon the words " sent us to war." After the majority of its members had resigned rather than declare war on Germany in support of France, the British Cabinet, with the exception of two members, agreed to deliver an ultimatum to the Ger- man Imperial authorities on August 3rd, 1914. This ulti- matum was to the effect that Great Britain would declare war upon Germany if Germany did not undertake not to violate the neutrality of Belgium. Germany violated the neutrality of Belgium ; Great Britain declared war on Ger- many. These are the exact facts. Any speculations that Mr. Shaw may make upon them are merely excursions in comparative ethics or imaginative disquisitions upon what Mr. Shaw imagines to be the psychologies of the statesmen concerned. This point cannot be sufficiently driven home. VII. WHAT IS A MILITARIST ? " Common Sense about the War," § 4, page 4, cols, i and 2 : Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the militarists. A militarist is a person who believes that all real power is the power to kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big battalions. Let us agree that aggressive militarism is the most mon- strous nuisance of the modern world ; that in a Utopian or ideal society any person possessing or uttering aggressive militarist views should be executed without mercy ; that an aggressive militarist is a person of contemptible intellect, defective imagination, and undeveloped views of the values of life. The most famous militarist at present, thanks to the zeal with which we have bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich Bernhardi. But we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own writers as a militarist propagandist. This phraseology is ambiguous. What is the exact mean- ing of "to take precedence of " ? If Bernhardi is the most famous militarist at present should he not take precedence 244 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE of General Chesney, who wrote " The Battle of Dorking," since General von Bernhardi is an agent of living propaganda, whereas the " Battle of Dorking " was absolutely forgotten until Mr. Shaw chose to revive attention to this work ? / am old enough to remember the beginning of the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in England. The Franco- Prussian War of 1870-71 left Europe very much taken back. Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though everybody was a little afraid of France ; and we were keeping " buffer States " between ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had indeed beaten Denmark ; but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned in her hour of need by those who should have helped her, to the great indignation of Ibsen. Ger- many had also beaten Austria ; but somehow everybody seems able to beat A ustria, though nobody seems able to draw the moral, that defeats do not matter as much as the militarists think, Aitstria being as important as ever. Mr. Shaw's versions of history have the colloquial in- accuracy of the dramatist who seeks for the picturesque rather than the historic average. It is absurd to say that up to 1870 nobody was afraid of Prussia. Austria dreaded Prussia ; Denmark dreaded Prussia ; the other German States dreaded Prussia ; so did the Russian Empire. It might reasonably be advanced that until the Prusso-Danish War no nation outside the German Confederation whose diet was at Frankfort dreaded Prussia. Whose duty was it to " help " Denmark ? The Prusso-Danish War came after in- numerable negotiations, in the course of which almost every German State of the Confederation, and in addition France and Great Britain, took the part of Denmark diplomatically^ Denmark was a little nation, but so also was Prussia then. And Denmark regarded herself, and was regarded by the other States of Europe, as impregnable owing to the range of forti- fications called the Diippel, which stretched across the Danish peninsula. It is sheer nonsense to say that Austria is as important as ever, or was so at the opening of the present war. At the Congress of Vienna Austria dictated to the entire world ; in 1914, and for many years past Austria, if ABOUT THE WAR " 245 it might be too much to say that she was merely the vassal of Prussia, was, at any rate, comparatively impotent in the councils of Europe except when she had the backing of the House of Hohenzollern. There was not a State in Europe that did not say to itself : " Good Heavens ! what would happen if she attacked us .■^ " This is mere writing. On November iSth, 1870, during the Siege of Paris, Thomas Carlyle addressed to the 2'imes an immensely long letter whose last sentence is as follows : " That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation and become Queen of the Conti- nent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hopefullest public fact that has occurred in my time." And that letter, if not the first, is, at any rate, the most egregious symptom of the lickspittle toadying to Prussian materialism, Prussian Philologie, and Prussianism in general, distinguishing a whole British school of thought, which, beginning with John Stuart Mill and continuing through George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Carlyle, finds its culmination in Mr. Shaw's pamphlet. We in England thought of our old-fashioned army, and our old-fashioned commander, George Ranger {of Cambridge), and our War Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility ; and we shook in our shoes. This is merely whimsical and probably quite untrue. But, if we " shook in our shoes," that was hardly a symptom of Militarism. We soon produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature, an anonymous booklet entitled, " The Battle of Dorking." It is merely silly to call the " Battle of Dorking" Bern- hardian literature. "The Battle of Dorking,'* regarded as a literary acliievement, is pleasant, amateurish, and fairly 246 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE good reading. It depicts the landing of several German Army Corps, in 1873, in the neighbourhood of Newhaven, after the entire British Fleet has been sunk by a new and devilish instrument called the torpedo. It shows the absolute defeat of an amateurishly collected British Army, formed of untrained volunteers, stiffened with a few regular regiments. It foreshadows national bankruptcy, and mild instances of Prussian SchreckUchkeit. Bernhardi writes such sentences as : " War is an unqualified necessity. . . ." Or : " Since the struggle [with France, England, and Russia] appears, on thorough investigation of the international question, necessary and inevitable, we must fight it out, cost what it may. ... In one way or another we must square our account with France if we wish for a free hand in our international policy. This is the first and foremost condition of a sound German policy. . . . France must be so completely crushed that she can never again come across our path." ^ This was written in 1896. It was not the first page of English militarist literature : you have only to turn back to the burst of glorification of war which heralded the silly Crimean Campaign {Tennyson's " Maud " is a surviving sample) to find pcsans to Mars which would have made Treitschke blush {perhaps they did). Of course the " Battle of Dorking " was not the first page of English miUtarist literature, Shakespeare wrote : " War is God's beadle; war is God's minister." Mr. Jorrocks also, by implication, commended war. But so did Homer, so did Horace, so did Bertran de Born, so did Dante, Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Chaucer. So did Tolstoy in his early days. But it was reserved for Treit- schke to echo the words of Hegel to the effect that waging war is the first province of the State, and " that the living God will see to it that, in spite of all the efforts of apostles of peace, war will always return as a saving remedy for humanity." 1 " Germany and the Next War," 1912 edition, pp. 23 and 104. ABOUT THE WAR" 247 It was reserved, in fact, for Prussia to evolve the state doctrine whose first principle was the waging of war, and whose second principle was the promotion of prosperity in the individual citizen by the waging of war. The point is that German militarist propaganda was pro- moted, subsidised, enjoined, and enforced by the Prussian State. The persons in England who have carried on mili- tarist propaganda have been retired army officers, regarded, as a rule, as " cranks " who have made little or no popular appeal. There have been General Chesney, Major Stewart Murray, the late Lord Roberts, and so on. In another cate- gory there was the brilliant author of " The Riddle of the Sands." These persons were laughed at by a proportion of the population, and, judged by the only test that we can get hold of — the statistical test — they had not nearly so much effect as almost any humanitarian, sociological, or merely eccentric organisations. In this connection the fol- lowing table should be impressive enough. Militarist Organisations {Complete List) Navy League (95 Branches) National Service League Imperial Maritime League Boys' Naval Brigade Public School Cadet Corps Social Organisations (A Selection Only) Band of Hope (15,000 Branches) Temperance Movement {130 Organisations) National Union of Woman Suf- frage (non-militant), (305 So- cieties) Churches of Christ Scientist (31 Churches, 41 Societies) Vegetarians (35 Societies) Peace Societies (selected) International Arbitration League Church of England Peace League Rationalist Peace Society Norman Angell Club National Peace Council Free Trade Union Tariff Reform Union Fabian Society Anti-Gambling League Anti- Vivisection League 248 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE Territorial Forces Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve R.S.P.C.A. N.S.P.C.C. British Union for Abolition of Vivisection Canine Defence League Our Dumb Friends' League Humanitarian League Research Defence Society Divorce Law Reform Association Penal Law Reform Association Salvation Army Memberships of Above Territorial Forces, 266,222 (1912) National Service League (Pay- ing Members) 100,000 (1913) Navy League, 100,000 (1912) R.N.V.R., 4,224 (1913) Boys' Naval Brigades, 1,260 (1913) Memberships of Above Brotherhood Movement, 620,000 (1913) C.E.T.S., 550,000 (1913) National British Women's Tem- perance Association, 190,000 (1913) Royal Naval Temperance So- ciety, 25,000 (1913) Fabian Society, 2,786 (1914) VII {Continued) Later on came the Jingo fever {anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention tJiat just now), Stead's " Truth About the Navy," Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National Review, Lord Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells's " War in the Air " {well worth re-reading just now), and the Dread- noughts. Throvtghout all these agitations the enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her millions of German conscripts. (a) The last sentence of this passage contradicts the first. In any case such writing is sheer whimsicahty of the most arbitrary kind. One might say, if one wished to be precise ABOUT THE WAR" 249 about such speculative matters — to be precise about the ground facts that, Great Britain having always had a " bogey," up till the middle nineties, the bogey was Russia ; from the middle nineties until, say, the South African War, France was gradually pulling into first place as the " Menace." Later it has been Prussia. This sort of writing is purely arbitrary and generally non- sensical ; but I might point out that, for instance in i88g, in an article in the Nineteenth Century, Lord Charles Beresford insisted that the British Fleet must be twice as large as the French Fleet ; that in 1890, Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- man, then Secretary of State for War, said before the Har- tington Commission : " In this country there is, in truth, no rule for general military policy, in the larger and more ambitious sense of the phrase. We have no designs against our European neighbours. Indian mili- tary policy will be settled in India itself." ^ And in 1896 a writer in the Edinburgh Review says : " As we have already said, Germany has supplied a uni- versal model. It would be absolutely impossible, however, to apply an exact imitation of the German system to the British Army." It may interest Mr. Shaw to know that the " authorities " upon which the writer in the Edinburgh bases his article are : " The Duties of the General Staff," by General Bronsart von Schellendorf. " The Brain of an Army; a Popular Account of the German General Staff," by Spenser Wilkinson. " The Report of the Royal Commission, etc." " The Letters of Vetus, on the Administration of the War Of&ce." Not one of these works can be called anti-German in tenor. (6) Mr. Stead's " Truth about the Navy " was not directed against Germany, but merely revealed weaknesses in the British Naval system. The suppression of the Channel Tunnel was directed, not against Germany, but against France. Mr. Newbolt, as far as I have been able to discover, had not written against Germany before the opening of the present 1 Report of the Hartington Commission, 1890. 250 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE war. Mr. Kipling had not written against Germany till that time. Mr. Wells's " War in the Air " is not directed against Germany as the foe of this country. {c) If we take, then, the other writers, setting Lord Roberts against General Bernhardi, and Mr. Spenser Wil- kinson, since he is a professor of history, against Professor Delbriick, how do Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse, and the National Review, stand up against Kant, Hegel, Treitschke, General von der Goltz, General von Clausewitz, Prince von Biilow, and the Emperor William II, who said " The trident must be in our hands" ? For the benefit of those English people who, like Mr. Shaw, are unacquainted with the Prussian state psychology, I here present the reader with one hundred quotations from German professors, princes, politicians, officials, school- masters, pubhcists, and journalists, who {a) either praise war in the abstract as of moral benefit to a nation or advocate it in the concrete as a method of increasing the wealth and moral and industrial prosperity of the German Empire, or (6) point out that Great Britain stands in the way of Germany, and must be put out of that way by means of the sword. As to the German official attitude towards France, I have already quoted a typical passage from the writings of General Bernhardi, who, it should be remembered, is at this moment the German Official Propagandist for the United States ; but I include here one or two more official or semi-official utter- ances directed against France. In limiting myself to one hundred extracts I am having regard only to what I imagine to be the reader's patience. From the sources indicated I will, if necessary, disinter one thousand or five thousand similar passages, the number being limited simply by the time and the means at my disposal. I think the reader will find me justffied in generahsing from the extracts here given that : Military extension of the Empire and its sources of prosperity is at the base of every Prussian official and semi-official publicist's utterance. It is one of the reserve resources of the German Empire, which is taken as being there and ready for use, much as in English State finance, alcohol, tea, or cocoa is at the disposal of a Chancellor of the Exchequer if it be necessary to increase ABOUT THE WAR" 251 the revenue. That may be said to be the essential difference between the psychology of the German Empire under Prus- sian hegemony and the psychologies of every other civilised Power of the present day. One Hundred German Militarist Utterances T. Royal Personages, Governors, Officials The German Crown Prince,^ Friedrich Wxlhelm (1882- . Military career beginning with his studies as cadet, 1 896-1900). 1 . " For him who has once ridden in a charge in peace, there is nothing better except another ride, ending in a clash with the foe. How often in the midst of a charge have I caught the yearning cry of a comrade, ' Donnerwetter ! If it were only in earnest ! ' That is the cavalry spirit ; every true soldier must feel and know it." — From an article in " Germany in Arms " (1913). 2. " The German Empire has, more than any other peoples of our old earth, the sacred duty to maintain its army and its fleet always at the highest degree of readiness to strike. Only thus supported by our good sword can we obtain the place in the sun which is our due, but is not voluntarily con- ceded to us." — Ibid. See " The Kaiser's Heir," published in 1913, pp. 116-17. Prince von BtJLow, Bernhard (1849- . Ed. Lausanne, Leipsic, and Berlin. Entered Foreign Of6.ce 1874 ; Ambassador at Rome, Petersburg, and Vienna. Imperial Chancellor, 1900-1909). In " Imperial Germany," memoirs written after retirement from the office of Imperial Chancellor, Prince Biilow pointed out that the German fleet was directed against England, and said that in 1897 great care was necessary not to arouse too 1 I omit the Emperor's bellicose utterances. For one thing, they are matters of common knowledge ; for another, I regard them rather as the romantic gasconading of a slightly unbalanced mind that is apt to grow over-excited at the sight of swords and standards. 252 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE much popular enthusiasm for the fleet in Germany, for fear of awakening British suspicions. 3. " (In 1900) our Navy was not strong enough for us forcibly to achieve a sufficient sea-power in the teeth of English interests. . . ." — " Imperial Germany," p. 90. 4. " We desire amicable and even friendly relations with England, but w^e are not afraid of hostile ones. . . . We con- front England to-day, supported as we are by a Navy which demands respect in a very different manner from fifteen years ago, when it was a question of avoiding any conflict with England as long as possible, till we had built our fleet. At that time our foreign policy was to a certain extent regulated by the question of armaments ; it had to be carried on under abnormal conditions. To-day the normal state of affairs is restored ; our armaments are at the service of our policy ... we need no longer take such care to prevent England from injuring our safety and wounding our dignity ; with our own unaided strength we are able, as is meet for Germans, to defend our dignity and our interests against England at sea as we have for centuries defended them against the con- tinental powers on land." — " Imperial Germany," p. 94. 5. " Those times of political powerlessness and of economic and political humility shall not return. We will never again, to quote (Professor) Friedrich List, become the servant of humanity." — Speech in Reichstag, 1900. General von Falkenhayn, Prussian War Minister (1861- . Military career. Service in China. Became Chief of Staff. Made War Minister, 191 3). 6. " Without the Army not a stone of these proud walls would be standing, and no workman could earn his bread in peace."— Speech in Reichstag, December 3rd, 1913. Dr. Helfferich, Imperial Minister of Finance (1872- Held various important positions in commercial or financial concerns. In 1904 Professorship of Political Economy at Bonn offered, but refused. Became Director of the Deutsche Bank and in 19 14 Minister of Finance). 7. " For Germans war is the most sublime test of the moral ABOUT THE WAR" 253 and material strength of the people." — Budget Speech, March nth, 1914. Graf von Wedel, Karl, S. L., Statthalter (Imperial Gov- ernor) of Alsace-Lorraine (1842- . Military career. In 1907 became Governor of Alsace-Lorraine). 8. " Honour the Army, which represents the fine flower of our people and our sanctuary." — Speech on retirement, April 19th, 1 91 4. Dr. Bethmann-Hollweg, Imperial Chancellor (1856- Studied law. Various legal positions ; in 1905 became Prussian Minister for Home Affairs, and in 1909 Imperial Chancellor) . 9. " For months past we have been living, and we are living now, in an atmosphere of passion such as we have never before experienced in Germany. At the root of this feeling is the determination of Germany to make its strength and capability prevail over the world." — Speech in Reichstag, November loth, 191 2. 2. Political Party Leaders, etc. Abg. Bassermann, National Liberal Leader (1854- . In 1893 elected Member of Reichstag for Mannheim. Has represented other towns and now sits for Saarbriicken. President of the National Liberal Party. A consistent upholder of the Big-Fleet policy for Germany. In various speeches stated that Germany must keep friendly ' with England until she had a great Navy). 10. " King Edward VII's whole policy consisted in isolating and in hemming in Germany. That is a great development of the consciously pursued English policy which rests on a tradition of centuries — upon a tradition of always directing itself against the most powerful State of the Continent. That State is now Germany. . . . All these developments must make one thing clear to us — that we must keep our eyes open and our sword sharp." — Speech in Reichstag, December 5th 1911. 254 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE Abg. Kuebel, National Liberal. 11. At the National Liberal Conference at Boblingen he lamented the " angelic patience " {Engelsgeduld) Germany had shown in the Agadir affair. " A single blood-letting is preferable to a chronic disease." — Speech, October 15th, igii. Conference of Liberal Women (Berlin October 19th, 1911). 12. Passed a resolution denouncing England. One of its five clauses contained this sentence : " A well-planned World-Power and Colonial policy [" Welt- und Kolonial Politik"] is a question of life and death [" Le- bensfrage"] for the working classes." The resolution went on to demand a very great increase in the German Navy (" einen kraftvollen Ausbau der deutschen Flotte ") and stated that strivings for peace directed towards England were a real danger for Germany. — E. Bernstein's " Die englische Gefahr und das deutsche Volk" (The English Peril and the German People), 191 1. Abg. von Heydebrand, Conservative. 13. " We have succeeded for the first time in concluding a treaty with France. That, in the opinion of many people, is an approach to a lasting rapprochement. This view I do not share. I can understand that France feels quite satisfied with the situation. . . . What has assured peace to us is not common accord and mutual understanding ; it is our good German sword and the feeling that our Government is ready to draw this sword at the proper moment. ... I can under- stand that it now pleases England to forget these things and to know nothing, after its plans have succeeded — of driving France and Germany into a war which, possibly, might not have been to England's advantage. That Englishmen should forget such things I can well understand. But we Germans have not forgotten. . . . We know now where our enemy stands." — Speech in Reichstag, November nth, 191 1. It was at this point of this speech that the German Crown Prince applauded the speaker from a box. ABOUT THE WAR" 255 Abg. General von Liebert, Nationalist, Reichspartei (1850- . Military career. Fought in 1866 and 1870. Author of military works. President of Pan-German League. Elected to Reichstag in 1907). 14. " Germany has always worked for the whole world, but it must do so no longer (see item 5) in these days of Realpolitik and the wars of brigandage in Tripoli [Italy's Tripolitan campaign]. I fear particularly from the Morocco agreement with France that, in an eventual war, France will draw great masses of troops from that territory." — Speech in Reichstag, November nth, 191 1. 3. Soldiers [General Principles) Clausewitz, Karl von (i 780-1831. Prussian General, and greatest of German military writers). 15. "War is nothing but a continuation of political inter- course with a mixture of other means." — " Vom Kriege " (Of War), English Edition, 1873. Book VIII. p. 65. 16. " Let us not hear of generals who conquer without bloodshed. If a bloody slaughter is a horrible sight, then that is a ground for paying more respect to war, but not for making the sword we wear blunter and blunter from feelings of humanity, until some one steps in with one that is sharp and lops off the arm from our body." — Ibid. Book IV. p. 151. MoLTKE, Helmuth, Count von (1800-1891. Prussian General and one of the greatest of strategists. Victorious General in 1866 and 1870). 17. " The idea of universal peace is but a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. . . . War is an element in the order of the world as established by God. . . . Without war the world would grow corrupt, and lose itself in materialism." — Correspondence with Bluntschli. December nth, 1880. 18. " The war of 1866 was not a war for national existence, nor was it a war "called for by 'popular demand ; Jt was a war. 256 MR. SHAW'S "COMMON SENSE carefully and long prepared, in the Prussian Cabinet, a war for an ideal good — the establishment of our power ' [fiir ein idcalcs Gut — fiir unsere Machtstellung] ", — Moltke's Corre- spondence, vol. vii. p. 426. Prussian General Staff. ig. " But since the tendency of thought of the last century was dominated essentially by humanitarian considerations, which not infrequently degenerated into sentimentality and flabby emotion [" SentimentaUtat und weichlicher Gefiihls- schwarmerei"] there have not been wanting attempts to in- fluence the development of the usages of war in a way which was in fundamental contradiction with the nature of war and its object." — The reference is to the Hague Conference. 20. " By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions. It will teach him that certain severities are indis- pensable to war — nay, more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application." — "German War Book," Professor Morgan's translation, pp. 54-5. Particular General von der Goltz (1852- . Military career. Author of several military works, also two operas). 21. " The question, then, arises : Is a knowledge of war valuable to the ordinary mortal, when it may only tempt him to dare difficulties and dangers perhaps to his own undoing ? Certainly ! What true soldierly nature would hesitate long to brush aside all scruples and seize the opportunity, when offered, of wielding the baton of a Field-Marshal ? The prize is a great one ; it is that which beckons the poet and artist onward on a thorny path — Immortality ! This word has an irresistible charm. The fortunate warrior rescues his name from oblivion." — " Das Volk in Waff en " (the Nation in Arms), pp. 472-3. 22. (Quoted at some length by Ellis Barker: "Modern Germany," pp. 143-4). "We must contradict the opinion that has been freely expressed tha 198 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, i^ Roumanians, 234 Royal George, 95 Runnymede, 193 Russell, Hon. Bertrand, 7, 8, 10, 16, 150, 170, 171, 173, 175, 177, 222, 226 Russia, 17, 25, 39, 40, 41, 49^ 230, 231, 235, 239, 249, 278 279 Ruthenians, 178, 234 Rye, 207 St. Helena, 97 St. Michel, Mont, 73 St. Remy, 47 Salammbo (By Gustave Flau- bert), 75 Samoa, 119 296 INDEX Sandgate, 27, 104 Sandgate Bay, 104 Sandwich, 207 Sappho, 98 Sasonoff, M., 19, 232 Saxony, 51, 124 Schcllcndorf, General Bronsart von, 249 Schiefler, Gustav, 158 Schicrmonnikoog, 132 Schiffer, Abg., 179 Schlee, Abg., 174 Schieswig-Holstein, 50, 116, 233 Schiicking, Professor Walther, 32 Seine, 195 Serajevo, 46, 231 Serbia, 17, 18, 47, 48, 134, 239 Serbs, 178 Shakespeare, William, 19, 20, •]■>), 81, loi, 246 Shall this War end German Militarism ? (By Norman Angell), 225 Shantung, 128 Shaw, George Bernard, 4, 6-S, 10-15, 17-20, 23, 24, 28, 29, 37, 57. 81, 156, 169, 184-7, 225, 226. Appendix B, pages 233-83 Shorncliffe, 104 Silesia, 117 Sinclair, Upton, 184 Socialists, 116, 135-6 Solent, 120 Song to Aegir (By the Emperor WilUam IT), 124-5 South African War, 85, 135, 249, 272 Southey, Robert, 95 Sozialistische Monatshefte, 135, 267, 269 Spanish Navy, 100 Sparta, 266 Spee, Admiral von, 98 Spencer, Herbert, 2>li' 245 Spielhagen Banks, 143-4 Spion Kop, 85 Standard Oil Company, 104 Stapel, Wilhelm, 268 Stead, William T., 248, 249 Stein, H. S. Carl, Freiherr von und zum, 239, 240 Stein, L., 268 Sternberg case, 143 Strasbourg, 73, y6, 79 Strauss, David Friedrich, 11, 262 Siiddeulsche Monatshefte, 265 Sussex, 205-7 Sweden, 70, 160 Switzerland, 181 Tdgliche Rundschau, Der, 258 Talavera, Battle of, 5 1 Temps, Le, 271 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 81, 246 Teutonic Knights, Order of, 162 Tewkesbury, Battle of, 207 Theorie und Geschichte des Rechts zum Kriege (By Heinrich Rettich), 262 Thermopylae, Battle of, 75 Thiers, Adolphe, 217 Thorn, 171 Three Years' Service Act, French, 151, 152, 269 Tilbury, 93 Times, The, 12, 62, 245 Tirpitz, Alfred P. Admiral von, 123, 128-32, 135, 137-9, 141- 2, 200, 266 Tisza, Count, 12, 19 Titanic, 10 1 Tolstoy, Leo, 13, 246 Tom Cringle's Log (By Michael Scott), 95 Trafalgar, Battle of, 21 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 11, 32, 33, 198, 246, 250, 262-3, 275 Tripoli, 255 Truth about the Navy, The (By W. T. Stead), 248, 249 Tsar of Russia, 278 Tuileries, 73-4, 203 TUrkei und die Grossmdchte, Die (By Heinrich von Treitschke), 263 Turkey, 47, 239, 279, 280 Two Admirals, The (By Feni- more Cooper), 92 Tzschirner, Heinrich Gottlieb, 259 Ulm, 161 Union of Democratic Control, 8, 10, 14-16, 225, 226, 228 INDEX 297 United States of America, 76, 104, 239, 250 Unter den Linden, 84, 232 Vatican, 184 Ventoux, Mont, 212 Vergnet, Paul, 271 Versailles, 74 Vetus, Letters of, 249 Victoria and Albert Docks, 93 Victoria, Queen, 83, 124 Vienna, 47, 239 Vienna, Congress of, 239, 244 Villeneuve, Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Silvestre, 97, 183 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 260 Volk in Waff en, Das (By Frei- herr von der Goltz), 256 Volksblatt fiir Stadt und Land, 260 Voltaire, Arouet de, 721 Wagner, Professor Adolf von, 33, 157, 264 Wagner, Richard, i:^ Walmer, 27 Walther von der Vogelweide, 156, 246 War and the Workers (By Ram- say Macdonald), 225 War in the Air, The (By H, G. Wells), 248, 249 War, the Offspring of Fear (By the Hon. Bertrand Russell), 16, 225 Ward, Humphry, 220 Warum es der deutsche Krieg ist I (By Paul Rohrbach), 157 Was bedeutet das deutsche Kaiser- tum (By Professor J. Classen), 158 Was uns der Krieg bringen muss (By a German), 158 Waterloo, Battle of, 51, 193, 195, 279 Weald, 206 Wedel, Graf von, 253 Wehrverein, Der, 269 Wellington, Duke of, 183 Wells, H. G, II, 248, 250 Weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes, Die (By Professor Eucken), 157, 161-4 Weltkrieg ; Deutsche Trdume (By August Niemnn), 272 Weltkrieg, Der (By Paul Hein- sick), 158 Weltwirtschaftliche Aufgaben und welipolitische Ziele (By Ernst von Halle), 266 Wendel, Abg., 174 Wenn ich der Kaiser war (By Daniel Fryman), 267 Westarp, Kuno, Graf von, 241 Westphalia, 117, 236 Westward Ho (By Charles Kings- ley), 95 What does Germany Want ? (By W. N. Willis), 269 White Book, German, 17, 18 White Heather, 122 White Rose League, 81, 116 Wilkinson, Spenser, 248, 249, 250 William the Conqueror, 206-7 William I, German Emperor, 83, 260 William II, German Emperor, 8, 17, 19, 21, 24-7, 55, 84, 112, 118-25, 13s, 137-8, 141-2, 176, 232, 242, 250, 251, 273, 275, 276-8, 281-3, 285 Wilhs, W. N., 269 Winchelsea, 27 Woermann Lloyd Line, 103 Wolff-Metternich, Count Paul von, 21 Wolff-Metternich case, 168 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 156, 246 Wolfstieg, Professor, 166 Woltmann, Dr. Ludwig, 7$ Wordsworth, William, 81 Wreschen, 172-3, 176 Yorck von Wartenburg, Graf, 114, 284-5 Zabern, 84, 114, 167, 175-7 Zaberner Wochenhlatt, Das, 176 Zehn Jahre Deutsche Kdmpfe (By Heinrich von Treitschke), 263 Zukunft, Die, 266 Zukunftskrieg und Zukunfts- friede (By Hans Delbruck), 263 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY HAZELL, WATSON AND \TNEY, LD. LONDON AND AYLESBURY. AA 000 886 091 8