Part 15

When it came to discussions of the war and Germany’s conduct of it, I found no way in which we could get together. We might have argued until doomsday, were it fitting for a guest to badger his hosts, without coming to a single point of agreement. Every one of the old fallacies was still swallowed, hook and line. If I had expected national disaster to bring a change of heart, I should have been grievously disappointed. To be sure, Mechlenburg is one of the remotest backwaters of the Empire, and these laborious, unimaginative tillers of the soil one of its most conservative elements. They would have considered it unseemly to make a business of thinking for themselves in political matters, something akin to accepting a position for which they had no previous training. There was that to arouse pity in the success with which the governing class had made use of this simple, unquestioning attitude for its own ends. One felt certain that these honest, straightforward victims of premeditated official lies would never have lent a helping hand had they known that the Fatherland was engaged in a war of conquest and not a war of defense.

Here again it was the mother who was most outspoken toward what she called “the wicked wrecking of poor, innocent Germany.” The father and the children expressed themselves more calmly, if at all, though it was evident that their convictions were the same. Apparently they had reached the point where further defense of what they regarded as the plain facts of the situation seemed a waste of words.

“I cried when the armistice was signed,” the mother confided to me one day, “for it meant that our enemies had done what they set out to do many years ago. They deliberately planned to destroy us, and they succeeded. But they were never able to defeat our wonderful armies in the field. England starved us, otherwise she would never have won. Then she fostered this Bolshevismus and Spartakismus and the wicked revolution that undermined us at the rear. But our brave soldiers at the front never gave way: they would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.”

She was a veritable mine of stories of atrocities by the English, the French, and especially the Russians, but she insisted there had never been one committed by the Germans.

“Our courageous soldiers were never like that,” she protested. “_They_ did not make war that way, like our heartless enemies.”

Yet in the same breath she rambled on into anecdotes of what any one of less prejudiced viewpoint would have called atrocities, but which she advanced as examples of the fighting qualities of the German troops. There again came in that curious German psychology, or mentality, or insanity, or whatever you choose to call it, which has always astounded the world at large. “Heinie” had seen the hungry soldiers recoup themselves by taking food away from the wicked Rumanians; he had often told how they entered the houses and carried away everything portable to sell to the Jews at a song, that the next battle should not find them unprepared. The officers had just pretended they did not see the men, for they could not let them go unfed. They had taken things themselves, too, especially the reserve officers. But then, war is war. If only I could get “Heinie” to tell some of the things he had seen and heard; how, for instance, the dastardly Russians had screamed when they were pushed back into the marshes, whole armies of them.

I found more interest in “Heinie’s” stories of the insuperable difficulties he had overcome as a _Feldwebel_ in keeping up the discipline of his men after the failure of the last great German offensive, but I did not press that point in her presence.

“No,” she went on, in answer to another question, “the Germans _never_ did anything against women. Those are all English lies! Heinie never told me of a single case”—“Heinie” was, of course, no more apt to tell mother such details than would one of the well-bred boys of our own Puritan society, but I kept the mental comment to myself. “Of course there were those shameless Polish girls, and French and Belgian hussies, who gave themselves freely to the soldiers, but....

“Certainly the Kaiser will come back,” she insisted. “We need our Kaiser; we _need_ princes, to govern the Empire. What are Ebert and all that crowd? _Handarbeiter_, hand workers, and nothing more. It is absurd to think that they can do the work of rulers. We need our princes, who have had generations of training in governing. _Siehst du_, I will give you an example. We have been _Handelsgärtner_ for generations. Hermann knows all about the business of gardening, because he was trained to it as a boy, _nicht wahr_? Do you think a man who had never planted a cabbage could come and do Hermann’s work? _Ausgeschlossen!_ Well, it is just as foolish for a _Handarbeiter_ like Ebert to attempt to become a ruler as it would be for one of our princes to try to run Hermann’s garden.

“Germany is divided into three classes—the rulers, the middle class (to which _we_ belong), and the proletariat or hand-workers, which includes Ebert and all these new upstarts. It is ridiculous to be getting these distinctions all mixed up. Leave the governing to the princes and their army officers and the Junkers. We use the nickname ‘Junker’ for our noble gentlemen, von Bernstorff, for instance, who is well known in America, and all the others who have a real right to use the ‘von’ before their names, whose ancestors were first highway robbers and then bold warriors, and who are naturally very proud”—she evidently thought this pride quite proper and fitting. “Then our army officers are chosen from the very best families and can marry only in the _gelehrten_ class, and only then if the girl has a dowry of at least eight hundred thousand marks. So they preserve all the nobility of their caste down through every generation and keep themselves quite free from middle-class taint—the _real_ officers I am speaking of, not the _Reservisten_, who are just ordinary middle-class men, merchants and doctors and teachers and the like, acting as officers during the war. _Those_ are the men who are trained to govern, and the only ones who _can_ govern.”

I knew, of course, that the great god of class was still ruling in Germany, but I confess that this bald statement of that fact left me somewhat flabbergasted. It is well to be reminded now and again, however, that the Teuton regards politics, diplomacy, and government as lifelong professions and not merely as the fleeting pastimes of lawyers, automobile-makers, and unsuccessful farmers; it clarifies our vision and aids us to see his problems more nearly as he sees them.

Several rambles in and about Schwerin only confirmed the impressions I had already formed—that the region was hopelessly conservative and that it had really seriously suffered from the war and the blockade. On the surface there was often no great change to be seen; but scratch beneath it anywhere and a host of social skeletons was sure to come to light. Even the famous old _Schwerinerschloss_, perhaps the most splendid castle in Germany, showed both this conservatism and the distress of the past years. The repairs it was undergoing after a recent fire had ceased abruptly with the flight of the reigning family of Mechlenburg, but the marks of something more serious than the conflagration showed in its seedy outward appearance. Yet not a chair had been disturbed within it, for all the revolution, and guards stationed about it by the Soldiers’ Council protected it as zealously as if they, too, were waiting for “our princes” to come back again. Almost the only sign of the new order of things was the sight of a score or more of discharged soldiers calmly fishing in the great _Schwerinersee_ about the castle, a crime that would have met with summary vengeance in the old ducal days.

Rumor having it that the peace terms were to be published that afternoon, I hastily took train one morning back to Berlin, that I might be in the heart of the uproar they were expected to arouse. At the frontier of Mechlenburg soldiers of the late dukedom went carefully through passengers’ baggage in search of food, particularly eggs, of which a local ordinance forbade the exportation. The quest seemed to be thorough and I saw no tips passed, but there was considerable successful smuggling, which came to light as soon as the train was well under way again. A well-dressed merchant beside me boastfully displayed a twenty-mark sausage in the bottom of his innocent-looking hand-bag, and his neighbors, not to be outdone in proof of cleverness, showed their caches of edibles laboriously concealed in brief-cases, hat-boxes, and laundry-bags.

“The peasants have grown absolutely shameless,” it was agreed. “They have the audacity to demand a mark or more for a single egg, and twenty for a chicken”—in other words, the rascals had turned upon the bourgeois some of his own favorite tricks, taking advantage of conditions which these same merchants would have considered legitimate sources of profit in their own business. Wrath against the “conscienceless” countrymen was unlimited, but no one thought of shaming the smugglers for their cheating.

The contrast between the outward courtesy of these punctilious examples of the well-to-do class and their total lack of real, active politeness was provoking. A first-class compartment had been reserved for a sick soldier who was plainly on his last journey, with a comrade in attendance. Travelers visibly able to stand in the corridor crowded in upon him until the section built for six held thirteen, and forced the invalid to crouch upright in a corner. Women were rudely, almost brutally, refused seats, unless they were pretty, in which case they were overwhelmed with fawning attentions.

A discussion of America broke out in the compartment I occupied. It resembled an exchange of opinions on the character of some dear friend of the gathering who had inadvertently committed some slight social breach. There was not a word at which the most chauvinistic of my fellow-countrymen could have taken offense. When I had listened for some time to the inexplicable expressions of affection for the nation that had turned the scales against their beloved Fatherland, I discarded my incognito. My companions acknowledged themselves surprised, then redoubled their assertions of friendliness. Was their attitude a mere pose, assumed on the chance of being heard by some representative of the country they hoped to placate? It seemed unlikely, for they had had no reason to suspect my nationality. I decided to overstep the bounds of veracity in the hope of getting at their real thoughts, if those they were expressing were merely assumed.

“I said I am an American,” I broke in, “but do not misunderstand me. We _Chileans_ are quite as truly Americans as those grasping Yankees who have been fighting against you.”

To my astonishment, the entire group sprang instantly to the defense of my real countrymen as against those I had falsely adopted. All the silly slanders I had once heard in Chile they discarded as such, and advanced proofs of Yankee integrity which even I could not have assembled.

“You Chileans have nothing to fear from American aggression,” the possessor of the twenty-mark sausage concluded, reassuringly, as the rumble of the train crossing the Spree set us to gathering our traps together. “The North Americans are a well-meaning people; but they are young, and England and France have led them temporarily astray, though they have not succeeded in corrupting their simple natures.”

IX THUS SPEAKS GERMANY

Lest he talk all the pleasure out of the rambles ahead, let us get the German’s opinion of the war cleared up before we start, even if we have to reach forward now and then for some of the things we shall hear on the way. I propose, therefore, to give him the floor unreservedly for a half-hour, without interruption, unless it be to throw in a question now and then to make his position and his sometimes curious mental processes clearer. The reader who feels that the prisoner at the bar is not entitled to tell his side of the story can easily skip this chapter.

Though I did not get it all from any one person—no resident of the 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.