and wasters, could not easily afford double,
treble, quadruple our military and naval expenditure. I advocated the
compulsion of every man to serve his country, both in war and peace. The
idlers and wasters perceiving dimly that I meant the cost to come out of
their pockets and meant to use the admission that riches should not
exempt a man from military service as an illustration of how absurd it
is to allow them to exempt him from civil service, did not embrace my
advocacy with enthusiasm; so I must reaffirm it now lest it should be
supposed that I am condemning those whose proceedings I am describing.
Though often horribly wrong in principle, they were quite right in
practice as far as they went. But they must stand to their guns now that
the guns are going off. They must not pretend that they were harmless
Radical lovers of peace, and that the propaganda of Militarism and of
inevitable war between England and Germany is a Prussian infamy for
which the Kaiser must be severely punished. That is not fair, not true,
not gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us half-way, as they
certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. When the German
fire-eaters drank to The Day (of Armageddon) they were drinking to the
day of which our Navy League fire-eaters had first said "It's bound to
come." Therefore, let us have no more nonsense about the Prussian Wolf
and the British Lamb, the Prussian Machiavelli and the English
Evangelist. We cannot shout for years that we are boys of the bulldog
breed, and then suddenly pose as gazelles. No. When Europe and America
come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is
concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the
lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage
soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly
pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one
another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are
now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be
tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world. I am sorry to
spoil the saintly image with a halo which the British Jingo journalist
sees just now when he looks in the glass; but it must be done if we are
to behave reasonably in the imminent day of reckoning.

And now back to Friedrich von Bernhardi.

*General Von Bernhardi.*

Like many soldier-authors, Friedrich is very readable; and