That same diplomacy, seconded by the press organization which invented facts and moulded opinion, scored successes in Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania, Switzerland, and contrived not only to keep Italy from declaring war against Germany, but to negotiate a treaty for the protection of German property there. Despite its clumsiness and arrogance and brutality, German diplomacy is unmatched as an agency for rousing popular forces in civilized and uncivilized countries into subversive excitement. It surrounded the Pope of Rome with philo-German dignitaries, gave him an Austrian as adviser, and permeated the Vatican with an atmosphere of Kultur which even pious Catholics of non-Teuton countries avoid as mephitic. It caught the Sultan and his Young Turks, Anglophile and Francophile, in its toils, and gave its warm approbation to the massacre of the Armenians. It won over the young Shah of Persia, who, with great difficulty and only after strenuous exertions, was kept from going over bodily to the Turkish camp. It bought the services of the Senussi. It is making headway with the Negus of Abyssinia. It offered a bribe to Italian socialists and found work for Italian anarchists, whose representatives were received in the palace of the Kaiser’s Ambassador in Rome. And – most difficult task of all – it reconciled, at least for a time, the interests of Bulgaria with those of Greece and Roumania.
German diplomacy has often misread foreign political situations, mistaken the trend of national opinion and sentiment and failed to achieve ends which might by dint of mere patience and quiescence have been readily accomplished. For it has no psychological standard by which to measure the nobler qualities of a foreign people, however closely it may have studied their politics, their history and their vices. Its tests are for the lower grades of human character, and with these it has indeed achieved extraordinary things.
Thus, with infinite labour the Teuton mind has grappled with the chaotic welter produced by the European war. But, besides the skilful handling of great financial and kindred problems, its assiduity in watching for and readiness to seize opportunities for dealing with the issues of lesser moment is worth noting, were it only for its value as a stimulus. One instance occurred in the very first sitting of the Reichstag after hostilities had begun. The legislature agreed to introduce a slight reform of the law, dealing with the rights of children born out of wedlock, of whom there are in Germany 185,000 a year. The Government assented to the change, which was embodied in a bill affirming the right of the illegitimate children of soldiers fallen in battle to the same pension as if their parents had been legally married. And the Reichstag passed the bill unanimously.
This solicitude about little things is most saliently in evidence in the military domain. Here nothing is neglected that can contribute to the fighting value of the units. Hence the care shown for the nourishment and comfort of the soldiers. Ruthlessly though they are sacrificed in battle, they are well looked after in the trenches, and their career is followed with interest and recorded with accuracy by their superiors. I was struck with the completeness of the information which the German War Office possesses and can produce at a moment’s notice about any individual soldier. It was brought home to me in this way. The Chief of the Berlin police had a grandson in the war who had been missed for several weeks. Desirous of obtaining particulars about his capture or death, he asked a neutral friend to obtain information from the Russians. And by way of furnishing a description he sent a printed card, which I read. It contained the name and age of the soldier, the regiment to which he belonged, the hamlet in which he was last seen, the distances that separated that hamlet from the next town and the next large city, the day, the hour and the minute when the man together with his comrades were attacked, and the number of Russians who attacked them. And all these printed particulars refer to a private soldier! Is there anything comparable to this to be found in any of the allied countries?
The scene of another characteristic fact that struck me was Brussels. Princess L. requested permission from the German authorities to repair to France to visit her mother, who, she explained, was ill. At the Kommandantur her request was met with the cutting remark that many persons had been applying for permits to visit their mothers, sisters and other relations abroad, who all appeared to be victims of some mysterious epidemic. Still, the official added, he would not definitively refuse the request, but would accord it as soon as he had proof that the lady’s mother was really ill. “We shall have inquiries made.” “But you cannot have inquiries made in France during the war,” she objected. “Just as quickly as in peace time,” he retorted. Sceptical and sad the petitioner returned home. But in a day or two she was summoned to the Kommandantur and informed that her statement had been verified, her mother lay ill – the malady was mentioned – and she was permitted to go. The Germans have eyes and ears in all the countries of their adversaries.
One can readily imagine the painful kind of questions that will arise in the mind of an intelligent ally who realizes for the first time how great are the inventive and organizing talents of the Teuton, how unswerving his resolve, how tenacious he is of purpose, and how unconscious most of us still are of the need of bestirring ourselves to compete with him on terms of equality. The German’s striving is one, but all-embracing. His means are countless, for they are restricted by no limitations. In his search for tools and agents he enters into human nature, but not in its entire compass; only into the baser parts, so that his estimate is often erroneous and his expectations are unfulfilled. But even when ample deduction has been made for these failures, the odds remaining in his favour are formidable, and will continue undiminished unless and until we realize our plight, shuffle off the cramping coils of conservatism, insularity and self-complacency and brace ourselves to the most strenuous, the most painful effort we have ever yet put forth. On our capacity to effect this inward change, rather than upon any diplomatic arrangements, depends the issue of the struggle which will begin when military and naval hostilities have come to an end.
CHAPTER XX
PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE
Plain though these facts are, the Entente nations, and in particular the British people, either ignore them wholly or misinterpret their purport. Hence we continue absorbed in the pursuit of interests, parochial and parliamentary, which though quite human, are utterly off the line of racial and imperial progress. We obstinately shut our eyes to the magnitude of the Sphinx question that confronts us, and we address ourselves to one – and that the least important – of its many facets, and content ourselves with tackling that. We descant upon the turpitude of the Teuton who from the regions of idealism in which Goethe, Herder and their contemporaries dwelt has sunk into shift, treason and murder, and we proclaim our faith in the ultimate triumph of right, justice and of the democracy in which alone they flourish. But this frame of mind, which moves us to identify ourselves with all that is best in humanity, if cultivated will prove fatal. It accustoms us to dangerous hallucinations. We assume that we are the chosen people, and we neglect the virtues which alone would justify our election. For generations we have been reaping and wasting, instead of ploughing and sowing. We have been living on our capital, nay, on our credit, and have long since overdrawn our account. Our successes in the past, sometimes the result of fortuitous circumstances, more often of the blunders of our rivals, inspire a presumptuous confidence in successes for the future and a conviction that come what may we are destined to muddle through. A special providence is watching over us – a cousin German to the Kaiser’s “good old God.” In truth we are tempting Fate, postulating an exception to the law of cause and effect, and looking for Hebrew miracles in the twentieth century after Christ.
Were it otherwise, the nation would not have continued to entrust its destinies to the men who misguided it consistently and perseveringly for so many years, to the watchmen who saw nothing of the rocks and sandbanks ahead which it was their function to discern and their duty to avoid, and who are now unwittingly but effectually deluding the people into believing that the present campaign, which is but a single episode in a long-spun-out contest, is an independent event which began in August 1914 and may end this year or the next. These same leaders are busily inculcating the delusive notion that the diplomatic instrument which will one day close hostilities will be a treaty of peace. And they are seemingly prepared to negotiate its terms on that assumption.
In truth, we are engaged in a duel which began thirty years ago, gave the Germans such booty as Heligoland, their world-trade, their wealth, their formidable navy, their Baghdad Railway, their various overseas colonies, their European Allies, and the enormous resources with which when this acute phase of the contest is over they will re-transfer the venue to the economic and political domains and carry on the struggle with greater vigour than before. And peace terms concluded on any other supposition cannot be conducive to the national welfare. We are locked in a deadly embrace with a compact people of 120,000,000, of indomitable spirit, boundless resources, unquenchable faith and a single aim. Yet we are already looking forward to the time in the near future when our intercourse, however circumscribed, with this nation will be essentially pacific, and when we can revert to our cherished narrow interests and our easy-going dilettantism. We feed upon the hope that in a few brief years the British nation will have got safely back to its old beaten grooves, and not only business and sport but everything else will go on as usual. Yet all the salient facts which force themselves on our attention to-day, all the decisive events of the past thirty years are cogent proofs of the unbroken sequence of a trial of strength which the future historian and the present statesman, if there be one, must characterize as a life-and-death struggle between the champions of the new Teuton politico-social ordering and the partisans of the old. But after the lapse of a generation and with the record of all our losses before us, we have not yet formed a right conception of the situation, and its issues, or of the historic forces at work. In these circumstances, no degree of sagacity can help us to devise the only policy in which salvation resides. The prevailing mistaken conception must be rectified before any headway can be made against the currents that are fast bearing us down. And the time at our disposal is brief.
It needs few words to characterize the effects which the dreamy optimism of the Entente nations had on their method of mobilizing their resources to carry on the war. Taken unawares they had nothing ready. Misapprehending the nature of the issues and the redoubtable character of the contest, they pursued subordinate aims with insufficient means. The most daring strategical moves of the enemy, in war as in diplomacy, they ridiculed as either bluff or madness. The journalistic campaign in neutral countries they scoffed at as vain, and put their faith in the final triumph of truth. Their financial measures, oscillating from one extreme to another, denoted the absence of any settled plan, of any clear-cut picture of the needs of the moment. The odds in their favour, which circumstance had given and circumstance might take away again, they looked upon as inalienable, until they ended by forfeiting them all. Viewing the campaign as a transient event, the British Government prosecuted it by means of make-shifts, instead of radical measures. Obligatory service was scouted at as un-English. Discriminating customs tariffs were condemned as heretical. It was not until the enemy had occupied Poland, overrun Serbia, driven the Allied troops from the Dardanelles, bent Montenegro to the yoke, threatened Egypt, Riga and Petrograd, that some rays of light penetrated the atmosphere of ignorance and prejudice through which the Allies surveyed the European welter. They had begun by counting upon the breaking up of the Habsburg Monarchy. They felt sure that the Tsar’s armies would capture Budapest and advance on Berlin. They planned the defeat of Germany by famine. They built another fabric of hopes on “Kitchener’s Great Army” in the spring of 1915. But one after another these anticipations were belied by events. And now the nation blithely accepts the further forecasts of the men who are chargeable with this long sequence of avoidable errors.
Respect for individual liberty was carried to such a point in Great Britain that organizations against recruiting were tolerated in England and Ireland, and strikes, which not only inflicted heavy pecuniary losses on the nation but actually stopped its supplies of munitions and brought it within sight of discomfiture, were treated with soft words and immediate concessions. One cannot read even Mr. Lloyd George’s summary narrative of the preposterous doings of British slackers without wondering whether salvation is still possible. These men not only refused to work their best for the community, but forbade their comrades to work well. At Enfield, we are told, a man was obliged by trade union regulations so to regulate his work that he did not earn more than 1s. an hour, though he could easily have earned 2s. 6d.118 Another man was doing two and a half days’ work in two days, and when he refused to carry out the behest of the Ironfounders’ Board to waste the other half day he was fined £1.119 A consequence of this anti-national attitude was that “we had to wait for weeks in Birmingham with machinery lying idle, with our men without rifles, with our men with a most inadequate supply of machine guns to attack the enemy and defend themselves.”120 Every one will re-echo the Minister’s comment on the outlook, if this attitude is persisted in – “we are making straight for disaster.”
Compare this state of things with that which rules in Germany. It is a British Minister who describes it: “If you want to realize what organized labour in this war means, read the story of the last twelve months. By the end of September the German armies were checked. They sustained an overwhelming defeat in France, Russia was advancing against them towards the Carpathians, and I believe in East Prussia. That is not the case to-day. Why? The German workmen came in; organized labour in Germany prepared to take the field. They worked and worked quietly, persistently, continuously, without stint or strife, without restriction for months and months, through the autumn, through the winter, through the spring. Then came that avalanche of shot and shell which broke the great Russian armies and drove them back. That was the victory of the German workmen.”121
Great Britain is the classic land of strikes. Strikers are sacred among us. Industrial compulsion is rank heresy.
That is one of our difficulties, and by no means the least formidable. The nation, despite the superb example of patriotic heroism given by all classes, parties, provinces and colonies of the Empire, is still deficient in cohesiveness. No fire of enthusiasm has yet burned fiercely enough among all sections of the Empire and all members of the race to fuse them in such a compact unified organism as we behold in the Teuton’s Fatherland. Read the characteristic given of us by the ex-German Minister Dernburg, and say whether it is over-coloured. Discoursing on the difficulties which Britain has to cope with in carrying on the war, he says: “They are intensified … by the narrow-minded customs of the English trade unions, which contrast with the patriotic behaviour of the German associations of the like nature as night contrasts with day.”122 This is melancholy reading for those whose hopes are fervent for a bright future of the British race, and it prepares them to listen in anxious silence to the general conclusion at which the Prussian ex-Minister arrives: “It is in the highest degree improbable,” he says, “that after the winding up of this contest England will be able to keep or wield any form of economic superiority whatever over Germany.”
In our Allies we find a strong touch of resemblance to ourselves. Their state of unpreparedness is amazing, if less desperate than ours. Russia, it is true, did much better at the outset than friend or foe anticipated, and she might have done quite well if only she had been supplied with munitions. But she had not nearly enough, and her armies were slaughtered like sheep in consequence. Then there were no boots for the soldiers, who were forced to wear thin canvas leggings with leather soles. And scores of waggon-loads of incapacitated men were taken to Petrograd and other cities whose feet had been frozen for lack of shoe-leather. One of the urgent wants of the Tsardom are railways, which the late Count Witte was so eager to construct. When hostilities opened, the insufficiency of communications became one of the decisive factors in Russia’s disasters. And it was heightened by the conduct of, shall we say, the prussianized officials,123 who are reported to have disposed of waggons for large sums to greedy merchants, who used to raise the prices of the merchandise and batten on the misery of their fellows.
Trains, needed to supply the fighting men at the front with food and the wounded at the rear with medicaments, were kept back to suit the schemes of these greedy cormorants. Gratuities, it is openly affirmed, had to be paid by Red Cross and other officers to those subordinate railway servants who had it in their power to send on a train or shunt it off for days on a side-track. Bribery is working havoc in the Tsardom. In January 1916 the Moscow municipality discussed the advisability of voting a certain sum of money and putting it at the disposal of the chief officer of the city, to be discreetly employed in transactions with complacent railway officials, in order to further the work of reducing prices on necessaries of life. The motive adduced for this homœopathic way of treating a social distemper were the conditions of life in Russia and the necessity of complying with them. But as the Statute Book does not recognize these conditions and condemns bribery absolutely, a vote on the subject was not taken.124
Acting on instructions issued by the Finance Minister, a Member of the Council of the Finance Ministry, D. I. Zassiadko, visited the Kharkoff circuit for the purpose of studying the bribery problem on the spot. M. Zassiadko acquired the conviction “on the spot” that the railway officials do really take bribes, “and even of considerable amounts.” But, that ascertained, the representative of the Ministry decided to delve deeper to the root of the matter. And he reached the conclusion that railway servants belong to the class of the tempted. The evil, he reported, resides not in the circumstance that they take bribes, but that bribes are offered whereby these weak little souls are seduced. The representative of the Ministry discovered an entire category of bribes which do not bear the signs of extortion, but only of “gratitude.” To us this conclusion sounds somewhat naïve. The most widely circulated journal of Petrograd prefaces an article on the subject as follows.125
“The misdeeds of the officials and bribery on the railway system cry out to heaven,” writes the organ of the Constitutional Democrats. “Compared with the reverses on the Carpathians and in Poland, the defeats we are sustaining in our own house and behind the enemy’s back are much greater…” On the important line Petrograd-Moscow-Perm scandalous cases of corruption took place in which, according to Russian journals, officials of a class who might reasonably be regarded as unbribable were implicated. They are alleged to have let out to firms of speculators for large sums of money, goods waggons which were already destined to carry consignments to the front.126 Russia’s purchases abroad have made a profound impression on the peoples in whose midst they were effected. The principles on which these transactions were carried on provoked lively comments. It is not that they revealed a superlative degree of disorganization. That touch would have merely marked the kinship of the men concerned with their allies. By the discovery that the Russian Government’s purchasing Commissioners, the representatives of one of its embassies, the agents of the British Government and the equally zealous agents of the French Government were all secretly bidding against each other for the same rifles to be delivered to the Tsar’s Ministers, only a smile of recognition was elicited. It may have seemed at once amusing and consolatory to find that all were tarred with the same brush. But when it was discovered that the offer of certain army necessaries was put off for weeks and weeks, although they were to be had under cost price, and was then accepted at a much higher price, profound sympathy was felt for the Tsar’s armies.
Chaos, waste and a variety of abuses that pressed heavily on the poorer classes marked the efforts made by the Russian Government to cope with the scarcity of fuel, corn and other necessaries which began to be felt soon after the war. The rolling stock, it was complained, was utterly insufficient, yet it was found possible to transport 1,000,000 poods127 weight of mineral water of doubtful quality. When trains arrived bringing supplies to the suffering population, it turned out that there were no hands to unload the waggons. And when labour was requisitioned, vehicles were not to be had. In October 1915 on the rails of Moscow station five thousand waggons, laden with life’s necessaries, stood waiting and waiting in vain for the unskilled labour which ought to have been abundant, considering the number of the population and of the refugees. At the same time 2000 waggons were on the rails of the Petrograd station, their contents lying unutilized.128 It is only by the lack of order and organization that one can explain the facts that in Petrograd the inhabitants have no butter, while in the places where butter is made it is being sold cheaper than before, at 12 in lieu of 16 to 18 roubles a pood. In the province of Ekaterinograd, mines which own 800,000 poods of coal cannot get more than a few waggon loads of it every month.
Russia has incomparably more than enough fuel, without importing any, to satisfy all the needs of her 180,000,000 inhabitants. But owing to the insufficiency of communications, and still more to the lack of forethought and enterprise, the population of many cities and towns underwent serious hardships in consequence of the impossibility of acquiring coal or wood. In September 1915 the Petrograd region could obtain no more than 65 per cent. of the necessary quantity, and a month later only 49 per cent. In Moscow the plight of the inhabitants was worse. In September they could get but 26 per cent. of their needs and in October 40 per cent. According to the Minister of Commerce, who volunteered these data, the condition of the towns of Rostoff, Novotcherkassk, Nakhitchevan, Taganrog, Ekaterinodar and others was not a whit better. The city of Vyatka was, according to the Novoye Vremya,129 in January 1916 without fuel, while the mercury registered 30 degrees Reaumur below freezing-point. The unfortunate citizens heated their homes with fragments of hoardings, tables, desks and stools. And yet there is abundant fuel in the superb forests with which Vyatka is surrounded, and, what is more to the point, the city authorities had received during the preceding spring 60,000 roubles for the purpose of purchasing a supply of wood for the winter. But they did nothing, organization not being one of their strong points.
Live stock in Russia has diminished during the war to a much larger extent than was anticipated. The peasantry, owing to the prohibition of alcohol, now consume from 150 to 200 per cent. more meat than before, and what with the refugees from Poland, the prisoners of war and the increased needs of the army, no less than 20 per cent. of the cattle of the entire Empire was used during the first eighteen months130 and 30 per cent. of the stock of all European Russia. In consequence of the shortage and of the irregularity of the transport, three days of abstinence from meat were ordained. Yet in January 1916 a discovery was casually made in the Kieff forests between Byelitch and Pushtsha Voditzka, which caused considerable lifting of the eyebrows. About 8000 head of cattle and several thousand sheep were found with no cowherds, shepherds or owners, wandering about from place to place. Scores of them were succumbing to hunger and cold every day. The paths in the woods were covered with the dead bodies of kine, calves and sheep. The journal which records this fact affirms that these herds belong to the Union of Zemstvos, which had purchased them from the peasants who had to flee from the occupied provinces. The President of the Union of Zemstvos is said to have confirmed this odd story with the qualification that the forlorn horned cattle and sheep are the property not of the Union of Zemstvos, but of the Ministry of Agriculture, which is alone answerable.131
The card system of distributing provisions that are scarce found its way first into Germany and then into Austria and Russia. But in the last-named empire it was much less successful than in the two first mentioned. According to the Petrograd journals in Pskoff, where it was tried, many individuals got no cards, and therefore no provisions. Many who possessed the cards found nothing to buy. And some of those who obtained the articles they wanted paid dearer for them than if they had bought them without cards. And as with cards one has to lay in a stock to last a fortnight, the poorer families were unable to utilize them.132
In France, as well as in Russia, the professional organizers, especially the civilians, were very much adrift. In the army all the sterling qualities of the French nation at its best, and many that were deemed extinct, but are now seen to have been only dormant, shone forth resplendent. Valour, fortitude, staying power, self-abnegation for the common good, became household virtues. Friends and foes were equally surprised. But the civil administration remained well-meaning, patriotic and unregenerate to the last. The old Adam lived and acted up to his reputation.
Before the war the French railway administration had been criticized severely. It is not for a foreigner to express an opinion on the internal ordering of a country not his own, but unbiassed French experts found that the strictures were called for and the verdict, in which the public acquiesced, was well grounded. Subsequently, when the struggle began and the railway system was tested, people had reason to remember the previous complaints, for they saw how little had been done in the meanwhile to remove the causes of dissatisfaction. The first drawback was the want of rolling stock. “Give us waggons and we will execute all orders and supply the War Ministry,” cried the munitions firms. “There are no waggons in the ports, and we cannot get the coal delivered,” exclaimed the importers. “The country is threatened with general paralysis,” wrote the Journal;133 “we can neither forward nor sell anything.” The railway administration asked for a fortnight’s notice, then for three weeks and finally an indefinite period, before it could provide a single truck. “I have fertilizing stuff to forward before the season is past,” pleads the representative of one firm. “We have no waggons,” is the reply. “I must have my produce delivered at once to the Government,” argues another, “for it is wanted for the fabrication of powder.” But the answer came promptly: “There are no waggons.” “But you have waggons. I see them over there” (the station was Cognac). “Yes, but we may not touch them. They belong to the military engineering department.” “Well, but what are they doing there?” “Ah, that is none of our business.”134
And in the ports, at the termini, at intermediate stations, the merchandise lay heaped up, immobilized, while the merchants, the middlemen, the manufacturers, the Government, the army were waiting, time was lapsing, and the fate of the Republic and the nation hanging in the balance. At Havre great machines, destined for a Paris firm which was to have delivered them to factories making shells, lay untouched for two months. The number of shells lost in this way has never been calculated. Yet it was well known that during all that time there were numbers of waggons available. What had become of them? The answer was: They are to be found everywhere, immobilized. It is a case of general immobilization of the rolling stock. People slept in them, turned them into cottages, used them as warehouses, each individual reasoning that one waggon more or less would not be missed. And as this argument was used by large numbers of easy-going, well-meaning people the result was appalling.
The most terrific war known to history was raging in three Continents, and one group of belligerents, unaware or heedless of the magnitude of the issues, kept wasting its enormous resources and throwing away its advantages. At the little station of Cognac waggons laden with all kinds of war materials, barbed wire, galvanized wire, etc., were detained from September 1914 until November 1915, 400 days in all, doing nothing. Forty-two waggons ready to move were found on two grass-covered rails. Fourteen waggons were there since September 1914. Eight since December of the same year, twenty since June. Altogether at the modest little station of Cognac the total recorded by Senator Humbert’s Journal was 228,500 tons-days. “All this during the most tremendous war the world has ever witnessed, in which hundreds of thousands of men have been slain, where we have continually been short of war material, while industry and commerce are agonizing for lack of means of transport. It may well seem a dream.”135