IV

THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY


In considering the Prussian point of view, we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks.
So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong
that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The
spokesmen of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating
this entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or
even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's
celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we
should all become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order
to his troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know,
his words ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate
your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that
is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality, the train
of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valour