Petrograd, on the outbreak of the war, a “morning-after” feeling was reported, and the French took the field in gloomy silence and with clenched teeth.
In a single night the temper of the German people blazed into warlike enthusiasm for the repulse of the national enemy, by whom, they imagined, they were basely attacked and threatened with annihilation.
To all these influences the majority of the German Social Democracy succumbed, and, to a still higher degree, the rest of the people. Had William threatened the “Sozis” with arrest as recently as July 28th, he was able to proclaim on August 1st that he “knew no more parties”—i.e., that they, one and all, had capitulated to him.
So by Bethmann's tactics the great task was accomplished, and the German people were made accomplices in his war-policy, in the sense that they sanctioned it and supported it, up to the military collapse.
It was not, however, the actual policy of William and his Government for which the German people enthusiastically staked life and property, but a policy which in fact did not exist at all, a mere mirage, made plausible by every fraudulent means available down to the ignominious end.
And this is precisely what we most clearly gather from the Foreign Office documents. These show that among the peoples who were sacrificed to William's war-policy the German nation heads the list. The more they incriminate the Hohenzollern régime, the more they exculpate the German people, for they testify most distinctly that the latter had no notion of the actual course of the events that led to war far less than the other nations—while those politicians who from scattered
