Part 5

And here for the next war were Denmark and Holland, Belgium and northern France--so many jewel boxes that could be looted. To the eastward were Poland with her coal mines, Rumania with her oil fields and Russia with her wheat granaries. And once Central Europe became a Middle-Europe German Empire there was no reason why later on Germany should not extend her conquests to Russia on the east and England on the west, and then to North and South America.

It was a great scheme. Never was prize so rich. Never could obstacles be so easily swept away. To make Berlin a world-capital and Kaiser Wilhelm a world-emperor only two things were needed.

Plainly the first thing to be done was to organize the Pan-German Empire League and educate the leading men of Germany--the ship owners, bankers, merchants and manufacturers, editors, ministers, priests and university professors.

Local branch societies were organized in all the large German towns and cities. Weekly meetings were held, papers read and reports made. Slowly people of the middle class were included in the league. Documents marked "Secret and Confidential" were distributed, setting forth the details of the scheme.

Full reports were made as to what Germany could make by seizing the fields of Denmark, the cities on the mouth of the Rhine in Belgium, the coal and iron mines of France, Poland and Russia, and also the undeveloped resources of the Valley of the Euphrates.

Careful statements were prepared as to the difficulties that must be surmounted, but always this lure was held out--that the poorest German who then had nothing, would when Germany was victorious become a landowner, live in a mansion and drive his own automobile. Then he would have Russians and Frenchmen to wait upon him, since the German was a superman, intended for a patrician, while all other races were pigs, intended by nature to be bondsmen and plebeians.

"The rest of the world is amassing wealth, and when the fruit is ripe then we Germans will pluck it"--this was their motto.

Little by little the germ of world-ambition became a fever, burning in the soul of every German at home or abroad. It took twenty years to thoroughly inculcate every individual of the German race with this feverish ambition, but when 1914 came every German had gone over to the Pan-German scheme and was ready to die for it.

2. The Berlin Schemers and Their Plot

After all the Germans at home and abroad understood the Pan-German scheme of seditious intrigue in foreign countries and the vast web was spun and thrown out over all the cities and continents where the Kaiser's representatives were living, the second thing to be done was to make the plan clear by spreading it out like a great map. The method used, therefore, was pictorial.

The Department of Publicity in Berlin became experts on geography. They began to issue illustrated maps so that the rudest German peasants and the German colonists living in Milwaukee or El Paso, in Rio Janeiro or Buenos Aires, in Brussels or St. Petersburg, in Melbourne or Calcutta, could easily understand the method and the goal.

Out of twenty maps issued in Berlin and reproduced by Andre Cheredame, no one is more important than the one marked "The Old Roman Empire." The simplest German miner understood the map at a glance and realized its meaning for the members of the Pan-German League. Here is old Rome marked world capital. Here is Caesar Augustus called the first world emperor. Here is Carthage with its capital looted and Roman peasants remaining after the victory to move into rich men's houses and estates of North Africa. And here also were the maps of conquered Palestine, Ephesus, Athens and Corinth. To be sure the old Romans had to become soldiers, but, later, did not each Roman soldier live in the rich gardens around Thebes, Ephesus and Corinth?

Instantly the imaginations of the German peasants and workmen kindled. The Kaiser was right. What had been in Rome must be in Berlin. The Elbe must succeed the Tiber. Berlin shall be the second world-capital. Our Wilhelm shall be the second world-emperor. Germania shall be written straight across Europe from Hamburg on the North Sea to Bagdad on the Persian Gulf. Germans alone shall be allowed to carry weapons, as once only the Roman was allowed to own a spear; only Germans shall be allowed to hold title deeds to lands, even as once only Romans could hold a field or a house in fee simple. Old Rome won by becoming a military State.

Did not the people of Rome go forth as soldiers and return with triumphal processions, with treasures of loot that took days to pass along the Appian Way, while the Romans stood cheering and the women and children sang and threw flowers in the path? Why should not the German army, between the reaping of the wheat in July and the threshing of the wheat in October, return from Brussels and Paris laden with treasure, while a second triumphal procession marched down Wilhelmstrasse?

The German peasants kindled at this dream. Why should the German have to live always on bologna sausage, drink beer, eat sauerkraut and live in ugly houses when the people of Paris and London drank champagne, ate roast fowl, wore French laces and the finest English wools? It was a wicked shame. Surely the German was intended for something better than sauerkraut and beer!

"Two weeks and we will be in Brussels. Three weeks and we will have Paris. Two months and we will loot London."

This was the plan. How significant that letter, taken from the dead body of a German boy found in No Man's Land, near Compiegne.

"Within three days, Liebschen, we will be in Paris. I intend to bring you a pocketful of Paris rings and jewels, with Paris gowns and laces."

From the body of a German boy found near Luneville was taken this letter saying that, with his three companions, he had picked out four French farms and left the houses standing, and that his friends and himself had picked out these farms as permanent homes. Later he added that Heinrich thought it would be much better for them to wait until they smashed England and made Canada a German colony. Then they could own, not small French farms, but vast Canadian farms with a hundred tenants working for him in the valleys around Toronto and the vineyards of Winnipeg and orchards of Hudson Bay.

Most shrewd and cunning, the plotters of the Potsdam gang. They knew how to feed the fires of envy and avarice in the German people. Every few weeks they placed new material in the hands of every German at home and abroad. They reminded each poor peasant and foreign colonist that he was a superman, and that by day and by night he was to prepare for the time when he would become the head of all the people of the town or industry with which he was related. Poor Germans in foreign countries dreamed their dreams of the time when they would be appointed by the Kaiser and Foreign Minister to take charge of the village in Mexico, the mine in Chile, or when they would be the tax collector in some distant province.

We know now, from letters that have been found, that the German soldiers in France carried in their pockets a description by the German historian Curtius of the triumphal procession along the Appian Way, when the Roman conquerors came home loaded with loot. These skillful German plotters printed at the bottom of Curtius's description the statement that each German soldier must look forward to a similar return from London, Paris and Brussels to march through the streets of Munich and Berlin.

What a dream was this German dream! What treasures were to be brought into Berlin! What marbles and bronzes of Rodin stolen from Paris! At last Berlin was to own beautiful paintings, for the treasures of the Louvre were to be the Kaiser's.

Never was there such a dream dreamed by peasants who soon were to become princes and kings and patricians. The German had exchanged the rye bread of 1913 for the "fog bank" of 1918; had given up German beer to grasp only empty, breaking bubbles. But it was a great dream while it lasted. In pursuance of his hope he sacrificed three million German boys, left dead in the fields of Flanders and France. He sent home four million German cripples. He filled the land with vast armies of widows and orphans.

It could not have been otherwise. There has never been, and never will be, but one world city--Rome; and there has never been but one world-emperor--Caesar Augustus. There is to be one universal kingdom--and that is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, justice, peace and good-will. The German has been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.

A world-kingdom will come, but no Kaiser will rule over that empire of love. In that world-parliament all the races shall be represented as equals; then the earth that has long been a battle-field shall become an Eden garden, where all are patriots towards the world-kingdom, and scholars towards the intellect, and self-sufficing towards the family, and obedient towards their God.

3. German Superiority a Myth That Has Exploded

Several years before the great war began a Dutch humorist wrote a play on German megalomania. He portrayed a German schoolroom in Prussia. Thirty or forty embryonic Prussians are at the desks and a Prussian schoolmaster is in the chair.

"Children, what is the greatest country in the world?"