Chapter III (6)

Nearly all the public documents issued by the German Government during this war, and all the speeches of its statesmen, are thick-inlaid with statements which, if not blank lies, and known by the speaker or writer to be lies, are yet proofs of some disordered quality in the mind of the speaker or writer. Sometimes the speaker seems to be self-hypnotised, so that he really believes a lie as big as a mountain to be the truth; or he suffers from some eccentric paralysis of the memory which enables him to forget what he has said, or written, only a moment before.

The famous ‘scrap of paper’ incident, taken as a whole, has the office of a searchlight as showing the morbid condition both of German morals and of German intelligence. Anybody with a touch of literary imagination will look back upon that scene in a room in Berlin, when the German Chancellor complained to Sir Edward Goschen, ‘You are going to war with us over a scrap of paper,’ and recognise it as one of the most picturesque, as well as the great and critical, moments in history. The German represented the greatest military Power in the world, the Englishman the greatest naval Power. Had both agreed to dismiss as a mere ‘scrap of paper’ the treaty that guards the neutrality of Belgium, the sanctity of all treaties would have disappeared at a breath.

But that dismissal into space as a mere scrap of paper of the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, which bore the name of Germany, was to Germany herself a worse disaster than the loss of a pitched battle. It was a form of suicide. It destroyed her public credit; it dismissed her from the realm of good faith. When, at the end of the war, the representatives of the nations now in conflict sit around some table in London or in Paris to draw up terms of peace, the ghost of this scrap of paper will cost Germany much, for she has stripped herself of all title to be trusted. Now, a blunder so unspeakably stupid on the part of men so able shows that at that moment, and in that act, the brains of the men who were the representatives of Germany were in some curious state of paralysis.

But this gigantic blunder is to this day being pursued by Germany with explanations and justifications which, as examples of unreason, suggest nothing so much as the logic employed in ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ The German Chancellor himself some time afterwards asked the world to believe that what he meant was that ‘a scrap of paper’ represented the _British_ idea of the value of a treaty, while Germany ‘took her responsibility towards neutral States seriously.’ And Bethmann-Hollweg offered this explanation after Germany had actually violated Belgian neutrality, and Great Britain had gone to war to maintain it!

The German Chancellor offered, in the very same speech, yet another explanation in open quarrel with the explanation just given. At the time he described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper,’ he had ‘reason to believe,’ he told the Reichstag, that the Belgians themselves had destroyed their own neutrality by a convention they had made with England for the introduction of British troops; but as he lacked formal proof of the circumstance, he did not mention it at the time. Since then they had captured Brussels, and found, in the archives there, the actual text of the convention with England, by which Belgium violated its own neutrality. As a matter of fact, the guilty document which the German Chancellor quoted was not a ‘convention’ at all, but notes of a ‘conversation’ betwixt the British military attaché and Major-General Ducalme, a Belgian officer. It was an academic discussion of what might be done ‘after Germany had entered Belgian territory’; and it was endorsed as ‘not binding’ on either of the two nations. And the German Chancellor quotes this discussion of what might be done to _guard_ its neutrality against German attack as a _surrender_ of its neutrality. This is very much as though a burglar, caught in the act of plundering a house, claimed that his burglary was justifiable, as he found—_after_ he had broken into the house—that its owner had a revolver under his pillow.

The doctrine of the freedom of the sea which Germany has suddenly begun to preach at the top of its voice is yet another proof of either the entire absence of any sense of humour in the German mind, or of a morbid condition of the German conscience. For Great Britain, the geographical distribution of her Empire makes an overwhelming superiority in naval power a condition of its existence; but the seas of the planet, under her supremacy, have been free to every flag—except the black flag of the pirate. She has never abused her sea-power. It is Germany that has made the sea terrible by sowing it with drifting mines and making it a field for the performances of its submarines. Great Britain has supreme power on the sea, Germany has—or _had_—supreme military power on land; and what Germany means by ‘the freedom of the sea’ is that Great Britain’s advantage should be cancelled out of existence, while her own advantage should remain undiminished.

It is worth quoting the words in which, in his clear-cut, sword-edged prose, Mr. A. J. Balfour analyses and describes this new German doctrine. ‘The most simple-minded,’ he says, ‘must feel suspicious when they find that _these missionaries of maritime freedom are the very same persons who preach and who practise upon the land the extremest doctrines of military absolutism_.

‘She poses as a reformer of international law, though international law has never bound her for an hour. She objects to “economic pressure” when it is exercised by a fleet, though she sets no limit to the brutal completeness with which economic pressure may be imposed by an army. She sighs over the suffering which war imposes upon peaceful commerce, though her own methods of dealing with peaceful commerce would have wrung the conscience of Captain Kidd. She denounces the maritime methods of the Allies, though in her efforts to defeat them she is deterred neither by the rules of war, the appeal of humanity, nor the rights of neutrals.’

Now, when a Power like Germany, with such a record on the sea, attires itself in the garb of a missionary, and begins to preach the gospel of ‘the freedom of the sea,’ the phenomenon appeals to the literary imagination by its exquisite absurdity; to the alienist it suggests the urgent need of medical treatment.

That the Power which has scorched with fire and splashed red with blood the little State it had sworn to protect, which sank the _Lusitania_ and shot Nurse Cavell, should complain to high heaven that Great Britain had broken the regulations of the Hague Convention, is an audacity which paralyses the sane intelligence. It is as though Jack the Ripper published a tract against vivisection, or Deeming wrote a pious homily on ‘How to Make Home Happy.’

Another illustration of this lunatic quality in the German mind is found in the furious complaints against Great Britain for starving—or for even _trying_ to starve—Germany, including its women and children. And yet it was Germany that in 1870 drew lines of blockade around Paris, and waited for starvation to bring the ‘gay city’ to surrender! No German city yet has known the horrors of starvation as the German armies compelled Paris to know them. The death-rate of little children during those sad months rose to 5000 a week, and Bismarck, when he rode into Paris after its surrender, expressed his surprise at seeing _any_ children yet alive. Von Hindenburg, when told quite recently that Russian peasants were starving in Poland, said ‘It is just as well that it should be so; we cannot make war sentimentally.’ Then he repeated the formula which is the true credo of every Prussian soldier: ‘_The more ruthlessly war is waged, the more humane does it really become_; for that is the best way to bring it to a rapid conclusion.’ But what more complete proof of the one-sidedness of the German mind can be discovered than the fact, say, that at the present moment it is itself starving Belgium, so that its inhabitants have to be fed by the pity of the world, and at the same time it is screaming aloud to the whole universe because the meat ration in Berlin has to be reduced in consequence of the British blockade? The puzzle is not so much that Germany acts with such gaping inconsistency; it has not the faintest notion that it is inconsistent. This is a mental condition rare outside, and not even always found _inside_, a lunatic asylum.

The delirious self-complacency of the Prussianised German, again, leaves the whole outside world speechless. There is no other such instance of megalomania in history. No other people pay such loud compliments to themselves, and pay them with such unashamed diligence. They decorate themselves with compliments as a savage decorates himself with bits of broken glass. A philosopher like Hegel set the example of proclaiming in German accents and to German ears the ‘godlike glory’ of the German nation. The ‘spiritual nature of Germanism,’ we are assured seven days a week by German editors, makes it the standard-bearer of Christian Europe. Morality, we are warned, ‘depends on the preservation of the Christian Germanic spirit and on the political power of Germany. Civilisation and Christianity are unthinkable without the Germans.’

‘Germany,’ says Professor Lamprecht, ‘is now the protector and pillar of European civilisation; and after bloody victories the world will be healed by being Germanised.’ ‘We Germans are singled out by Providence to march at the head of all _Kultur_ people.... We have the highest mental creative gifts; we form the crown of _Kultur_ in the whole of creation.’ Can anyone doubt, after reading through pages like this, that Germany is self-hypnotised? There must be some morbid condition in the character which thus exudes compliments to itself through every pore in its skin. It is the sign of a disordered intelligence.

The doctrine of ‘frightfulness,’ as a method in war, is the special contribution of Germany to the present conflict. It is curious, however, to remember that the most terrible example of ‘frightfulness,’ as far as Europe is concerned, was supplied by Germany 300 years ago in the famous, or rather infamous, Thirty Years’ War; and a chapter from its grim pages reads like nothing so much as a page from the German performances in Belgium in 1914-15. The slaughter in Germany during that period was so huge that in 1648 the country had only a third of the population of 1618; in some districts the depopulation was so great that every man was allowed to have _two_ wives! It is a German historian who says that ‘even now the injury done to the psychology of the German people by the moral and intellectual decay of the Thirty Years’ War has hardly been repaired.’ Those words were written before the present war broke out, but there are some pages in the performances of Germany to-day that justify that statement.

What makes the folly of Germany to-day absolutely unique, however, is the fact that, in its adoption of ‘frightfulness’ as a war measure, it takes the performances of the Thirty Years’ War, translates them into modern terms, practises them on a new scale, and _enjoins_ them as _virtues_! The German soldier is instructed, for reasons of humanity, to be as inhuman as possible; and the German War Book gives grim details of what can be done, and supports its instructions by logic which, if it is dreadful, is certainly plausible. If war is made more frightful, it is argued, it will be made shorter; so it is a service to humanity to bombard defenceless towns, burn whole villages, shoot unarmed citizens, including women and children. One German divine, indeed—and German divines during this war have done and said some wonderful things—preached a sermon to show that ‘frightfulness’ carried to the _n_th was a form—a German form—of fulfilling the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ‘If you love your neighbour, you will do your best to prevent him being caught in the red tide of war—or to get him out of it—as early as possible; and you will achieve this best by making war as terrible as you can.’

The committee which inquired into German atrocities in Belgium, and is responsible for the Bryce Report, had on it such shrewd, practical, hard-headed men as Lord Bryce, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollock, and their report is the most dreadful indictment ever drawn up against any nation, civilised or uncivilised.

It says: ‘In the minds of Prussian officers, war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feeling.... Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory.’ Then a very pregnant sentence is added: ‘It is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession, and been hypnotised by its spirit.... If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible, though not less pernicious.’

The use of ‘frightfulness’ as a method of war, in other words, is the result of diseased psychological conditions. To have ‘brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war’ is a process which might well result in an evil obsession as real, and as devilish in its spirit and its fruits, as possession by the devil himself. But the most astonishing thing in this whole astonishing story is that Germany betrays no sense that it has done anything worthy of blame. It learns with a bewildered exasperation that the outside world disapproves of this example of German ‘culture.’ The Kaiser is quite sure that he has the Divine approval in this, and everything else he does. From the wireless station at Berlin an official ‘explanation’ of this stupendous crime of a destroyed city was sent to the newspapers of the world:

‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil
population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity,
and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a
warning to the whole country.’

Now, as an example of inverted ethics, this is almost worthy of a place in De Quincey’s essay on ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ‘The German Government,’ says Secretary Hay, ‘is generally brutal, but not often silly.’ Here, however, it is at once both silly and brutal in a quite superlative degree. It is, of course, exactly this doctrine of ‘frightfulness’ which has made Germany the outlaw of the civilised world.

Perhaps nothing in this war will so sharply arrest what we have called the literary imagination as the uncertainty, the dim half-lights as to its reasons and issues, with which it began.

Some of the ‘explanations’ of the war are foolish; some are cynical. The Hon. Bertrand Russell, for example, has written a book on the war in which he says the nations of Central Europe are fighting for much the same reason dogs do—because ‘_they don’t like each other’s smell_‘! Would anyone quote now, as an explanation of the war, that couple of pistol-shots in a street in Serajevo which slew the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife? It is like offering the bursting of a soda-water bottle as the explanation of a Niagara, or tracing an earthquake to the explosion of a cracker. The Austrian ultimatum to Servia seems to be the match which fired the magazine; but if there had been no ‘magazine’ the ‘match’ would have been quite innocent.

For Great Britain, the first reason of the war was something immediate and concrete—the German invasion of Belgium. Great Britain was pledged, both by express treaty and by its historic policy, to maintain that neutrality; and when the German columns crossed the Belgian frontier war was inevitable. It was a simple question of good faith; England, Mr. Asquith declared, must keep her pledged word. But when the war was begun it was quickly realised that the existence of the Empire depended on its result; and so Mr. Bonar Law told the House of Commons, ‘This is a fight for our national existence.’ That is certainly true, and it applies with greatest force to the Dominions. If the British Empire goes into liquidation, the most coveted assets will be Australia, with its 12,000 miles of girdling sea, its radiant climate, its mineral wealth, its vast pastures, or New Zealand, the Great Britain of the Pacific. The men in the French and Flemish trenches are certainly fighting for—amongst other things—the safety of every home in Australia and New Zealand. But the war raised the question of the value of the treaty relations which bind civilised States together; so, as Lord Rosebery put it, we are fighting for ‘the sanctity of public law in Europe.’ A German victory would turn every treaty throughout Christendom into a ‘scrap of paper.’ In the first message, again, King George addressed to the Empire, he said, ‘We are fighting for the continuity of civilisation;’ and _that_ also is true. The defeat of the Allies would put not only Europe, but Christendom, back into the Dark Ages.

In this way, as the war went on, its ‘reasons’ expanded: the obligation of the pledged word; our national existence; the sanctity of public law; the continuity of civilisation. Yet even these reasons all put together are inadequate. There remains something in the war differentiating it from any other ever fought; some intangible and invisible element not easy to define. In his famous speech in the Guildhall Mr. Asquith expressed this by saying ‘This is not so much a material as a spiritual conflict.’ It is a conflict, in other words, not racial, political, dynastic, or a mere wrestle of political ideals. It is a battle of opposing ethical codes. We are fighting not merely a nation, but a doctrine—something that steel cannot pierce nor high explosives wreck. And it is a doctrine armed, disciplined, terrible; fighting with 17-inch howitzers and poisonous gases, with submarines.

But what exactly is the ‘doctrine’ against which we are fighting? It is customary to quote Nietzsche at this point, and find in his teaching the germ of the ‘doctrine’ for which to-day Germany fights, and against which the rest of the world is in arms. But for one thing it is difficult to discover any single sustained and intelligible ‘doctrine’ in the structure of Nietzsche’s works. He died in a lunatic asylum, and had a strain of lunacy in his writings, if not in his blood, long before his insanity came under medical treatment. He had a touch of genius, but thin partitions divided his genius from madness. If Germany took its creed from Nietzsche it would be not only furiously anti-Christian and furiously atheistic, but even furiously non-moral. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche said, ‘ought to be shot at. Pangs of conscience were indecent.’ In that dim realm into which his half-insane mind wandered—the ‘twilight of the gods’—evil and good had no existence. As for Christianity, he called it ‘the greatest of all conceivable corruptions,’ the ‘one immortal blemish of mankind.’ Jesus Christ, for Nietzsche, was ‘a knave, a charlatan.’ Everyone knows how Nietzsche took the Beatitudes and inverted them. His creed combined the theology of a lunatic asylum with the ethics of a gaol. Now the Germany against which the world is fighting to-day is certainly not atheistic, and it at least thinks itself to be intensely Christian.

What makes the tragedy of Germany in this war, the thing which puzzles even those who are fighting against it, is the fact that Germany is acting on a doctrine stranger and more terrible than Paganism itself. It undertakes to be _both_ Christian and Pagan at the same time; Christian in the individual life, Pagan as a nation. It has two eternally hostile codes of ethics: one for the individual and the other for the State. As a private citizen the German may be a Christian, and ought to be one; but the moment he puts on a spike-helmet, or sits at a Government desk, he strips himself of all Christian morals; vice and virtue change their names for him. As a soldier he can clothe himself with ‘frightfulness’; can rape, plunder, kill, burn, with the entire approval of his official—that is to say, his Paganised—conscience. As a diplomatist, he can lie and cheat and forswear himself, and leave his Christian self-respect untouched. For Germany acts on the theory that the State is a non-moral, predatory entity, for which the distinction betwixt good and evil does not exist. It stands in no relation to God; it has no more morals than a tiger; it acts on the law of the jungle. Might, in its dreadful code, is right.

In the Prussianised Germany against which we are fighting we have, in brief, a double personality. When it acts as a nation it undergoes a transformation more terrible than that in R. L. Stevenson’s tale when Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde. All the separate individualities of Germany melt into one gigantic Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde in a spike-helmet. Or, to change the figure, they become the ‘great blond beast’ of Nietzsche, lawless, predatory, invincible, the superman, a non-moral monster. The supermen, says Nietzsche, ‘where a foreign country begins, revert to the beast-of-prey conscience, like jubilant monsters who come with bravado from a ghastly bout of murder, arson, rape, and torture.... The nation becomes a magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.’

Treitschke, the little stone-deaf professor of history, proclaimed the doctrine that the State is a non-moral entity, for which an ethical code has no meaning. Bernhardi puts the matter more explicitly. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘came into the world to establish a society founded on love; but that principle does not extend to the State’; in all that concerns the State, Jesus Christ has no authority. His laws do not extend to _that_ realm. When before in history have we this doctrine proclaimed from the iron lips of 17-inch howitzers? Here lies the explanation of all that puzzles us in the present war—the strange perversities discoverable in German policy: its contempt for truth, its capacity for cruelty; its blindness to moral distinctions. We are fighting with a nation which, taken individually, believes itself to be Christian; but, taken as a nation, it is by deliberate choice Pagan.

‘_They chose new gods ... then was war in the gate_;’ so runs an ancient Hebrew psalm, explaining a dark page in a dark history. In those words, cause and effect are set side by side. Germany has certainly chosen ‘a new god’; a god of war; the god of high explosives, of poison gases, of submarines; a god of material forces, of battles and bloodshed—as ultimate arbiter in the struggle to spread the Pan-German ideal. Everyone remembers how Nietzsche inverted the Beatitudes. ‘Blessed,’ he said, ‘are’—not the meek—but ‘the strong, for _they_ shall inherit the earth.’ ‘Blessed are’—not the peacemakers—but ‘the war-makers, for they shall be called the sons of Odin.’ Cramb said that in Europe two great spiritual forces, Napoleon and Christ, oppose each other, and their conflict is ‘the most significant spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century.’ He adds that, in Germany, ‘Corsica has conquered Galilee’; Napoleon, or what Napoleon represents, is worshipped; not Christ, or what Christ teaches.

But the Germans do not understand even the Napoleon they accept as their ideal. That great master of the art of war himself said that ‘in war moral forces were to material forces as three to one.’ It is true that by ‘moral’ Napoleon did not exactly mean ‘ethical’; but the ethical is an essential part of the moral. Germany forgets—or inverts—the ethical; and that is the most fatal of blunders. For, as Carlyle teaches, this is a world of facts, and the first condition of success in any realm is fidelity to facts. And certainly the most important kinds of ‘facts’ are in the ethical order. They have the quality of eternity in them. This world has been so constructed by its Maker that a falsehood is in quarrel with the very system of things, and the Prussianised Germany, which has set the world in a flame with its greeds, and hates, and envies, is fighting against the ‘system of things.’

We, on our part, have greater allies than the nations knitted to us by formal treaties. With the change of a single word we can adopt Wordsworth’s memorable lines:

‘... Thou hast great allies,
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And Love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’

But in this war we have still mightier allies than these. All the forces that make for truth, for humanity, for honour, for justice, for freedom, are our allies. These are the enduring forces of the universe; and the Maker and Ruler of these forces, of whose character they are the reflex and of whose will they are the servants, is on our side too.