Germany and the Next War by Friedrich von Bernhardi
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Friedrich von Bernhardi >> Germany and the Next War
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24 GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR
BY GENERAL FRIEDRICH VON BERNHARDI
TRANSLATED BY ALLEN H. POWLES
1912
All the patriotic sections of the German people were greatly excited
during the summer and autumn of 1911. The conviction lay heavy on all
hearts that in the settlement of the Morocco dispute no mere commercial
or colonial question of minor importance was being discussed, but that
the honour and future of the German nation were at stake. A deep rift
had opened between the feeling of the nation and the diplomatic action
of the Government. Public opinion, which was clearly in favour of
asserting ourselves, did not understand the dangers of our political
position, and the sacrifices which a boldly-outlined policy would have
demanded. I cannot say whether the nation, which undoubtedly in an
overwhelming majority would have gladly obeyed the call to arms, would
have been equally ready to bear permanent and heavy burdens of taxation.
Haggling about war contributions is as pronounced a characteristic of
the German Reichstag in modern Berlin as it was in medieval Regensburg.
These conditions have induced me to publish now the following pages,
which were partly written some time ago.
Nobody can fail to see that we have reached a crisis in our national and
political development. At such times it is necessary to be absolutely
clear on three points: the goals to be aimed at, the difficulties to be
surmounted, and the sacrifices to be made.
The task I have set myself is to discuss these matters, stripped of all
diplomatic disguise, as clearly and convincingly as possible. It is
obvious that this can only be done by taking a national point of view.
Our science, our literature, and the warlike achievements of our past,
have made me proudly conscious of belonging to a great civilized nation
which, in spite of all the weakness and mistakes of bygone days, must,
and assuredly will, win a glorious future; and it is out of the fulness
of my German heart that I have recorded my convictions. I believe that
thus I shall most effectually rouse the national feeling in my readers'
hearts, and strengthen the national purpose.
THE AUTHOR.
_October, 1911_
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Power of the peace idea--Causes of the love of peace in Germany--
German consciousness of strength--Lack of definite political aims
--Perilous situation of Germany and the conditions of successful
self-assertion--Need to test the authority of the peace idea, and to
explain the tasks and aims of Germany in the light of history
CHAPTER I
THE RIGHT TO MAKE WAR
Pacific ideals and arbitration--The biological necessity of war--The
duty of self-assertion--The right of conquest--The struggle for
employment--War a moral obligation--Beneficent results of war
--War from the Christian and from the materialist standpoints--
Arbitration and international law--Destructiveness and immorality
of peace aspirations--Real and Utopian humanity--Dangerous
results of peace aspirations in Germany--The duty of
the State
CHAPTER II
THE DUTY TO MAKE WAR
Bismarck and the justification of war--The duty to fight--The teaching
of history--War only justifiable on adequate grounds--The
foundations of political morality--Political and individual morality
--The grounds for making war--The decision to make war--The
responsibility of the statesman
CHAPTER III
A BRIEF SURVEY OF GERMANY'S HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The ways of Providence in history--Christianity and the Germans--
The Empire and the Papacy--Breach between the German World
Empire and the revived spiritual power--Rise of the great States
of Europe and political downfall of Germany after the Thirty
Years' War--Rise of the Prussian State--The epoch of the Revolution
and the War of Liberation--Intellectual supremacy of
Germany--After the War of Liberation--Germany under William
I. and Bismarck--Change in the conception of the State and
the principle of nationality--New economic developments and
the World Power of England--Rise of other World Powers--
Socialism, and how to overcome it--German science and art--
Internal disintegration of Germany and her latent strength
CHAPTER IV
GERMANY'S HISTORICAL MISSION
Grounds of the intellectual supremacy of Germany--Germany's role
as spiritual and intellectual leader--Conquest of religious and
social obstacles--Inadequacy of our present political position--
To secure what we have won our first duty--Necessity of increasing
our political power--Necessity of colonial expansion--
Menace to our aspirations from hostile Powers
CHAPTER V
WORLD POWER OR DOWNFALL
Points of view for judging of the political situation--The States of the
Triple Alliance--The political interests of France and Russia--
The Russo-French Alliance--The policy of Great Britain--
America and the rising World Powers of the Far East--The importance
of Turkey--Spain and the minor States of Europe--Perilous
position of Germany--World power or downfall--Increase
of political power: how to obtain it--German colonial
policy--The principle of the balance of power in Europe--Neutral
States--The principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs
of other States--Germany and the rules of international politics
--The foundations of our internal strength
CHAPTER VI
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ARMY FOR WAR
Its necessity--Its twofold aspect--The educational importance of
military efficiency--Different military systems--Change in the
nature of military efficiency due to the advance of civilization--
Variety of methods of preparation for war--The armaments of
minor States--The armaments of the Great Powers--Harmonious
development of all elements of strength--Influence on armaments
of different conceptions of the duties of the State--Permanent
factors to be kept in sight in relation to military preparedness--
Statecraft in this connection
CHAPTER VII
THE CHARACTER OF OUR NEXT WAR
Our opponents--The French army--The military power of Russia--
The land forces of England--The military power of Germany and
Austria; of Italy--The Turkish army--The smaller Balkan States
--The Roumanian army--The armies of the lesser States of Central
Europe--Greece and Spain--The fleets of the principal naval
Powers--The enmity of France--The hostility of England--
Russia's probable behaviour in a war against Germany--The
military situation of Germany--Her isolation--What will be at
stake in our next war--Preparation for war
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEXT NAVAL WAR
England's preparations for a naval war against Germany--Germany's
first measures against England--England and the neutrality of the
small neighbouring States--The importance of Denmark--Commercial
mobilization--The two kinds of blockade: The close
blockade and the extended blockade--England's attack on our
coasts--Co-operation of the air-fleet in their defence--The decisive
battle and its importance--Participation of France and Russia in
a German-English war
CHAPTER IX
THE CRUCIAL QUESTION
Reciprocal relations of land and sea power--The governing points of
view in respect of war preparations--Carrying out of universal
military service--The value of intellectual superiority--Masses,
weapons, and transport in modern war--Tactical efficiency and
the quality of the troops--The advantage of the offensive--Points
to be kept in view in war preparations--Refutation of the prevailing
restricted notions on this head--The _Ersatzreserve_--New
formations--Employment of the troops of the line and the new
formations--Strengthening of the standing army--The importance
of personality
CHAPTER X
ARMY ORGANIZATION
Not criticism wanted of what is now in existence, but its further
development--Fighting power and tactical efficiency--Strength of the
peace establishment--Number of officers and N.C.O.'s, especially in the
infantry--Relations of the different arms to each other--Distribution
of machine guns--Proportion between infantry and artillery--Lessons to
be learned from recent wars with regard to this--Superiority at the
decisive point--The strength of the artillery and tactical
efficiency--Tactical efficiency of modern armies--Tactical efficiency
and the marching depth of an army corps--Importance of the internal
organization of tactical units--Organization and distribution of field
artillery; of heavy field howitzers--Field pioneers and fortress
pioneers--Tasks of the cavalry and the air-fleet--Increase of the
cavalry and formation of cyclist troops--Tactical organization of the
cavalry--Development of the air-fleet--Summary of the necessary
requirements--Different ways of carrying them out--Importance of
governing points of view for war preparations
CHAPTER XI
TRAINING AND EDUCATION
The spirit of training--Self-dependence and the employment of masses--
Education in self-dependence--Defects in our training for war on the
grand scale--Need of giving a new character to our manoeuvres and to
the training of our commanders--Practical training of the artillery--
Training in tactical efficiency--Practice in marching under war
conditions--Training of the train officers and column leaders--
Control of the General Staff by the higher commanders--Value of
manoeuvres: how to arrange them--Preliminary theoretical training of
the higher commanders--Training of the cavalry and the airmen; of the
pioneers and commissariat troops--Promotion of intellectual development
in the army--Training in the military academy
CHAPTER XII
PREPARATION FOR THE NAVAL WAR
The position of a World Power implies naval strength--Development
of German naval ideals--The task of the German fleet; its strength
--Importance of coast defences--Necessity of accelerating our
naval armaments--The building of the fleet--The institution of
the air-fleet--Preliminary measures for a war on commerce--
Mobilization--General points of view with regard to preparations
for the naval war--Lost opportunities in the past
CHAPTER XIII
THE ARMY AND POPULAR EDUCATION
The universal importance of national education--Its value for the
army--Hurtful influences at work on it--Duties of the State with
regard to national health--Work and sport--The importance of
the school--The inadequacy of our national schools--Military
education and education in the national schools--Methods of
instruction in the latter--Necessity for their reform--Continuation
schools--Influence of national education on the Russo-Japanese
War--Other means of national education--The propaganda of
action
CHAPTER XIV
FINANCIAL AND POLITICAL PREPARATION FOR WAR
Duties of the State in regard to war preparations--The State and
national credit--The financial capacity of Germany--Necessity of
new sources of revenue--The imperial right of inheritance--Policy
of interests and alliances--Moulding and exploitation of the
political situation--The laws of political conduct--Interaction of
military and political war preparations--Political preparations
for our next war--Governing factors in the conduct of German policy
EPILOGUE
The latest political events--Conduct of the German Imperial Government
--The arrangement with France--Anglo-French relations and
the attitude of England--The requirements of the situation
GERMANY AND THE NEXT WAR
INTRODUCTION
The value of war for the political and moral development of mankind has
been criticized by large sections of the modern civilized world in a way
which threatens to weaken the defensive powers of States by undermining
the warlike spirit of the people. Such ideas are widely disseminated in
Germany, and whole strata of our nation seem to have lost that ideal
enthusiasm which constituted the greatness of its history. With the
increase of wealth they live for the moment, they are incapable of
sacrificing the enjoyment of the hour to the service of great
conceptions, and close their eyes complacently to the duties of our
future and to the pressing problems of international life which await a
solution at the present time.
We have been capable of soaring upwards. Mighty deeds raised Germany
from political disruption and feebleness to the forefront of European
nations. But we do not seem willing to take up this inheritance, and to
advance along the path of development in politics and culture. We
tremble at our own greatness, and shirk the sacrifices it demands from
us. Yet we do not wish to renounce the claim which we derive from our
glorious past. How rightly Fichte once judged his countrymen when he
said the German can never wish for a thing by itself; he must always
wish for its contrary also.
The Germans were formerly the best fighting men and the most warlike
nation of Europe. For a long time they have proved themselves to be the
ruling people of the Continent by the power of their arms and the
loftiness of their ideas. Germans have bled and conquered on countless
battlefields in every part of the world, and in late years have shown
that the heroism of their ancestors still lives in the descendants. In
striking contrast to this military aptitude they have to-day become a
peace-loving--an almost "too" peace-loving--nation. A rude shock is
needed to awaken their warlike instincts, and compel them to show their
military strength.
This strongly-marked love of peace is due to various causes.
It springs first from the good-natured character of the German people,
which finds intense satisfaction in doctrinaire disputations and
partisanship, but dislikes pushing things to an extreme. It is connected
with another characteristic of the German nature. Our aim is to be just,
and we strangely imagine that all other nations with whom we exchange
relations share this aim. We are always ready to consider the peaceful
assurances of foreign diplomacy and of the foreign Press to be no less
genuine and true than our own ideas of peace, and we obstinately resist
the view that the political world is only ruled by interests and never
from ideal aims of philanthropy. "Justice," Goethe says aptly, "is a
quality and a phantom of the Germans." We are always inclined to assume
that disputes between States can find a peaceful solution on the basis
of justice without clearly realizing what _international_ justice is.
An additional cause of the love of peace, besides those which are rooted
in the very soul of the German people, is the wish not to be disturbed
in commercial life.
The Germans are born business men, more than any others in the world.
Even before the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, Germany was perhaps
the greatest trading Power in the world, and in the last forty years
Germany's trade has made marvellous progress under the renewed expansion
of her political power. Notwithstanding our small stretch of coast-line,
we have created in a few years the second largest merchant fleet in the
world, and our young industries challenge competition with all the great
industrial States of the earth. German trading-houses are established
all over the world; German merchants traverse every quarter of the
globe; a part, indeed, of English wholesale trade is in the hands of
Germans, who are, of course, mostly lost to their own country. Under
these conditions our national wealth has increased with rapid strides.
Our trade and our industries--owners no less than employes--do not want
this development to be interrupted. They believe that peace is the
essential condition of commerce. They assume that free competition will
be conceded to us, and do not reflect that our victorious wars have
never disturbed our business life, and that the political power regained
by war rendered possible the vast progress of our trade and commerce.
Universal military service, too, contributes to the love of peace, for
war in these days does not merely affect, as formerly, definite limited
circles, but the whole nation suffers alike. All families and all
classes have to pay the same toll of human lives. Finally comes the
effect of that universal conception of peace so characteristic of the
times--the idea that war in itself is a sign of barbarism unworthy of an
aspiring people, and that the finest blossoms of culture can only unfold
in peace.
Under the many-sided influence of such views and aspirations, we seem
entirely to have forgotten the teaching which once the old German Empire
received with "astonishment and indignation" from Frederick the Great,
that "the rights of States can only be asserted by the living power";
that what was won in war can only be kept by war; and that we Germans,
cramped as we are by political and geographical conditions, require the
greatest efforts to hold and to increase what we have won. We regard our
warlike preparations as an almost insupportable burden, which it is the
special duty of the German Reichstag to lighten so far as possible. We
seem to have forgotten that the conscious increase of our armament is
not an inevitable evil, but the most necessary precondition of our
national health, and the only guarantee of our international prestige.
We are accustomed to regard war as a curse, and refuse to recognize it
as the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power.
Besides this clamorous need of peace, and in spite of its continued
justification, other movements, wishes, and efforts, inarticulate and
often unconscious, live in the depths of the soul of the German people.
The agelong dream of the German nation was realized in the political
union of the greater part of the German races and in the founding of the
German Empire. Since then there lives in the hearts of all (I would not
exclude even the supporters of the anti-national party) a proud
consciousness of strength, of regained national unity, and of increased
political power. This consciousness is supported by the fixed
determination never to abandon these acquisitions. The conviction is
universal that every attack upon these conquests will rouse the whole
nation with enthusiastic unanimity to arms. We all wish, indeed, to be
able to maintain our present position in the world without a conflict,
and we live in the belief that the power of our State will steadily
increase without our needing to fight for it. We do not at the bottom of
our hearts shrink from such a conflict, but we look towards it with a
certain calm confidence, and are inwardly resolved never to let
ourselves be degraded to an inferior position without striking a blow.
Every appeal to force finds a loud response in the hearts of all. Not
merely in the North, where a proud, efficient, hard-working race with
glorious traditions has grown up under the laurel-crowned banner of
Prussia, does this feeling thrive as an unconscious basis of all
thought, sentiment, and volition, in the depth of the soul; but in the
South also, which has suffered for centuries under the curse of petty
nationalities, the haughty pride and ambition of the German stock live
in the heart of the people. Here and there, maybe, such emotions slumber
in the shade of a jealous particularism, overgrown by the richer and
more luxuriant forms of social intercourse; but still they are animated
by latent energy; here, too, the germs of mighty national consciousness
await their awakening.
Thus the political power of our nation, while fully alive below the
surface, is fettered externally by this love of peace. It fritters
itself away in fruitless bickerings and doctrinaire disputes. We no
longer have a clearly defined political and national aim, which grips
the imagination, moves the heart of the people, and forces them to unity
of action. Such a goal existed, until our wars of unification, in the
yearnings for German unity, for the fulfilment of the Barbarossa legend.
A great danger to the healthy, continuous growth of our people seems to
me to lie in the lack of it, and the more our political position in the
world is threatened by external complications, the greater is this
danger.
Extreme tension exists between the Great Powers, notwithstanding all
peaceful prospects for the moment, and it is hardly to be assumed that
their aspirations, which conflict at so many points and are so often
pressed forward with brutal energy, will always find a pacific
settlement.
In this struggle of the most powerful nations, which employ peaceful
methods at first until the differences between them grow irreconcilable,
our German nation is beset on all sides. This is primarily a result of
our geographical position in the midst of hostile rivals, but also
because we have forced ourselves, though the last-comers, the virtual
upstarts, between the States which have earlier gained their place, and
now claim our share in the dominion of this world, after we have for
centuries been paramount only in the realm of intellect. We have thus
injured a thousand interests and roused bitter hostilities. It must be
reserved for a subsequent section to explain the political situation
thus affected, but one point can be mentioned without further
consideration: if a violent solution of existing difficulties is
adopted, if the political crisis develops into military action, the
Germans would have a dangerous situation in the midst of all the forces
brought into play against them. On the other hand, the issue of this
struggle will be decisive of Germany's whole future as State and nation.
We have the most to win or lose by such a struggle. We shall be beset by
the greatest perils, and we can only emerge victoriously from this
struggle against a world of hostile elements, and successfully carry
through a Seven Years' War for our position as a World Power, if we gain
a start on our probable enemy as _soldiers_; if the army which will
fight our battles is supported by all the material and spiritual forces
of the nation; if the resolve to conquer lives not only in our troops,
but in the entire united people which sends these troops to fight for
all their dearest possessions.
These were the considerations which induced me to regard war from the
standpoint of civilization, and to study its relation to the great
tasks of the present and the future which Providence has set before the
German people as the greatest civilized people known to history.
From this standpoint I must first of all examine the aspirations for
peace, which seem to dominate our age and threaten to poison the soul of
the German people, according to their true moral significance. I must
try to prove that war is not merely a necessary element in the life of
nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true
civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality.
I must endeavour to develop from the history of the German past in its
connection with the conditions of the present those aspects of the
question which may guide us into the unknown land of the future. The
historical past cannot be killed; it exists and works according to
inward laws, while the present, too, imposes its own drastic
obligations. No one need passively submit to the pressure of
circumstances; even States stand, like the Hercules of legend, at the
parting of the ways. They can choose the road to progress or to
decadence. "A favoured position in the world will only become effective
in the life of nations by the conscious human endeavour to use it." It
seemed to me, therefore, to be necessary and profitable, at this parting
of the ways of our development where we now stand, to throw what light I
may on the different paths which are open to our people. A nation must
fully realize the probable consequences of its action; then only can it
take deliberately the great decisions for its future development, and,
looking forward to its destiny with clear gaze, be prepared for any
sacrifices which the present or future may demand.
These sacrifices, so far as they lie within the military and financial
sphere, depend mainly on the idea of what Germany is called upon to
strive for and attain in the present and the future. Only those who
share my conception of the duties and obligations of the German people,
and my conviction that they cannot be fulfilled without drawing the
sword, will be able to estimate correctly my arguments and conclusions
in the purely military sphere, and to judge competently the financial
demands which spring out of it. It is only in their logical connection
with the entire development, political and moral, of the State that the
military requirements find their motive and their justification.
CHAPTER I
THE RIGHT TO MAKE WAR
Since 1795, when Immanuel Kant published in his old age his treatise on
"Perpetual Peace," many have considered it an established fact that war
is the destruction of all good and the origin of all evil. In spite of
all that history teaches, no conviction is felt that the struggle
between nations is inevitable, and the growth of civilization is
credited with a power to which war must yield. But, undisturbed by such
human theories and the change of times, war has again and again marched
from country to country with the clash of arms, and has proved its
destructive as well as creative and purifying power. It has not
succeeded in teaching mankind what its real nature is. Long periods of
war, far from convincing men of the necessity of war, have, on the
contrary, always revived the wish to exclude war, where possible, from
the political intercourse of nations.
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