Part 15 (1/2)
What the purpose of the State Department was in thus attempting to prevent any but army officers or government officials from reporting on conditions in Germany the writer does not know. It is probable, however, that the initiative did not come from Was.h.i.+ngton.
CHAPTER XIII.
”The New Freedom.”
The conclusion of the armistice was the signal for a general collapse among Germany's armed forces. This did not at first affect the troops in the trenches, and many of them preserved an almost exemplary spirit and discipline until they reached home, but the men of the _etappe_--the positions back of the front and at the military bases--threw order and discipline to the winds. It was here that revolutionary propaganda and red doctrines had secured the most adherents in the army, and the effect was quickly seen. Abandoning provisions, munitions and military stores generally, looting and terrifying the people of their own villages and cities, the troops of the _etappe_ straggled back to the homeland, where they were welcomed by the elements responsible for Germany's collapse.
The government sent a telegram to the Supreme Army Command, pointing out the necessity of an orderly demobilization and emphasizing the chaotic conditions that would result if army units arbitrarily left their posts.
Commanding officers were directed to promulgate these orders:
”1. Relations between officers and men must rest upon mutual confidence. The soldier's voluntary submission to his officer and comradely treatment of the soldier by his superior are conditions precedent for this.
”2. Officers retain their power of command. Unconditional obedience when on duty is of decisive importance if the return march to the German homeland is to be successfully carried out.
Military discipline and order in the armies must be maintained in all circ.u.mstances.
”3. For the maintenance of confidence between officers and men the soldiers' councils have advisory powers in matters relating to provisioning, furloughs and the infliction of military punishments. It is their highest duty to endeavor to prevent disorder and mutiny.
”4. Officers and men shall have the same rations.
”5. Officers and men shall receive the same extra allowances of pay and perquisites.”
”Voluntary submission” by soldiers to officers might be feasible in a victorious and patriotic army, but it is impracticable among troops infected with Socialist doctrines and retreating before their conquerors. Authority, once destroyed, can never be regained. This was proved not only at the front, but at home as well. _Die neue Freiheit_ (the new freedom), a phrase glibly mouthed by all supporters of the revolution, a.s.sumed the same grotesque forms in Germany as in Russia.
Automobiles, commandeered by soldiers from army depots or from the royal garages, flying red flags, darted through the streets at speeds defying all regulations, filled with unwashed and unshaven occupants lolling on the cus.h.i.+oned seats. Cabmen drove serenely up the left side of Unter den Linden, twiddling their fingers at the few personally escorted and disarmed policemen whom they saw. Gambling games ran openly at street-corners. Soldiers mounted improvised booths in the streets and sold cigarettes and soap looted from army stores.
Earnest revolutionaries traveled through the city looking for signs containing the word _kaiserlich_ (imperial) or _koniglich_ (royal), and mutilated or destroyed them. Court purveyors took down their signs or draped them. The _Kaiser Keller_ in Friedrichstra.s.se became simply a _Keller_ and the bust of the Kaiser over the door was covered with a piece of canvas. The Royal Opera-House became the ”Opera-House Unter den Linden.”
One of the most outstanding characteristics of the German people in peace times had been their love of order. Even the superficial observer could not help noticing it, and one of its manifestations earned general commendation. This was that the unsightly billboards and placarded walls that disfigure American cities were never seen in Germany. Neat and sightly columns were erected in various places for official, theatrical or business announcements, and no posters might be affixed anywhere else. Nothing more strikingly ill.u.s.trates the character of the collapse in Germany than the fact that it destroyed even this deeply ingrained love of order. _Genossen_ with brushes and paste-pots calmly defaced house-walls and even show windows on main streets with placards whose quality showed that German art, too, had suffered in the general collapse of the Empire.
There was something so essentially childish in the manner in which a great part of the people reacted to _die neue Freiheit_ that one is not surprised to hear that it also turned juvenile heads. Several hundred schoolboys and schoolgirls, from twelve to seventeen years old, paraded through the main streets of Berlin, carrying red flags and placards with incendiary inscriptions. The procession stopped before the Prussian Diet building, where the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council was in session, and presented a list of demands. These included the vote for all persons eighteen years old or over, the abolition of corporal punishment and partic.i.p.ation by the school-children in the administration of the schools. The chairman of the _Vollzugsrat_ of the council addressed the juvenile paraders, and declared that he was in complete sympathy with their demands.
A seventeen-year-old lad replied with a speech in which he warned the council that there would be terrible consequences if the demands were not granted. The procession then went on to the Reichstag building, where speeches were made by several juvenile orators, demanding the resignation or removal of Ebert and Scheidemann and threatening a general juvenile strike if this demand was not accepted immediately.
Enthusiasm was heightened in the first week of the revolutionary government's existence by reports that enemy countries were also in the grip of revolution. Tuesday's papers published a report that Foch had been murdered, Poincare had fled from Paris and the French government had been overthrown. Reports came from Hamburg and Kiel that English sailors had hoisted the red flag and were fraternizing with German s.h.i.+ps' crews on the North Sea. The Soldiers' Council at Paderborn reported that the red flag had been hoisted in the French trenches from the Belgian border to Mons, and that French soldiers were fraternizing with the Germans. That these reports found considerable credence throws a certain light on the German psychology of these days. The reaction when they were found to be false further increased the former despondency.
The six-man cabinet decreed on November 15th the dissolution of the Prussian Diet and the abolishment of the House of Lords. Replying to a telegram from President Fehrenbach of the Reichstag, asking whether the government intended to prevent the Reichstag from coming together in the following week, the cabinet telegraphed:
”As a consequence of the political overturn, which has done away with the inst.i.tution of German Kaiserdom as well as with the Federal Council in its capacity of a lawgiving body, the Reichstag which was elected in 1912 can also not reconvene.”
The cabinet--subject to the control theoretically exercisable by the _Vollzugsrat_--was thus untrammeled by other legislative or administrative inst.i.tutions. But it was, as we have seen, trammeled from without by the disastrous material conditions in Germany, by the mental and moral s.h.i.+pwreck of its people, by the peculiar German psychology and by the political immaturity of the whole nation--a political immaturity, moreover, which even certain cabinet members shared. From within the cabinet was also seriously handicapped from the start by its ”parity”
composition, that is to say, the fact that power was equally divided between Majority and Independent Socialists without a deciding casting vote in case of disagreement along party lines. If the Independent Socialist cabinet members and the rank and file of their party had comprehended the real character and completeness of the revolution, as it was comprehended by some of the theorists of the party--notably Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein--and if they had avoided their disastrous fellows.h.i.+p with Joffe and other Bolshevik agents, the subsequent course of events would have been different. But they lacked this comprehension and they had been defiled in handling the pitch of Bolshevism.
All the revolutions of the last century and a quarter had been of _bourgeois_ origin. They had, however, been carried into effect with the aid of the proletariat, since the _bourgeoisie_, being numerically much weaker than the proletariat, does not command the actual brute force to make revolution. At first the _bourgeoisie_, as planners of the overthrow, took control of the authority of the state and exercised it for their own ends. The proletariat, which had learned its own strength and resources in the revolutionary contests, used its power to compel a further development of the revolution in a more radical direction and eventually compelled the first holders of authority to give way to a government more responsive to the demands of the lower cla.s.ses. Thus the events of 1789 in Paris were followed by the victory of the Montane party, the events of September 4, 1870, by those of March 18, 1871, and the Kerensky revolution in Petrograd by the Bolshevik revolution of November, 1917.
The German revolution, however, alone among the great revolutions of the world, was, as has already been pointed out, both in its origins and execution, proletarian and Socialistic. The _bourgeoisie_ had no part in it and no partic.i.p.ation in the revolutionary government. Any attempt to develop the revolution further by overthrowing or opposing the first revolutionary government could therefore serve only factional and not cla.s.s interests. Factional clashes were, of course, inevitable. The members of the Paris Commune split into four distinct factions, Jacobins, Blanquists, Proudhonists and a small group of Marxist Internationalists. But these, bitterly as they attacked each other's methods and views, nevertheless presented at all times a united front against the _bourgeoisie_, whereas the German Independent Socialists, from whom better things might have been expected, almost from the beginning played into the hands of the Spartacans, from whom nothing good could have been expected, and thus seriously weakened the government and eventually made a violent second phase of the revolution unavoidable.
If it be admitted that Socialist government was the proper form of government for Germany at this time, it is clear that the Independent Socialists had a very real mission. This was well expressed in the first month of the revolution in a pamphlet by Kautsky, in which he wrote:
”The extremes (Majority Socialists and Spartacans) can best be described thus: the one side (Majority) has not yet completely freed itself from _bourgeois_ habits of thought and still has much confidence in the _bourgeois_ world, whose inner strength it overestimates. The other side (Spartacans) totally lacks all comprehension of the _bourgeois_ world and regards it as a collection of scoundrels. It despises the mental and economic accomplishments of the _bourgeoisie_ and believes that the proletarians, without any special knowledge or any kind of training, are able to take over immediately all political and economic functions formerly exercised by the _bourgeois_ authorities.