New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1

Above all, though, the German admired the Englishman, in the rôle of the "royal merchant," the far-seeing colonizer, the master of the seas. Without envy Germany gave England credit for all these qualities. And when during the Boer war voices were raised to warn against the English character, even then to most of us our Anglo-Saxon cousin remained the "Gentleman beyond reproach."

Then there is the great German love for Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries; here we may find the Germanic race less adulterated than in our own country. Scandinavian poets have become our poets and we are as proud of the works of the Swedish artist as we are of those of our people.

We gaze with delight upon the proud, blonde grace of the Norse maid; the more gentle and pliant manners of the Swedes and Danes arouse our admiration; and we dearly love their beautiful fjords and forests of beech and birch.

Love Changed to Suspicion.

Many of us wonder today how much of all this love we, in the days to come, will be able to rescue from the debris. "Has the world gone mad that it has ceased to believe in our sincerity?" This at present is the cry of many, many thousand German men and women. Do we deserve to have our love requited with hate? And to find in the countries which declare themselves neutral, distrust, reserve, and, in fact, doubt of our honest intentions? Sad, dull despair has taken possession of the hearts of our best men and women. It is not because they tremble for the fate of the loved ones who have been compelled to go to the front and not because there is any fear as to the outcome of this war. Not one among us doubts the ultimate triumph of Germany. We also know that we must pay a terrible toll for this victory with the blood of our sons, fathers and husbands.

Equally as much as they mourn the loss of our young manhood many of our best citizens deplore the hatred which has spread over the face of the globe, hate which has torn asunder what was believed to have been a firmly woven net of a common European culture. That which we with ardent souls have labored to create is being devastated by ruthless force.

The following story of the non-commissioned German officer is typical or symbolical of many. He, while the bullets of the inhabitants of Louvain fell around him, rescued the priceless old paintings from the burning Church of St. Peter, simply because he was an art-historian and knew and loved each of the masterpieces. And well we all understand the feelings which mastered him during those moments of horror.

He would probably think and say, "I have but done my duty."

And now we have arrived at the point which gives rise to the greatest amount of antipathy. Our opponents declare we are endowed with great ability—they say they must acknowledge that. But how can a race of stiff, dry, duty-performing beings awaken love? The German must lose all claim to individual freedom and independence of thought in consequence of the training which he receives. When he is a child he commences it in a military subordination in the school, he continues it in the barracks, and later, when he enters a vocational life, under the stern leadership of his superiors. He becomes, our critics continue, simply a disagreeable pedantic tool of the all-powerful "drill." This atmosphere of "drill," or in other words this stern hard military spirit, envelops him, accompanies him as guardian from the cradle to the grave, and makes of him an unbearable companion for all the more refined, gentle, and amiable nations. Yes, our opponents often declare that they are waging war not only against Germany, but against this pedantic, military, tyrannical sense of duty, which they call the "Prussian spirit." It shall once and for all, they assert, be eradicated from the world.

A Religious Feeling of Duty.

Far be it from me to deny that my country people, male and female, do indeed possess an unusually strong sense of duty. This is combined with a desire for justice which is so often looked upon by outsiders as a lack of patriotic pride, and with an honesty which easily makes the German appear so clumsy and awkward. These three characteristics belong indissolubly together and one is not to be thought of without the other. The spirit from which the German sense of duty arises is what the foreigner so often misunderstands in us. He generally confuses sense of duty with blind obedience. But this sense of duty does not originate from a need for submission or from a mental dependence. No, it rests on a deep philosophical reason and arises from the mental recognition of ethical and national necessity. That is why it can exist side by side with the most extreme individualism, which also belongs to the peculiarities of the character of our people. The Germans have always been a nation of thinkers. Not only the scholar, also the simple worker, the laborer, the modest mother take a deep pleasure in forming their philosophy of life and the world. Side by side with the loud triumph of our industry goes this quieter existence, which has been rather pushed into the background in the last decades, but has not, therefore, ceased to exist. And the further the belief in miracles stepped into the background, the more the belief in duty acquired a warm religious tinge. The loud complaints about the vanishing of the sense of duty among the young, which has so often been voiced by public opinion, only prove how strongly this ethical force was governing people's minds. Every seeming diminution of it was felt to be a disastrous endangerment of the knowledge of the people. We have perhaps acted childishly and foolishly toward other nations by too great confidence. But in the consciousness of the entire German Nation the ominous feeling was living and working with mighty power, that only if every one of us devotes his entire strength to the post assigned to him, and works until the exhaustion of his last mental and physical power, only then can we as a national whole retain our high level and, surrounded by dangers on all sides, create sufficient room for ourselves to breathe and live.

The Military and the Socialists.

Two mighty organizations exist among us which were opposed to each other until recently—the military and the Social Democratic. The world sees with amazement the perfection which has been reached by the military organization of our army. Its achievements have only become possible through the above-mentioned philosophical conception of the sense of duty which raises it far above any systematic obedience and lets it appear in the light of religious ideal. Duty becomes in these serious and energetic minds a voluntary adaptation to a carefully organized whole with the knowledge that to serve this whole at the same time produces the highest achievement of the individual personality. The Social Democratic organization, opposed though it is to the military organization, is also composed of Germans and is, therefore, directed by the same basic principles as the military organization, although for entirely different purposes. For this one reason it was almost a matter of course that the Social Democrats offered their services for the war at the moment when they recognized that it had become of imperious necessity to set aside personal wishes and ideals and to put in the foreground only the duty of the defense of their country. The idea of our opponents, that they would find a support in the Socialists of our country, rested on a complete misunderstanding of the German character.

A foreign woman wrote to me in the days of the mobilization: "I do not understand the German enthusiasm for war—how it is possible that one can become enthusiastic about murder!" The woman only saw the exterior and superficial phase of things.

In its endeavor to unite itself with the world the German soul had suddenly come upon the wildest hatred * * * numerous high ideals of culture fell to ruin within a few hours. Deeply wounded, it was hurled back into its most personal possessions. Here it found itself face to face with tasks which far surpassed anything demanded heretofore of it as fulfillment of duty. And now there came to pass a wonder which will be unforgettable for every one who lived through this period. Everything dry, petty, pedantic, connected with German ways, which had often made many of us impatient with ourselves, was suddenly swept away by the storm of these days.

A gigantic wave of fiery hot feeling passed through our country flaming up like a beautiful sacrificial pyre. It was no longer a duty to offer one's self and one's life—it was supreme bliss. That might easily sound like a hollow phrase. But there is a proof, which is more genuine than words, than songs, and cheers. That is the expression in the faces of the people, their uncontrolled spontaneous movements. I saw the eyes light up of an old woman who had sent four sons into battle and exclaimed: "It is glorious to be allowed to give the Fatherland so much!" I saw the controlled calm in the features of sorrowing mothers who knew that their only sons had fallen. But the expression in the faces of many wounded who were already returning home gripped me the most. They had lived through the horror of the battle, their feet had waded through blood, their young bodies were horribly maimed. I saw this strangely serene, quietly friendly expression in the young faces. They were men who had sacrificed their ego. They were great patient conquerors of selfishness. And with what tenderness, what goodness are they surrounded, to lighten their lot, to give them joy. How the general sentiment is often expressed in the gesture of a single person—you did that for us—how can we sufficiently requite you?

A stream of love is flowing through our Fatherland and is uniting all hearts. The unobtrusive mother "duty" gave birth to the genial child "feeling." She bestowed on it her strong vitality so that it can defy a world of hatred—and conquer it.

A Letter to Gerhart Hauptmann

By Romain Rolland

I am not, Gerhart Hauptmann, of those Frenchmen who call Germany barbarian. I recognize the intellectual and moral grandeur of your mighty race. I realize all that I owe to the thinkers of old Germany; and even at this extreme hour I recall to mind the example and the words of our Goethe—for he belongs to all humanity—repudiating national hatred and preserving his soul serene in those heights "where one feels the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil my heart with hatred.

Whatever reason I may have, therefore, to suffer through the deeds of your Germany and to judge as criminal the German policy and the German methods, I do not hold responsible the people who submit thereto and are reduced to mere blind instruments. This does not mean that I regard war as a fatality. A Frenchman knows no such word as fatality. Fatality is the excuse of souls that lack a will.

No. This war is the fruit of the feebleness of peoples and of their stupidity. One can only pity them; one cannot blame them. I do not reproach you for our sorrows. Your mourning will not be less than ours. If France is ruined, so also will be Germany. I did not even raise my voice when I saw your armies violate the neutrality of noble Belgium. This forfeit of honor, which compels the contempt of every right-thinking mind, is too well within the political tradition of Prussian Kings to have surprised me.

But the fury with which you treated that generous land whose one crime was to defend, unto despair, its independence and the idea of justice—that was too much! The world revolts in wrath at this. Reserve for us your violence—for us French, who are your enemies. But to trample upon your victims, upon the little Belgian people, unfortunate and innocent—that is ignominy!

And not content with assaulting the Belgium that lives, you wage war on the dead, on the glory of past centuries. You bombard Malines, you put Rubens to flame, Louvain comes from your hands a heap of ashes—Louvain with its treasures of art and knowledge, the holy city! Who indeed are you and what name do you conjure us to call you, Hauptmann, you who reject the title of barbarian?

Are you the children of Goethe or of Attila? Do you wage war against armies or against the human spirit? Kill men if you must, but respect man's work. For this is the heritage of the human race. And you, like us, are its trustees. In making pillage of it as you have done you prove yourselves unworthy of this great inheritance, unworthy of holding rank in the small European army which is the garde d'honneur of civilization.

It is not to the sense of the rest of the world that I appeal against you. It is to yourself, Hauptmann. In the name of our Europe, of which up to the present you have been one of the noblest champions—in the name of that civilization for which the greatest of men have struggled—in the name of the honor even of your German race, Gerhart Hauptmann, I adjure you, I command you, you and the intellectual élite of Germany, where I have so many friends, to protest with utmost vehemence against this crime which leaps back upon yourselves.

If you fail in this, one of two things will be proved—that you acquiesce, (and then the opinion of the world will crush you,) or that you are powerless to raise your voice against the Huns that now command you. And in that case, with what right will you still pretend, as you have written, that your cause is that of liberty and human progress?

You will be giving to the world a proof that, incapable of defending the liberty of the world, you are helpless even to uphold your own; that the élite of Germany lies subservient to the blackest despotism—to a tyranny which mutilates masterpieces and assassinates the human spirit.

I await your response, Hauptmann—a response which shall be an act. The opinion of Europe awaits it, as do I. Bear this in mind; in a moment like this, even silence is an act.

A Reply to Rolland

By Gerhart Hauptmann

You address me, Herr Rolland, in public words which breathe the pain over this war, (forced by England, Russia and France,) pain over the endangering of European culture and the destruction of hallowed memorials of ancient art. I share in this general sorrow, but that to which I cannot consent is to give an answer whose spirit you have already prescribed and concerning which you wrongly assert that it is awaited by all Europe. I know that you are of German blood. Your beautiful novel, "Jean-Christophe," will remain immortal among us Germans together with "Wilhelm Meister," and "der grüne Heinrich."

But France became your adopted fatherland; therefore your heart must now be torn and your judgment confused. You have labored zealously for the reconciliation of both peoples. In spite of all this when the present bloody conflict destroys your fair concept of peace, as it has done for so many others, you see our nation and our people through French eyes, and every attempt to make you see clearly and as a German is absolutely sure to be in vain.

Naturally everything which you say of our Government, of our army and our people, is distorted, everything is false, so false that in this respect your open letter to me appears as an empty black surface.

War is war. You may lament war, but you should not wonder at the things that are inseparable from the elementary fact itself. Assuredly it is deplorable that in the conflict an irreplaceable Rubens is destroyed, but—with all honor to Rubens!—I am among those in whom the shattered breast of his fellow-man compels far deeper pain.

And, Herr Rolland, it is not exactly fitting that you should adopt a tone implying that the people of your land, the French, are coming out to meet us with palm branches, when in reality they are plentifully equipped with cannon, with cartridges, yes, even with dumdum bullets. It is apparent that you have grown pretty fearful of our brave troops! That is to the glory of a power which is invincible through the justice of its cause. The German soldier has nothing whatsoever in common with the loathsome and puerile were-wolf tales which your lying French press so zealously publishes abroad, that press which the French and the Belgian people have to thank for their misfortune.

Let the idle Englishmen call us Huns; you may, for all I care, characterize the warriors of our splendid Landwehr as sons of Attila; it is enough for us if this Landwehr can shatter into a thousand pieces the ring of our merciless enemies. Far better that you should call us sons of Attila, cross yourselves in fear and remain outside our borders, than that you should indict tender inscriptions upon the tomb of our German name, calling us the beloved descendants of Goethe. The epithet Huns is coined by people who, themselves Huns, are experiencing disappointment in their criminal attacks on the life of a sound and valorous race, because it knows the trick of parrying a fearful blow with still more fearful force. In their impotence, they take refuge in curses.

I say nothing against the Belgian people. The peaceful passage of German troops, a question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because the Government had made itself a tool of England and France. This same Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to support a lost cause, and by that act—Herr Rolland, you are a musician!—struck the horrible keynote of conflict. If you are at all in a position to break your way through the giant's wall of anti-German lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept. 7; read further the telegram which on Sept. 8 the Kaiser himself addressed to President Wilson. You will then discover things which it is necessary to know in order to understand the calamity of Louvain.

Another Reply to Rolland

By Karl Wolfskehl

To you, Rolland, belonging as a chosen one to the more important Frenchmen who can rise above their race, the German nature has often been revealed. To you, now, we shall make answer, offer frank testimony concerning the spirit of the time, concerning that fate, that very fate in which you, the Frenchman, do not believe. You do not believe in it; what to us is fate, mysterious necessity, to you is fatalité, an unavoidable Alp which threatens the individual in his individual freedom. This fatalité, we, too, do not believe in it, but we do believe in the forces which bring forth the eternal in human will, that these both are one, will and forces, one with necessity, with actuality, with creative, moral power, of which all great ideas are the children, the idea of freedom, the idea of the beautiful, the idea of tragic fidelity, and that these, reaching far above being and passing away, are nevertheless real, life entire, fact entire. All that which is as dear to you as to us, great works and great feelings, resignation and self-restraint, all that is necessity, is fate, that became will—all that a unity out of choice and compulsion. All that is for us eternal, not according to the measure of time, but according to the beginning and the power of its working forces, in so far as it is necessary.

Thus has it become fate, destiny, not fatalité, rather like that fate which in Beethoven's own words in the first movement of his "Eroica" "is the knocking at the gate."

Such a fate is this war. No one wanted it in our Germany, for it was forced upon us with terrible arbitrariness, contrary to all right. Do you not know of the net that has been spun around us and drawn tight for the last half of a generation, to choke us? Do you not know how often this most peaceful of peoples has drawn back, how often the strange powers in the East and in the West have with contemptuous snarls said, "Wilhelm will not make war"? That you ought to know, Rolland, for it is known to the whole world.

The War "Came from God."

But I will betray something to you that you cannot know, because you are a stranger; and this will probably show you where we see fate. I will betray to you the fact that there is still another Germany behind the exterior in which great politics and great finance meet with the literary champions of Europe. That Germany tells you in this heavy hour of Europe:

This undesired war that has been forced upon us is nevertheless a necessity; it had to come to pass for the sake of Germany and the world of European humanity, for the sake of the world. We did not want it, but it came from God. Our poet knew of it. He saw this war and its necessity and its virtues, and heralded it, long before an ugly suspicion of it flew through the year—before the leaves began to turn. The "Stern des Bundes" ["Star of the Federation"] is this book of prophecy, this book of necessity and of triumph.

The present need and the present triumph are quite human and quite inexorable. They have a part in all that has taken place, and they are unprecedented and new. None of us—do you hear, Rolland?—none of us Germans today would hesitate to help destroy every monument of our holy German past, if necessity made it a matter of the last ditch, for that from which alone all monuments of all times draw their right of existence and their worth unless they are empty husks, skeletons, and framework; even so, we alone may ask what shall come to pass, not what shall cease. Which ruins are ravings, and which are the pains of childbirth, we do not presume to decide; but you, too, who are so pained by ruins, even as we are pained by them, you, too, do not know it.

Today it is a question of the life or death of the European soul. Do you not believe that this soul is more endangered at the hands of the hordes of stub-nosed Slavs than of the phalanx of those whom you, Rolland, call Huns? Your sense must give you the right to answer. Recall the terrible story of Russian incendiarism for the last hundred years, which has torn to pieces in ever-increasing lust for murder bodies and souls; recall the eternally perjured and law-defying regiment of grave diggers; and then blush that you have characterized as a heavy crime a manfully confessed act of self-defense on the part of the Germans, the temporary occupation of Belgium! Blush that you have forgotten the Russian Moloch now loosed upon us, drunk with the blood and tears of alien peoples as well as of its own children! That you have forgotten all that, in order to lament over buildings which we have been forced in self-defense—again in self-defense—to sacrifice! And blush for those of your people who have become accomplices of that Moloch! Those who are sinning against the Holy Ghost of Europe, in order to attempt belated vengeance against Germany! Do you know what the ancients, the very Greeks and Romans from whom you have drawn your blood and temperament, called that sin? Blood-guiltiness is the name of that horror. And do you know how it is atoned for? I shrink to ask further, yea, even to think further; for horror falls upon me, and I see the unspeakable.

Today, battling against you allies of the swarms of Muscovites, we Europeans are battling also for that France which you are threatening—you, not we!

German Intellectuals "All Afire."

Yes, Romain Rolland, try, Frenchman that you are, to look into the mysteries of the time. Ask yourself, marvel, how it comes to pass that we, the intellectuals among the Germans, take part without exception in this dreadful war; take part with body and soul. None of us ambitious, none of us a politician, not one of us who, till this war, busied himself about anything except his idea, the Palladium of his life! And now we are all afire, with all our hearts, with our whole people, all full of determination and prepared for the last. All our youth in the field, every man among us thrilled with faith in our God and this battle of our God, every man among us conscious of the sacred necessity that has driven us, every man among us consecrated for timely death! Are these incendiaries? Are these slaves, whom a despot points the way to the rolling dead? Every one knows it is our all that is at stake; it is a matter of the divine in humanity, a matter of our preservation and that of Europe.

And so we stand amid death and ruins under the star—one federation, one single union. This I have had to tell you, whether you will listen to it, whether Europe has ears to hear it, or not. From now on, may our deeds be our words!

Are We Barbarians?