THE MEMORIAL TO THE THREE GERMANS

In the controversy over the inclusion of the German names in the list of Harvard dead to whom the Memorial Church is dedicated there has been an almost complete failure to make clear the principles at issue. Neither the University nor the Alumni Committee has attempted to make any real public defense of the decision to exclude the names. And few who disliked this decision have formulated the grounds for their stand with any clarity. Those who are now behind the plans to place in the Memorial Church a special tablet in honor of the Harvard men who died on the German side have carefully avoided making any public statement of their motives. Their silence vitiates the whole plan. If the placing of a memorial to the Germans is to mean much, there must be a definite conception in the University of why it is being done.

The addition of the German names is significant in two ways. In the first place, it is a gesture of respect and homage to the Harvard men who sacrificed their lives for their country on the side of the Central Powers. In the second place, it is an implicit protest against the distinction between the honor due to those who fought for the Central Powers and to those who fought for the Allies. And that is what is most important.

The Memorial Church was dedicated on Armistice Day to those Harvard men who fought in the Allied cause. That is a matter of history and the placing of a separate monument to the three Germans emphasizes that fact. But the dedication of such a monument will serve as a witness that public opinion, among undergraduates at least, was against the spirit of the official dedication of the Church.

Those who were responsible for leaving out the German names committed themselves obviously and inescapably to the stand that only Harvard men who died for the Allies ought to be honored, because their cause was holier than that of the Central Powers. The memorial is thus not primarily a tribute to courage and self-sacrifice for an ideal, any ideal, but an historical pronouncement upon the merits of that ideal. It implies that of all the nations tragically enmeshed in the nationalistic system of 1914 only the Allied Powers were righteous.

The protest against this implication is based on grounds which the War generation refuses to admit, but which the present college generation is sure to accept. Those grounds are that there is no historical basis for the exaltation of the Allied cause on the assumption that Germany was alone responsible for the War. It does not matter whether or not Germany can historically be accused for sole guilt for the actual outbreak of the War. Nothing can exonerate Germany from responsibility and any thought of whitewashing the Imperial government would be ludicrous. There is no question that the philosophy of the Prussian military caste was a barbarous one, and that it was expressed in a particularly brutal and uncompromising form. But the point is that essentially the same philosophy was dominant in the Allied nations. A blatant nationalism, a selfish imperialism, and a ruthless economic war on all rivals was characteristic of all the nations of the world in 1914. There was a profoundly evil philosophy there which needed to be destroyed. But there is little evidence that the Allies fought with the determination to destroy that philosophy and it is far from certain that the Allied victory accomplished its destruction.

No good can come of smuggling the German memorial into the Harvard Church. The memorial ought to represent the conviction that the War was the result of something radically evil in the spirit and actions of the whole world and that therefore the Allied cause cannot rightly be exalted. It ought also to help to crystallize the conviction in the University that the 1914 principles of international action must be rejected. In order that the memorial may serve this purpose, there ought to be a formal expression of the reasons for placing of the German names in the Harvard Memorial Church. Without some public statement to justify it, the placing of the memorial to the three German men loses its main point.