The German Effort.

New York Times 100 years ago today, March 9, 1913:
    Our Berlin and Paris dispatches picture two nations making; unheard-of sacrifices to prepare for war — Germany because her ruler realizes, somewhat tardily, that the primacy his army held six months ago is no longer undisputed, and France because she feels forced to meet the danger involved in the action of Germany.
    The reasoning of the statesmen of Germany is fairly clear. A very powerful alliance has sprung up unexpectedly in the Balkan Peninsula and the islands of the Aegean. Its future attitude toward the Triple Alliance, of which Germany is the head, is entirely obscure. For the present its relations to Austria are marked by distrust and resentment.
    That, perhaps, was unavoidable, for at the outset Austria had an immensely important and difficult part to play. She has long stood as the guardian of Western and Central Europe against what her rulers and those of Germany regarded as the "Slav Peril," the aggression and ultimate domination in Europe of Russia, with an organized following of Slav States and Slav peoples in Austria and in the Balkans. In that role Austria set out at the start of the Balkan conflict to limit the spoils of war that, in case of success, should fall to her neighbor, Servia. She succeeded in getting Servia to abandon her claim to a military and naval stronghold on the Adriatic, and to accept certain not clearly defined rights of transit to an outlet on the water. And to this Russia seems to have assented.
    Plainly Germany does not regard the understanding thus reached as complete or stable. If she did she would not resort to an extreme and almost desperate increase of her armies. Her rulers must think that possible danger is far greater, or they would not strain every nerve to prepare for it. And they must think that their own part in meeting that danger is likely to be much greater and more arduous. They are arming because they believe either that their allies cannot give the aid they were once relied on to give, or that new sources of menace have arisen which will demand more force than they and their allies now have at their disposal. Probably they have reasoned along both lines. It is obvious that Austria in case of a Slav combination under the lead of Russia would be relatively weaker than a year ago. It is possible, though by no means certain, that the Balkan allies, Slav in part, and with strong Slav sympathies, may enter such a combination, and that Russia is prepared to lead it. On the other hand, the exact degree of reliance Germany can place upon Italy is not clear. The possession of Tripoli, which was originally planned to strengthen the Triple Alliance in the Eastern Mediterranean, may prove a source of weakness, if Austria cannot co-operate with Italy, and it is even conceivable steadily might seek an understanding with England and
    France, deserting the Triple Alliance altogether.
    These are the new elements in the situation that may be supposed to influence Germany in her new and unprecedented effort to strengthen herself. In view of them the German Government will claim that it is acting wholly and sincerely on the defensive, that the surest — practically the only — way to prevent attack will be to prepare to make attack hopeless. Nor is this reasoning without justification in reason and in precedent. Germany is doing with her army, only on a larger scale, what France has been doing for forty years, and is now doing with energy proportioned to that of Germany, and what England has been doing with her navy. She is doing what Russia has been doing since the morrow of the Japanese war.
    Are we to conclude that the reasoning of the German rulers is based on fact, and that the wild struggle in the Balkans is only the prelude to a general conflict? It is possible, but it is not necessarily so. The policy of Germany is not yet carried out. It is not certain that it can be. It involves grievous distress for the German people, and a serious check to German industrial expansion. That expansion has been marvelous, and in a way it has been undoubtedly substantial. But it has been carried out by credit, by loans almost wholly derived from the two countries with which ultimate war is frankly calculated. There are those in Germany who say with brutal candor that if peace is broken English and French debts will be repudiated. But repudiation means stagnation and disaster. The Germans cannot go into general bankruptcy and continue in business. They cannot stop business and continue to meet the extreme taxation a great war implies. The silent forces of commerce are working for peace, and they are very powerful and enduring.