The German people still clung desperately to those ideas after the armistice, as I found in Cologne and other towns, and as friends of mine who had visited Berlin told me after peace was signed. The Germans refused to believe in accusations of atrocity. They knew that some of these stories had been faked by hostile propaganda, and, knowing that, as we know, they thought all were false. They said “Lies—lies—lies!”—and made counter-charges against the Russians and Poles. They could not bring themselves to believe that their sons and brothers had been more brutal than the laws of war allow, and what brutality they had done was imposed upon them by ruthless discipline. But they deplored the war, and the common people, ex-soldiers and civilians, cursed the rich and governing classes who had made profit out of it, and had continued it when they might have made peace with honor. That was their accusation against their leaders—that and the ruthless, bloody way in which their men had been hurled into the furnace on a gambler’s chance of victory, while they were duped by faked promises of victory.
When not put upon their defense by accusations against the whole Fatherland, the German people, as far as I could tell by talking with a few of them, and by those letters which fell into our hands, revolted in spirit against the monstrous futility and idiocy of the war, and were convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the greed and pride of the governing classes of all nations, who had used men’s bodies as counters in a devil’s game. That view was expressed in the signboards put above the parapet, “We’re all fools: let’s all go home”; and in that letter by the woman who wrote:
“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes … All soldiers—friend and foe—ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, so that this war, which enslaves the people more than ever, may cease.”
It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may cause a more passionate revolution in Germany when the people awaken from their stupor. It was that view which led to the Russian Revolution and to Bolshevism. It is the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of British workingmen and making them threaten to strike against any adventure of war, like that in Russia, which seems to them (unless proved otherwise) on behalf of the “gilded ones” and for the enslavement of the peoples.
Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate convictions of masses of men in Europe. That is one key to the heart of the revolutionary movement which is surging beneath the surface of our European state. It is a the belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as the direct guilt of the German war lords was the guilt of the whole political society of Europe, whose secret diplomacy (unrevealed to the peoples) was based upon hatred and fear and rivalry, in play for imperial power and the world’s markets, as common folk play dominoes for penny points, and risking the lives of common folk in a gamble for enormous stakes of territory, imperial prestige, the personal vanity of politicians, the vast private gain of trusts and profiteers. To keep the living counters quiet, to make them jump into the pool of their own free will at the word “Go,” the statesmen, diplomats, trusts, and profiteers debauch the name of patriotism, raise the watchword of liberty, and play upon the ignorance of the mob easily, skillfully, by inciting them to race hatred, by inflaming the brute-passion in them, and by concocting a terrible mixture of false idealism and self-interest, so that simple minds quick to respond to sentiment, as well as those quick to hear the call of the beast, rally shoulder to shoulder and march to the battlegrounds under the spell of that potion. Some go with a noble sense of sacrifice, some with bloodlust in their hearts, most with the herd-instinct following the lead, little knowing that they are but the pawns of a game which is being played behind closed doors by the great gamblers in the courts and Foreign Offices, and committee-rooms, and countinghouses, of the political casinos in Europe.
I have heard the expression of this view from soldiers during the war and since the war, at street-corners, in tramcars, and in conversations with railway men, mechanics, policemen, and others who were soldiers a year ago, or stay-at-homes, thinking hard over the meaning of the war. I am certain that millions of men are thinking these things, because I found the track of those common thoughts, crude, simple, dangerous, among Canadian soldiers crossing the Atlantic, in
