Nothing in the history of the past four years has more clearly brought out the difference between the civilised and the savage view of war, than the record of the German U-boat campaign. All civilised men are agreed, and have for centuries been agreed, about war. In their view war may be unavoidable, in so far as all order and security are ultimately dependent on force; but it is a lamentable necessity, and when unnecessary—that is, when undertaken for any object whatever except defence against aggression or tyranny—it is an abominable thing, a violation of human nature. This view is not inconsistent with the plain truth that the act of fighting is often pleasurable in itself, and that, when fighting in a right spirit, men often reach heights of nobility which they would never attain in peaceful occupations.
The savage is in accord with this view on one point only. He has the primitive joy of battle in him; but he cares nothing for right or wrong, and his military power is exerted either wantonly, or with the object of plunder and domination. So long as he gratifies his selfish instincts, he does not care what happens to the rest of the human race, or to human nature. Civilised men have for centuries laid down rules of war,162 that human industry and human society might suffer only such damage as could not be avoided in the exercise of armed force; and above all, that human nature might not be corrupted by acts done or suffered in brutal violation of it. These rules of chivalry were not always kept, but by civilised nations they have never been broken without shame and repentance. Savage races sometimes have a rudimentary tradition of the kind—the less savage they. But, in general, they have a brute courage and a brute ferocity, without mercy or law; and the worst of all are those who, living in community with races of merciful and law-abiding ideals, have themselves never been touched by the spirit of chivalry, and have ended by making the repudiation of it into a national religion of their own.
It has long been a recognised characteristic of the British stock, all over the world, to regard a stout opponent with generous admiration, even with a feeling of fellowship; and to deal kindly with him when defeated. But this chivalry of feeling and conduct, now so widespread among us, is a spiritual inheritance and derived, not from our Teutonic ancestors, but from our conquest by French civilisation. It has never been shared by the Germans, or shown in any of their wars. Froissart remarked, five and a half centuries ago, on the difference between the French and English knights, who played their limited game of war with honour and courtesy, and the Germans, who had neither of those qualities. A century later, it is recorded of Bayard—‘Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’—that whenever he was serving in an army with a German contingent, he was careful to stay in billets till they had marched out, because of their habit of burning, when163 they left, the houses where they had found hospitality. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their barbarity was unbounded; the Thirty Years’ War was the lasting shame of Europe, and the Sack of Magdeburg a final example of the triumph of the wild swine in man. In the eighteenth century, Prussia produced a grotesque anticipation of Zulu ideals, and called its chief Frederick the Great. In the Napoleonic wars, the cruelty of his German allies disgusted the Iron Duke, who had commanded many ruffians and seen some appalling days of horror. In our own time, we have witnessed the brutal attacks on Denmark and Austria, the treachery of the Ems telegram, and the development of Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policy into the complete Machiavellism of Wilhelm II and his confederates. It is not a new character, the German; it is an old one, long inherited. Nemo repente fit Tirpissimas. If anyone doubts this, or wishes to doubt it, let him look through the criminal statistics of the German Government for the ten years preceding the War, and read the book of Professor Aschaffenburg, the chief criminologist of Germany, published in 1913. He will there find it stated and proved, that the most violent and abominable forms of crime were then prevalent in Germany, to a degree beyond all our experience—beyond all imagination of what was possible in a human community—and that the honest and patriotic writer himself regarded this ever-rising tide of savagery, among the younger generation, as ‘a serious menace to the moral stability of Europe.’ It is against this younger generation, with these old vices, that we have had to defend ourselves; and now that we have beaten them, now that the time has come when, if they had164 been clean fighters and fellow-men, every British hand would have been ready for their grip, we can but hold back with grave and temperate anger, and the recollection that we have first to safeguard the new world from those who have desolated and defiled the old.
Anger it must still be, however grave and temperate. Look at the conduct of the War, and especially at the conduct of the submarine war, as coolly and scientifically as you can, you will not find it possible to separate the purely military from the moral aspect. Technically, the Germans were making trial of a new weapon which it was difficult to use effectively under the old rules. They quickly determined, not to improve or adapt the weapon, but to abandon the rules. For this they were rightly condemned by the only powerful neutral opinion remaining in the world. But they not only broke the law, they broke it in German fashion. Their lawlessness, if skilfully carried out with the natural desire to avoid unnecessary suffering, might have been reduced to an almost technical breach, involving little or no loss of life. But they chose instead to exhibit to the world, present and to come, the spectacle of a whole Service practising murder under deliberate orders; and adding strokes of personal cruelty hitherto known only among madmen or merciless barbarians. Finally—and this concerns our future intercourse even more nearly—the German people at home, a nation haughtily claiming pre-eminence in all virtue, moral and intellectual, accepted every order of their ruling caste, and applauded every act of their hordes in the battle, however abhorrent to sane human feeling. In all this, we need make no accusations of our own; we have only to set out the facts, and the words with which the165 German people and their teachers received them and rejoiced in them.
It was towards the end of 1914 that the German Admiralty conceived the idea of blockading the British Isles by means of a submarine fleet. There were, as we have already seen, great difficulties in the way. For the pursuit and capture of commerce, a submarine is not nearly so well fitted as an ordinary cruiser; is not, in fact, well fitted at all. To hold up and examine a ship on the surface is too dangerous a venture for a frail boat with a very small crew; to put a prize crew on board, and send the captured vessel into port, is generally impossible. As an exception, and in case of extreme necessity, it has always been recognised that a prize may be sunk, if the crew and passengers are safely provided for; but this proviso, too, is almost impossible for a submarine to fulfil. Besides these technical difficulties, there was also the danger of offending neutral powers, especially if their ships were to be sunk without evidence that they were carrying contraband.
Under the advice of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, it was decided to defy all these risks and difficulties. The question was asked by him, just before Christmas 1914, ‘What would America say, if Germany should declare a submarine war against all enemy trading vessels?’ and on February 4, 1915, a formal proclamation followed from Berlin. This announced that the waters round Great Britain and Ireland were held to be a war-region, and that from February 18 ‘every enemy merchant-vessel found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’
166 No civilised Power had ever before threatened to murder non-combatants in this fashion; but there was even worse to come—the seamen of nations not at war at all were to take their chance of death with the rest. ‘Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war-region, where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.’ No ‘misuse of neutral flags’ has ever been ordered by our Government. The destruction of a merchant-vessel or liner without warning or search, is not an incident ‘inevitable in sea warfare’; it is an incident always avoided in any sea warfare except that waged by barbarians.
A fortnight later the sinkings began; and on March 9 three ships were torpedoed, without warning, in one day. In the case of one of these, the Tangistan, 37 men were killed or drowned out of the 38 on board. On March 15 the stewardess and five men of the Fingal were drowned. And on the 27th the crew of the Aguila were fired upon while launching their boats; three were killed and several more wounded. On the 28th, the Elder-Dempster liner, the Falaba, from Liverpool to South Africa, was stopped and torpedoed in cold blood. As the crew and passengers sank, the Germans looked on from the deck of the U-boat, laughing and jeering at their struggling victims, of whom 111 perished. ‘The sinking of the Falaba,’ said the New York Times, ‘is perhaps the most shocking crime of the War.’
It did not long remain unsurpassed. In April, the German Embassy at Washington publicly advertised that vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or her allies were liable to destruction, and that travellers167 sailing in them would do so at their own risk. Intending travellers smiled at this outrageous threat and went on booking their passages to Europe. Even when those about to sail in the huge liner Lusitania received anonymous telegrams, warning them that the ship would be sunk, no one believed that the Government of a great Power could seriously intend such a crime. Not a single berth was countermanded, and, on May 1, the Lusitania sailed from New York, carrying, besides her crew of 651, no less than 1,255 passengers.
On the morning of Friday, May 7, she made her landfall on the Irish coast. The sea was dangerously calm; but Captain Turner, wishing ‘to reach the bar at Liverpool at a time when he could proceed up the river without stopping to pick up a pilot,’ reduced speed to 18 knots, holding on the ordinary course. At 2 P.M. the Lusitania passed the Old Head of Kinsale; at 2.15 she was torpedoed without warning, and without a submarine having been sighted by anyone on board. Her main steam-pipe was cut, and her engines could not be stopped; she listed heavily to starboard, and while she was under way it was very difficult to launch the boats. At 2.36 she went down, and of the 1,906 souls on board, 1,134 went down with her, only 772 being saved in the boats which got clear.
This was, for the German Government and the German Navy, an unparalleled disgrace. The German nation had still the chance of repudiating such a crime. But they knew no reason for repudiating it; it was congenial to their long-established character, and differed only in concentrated villainy from the countless murders and brutalities which had troubled the criminologists before the War. The German people168 adopted the crime as their own act, and celebrated it with universal joy. ‘The news,’ said the well-known K?lnische Zeitung, ‘will be received by the German people with unanimous satisfaction, since it proves to England and the whole world, that Germany is quite in earnest in regard to her submarine warfare.’ The K?lnische Volkszeitung, a prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper, was even more delighted. ‘With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy, and it will not be the last.’ The two words ‘joyful’ and ‘pride’ are here the mark of true savagery. Only savages could be joyful over the horrible death of a thousand women, children, and non-combatants; only savages could feel pride in the act, for it was in no way a difficult or dangerous feat. But this half-witted wickedness is clearly recognised in Germany as the national ideal. In the midst of the general exultation, when medals were being struck, holidays given to school children, and subscriptions got up for the ‘heroic’ crew of the U-boat, Pastor Baumgarten preached on the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and gave his estimate of the German character in these words: ‘Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve, from the bottom of his heart, the sinking of the Lusitania—whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to countless perfectly innocent victims, and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German.’
‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August 9, of the same year, the White Star liner Arabic, one day out from Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss.169 Dunsley in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her; but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the Dunsley and torpedoed the Arabic without a moment’s warning. Boats were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost out of 424.
In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of war. This was obviously impossi............