Part 3

Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the war which took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not a theologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past of his country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a half before, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of man and God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young to remember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for the welfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have done so with searching and scorching eloquence (the voice of Bebel) had only just been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, in the last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a great nation being lured on to its moral death-agony amid canting appeals to the Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy.

A CONVERSATION WITH LORD ROBERTS

Meantime what had been happening among ourselves? The far-off murmur of the approaching wind had been heard by all of us, but as none can hope to describe the effect on the whole Empire, perhaps each may be allowed to indicate the character of the warning as it came to his own ears. It was at Naples, not long after the event, that I heard how the late King had felt about his last visit to Berlin. I was then on my way home from Egypt, where I had spent some days at Mena, while Lord Roberts was staying there on his way back from the Soudan. He seemed restless and anxious. On two successive mornings I sat with him for a long hour in the shade of the terraces which overlook the Pyramids discussing the “German danger.” After the great soldier had left for Cairo he wrote asking me to regard our conversations as confidential; and down to this moment I have always done so, but I see no harm now (quite the reverse of harm) in repeating the substance of what he said so many years ago on a matter of such infinite momentousness.

“Do you really attach importance to this scare of a German invasion?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I do,” said Lord Roberts.

“You think an enemy army could be landed on our shores?”

“As things are now, yes, I think it could.”

“Do you think you could land an army on the East Coast of England and march on to London?”

“Yes, I do.”

“In a thick fog, of course?” “Without a fog,” said Lord Roberts. After that he described in detail the measures we ought to take to make such an attack impossible and I hasten to add that, so far as I can see and know, the precautionary measures he recommended have all been taken since the outbreak of the war.

“WE’LL FIGHT AND FIGHT SOON”

By that time I had, in common with the majority of my countrymen who travelled much abroad, been compelled to recognize the ever-increasing hostility of the German and British peoples whenever they encountered each other on the highways of the world--their constant cross-purposes on steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos, post and telegraph offices--making social intercourse difficult and friendship impossible. The overbearing manners of many German travellers, their aggressive and domineering selfishness, which always demanded the best seats, the best rooms, and the first attention, was year by year becoming more and more intolerable to the British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced. Indeed, it must be admitted that our country-people usually met the German claims to be the supermen of Europe with rather unnecessary self-assertion. If an unmannerly German pushed before us at the counter of a booking-office we pushed him back; if he shouted over our shoulders at a telegraph office we told him to hold his tongue; and if, in stiflingly hot weather, he insisted (as he often did) on shutting up again and again the window of a railway carriage after we had opened it for a breath of air, we sometimes drove our elbow through the glass for final answer--as I saw an English barrister do one choking day on the journey between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they were disquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with Professor Harnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood, history, and faith the German and British peoples were brothers (ugly as it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in the world-task of civilization than with almost any other nation.

“If we are brothers we’ll fight all the more fiercely for that fact,” we thought, “and, God help us, we’ll fight soon.”

“HE KNOWS, DOESN’T HE?”

I was staying in a neutral country at an hotel much frequented by the German governing classes when an English newspaper proprietor, after a visit to Berlin, published in his most popular journal a map of a portion of Northern Europe in order to show at sight his view of the extent of the forthcoming German aggression. The paper was lying open between a group of gentlemen whose names have since become prominent in relation to the war when I stepped up to the table. The men were obviously angry, although laughing immoderately. “Look at that,” said one of them, pointing to the map and running his finger down the coast of Holland and Belgium and France to Calais. “He knows, doesn’t he?”

And then, after a general burst of derisive laughter, came a bitter attack on British journalism (“The scaremongering of that paper is doing more than anything in the world to make war between Germany and England”), a still fiercer and more bitter assault on our Lords of the Admiralty, who had lately proposed a year’s truce in the building of battleships (“Tell your Mr. Churchill to mind his own business, and we’ll mind ours”), and, finally, a passionate protest that Germany’s object in increasing her navy was not to enlarge her empire, but merely to keep the seas open to her trade. “Why,” said one of the men, “nine-tenths of my own business is with London, and if England could shut up our ships I should be a ruined man in a month.” “Quite so,” said another, “and so far as German people go that’s the beginning and end of the whole matter.”

WE BELIEVED IT

We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my countrymen who through many years believed that story--that the accident of Germany’s disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to break British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlarge her navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through the Kiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced to shoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threatening fortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of the Bight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I did my best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and the darkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from gigantic furnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day when frail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns. I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of the scholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription and of the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafés, and the hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than military necessity.

And then there was the human charm of some German homes to soothe away suspicion--the scholar’s quiet house (beyond the clattering parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank “to all good friends in England,” and the sweet simplicity of the little town in Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, where the nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musical societies, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was so difficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-power and dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall those German homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to do so. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were already approaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmur long before ourselves--heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much less and worse than nothing.

THE FALLING OF THE THUNDERBOLT

Into such an unpromising atmosphere of national hostility the war came down on us, in July 1914, like a thunderbolt. In spite of grave warnings few or none in this country were at that moment giving a thought to it. On the contrary, we were thinking of all manner of immeasurably smaller things, for Great Britain, although governing more than one-fifth of the habitable globe, has an extraordinary capacity for becoming absorbed in the affairs of its two little islands. It was so in the autumn of 1914, when we thought Home Rule and Land Reform covered all our horizon, although a thunder-cloud that was to silence these big little guns had already gathered in the sky.

Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if secret diplomacy had too long concealed from us the storm that was so soon to break. That kind of surprise must never come to us again. Many and obvious may be the dangers of allowing the public to participate in delicate and difficult negotiations between nations, but if democracy has any rights surely the chief of them is to know step by step by what means its representatives are controlling its destiny. We did not hear what was happening in the Cabinets of Europe, under that miserable disguise of the Archduke’s assassination, until the closing days of July. Consequently, we reeled under the danger that threatened us, and were not at first capable of comprehending the cause and the measure of it.

“What is this wretched conspiracy in Serbia to us, and why in God’s name should we have to fight about it?” we thought. Or perhaps, “We’ve always been told that treaties between nations are safeguards of peace, but here, heaven help us, they are dragging us into war.”

So general was this sentiment of revolt during the last tragic days that it is commonly understood to have extended to the Cabinet. Six members are said to have opposed war. One of them, a philosopher and historian of high distinction, could not see his way with his colleagues, and retired from their company. Another, who came from the working-classes, is understood to have resigned from thought of the sufferings which any war, however justifiable, must inevitably inflict upon the poor. A third, a lawyer in a position of the utmost authority, is believed to have had grave misgivings about our legal right to call Germany to account. And I have heard that a fourth, who had been prominent as a pacifist in the days of an earlier conflict, had written a letter to a colleague as late as the evening of August 1, saying that a war declared merely on grounds of problematical self-interest would create such an outcry in Great Britain as had never been heard here before--leaving us a derided and, therefore, easily-vanquished people.

THE PART CHANCE PLAYED

But chance plays the largest part in the drama of life, and accident often confounds the plans of men. Not feeling entirely sure of his letter the pacifist Minister put it in his pocket when he dressed that night to go out to dinner. And when he sat down at table he found himself seated next to the able, earnest, and passionately patriotic Minister for Belgium. Perhaps he was urging some objections to British intervention, when his neighbour said: “But what about Belgium? You have promised to protect her, and if you don’t do so she will be destroyed.”

That raised visions of the work of the little nations; memories of their immense contributions to human progress from the days of Israel downwards; thoughts of the vast loss to liberty, to morality, to religion, and to all the other fruits of the unfettered soul that would come to the world from the over-riding of the weak peoples by the strong. The result was swift and sure--the letter in the Minister’s pocket never reached the important person to whom it was addressed.