THE EMPIRE OF HATE
Though the end of the carnage is not even approximately in sight, a
synoptic view of Germany in war-time is feasible to a more comprehensive
extent than is possible in Britain. Armageddon found the Fatherland
completely caparisoned for war, with her people so steeped in discipline
that it was the merest formality to harness their peace-time habits to
Mars' Juggernaut and drive the entire nation to battle as one would a
well-trained team. "Team-work," in fact, exactly describes Germany's
war-time performances. They are achievements in national unison without
parallel in history. Britain, on the other hand, having been overtaken
by war, except for her navy, in a state of naked unpreparedness, was
plunged forthwith into the melting-pot. Traditions, customs,
institutions, hobbies, prejudices, fetishes, even cherished laws, had to
be abandoned, upset or reconstructed to fit a world of iron conditions
unsuited to a dreamland of comfortable theories. The remaking of
Britain, after sixteen months of war, is not yet ended. It has, indeed,
hardly commenced. The time to write an accurate history of these isles
during the Great Test will come not when peace is signed, but perhaps a
decade later, when the New England will have begun to assume, in misty
outline at least, the physical, moral and intellectual dimensions in
which war, with its scars and its cleansings, left her.
Organized for war, body and soul, as Germany has been for generation
upon generation, and never more so, of course, than in the living
generation, the country slid into the bloody groove as neatly as if it
had never had its being elsewhere. The prospect of "starvation," for
instance, quite apart from the fact that it was a German-invented bogy
trotted out to deceive the enemy and extort the commiseration of
neutrals, never seriously disturbed the Germans' equanimity, for from
the cradle up frugality has been instilled in them as a virtue sister to
patriotism. No people in the world could overnight descend to a war
standard of living so rapidly as the Germans. Accustomed to the
affluence of sudden prosperity as the nation, as a whole, was, it had
yet only to return to familiar inculcated habits, when the Kaiser
called. The grand German bluff of the first year of the war was the
introduction of the bread-ticket ration system. How the grain-shippers
of Chicago and Duluth must have chuckled over it, when they recalled the
gigantic advance purchases of wheat made for German and Austrian account
in May, 1914--_three full months before_ "the Russian mobilization
menace!" Germany can never be starved, and she knows it. Von Tirpitz
knew it when he proclaimed submarine piracy as a "reprisal" for British
"attempts to starve us out." The grip of the British Fleet around
Germany's neck has inconvenienced the Germans, but it can never cause
them to famish. The "starvation" myth which the German propagandists in
the United States so assiduously circulated was devised, purely and
simply, for the purpose of arousing the compassion of the
generous-hearted American people, in the hope that our most sentimental
of governments would intervene, in humanity's name, to lift from
Germany's throat a yoke which she herself was powerless to remove. That
is the long and short of the "starvation" story.
As inborn and cultivated habits of frugality and thrift enabled the
introduction of the bread-ticket without marked disturbance to normal
German life, so the nation resorted willingly and easily to all the
other new conditions which war imposed. A people goose-stepped and
policed from the nursery to the grave, bred in docility, with wills of
their own eternally broken before they have left the _Kinderstube_, with
initiative and self-reliance knocked out of them with the rod at home
and in school, and with blind unyielding subordination to discipline
literally pounded into their bones in barracks, provides no astonishing
spectacle in making war, when war comes, as one man obeying one supreme
will. War is the _ultima ratio_, indeed, which this national system of
self-suppression has in mind. The surprising thing is not that the
world has witnessed so colossal an exhibition of team-work in Germany.
The unexpected would have been if Germany had given any other account of
herself. When we speak, as we all do, and especially the English, of
"Germany's years of preparation," we should eliminate the notion that
these preparations were confined to shells, guns, fortifications,
battleships and legions. No single other "preparation" of the German
war gods measured up, in my judgment, to the unseen and unnoticed, yet
all-engulfing, decade-old, national scheme of molding the minds of men,
women, children and babes along the line of unresisting, complete
slavery to Superiority, uniformed as the State. When you dilute this
super-subjugation with the wine of true patriotism which, despite their
Socialism, their police, their burdensome taxes, their goose-step, their
powerless parliaments and all the other concomitants of an autocratic
monarchy, flows red and joyously through the soul of the Germans, you
secure a spiritual admixture which approaches invincibility. You
discover the ingredients of what Lloyd-George christened the
"potato-bread spirit," which he truly described as a greater danger for
Germany's enemies than Hindenburg's strategy. The former will survive
long after the latter has broken down.
For a full year, interrupted only by six weeks in the United States at
the end of the winter of 1914-15, I have kept in as close touch with
Germany in war-time as if I were at my old lookout in the
Friedrichstrasse. My professional task in London all that time has been
to study the German Press. Day in and day out I have done so. I have
read the Government-controlled _Lokal-Anzeiger_, the radical _Berliner
Tageblatt_, the venerable _Vossische Zeitung_, Count Reventlow's organ
of Frightfulness, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_, the Pan-German _Taegliche
Rundschau_, the Thunderer of Prussian conservatism, the _Kreuz-Zeitung_,
and Maximilian Harden's vitriolic _Zukunft_. The voice of paralyzed
Hamburg has come to me morning and night through the malevolent
_Hamburger Nachrichten_ and _Fremdenblatt_. _Vorwaerts_ has kept me
informed of German Socialism's invertebrate vagaries. The cultured
_Cologne Gazette_, the property of Doctor Neven-Dumont, whose wife is
half-English and whose son is proud of his Oxford degree, and yet has
almost led the German Press in the violence of its Anglophobism, has
told me what semi-official Germany wanted the world to believe was its
views from hour to hour. In the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ I have been able
to glean the news and opinion of the great German financial and
commercial classes for which it speaks. Catholic Bavaria, the land of
Crown Prince "Rupprecht, the Bloody," has been interpreted to me by the
_Munich Neueste Nachrichten_. The _Dresdner Anzeiger_ has mirrored
Saxony day by day. And, as the _Stimmung_ of no country in the world is
so faithfully reproduced by its comic press as is opinion in Germany, my
readings have been amplified, as well as lightened, by heartlessly
ironic _Simplicissimus_, artistic _Jugend, Fliegende Blaetter_ and
_Lustige Blaetter_. My German literary diet, which was ruining my
eye-sight, has been almost more opulent than when in Berlin, has finally
been enriched from week to week by the incessant grist of pamphlets and
booklets which has poured from the German mill even in more copious and
overwhelming measure than in peace-times. If the printed word is the
index of a nation's thought, little of moment in Germany since August,
1914, has escaped me. I have had the inestimable advantage of being
able to absorb it in the light of its relationship to the situation
outside of Germany--an opportunity of which the Germans themselves,
though I would not try to make them believe it, have been cruelly
deprived.
Telescopic observation of Germany, as reflected by its press, a little
knowledge of what Doctor Muensterberg would call the Fatherland's
"psychology," and the actual deeds of the German army, navy and
Government have provided me, I think I may make so bold as to say, with
a fairly complete and accurate picture. Germany, thus visualized,
stands out to me in bold, clear-cut relief. It is a strange and
terrible composite of forces generally considered incongruous and
mutually destructive--Efficiency, Malice and Intolerance. The world
ought to have known that in war Germany would reveal titanic powers of
scientific organization. It did not expect to find her an Empire of
Hate. It hardly imagined that the land of Goethe and Wagner, Koch,
Behring and Ehrlich, Siemens, Rathenau and Ballin, Hauptmann, Strauss
and Reinhardt, Eucken, Haeckel and Harnack, could be turned even by the
devouring blasts of war into a community capable of elevating to the
dignity of a national anthem such a ferocious song as Lissauer's _Hymn
of Hate Against England_, whose soul is best breathed by its closing
stanza:
"Take you the folk of the Earth in pay,
With bars of gold your ramparts lay,
Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,
Ye reckon well, but not well enough now.
French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,
We fight the battle with bronze and steel,
And the time that is coming Peace will seal.
You will we hate with a lasting hate,
We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of seventy millions, choking down.
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe, and one alone--
ENGLAND!"
Even Barbara Henderson's brilliant translation of this epic of spleen,
the first version of which to be published in Great Britain it was my
privilege to reprint in _The Daily Mail_ from the columns of the _New
York Times_, fails to do justice to the innate rancor and gall of
Lissauer's original verses. Americans who visited Germany during the
war were unanimous in agreeing that no rendering of the _Hymn of Hate_
in English could possibly interpret its consuming spirit. You had to
hear it rasped with the ferocity of snarling, guttural German, they
would say, to gain even an approximate idea of its power. You had to
watch a man or woman recitationist or singer, for it was set to music,
too, bawl it out, in a crescendo of passionate fury as the final word of
each stanza, _England!_ was reached. You had to sit in the midst of a
theater, cafe or music-hall audience, or even in a drawing-room, and
note all around you the frenzied countenances, the clenched fists, the
whole enraged being, of men, women and children, to know how Lissauer's
ballad of gall had burnt itself into a people's soul. There have been
more or less sincere efforts in Germany to banish the _Hymn of Hate_.
Lissauer having previously received the Iron Cross for poetic gallantry,
and from the pulpit and the school rostrum the unrighteousness of hate
had been sanctimoniously proclaimed. But Lissauer only put into verse
the spirit which maddened Berlin on the night of August 4, 1914, which
grew in intensity as the magnitude of British intervention in the war
slowly dawned, and which, surface manifestations to the contrary
notwithstanding, lingers deep and ineffaceable in the German breast, and
will remain there, barring a miracle, for generations after the war is
over.
While the _Hymn of Hate_ was at the zenith of its glory, some genius
whose name, unfortunately, will be lost to posterity, invented _Gott
strafe England!_ (God punish England) as the most patriotic form of
greeting which one German could exchange with another. Friends meeting
in the suburban trains or street-cars, or in the streets, no longer
lifted their hats as usual and said _Guten Morgen_. They shook hands
solemnly and exclaimed _Gott strafe England_! When they parted at
night, it was not _Guten Abend_, but _Gott strafe England_! Then they
began stamping it--with a rubber-stamp which was sold by the thousand
for the purpose--on their letters to correspondents at home and abroad.
It was even adopted, now and then, as an epitaph for a fallen soldier,
whose relatives would end up the customary obituary in the advertising
columns of the newspapers with _Gott strafe England_. Now postcards
blossomed forth with the new national motto. Scarf-pins made their
appearance in the windows of cheap-jewelry stores, inscribed _Gott
strafe England_! The legend was reproduced in a score of different
designs on cuff-links, brooches, and even wedding-rings, while hardly a
schoolchild was without a badge or button emblazoned with the
Fatherland's holiest war prayer. Handkerchiefs were embroidered with
it, pocket-knives had it enameled on their handles, and many a
_Liebesgabe_ to a dear one in the trenches went forth with a pair of
black-white-red braces imprinted _Gott strafe England_! On a medal
which doubtless decorated thousands of German breasts--a sample reached
England--was engraved:
"Give us this day our daily bread; England
would take it from us. God punish her!"
Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was beaten by Sir John French's
"contemptible little army" at Neuve Chapelle and Artois, placed Royal
approval on the _Gott strafe England_ cult in his notorious battle-order
in the winter campaign to "annihilate the British arch-foe in front of
us at any and all cost."
Englishmen, and especially English soldiers, perhaps measured the _Gott
strafe England_ sentiment at below its real value as a German fighting
asset when they decided to treat it as a joke. That was the spirit, at
any rate, which animated a group of young Eton men at the front, who
sent a postcard to the Headmaster of their historic school rival
reading: _Gott strafe Harrow_! And on April Fool's day British Tommies
across a certain meadow of death in Flanders expelled from a
mine-thrower something which looked murderously like a bomb. When it
bounced in front of the German lines, and bounced again, without
exploding, a "Boche" ventured out of the trenches and picked it up. He
found it was a football, and on it was inscribed:
April Fool!
_Gott strafe England!_
[Illustration: "A PRUSSIAN HOUSEHOLD AT THEIR MORNING HATE--From _London
Punch_"]
Mr. Punch and his lesser _confreres_ in British humor have almost lived
through the war on _Gott strafe England_! The sentiment has not struck
terror into John Bull's heart, but it has very materially added to his
war-time gaiety.
Next to the Hate epidemic, the mystifying account of themselves which
the German Social Democrats have given during the war stands out as the
main phenomenon. I have asked myself more than once what might have
been if Bebel, the brains, or Singer, the fists, of the old-time
Socialistic movement had been alive in August, 1914. Certainly the
utter failure of the Socialists to hamper the operation of the German
war-machine will remain forever one of the amazing episodes of the war.
It will rank, of course, also, as one of the blazing miscalculations of
the Fatherland's enemies. It is true that Bebel, the long-time autocrat
of the German "Reds," proclaimed often enough that when Germany was in
peril, he and his Genossen would shoulder the musket with a will. Yet
the suspicion always lurked that when the German War Party's time came
and it essayed to drag the German people across the Rubicon, the Social
Democracy, with 4,250,000 voters, 111 members of parliament and German
trades-unionism almost solidly behind it, would be found standing like
an insuperable barrier against the powers of aggression. There had been
more than one hint that working-class Germany, in that hour, would not
shrink from utilizing the potent weapon of the General Strike to stay
the hand of the war zealots. Opinion on that score amounted to almost
positive conviction in non-Socialistic Germany and throughout Europe, in
case the test were to be forced by a German war of manifestly
provocative character. It therefore was of prime importance to the
clique which engineered the war that the Social Democracy be made to
believe, forthwith and implicitly, that the impending conflict was a
"defensive war," to which Socialist leaders had always pledged the
proletariat's unswerving support. Categorical and lachrymose assurances
to that effect were accordingly given to the Social Democratic group of
the Reichstag by the Imperial Chancellor in the confidential conferences
with the parties, which preceded the public session of the House on
August 4, 1914. The once-despised "Reds," so often denounced by William
II as "men without a country," but whose votes in the national
legislature were now so essential to the show of Imperial unity with
which Germany desired to go to war, were supplied with ample "evidence"
that Germany's cause was "just." She had been "fallen upon" by
ruthless, envious enemies, the struggle about to begin would be waged by
the Fatherland in "defense" of its holiest national interests, and the
support of all classes was essential to the waging of the fight with
which nothing short of "the Empire's existence" was was bound up. The
Socialists listened, patriotically, to this siren song. They believed
its tale of woe. They bade the Chancellor to be assured that they would
not be found wanting in Germany's moment of peril. And a few hours
later Herr Haase, the chairman of the party, was on his feet in the
Reichstag, uttering glittering platitudes about Socialism's
constitutional abhorrence of war and all its works, but proclaiming that
the party's full strength and support were at the Government's disposal
for the purpose of repelling the invader! _Sic transit gloria mundi!_
August Bebel might well have remarked, could his shade have hovered over
this abject surrender to Mars by his supine heirs of the fundamental
principles to which he had consecrated a life-time.
From that moment forth the Kaiser needed to give himself no concern as
to "the internal foe," the nickname of reproach always saddled on the
Social Democracy by the Military Autocracy. The wing-clipped "Reds"
were even allowed a certain latitude of free speech and thought about
the war. They were permitted to indulge in their favorite academic
discussions about the propriety of Socialist votes for war credits, and
even Haase himself, having gradually come to realize that the Kaiser and
Bethmann Hollweg had sold the Social Democracy a political gold brick,
was not locked up for sedition for issuing, together with two
fellow-leaders, Bernstein and Kautsky, a courageous manifesto against
support of limitless war grants. _Vorwaerts_, the Socialist organ, and
other party newspapers were from time to time suppressed by the military
censor for airing war opinions too freely, but as successive war
measures were presented for the approval of the Reichstag, a safe
majority of Socialist votes was on each occasion cast in their favor.
The myth of a "war of defense" was never broken down. The King of
Bavaria and the National Liberal Party gave the game away during the
spring and summer of 1915, by blustering about the necessity for
sweeping "rectifications of our frontiers," or, in other words,
wholesale annexation of conquered territory, but Germany's war was well
into its second year finding the Social Democracy, for the purposes and
needs of the Government at least, entirely harmless. Food shortage and
high prices churned proletariat Germany into growing discontent, as the
war proceeded. Butter and meat riots have occurred in Berlin, and there
have been ominous suggestions that the military authorities are alive to
the possibility of "revolutionary" manifestations. But the day of
Germany's Commune is not yet. No better evidence of the completeness
with which the Socialist party was hypnotized from the outset could have
been supplied than by the action of Doctor Ludwig Frank, one of its
brilliant young leaders, in volunteering for military service. Frank
fell in the earliest fighting in France, in August, 1914, and now fills
a hero's grave. A Jewish lawyer in Baden, he was commonly looked upon
as the future chieftain of Social Democracy. The war interfered with a
cherished plan of his--to visit and lecture in the United States--and I
suppose the last interview he ever gave was one I had with him, in which
he spoke with enthusiasm of the American impressions he hoped to gather.
He was keenly interested in the corporation problem, recognized that it
contained evils with which Germany before long would have to cope, and
wanted to equip himself with first-hand knowledge of its ramifications
in the home of its highest development. Frank was not a fire-eating
German Social Democrat. He belonged to the moderate or "revisionist"
wing of the party. He was obsessed with no illusions as to the future
possibilities of Socialism in Germany and acknowledged that sane
democrats had long since abandoned hope of accomplishing anything more
than the establishment of a truly constitutional monarchy and
Parliamentary government. It is a thousand pities that Ludwig Frank has
not been spared to play his capable part in the political reconstruction
of Germany which, win or lose, is almost inevitably certain to follow
the war. Doctor Karl Liebknecht, that stormy petrel of German
Socialism, remained the one man to utter anti-war sentiment day in and
day out. Even the Government's action in sticking him into field-gray
and dispatching him to the front for intermittent service failed to
check the flow of his invective. Liebknecht represents the Imperial
borough of Potsdam, of all places in the world, in the German
Parliament, but, though he has talked incessantly and voted
rebelliously, the voice of the representative of the Kaiser's
congressional district was destined to remain as one crying in the
wilderness.
I have said that the triumphs of Germany behind the firing-line--the
fortitude with which she has borne her hideous losses in life, the
magnificently effective demonstration of unity, economy, self-sacrifice,
industrial and financial organization, and adaptability to all the
domestic conditions of war--were only things which those of us who knew
the Germans expected to come to pass. They were as inevitable, in their
paternalized State, the Empire of System, as were the early cannon-ball
successes of the German army. We who were aware, as eye-witnesses, of
Germany's prodigious preparations for "the Day," never doubted that,
having chosen her own moment for launching her thunderbolts, they would
accomplish precisely the staggering blows and strangle-holds which
August and September, 1914, brought forth. Although (including myself)
there was not one man in ten thousand in Berlin who knew who Hindenburg
was--I have merely a faint recollection of having once read his name as
an army commander in _Kaiser Maneuvers_--a good many of us had an
abiding impression that the Russian army was no match for the German war
machine, however easily the Czar might roll up the Austrians. The
victories of the German armies in the war are no surprise to the German
people. They have been raised in the belief that their military power
was invincible, even against a world of foes. Events in the first year
and a half of the war, even though Paris and Calais remained untaken,
were certainly such as to convince Germans that their traditional and
child-like confidence in their armed prowess was justified.
But in addition to Hate and Socialist impotence, two things which
astounded those who knew and admired the German people, were their
callousness toward the deeds which have been committed by their army and
navy and their savage intolerance of any other point of view except
their own. I am not one of those who believe that all Germans have
cloven hoofs. Bitterly as I oppose their cause in this war and fully as
I hold their War Party responsible for the war, I am not prepared to
believe that the Germans are either a decadent or a lost race. What I
do believe is that the war has, temporarily at least, annihilated the
moral qualities of the Germans and dragged them from the high estate of
ethical and discriminating intelligence in which they lived in
antebellum times. The Germans of Louvain, of the _Lusitania_,
asphyxiating gas, liquid fire, submarine piracy, airship assassination
and General Frightfulness are not the Germans among whom I spent
thirteen happy, fruitful years. They are not the Germans whose main
concern, as it is that of the average run of men and women in other
climes, was to prosper, raise families, educate children, live
comfortably, acquire a competence and enjoy life generally. These
Germans no longer exist. They have been succeeded by a race of
war-maddened Germans, who were told by their Imperial Chancellor that
"necessity knows no law," that treaties are "scraps of paper," and who
have been made to believe that, in war, there is but one thing to
do--"to hack our way through"--and that, as Bismarck and the German War
Book said, the enemy must be left with nothing except eyes to weep with.
The Germans have been steeped in all this by their overlords, living and
dead, and, being children of discipline, they have looked with
unmoistened eye upon all and sundry done in the holy name of these
bedrock German principles.
The Fatherland's heartlessness toward such events as the rape of Belgium
becomes less inexplicable when one recalls the cult of brutality which
pursues the German from the nursery upward. As a child in swaddling
clothes, he is taught that he has no right to a will of his own, and if
he attempts to cultivate one, it is promptly beaten out of him. I
recall, with more amusement than the episode inspired in me at the time,
the struggle we had with our beloved family physician in Berlin, Doctor
Keiler, to allow us to bring up our three or four-year-old son as a boy
and not as a machine. "_Das Kind darf keinen Willen hoben!_" I
remember dear old Keiler shrieking in Wilmersdorf more than once, as he
labored in vain to convince us that if Frightfulness was necessary to
break the youngster's inborn initiative and self-reliance, we must not
shrink from resorting to it. And when the German escapes the
_Kinderstube_ with its unfailing rod and enters _Gymnasium_, he is once
more under the cruel lash of Efficiency, which drives scores of lads to
suicide at each recurring Easter-time because they have failed in
examinations for the higher grade, notwithstanding a term's unceasing
hounding by their drill-sergeant of a teacher and class-room and home
cramming which have kept his frame thin and his cheek pallid. A whole
literature has come into existence in opposition to the intellectual
brutality to which German schoolboys between the ages of eight and
sixteen are subjected, but the consensus of opinion is that the system's
advantages outweigh its deficiencies, and that youthful suicides are
part of the price the Fatherland must pay for what Professor Lasson of
Berlin calls its "cultural superiority" over the rest of mankind.
Thrashed in the nursery, tormented in school, the German lad must then
face a period of bullying in barracks, for, if he has managed to survive
his _Gymnasia_ years in health, he will enter the army. It is not
necessary in this narrative to dilate upon the cruelties committed in
German barracks in the sacrosanct name of Discipline and Thoroughness.
There is a literature in Germany on that subject, too, and the penal
records of the military and civil courts comprise the bulk of it. It is
only with the lesson of the system with which we need to concern
ourselves here; and that is, that the German man who emerges from the
army comes out with notions about the efficacy and justifiability of
brute force and brutality which are certain, under the red license which
war confers, to find expression in terrible deeds. In other words, a
German who has himself perhaps been assaulted by his regimental sergeant
on scores of occasions (such cases are plentiful), who has seen the
bloody saber-duel elevated in his university days to the level of the
manliest art, who has throughout his life been a supine victim of police
violence, who holds womankind in semi-contempt, who thinks it
sportsmanlike to shoot birds alight, who rejoices in his prowess as a
slaughterer of wild game, who beats his horses, who is as unfamiliar
with the ethics of sport and play as he is with the lingo of a Choctaw
dialect--such a man, I say, is bound, when he is sent forth with his
Kaiser's mandate to "hack his way through," to stagger humanity as the
Germans have never ceased to stagger it on land, on sea and in the air
since August, 1914. Given a nation of non-combatants who have been
instructed to believe that these things _must_ be because otherwise
their existence will be imperiled, and you have to do with a community
which, however delightful its qualities as individuals, is no longer
capable of measuring right and wrong, by normal standards and which is
ready to tolerate any and everything, as long as it is part and parcel
of the general scheme to "preserve the Fatherland." If one considers
all these things, which I set down in no spirit of venom, but purely in
an attempt to diagnose German war callousness, one will begin to be able
to understand why German sensibilities remain unshocked in the presence
of things which have horrified civilization. One's understanding will
be complete if it is remembered that not one in a million Germans
believes that these things have happened at all!
Philosophy, logic, metaphysics and psychology are cultivated sciences in
Germany. It is even sometimes claimed--in Berlin and in certain regions
of Harvard--that they were "made in Germany." Yet as applied sciences
they have given a woefully sorry exhibition of themselves in the
Fatherland during the war. They have, as a matter of fact, entirely
disappeared. They have been supplanted by a new doctrine, for which the
Germans themselves have an old and incomparable word--_Rechthaberei_. I
learned that precious term from an American colleague in Berlin, a South
Carolinian and profound student of German character named William C.
Dreher. Dreher, who is an able journalist specializing in economics,
has held forth to me on countless occasions about "Prussian
_Rechthaberei_"--the unquenchable conviction of the average Teuton that
he not only is "right" about everything, but that everybody else whom he
permits to have a thought or a word on the same subject is essentially,
inherently and incorrigibly "wrong." I can hardly credit the report
that Dreher himself has fallen a victim to the insidious influence of
_Rechthaberei_. It is something that presupposes omniscience and mental
aristocracy on the part of the propounder of a given theory, and
senility or utterly misguided stubbornness on the part of the opponent.
Germany has wallowed in _Rechthaberei_ since August 1, 1914. It has
sucked into the mire of intolerance everybody who has dared to cherish a
contrary view. It has refused the right of independence of thought to
every living soul, unless that thought is pro-German. It has swallowed
whole anything the German Government and its muzzled press have said,
and it has condemned as criminal falsehood anything published in enemy
countries. It allows British, French and Russian newspapers, in a lordly
way, to circulate freely in Germany, as of yore, thumping its chest and
saying "We are not afraid of the truth"--but only after having drilled
the country into believing that _nothing_ printed abroad about the war
is or can be true! So the German who finds _The Daily Mail_ or the _New
York Times_ on its accustomed file at his favorite cafe, just as he used
to do in peace days, _knows in advance_ that he is to read "lies," and
he digests them, leaving his patriotism unpolluted.
"Mass-suggestion" has thus worked wonders in War Germany. It has driven
me for example--I hope not forever--from the ranks of my oldest and best
friends in Germany--Americans, as well as Germans. It impelled my wife's
dearest friend, the Philadelphia-born wife of a German, to write a
letter early in the war, formally "canceling" the friendship, because
"your husband, instead of choosing to identify himself with an honest
cause, has thrown in his lot with England, and, with her, will share the
downfall toward which that nation is headed." That would be funny, if
it were not so tragically pathetic. I hear that a great many good
people in Berlin, wasting upon me breath and choleric energy which
deserved to be spent on a far worthier object, fairly splutter when they
hear or read my name. I have been the target of absurd and filthy
personal abuse in the German press. I have won undying execration, for
I have dared, in a most un-German way, to have a view of my own on the
question which is agitating men's minds and searching their hearts as
never was done before.
Yet all the millstones of hate and intolerance are not preventing the
Germans from conducting a fight which challenges, in its efficiency,
barring its inhuman aspects, the admiration of foe and neutral the world
over. They are, indeed, a nation in arms. Their Spartan qualities
behind the front, their contempt of death in the enemy's fire, will not
easily be conquered. Exhaustion, economic and human, must tell against
them in the long run, though the process of attrition will be vastly
slower, I fancy, than armchair war critics in England think. The
Germans will fight to the last man and the last pfennig, as I know them,
and when they are beaten, they will furl their tattered standards after
a combat which, stripped of its horrors, will yet have been marked by
deeds of patriotism, courage and glory fit to take their place alongside
the heroic traditions of mankind.