THE CRIME AGAINST THE CHILDREN
The boys and girls of Germany play an important part in _die grosse
Zeit_ (this great wartime). Every atom of energy that can be
dragged out of the children has been put to practical purpose.
Their little souls, cursed by "incubated hate," have been so worked
upon by the State schoolmasters that they have redoubled their
energies in the tasks imposed upon them of collecting gold, copper,
nickel, brass, paper, acorns, blackberries, blueberries, rubber,
woollen and war loan money.
All this summer on release from school, which commences at seven
and closes at three in most parts of Germany, the hours varying in
some districts, the children, in organised squads, have been put to
these important purposes of State. They had much to do with the
getting in of the harvest.
The schoolmaster has played his part in the training of the child
to militarism, State worship, and enemy hatred as effectively as
the professor and the clergyman.
Here are two German children's school songs, that are being sung
daily. Both of them are creations of the war: both written by
schoolmasters. The particularly offensive song about King Edward
and England is principally sung by girls--the future mothers of
Germany:--
O England, O England,
Wie gross sind Deine Lugen!
Ist Dein Verbrechen noch so gross,
Du schwindelst Dich vom Galgen los.
O Eduard, O Eduard, du Muster aller Fursten,
Nichts hattest Du von einem Rex,
Du eitler Schlips--und Westenfex.
[Oh, England, oh, England, how great are thy lies! However great
thy crimes, thou cheatest the gallows. Oh, Edward, oh, Edward,
thou model Prince! Thou hadst nothing kindly in thee, thou vain
fop!]
Da druben, da druben liegt der Feind,
In feigen Schutzengraben,
Wir greifen ihn an, und ein Hund, wer meint,
Heut' wurde Pardon gegeben.
Schlagt alles tot, was um Gnade fleht,
Schiesst alles nieder wie Hunde,
Mehr Feinde, mehr Feinde! sei euer Gebet
In dieser Vergeltungsstunde.
[Over there in the cowardly trenches lies the enemy. We attack
him, and only a dog will say that pardon should be given to-day.
Strike dead everything which prays for mercy. Shoot everything
down like dogs. "More enemies, more enemies," be your prayer in
this hour of retribution.]
The elementary schools, or _Volksschulen_, are free, and attendance
is compulsory from six to fourteen. There are some 61,000 free
public elementary schools with over 10,000,000 pupils, and over 600
private elementary schools, with 42,000 pupils who pay fees.
Germany is a land of civil service; to enter which a certificate
from a secondary school is necessary. Some authorities maintain
that the only way to prevent being flooded with candidates is to
make the examinations crushingly severe. Children are early made
to realise that all hope of succeeding in life rests upon the
passing of these examinations. Thus the despair which often leads
to suicide on the one hand and knowledge without keenness on the
other.
Hardly any class has suffered more heavily in the war than the
masters of the State schools, which are equivalent to English
Council schools and American public schools. The thinning of
their ranks is an eloquent proof of the heaviness of the German
death toll. Their places have been taken by elderly men, but
principally by women. It is a kind of Nemesis that they should
have fallen in the very cause they have been propagating for at
least a generation.
Those who knew only the old and pleasant Germany do not realise the
speeding up of the hate machine that has taken place in the last
decade. The protests against this State creation of hate grow less
and less as the war proceeds. To-day only comparatively few
members of the Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this
horrible contamination of the minds of the coming generation of
German men and women. Not much reflection is needed to see on what
fruitful soil the great National Liberal Party, with its backing of
capitalists, greedy merchants, chemists, bankers, ship and mine
owners, is planting its seeds for the future. There is no cure for
this evil state of affairs, but the practical proof, inflicted by
big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation of which the
very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and taught
that German _Kultur_ must be spread by bloodshed and terror.
With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life.
The good influence of some churches has gone completely. They are
part of the great war machine. The position of the mother is not
what it was. The old German Hausfrau of the three K's, which I
will roughly translate by "Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk," has become
even more a servant of the master of the house than she was. The
State has taken control of the souls of her children, and she has
not even that authority that she had twenty years ago. The father
has become even more important than of yore. The natural tendency
of a nation of which almost every man is a soldier, is to elevate
the man at the expense of the woman, and the German woman has taken
to her new position very readily. She plays her wonderful part in
the production of munitions, not as in Britain in a spirit of
equality, but with a sort of admitted inferiority difficult to
describe exactly.
At four years of age the German male child begins to be a soldier.
At six he is accustomed to walk in military formation. This system
has a few advantages, but many disadvantages. A great concourse of
infants can, for example, be marshalled through the streets of a
city without any trouble at all. But that useful discipline is
more than counterbalanced by the killing of individuality. German
children, especially during the war, try to grow up to be little
men and women as quickly as possible. They have shared the long
working hours of the grown-ups, and late in the hot summer nights I
have seen little Bavarian boys and girls who have been at school
from seven and worked in the fields from three o'clock till dark,
drinking their beer in the beer garden with a relish that showed
they needed some stimulant. The beer is not Bass's ale, but it
contains from two to five per cent. of alcohol. Unhealthy-looking
little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during
the war. The overwork, and the lowering of the diet, has given
them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes. All games and
amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps
marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and
"Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles."
The girls, in like fashion, often spend their school interval in
marching in columns of four, singing the same horrible chants.
Up to the time of the scarcity of woollen materials, the millions
of little German schoolgirls produced their full output of comforts
for the troops.
The practical result, from a military point of view, of training
children to venerate the All-Highest War Lord and his family,
together with his ancestors, was shown at the beginning of the war,
when there came a great rush of volunteers (_Freiwillige_), many of
them beneath the military age, many of them beyond it. In most of
the calculations of German man-power, some ally and neutral
military writers seem to have forgotten these volunteers, estimated
at two millions.
A significant change in Germany is the cessation of the volunteer
movement. Parents who gladly sent forth their boys as volunteers,
are now endeavouring by every means in their power to postpone the
evil day in the firm belief that peace will come before the age of
military service has been reached. It is a change at least as
significant as that which, lies between the German's "We have
won--the more enemies the better" of two years back, and the "We
must hold out" of to-day.
Of the school structures in modern Germany it would be idle to
pretend that they are not excellent in every respect--perfect
ventilation, sanitation, plenty of space, large numbers of
class-rooms, and halls for the choral singing, which is part of the
German system of education, and by which the "hate" songs have been
so readily spread. The same halls are used for evening lectures
for adults and night improvement schools.
It is significant that all the schools built between 1911 and 1914
were so arranged, not only in Germany, but throughout Austria, that
they could be turned into hospitals with hardly any alteration.
For this purpose, temporary partitions divided portions of the
buildings, and an unusually large supply of water was laid on.
Special entrances for ambulances were already in existence, baths
had already been fitted in the wounded reception rooms, and in many
cases sterilising sheds were already installed. The walls were
made of a material that could he quickly whitewashed for the
extermination of germs. If this obvious preparation for war is
named to the average German, his reply is, "The growing jealousy of
German culture and commerce throughout the world rendered necessary
protective measures."
A total lack of sense of humour and sense of proportion among the
Germans can be gathered from the fact that Mr. Haselden's famous
cartoons of Big and Little Willie, which have a vogue among
Americana and other neutrals in Germany, and are by no means
unkind, are regarded by Germans as a sort of sacrilege. These same
people do not hesitate to circulate the most horrible and indecent
pictures of President Wilson, King George, President Poincare, and
especially of Viscount Grey of Falloden. The Tsar is usually
depicted covered with vermin. The King of Italy as an evil-looking
dwarf with a dagger in his hand. Only those who have seen the
virulence of the caricatures, circulated by picture postcard, can
have any idea of the horrible material on which the German child is
fed. The only protest I ever heard came from the Artists' Society
of Munich, who objected to these loathsome educational efforts as
being injurious to the reputation of artistic Germany and
calculated to produce permanent damage to the juvenile mind.
The atmosphere of the German home is so different from that in
which I have been brought up in the United States, and have seen in
England, that the Germans are not at all shocked by topics of
conversation never referred to in other countries. Subjects are
discussed before German girls of eleven and twelve, and German boys
of the same age, that make an Anglo-Saxon anxious to get out of the
room. I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that
leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so
many learned treatises have been written.
Just before the war it looked as though the German young man and
woman were going to improve. Lawn tennis was spreading, despite
old-fashioned prejudice. Football was coming in. Rowing was
making some progress, as you may have learned at Henley. It was
not the spontaneous sport of Anglo-Saxon countries, but a more
concentrated effort to imitate and to excel.
Running races had become lately a German school amusement, but the
results, as a rule, were that if there were five competitors, the
four losers entered a protest against the winner. In any case,
each of the four produced excellent excuses why he had lost, other
than the fact that he had been properly beaten.
A learned American "exchange professor," who had returned from a
German university, whom I met in Boston last year on my way from
England to Germany, truly summed up the situation of athletics in
German schools by saying, "German boys are bad-tempered losers and
boastful winners."
Upon what kinds of history is the German child being brought up?
The basis of it is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, with
volumes devoted to the Danish and Austrian campaigns and minute
descriptions of every phase of all the battles with France in 1870,
written in a curious hysterical fashion.
The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are
typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play
a great role in war propaganda. The schoolmaster having done his
work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent
dose on the Sabbath. Sedan Day, which before the war was the
culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday
School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.
There are some traits in German children most likeable. There are,
for example, the respect for, and courtesy and kindness towards,
anybody older than themselves. There are admiration for learning
and ambition to excel in any particular task. There is a genuine
love of music. On the other hand, there is much dishonesty, as may
be witnessed by the proceedings in the German police courts, and
has been proved in the gold and other collections.
The elimination of real religion in the education of children and
the substitution of worship of the State is, in the minds of many
impartial observers, something approaching a national catastrophe.
In any other community it would probably be accompanied by anarchy.
It certainly has swelled the calendar of German crime. German
statistics prove that every sort of horror has been greatly on the
increase in the last quarter of a century.
I went to Germany the first time under the impression that the
Anglo-Saxon had much to learn from German education. I do not
think that any observer in Germany itself to-day would find
anything valuable to learn in the field of education, except when
the German student comes to the time he takes up scientific
research, to which the German mind, with its intense industry and
regard for detail, is so eminently suited. The German Government
gives these young students every advantage. They are not, as with
us, obliged to start money-making as soon as they leave school. As
a rule a German boy's career is marked out for him by his parents
and the schoolmaster at a very early age. If he is to follow out
any one of the thousand branches of chemical research dealing with
coal-tar products, for example, he knows his fate at fourteen or
fifteen, and his eye is rarely averted from his goal until he has
achieved knowledge and experience likely to help him in the great
German trade success which has followed their utilisation of
applied science.