"Does it not sound truly horrible for the greatest benefactor of a nation, which has to thank him for having realized its century-old dream of unity, to say in all calm and as something quite obvious, that his own nation engages in a civil war 'with more love' than any other war? And wherever we look in Bismarck's speeches, the same complaint is found which had been the eternal lamentation of Goethe--the lament over the lack of faith and will of the Germans. "How will it be this time? Will it be as after the Seven Years' War, after the War of Liberation, after 1870? Will it be again all in vain? As soon as the Fatherland is secure, will every German once again cease to be a German in order to become some kind of -crat or -ist or -er? This time it will be more difficult, for from this war he will return no more into the same Fatherland. It will have expanded; the German Fatherland will be greater. Arndt's poems must be written over again: no longer merely 'as far as the German tongue is spoken.' Germany will stretch beyond that limit, and in it the German will have work to do. "In his speech Bismarck spoke of the 'unoccupied'; but in all probability after this war, for years to come, there will be no 'unoccupied' Germans. They will be fully occupied with the new organization. What the sword has won, we shall keep. 'The pike in the European carp-pond,' said Bismarck once, 'prevent us from becoming carp. They compel us to exertions which voluntarily we should hardly be willing to make. They compel us to hold together, which is in direct contradiction to our innermost nature.' "As we cannot change our nature, it will be good if we take over for good and all a number--a very considerable number,--of these European pike. That will occupy the German peasant and give an outlet to his superfluous energies. There will be no leisure-energy to discharge itself in party strife. Further, we must build Europe up again. It stood on rotten foundations, and now it has fallen to pieces. We shall erect it again on a German basis, and there will be work enough."[30] [Footnote 30: Hermann Bahr: "Kriegssegen" ("The Blessings of War"). Published in Munich, 1915, p. 5 _et seq_.] CHAPTER V WARS AND RUMOURS OF WARS It would be more than human if the German nation had actually realized the lyrical picture painted by two well-known writers in the preceding chapter. German newspapers, it is true, prove that the national unity so loudly acclaimed was no empty word; moreover, they show conclusively that grumblers and half-hearted enthusiasts were not lacking. It would probably be more correct to describe them as "sober-minded patriots." These elements had, however, to use a colloquialism, an "exceedingly rough time."