During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi. Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon. These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the culminating effects of their devilry. Prince Bülow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen, will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck’s aphorisms are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite Shakespeare. Bülow’s name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War Party’s demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck’s blasphemous bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Bülow in 1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and, being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this war.