Irvin S. Cobb

“ When I think back on those first stages—and in some respects the most tragic stages—of the great war, I do not see it as a thing of pomp and glory, of splendid panorama, pitched on a more impressive scale than any movement ever was in all the history of mankind. I do not, in retrospect, see the sunlight glinting on the long, unending, weaving lanes of bayonets; or the troops pouring in grey streams, like molten quicksilver, along all those dusty highroads of Northern Europe ”

“ When we have conquered our enemies, as conquer them we shall—when we have implanted among them our own German culture, our own German institutions and our own German form of government, which surely we also shall do—they will, in succeeding generations, be the better and the happier for it. They will come to know, then, that the guns of our fleets and the rifles of our soldiers brought them blessings in disguise. Out of their present sufferings and their future humiliations will spring up the benefits of German civilisation. ”

“ If our oversea observations of this war abroad have taught us anything, they should have taught us that the German Army—and when I say army I mean in this case, not its men but its officers, since in the German Army the officers are essentially the brain and the power and the motive force directing the unthinking, blindly obedient mass beneath them—that the German Army is not an army of good sportsmen. And that, I take it, is an even more important consideration upon the field of battle than it is upon the athletic field. As the saying goes, the Germans don't play the game. ”

“ What difference though we may have to continue to destroy yet more Belgian towns and shoot yet more Belgian civilians? Ultimately the results of our operations are bound to redound to the greater glory of the Greater German Empire, which means European civilisation.
"My friend, do you know that nearly a quarter of the inhabitants of Belgium are illiterates, as you would put it in English—Unalphabets, as we Germans say? Well, that is true—a quarter of them can neither read nor write. In Germany only a fractional part of one per cent of our people are illiterate to that extent. ”

“ And, by the same token, it is committed, with equal firmness, to the conviction that the designs and the deeds of all the nations and all the peoples opposed to their nation must perforce be obnoxious to God. By the processes of their own peculiar theology—a theology which blossomed and began to bear its fruit after the war started, but for which the seed had been sown long before—God is not Our God but Their God. He is not the common creator of mankind, but a special Creator of Teutons. He is a German God. For you to say this would sound in American ears like sacrilege. ”

“ Though Germany is still very far, one imagines, from the point of complete exhaustion, it is not to be denied that she is bleeding white and starving thin. And, as all fair-minded patriotic men on this side of the ocean agree, she did, by a persistent campaign of aggressions against our flag, and by murdering our people on the high seas, and by plotting against our industries and our national integrity, finally force us into the war. ”

“ It is what he would not show us, and if opportunity comes will not show us, any more than he showed it to Belgium or to France, or to Edith Cavell, or to those women and those babies on the Lusitania.
He did not make war cruel—it already was that; but he has kept it cruel. War with him is not an emotional pastime; not a time for hysterical lip service to his flag; not a time for fuss and feathers. And, most of all, it is to him not a time for any display of mawkish, maudlin forbearance to his foe ”

“ I remember I had said to myself, as, no doubt, most Americans had said to themselves:
"We are a peaceful nation; not concerned with dreams of conquest. We have the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans for our protection. We are not going to make war on anybody else. Nobody else is going to make war on us. War is going out of fashion all over the planet. A passion for peace is coming to be the fashion of the world. The lion and the lamb lie down together."
Well, the lion and the lamb did lie down together—over there in Europe ”

“ When our lawgivers have followed our soldiers across the expanded frontiers of our Empire; when we have made the German language the language of annexed Belgium; when we have introduced our incomparably superior methods into all departments of Belgian life; when we have taught all the Belgians to speak the German tongue, and have required of them that they do speak it—then these Belgians, as Germans, will be better off than ever they could have been as Belgians. ”

“ All the same, to make war successfully we must make it with a whole heart. We must hold it to be a holy war; we must preach a jihad, remembering always, now that the Chinese Empire is a republic, now that Russia by revolution has thrown off the chains of autocracy, that we are fighting not only to punish the enemy for wrongs inflicted and insults overpatiently endured ”

“ It [Pg 40] is as inconceivable to imagine German officers going in for baseball or football or cricket as it is to imagine American volunteers marching the goose step or to imagine Englishmen relishing the cut-and-dried calisthenics of a Turnverein.
The Germans are not an outdoor race; they are not given to playing outdoor sports and abiding by the rules of those sports, as Englishmen and as Americans are. And in war—that biggest of all outdoor games—it stands proved against them that they do not play according to the rules, except they be rules of their own making. ”

“ In peace the mental docility of the German, his willingness to accept an order unquestioningly and mechanically to obey it, may be a virtue, as we reckon racial traits of a people among their virtues; in war this same trait becomes a vice. In peace it makes him yet more peaceful; in war it gives to his manner of waging war an added sinister menace.
It is that very menace which must confront the American troopers who may be sent abroad for service. ”

“ We must risk something more precious than money; something more needful than munitions; we must risk our manhood. We cannot expect England's navy to stand between us and harm for our coasts, and France's worn battalions to bear the brunt of the trench work.
Knowing nothing of military expediency, I yet believe that, for the moral effect upon the world and for our own position, when the time for making peace comes it would [Pg 44] be better for us, rather than the securing of our own soil against attack or invasion, that an American flag should wave over American troops in Flanders ”

“ I think they should know that in the minds of these self-idolaters, who have laid claim to Creator and to creation as their own ordained possessions, we shall stand in no different light than the Belgians stand, or the Serbians, or the Poles, or the people of Northern France. Upon us, if the chance is vouchsafed them, they would visit a heaping measure of the same wrath they poured on those invaded and broken nations of Europe, showing to Americans no more mercy than they showed to them. ”

“ It may be argued that the French are not an outdoor race or a sport-loving race, as we conceive sports. But, on the other hand, the Frenchman is essentially romantic and essentially dramatic, and, whether in war or in victory afterward, he is likely to exhibit the magnanimous and the generous virtues rather than the cruel and the unkindly ones, because, as we all know, it is easier to dramatise one's good impulses than one's evil ones. ”

“ But evidently no one within the German Empire, either in authority or out of it, found any fault with the worthy pastor's sentiment that the Germans, above all other races—except possibly the Turks, who appear to have been taken into the Heavenly fold by a special dispensation—are particularly favoured and endowed of God, and enjoy His extraordinary—one might almost be tempted to say His private—guardianship, love and care. ”

“ Now the German, as has recently been [Pg 41] shown, is neither dramatic nor sportsmanlike. He is a greedy winner and he is a bad loser—a most remarkably bad loser. Good sportsmen would not have broken Belgium into bloody bits because Belgium stood between them and their goal; good sportsmen would not have sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "Gott Strafe England!" their battle cry; good sportsmen would not have shot Edith Cavell or sunk the Lusitania. ”

“ Because we have an admiration for one of these two Germanys is no more a reason why we should abate our indignation and our detestation for the other Germany than that because a man loves a cheery blaze upon his hearthstone he should refuse to fight a forest fire. ”

“ If the leaders believe these things their followers must also believe them; must believe, with the Reverend Lehmann and the Reverend Vorwerk, that God is a German God, and should properly be so addressed by a worshipper upon his knees, since one prayer begins "O German God!"; must believe, with Von Bernhardi—who spoke of "the miserable life of all small states"—that "to allow to the weak the same right of existence as to the strong, vigorous nation means presumptuous encroachment upon the natural laws of development" ”

“ Having been forced into the war, as we [Pg 71] are, it is well that our people should know to the fullest possible degree not only what they are fighting for—the preservation of democracy in the world, for one thing—but that likewise they should know and in that knowledge recognise the danger to us, of the mental forces operating behind the military arm of our national enemy. ”

“ Had there been an order to the contrary, those poor women and those scrawny children might have starved, and no German soldier, whatever his private feelings, would have dared offer to them a crust of bread or a bone of beef. ”

“ The first question is 'What is Germany?' And the answer is 'My Fatherland—a country entirely surrounded by Enemies!'
"So you see, gentlemen, we start at the cradle and at the kindergarten to teach our young people what it means to live with Russia on one side of them and with France [Pg 62] and Belgium and Britain on the other. They cannot forget for one instant the task that lies before them. Their educators—parents, teachers, pastors, military instructors, officials of every rank and every grade—never let them forget it." ”

“ What they have yet to learn—and they will only be taught it at the muzzle of guns—is that a civilisation cannot endure when it is half Prussian and half free. It is my understanding that this country, along with ten or twelve others, is now committed to the task of enforcing this lesson upon the consciousness of the only confederation of enemies to a representative form of government now left upon either hemisphere. ”

“ Having spread the gospel of force for so long, Prussianised Germany can understand but one counter-argument—force. We must give her back blow for blow—a harder blow in return for each blow she gives us. "Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just" ”

“ On the other hand, troops who actually had seen hard fighting rarely failed to evince a sincere respect, and in some instances a sort of reluctant admiration, for the courage and the steadfastness of their [Pg 55] adversaries. They were convinced—and that I suppose was only natural—of the superiority of the German soldiers, man for man, over the soldiers of any other nation; but they had been cured of the earlier delusion that most of the stalwart heroes were to be found on the one side and most of the weaklings and cravens on the other. ”

“ Any Christian race, going to war in what it esteems to be a righteous cause, prays to God to bless its campaigns with victory and to sustain its arms with fortitude. It had remained for this Christian race to assume that the God to whom they addressed their petitions was their own peculiar God, and that His Kingdom on Earth was Germany and Germany only ”

“ It is that very menace which must confront our people at home in the event that the enemy shall get near enough to our coasts to bombard our shore cities, or should he succeed in landing an expeditionary force upon American soil. ”

“ On November 13, 1914, according to Doctor Bang, a German theological professor preached an address which the Berliner Lokal Anzeiger reproduced, with favourable editorial comment. Here is a typical paragraph from this sermon:
"The deepest and most thought-inspiring result of the war is 'the German God.' Not the national God such as the lower nations worship, but 'Our God,' Who is not ashamed of belonging to us, the peculiar acquirement of our heart." ”

“ We were strong enough to beat all Europe and all Asia; we were not strong enough to beat the supreme Power of the New World too; we, with our allies, could not withstand the combined forces of the whole earth. ”

“ Indeed, I am willing to go still further and say, because of the rigorous discipline by which the German common soldier is bound, that in the German occupation of hostile territory opportunities for the individual brute or the individual degenerate to commit excesses against the individual victim were greatly reduced. Of course there must have been sporadic instances of hideous acts—there always have been where men went to war ”

“ Because that rebellious soldier would never have lived long enough to write down the record of his humanity—he would have been shot dead by the revolver of his own captain or his own lieutenant.
I saw German soldiers marching through a wrecked and ravished countryside, sing [Pg 35] ing their German songs about the home place, and the Christmas tree, and the Rhine maiden—creatures so full of sentiment that they had no room in their souls for sympathy. And, by the same token, I saw German soldiers dividing their rations with hungry Belgians. ”