"Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand." (Gospel of Matthew, 12:25)The German defeat cannot deter French opinion from rendering our enemies the homage they earned, by the energy of their leaders and the efforts of those who carried out their orders. But the exceptional extent of the warlike qualities they demonstrated, from one end of the drama to the other, better enables us to measure the errors that they committed.
We can do so all the more easily because almost all the German personages who played a role of the first rank in the conduct of the struggle have now published their memoirs. And, while it would not be fitting to make use of these writings without very seriously weighing the spirit of self-justification in which they were written, it is possible by comparing them one with another, by counterpoising the theses they maintain, and by grouping their affirmations and negations to discern more or less the principal reversals, and to form a judgment about the action of these personalities.
Among the multiple acts of this drama, the present study is concerned with the episodes that appear to be most freighted with consequences for the course and outcome of the war. Moreover, these seem to be most characteristic of the spirit and conduct of the personalities who were involved in them. It also happens as is easily explained - that the memoirs of the actors are particularly expansive and impassioned in regard to these events.
The five chapters to follow thus have for their subjects, respectively,
- The indiscipline of von Kluck, who from the 2nd to the 5th of September 1914, created the conditions favorable to our offensive at the Marne and called forth our victory;
- The unremitting struggle waged by Grand Admiral Tirpitz against Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg from 1914 to 1919, to compel him to declare unlimited submarine warfare, which he by no means wished to do, and which induced the Americans to take up arms;
- The inability of Germany to establish a unified command in the coalition of central states, even though all the circumstances combined to offer it to them;
- The governmental crisis, thenceforth incurable, provoked at Berlin in 1917 by the intrigue of Ludendorff, who was resolved to seize de facto dictatorial power and did not hesitate, in order to achieve this, to overthrow Chancellor Bethmann, compelling the Kaiser's will, rousing up political parties, and creating a fatal agitation in public opinion;
- Finally, beginning on July 18, 1918, the abrupt and complete moral collapse of a valiant people, a degradation all the more grandiose because this people had, until then, been able to muster a collective will to conquer, an obstinacy in staying the course, a capacity for suffering that deserved the admiration and astonishment of its enemies from the first day of the war, and will assuredly secure the homage of history.
The German military leaders, whose task it was to guide and coordinate such immense efforts, gave proof of an audacity, of a spirit of enterprise, of a will to succeed, of a vigor in handling resources, whose reverberations have not been stilled by their ultimate defeat. Perhaps this study - or, more precisely, the disclosure of the events that are its object may make evident the defects common to these eminent men: the characteristic taste for immoderate undertakings; the passion to expand their personal power at any cost; the contempt for the limits marked out by human experience, common sense, and the law.
Perhaps reading this will cause the reader to reflect that the German leaders, far from combatting these excesses in themselves, or at least concealing them as defects, considered them instead as forces, and erected them into a system; and that this error bore down with a crushing weight at the decisive moments of the war. One may perhaps find in their conduct the imprint of Nietzsche's theories of the elite and the Overman, adopted by the military generation that was to conduct the recent hostilities and which had come to maturity and definitively fixed its philosophy around the turn of the century.
The Overman with his exceptional character, his will to power, his taste for risk, his contempt for others who want to see him as Zarathustra - appeared to these impassioned men of ambition as the ideal that they should attain. They voluntarily resolved to be part of that formidable Nietzschean elite who are convinced that, in pursuing their own glory, they are serving the general interest; who exercise compulsion on "the mass of slaves," holding them in contempt; and who do not hesitate in the face of human suffering, except to hail it as necessary and desirable.
Perhaps, finally, in meditating upon these events, one may wish to measure with what dignity we should clothe that superior philosophy of war which animated these leaders and which could at one time render futile the harshest efforts of a great people and at another constitute the most universal and surest guarantee of the destinies of the fatherland.
This study will have attained its object if it helps in a modest way to induce our military leaders of tomorrow, following the example of their victorious models in the recent war, to shape their minds and mold their characters according to the rules of classical order. It is from those rules that they may draw that sense of balance, of what is possible, of measure, which alone renders the works of energy durable and fecund.
In the classical French garden, no tree seeks to stifle the others by overshadowing them; the plants accommodate themselves to being geometrically arranged; the pond does not aspire to be a waterfall; the statues do not vie to obtrude themselves upon the admiring spectator. A noble melancholy comes over us, from time to time. Perhaps it comes from our feeling that each element, in isolation, might have been more radiantly brilliant. But that would be to the detriment of the whole; and the observer takes delight in the rule that impresses on the garden its magnificent harmony.
Mais:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2013/11/06/ARTFIG00536-de-gaulle-avant-de-gaulle.php
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnITUZiU2NMLU1IMGc
