The World Decision by Robert Herrick
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Robert Herrick >> The World Decision
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The supreme evidence of German atrocities is to be found in the
infamous "Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," a singular revelation of
national character in which the German general staff has summed
up for young officers the principles that should govern the conduct
of invading armies. One finds here,--"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." This convenient
generalization covers the multitude of Belgian crimes. This interesting
manual of conduct for officers further warns against "sentimentalism
and flabby emotion," such as are embodied in the Hague Conventions,
and after stating the generally accepted rule or custom of warfare
warns that exceptions are always permissible where the officer deems
exceptional severities are "indispensable." After perusing the
"Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege," need one seek more evidence of German
atrocities from the levying of confiscatory fines upon conquered
peoples to the use of noncombatants as human screens in military
operations? The germ of the barbarous system is there contained in
its entirety.
* * * * *
But the implication of all this is much deeper than might appear on the
surface. Such a theory of warfare as is set forth in the "War Book," as
has been exemplified throughout the war, having its climax to date in
the murder of Edith Cavell, is not the result of uncontrolled passions
wrought to ferocity. It is deliberate, preconceived, defended,--an
article of faith intimately bound up with the German ideal of the state.
There is the danger. That the precept of the higher military authorities
is accepted by the general public may be seen in the following passage
from the Hamburg "Fremdenblatt"--or is it but a press note inserted by
the high commandment? "Toxic gases are simply a new instrument of
warfare; they are condemned because they are not universally adopted....
In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the lucubrations
of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish babbling. New
technical knowledge gives new arms to those who are not fools and know
how to use them.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law
creates humanity. All these are changing ideas and Germans are not
disposed to discuss them during the war."
An Indian on the warpath scalps, burns, tortures, and we say it is
the Indian nature to do these things. So-called civilized white men
have gone on the loose in and out of war and have done many shameful
deeds: we blush for them and draw the veil. But what never before has
been accomplished is to have barbarism deliberately inculcated as
part of the policy of warfare by a so-called civilized state; also
warfare considered to be the flower of statecraft. Clausewitz lays
down the principle that war is the legitimate carrying-out of state
policy; the state relies upon war to execute its designs. The German
military authorities announce and print for the use of their officers
that in war deviation from any recognized principle of conduct is
permitted under the excuse of "indispensable severity"--for the sake
of terrorizing hostile peoples--and humanitarianism is condemned as
"sentimentalism and flabby emotion."
There we have the gist of the whole affair--what makes the Frenchman
instinctively consider the German to be a barbarian, what makes modern
Germany the menace of the entire world. It is not its militaristic
ideals, its mechanical civilization, not even its brutality and
vulgarity, not even the ferocity of its warfare: it is the methodical
application of this underlying principle of conduct which has been
inculcated into the people so that they rejoice at the sinking of the
Lusitania, which has been employed in this war systematically from the
first day. This is the barbarian essence of the German character.
It is not the raping of women, not the staff officers' drunken
orgies in chateaux, not the looting and burning of houses, not the
stupid treatment of Belgians and French "hostages," etc. All these
are distressing but not necessarily characteristic. It is the principle
of the legitimacy of evil provided only that evil works to the advantage
of the German state. That is the vicious term in the German syllogism.
The state can do no wrong: therefore the individual acting for the state
can do no wrong. The one supreme end sanctioned by divine authority is
the endurance and the magnification of the German state. Whatever a
German may do or cause to be done with this holy end in view is not
merely just and reasonable, but necessary and praiseworthy. Hence there
follows, naturally, the vile system of German espionage, of propaganda
in neutral countries, the indiscriminate use of the submarine weapon,
terrorization, military murders of civilians, and all the rest of the
long count against Germany. Assume the vital major premise and the rest
follows inevitably, provided her citizens are both docile and have a
natural fund of brutality.
* * * * *
"In warfare humanity does not exist and cannot exist. All the
lucubrations of the Hague Conferences on this subject are childish
babbling.... Knowledge creates power, power creates law, law creates
humanity. All these are changing ideas."
The world has known the barbarian always; we are all acquainted with
him from personal experience. But the world has never before known a
reasoned, intellectual barbarism, a barbarian that has elevated into
a philosophy of human life with the sanctions of religion his instincts
and impulses. And that is the menace of the German, not his force nor
his brutality, but the risk that he can successfully impose upon the
world such an atrocious creed, intimidating into imitation those cowardly
souls whom he does not care to conquer. If Germany were to win this war,
it would not be her bumptious aggression that the world ought to fear
so much as the enormous impulse it would give to her detestable creed,
to the principle of evil in the world. The danger for us Americans is
greater than for others, not because of exposed coasts and an unprepared
army, but because we are already tainted with the same raw materialism
of belief. Too many individuals in America would find a sympathetic
echo in their own hearts to the German creed of collective selfishness
and barbarism.
* * * * *
One heard in Paris surprisingly little about German atrocities, less
than in Boston and New York, much less than in London. Not that the
French do not believe them: they know the bitter truth about German
inhumanity as none others. With that admirable stoicism and lucid
conservation of moral force displayed by the French from the beginning,
they do not waste their strength in denunciation: they have accepted
it as one of the terrible aspects of the evil they are fighting. They
probably understand the German character as now wholly revealed better
than the rest of the world and are not so much surprised by its
manifestations. They have examined the German, and have fortified
themselves against his cruel power.
But they cannot forget these incredible outrages. There are too many
fresh examples--too many robbed and maltreated refugees, too many
fatherless and motherless children, still coming to Paris by the
trainload, whom they must provide for, too many relatives and friends
who have been abused and murdered or whose property has been looted
by German soldiers and officers. Also there are too many Frenchmen
who have seen the horrors with their own eyes, too many doctors and
stretcher-bearers shot down by those they were trying to aid, too many
hospitals bombarded, too many wounded prisoners killed. The German
atrocity is documented in France over and over, within the knowledge
of millions. It will prove to be Germany's great stumbling-block after
the war, when she looks about a shocked world for peoples to trade with.
* * * * *
In the dining-room of the military club at Commercy, where a corps
of the French army now has its headquarters, there is a wall painting
of the last century representing the heroic deeds of Jeanne d'Arc.
"That," said General C., pointing to the little figure on horseback,
"is French! And the French have fought this war chivalrously--not
against monuments, against women and children and old people, but
as soldiers against soldiers!"
The Latin is sometimes cruel--he has within him the capacity for
cruelty--and the history of Latin peoples is stained here and there
with ferocity. But the Latin has never organized cruelty methodically,
has never elevated terrorization into a principle of warfare, a weapon
of statecraft. For one thing he is too intelligent: he knows that
cruelty begets reprisals, that brutality breeds hate. After Alsace
the German should have known too much to try the same method in harsher
forms upon Belgium and invaded France. But the barbarian learns no
spiritual lessons. Persian atrocity, Saracen atrocity, Indian atrocity,
Spanish atrocity--they have all failed. An enduring triumph was never
won on that principle of "indispensable severity."
It is barbarism as well as the barbarian which France is fighting,
and the French know it, are profoundly conscious of it, from the
cool, dispassionate philosopher, like Bergson or Boutroux or Hovelaque,
to the girl conductor on the tram, the dirty _poilu_ in the trench.
For more than a generation the French world has suffered from the
fear of this new barbarian, and the time has come again, as it has
come so many times before in history, for the momentous decision with
the barbarian. Again as before it must come on the fields of France
where the ancient curse of barbarism has been met and destroyed.
IV
_The German Lesson_
The barbarian must be met on his own ground of force and efficiency,--"an
eye for an eye," not with arguments or apologies, not even with numbers
or wealth. The vital question for us all to-day is not how unprepared the
Allies were for the onslaught of barbarism, but how far they have overcome
their handicap, how thoroughly they have learned the barbarian's lesson.
The varying degrees in which the different allied nations have grasped
the meaning of the lesson and applied it tell us not merely their chance
of survival, but also the probable outcome of the world decision. What
that lesson is which Germany is teaching the world by blood and iron is
a byword on men's tongues to-day: the value of it is another question.
* * * * *
Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn
of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde;
the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that
the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule.
As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but
degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate
was reserved for the English, her most ignoble slurs for the French.
Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as
wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations
were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in
stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by
temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull
German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible.
This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and
degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of
that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.
The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have
compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable
of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months
Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable,
even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the
German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane
than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has
replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies.
One of the astonishing revelations of national psychology unfolded in
the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity.
For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an
ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has
come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or
energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their
home and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the menace of his
barbarism.
That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German
lesson faster than his allies.
* * * * *
What everybody knows by this time, and in America is repeating with
sickening fluency, is that Germany is "efficient," not only militarily
efficient, but socially and economically efficient--which these days
amounts to the same thing. Germany is "organized" both for peace and
war more efficiently than any other nation in the world. The two terms
that this war has driven into all men's consciousness are "efficiency"
and "organization." We in America, prone to admire the sheen of tin,
have bowed down in greater admiration than any other people to German
"efficiency." For efficiency values in the operations of life are just
the ones we are most capable of appreciating, although our government
and general social organization remain as lamentably inefficient as,
say, the English. But being a business people we are fitted to admire
business qualities above all others. The German army, the German state
are magnificently run businesses! To some of us, however, the term
"efficiency" has become nauseating because it has been associated with
so much else that we loathe from the bottom of our souls. If we cannot
have an "efficient" civilization without paying the price for it that
Germany has paid,--the price of humanity, of beauty, the price of her
soul,--let us return to the primitive inefficiency of a Sicilian
village!
Germany under a highly autocratic system of government has created
a social machine of unexampled and formidable efficiency. The German
realized before his rivals that war had become, like all other human
activities, a matter of business on a huge scale. And he had prepared
not merely the special instruments of war, but also the tributary
business on this scale of modern magnitude: he had converted his state
into a powerful war machine. All this which is now commonplace has
become more glaringly evident to us onlookers because of the lamentable
failure of England and Russia especially to meet the requirements of
the new business. So incapable do they seem of learning the German
lesson that to some Americans the cause of the Allies is doomed already
to disaster. Certainly the English and the Russians have justified many
of those bitter German taunts.
It has not been so with France. The French also were caught
unprepared--to their honor--like their allies. Can a real democracy
ever be prepared for war? France, suffering grievously from the first
blow dealt by the enemy, looked destruction in the face before the
stand at the Marne. The famous victory of the Marne, I believe, is
still unknown in Germany--I have been so informed by an American who
spent last winter in Germany. The battle of the Marne may not rank
in history as quite the greatest battle in the history of the world.
The French may exaggerate its importance as a military event. The
English have certainly exaggerated the part played by their little
expeditionary force of less than a hundred thousand in "saving France."
That is for others to dispute. But it was without any question a great
moral victory for the French of the utmost tonic value to the nation.
It saved France from despair, possibly from the annihilation that
follows despair. And ever since the Marne victory, French confidence
and _elan_ have been rapidly growing. During that bloody September week
they realized that the barbarian was not invincible, the machine was
not so perfect but that human will and human courage could resist it.
Moreover, the machine lacked that quality of spirit which the French
felt in themselves. As the months have dragged around an entire year
and more in the trenches, almost contempt has grown in the mind of
the French soldier for the formidable German machine. Strong as it
is, it yet lacks something--that something of human spirit without
which permanent victories cannot be achieved. Its strength can be
imitated. The spirit cannot be "organized."
French confidence is more than an official phrase, a mere bluff!
* * * * *
But--and just here lies the profound significance of it all--the
French realized at once that in order to conquer the German machine
they must create an equally efficient and powerful machine, which
with that plus of human spirit and the inspiration of their cause
would carry them over into victory. So while the English were berating
the barbarian for his atrocious misconduct, advertising "business as
usual," and filching what German trade they could, bungling at this
and that, until they have become a spectacle to themselves, the French
nation concentrated all its energies upon preparing an organization
fit to meet the German organization. While General Joffre held the
Germans behind the four hundred miles of trenches, France made itself
over into a society organized for war--the new business kind of war
which is waged in factory and railway terminal, not by gallant charges.
"_Organiser_" has become in the Frenchman's vocabulary the next most
popular word to "_patrie_." One implies, these days, the other.
It is said that when Germany invaded France, the French had not a
ton of their chief high explosive on hand. Some of its ingredients
they had been getting from Germany! France lost her coal and iron
mines and her largest factories the first weeks of the war and has
not regained them. Yet early in last April, according to the official
announcement, France was turning out six times as much ammunition as
was deemed, before the war, the maximum requirement, and would shortly
turn out ten times as much, which has ere this probably been greatly
exceeded. Meanwhile, by April the artillery had been increased
sevenfold. In attaining these results, France has accomplished a
greater marvel relatively speaking than the most boasted German
efficiency. She has had to get her coal from England, her ores from
Spain, her machines for making guns and shells from us. She has had
to improvise shell factories and gun plants from automobile factories,
electric plants, railway repair shops--from anything and everything.
I visited a small tile factory that was being utilized to make hand
grenades. Innumerable small shops in Paris are engaged in munition
work. The amount of ammunition bought in America by France has been
grossly exaggerated by the German press. Latterly, France has employed
American engineers to build large munition plants in France that will
become the property of the Government.
Throughout the spring the Paris newspapers appeared every morning
with large headlines: "More guns! More ammunition!!" And they got
them, made them. The headlines are no longer needed, for the
superiority in shell and guns rests with the French, not with the
Germans, on the western front.
* * * * *
France, industrially crippled, has accomplished this marvel in
one short year. The country has become one vast workshop for war.
The Latin genius for organization on the small scale has met the
German genius for organization on the large scale. The industrial
transformation has been facilitated by the system of conscription
over which the English have wrangled so long and so futilely to the
mystery of their keener-witted allies. To the Frenchman conscription
means merely the most effective method of applying patriotism, of
cooeperation for the common cause. France has mobilized not only her
men, but her women and children, it might be said, so thoroughly have
the civilian elements worked into the shops and other non-military
labor. To sort out their labor and put it where it was most effective,
to substitute women workers for men wherever possible, were the first
steps in the huge work of social reorganization. There were no labor
troubles to contend with, thanks to the conscription system and to
the awakened patriotism of every element in society. France looked
on aghast when her necessary supplies of coal were threatened by the
strike of Welsh miners, averted only by the personal pleadings of a
popular minister! To the Latin, more disciplined and more alive to
the real dangers of the situation than the Anglo-Saxon, the English
attitude was simply incomprehensible. Also France has not had her
efficiency so seriously threatened by the liquor problem as has
England: the military authorities have taken stern measures against
this danger and have carried them out firmly. So far as the army
itself is concerned, the drink evil does not exist.
The manufacture of ammunition and cannon is but one element in the new
warfare. France has had to feed, clothe, and maintain her armies under
the same handicap, to meet all the unexpected requirements in material
of the trench war. The French have rediscovered the hand grenade and
developed it into the characteristic weapon of the war, have unearthed
all their old mortars from the arsenals and adapted them to the trench,
and created the best aerial service of all the combatants. Incidentally
they have effectually protected Paris from air raids since the first
months of the war by their careful aerial patrol. All this is aside from
the task of putting the nation socially and economically on the war
basis--in providing for the wounded, the dependent women and children,
and also for a perpetual stream of refugees from Belgium and the invaded
provinces, a burden that Germany has not yet had to carry.
Not all this huge work of reorganization could be done immediately
with equal success. The sanitary service suffered grievously, especially
at the beginning,--needed all the help that generous outsiders could
give,--still needs it. The percentage of death among the wounded is too
high, of those returned to the army too low. There have been wastes in
other directions due to haste, inexperience, political interference, but
nothing like the wastes that England has suffered from the same causes,
infinitely less than we should suffer judging from the ineptitudes we
displayed in our little Spanish War.
Probably France is not as well organized to-day for the war business
as is Germany. Very possibly she never will be, which is not to the
discredit of her people. The nation has had to do in one short year,
grievously handicapped at the start, what Germany has done at her leisure
during forty years. Moreover, the Latin temperament is intolerant of the
mechanical, the routine, which is the glory of the German. Although the
French have realized with marvelous quickness the necessity of war
organization and have adapted themselves to it,--have learned the German
lesson,--they are spiritually above making it the supreme ideal of
national effort. Without argument they have accepted the conditions
imposed upon them, but they do not regard the modern war business as
the flower of human civilization.
* * * * *
Mere preparation, no matter how scientific and thorough, is by no
means the whole of the German lesson. The first months of the war
we heard too much about German preparedness, too little about German
character. By this time the world is realizing that military preparation
is but one manifestation of that German character, and the real danger
is German character itself. According to reports in her own newspapers
Germany found herself running short of war materials after the first
weeks of this extraordinarily prodigal war, which exceeded even her
prudent calculations. But Germany had the habit of preparation and the
social machinery ready to enlarge her war product. Without advertising
her situation to the world, she provided for the new requirements so
abundantly that she has not yet betrayed any deficiency in material.
And while she was sweeping victoriously across northern France toward
Paris, with the belief that the city must fall before her big guns,
nevertheless her engineers took pains to prepare the Aisne line of
defense, which saved her armies from disaster and enabled them to keep
their tenacious grip on Belgium and northern France. This is the real
strength of Germany, the real import of the bitter lesson she is
teaching the world--the habit of preparation, discipline, organization,
thrift. On the specifically military side the French seem to have learned
this lesson well. They have fortified the ground between the present
front and Paris with line after line of defensive works. The fields are
gray with barbed wire. A few miles outside of the suburbs of Paris may
be seen as complete a system of trenches as on the front, and the _kepi_
of the territorial digging a trench is a familiar sight almost anywhere
in eastern France. It is inconceivable that any "drive" on the western
front could be successful. The confidence of the French rests in part
on these precautions.
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