Lest he talk all the pleasure out of the rambles ahead, let us get the German’s opinion of the war cleared up before we start, even if we have to reach forward now and then for some of the things we shall hear on the way. I propose, therefore, to give him the floor unreservedly for a half-hour, without interruption, unless it be to throw in a question now and then to make his position and his sometimes curious mental processes clearer. The reader who feels that the prisoner at the bar is not entitled to tell his side of the story can easily skip this chapter.

Though I did not get it all from any one person—no resident of the Fatherland talked so long in the hungry armistice days—the German point of view averaged about as follows. There were plenty of variations from this central line, and I shall attempt to show the frontier of these deviations as we go along. We shall probably not find this statement of his point of view very original; most of his arguments we have heard before, chiefly while the question of our coming or not coming into the war was seething. Fifteen years ago, when I first visited him at home, I did not gather the impression that every German thought alike. To-day he seems to reach the same conclusions by the same curious trains of thought, no matter what his caste, profession, experience, and to some extent his environment—for even those who remained far from the scene of conflict during 179all the war seem to have worked themselves into much the same mental attitude as their people at home. But then, this is also largely true of his enemies, among whom one hears almost as frequently the tiresome repetition of the same stereotyped conclusions that have in some cases been deliberately manufactured for public consumption. One comes at times to question whether there is really any gain nowadays in running about the earth gathering men’s opinions, for they so often bear the factory-made label, the trade-mark of one great central plant, like the material commodities of our modern industrial world. The press, the cable, the propagandist, and the printer have made a thinking-machine, as Edison has made a talking-machine, and Burroughs a mechanical arithmetic.

The first, of course, if not the burning question of the controversy was, who started the war, and why? The German at home showed a certain impatience at this query, as a politician might at a question that he had already repeatedly explained to his constituents. But with care and perseverance he could usually be drawn into the discussion, whereupon he outlined the prevailing opinion, with such minor variations as his slight individuality permitted; almost always without heat, always without that stone-blind prejudice that is so frequent among the Allied man in the street. Then he fell into apathetic silence or harked back to the ever-present question of food. But let him tell it in his own way.

“The war was started by circumstances. War had become a necessity to an over-prosperous world, as bleeding sometimes becomes necessary to a fat person. Neither side was wholly and deliberately guilty of beginning it, but if there is actual personal guilt, it is chiefly that of the Allies, especially England. We understand the hatred of France. It came largely from fear, though to a great extent unnecessary fear. The ruling party in Russia 180wanted war, wanted it as early as 1909, for without it they would have lost their power. It was a question of interior politics with them. But with England there was less excuse. In her case it was only envy and selfishness; the petty motives that sprout in a shopkeeper’s soul. We were making successful concurrenz against her in all the markets of the world—though by our German word ‘concurrenz’ we mean more than mere commercial competition; she saw herself in danger of losing the hegemony of Europe, her position as the most important nation on the globe. She set out deliberately to destroy us, to vernichten, to bring us to nothing. We hate”—though come to think of it I do not recall once having heard a German use the word hate in describing his own feelings, nor did I run across any reference to the notorious “Hymn of Hate” during all my travels through the Empire—“we dislike, then, we blame England most, for it was she more than any other one party in the controversy who planned and nourished it. How? By making an Entente against us that surrounded us with a steel wall; by bolstering up the revanche feeling in France; by urging on the ruling class in Russia; by playing on the dormant brutality of the Russian masses and catering to the natural fanaticism of the French, deliberately keeping alive their desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine. Edward VII set the ball rolling with his constant visits to Paris.”

“I had much intercourse and correspondence with Frenchmen before the war,” said a German professor of European history, “and I found a willingness among those of my own generation, those between thirty and fifty, to drop the matter, to admit that, after all, Alsace-Lorraine was as much German as French. Then some ten years ago I began to note a change of tone. The younger generation was being pumped full of the revanche spirit from the day they started to school; in foreign countries every French text-book incited 181crocodile tears over the poor statue of Strassburg, with its withered flowers. It was this younger generation that brought France into the war—this and Clemenceau, who is still living back in 1870.”

“But the despatches, the official state papers already published, show that England was doing her best to avoid....”

“Oh, you simple Americans! You do not seem to realize that such things are made for foreign consumption, made to sell, to flash before a gaping world, to publish in the school-books of the future, not for actual use, not to be seriously believed by the experienced and the disillusioned. That has been the story of European politics for centuries, since long before you dear, na?ve people came into existence. You are like a new-comer dropping into a poker game that has been going on since long before you learned to distinguish one card from another. You do not guess that the deck is pin-pricked and that every kind of underhand trick is tacitly allowed, so long as the player can ‘get away with it.’ Now if we could get the really secret papers that passed back and forth, especially if we could get what went on in private conversation or ’way inside the heads of Grey and the rest of them....”

“Yes, but—you will pardon my na?veté, I am sure—but if England had long deliberately planned a European war, why did she have nothing but a contemp—but a very small army ready when it broke out?”

“Because she expected, as usual, to have some one else do her fighting for her. And she succeeded! When they were almost burned beyond recovery she got America to pull her chestnuts out of the fire—and now America does not even get enough out of it to salve her scorched fingers. But for America we should have won the war, unquestionably. But England has lost it, in a way, too, for she has been forced to let America assume the most important place in the world. You will have a war with England yourselves 182for that very reason in a few years, as soon as she catches her breath and discovers you at the head of the table, in the seat which she has so long arrogated to herself. You will be her next victim—with Japan jumping on your back the moment it is turned.

“Yes, in one sense Germany did want war. She had to have it or die, for the steel wall England had been forging about her for twenty years was crushing our life out and had to be broken. Then, too, there was one party, the ‘Old Germans’—what you call the Junkers—that was not averse to such a contest. The munition-makers wanted war, of course; they always do. Some of our generals”—Ludendorff was the name most frequently heard in this connection; Hindenburg never—“wanted it. But it is absurd to accuse the Kaiser of starting it, simply because he was the figurehead, the most prominent bugaboo, a catchword for the mob. The Hohenzollerns did us much damage; but they also brought us much good. The Kaiser loved peace and did all in his power to keep it. He was the only emperor—we were the only large nation that had waged no war or stolen no territory since 1871. But the English-French-Russian combination drove us into a corner. We had to have the best army in the world, just as England has to have the best navy. We had no world-conquering ambitions; we had no ‘Drang nach Osten’ which our enemies have so often charged against us, except for trade. Our diplomats were not what they should have been; Bethmann-Hollweg has as much guilt as any one in the whole affair, on our side. We have had no real diplomats, except von Bülow, since Bismarck. But the Germans as a nation never wanted war. The Kaiser would not have declared it even when he did had he not feared that the Social Democrats would desert him in the crisis if it were put off longer. We had only self-protection as our war aim from the beginning, but we did not dare openly say so for fear the enemy, 183which had decided on our annihilation, would take it as an admission of weakness.”

This whitewashing of the Kaiser was universal in Germany, as far as my personal experience goes. No one, whatever his age, sex, caste, place of residence, or political complexion, accused him of being more than an accessory before the fact. The most rabid—pardon, I never heard a German speak rabidly on any subject, unless it was perhaps the lack of food and tobacco—the most decidedly monarchical always softened any criticism of the ex-emperor with the footnote that he, after all, was not chiefly to blame. His bad counselors, the force of circumstances over which he had little control ... and so on. Then there were those, particularly, though not entirely, in the backwaters of Prussia, the women especially, who gazed after his retreated figure pityingly, almost tearfully, as if he had been the principal sufferer from the catastrophe.

Nor did I ever hear any German, not even a Socialist of the extremest left, not even a Bavarian, admit that Germany was wholly in the wrong. Once only did I hear a man go so far as to assert that Germany had at least half the guilt of the war. He was a stanch-minded, rather conservative Socialist living in the Polish atmosphere of Bromberg. On the other hand, citizens of the Allied countries, who had dwelt in Germany since 1914, were all more or less firm converts to the England-France-Russia theory. Such is the power of environment. An English governess, who had lost a brother in the war and who was returning home for the first time since it began, expressed the fear that she would soon be compelled to return to Germany to preserve her peace of mind. A few laid the blame entirely to Russia; some charged it all to “the Jews,” implying a rather extraordinary power on the part of the million or so of that race within the Empire.

Now and then one ran across a simple old countryman 184who took his opinions wholly and unreservedly as they had been delivered to him, without ever having opened the package. “How did it start? Why, let’s see. They killed some prince down in ... somewhere or other, I never can remember these foreign names, and his wife, too, if I remember, and then Russia ...” and so on. He was of the same class as those who asserted, “I don’t know when gas was first used, or just where, but it was by the wicked French—or was it the scoundrelly English?” But these simple, swallow-it-whole yokels were on the whole more rare than they would have been in many another land. However much we may sneer at her Kultur, the Kaiser régime brought to the most distant corners of the Empire a certain degree of instruction, even if it was only of a deliberately Teutonic brand. In the great majority of cases one was astounded at the clear, comprehensive, and, within limits, unprejudiced view of all the field of European politics of many a peasant grubbing out his existence on a remote hillside. More than one of them could have exchanged minds with some of our national officials to the decided advantage of the latter. My memory still harks back to the tall, ungainly farmer in whose lowly little inn I spent the last night of my German tramp, a man who had lived almost incessantly in the trenches during all the war, and returned home still a “simple soldier,” who topped off a sharp, clear-cut exposé of the politics of Europe for the past half-century with: “Who started it? Listen. Suppose a diligent, sober, hard-working mechanic is engaged on the same job with an arrogant, often careless, and sometimes intoxicated competitor. Suppose the competitor begins to note that if things go on as they are the sober mechanic will in time be given all the work, for being the more efficient, or that there will come a time when, thanks to his diligence, there will be no work left for either of them. If the rowdy suddenly strikes his rival a foul 185blow in the back when he is not looking and the hard-worker drops his tools and strikes back, who started it?”

On the conduct of the war there was as nearly unanimity of opinion as on its genesis. “The Russians and the French, secretly sustained by England, invaded Germany first. William”—they call him that almost as often as the Kaiser now—“who was the only important ruler who had not declared war in more than forty years, gave them twelve hours to desist from their designs; they refused, and the war went on. Had we planned to go to war we should certainly have passed the tip to the millions of Germans in foreign lands in time for them to have reached Germany. You yourself have seen how they poured down to the ports when they heard of the Fatherland’s danger, and how regretfully they returned to their far-off duties when it became apparent that England was not going to let them come home. Then we went through Belgium. We should not have done so, of course, but any people would have done the same to protect its national existence. Besides, we offered to do so peacefully; the stubborn Belgians would not have suffered in the slightest. And Belgium had a secret treaty with the Entente that would have permitted them to attack us from that side ...” and so on.

“Moral guilt? Not the slightest. As we feel no guilt whatever for starting the war—because we did not start it—so we feel none for any of the ways in which we waged it. The U-boats? What was our drowning of a few silly passengers who insisted on traveling compared with what the British were doing in starving our women and children, our entire nation?” (The old specious argument about the warning not to take the Lusitania was still frequently heard.) “We had to use U-boats or starve. A hysterical world blamed us for the more dramatic but by far the less wicked of two weapons. Drowning is a pleasant death compared with starvation. War is war. But it was a very 186stupid mistake on the part of old fool Tirpitz.” (The admiral probably had his whiskers pulled more often, figuratively, than any other man in the Empire. True, he was almost the only German left who felt capable of still nourishing so luxurious an adornment. But the U-boat policy had very few partizans left.) “Moral guilt, most certainly not. But it was the height of asininity. If he had had ten times as many U-boats, yes, by all means. But not when it brought in America and still failed to break the blockade. If the U-boat fans had not insisted on their program the war would have been over in 1916. But America would probably have come in, anyway; there were her loans to the Allies, and the munitions she furnished them. America, we suspect, was chiefly interested in her interest.”

To all charges of unfair methods of warfare, of tyranny over the civilian population, of atrocities, Germany replied with an all-embracing: “You’re another.” “If we first used gas”—which by no means all Germans admitted—“think of those dreadful tanks! If we bombed London and Paris, see how our dear brethren along the Rhine suffered from your airmen. If we were forced to be stern with the population of the occupied regions, go hear what the Russians did in our eastern provinces. You make martyrs of your Cavells and Fryatts; we can name you scores of Germans who suffered worse far more unjustly. As to accusing us of wanton atrocities, that has become one of the recognized weapons of modern warfare, one of the tricks of the game, this shouting of calumnies against your gagged enemy to a keenly listening audience not averse to feeding on such morbid morsels. It was accepted as a recognized misdeal in the political poker game as far back as the Boer War, when the science of photography first reached the advanced stage that made it possible to show English soldiers catching on their bayonets babies that had never 187been within a hundred miles of them. Like all the underhand moves, it was immensely improved or perfected during this long life-and-death struggle. That was one of the things we somewhat neglected, first from lack of foresight, later because of the impossibility of making ourselves heard by the audience, of getting it across the footlights, while our enemies screened the whole front of the stage. Ninety per cent. of the so-called atrocities were made out of whole cloth, or out of very slight remnants. We admit the cleverness of the other side in ‘getting away with it,’ but now that it has served its purpose we expect him, if he is the fair sportsman he pretends, to acknowledge it was only a trick, at least as soon as the smoke and heat of action have cleared a bit.” (This view was widely held among citizens of Allied nations who have traveled in Germany since the signing of the armistice, though few of them admitted it except in private conversation.) “There were, of course, things that should not have been. There are in all armies; there have been in all wars, and always will be. But if some of our soldiers forgot themselves, if our reserve officers were not always of the high standard their position called for, let us tell you of some of the horrible things the Russians perpetrated in our eastern provinces”—somehow Germany always seemed to flee eastward when this question of atrocities came up.

“One of our greatest mistakes was the failure to realize the value of réclame, of publicity, propaganda, advertising, or whatever you choose to call it, until it was too late.” (Berlin was showing one of our great “Hun” pictures in her principal cinemas at the time of my visit, partly for the amusement of seeing themselves as others see them, but chiefly as an example of how they “missed a bet” in not discovering how the “movies” could also be “mobilized” for war ends.) “The United States was finally led astray and brought into the war chiefly because England and 188France made skilful use of propaganda, because they controlled the great avenues of the transmission of news. It looks like a silly, childish little trick for the Allies to take our cables away from us—along with our milch cows—but it is really very important, for they keep on telling unrefuted lies about us as long as it serves their purposes. Now that they have a clear field, they will discolor the facts more than ever. They censored, doctored their public prints far more than we did. See how they dare not even yet publish the terms of the treaty that was handed us at Versailles; yet we have had them here in Germany for days. Even the French Chamber and the American Senate got them first from our papers. Open diplomacy indeed! There never was a time during the war that French and English and, when we could get them, American papers could not be bought at any kiosk in our larger cities. Look at Haase, who publishes daily the strongest kind of attacks on the government, quite openly, while the newspapers of Paris are still sprinkled with the long white hoofprints of the censor.

“We admit our fault—and we are now paying for it. This publicity was one of the ‘perfectly legitimate’ moves in the crooked game of war, one of the cleverest of the tricks, and we overlooked it, thanks to the thick heads of our diplomat............