The German private soldier would not have been shot down unless these eloquent sermons had been preached. None the less, he had never grasped or understood, far less had he adhered to and professed, the cardinal doctrines which they contained. He still believed in the old-fashioned morality, and thought that states as well as individual men were bound to act justly. It was this faith which gave { 124} him his strength, and made him die gladly. For he believed that Germany had acted justly, the Allies unjustly, that it was his task, along with other good men and true, to win victory for his Emperor and safety for his Fatherland, and to crush the treacherous and malignant aggressors.
In spite of all this preliminary discoursing which had been going on for many years past, like artillery preparation before an infantry attack--about world-power, will-to-power, and all the rest of it--nothing is more remarkable than the contrast presented, immediately after war broke out, between the blatancy of those writers who had caused the war and the bleating of those (in many cases the same) who sought to justify Germany's part in it to their countrymen and the world.
On the enlightened principles of Treitschke and Bernhardi, Britain would have acted not only wisely, but in the strictest accordance with her duty to her own state, had she indeed contrived and compassed this war, believing circumstances to be favourable for herself and unfavourable for Germany. Not another shred of right or reason was required.[14] But when war actually burst out, all these new-fangled doctrines went by the board. Though the ink was hardly dry upon Bernhardi's latest exhortation--of which several hundred thousand copies had been sold, and in which he urged his fellow-countrymen to watch their time and make war when it suited them, without remorse and no matter on what { 125} plea--in spite of this fact, there was a singular lack of Stoicism among 'the brethren' when war was declared against Russia and France. When Britain joined in, and when things began to go less well than had been expected, Stoicism entirely disappeared. Indeed there is something highly ludicrous, at the same time painful--like all spectacles of human abasement--in the chorus of whines and shrill execration, which at once went up to heaven from that very pedantocracy whose leaders, so short a time before, had been preaching that, as between the nations of the earth, Might is Right, and Craft is the trusty servant of Might.[15]