A GERMAN TOUR
“In small, truckling States, a timely compromise with power has
often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their
puny existence: but a great State is too much envied, too much
dreaded to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be
respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things
not to be begged. They must be commanded.”—EDMUND BURKE,
_Letter I on A Regicide Peace_.
IN the late summer of 1908, at the end of the parliamentary session, Mr.
Lloyd George traversed Germany from west to east and from south to
north. It was a very thorough and systematic motor-tour. He was the
travelling guest of Mr. (now Sir) Charles Henry,[55] a Member of
Parliament of great public spirit and strong Liberal views, who invited
me also to accompany the party. It was a journey of profound interest
for us all. The object of the tour was to investigate the German system
of National Insurance. Parliament had just passed the Old Age Pensions
Act; and Mr. Lloyd George had already publicly promised to round off the
British pension system by a general scheme of national insurance. Before
drafting the actual Bills he wished to make a complete study of that
very comprehensive system which had been operating in Germany since
1893. The German Government gave us access to all their Central State
Insurance Offices, and gave us facilities for interviewing all their
leading Insurance civil servants. We visited most of the largest towns
of the German Empire, and had conversations with employers and
workmen—Socialists and trade unionists—as well as with officials.
Never was a statesman’s holiday spent in a more thorough investigation
of a great problem of the lives of the people.
We started the motor-tour in France. We trained to Amiens, where the
motor met us, and travelled on the great northern French national roads
through the very region where so much of the fighting has taken place
during the last three years—through Compiègne, Soissons, along the
valley of the Aisne to Rheims, where we visited the Cathedral—that
great masterpiece of Gothic architecture which has since suffered such
sacrilegious injury. Thence we travelled south by Châlons-sur-Marne,
following the river valley by Vitry and Bar-le-Duc. We crossed the Meuse
and passed through Nancy, that most lovely of valley frontier towns,
which has since so bravely borne such fierce enemy attacks. Nancy looked
very peaceful on that August day when we passed through her pretty
streets and pressed on towards the Vosges Mountains, hoping to reach
Strassburg that evening.
At that point we made a happy miscalculation in our time; and we were
benighted in a little French village just on the edge of the frontier at
the very summit of the Vosges. We found that we could get supper and
beds at one of those clean little _auberges_ which are scarcely ever
lacking in the smallest French village. As we supped on the excellent
meal of _bouillon_ and cutlets improvised by the ready hostess, she
stood and talked to us. She spoke to us of the memories of 1870-71, when
the tide of war had so swiftly passed by that little village. She was a
school-child at that time, and she had missed two years of her
schooling. For the Germans had remained in occupation of that part of
the country on the Vosges frontier for fully a year after the end of the
war. The withdrawal of the army took place, Department by Department, as
the indemnity was paid; and this Department was the last to be
evacuated. Before the war she was living well within France; at the end
she found herself on the edge of the new frontier.
We asked her how she managed to make an inn pay at such a spot. “Oh,
quite easily,” she said. “We are kept going by the people of French
birth who come up on Sundays from Alsace!” “Why?” “Oh, just to feel the
joy of living for a day on French soil!”
Next day we motored down to Strassburg, climbed the towers, and saw the
marks of the German shells fired nearly forty years before, and spent a
pleasant afternoon in the picturesque streets of that ancient town. As
far as man could do it Alsace had been painted black, white and red with
Teuton colours. Nowhere in the streets of Strassburg did we observe any
sign or notice in any language but German. Everywhere were German
soldiers, and in the evening we attended a concert of massed German
bands at which the music was purely Teuton, and Teuton of the most
patriotic kind. But the people seemed to us to listen with a certain
strange dull indifference to all this brazen wooing; and beneath the
surface we seemed to hear the whisper of a coming storm. Next day,
motoring across the country, we had occasion to ask the way from an
Alsatian peasant. The question was asked in German, but one of the party
slipped in with French. The peasant’s face instantly lighted up. “Ah! do
the gentlemen speak in French?” he said. “Ah! I prefer to speak in that
language myself.” So little had all the arts of suppression succeeded in
crushing the spirit of that race.
At Stuttgart we were witnesses of a strange event, which comes now back
to memory with a significance which was then hidden. Count Zeppelin was
then experimenting with his airships, and one of those new miracles had
been advertised to start on a voyage from a spot near Stuttgart. The
whole town had flooded out in a vast multitude to see the airship make a
start; but at the critical moment there arose a hurricane of wind. The
ship was torn from its moorings and fell in utter wreckage and confusion
in the midst of the crowd. We arrived on the scene just after this had
happened, and met the people returning from witnessing the disaster.
What was notable about that multitude was the passion of grief which at
that moment was sweeping over them. It was as if they had all suffered
some acute personal loss. Men and women were gesticulating, some were
almost weeping; all their faces were troubled and perplexed. As the
people coming from the city met those returning we could hear
exclamations of sorrow and almost of anguish. “Ah!” they cried, “is the
airship down? What a horrible calamity!” We heard afterwards that the
crowd surrounding the airship had just sung that famous national hymn,
“Deutschland über alles.” They had been worked up to ecstasy when the
airship crashed.
So we motored through that land in that happy peace time, little
foreboding all the great calamities that were to break from that
storm-centre on to an unsuspecting world.
Bethmann-Hollweg was at that time “Home Secretary,” a vigorous, amiable
Minister of the official kind, sincerely keen on social reforms; a
Junker of the better type. He treated Mr. Lloyd George with great
courtesy. He returned from his holiday, and specially entertained him
and his party in the famous restaurant at the Zoological Gardens at
Berlin. He invited many eminent members of the German Civil Service to
meet us. Every one was very gracious and polite—almost too polite for
comfort. After dinner we went into a large reception-room, and there we
remained standing all the evening talking and looking at one another.
Towards the end of the evening we began to feel very fatigued. I
ventured to ask one of the German officials whether it would be the
correct thing to sit down. “Oh!” he said. “We have all been waiting for
you to sit down! We, too, are very tired!”
In the middle of this rivalry in fatigue, they brought round great
glasses of foaming beer in Prussian fashion. Mr. Lloyd George, who is
almost a teetotaler, looked at the glasses with a scared expression.
Then suddenly his face grew resolute. “We must show that Great Britain
is not to be left behind!”
Bethmann-Hollweg did not talk politics until towards the end of dinner.
The conversation drifted to King Edward’s visit to the Russian Czar at
Réval. That visit had caused a great ferment in Germany, and grave
suspicions of British intentions. Bethmann-Hollweg voiced those
suspicions in the frankest manner. “You are trying to encircle us!” he
cried to Mr. Lloyd George. “You and France and Russia are attempting to
strangle us!”
Mr. Lloyd George assured him of the friendliness of Great Britain
towards all the great Powers; but for the moment he refused to be
appeased. He thumped the table with his hand. “The Prussian Government
has only to lift a finger,” he cried, “and every living Prussian will
die for the Fatherland!”
Mr. Lloyd George listened to all this with his characteristic calmness
and good-humour. “But what about the other Germans?” he put in at this
point.
A shadow passed over the face of the Prussian Minister.
“Oh! they?” he said with a gesture. “They, too, will come along!”
But this was only a flash. On the whole, Bethmann-Hollweg was very
friendly; and the facts of his family life showed him Anglophile. He had
sent his son to an English University; and admiration for English
education was, curiously enough, just at that moment almost as much a
fashion in Germany as admiration for German education in England. When
we were lunching with a judge at Frankfort Mr. Lloyd George discovered
that the daughter of the house had actually been at school along with
his own daughter at the famous English girls’ school near
Brighton—Roedean.
Of course, it is always foolish to imagine that social courtesies
seriously affect the grave pursuit of national interests in any country.
But they produce a friendly atmosphere; and he would be a criminal who,
with all the causes of difference and conflict in the world, did not
always try to improve the human atmosphere.
The people of Hamburg were remarkably friendly to us. The merchants
trading with England gave us an especially enthusiastic reception. They
feasted us at a banquet at which sat the Hamburg Prussian Minister—for
Berlin keeps a Ministry in the “Free Towns” as a last relic of their
former independence.
It was on the occasion of that banquet that Mr. Lloyd George threw out
the idea of regulating armaments by a Plimsoll “Load-line” fixed
according to population. It is strange to-day to remember with what
enthusiasm that suggestion was received by the Hamburg merchants.
The authorities of Hamburg provided a launch to take us into every
corner of their famous port, so as to show us all the power and pride of
their new creation—with all its marvellous up-to-date devices for
handling ships and cargoes, its wonderful new docks and elevators, its
ingenious and multifarious resources for expediting sea-traffic. It was
good to see that port; if only to realise the wisdom of the King’s
advice to us at home—“Wake up, Britain!”
It is difficult to exaggerate the part played by the personality of the
Kaiser in German imperial politics at that moment. If one probed any
great German question to the bottom, one always came back to that fact.
Take the question of the Navy—that vital Anglo-German problem of the
early century. The Army chiefs were, I think, quite ready to contemplate
a naval “deal,” if only to keep England out of the land-wars of the
Continent. The Social Democrats, of course, were more than willing; they
were anti-naval as well as anti-militarist. But to the Kaiser the Navy
was always prime favourite; it was his toy, his darling dream, his
cherished ambition. His sincerest belief and hopes were expressed in the
phrase, “Our future lies on the ocean.” He stimulated the popular zeal
for the Navy in every possible way. The Nord Deutsche Lloyd Liners had
elaborate pictures comparing the respective navies, and showing the
smallness of the German in comparison with ours; the great German Navy
League was constantly pushed forward; and no Minister could long remain
in power who did not sympathise with this cult. The curious thing was
that the German populations along the sea-board were not half so
enthusiastic for the Navy as the inland populations, who seemed
enthusiastic in proportion to their ignorance of the sea.
Many Germans used to put down the Kaiser’s passion for the Navy to his
English blood. He was a very enthusiastic yachtsman; and, as most
yachtsmen are Englishmen, that threw him into constant relations of
intimacy with English sailor-men. The English yachtsmen on the North Sea
found him almost excessive in his friendliness. I remember an instance
given to me by a famous English yachtsman, fond of cruising in northern
waters. A German torpedo-boat had accidentally one evening broken the
bowsprit of his yacht. During the night, while the owner was asleep, a
body of carpenters came on board of the English yacht and mended the
bowsprit. In the morning, after breakfast, the Kaiser arrived himself.
He had sent the carpenters. “Well!” he said, “how do you like your new
bowsprit?” Then he looked at it whimsically. “When you go back to
England,” he said, “tell them it was ‘made in Germany’!”
And yet at that very time this friendliness towards English
yachtsmen—of which this was only one example—was not preventing the
Kaiser from regarding the British naval power with a haunting jealousy
that led him into the constant intrigues against England, of which we
gain a glimpse in the secret correspondence discovered in the palace of
the Russian Czar.
The Kaiser, indeed, was at that time always a great trouble to all the
diplomats. He was like a perpetual cracker explosively zig-zagging about
in all the Foreign Offices of Europe. Nobody ever knew what he would do
or say—to whom he would talk, and with whom he would correspond. He had
a touch of freakish irresponsibility. “I always knew that Willy would
come to no good,” sighed an English Princess of the old school; and she
seemed to have an eye for character. After Agadir, he calmly protested
that the British Government had no right to object, as he had told some
one of his intentions when he was visiting the British Court! His
telegram to President Wilson seems to show that he carried this view of
the British Constitution right up to the eve of the Great War.
“He is a bad neighbour,” said an official of the British Foreign Office
at that time; and that really seemed to sum it up.
His constant changes of mood made German foreign policy very difficult
to forecast, and I do not think that any one can claim to have foreseen
the future.
The German officials told me that they had never had a visitor with a
quicker mind than Mr. Lloyd George. After a long day spent in the
Central Insurance Office at Berlin, the men who went round with us were
very enthusiastic. “He grasps the system more rapidly than any student
we have ever had.” Mr. Lloyd George, indeed, made a very exhaustive
study of the German system. But in his Act he improved upon it and added
to it in many important respects.[56]
It was a strange visit, curious to look back upon at this distance of
time. Our days were filled with the insistent calls of a great social
inquiry. But we could not ignore another aspect. After all, there was a
greater problem darkening the air than insurance against individual
sickness and unemployment. What about insurance against another and
greater human sickness—the sickness of war? The thought of that kept
recurring, like a secondary theme in some piece of music.
The impressions gained during this tour (1908) partly account, no doubt,
for the firmness of Mr. Lloyd George’s language in that famous City
speech with which, after consultation with Sir Edward Grey, he faced the
German Agadir threat in 1911. He himself always contended at the time
that that speech saved Europe from war. A firm, clear, real attitude—an
attitude that would convince Germany that we meant what we said—that is
what he always in those days advocated. He argued that here was the most
positive realistic Power in the world—with no regard for sentimentalism
or even humanity where the interests of Germany were concerned. Very
well; let us treat them as they treated us. Let them know definitely
where we stood. Let our language to them be plain and frank. They would
respect us all the more for it.
He was very fiercely attacked for this speech by the pacifists at the
time, both in public and private. He made a characteristic reply to
their pin-pricks. “Perhaps it would have been better if I had not made
the speech! There would have been war, and the Prussian bully would have
got the thrashing he deserves!”
Then, as since, nothing irritated and angered him more than the attitude
of Germany to France. “It is simply persecution!” he used to say. “The
world cannot be carried on along these lines!”
So he had already a dim perception of the great issue which was so soon
to divide the world.
Between 1908 and 1914 came that “Turtle Dove” period (1912-1914) during
which Germany wooed us. Never had Germany been more friendly to Great
Britain than she was in the spring of that fatal year, 1914; never had
our relations been more smooth; never had her protestations of affection
been more numerous. The change from 1911 was almost startling.
Perhaps it ought to have startled us more. It is so easy to be sages
after the accomplished fact. But it is not often that the architects of
suspicion build wisely; their day comes once in a while, and they
rejoice exceedingly. It is, perhaps, the worst crime of Germany that she
has strengthened that sinister creed of doubt, and lowered faith between
man and man.
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[55] Died January, 1920.
[56] He raised the level of the sick benefit; he added several new
benefits; and he paid the doctors better.