As most people know,
his words ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate
your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that
is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality, the train
of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valour
of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as
contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments
in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to
think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of
an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment,
in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the supreme
skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack.
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