It was the end.
Like Siegfried, stricken down by the treacherous spear of savage Hagan, our weary front collapsed. It was in vain that it had tried to drink in new vitality from that fountain in our homeland which had run dry. It was now our task to save what was left of our army for the subsequent reconstruction of our Fatherland. The present was lost. We had only our hope in the future.
So to work!
I can quite understand the desire to leave the country which possessed many of our officers at the sight of the ruin of everything which they held dear. The longing "to have nothing more to do" with a world in which unbridled passions were mutilating the true heart of our nation until it was unrecognizable, was a very human one, and yet — I must say exactly what I think.
Comrades of the German Army, once the proud and mighty German Army! How can you talk of despondency? Think of the men who gave us a new Fatherland more than a hundred years ago. Their religion was their faith in themselves and in the sacredness of their cause. They built up a new Fatherland, not on the foundation of doctrines strange to them, but on those of the free development of the individual within the framework of the whole body politic, and on his sense of responsibility to the state. Germany will tread that path once more as soon as she is permitted to do so.
I have an unshakable conviction that, as in those days, our historical continuity with our great and glorious past will be preserved or restored where it has been broken. The old German spirit will descend upon us again, though it may be that we shall first have to go through the purifying fires of passion and suffering. Our enemies well know what that spirit means. They admired and hated it in peace, they feared and were amazed at it on the battlefields of the Great War. They tried to represent our strength to their peoples as the expression of the empty word "organization."
They say nothing about the spirit which created this tenement and lives and works within it. With and through that spirit, we will courageously build up our world again.
Germany, the goal and starting point of so much that is inexhaustible in human civilization and culture, will count as naught only so long as she ceases to believe in her great historical mission. My faith is unshakable that the best among us, with their deep, strong thoughts, will succeed in fusing the ideas of today with the precious relics of ancient times and on them set the stamp of eternal qualities which will bring salvation to our Fatherland.
Such is the firm conviction with which I left the bloody battlefields of this War of Nations. I have witnessed the heroic struggle of my Fatherland, and I shall never believe that it was its death struggle.
I have often been asked the question on what I based my hopes of our ultimate victory even in the darkest hours of the war. I could only point to my faith in the justice of our cause and my confidence in our Fatherland and the army.
I passed through the serious crises of this long war and the days that followed it in a state of mind and feeling for which I can find no better expression than the words in which Field-Marshal Herrmann von Boyen, when he was Prussian War Minister in 1811, wrote to his Sovereign in the midst of the greatest military and political afflictions of our enslaved Fatherland:
"I am not in any way ignorant of the dangers of our situation, but where we have no alternative but subjection or honor, religion gives me the strength to do everything which right and duty demand.
Man can never foresee with certainty the end of the task to which he has set his hand, but he who lives only for duty from inmost conviction has a shield about him which gives him peace in every situation in life, come what may, and indeed often brings him the success for which he strives.
It is not the ravings of excited fanaticism, but the expression of a religious feeling when I thank those who taught me long ago to love my King and Fatherland as the most sacred possessions on earth."
For the time being a flood of wild political passions and sounding speeches has overwhelmed the ancient structure of our state, and apparently destroyed all our sacred traditions. Yet this flood will subside again. Then from the tempestuous seas of our national life will once more emerge that rock — the German Imperial House — to which the hopes of our fathers clung in days of yore, and on which the future of our Fatherland was confidently set, nearly half a century ago, by our own efforts.
When our national ideals and our national conscience have resumed their sway among us, we shall see how moral values have been struggling to birth in our present grievous trials and the Great War on which no nation is entitled to look back with more pride than the German people, so long as it remained true to itself. Then, and then only, will the blood of all those who fell believing in the greatness of Germany have been poured out not in vain.
In that hope I lay down my pen and firmly build on you — Young Germany!