Prince Max of Baden
Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden. Translated by W. M. Calder and C. W. H. Sutton. (Constable & Co. 2 vols. 42s.) Jr was well worth while to make the memoirs of Prince Max of Baden accessible to English readers. These two volumes give an intensely interesting, and indeed moving, picture of the collapse of the German Empire. Seldom has there been such a confusion of cross-purposes inspired by lack of informa- tion or by false information, by hesitation and panicky despair. Perhaps an empire which had been trained in arrogance, and of which the people had been constantly misled during the War by the military caste (who thought it mattered not at all whether a civilian public was informed or consulted) was almost bound to go down to its doom in that manner. However that may be, recrimination could not be avoided afterwards. Prince Max has been blamed mOre than any single man—yet very unfairly, because he was called in as
Chancellor when the Empire was past saving. It was designed for Min that he should be a scapegoat ; but instead of dis- appearing into the desert bearing the sins of the military rulers, he has sought only a relative seclusion and has spent his time in writing his apologia.
It must be said that this apologia • is very unconvincing. We. recommend the book because it is the most thrilling narrative of the collapse that we have read. Prince Max, however, wishes to be judged by his apologia. All that it amounts to is that peace could have been made much earlier—chiefly when Prince Max himself tried to bring it about—but that when the Supreme Command announced that all was lost and was willing to accept any conditions imposed by President Wilson the Supreme Command went too far. The Supreme Conunand was at the last, according to Prince Max, the supreme author of German humiliation. Ile might, he says, have saved Germany, or much of it, if only his advice had been taken. The whole story is stricken through and through with tragic reflections, with tortured thinking. Could he have done otherwise ? Could he ? Could he ? For our part we feel that Prince Max's judgment continually went astray ; that out of his unquestionable nobility of character he tried for impossible things when he should have recognized that they were impossible because the arrogant militarists were obviously not yet sufficiently humbled ; and that in the end he allowed himself to be the dupe of fantastic hopes when the meanest intelligence among the Generals knew that the army would never again stand against a mass attack.
He tells us first of all about his work for prisoners of war in Germany. It is clear from his appeals on behalf of the prisoners, and from his letters to his distinguished relations, that he felt and acted throughout as a man of honour, human- ity and sympathy, a man who cared greatly for the repute of his country. He admits that there was much to be regretted in the treatme#t of prisoners, and in particular he deplored the deportation of Belgians. He argues, however, that severities and cruelties were committed by underlings who misinterpreted the orders of the War Office and, above all, the wishes of the Kaiser. We hope it may be so, for the higher officials would be relieved of some of the enormities of which such a careful inquirer as Lord Bryce, for instance, believed them to be guilty. But if Prince Max is right, what is one to think of the German War Office, which created the most wonderful fighting machine ever known, and yet was unable to impress its orders upon minor officers ?'
In Prince Max's opinion opportunities for peace occurred in 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918 (that is to say before August, 1918), and any one of them would have led to a peace of "general contentment." He himself was the author of a letter to Prince Aleaxander Hohenlohe on the possibilities of peace, which, like Lord Lansdowne's famous letter in this country, came before the time was ripe. He deceives himself—we can use no other phrase—into thinking that if peace had been made before any of the principal nations confessed itself beaten we should be rejoicing now in several blessings, among which he mentions disarmament, not in Germany only," Freedom of the Seas, frontiers drawn in accordance with ethnographic fact and not merely to satisfy the aspirations of "certain favoured nations," and the absence of "aggressive Imperialism." He believes the first opportunity of peace to have been missed when Germany refused to announce to the world that she had no intention of keeping Belgium. He is, of course, right in saying that the violation of Belgian neu- trality was the particular act of wickedness which swept Great Britain into the War, but by the time his so-called peace opportunities began to occur much else had happened which had convinced the Allies that the world would never be safe while the German autocratic bureaucracy retained a vestige of power. There was then no possibility of the Allies halting (unless they were themselves beaten) till they had ended that evil German institution.
An example of Prince Max's confused thinking may be seen in the development of his arguments about German submarine warfare. He could not reconcile himself to it at first. We can have little doubt that he secretly felt that a sufficient reason against it was that it was atrocious, though he dwelt principally on the effect which it certainly had on
intensifying the determination of Germany's enemies. When, 'however, Germany carried the unrestricted policy to its Aiideous conclusion be discovered that this policy had tun legal justification US it was a necessary response to the iniquities of the blockade. He does not even mention the obvious difference that blockades were established by tradition, whereas the German policy of" sinking without a trace " was an invented violation of the rules of Geneva and the Hague.
It is impossible not to sympathize with Prince Max in his position as Chancellor. His was the invidious and unpopular task of appealing to President Wilson for peace. His Ministers had been appointed by the preceding Chancellor and were scarcely loyal to him. He actually persuades himself that if he had not been prohibited from delivering a certain speech which he had most carefully composed the course of events would have been less humiliating for Ger- many. But however right he may have been at one time in nobly and bravely warning the Supreme Command, he was wrong finally. When the soldiers knew that they were beaten and bluntly admitted it he continued to weave a web of deluding hopes.
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