My Four Years in Germany | Page 2

the
knowledge that, unless indemnities are obtained from other countries,

the weight of the great war debt will fall upon the people, perhaps
makes them readier to risk all in a final attempt to win the war and
impose indemnities upon not only the nations of Europe but also upon
the United States of America.
We are engaged in a war against the greatest military power the world
has ever seen; against a people whose country was for so many
centuries a theatre of devastating wars that fear is bred in the very
marrow of their souls, making them ready to submit their lives and
fortunes to an autocracy which for centuries has ground their faces, but
which has promised them, as a result of the war, not only security but
riches untold and the dominion of the world; a people which, as from a
high mountain, has looked upon the cities of the world and the glories
of them, and has been promised these cities and these glories by the
devils of autocracy and of war.
We are warring against a nation whose poets and professors, whose
pedagogues and whose parsons have united in stirring its people to a
white pitch of hatred, first against Russia, then against England and
now against America.
The U-Boat peril is a very real one for England. Russia may either
break up into civil wars or become so ineffective that the millions of
German troops engaged on the Russian front may be withdrawn and
hurled against the Western lines. We stand in great peril, and only the
exercise of ruthless realism can win this war for us. If Germany wins
this war it means the triumph of the autocratic system. It means the
triumph of those who believe not only in war as a national industry, not
only in war for itself but also in war as a high and noble occupation.
Unless Germany is beaten the whole world will be compelled to turn
itself into an armed camp, until the German autocracy either brings
every nation under its dominion or is forever wiped out as a form of
government.
We are in this war because we were forced into it: because Germany
not only murdered our citizens on the high seas, but also filled our
country with spies and sought to incite our people to civil war. We
were given no opportunity to discuss or negotiate. The forty-eight hour
ultimatum given by Austria to Serbia was not, as Bernard Shaw said,
"A decent time in which to ask a man to pay his hotel bill." What of the
six-hour ultimatum given to me in Berlin on the evening of January

thirty-first, 1917, when I was notified at six that ruthless warfare would
commence at twelve? Why the German government, which up to that
moment had professed amity and a desire to stand by the Sussex
pledges, knew that it took almost two days to send a cable to America!
I believe that we are not only justly in this war, but prudently in this
war. If we had stayed out and the war had been drawn or won by
Germany we should have been attacked, and that while Europe stood
grinning by: not directly at first, but through an attack on some Central
or South American State to which it would be at least as difficult for us
to send troops as for Germany. And what if this powerful nation,
vowed to war, were once firmly established in South or Central
America? What of our boasted isolation then?
It is only because I believe that our people should be informed that I
have consented to write this book. There are too many thinkers, writers
and speakers in the United States; from now on we need the doers, the
organisers, and the realists who alone can win this contest for us, for
democracy and for permanent peace!
Writing of events so new, I am, of course, compelled to exercise a great
discretion, to keep silent on many things of which I would speak, to
suspend many judgments and to hold for future disclosure many things,
the relation of which now would perhaps only serve to increase
bitterness or to cause internal dissension in our own land.
The American who travels through Germany in summer time or who
spends a month having his liver tickled at Homburg or Carlsbad, who
has his digestion restored by Dr. Dapper at Kissingen or who relearns
the lost art of eating meat at Dr. Dengler's in Baden, learns little of the
real Germany and its rulers; and in this book I tell something of the real
Germany, not only that my readers may understand the events of the
last three years but also that they may judge of what is