T. P. O'CONNOR
[T. P. here gives expression to his views on the German Nation and on the War and its issues.]
This Great War is to me not merely a fight between nations; it is even more a fight between ideals; it is a spiritual as well as a material fight. It is not enough that we beat down the armies of Germany and of Austria; that we shall do, though it take a long time, galleons of treasure, and oceans of blood. We have even more to beat down and destroy for ever the most pernicious, the most wicked and the most insane gospel that ever took possession of a nation and drove its people to the madness which precedes destruction.
Of the hundreds of articles I have read since this War began, the one which brought most light to me was a passage in a letter from Sir Valentine Chirol, in which he related a conversation he had had many years ago with the late Herr Bebel, the great leader of the Socialist party. This is the passage:
"About twenty years ago I was watching with Herr Bebel a Prussian regiment of Foot Guards marching out of the Brandenburg Gate at Berlin. The Socialist leader told me with some pride that more than half of them were probably Social Democrats. I asked him whether, in the event of war, that would make the slightest difference; and he replied to me quite frankly: 'No, I am afraid not the slightest. Nothing will happen until Germany has been sobered by a great military catastrophe. Das volk ist noch immer siegestrunken.' (The people are still drunk with victory.)"
Drunk with victory!—that is the most lucid and complete and terse summing up of the German state of mind which has ever appeared. We have had to deal for nearly half a century with a nation which was in a state of drunken, and therefore insane, megalomania. It is quite true that the whole nation, perhaps, did not share this gospel; Herr Bebel and
187
