The Barbarism of Berlin

The Barbarism of Berlin

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Title: The Barbarism of Berlin
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Release Date: March 13, 2004 [eBook #11560]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
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BARBARISM OF BERLIN***
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THE BARBARISM OF BERLIN
BY
G.K. CHESTERTON
First Published 1914

Contents
INTRODUCTION: THE FACTS OF THE CASE
I. THE WAR ON THE WORD
II. THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
III. THE APPETITE OF TYRANNY
IV. THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY

INTRODUCTION.
THE FACTS OF THE CASE.
Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering
business a story: and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as
madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate
many other people's weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the
master of the house was burned because he was drunk: it may be that
the mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and
perished arguing about the expense of a fire-escape. It is, nevertheless,
broadly true that they both were burned because I set fire to their house.
That is the story of the thing. The mere facts of the story about the
present European conflagration are quite as easy to tell.
Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most
sincere war of human history, it is as easy to answer the question of
why England came to be in it at all, as it is to ask how a man fell down
a coal-hole, or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole
truth. But facts are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple.
Prussia, France, and England had all promised not to invade Belgium.
Prussia proposed to invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of
invading France. But Prussia promised that if she might break in,
through her own broken promise and ours, she would break in and not
steal. In other words, we were offered at the same instant a promise of
faith in the future and a proposal of perjury in the present. Those
interested in human origins may refer to an old Victorian writer of
English, who, in the last and most restrained of his historical essays,
wrote of Frederick the Great, the founder of this unchanging Prussian
policy. After describing how Frederick broke the guarantee he had
signed on behalf of Maria Theresa, he then describes how Frederick
sought to put things straight by a promise that was an insult. "If she
would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against
any power which should try to deprive her of her other dominions, as if
he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise
could be of more value than the old one." That passage was written by
Macaulay, but so far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned it
might have been written by me.
Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest

there can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that
one can almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One
could make a kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to
the English diplomatist, if he had been silenced every time by Prussian
diplomacy. Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:
July 24: Germany invades Belgium.
July 25: England declares war.
July 26: Germany promises not to annex Belgium.
July 27: England withdraws from the war.
July 28: Germany annexes Belgium, England declares war.
July 29: Germany promises not to annex France, England withdraws
from the war.
July 30: Germany annexes France, England declares war.
July 31: Germany promises not to annex England.
Aug. 1: England withdraws from the war. Germany invades England.
How long is anybody expected to go on with that sort of game; or keep
peace at that illimitable price? How long must we pursue a road in
which promises are all fetishes in front of us; and all fragments behind
us? No; upon the cold facts of the final negotiations, as told by any of
the diplomatists in any of the documents, there is no doubt about the
story. And no