New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With IndexVarious
History
New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With Index
Various
World War, 1914-1918
In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation--a kind of knot in the brain.
Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of
French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange
philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to
saying, "It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I
am superior to you." The spokesman of this system seems to have a
curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction
sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. I have
already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated suggestion that in
order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns. A
much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching
the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: "It is
my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for
the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you
address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate
first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French's
contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over. What I am interested in is the mentality, the train
of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French's little army is contemptible it would seem clear that all the
skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and
valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated
as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible
sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He
wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted
to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the
same moment, in the utter weakness of the British Nation in their attack
and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling such an
attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for
England and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying
to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather
mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with
the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig, and let the impure
blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.
*Prof. Harnack's Reproach*.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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