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Updated: June 20, 2025
We know Bernhardi's remorseless views taken from Treitschke and adopted by the whole German nation: "War is a fiery crucible, a terrible training school through which the world has grown better."
Following the lead of Treitschke, he depreciated colonies rich merely in products; for Germany needed homes for her children in future generations, and she must fight for them with all her might at the first favourable opportunity. This is the burden of Bernhardi's message, which bristles with rage at the loss of Morocco.
Nobody cared twopence about treaties: indeed, it was not for us, who had seen the treaty of Berlin torn up by the brazen seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria in 1909, and taken that lying down, as Russia did, to talk about the sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books.
General von Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War is one of the most interesting, as well as most suggestive, of books, intended to illustrate the spirit of German ambition. Bernhardi writes like a soldier. Such philosophy as he possesses he has taken from Nietzsche. His applications of history come from Treitschke.
Thus he contrasts Bernhardi's brilliant with our own very dull militarists' facts, the result being that the intense mediocrity of Bernhardi leaps to the eye on every page, and that events have thoroughly discredited all his political and many of his military ideas, whereas we possess militarists of first-class quality. Naturally, Shaw calls England muddle-headed.
The latest response to Bernhardi's book, "England the Vassal of Germany," is Kipling's poem in the King Albert book issued December 16 to augment the Belgian Relief Fund. I clip two verses: They traded with the careless earth, And good return it gave; They plotted by their neighbor's hearth The means to make him slave.
In 1911 also was published General Bernhardi's famous book, which defined and described the course of future action, and the aim which Germany was henceforth to pursue with all her strength: Weltmacht oder Niedergang, world-power or downfall. The events in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 completed the conversion of those who still clung to the policy of peaceful bullying.
General von Bernhardi's admiring references to his philosophy sufficiently show this. But Nietzsche's very limited influence on German thought cannot reasonably be quoted as justification of the common saying that Germany had deserted Christianity for Paganism. Had such a statement been made before the war began, our divines would have indignantly repudiated it.
Bernhardi's writings are generally believed to be an inspiration, and in part a statement of German policy. But Mr. Shaw differs.
He is reluctant to go anywhere without a copy of the rules, a guarantee of support, and a regular pension. His outlook is as prosaic as General von Bernhardi's or General von der Golt's own, and that is saying a great deal. In all the German political treatises there is an immeasurable dreariness.
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