Volleys from a non-combatant

Front matter

Glass,

Book

BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER

Preface

Dear Hazen : I dedicate this little book to you because, if you had not said that you thought such a collection might be useful to refer to hereafter, I should hardly have decided to reprint it. I know too well how fugitive such pieces must be, but I know, also, how grateful the historian is when he comes upon them and finds in them the expression of a party, or it may, as in this case, of a mere individual, during a great crisis. Assuredly, I speak only for myself, but perhaps some readers will find in these papers, as you do, certain symptoms without a knowledge of which no one can hope to understand the changing attitude of America toward the Atrocious War.

From the beginning of August, 1914, when the German Kaiser forced this war upon the world, I believed that it was a contest in which Germany strove to destroy Civilization and to substitute for it the barbaric German Kultur — the negation of moral law, the system in which the shameless deceit and unimagined cruelty of German selfishness embodied themselves. I underestimated the viii PREFACE

immense advantage which forty years of preparation gave the Germans at the start. I thought that England and France on the west and Russia on the east would be able to halt the Germans quickly. But the rapid retreat to the Marne and the Russian rout at the Mazurian Lakes showed me my mistake; and when the Germans, driven back by Joffre and Foch, dug in at the Aisne, I feared that the struggle must be long. But I did not doubt then, nor have I ever doubted since, what the outcome would be. First : because I do not believe that the Powers of Evil can root out Righteousness from the world; and next, because, looking at history, I saw that every modern attempt to dominate Europe — by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, by the French under Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, and by Napoleon a hundred years ago — had been foiled and shattered by England. So England's part in this war seemed to me a very cheering portent.

The English are often slow; they rather pride themselves on their ability to muddle through: compared with the Germans, they make war like amateurs; but the plain historical fact is, that they have looked every would-be European conqueror for the last four hundred years squarely in the eyes, and have seen him go down before them.

PREFACE ix

Had the conceit of William II of Hohenzollern not been so colossal that it made him appear, to himself, greater than the anaemic Gott whom he claimed for partner, he would have been very careful not to range England against Germany in a life-or-death struggle.

Seeing that the war was the culmination of the rivalry between Democracy and Autocracy, between Liberty and Bondage, which had been going on for more than a century, I had no doubt that the United States ought openly and at once to take their stand on the side of Freedom and Justice. I loathed the German propaganda which tried to poison Americans into thinking that no oath, no pledge is sacred; that solemn treaties are mere scraps of paper; that, in war, Germans may burn and slay, may outrage women, crucify men, bayonet children and infants, deport men into industrial slavery and women and girls into infamous sexual bondage, bombard hospitals, sink hospital ships and merchant vessels loaded with neutrals and non-combatants, and still expect to be regarded as men and not as demons. For lack of another word, we call them Prussians. To prevent the total pollution of our people by the letting loose of the Prussian moral sewers — which, apparently, no one in authority did anything to check — x PREFACE

I deemed it the duty of every one of us who saw this danger and who recognized above all our national contribution to Freedom, to force the United States to join the Allies. Ever since we broke with Germany in April, 1917, our duty, it seemed to me, was to support the war with might and main and to oppose at every turn the votaries of Pacifism, Bolshevism, and all forms under which the friends and agents of the Kaiser pursued their sly work here.

While the topics discussed in these papers seem, therefore, somewhat miscellaneous, they have, nevertheless, this underlying unity. I reprint them in their original form, except for some necessary correction of type or phrase, because such symptomatic essays lose their value if, on reprinting, they are corrected up to date. Any one can be a prophet after the event. In general, each paper expresses what I felt to be a need of the time when it was written; for a danger which must be faced, must be understood in order to be crushed. I lay no more claim to serenity than to neutrality. I have noticed in this crisis that the men who boasted of being "impartial," were either pro- German, or they had no hearts to beat faster although the fate of mankind hung in the balance.

To the title "Volleys from a Non-Combatant,"

PREFACE X i

I would gladly add "Unwilling"; because, as you know, had Fate permitted, I should have been an active combatant, although far beyond the draft age. That arbitrary limit should never shut out any man, provided he is robust physically, and firm in health. Let us never forget that age does not disqualify Marshal Foch who has already thrice saved Civilization and is now giving Moloch, in his Prussian incarnation, his final quietus. Foch is nearly three score years and ten old.

I never see a battalion of our soldiers drilling, or marching along the street, without envying them. I never say good-bye to any young friend in uniform starting for France, without envying him his great opportunity to show, whether he live or die, that he is willing to sacrifice himself for those supreme things without which civilized men cannot live. But a disabling infirmity has forced me into the pitiful ranks of the Unwilling Non-Combatants. Finding that I could only stand and wait, I was reduced to writing. Hence these pale records of a spirit which craved a different outlet.

Faithfully yours, William Roscoe Thayer.

Cambridge, October 25, igi8

Contents

PAGB

Preface vii

CHAPTER

II

At the end of July, 1914, William and his advisers — if, indeed, he allows any one to advise him — believed that the enemies against whom they had long been plotting were so unprepared that it would be easy to crush them by sudden attack. For several weeks Germany had been making such preparations for mobilizing her armies as she could without exciting suspicion. Naturally, at the beginning of August, when the German troops invaded France and Belgium, they took the French and Belgian armies almost by surprise. Alone among the forces of the western Allies the British fleet was mobilized. The German supermen swept through Belgium and northeastern France, outnumbering the hastily assembled troops of their adversaries three or four to one; but even this disparity in their favour would not have given them their swift success if it had not been for their gigantic howitzers, which demolished fortifications supposed to be impregnable.

So far it appears that neither in those early combats nor later did the German soldiers win in open fight against an equal number of foes. The same was true in the war of 1870. 1 This is a strange record for supermen! A German superman, we might innocently think, ought to be a match for at least three or four French or British fighters. It turned out, however, that it was the German readiness, the superior equipment, and, above all, the surprise, which gave the Kaiser his immense and immediate advantage. And yet with all these elements and Prussian prestige — which had become a legend — in his favour, he was not able to achieve his purpose. His triumphal entry into Paris — to celebrate which, with true German thoroughness, he struck a medal before

J In 1866, in the war between Prussia and Austria, the Prussians had 221,000 troops at the decisive battle of Sadowa, the Austrians had only 200,000. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the inequalities were still greater. At Woerth the Germans numbered 84,000, the French 39,000. At Gravelotte, the Germans had 205,000, the French 39,000. At Reichshofen, the Germans 180,000, the French 45,000. At St. Privat, the Germans, 80,000, the French 18,000. At Sedan the Germans 220,000, the French 100,000. These figures pay a high tribute to the German strategy which always contrived to bring a larger force than the enemy's into battle; they do not, however, exalt the German soldier in a man-to-man contest with foreign foes.

the war began — never took place. At the end of the first week in September the French, under Manoury, made a sudden dash on the German right, which upset Von Kluck's plans and so thoroughly dislocated the entire strategy of the German General Staff that on September 9th Foch's army drove like a thunderbolt through the German centre, saved Paris, sent all the Kaiser's forces in full retreat eastward and northward, pricked the supermen's dream of world dominion, and saved civilization.

Here again we are perplexed. Which were the supermen — the German centre of Prussian Guards and Saxons, who crumbled before Foch's Frenchmen, or those Frenchmen themselves? Would it be correct to define a German superman as one who cannot stand up against a mere ordinary foreign man? The ninety-three professors who certified to the moral, not less than to the military, perfection of Germany, would dissent from this; and yet how does it profit you to be a superman if you run before any smaller variety of men?

Looking back, we see that the German occupation of Belgium and northeastern France was due to preparation and surprise, and not to any superhuman quality; and this is true of all the Teutonic successes during the first two years of the war.

The Germans invariably had either larger forces or far superior equipment, or both. They accomplished their great drive into Russia at a time when the Russian supply of munitions was exhausted. For the Germans to sweep almost defenseless masses of Russians before them was, therefore, a scarcely more glorious feat than it was for the Spaniards to put to rout the Aztecs with their bows and arrows, or for the heroic ranchmen who dropped from the fatigue of slaughtering rabbits in a drive. Search where we will, we find nothing supermannish in such victories.

Ah, but does not the perfect preparation indicate the superman? Let us examine. If you had spent your life, from boyhood up, using dumb-bells, should you expect to qualify as a superman if in

a competition with your neighbours, who had de-

i

voted themselves to golf and tennis and yachting, you should lift with ease the heaviest dumb-bell, which the strongest of them could not stir ? Hardly. Well, for fifty years the Prussians had made militarism the chief business of life; wherever possible they applied each new invention to improving their arms and equipment; they indulged in three wars, which gave them invaluable practice. They foresaw that logistics would be not less important than strategy or tactics in the conflict they were secretly preparing for. Nor should we minimize the stimulating effect which the knowledge that he would be called upon to serve in an enterprise for the glory of the Fatherland, and with certain success in sight, produced on each recruit.

None of this militarist training went on in Great Britain, where the army in peace time, composed of volunteers, numbered less than two hundredths per cent, of the population, and since the Crimea had never faced a European enemy. France, on the contrary, had been compelled by the German menace to maintain a large armament; but her purpose being defense and not aggression, she conscripted relatively fewer men than did the Germans; and her population numbered less than forty millions, while Germany's was nearly seventy millions. Her military system was also less efficiently carried out. Russia, likewise, and Italy had conscription and imitated German methods, but without German thoroughness.

It is not unfair to say, accordingly, that when Germany sprang the test of ordeal by battle on her European neighbours they were scarcely less ready than were the competitors of our expert in dumb-bells to cope with him. To argue from their enemies' unpreparedness that the Germans were supermen would violate any logic based on reason.

And here a grotesque conundrum suggests itself: If it took the Germans, by devoting their chief attention to militarism, forty years to organize a magnificent army, and if it has taken the English, a non-militarist nation, two years to organize an army equal and in some respects superior to the German, who are the supermen?

Perhaps I am not deferent enough to the superman; but I deny that anything — whether a kaiser made of flesh and blood or a Krupp gun made of steel — should be an object of servile reverence, much less of worship. If I were hunting for a superman I should look for him in someone who achieved great victories against great odds. This has not been true of the Germans in the present war. Hindenburg in East Prussia and Poland, Mackensen in Galicia and the Balkans, Falkenhayn in Rumania, and the generals who led the dash into France and Belgium — all had great odds in their favour. As soon as the Allies rose anywhere near to an equality with them, the German spectacular successes ceased.

Even the fact that at the beginning of the war the total available man power of the Germans was only one-half that of the Allies does npt entitle them to pose as supermen, for their geographical position and the abundance of their means of transportation more than doubled — probably it trebled — their military potentiality. No other country in Europe had so fine a natural defense as Germany, with Austria bound to her. The fringe of neutral states, Holland and Denmark, protects her from attack by sea; the ridges of Alsace and Lorraine, accessible only through two or three gaps, which have been splendidly fortified, fend her from French invasion on the west; neutral Switzerland serves as a bulwark on the southwest; Austria lies between her and Italian or Slavic aggression on the southeast; and her eastern frontier, dotted with lakes and marshes, can be reached by Russian invaders only after they have crossed long stretches of country. Five German strategic railways can rush German troops by the hundred thousand to protect that frontier at any point from the Russians against one railway available for carrying the Russian armies westward.

The girdle of neutral states which have clandestinely furnished Germany with food and military staples, thereby prolonging the war by at least a year, should also be counted as an immense help to her. If those states had been integral parts of Germany that hefp could not have been rendered. Holland and Denmark would have been blockaded from the start.

To the incalculable advantage due to geography must be added that which the Germans enjoyed by seizing Belgium and northeastern France — a seizure that involved the breaking by the Germans of solemn treaties, and pilloried them as outlaws from civilization. We can hardly contend that the surprise and deceit and the outrage on morals and humanity which were the elements of their western invasion can qualify them as supermen, unless we agree that the ruffian who bludgeons his victim from behind at night is a superman.

Instead of calling supermen the German troops that were shuttled from east to west and from west to east in admirably appointed railway trains which took along with them artillery, food, and munitions, I should apply that term to Napoleon's Army of Italy, which marched on foot from Paris to Venice, ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-equipped — a mob, rather than an army — led by the "little puppet with dishevelled hair," and which wiped out three Austrian armies of much larger numbers, commanded by Austria's most renowned generals. Similarly, was not Napoleon's assembling of the host with which he invaded Russia in 1812 a more astonishing task than that of mobilizing the Germans in 1914, or of dispatching them in trains and motors and trucks and lorries to any desired point ?

Napoleon's conscripts footed it from the Pyrenees, or from Finisterre, or from Calabria — to Vilna. As you are whirled at forty miles an hour across the American continent amid such modest luxury as a Pullman car affords, if you happen to think of the pioneers — thirsty, weary, footsore, shrouded in doubts — who first blazed the trail over the prairies and the Rockies to the Pacific, do you look down on them as mere men? Do you look up to yourself as a superman?

With the best intentions in the world, I fear that we must dismiss the superman myth; or at least we must so revise our definition of superman that it will fit not those who can do things on a large scale because they have every contrivance at their disposal, but those who work marvels with a meagre outfit. Call Columbus, in his tiny Santa Maria of one hundred tons burthen, a superman if you will, but not the captain of a fifty-thousand-ton ocean liner.

in

In our glimpses at individual supermen and at concrete examples of their acts, perhaps we have not paid sufficient respect to the philosophic theory of the superman. The Germans assure us that in order to understand them, we must think Germanly. They see themselves as supermen — giants among dwarfs; but through some regrettable defect in our vision we see them as a race of great vigour and remarkable attainments in certain fields but not at all as demigods or even as Titans. The notion that here and there a superman is born — a person "beyond good and evil," who is expected not only not to curb his appetites and passions, but to prove his supermannishness by giving them a free rein — is a very inebriating notion if you are clever enough to persuade yourself and your group that you are one of these privileged creatures.

The champions of the philosophy of supermania lean heavily on biology to support their creed. They have been misled by the phrase "the survival of the fittest." You might infer, to hear them buzz, that only the fittest survive, or, to put it conversely, the fact that you survive is proof that you are the "fittest." Possibly a German complacently accepts this as a selfevident truth, but most of us non-Germans, even in our moods of most inflated self-esteem, must have our doubts as to our being the "fittest." Historians will recall many individuals, dead long since in body but living on in spirit, who were "fitter" than any among us to survive;

nay, were there not many groups and even periods in the past which our "fittest" to-day cannot match?

To interpret history in this mechanical fashion is as unsafe as it would be to try to climb the Matterhorn by practising the goosestep. If the "survival of the fittest" meant what the German believers in the phrase claim, then long before our geological era one species of mammals would have devoured all the others, and there would be only one triumphantly "fittest" kind of bird, of insect, and of fish; and long ago one breed of men would have swallowed up or exterminated all other breeds. Has this happened? Has a tribe of supermen arisen to dominate the world ?

There have been conquering races — Assyrians, Egyptians, Macedonians, Romans, Teutonic Barbarians (ancient and modern), Normans, Arabs, Turks, Spaniards, Anglo-Saxons, Frenchmen, Prussians — but it would be difficult to discover the quality common to them all which made each in turn "fittest." And if we discovered it we should learn only what made them military conquerors.

But ability for military conquest is only one form of "fitness," and not the highest. Marcus Aurelius, for instance, would have gone down before one of the brawny gladiators in the Colosseum;

or, to make the point even clearer, say that he had succumbed to a lion in the arena. How would his fitness to survive compare with that of the gladia-. tor or the wild beast ? Over the earth the common fly — musca domestica — is more plentifully diffused than even the Germans; fear of lese-majeste restrains us from making any inference as to their relative fitness.

So there are, it seems, different kinds of fitness to survive; there are heights of excellence not dreamt of by the German General Staff; and there is human progress not to be measured or attained by the Prussian goose-step. "Fitness to survive?" After nearly eighteen hundred years the golden thoughts of Marcus Aurelius survive to-day in the hearts of thousands, but the names of the victorious gladiators in the Flavian Amphitheatre are forgotten, as those of Hindenburg, Moltke, and Mackensen will be when other standards of fitness than those of slaughter rule again. In days of Frightfulness like the present it gives solace to reflect that we can still hear Theocritus singing his idyls among the moonlit groves, while all the wicked tyrants of Syracuse associated with atrocious crimes are mere names or even less. And if to-day we had to choose between preserving the art, literature, and history of Athens and the Kultur of Germany under William II, can there be any doubt as to which we should jettison? In blotting out the Sieges Allee we should deprive posterity of many a smile, and in throwing over the records of Pan-Germanism and Supermania we should deprive it of proofs of otherwise incredible racial hallucination; but, after all, Treitschke, Nietzsche, and the Hohenzollern Kaiser are but for a generation, whereas Thucydides, Plato, and Pericles are for all time.

May we not conclude, therefore, that when we subject the superman to the test of philosophy, or of biology, or of history, they refuse to recognize his claims?

"We have seen you before," they say: "we have watched your recurrent appearance in human affairs ever since the time when man, ceasing to be a quadruped, stood up on his hind feet. We strongly suspect, if you will permit us to say so, that you are really a survival of the quadruped, or Inframan, in the human race. We admire your adroitness in palming off infra as super, but really who are the people whom you have fooled in this way? Do they stand on their heads, or is their eyesight twisted, or do they dwell in asylums for the insane, or are they still quadrupeds?"

They are none of these; they are Germans.

IV

At the outset of our philosophic inquiry a chilling question confronts us: How can we know that the Germans are supermen ? If the attributes of the superman are above those of mere man, what faculty has mere man by which to recognize them? For the superman is not simply a being in whom the talents of mere man are magnified many times — he is a higher creation. We can know Caesar, Socrates, Napoleon, Emerson, because they, too, were men; but how can we know the superman any more than the kitten which chases its tail on the floor beside me knows my nature or my thoughts ?

Perhaps our only way is to assume that the superman belongs to our genus and to study him experimentally as we would any other strange creature. So we shall be able to value him in human terms, which may or may not coincide with the value he has set upon himself.

I remarked just now that he does not appear to have excelled even in science in those large discoveries, the product of the creative imagination, which we associate with superior minds. The steamboat was invented by Fulton, an American; the locomotive, applied to the railroad, by Stephenson, an Englishman; the telegraph, by Morse, an American; wireless telegraphy, by Marconi, an Italian with an Irish mother; the telephone, by Bell, an American; and when we come to the field of war implements what surprise is this? Not German supermen, but mere men of other races dreamed, devised, and designed them. An American named Holland put the first submarine into the water; he, too, invented the submarine torpedo; Maxim, another American, invented the machine gun; two American brothers, the Wrights, set flying the first practical airplanes; Bessemer, an Englishman, discovered the process for making steel, without which Krupp guns, large or small, would not have existed; and nearly a century and a half ago a Frenchman, Montgolfier, invented the balloon, the principle of which underlies the Zeppelin, the dirigible, and all similar modern varieties. Even in the art of war itself, it was not the Germans who introduced trench warfare.

Not a German in all this list. The supermen turn out to be amazingly lavish borrowers of other men's ideas, prolific adapters, untiring imitators. Among men it is the discoverer — and not those who follow him or perhaps improve upon him — that is rated highest. Can the ranking be reversed among supermen? Among them do the secondrates stand higher than the first ?

If we leave the sphere of invention and enter that of basic principles, we find that no German, but a modest Englishman, Charles Darwin, announced the idea which has been the keynote of modern thought and of modern science. Louis Pasteur, a modest Frenchman, demonstrated the true method of biology; Michael Faraday, a modest Englishman, laid down the laws which have guided all subsequent students and appliers of electricity; Joseph Lister, another modest Englishman, conferred upon this suffering world the boon of antisepsis.

Our search for indisputable proof that Germans have been supermen in these many fields seems barren. Can they have been mistaken? Does not the giant know the length of his own belt? Who are we to doubt or to deny? Is it not presumptuous in moles to question the magnitude of elephants? In fairness we must judge the Germans by their achievements in the activity which they pronounce supreme. That activity is war, the sum and crown of all their ideals and talents. I have hinted, perhaps too audaciously, that in the actual war the Germans have revealed none of those transcendent qualities that must be, of course, the martial heritage of supermen. Let us glance once more at this matter, which is evidently the final test for our poor human intelligence of the superman's claims.

We must never forget that when the Kaiser forced his atrocious war upon the world in August, 1914, he commanded the most stupendous army the world had ever seen; in equipment, in drill, in the speed of its mobilization, it had no rivals. It swept on, apparently irresistible, for thirty-six days; then Manoury found the crevice in the German giant's armour, plunged his sword into it, and the monster reeled backward. Four days later it was in full retreat. This is puzzling to the plain common-sense man. It surprised even the Germans themselves. In the happy days of Bourbon despotism in the Two Sicilies, the soldiers were given amulets, which, they were assured, would render them invulnerable to the bullets of their enemies. What must a Bourbon soldier have thought when he was brought to the ground by a ball that smashed his thigh? The Kaiser gave his German soldiers similar amulets — he told them that they were supermen and invincible. When they were beaten at the Marne and only by their superior running ability succeeded in reaching the Aisne in time to dig themselves in before their pursuers came up with them, were they troubled by doubts as to the validity of their amulets ? Being Germans, they probably indulged in no surmises, for the German soldier is trained not to think.

But a few weeks later the Kaiser, having been baffled at the Marne, decided to make a drive on Calais. What could hinder him? There were a hundred thousand British troops round Ypres, but the Kaiser had already in a speech sneered away General French's "contemptible little army." The Kaiser had been the master strategist and victor in the German grand manoeuvres for twenty-five years, and his verdict on military qualities must therefore be final. So he sent half a million of his best troops on their promenade to Calais; but at Ypres the "Contemptibles" — who wear that as a name of honour forever — stood their ground; they had only rifles and small field pieces to oppose the heavy artillery and the machine guns of the enemy; they were mostly unused to European warfare fighting against the best regiments of Germany; they were only Britishers while their foes were Germans. And yet the " Contemptibles" held fast; many of them died with a cheer, but they held fast. The flower of the Kaiser's army never got beyond Ypres, either then or in the three years that have followed.

Here is another puzzle for the plain," common-sense mere man. If one Britisher can check and virtually defeat five Germans, which is the real superman? Let us pray to be "Contemptibles," and let us not begrudge the beaten supermen their Iron Crosses.

One form — is it not the most loathsome? — of German mendacity and deceit, is the bribery by the Germans of the armies of their enemies. Thus the superman did not overcome the Russians by superior military skill and bravery, but by corrupting those Russians — from the dweller in the Imperial Palace to generals, colonels, and mere captains — who had charge of supplying the Russian armies with food, munition, and clothing, or who led the troops. Russia was sold out by traitors: the buyers were the Germans. So, too, the regiments which started the Italian avalanche of panic at Plezzo had previously been stroked by German agents. Here again is a strange paradox. The supermen, who preach that war is the highest business of life — the pleasure which they chiefly yearn to enjoy — instead of indulging themselves to the full when they can, buy off, paralyze with bribes, the foes who should fight them. What can this be? Kultur ? Stonewall Jackson did not win Chnncellorsville or Grant take Vicksburg by bribery. But then, they were not supermen, they were not Germans; they were honest, honourable, and chivalrous soldiers, and so were their adversaries.