PREFACE by Sir Valentine Chirol
"SOME student of the historical phenomena of our times will doubtless one day work out a complete record of the warnings of the coming storm we have had out of the mouths of Germans themselves since Treitschke, the apocalyptic precursor of the Mailed Fist, first proclaimed that Germany must square ac-counts first with France and Russia and then proceed to the squaring of the last and greatest of her accounts—with England. When that record has been compiled, we shall hardly be able to charge the Germans with having sought to take us unawares. There are none so deaf as those who have not ears to listen, or who listen only to the things they like to hear. With the latter, indeed, our ears were plied to satiety through all the many official and unofficial channels which Germany had at her command, from the Emperor and his Ministers down to the personally conducted parties of amiable Teutons who periodically came over here with hatred in their hearts but with a keen eye to business and always with their pockets bulging out with messages of peace and goodwill. Only a nation as addicted as ourselves to contemptuous indifference in regard to all foreign countries could have failed to be struck with the contrast between the smooth language used before the footlights under the audible prompting of the Imperial stage manager, and what was being not merely said but done behind the scenes by the blood and iron authors of the new Teutonic drama : " World Empire or Downfall." Our prosperity had satisfied us that peace was the greatest of British interests, and, that being so, we hugged ourselves with the comfortable assumption that nobody else would try to disturb it. If peace was good enough for Englishmen, it was good enough for the rest of the world. That in Germany there was growing up a powerful school of thought which looked upon war as in itself a far higher thing than peace, and war with England, especially, as indispensable to the working out of Germany's destinies, was to most Englishmen incredible, as most things seem to be that lie entirely outside the range of one's own experience. When Germany, time and again, rejected with scorn and derision the proposals of the British Government to reduce the burden of armaments by common agreement, or to expand the area of international arbitration, or to mitigate the horrors of warfare by the solemn enactment of specific regulations, we spoke with sorrow rather than with indignation of her short-sightedness and comforted ourselves with the assurance that, in the long run, the forces of progress and peace must prevail in Germany, as everywhere else, over the mediaeval influences of a German bureaucracy still imbued with some of the worst Bismarckian traditions. The few Englishmen who, having enjoyed better opportunities, had for many years past read the signs of the times in Germany, who had realized that a new generation was growing up which regarded even the Bismarckian traditions as too mild and cramped to achieve the boundless expansion of the Teutonic world empire, who had recognized that the German sword was no longer, as in Bismarck's days, merely the powerful weapon which German diplomacy controlled, but itself now controlled German diplomacy, did their best to enlighten their fellow-countrymen, but they were merely jeered at for their pains as mischievous alarmists who mistook the ravings of a few German fire-eaters for the voice of the great peace-loving German people. Some of our rulers, with the fuller knowledge they were bound to possess, saw, if only as through a glass darkly, the breakers ahead. But they hesitated to take the country into their complete confidence, and the measures they were from time to time compelled to take in order to secure a modicum of national safety were therefore too often only half measures brought forward with an apologetic half-heartedness which failed to carry conviction either to friends or to foes.
This translation of Colonel Frobenius's book, with the high-sounding title of The German Empire's Hour of Destiny, is the latest addition to the evidence with which, since the war broke out, the British public is being confronted of its blindness for so many years past to the true inwardness of German ambitions. He too is one of those who foreshadowed Germany's Next War, and though he is not possessed of the fine frenzy which inspires General von Bernhardi's works, and indeed looks mainly to an American, General Homer Lea, for his text, his businesslike discussion of the military problem to which Germany would have to address herself, is none the less valuable. As for all the writers of this school, England is for him the enemy par excellence. But in some respects he surpasses them all by imputing to her, even in the conduct of the coming war, the same Machiavellian duplicity which has, of course, in his opinion characterized her diplomatic preparations for it. " The world is governed only by trickery and deceit," wrote Frederick the Great to Voltaire, and the Emperor William prides himself, above all, on being the direct heir of the Frederickian tradition. But he who puts his faith in trickery and deceit and makes a constant practice of them, is apt to assume that everyone else does the same, and this assumption lands him in grievous miscalculations. Colonel Frobenius has stumbled badly into this very pitfall. He believes, of course, in the first place that England, whilst anxious to see Germany involved in a life and death struggle with France and Russia, would do her best to keep out of the conflict herself, with a view to profiting, as she has always done, by the ultimate exhaustion of the belligerent Powers. But should she come in, it would be only for the purpose of destroying the German Navy, of which she has watched the growth with jealous alarm ; even if her military resources allowed her to take any part in the hostilities on land, it would not be in her interest and therefore she would not care to assist the French Army which, if victorious over Germany, would in its turn become once more, as it has been in the past, a source of disquietude to the British Islands. Colonel Frobenius, it should be added, is good enough to impute equally mean arriere pensees to our allies. France and Russia, according to him, would like to destroy the German Army, but they would also like to preserve the German Navy as a counter to be subsequently employed against the increasing predominance of England. It is a singular and also a re-assuring feature in the disquisitions of all these apostles of brute force that, however sound their military theories may prove to have been, their political calculations have, for the most part, already hopelessly miscarried. The reason is not far to seek. Their military theories dealt with forces which are capable of more or less exact calculation ; their political estimates ignored all those moral imponderabilia of which Bismarck himself was fain to recognize the immense importance. No doubt, in a world ruled wholly by brute force, as the world would be if they had their way, they would be right, for all moral forces, ponderable or imponderable, would have ceased to exist. But happily, though Colonel Frobenius has been specially blessed by no less exalted a personage than the Crown Prince of Germany himself, that time is not yet."
VALENTINE CHIROL |
