Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Speaking of Prussians–
XI
But fifty or a hundred miles away on German soil, among the home-biding populace, was a different story. It was there I found out about Kultur. It was there I first began to realise that, not content with assuming a direct and intimate partnership with Providence, civilian Germany was taking Providence under its patronage, was remodelling its conceptions of Deity to be purely and solely a German Deity.
That more or less ribald jingle called "Me und Gott!" aimed at the Kaiser and frequently repeated in this country a few years before, had, in the face of what we now beheld, altogether lost the force of its one-time humorous application. As we appraised the prevalent sentiment, it had, in the sober, serious consciousness of otherwise sane men and women, become the truth and less than the truth.
Any Christian race, going to war in what it esteems to be a righteous cause, prays to God to bless its campaigns with victory and to sustain its arms with fortitude. It had remained for this Christian race to assume that the God to whom they addressed their petitions was their own peculiar God, and that His Kingdom on Earth was Germany and Germany only; and that His chosen people now and forevermore would be Germans and Germans only.
This is not a wild statement. Trustworthy evidence in support of it will presently be offered.
We met some weirdly interesting persons during our enforced sojourn there in Aix la Chapelle in September and October of that year. There was, for example, the invalided officer who never spoke of England or the English that he did not grind his teeth together audibly. I have never yet been able to decide whether this was a bit of theatricalism designed to make more forcible than the words he uttered his detestation for the country which, most of all, had balked Germany in her designs upon France and upon the mastery of the seas – a sort of dental punctuation for his spoken anathemas, as it were – or whether it was an involuntary expression of his feelings. In either event he grated his teeth very loudly, very frequently and very effectively.
There was the young German petty officer, also on sick leave, who told me with great earnestness and professed to believe the truth of it that two captured English surgeons had been summarily executed because in their surgical kits had been found instruments especially designed for the purpose of gouging out the eyes of wounded and helpless Germans.
And there was the spectacled scientist-author-spy, who dropped in on two of us one morning at the hotel where we were quartered, and who thereafter favoured us at close intervals with many hours of his company. It was from this person more than from any other that I acquired what I believed to be a fairly adequate conception of the views held then and thereafter and now by an overwhelming majority of educated Prussians, trained in the Prussian school of thought and propaganda.
I cannot now recall this person's name, though I knew it well at the time; but I do recall his appearance. He was tall and slender, with red hair; a lean, keen intellectual face; and a pair of weak, pale-blue eyes, looking out through heavy convex glasses. He spoke English, French and Danish with fluency. He had been a world traveller and had written books on the subject of travel, which he showed us. He had been an inventor of electrical devices and had written at least one book on the subject of electric-lighting development. He had been an amateur photographer of some note evidently, and had written rather extensively on that subject.
His present employment was not so easily discerned, though it was quite plain that, like nearly every intelligent civilian in that part of Germany, he was engaged upon some service more or less closely related to the military and governmental activities of the empire. He wore the brassard of the Red Cross on his arm, it is true, but apparently had nothing really to do with hospital or ambulance work. And he had at his disposal a military automobile, in which he made frequent and more or less extended excursions into the occupied territory of France and Belgium.
After one or two visits from him we decided that, by some higher authority, he had been assigned to the dual task of ascertaining our own views regarding Germany's part in the conflict and of influencing our minds if possible to accept the views he and his class held. He may have had an even more important mission; we thought sometimes that he perhaps was doing a little espionage work, either on his own account or under orders, because he began to seek our company about the time we noted a cessation of clumsy activities on the part of those two preposterously mysterious sleuths of the German Secret Service who, until then, had been watching us pretty closely.
Be this as it may, he manifested a gentlemanly but persistent curiosity regarding our observations and regarding the articles which he knew we were writing for American consumption. And meantime he lost no opportunity of preaching into our ears the theories and the dogmas of his Prussianized Kultur.
I remember that, on almost his first call upon us, either my companion or myself remarked upon the united and the whole-hearted devotion the civilian populace of the province, from the youngest to the oldest, exhibited for the German cause. Instantly his posture changed. From the polite interviewer he turned into the zealot who preaches a holy cause. His lensed eyes became pallid blue sparks; and he said:
"Surely – and why not? For forty-odd years we have been educating our people to believe that only through war and through conquest could our nation achieve its place in the sun – elbowroom for its industrial and its spiritual development. Germany is a giant – the giant of the universe and she must have breathing space; and only by the swallowing up of smaller states can she get that breathing space. Almost at the mother's breast we teach our babies that. Do you know, my friends, what the first question is, in the first primer of geography, which German children hear when they enter school?
"No? Then I will tell you. The first question is 'What is Germany?' And the answer is 'My Fatherland – a country entirely surrounded by Enemies!'
"So you see, gentlemen, we start at the cradle and at the kindergarten to teach our young people what it means to live with Russia on one side of them and with France and Belgium and Britain on the other. They cannot forget for one instant the task that lies before them. Their educators – parents, teachers, pastors, military instructors, officials of every rank and every grade – never let them forget it."
XII
Even more illuminating were his views with regard to the position of Germany in Europe before the war began. He admitted that for years, by the neighbour-peoples, Germany had been feared and distrusted. This, he insisted, was not Germany's fault, but a fear and a distrust born of envy and malice among deteriorated and decaying nations for a land which, so far as Europe, at least, was concerned, was the mother of all the virtues and all the great benevolent impulses of the century. He denied that Germany had ever been overbearing or threatening; denied that anything except jealousy could lie at the back of the general suspicion directed against Prussia, not only by aliens but – before the war began – by Bavaria and by Saxony as well.
"Germany," he said to me one day, "has earned the right to rule this Hemisphere; and Germany is going to rule it! When we have conquered our enemies, as conquer them we shall – when we have implanted among them our own German culture, our own German institutions and our own German form of government, which surely we also shall do – they will, in succeeding generations, be the better and the happier for it. They will come to know, then, that the guns of our fleets and the rifles of our soldiers brought them blessings in disguise. Out of their present sufferings and their future humiliations will spring up the benefits of German civilisation.
"At first they may not want to accept our German civilisation. They will have to accept it – at the point of the bayonet if necessary. If it is required that these petty lesser states should be exterminated altogether, we shall not hesitate before that task either. They are decadents, dying now of dry rot and degeneracy; better that they should be dead altogether than that the spread of German Kultur through the world should be checked or diverted from its course. We shall teach the world that the individual exists for the good of the state, rather than that the state exists for the individual."
To the miseries that had been inflicted upon Belgium, and which he himself had had opportunity to view at first hand, he gave no heed – this scholarly pundit-preacher of the tenets of Prussianism. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the question of the rights and wrongs of the German invasion of Belgium. He wasted no sympathy upon Louvain, sacked and pillaged and burned, or upon Dinant, razed to the ground for the most part, and with seven hundred of its male inhabitants put to death on one slaughter-day in punitive punishment for acts of guerrilla warfare alleged to have been committed by civilians against Germans coming upon them in uniform.
Yet I do not think that, in most of the relations of life, he was a cruel or even an unkind man. He merely saw Belgium through glasses made in Germany. He explained his attitude substantially after this fashion, as I now recall the sense and the phrasing of his words:
"What difference does it make to posterity that we have had to destroy a few hotbeds of ignorance and shoot a few thousand undisciplined, uneducated, turbulent persons? What difference though we may have to continue to destroy yet more Belgian towns and shoot yet more Belgian civilians? Ultimately the results of our operations are bound to redound to the greater glory of the Greater German Empire, which means European civilisation.
"My friend, do you know that nearly a quarter of the inhabitants of Belgium are illiterates, as you would put it in English —Unalphabets, as we Germans say? Well, that is true – a quarter of them can neither read nor write. In Germany only a fractional part of one per cent of our people are illiterate to that extent. We have taken Belgium by force of arms and we are never going to give it up. Already it is a province of the German Empire.
"When our lawgivers have followed our soldiers across the expanded frontiers of our Empire; when we have made the German language the language of annexed Belgium; when we have introduced our incomparably superior methods into all departments of Belgian life; when we have taught all the Belgians to speak the German tongue, and have required of them that they do speak it – then these Belgians, as Germans, will be better off than ever they could have been as Belgians. Never fear; we shall know how to handle them.
"With Alsace and Lorraine we were too mild for their own good. With Belgium we shall be stern; but we shall be just. It is the predestined fate of Belgium that she should become a German possession and a German territory. Geography and destiny both point the way for us, and we Germans never turn from the duties intrusted to us by our God and our Kaiser! We mean to teach these lesser peoples before we are through that the individual exists for the good of the State, not, as some of them profess to believe, that the State exists for the good of the individual."
