THE STAGE MANAGERS
Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War
Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War
Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is _not_. It is not a party
in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's
Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National
Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever
organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in
August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are
decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for
the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever
acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You
could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to
acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister,
its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when
it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War
Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and
fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready
that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a
zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to
approach.
When the German War Party pressed the button for the Great Massacre, the
Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand
inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one
can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand
Germans really wanted war. _They_ were the "War Party." Sixty-six
millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant
prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed,
longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought
about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that
William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the
literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history
which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for
the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to
that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1914, the wife of
Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German
General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be
nameless. The _Frau Generalstabschef_ was in a state of obvious mental
excitement.
"_Ach_, what a day I've been through, _Kinder_!" she began. "My husband
came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the
couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished
the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had
helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"
There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct,
fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the
supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced"
into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence.
No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of
explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that
when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army."
Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred
loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred
to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization
order." _Die Post_, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the
Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had
to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into
the reluctant hand of William II.
The Kaiser was constitutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in
my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like
our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter.
Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to
their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want
to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever
slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was
noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in
perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to
Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not
already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man
when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in
mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along
the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War
Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand.
He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers
coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He
sent the _Panther_ to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled
for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa
would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff
as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not,
and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never
Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered.
Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before God and
history my conscience is clear. _I did not will this war_. One year
has elapsed since I was _obliged_ to call the German people to arms."
Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main
Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915.
Herewith I place _Frau Generalstabschef_ von Moltke on the stand as
chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.
I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million
five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany _minority_ rules.
It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War
Party _insisted_ upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and
all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one
alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked
for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of
Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted
with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or
abdication.
Assertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the
reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which
the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a
view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all
the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public
opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between
July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and
August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European
conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception
which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a
multitudinous mob mad for war.
I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady
expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the
forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and
ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the accumulation of a
war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable
instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the
ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the
hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.
In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as
the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany
ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international
personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper
correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, _Germany's Next
War_, as classic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world,
dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship,
but because of its innate _authoritativeness_. The result was the
translation of _Germany's Next War_ into the English language, and
subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the
world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's
vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route
back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him
the name of an American translator and publisher for his books.
Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive
writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more
beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German
war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way
had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After
Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the
world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before _Die
Post_, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_ and other organs of blood-and-iron
were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's
manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that
the German masses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of
manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.
The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles,
January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of
the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned
victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism,
the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To
the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever
remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding
Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled
of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror
imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with
invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an
insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had
accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible.
"World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.
In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military
Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial
greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military
hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to
force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her
power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the
Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its
insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by
thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear God, and nothing else
in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast
into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was
enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it
has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely
and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that
_Furor Teutonicus_ was a power which, when it went forth to slay and
conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear
of God. _Nouveau riche_ Germany, with France's one billion two hundred
and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be
the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and
became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by
arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political
brutality as a new national _Leit-motif_. "We, not the Jews, are God's
chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority
make German _Weltmacht_ manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it
was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad
career.
During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke
and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi.
Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college
education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their
Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large
degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German
masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than
names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of
the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its
deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain
the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that
half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more
modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the
Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German
Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like
Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and
press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon.
These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the
myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and
Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of
the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the
culminating effects of their devilry.
Prince Buelow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen,
will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one
important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck's aphorisms
are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite
Shakespeare. Buelow's name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an
epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War
Party's demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written
or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that
Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat
which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in
precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck's blasphemous
bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Buelow in
1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a
flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and,
being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and
deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an
entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this
war.
Like all the War Party's dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer
cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun"
for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl
Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the
Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world,
thus summarized Germany's "place in the sun":
"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred
fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven
hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895.
The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million
dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five
to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.
"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five
thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million
dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures
summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor
which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."
Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the
Fatherland's "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the
population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the
development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while
Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate
of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912
to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many
years before that date, an _importer_ of men, instead of an exporter;
that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from
1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports,
during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one
thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million
dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.
By a "place in the sun" Prince Buelow meant, primarily, territorial
expansion for Germany's "surplus population." Yet even in this respect
German aggrandizement kept pace with her fabulous economic development.
When war broke out in 1914, the German colonial empire oversea was
hundreds of thousands of square miles more extensive than Germany in
Europe. It is true that the Germans went in for colonial land-grabbing
late in the game, after England, particularly, had acquired the best
territory in both hemispheres, and many years after the Monroe Doctrine
had effectually checked European expansion in the Americas. As the
result of "colonial empire" in inferior regions of the earth, the total
white population of German colonies in 1913 was less than twenty-eight
thousand, or roundly, three and one-half per cent. of the _annual_
growth of German population. Although acquired nominally for "trade,"
Germany's commerce with her colonies in imports and exports totaled in
1914 a fraction more than twenty-five million dollars, or about
_one-half of one per cent._ of Germany's total trade of five thousand
million dollars in 1912. Germany's lust for a larger "place in the
sun," as it has been aptly described by the author of _J'Accuse_, is
"square-mile greed," pure and simple, and as the same frank and
brilliant writer points out, Germany not only demands a "place in the
sun," but claims it for herself alone, insisting that the rest of the
world shall content itself with "a place in the shade."
To popularize the "place in the sun" theory two great German national
organizations went valiantly to work--the Pan-German League and the
German Navy League. The Pan-Germans, whose efforts were seconded by a
subsidiary society called the Association for the Perpetuation of
Germanism Abroad, set themselves the task of educating German public
opinion in regard to "the bitter need" of a "Greater Germany," to be
achieved by hook or crook. The German Navy League dedicated itself to
fomenting agitation designed to meet the Kaiser's expressed "bitter
need" of vast German sea power. Ostensibly private in character, both
of these militant propaganda organizations enjoyed more or less official
countenance and support. On occasion, when their activities appeared
too pernicious or threatened to obstruct the subtle machinations of
German diplomacy, the Government would convincingly "disavow" the
leagues. But all the time they were working for Germany's "place in the
sun." Under their auspices, the country for years was drenched with
belligerent and provocative literature, which harped ceaselessly on the
theme that what Germany could not secure by diplomacy she must prepare
to extort by the sword.
As the Pan-Germans and the Navy League cherished twin aspirations, it
was not surprising that two men, General Keim, a retired officer of the
army, and Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a retired officer of the navy,
should be moving spirits in both organizations. General Keim, in his
zeal to support Admiral von Tirpitz's big navy schemes, eventually went
to such extremes in the pursuit of his duties as president of the Navy
League that the organization's existence as a national association was
momentarily threatened. It was giving the game away. Keim was
thereupon removed from his position, to be succeeded by the Grand Old
Man of the German Fleet, Grand-Admiral von Koester. Koester was
_suaviter in modo_, but no less _fortiter in re_ than Keim. Entering
the presidency of the Navy League in the midst of the Dreadnought era,
when Germany's dream of her "future upon the water" was sweetest, his
systematic fanning of the public temper, especially against England,
left nothing to be desired.
General Keim, deposed from the leadership of the Navy League, was
presently kicked up-stairs by the German War Party and made president of
the newly-formed "German Defense League." This association was
organized to launch a national agitation in favor of increasing the
German military establishment.
The methods which had caused Keim's "downfall" from the presidency of
the Navy League were promptly employed by him in the new army league.
With a host of influential newspapers and "war industry" interests at
their back, plus the benevolent patronage of the Imperial family and
Government, Koester and Keim carried out for six years preceding August,
1914, the most prodigious and audacious propaganda crusade in European
history. Germany's need for "a place in the sun," on whatever
particular chord they harped, was always their keynote. The "Defense
League" scored its crowning triumph in 1913 by accomplishing the passage
of the celebrated Army Bill whereby the land forces of the Empire were
augmented at an expense of two hundred fifty million dollars--the
immediate preliminary step to the assault of Europe by the Kaiser's
legions.
Count Reventlow, a Jingo of Jingoes, rendered both the navy and army
leagues valiant support in the columns of his newspaper, the _Deutsche
Tageszeitung_, and in a regular grist of pamphlets and books which his
facile pen from time to time reeled off. Reventlow was one of the
archpriests of the War Party. A champion hater of everything foreign,
he was temperamentally fitted to advocate the doctrine of Force and
Germany's right to world-conquest by fire and sword. Count Reventlow,
whom it was my pleasure to know intimately, hated England, France and
Russia with a ferocity delightful to behold. His Francophobism was
little diminished by his marriage to a charming French noblewoman. He
hated America, too. I could never quite divine the gallant Count's
reason for eating an American alive, in his mind, every morning for
breakfast, and for despising us as cordially as he detested Mr. Winston
Churchill, Monsieur Delcasse or the Czar, until he confessed to me one
day that he lost a fortune through unfortunate speculation in a Florida
fruit plantation. Thenceforth, apparently, Reventlow's anti-Americanism
knew no bounds. It was more explosive than usual during his discussion
of the _Lusitania_ massacre, but it was pathological.
A pillar of the German War Party, whose name is almost entirely unknown
abroad, is Doctor Hammann, chief of the notorious Press Bureau of the
German Foreign Office and Imperial Chancellery. Hammann for twenty
years, because one of the craftiest, has been one of the most powerful
men in German politics. For two decades he survived the incessant
vicissitudes and intrigues of the Foreign Office, which indeed were more
than once of his own making. He was frequently credited with being "the
real Chancellor" in Buelow's days because of his sinister influence over
that suave statesman. Hammann's nominal duties were confined to
manipulating the German press for the Government's purposes and to
exercising such "control" over the Berlin correspondents of foreign
newspapers as might from time to time appear feasible or possible.
Himself a retired journalist of unsavory reputation--he was a few years
ago under indictment for perjury in an unlovely domestic scandal--he
seemed to his superiors an ideal personage to deal with the Fourth
Estate, which Bismarck trained Germans to look upon as "the reptile
press." Hammann's function, for the War Party's purposes, was to
mislead public opinion, at home and abroad, as to the real intentions
and machinations of _Weltpolitik_. Under his shrewd direction German
newspapers, restlessly propagating the Fatherland's need for "a place in
the sun," systematically distorted the international situation so as to
represent Germany as the innocent lamb and all other nations as ravenous
wolves howling for her immaculate blood. That Hammann is regarded as
having rendered "our just cause" priceless service was proved only a few
months ago by his promotion to a full division-directorship in the
Foreign Office. He had hitherto ranked merely as a _Wirklicher
Geheimrat_, or sub-official of the department, although as a matter of
fact five Foreign Secretaries, "under" whom he nominally served, were
mere putty in the hands of Germany's Imperial Press Agent-in-Chief.
Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, of course, has for years been one of the
super-pillars of the German War Party. The Kaiser's Fleet is the
creation of von Tirpitz, though William II receives popular credit for
the achievement, and von Tirpitz created it essentially for war. Von
Tirpitz once honored me with a heart-to-heart confab on Anglo-German
naval rivalry. He rebuked me in a paternal way for specializing in
German naval news. Germany had no ulterior motive, he said. She was
building a defensive fleet primarily, though one that would be strong
enough, on occasion, to "throw into the balance of international
politics a weight commensurate with Germany's status as a World Power."
Von Tirpitz was the incarnation of the naval spirit which longed for the
chance to show the world that Germany at sea was as "glorious" as
centuries of martial history had proved her on land. German sailors
chafed under the corroding restraint of peace. They hankered for
laurels. They were tired of manning a dress-parade fleet, whose
functions seemed to be confined to holding spectacular reviews for the
Kaiser's glorification at Kiel. They hungered for "the Day." Von
Tirpitz has denied passionately that they ever drank to "the Day" in
their battleship messes. But it was the unspoken prayer which lulled
them to well-earned sleep, for in consequence of the iron discipline and
remorseless labor which von Tirpitz imposed on his officers and men in
anticipation of "Germany's Trafalgar," the Kaiser's Fleet was the
hardest worked navy in the world. No Armada in history was ever so
perpetually "battle-ready" as the German High Seas Fleet. It was the
Fleet which made its very own that other hypocritical German battle-cry,
"The Freedom of the Sea," which means, of course, a German-ruled sea.
Von Tirpitz's task was not only to build the fleet but to agitate German
public opinion uninterruptedly in favor of its constant expansion. To
him and the Navy League, which he controlled, and to his Press Bureau
and its swarm of journalistic and literary parasites, were due the
remarkable Anglophobe campaigns which resulted in the desired periodical
additions to the Fleet. A politician of consummate talent, von Tirpitz
held successive Reichstags in the palm of his hand. No Imperial
Chancellor, though nominally his chief, was ever able to override the
imperious will of von Tirpitz the Eternal. Repeatedly in the years
preceding the war England held out the hand of a naval _entente_. The
War Party and von Tirpitz said "No!" And Armageddon became as
inevitable as the setting sun.
I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party.
They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von
Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a
nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern
Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the
doctrine that Germans' "cultural paramountcy over all other nations"
entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the
Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of
the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany
of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like
Delbrueck, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack,
or minor theorists like Muensterberg, who year in and year out preached
the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and
Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War
Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of
German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms
have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German
War Party.
And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the
professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and
Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there
was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty
thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war
and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I
suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties."
But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as
sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars
that it was only a question of time when they would realize their
aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only
the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid
of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.
But the Grand Mogul of the German War Party, its pet, darling and patron
saint, was Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's ebullient heir who
contributed so conspicuously to Germany's loss of Paris in September,
1914. For ten years he was the apple of the army's eye. William II's
oratorical peace palaverings long ago convinced his military paladins
that their hopes could no longer with safety be pinned on the monarch
who would do nothing but _rattle_ his saber. "A place in the sun" could
never be achieved by such tactics, they argued, so they transferred
their affections and their expectations to the "young man" who cheered
in the Reichstag when his father's Government was accused of cowardice
in Morocco. They placed their destinies in the keeping of the Imperial
hotspur who wrote in his book, _Germany in Arms_, that "visionary dreams
of everlasting peace throughout the world are un-German." Their real
allegiance was sworn henceforth to the swashbuckling young buffoon, who,
taking leave of the Death's Head Hussars after two years' colonelcy,
admonished them to "think of him whose most ardent desire it has always
been to be allowed to share at your side the supreme moment of a
soldier's happiness--when the King calls to arms and the bugle sounds
the charge!" It was an open secret that when the Crown Prince was
exiled to the command of a cavalry regiment in dreamy Danzig, far away
from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude in Berlin, the Kaiser's
action was inspired by the disquieting realisation that his heir was
acquiring a popularity, both in and out of the army, which boded ill for
the security of the monarch's own status with his subjects.
These, then, are the men, and these their principal methods, which
provided the scenario for the impending clash. As with every great
"production," preliminary plans were well and truly laid. Rehearsals,
in the form of stupendous maneuvers on "a strictly warlike basis," had
brought the chief actors, scene shifters and other accessories to
first-night pitch. The stage managers' work was done. They had now
only to take their appointed places in the flies and wings and let the
tragedy proceed. The rest could be left to the puppets on both sides of
the footlights. A month of slow music, and then the grand _finale_.