Books

IT IS terrifying to realize that such learned creatures as Ewald Banse are preparing the minds and the wills of German youth for a new war. When the Nazis came into power they appointed this cold-blooded pedant Professor of Military Science at Brunswick Technical College and his new work, issued in translation under the title of “Germany Prepares for War,” terrifying enough as it is on its own account, is triply ominous for the official weight it undoubtedly carries. Ewald Banse is preparing the way for a war of revenge. The influence of this man would be sufficiently poisonous were he merely a rabble-rousing flannel-mouthed, froth-flecked propagandist, but his poison is more than normally deadly because he is intelligent, he is learned, he is informed, he is consistent and once you grant his nationalistic premise his conclusions are inevitable.

Prof. Banse knows precisely how Germany might have won the World War, what mistakes she made on her Eastern and Western fronts which prevented her from winning the war and the ways in which evil Fate gave her defeat instead of the Victory she would surely have had had Ewald Banse been consulted as to the proper conduct of strategy. In fact, the Herr Professor has the strategy of the next war neatly laid out, including the campaign of propaganda, in which the Germans were woefully deficient in the last as compared with the English, the lining up of Allies and the uses of poison gases and the rest of it.

During the war the chief reproach against the Germans was that they were fighting without mercy. The word Schrecklichkeit was the noun applied to the German method of warfare, and we thought of Admiral Von Tirpitz as a pretty low sort of skunk, because of his advocacy of the U-boat method of warfare. But Ewald Banse, with his professional incapacity to see human beings as human beings, but as animated ciphers convenient for the creation of a new German Empire, this Banse makes Tirpitz sound like a puling infant. For he says, in so many words, that since Germany violated the neutrality of Belgium, she might just as well have gone ahead and violated the neutrality of Holland, which would have given her an immediate outlet on the sea facing England. She could thus have negated the danger of the British economic blockade, and might even have threatened Great Britain with invasion. There are of course other ifs; if there had been more men on the Western front than there were; if Austria had done her part with greater vigor; if the U-boat campaign had been either more relentlessly pursued, or else been abandoned at the price of maintaining American neutrality; if the Allies hadn’t bought off some of Germany’s Allies; if the Brest-Litvosk peace had been better managed; if German propaganda had been more intelligently pursued both at home and abroad, and if the Gods had been kinder. Even so Germany practically won the War and next time she fights, there isn’t going to be any doubt about it. Not with Ewald Banse exercising his proper prerogative of advising the General Staff, the diplomatic corps, the propaganda bureaux and the rest of it. But one of the first requirements of Germany is either to get herself an Ally with an excellent oil supply, or else to lay in, in bomb-proof shelters, a vast reservoir of oil, or else hope for a German scientist to discover the liquefaction of coal.

I quote a few gems from Herr Banse’s book. “The day of discomfort and hard-thinking and grim resolve and cold steel has begun. A grim, iron age lies before us.” “National sentiment . . . means self-respect. . . . The internationalist is a bastard in blood and a eunuch in intellect.” “We want an empire in which we can once more profess and call ourselves Germans without fear of being sat upon.” “Mighty empires …only grow out of the clang of swords. The Third Reich, as we dream of it–from the Flanders coast to the Raab, from Memel to the Adige and the Rhone–can also only be horn in blood and iron. Ideas and works and armies must march and fight and die before the vast and splendid structure of the Third Reich rises from the ground of the Western world.” There you have it in Herr Banse’s nutshell.