It is by delusions such as these that the British people were hoodwinked in the past, and it is by the same vain imaginings that they may be victimized in the future. For they seem incapable of gauging the German psyche. The two races meet each other in masks. The apparent ingenuousness of the English-speaking Teuton is calculated to throw the most vigilant Anglo-Saxon intelligence off its guard. We have no psychological X-rays by which to pierce the peculiar racial vesture in which the German soul is shrouded, nor are we endowed with the gift of patient observation which might enable us to extract those rays from facts. And so we stumble along, dealing with an imaginary people whom we ourselves have created after our own image and likeness, falling into fatal blunders and recommencing anew.
It is true that the mark has fallen, and that the German financial fabric is in a parlous condition. But that fabric is kept from crumbling away by the war, just as the Egyptian papyrus is preserved so long as it does not come into contact with the air. Moreover, common prudence should impel us to find out at what a cost to ourselves we have reduced the value of the mark. If financial exhaustion be among the ways in which one group of belligerents may be made to succumb, it is wise to ask whether it is the States which have to pay gold for their huge requirements or those which can get almost everything they need for paper that are likely to succumb first.
The question is relevant, yet, because it has not been moved into the foreground of discussion, there are few people who ponder on it.
Personally, I am convinced that impecuniosity and loss of credit will never bring the Germans to their knees.
Great Britain has achieved wonders in the financial sphere during this war, as the Allies and certain neutrals can testify. Our budgets are monuments of the nation’s spirit of self-sacrifice. But we have not come scathless out of the ordeal. And besides our inevitable losses we are suffering from criminal waste. No other country is so thriftless as ours. In this respect we are a byword among the peoples of the world. But we give no thought to the consequences. Yet the yearly outlay on the one hand and the means of meeting it on the other hand are calculable, and it would be well if those who rely upon Germany’s financial prostration would carefully reckon up and compare the two, were it only for the sake of the sobering effect. On this aspect of the problem it is needless to dwell further. It will compel close and painful attention before the end of the campaign.
Another point to which inadequate heed has been paid, is the lack of working men. This dearth of labour is not felt in Germany or Austria, because they have two million prisoners and two million Poles on whom they can draw not only for agricultural work but also for skilled labour. And the authorities of both those empires are employing their war prisoners very freely. Here, as everywhere else, the Teuton is enterprising. I have seen photographs of Russians in Germany harnessed and employed as beasts of burden. At any rate, it is no secret that from the latter half of the year 1915 Germany and Austria were far ahead of Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States and Japan combined in the amount of munitions they turned out every week. And they are still ahead of them to-day. This fact, which can be verified, has an ominous ring. What it connotes is that our enemies have no strikes, no conscientious objectors, no fiddling with obligatory service, industrial or military. Each man is at his country’s beck and call. Germany is free from strikers, slackers and such-like anti-social types.
In Russia the want of working men is felt keenly. It is one of the main elements of the sharp rise of prices there. In France, too, the number of hands needed is very great, and the loss inflicted by their withdrawal from the labour market is more sensible than the average reader has any notion of. And far from being filled, these gaps are becoming wider day by day. This shortage is a source of solicitude to the Government of the Republic.
What it portends may readily be imagined. It certainly compels us to qualify the cheering assertion that time is on our side. What else it implies may be left to the imagination of the reader.
More serious still than the financial burden, or the dearth of workmen, is the inadequacy of the mercantile marine to the needs of the Allies in general, and of Great Britain in especial. To this privation submarine warfare has contributed materially. And there is not the slenderest ground for hope that the Germans will desist from it during this campaign. On the contrary, they will intensify it. Of the neutrals, some are too weak and others too timid to enter an energetic protest against this violation of international law. The freight-carrying capacity of the transports still available is less than the British optimist realizes. How much less, it would be unfruitful to inquire. It is enough to know that in this matter, too, we had better seek a more helpful ally than time. Those who are most conversant with these elements of the problem are haunted by a restive consciousness of disappointment and apprehension.
For the power, the independence, the destinies of the Empire are interwoven with our command of the sea. On our merchant tonnage depend our economic life, our army and navy, everything we have and are and hope to be. That destroyed or paralysed, nothing remains but a memory. And the Germans are working hard and not unsuccessfully to cripple it. During the week ending April 13, 85,000 tons of British and neutral shipping were destroyed. Since the beginning of the submarine blockade over 3,000,000 tons have been sent to the bottom of the sea. On an average 50,000 tons a week are being torpedoed or mined, and our losses tend to augment rather than diminish. Nor is that all. Not only is our merchant tonnage being whittled down below the minimum needed for our strict requirements, but we are also being hindered from utilizing the transports available. And herein lies a danger the full significance of which has not yet received proper attention. Shortage of labour is pleaded as the reason why effective measures have not been adopted to fill the gaps made by the enemy submarines. And labour is inadequate because the Government eschewes industrial as well as military compulsion. It possesses the power, but shrinks from wielding it. To my thinking, this is one of the symptoms of that madness with which the gods strike a nation before destroying it.
And the longer this process of – shall we call it mutual? – exhaustion goes on, the more important grow the neutral States and the louder sound their voices. They are like Jeshurun, who waxed fat and kicked. Without special aptitudes for arithmetic one may calculate, with a rough approach to accuracy, the time when the process of mutual exhaustion will enable the neutrals to exert an absurdly disproportionate and possibly dangerous influence over the belligerents. That is a calculation which those optimists would do well to make who tell us that all is well because “time is on our side.”
It is still open to us to utilize our superior resources, realize our latent strength, and ward off the dangers that beset us. But the first advance towards the goal must be to face the facts, behold things and persons as they are, and apply our new-found knowledge to the work of self-rescue. Our conception of the nature of the contest in which we are engaged must be recast. Our demands on our national leaders – not those now in power who only mislead – must be greatly enlarged. Truth, however bitter, must take the place of fancy. Ideas and institutions incongruous with the new social and political conditions must be displaced. The nation’s aims and policy should be stated boldly and clearly, and adequate machinery set up to achieve them. In a word, system will have to be substituted for confusion, method for haphazard. Destitute of a great or strong man, it behoves us to imitate our enemy and create a vast organization with branches all over the empire. But the influence of the government ever since the outbreak of the war has militated against all those reforms.
If these changes had been effected at the outset the story of the present campaign would have been different from what it is. A group of belligerents representing only 5,921,000 square kilometres of territory and 150,199,000 inhabitants, or, say, 4 per cent. of dry land and 9·1 per cent. of human beings, would not have held its own for twenty-one months against a group disposing of 68,031,000 square kilometres of territory and a population of 770,060,000, or 46 per cent. of the land on the globe and 47 per cent. of the human race. Providence has bestowed upon the Allies the wherewithal to attain their legitimate ends. The Allies’ leaders are frittering them away.
For the thirty years of preparation do not afford us an adequate explanation of the Teuton superiority. The clue is to be found in the psychological factor. Germany is wholly alive, physically, intellectually and psychically. And she lives in the present and future. We either drowse or vegetate in and for the past. She has the decisive advantage of possessing organization and organizers. Therein lies the secret of her sustained success. The Allies lack both, and are hardly conscious of the necessity of making good the deficiency. Therein lies their weakness. It has made itself felt throughout the campaign and will determine the upshot of the war. And in the politico-economic struggle that will follow the war, it is the same psychological factor which the Allies rate so low that will decide the final issue.
Unless we wake up to the reality and readjust our ideas and methods to that – and of such awakening there is as yet no sure token – the outcome of the present war will be a draw, and the final upshot of the larger contest will be our utter defeat. No journalistic optimism, no ministerial magniloquence can alter that. These contingencies are already fullfronting us, as we shall soon learn to our cost, and the people who are veiling them from the public view, however praiseworthy their intentions may be, are leading the nation to ruin. And if we continue to uphold our present chiefs and methods national disaster is as inevitable as destiny. But it is well to remember that it is not Fate that is pursuing us; it is we who are overtaking Fate.