was 96. At the Centenary of Singapore (6th February, 1919) there still remained in Singapore seven original members, one of whom, Lt.-Colonel G. A. Derrick, C.B.E., V.D., was Commandant.

At the Queen's Birthday Parade of 1891, four Maxim guns were formally presented to the Corps. Two had been subscribed for by the Asiatic community, and the other two were given by His Highness the late Sultan of Johore, and the late Mr. Cheang Hong Lim respectively. The Singapore Volunteer Artillery thereby became the first Maxim-gun Company in the British Forces, Regular or Auxiliary. Since 1902, the Maxim-gun Company has worked as a separate unit.

The Singapore Volunteer Artillery continued to be the sole volunteer unit in Singapore until after the outbreak of the South African War in 1899. As the British battalion was then replaced by an Indian battalion, the British community formed a Volunteer Rifle Corps. It started with 100 members, but soon increased to nearly double that number. When a British regiment returned to Singapore in 1904, its services were discontinued.

In 1901 the Volunteers increased considerably in size and importance, and assumed their present title of the Singapore Volunteer Corps. An Engineer unit of Europeans was formed, and was later permitted to be known as the Singapore Royal Engineers (Volunteer). A Singapore Volunteer Infantry unit was also raised. In it, No. 1 Company was composed of Eurasians and No. 2 Company of Chinese. A Cadet Corps was also raised, but at a later date school cadet companies unconnected with the corps were formed in substitution.

The Eurasian Company of the Singapore Volunteer Infantry was disbanded in 1909, and the present Malay Company took its place. Later, however, a Eurasian company was again enrolled with good results.

Early in 1914, the Medical Company of the Singapore Volunteer Corps, which had been a development of a Bearer Section of the Singapore Volunteer Artillery, was reconstituted, and formed into the Singapore Field Ambulance Company, a very useful and important unit of the Corps.

Germany in Africa.

Germany

and

world.

supre

macy.

CHAPTER XII

GERMANY AND THE DAY'

WE have seen that, outside Europe, Germany, as a landholder, was most in evidence in tropical Africa. Africa is the central continent, and in Africa, as in Europe, the Germans had been active in consolidating a central position. Early in 1914, a few months before the war began, the railway from Dar es Salaam, the capital of German East Africa, to the centremost African lake, Lake Tanganyika, had been completed, to link up German East Africa with the Belgian Congo. On the other side of Africa the latest deal with France in 1911 had extended the German Cameroons down to the Lower Congo, just as the Anglo-German treaty of 1890 had given to German South-West Africa access to the Zambesi. Twice already, in 1905-6 and 1911, the years of the Algeciras Conference and the Agadir incident, FrancoGerman relations in regard to Africa had nearly precipitated war. Africa must assuredly be credited with having been one of the contributing factors to the war which eventually came.

From the time when new worlds beyond the ocean were laid bare, to be fields for European expansion, to stimulate the greed and the enterprise of European princes and peoples, at intervals of centuries the lust of world-domination seems to have overmastered one nation or another, or the rulers of one nation or another, and to have impelled them to try to overmaster others. So it was, in effect, with Spain under Philip II; so it was with France under Louis XIV, and again a hundred years later under Napoleon; so it was with Germany. But history never really repeats itself, and every century necessarily has its own determining causes and its special features. The religious fanaticism of Philip II was present, but not omnipresent, in the régime of Louis XIV; in the designs of Napoleon or of the Kaiser religion had

no place. In all these instances military despotism was the driving force; but the despotisms varied in origin, in kind, and in extent. The despotism of Philip of Spain or of Louis of France was rooted in monarchical tradition, backed by a despotic Church; the despotism of Napoleon was that of a military genius, the consummately successful leader in war of a newly enfranchised people; German despotism was the outcome of achievement under the leadership of a dynasty which combined the traditions of autocracy with success in war, it embodied the aspirations of a lately unified and victorious nation. What were these aspirations, and why? Whence did they arise and whither did they tend? What factors or features, if any, were there in Germany and the Germans in 1914, which did not simply reproduce, in a guise coloured by place and time, the factors or the features of past ages in history? Three wars, following close on one another, had made Germany one, and made it a Prussian Germany, a Germany moulded by the particular offshoot of the German stock of which it had been said long years before that its only industry was war. The new Germany was an empire in the old popular sense, only more so. It was an empire in the least attractive dress. No empire in the past ever rested more completely or more surely upon military strength, none was ever so well or so intelligently organized upon a uniform system. The basis of it all was might as right; the living expression and embodiment of might was the German Army, which had proved irresistible on the continent of Europe, made irresistible by concentrated effort and tireless organization, and gaining additional strength year by year. Owing their existence to war; identifying war, from recent German history, with short, swift, victorious campaigns; placed by nature for offensive war in the centremost position in Europe; by upbringing and tradition habituated to war; taught, trained, and allotted for war-this new German nation naturally ranged itself behind, or rather made itself one with, the military power, the German Army. There grew up

a very numerous and powerful nation in arms, educated beyond all other nations, but educated with a very definite purpose on rigidly prescribed cast-iron lines, living and thriving under a military despotism, willingly and joyfully, because the military despotism had brought in abundance present wealth and power, and also because it embodied all their hopes for the future and the only means of realizing those hopes. For, as the years went on, the Germans gradually became instinct, from all highest to all lowest, with patriotic and burning belief in the national destiny and in the power of the nation to compass it. They imbibed and they preached the gospel of Weltpolitik and Kultur; they believed in a mission to dominate and Germanize the world; and they acted consistently on their belief.

In order to apprehend the 'inwardness '-to use a cant phrase of Germany and the Germans, the stage of German evolution which had been reached in the summer of 1914, we have, on the one hand, to bear in mind the more sentimental side, to look upon German schemes as having been in their origin the dreams of ambitious patriots, to appreciate that little by little the visions of the few became the fixed goal of the many, through ocular demonstration year after year of immensely growing resources and capacity, of the impossible coming within range of possibility, of castles in the air being brought down from cloudland to a more or less firm basis upon a half-conscious and yielding world. On the other hand we have to study for our own admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come, the intensely practical steps taken to ensure that the dreams should become realities. If the call to Germany was to lead and mould the world, then, when force could be applied with advantage and effect, force should be applied. The Belgian Congo ought to be in German hands, the French colonial possessions ought to be shared with Germany, and later the British also. Meanwhile, minute attention could be given to every detail, each small opening could be pushed wider, every German could become a forerunner and

emissary of Empire, all private interests serving the public interest and in doing so serving themselves. Germans taught the world a lesson, which will never be forgotten, that in peace time there can be not only preparation for war but also the actual concomitants of war; and that conquest can begin by acquiring control of economic resources as much as by annexing soil. Peaceful penetration is one phase of hostile invasion, and those who in open ports and lands are not forgetful to entertain strangers, may find that unawares they are harbouring in their midst aliens who are lower than the angels. Germans took what countries could be taken without open war; Germans politically dominated such lands and peoples as in any way lent themselves to political domination; and, where domination was not, as we say, practical politics, the same end was pursued by trade insistence, commercial combines, social insinuation, intrigue in one form or another, different means being employed under different conditions, but always to the same end. German monopoly of this or that product or industry in Australia was one thing, German underground influence in Russian politics was another, yet they were in effect only different phases of one and the same thing, German supremacy in the wide world.

The German effort, then, while starting from sources familiar in history, from success in war and from the attainment of national unity as the fruit of that success, differed from all previous ventures of military despotism, not only in degree but in kind. The distinctive feature of the German world enterprise was set design, consciously and continuously elaborated by rulers and nation alike through a long term of years. Spain and France had their overseas Empires, their traditions and experiences of Imperial aggrandizement and growth, supplementing and feeding continental ambitions near home. Their paths had been on sea as well as on land. Germany had no tradition behind her of expansion in East or West; she had served no apprenticeship; her colonial possessions, like her fleet, were creations of