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A moment ago I mentioned Bernhardi's words. Perhaps they will serve as the best comment with which to close this review. The quotation is from his book, "On War of To-day": "If at some future time Germany is involved in the slowly threatening war, she need not recoil before the numerical superiority of her enemies.
A German must know the rules before he can get to work. More than three hundred years ago a book was written in England which is in some ways a very exact counterpart to General von Bernhardi's notorious treatise. It is called Tamburlaine, and, unlike its successor, is full of poetry and beauty. Our own colonization began with a great deal of violent work, and much wrong done to others.
The logical conclusion of Bernhardi's thesis was that Germany and Austria should boldly side with the Moors and Turks against France and Italy, summoning Islam to arms, if need be, against Christendom. Perhaps if Turkey had possessed the 1,500,000 troops whom her War Minister, Chevket Pacha, was hopefully striving to raise, this might have been the outcome of events.
England stands for the idea of a public law of Europe, and for the small nations which it protects. She stands for her own preservation, which is menaced when public law is broken, and the 'ages' slow-bought gain' imperilled. General Bernhardi's book, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg, was published in 1911, and has been translated into English under the title Germany and the Next War.
For be it remembered that Bernhardi's words are to be taken very seriously, for they are not the ravings of some Pan-German monomaniac, but the considered views of the foremost military writer of Germany, one who is in touch with those inner circles whose opinions are the springs of national policy. "Our last and greatest reckoning is to be with Great Britain," said the bitter Treitschke.
Sometimes even a song has moved a whole nation, and made what seemed impossible, an accomplished fact. What influence had the Marseillaise on the French Revolution? Let French historians tell us. When Bob opened Von Bernhardi's book, he expected to be interested, and perhaps enlightened; but he certainly did not expect it to revolutionise his thoughts. At first he read with only half his mind.
It is the book of a clever, intelligent, but misguided German writer which has been responsible for Belgium's unrest Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War that and articles of a similar tenor which preceded it." "Never read any of them," Norgate remarked.
Those who have violated the Belgian treaty, those who have sown torpedoes in the open sea, those who have dropped bombs on Antwerp and Paris indiscriminately with the idea of killing whom they may strike, have taken to heart Bernhardi's doctrine that war is a glorious occupation. Can any one longer disbelieve the completely barbarous behaviour of the Prussians?
According to Bernhardi's volume German militarism means at least two things. First the suppression of every other nationality except the German; second the suppression of the whole civilian element in the population under the heel of the German drill-sergeant. Is it any wonder that the recent war has been conducted by Berlin with such appalling barbarism and ferocity?
England, as the heart of the Entente, must be harmed before peace can be made; Submarines can and must end the war. This book is for the German people a naval text book as General von Bernhardi's book, "Germany and the Next War," was a military text book. Bernhardi's task was to school Germany into the belief in the unbeatableness of the German army.
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