Seven hundred French railway stations were devoid of rolling stock. On the other hand, from the beginning of the war down to November 1915, 729 waggons were lying immobilized at the station of Blanc-Mesnil. Seven hundred and twenty-nine!136 Merchants, manufacturers, importers, all were being literally beggared for lack of transports while hundreds of waggons lay rotting at obscure little stations for over a year. “The whole region of the West is encumbered,” we read, “with 30,000,000 hectolitres of apples, valued at 300,000,000 francs, which cannot be conveyed anywhither, and which people are beginning to bury in the earth as manure. Sugar is scarce and is rising in price, whereas ever since last August137 a single firm has unloaded 10,000 tons of sugar at Havre which it cannot have transported to Paris. Innumerable army purveyors are unable to send the machines for the shells…” An official order to the army prescribed a substitute for barbed wire, which was not to be had at any price, yet at a single station at least 135 tons of barbed wire were lying for a twelvemonth unused, untouched.138 On November 27, 1915, the military hospital N16 at Poitiers needed coal. A request was made by telephone. The reply received was: “We have coal at La Rochelle, but there are no waggons to carry it.” Yet there were forty-two waggons immobilized at Cognac, 729 at Blanc-Mesnil and 121 standing laden with barbed wire and other materials for over a year!
Organization and intelligence!
With engines the experience was the same. The French Government, anxious to make up for the deficiency, purchased 140 engines of British make to be delivered some time in 1916. Yet at that time there were at the station of Mezidon (Calvados) over 500 engines immobilized, nobody knew why or by whom. This cemetery of locomotives was photographed by the Journal. Such was the harvest reaped by the enterprising Senator Humbert’s commission at that one station. There were others. At Marles six Belgian engines, at Serquigny twenty, etc.
The attention of the French authorities having been called to this unqualifiable neglect, a senatorial railway commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and it reported that: “The engines in question, numbering about 2000, of which 1000 on the State railway system are now going to be repaired.” “There are therefore 2000 engines scandalously abandoned,” comments the Journal, … “forgotten during sixteen months, and having passed from the state of being inutilized to that of being inutilizable. For if these machines, which were in service before the war and came from Belgium, are to-day, like the waggons of Blanc-Mesnil, incapable of being utilized in their present state, as the official note puts it, the reason is that they were left to decay in the rain and the wind without cover or case for five hundred days.”139
Interesting in a smaller way is the reply given by the French War Minister to a question by a deputy, the Marquis de Ludre, who asked for information about a consignment of knives which had been provided for the army, but were found to be quite useless. The Minister explained that the Generalissimus having requested the immediate dispatch of 165,000 knives, the department charged with the execution of the order had no time to examine the goods, and the circumstance was overlooked that all kinds of knives were supplied, without any reference to the purpose for which they were destined.140 The Minister added that no one should be blamed for this, inasmuch as it was “the result of exaggerated but praiseworthy zeal.” This construction is charitable and may be true in fact. But the soldiers who, in lieu of a serviceable blade, found themselves in possession of a dessert knife may have taken a different view of the transaction.
This is hardly what is understood by organization.
Beside those scenes from chaos set this picture of order: “In a small French town in which the supreme etape commando of Kluck’s army was situated, we inspected a field postal station. On the ground floor the letters were being received and delivered. The stream of soldiers was endless. They were sending field postcards, which are forwarded gratuitously. The difficult work of sorting the correspondence was being transacted on the first storey. Every day from 1800 to 2000 post sacks arrive, mostly with small packets and postcards, and day after day the same difficult problem presents itself – how to find the addressee. Many regiments, it is true, have permanent quarters, but there are mobile columns as well. Quick transfers are possible, and individuals may be shifted to another place or incorporated in a different regiment. The arranging of the correspondence went forward in a spacious room; the letters which it was difficult to deliver were handed over to a number of specialists, who sat in an adjoining apartment and studied all the changes caused by the transfer of troops. They found help in an address-book containing a list of all the field formations. About once every four days, or even oftener, a new edition of this work was issued. By the middle of December 1914 the eighty-fourth edition was in print.”141
This talent for organization, this capacity of thought concentration in circumstances which tend to strengthen emotion at the cost of reason, have been constantly displayed by our enemies throughout the entire struggle of the past thirty years, and never more conspicuously than during the present war. Every emergency found them ready. The most unlikely eventualities had been foreseen and provided for. Private initiative, which “grandmotherly legislation” was supposed to have killed, was more alert and resourceful than among any of the Entente nations. Every German is in some respects an agent of his Government. Each one thinks he foresees some eventuality with the genesis of which he is especially conversant, and he forthwith communicates his forecast and at the same time his plan for coping with the danger to some official. And all suggestions are thankfully received and dealt with on their intrinsic merits. For such matters the rulers of the Empire, however engrossed by urgent problems, have always time and money.
It is instructive and may possibly be helpful to compare this spirit of detachment from the personal and party elements of the situation, this accessibility to every call of patriotic duty, this self-possession under conditions calculated to hinder calm deliberation, with the hesitations, the bewilderment, the conflicting decisions of the Entente leaders and their impatience of unauthorized initiative and offers of private assistance. Outsiders are not wanted. Their money is not rejected, but nothing else that they tender is readily received.
In other more momentous matters the Allies also lagged behind their adversaries. Despite their vast resources and the generous offers of private help, the care taken of the wounded left a good deal to be desired. The articles on this subject which were published in the London Press provided ample food for bitter reflection. In France, at the beginning of the war, wounded soldiers, after receiving first aid, were conveyed for days in carts over uneven roads to the hospitals in which they were to be treated. An American gentleman, witnessing the sufferings of these victims of circumstance, collected a number of motors in which to have them transported rapidly and with relative comfort. But his offer of these conveyances was rejected by all the departments to which he applied. And it was only after he had spent weeks in visiting influential friends in London that he finally obtained an introduction to the Secretary for War, who, overriding the decisions of his subordinates, closed with the proposal and sent the benefactor with his motors to the front.
It has been affirmed by unbiassed neutral witnesses who evinced special interest in the subject that tens of thousands of the allied wounded who died of their injuries might have been saved had they had proper care. But defective organization and other avoidable causes deprived them of efficient medical help.
By Great Britain more comprehensive measures were fitfully taken, of which our wounded have reaped the benefit. A French journal142 enumerated, with a high tribute of praise, the results of the observations made by a commission of British physicians in the Grand Palais Hospital in Paris: “More than half, to be exact 54 per cent., of the wounded entrusted to the care of the doctors of the Grand Palais since last May have been sent back to the front, completely cured. What an achievement!” Undoubtedly it is a feat to be proud of, if we compare it with the percentage of cured in certain other countries and in the Dardanelles. But if we set it side by side with what is claimed for and by the Germans, it may appear less remarkable. It cannot be gainsaid that the British authorities have spared neither money nor pains to alleviate the sufferings and heal the injuries of the wounded. And if the measure of their success is still capable of being extended, the reason certainly does not lie in any lack of good will.
On the incapacitated German soldier every possible care is bestowed. His every need is foreseen and when possible provided for with an eye to thoroughness and economy. Waste and niggardliness are sedulously eschewed. Every man is provided with a square of canvas with eyelets, which serves as a carpet on which he lies at night, as a stretcher on which, when wounded, he is carried to the place where he can have his injuries attended to, and which, when he is killed, is used as a winding-sheet. The medical organization of the army is as thorough as the military. And the results attained justify the solicitude displayed. From month to month the percentage of wounded who are able to return to the front has been augmenting steadily, and the death-rate has decreased correspondingly. During the first month of the war, out of every hundred wounded there were 84·8 capable of further service, 3·0 dead, and 12·2 incapacitated or sent home. In September of the same year the number of those able to return to the front rose to 88·1, or about 4 per cent. more. And at the same time the death-rate sank from 3 to 2·7 per cent. In the third month the proportion of soldiers able to resume their places in the ranks of fighters was 88·9, while the deaths had been reduced to 2·4. During the period beginning with November and ending in March the number of the wounded who went back to the front oscillated between 87·3 and 88·9. In November the percentage of deaths was only 2·1 per cent., and in December only 1·7 per cent. January 1916 showed a further improvement, the death-rate having fallen to 1·4 and in February 1·3 per cent. During the two following months the percentage rose again to 1·4, but declined slowly until in June and July it had descended to 1·2 per cent. The number of wounded men who were sent back to their places at the front had meanwhile increased by April to 91·2, and by June 1915 to 91·7, and in May and July to 91·8. Seven per cent. were wholly incapacitated or dismissed to their homes. Among the latter a considerable percentage returned subsequently to the ranks. Altogether, then, about 91·8 per cent. of the wounded German soldiers who fall in battle are so well taken care of that they are able to fight again, and no more than 1·2 per cent. of the total number succumb to their wounds.143
This strict conformity to the material and psychological conditions of success marks the method by which the Germans proceed to realize a grandiose plan which is understood and furthered by one and all. Their talent for organization, their insight, their inventiveness, and their highly developed social sense are all pressed into the service of this patriotic cause. And it is to these permanent qualities, more even than to their thirty years’ military and economic preparation, that they owe their many successes. The cynicism and ruthlessness of our arch-enemy should not be allowed to blind us to his enterprise, his stoicism, his meticulous applications of the law of cause and effect. These are among his most valuable assets, and unless we have solid advantages of our own to set against and outweigh them, our appeals to the justice of our cause and our denunciations of his wicked designs will avail us nothing. It is to our interest to seek out and note whatever strength is inherent in himself or his methods and to appropriate that. The struggle will ultimately be decided by the superiority of equipment, material and moral, which one side possesses over the other. As for the conceptions of public law and international right which the antagonists severally stand for, they must be gauged by quite other standards than heavy guns and asphyxiating gases. It is not impossible that in the course of time, and by dint of reciprocal action and reaction, the German views may be sufficiently modified and moralized to render possible the usual process of assimilation with which the history of speculative ideas and social movements has rendered us familiar. Meanwhile, truth compels us to admit that part at least of the western system is being overtaken by decay, and stands in need of speedy and thorough renovation.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FINAL ISSUE
To come victorious out of the present ordeal – if, indeed, that be possible with the leaders, principles, methods and strivings that still characterize us – will not suffice to effect the triumph of our cause. The present, momentous though it be, cannot with safety be separated in thought or action from the future. The struggle will go on relentlessly after this campaign until one side has worsted the other definitively. And it is for that struggle that it behoves us to prepare while the war is still at its height.
The Germans, true to their practice, have set us the example. Their curious combinations for dividing the Allies while negotiating their own schemes for reorganizing political Europe have been worked out in almost every detail. Their projects for creating a vast and powerful economic organization, to be known as Central Europe,144 with its first appendix in the Balkan Peninsula, have been carefully woven, and will be duly embellished when the hour for unfolding them has struck. In a word, when opportunity suddenly appears like the bridegroom of the Gospel, the German will be found waiting, with girded loins and trimmed lamp. He has distributed the parts of each nation in the international drama, and if the rôles cannot be taken over to-morrow, he will wait until the day after.
The world is henceforth no longer a field of labour for the individual. Co-operation is the open sesame to the economic life of the future. And co-operation means organization. Organization, then, is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a group of powers whose territory and population are many times greater than its own. That race has demonstrated the quasi-omnipotence of organized labour, and has thereby itself become almost omnipotent. On the success or failure of its adversaries to create a like force and rise to the same height depends the future of Europe and the British Empire. One of the first corollaries of the new principle is the enlargement of all great units, including political communities. Germany and Austria, therefore, are bound, if not precisely to coalesce in one whole, at least to co-operate and combine for their common ends against common competitors, and thus to form the nucleus of that federal state which is, our enemies hope, one day to be commensurate with the continent of Europe.
At present, however satisfactory the military situation may be said to be, the general outlook is far from bright. Our aims are impoverished, our creative energies are clogged by prejudice, our political vision is narrowed by party goals, and the forces inherent in the nation which should be employed in readjusting its life to the new conditions are being frittered away in abortive efforts to neutralize dissolvent ideas that are sapping only those organs of our social and political system which are already vicious or decayed. The waste of the empire’s resources has no parallel in history. Supreme confusion marks our internal condition. Our leaders have done nothing to familiarize the nation with the dangers that threaten it, the means by which they should be met, or with the social and political ideas which are destined to shape and sway the new order of things which is already close at hand.
In the absence of constructive leaders it is for the nation itself to make due preparation for the momentous changes in the social and political system of Europe to which the present crisis is but the prelude.
And although much has been spoken and written on the subject since the war began, little permanent work has as yet been done. And there are few signs of a radical change for the better. The confusion and incongruousness that mark the ideas of the reformers, and the hesitancy and conflicting interests of politicians make one dubious of the outcome of the present contest. Almost everything essential would appear to be still lacking to the Allies, and the nature of the coming “peace period” is not realized, because the war is looked upon as an isolated phenomenon which began in July 1914, and will end when hostilities have ceased. Another belief equally misleading and mischievous is that the Teuton race can be paralysed if not crushed, and that for fifty or sixty years to come no revival of its energies, no recrudescence of its morbid aggressiveness need be apprehended. If we continue to shape our conduct on that assumption we may find ourselves one day in a Serbonian bog from which there is no rescue. However stringent the conditions which the Allies may be able to impose on their enemies, there will still remain a keen, strenuous, irrepressible race of at least a hundred and twenty millions, endowed with rare capacities for organization, cohesion, self-sacrifice and perseverance, whom no treaties can bind, no scruples can restrain, no dangers intimidate. At any moment a new invention, a favourable diplomatic combination, would suffice to move them to burst all bounds and resume the military, naval and aerial contest anew.
Even now, while the war is still raging, they are busy with comprehensive plans for the economic struggle which will succeed it. Nor are they content to weave schemes. They have already begun to carry them out. To mention but a few of the less important enterprises, as symptoms of the German solicitude for detail, there was a numerous gathering of railway representatives, Austrian, Hungarian and German, in August 1915, to consider the means of readjusting the railway service to the conditions which the peace would usher in. Among the projects laid before the meeting and insisted on by various financial institutions was the reconstruction on a new basis of the Sleeping Car Company, from which Belgian capital is to be excluded.145
In Italy many of the German commercial houses are, so to say, hibernating during the war. They merely altered their names and substituted well-paid, friendly Italians for Germans, and the feat was achieved. In this way the Kaiser’s mercury mines of Abbadia, San Salvatore and Corte Vecchia in Tuscany are being protected, and nobody in Italy is under any misapprehension as to what is going on there. They are nominally in the hands of Swiss.
One of the most successful manœuvres by which the Germans have already parried the strokes of their rivals in the economic struggle is by crossing the frontiers and carrying on the contest in the enemy’s country. It was thus that, when Russia, by way of protecting her own nascent textile industries, levied heavy duties on imports from abroad, the Germans transported their plant and their workmen across the border, built extensive works in Lodz which gradually grew into a prosperous German city and rendered sterling services to the Teuton invader during the present war. They intend to have recourse to the same device as soon as hostilities have ceased. German trade papers announced this to their readers and urged them to communicate with the staff with a view to receiving information respecting ways and means.
One Berlin trade journal – the most widely circulated in the German capital – had recently a great headline entitled: “How to keep up German Exportation after the War!” After a preamble enumerating the difficulties that would be thrown in the way of exporters by the Allies, the article went on thus: “For some years to come the means of extricating ourselves from this cruel predicament will consist in transporting the work of manufacturing or refining our merchandise to a neutral country. We are now in a position to offer information and advice on this head to those German manufacturers who are working for exportation, and we shall endeavour to extend our action in the future. We advise all those manufacturers who are desirous of developing their business in this way to enter into relations with us without delay.”146
The device is simple, and has hitherto been efficacious. In Switzerland the number of German firms is large and continues to augment. They are branches of German houses, and their aim is to further the interests of these. They mask their intentions by assuming Swiss names and also by obtaining for their employees naturalization papers in the little republic. How, it may be asked, do the Allies propose to thwart these manœuvres? They probably have not given the matter a moment’s serious consideration. A Swiss journal of repute147 published some time ago a characteristic letter received by a Swiss business man from a German textile manufacturer. One passage is worth reproducing: “The actual situation renders it impossible for us to maintain relations with our former customers. Hence, it is of the utmost importance for us to be informed respecting the commercial and financial situation with a view to the resumption of our intercourse in a lucrative form after this long interruption. It is our intention, therefore, to have our products sold through a Swiss branch by Swiss agents.”148
With their incorrigible disposition to judge others by themselves, the British people fancy that after the war a wave of liberalism will sweep over Germany, demolish the strongholds of militarism there, and reveal a pacific, level-headed nation with whom it may be possible to hold friendly intercourse. This, to my thinking, is also a delusion. Even if the Kaiser and his environment were dislodged from their places, Germany’s ideals, aims and strivings would remain unchanged. But the Kaiser and his Government are minded to leave nothing to chance. They, too, have their plans, which are simple and comprehensive, and would appear to have escaped the notice of British optimists. And yet they are well worth consideration. The Germans themselves put the matter thus —
The enormous expenditure necessitated by the war will call for special financial legislation of which the keynote will be found in monopolies. Now, the present German Finance Minister, who is a banker by training, intends that the monopolies to be created shall be effected, not by the unaided resources of the State, but by its co-operation with the interested business men and banks. On this basis he is working at monopolies of cigarettes, life insurance and electric power. This complex arrangement is facilitated by the machinery of the banks and their peculiar activity. And here we touch upon one of the main sources whence German organization after the war will draw its vitality. It is on the operations of these financial institutions that it behoves us to lay stress. They are so many magnetic centres which attract nearly all the free capital of the country and then employ it as they think fit. And one momentous consequence of this command of money is the possession of almost unrestricted power over industrial enterprises, present and future. For it depends on the banks to extend these and to restrict the output of those in consonance with the economic policy pursued by the State.
Nor should it be forgotten that the power and influence of the banks is not limited by the amount of capital they actually possess. Over and above this they wield all the financial force conferred by the vast amounts deposited with them by customers. This was evidenced in the case of the Banca Commerciale in Italy, which had a working capital of £6,240,000 in the year 1914. Now, of that sum only 2·5 per cent. was owned by Germans, yet the bank itself and all the industries dependent on it were exploited by the German Board of Directors.149 In the Fatherland we observe the same phenomenon. All the German banks together, excepting the hypothecary institutions, owned £195,000,000 sterling, about 44 per cent. of which belonged to the eight principal banks of the empire.150 Possessing only £86,050,000 of their own, they disposed of £259,600,000 belonging to other people.
One effect of the establishment of groups of monopolies will be to increase the number of persons dependent for their livelihood on the State. It is calculated that the total, including heads of families, will amount to tens of millions. The corn monopoly will bring in five million farmers, heads of families, who will have to look to the State for the amount of their yearly income. For it is evident that the Government will be “co-operating” not with the peasants, but with the great landed proprietors. Now, these are the men whose backing is indispensable, and has never been wanting, to the military and court parties who are primarily responsible for the war. Once the wages of the workmen and the interest on capital become dependent on the State, the entire nation is but a vast machine worked by the men in power. To suppose that these will lend a willing ear to the demands for political liberty which are certain to be made after the conclusion of peace is to expect the impossible. What will probably happen is a keen struggle between the classes and the masses for the mastery, but until it is decided in favour of the latter, the Germany of the future will continue to be the Germany of to-day.
In the meanwhile, the Teutons, despite their striking inferiority in numbers and resources, have kept the Great Powers of the world at bay, have defeated their armies, sunk their mercantile marine, occupied their territory, drained their wealth, paralysed their trade and deprived them of all the odds which they owed to circumstance. Organization has thus more than made up for the seemingly overpowering advantages possessed by the Allies at the outset. That it will suddenly lose its worth during the remainder of the campaign is hardly to be expected. The contingency which we may have to face, if we continue to move at our present pace, is manifest to the observant student of politics.
By the average man and our “leaders of men” it is hardly even suspected. Our easy-going optimism is largely the result of temperament and partly, too, of presumptuous confidence born of past luck, and in especial of the relief we feel at our escape from most of the obvious dangers that menaced us at the outset of the war. There has been no trouble over Ireland, no rising in India, no serious defection in South Africa, no invasion of Egypt. And we irrationally feel that these dark clouds, having drifted harmlessly past, the others will follow them. It was said of the Swiss in mediæval times, that they were kept together by the bewilderment of men and the providence of God, confusione hominum et providentia Dei. The same might be truly predicated of the British people of to-day.
But there is no reason for assuming that they will be thus providentially cared for in the future. The Allies have not yet driven the Germans out of Belgium, France, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland or Kurland. Neither have they contrived to starve them into sueing for peace. They talk glibly of exhausting them as though their own resources were inexhaustible. They do well perhaps to make light of the Zeppelins, but they pay far too little attention to the submarines, and seem not to realize the magnitude of the losses which these weapons have inflicted on our merchant shipping, nor to have calculated how long it can hold out at the present rate of destruction. Freights have increased enormously, and they have not yet reached the highest point they are likely to attain. Imports have been restricted, prices have gone up and taxation has increased. Time may not be on the side of our enemies, but is it on ours? It is a fickle ally at best, and to rely on its support is to lean on a split reed.
Optimism of the unreasoning kind prevalent in Great Britain is unwarranted, whether we confine our view to the actual campaign or extend it to the greater struggle of which that forms but an episode. Taking the former case first, one is struck with certain considerations which, without inspiring dismay, ought surely to preserve us from that excessive self-confidence which is too often a hindrance to fruitful exertion. The financial burden and its relation to the limits of the allied nations’ capacity to bear it is a fit subject for meditation when we feel uplifted in self-complacency. Doubtless it is encouraging to watch the symptoms of slow exhaustion displaying themselves in the central empires and to speculate on the consequences of the further fall of the German mark. But these consequences we are too apt to exaggerate. For we misjudge the character, the staying powers, the ideals, the psychology of the German people. We fancy that because they have been reduced from comfort to hardship therefore they are on the verge of collapse. We imagine that because their commercial and industrial classes are keen on making money and ardently desire peace, they are also ready to purchase it by acquiescing in conditions which would dispel their dreams of world power. We feel certain that if Prussia and all the German States received genuine parliamentary government, the costly ambitions of the military party would forthwith be dispelled for all time.