by no means confined to the age with which it deals. It is the essence of the historian's faith that past and present help to explain one another; and the light of history in the making around us illumines the making of history in the past. That is largely because we feel the present more than we can ever feel the past, and insight into human affairs is as much a matter of sense as it is of science. Moreover, it is the process of production rather than the finished product which interests the real historian, and history is a living subject because mankind is always producing and never knowing-apart from the mechanical sciences -what the finished product will be. Historical students will understand the Napoleonic wars all the better for having felt a similar tension, and communion with the past, although a very imperfect communion of saints, is essential to the continuous life of humanity. The date of each of these essays is precisely indicated so that it may be borne in mind in the criticisms they may suggest. There is inevitably some repetition, and most of them contain expressions which they would not have contained, had they been written earlier or later; but to modify the record of expressed opinion in the light of later events indicates a dishonest ambition for consistency or prescience, and is one of the most insidious forms of historical forgery. A. F. POLLARD. CONTENTS. PAGE PREFACE V I. THE WAR: ITS HISTORY AND ITS MORALS.1 It has often been remarked, from the time of Aristotle downwards, that, while the occasions of great events may be trivial, the causes are always profound. This distinction between occasions and causes must ever be borne in mind when we attempt to trace the origin of the Great War of 1914. Occasions for war we have always with us; they are as plentiful as the microbes infesting the air we breathe; and, just as our individual health depends, not upon the possibility of avoiding microbes, but upon the general state of our body, so the preservation of the world's peace depends, not upon the absence of occasions for war, but upon the condition of mind in which the peoples and governments of the earth confront them. We are not at war because an archduke was murdered, but because that occasion for war burst upon one or two powers not disinclined to break the peace. If we can account for the bellicose attitude of Germany and Austria in July, 1914, we can understand the outbreak of war; for, if it is true that it takes two to make a quarrel, it is truer that it takes two to keep the peace. 1 A lecture delivered from notes at University College on 5 October, 1914; written out and published in January, 1915, 66 The main problem, therefore, resolves itself into the question, Why was Germany not anxious to avoid a war? Austria may almost be eliminated from this discussion, because it is clear from the official correspondence that Austria, if left to herself, would have found a means of escape from the dilemma; and, indeed, war between her and Russia did not begin until five days after its declaration by Germany, while six days more elapsed before war began between Austria and France and Great Britain. The ultimate cause of the war must be sought in Germany's frame of mind, and that frame of mind I propose to illustrate chiefly by means of two books, Prince von Bülow's Imperial Germany" and Bernhardi's "Germany and the Next War". The ex-Chancellor's volume is a moderate exposition of German policy which probably represents the mind-perhaps the better mind-of the German Foreign Office before the outbreak of war. Bernhardi's book represents that of the military party whose aggressiveness may have had something to do with Bülow's resignation, and certainly got the better of the Kaiser's less truculent inclinations. It is a book which many of us have been reading with what patience we could command, and perhaps also with this amount of comfort that nothing done by Germany since the war began has done more to compromise her moral position than this revelation of Prussian mentality written in time of peace, before the first Balkan war or even the Agadir crisis had ruffled the surface of affairs. As Prince von Bülow points out' with some humour, it is a German foible to deduce the most 1 Pp. 128-9. |