Before the War Part 7

This state of things involved much delay in mobilization. A careful inquiry made in 1906 disclosed that in order to put even 80,000 men on the Continent, a period which might be well over two months was the minimum required. Besides this great difficulty, the other items to which I have referred as required for the six divisions were not there in any shape even approaching sufficiency. The artillery too was deficient.

There is no more amusing myth than the one according to which the horse and field artillery were reduced. The batteries which could be made instantly effective for war were, in fact, raised from forty-two to eighty-one. The personnel of this artillery was increased by a third for mobilization. For the first time the horse and field artillery was given the modern organization which Cardwell had not been able to give it. The establishments had been merely peace establishments. There were ninety-nine batteries which could parade about on ceremonial occasions, but if war had broken out they would have had to be rolled up, and the personnel of fifty-seven of them taken to produce the mobilized forty-two which were all that could be put into the field. The difficulty was got over by the organization of eighteen of the ninety-nine into training brigades, and the additional men needed for the mobilization of eighty-one fighting batteries were thus obtained. No doubt some of the artillery officers did not like being set to training work, and complained that they were being reduced. But it was a reduction from unreal work of parade in order to double fighting efficiency. Not a man or a gun of the regular horse and field artillery was ever reduced in any shape or form, and not only were the effective batteries largely increased, but over 150 serviceable batteries were created and made part of the Second Line, or Territorial, Army. This was a force which could be used either for home defense or for expansion of an expeditionary force of Regulars. The Militia, which was not under obligation to serve abroad, was abolished, and its substance was converted into third regular battalions, organized for the purpose of training and providing drafts to meet the wastage of war in the first and second regular battalions of their regiments. Some of those third battalions are said to have trained and sent out as many as twelve thousand men apiece in the course of the war.

All these things were done under the direction of such young and modern soldiers as Sir Douglas Haig on the General Staff side, and as Sir John Cowans on the administrative side. Both of these officers were brought home from India for the purpose. Sir Herbert Miles, as Quartermaster-General, and Sir Stanley von Donop, as Master-General of the Ordnance also rendered much help. The newly organized General Staff thought the plans out under the direction, first of Sir Neville Lyttelton, and then of Sir William Nicholson, its successive chiefs. The latter and Sir Douglas Haig in addition worked out, in consultation with the representatives of the Dominions, the organization of their troops in units and with staffs and weapons corresponding as nearly as was practicable to our own. Systematic conferences between the British and Dominion War and other Ministers prepared the ground for this. Sir Wilfrid Laurier and General Botha and others of the Dominion Ministers came to London and co-operated.

It is sometimes said that all these things were very well, but that we should have at once raised a much larger army, as in the course of the war we ultimately had to do. The answer is that in a time of peace we could not possibly have raised a large army on the Continental scale. If we had tried to we should have made a miserable and possibly disastrous failure. The utmost we could do toward it was to provide the organization in which the comparatively small force which was all we could create might be expanded after a war broke out.

How this nucleus organization, on the basis of which the later expansions took place, was fas.h.i.+oned so as to afford a general pattern, anyone may see who chooses to expend a s.h.i.+lling on the purchase of the little volume called "Field Service Regulations, Part II." This piece of work took nearly three years to prepare. With the organization of which I have spoken, which was made in accordance with its principles, the whole of the task of recasting the British Army was performed by 1911.

What we had by that time attained was the power to send an army of, not 100,000 men, which was all that had originally been suggested, but of 160,000, to a place of concentration opposite the Belgian frontier, and to have it concentrated there within a time which was fifteen days in 1911, but was a little later reduced to twelve. No German army could mobilize and concentrate at such a distance more rapidly. So far as I know none of the necessary details were overlooked, and the timetables and arrangements for the concentration worked out, when the moment for their use came, without a hitch. What had been done was to take the old-fas.h.i.+oned British Army and to rid it of superfluous fat, to develop muscle in place of mere flesh, and to put the whole force into proper training. If the warrior looked slender he was at least as well prepared for the ring as science could make him.

It is said that this army ought to have been provided from the first with more heavy artillery. But the reason why its artillery, and that of the French armies also, were of a comparatively light pattern was not due to any notion of economy or to civilian interference. We had enough money, even in those difficult days, for every necessary purpose.

The real reason was that the General Staffs of both the French and the British Armies had advised that the campaign would probably be one in which swiftness in moving troops would prove the determining factor. Heavy artillery, and even any large number of the ponderous machine-guns of that period (the Lewis gun had not yet appeared), would have been a serious impediment to such mobility. What was antic.i.p.ated was a series of great battles. "It was supposed by certain soldiers," says a well-informed military critic (Colonel A'Court Repington, at page 276 of his "Vestigia"), "that the war against Germany would be decided by the fighting of some seven great battles en rase campagne, where heavies would be a positive enc.u.mbrance."

So far the staffs proved to be right, for in the early period of the war mobility did count for a very great deal, and it was not until later that trench warfare became the dominant factor, a stage for which even the Germans themselves, as we now know, from the memoirs of Admiral Tirpitz and other books, were not adequately prepared in point of guns, or of sh.e.l.ls and powder, either.

It is said that we in Great Britain ought, before entering on the Entente, to have provided an army, not of 160,000, but of 2,000,000 men. And it is remarked that this is what we had to do in the end. This suggestion does not, however, bear scrutiny. No doubt it would have been a great advantage if, in addition to our tremendous navy, we could have produced, at the outbreak of the war, 2,000,000 men, so trained as to be the equals in this respect of German troops, and properly fas.h.i.+oned into the great divisions that were necessary, with full equipment and auxiliary services. But to train the recruits, and to command such an army when fas.h.i.+oned, would have required a very great corps of professional officers of high military education, many times as large as we had actually raised. How were these to have been got?

I sometimes read speeches, made even by officers who have served with distinction at the head of their men in the field, which express regret that the British nation was so shortsighted as not to have provided such an army before the war. They point to the effort it made later on with such success during the war. But to raise armies under the stress of war, when the people submit cheerfully to compulsion, and when highly intelligent civilian men of business readily quit their occupations to be trained as rapidly as possible for the work of every kind of officer, is one thing. To do it in peace time is quite another. I doubt whether more was possible in this direction than, in the days prior to the war, to organize the Officers' Training Corps, which contained over twenty thousand partially prepared young men, and began at once to expand to yet larger dimensions from the day when war broke out. For the corps of matured officers, required to train recruits and to command them in war when organized in their units, would have had to consist of soldiers, themselves highly trained in military organization, who had devoted their lives to this work as a profession. It takes many years in peace time to train such officers. Because they must be professional, they can only be recruited under a voluntary system.

Now, before the war it was difficult enough to recruit even so many as the number we then had got, a number totally inadequate for any army larger than the small one we actually put into shape at home. Every source had been tried in my time by the able administrative generals who were working under me at the War Office. I say "administrative generals," for here comes in the source of the confusion which at times leads not a few-including some whose military training has been exclusively in the leading of troops and in strategy and tactics-to miss the point.

Under the modern military principle, which is the secret of rapidity and efficiency in mobilization, duties are carefully defined and divided. The General Staff does not administer, and is not trained in the business of administration. This kind of military business is entrusted to the administrative side of the army, the officers of which receive a different kind of training. The General Staff says what is necessary. The administrative side provides it as far as it can. And among the exclusive functions of the administrative side of the War Office is the recruiting of personnel by the Adjutant-General and the Military Secretary. It is true that the Director of Military Training, who supervises the training of the young officer when obtained, belongs to the General Staff. That is because his work is educational. With obtaining the young officer it is only accidentally that he is at all concerned.

When, therefore, even distinguished commanders in the field express regret at the want of foresight of the British nation in not having prepared a much larger army before 1914, I would respectfully ask them how they imagine it could have been done.

To raise a great corps of officers who have voluntarily selected the career of an officer as an exclusive and absorbing profession has been possible in Germany and in France. But it has only become possible there after generations of effort and under pressure of a long-standing tradition, extending from decade to decade, under which a nation, armed for the defense of its land frontiers, has expended its money and its spirit in creating such an officer caste.

Now, the British nation has put its money and its fighting spirit primarily into its Navy and its oversea forces. Why? Because, just as the Continental tradition had its genesis in the necessity for instant readiness to defend land frontiers, so our tradition has had its genesis in the vital necessity of always commanding the sea.

Possibly if, just after the war of 1870, we had endeavored to enter on a new tradition, and to develop a great army, we might have succeeded in doing so. With forty years' time devoted to the task and a very large expenditure we might conceivably have succeeded. But I think that had we done so we should have been very foolish. Our navy would inevitably have been diminished and deteriorated. You can not ride two horses at once, and no more can you possess in their integrity two great conflicting military traditions.

But what I am saying does not rest on my own conclusions alone. In the year 1912 the then Chief of the General Staff told me that he and the General Staff would like to investigate, as a purely military problem, the question whether we could or could not raise a great army. I thought this a reasonable inquiry and sanctioned and found money for it, only stipulating that they should consult with the Administrative Staffs when a.s.sembling the materials for the investigation. The outcome was embodied in a report made to me by Lord Nicholson, himself a soldier who had a strong desire for compulsory service and a large army. He reported, as the result of a prolonged and careful investigation, that, alike as regarded officers and as regarded buildings and equipment, the conclusion of the General Staff was that it would be in a high degree unwise to try, during a period of unrest on the Continent, to commence a new military system. It could not be built up excepting after much unavoidable delay. We might at once experience a falling off in voluntary recruiting, and so become seriously weaker before we had a chance of becoming stronger. And the temptation to a foreign General Staff to make an early end of what it might insist on interpreting as preparation for aggression on our part would be too strong to be risked. What we should get might prove to be a mob in place of an army. I quite agreed, and not the less because it was highly improbable that the country would have looked at anything of the sort.

What we actually could produce in the form of an army had to be estimated, not as if we were standing alone, but as being an adjunct to what was possessed by France and Russia. They had large armies and small navies. We had a large navy and a small army. When these were considered in conjunction, I do not think that the hope of some of our best military authorities, that an aggressive attempt by the Central Powers could be made abortive, was an over-sanguine one.

Much of what we did owe for the excellence of the Expeditionary Force, such as it was in point of size, and much of what we have since owed for the excellence of the great armies that we subsequently raised, was due to the unbroken work of the fine Administrative Staff, developed in those days, to which I have already referred. I often regret that when the nation gave its thanks through Parliament to the army, the splendid contribution made by those who prepared the administrative services was not adequately recognized. But this arose from the old British tradition under which fighting and administration were not distinguished as being quite separate and yet equally essential for fighting. The public had not got into its head the reality of the process of defining the two different functions with precision, and of confiding them to different sets of officers differently trained.

The principle was a novel one in the army itself, and why one set of officers should be trained at the Staff College and another at the London School of Economics was not a question the answer to which was quite familiar, even to all soldiers.

It is, I think, certain that for purely military reasons, even if, in view of political (including diplomatic) difficulties any party in the State had felt itself able to undertake the task of raising a great army under compulsory service, and to set itself to accomplish it, say, within the ten years before the war, the fulfilment of the undertaking could not have been accomplished, and failure in it would have made us much weaker than we were when the war broke out. The only course really open was to make use of the existing voluntary system, and bring its organization for war up to the modern requirements, of which they were in 1906 far short. It is true that the voluntary system could not give us a substantially larger army, or more than a better one in point of quality. The stream of voluntary recruits was limited. When the 156 battalions of the line which existed on paper in 1906 were in that year nominally reduced to 148, there was no real reduction, altho some money was saved which was required for some other essential military purposes. For the remaining battalions were short of their proper strength, and it took all the recruits set free by the so-called reductions to bring the 148-some of which were badly short of officers and men alike-to the proper establishment required for the six new divisions of the Expeditionary Force.

I remember well the then Adjutant-General, Sir Charles Douglas, one of the ablest men of business who ever filled that position in this country, informing me at that time that he could not raise a single further division to be added to the six at home.

But if the voluntary system had disadvantages, it also presented us with advantages. The professional and therefore voluntary nature of our army, which, because it was professional, was always ready for sending overseas on expeditions, was in reality made necessary by our position as the island center of a great and scattered Empire. We had increased that Empire enormously by the possession of a voluntarily serving army. Whether this vast increase of the Empire has been always defensible I am not discussing. What I am saying is that we owe the actual increases largely to this, that we were the only Power in the world that was ready to step in at short notice and occupy vacant territory. We always had a much larger Expeditionary Force available for this special purpose than Germany or any other country. That has been our tradition, as contrasted with the tradition of other nations who have been limited in this kind of capacity by the necessity of putting their military forces on a compulsory basis and keeping them at home for the protection of their land frontiers. Ours was the method in which we had been schooled by experience.

It is for such reasons as I have now submitted that I am wholly unable to a.s.sent to the suggestion that we did not look ahead, or considered within the years just before the war whether we were preparing to make the sort of contribution that our own interests and our friends.h.i.+ps alike required. Sea power was for us then, as always before in our history, the dominant element in military policy. I have little doubt that we made mistakes over details. That is inherent in human and therefore finite effort. But I believe that we did in the main the best we could for the fulfilment of our only purpose, which was to preserve the peace of the world and avoid contributing to its disturbance, and also to prepare to defend ourselves and our friends against aggression. Talk to the public we could not, for it would have hindered and not helped us to do so. A "preventive war," which the Entente Powers would not have been so ready to meet as they became later on, might well have been the result. Rhetorical declarations on platforms would have been wholly out of place. But we could think, and to the best of such abilities as we and our expert advisers possessed, we did try to think.

A curious legend which had its origin in Berlin, in October, 1914, has obtained such currency that it is worth while to make an end of it. The legend is that the British Military Attache at Brussels, the late General Barnardiston, had informed the Chief of the Belgian General Staff of secret plans, prepared at the War Office in London, to invade Belgium, and if necessary to violate her neutrality, in order to make an expedition, the purpose of which was to attack Germany through that country. The story appears to have emanated from Baron Greindl, who was the Belgian Minister at Berlin in 1911. He had been completely misinformed, no doubt in that capital, and there is no truth whatever in what he had been told about what he called the "perfidious and naf revelations" of the British Military Attache at Brussels. Him the story represents as having said that his Minister (by whom I presume myself, as the then Secretary of State for War, to have been intended) and the British General Staff were the only persons in the secret. I have to observe, in the first place, that I never during my tenure of office, either suggested any such plan, or heard of anyone else suggesting it. When the story was brought to my knowledge, which was not until November, 1914, I inquired at once of General Barnardiston and of his successor, Colonel Bridges, whether there was any foundation for it. The reply from each of these distinguished officers was that there was none.

We were among the guarantors of Belgian neutrality, and it was of course conceivable that, if she called on us to do so, we might have had to defend her. It would be part of the duty of our Military Attache to remember this, and, if opportunity offered, to ascertain in informal conversation the view of the Belgian General Staff as to what form of help they would be likely to ask us for. This he doubtless did, and indeed it appears from what the Chief of the Belgian General Staff wrote to the Belgian War Minister that the former had discussed the contingency of Belgium desiring our help with General Barnardiston, and had done so gladly. But even so the conversation must have been very informal, for in the account of it by the Chief of the Belgian General Staff there are errors about the composition of the possible British Force which indicate that either he took no notes, or else that Colonel Barnardiston had not thought it an occasion which required him to obtain details from London. At all events, such talk as there was appears to have had relation only to what we ought to do, if requested by Belgium to help, in case of her being invaded by another Power.

The doc.u.ments will be found in the volume of Collected Diplomatic Doc.u.ments relating to the outbreak of the war, presented to Parliament in May, 1915 (Cd. 7860). This volume includes a vigorous denial by Sir Edward Grey of the insinuation.

EPILOG

CHAPTER V

EPILOG

The great war is over, and the Powers of the West have conquered. In the earlier pages I have given my own view of why they won in the tremendous struggle that now belongs to history. They had on their side moral forces which were lacking to their adversaries.

Germany went into the war with a conviction that had been carefully instilled into her people. It was that she was being ringed round with the intention that she should be crushed, and that presently it would be too late for her to deliver herself. The lesson so taught to her was not a true one. She might easily have obtained guarantees of peace which ought to have satisfied her, without undertaking a risk which in the end was to prove disastrous. No one here wanted to ruin her, no one who counted seriously in this country. And if we did not want to, no more in reality did France or Russia. She brought her fate on her head by the unwisdom of her methods. But her people hardly desired the dangers of unnecessary war, and her rulers dared not have ventured these dangers had they not first of all preached a wrong doctrine to those over whom they ruled. They had their way in the end, and disaster to sixty-eight millions of Germans was the consequence. The calculations of their chiefs were bad from the beginning. It is almost certain that the best and most eminent among even these really desired peace. They blundered in method. It was not by continually flas.h.i.+ng the saber that peace was to be secured.

It is scarcely likely that the conditions under which this war became possible will recur. It is more than unlikely that they will recur in our time. But it is none the less worth while to consider how the unlikelihood can be made to approach most nearly to a certainty.

Not, I think, by causing the millions of German-speaking people to feel that they are in chains without possibility of freedom. More certainly, surely, by leading them to the faith that if they will play a part in the great world effort for permanent peace and for reconstruction they will be welcomed to the brotherhood of nations. The individual German citizen is more like the individual Anglo-Saxon than he is different from him. The same hopes and the same fears animate him, and he is sober and industrious quite as much as we are. He has similar problems and similar interests.

Time must pa.s.s before the angry feeling that a great struggle produces can die down. But there are already indications that this feeling is not as intense with us as it was even a short time ago. Germany made a colossal and unjustifiable blunder. She is responsible for the action of her late Government. We think so, and we are not likely to change our opinion on this point. The grief of our people over their dead, over the lives that were laid down for the nation from the highest kind of inspiration, will keep the public mind fixed on this conclusion. And so will the waste and misery to the whole world which an unnecessary war has brought in its train. But presently we shall ask ourselves, in moments of reflection, whether this ought to be our final word, and also, perhaps, whether some want of care on our own part, and certain deficiencies of which we are now more conscious than we used to be, may not have had something to do with the failure of other people to divine our real mood and intentions. I am not sure that in days that are to come we shall give ourselves the whole benefit of the doubt. However this may be, we are in no case a vindictive people.

But in any view something serious is at stake. It will be a bad thing for us, and it will be a bad thing for the world, if the people of the vanquished nations are left to feel that they have no hope of being restored to decent conditions of existence. At present despair is threatening them. Their estimate is that the crus.h.i.+ng burden of the terms of peace, if carried out to their full possibilities, bars them from the prospect of a better future. Their only way of deliverance may well come to seem to them to lie in the grouping of the discontented nationalities, and the faith that by this means, at some time which may come hereafter, a new balance of power may begin to be set up.

Now this is not a good prospect, and the sooner we succeed in softening the sense of real hards.h.i.+p out of which it arises the better. Germany and Austria must pay the penalty they have incurred before the tribunal of international justice. But that penalty ought to be tempered by something that depends on even more than mercy. It is intended to be inflicted for the good of the world, and if it a.s.sumes a form which threatens the future safety of the world it is not wise to press it to its extreme consequences. We have to work toward a better state of things than that which is promised to-day. We have never hitherto kept up old animosities unduly long, and that has been one of the secrets of our strength in the world. The lessons of history point to the expediency of trying to heal instead of to keep open the wound which exists. Those who know the growth in the past of literature, of music, of science, of philosophy, of industry and of commerce, do not wish the German people to die out. It is only the ignorant that can desire this, and, hitherto in the course of our history, the ignorant have neither proved to be safe guides nor have they prevailed. To-day, as before, we must think of generations other than our own if we would preserve our strength.

I hope that a time is near in which we shall no longer proclaim old grievances, but instead cease to dwell on the past in this case, just as we have ceased in the cases of the French, the Spanish, the Russians, and the Boers. It is best in every way that it should come to be so.

It is not with any hope that these pages will satisfy the extremists of to-day that they have been written. They are intended for those who try to be dispa.s.sionate, and for them only, as a contribution to a vast heap of material that is being gathered together for consideration. It is well that those who were in any way directly connected with the story to which they relate should place on record what they saw. But the whole story in its fulness is beyond the knowledge of anyone of our time. The history of the world is, as has been said, the judgment of the world. It is therefore only after an interval that it can be sufficiently written. The ultimate and real origin of this war, the greatest humanity has ever had to endure, was a set of colossal suspicions of each other by the nations concerned. I do not mean that none of them were in the right or that some of them were not deeply in the wrong. What I do mean is that if there had been insight sufficient all round the nations concerned would not have misinterpreted each other.

To us it looks as tho Germany had been inspired throughout by a bad tradition, a spirit older than even the days of Frederick the Great. Had she been wise we think that she would have changed her national policy after Bismarck had brought it to unexampled success in things material. There are not wanting indications that he himself had the sense of the necessity of great caution in pursuing this policy farther, and felt that it could not be safely continued without modification. It was no policy that was safe for any but the strongest and sanest of minds, and even for those it had ceased to be safe. The potential resistance to it was becoming too serious.

But we do not need to doubt that there were many in Germany itself who saw this and did not desire to rely merely on blood and iron. The men and women in every country resemble those in other countries more than they differ from them. Germany was no exception to the rule. It is a great mistake to judge her as she was merely from a few newspapers and by the reports from Berlin of their special correspondents. Sixty-eight millions of people could not be estimated in their opinions by the att.i.tude of a handful, however eminent and prominent, in the home of "Real politik." It is, of course, true that the Germans were taught to believe that they were a very great nation which had not got its full share of the good things of this world, a share of which they were more worthy and for which they were better organized than any other. But it is also true that we here thought that we ourselves were ent.i.tled to a great deal to which other people did not admit our moral t.i.tle. It was not only Germany that was lacking in imagination. No doubt many Germans had the idea that we wished to hem them in and that we did not like them. Our failure to make ourselves understood left them not without reason for this belief. But dislike of Germany was not the att.i.tude of the great ma.s.s of sober and G.o.d-fearing Englishmen, and I do not believe that the counter-att.i.tude was that of the bulk of sober and G.o.d-fearing Germans. They and we alike mutually misjudged each other from what was written in newspapers and said in speeches by people who were not responsible exponents of opinion, and neither nation took sufficient trouble to make clear that what was thus written and said was not sufficient material on which to judge it. It is very difficult to diagnose general opinion in a foreign nation, and one of the reasons of the difficulty is that people at home do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that their unfriendly utterances about their neighbors are likely to receive more publicity and attention than the utterances that are friendly. It makes little difference that the latter may greatly preponderate in number. They are read in the main only in the country in which they are made.

Neither Germans nor Englishmen were careful before the war always to be pleasant to each other, and the same used to be true of Frenchmen and Englishmen. But just as we are coming to understand why and how France and England misinterpreted each other systematically a century and a half ago, so we may yet learn how we came to present, more than a hundred years later, difficulties to the Germans not wholly unlike those which they presented to us. No mere record of the dry facts will be enough to render this intelligible in its full significance. The historian who is to carry conviction must do more than present photographs. He must create a picture inspired by his own study and from the depth of his own mind, and presented in its real proportions with its proper lights and shadows, as a true artist alone can present it. Browning has told us something worth remembering. It is at the end of "The Ring and the Book":

Art may tell a truth Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought, Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.

So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, Beyond mere imagery on the wall,- So, note by note, bring music from your mind, Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,- So write a book shall mean beyond the facts, Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

The truth in its fulness and completeness can not be compa.s.sed in any single narrative of events. It is, of course, the case that history depends for its value on scientific accuracy, but that is not the only kind of truth on which it depends. No man, even the most careful and exacting, can rely on having the whole of the materials before his eye, and if he had them there they would not only be presented in tints depending on his outlook, but would be too vast to admit of his using more than isolated fragments to work into his picture of the whole. Selection is a necessity, and when to the fact that there must be selection there is added the other fact that every historian has his personal equation, the notion of a history constructed by a single man on the methods of the physicist is a delusion. The best that the great historian can do is to present the details in the light of the spirit of the period of which he is writing, and in order that he may present his narrative aright, as his mind has reconstructed it, he must estimate his details in the order in importance that was actually theirs. Now for this the balance and the measuring rod do not suffice. Quality counts as much as does quant.i.ty in determining importance. What is merely inert and mechanical is the subject neither of the artist nor the historian. It is, of course, necessary that by close and exact research the materials should first of all be collected and a.s.sembled. But that is only the first step, and it always has to be followed by a process of grouping and fas.h.i.+oning. The result may have to be the leaving out (or the leaving over for presentation by other artists) of aspects which are not dealt with. We see this when we compare even the best portraits. They do not wholly agree; it is enough if they correspond. For portraits may vary in expression, and yet each may be true. The characteristic of what is alive and is intelligent and spiritual is that it may have many expressions, every one of which really harmonizes with every other. It is because they can bring out expression in this fas.h.i.+on that we continue to set high store on the work of a Gibbon or a Mommsen.

The moral of this is twofold. We must, to begin with, be content for the present to remain in the stage at which all that can be done is to collect and a.s.semble facts and personal impressions with as great care as we can. The whole truth we can not bring out or estimate until the later period, altho we may be sure enough of what we have before us to make us feel capable of doing justice of a rough kind, so far as necessary action is concerned.

And there is yet another deduction to be drawn. It is at all events possible that the wider view of a generation later than this may be one in which Germany will be judged more gently than the Allies can judge her to-day. We do not now look on the French Revolution as our forefathers looked on it. We see, because recent historians have impressed it on us, that it was a violent uprising against, not Louis XVI., but a Louis XIV. What France really made her great Revolution to bring about was the establishment of a Const.i.tution. Horrible deeds were perpetrated in the name of Liberty, but it was not due to any horrible national spirit that they were perpetrated. France was responsible no doubt for the deeds of the men who acted in her name. But she could hardly have controlled them even had she pa.s.sionately desired to do so. And she did not pa.s.sionately desire to do so because, however little the ma.s.s of the people outside Paris may have wished to ma.s.sacre the adherents of the old regime, the people as a whole welcomed deliverance from calamity, even at the price of violent action.