CHAPTER IV

GERMAN THOUGHT

TREITSCHKE

In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of 1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands perfectly well,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the pages of History everywhere reveal.”

To-day, everybody talks of Treitschke, though I doubt if half a dozen people in England have read him. His brilliant essays, _Historische und Politische Aufsätze_, illuminating almost every aspect of German controversy, have never been translated; neither has his _Politik_, a searching and cynical examination of the foundations of Political Science which exalts the State at the expense of Society; and his _Deutsche Geschichte_, which was designed to be the supreme apologetic of Prussian policy, is also unknown in our tongue. But in Germany their vogue has been and still is enormous; they are to Germans what Carlyle and Macaulay were to us. Treitschke, indeed, has much in common with Carlyle; the same contempt for Parliaments and constitutional freedom; the same worship of the strong man armed; the same somber, almost savage, irony, and, let it not be forgotten, the same deep moral fervor. His character was irreproachable. At the age of fifteen he wrote down this motto for his own: “To be always upright, honest, moral, to become a man, a man useful to humanity, a brave man--these are my ambitions.” This high ideal he strove manfully to realize. But he was a doctrinaire, and of all doctrinaires the conscientious doctrinaire is the most dangerous. Undoubtedly, in his case, as in that of so many other enlightened Germans--Sybel, for example--his apostasy from Liberalism dated from the moment of his conviction that the only hope for German unity lay not in Parliaments but in the military hegemony of Prussia. The bloody triumphs of the Austro-Prussian War convinced him that the salvation of Germany was “only possible by the annihilation of small States,” that States rest on force, not consent, that success is the supreme test of merit, and that the issues of war are the judgment of God. He was singularly free from sophistry and never attempted, like Sybel, to defend the Ems telegram by the disingenuous plea that “an abbreviation is not a falsification”; it was enough for him that the trick achieved its purpose. And he had a frank contempt for those Prussian jurists who attempted to find a legal title to Schleswig-Holstein; the real truth of the matter he roundly declared, was that the annexation of the duchies was necessary for the realization of German aims. When he writes about war he writes without any sanctimonious cant:

It is not for Germans to repeat the commonplaces of the apostles of peace or of the priests of Mammon, nor should they close their eyes before the cruel necessities of the age. Yes, ours is an epoch of war, our age is an age of iron. If the strong get the better of the weak, it is an inexorable law of life. Those wars of hunger which we still see to-day amongst negro tribes are as necessary for the economic conditions of the heart of Africa as the sacred war which a people undertakes to preserve the most precious belongings of its moral culture. There as here it is a struggle for life, here for a moral good, there for a material good.

Readers of Bernhardi will recognize here the source of Bernhardi’s inspiration. If Treitschke was a casuist at all--and as a rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank--his was the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may corrupt the end or become an end in themselves he never saw, or only saw it at the end of his life. He honestly believed that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, he feared the commercialism of modern times, and despised England because he judged her wars to have always been undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He sneers at the Englishman who “scatters the blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other.” He honestly believed that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic life, a pastoral simplicity, and a deep religious faith to which no European country could approach, and at the time he wrote the picture was not overdrawn. He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were hallowed, wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive faith of Luther’s great Hymn. Writing of German Protestantism as the corner-stone of German unity, he says:

Everywhere it has been the solid rampart of our language and customs. In Alsace, as in the mountains of Transylvania and on the distant shores of the Baltic, as long as the peasant shall sing his old canticle

Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott

German life shall not pass away.

Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke’s influence on his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his teaching.

But Treitschke was dazzled by the military successes of Prussia in 1866. With that violent reaction against culture which is so common among its professional devotees, and which often makes the men of the pen far more sanguinary than the men of the sword, he derided the old Germany of Goethe and Kant as “a nation of poets and thinkers without a polity” (“Ein staatloses Volk von Dichtern und Denkern”), and almost despised his own intellectual vocation. “Each dragoon,” he cried enviously, “who knocks a Croat on the head does far more for the German cause than the finest political brain that ever wielded a trenchant pen.” But for his grievous deafness he would, like his father, have chosen the profession of arms. Failing that, he chose to teach. “It is a fine thing,” he wrote, “to be master of the younger generation,” and he set himself to indoctrinate it with the aim of German unity. He taught from 1859 to 1875 successively at Leipzig, Freiburg, Kiel, and Heidelberg. From 1875 till his death in 1896 he occupied with immense éclat the chair of modern history at Berlin. And so, although a Saxon, he enlisted his pen in the service of Prussia--Prussia which always knows how to attract men of ideas but rarely produces them. In the great roll of German statesmen and thinkers and poets--Stein, Hardenberg, Goethe, Hegel--you will look almost in vain for one who is of Prussian birth. She may pervert them; she cannot create them.

Treitschke’s views were, of course, shared by many of his contemporaries. The Seminars of the German Universities were the arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony. Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, Sybel, Häusser, Droysen, Gneist--all ministered to that ascendency, and they all have this in common--that they are merciless to the claims of the small States whose existence seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. They are also united in common hatred of France, for they feared not only the adventures of Napoleon the Third but the leveling doctrines of the French Revolution. Burke’s _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ are not more violent against France than the writings of Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke. What, however, distinguishes Treitschke from his intellectual confrères is his thoroughness. They made reservations which he scorned to make. Sybel, for example, is often apologetic when he comes to the more questionable episodes in Prussian policy--the partition of Poland, the affairs of the duchies, the Treaty of Bâle, the diplomacy of 1870; Treitschke is disturbed by no such qualms. Bismarck who practised a certain economy in giving Sybel access to official documents for his semi-official history of Prussian policy, _Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs_, had much greater confidence in Treitschke and told him he felt sure he would not be disturbed to find that “our political linen is not as white as it might be.” So, too, while others like Mommsen refused to go the whole way with Bismarck in domestic policy, and clung to their early Radicalism, Treitschke had no compunction about absolutism. He ended, indeed, by becoming the champion of the Junkers, and his history is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. “Be governmental” was his succinct maxim, and he rested his hopes for Germany on the bureaucracy and the army. Indeed, if he had had his way, he would have substituted a unity state for the federal system of the German Empire, and would have liked to see all Germany an enlarged Prussia--“ein erweitertes Preussen”--a view which is somewhat difficult to reconcile with his attacks on France as being “politically in a state of perpetual nonage,” and on the French Government as hostile to all forms of provincial autonomy.

By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of the unity of Germany to a conception of her rôle as a world-power. He is the true father of Weltpolitik. Much of what he writes on this head is legitimate enough. Like Hohenlohe and Bismarck he felt the humiliation of Germany’s weakness in the councils of Europe. Writing in 1863 he complains:

One thing we still lack--the State. Our people is the only one which has no common legislation, which can send no representatives to the Concert of Europe. No salute greets the German flag in a foreign port. Our Fatherland sails the high seas without colors like a pirate.

Germany, he declared, must become “a power across the sea.” This conclusion, coupled with bitter recollections of the part played by England in the affair of the Duchies, no doubt accounted for his growing dislike of England.

Among the English the love of money has killed every sentiment of honor and every distinction between what is just and unjust. They hide their poltroonery and their materialism behind grand phrases of unctuous theology. When one sees the English press raising its eyes to heaven, frightened by the audacity of these faithless peoples in arms upon the Continent, one might imagine one heard a venerable parson droning away. As if the Almighty God, in Whose name Cromwell’s Ironsides fought their battles, commanded us Germans to allow our enemy to march undisturbed upon Berlin. Oh, what hypocrisy! Oh, cant, cant, cant!

Europe, he says elsewhere, should have put bounds to the overweening ambition of Britain by bringing to an end the crushing domination of the English Fleet at Gibraltar, at Malta, and at Corfu, and by “restoring the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples.” Thus did he sow the seeds of German maritime ambition.

If I were asked to select the most characteristic of Treitschke’s works I should be inclined to choose the vehement little pamphlet _Was fordern wir von Frankreich?_ in which he insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It is at once the vindication of Prussian policy, and, in the light of the last forty-four years, its condemnation. Like Mommsen, who wrote in much the same strain at the same time, he insisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be “forced to be free,” that Morality and History (which for him are much the same thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it.

We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves, who through their French associations have lived in ignorance of the new Germany. We will give them back their own identity against their will. We have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of History (“das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mächte der Geschichte”) to be able to believe in the unconditional value of a plebiscite on this matter. We invoke the men of the past against the present.

The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against the living. Dead men tell no tales. It was, he admitted, true that the Alsatians did not love the Germans. These “misguided people” betrayed “that fatal impulse of Germans” to cleave to other nations than their own. “Well may we Germans be horrified,” he adds, “when to-day we see these German people rail in German speech like wild beasts against their own flesh and blood as ‘German curs’ (‘deutschen Hunde’) and ‘stink-Prussians’ (‘Stinkpreussen’).” Treitschke was too honest to deny it. There was, he ruefully admitted, something rather unlovely about the “civilizing” methods of Prussia. “Prussia has perhaps not always been guided by genial men.” But, he argued, Prussia united under the new Empire to the rest of Germany would become humanized and would in turn humanize the new subject-peoples. Well, the forty-four years that have elapsed since Treitschke wrote have refuted him. Instead of a Germanized Prussia, we see a Prussianized Germany. Her “geniality” is the geniality of Zabern. The Poles, the Danes, and the Alsatians are still contumacious. Treitschke appealed to History and History has answered him.

Had he never any misgivings? Yes. After twenty-five years, and within a month of his death, this Hebrew prophet looking round in the year of grace 1895 on the “culture” of modern Germany was filled with apprehension. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sedan he delivered an address in the University of Berlin which struck his fond disciples dumb. The Empire, he declared, had disarmed her enemies neither without nor within.

In every direction our manners have deteriorated. The respect which Goethe declared to be the true end of all moral education disappears in the new generation with a giddy rapidity: respect of God, respect for the limits which nature and society have placed between the two sexes; respect for the Fatherland, which is every day disappearing before the will-of-the-wisp of an indulgent humanity. The more culture extends, the more insipid it becomes; men despise the profundity of the ancient world and consider only that which subserves their immediate end.

The things of the mind, he cried, had lost their hold on the German people. Every one was eager to get rich and to relieve the monotony of a vain existence by the cult of idle and meretricious pleasures. The signs of the times were everywhere dark and gloomy. The new Emperor (William the Second), he had already hinted, was a dangerous charlatan.

The wheel had come full circle. Fustel de Coulanges was justified of his prophecy. And the handwriting on the walls of Destiny was never more legible than now.

CONCLUSION

The contemplation of History, so a great master of the art has told us, may not make men wise but it is sure to make them sad. The austere Muse has never had a sadder page to show than that which is even now being added to her record. We see now the full fruition of the German doctrine of the beatitude of War. In sorrow and in anguish, in anguish and in darkness, Belgium is weeping for her children and will not be comforted because they are not. The invader has spared neither age nor sex, neither rank nor function, and every insult that malice could invent, or insolence inspire, has been heaped upon her bowed head. The hearths are cold, the altars desecrated, the fields untilled, the granaries empty. The peasant watches the heavens but he may not sow, he has regarded his fields but he might not reap. The very stones in her cities cry out; hardly one of them is left upon another. No nation had ever given Europe more blithe and winning pledges of her devotion to the arts of peace. The Flemish school of painters had endowed the world with portraits of a grave tenderness which posterity might always admire but could never imitate. The chisels of her medieval craftsmen had left us a legacy of buoyant fancy in stone whose characters were alive for us with the animation of the Canterbury Tales. All this the invader has stamped out like the plague. A once busy and thriving community begs its bread in alien lands. Never since the captivity of Babylon has there been so tragic an expatriation. Yet noble in her sorrow and exalted in her anguish, Belgium, like some patient caryatid, still supports the broken architrave of the violated Treaty. Her little army is still unconquered, her spirit is never crushed. She will arise purified by her sorrow and ennobled by her suffering, and generations yet unborn shall rise up to call her blessed.

THE WAR BOOK OF THE

GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

INTRODUCTION

[Sidenote: What is a State of War.]

The armies of belligerent States on the outbreak of hostilities, or indeed the moment war is declared, enter into a certain relation with one another which is known by the name of “A State of War.” This relationship, which at the beginning only concerns the members of the two armies, is extended, the moment the frontier is crossed, to all inhabitants of the enemy’s State, so far as its territory is occupied; indeed it extends itself ultimately to both the movable and immovable property of the State and its citizens.

[Sidenote: Active Persons and Passive.]

A distinction is drawn between an “active” and a “passive” state of war. By the first is to be understood the relation to one another of the actual fighting organs of the two belligerents, that is to say, of the persons forming the army, besides that of the representative heads of the State and of the leaders. By the second term, _i.e._, the “passive” state of war, on the other hand, is to be understood the relationship of the hostile army to those inhabitants of the State, who share in the actual conduct of war only in consequence of their natural association with the army of their own State, and who on that account are only to be regarded as enemies in a passive sense. As occupying an intermediate position, one has often to take into account a number of persons who while belonging to the army do not actually participate in the conduct of hostilities but continue in the field to pursue what is to some extent a peaceful occupation, such as Army Chaplains, Doctors, Medical Officers of Health, Hospital Nurses, Voluntary Nurses, and other Officials, Sutlers, Contractors, Newspaper Correspondents and the like.

[Sidenote: That War is no Respecter of Persons.]

Now although according to the modern conception of war, it is primarily concerned with the persons belonging to the opposing armies, yet no citizen or inhabitant of a State occupied by a hostile army can altogether escape the burdens, restrictions, sacrifices, and inconveniences which are the natural consequence of a State of War. A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the Enemy State and the positions they occupy, but it will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual[38] and material resources of the latter.[39] Humanitarian claims such as the protection of men and their goods can only be taken into consideration in so far as the nature and object of the war permit.

[Sidenote: The Usages of War.]

Consequently the “argument of war” permits every belligerent State to have recourse to all means which enable it to attain the object of the war; still, practise has taught the advisability of allowing in one’s own interest the introduction of a limitation in the use of certain methods of war and a total renunciation of the use of others. Chivalrous feelings, Christian thought, higher civilization and, by no means least of all, the recognition of one’s own advantage, have led to a voluntary and self-imposed limitation, the necessity of which is to-day tacitly recognized by all States and their armies. They have led in the course of time, in the simple transmission of knightly usage in the passages of arms, to a series of agreements, hallowed by tradition, and we are accustomed to sum these up in the words “usage of war” (Kriegsbrauch), “custom of war” (Kriegssitte), “or fashion of war” (Kriegsmanier). Customs of this kind have always existed, even in the times of antiquity; they differed according to the civilization of the different nations and their public economy, they were not always identical, even in one and the same conflict, and they have in the course of time often changed; they are older than any scientific law of war, they have come down to us unwritten, and moreover they maintain themselves in full vitality; they have therefore won an assured position in standing armies according as these latter have been introduced into the systems of almost every European State.

[Sidenote: Of the futility of Written Agreements as Scraps of Paper.]

The fact that such limitations of the unrestricted and reckless application of all the available means for the conduct of war, and thereby the humanization of the customary methods of pursuing war really exist, and are actually observed by the armies of all civilized States, has in the course of the nineteenth century often led to attempts to develop, to extend, and thus to make universally binding these preexisting usages of war; to elevate them to the level of laws binding nations and armies, in other words to create a _codex belli_; a law of war. All these attempts have hitherto, with some few exceptions to be mentioned later, completely failed. If, therefore, in the following work the expression “the law of war” is used, it must be understood that by it is meant not a _lex scripta_ introduced by international agreements; but only a reciprocity of mutual agreement; a limitation of arbitrary behavior, which custom and conventionality, human friendliness and a calculating egotism have erected, but for the observance of which there exists no express sanction, but only “the fear of reprisals” decides.

[Sidenote: The “flabby emotion” of Humanitarianism.]

Consequently the usage of war is even now the only means of regulating the relations of belligerent States to one another. But with the idea of the usages of war will always be bound up the character of something transitory, inconstant, something dependent on factors outside the army. Nowadays it is not only the army which influences the spirit of the customs of war and assures recognition of its unwritten laws. Since the almost universal introduction of conscription, the peoples themselves exercise a profound influence upon this spirit. In the modern usages of war one can no longer regard merely the traditional inheritance of the ancient etiquette of the profession of arms, and the professional outlook accompanying it, but there is also the deposit of the currents of thought which agitate our time. But since the tendency of thought of the last century was dominated essentially by humanitarian considerations which not infrequently degenerated into sentimentality and flabby emotion (_Sentimentalität und weichlicher Gefühlsschwärmerei_) there have not been wanting attempts to influence the development of the usages of war in a way which was in fundamental contradiction with the nature of war and its object. Attempts of this kind will also not be wanting in the future, the more so as these agitations have found a kind of moral recognition in some provisions of the Geneva Convention and the Brussels and Hague Conferences.

[Sidenote: Cruelty is often “the truest humanity.”]

[Sidenote: The perfect Officer.]

Moreover the officer is a child of his time. He is subject to the intellectual[40] tendencies which influence his own nation; the more educated he is the more will this be the case. The danger that, in this way, he will arrive at false views about the essential character of war must not be lost sight of. The danger can only be met by a thorough study of war itself. By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions, it will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war, nay more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them. It will also teach him how the rules of belligerent intercourse in war have developed, how in the course of time they have solidified into general usages of war, and finally it will teach him whether the governing usages of war are justified or not, whether they are to be modified or whether they are to be observed. But for a study of military history in this light, knowledge of the fundamental conceptions of modern international and military movements is certainly necessary. To present this is the main purpose of the following work.