Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/825

Rh France had had time to form a league with others whose object it would be to humble Germany in her turn. France, the possible ally of Germany's new antagonist, not France the present enemy, was the key to that skilful mixture of hectoring with pretended fear which deceived not only other nations, but the sober-minded Germans themselves, the balance of whose reasoning power the intoxication of conquest has unsettled.

This being so, it becomes all important to inquire what are the future possibilities against which German statesmen and strategists feel themselves thus urged to provide, even at the cost of present wrong-doing. The new empire has not a friend in Europe; and no one asserts this more plainly than its own chief organs. Is it forced, therefore, to contemplate the dreadful issue of an indignant Continent rising up against it as one man, as against the Napoleonic empire when once the failure before Moscow turned the tide of its successes? No, indeed. ObxoxiousObnoxious [sic] as Germany has made herself in Scandinavia by her cynical contempt for treaties in the matter of Schleswig; feared as she is in Switzerland and in Austria for what the patriots of those countries think her insolent pretensions to the allegiance of all that use her tongue; dreaded in Holland and Belgium for her greed of ports and colonies and commerce; coldly disliked by Russia as the new barrier to all ambitious Muscovite policy that tends westward; it is in France alone, where the iron yoke of subjection entered into men's souls, that she is hated with something like the bitterness of personal loathing which Germans felt towards France in days of old Napoleonic sway. And, besides the difference of sentiment, there is a vast difference, too often overlooked, in the military situation. The central geographical position of Germany, if laying her apparently open to attack from many quarters, and giving her, as her war-office is wont to plead, a vast length of frontier to defend, vaster by far than that of any other country but Austria, is in truth greatly favourable to her as against a general combination. Those lesser powers which at times please themselves with the saying of Count Moltke, that it would take one or two army-corps to look after a single one of them if hostile, would, in truth, if declaring against Germany, be so separated by their supposed antagonist that neither one of them, nor all combined, could possibly affect the course of a fresh struggle. If venturing to draw the sword against her, they would but give occupation to some of the best troops of the second line she is now preparing under her new Landsturm law. And certainly whilst Holland and Denmark keep their proposed army reforms, as is the case up to the present time, wholly in the style of paper project; and Switzerland and Sweden trust to militia; while Belgium shows herself the only one of these lesser powers prepared to sacrifice commercial demands and party aspirations in the smallest degree to military necessities; so long may we be sure that Germany might be at war with one and all to-morrow without deducting a man from the field army with which she would carry on the struggle with more formidable foes.

Italy is the hardest of all the European countries to judge of as effects their general future as a whole. But it is sufficient here to say that her isolated geographical position, her urgent financial necessities, her general need of time to consolidate the national elements divided for many centuries — all make it so extremely improbable that she would be tempted to indulge in a great war for any cause less than that of self-preservation, that she may be left out of our present view. Certainly she cannot affect the present policy of Berlin, nor of those other cabinets with which that of Berlin is chiefly concerned.

Putting France then for the present altogether aside, for the very sufficient reasons already given, reasons which may be said to amount to demonstration, that she cannot hopefully play the leading part in the near military future of Europe, and knows this well enough not to attempt it; we must fix our attention on Austria, or Russia, or both together, as the real cause of German uneasiness, that uneasiness which of late took the alarming form of preparing to crush utterly out of France the power of future combinations with other great States, and so exclude her from the problem of the military future of Germany. If this feeling be genuine and unfeigned, that is, if Germany has really any possible foe she counts menacing to her newly won greatness, that foe cannot be found in France, much less in the smaller independent States. It must be sought, therefore, in the two great empires that border her to the south and east. We will look at each of these a little in detail, to discover, if we can, how far such anxiety may be justified.

The supposed danger can hardly come from Austria. She knows so well her want of that unity against which she would 