IT was commonly said at the beginning of this war that, whatever Germany’s military resources might be, she was hopelessly and childishly lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowledge of psychology, from which all success in diplomacy is distilled. As instances of this grave defect, people adduced the fact that apparently she had not anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced not to be a crime merely, but a blander of the stupidest sort. It is perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till now, at any rate, of “having got the hang of it” at all. But critics of her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it merely because it did not interest her. It was not worth her while to master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not to understand them but to conquer them. She had all the information she wanted about their armies and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and correctly tabulated. Why, then, since this was all that concerned her, should she bother her head about what they might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the torpedoing of neutral ships without warning? As long as her fumes were deadly and her submarines subtle, nothing further concerned her.
But Europe generally made a great mistake in supposing that she could not learn psychology and the process of its distillation into diplomacy when it interested her. The psychology of the French and English was a useless study, for she was merely going to fight them, but for years she had been studying with an industry and a patience that put our diplomacy to shame (as was most swiftly and ignominiously proven when it came into conflict with hers) the psychology of the Turks. For years she had watched the dealings of the Great Powers with Turkey, but she had never really associated herself with that policy. She sat quietly by and saw how it worked. Briefly it was this. For a hundred years Turkey had been a Sick Man, and for a hundred years he had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of the Physician-Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse. So there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of strychnine and oxygen and, no less, by a policy of rousing and irritating the patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him; France deprived him of his hot-water bottle when she snatched at the Constantinople quays, and they all shook and slapped him when he went to war with Greece in 1896, and instantly deprived him of the territory he had won in Thessaly. That was the principle of European diplomacy towards Turkey, and from it Germany always held aloof.
But from about the beginning of the reign of the present German Emperor, German or rather Prussian diplomacy had been going quietly about its work. It was worth while to study the psychology of the Turks, because dimly then, but with ever increasing distinctness, Germany foresaw that Turkey might be a counter of immense importance in the great conflict which was assuredly drawing nearer, though as yet its existence was but foreshadowed by the most distant reflections of summer lightning on a serene horizon. But if Turkey was to be of any profit to her, she wanted a strong Turkey who could fight with her (or rather for her), and she had no use for the Sick Man whom the other Powers were bent on keeping alive but no more. Her own eventual domination of Turkey was always the end in view, but she wanted to dominate not a weak but a strong servant. And her diplomacy was not less than brilliant simply from the facts that on the one hand it soothed Turkey instead of irritating, and on the other it went absolutely unnoticed for a long time. Nobody knew that it was going on. She sent officers to train the Turkish army, well knowing what magnificent material Anatolia afforded, and she had thoroughly grasped the salient fact that to make any way with Oriental peoples your purse must be open and your backshish unlimited. “There is no God but backshish, and the Deutsche Bank is his prophet.”
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