Fatherland talked so long in the hungry armistice days—the German point
of view averaged about as follows. There were plenty of variations from
this central line, and I shall attempt to show the frontier of these
deviations as we go along. We shall probably not find this statement of
his point of view very original; most of his arguments we have heard
before, chiefly while the question of our coming or not coming into the
war was seething. Fifteen years ago, when I first visited him at home, I
did not gather the impression that every German thought alike. To-day he
seems to reach the same conclusions by the same curious trains of
thought, no matter what his caste, profession, experience, and to some
extent his environment—for even those who remained far from the scene of
conflict during all the war seem to have worked themselves into much the
same mental attitude as their people at home. But then, this is also
largely true of his enemies, among whom one hears almost as frequently
the tiresome repetition of the same stereotyped conclusions that have in
some cases been deliberately manufactured for public consumption. One
comes at times to question whether there is really any gain nowadays in
running about the earth gathering men’s opinions, for they so often bear
the factory-made label, the trade-mark of one great central plant, like
the material commodities of our modern industrial world. The press, the
cable, the propagandist, and the printer have made a thinking-machine,
as Edison has made a talking-machine, and Burroughs a mechanical
arithmetic.
The first, of course, if not the burning question of the controversy
was, who started the war, and why? The German at home showed a certain
impatience at this query, as a politician might at a question that he
had already repeatedly explained to his constituents. But with care and
perseverance he could usually be drawn into the discussion, whereupon he
outlined the prevailing opinion, with such minor variations as his
slight individuality permitted; almost always without heat, always
without that stone-blind prejudice that is so frequent among the Allied
man in the street. Then he fell into apathetic silence or harked back to
the ever-present question of food. But let him tell it in his own way.
“The war was started by circumstances. War had become a necessity to an
over-prosperous world, as bleeding sometimes becomes necessary to a fat
person. Neither side was wholly and deliberately guilty of beginning it,
but if there is actual personal guilt, it is chiefly that of the Allies,
especially England. We understand the hatred of France. It came largely
from fear, though to a great extent unnecessary fear. The ruling party
in Russia wanted war, wanted it as early as 1909, for without it they
would have lost their power. It was a question of interior politics with
them. But with England there was less excuse. In her case it was only
envy and selfishness; the petty motives that sprout in a shopkeeper’s
soul. We were making successful _concurrenz_ against her in all the
markets of the world—though by our German word ‘_concurrenz_’ we mean
more than mere commercial competition; she saw herself in danger of
losing the hegemony of Europe, her position as the most important nation
on the globe. She set out deliberately to destroy us, to _vernichten_,
to bring us to nothing. We hate”—though come to think of it I do not
recall once having heard a German use the word hate in describing his
own feelings, nor did I run across any reference to the notorious “Hymn
of Hate” during all my travels through the Empire—“we dislike, then, we
blame England most, for it was she more than any other one party in the
controversy who planned and nourished it. How? By making an Entente
against us that surrounded us with a steel wall; by bolstering up the
_revanche_ feeling in France; by urging on the ruling class in Russia;
by playing on the dormant brutality of the Russian masses and catering
to the natural fanaticism of the French, deliberately keeping alive
their desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine. Edward VII set the ball rolling
with his constant visits to Paris.”
“I had much intercourse and correspondence with Frenchmen before the
war,” said a German professor of European history, “and I found a
willingness among those of my own generation, those between thirty and
fifty, to drop the matter, to admit that, after all, Alsace-Lorraine was
as much German as French. Then some ten years ago I began to note a
change of tone. The younger generation was being pumped full of the
_revanche_ spirit from the day they started to school; in foreign
countries every French text-book incited crocodile tears over the poor
statue of Strassburg, with its withered flowers. It was this younger
generation that brought France into the war—this and Clemenceau, who is
still living back in 1870.”
“But the despatches, the official state papers already published, show
that England was doing her best to avoid....”
“Oh, you simple Americans! You do not seem to realize that such things
are made for foreign consumption, made to sell, to flash before a gaping
world, to publish in the school-books of the future, not for actual use,
not to be seriously believed by the experienced and the disillusioned.
That has been the story of European politics for centuries, since long
before you dear, naïve people came into existence. You are like a
new-comer dropping into a poker game that has been going on since long
before you learned to distinguish one card from another. You do not
guess that the deck is pin-pricked and that every kind of underhand
trick is tacitly allowed, so long as the player can ‘get away with it.’
Now if we could get the _really_ secret papers that passed back and
forth, especially if we could get what went on in private conversation
or ’way inside the heads of Grey and the rest of them....”
“Yes, but—you will pardon my naïveté, I am sure—but if England had long
deliberately planned a European war, why did she have nothing but a
contemp—but a very small army ready when it broke out?”
“Because she expected, as usual, to have some one else do her fighting
for her. And she succeeded! When they were almost burned beyond recovery
she got America to pull her chestnuts out of the fire—and now America
does not even get enough out of it to salve her scorched fingers. But
for America we should have won the war, unquestionably. But England has
lost it, in a way, too, for she has been forced to let America assume
the most important place in the world. You will have a war with England
yourselves for that very reason in a few years, as soon as she catches
her breath and discovers you at the head of the table, in the seat which
she has so long arrogated to herself. You will be her next victim—with
Japan jumping on your back the moment it is turned.
“Yes, in one sense Germany did want war. She had to have it or die, for
the steel wall England had been forging about her for twenty years was
crushing our life out and had to be broken. Then, too, there was one
party, the ‘Old Germans’—what you call the Junkers—that was not averse
to such a contest. The munition-makers wanted war, of course; they
always do. Some of our generals”—Ludendorff was the name most frequently
heard in this connection; Hindenburg never—“wanted it. But it is absurd
to accuse the Kaiser of starting it, simply because he was the
figurehead, the most prominent bugaboo, a catchword for the mob. The
Hohenzollerns did us much damage; but they also brought us much good.
The Kaiser loved peace and did all in his power to keep it. He was the
only emperor—we were the only large nation that had waged no war or
stolen no territory since 1871. But the English-French-Russian
combination drove us into a corner. We had to have the best army in the
world, just as England has to have the best navy. We had no
world-conquering ambitions; we had no ‘_Drang nach Osten_’ which our
enemies have so often charged against us, except for trade. Our
diplomats were not what they should have been; Bethmann-Hollweg has as
much guilt as any one in the whole affair, on our side. We have had no
real diplomats, except von Bülow, since Bismarck. But the Germans as a
nation never wanted war. The Kaiser would not have declared it even when
he did had he not feared that the Social Democrats would desert him in
the crisis if it were put off longer. We had only self-protection as our
war aim from the beginning, but we did not dare openly say so for fear
the enemy, which had decided on our annihilation, would take it as an
admission of weakness.”
This whitewashing of the Kaiser was universal in Germany, as far as my
personal experience goes. No one, whatever his age, sex, caste, place of
residence, or political complexion, accused him of being more than an
accessory before the fact. The most rabid—pardon, I never heard a German
speak rabidly on any subject, unless it was perhaps the lack of food and
tobacco—the most decidedly monarchical always softened any criticism of
the ex-emperor with the footnote that he, after all, was not chiefly to
blame. His bad counselors, the force of circumstances over which he had
little control ... and so on. Then there were those, particularly,
though not entirely, in the backwaters of Prussia, the women especially,
who gazed after his retreated figure pityingly, almost tearfully, as if
he had been the principal sufferer from the catastrophe.
Nor did I ever hear any German, not even a Socialist of the extremest
left, not even a Bavarian, admit that Germany was wholly in the wrong.
Once only did I hear a man go so far as to assert that Germany had at
least half the guilt of the war. He was a stanch-minded, rather
conservative Socialist living in the Polish atmosphere of Bromberg. On
the other hand, citizens of the Allied countries, who had dwelt in
Germany since 1914, were all more or less firm converts to the
England-France-Russia theory. Such is the power of environment. An
English governess, who had lost a brother in the war and who was
returning home for the first time since it began, expressed the fear
that she would soon be compelled to return to Germany to preserve her
peace of mind. A few laid the blame entirely to Russia; some charged it
all to “the Jews,” implying a rather extraordinary power on the part of
the million or so of that race within the Empire.
Now and then one ran across a simple old countryman who took his
opinions wholly and unreservedly as they had been delivered to him,
without ever having opened the package. “How did it start? Why, let’s
see. They killed some prince down in ... somewhere or other, I never can
remember these foreign names, and his wife, too, if I remember, and then
Russia ...” and so on. He was of the same class as those who asserted,
“I don’t know when gas was first used, or just where, but it was by the
wicked French—or was it the scoundrelly English?” But these simple,
swallow-it-whole yokels were on the whole more rare than they would have
been in many another land. However much we may sneer at her _Kultur_,
the Kaiser régime brought to the most distant corners of the Empire a
certain degree of instruction, even if it was only of a deliberately
Teutonic brand. In the great majority of cases one was astounded at the
clear, comprehensive, and, within limits, unprejudiced view of all the
field of European politics of many a peasant grubbing out his existence
on a remote hillside. More than one of them could have exchanged minds
with some of our national officials to the decided advantage of the
latter. My memory still harks back to the tall, ungainly farmer in whose
lowly little inn I spent the last night of my German tramp, a man who
had lived almost incessantly in the trenches during all the war, and
returned home still a “simple soldier,” who topped off a sharp,
clear-cut exposé of the politics of Europe for the past half-century
with: “Who started it? Listen. Suppose a diligent, sober, hard-working
mechanic is engaged on the same job with an arrogant, often careless,
and sometimes intoxicated competitor. Suppose the competitor begins to
note that if things go on as they are the sober mechanic will in time be
given all the work, for being the more efficient, or that there will
come a time when, thanks to his diligence, there will be no work left
for either of them. If the rowdy suddenly strikes his rival a foul blow
in the back when he is not looking and the hard-worker drops his tools
and strikes back, who started it?”
On the conduct of the war there was as nearly unanimity of opinion as on
its genesis. “The Russians and the French, secretly sustained by
England, invaded Germany first. William”—they call him that almost as
often as the Kaiser now—“who was the only important ruler who had not
declared war in more than forty years, gave them twelve hours to desist
from their designs; they refused, and the war went on. Had we planned to
go to war we should certainly have passed the tip to the millions of
Germans in foreign lands in time for them to have reached Germany. You
yourself have seen how they poured down to the ports when they heard of
the Fatherland’s danger, and how regretfully they returned to their
far-off duties when it became apparent that England was not going to let
them come home. Then we went through Belgium. We should not have done
so, of course, but any people would have done the same to protect its
national existence. Besides, we offered to do so peacefully; the
stubborn Belgians would not have suffered in the slightest. And Belgium
had a secret treaty with the Entente that would have permitted them to
attack us from that side ...” and so on.
“Moral guilt? Not the slightest. As we feel no guilt whatever for
starting the war—because we did not start it—so we feel none for any of
the ways in which we waged it. The U-boats? What was our drowning of a
few silly passengers who insisted on traveling compared with what the
British were doing in starving our women and children, our entire
nation?” (The old specious argument about the warning not to take the
_Lusitania_ was still frequently heard.) “We had to use U-boats or
starve. A hysterical world blamed us for the more dramatic but by far
the less wicked of two weapons. Drowning is a pleasant death compared
with starvation. War is war. But it was a very stupid mistake on the
part of old fool Tirpitz.” (The admiral probably had his whiskers pulled
more often, figuratively, than any other man in the Empire. True, he was
almost the only German left who felt capable of still nourishing so
luxurious an adornment. But the U-boat policy had very few partizans
left.) “Moral guilt, most certainly not. But it was the height of
asininity. If he had had ten times as many U-boats, yes, by all means.
But not when it brought in America and still failed to break the
blockade. If the U-boat fans had not insisted on their program the war
would have been over in 1916. But America would probably have come in,
anyway; there were her loans to the Allies, and the munitions she
furnished them. America, we suspect, was chiefly interested in her
interest.”
To all charges of unfair methods of warfare, of tyranny over the
civilian population, of atrocities, Germany replied with an
all-embracing: “You’re another.” “If we first used gas”—which by no
means all Germans admitted—“think of those dreadful tanks! If we bombed
London and Paris, see how our dear brethren along the Rhine suffered
from your airmen. If we were forced to be stern with the population of
the occupied regions, go hear what the Russians did in our eastern
provinces. You make martyrs of your Cavells and Fryatts; we can name you
scores of Germans who suffered worse far more unjustly. As to accusing
us of wanton atrocities, that has become one of the recognized weapons
of modern warfare, one of the tricks of the game, this shouting of
calumnies against your gagged enemy to a keenly listening audience not
averse to feeding on such morbid morsels. It was accepted as a
recognized misdeal in the political poker game as far back as the Boer
War, when the science of photography first reached the advanced stage
that made it possible to show English soldiers catching on their
bayonets babies that had never been within a hundred miles of them. Like
all the underhand moves, it was immensely improved or perfected during
this long life-and-death struggle. That was one of the things we
somewhat neglected, first from lack of foresight, later because of the
impossibility of making ourselves heard by the audience, of getting it
across the footlights, while our enemies screened the whole front of the
stage. Ninety per cent. of the so-called atrocities were made out of
whole cloth, or out of very slight remnants. We admit the cleverness of
the other side in ‘getting away with it,’ but now that it has served its
purpose we expect him, if he is the fair sportsman he pretends, to
acknowledge it was only a trick, at least as soon as the smoke and heat
of action have cleared a bit.” (This view was widely held among citizens
of Allied nations who have traveled in Germany since the signing of the
armistice, though few of them admitted it except in private
conversation.) “There were, of course, things that should not have been.
There are in all armies; there have been in all wars, and always will
be. But if some of our soldiers forgot themselves, if our reserve
officers were not always of the high standard their position called for,
let us tell you of some of the horrible things the Russians perpetrated
in our eastern provinces”—somehow Germany always seemed to flee eastward
when this question of atrocities came up.
“One of our greatest mistakes was the failure to realize the value of
_réclame_, of publicity, propaganda, advertising, or whatever you choose
to call it, until it was too late.” (Berlin was showing one of our great
“Hun” pictures in her principal cinemas at the time of my visit, partly
for the amusement of seeing themselves as others see them, but chiefly
as an example of how they “missed a bet” in not discovering how the
“movies” could also be “mobilized” for war ends.) “The United States was
finally led astray and brought into the war chiefly because England and
France made skilful use of propaganda, because they controlled the great
avenues of the transmission of news. It looks like a silly, childish
little trick for the Allies to take our cables away from us—along with
our milch cows—but it is really very important, for they keep on telling
unrefuted lies about us as long as it serves their purposes. Now that
they have a clear field, they will discolor the facts more than ever.
They censored, doctored their public prints far more than we did. See
how they dare not even yet publish the terms of the treaty that was
handed us at Versailles; yet we have had them here in Germany for days.
Even the French Chamber and the American Senate got them first from our
papers. Open diplomacy indeed! There never was a time during the war
that French and English and, when we could get them, American papers
could not be bought at any kiosk in our larger cities. Look at Haase,
who publishes daily the strongest kind of attacks on the government,
quite openly, while the newspapers of Paris are still sprinkled with the
long white hoofprints of the censor.
“We admit our fault—and we are now paying for it. This publicity was one
of the ‘perfectly legitimate’ moves in the crooked game of war, one of
the cleverest of the tricks, and we overlooked it, thanks to the thick
heads of our diplomats! It was perhaps the deciding factor. The English
with their shopkeeper souls; the French, crudely materialistic under
their pretended love of art; the traitorous Italians—were not equal all
together to downing us. But when they succeeded in talking over America,
a great big healthy child overtopping them all, naïve, inexperienced,
rather flattered at being let into a man’s game, somewhat hysterical”—I
am putting things a bit more baldly than I ever heard them stated, but
that is what was meant—“we might have known it was all over with us. Now
we are in a pretty predicament. We have no national wealth left, except
our labor, for we have given up everything else. We cannot even
emigrate—except to Russia. My children will see a great combination with
them, unless this Bolshevism sweeps all before it now while the bars are
down.
“But we were never defeated militarily. _Ausgeschlossen!_ We won the
war—on the field of battle, such a war as was never before waged against
a nation in all history. That is what makes our real defeat so bitter.
America did it, with her unlimited flood of materials, her endless
resources, plus the hunger blockade. With the whole world against us and
starvation undermining us at the rear, what was left for us? But we
still held our front; our line never cracked. The German army was the
best in the world—to-day the American is—its discipline was strict, but
there was a reason, centuries of experience, behind every command. But
the war lasted too long; we got overtrained, went stale and....”
No German, from the mouth of the Elbe to the mountains of Bavaria,
admitted for an instant that his army was defeated. Whatever their other
opinions, the Boches insisted on hugging to themselves the cold
conviction that they were beaten from within, never by a foreign enemy.
They seemed almost fond of boasting that it took America with her
boundless resources to turn the scales against them. But they were not
always consistent in this view, for they admitted that with the failure
of the last offensive they knew the game was up; they admitted that
Hindenburg himself asserted that the side that succeeded in bringing up
the last half-million fresh troops would win the war. In this connection
it may be of interest to hear what the German Staff (American
Intelligence Section) thought of the American army. “The United States
enlisted men,” runs their statement, “were excellent soldiers. They took
battle as an adventure and were the best shock troops of the war when it
ended. Their officers were good up to and sometimes through battalion
commanders; above that they were astonishingly weak.”
Throughout all Germany the proposed peace terms were received in much
the same spirit they had been in Berlin. Outwardly they were greeted
with surprising calmness, almost apathy. But one could find protests and
to spare by knowing where to listen. “This peace is even less open and
fair than that of the Congress of Vienna,” came the first returns. “We
expected to lose some territory in the east, perhaps, but that
Alsace-Lorraine should be allowed to vote which of us she cared to join,
that ‘self-determination’ of which Wilson has spoken so much. Both of
those provinces always belonged to Germany, except for the hundred years
between the time Louis XIV stole them from us and Bismarck won them
back; they belonged to Germany just as much as Poland ever did to the
Poles. Lorraine may want to be French; Alsace certainly does not, and
never did.”