IX

I am coming now to what seems to me to be the most important

consideration of all. In this war upon which we have entered our chief

enemy is a nation firmly committed to the belief that whatever it may do

is most agreeable in the sight of God. It is firmly committed to the

belief that the acts of its Kaiser, its Crown Prince, its government,

its statesmen, its generals and its armies are done in accordance with

the will and the purposes of God. And, by the same token, it is

committed, with equal firmness, to the conviction that the designs and

the deeds of all the nations and all the peoples opposed to their nation

must perforce be obnoxious to God. By the processes of their own

peculiar theology--a theology which blossomed and began to bear its

fruit after the war started, but for which the seed had been sown long

before--God is not Our God but Their God. He is not the common creator

of mankind, but a special Creator of Teutons. He is a German God. For

you to say this would sound in American ears like sacrilege. For me to

write it down here smacks of blasphemy and impiety. But to the

German--in Germany--it is sound religion, founded upon the Gospels and

the Creed, proven in the Scriptures, abundantly justified in the

performances and the intentions of an anointed and a sanctified few

millions among all the unnumbered millions who breed upon the earth.

Now here, by way of a beginning, is the proof of it. This proof is to be

found in a collection of original poems published by a German pastor,

the Reverend Herr Doktor Konsistorialrat D. Vorwerk. In the first

edition of his book there occurred a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, of

which the following are the last three petitions and the close:

"Though the warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work daily death and

tenfold woe unto the enemy. Forgive in merciful long-suffering each

bullet and each blow which misses its mark! Lead us not into the

temptation of letting our wrath be too tame in carrying out Thy

divine judgment! Deliver us and our Ally from the infernal Enemy

and his servants on earth. Thine is the kingdom, The German Land;

may we, by aid of Thy steel-clad hand, achieve the power and the

glory."

From subsequent editions of the work of Pastor Vorwerk this prayer was

omitted. It is said to have been denounced as blasphemous by a

religious journal, published in Germany--but not in Berlin. But

evidently no one within the German Empire, either in authority or out of

it, found any fault with the worthy pastor's sentiment that the

Germans, above all other races--except possibly the Turks, who

appear to have been taken into the Heavenly fold by a special

dispensation--are particularly favoured and endowed of God, and

enjoy His extraordinary--one might almost be tempted to say His

private--guardianship, love and care. For in varying forms this

fetishism is expressed in scores of places. Consider this example, which

cannot have lost much of its original force in translation:

"How can it be that Germany is surrounded by nothing but enemies

and has not a single friend? Is not this Germany's own fault? No!

Do you not know that Prince of Hades, whose name is Envy, and who

unites scoundrels and sunders heroes? Let us, therefore, rejoice

that Envy has thus risen up against us; it only shows that God has

exalted and richly blessed us. Think of Him who was hanged on the

Cross and seemed forsaken of God, and had to tread in such

loneliness His path to victory! My German people, even if thy road

be strewn with thorns and beset by enemies, press onward, filled

with defiance and confidence. The heavenly ladder is still

standing. Thou and thy God, ye are the majority!"

I have quoted these extracts from the printed and circulated book of an

ordained and reputable German clergyman, and presumably also a popular

and respected German clergyman, because I honestly believe them to be

not the individual mouthings of an isolated fanatic, but the voice of an

enormous number of his fellow countrymen, expressing a conviction that

has come to be common among them since August, 1914.

I believe, further, that they should be quoted because knowledge of them

will the better help our own people here in the United States to

understand the temper of a vast group of our enemies; will help us to

understand the motives behind some of the forms of hostility and

reprisal that undoubtedly they are going to attempt to inflict upon the

United States; help us, I hope, to understand that, upon our part, in

waging this war an over-measure of forbearance, a mistaken charity, or a

faith in the virtue of his fair promises is only wasted when it is

visited upon an adversary who, for his part, is upborne by the perverted

spiritualism and the degenerated self-idolatry of a Mad Mullah. It is

all very well to pour oil on troubled waters; it is foolishness to pour

it on wildfire.

X

In this same connection it may not be amiss for us to consider the

predominant and predominating viewpoints of another and an equally

formidable group of the foemen. In October, 1913, nearly a year before

Germany started the World War, one of the recognised leaders of the

association who called themselves "Young Germany" wrote in the official

organ, the accepted mouthpiece of the Junker set and the Crown Prince's

favoured adherents, a remarkable statement--that is, it would have been

a remarkable statement coming from any other source than the source from

whence it did come. It read as follows:

"War is the noblest and holiest expression of human activity. For

us, too, the great glad hour of battle will strike. Still and deep

in the German heart must live the joy of battle and the longing for

it. Let us ridicule to the uttermost the old women in breeches who

fear war and deplore it as cruel or revolting. War is beautiful....

When here on earth a battle is won by German arms and the faithful

dead ascend to heaven, a Potsdam lance corporal will call the guard

to the door and 'Old Fritz,' springing from his golden throne, will

give the command to present arms. That is the heaven of Young

Germany!"

The likening of Heaven to a place of eternal beatitude, populated by

German soldiers, with a Potsdam lance corporal succeeding Saint Peter at

the gate, and "Old Fritz"--Frederick the Great--in sole and triumphant

occupancy of the Golden Throne, where, according to the conceptions of

the most Christian races, The Almighty sits, is a picture requiring no

comment.

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

Prussianism.

I think I am in position to tell something of the growth of these

sentiments among the Germans. As I stated on almost the first page of

this little book, it fell to my lot to be on German soil in September

and October of that first year of the Great War, before there was any

prospect of our entering it as a belligerent Power, and when the

civilian populace, having been exalted by the series of unbroken

victories that had marked the first stage of hostilities for the German

forces, east and west, was suffering from the depressions occasioned by

the defeat before Paris, the retreat from the Marne back to the Aisne,

and finally by the growing fear that Italy, instead of coming into the

conflict as an ally of the two Teutonic Empires, might, if she became

an active combatant at all, cast in her lot with France and with

England.

It was from civilians that I got a sense of the intellectual motive

powers behind the mass of civilians in Rhenish Prussia. It was from them

that I learned something of the real German meaning of the German word

_Kultur_. In view of recent and present developments on our side of the

ocean, culminating in our entry into the war, I am constrained to

believe I may perhaps, in my own small way, contribute to American

readers some slight measure of appreciation of what that _Kultur_ means

and may mean as applied to other and lesser nations by its creators,

protagonists and proud proprietors.

I heard nothing of _Kultur_ from the German military men with whom I had

theretofore come into contact in Belgium and in Northern France, and

whom I still was meeting daily both in their social and in their

official capacities. So far as one might judge by their language and

their behaviour they, almost without an exception, were heartily at war

for a hearty love of war--the officers, I mean. To them the war--the

successful prosecution of it, regardless of the cost; the immediate

glory, and the final ascendancy over all Europe and Asia of the German

arms--was everything. With them nothing else counted but that--except,

of course, the ultimate humbling of Great Britain in the dust. Seemingly

the woful side of the situation, the losses and the sufferings and the

horrors, concerned them not a whit. War for war's sake; that was their

religion; never mind what had gone before; never mind what might come

after. To make war terribly and successfully, to make it with

frightfulness and with a frightful speed, was their sole aim.

Never did I hear them, or any one of them, openly invoking the aid of

the Creator. They were content with the tools forged for their hands by

their military overlords. As for the men in the ranks, if they did any

thinking on their own account it was not visible upon the surface. Their

business was to use their bodies, not their heads; their trade to obey

orders. They knew that business and they followed that trade. And

already poor little wasted Belgium stood a smoking, bloody monument to

their thorough, painstaking and most efficient craftsmanship.

Nor, except among the green troops which had not yet been under fire,

was there any expressed hatred, either with officers or men, for the

opposing soldiers. During our experiences in the battle lines, and

directly behind the battle lines, in the weeks immediately preceding

the time of which I purpose to write, we had aimed at a plan of

ascertaining, with perfect accuracy, whether the German forces we

encountered had seen any service except theoretical service. If we ran

across a command whose members spoke contemptuously of the French or the

English or the Belgian soldiers, we might make sure in our own minds

that here were men who had yet to come to grips at close range with

their enemy.

On the other hand, troops who actually had seen hard fighting rarely

failed to evince a sincere respect, and in some instances a sort of

reluctant admiration, for the courage and the steadfastness of their

adversaries. They were convinced--and that I suppose was only

natural--of the superiority of the German soldiers, man for man, over

the soldiers of any other nation; but they had been cured of the earlier

delusion that most of the stalwart heroes were to be found on the one

side and most of the weaklings and cravens on the other.

Likewise the hot furnaces of battle had smelted much of the hate out of

their hearts. The slag was gone; what remained was the right metal of

soldierliness. I imagine this has been true in a greater or less degree

of all so-called civilised wars where brave and resolute men have fought

against brave and resolute men. Certainly I know it to have been true of

the first periods of this present war.