The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Old German Adam
THE OLD GERMAN ADAM
It was the old historic story of German
duplicity, and the nations of Europe had no
excuse for being surprised. When the Prussian
Monarchy was first bestowed on the relatively
humble family of the Hohenzollerns, they found
their territory for the most part sterile, the soil
round Berlin and about Potsdam—the favourite
residence of the Margraves—a sandy desert that
could scarcely be made to yield a crop of rye or
oats, so they set themselves to enlarge and enrich
it by help of an army out of all proportion to the
size and importance of their State. The results
were inevitable. When war becomes the trade
of a separate class it is natural that they should
wish to pursue it at the first favourable opportunity
of conquest. That opportunity came to
Prussia when Charles VI died and the Archduchess
Maria Theresa succeeded to her father
by virtue of a law (the Pragmatic Sanction),
to which all the Powers of Europe had subscribed.
Frederick had subscribed to it. But, nevertheless,
in the name of Prussia, without any proper
excuse or even decent pretext, he took possession
of Silesia, thereby robbing the ally whom he had
bound himself to defend, and committing the same
great crime of violating his pledged word, which
Germany has now committed against Belgium.
But there was one difference between the outrages of 1740 and 1914. The great barrator made no hypocritical pretence of desiring peace. " Ambition, interest, the desire of making people talk about me carried the day, and I decided for war," he said. It was reserved for Harnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about the responsibilities of "Kultur" (that harlot of the German dictionary, debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom of heaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the old German Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of war with France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian frontier there was no thought of the Archduke Ferdinand or of the doddering old man on the Austrian throne, whose paternal heart had been sorely wounded. Germany was out to rob France of her colonies—to rob her, and the Germans knew it.
"A few centuries may have to run their course," said their own poet Goethe (who surely knew the German soul), "before it can be said of the German people, 'It is a long time since they were barbarians.'"
Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the war which took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not a theologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past of his country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a half before, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of man and God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young to remember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for the welfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have done so with searching and scorching eloquence, the voice of Bebel, had only just been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, in the last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a great nation being lured on to its moral death- agony amid canting appeals to the Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy.