A General Sketch of the European War: The First Phase - Hilaire Belloc

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the German orders to the Austrians upon the East; the overrunning of Belgium, and the German success upon the Sambre; then the pursuit of the Franco-British forces to the line Paris-Verdun, up to the eve of the successful counter-offensive undertaken by them in the first week of September. I will end by describing what were the contemporary events in the Eastern field: in its northern part the overrunning of East Prussia by the Russians, and the heavy blow which the Germans there administered to the invader; in its southern the Austrian opposition to the Russians on the Galician borders, and the breakdown of that opposition at Lemberg.

      My terminal date for this sketch will be the 5th of September.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      War is the attempt of two human groups each to impose its will upon the other by force of arms. This definition holds of the most righteous war fought in self-defence as much as it does of the most iniquitous war of mere aggression. The aggressor, for instance, proposes to take the goods of his victim without the pretence of a claim. He is attempting to impose his will upon that victim. The victim, in resisting by force of arms, is no less attempting to impose his will upon the aggressor; and if he is victorious does effectually impose that will: for it is his will to prevent the robbery.

      Every war, then, arises from some conflict of wills between two human groups, each intent upon some political or civic purpose, conflicting with that of his opponent.

      War and all military action is but a means to a non-military end, to be achieved and realized in peace.

      Although arguable differences invariably exist as to the right or wrong of either party in any war, yet the conflicting wills of the two parties, the irreconcilable political objects which each has put before itself and the opposition between which has led to conflict, can easily be defined.

      They fall into two classes:—

      1. The general objects at which the combatants have long been aiming.

      2. The particular objects apparent just before, and actually provoking, the conflict.

      In the case of the present enormous series of campaigns, which occupy the energies of nearly all Europe, the general causes can be easily defined, and that without serious fear of contradiction by the partisans of either side.

      On the one hand, the Germanic peoples, especially that great majority of them now organized as the German Empire under the hegemony of Prussia, had for fully a lifetime and more been possessed of a certain conception of themselves which may be not unjustly put into the form of the following declaration. It is a declaration consonant with most that has been written from the German standpoint during more than a generation, and many of its phrases are taken directly from the principal exponents of the German idea.

      (I) The German Object.

      "We the Germans are in spirit one nation. But we are a nation the unity of which has been constantly forbidden for centuries by a number of accidents. None the less that unity has always been an ideal underlying our lives. Once or twice in the remote past it has been nearly achieved, especially under the great German emperors of the Middle Ages. Whenever it has thus been nearly achieved, we Germans have easily proved ourselves the masters of other societies around us. Most unfortunately our very strength has proved our ruin time and again by leading us into adventures, particularly adventures in Italy, which took the place of our national ideal for unity and disturbed and swamped it. The reason we have been thus supreme whenever we were united or even nearly united lay in the fact, which must be patent to every observer, that our mental, moral, and physical characteristics render us superior to all rivals. The German or Teutonic race can everywhere achieve, other things being equal, more than can any other race. Witness the conquest of the Roman Empire by German tribes; the political genius, commercial success, and final colonial expansion of the English, a Teutonic people; and the peculiar strength of the German races resident within their old homes on the Rhine, the Danube, the Weser, and the Elbe, whenever they were not fatally disunited by domestic quarrel or unwise foreign ideals. It was we who revivified the declining society of Roman Gaul, and made it into the vigorous mediæval France that was ruled from the North. It was we who made and conquered the heathen Slavs threatening Europe from the East, and who civilized them so far as they could be civilized. We are, in a word, and that patently not only to ourselves but to all others, the superior and leading race of mankind; and you have but to contrast us with the unstable Celt—who has never produced a State—the corrupt and now hopelessly mongrel Mediterranean or 'Latin' stock, the barbarous and disorderly Slav, to perceive at once the truth of all we say.

      Sketch 1.

      "It so happens that the various accidents which interrupted our strivings for unity permitted other national groups, inferior morally and physically to our own, to play a greater part than such an inferiority warranted; and the same accidents permitted men of Teutonic stock, not inhabiting the ancient homes of the Teutons, but emigrated therefrom and politically separated from the German Empire, to obtain advantages in which we ourselves should have had a share, but which we missed. Thus England, a Teutonic country, obtained her vast colonial empire while we had not a ship upon the sea.

      "France, a nation then healthier than it is now, but still of much baser stock than our own, played for centuries the leading part in Western Europe; she is even to-day 'over-capitalized,' as it were, possessing a far greater hold over the modern world than her real strength warrants. Even the savage Slavs have profited by our former disunion, and the Russian autocracy not only rules millions of German-speaking subjects, but threatens our frontiers with its great numbers of barbarians, and exercises over the Balkan Peninsula, and therefore over the all-important position of Constantinople, a power very dangerous to European culture as a whole, and particularly to our own culture—which is, of course, by far the highest culture of all.

      "Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries. In a series of wars we accomplished that unity, and we amply manifested our superiority when we were once united by defeating with the greatest ease and in the most fundamental fashion the French, whom the rest of Europe then conceived to be the chief military power.

      "From that moment we have incontestably stood in the sight of all as the strongest people in the world, and yet because other and lesser nations had the start of us, our actual international position, our foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities. England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France, though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, while we were obtaining nothing. The barbarous Russians were increasing constantly in numbers, and somewhat perfecting their insufficient military machine without any interference from us, grave as was the menace from them upon our Eastern frontier.

      "It was evident that such a state of things could not endure. A nation so united and so immensely strong could not remain in a position

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