June 8.
THERE is no breach of confidence in saying that our correspondent Fairplay'? is, we believe, either a German or an Austrian. So much appears obvious from his letter, which, no doubt, we shall be blamed by some for printing. It is easy, we shall be told, fora Hun to say that it is time now to try getting a'saner and more reasonable view of what passed in the last few years.' Quite easy, of course, even allowing for the fact that millions of Germans believed implicitly in tales of British atrocities disseminated by "their Government. Yet there is something in Fairplay's" letter which may make us pause and think. And above all, we have sooner or later to face the question, what is going to be our attitude towards the German people? It is a question complicated in many ways. Allowing -for all possible exaggeration, there is no denying that. the Germans did many beastly things, even beyond the utmost limits of what could be justified by the principle that war must be brutal and the more brutal it is the quicker it is over. And in assessing the responsibility, it was hard to draw any distinction between Government and people. These things are not easily forgotten. But the greater difficulty is this. We who discuss so easily what our duty towards our neighbour is are for the most part civilians, who saw little or nothing of the war, certainly did no fighting. Is it loyal and decent to the men who fell for our sakes to pass a sponge over the record, to treat the German and to meet him as if nothing had happened?
What do soldiers think of the Germans? We published an interview with General Gough a few weeks ago who made no secrat of his feeling, that it was un-English to nourish animosities and that, having fought and won, we ought to forgive and forget. And covering a wider field, speaking with the intimate acquaintance of the almost intolerable sufferings of the common soldier born of over four years' living and working beside him, Mr. Philip Gibbs fells us the same thing in that striking book Realities of War,"" in which he describes what the war was with the brutality of an untouched photograph. He says emphatically that few if any soldiers bore malice or hatred rather they seemed to feel a sort of pity for the Germans condemned to the same loathsome existence as themselves. He says also that, whereas in the earlier years of the war there were many men who came out to the front inspired with zeal to fight for liberty and justice andthe freeing of the world from war, as time passed they began to take a different view, to ask themselves when ther there was so much to choose between one side and another, whether they were not being sacrificed for the maintenance of a regime by which they themselves gained nothing but rather the reverse. And he says that since the war ended this feeling has been deepened by the refusal of the old hierarchies to recognize the new spirit and their desperate efforts to entrench themselves in their old privileges. And Mr. Gibbs goes on to say that in the making of the Peace Treaty a great opportunity was lost. For, he says, the German people were stunned and bewildered; they had not risen in revolt against their leaders as the Russians did; it was their leaders who had deserted them; and in this frame of mind, with all their beliefs and their power in ruins about them, a generous peace would have done more to cause them to rise and cast out militarism for ever, than any exaction of penalties and describing of new frontiers which in the long run can mean naught but the perpetuating of government by the greater force and the tempting of force to rise against it.
It is difficult to do justice to a book of four hundred and fifty pages in less than half as many words. Many people will protest violently against Mr. Gibbs's conclusions as we have summarized them; and in reading there is much with which one differs. As a whole the book makes a deep impression. Have we secured such a peace as will make war hereafter impossible? It seems more than doubtful. There were two ways of touching the Germans, by swift and plenary punishment or by wide generosity. We have used neither and thus the old powers in Germany have apparently reinstated themselves. Actions of State trench still upon those of private individuals. We cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. And this, perhaps, causes the greatest diffi-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.