But in this case there was not even a definite compact. Therefore, no one could advance a moral plea against the hesitation which our politicians showed in that grave moment. No, what is to be advanced against the politicians who so lamentably bungled that affair is a charge drawn from the intellectual, not from the moral side of our nature. They acted stupidly, as indeed their trade leads men to act: for professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise. It was bad judgment to leave the matter in doubt to the last; and the decision was deferred and deferred again, simply because your professional politician, always absorbed in a wretched personal intrigue, blinked and was bewildered by a great issue suddenly thrust upon him.
You will often hear it said war could not but come when once the three great Continental Powers had mobilised. It has been repeated that the act of mobilisation—of full mobilisation—renders war necessary. The statement is untrue. Certainly the French mobilisation did not, even up to the very last moment, render war necessary; and the same is true of the German.
Again, it is still said by fanatics that the Russian Government intended and provoked the war. And many men not fanatics, but ignorant of Europe, or at issue with Christendom, repeat the myth. Those who plead in favour of Prussia and of the German General Staff (they are numerous in England today) still pretend, as do all the German writers, that the mobilisation ordered from Berlin was but a reply to the earlier orders issued from Saint Petersburg.
History will not accept that. There is altogether too much against it. There is the connection between the “Lokal Anzeiger” and the German General Staff. Still more there is the nature of German mobilisation, which was so designed that preliminary orders were, to its general scheme, what final orders were in any other country. The Prussian scheme of mobilisation may be compared to a loaded gun. If I know that a man has his gun loaded and he aims it at me, my then loading mine is not a provocation.
Much more is there, against so strained and distorted a piece of special pleading, the truth obvious to anyone, even the most superficial, who had seen Germany since 1911: the whole mass of that population supported its government in a determination for what was believed would prove a short and highly lucrative campaign, and one not only highly lucrative, but settling forever the security of that great experiment which Prussia had not quite consolidated by her series of rapid victories a lifetime before.
But though the German mobilisation was indeed proof of the truth that Prussia and her subjects desired war, that war so eagerly desired was a Continental war only. The Continental war envisaged at Berlin excluded the factor of English intervention. Not that it was believed such intervention would make any great difference in what was assumed would be an immediate and crushing victory in the West, but that sea power continuously exercised could not but have given pause upon what Berlin thought would be the probable result of the struggle in the East. Granted an immediate and certain German victory in the West (as a fact it failed), there would still be an Eastern campaign which the German General Staff believed to be necessarily prolonged and which they dreaded; blockade during that trial they dared not face.
Two men, I think, deserved well of their country at that moment, granted that an entry into the war sooner or later was inevitable. One was Mr. Winston Churchill, who upon his own initiative mobilised the Fleet; and the other was Lord Haldane, who convinced his colleagues of the nature of the peril and who, it should be remembered, had made possible the cooperation of Britain in the war by his scheme for mobilisation. All that followed was based upon the work originally done by him at the War Office at a time when, to the great bulk of his countrymen, the idea of such a conflict was still quite unfamiliar and its enormous implications incredible.
For the rest, it is neither generous nor wise to pick out any particular set of misjudgments; for the whole of Europe, all its culture and all its intelligence, was at fault in estimates of the war. You may say of all the mass of stuff that has been written since the Armistice that it can be graded in degrees of intelligence according to its admission of the unexpected and the fortuitous throughout those terrible years. The less intelligent the writer the more he ascribes this or that development to a plan; the more intelligent he is the more he admits factors independent of our wills and our intelligences: factors proceeding, as our fathers would have said, and as I believe, consciously from a Will above humanity or (as it is the modern fashion to affirm) coming into human affairs from no god, but blindly—at any rate, factors external to human direction. In the individual actions can be traced clearly enough what measure of conclusion their success involved, or what lack of it their failure was due to. But, in the general lines of the turmoil, it is not so. Here and there a chance guess proved right, but it was no more than a guess, unless we except Lord Kitchener’s warning that the war would last at least three years: he gave it when most men thought it might not last three months.
It is with regard to the Great War as it is with regard to every set of campaigns in history; if you omit that which was not subject to any human will
