was to lead to. I felt instinctively that it must end disastrously, and the effect which it produced upon me as a member of a small and neighbouring nation was a disturbing one.
I attributed the conditions in Germany to the non-political and herdlike character of the German people, their inadequate training in democracy, the lack of a revolutionary spirit in German Socialism, and the proneness to empty mechanical doctrinairism which never fully conformed with the demands of life and was either a convenient pretext for not doing anything practical or else led to a blind and fanatical pursuit of an idée fixe.
Thus I reached the study of Pan-Germanism, its theory and practice. In a theoretical respect I was interested by Lagarde, Treitschke, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (and through him by Gobineau), while on the practical side I turned to Rohrbach, Rüdiger, and various Pan-German pamphleteers. I wondered what were the effects of the propaganda carried on by Rohrbach’s group, which in hundreds of thousands of leaflets, booklets, and pamphlets popularized the Berlin-Bagdad scheme and demanded not only the development of the fleet, but also a large supply of aircraft.(2) In the pamphlets issued by Counsellor Martin during 1908 it was shown, for example, by diagrams, how, when, and within what time a German air fleet could land hundreds of thousands of troops near London, and how quickly it could transport similar forces to Constantinople, Bagdad, and the Persian Gulf. These matters both bewildered and provoked me, compelling me to reflect upon the political future of Germany, to make careful comparisons with what I had seen in England and France, and to occupy myself with the problems of war. Such, in general terms, is a synthesis of the external political impressions, with a direct or indirect bearing upon the war, which I brought back with me from my travels.
On the whole I became attached to France because of the tradition of the great revolution; the broad perspectives of its national history; its love for liberty of thought; for the fullness of its cultural life; for the abundance of its philosophical, scientific, literary, and artistic culture; for its traditional humanitarian, universal, and cosmopolitan tendency, which sought a genuine cult of humanity. I was also enormously attracted by the idealistic and revolutionary impulse underlying the social
B
