Part 3 (1/2)
I met her some weeks later on her way home from church. ”It is no use,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly, ”the church does not satisfy the longing in my heart. It is not for such as me.
Nothing but war, war, war, and hate, hate, hate!”
The German Navy League, an aggressive body which had gathered around it more than a million members previous to the war, stirred up anti-British feeling by means of leaflets, newspaper articles, kinematograph exhibitions, and sermons. Among the bitterest of the preachers are returned missionaries from British possessions.
Although the social position of the pastor in a German village is less than that of a minor Government official, yet he and his wife wield considerable influence. The leading pastors receive each week many of the Government propaganda doc.u.ments, including a digest carefully prepared for them by the foreign Press Department.
I obtained some copies of this weekly digest, but was unable to bring them out of Germany. What purport to be extracts from the London newspapers are ingenious distortions. Sometimes a portion of an article is reprinted with the omission of the context, thus entirely altering its meaning. The recipients of this carefully prepared sheet believe implicitly in its authenticity. Any chance remark of a political n.o.body in the House of Commons that seems favourable to Germany is quoted extensively. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, in the eyes of the German village clergyman, ranks as one of the most important men in the British Empire. Mr. Stanton, M.P., in their view, is a low hireling of the British Government, doing dirty work in the hope of getting political preferment. The _Labour Leader_, which I have not seen in any house or hotel or on any newspaper stall, is, according to this digest, one of the leading English newspapers, and almost the only truth-telling organ of the Allies.
These people really believe this. When home-staying Englishmen talk to me about the German War party, I find it difficult to explain to them that the German War party is practically the whole country.
One or two better-travelled and better-educated pastors have expressed mild regret at the bloodthirsty att.i.tude of their brethren in private conversation. But I never heard of one who had the courage to ”speak out in open meeting.”
The modern, material Germany has not much use for religion except as a factor in government. The notorious spread of extreme agnosticism in the last quarter of a century renders it essential for the clergy to hold their places by stooping to the violence of the Professors. Mixed with their att.i.tude of hostility to Britain is a considerable amount of professional jealousy and envy. A number of German pastors paid a visit to London some two or three years before the outbreak of war, and I happened to meet one of them recently in Germany. So far from being impressed by what he had seen there, he had come to the conclusion that the English clergy, and especially the Nonconformists, were an overpaid, and undisciplined body, with no other aim than their personal comfort.
He had visited Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, Spurgeon's Tabernacle, the City Temple, and had studied--so he told me--English Wesleyanism and, Congregationalism in several provincial centres. He was particularly bitter about one Nonconformist who had accepted a large salary to go to the United States. He returned to Germany impressed with the idea that the Nonconformist and State Churches alike were a body of sycophants, sharing the general decadent state of the English. What struck him princ.i.p.ally was what he referred to continually as the lack of discipline and uniformity. Each man seemed to take his own point of view, without any regard to the opinions of the particular religious denomination to which he belonged. All were grossly ignorant of science and chemistry, and all were very much overpaid.
Here, I think, lay the sting of his envy, and it is part of the general jealousy of England, a country where everybody is supposed to be underworked and overpaid.
The only worse country in this respect from the German point of view is the United States, ”where even the American Lutheran pastors have fallen victims to the l.u.s.t for money.” The particular Lutheran of whom I am speaking had been the guest of an English Nonconformist minister and his wife, who had evidently tried to be as hospitable as possible, and had no doubt put themselves out to take him for excursions and outings in the Shakespeare country.
”It was nothing but eating and drinking and sightseeing,” remarked the Herr Pastor.
I suggested that he was a guest, to be looked after.
”I can a.s.sure you,” he replied, ”that Mr. ------ had nothing to do all day but read the newspapers, and drink tea with his congregation. He did not take the trouble to grow his own vegetables, and all he had to do was to preach on Sundays and attend a very unruly Sunday school. His wife, too, was not dressed as one of ours.”
He explained to me that his own life was very different. He eked out his minute salary by a small scientifically managed farm, and I gathered the impression that he was much more of a farmer than a pastor, for he deplored his inability to obtain imported nitrates owing to the blockade. The only question on which he was at all unorthodox was that of the Junkers and their regrettable power of holding potatoes, pigs, and other supplies while small men like him had been obliged to sell. He had a good collection of modern scientific agricultural works, of which the Germans have an abundance.
But while admiring the energy of the great capitalists and the rational Liberal Party, the average clergyman tends towards sympathy with the Agrarians. The pastor of the small towns and villages, who is very much under the thumb of the local Junker or rich manufacturer, has as his highest ambition the hope that he and his wife may be invited to coffee at least twice a year. The pastor's wife is delighted to be condescendingly received by the great lady. Herr Pastor talks agriculture with Herr Baron, and Frau Pastor discusses past and coming incidents in the local birth rate with Frau Baron. Sn.o.bbery has no greater exemplification than in the relations of the local Lutheran pastor and the local landlord or millionaire.
A sidelight on German mentality is contained in a little conversation which I had with a clergyman in the Province of Posen.
He knew England well, by residence and by matrimonial connections.
This is how he explained the battle of the Somme. I give his own words:--
”Many wounded men are coming back to our Church from the dreadful Western front. They have been fighting the British, and they find that so ignorant are the British of warfare that the British soldiers on the Somme refuse to surrender, not knowing that they are really beaten, with the result that terrible losses are inflicted upon our brave troops.”
In this exact report of a conversation is summed up a great deal of German psychology.
For the Salvation Army a number of Germans have genuine respect, because it seems to be organised on some military basis. The Church of England they consider as degenerate as the Nonconformist.
Both, they think, are mere refuges for money-making ecclesiastics.
CHAPTER V
PUPPET PROFESSORS
The professor, like the army officer, has long been a semi-deity in Germany. Not only in his university lectures does he influence the students, and particularly the prospective teachers of secondary schools who hang on his words, but he writes the bulk of the historical, economic and political literature of the daily Press, the magazines and the tons of pamphlets which flood the country.
Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own. It gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of the State. As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil servant, since the universities are State inst.i.tutions. He takes an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach or do anything questioning the ways of the State. His only way to make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.
The history of Prussia is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, and the members of the House, generation after generation, must all be portrayed a& heroes. There was a striking ill.u.s.tration of this in 1913 when the Kaiser had Hauptmann's historical play suppressed because it represented Frederick William III. in true light, as putty in the hands of Napoleon.
There is a small group of German professors interested solely in scientific research, such as Professor Roentgen and the late Professor Ehrlich, which we exclude from the ”puppet professors.”