THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF
THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF
BEING “THE USAGES OF WAR ON LAND”
ISSUED BY THE GREAT GENERAL
STAFF OF THE GERMAN ARMY
TRANSLATED WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
BY
J. H. MORGAN, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AT UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON, LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL
COLLEGE, OXFORD; JOINT AUTHOR OF
“WAR: ITS CONDUCT AND ITS
LEGAL RESULTS”
NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1915
Copyright, 1915, by
MCBRIDE, NAST & CO.
Published March, 1915
TO
THE LORD FITZMAURICE
IN TOKEN OF
FOURTEEN YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
AND OF
MUCH WISE COUNSEL IN THE STUDY
OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
PREFATORY NOTE
The text of this book is a literal and integral translation of the
_Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege_ issued and re-issued by the German
General Staff for the instruction of German officers. It is the most
authoritative work of its kind in Germany and takes precedence over
all other publications whether military or legal, alike over the works
of Bernhardi the soldier and of Holtzendorff the jurist. As will be
shown in detail in the critical introduction, The Hague Conventions are
treated by the authors as little more than “scraps of paper”--the only
“laws” recognized by the German Staff are the military usages laid down
in the pages of the Manual, and resting upon “a calculating egotism”
and injudicious “form of reprisals.”
I have treated the original text with religious respect, seeking
neither to extenuate nor to set down aught in malice. The text is by
no means elegant, but, having regard to the profound significance of
the views therein expressed or suggested, I have thought it my duty
as a translator to sacrifice grace to fidelity. Text, footnotes, and
capital headlines are all literally translated in their entirety. When
I have added footnotes of my own they are enclosed in square brackets.
The marginal notes have been added in order to supply the reader with
a continuous clue. In the Critical Introduction which precedes the
text I have attempted to show the intellectual pedigree of the book as
the true child of the Prussian military tradition, and to exhibit its
degrees of affinity with German morals and with German policy--with
“Politik” and “Kultur.” I have therefore attempted a short study of
German diplomacy, politics, and academic teaching since 1870, with
some side glances at the writings of German soldiers and jurists. All
these, it must be remembered, are integrally related; they all envisage
the same problem. That problem is War. In the German imagination the
Temple of Janus is never closed. Peace is but a suspension of the
state of war instead of war being a rude interruption of a state of
peace. The temperament of the German is saturated with this belligerent
emotion and every one who is not with him is against him. An unbroken
chain links together Clausewitz, Bismarck, Treitschke, von der Goltz,
Bernhardi, and the official exponents of German policy to-day. The
teaching of Clausewitz that war is a continuation of policy has sunk
deeply into the German mind, with the result that their conception of
foreign policy is to provoke a constant apprehension of war.
The first part of the Introduction appears in print for the first time.
In the second and third parts I have incorporated a short essay on
Treitschke which has appeared in the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_
(in October last), a criticism of German diplomacy and politics which
was originally contributed to the _Spectator_ in 1906 and a study of
the German professors which was published, under the title of “The
Academic Garrison,” in the _Times_ Supplement of Sept. 1st, 1914. I
desire to thank the respective Editors for their kindness in allowing
me to reproduce here what I had already written there.
J. H. M.
CONTENTS
PAGE
DEDICATION v
PREFATORY NOTE vii
INTRODUCTION--
I THE GERMAN VIEW OF WAR 1
II GERMAN DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT 16
III GERMAN CULTURE: THE ACADEMIC GARRISON 44
IV GERMAN THOUGHT: TREITSCHKE 53
V CONCLUSION 65
CONTENTS OF THE WAR BOOK OF THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF--
INTRODUCTION 67
PART I
USAGES OF WAR AS REGARDS THE ENEMY’S ARMY
I WHO BELONGS TO THE HOSTILE ARMY 75
Regular Army--Irregular Troops--People’s Wars and National
Wars.
II THE MEANS OF CONDUCTING WAR 84
A.--MEANS OF WAR DEPENDING ON FORCE 85
1. Annihilation, slaughter, and wounding of hostile
combatants.
2. Capture of Enemy combatants:
Modern conception of war captivity--Who is subject
to it?--Point of view for treatment of prisoners of
war--Right to put prisoners to death--Termination
of the captivity--Transport of Prisoners.
3. Sieges and Bombardments:
(_a_) Fortresses, strong places and fortified
places. Notification of bombardment--Scope of
bombardment--Treatment of civil population within
an enemy’s fortress--Diplomatists of neutral
States within a besieged fortress--Treatment of
the fortress after storming it. (_b_) Open towns,
villages, buildings and the like, which, however,
are occupied or used for military purposes.
B.--METHODS NOT INVOLVING THE USE OF FORCE 110
Cunning and deceit--Lawful and unlawful stratagem.
III TREATMENT OF WOUNDED AND SICK SOLDIERS 115
Modern view of non-effective combatants--Geneva
Convention--Hyenas of the battlefield.
IV INTERCOURSE BETWEEN BELLIGERENT ARMIES 117
Bearers of flags of truce--Treatment of them--Forms
as to their reception.
V SCOUTS AND SPIES 124
The notion of a spy--Treatment.
VI DESERTERS AND RENEGADES 127
VII CIVILIANS IN THE TRAIN OF AN ARMY 128
General--Authorizations--The representatives of the
Press.
VIII THE EXTERNAL MARK OF INVIOLABILITY 133
IX WAR TREATIES 135
A.--TREATIES OF EXCHANGE 135
B.--TREATIES OF CAPITULATION 136
C.--SAFE-CONDUCTS 140
D.--TREATIES OF ARMISTICE 141
PART II
USAGES OF WAR IN REGARD TO ENEMY TERRITORY AND ITS INHABITANTS
I RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF THE INHABITANTS 147
General Notions--Rights--Duties--Hostages--Jurisdiction
in enemy’s provinces when occupied--War rebellion and War
treason.
II PRIVATE PROPERTY IN WAR 161
III BOOTY AND PLUNDERING 167
Real and Personal State Property--Real and Personal
Private Property.
IV REQUISITIONS AND WAR LEVIES 174
V ADMINISTRATION OF OCCUPIED TERRITORY 180
General--Legislation--Relation of inhabitants to the
Provisional Government--Courts--Officials--Administration--
Railways.
PART III
USAGES OF WAR AS REGARDS NEUTRAL STATES 187
Idea of neutrality--Duties of neutral States--Contraband
of war--Rights of neutral States.
CONTENTS
OF EDITOR’S MARGINAL COMMENTARY
PAGE
What is a State of War 67
Active Persons and Passive 67
That War is no respector of Persons 68
The Usages of War 69
Of the futility of Written Agreements as Scraps of Paper 70
The “flabby emotion” of Humanitarianism 71
That Cruelty is often “the truest humanity” 72
The perfect Officer 72
Who are Combatants and who are not 75
The Irregular 76
Each State must decide for itself 77
The necessity of Authorization 77
Exceptions which prove the rule 77
The Free Lance 78
Modern views 79
The German Military View 80
The _Levée en masse_ 81
The Hague Regulations will not do 83
A short way with the Defender of his Country 83
Violence and Cunning 84
How to make an end of the Enemy 85
The Rules of the Game 85
Colored Troops are Blacklegs 87
Prisoners of War 88
_Væ Victis!_ 89
The Modern View 89
Prisoners of War are to be Honorably treated 90
Who may be made Prisoners 91
The treatment of Prisoners of War 92
Their confinement 92
The Prisoner and his Taskmaster 93
Flight 94
Diet 95
Letters 95
Personal belongings 95
The Information Bureau 96
When Prisoners may be put to Death 97
“Reprisals” 97
One must not be too scrupulous 98
The end of Captivity 99
Parole 100
Exchange of Prisoners 102
Removal of Prisoners 102
Sieges and Bombardments: Fair Game 103
Of making the most of one’s opportunity 104
Spare the Churches 105
A Bombardment is no Respector of Persons 105
A timely severity 106
“Undefended Places” 108
Stratagems 110
What are “dirty tricks”? 111
The apophthegm of Frederick the Great 111
Of False Uniforms 112
The Corruption of others may be useful 113
And Murder is one of the Fine Arts 114
That the ugly is often expedient, and that it is a mistake to
be too “nice-minded” 114
The Sanctity of the Geneva Convention 115
The “Hyenas of the Battlefield” 116
Flags of Truce 117
The Etiquette of Flags of Truce 119
The Envoy 120
His approach 120
The Challenge--“Wer da?” 120
His reception 120
He dismounts 121
Let his Yea be Yea, and his Nay, Nay 121
The duty of his Interlocutor 121
The Impatient Envoy 122
The French again 122
The Scout 124
The Spy and his short shrift 124
What is a Spy? 125
Of the essentials of Espionage 126
Accessories are Principals 126
The Deserter is faithless, and the Renegade false 127
But both may be useful 127
“Followers” 128
The War Correspondent: his importance. His presence is desirable 129
The ideal War Correspondent 130
The Etiquette of the War Correspondent 131
How to tell a Non-Combatant 133
War Treaties 135
That Faith must be kept even with an enemy 135
Exchange of Prisoners 135
Capitulations--they cannot be too meticulous 136
Of the White Flag 139
Of Safe-Conducts 140
Of Armistice 141
The Civil Population is not to be regarded as an enemy 147
They must not be molested 148
Their duty 149
Of the humanity of the Germans and the barbarity of the French 149
What the Invader may do 151
A man may be compelled to Betray his Country 153
And worse 153
Of forced labor 154
Of a certain harsh measure and its justification 154
Hostages 155
A “harsh and cruel” measure 156
But it was “successful” 156
War Rebellion 157
War Treason and Unwilling Guides 159
Another deplorable necessity 159
Of Private Property and its immunities 161
Of German behavior 163
The gentle Hun and the looking-glass 165
Booty 167
The State realty may be used but must not be wasted 168
State Personalty is at the mercy of the victor 169
Private realty 170
Private personalty 170
“Choses in action” 171
Plundering is wicked 171
Requisitions 174
How the docile German learnt the “better way” 175
To exhaust the country is deplorable, but we mean to do it 175
Buccaneering levies 177
How to administer an invaded country 180
The Laws remain--with qualification 181
The Inhabitants must obey 182
Martial Law 182
Fiscal Policy 184
Occupation must be real, not fictitious 185
What neutrality means 187
A neutral cannot be all things to all men; therefore he must be
nothing to any of them 187
But there are limits to this detachment 188
Duties of the neutral--belligerents must be warned off 188
The neutral must guard its inviolable frontiers. It must intern
the trespassers 189
Unneutral service 191
The “sinews of war”--loans to belligerents 191
Contraband of War 191
Good business 192
Foodstuffs 192
Contraband on a small scale 193
And on a large scale 194
The practise differs 194
Who may pass--the Sick and the Wounded 195
Who may not pass--Prisoners of War 196
Rights of the neutral 196
The neutral has the right to be left alone 197
Neutral territory is sacred 197
The neutral may resist a violation of its territory “with all
the means in his power” 197
Neutrality is presumed 198
The Property of Neutrals 198
Diplomatic intercourse 199
THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE GERMAN VIEW OF WAR
The ideal Prince, so Machiavelli has told us, need not, and indeed
should not, possess virtuous qualities, but he should always contrive
to appear to possess them.[1] The somber Florentine has been studied in
Germany as he has been studied nowhere else and a double portion of his
spirit has descended on the authors of this book. Herein the perfect
officer, like the perfect Prince, is taught that it is more important
to be thought humane than to practise humanity; the former may probably
be useful but the latter is certainly inconvenient.
Hence the peculiar logic of this book which consists for the most part
in ostentatiously laying down unimpeachable rules and then quietly
destroying them by debilitating exceptions. The civil population of
an invaded country--the young officer is reminded on one page--is to
be left undisturbed in mind, body, and estate, their honor is to
be inviolate, their lives protected, and their property secure. To
compel them to assist the enemy is brutal, to make them betray their
own country is inhuman. Such is the general proposition. Yet a little
while and the Manual descends to particulars. Can the officer compel
the peaceful inhabitants to give information about the strength and
disposition of his country’s forces?[2] Yes, answers the German War
Book, it is doubtless regrettable but it is often necessary. Should
they be exposed to the fire of their own troops?[3] Yes; it may be
indefensible, but its “main justification” is that it is “successful.”
Should the tribute of supplies levied upon them be proportioned to
their ability to pay it?[4] No; “this is all very well in theory but
it would rarely be observed in practise.” Should the forced labor of
the inhabitants be limited to works which are not designed to injure
their own country?[5] No; this is an absurd distinction and impossible.
Should prisoners of war be put to death? It is always “ugly” but it is
sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin, or corrupt a citizen, or
incite an incendiary? Certainly; it may not be reputable (_anständig_),
and honor may fight shy of it, but the law of war is less “touchy”
(_empfindlich_). Should the women and children--the old and the
feeble--be allowed to depart before a bombardment begins? On the
contrary; their presence is greatly to be desired (_ein Vortheil_)--it
makes the bombardment all the more effective. Should the civil
population of a small and defenseless country be entitled to claim the
right, provided they carry their arms openly and use them honorably,
to defend their native land from the invader?[6] No; they act at their
peril and must, however sudden and wanton the invasion, elaborate an
organization or they will receive no quarter.[7]
We might multiply examples. But these are sufficient. It will be
obvious that the German Staff are nothing if not casuists. In their
brutality they are the true descendants of Clausewitz, the father of
Prussian military tradition.
“Laws of war are self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible
and hardly worth mentioning, termed ‘usages of war.’ Now
philanthropists may easily imagine that there is a skilful method
of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great
bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the art of war.
However plausible this may appear, still it is an error which must
be extirpated, for in such dangerous things as war the errors
which proceed from the spirit of benevolence are the worst....
To introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of
moderation would be an absurdity.... War is an act of violence
which in its application knows no bounds.”[8]
The only difference between Clausewitz and his lineal successors is not
that they are less brutal but that they are more disingenuous. When he
comes to discuss that form of living on the country which is dignified
by the name of requisitions, he roundly says they should be enforced.
“by the fear of responsibility, punishment, and ill-treatment
which in such cases presses like a general weight on the whole
population.... This resource has no limits except those of
the exhaustion, impoverishment, and devastation of the whole
country.”[9]
Our War Book is more discreet but not more merciful. Private property,
it begins by saying, should always be respected. To take a man’s
property when he is present is robbery; when he is absent it is
“downright burglary.” But if the “necessity of war” makes it advisable,
“every sequestration, every appropriation, temporary or permanent,
every use, every injury and all destruction are permissible.”
It is, indeed, unfortunate that the War Book when it inculcates
“frightfulness” is never obscure, and that when it advises forbearance
it is always ambiguous. The reader must bear in mind that the authors,
in common with their kind in Germany, always enforce a distinction
between _Kriegsmanier_ and _Kriegsraison_,[10] between theory and
practise, between the rule and the exception. That in extreme cases
such distinctions may be necessary is true; the melancholy thing is
that German writers make a system and indeed a virtue of them. In this
respect the jurists are not appreciably superior to their soldiers.
Brutality is bad, but a pedantic brutality is worse in proportion as it
is more reflective. Holtzendorff’s _Handbuch des Völkerrechts_, than
which there is no more authoritative book in the legal literature of
Germany, after pages of sanctification of “the natural right” to defend
one’s fatherland against invasion by a _levée en masse_, terminates
the argument for a generous recognition of the combatant status of the
enemy with the melancholy qualification, “unless _the Terrorism so
often necessary in war_ does not demand the contrary.”[11]
To “terrorize” the civil population of the enemy is, indeed, a first
principle with German writers on the Art of War. Let the reader
ponder carefully on the sinister sentence in the third paragraph of
the War Book and the illuminating footnote from Moltke with which it
is supported. The doctrine--which is at the foundation of all such
progress as has been made by international law in regularizing and
humanizing the conduct of war--that the sole object of it should be
to disable the armed forces of the enemy, finds no countenance here.
No, say the German staff, we must seek just as much (_in gleicher
Weise_) to smash (_zerstören_) the total “intellectual” (_geistig_),
and material resources of the enemy. It is no exaggeration to interpret
this as a counsel not merely to destroy the body of a nation, but to
ruin its soul. The “Geist” of a people means in German its very spirit
and finer essence. It means a good deal more than intellect and but a
little less than religion. The “Geist” of a nation is “the partnership
in all science, the partnership in all art, the partnership in every
virtue, and in all perfection,” which Burke defined as the true
conception of the State. Hence it may be no accident but policy which
has caused the Germans in Belgium to stable their horses in churches,
to destroy municipal palaces, to defile the hearth, and bombard
cathedrals. All this is scientifically calculated “to smash the total
spiritual resources” of a people, to humiliate them, to stupefy them,
in a word to break their “spirit.”
Let the reader also study carefully a dark sentence in that section of
the War Book which deals with “Cunning and Deceit.” There the German
officer is instructed that “there is nothing in international law
against” (_steht völkerrechtlich nichts entgegen_) the exploitation
of the crimes of third persons, “such as assassination, incendiarism,
robbery and the like,” to the disadvantage of the enemy. “There is
nothing in international law against it!” No, indeed. There are many
things upon which international law is silent for the simple reason
that it refuses to contemplate their possibility. It assumes that
it is dealing not with brutes but with men. International law is
the etiquette of international society, and society, as it has been
gravely said, is conducted on the assumption that murder will not be
committed. We do not carry revolvers in our pockets when we enter our
clubs, or finger them when we shake hands with a stranger. Nor, to
adopt a very homely illustration, does any hostess think it necessary
to put up a notice in her drawing-room that guests are not allowed to
spit upon the floor. But what should we think of a man who committed
this disgusting offense, and then pleaded that there was nothing to
show that the hostess had forbidden it? Human society, like political
society, advances in proportion as it rests on voluntary morality
rather than positive law. In primitive society everything is “taboo,”
because the only thing that will restrain the undisciplined passions
of men is fear. Can it be that this is why the traveler in Germany
finds everything “verboten,” and that things which in our own country
are left to the good sense and good breeding of the citizen have to
be officiously forbidden? Can it be that this people which is always
making an ostentatious parade of its “culture” is still red in tooth
and claw? When a man boasts his breeding we instinctively suspect
it; indeed the boast is itself ill-bred. If the reader thinks these
reflections uncharitable, let him ponder on the treatment of Belgium.
It will be seen therefore that the writers of the War Book have taken
to heart the cynical maxim of Machiavelli that “a Prince should
understand how to use well both the man and the beast.” We shall have
occasion to observe later in this introduction that the same maxim
runs like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of German diplomacy.
Machiavelli’s dark counsel finds a responsive echo in Bismarck’s
cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext can always be found
for a war when you want one. When these things are borne in mind the
reader will be able to understand how it is that the nation which has
used the strongest language[12] about the eternal inviolability of the
neutrality of Belgium should be the first to violate it.
The reader may ask, What of the Hague Conventions? They are
international agreements, to which Germany was a party, representing
the fruition of years of patient endeavor to ameliorate the horrors of
war. If they have any defect it is not that they go too far but that
they do not go far enough. But of them and the humanitarian movement
of which they are the expression, the German Staff has but a very poor
opinion. They are for it the crest of a wave of “Sentimentalism and
flabby emotion.” (_Sentimentalität und weichlicher Gefühlsschwärmerei._)
Such movements, our authors declare, are “in fundamental contradiction
with the nature and object of war itself.” They are rarely mentioned
in this book and never respectfully. The reader will look in vain
for such an incorporation of the Hague Regulations in this official
text-book as has been made by the English War Office in our own
_Manual of Military Law_. Nor is the reason far to seek. The German
Government has never viewed with favor attempts to codify the laws
and usages of war. Amiable sentiments, prolegomenous resolutions,
protestations of “culture” and “humanity,” she has welcomed with
evangelical fervor. But the moment attempts are made to subject
these volatile sentiments to pressure and liquefy them in the form
of an agreement, she has protested that to particularize would be
to “enfeeble humane and civilizing thoughts.”[13] Nothing is more
illuminating as to the respective attitudes of Germany and England to
such international agreements than the discussions which took place
at the Hague Conference of 1907 on the desirability of imposing in
express terms restrictions upon the laying of submarine mines in order
to protect innocent shipping in neutral waters. The representatives of
the two Powers agreed in admitting that it did not follow that because
the Convention had not prohibited a certain act it thereby sanctioned
it. But whereas the English representatives regarded this as a reason
why the Convention could never be too explicit,[14] the spokesman
of Germany urged it as a reason why it could never be too ambiguous.
In the view of the latter, not international law but “conscience,
good sense, and the sentiment of duties imposed by the principles
of humanity will be the surest guides for the conduct of soldiers
and sailors and the most efficacious guarantees against abuse.”[15]
Conscience, “the good German Conscience,” as a German newspaper has
recently called it, is, as we have seen, an accommodating monitor,
and in that forum there are only too many special pleaders. If the
German conscience is to be the sole judge of the lawfulness of German
practises, then it is a clear case of “the right arm strikes and
the left arm is called upon to decide the lawfulness of the blow.”
It is, indeed, difficult to see, if Baron von Bieberstein’s view of
international agreements be the right one, why there should be any such
agreements at all. The only rule which results from such an Economy of
Truth would be: All things are lawful but all are not expedient. And
such, indeed, is the conclusion of the German War Book.
The cynicism of this book is not more remarkable than its affectation.
There are pages in it of the most admirable sentiment--witness
those about the turpitude of plundering and the inviolability of
neutral territory. Taken by themselves, they form the most scathing
denunciation of the conduct of the German army in Belgium that could
well be conceived. Let the reader weigh carefully the following:
Movable private property which in earlier times was the
incontestable booty of the victor is held by modern opinion to be
inviolable. The carrying away of gold, watches, rings, trinkets, or
other objects of value is therefore to be regarded as robbery, and
correspondingly punishable.
No plundering but downright burglary is it for a man to take away
things out of an unoccupied house or at a time when the occupant
happens to be absent.
Forced contributions (_Kriegschatzungen_) are denounced as “a form of
plundering” rarely, if ever, to be justified, as requisitions may be,
by the plea of necessity. The victor has no right, the Book adds, to
practise them in order to recoup himself for the cost of the war, or
to subsidize an operation against the nation whose territory is in his
occupation. To extort them as a ransom from the violence of war is
equally unjustifiable: thus out of its own mouth is the German staff
condemned and its “buccaneering levies” upon the forlorn inhabitants of
Belgium held up to reprobation.
Still more significant are the remarks on the right and duty of
neutrals. The inviolability of neutral territory and the sanctity of
the Geneva Convention are the only two principles of international law
which the German War Book admits to be laws of perfect obligation. A
neutral State, it declares, not only may, but must forbid the passage
of troops to the subjects of both belligerents. If either attempts it,
the neutral State has the right to resist “with all the means in its
power.” However overwhelming the necessity, no belligerent must succumb
to the temptation to trespass upon the neutral territory. If this be
true of a neutral State it is doubly true of a neutralized State. No
one has been so emphatic on this point as the German jurists whose
words the War Book is so fond of praying in aid. The Treaty of London
guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is declared by them to be “a
landmark of progress in the formation of a European polity” and “up
till now no Power has dared to violate a guarantee of this kind.”[16]
“He who injures a right does injury to the cause of right itself,
and in these guarantees lies the express obligation to prevent such
things.... Nothing could make the situation of Europe more insecure
than an egotistical repudiation by the great States of these duties
of international fellowship.”[17]
The reader will, perhaps, hardly need to be cautioned against the
belligerent footnotes with which the General Staff has illuminated
the text. They are, as he will observe, mainly directed towards
illustrating the peculiar depravity of the French in 1870. They
are certainly suspect, and all the more so, because the notorious
malpractices of the Germans in that campaign are dismissed, where they
are noticed at all, with the airy remark that there were peculiar
circumstances, or that they were unauthorized, or that the “necessity
of war” afforded sufficient justification. All this is _ex parte_. So
too, to a large extent, is the parade of professors in the footnotes.
They are almost always German professors and, as we shall see later,
the German professor is, and is compelled to be, a docile instrument of
the State.
The book has, of course, a permanent value apart from the light it
throws upon contemporary issues. Some of the chapters, such as that
on the right and duties of neutrals, represent a carefully considered
theory, little tainted by the cynicism which disfigures the rest of the
book. It should be of great interest and value to those of us who are
engaged in studying the problem of bringing economic pressure to bear
upon Germany, by enclosing her in the meshes of conditional contraband.
So, too, the chapter on the treatment of Prisoners of War will have
a special, and for some a poignant, interest just now. The chapter
on the treatment of occupied territory is, of course, of profound
significance in view of the present state of Belgium.
CHAPTER II
GERMAN DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT
Bismarck, wrote Hohenlohe, who ultimately succeeded him as Imperial
Chancellor, “handles everything with a certain arrogance (_Uebermut_),
and this gives him a considerable advantage in dealing with the timid
minds of the older European diplomacy.” This native arrogance became
accentuated after the triumphs of 1870 until, in Hohenlohe’s words,
Bismarck became “the terror” of all European diplomatists. That word
is the clue to German diplomacy. The terrorism which the Germans
practise in war they indoctrinate in peace. It was a favorite saying
of Clausewitz, whose military writings enjoy an almost apostolic
authority in Germany, that War and Peace are but a continuation of one
another--“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse
with a mixture of other means.”[18] The same lesson is written large
on every page of von der Goltz[19] and Bernhardi.[20] In other words,
war projects its dark shadow over the whole of German diplomacy. The
dominant postures in “shining armor” at critical moments in the peace
of Europe, and the menacing invocations of the “mailed fist” are not,
as is commonly supposed, a passionate idiosyncrasy of the present
Emperor. They are a legacy of the Bismarckian tradition. To keep Europe
in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension by somber hints of war
was, as we shall see, the favorite method by which Bismarck attained
his diplomatic ends. For the German Chancellerie rumors of wars are
of only less political efficacy than wars themselves. After 1870,
metaphors of war became part of the normal vocabulary of the German
Government in times of peace. Not only so but, as will be seen in the
two succeeding chapters, a belligerent emotion suffused the temperament
of the whole German people, and alike in the State Universities, and
the stipendiary Press, there was developed a cult of War for its own
sake. The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in
the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.
Now War is at best but a negative conception and its adoption as the
_Credo_ of German thinkers since 1870 explains why their contributions
to Political Science have been so sterile. More than that, it accounts
for the decline in public morality. Politically, Germany, as we
shall see, has remained absolutely stagnant. She is now no nearer
self-government than she was in 1870; she is much farther removed from
it than she was in 1848. The inevitable result has been, that politics
have for her come to mean little more than intrigues in high places,
the deadly struggle of one contending faction at court against another,
with the peace of Europe as pawns in the game. The German Empire, like
the Prussian kingdom, has little more than a paper constitution, a
_lex imperfecta_ as Gneist called it. The Reichstag has little power
and less prestige, and its authority as a representative assembly has
been so enervated by the shock tactics practised by the Government
in forcing, or threatening to force, a series of dissolutions to
punish contumacious behavior, that it is little better than a debating
society. A vote of censure on the Government has absolutely no
effect. Of the two powers, the Army and the Reichstag, the Army is
infinitely the stronger; there is no law such as our Army Annual Act
which subjects it to Parliamentary control. Even the Bundesrath[21]
(or Federal Council), strong as it is, is hardly stronger than the
German General Staff, for the real force which welds the German Empire
together is not so much this council of plenipotentiaries from the
States as the military hegemony of Prussia and the military conventions
between her and the Southern States by which the latter placed their
armies under her supreme control. In this shirt of steel the body
politic is enclosed as in a vice.
* * * * *
Nothing illustrates the political lifelessness of Germany, the
arrogance of its rulers and the docility of its people (for whom,
as will be seen, the former have frequently expressed the utmost
contempt) more than the tortuous course of German diplomacy during the
years 1870-1900. I shall attempt to sketch very briefly the political
history of those years, particularly in the light of the policy of
calculated Terrorism by which the German Chancellerie sought to impose
its yoke upon Europe. Well did Lord Odo Russell say that “Bismarck’s
sayings inspired respect” (he might, had he not been speaking as an
ambassador, have used, like Hohenlohe, a stronger word) “and his
silences apprehension.”[22] If it be true, as von der Goltz says it
is, that national strategy is the expression of national character and
that the German method is, to use his words, “a brutal offensive,”
nothing could bring out that amiable characteristic more clearly than
the study of Bismarck’s diplomacy. The German is brutal in war just
because he is insolent in peace. Count Herbert “can be very insolent,”
wrote the servile Busch of Bismarck’s son, “which in diplomacy is very
useful.”[23]
Bismarck’s attitude towards treaty obligations is one of the chief
clues to the history of the years 1870-1900. International policy,
he once wrote, is “a fluid element which under certain conditions
will solidify, but on a change of atmosphere reverts to its original
condition.”[24] The process of solidification is represented by the
making of treaties; that of melting is a euphemism for the breaking of
them. To reinsure Germany’s future by taking out policies in different
countries in the form of secret treaties of alliance while concealing
the existence of other and conflicting treaties seemed to him not
only astute but admirable. Thus having persuaded Austria-Hungary to
enter into a Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy by holding out as
the inducement the promise of protection against Russia, Bismarck by
his own subsequent confession concluded a secret treaty with Russia
against Austria. To play off each of these countries against the
other by independent professions of exclusive loyalty to both was
the _Leit-motif_ of his diplomacy. Nor did he treat the collective
guarantees of European treaties with any greater respect. Good faith
was a negotiable security. Hence his skilful exploitation of the Black
Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris (1856) when he wished to secure the
friendly neutrality of Russia during the Franco-Prussian War. Russia,
it will be remembered, suddenly and to every one’s surprise, denounced
those clauses. The European Powers, on the initiative of England,
disputed Russia’s claim to denounce _motu proprio_ an international
obligation of so solemn a character, and Bismarck responded to Lord
Granville’s initiative in words of ostentatious propriety:
“That the Russian Circular of the 19th October [denouncing the
clauses in question] had _taken him by surprise_. That while he had
always held that the Treaty of 1856 pressed with undue severity
upon Russia, he entirely disapproved of the manner adopted and the
time selected by the Russian Government to force the revision of
the Treaty.”[25]
Nearly a generation later Bismarck confessed, and prided himself on the
confession, in his Reminiscences,[26] that he had himself instigated
Russia to denounce the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty; that he had not
only instigated this repudiation but had initiated it as affording “an
opportunity of improving our relations with Russia.” Russia succumbed
to the temptation, but, as Bismarck cheerfully admits, not without
reluctance.
This, however, is not all: Europe “saved her face” by putting on record
in the Conference of London (1871) a Protocol, subscribed by the
Plenipotentiaries of all the Powers, in which it was laid down as
“an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can
repudiate treaty engagements or modify treaty provisions, except
with the consent of the contracting parties by mutual agreement.”
This instrument has been called, not inaptly, the foundation of the
public law of Europe. It was in virtue of this principle that Russia
was obliged to submit the Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano, and
with it the fruits of her victories in 1877-8 to the arbitrament of
the Congress of Berlin. At that Congress Bismarck played his favorite
rôle of “honest broker,” and there is considerable ground for believing
that he sold the same stock several times over to different clients
and pocketed the “differences.” What kind of conflicting assurances he
gave to the different Powers will never be fully known, but there is
good ground for believing that in securing the temporary occupation
of Bosnia-Herzegovina he had in mind the ultimate Germanization
of the Adriatic, and that domination of the Mediterranean at the
expense of England which has long been the dream of German publicists
from Treitschke onward.[27] What, however, clearly emerged from the
Congress, and was embodied in Article XXV of the Berlin Treaty, was,
that Austria was to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina under a
European mandate. She acquired lordship without ownership; in other
words, the territory became a Protectorate. Her title, as it originated
in, so it was limited by, the Treaty of Berlin. Exactly thirty years
later, in the autumn of 1908, Austria, acting in concert with Germany,
abused her fiduciary position and without any mandate from the Powers
annexed the territory of which she had been made the guardian. This
arbitrary action was a violation of the principle to which she and
Germany had subscribed at the London Conference, and Sir Edward
Grey attempted, as Lord Granville had done before him, to preserve
the credit of the public law of Europe by a conference which should
consider the compensation due to Servia for an act which so gravely
compromised her security. Russia, France, and Italy joined with Great
Britain in this heroic, if belated, attempt to save the international
situation. It was at this moment (March; 1909) that Germany appeared
on the scene “in shining armor,” despatched a veiled ultimatum to
Russia, with a covert threat to mobilize, and forced her to abandon her
advocacy of the claims of Servia and, with them, of the public law of
Europe.
Thus did History repeat itself. Germany stood forth once again as the
chartered libertine of Europe whom no faith could bind and no duty
oblige. May it not be said of her what Machiavelli said of Alexander
Borgia: “E non fu mai uomo che avesse maggiore efficacia in asseveraie,
e che con maggiori giuramenti affermasse una cosa, e che l’osservasse
meno.”[28]
* * * * *
It would carry me far beyond the limits of this Introduction to trace
in like detail the German policy of _Scharfmacherei_ which consisted,
to use the mordant phrase of M. Hanotaux, in putting up to auction that
which is not yours to sell and, not infrequently, knocking it down to
more than one bidder. That Bismarck encouraged Russian ambitions in
Asia and French ambitions in Africa with the view of making mischief
between each of them and England is notorious.[29] In his earlier
attitude he was content to play the rôle of _tertius gaudens_; in his
later he was an active _agent provocateur_--particularly during the
years 1883-1885, when he joined in the scramble for Africa. The earlier
attitude is well indicated in Hohenlohe’s revelations, that Bismarck
regarded French colonial operations as a timely diversion from the
Rhine, and would not be at all sorry “to see the English and French
locomotives come into collision,” and a French annexation of Morocco
would have had his benevolent approval. After 1883 his attitude was
less passive but not less mischievous. Ten years earlier he had told
Lord Odo Russell that colonies “would only be a cause of weakness” to
Germany. But by 1883 he had been slowly and reluctantly converted to
the militant policy of the Colonial party and the cry of _Weltpolitik_
was as good as a war scare for electioneering purposes. It was in
these days that hatred of England, a hatred conceived in jealousy of
her world-Empire, was brought forth, and the obstetrics of Treitschke
materially assisted its birth. Bismarck, however, as readers of his
Reminiscences are well aware, had an intellectual dislike of England
based on her forms of government. He loved the darker ways of diplomacy
and he thought our Cabinet system fatal to them. He had an intense
dislike of Parliamentarism, he despised alliances “for which the Crown
is not answerable but only the fleeting cabinet of the day,” and above
all he hated plain dealing and publicity. “It is astonishing,” wrote
Lord Ampthill, “how cordially Bismarck hates our Blue Books.”
* * * * *
The story of Bismarck’s diplomatic relations with England during these
years exhibits the same features of duplicity tempered by violence as
marked his relations with the rest of Europe. He acquired Samoa by a
deliberate breach of faith, and his pretense of negotiations with this
country to delimit the frontiers of English and German acquisitions
while he stole a march upon us were properly stigmatized by the
Colonial Office as “shabby behavior.” Whether he really egged on France
to “take Tunis” in order to embroil her with England will perhaps never
be really known,[30] but it was widely suspected in France that his
motives in supporting, if not instigating,[31] the colonial policy of
Jules Ferry would not bear a very close examination. That he regarded
it as a timely diversion from the Rhine is certain; that he encouraged
it as a promising embarrassment to England is probable. There can be
no doubt that much the same construction is to be put on his attitude
towards Russia’s aspirations in Asia; that they should divert Russia
from Europe was necessary; that they might entangle her with England
was desirable.
Fear of Russia has, in fact, always been an obsession of the German
Government. That fear is the just Nemesis of Frederick the Great’s
responsibility for the infamous Partition of Poland. The reader, who
wants to understand the causes of this, cannot do better than study an
old map of the kingdom of Poland, and compare it with a map of Poland
after the first and second Partitions. The effect of those cynical
transactions was to extinguish an ancient “buffer state,” separating
Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and by extinguishing it to bring them
into menacing contiguity with each other. Never has any crime so
haunted its perpetrators. Poland has been the permanent distraction
of the three nations who dismembered her, each perpetually suspicious
of the other two, and this fact is the main clue to the history of
Eastern Europe.[32] The fear of Russia, and of a Russo-French or
a Russo-Austrian Alliance, is the dominant feature of Bismarck’s
diplomacy. He was, indeed, the evil genius of Russia for, by his own
confession,[33] he intrigued to prevent her from pursuing a liberal
policy towards Poland, for fear that she would thereby be drawn into
friendship with France. To induce her to break faith with Russia, her
Polish subjects in one case, and with Europe in another--the former
by suppressing the Polish constitutional movement; the latter by
repudiating the Black Sea clauses--was to isolate her from Europe.
German writers to-day affect to speak of “Muscovite barbarism” and
“Oriental despotism,” but it has been the deliberate policy of Germany
to cut Russia off from the main stream of European civilization--to
turn her face Eastwards, thereby Bismarck hoped, to quote his own
words, to “weaken her pressure on our Eastern frontiers.”
But Bismarck’s contempt for treaties and his love for setting other
Powers by the ears were venial compared with his policy of Terrorism.
His attitude to France from 1870 to the day of his retirement from
office--and it has been mis-stated many times by his successors--was
very much that which Newman ascribed to the Erastian view of the
treatment of the church--“to keep her low” and in a perpetual state
of terror-stricken servility. That this is no exaggeration will be
apparent from what follows here about the war scares with which he
terrified France, and with France Europe also, in the years 1873-5,
the years, when, as our ambassador at Paris, Lord Lytton, has put
it, he “played with her like a cat with a mouse.”[34] Perhaps the
most illuminating account of these tenebrous proceedings is to be
derived from Hohenlohe, who accepted the offer of the German Embassy
at Paris in May, 1874. The post was no easy one. There had already
been a “scare” in the previous December, when Bismarck menaced the
Duc de Broglie with war, using the attitude of the French Bishops as
a pretext;[35] and, although Hohenlohe’s appointment was at first
regarded as an eirenicon, there followed a period of extreme tension,
when, as the Duc Decazes subsequently confessed, French Ministers were
“living at the mercy of the smallest incident, the least mistake.”
The truth about the subsequent war scare of 1875 is still a matter of
speculation, but the documents published of late years by de Broglie
and Hanotaux, and the despatches of Lord Odo Russell, have thrown
considerable suspicion of a very positive kind on Bismarck’s plea
that it was all a malicious invention of Gontaut-Biron, the French
Ambassador, and of Gortchakoff. A careful collation of the passages
in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs goes far to confirm these suspicions, and,
incidentally, to reveal Bismarck’s inner diplomacy in a very sinister
light. Hohenlohe was appointed to succeed the unhappy Arnim, who had
made himself obnoxious to Bismarck by his independence, and he was
instructed by the Chancellor, that it was to the interest of Germany
to see that France should become “a weak Republic and anarchical,”
so as to be a negligible quantity in European politics, on which the
Emperor William I remarked to Hohenlohe that “that was not a policy,”
and was not “decent,” subsequently confiding to Hohenlohe that
Bismarck was trying “to drive him more and more into war”; whereupon
Hohenlohe confidently remarked: “I know nothing of it, and I should be
the first to hear of it.” Hohenlohe soon found reason to change his
opinion. As Gortchakoff remarked to Decazes, “they have a difficult
way with diplomatists at Berlin,” and Hohenlohe was instructed to
press the French Ministry for the recall of Gontaut-Biron, against
whom Bismarck complained on account of his Legitimist opinions and
his friendship with the Empress Augusta. Thereupon, that supple and
elusive diplomat, the Duc Decazes, parried by inviting an explanation
of the menacing words which Gontaut-Biron declared had been uttered
to him by Radowitz, a Councilor of Legation in Berlin, to the effect
that “it would be both politic and Christian to declare war at once,”
the Duke adding shrewdly: “One doesn’t invent these things.” Hohenlohe
in his perplexity tried to get at the truth from Bismarck, and met
with what seems to us a most disingenuous explanation. Bismarck said
Radowitz denied the whole thing, but added that, even if he had said
it, Gontaut-Biron had no right to report it. He admitted, however, that
Radowitz made mischief and “egged on” Bülow, the Foreign Secretary.
“You may be sure,” he added, “that these two between them would land
us in a war in four weeks if I didn’t act as safety-valve.” Hohenlohe
took advantage of this confession to press for the despatch of Radowitz
to some distant Embassy “to cool himself.” To this Bismarck assented,
but a few days later declared that Radowitz was indispensable. When
Hohenlohe attempted to sound Bismarck on the subject the Chancellor
showed the utmost reserve. After the war scare had passed, Decazes
related to Hohenlohe an earlier example of Imperial truculence on the
part of Arnim, who, on leaving after a call, turned round as he reached
the door and called out: “I have forgotten one thing. Recollect that
I forbid you to get possession of Tunis”; and when Decazes affected
to regard the matter as a jest, Arnim repeated with emphasis: “Yes,
I forbid it.” Hohenlohe adds that an examination of his predecessor’s
papers convinced him that Arnim did not speak without express
authorization. When the elections for the French Chamber are imminent
in the autumn of 1877, Bismarck informs Hohenlohe that Germany will
adopt “a threatening attitude,” but “the scene will be laid in Berlin,
not in Paris.” The usual Press campaign followed, much to the vexation
of the Emperor, who complained to Hohenlohe that the result of these
“pin-pricks” (Nadelstiche) would provoke the French people beyond
endurance.
In studying this calculated truculence we have to remember that in
Germany foreign and domestic policy are inextricably interwoven. A war
scare is with the German Government a favorite method of bringing the
Reichstag to a docile frame of mind and diverting it from inconvenient
criticism of the Government’s policy at home. Moreover, just as war is,
in von der Goltz’s words, a reflection of national character, so is
diplomacy. A nation’s character is revealed in its diplomacy just as a
man’s breeding is revealed in his conversation.[36] We must therefore
take into account the polity of Germany and its political standards.
The picture of the Prussian autocracy in the later days of Bismarck’s
rule which we can reconstruct from different entries in Hohenlohe’s
Journal from the year 1885 onwards is a very somber one. It is a
picture of suspicion, treachery, vacillation, and calumny in high
places which remind one of nothing so much as the Court of the later
Bourbons. It is a régime of violence abroad and dissensions at home.
Bismarck’s health was failing him, and with his health his temper. He
complained to Hohenlohe that his head “grew hot” the moment he worked,
and the latter hardly dared to dispute with him on the gravest matters
of State. Readers of Busch will remember his frank disclosures of the
anarchy of the Foreign Office when Bismarck was away: “if the Chief
gives violent instructions, they are carried out with still greater
violence.” In Hohenlohe we begin to see all the grave implications
of this. Bismarck, with what Lord Odo Russell called his passion
for authority, was fond of sneering at English foreign policy as
liable to be blown about with every wind of political doctrine; but
if Parliamentary control has its defects, autocracy has defects more
insidious still. Will becomes caprice, and foreign relations are at
the mercy of bureaucrats who have no sense of responsibility so long
as they can adroitly flatter their master. When a bureaucrat trained
under this system arrives at power, the result may be nothing less
than disastrous. This was what happened when Bismarck’s instrument,
Holstein, concentrated power into his own hands at the Foreign Office;
and as the _Neue Freie Presse_[37] pointed out in its disclosures on
his fall (1906), the results are writ large in the narrowly averted
catastrophe of a war with France in 1905. Bismarck’s disciples had all
his calculated violence without its timeliness. In the Foreign Office,
Hohenlohe discovered a kind of anarchical “republicanism”--“nobody,”
in Bismarck’s frequent absence “will own responsibility to any one
else.” “Bismarck is nervously excitable,” writes Hohenlohe in March,
1885, “and harasses his subordinates and frightens them, so that
they see more behind his expression than there really is.” Like most
small men, in terror themselves, they terrorized others. Moreover,
the disinclination of the Prussian mind, which Bismarck himself
once noted, to accept any responsibility which is not covered by
instructions, tended to reduce the German Ambassadors abroad to the
level of mere aides-de-camp. Hohenlohe found himself involved in the
same embarrassments at Paris as Count Münster did in London. Any one
who has studied the inner history of German foreign policy must have
divined a secret diplomacy as devious of its kind as that of Louis XV.
Of its exact bearings little is known, but a great deal may reasonably
be suspected. There is always the triple diplomacy of the Court, the
Imperial Chancery, and lastly the Diplomatic Service, which is not
necessarily in the confidence of either.
The same debilitating influences of a dictatorship were at work in
Ministerial and Parliamentary life. Bismarck had an equal contempt
for the collective responsibility of Ministers and for Parliamentary
control. Having done his best to deprive the Members of the
Reichstag of power, he was annoyed at their irresponsibility. He
called men like Bennigsen and Windhorst silly schoolboy politicians
(Karlchen-Miesnick-Tertianen) or “lying scoundrels” (verlogene
Halunken). He was surprised that representation without control
resulted in faction. It is the Nemesis of his own political doctrines.
When he met with opposition he clamored for repressive measures, and
could not understand some of the scruples of the Liberals as to the
exceptional laws against the Socialists. Moreover, having tried, like
another Richelieu, to reduce his fellow-Ministers to the position of
clerks, he was annoyed at their want of corporate spirit, and when they
refused to follow him into his retirement, he declaimed against their
apostasy in having “left him in the lurch.” He talked at one time of
abolishing the Reichstag; at another of having a special post created
for himself as “General-Adjutant.” He complained of overwork--and his
energy was Titanic--but he insisted on keeping his eye on everything,
conscientiously enough, because, he tells Hohenlohe, “he could not
put his name to things which did not reflect his own mind.” But
perhaps the gravest moral of it all is the Nemesis of deception. It
is difficult to be both loved and feared, said Machiavelli. There
is a somber irony in the remark of the Czar to the Emperor in 1892,
which the latter repeated to Hohenlohe. Bismarck had been compelled
to retire because he had failed to induce the Emperor to violate
Germany’s contractual obligations to Austria by renewing his secret
agreement with Russia, and he consoled himself in his retirement with
the somewhat unctuous reflection that he was a martyr to the cause of
Russo-German friendship, betrayed, according to him, by Caprivi. “Do
you know,” said the young Emperor (in August, 1892), “the Czar has
told me he has every trust in Caprivi; whereas when Bismarck has said
anything to him he has always had the conviction that ‘he is tricking
me.’” We are reminded of the occasion when Talleyrand told the truth so
frankly that his interlocutor persisted in regarding it as an elaborate
form of deception. After all, there are advantages, even in diplomacy,
in being what Schuvaloff called Caprivi, a “too honest man.” It was the
same with the domestic atmosphere. Bismarck, an adept at deceiving,
is always complaining of deception; a master of intrigue, he is always
declaiming against the intrigues of others. He inveighs against the
Empress Augusta: “for fifty years she has been my opponent with the
Emperor.” He lived in an atmosphere of distrust, he was often insolent,
and always suspicious. It affected all his diplomatic intercourse,
and was not at all to Hohenlohe’s taste. “He handles everything with
a certain arrogance (_Uebermut_),” once wrote Hohenlohe (as we have
already said) of a discussion with him over foreign affairs. “_This has
always been his way._”
All these tendencies came to a head when the scepter passed from the
infirm hands of William I to those of a dying King, around whose
death-bed the military party and the Chancellor’s party began to
intrigue for influence over the young Prince whose advent to empire was
hourly expected. Of these intrigues Hohenlohe, who was now Statthalter
of Alsace-Lorraine, soon began to feel the effects without at first
discovering the cause. He loved the people of the Reichsland, was a
friend of France, and an advocate of liberal institutions, and in this
spirit he strove to administer the incorporated territories. But the
military party worked against him, hoping to secure the abolition of
the moderate measure of local government and Reichstag representation
which the Provinces possessed; and when the latter returned a hostile
majority to the Reichstag they redoubled their efforts for a policy
of “Thorough.” Bismarck gave but a lukewarm support to Hohenlohe and
insisted on the enforcement of drastic passport regulations, which,
combined with the Schnaebele affair (on which the Memoirs are very
reticent), almost provoked France to War--naturally enough, in the
opinion of Hohenlohe, and inevitably, according to the forebodings
of the German Military Attaché at Paris. To Hohenlohe’s imploring
representations Bismarck replied with grim jests about Alva’s rule in
the Netherlands, adding that it is all done to show the French “that
their noise doesn’t alarm us.” Meanwhile Switzerland was alienated,
France injured, and Austria suspicious. But Hohenlohe, after inquiries
in Berlin and Baden, began to discover the reason. Bismarck feared
the influence of the military party over the martial spirit of Prince
William, and was determined to show himself equally militant in order
to secure his dynasty. “His sole object is to get his son Herbert into
the saddle,” said Bleichroder; “so there is no hope of an improvement
in Alsace-Lorraine,”--although Prince Herbert alienated everybody
by his insolence, which was so gross that the Prince of Wales (King
Edward), at this time in Berlin, declared that he could scarcely
restrain himself from showing him the door. The leader of the military
party, Waldersee, was hardly more public-spirited. He had, according to
Bismarck, been made Chief of Staff by Moltke, over the heads of more
competent men, because he was more docile than they. Between these
military and civil autocracies the struggle for the possession of the
present Emperor raged remorselessly, and with appalling levity they
made the peace of two great nations the pawns in the game. The young
Emperor is seen in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs feeling his way, groping in the
dark; but those who, like the Grand Duke of Baden, knew the strength of
his character, foresaw the end. At first, he “doesn’t trust himself to
hold a different opinion from Bismarck”; but, “as soon as he perceives
that Bismarck doesn’t tell him everything,” predicted the Grand Duke,
“there will be trouble.” Meanwhile Waldersee was working for war, for
no better reason than that he was getting old, and spoiling for a fight
before it was too late for him to take the field.
For Bismarck’s dismissal there were various causes: differences in
domestic policy and in foreign, and an absolute _impasse_ on the
question whether Bismarck’s fellow-Ministers were to be treated as
colleagues or subordinates. “Bismarck,” said Caprivi afterwards, “had
made a treaty with Russia by which we guaranteed her a free hand in
Bulgaria and Constantinople, and Russia bound herself to remain
neutral in a war with France. That would have meant the shattering of
the Triple Alliance.” Moreover, the relations of Emperor and Chancellor
were, at the last, disfigured by violent scenes, during which the
Kaiser, according to the testimony of every one, showed the most
astonishing dignity and restraint. But it may all be summed up in the
words of the Grand Duke of Baden, reechoed by the Emperor to Hohenlohe,
it had to be a choice between the dynasties of Hohenzollern and
Bismarck. The end came to such a period of fear, agony, irony, despair,
recrimination, and catastrophic laughter as only the pen of a Tacitus
could adequately describe. Bismarck’s last years, both of power and
retirement, were those of a lost soul. Having tried to intrigue with
foreign Ambassadors against his Sovereign before his retirement, he
tried to mobilize the Press against him after he had retired, and even
stooped to join hands with his old rival, Waldersee, for the overthrow
of his successor, Caprivi, being quite indifferent, complained the
Kaiser bitterly, to what might happen afterwards. “It is sad to think,”
said the Emperor of Austria to Hohenlohe, “that such a man can sink so
low.”
When Bismarck was dismissed every one raised his head. It seemed to
Hohenlohe to be at last a case of the beatitude: “the meek shall
inherit the earth.” Holstein, the Under-Secretary, who, to the disgust
of Bismarck, refused to follow his chief and who now quietly made
himself the residuary legatee of the whole political inheritance of the
Foreign Office, intended by Bismarck for his son, freely criticized his
ex-chief’s policy in a conversation with Hohenlohe:
“He adduced as errors of Bismarck’s policy: The Berlin Congress,
the mediation in China in favor of France, the prevention of the
conflict between England and Russia in Afghanistan, and the whole
of his _tracasseries_ with Russia. As to his recent plan of leaving
Austria in the lurch, he says we should then have made ourselves so
contemptible that we should have become isolated and dependent on
Russia.”
Bismarck, whom Hohenlohe visited in his retirement, with a strange
want of patriotism and of perspicuity, pursued “his favorite theme”
and inveighed against the envy (_der Neid_) of the German people and
their incurable particularism. He never divined how much his jealous
autocracy had fostered these tendencies. One may hazard the opinion
that the Germans are no more wanting in public spirit and political
capacity than any other nation; but if they are deprived of the rights
of private judgment and the exercise of political ability, they are
no more likely to be immune from the corresponding disabilities.
Certainly, in no country where public men are accustomed to the
exercise of mutual tolerance and loyal cooperation by the practise of
Cabinet government, and where public opinion has healthy play, would
such an exhibition of disloyalty and slander as is here exhibited be
tolerated, or even possible. When in 1895 Caprivi succumbed to the
intrigues of the military caste and the Agrarian Party, Hohenlohe, now
in his seventy-sixth year, was entreated to come to the rescue, his
accession being regarded as the only security for German unity. To
his eternal credit, Hohenlohe accepted; but, if we may read between
the lines of the scanty extracts here vouchsafed from the record of
a Ministerial activity of six years, we may conjecture that it was
mostly labor and sorrow. He was opposed to agrarianism and repressive
measures, and anxious “to get on with the Reichstag,” seeing in the
forms of public discussion the only security for the public peace. But
“the Prussian Junkers could not tolerate South German Liberalism,”
and the most powerful political caste in the world, with the Army and
the King on their side, appear to have been too much for him. His
retirement in 1900 marks the end of a fugitive attempt at something
like a liberal policy in Germany, and during the fourteen years which
have elapsed since that event autocracy has held undisputed sway in
Germany. The history of these latter years is fresh in the minds of
most students of public affairs, and we will not attempt to pursue it
here.
CHAPTER III
GERMAN CULTURE
THE ACADEMIC GARRISON
Nothing is so characteristic of the German nation as its astonishing
single-mindedness--using that term in a mental and not a moral sense.
Since Prussia established her ascendency the nation has developed an
immense concentration of purpose. If the military men are not more
belligerent than the diplomatists, the diplomatists are not more
belligerent than the professors. A single purpose seems to animate
them: it is to proclaim the spiritual efficacy, and the eternal
necessity, of War.
Already there are signs that the German professors are taking the
field. Their mobilization is apparently not yet complete, but we may
expect before long to see their whole force, from the oldest Professor
Emeritus down to the youngest _Privat-dozent_, sharpening their pens
against us. Professors Harnack, Haeckel, and Eucken have already made a
reconnaissance in force, and in language which might have come straight
from the armory of Treitschke have denounced the mingled cupidity
and hypocrisy with which we, so they say, have joined forces with
Muscovite “barbarism” against Teutonic culture. This, we may feel sure,
is only the beginning.
German professors have a way of making history as well as writing
it, and the Prussian Government has always attached the greatest
importance to taking away its enemy’s character before it despoils
him of his goods. Long before the wars of 1866 and 1870 the seminars
of the Prussian universities were as busy forging title-deeds to
the smaller German states and to Alsace-Lorraine as any medieval
scriptorium, and not less ingenious. In the Franco-Prussian War
the professors--Treitschke, Mommsen, Sybel--were the first to take
the field and the last to quit it. Theirs it was to exploit the
secular hatreds of the past. Even Ranke, the nearest approach to “a
good European” of which German schools of history could boast, was
implacable. When asked by Thiers on whom, the Third Empire having
fallen, the Germans were continuing to make war, he replied, “On Louis
XIV.”
Hardly were the results achieved before a casuistry was developed to
justify them. Sybel’s apologetics in “Die Begründung des deutschen
Reichs” began it; others have gone far beyond them. “Blessed be the
hand that traced those lines,” is Professor Delbrück’s benediction on
the forgery of the Ems telegram; and in language which is almost a
paraphrase of Bismarck’s cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext
for a war can always be found when you want one, he has laid it down
that “a good diplomat” should always have his quiver full of such
barbed arrows. So, too, Sybel on Frederick’s complicity in the Second
Partition of an inoffensive Poland anticipates in almost so many words
the recent sophistry of the Imperial Chancellor on the violation of
the neutrality of Belgium. “Wrong? I grant you--a violation of law in
the most literal sense of the word.” But, he adds, necessity knows no
law, and, “to sum it up,” after all, Prussia “thereby gained a very
considerable territory.” And thus Treitschke on the question of the
duchies, or again, to go farther afield, Mommsen on the inexorable
“law” that the race is always to the swift and the battle to the
strong. Frederick the Great surely knew his fellow-countrymen when he
said with characteristic cynicism: “I begin by taking; I can always
find pedants to prove my rights afterwards.” Not the Chancelleries
only, but even the General Staff has worked hand in glove with the
lecture-room. When Bernhardi and von der Goltz exalt the spiritual
efficacy of war they are repeating almost word for word the language
of Treitschke. Not a faculty but ministers to German statecraft in its
turn. The economists, notably von Halle and Wagner, have been as busy
and pragmatical as the historians--theirs is the doctrine of Prussian
military hegemony upon a basis of agrarianism, of the absorption of
Holland, and of “the future upon the water.” The very vocabulary of
the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin
University.
To understand the potency of these academic influences in German
policy one must know something of the constitution of the German
universities. In no country is the control of the Government over the
universities so strong; nowhere is it so vigilant. Political favor may
make or mar an academic career; the complaisant professor is decorated,
the contumacious is cashiered. German academic history is full of
examples. Treitschke, Sybel, even Mommsen all felt the weight of royal
displeasure at one period or another. The present Emperor vetoed the
award of the Verdun prize to Sybel because in his history of Prussian
policy he had exalted Bismarck at the expense of the Hohenzollerns, and
he threatened to close the archives to Treitschke. Even Mommsen had at
one time to learn the steepness of alien stairs.
On the other hand, no Government recognizes so readily the value of
a professor who is docile--he is of more value than many Pomeranian
Grenadiers. Bismarck invited Treitschke to accompany the army of Sadowa
as a writer of military bulletins, and both he and Sybel were, after
due caution, commissioned to write those apologetics of Prussian
policy which are classics of their kind. Most German professors have
at one time or another been publicists, and the _Grenzboten_ and the
_Preussische Jahrbücher_ maintain the polemical traditions of Sybel’s
“Historische Zeitschrift.” Moreover, the German university system, with
the singular freedom in the choice of lectures and universities, which
it leaves to the student, tends to make a professor’s classes depend
for their success on his power of attracting a public by trenchant
oratory. Well has Acton said that the “garrison” of distinguished
historians that prepared the Prussian supremacy, together with their
own, “hold Berlin like a fortress.” They still hold it and their
science of fortification has not changed.
It is not necessary to recapitulate here the earlier phases of this
politico-historical school whose motto found expression in Droysen’s
aphorism, “The statesman is the historian in practise,” and whose
moral was “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” or, to put it less
pretentiously, “Nothing succeeds like success.” All of them, Niebuhr,
Mommsen, Droysen, Häusser, Sybel, Treitschke, have this in common:
that they are merciless to the rights of small nationalities. This was
no accident; it was due to the magnetism exercised upon their minds
by the hegemony of Prussia and by their opposition to the idea of a
loose confederation of small States. They were almost equally united
in a common detestation of France and could find no word too hard for
her polity, her literature, her ideals, and her people. “Sodom” and
“Babylon” were the best they could spare her. “Die Nation ist unser
Feind” wrote Treitschke in 1870, and “we must draw her teeth.” Even
Ranke declared that everything good in Germany had risen by way of
opposition to French influences. The intellectual war was carried into
every field and epoch of history, and all the institutions of modern
civilization were traced by writers like Waitz and Maurer to the early
German tribes uncorrupted by Roman influences. The same spirit was
apparent in Sybel’s hatred of the French Revolution and all its works.
This is not the place to expound the intellectual revenge which French
scholars like Fustel de Coulanges in the one sphere, and Albert Sorel
in the other, afterwards took upon this insensate chauvinism of the
chair. Sufficient to say that this cult of war and gospel of hate have
narrowed the outlook of German thought ever since, as Renan warned
Strauss they would, and have left Germany in an intellectual isolation
from the rest of Europe only to be paralleled by her moral isolation
of to-day. It was useless for Renan to remind German scholars that
pride is the only vice which is punished in this world. “We Germans,”
retorted Mommsen, “are not modest and don’t pretend to be.” The words
are almost the echo of that “thrasonic brag” with which Bismarck one
day electrified the Reichstag.
In the academic circles of to-day much of the hate formerly vented
upon France is now diverted to England. In this, Treitschke set the
fashion. Nothing delighted him more than to garnish his immensely
popular lectures with uproarious jests at England--“the hypocrite who,
with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other, scatters over
the universe the benefits of civilization.” But there was always method
in his madness. Treitschke was one of the first to demand for Germany
“a place in the sun”--this commonplace of Imperial speeches was, I
believe, coined by Sybel--and to press for the creation of a German
Navy which should do what “Europe” had failed to do--set bounds to the
crushing domination of the British Fleet and “restore the Mediterranean
to the Mediterranean peoples” by snatching back Malta, Corfu, and
Gibraltar. The seed fell on fruitful soil. A young economist, the late
Professor von Halle, whose vehement lectures I used to attend when a
student at Berlin University, worked out the maritime possibilities
of German ambitions in “Volks-und Seewirthschaft,” and his method
is highly significant in view of the recent ultimatum delivered by
Germany to Belgium. It was nothing less than the seduction of Holland
by economic bribes into promising to Germany the abandonment of the
neutrality of her ports in the event of war. Thereby, and thereby
alone, he argued, Germany would be reconciled to the “monstrosity”
(_Unding_) of the mouth of the Rhine being in non-German hands.
In return Germany would take Holland and her colonies under her
“protection.” To the same effect writes Professor Karl Lamprecht in his
“Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit,” seizing upon the Boer war to
demonstrate to Holland that England is the enemy. The same argument was
put forward by Professor Lexis. This was in the true line of academic
tradition. Even the discreet and temperate Ranke once counseled
Bismarck to annex Switzerland.
Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the academic “garrison.”
Of the lesser lansquenets, the horde of privat-dozents and obscurer
professors, whose intellectual folly is only equaled by their
audacity, and who are the mainstay of the Pan-German movement, I have
said nothing. It may be doubted whether the second generation can
show anything like the intellectual prestige which, with all their
intemperance, distinguished their predecessors. But they have all laid
to heart Treitschke’s maxim, “Be governmental,” honor the King, worship
the State, and “believe that no salvation is possible except by the
annihilation of the smaller States.” It is a strange ending to the
Germany of Kant and Goethe.
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der täglich sie erobern muss--
The noble lines of Goethe have now a variant reading--“He alone
achieves freedom and existence who seeks to repeat his conquests at the
expense of others” might be the motto of the Germans of to-day. But as
they have appealed to History, so will History answer them.
CHAPTER IV
GERMAN THOUGHT
TREITSCHKE
In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres
du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of
1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of
the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy
War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it
leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was
not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning
of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival
of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required
more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison
of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The
great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed
a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the
vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands
perfectly well,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not
kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic
injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old
Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the
apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the
pages of History everywhere reveal.”
To-day, everybody talks of Treitschke, though I doubt if half a dozen
people in England have read him. His brilliant essays, _Historische
und Politische Aufsätze_, illuminating almost every aspect of German
controversy, have never been translated; neither has his _Politik_,
a searching and cynical examination of the foundations of Political
Science which exalts the State at the expense of Society; and his
_Deutsche Geschichte_, which was designed to be the supreme apologetic
of Prussian policy, is also unknown in our tongue. But in Germany
their vogue has been and still is enormous; they are to Germans what
Carlyle and Macaulay were to us. Treitschke, indeed, has much in common
with Carlyle; the same contempt for Parliaments and constitutional
freedom; the same worship of the strong man armed; the same somber,
almost savage, irony, and, let it not be forgotten, the same deep
moral fervor. His character was irreproachable. At the age of fifteen
he wrote down this motto for his own: “To be always upright, honest,
moral, to become a man, a man useful to humanity, a brave man--these
are my ambitions.” This high ideal he strove manfully to realize.
But he was a doctrinaire, and of all doctrinaires the conscientious
doctrinaire is the most dangerous. Undoubtedly, in his case, as in that
of so many other enlightened Germans--Sybel, for example--his apostasy
from Liberalism dated from the moment of his conviction that the only
hope for German unity lay not in Parliaments but in the military
hegemony of Prussia. The bloody triumphs of the Austro-Prussian War
convinced him that the salvation of Germany was “only possible by the
annihilation of small States,” that States rest on force, not consent,
that success is the supreme test of merit, and that the issues of
war are the judgment of God. He was singularly free from sophistry
and never attempted, like Sybel, to defend the Ems telegram by the
disingenuous plea that “an abbreviation is not a falsification”; it
was enough for him that the trick achieved its purpose. And he had a
frank contempt for those Prussian jurists who attempted to find a legal
title to Schleswig-Holstein; the real truth of the matter he roundly
declared, was that the annexation of the duchies was necessary for the
realization of German aims. When he writes about war he writes without
any sanctimonious cant:
It is not for Germans to repeat the commonplaces of the apostles of
peace or of the priests of Mammon, nor should they close their eyes
before the cruel necessities of the age. Yes, ours is an epoch of
war, our age is an age of iron. If the strong get the better of the
weak, it is an inexorable law of life. Those wars of hunger which
we still see to-day amongst negro tribes are as necessary for the
economic conditions of the heart of Africa as the sacred war which
a people undertakes to preserve the most precious belongings of its
moral culture. There as here it is a struggle for life, here for a
moral good, there for a material good.
Readers of Bernhardi will recognize here the source of Bernhardi’s
inspiration. If Treitschke was a casuist at all--and as a rule he is
refreshingly, if brutally, frank--his was the supreme casuistry of the
doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may corrupt
the end or become an end in themselves he never saw, or only saw it
at the end of his life. He honestly believed that war was the nurse
of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, he feared the commercialism
of modern times, and despised England because he judged her wars to
have always been undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He
sneers at the Englishman who “scatters the blessings of civilization
with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other.” He honestly
believed that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic life, a pastoral
simplicity, and a deep religious faith to which no European country
could approach, and at the time he wrote the picture was not overdrawn.
He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he
celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were
hallowed, wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive
faith of Luther’s great Hymn. Writing of German Protestantism as the
corner-stone of German unity, he says:
Everywhere it has been the solid rampart of our language and
customs. In Alsace, as in the mountains of Transylvania and on the
distant shores of the Baltic, as long as the peasant shall sing his
old canticle
Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott
German life shall not pass away.
Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke’s influence on
his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his
teaching.
But Treitschke was dazzled by the military successes of Prussia in
1866. With that violent reaction against culture which is so common
among its professional devotees, and which often makes the men of the
pen far more sanguinary than the men of the sword, he derided the
old Germany of Goethe and Kant as “a nation of poets and thinkers
without a polity” (“Ein staatloses Volk von Dichtern und Denkern”),
and almost despised his own intellectual vocation. “Each dragoon,”
he cried enviously, “who knocks a Croat on the head does far more
for the German cause than the finest political brain that ever
wielded a trenchant pen.” But for his grievous deafness he would,
like his father, have chosen the profession of arms. Failing that,
he chose to teach. “It is a fine thing,” he wrote, “to be master of
the younger generation,” and he set himself to indoctrinate it with
the aim of German unity. He taught from 1859 to 1875 successively at
Leipzig, Freiburg, Kiel, and Heidelberg. From 1875 till his death in
1896 he occupied with immense éclat the chair of modern history at
Berlin. And so, although a Saxon, he enlisted his pen in the service
of Prussia--Prussia which always knows how to attract men of ideas
but rarely produces them. In the great roll of German statesmen and
thinkers and poets--Stein, Hardenberg, Goethe, Hegel--you will look
almost in vain for one who is of Prussian birth. She may pervert them;
she cannot create them.
Treitschke’s views were, of course, shared by many of his
contemporaries. The Seminars of the German Universities were the
arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony.
Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, Sybel, Häusser, Droysen, Gneist--all
ministered to that ascendency, and they all have this in common--that
they are merciless to the claims of the small States whose existence
seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. They are also united
in common hatred of France, for they feared not only the adventures of
Napoleon the Third but the leveling doctrines of the French Revolution.
Burke’s _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ are not more violent against
France than the writings of Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke. What,
however, distinguishes Treitschke from his intellectual confrères is
his thoroughness. They made reservations which he scorned to make.
Sybel, for example, is often apologetic when he comes to the more
questionable episodes in Prussian policy--the partition of Poland, the
affairs of the duchies, the Treaty of Bâle, the diplomacy of 1870;
Treitschke is disturbed by no such qualms. Bismarck who practised a
certain economy in giving Sybel access to official documents for his
semi-official history of Prussian policy, _Die Begründung des deutschen
Reichs_, had much greater confidence in Treitschke and told him he felt
sure he would not be disturbed to find that “our political linen is not
as white as it might be.” So, too, while others like Mommsen refused to
go the whole way with Bismarck in domestic policy, and clung to their
early Radicalism, Treitschke had no compunction about absolutism. He
ended, indeed, by becoming the champion of the Junkers, and his history
is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. “Be governmental”
was his succinct maxim, and he rested his hopes for Germany on the
bureaucracy and the army. Indeed, if he had had his way, he would have
substituted a unity state for the federal system of the German Empire,
and would have liked to see all Germany an enlarged Prussia--“ein
erweitertes Preussen”--a view which is somewhat difficult to reconcile
with his attacks on France as being “politically in a state of
perpetual nonage,” and on the French Government as hostile to all forms
of provincial autonomy.
By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of
the unity of Germany to a conception of her rôle as a world-power.
He is the true father of Weltpolitik. Much of what he writes on this
head is legitimate enough. Like Hohenlohe and Bismarck he felt the
humiliation of Germany’s weakness in the councils of Europe. Writing in
1863 he complains:
One thing we still lack--the State. Our people is the only one
which has no common legislation, which can send no representatives
to the Concert of Europe. No salute greets the German flag in a
foreign port. Our Fatherland sails the high seas without colors
like a pirate.
Germany, he declared, must become “a power across the sea.” This
conclusion, coupled with bitter recollections of the part played by
England in the affair of the Duchies, no doubt accounted for his
growing dislike of England.
Among the English the love of money has killed every sentiment of
honor and every distinction between what is just and unjust. They
hide their poltroonery and their materialism behind grand phrases
of unctuous theology. When one sees the English press raising its
eyes to heaven, frightened by the audacity of these faithless
peoples in arms upon the Continent, one might imagine one heard a
venerable parson droning away. As if the Almighty God, in Whose
name Cromwell’s Ironsides fought their battles, commanded us
Germans to allow our enemy to march undisturbed upon Berlin. Oh,
what hypocrisy! Oh, cant, cant, cant!
Europe, he says elsewhere, should have put bounds to the overweening
ambition of Britain by bringing to an end the crushing domination
of the English Fleet at Gibraltar, at Malta, and at Corfu, and by
“restoring the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples.” Thus did he
sow the seeds of German maritime ambition.
If I were asked to select the most characteristic of Treitschke’s
works I should be inclined to choose the vehement little pamphlet _Was
fordern wir von Frankreich?_ in which he insisted on the annexation
of Alsace-Lorraine. It is at once the vindication of Prussian policy,
and, in the light of the last forty-four years, its condemnation.
Like Mommsen, who wrote in much the same strain at the same time, he
insisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be “forced to
be free,” that Morality and History (which for him are much the same
thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it.
We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good
for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves, who through their
French associations have lived in ignorance of the new Germany.
We will give them back their own identity against their will. We
have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in
glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of
History (“das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mächte der
Geschichte”) to be able to believe in the unconditional value of a
plebiscite on this matter. We invoke the men of the past against
the present.
The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is
easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against
the living. Dead men tell no tales. It was, he admitted, true that the
Alsatians did not love the Germans. These “misguided people” betrayed
“that fatal impulse of Germans” to cleave to other nations than their
own. “Well may we Germans be horrified,” he adds, “when to-day we see
these German people rail in German speech like wild beasts against
their own flesh and blood as ‘German curs’ (‘deutschen Hunde’) and
‘stink-Prussians’ (‘Stinkpreussen’).” Treitschke was too honest to deny
it. There was, he ruefully admitted, something rather unlovely about
the “civilizing” methods of Prussia. “Prussia has perhaps not always
been guided by genial men.” But, he argued, Prussia united under the
new Empire to the rest of Germany would become humanized and would
in turn humanize the new subject-peoples. Well, the forty-four years
that have elapsed since Treitschke wrote have refuted him. Instead of
a Germanized Prussia, we see a Prussianized Germany. Her “geniality”
is the geniality of Zabern. The Poles, the Danes, and the Alsatians
are still contumacious. Treitschke appealed to History and History has
answered him.
Had he never any misgivings? Yes. After twenty-five years, and within
a month of his death, this Hebrew prophet looking round in the year
of grace 1895 on the “culture” of modern Germany was filled with
apprehension. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sedan he delivered an
address in the University of Berlin which struck his fond disciples
dumb. The Empire, he declared, had disarmed her enemies neither without
nor within.
In every direction our manners have deteriorated. The respect
which Goethe declared to be the true end of all moral education
disappears in the new generation with a giddy rapidity: respect of
God, respect for the limits which nature and society have placed
between the two sexes; respect for the Fatherland, which is every
day disappearing before the will-of-the-wisp of an indulgent
humanity. The more culture extends, the more insipid it becomes;
men despise the profundity of the ancient world and consider only
that which subserves their immediate end.
The things of the mind, he cried, had lost their hold on the German
people. Every one was eager to get rich and to relieve the monotony of
a vain existence by the cult of idle and meretricious pleasures. The
signs of the times were everywhere dark and gloomy. The new Emperor
(William the Second), he had already hinted, was a dangerous charlatan.
The wheel had come full circle. Fustel de Coulanges was justified of
his prophecy. And the handwriting on the walls of Destiny was never
more legible than now.
CONCLUSION
The contemplation of History, so a great master of the art has told
us, may not make men wise but it is sure to make them sad. The austere
Muse has never had a sadder page to show than that which is even now
being added to her record. We see now the full fruition of the German
doctrine of the beatitude of War. In sorrow and in anguish, in anguish
and in darkness, Belgium is weeping for her children and will not be
comforted because they are not. The invader has spared neither age nor
sex, neither rank nor function, and every insult that malice could
invent, or insolence inspire, has been heaped upon her bowed head.
The hearths are cold, the altars desecrated, the fields untilled, the
granaries empty. The peasant watches the heavens but he may not sow,
he has regarded his fields but he might not reap. The very stones in
her cities cry out; hardly one of them is left upon another. No nation
had ever given Europe more blithe and winning pledges of her devotion
to the arts of peace. The Flemish school of painters had endowed the
world with portraits of a grave tenderness which posterity might always
admire but could never imitate. The chisels of her medieval craftsmen
had left us a legacy of buoyant fancy in stone whose characters were
alive for us with the animation of the Canterbury Tales. All this the
invader has stamped out like the plague. A once busy and thriving
community begs its bread in alien lands. Never since the captivity of
Babylon has there been so tragic an expatriation. Yet noble in her
sorrow and exalted in her anguish, Belgium, like some patient caryatid,
still supports the broken architrave of the violated Treaty. Her little
army is still unconquered, her spirit is never crushed. She will arise
purified by her sorrow and ennobled by her suffering, and generations
yet unborn shall rise up to call her blessed.
THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF
INTRODUCTION
[Sidenote: What is a State of War.]
The armies of belligerent States on the outbreak of hostilities, or
indeed the moment war is declared, enter into a certain relation with
one another which is known by the name of “A State of War.” This
relationship, which at the beginning only concerns the members of the
two armies, is extended, the moment the frontier is crossed, to all
inhabitants of the enemy’s State, so far as its territory is occupied;
indeed it extends itself ultimately to both the movable and immovable
property of the State and its citizens.
[Sidenote: Active Persons and Passive.]
A distinction is drawn between an “active” and a “passive” state of
war. By the first is to be understood the relation to one another of
the actual fighting organs of the two belligerents, that is to say,
of the persons forming the army, besides that of the representative
heads of the State and of the leaders. By the second term, _i.e._, the
“passive” state of war, on the other hand, is to be understood the
relationship of the hostile army to those inhabitants of the State, who
share in the actual conduct of war only in consequence of their natural
association with the army of their own State, and who on that account
are only to be regarded as enemies in a passive sense. As occupying an
intermediate position, one has often to take into account a number of
persons who while belonging to the army do not actually participate in
the conduct of hostilities but continue in the field to pursue what is
to some extent a peaceful occupation, such as Army Chaplains, Doctors,
Medical Officers of Health, Hospital Nurses, Voluntary Nurses, and
other Officials, Sutlers, Contractors, Newspaper Correspondents and the
like.
[Sidenote: That War is no Respecter of Persons.]
Now although according to the modern conception of war, it is
primarily concerned with the persons belonging to the opposing armies,
yet no citizen or inhabitant of a State occupied by a hostile army
can altogether escape the burdens, restrictions, sacrifices, and
inconveniences which are the natural consequence of a State of War.
A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the
combatants of the Enemy State and the positions they occupy, but it
will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual[38]
and material resources of the latter.[39] Humanitarian claims such
as the protection of men and their goods can only be taken into
consideration in so far as the nature and object of the war permit.
[Sidenote: The Usages of War.]
Consequently the “argument of war” permits every belligerent State
to have recourse to all means which enable it to attain the object
of the war; still, practise has taught the advisability of allowing
in one’s own interest the introduction of a limitation in the use of
certain methods of war and a total renunciation of the use of others.
Chivalrous feelings, Christian thought, higher civilization and, by no
means least of all, the recognition of one’s own advantage, have led
to a voluntary and self-imposed limitation, the necessity of which is
to-day tacitly recognized by all States and their armies. They have
led in the course of time, in the simple transmission of knightly
usage in the passages of arms, to a series of agreements, hallowed by
tradition, and we are accustomed to sum these up in the words “usage
of war” (Kriegsbrauch), “custom of war” (Kriegssitte), “or fashion of
war” (Kriegsmanier). Customs of this kind have always existed, even in
the times of antiquity; they differed according to the civilization
of the different nations and their public economy, they were not
always identical, even in one and the same conflict, and they have in
the course of time often changed; they are older than any scientific
law of war, they have come down to us unwritten, and moreover they
maintain themselves in full vitality; they have therefore won an
assured position in standing armies according as these latter have been
introduced into the systems of almost every European State.
[Sidenote: Of the futility of Written Agreements as Scraps of Paper.]
The fact that such limitations of the unrestricted and reckless
application of all the available means for the conduct of war, and
thereby the humanization of the customary methods of pursuing war
really exist, and are actually observed by the armies of all civilized
States, has in the course of the nineteenth century often led to
attempts to develop, to extend, and thus to make universally binding
these preexisting usages of war; to elevate them to the level of
laws binding nations and armies, in other words to create a _codex
belli_; a law of war. All these attempts have hitherto, with some few
exceptions to be mentioned later, completely failed. If, therefore, in
the following work the expression “the law of war” is used, it must
be understood that by it is meant not a _lex scripta_ introduced by
international agreements; but only a reciprocity of mutual agreement;
a limitation of arbitrary behavior, which custom and conventionality,
human friendliness and a calculating egotism have erected, but for the
observance of which there exists no express sanction, but only “the
fear of reprisals” decides.
[Sidenote: The “flabby emotion” of Humanitarianism.]
Consequently the usage of war is even now the only means of regulating
the relations of belligerent States to one another. But with the idea
of the usages of war will always be bound up the character of something
transitory, inconstant, something dependent on factors outside the
army. Nowadays it is not only the army which influences the spirit
of the customs of war and assures recognition of its unwritten laws.
Since the almost universal introduction of conscription, the peoples
themselves exercise a profound influence upon this spirit. In the
modern usages of war one can no longer regard merely the traditional
inheritance of the ancient etiquette of the profession of arms, and the
professional outlook accompanying it, but there is also the deposit
of the currents of thought which agitate our time. 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 (_Sentimentalität und weichlicher
Gefühlsschwärmerei_) there have not been wanting attempts to influence
the development of the usages of war in a way which was in fundamental
contradiction with the nature of war and its object. Attempts of this
kind will also not be wanting in the future, the more so as these
agitations have found a kind of moral recognition in some provisions of
the Geneva Convention and the Brussels and Hague Conferences.
[Sidenote: Cruelty is often “the truest humanity.”]
[Sidenote: The perfect Officer.]
Moreover the officer is a child of his time. He is subject to the
intellectual[40] tendencies which influence his own nation; the more
educated he is the more will this be the case. The danger that, in
this way, he will arrive at false views about the essential character
of war must not be lost sight of. The danger can only be met by a
thorough study of war itself. 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 indispensable
to war, nay more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a
ruthless application of them. It will also teach him how the rules
of belligerent intercourse in war have developed, how in the course
of time they have solidified into general usages of war, and finally
it will teach him whether the governing usages of war are justified
or not, whether they are to be modified or whether they are to be
observed. But for a study of military history in this light, knowledge
of the fundamental conceptions of modern international and military
movements is certainly necessary. To present this is the main purpose
of the following work.
PART I
THE USAGES OF WAR IN REGARD TO THE HOSTILE ARMY
CHAPTER I
WHO BELONGS TO THE HOSTILE ARMY?
[Sidenote: Who are Combatants and who are not.]
Since the subjects of enemy States have quite different rights and
duties according as they occupy an active or a passive position, the
question arises: Who is to be recognized as occupying the active
position, or what amounts to the same thing--Who belongs to the hostile
army? This is a question of particular importance.
According to the universal usages of war, the following are to be
regarded as occupying an active position:
1. The heads of the enemy’s state and its ministers, even though
they possess no military rank.
2. The regular army, and it is a matter of indifference whether
the army is recruited voluntarily or by conscription; whether
the army consists of subjects or aliens (mercenaries); whether
it is brought together out of elements which were already in
the service in time of peace, or out of such as are enrolled
at the moment of mobilization (militia, reserve, national
guard and Landsturm).
3. Subject to certain assumptions, irregular combatants, also,
_i.e._, such as are not constituent parts of the regular army,
but have only taken up arms for the length of the war, or,
indeed, for a particular task of the war.
[Sidenote: The Irregular.]
Only the third class of persons need be more closely considered. In
their case the question how far the rights of an active position are
to be conceded to them has at all times been matter of controversy,
and the treatment of irregular troops has in consequence varied
considerably. Generally speaking the study of military history leads
to the conclusion that the Commanding Officers of regular armies
were always inclined to regard irregular troops of the enemy with
distrust, and to apply to them the contemporary laws of war with
peculiar severity. This unfavorable prejudice is based on the ground
that the want of a military education and of stern discipline among
irregular troops, easily leads to transgressions and to non-observance
of the usages of war, and that the minor skirmishes which they prefer
to indulge in, and which by their very nature lead to individual
enterprise, open the door to irregularity and savagery, and easily
deteriorate into robbery and unauthorized violence, so that in every
case the general insecurity which it develops engenders bitterness,
fury, and revengeful feelings in the harassed troops, and leads to
cruel reprisals. Let any one read the combats of the French troops in
the Spanish Peninsula in the years 1808 to 1814, in Tyrol in 1809,
in Germany in 1813, and also those of the English in their different
Colonial wars, or again the Carlist Wars, the Russo-Turkish War,
and the Franco-Prussian War,[41] and one will everywhere find this
experience confirmed.
[Sidenote: Each State must decide for itself.]
If these points of view are on the whole decisive against the
employment of irregular troops, yet on the other hand, it must be left
to each particular State to determine how far it will disregard such
considerations; from the point of view of international law no State
is compelled to limit the instruments of its military operations to
the standing army. It is, on the contrary, completely justified in
drawing upon all the inhabitants capable of bearing arms, entirely
according to its discretion, and in imparting to them an authorization
to participate in the war.
[Sidenote: The necessity of Authorization.]
This public authorization has therefore been until quite recently
regarded as the presumed necessary condition of any recognition of
combatant rights.
[Sidenote: Exceptions which prove the rule.]
[Sidenote: The Free Lance.]
Of course there are numerous examples in military history in which
irregular combatants have been recognized as combatants by the enemy,
without any public authorization of the kind; thus in the latest wars
of North America, Switzerland, and Italy, and also in the case of the
campaign (without any kind of commission from a State) of Garibaldi
against Naples and Sicily in the year 1860. But in all these cases
the tacitly conceded recognition originated not out of any obligatory
principles of international law or of military usage, but simply and
solely out of the fear of reprisals. The power to prevent the entrance
on the scene of these irregular partizans did not exist, and it was
feared that by not recognizing their quality as combatants the war a
cruel character might be given, and consequently that more harm than
good might result to the parties themselves. On the other hand there
has always been a universal consensus of opinion against recognizing
irregulars who make their appearance individually or in small bands,
and who conduct war in some measure on their own account (auf eigene
Faust) detached from the army, and such opinion approves of the
punishment of these offenders with death.
This legal attitude which denies every unauthorized rising and
identifies it with brigandage was taken up by the revolutionary armies
of France towards the insurrection in La Vendée, and again by Napoleon
in his proceedings against Schill and Dörnberg in the year 1809, and
again by Wellington, Schwarzenberg, and Blücher, in the Proclamations
issued by them in France in the year 1814, and the German Army adopted
the same standpoint in the year 1870-71, when it demanded that: “Every
prisoner who wishes to be treated as a prisoner of war must produce
a certificate as to his character as a French soldier, issued by the
legal authorities, and addressed to him personally, to the effect that
he has been called to the Colors and is borne on the Roll of a corps
organized on a military footing by the French Government.”
[Sidenote: Modern views.]
In the controversies which have arisen since the war of 1870-71 over
the different questions of international law and the laws of war,
decisive emphasis has no longer been placed upon the question of public
authorization, and it has been proposed, on grounds of expediency,
to recognize as combatants such irregulars as are indeed without an
express and immediate public authorization, but who are organized in
military fashion and are under a responsible leader. The view here
taken was that by a recognition of these kind of irregular troops the
dangers and horrors of war would be diminished, and that a substitute
for the legal authorization lacking in the case of individuals offers
itself in the military organization and in the existence of a leader
responsible to his own State.
Moreover the Brussels Declaration of August 27, 1874, and in
consonance with it the _Manual of the Institute of International Law_,
desire as the first condition of recognition as combatants “that they
have at their head a personality who is responsible for the behavior of
those under him to his own Government.”[42]
[Sidenote: The German Military View.]
Considered from the military point of view there is not much objection
to the omission of the demand for public authorization, so soon as
it becomes a question of organized detachments of troops, but in the
case of hostile individuals who appear on the scene we shall none the
less be unable to dispense with the certificate of membership of an
organized band, if such individuals are to be regarded and treated as
lawful belligerents.
But the organization of irregulars in military bands and their
subjection to a responsible leader are not by themselves sufficient
to enable one to grant them the status of belligerents; even more
important than these is the necessity of being able to recognize them
as such and of their carrying their arms openly. The soldier must know
who he has against him as an active opponent, he must be protected
against treacherous killing and against any military operation which is
prohibited by the usages of war among regular armies. The chivalrous
idea which rules in the regular armies of all civilized States always
seeks an open profession of one’s belligerent character. The demand
must, therefore, be insisted on that irregular troops, although not in
uniform, shall at least be distinguishable by visible signs which are
recognizable at a distance.[43] Only by such means can the occurrence
of misuse in the practise of war on the one side, and the tragic
consequences of the non-recognition of combatant status on the other,
be made impossible. The Brussels Declarations also therefore recommend,
in Art. 9 (2 and 3), that they, _i.e._, the irregular troops, should
wear a fixed sign which is visible from a distance, and that they
should carry their weapons openly. The Hague Convention adds to these
three conditions yet a fourth, “That they observe the laws and usages
of war in their military operations.”
[Sidenote: The Levée en masse.]
[Sidenote: The Hague Regulations will not do.]
[Sidenote: A short way with the Defender of his Country.]
This condition must also be maintained if it becomes a question
of the _levée en masse_, the arming of the whole population of the
country, province, or district; in other words the so-called people’s
war or national war.[44] Starting from the view that one can never
deny to the population of a country the natural right of defense of
one’s fatherland, and that the smaller and consequently less powerful
States can only find protection in such _levées en masse_, the
majority of authorities on International law have, in their proposals
for codification, sought to attain the recognition on principle of
the combatant status of all these kinds of people’s champions, and
in the Brussels declaration and the Hague Regulations the aforesaid
condition[45] is omitted. As against this one may nevertheless remark
that the condition requiring a military organization and a clearly
recognizable mark of being attached to the enemy’s troops, is not
synonymous with a denial of the natural right of defense of one’s
country. It is therefore not a question of restraining the population
from seizing arms but only of compelling it to do this in an organized
manner. Subjection to a responsible leader, a military organization,
and clear recognizability cannot be left out of account unless the
whole recognized foundation for the admission of irregulars is going
to be given up altogether, and a conflict of one private individual
against another is to be introduced again, with all its attendant
horrors, of which, for example, the proceedings in Bazeilles in
the last Franco-Prussian War afford an instance. If the necessary
organization does not really become established--a case which is by no
means likely to occur often--then nothing remains but a conflict of
individuals, and those who conduct it cannot claim the rights of an
active military status. The disadvantages and severities inherent in
such a state of affairs are more insignificant and less inhuman than
those which would result from recognition.[46]