ad also beaten Austria; but somehow
everybody seems able to beat Austria, though nobody seems able to draw
the moral that defeats do not matter as much as the Militarists think,
Austria being as important as ever. Suddenly Germany beat France right
down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in war of
which nobody up to then had any conception. There was not a State in
Europe that did not say to itself: "Good Heavens! what would happen if
she attacked _us_?" We in England thought of our old-fashioned army and
our old-fashioned commander George Ranger (of Cambridge), and our War
Office with its Crimean tradition of imbecility; and we shook in our
shoes. But we were not such fools as to leave it at that. We soon
produced the first page of the Bernhardian literature: an anonymous
booklet entitled _The Battle of Dorking_. It was not the first page of
English Militarist literature: you have only to turn back to the burst
of glorification of war which heralded the silly Crimean campaign
(Tennyson's _Maud_ is a surviving sample) to find paeans to Mars which
would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they did); but it was the
first page in which it was assumed as a matter of course that Germany
and not France or Russia was England's natural enemy. _The Battle of
Dorking_ had an enormous sale; and the wildest guesses were current as
to its authorship. And its moral was "To arms; or the Germans will
besiege London as they besieged Paris." From that time until the
present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has never ceased.
The lead given by _The Battle of Dorking_ was taken up by articles in
the daily press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo fever
(anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now),
Stead's _Truth About the Navy_, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression
of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral Maxse,
Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, _The National Review_, Lord Roberts,
the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign Secretary on
the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells's _War in the Air_ (well worth re-reading
just now), and the Dreadnoughts. Throughout all these agitations the
enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was Prussia and her
millions of German conscripts. At first, in _The Battle of Dorking_
phase, the note was mainly defensive. But from the moment when the
Kaiser began to copy our Armada policy by building a big fleet, t