New York Times Current History: Vol 1, No. 1 | Page 6

of his toes; and Sir Edward is
a charming man, incapable of cutting down even an Opposition front
bencher, or of telling a German he intends to have him shot. Lord
Cromer is a Junker. Mr. Winston Churchill is an odd and not
disagreeable compound of Junker and Yankee: his frank anti-German
pugnacity is enormously more popular than the moral babble (Milton's
phrase) of his sanctimonious colleagues. He is a bumptious and jolly
Junker, just as Lord Curzon is an uppish Junker. I need not string out
the list. In these islands the Junker is literally all over the shop.
It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker or a successful
barrister to get into an English Cabinet, no matter which party is in
power, or to avoid resigning when we strike up the drum. The Foreign
Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are overwhelmingly
Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only claim to their
position is the possession of ability of some sort: mostly ability to make
money. And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker, though less true-blue
than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey,
who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an
ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies by a stroke
of his pen.
*What Is a Militarist?*
Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the Militarists.
A Militarist is a person who believes that all real power is the power to
kill, and that Providence is on the side of the big battalions. The most
famous Militarist at present, thanks to the zeal with which we have
bought and quoted his book, is General Friedrich von Bernhardi. But
we cannot allow the General to take precedence of our own writers as a
Militarist propagandist. I am old enough to remember the beginning of
the anti-German phase of that very ancient propaganda in England. The

Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 left Europe very much taken aback.
Up to that date nobody was afraid of Prussia, though everybody was a
little afraid of France; and we were keeping "buffer States" between
ourselves and Russia in the east. Germany had indeed beaten Denmark;
but then Denmark was a little State, and was abandoned in her hour of
need by those who should have helped her, to the great indignation of
Ibsen. Germany had also beaten Austria; but somehow everybody
seems able to beat Austria, though nobody seems able to draw the
moral that defeats do not matter as much as the Militarists think,
Austria being as important as ever. Suddenly Germany beat France
right down into the dust, by the exercise of an organized efficiency in
war of which nobody up to then had any conception. There was not a
State in Europe that did not say to itself: "Good Heavens! what would
happen if she attacked us?" We in England thought of our
old-fashioned army and our old-fashioned commander George Ranger
(of Cambridge), and our War Office with its Crimean tradition of
imbecility; and we shook in our shoes. But we were not such fools as to
leave it at that. We soon produced the first page of the Bernhardian
literature: an anonymous booklet entitled The Battle of Dorking. It was
not the first page of English Militarist literature: you have only to turn
back to the burst of glorification of war which heralded the silly
Crimean campaign (Tennyson's Maud is a surviving sample) to find
paeans to Mars which would have made Treitschke blush (perhaps they
did); but it was the first page in which it was assumed as a matter of
course that Germany and not France or Russia was England's natural
enemy. The Battle of Dorking had an enormous sale; and the wildest
guesses were current as to its authorship. And its moral was "To arms;
or the Germans will besiege London as they besieged Paris." From that
time until the present, the British propaganda of war with Germany has
never ceased. The lead given by The Battle of Dorking was taken up by
articles in the daily press and the magazines. Later on came the Jingo
fever (anti-Russian, by the way; but let us not mention that just now),
Stead's Truth About the Navy, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, the suppression
of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford, Mr. Garvin, Admiral
Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National Review, Lord
Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist Foreign
Secretary on the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells's War in the Air (well

worth re-reading just now), and the Dreadnoughts. Throughout all these
agitations the enemy, the villain of the piece, the White Peril, was
Prussia and her millions