Introduction

This book does not pretend to be fiction, and if it provides entertainment it is on account of its sterling honesty. This same quality gives it an even higher value as a document, and it is as such that those will read it who desire to arrive at any conclusion at once profound and useful about the War.

Its honesty, however, lends this book a further attraction. The young student of nineteen, who entered the German Army of his own free will, before the War was a year old, and “stuck it” in spite of twenty wounds and the usual disillusionment that we all experienced, displays the truly adventurous spirit. He is a real schoolboy, childishly delighted with life, forgivably boasting of his drinking capacity. He is no more brutal or insensitive than any other explorer, Arctic or Equatorial. He snipes at English Tommies or French poilus, and naively claims to have hit them, in a spirit of sportsmanship which contains no sting for us because we know the inevitable end. The remarkable thing is that, perhaps on account of his youth, perhaps because of German over-training, possibly because of some personal quality, he never seems to see that the end was inevitable. He had no conception of himself as the man of violence, so familiar in Holy Writ or classic story. He must have been astonished to find himself described as a “Hun.” There was nothing petty or mean about his deliberate destruction of property in the German retreat of 1917. It was part of the game, and there is no word against the similar treatment of East Prussia by the Russians. That was war as he saw it. He had his regrets for friends and comrades slain all round him, aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of the Western Front, on which alone he served, bursts of philosophy which are no worse than most, and very considerable narrative power. Yet none of these qualities helped him to any understanding of what war is, and must be. Right to the end, when, helmetless, his lungs full of blood, he saw the German troops coming up from the support line, holding up their hands and throwing away their arms and equipment, he clings to his ideal of military Germany expressed in the last three pages. Even after that, when writing this book, he seems to imagine that a sort of Nietzschean-Wagnerian atmosphere of heroics translated into terms of gas and tanks can be recreated out of the wreckage of empire. One cannot but respect the sincere, courageous fighter.

What, then, does this book prove? There are in it mistakes of fact due, I think, to the physical effects on his memory of repeated blows from great pieces of metal. There is the necessary limitation of one who was never other than a company officer, and who apparently did not know the very names of the battles into the forefront of which he was thrust. There are statements of things seen or done on battlefields, at moments when neither he nor anyone else could be sure of accuracy; they may be put down as images evoked by the delirium of battle fever. Yet the whole is stamped with truth, and has remained untranslated since its first publication in Germany in 1921. It comes most opportunely now, when there are signs of an attempt to resurrect the God of War, to re-gild his gas-bleached armour, and to clothe in some sort of martial panoply the machinery on which he depends. To discredit such an attempt, nothing could be better than the diary of this high-minded devotee of personal combat. He was no middle-aged civilian, unwillingly taking up arms and finding all his worst preconceptions abundantly fulfilled. He was nearly as good a specimen as ever worshipped Mars, and to what did he come?⁠—to that unescapable doom that brings to meet violence precisely such resistance as shall cancel and annul it. On this point the strength and finality of the testimony cannot be missed. It is to be hoped that the book will be widely read.