Speaking of Prussians–

And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a most dangerous thing for all the peoples of the earth, and a most evil thing, that into the world should come a scheme of military government so hellishly contrived and so exactly directed that, by the flirt of a colonel's thumb, a thousand men may, at will, be transformed from kindly, courageous, manly soldiers into relentless, ruthless executioners and incendiaries; and, by another flirt of that supreme and arrogant thumb, be converted back again into decent men.

VII

In peace the mental docility of the German, his willingness to accept an order unquestioningly and mechanically to obey it, may be a virtue, as we reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this same trait becomes a vice. In peace it makes him yet more peaceful; in war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace.

It is that very menace which must confront the American troopers who may be sent abroad for service. It is that very menace which must confront our people at home in the event that the enemy shall get near enough to our coasts to bombard our shore cities, or should he succeed in landing an expeditionary force upon American soil.

When I first came back from the war front I marvelled that sensible persons so often asked me what sort of people the Germans were, as though Germans were a stranger race, like Patagonians or the South Sea Islanders, living in some remote and untravelled corner of the globe. I felt like telling them that Germans in Germany were like the Germans they knew in America – in the main, God-fearing, orderly, hard-working, self-respecting citizens. But through these intervening months I have changed my mind; to-day I should make a different answer. I would say, to him who asked that question now, that the same tractability of temperament which, under the easy-going, flexible workings of our American plan of living makes the German-born American so readily conform to his physical and metaphysical surroundings here, and makes his progeny so soon to amalgamate with our fused and conglomerated stock, has the effect, in his Fatherland, of all the more easily and all the more firmly filling his mind and shaping his deeds in conformity with the exact and rigorous demands of the Prussianism that has been shackled upon him since his empire ceased to be a group of petty states.

We have got to remember, then, that the Germany with which we have broken is not the Germany of Heine and Goethe and Haeckel and Beethoven; not the Germany which gave us Steuben in the Revolutionary War, and Sigel and Schurz in the Civil War; not the Germany of the chivalrous, lovable Saxon, or yet of the music-loving, home-loving Bavarian; not the Germany which was the birthplace of the kindly, honourable, industrious, patriotic German-speaking neighbour round the corner from you – but the fanatical, tyrannical, power-mad, blood-and-iron Prussianised Germany of Bismarck and Von Bernhardi, of the Crown Prince and the Junkers – that passionate Prussianised Germany which for forty years through the instrumentality of its ruling classes – not necessarily its Kaiser, but its real ruling classes – has been jealously striving to pervert every native ounce of its scientific and its inventive and its creative genius out of the paths of progress and civilisation and to jam it into the grooves of the greatest autocratic machine, the greatest organism for killing off human beings, the greatest engine of misbegotten and misdirected efficiency that was ever created in the world. Because we have an admiration for one of these two Germanys is no more a reason why we should abate our indignation and our detestation for the other Germany than that because a man loves a cheery blaze upon his hearthstone he should refuse to fight a forest fire.

We have got to remember another thing. If our oversea observations of this war abroad have taught us anything, they should have taught us that the German Army – and when I say army I mean in this case, not its men but its officers, since in the German Army the officers are essentially the brain and the power and the motive force directing the unthinking, blindly obedient mass beneath them – that the German Army is not an army of good sportsmen. And that, I take it, is an even more important consideration upon the field of battle than it is upon the athletic field. As the saying goes, the Germans don't play the game. It is as inconceivable to imagine German officers going in for baseball or football or cricket as it is to imagine American volunteers marching the goose step or to imagine Englishmen relishing the cut-and-dried calisthenics of a Turnverein.

The Germans are not an outdoor race; they are not given to playing outdoor sports and abiding by the rules of those sports, as Englishmen and as Americans are. And in war – that biggest of all outdoor games – it stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules, except they be rules of their own making. It may be argued that the French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive sports. But, on the other hand, the Frenchman is essentially romantic and essentially dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory afterward, he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and the generous virtues rather than the cruel and the unkindly ones, because, as we all know, it is easier to dramatise one's good impulses than one's evil ones.

Now the German, as has recently been shown, is neither dramatic nor sportsmanlike. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad loser – a most remarkably bad loser. Good sportsmen would not have broken Belgium into bloody bits because Belgium stood between them and their goal; good sportsmen would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "Gott Strafe England!" their battle cry; good sportsmen would not have shot Edith Cavell or sunk the Lusitania. Good sportsmen would not have packed the helpless men and boys of a conquered and a prostrate land off as captives into an enforced servitude worse than African slavery; would not wantonly have wasted La Fère and Chauny and Ham, and a hundred other French towns, as they did in March and April of this year, for no conceivable reason than that they must surrender these towns back into the hand of the enemy; would not have cut down the little orchard trees nor shovelled dung into the drinking wells; would not, while ostensibly at peace with us, have plotted to destroy our industrial plants and to plant the seeds of sedition among our foreign-born citizens, and to dismember our country, parceling it out between a brown race in Mexico and a yellow race in Japan. Good sports do not do these things, and Germany did all of them. That means something.

VIII

Having spread the gospel of force for so long, Prussianised Germany can understand but one counter-argument – force. We must give her back blow for blow – a harder blow in return for each blow she gives us. "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just"; and our quarrel is just. All the same, to make war successfully we must make it with a whole heart. We must hold it to be a holy war; we must preach a jihad, remembering always, now that the Chinese Empire is a republic, now that Russia by revolution has thrown off the chains of autocracy, that we are fighting not only to punish the enemy for wrongs inflicted and insults overpatiently endured; not only to make the seas free to honest commerce; not only for the protection of our flag and our ships and the lives of our people at home and abroad – but along with England, France – yes, and Russia – are fighting for the preservation of the principles of constitutional and representative government against those few remaining crowned heads who hold by the divine right of kings, and who believe that man was created not a self-governing creature but a vassal.

Merely because we are willing to give of our wealth and our granaries and our steel mills, we cannot expect to have an honourable share in this war, and to share as an equal in its final settlement. We must risk something more precious than money; something more needful than munitions; we must risk our manhood. We cannot expect England's navy to stand between us and harm for our coasts, and France's worn battalions to bear the brunt of the trench work.

Knowing nothing of military expediency, I yet believe that, for the moral effect upon the world and for our own position, when the time for making peace comes it would be better for us, rather than the securing of our own soil against attack or invasion, that an American flag should wave over American troops in Flanders; that a Texas cow-puncher should lead a forlorn hope in France; that a Connecticut clockmaker should invent a device which will blunt the fangs of that stinging adder of the sea, the U-boat, and – who knows? – perhaps scotch the poison snake altogether.

Maybe it is true that, in our mistaken forbearance, we have failed and come short. Maybe we have endured too long and too patiently; we can atone for all that. But —

Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.

IX

I am coming now to what seems to me to be the most important consideration of all. In this war upon which we have entered our chief enemy is a nation firmly committed to the belief that whatever it may do is most agreeable in the sight of God. It is firmly committed to the belief that the acts of its Kaiser, its Crown Prince, its government, its statesmen, its generals and its armies are done in accordance with the will and the purposes of God. And, by the same token, it is committed, with equal firmness, to the conviction that the designs and the deeds of all the nations and all the peoples opposed to their nation must perforce be obnoxious to God. By the processes of their own peculiar theology – a theology which blossomed and began to bear its fruit after the war started, but for which the seed had been sown long before – God is not Our God but Their God. He is not the common creator of mankind, but a special Creator of Teutons. He is a German God. For you to say this would sound in American ears like sacrilege. For me to write it down here smacks of blasphemy and impiety. But to the German – in Germany – it is sound religion, founded upon the Gospels and the Creed, proven in the Scriptures, abundantly justified in the performances and the intentions of an anointed and a sanctified few millions among all the unnumbered millions who breed upon the earth.

Now here, by way of a beginning, is the proof of it. This proof is to be found in a collection of original poems published by a German pastor, the Reverend Herr Doktor Konsistorialrat D. Vorwerk. In the first edition of his book there occurred a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, of which the following are the last three petitions and the close:

"Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily death and tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful long-suffering each bullet and each blow which misses its mark! Lead us not into the temptation of letting our wrath be too tame in carrying out Thy divine judgment! Deliver us and our Ally from the infernal Enemy and his servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, The German Land; may we, by aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the power and the glory."

From subsequent editions of the work of Pastor Vorwerk this prayer was omitted. It is said to have been denounced as blasphemous by a religious journal, published in Germany – but not in Berlin. But evidently no one within the German Empire, either in authority or out of it, found any fault with the worthy pastor's sentiment that the Germans, above all other races – except possibly the Turks, who appear to have been taken into the Heavenly fold by a special dispensation – are particularly favoured and endowed of God, and enjoy His extraordinary – one might almost be tempted to say His private – guardianship, love and care. For in varying forms this fetishism is expressed in scores of places. Consider this example, which cannot have lost much of its original force in translation:

"How can it be that Germany is surrounded by nothing but enemies and has not a single friend? Is not this Germany's own fault? No! Do you not know that Prince of Hades, whose name is Envy, and who unites scoundrels and sunders heroes? Let us, therefore, rejoice that Envy has thus risen up against us; it only shows that God has exalted and richly blessed us. Think of Him who was hanged on the Cross and seemed forsaken of God, and had to tread in such loneliness His path to victory! My German people, even if thy road be strewn with thorns and beset by enemies, press onward, filled with defiance and confidence. The heavenly ladder is still standing. Thou and thy God, ye are the majority!"

I have quoted these extracts from the printed and circulated book of an ordained and reputable German clergyman, and presumably also a popular and respected German clergyman, because I honestly believe them to be not the individual mouthings of an isolated fanatic, but the voice of an enormous number of his fellow countrymen, expressing a conviction that has come to be common among them since August, 1914.

I believe, further, that they should be quoted because knowledge of them will the better help our own people here in the United States to understand the temper of a vast group of our enemies; will help us to understand the motives behind some of the forms of hostility and reprisal that undoubtedly they are going to attempt to inflict upon the United States; help us, I hope, to understand that, upon our part, in waging this war an over-measure of forbearance, a mistaken charity, or a faith in the virtue of his fair promises is only wasted when it is visited upon an adversary who, for his part, is upborne by the perverted spiritualism and the degenerated self-idolatry of a Mad Mullah. It is all very well to pour oil on troubled waters; it is foolishness to pour it on wildfire.

X

In this same connection it may not be amiss for us to consider the predominant and predominating viewpoints of another and an equally formidable group of the foemen. In October, 1913, nearly a year before Germany started the World War, one of the recognised leaders of the association who called themselves "Young Germany" wrote in the official organ, the accepted mouthpiece of the Junker set and the Crown Prince's favoured adherents, a remarkable statement – that is, it would have been a remarkable statement coming from any other source than the source from whence it did come. It read as follows:

"War is the noblest and holiest expression of human activity. For us, too, the great glad hour of battle will strike. Still and deep in the German heart must live the joy of battle and the longing for it. Let us ridicule to the uttermost the old women in breeches who fear war and deplore it as cruel or revolting. War is beautiful… When here on earth a battle is won by German arms and the faithful dead ascend to heaven, a Potsdam lance corporal will call the guard to the door and 'Old Fritz,' springing from his golden throne, will give the command to present arms. That is the heaven of Young Germany!"

The likening of Heaven to a place of eternal beatitude, populated by German soldiers, with a Potsdam lance corporal succeeding Saint Peter at the gate, and "Old Fritz" – Frederick the Great – in sole and triumphant occupancy of the Golden Throne, where, according to the conceptions of the most Christian races, The Almighty sits, is a picture requiring no comment.

It speaks for itself. Also it speaks for the paranoia of militant Prussianism.

I think I am in position to tell something of the growth of these sentiments among the Germans. As I stated on almost the first page of this little book, it fell to my lot to be on German soil in September and October of that first year of the Great War, before there was any prospect of our entering it as a belligerent Power, and when the civilian populace, having been exalted by the series of unbroken victories that had marked the first stage of hostilities for the German forces, east and west, was suffering from the depressions occasioned by the defeat before Paris, the retreat from the Marne back to the Aisne, and finally by the growing fear that Italy, instead of coming into the conflict as an ally of the two Teutonic Empires, might, if she became an active combatant at all, cast in her lot with France and with England.

It was from civilians that I got a sense of the intellectual motive powers behind the mass of civilians in Rhenish Prussia. It was from them that I learned something of the real German meaning of the German word Kultur. In view of recent and present developments on our side of the ocean, culminating in our entry into the war, I am constrained to believe I may perhaps, in my own small way, contribute to American readers some slight measure of appreciation of what that Kultur means and may mean as applied to other and lesser nations by its creators, protagonists and proud proprietors.

I heard nothing of Kultur from the German military men with whom I had theretofore come into contact in Belgium and in Northern France, and whom I still was meeting daily both in their social and in their official capacities. So far as one might judge by their language and their behaviour they, almost without an exception, were heartily at war for a hearty love of war – the officers, I mean. To them the war – the successful prosecution of it, regardless of the cost; the immediate glory, and the final ascendancy over all Europe and Asia of the German arms – was everything. With them nothing else counted but that – except, of course, the ultimate humbling of Great Britain in the dust. Seemingly the woful side of the situation, the losses and the sufferings and the horrors, concerned them not a whit. War for war's sake; that was their religion; never mind what had gone before; never mind what might come after. To make war terribly and successfully, to make it with frightfulness and with a frightful speed, was their sole aim.

Never did I hear them, or any one of them, openly invoking the aid of the Creator. They were content with the tools forged for their hands by their military overlords. As for the men in the ranks, if they did any thinking on their own account it was not visible upon the surface. Their business was to use their bodies, not their heads; their trade to obey orders. They knew that business and they followed that trade. And already poor little wasted Belgium stood a smoking, bloody monument to their thorough, painstaking and most efficient craftsmanship.

Nor, except among the green troops which had not yet been under fire, was there any expressed hatred, either with officers or men, for the opposing soldiers. During our experiences in the battle lines, and directly behind the battle lines, in the weeks immediately preceding the time of which I purpose to write, we had aimed at a plan of ascertaining, with perfect accuracy, whether the German forces we encountered had seen any service except theoretical service. If we ran across a command whose members spoke contemptuously of the French or the English or the Belgian soldiers, we might make sure in our own minds that here were men who had yet to come to grips at close range with their enemy.

On the other hand, troops who actually had seen hard fighting rarely failed to evince a sincere respect, and in some instances a sort of reluctant admiration, for the courage and the steadfastness of their adversaries. They were convinced – and that I suppose was only natural – of the superiority of the German soldiers, man for man, over the soldiers of any other nation; but they had been cured of the earlier delusion that most of the stalwart heroes were to be found on the one side and most of the weaklings and cravens on the other.

Likewise the hot furnaces of battle had smelted much of the hate out of their hearts. The slag was gone; what remained was the right metal of soldierliness. I imagine this has been true in a greater or less degree of all so-called civilised wars where brave and resolute men have fought against brave and resolute men. Certainly I know it to have been true of the first periods of this present war.

XI

But fifty or a hundred miles away on German soil, among the home-biding populace, was a different story. It was there I found out about Kultur. It was there I first began to realise that, not content with assuming a direct and intimate partnership with Providence, civilian Germany was taking Providence under its patronage, was remodelling its conceptions of Deity to be purely and solely a German Deity.

That more or less ribald jingle called "Me und Gott!" aimed at the Kaiser and frequently repeated in this country a few years before, had, in the face of what we now beheld, altogether lost the force of its one-time humorous application. As we appraised the prevalent sentiment, it had, in the sober, serious consciousness of otherwise sane men and women, become the truth and less than the truth.

Any Christian race, going to war in what it esteems to be a righteous cause, prays to God to bless its campaigns with victory and to sustain its arms with fortitude. It had remained for this Christian race to assume that the God to whom they addressed their petitions was their own peculiar God, and that His Kingdom on Earth was Germany and Germany only; and that His chosen people now and forevermore would be Germans and Germans only.

This is not a wild statement. Trustworthy evidence in support of it will presently be offered.

We met some weirdly interesting persons during our enforced sojourn there in Aix la Chapelle in September and October of that year. There was, for example, the invalided officer who never spoke of England or the English that he did not grind his teeth together audibly. I have never yet been able to decide whether this was a bit of theatricalism designed to make more forcible than the words he uttered his detestation for the country which, most of all, had balked Germany in her designs upon France and upon the mastery of the seas – a sort of dental punctuation for his spoken anathemas, as it were – or whether it was an involuntary expression of his feelings. In either event he grated his teeth very loudly, very frequently and very effectively.

There was the young German petty officer, also on sick leave, who told me with great earnestness and professed to believe the truth of it that two captured English surgeons had been summarily executed because in their surgical kits had been found instruments especially designed for the purpose of gouging out the eyes of wounded and helpless Germans.

And there was the spectacled scientist-author-spy, who dropped in on two of us one morning at the hotel where we were quartered, and who thereafter favoured us at close intervals with many hours of his company. It was from this person more than from any other that I acquired what I believed to be a fairly adequate conception of the views held then and thereafter and now by an overwhelming majority of educated Prussians, trained in the Prussian school of thought and propaganda.

I cannot now recall this person's name, though I knew it well at the time; but I do recall his appearance. He was tall and slender, with red hair; a lean, keen intellectual face; and a pair of weak, pale-blue eyes, looking out through heavy convex glasses. He spoke English, French and Danish with fluency. He had been a world traveller and had written books on the subject of travel, which he showed us. He had been an inventor of electrical devices and had written at least one book on the subject of electric-lighting development. He had been an amateur photographer of some note evidently, and had written rather extensively on that subject.

His present employment was not so easily discerned, though it was quite plain that, like nearly every intelligent civilian in that part of Germany, he was engaged upon some service more or less closely related to the military and governmental activities of the empire. He wore the brassard of the Red Cross on his arm, it is true, but apparently had nothing really to do with hospital or ambulance work. And he had at his disposal a military automobile, in which he made frequent and more or less extended excursions into the occupied territory of France and Belgium.

After one or two visits from him we decided that, by some higher authority, he had been assigned to the dual task of ascertaining our own views regarding Germany's part in the conflict and of influencing our minds if possible to accept the views he and his class held. He may have had an even more important mission; we thought sometimes that he perhaps was doing a little espionage work, either on his own account or under orders, because he began to seek our company about the time we noted a cessation of clumsy activities on the part of those two preposterously mysterious sleuths of the German Secret Service who, until then, had been watching us pretty closely.