WHAT THE GREAT WAR REALLY MEANS
The history of the human race has been the history of man’s struggle
toward freedom. Because certain nations have seen the light sooner
than others, they have been the object of attack by these others,
primarily because the rulers of the latter have been shrewd enough
to see that revolution is contagious. A free neighbor threatens the
existence of a monarch who derives his power from the force with which
he has surrounded himself and from the blindness of his own people. A
free neighbor is therefore a menace to autocracy, and something to be
crushed.
When the people of France, inspired by the example of the United
States, arose in revolution against their monarch, the revolution
shook the thrones of Europe. The King of France was closer in blood
to other royal families of Europe than he was to the people whom he
had governed. The Queen of France was a Hapsburg, of the royal family
of Austria, whose representatives were in almost every royal house of
the Continent of Europe. The success of the French Revolution was the
handwriting on the wall; and every Belshazzar on a throne had a Daniel
of statesmanship to tell him what it meant.
Almost at once the Kings of Europe rallied against France, because free
France threatened the existence of the Kings. France fought valiantly.
The military establishment which she had to assume to protect her
rights, however, swung her out of the republican form of government
she had set up, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who won her wars, became her
Emperor. The change, however, did not swing back the French people into
any slavish acceptance of royalty. They held, in spite of Bonaparte’s
court, their fundamental democracy; and it was a democratic army which
France sent across Europe. Napoleon himself said that every private
carried a field-marshal’s bâton in his knapsack. Every man had a
chance for promotion. Every man had a chance to better his life. And,
because France remained fundamentally democratic, the Kings battled
against Bonaparte. They defeated him, finally; but they did not defeat
France, for its spirit remained free.
Germany, nearest neighbor to France, had never known democracy.
Once part of the vast kingdom known as the Holy Roman Empire,
she had disintegrated into little states, kingdoms, duchies, and
archbishoprics, each ruled by one-man power. Sometimes a King, stronger
than the others, drew the kingdoms together for purposes of warfare
against other countries. Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, fought
against Austria. With him the power of Prussia rose. After his death
it declined so that Napoleon found the conquest of Prussia easy, and
went about it so thoroughly that he made the French conquest a profound
humiliation to the Prussians. Even his defeat at Waterloo failed to
pay the debt Prussia cherished against the French.
It was in the time of Napoleon that the German people came nearer to
freedom of spirit than they had been before or have been since. For
in fighting a foreign enemy who sought power even as the Hohenzollern
ruler of Germany seeks it to-day, the youth of Germany glimpsed the
truth of democracy. With Napoleon’s defeat they stood ready to move
forward toward it. But again the Kings intervened.
There was formed in Europe at that time the Holy Alliance, that same
group of Kings and Kingmakers who sought to restore to Spain its
revolting colonies in South America, and who held firmly to the idea of
the divine right of Kings. This Holy Alliance throttled free thought
in Germany. By 1848 revolutions for the right of freedom surged up
throughout the German states and kingdoms and principalities. They were
beaten down by the ruling powers, one helping the other. It was at this
time that the German emigration toward the United States began, for
the leaders of the revolution sought a land where they could be free.
Those who stayed came in time to accept the system which the rulers
imposed upon them.
The putting down of the revolution of 1848 gave Prussia increased
power. She had a disciplined standing army, and a military
establishment. In 1862 William I became King. He made Bismarck his
prime minister, and the march of Prussia toward world conquest began.
Bismarck made the whole Prussian nation into an army. Then he made
alliance with Austria to secure the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein from
Denmark. Then he provoked a quarrel with Austria so that Prussia might
deprive her of all influence over the other German states. He won his
object in a six-weeks’ war in 1866. But he was not satisfied with
the power he had won, for democratic France--democratic for all her
acceptance of another Napoleon for her throne--still threatened the
power of Kings who claimed that their power came from God, and not from
their people.
Prussia waited its chance. When France was unprepared, a quarrel was
brought on, and the blow struck. Prussia took Alsace and Lorraine from
her. Then the King of Prussia was made Emperor of Germany.
The territory which Prussia had acquired for the German Empire, for
Alsace and Lorraine are the richest mineral districts of France,
gave Germany opportunity for that industrial development which has
marked her history since the Franco-Prussian War. Germany’s population
overcrowded her territorial space. Germany grew rich and prosperous.
Germany became highly efficient in mechanical arts. German trade
reached out over the world, but found the barriers of the establishment
of other nations. The German army remained a great machine, officered
by Prussian nobles. Germany grew so mighty that she grew to believe
that might makes right. She had the might, and she made ready to
exercise it.
First of all, she needed trade routes. She needed a way to the sea more
open than the Hamburg harbors. She wanted a road to Asia. She wanted
to control the gateway to the rich Orient. She wanted an empire that
would contain Austria-Hungary as well as Germany proper. And she set
out to win it all.
In 1914 the situation was this: Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria,
was an old man, a sick man. His empire, composed of scores of
nationalities, held together by a thin thread. If he died, it might
disintegrate into groups of free peoples. Serbia, its near neighbor,
had won independence. The Balkan wars had shifted power to small states
that stood between Germany and the Orient. Russia was disaffected. A
revolution might come at any time that would dethrone the Czar. Unless
a war, and a great war, was started, many and great free nations would
soon surround Germany, cutting her off from the way to the Orient.
France, her hated neighbor, flaunted her free institutions in her
face and remembered Alsace and Lorraine. England cut her off from
unrestricted rule of the sea. To be sure, she was not eager to force
war with England, since the German navy had not arrived at the point
of preparedness of the German army. England could wait until Germany
had conquered the rest of Europe. Then, when England was conquered,
too, Germany would punish the United States for our “international
impertinence” as Bismarck called our policy of the Monroe Doctrine. It
was the time to strike. Germany, as usual in the Bismarckian policy,
made the occasion.
Down in Bosnia, a Balkan state which Austria had seized and held
against the will of its people, an anarchist threw a bomb which killed
an Austrian archduke in June, 1914. For a time no action came of the
happening. Then Austria announced that she had discovered that the
assassination was the result of a Serbian plot, known to the Serbian
Government, Bosnia’s neighbor and the friend of her freedom. Therefore
she declared war on Serbia. Germany gave her consent to the ultimatum.
She was taking her opportunity.
Knowing that a war of Austria against Serbia would open a way for her
own progress toward the East, Germany, being prepared to the last
gun and last man, forced the issue. She knew that Russia would rise
against her, but she knew, better than the Russian Government did, how
unprepared Russia was. On the first day of August, 1914, she declared
war against Russia. On the fourth day of August the _Reichstag_, the
people’s legislative body of Germany, met and for the first time
learned officially of what had been done. By that time the German
Government had put itself in a position of war against Russia, France,
Great Britain, and Belgium, a fact which proves how little the German
people had to say about the making of actual warfare.
In utter contempt of a treaty which had been signed Germany invaded
Belgium on the way to France. Belgium resisted the invasion. A Chinese
schoolboy, writing of the event in a school in western Canada months
afterward, phrased the story better than any historian has done.
“Germany,” he wrote, “said to Belgium: ‘Let me through.’ Belgium said:
‘I am not a road. I am a nation.’” And Belgium proved to the world how
strong a small nation may be in courage. For she resisted Germany so
well that France had time to gather her forces for defense. The drive
to Paris was stopped. Prussia had announced that its armies would be in
Paris in an almost incredibly short time.
In the meantime Germany made alliance with the Sultan of Turkey. The
war on the eastern front began. Hordes of Austrians and Germans swarmed
over Poland into Russia, and back again as Russia beat them back,
then forward again as Russia collapsed. In Egypt, in Palestine, in
Mesopotamia war has raged. Japan joined. China broke off relations with
Germany. Japan holds troops at the eastern end of the Russian-Siberian
railway, waiting for the word of the Allies to strike westward.
In the west the war has remained almost stationary since the initial
sweep of the German hordes; but eastward Germany has driven her
armies toward her goal. Russia has disintegrated, pulled apart by the
insidious forces of German intrigue. Germany has the open way to the
East. She has the resources of Austria-Hungary, of Russia, of Asia
Minor at her command.
Had it not been for Germany’s idea that she could conquer the world
in one war, an idea supported by her eastward conquests, she might be
nearer to ultimate success than she is to-day. For the entrance of the
United States into the war, provoked by German measures of attack on
American commerce, has materially changed the issue. It has put heart
into the Allies, as well as opening up the field of supplies of men and
munitions for them. Our country has barely begun to fight, for it has
taken a year to bear to France the necessary troops and equipment.
However long the war may be, it is one that must be fought to the end.
For, as a river purifies itself as it flows, so has the issue of the
war defined itself as it has progressed. In its beginning Germany
strove to make the world believe that it was a trade war between
Austria and Serbia which Russia had entered for the injury of Austria
and which had been forced on Germany in Austria’s defense. Then she
claimed that she fought England “for the freedom of the seas.” The
war against Belgium was “a military necessity,” the submarine warfare
against neutral nations “a retaliatory measure against blockade.” But
in the long run Germany’s war is the war of the military caste of the
world against the free peoples, the war of government holding power
by force against government holding power by popular vote, the war of
military establishment against peaceful ideals; and until it is won by
those who fight Germany there can be no lasting peace in the world.