In peace the mental docility of the German, his willingness to accept an
order unquestioningly and mechanically to obey it, may be a virtue, as
we reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this
same trait becomes a vice. In peace it makes him yet more peaceful; in
war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace.
It is that very menace which must confront the American troopers who may
be sent abroad for service. It is that very menace which must confront
our people at home in the event that the enemy shall get near enough to
our coasts to bombard our shore cities, or should he succeed in landing
an expeditionary force upon American soil.
When I first came back from the war front I marvelled that sensible
persons so often asked me what sort of people the Germans were, as
though Germans were a stranger race, like Patagonians or the South Sea
Islanders, living in some remote and untravelled corner of the globe. I
felt like telling them that Germans in Germany were like the Germans
they knew in America--in the main, God-fearing, orderly, hard-working,
self-respecting citizens. But through these intervening months I have
changed my mind; to-day I should make a different answer. I would say,
to him who asked that question now, that the same tractability of
temperament which, under the easy-going, flexible workings of our
American plan of living makes the German-born American so readily
conform to his physical and metaphysical surroundings here, and makes
his progeny so soon to amalgamate with our fused and conglomerated
stock, has the effect, in his Fatherland, of all the more easily and all
the more firmly filling his mind and shaping his deeds in conformity
with the exact and rigorous demands of the Prussianism that has been
shackled upon him since his empire ceased to be a group of petty
states.
We have got to remember, then, that the Germany with which we have
broken is not the Germany of Heine and Goethe and Haeckel and Beethoven;
not the Germany which gave us Steuben in the Revolutionary War, and
Sigel and Schurz in the Civil War; not the Germany of the chivalrous,
lovable Saxon, or yet of the music-loving, home-loving Bavarian; not the
Germany which was the birthplace of the kindly, honourable, industrious,
patriotic German-speaking neighbour round the corner from you--but the
fanatical, tyrannical, power-mad, blood-and-iron Prussianised Germany of
Bismarck and Von Bernhardi, of the Crown Prince and the Junkers--that
passionate Prussianised Germany which for forty years through the
instrumentality of its ruling classes--not necessarily its Kaiser, but
its real ruling classes--has been jealously striving to pervert every
native ounce of its scientific and its inventive and its creative genius
out of the paths of progress and civilisation and to jam it into the
grooves of the greatest autocratic machine, the greatest organism for
killing off human beings, the greatest engine of misbegotten and
misdirected efficiency that was ever created in the world. Because we
have an admiration for one of these two Germanys is no more a reason why
we should abate our indignation and our detestation for the other
Germany than that because a man loves a cheery blaze upon his
hearthstone he should refuse to fight a forest fire.
We have got to remember another thing. If our oversea observations of
this war abroad have taught us anything, they should have taught us that
the German Army--and when I say army I mean in this case, not its men
but its officers, since in the German Army the officers are essentially
the brain and the power and the motive force directing the unthinking,
blindly obedient mass beneath them--that the German Army is not an army
of good sportsmen. And that, I take it, is an even more important
consideration upon the field of battle than it is upon the athletic
field. As the saying goes, the Germans don't play the game. It is as
inconceivable to imagine German officers going in for baseball or
football or cricket as it is to imagine American volunteers marching the
goose step or to imagine Englishmen relishing the cut-and-dried
calisthenics of a _Turnverein._
The Germans are not an outdoor race; they are not given to playing
outdoor sports and abiding by the rules of those sports, as Englishmen
and as Americans are. And in war--that biggest of all outdoor games--it
stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules,
except they be rules of their own making. It may be argued that the
French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive
sports. But, on the other hand, the Frenchman is essentially romantic
and essentially dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory afterward,
he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and the generous virtues rather
than the cruel and the unkindly ones, because, as we all know, it is
easier to dramatise one's good impulses than one's evil ones.
Now the German, as has recently been shown, is neither dramatic nor
sportsmanlike. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad loser--a most
remarkably bad loser. Good sportsmen would not have broken Belgium into
bloody bits because Belgium stood between them and their goal; good
sportsmen would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "_Gott Strafe
England!_" their battle cry; good sportsmen would not have shot Edith
Cavell or sunk the _Lusitania_. Good sportsmen would not have packed the
helpless men and boys of a conquered and a prostrate land off as
captives into an enforced servitude worse than African slavery; would
not wantonly have wasted La Fère and Chauny and Ham, and a hundred other
French towns, as they did in March and April of this year, for no
conceivable reason than that they must surrender these towns back into
the hand of the enemy; would not have cut down the little orchard trees
nor shovelled dung into the drinking wells; would not, while ostensibly
at peace with us, have plotted to destroy our industrial plants and to
plant the seeds of sedition among our foreign-born citizens, and to
dismember our country, parceling it out between a brown race in Mexico
and a yellow race in Japan. Good sports do not do these things, and
Germany did all of them. That means something.