It may be that, in this war, the military leaders, not on the German side alone, were not masters of the situation. For the first time the war was literally a war of masses, of whole peoples, a democratic war if the term is not inappropriate. It would almost seem that, in democratic war, the leader of an immense host cannot take decisions by himself but has to consult other leaders, since battles and the war as a whole can only be won by the coordination of separate armies. Voltaire wrote long ago that the biggest armies can do nothing big, that they neutralize each other, and that such war brings naught save woe to peoples. In high degree this is true of the world war.
But the defeat of Germany was not due to military deficiencies alone. As Clausewitz rightly said, war is the pursuit of political ends by other means; and the whole German estimate of the situation in Europe and in the world, and even of the situation in Germany, was wrong. The pan-German scheme—the German army and its corps of officers were pan-German in tendency—was erudite, but of dubious quality. The Germans miscalculated the balance of forces, political, military and economic; they over-estimated themselves and their allies and under-estimated their foes. At the outset they under-estimated England and, until the last moment, they disbelieved obstinately in the military mobilization of America. By experiments they proved to their own satisfaction that the Americans could not cross the Atlantic; and in their own imagination they exaggerated the power of submarines, of which, in any case, they had too few. The way they deceived themselves about Austria is almost incomprehensible, for they must have seen, at a very early stage in Galicia and Serbia, how incapable the Austrian commanders were. To my mind, the campaign against Italy likewise reveals the incapacity of Austria, and of Germany too; for a better and more vigorous leader of the Austro-Hungarian and German troops would have utilized Northern Italy more effectively against France. On the Allied side only the French and, to some extent, the Italians were in a position to take the field with armies already organized on the basis of compulsory military service and animated by military traditions, whereas the British and American armies were largely improvised—conclusive proof of the inefficacy of Prussian militarism. Even in a military sense, absolutist monarchism was defeated by democracy.
Nor did the Germans take the industrial supremacy of the
