Speaking of Prussians–

XII

Even more illuminating were his views with regard to the position of Germany in Europe before the war began. He admitted that for years, by the neighbour-peoples, Germany had been feared and distrusted. This, he insisted, was not Germany's fault, but a fear and a distrust born of envy and malice among deteriorated and decaying nations for a land which, so far as Europe, at least, was concerned, was the mother of all the virtues and all the great benevolent impulses of the century. He denied that Germany had ever been overbearing or threatening; denied that anything except jealousy could lie at the back of the general suspicion directed against Prussia, not only by aliens but – before the war began – by Bavaria and by Saxony as well.

"Germany," he said to me one day, "has earned the right to rule this Hemisphere; and Germany is going to rule it! When we have conquered our enemies, as conquer them we shall – when we have implanted among them our own German culture, our own German institutions and our own German form of government, which surely we also shall do – they will, in succeeding generations, be the better and the happier for it. They will come to know, then, that the guns of our fleets and the rifles of our soldiers brought them blessings in disguise. Out of their present sufferings and their future humiliations will spring up the benefits of German civilisation.

"At first they may not want to accept our German civilisation. They will have to accept it – at the point of the bayonet if necessary. If it is required that these petty lesser states should be exterminated altogether, we shall not hesitate before that task either. They are decadents, dying now of dry rot and degeneracy; better that they should be dead altogether than that the spread of German Kultur through the world should be checked or diverted from its course. We shall teach the world that the individual exists for the good of the state, rather than that the state exists for the individual."

To the miseries that had been inflicted upon Belgium, and which he himself had had opportunity to view at first hand, he gave no heed – this scholarly pundit-preacher of the tenets of Prussianism. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the question of the rights and wrongs of the German invasion of Belgium. He wasted no sympathy upon Louvain, sacked and pillaged and burned, or upon Dinant, razed to the ground for the most part, and with seven hundred of its male inhabitants put to death on one slaughter-day in punitive punishment for acts of guerrilla warfare alleged to have been committed by civilians against Germans coming upon them in uniform.

Yet I do not think that, in most of the relations of life, he was a cruel or even an unkind man. He merely saw Belgium through glasses made in Germany. He explained his attitude substantially after this fashion, as I now recall the sense and the phrasing of his words:

"What difference does it make to posterity that we have had to destroy a few hotbeds of ignorance and shoot a few thousand undisciplined, uneducated, turbulent persons? What difference though we may have to continue to destroy yet more Belgian towns and shoot yet more Belgian civilians? Ultimately the results of our operations are bound to redound to the greater glory of the Greater German Empire, which means European civilisation.

"My friend, do you know that nearly a quarter of the inhabitants of Belgium are illiterates, as you would put it in English —Unalphabets, as we Germans say? Well, that is true – a quarter of them can neither read nor write. In Germany only a fractional part of one per cent of our people are illiterate to that extent. We have taken Belgium by force of arms and we are never going to give it up. Already it is a province of the German Empire.

"When our lawgivers have followed our soldiers across the expanded frontiers of our Empire; when we have made the German language the language of annexed Belgium; when we have introduced our incomparably superior methods into all departments of Belgian life; when we have taught all the Belgians to speak the German tongue, and have required of them that they do speak it – then these Belgians, as Germans, will be better off than ever they could have been as Belgians. Never fear; we shall know how to handle them.

"With Alsace and Lorraine we were too mild for their own good. With Belgium we shall be stern; but we shall be just. It is the predestined fate of Belgium that she should become a German possession and a German territory. Geography and destiny both point the way for us, and we Germans never turn from the duties intrusted to us by our God and our Kaiser! We mean to teach these lesser peoples before we are through that the individual exists for the good of the State, not, as some of them profess to believe, that the State exists for the good of the individual."

XIII

It never seemed to occur to him that Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen might personally prefer to keep on being Belgians or Frenchmen or Dutchmen, and might have some rights in the matter; indeed might prefer to die rather than live under a system intolerable to human beings reared outside the scope of Prussian influence. So far as I might judge, this never occurred to any of the less eloquent but equally ardent defenders of this peculiar brand of Kultur with whom I talked during that fall in the Rhineland country.

We must have been blind then, my companion and I – yes, and deaf too; for we diagnosed this bigotry as evidences of an egomania, probably confined to a few hundreds or a few thousands among the German-speaking peoples. In the light of what has happened since we all know that the disease affected a whole nation, and was a disease of which, as yet, the frequent upsettings of their original programme and the absolute certainty that the programme itself can never be carried out until Europe and America both are graveyards have not to any very noticeable extent served to operate as a cure.

In those early, optimistic days these paranoiacs conceived of a world that should sometime be altogether Prussianised. Their vision was not bounded by the seas about their own Continent; it extended to other Continents, our own included. That dream is over and done with. What they have yet to learn – and they will only be taught it at the muzzle of guns – is that a civilisation cannot endure when it is half Prussian and half free. It is my understanding that this country, along with ten or twelve others, is now committed to the task of enforcing this lesson upon the consciousness of the only confederation of enemies to a representative form of government now left upon either hemisphere.

XIV

A prophet is nearly always a bore. He is apt to be tiresome when expounding his predictions, and likely to become a common nuisance should his predictions come true. Indeed, the I-told-you-so person is oftentimes a worse pest than the I-am-now-telling-you-so individual. I have no desire to assume either rôle; but here lately I have not been able to restrain my satisfaction at finding, as I believed, that two of my own private convictions are about to be justified by the accomplished fact. As a result of all that I saw and heard in the war zone, more than two years and a half ago, I made up my mind to the probable consummation of these contingencies – namely:

First: That, despite her earlier successes, despite all her preparedness and all her efficiency and all her valour, Germany eventually would be defeated as the Southern Confederacy was defeated – by being bled white and starved thin.

Second: That when to Germany's rulers this prospect became certain they would with deliberate intent embroil the United States in the conflict as an avowed and declared enemy, in order that the men who drove Germany to the slaughter might save their faces before their own people, at the front and at home, by saying to them in effect: "We were strong enough to beat all Europe and all Asia; we were not strong enough to beat the supreme Power of the New World too; we, with our allies, could not withstand the combined forces of the whole earth."

Though Germany is still very far, one imagines, from the point of complete exhaustion, it is not to be denied that she is bleeding white and starving thin. And, as all fair-minded patriotic men on this side of the ocean agree, she did, by a persistent campaign of aggressions against our flag, and by murdering our people on the high seas, and by plotting against our industries and our national integrity, finally force us into the war.

Having been forced into the war, as we are, it is well that our people should know to the fullest possible degree not only what they are fighting for – the preservation of democracy in the world, for one thing – but that likewise they should know and in that knowledge recognise the danger to us, of the mental forces operating behind the military arm of our national enemy.

I think they should know that in the minds of these self-idolaters, who have laid claim to Creator and to creation as their own ordained possessions, we shall stand in no different light than the Belgians stand, or the Serbians, or the Poles, or the people of Northern France. Upon us, if the chance is vouchsafed them, they would visit a heaping measure of the same wrath they poured on those invaded and broken nations of Europe, showing to Americans no more mercy than they showed to them.

I deem it my duty, therefore, to write what already I have written in this little book, and, before closing it, to append certain quotations, as particularly illuminating evidences of the besetting mania that has been fastened upon the brains of an otherwise rational race of our fellow beings through two generations of crafty implanting and fostering by greater maniacs, wearing crowns and shoulder straps, and – yes, the livery of Our Lord and Master.

For the quotations from the poetic utterances of the Reverend Doctor Vorwerk, which appeared in preceding paragraphs of this article, the writer is indebted to a documentation compiled from authentic German sources by a Dane, the Reverend J. P. Bang, D. D., professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, a famous Lutheran institution, under the title of Hurrah and Hallelujah– which, incidentally, was a title borrowed from the published poetic works of this same Doctor Vorwerk. Doctor Bang's symposium has lately been published in English by the American publisher, Doran, with an introduction by "Ralph Connor," the Canadian novelist, otherwise Major Charles W. Gordon, of the Canadian Overseas Forces.

XV

Had Doctor Bang set forth as his own views, as a neutral, the amazing utterances which make up the bulk of his compilation, no one here or abroad would have believed that he described a true condition. But he was smarter than that. He was mainly content to repeat literal translations of indubitable prayers, poems, sermons, addresses – written and spoken statements of contemporary German clergymen, German professors and German statesmen.

In further support of the point which I have been striving to make I mean to take the liberty here of adding a few more extracts from the first American edition of Hurrah and Hallelujah, in each instance giving credit to the original German author of the same.

For instance, the Reverend Doctor Vorwerk, who appears to specialise in prayers, begins one invocation with this sentence, which is especially interesting in that the good pastor couples the Cherubim, the Seraphim, and – guess what? – the Zeppelins in the same breath:

"Thou Who dwellest high above Cherubim, Seraphim and Zeppelins; Thou Who art enthroned as a God of Thunder in the midst of lightning from the clouds, and lightning from sword and cannon, send thunder, lightning, hail and tempest hurtling upon our enemy; bestow upon us his banners; hurl him down into the dark burial pits!"

Another poet, Franz Philippi by name, in a widely circulated work called World-Germany, delivers himself in part as follows:

"Formerly German thought was shut up in her corner; but now the world shall have its coat cut according to German measure and, as far as our swords flash and German blood flows, the circle of the earth shall come under the tutelage of German activity."

Herr J. Suze, a prose writer, says with the emphasis of profound conviction:

"The Germans are first before the Throne of God – Thou couldst not place the golden crown of victory in purer hands."

On November 13, 1914, according to Doctor Bang, a German theological professor preached an address which the Berliner Lokal Anzeiger reproduced, with favourable editorial comment. Here is a typical paragraph from this sermon:

"The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is 'the German God.' Not the national God such as the lower nations worship, but 'Our God,' Who is not ashamed of belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart."

The Reverend H. Francke is a pastor in the city of Liegnitz. From his pulpit he delivered a series of so-called war sermons, which afterward, at the request of the members of his flock, were printed in a book, the cover of which was ornamented with the Iron Cross. And we find the Reverend Francke adding his voice to the chorus thus:

"Germany is precisely – who would venture to deny it? – the representative of the highest morality, of the purest humanity, of the most chastened Christianity."

The Reverend Walter Lehmann, pastor at the town of Hamberge, in Holstein, went a trifle further. When he got out his book of war sermons he published it under the title About the German God; and therein, among other things, he said:

"This means that we go forth to war as Christians, precisely as Christians, as we Germans understand Christianity; it means that we have God on our side… Can the Russians, the French, the Serbians, the English, say this? No; not one of them. Only we Germans can say it… If God is for us who can be against us? It is enough for us to be a part of God… A nation" – Germany – "which is God's seed corn for the future… Germany is the centre of God's plans for the world… That glorious feat of arms forty-four years ago" – the Battle of Sedan – "gives us courage to believe that the German soul is the world's soul; that God and Germany belong to one another."

These are the concluding words of the Reverend Lehmann's book About the German God:

"Oh, that the German God may permeate the world! Oh, that the eternal victory may blossom before the God of the German soul!"

It will not do to slight the Herr Pastor Job Rump, lic., Doctor, of Berlin. Hearken a moment to a word or two from one of Doctor Rump's published pamphlets:

"A corrupt world, fettered in monstrous sin, shall, by the will of God, be healed by the German nature… Ye" – the Germans – "are the chosen generation, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, the peculiar people."

A learned and no doubt a pious professor, Herr G. Roethe, is credited with this modest claim:

"While other nations are born, ripen and grow old, the Germans alone possess the gift of rejuvenescence."

And so on and so forth, for two hundred and thirty-four pages of Hurrah and Hallelujah. The run of the contents is quite up to sample. None of us can object to these reverend gentlemen seeking to walk with God; what we do object to is their undertaking to lead Him.

XVI

So far as I can tell, Doctor Bang has not overlooked a single bet. He makes out a complete case; and, what is more, in so doing he relies not upon his own conclusions, but upon the avowed utterances of distinguished German savants, clergymen and versifiers.

These, then, are the spoken thoughts of civilian leaders of our enemy. If the leaders believe these things their followers must also believe them; must believe, with the Reverend Lehmann and the Reverend Vorwerk, that God is a German God, and should properly be so addressed by a worshipper upon his knees, since one prayer begins "O German God!"; must believe, with Von Bernhardi – who spoke of "the miserable life of all small states" – that "to allow to the weak the same right of existence as to the strong, vigorous nation means presumptuous encroachment upon the natural laws of development"; and with Treitschke, that "the small nations have no right to existence and ought to be swallowed up"; and with Lasson, that "It is moral, inasmuch as it is reasonable, that the small states, in spite of treaties, should become the prey of the strongest"; and must believe that to Prussia was appointed the task of curing the whole world, America included, of what – according to the Prussian ideal – ails it.

It is the nation which believes these things, and which has striven in this war to practice what its teachers preached, that we now are called upon to fight. If we remember this as we go along it will help us to understand some of the things the enemy will seek to do unto us; and should help him to understand some of the things we mean to do unto him.

Indeed, there is hope of his being able some day to understand that we entered this war not against a people or a nation so much as we entered it against an idea, a disease, a form of paranoia, a form of rabies, a form of mania which has turned men into blasphemous and murderous mad dogs, running amuck and slavering in the highways of the world.

What would any intelligent American do if a mad dog entered the street where he lived, even though that dog, before it went mad, had been a kind and docile creature? And what is he going to do in the existing situation?

The same answer does for both questions. Because there is only one answer.