and in Northern France, and whom I still was meeting daily both in their social and in their official capacities. So far as one might judge by their language and their behaviour they, almost without an exception, were heartily at war for a hearty love of war—the officers, I mean. To them the war—the successful prosecution of it, regardless of the cost; the immediate glory, and the final ascendancy over all Europe and Asia of the German arms—was everything. With them nothing else counted but that—except, of course, the ultimate humbling of Great Britain in the dust. Seemingly the woful side of the situation, the losses and the sufferings and the horrors, concerned them not a whit. War for war's sake; that was their religion; never mind what had gone before; never mind what might come after. To make war terribly and successfully, to make it with frightfulness and with a frightful speed, was their sole aim.

Never did I hear them, or any one of them, openly invoking the aid of the Creator. They were content with the tools forged for their hands by their military overlords. As for the men in the ranks, if they did any thinking on their own account it was not visible upon the surface. Their business was to use their bodies, not their heads; their trade to obey orders. They knew that business and they followed that trade. And already poor little wasted Belgium stood a smoking, bloody monument to their thorough, painstaking and most efficient craftsmanship.

Nor, except among the green troops which had not yet been under fire, was there any expressed hatred, either with officers or men, for the opposing soldiers. During our experiences in the battle lines, and directly behind the battle lines, in the weeks immediately preceding the time of which I purpose to write, we had aimed at a plan of ascertaining, with perfect accuracy, whether the German forces we encountered had seen any service except theoretical service. If we ran across a command whose members spoke contemptuously of the French or the English or the Belgian soldiers, we might make sure in our own minds that here were men who had yet to come to grips at close range with their enemy.

On the other hand, troops who actually had seen hard fighting rarely failed to evince a sincere respect, and in some instances a sort of reluctant admiration, for the courage and the steadfastness of their adversaries. They were convinced—and that I suppose was only natural—of the superiority of the German soldiers, man for man, over the soldiers of any other nation; but they had been cured of the earlier delusion that most of the stalwart heroes were to be found on the one side and most of the weaklings and cravens on the other.

Likewise the hot furnaces of battle had smelted much of the hate out of their hearts. The slag was gone; what remained was the right metal of soldierliness. I imagine this has been true in a greater or less degree of all so-called civilised wars where brave and resolute men have fought against brave and resolute men. Certainly I know it to have been true of the first periods of this present war.

XI

But fifty or a hundred miles away on German soil, among the home-biding populace, was a different story. It was there I found out about Kultur. It was there I first began to realise that, not content with assuming a direct and intimate partnership with Providence, civilian Germany was taking Providence under its patronage, was remodelling its conceptions of Deity to be purely and solely a German Deity.

That more or less ribald jingle called "Me und Gott!" aimed at the Kaiser and frequently repeated in this country a few years before, had, in the face of what we now beheld, altogether lost the force of its one-time humorous application. As we appraised the prevalent sentiment, it had, in the sober, serious consciousness of otherwise sane men and women, become the truth and less than the truth.

Any Christian race, going to war in what it esteems to be a righteous cause, prays to God to bless its campaigns with victory and to sustain its arms with fortitude. It had remained for this Christian race to assume that the God to whom they addressed their petitions was their own peculiar God, and that His Kingdom on Earth was Germany and Germany only; and that His chosen people now and forevermore would be Germans and Germans only.

This is not a wild statement. Trustworthy evidence in support of it will presently be offered.

We met some weirdly interesting persons during our enforced sojourn there in Aix la Chapelle in September and October of that year. There was, for example, the invalided officer who never spoke of England or the English that he did not grind his teeth together audibly. I have never yet been able to decide whether this was a bit of theatricalism designed to make more forcible than the words he uttered his detestation for the country which, most of all, had balked Germany in her designs upon France and upon the mastery of the seas—a sort of dental punctuation for his spoken anathemas, as it were—or whether it was an involuntary expression of his feelings. In either event he grated his teeth very loudly, very frequently and very effectively.

There was the young German petty officer, also on sick leave, who told me with great earnestness and professed to believe the truth of it that two captured English surgeons had been summarily executed because in their surgical kits had been found instruments especially designed for the purpose of gouging out the eyes of wounded and helpless Germans.

And there was the spectacled scientist-author-spy, who dropped in on two of us one morning at the hotel where we were quartered, and who thereafter favoured us at close intervals with many hours of his company. It was from this person more than from any other that I acquired what I believed to be a fairly adequate conception of the views held then and thereafter and now by an overwhelming majority of educated Prussians, trained in the Prussian school of thought and propaganda.

I cannot now recall this person's name, though I knew it well at the time; but I do recall his appearance. He was tall and slender, with red hair; a lean, keen intellectual face; and a pair of weak, pale-blue eyes, looking out through heavy convex glasses. He spoke English, French and Danish with fluency. He had been a world traveller and had written books on the subject of travel, which he showed us. He had been an inventor of electrical devices and had written at least one book on the subject of electric-lighting development. He had been an amateur photographer of some note evidently, and had written rather extensively on that subject.

His present employment was not so easily discerned, though it was quite plain that, like nearly every intelligent civilian in that part of Germany, he was engaged upon some service more or less closely related to the military and governmental activities of the empire. He wore the brassard of the Red Cross on his arm, it is true, but apparently had nothing really to do with hospital or ambulance work. And he had at his disposal a military automobile, in which he made frequent and more or less extended excursions into the occupied territory of France and Belgium.

After one or two visits from him we decided that, by some higher authority, he had been assigned to the dual task of ascertaining our own views regarding Germany's part in the conflict and of influencing our minds if possible to accept the views