during those early days the chief interest of our life lay in the insight it gave into the conditions and psychology of the german people. for nearly four years we had been at war with this nation, and yet we knew practically nothing about it. for four years an iron screen had been drawn between us and them. all the information that we received came to us through the filtering places of many censorships. we were told only what the authorities wished us to be told; and of the countless activities of germany, report reached us of none that could bring credit to any nation but our own. but now we were able to converse freely with german officers and soldiers, and form our own opinion as to their attitude towards us.
of course this opinion is subject to numberless qualifications. even from the highest{92} window of the citadel only a limited view can be obtained of a country that has been the subject of so much calumny and conjecture. our impressions were confined to one province and one town in that province; they cannot be said to represent the mentality of germany as a whole; and of the five hundred officers confined within the barracks, each individual has brought home with him a different idea of germany and the germans.
and again, it may be that personally i have been rather fortunate in my experiences. baden-hessen is one of the least prussianised provinces in germany, and officer prisoners of war are treated a great deal better than the men. but i do believe that the conversations i had with various germans, both soldiers and civilians, give a fairly accurate index to the attitude of a large number of the enemy.
what came as the greatest surprise to me personally was the absence, to a considerable extent, of all vindictiveness and hate.{93} evidence goes to prove that there was in the early months of the war a good deal of collective hate; and as a relic of this there were in the shops picture postcards of sinking battleships headed “gott strafe england,” and the cartoons in the illustrated papers such as simplicissimus and the lustige bl?tter were all to the tune of “my baton drips with blood.” but the frankfurter zeitung, which is the representative paper of that part of the country, was absolutely free from articles headed “the english beast” or “the devilish briton.” it afforded an ideal example of journalistic continence.
and it was the same with their poetry and literature. there was much verse inspired by the same violence as “the hymn of hate.” there were numberless sonnets starting off, “england, du perfides land,” and it is only this sort of stuff that we have been allowed to read in england. this is the standard by which the germans have been judged, and it presents them in a very false light. for after all, if the “hate” verse{94} that is scattered throughout the english press were to be taken as representative of the ideals and the aspirations of the race, we should show up none too well. for with the majority, no sooner does a man try to put his thoughts into words, than he loses his bearings. he does not write what he feels, but what he thinks he should feel. all that is genuine in him is inarticulate, and the obvious rises to the surface. and it has followed that in the last four years there has been an incredible quantity of bad verse written and very little good. but that little good is the key to the english temperament. the secret longings of the individual have been revealed not in the type of poem that goes—
“we mean to thrash these prussian pups,
we’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old krupps,
we loathe them all, the dirty swine,
we’ll drown the whole lot in the rhine.”
they have found their expression in the deep and sincere emotion of such poems as “not dead,” by robert graves, j. c.{95} squire’s “the bulldog,” robert nichols’s “fulfilment,” and siegfried sassoon’s “in the pink.”
and working from this basis, it is surely more just to judge germany less by the cheap vehemence of lissauer than by those quiet poems that, hidden away among pages of opprobrium and rhetoric, enshrine far more truthfully those emotions that have lingered in the heart of the suffering individual from the very beginning of time.
there is a poem on a captured trench that opens with a brief word-picture of the scene, the squalor, the battered parapet, the dead men. “over this trench,” the poet continues—
“over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears.
pain is pain always,
and courage is true wheresoever it may be found.
and in the hearts of our enemy were both these things....
that we must not forget;
germany must love even with the sword that kills.”
that sentiment is universal, it contains the complete tragedy of conquest.{96}
and indeed for the individual soldier war is the same under whatever standard he may fight. german militarism may have been the aggressive factor, but the individual did not know it. unless a people feels its cause to be just, it will not enter into the lists. if it is the aggressor, then that people must be hoodwinked. the victory lust of 1914 was a collective emotion springing from the german temperament and from their belief that they were in the right. the individual soldier went to battle with feelings not too far removed from our own.
“the war was a crusade to us then,” a german professor said to me; “we felt that france and russia had been steadily preparing war for years. we felt that they were only awaiting an opportunity. the russians mobilised long before we did. they drove us to it.”
it was in that spirit, he told me, that the german volunteer armed himself in august 1914.
“but of course,” he said, “it didn’t last long. the glamour went soon enough. and{97} now, well, all we want is that the war should cease.”
and in the spring of 1918 the individual outlook in many ways resembled that of france and england. there was the same talk of profiteers, of the men who dreaded the cessation of hostilities, of the ministers who were clinging to office. there was the old talk of those who had not suffered in the war. it was all very well for the rich, they could buy butter, they did not have to starve. they managed to find soft jobs behind the lines. they did not want the war to stop. indeed, the resentment against the “shirkers” and “profiteers” was more acute than the hatred of the allies. for after all, emotions like love and hate are not collective. one can only hate the thing one knows.
and from conversations with this german professor emerged the spiritual odyssey of his nation. the change from enthusiasm came apparently very quickly; probably because the alliance suffered so heavily in{98} loss of life, and because its internal troubles were so great. the war weariness had not taken long to settle; for many months peace had seemed the only desirable end, and victory in the field was regarded as important only in as far as it appeared the safest road to this goal. victory qua victory they no longer desired.
this the imperialists and pan-germans must have realised, and they had made it their business to persuade their people that without victory peace was impossible. a significant illustration of this is afforded by the change of catchword, as displayed on public notices. below some of the early photographs of the crown prince was printed “durch kampf zum sieg”—“through battle to victory,” and this represented the early attitude; but by the time that we had arrived in germany this had been changed. on many of the match-boxes was a picture of a soldier and a munition worker shaking hands, and beneath was written, “durch arbeit zum sieg: durch sieg zum frieden.”{99}
this was what the imperialists had to keep before the people if they wished to retain their office and their ambitions. the people were no longer prepared to sacrifice themselves for some abstract conception of glory and honour. they wanted peace, and as long as their armies were able to conquer in the field they were prepared to believe that that was the way to peace. but if their hopes proved unfounded, they were in a state of readiness to seek what they wanted by other means.
it was no longer “zum sieg” but “durch sieg”; and in view of what has since happened, i think, this is an important thing to grasp.
