The World War
The struggle of 1914, Heaven knows, was not forced upon the masses, but was demanded by the whole people.
They wanted to put an end at last to the general uncertainty. Only on that ground can we understand how more than two million German men followed the flag into this supreme struggle, ready to protect it with the last drop of their blood.
To me those days seemed like deliverance from the angry feelings of my youth. I am not ashamed to say even now that I fell on my knees, overcome by a storm of enthusiasm, and thanked Heaven out of an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to live in this age.
A battle for freedom had begun whose superior in grandeur the earth had never seen; for Destiny had barely begun to take its course before the great masses started to realize that this time it was a matter not of Serbia’s or even Austria’s fate but of the existence or non-existence of the German nation.
For the last time in many years the people had a stroke of clairvoyance about its own future. And so at the very outset of the monstrous struggle the intoxicating extravagant enthusiasm took on the necessary serious undertone; only this realization made of the nation’s exaltation more than a mere flash in the pan. This was only too essential, for people in general had not, after all, the slightest conception of the possible length of the battle that was beginning. They dreamed of being home again by winter, to go back to their peaceable labors.
What man wishes, he hopes and believes. The overwhelming majority of the nation was long since sick of the eternal uncertainty; so it was only too understandable that no one believed in a peaceful solution of the Austro-Serbian conflict, and hoped for the final day of settlement. Of these millions I was one.
Scarcely had the news of the assassination become known in Munich when two ideas flashed through my head: first, that war was at last unavoidable, but beyond this, that the Hapsburg State would now be compelled to stick to its alliance; for what I had always feared above all was the possibility that some day
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