Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/312
BERNHARDI'S APOLOGIA.
[In the New York Press the author of Germany and the Next War has explained the purity of his own and his country's attitude; and has followed up this defence with a résumé of the War, completely favourable to Germany, and corresponding in scarcely a single detail with the facts.]
Their staff of life a broken reed
(No doubt a Teuton bluff designed
To make the hearts of neutrals bleed);
But you, Bernhardi, you at least
Need never know an aching hollow,
Who have, for your perpetual feast,
So many swelling words to swallow.
Such as Przemysl never faced,
And show at last, with hands in air,
A heavy bulge about the waist;
For, though the cud that you have chewed
Has cost a deal of masticating,
I think you never handled food
So rich, so meaty, so inflating.
You leave your rôle of warrior-seer,
To re-create the past instead
For long and innocent ears to hear;
And in your twopence-coloured tract―
Its Teuton touch so light and airy―
Dull History, disengaged from Fact,
Debouches on the bounds of Faerie.
Your effort in The New York Sun,
"What will the other liars say
When they perceive their gifts outdone;
When they suspect, what now I know
Who hitherto retained a bias
In favour of the Wolff Bureau―
That you're the leading Ananias?"
O.S.
UNWRITTEN LETTERS TO THE KAISER.
No. XVIII.
(A Fragment from G**rg* B*rn**d Sh*w.)
... but when I am asked to go a step farther I really must cry Halt. For the truth is that you yourself, with your awful nod and your glittering uniforms and your loud meaningless talking and your sham religion and your fondness for poor jokes, are merely one of the superfluous things of which the world is full. Nobody who knows me will suppose that, because I have chosen an inappropriate moment for showing up my fellow-countrymen, I am therefore likely to sing hosannas in your praise. What I see in you is, as I say, a superfluity. What you see in me Heaven knows, and I think I can guess. It is intellect, pure intellect, and in paying attention to what is represented to you as intellect you imagine you are acting up to the traditions of your family.
To be sure your predecessor didn't make much of his intimacy with Voltair. When all is taken into account the sneering ill-conditioned old writer has the best of the quarrel, though no doubt the King had his happy moments when he set the philosopher shrieking his woes all over Europe. No, I don't like the precedent. I cannot imagine myself at Potsdam any more than I can imagine you at a general meeting of the Fabian Society. By this I don't mean that there are no worse places than Potsdam, any more than I mean that there are no more delectable discussions than those of my beloved Fabians. All I mean is that you and I, both of us admirable men in our way, had better keep ourselves to our own pasture grounds and not try, as you are trying, to encroach upon those of our neighbours. What should I do at Potsdam? It is possible, perhaps, for a German to have esprit―to be light and witty in conversation, sympathetic in his intercourse with others, unpedantic and rational in his judgments; but if we may assume the existence of such a German we may at the same time be quite certain that we shan't find him in Potsdam or in any place that has the true Potsdam qualities, with its tame Professors, its stiff military heel-clickers, its intolerable heaviness in the intellectual atmosphere and its calm assumption, maddening to a mind like mine, that Germans are necessarily right because they are Germans. To be patronised by a Professor or a General, and above all to be patronised in the German language, would be death to me in something less than ten minutes. I don't want to die and I do want to go on writing prefaces to my plays, so to Potsdam, the Canossa of the spirit, I, at any rate, refuse to go.
May I remind you, by the way, that Frederick, your supreme model and Carlyle's favourite, was in some points but a poor German. Prussians he thought excellent as material for filling up casualty lists, but beyond that he doesn't seem to have cared to give them much power. As to the German language, he had the utmost contempt for it as a medium of intercourse between civilised human beings. Next to his ambition to win fame and rob Maria Theresa he had one ardent desire―to shine as a master of the French language. He deluged Voltaire with his efforts in French poetry. After he had defeated Soubise in the battle of Rossbach he sat down and composed a perfectly execrable copy of French verses, in which he held his enemy up to the derision of mankind in an abominable series of insults. The badness of the lines may perhaps be taken as a strong proof of his patriotism. Have you ever read them? And, if you have, what do you think of them?
You are certainly wrong when you declare that the German case in this War must commend itself by its not-to-be-broken strength to any candid mind. No mind could well be more candid than mine, and I can only say that, having read with great reluctance much that has been written on the subject by Germans, I have come to the conclusion that your German case is the worst of all those produced by the War. In comparison the case of England is crystal clear, and even the case of Austria takes on a certain amount of reasonableness. If you ask me why I don't say that in England, I reply that that is not my way. To pour cold water on the opinions of one's countrymen is the best plan for getting oneself talked about―better even than putting on a silver helmet and spouting Imperial rubbish before an Army Corps. And if one makes a howler about the history of the United States and the proprietorship of Alaska so much the better. It isn't everybody who can get himself corrected by a schoolboy.
Yours at a distance, G. B. S.
The Truce.
"Our readers are earnestly requested to support heAdvertisers in the paper."―The Common Cause.
Appearing in an organ of the feminists this shows a most forgiving spirit
"All Germany wanted from Russia was that she should not continue to be the hope of the Slaps."―Newcastle Evening Chronicle.
If Germany wanted to attract the Slaps to herself she has succeeded beyond her wildest hopes.