Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter V

DEUTSCHLAND UeBER ALLAH

It was commonly said at the beginning of this war that, whatever Germany’s military resources might be, she was hopelessly and childishly lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowledge of psychology, from which all success in diplomacy is distilled.  As instances of this grave defect, people adduced the fact that, apparently, she had not anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced to be not a crime merely, but a blunder of the stupidest sort.  It is perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till now, at any rate, of ‘having got the hang of it’ at all.  But critics of her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it merely because it did not interest her.  It was not worth her while to master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not to understand them, but to conquer them.  She had all the information she wanted about their armies and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and correctly tabulated.  Why, then, since this was all that concerned her, should she cram her head with irrelevant information about what they might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the torpedoing of neutral ships without warning?  As long as her fumes were deadly and her submarines subtle, nothing further concerned her.

But Europe generally made a great mistake in supposing that Germany could not learn psychology, and the process of its distillation into diplomacy when it interested her.  The psychology of the French and English was a useless study, for she was merely going to fight them, but for years she had been studying with an industry and a patience that put our diplomacy to shame (as was most swiftly and ignominiously proven when it came into conflict with hers) the psychology of the Turks.  For years she had watched the dealings of the Great Powers with Turkey, but she had never really associated herself with that policy.  She sat quietly by and saw how it worked.  Briefly it was this.  For a hundred years Turkey had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of the Physician Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse.  So there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of strychnine and oxygen, and, no less, by a policy of rousing and irritating the patient.  All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they persevered:  Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him; France deprived him of his hot-water bottle when she snatched at the Constantinople quays, and they all shook and slapped him when he went to war with Greece in 1896, and instantly deprived him of the territory he had won in Thessaly.  That was the principle of European diplomacy towards Turkey, and from it Germany always held aloof.