changes. These changes have characterized our entire Polish policy,
from 1815 till today. They took place whenever high Polish families
gained influence at court. You all know the Radziwill family and its
influence at the court of Frederick William IV. If we could make a
mental test of the popular feeling of 1831 and of today, we should
find that the conviction has greatly increased that we have German
fellow-countrymen in the Grand duchy of Posen. The former and, I am
tempted to say, childish cult of the Poles as I knew it in my
childhood is no longer possible. Then we were taught Polish songs in
our music lessons together with the Marseillaise, to be sure. The
Polish nobleman, therefore, than whom God never created anything more
reactionary, was here thrown into one pot with the French revolution,
and liberalism was coupled with the cause of the Poles, because we
were lacking in political perspicacity. Such feelings were ingrained
in our citizens at that time. I am thinking especially of the citizens
of Berlin. If today you ask the opinion of your forty-eight million
fellow-countrymen, and compare their views and those of the bulk of
the German army with the bugbear which had found lodging in German
hearts at the time of Platen's Polish songs, you surely cannot
despair of further development. We may, you must agree, register
progress, although it is slow and there are lapses. It is like
climbing a sandy hill or walking in the lava of Mount Vesuvius. One
often glides back, but on the whole one is advancing. Your position
will grow the stronger the more vigorously developed our sense of
nationality will become. I ask of you, do not despair if there are
clouds in the sky, especially in this rainy year which has saddened
the farmers. They will disappear, and the union of the Warthe and the
Vistula with Germany is irrefragable.
For centuries we have existed without Alsace-Lorraine, but no one yet
has dared to think of what our existence would be if today a new
kingdom of _Poland_ were founded. Formerly it was a passive power.
Today it would be an active enemy supported by the rest of Europe. As
long as it would not have gained possession of Danzig, Thorn, and West
Prussia, and I know not what else the excitable Polish mind might
crave, it would always be the ally of our enemies. It indicates,
therefore, insufficient political skill or political ignorance if we
rely in any way on the Polish nobles for the safety of our eastern
frontier, or if we think that we can win them to fight anywhere for
German possessions, sword in hand. This is an Utopian idea. The only
thing which we and you, gentlemen, can do under present conditions,
and which we can learn from the Poles, is to cling to one another. The
Poles, too, have parties, and used to show this even more
unfortunately than we, but all their parties disappear as soon as a
national question is broached. I wish the same would come to be true
of us, and that in national questions we would belong primarily, not
to a party, but to the nation. Let us be of as divergent opinions as
we choose, but when in our eastern provinces the question arises:
"German or Polish," then let the party feuds be laid aside until, as
the Berliners say, "After nine o'clock." Now is the time to fight and
to stand together. This is just as it is in military matters--and I
am glad to see among you many who have experience in such things.
Before joining an attack in war we do not ask: Shall we follow our
progressive or our reactionary neighbor? We advance when the drum
beats the signal, and so we should in national affairs forget all
party differences, and form a solid phalanx hurling all our spears,
reactionary, progressive, and despotic alike, against the enemy.
If we agree on this--and the dangers of the future are compelling us
to do so--we shall win our women and children for the same strict
sense of nationality. And if our women are with us, and our youths, we
are saved for all time. This is one of our present tasks, to give a
national education to our children. I am confident that the German
women possess all the necessary qualifications for this task. I shall
ask you, therefore, to join me in a toast: The German Women in the
Grandduchy of Posen! And may the German idea take an ever firmer hold
in your country!
LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!
April 1,1895
TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.
[The eightieth birthday of Prince Bismarck was celebrated as a
national holiday everywhere in Germany. Not less than 5,250 youths
from the universities and academies visited Friedrichsruh on April 1
to bear witness, before the "old man" of Germany, to their love for
the emperor and the empire. After receiving a delegation from the
faculties of all the universities, Bismarck addressed the students as
follows:]
Gentlemen! I have just heard from the lips of your teachers, the
leaders of higher education, an appreciation of my past, which means
much to me. From your greeting, I infer a promise for the future, and
this means even more for a man of my years than his love of
approbation. You will be able, at least many of you, to live according
to the sentiments which your presence here today reveals, and to do so
to the middle of the next century, while I have long been condemned to
inactivity and belong to the days that are past. I find consolation in
this observation, for the German is not so constituted that he could
entirely dismiss in his old age what in his youth inspired him. Forty
and sixty years hence you will not hold exactly the same views as
today, but the seed planted in your young hearts by the reign of
Emperor William I. will bear fruit, and, even when you grow old, your
attitude will ever be German-national because it is so today--whatever
form our institutions may have taken in the meanwhile. We do not
wilfully dismiss from our hearts the love of national sentiments; we
do not lose them when we emigrate. I know instances of hundreds of
thousands of Germans from America, South Africa, and Australia who are
today bound to the fatherland with the same enthusiasm which carried
many of them to the war.
We had to win our national independence in difficult wars. The
preparation, the prologue, was the Holstein war. We had to fight with
Austria for a settlement; no court of law could have given us a decree
of separation; we had to fight. That we were facing a French war after
our victory at Sadowa could not remain in doubt for anyone who knew
the conditions of Europe. It was, however, desirable not to wage this
war too soon nor before we had garnered to some extent the fruits of
our North-German union. After the war had been waged everybody here
was saying that within five years we should have to wage the next war.
This was to be feared, it is true, but I have ever since considered it
to be my duty to prevent it. We Germans had no longer any reason for
war. We had what we needed. To fight for more, from a lust of conquest
and for the annexation of countries which were not necessary for us,
always appeared to me like an atrocity; I am tempted to say like a
Bonapartistic and foreign atrocity, alien to the Germanic sense of
justice.
Consequently since we rebuilt and enlarged our house according to our
needs, I have always been a man of peace, nor have I shrunk from small
sacrifices. The strong man can afford to yield at times. Neither the
Caroline Islands nor Samoa were worth a war, however much stress I
have always laid on our colonial development. We did not stand in need
of glory won in battles, nor of prestige. This indeed is the
superiority of the German character over all others, that it is
satisfied when it can acknowledge its own worth, and has no need of
recognition, authority, or privilege. It is self-sufficient. This is
the course I have steered, and in politics it is much easier to say
what one should avoid than to say what one should do. Certain
principles of honesty and courage forbid one to do certain things,
just as the access to certain fields is interdicted in the army
maneuvers. But the decision as to what has to be done is a very
different matter, and no one can be sure of it beforehand, for
politics are a task which can be compared only to the navigation of
unknown waters. One does not know what the weather will be or how the
currents will flow, nor what storms will be raging. There is in
politics this additional factor of uncertainty that one is largely
dependent on the decisions of others on whom one has counted and who
have failed. One never can act with complete independence. And, when
our friends whose assistance we need, although we cannot guarantee it,
change their minds, our whole plan has failed. Positive enterprises
are, therefore, very difficult in politics, and when they succeed you
should be grateful to God who has given His blessing, and not find
fault with details which one or the other may regret, but accept the
situation as God has made it. For man cannot create or direct the
stream of time. He can sail on it and steer his craft with more or
less skill, be stranded and shipwrecked, or make a favorable port.
Since we now have made a favorable port, as I conclude from the
predominant although not unanimous opinion of my countrymen, whose
approval is all we have worked for, let us be satisfied, and let us
keep and cherish what we have won in an Emperor and an empire as it
is, and not as some individuals may wish it should be, with other
institutions, and a little bit more of this or that religious or
social detail that they may have at heart. Let us be careful to keep
what we have, lest we lose it because we do not know how to appreciate
it. Germany once was a powerful empire under the Carolingians, the
Saxons, and the Hohenstaufens, and when she lost her place, five, yes
six hundred years passed before she regained the use of her legs--if I
may say so. Political and geological developments are equally slow.
Layers are deposited one on the other, forming new banks and new
mountains. But I should like to ask especially the young gentlemen:
Do not yield too much to the German love of criticism! Accept what God
has given us, and what we have toiled to garner, while the rest of
Europe--I cannot say attacked us, but ominously stood at attention. It
was not easy. If we had been cited before the European Council of
Elders before our French affairs were settled, we should not have
fared nearly so well; and it was my task to avoid this if I possibly
could. It is natural that not everything which everybody wished could
be obtained under these conditions, and I mention this only to claim
the indulgence of those who are perfectly justified in expecting more,
and possibly in striving for more. But, above everything, do not be
premature, and do not act in haste. Let us cling for the present to
what we have.
The men who made the biggest sacrifices that the empire might be born
were undoubtedly the German princes, not excluding the King of
Prussia. My old master hesitated long before he voluntarily yielded
his independence to the empire. Let us then be thankful to the
reigning houses who made sacrifices for the empire which after the
full thousand years of German history must have been hard for them to
make; and let us be thankful to science, and those who cultivate her,
for having kept alive on their hearths the fire of German unity to the
time when new fuel was added and it flamed up and provided us with
satisfying light and warmth.
I would then--and you will say I am an old, conservative man--compress
what I have to say into these words: Let us keep above everything the
things we have, before we look for new things, nor be afraid of those
people who begrudge them to us. In Germany struggles have existed
always, and the party schisms of today are naught but the echoes of
the old German struggle between the noble families and the trade
unions in the cities, and between those who had and those who had not
in the peasant wars, in the religious wars, and in the thirty years'
war. None of these far reaching fissures, which I am tempted to call
geological, can disappear at once. And should we not be indulgent with
our opponents, if we ourselves do not desist from fighting? Life is a
struggle everywhere in nature, and without inner struggles we end by
being like the Chinese, and become petrified. No struggle, no life!
Only, in every fight where the national question arises, there must be
a rallying point. For us this is the empire, not as it may seem to be
desirable, but as it is, the empire and the Emperor, who represents
it. That is why I ask you to join me in wishing well to the Emperor
and the empire. I hope that in 1950 all of you who are still living
will again respond with contented hearts to the toast
LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR AND THE EMPIRE!
THE LIFE OF MOLTKE
BY KARL DETLEV JESSEN, PH.D.
Professor of German Literature, Bryn Mawr College
To relate, in detail, the story of the life of General-Fieldmarshal
Graf Helmuth von Moltke--or, as we shall briefly call him,
Moltke--means to give an account of that memorable phase of modern
history, perhaps, so far as Europe is concerned, the most important of
the nineteenth century. This was the ascendency of Prussia, of her
king and of her people, culminating in the unification and the
consolidation of most of the German states into one great empire, with
all its realization of military and political power, of social,
economic, and, in a wide sense, of cultural eminence and efficiency.
The barest outlines, however, must suffice for the present purpose.
Moltke was born at the threshold of the century the history of which
he so prominently helped to shape, on October 26, 1800, at Parchim in
the duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. On his father's side he descended
from a family of the North German gentry which had come to various
degrees of prominence in some German as well as Scandinavian states.
No doubt he inherited the military instinct from this race of
warriors, statesmen, and landholders; a race the characteristic traits
of which indicated the line along which he was bound to develop, the
field in which he was to manifest his greatest achievements. But there
is just as little doubt that all the elements of character which
exalted his military gifts and instincts into an almost antique
nobility, simplicity, and grandeur--his dignity, purity, dutifulness,
his profound religious devotion, and sense of humor--came to him from
his mother, who was descended from an ancient patrician family of the
little republican commonwealth, the once famous Hansatown of
Lübeck. How far the Huguenot strain may have influenced him, through
his paternal grandmother, is hard to tell, since we know but little of
Charlotte d'Olivet.
After the family had moved to Holstein, where his father failed to
make a success of an agricultural undertaking for which he seems to
have lacked fitness, young Moltke entered the Royal Danish Military
Academy as a cadet, and there passed his lieutenant's examination with
distinction; but he sought and found a commission under the Prussian
eagle. He entered the eighth grenadiers at Frankfort-on-the-Oder. A
year later, in 1823, he was sent to what is now called the War Academy
in Berlin. Only by the closest economy and by some outside work,
partly literary, as we shall see, he managed to get along with his
exceedingly small officer's pay. He distinguished himself however so
much that he became, successively, a teacher at the Division School
and an active military geological surveyor, and finally was taken into
the General Staff of the Army. Becoming a first lieutenant in 1832, a
captain in 1835, ahead of many of his comrades, he served exclusively
in strategical positions. During the four years, 1835-39, he, with
some comrades, was in the Turkish dominions for the purpose of
organizing and drilling the Turkish Army. He witnessed, as an active
participant, the Turkish defeat by the insurgent Egyptians at Nisib on
the Euphrates, which was brought about by the indolent obstinacy of
the Turkish commander-in-chief. Like Xenophon, Moltke retreated toward
and reached the Black Sea. At Constantinople he obtained honorable
dismissal from the Sultan. After his return to Prussia he became chief
of the General Staff of the Fourth Army Corps. In 1841 he married Mary
Burt, a young relative who was partly of English extraction. The union
developed into an unusually happy married life, in spite of, or partly
because of, their great difference in age.
[Illustration: MOLTKE ANTON VON WERNER]
His wife, by whom he had no issue, lived to see the beginning of his
great achievements and fame, but died in 1868, before his proudest
triumph. Various commands led him to Italy, Spain, England, and Russia
as adjutant of Prussian princes. In 1858 he was appointed chief of the
General Staff of the Prussian Army--the institution which he shaped
into that great strategical instrument through which were made
possible, from a military point of view, the glorious successes of the
three wars--1864, 1866, 1870-71--and which has become the model of all
similar organizations the world over.
Side by side with the overtowering political achievement of Bismarck
and the more congenial life work of Roon, the minister of war,
Moltke's service to his country and his king stands unchallenged in
historical significance. He has indelibly inscribed his name on the
tablets of history as one of the world's greatest strategists. But he
did not lay down his work until extreme old age; in 1888, as he so
simply put it in his request for relief from duty, he resigned his
office, because he "could no more mount a horse." He, however, still
remained president of the Commission of National Defense and his last
speech in the German Reichstag, of which he had been a continuous
member since its establishment, he delivered on May 14, 1890. He died
on April 24, 1891. The nation felt that one of its great heroes had
passed away.
In two congratulatory documents on the occasion of Moltke's ninetieth
birthday, Theodor Mommsen, the historian, has summed up the results of
the great soldier's life-work--in the address presented by the Royal
Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in the honorary tablet of
the German cities. These inscriptions may be found in Mommsen's _Reden
und Aufsaetze_. Shortly after Moltke's death, in a commemorative
address at the same Academy, the historian and Hellenist Ernst Curtius
reviewed Moltke's relations to historical science and his achievements
in military science and in history. The Academy had appointed the
Fieldmarshal an honorary member in 1860 for his great achievements in
the military, geographical, and historical sciences. Professor
Curtius in the address draws the outlines of Moltke's character as a
student, and explains how he is indebted to the teachings of Karl
Ritter, the founder of scientific geography, how he clearly develops
under the influence of Niebuhr, Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von
Buch, and Erman, the physicist. He points out how Moltke, as historian
and as an expert cartographer, introduces scientific spirit and work
into his great creation, the German General Staff. As a strategist,
however, it remains to be said that he follows in the footsteps, puts
into practice and develops the methods of General von Clausewitz, the
first mind who put war on an empirical and scientific basis. Moltke
was intimately acquainted with Gibbon through a nearly completed
rendering into German of _The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_, a translation which, unfortunately, never was printed
and seems to be lost even in manuscript. As his favorite books and
writers Moltke mentions, among others, Littrow's _Astronomy,_ Liebig's
_Agricultural Chemistry_, Clausewitz's _On War,_ Ranke, Treitschke,
Carlyle. It appears, then, that his scientific equipment was of the
most solid sort, enabling him to make the most valuable contributions
to knowledge.
It is impossible to imagine to oneself Moltke breaking into tears,
either of wrath or of despair, in great crises of his life, such as we
know to have been the case with Bismarck. There is a contrast between
these two men in their very makeup. There is tragedy in Bismarck's
soul, in its volcanic eruptiveness and its conflicts. He is nervously
high-strung in the extreme, the very embodiment, in Karl Lamprecht's
terminology, of the type of "Reizsamkeit." He likes to listen to
Beethoven's music and his sense of nature reveals him to be
impressionable, sensitive. His gamut of emotions and feelings, and
their expression, is extraordinary. Moltke, on the other hand, appears
to be always in harmony with himself, he is far less impulsive than
his great contemporary and friend. His feeling, always awake for
nature, has no element of morbid and pathetic sentiment; in the
earlier stages of its manifestation we see it slightly tinged by
Romanticism. But he is at peace with nature, his great comforting
mother. There is no sudden and surprising break in his mental or
spiritual development. The ideal of the strategist, as antiquity saw
it, appears to be consummated in his person. William James, himself an
ardent pacificist, well observed that in the modern soldier there is a
matter-of-factness far removed from the bluff and make-believe of
modern life in general. He might have chosen Moltke as the best type
of this sort of warrior. But there was much more than this scientific
and dutiful soldier; there was at bottom of Moltke's nature a fine
sense of proportion, an artistic vein, and, not the least element, a
Christian philosophy of life just as far removed from mere perfunctory
indifferentism as from cocksure dogmatic bigotry and self-sufficiency.
We have striking evidence of this in the _Trostgedanken_, the
_Consolatory Thoughts on the Earthly Life and a Future Existence_,
which he laid down as the last literary utterance of his full and
eventful career. But this is not all; for most astonishing of all in
the richness of this well-rounded harmony of over ninety years of life
is a lively source of humor, due more to endowment and inheritance
from his mother than to her influence, as his letters to her bear
witness. When war is declared in 1870 he remarks that a new vitality
has entered his carcass, and, on the very eve of his demise, when in
the morning he had attended a session of the Upper House of the
Prussian Diet, loyal to his work and task to the very last moment, he
closed the last and winning game of whist he played with the quotation
of that grim bit of humor characteristic of Frederick the Great and
his soldiery: "_Wat seggt hei nu to sine ollen Suepers_?"