It was the old historic story of German duplicity, and the nations of
Europe had no excuse for being surprised. When the Prussian Monarchy
was first bestowed on the relatively humble family of the Höhenzollerns,
they found their territory for the most part sterile, the soil round
Berlin and about Potsdam--the favourite residence of the Margraves--a
sandy desert that could scarcely be made to yield a crop of rye or oats,
so they set themselves to enlarge and enrich it by help of an army
out of all proportion to the size and importance of their States. The
results were inevitable. When war becomes the trade of a separate class
it is natural that they should wish to pursue it at the first favourable
opportunity of conquest. That opportunity came to Prussia when Charles
VI died and the Archduchess Maria Theresa succeeded to her father by
virtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction), to which all the Powers
of Europe had subscribed. Frederick had subscribed to it. But,
nevertheless, in the name of Prussia, without any proper excuse or even
decent pretext, he took possession of Silesia, thereby robbing the ally
whom he had bound himself to defend, and committing the same great crime
of violating his pledged word, which Germany has now committed against
Belgium.
But there was one difference between the outrages of 1740 and 1914.
The great barrator made no hypocritical pretence of desiring peace.
“Ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me carried
the day, and I decided for war,” he said. It was reserved for
Harnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about the
responsibilities of “Kul-tur” (that harlot of the German dictionary,
debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom of
heaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the old
German Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of war
with France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian frontier
there was no thought of the Archduke Ferdinand or of the doddering
old man on the Austrian throne, whose paternal heart had been sorely
wounded. Germany was out to rob France of her colonies--to rob her, and
the Germans knew it.
“A few centuries may have to run their course,” said their own poet
Goethe (who surely knew the German soul), “before it can be said of the
German people, ‘It is a long time since they were barbarians.’”
Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the war
which took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not a
theologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past of
his country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a half
before, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of man
and God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young to
remember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for the
welfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have done
so with searching and scorching eloquence (the voice of Bebel) had only
just been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, in
the last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a great
nation being lured on to its moral death-agony amid canting appeals to
the Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy.