not composed of cowards, they too knew how to die ; from the very first day they were more in number than the German Army, and for their technical arma¬ ments they had the whole world in their service ; and yet we cannot get rid of the fact that the German victories, which continued through four years of hard fighting against the whole world, were due, apart from all the heroism and fine organization, solely to con¬ summate leadership. The organization and leader¬ ship of the German Army were the greatest the world has ever seen. The failures lay in the limitations of human powers of resistance.
The collapse of that Army was not the cause of our present misfortunes, but merely the consequence of other crimes, one of which ushered in a further collapse, and this time an obvious one.
Are nations, in fact, ever ruined by the loss of a war, and by that alone ? This can be very briefly answered.
It is always so, if the military defeat of the nation has been due to laziness, cowardice, want of character, in fact, unworthiness on that nation’s part. If it is not so, the military defeat will become a spur to a greater recovery in future, and not the tombstone of the nation.
History provides innumerable instances to prove the correctness of this statement.
Germany’s military defeat was, alas ! not an undeserved catastrophe, but a merited chastisement of eternal retribution. The defeat was more than deserved by us.
If the front, left to itself, had really given way, and if the national disaster had been really due to failure, the German nation would have accepted the defeat in quite another spirit. They would have borne the misfortune which followed with clenched teeth, or would have been overwhelmed by sorrow. Rage and fury would have filled their hearts against the tricks