Part 2 (1/2)

The schoolmaster has played his part in the training of the child to militarism, State wors.h.i.+p, and enemy hatred as effectively as the professor and the clergyman.

Here are two German children's school songs, that are being sung daily. Both of them are creations of the war: both written by schoolmasters. The particularly offensive song about King Edward and England is princ.i.p.ally sung by girls--the future mothers of Germany:--

O England, O England, Wie gross sind Deine Lugen!

Ist Dein Verbrechen noch so gross, Du schwindelst Dich vom Galgen los.

O Eduard, O Eduard, du Muster aller Fursten, Nichts hattest Du von einem Rex, Du eitler Schlips--und Westenfex.

[Oh, England, oh, England, how great are thy lies! However great thy crimes, thou cheatest the gallows. Oh, Edward, oh, Edward, thou model Prince! Thou hadst nothing kindly in thee, thou vain fop!]

Da druben, da druben liegt der Feind, In feigen Schutzengraben, Wir greifen ihn an, und ein Hund, wer meint, Heut' wurde Pardon gegeben.

Schlagt alles tot, was um Gnade fleht, Schiesst alles nieder wie Hunde, Mehr Feinde, mehr Feinde! sei euer Gebet In dieser Vergeltungsstunde.

[Over there in the cowardly trenches lies the enemy. We attack him, and only a dog will say that pardon should be given to-day.

Strike dead everything which prays for mercy. Shoot everything down like dogs. ”More enemies, more enemies,” be your prayer in this hour of retribution.]

The elementary schools, or _Volksschulen_, are free, and attendance is compulsory from six to fourteen. There are some 61,000 free public elementary schools with over 10,000,000 pupils, and over 600 private elementary schools, with 42,000 pupils who pay fees.

Germany is a land of civil service; to enter which a certificate from a secondary school is necessary. Some authorities maintain that the only way to prevent being flooded with candidates is to make the examinations crus.h.i.+ngly severe. Children are early made to realise that all hope of succeeding in life rests upon the pa.s.sing of these examinations. Thus the despair which often leads to suicide on the one hand and knowledge without keenness on the other.

Hardly any cla.s.s has suffered more heavily in the war than the masters of the State schools, which are equivalent to English Council schools and American public schools. The thinning of their ranks is an eloquent proof of the heaviness of the German death toll. Their places have been taken by elderly men, but princ.i.p.ally by women. It is a kind of Nemesis that they should have fallen in the very cause they have been propagating for at least a generation.

Those who knew only the old and pleasant Germany do not realise the speeding up of the hate machine that has taken place in the last decade. The protests against this State creation of hate grow less and less as the war proceeds. To-day only comparatively few members of the Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this horrible contamination of the minds of the coming generation of German men and women. Not much reflection is needed to see on what fruitful soil the great National Liberal Party, with its backing of capitalists, greedy merchants, chemists, bankers, s.h.i.+p and mine owners, is planting its seeds for the future. There is no cure for this evil state of affairs, but the practical proof, inflicted by big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation of which the very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and taught that German _Kultur_ must be spread by bloodshed and terror.

With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life.

The good influence of some churches has gone completely. They are part of the great war machine. The position of the mother is not what it was. The old German Hausfrau of the three K's, which I will roughly translate by ”Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk,” has become even more a servant of the master of the house than she was. The State has taken control of the souls of her children, and she has not even that authority that she had twenty years ago. The father has become even more important than of yore. The natural tendency of a nation of which almost every man is a soldier, is to elevate the man at the expense of the woman, and the German woman has taken to her new position very readily. She plays her wonderful part in the production of munitions, not as in Britain in a spirit of equality, but with a sort of admitted inferiority difficult to describe exactly.

At four years of age the German male child begins to be a soldier.

At six he is accustomed to walk in military formation. This system has a few advantages, but many disadvantages. A great concourse of infants can, for example, be marshalled through the streets of a city without any trouble at all. But that useful discipline is more than counterbalanced by the killing of individuality. German children, especially during the war, try to grow up to be little men and women as quickly as possible. They have shared the long working hours of the grown-ups, and late in the hot summer nights I have seen little Bavarian boys and girls who have been at school from seven and worked in the fields from three o'clock till dark, drinking their beer in the beer garden with a relish that showed they needed some stimulant. The beer is not Ba.s.s's ale, but it contains from two to five per cent. of alcohol. Unhealthy-looking little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during the war. The overwork, and the lowering of the diet, has given them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes. All games and amus.e.m.e.nts have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and ”Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles.”

The girls, in like fas.h.i.+on, often spend their school interval in marching in columns of four, singing the same horrible chants.

Up to the time of the scarcity of woollen materials, the millions of little German schoolgirls produced their full output of comforts for the troops.

The practical result, from a military point of view, of training children to venerate the All-Highest War Lord and his family, together with his ancestors, was shown at the beginning of the war, when there came a great rush of volunteers (_Freiwillige_), many of them beneath the military age, many of them beyond it. In most of the calculations of German man-power, some ally and neutral military writers seem to have forgotten these volunteers, estimated at two millions.

A significant change in Germany is the cessation of the volunteer movement. Parents who gladly sent forth their boys as volunteers, are now endeavouring by every means in their power to postpone the evil day in the firm belief that peace will come before the age of military service has been reached. It is a change at least as significant as that which, lies between the German's ”We have won--the more enemies the better” of two years back, and the ”We must hold out” of to-day.

Of the school structures in modern Germany it would be idle to pretend that they are not excellent in every respect--perfect ventilation, sanitation, plenty of s.p.a.ce, large numbers of cla.s.s-rooms, and halls for the choral singing, which is part of the German system of education, and by which the ”hate” songs have been so readily spread. The same halls are used for evening lectures for adults and night improvement schools.

It is significant that all the schools built between 1911 and 1914 were so arranged, not only in Germany, but throughout Austria, that they could be turned into hospitals with hardly any alteration.

For this purpose, temporary part.i.tions divided portions of the buildings, and an unusually large supply of water was laid on.

Special entrances for ambulances were already in existence, baths had already been fitted in the wounded reception rooms, and in many cases sterilising sheds were already installed. The walls were made of a material that could he quickly whitewashed for the extermination of germs. If this obvious preparation for war is named to the average German, his reply is, ”The growing jealousy of German culture and commerce throughout the world rendered necessary protective measures.”

A total lack of sense of humour and sense of proportion among the Germans can be gathered from the fact that Mr. Haselden's famous cartoons of Big and Little Willie, which have a vogue among Americana and other neutrals in Germany, and are by no means unkind, are regarded by Germans as a sort of sacrilege. These same people do not hesitate to circulate the most horrible and indecent pictures of President Wilson, King George, President Poincare, and especially of Viscount Grey of Falloden. The Tsar is usually depicted covered with vermin. The King of Italy as an evil-looking dwarf with a dagger in his hand. Only those who have seen the virulence of the caricatures, circulated by picture postcard, can have any idea of the horrible material on which the German child is fed. The only protest I ever heard came from the Artists' Society of Munich, who objected to these loathsome educational efforts as being injurious to the reputation of artistic Germany and calculated to produce permanent damage to the juvenile mind.

The atmosphere of the German home is so different from that in which I have been brought up in the United States, and have seen in England, that the Germans are not at all shocked by topics of conversation never referred to in other countries. Subjects are discussed before German girls of eleven and twelve, and German boys of the same age, that make an Anglo-Saxon anxious to get out of the room. I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so many learned treatises have been written.