From June, 1918, onwards, all hope of a German victory on the Western Front had disappeared. Germany was seething with discontent, her industrial life was paralised, the supply of munitions had seriously decreased; yet Ludendorff persevered, he drove the armies with remorseless energy, a kind of madness possessed him and his acolytes, imposing desperate courses and blinding them to facts. Their whole political existence was at stake, failure meant loss of place and power, of all that made life sweet, so they conceived a sinister design--if they failed “all else should go to ruin and become a prey.”
When the crash came, it came from within. For months, the German armies on the front had been a facade screening a welter of misery and starvation. The machine had functioned soullessly, causing the useless massacre of thousands of soldiers, while women and children died by tens of thousands in the midst of fictitious opulence. During these last days, the rank and file fought without hope, for an Emperor who was to save himself by flight, for leaders who treated them like pawns, for the defence of hearths and homes where famine and disease were rife. Long years of discipline had made these men automatons, they were parts of a great projectile whose momentum was not yet exhausted, and they had long ceased to reason why.
Unreasoning docility is held by some to be a civic virtue: that was the German doctrine and the basis of their Military System, which, though at its inception a defensive system, became an instrument of conquest, pride and insolence, a menace to the world. The form of war which Germany initiated and perfected has degraded war itself, it has organized slaughter with mechanical devices, has made tanks of more account than brains, and has crowned the triumph of matter over mind. There was a redeeming glamour about war as made by Alexander and Napoleon, today it is a hideous butchery, which can be directed by comparatively mediocre men. It has ceased to be an art and has become an occupation inextricably interwoven with a nation’s industrial life.
The downfall of the German Military System is a stern reminder of the vicissitude of things, and has removed a brooding shadow which darkened civilization. If calamitous experience serves as a guide to statesmen in the future, its rehabilitation will be prevented--in any form, however specious, in any land.