THE STATESMANSHIP OF THE ENTENTE
One of the most amazing phenomena of Entente statesmanship during the
present European struggle, is the offhand readiness with which the
Governments of France and Great Britain, yielding to abstract
reasoning founded upon gratuitous assumptions, not only reversed the
policy of centuries but committed themselves to a wholly new departure
which was certain to raise up enemies to the Entente, to render its
task immeasurably more arduous, and to lessen its means of achieving
success. However well Russia deserved of her allies, however
unquestionable her claim to the city of Constantine, no less suitable
a moment could have been selected to press that claim than the spring
of 1915. The only evidence we possess that the British statesmen
primarily responsible for this capital blunder were conscious of the
fateful character of this commitment, is the extreme care they took to
have their responsibility shared by the members of the Opposition,
which at that time was not represented in the Cabinet. But even with
this indication before us, we cannot believe that even now this
premature solution of a secular problem on lines suggested by
transient episodes of a military campaign, has struck the responsible
statesmen in proportion to its specific weight, the depth of its
importance, and the nature of its consequences. To take but one of
these, we find that towards the end of the second year of the
campaign, Turkey is one of the two key-positions of the international
situation. To conclude a separate peace with that Power is become a
pressing, and would also be a feasible, task were it not that this
earmarking of Constantinople for Russia constitutes an impassable
barrier. No Turkish Cabinet would or could conclude a separate peace
and strike up friendship with the nations that are making ready to
deprive the Caliph of his capital. It would be a mistake, however, to
assume that this premature allotment of Constantinople to Russia is
the only obstacle to the conclusion of a separate peace with Turkey.
There are also hindrances of a military nature which would have to be
displaced before any decisive move in this direction could be expected
of the young Turks.
But it cannot be gainsaid that the most formidable obstacle is that.
Neither can it be questioned that that premature arrangement will, if
the Allies emerge victorious from the ordeal, thrust into the
foreground of practical politics a whole group of problems the most
delicate and dangerous that were ever yet tackled by the inadequately
equipped diplomacy of the Allied Governments. It is then that the
Entente Powers will fully realize the deluge to which they made such
haste to open the sluice-gates in the spring of 1915. And the only way
practicable out of this blind alley would be the spontaneous
abandonment by the Russian Government of the right it possesses, which
however the Allies will certainly never call in question. Whether the
Tsar's Government believes such a sacrifice necessary, and whether,
if they did, they could summon up the courage requisite to make it,
are questions which Russia's loyal allies have neither the right nor
the wish to raise. We will carry out our obligations in the letter and
the spirit. If the Russian people, in the person of their responsible
organ, should renounce for the moment the claims which we have
formally recognized and undertaken to enforce, this decision will have
been come to spontaneously and without pressure or advice from their
allies.
The extent to which the Teuton had his own way among the easy-going
Russian people is hardly to be realized. It would be certainly
inexplicable in an empire governed on national lines and conscious of
its mission. For unlimited pliancy was the quality which German
importunity evoked on the part of the highest authorities. One of many
examples is worth recording. Among all industrial enterprises the
Russian Government is most sensitive about that of high explosives.
The manufacture of these they had always rigorously reserved for their
own people, on obvious grounds. Well, the moment the Germans resolved
to break down this barrier, they found the means to do it despite the
objection raised by the Russian Press that it would be dangerous to
confide the production of high explosives to foreigners and
superlatively dangerous to confide it to prospective enemies. The
prospective enemy carried the point, and the manufacture of high
explosives was handed over to a German company, which built works for
the purpose near the Russian capital, and had its headquarters and
board of directors in Berlin![44]
[44] _Novoye Vremya_, June 24, 1915.
As in Italy, so in the Tsardom, one of the principal levers of Teuton
interpenetration was the regulation of the national trade and
industry. That is to say, these were allowed to subsist and thrive up
to, but not beyond, the point at which they were useful as adjuncts of
German enterprise. And the regulators were principally two: the Treaty
of Commerce extorted from the Tsar's Government during the
embarrassments caused by the Manchurian campaign, and the German
banks, which in the empire paraded as Russian, just as in Italy they
were decked as Italian. Many of those financial institutions were but
branches of German houses, and their methods were identical with those
of the Banca Commerciale: long credits and easy modes of repayment
offered to all those who agreed to deal with German firms, while
discredit, ostracism, and ruin threatened the recalcitrant. And as
Italian money and Italian institutions were employed as instruments of
German interpenetration in foreign countries,[45] so Russian funds and
banks were used as helps to German interpenetration in Belgium and
other lands.
[45] For example, the Banca Franco-Italiana in Brazil.
A noteworthy instance of the ingenuity with which this intricate
mechanism was worked came to light shortly before the outbreak of the
war. In Brussels there was a branch of the Petrograd International
Bank which purported to be a purely Russian concern. But once the
Kaiser had sent his ultimatum to the Tsar's Government, the Russian
mask was doffed by the Brussels agency, which forthwith appeared in
its true colours as a potent instrument of germanization in Belgium.
There was found to be almost nothing Russian about the bank but the
name. The staff, the language spoken, the methods of business, the
political sympathies, the aims of the operations were all German. Out
of the forty-three permanent members of the staff, thirty were German
subjects, six Austrians, two German-Swiss, two Belgians, one was a
Dutchman, one Turk, and there was a solitary Russian. The moment Count
Berchtold presented his ultimatum to Serbia this "Russian" bank
refused to change any Russian banknotes on any terms and let it be
understood that they were valueless. A panic on the Belgian market was
the immediate consequence. Russian travellers had to deposit their
jewellery in pawn and pay exorbitant rates of interest on loans. The
bank itself practised a kind of usury, and advanced only sixty per
cent. of the face value of notes issued by the Imperial Bank of
Russia. When the Belgian Government, after the declaration of war,
began to tackle German espionage, this "Russian" bank was found to be
one of the strongholds of the military spies. Certain of the employees
were permanent agents of the German Military Attache, and were at the
same time inscribed as members of the staff of the Deutsche Bank of
Berlin.
All those well-thought-out and successfully executed schemes may bear
in upon the British people some notion of what is meant by German
organization and co-ordination, and may also help them to gauge the
chances of success, military, diplomatic and economic, on which the
Allies, with their easy-going ways, their hope of somehow "blundering
through," and their lack of combination and of plan--can rely when
pitted against a mighty organism, disposing of the most redoubtable
forces ever created by human science and skill, directed by a single
mind, and served with ascetic self-abnegation and religious ardour by
over a hundred million people. The courage and faith of the Allies in
gazing for years upon this portentous engine of destruction without
making suitable provision for the day when it would be turned against
themselves, will fill future generations with amazement.
No bare enumeration of details can convey an adequate idea of the
vastness, compactness and potency of the German organization which
kept the Russian Colossus partially paralysed at home, while the
Kaiser's armies were dealing it stunning blows on the battlefield. It
is a revelation which will be followed by a new birth of the whole
political world. The German colonists, the wandering German commercial
travellers who acted as political spies, the various banks,
joint-stock companies, religious sects, journals, reviews, schools,
clubs, Lutheran pastors, and other Teuton agents, were but so many
wheels and springs of the mighty machine which was set in motion and
kept working by the political leaders in Berlin. For all these firms
and enterprises and individuals from the Fatherland scattered over the
length and breadth of the Tsardom were welded together in one vast
organism by far-seeing politicians who canalized every important
current of the nation's life and imparted to it the direction which
German interests required. No enterprise was too vast, no detail too
trivial, for the attention of these moulders of Germany's destinies.
All those activities, commercial, financial, industrial,
journalistic, religious, political, the German mind combined into a
single idea, the co-ordinate parts of which were studied and
regulated, not by party chiefs, but by qualified experts, who,
although specialists, subjected them to organic treatment. In this
respect the German may be likened to a massive sombre figure who,
surrounded by a crowd of sprightly shadowy nobodies, discoursing with
easy frivolity on grave subjects, is engrossed with the task of
destroying a great part of the frame-work of the world in order to
rebuild it after his own plan. Unfortunately the extraordinary
enlargement of interest which marks the latter-day political
conceptions, and inspires the fateful action of Germany's acknowledged
leaders, breeds in the allied peoples not so much a stern resolve to
tame that revolutionary nation at all costs, as a sentimental longing
for the return of the idyllic past, and an illusive hope that by dint
of mild Christian charity it may yet be brought back.