VI
Doubtlessly you read the published extracts from diaries taken off the bodies of killed or captured German soldiers in the first year of the war. Didn't you often read where this soldier or that, setting down his own private thoughts, had lamented at having been required to put his hand to the task of killing and destroying? But, from this same source, did you ever get evidence that any soldier had actually revolted against this campaign of cruelty, and had refused to burn the homes of helpless civilians or to slay unresisting noncombatants? You did not, and for a very good reason: Because that rebellious soldier would never have lived long enough to write down the record of his humanity – he would have been shot dead by the revolver of his own captain or his own lieutenant.
I saw German soldiers marching through a wrecked and ravished countryside, singing their German songs about the home place, and the Christmas tree, and the Rhine maiden – creatures so full of sentiment that they had no room in their souls for sympathy. And, by the same token, I saw German soldiers dividing their rations with hungry Belgians. They divided their rations with these famished ones because it was not
verboten
– because there was no order to the contrary. Had there been an order to the contrary, those poor women and those scrawny children might have starved, and no German soldier, whatever his private feelings, would have dared offer to them a crust of bread or a bone of beef. Of that I am very sure.
And it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, a most dangerous thing for all the peoples of the earth, and a most evil thing, that into the world should come a scheme of military government so hellishly contrived and so exactly directed that, by the flirt of a colonel's thumb, a thousand men may, at will, be transformed from kindly, courageous, manly soldiers into relentless, ruthless executioners and incendiaries; and, by another flirt of that supreme and arrogant thumb, be converted back again into decent men.
VII
In peace the mental docility of the German, his willingness to accept an order unquestioningly and mechanically to obey it, may be a virtue, as we reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this same trait becomes a vice. In peace it makes him yet more peaceful; in war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace.
It is that very menace which must confront the American troopers who may be sent abroad for service. It is that very menace which must confront our people at home in the event that the enemy shall get near enough to our coasts to bombard our shore cities, or should he succeed in landing an expeditionary force upon American soil.
When I first came back from the war front I marvelled that sensible persons so often asked me what sort of people the Germans were, as though Germans were a stranger race, like Patagonians or the South Sea Islanders, living in some remote and untravelled corner of the globe. I felt like telling them that Germans in Germany were like the Germans they knew in America – in the main, God-fearing, orderly, hard-working, self-respecting citizens. But through these intervening months I have changed my mind; to-day I should make a different answer. I would say, to him who asked that question now, that the same tractability of temperament which, under the easy-going, flexible workings of our American plan of living makes the German-born American so readily conform to his physical and metaphysical surroundings here, and makes his progeny so soon to amalgamate with our fused and conglomerated stock, has the effect, in his Fatherland, of all the more easily and all the more firmly filling his mind and shaping his deeds in conformity with the exact and rigorous demands of the Prussianism that has been shackled upon him since his empire ceased to be a group of petty states.
We have got to remember, then, that the Germany with which we have broken is not the Germany of Heine and Goethe and Haeckel and Beethoven; not the Germany which gave us Steuben in the Revolutionary War, and Sigel and Schurz in the Civil War; not the Germany of the chivalrous, lovable Saxon, or yet of the music-loving, home-loving Bavarian; not the Germany which was the birthplace of the kindly, honourable, industrious, patriotic German-speaking neighbour round the corner from you – but the fanatical, tyrannical, power-mad, blood-and-iron Prussianised Germany of Bismarck and Von Bernhardi, of the Crown Prince and the Junkers – that passionate Prussianised Germany which for forty years through the instrumentality of its ruling classes – not necessarily its Kaiser, but its real ruling classes – has been jealously striving to pervert every native ounce of its scientific and its inventive and its creative genius out of the paths of progress and civilisation and to jam it into the grooves of the greatest autocratic machine, the greatest organism for killing off human beings, the greatest engine of misbegotten and misdirected efficiency that was ever created in the world. Because we have an admiration for one of these two Germanys is no more a reason why we should abate our indignation and our detestation for the other Germany than that because a man loves a cheery blaze upon his hearthstone he should refuse to fight a forest fire.
We have got to remember another thing. If our oversea observations of this war abroad have taught us anything, they should have taught us that the German Army – and when I say army I mean in this case, not its men but its officers, since in the German Army the officers are essentially the brain and the power and the motive force directing the unthinking, blindly obedient mass beneath them – that the German Army is not an army of good sportsmen. And that, I take it, is an even more important consideration upon the field of battle than it is upon the athletic field. As the saying goes, the Germans don't play the game. It is as inconceivable to imagine German officers going in for baseball or football or cricket as it is to imagine American volunteers marching the goose step or to imagine Englishmen relishing the cut-and-dried calisthenics of a
Turnverein.
The Germans are not an outdoor race; they are not given to playing outdoor sports and abiding by the rules of those sports, as Englishmen and as Americans are. And in war – that biggest of all outdoor games – it stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules, except they be rules of their own making. It may be argued that the French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive sports. But, on the other hand, the Frenchman is essentially romantic and essentially dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory afterward, he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and the generous virtues rather than the cruel and the unkindly ones, because, as we all know, it is easier to dramatise one's good impulses than one's evil ones.
Now the German, as has recently been shown, is neither dramatic nor sportsmanlike. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad loser – a most remarkably bad loser. Good sportsmen would not have broken Belgium into bloody bits because Belgium stood between them and their goal; good sportsmen would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "
Gott Strafe England!
" their battle cry; good sportsmen would not have shot Edith Cavell or sunk the
Lusitania
. Good sportsmen would not have packed the helpless men and boys of a conquered and a prostrate land off as captives i