played by fortune or against the enemy to whom destiny had given the victory. There would have been neither mirth nor dancing, cowardice would not have swelled with pride and glorified the defeat, the fighting troops would not have been mocked at and their colours dragged in the dirt; but, above all, that disgraceful state of affairs would never have arisen which induced a British officer, Colonel Repington, to proclaim with scorn : “Every third German is a traitor.”
No—the military collapse was itself but the con¬ sequence of a series of unhealthy manifestations and of those who promoted them ; they had already been infecting the nation in times of peace. The defeat was the first visible catastrophic result of a moral poisoning, a weakening of the will to self-preservation, and of doctrines which had begun many years previously to undermine the foundations of nation and Reich.
It was natural that the whole abysmal lying spirit of Jewry and the fighting organization of Marxism should see to it that the very man should be burdened with direct responsibility for the disaster, who all by himself attempted with superhuman will and energy to divert the catastrophe which he had foreseen, and to save the nation from a period of deep pain and humiliation. By taxing Ludendorff with the responsibility for losing the World War, they took the weapon of moral justification out of the hand of the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to justice.
We may almost regard it a great stroke of luck for the German nation that the period of creeping sickness came to a head and was stemmed so suddenly in that terrible catastrophe ; for if things had happened dif¬ ferently the nation would have gone on to ruin, more io6 MY STRUGGLE slowly perhaps, but also more surely. The disease would have become chronic, whereas, in the acute form of the disaster, it at least became clear and obvious to the eyes of a considerable number of observers. It was not by accident that men conquered the plague more