I am not sure that in this cartoon of Raemaekers the most pleasing
detail is not the servant’s right eye. You will observe in that
servant’s right eye an expression familiar in those who overhear this
sort of comment upon the peculiar bestialities of the Prussian in
Belgium and Poland, this extenuation of his baseness. When the war
was young the opportunity for giving that glance was commoner than it
is now. There were many even in a belligerent country who would tell
you in superior fashion how foolishly exaggerated were the so-called
“atrocities.” The greater number of such men (and women) talked of
“two Germanies”--one the nice Germany they knew and loved so well,
and the other apparently nasty Germany which raped, burned, stole,
broke faith, tortured, and the rest. Their number has diminished. But
there is a little lingering trace of the sort of thing still to be
discovered: men and women who hope against hope that the Prussian will
really prove good at heart after all. And it is usually just after
some expression of the kind that the most appalling news arrives with
a terrible irony to punctuate their folly. It reminds one a little of
the man in the story who was sure that he could tame a wild cat, and
was in the act of recording its virtues when it flew in his face. To an
impartial observer who cared nothing for our sufferings or the enemy’s
vices, there would be something enormously comic in the vision of these
few remaining (for there are still some few remaining) that approach
the wild beast with soothing words and receive as their only reward
a very large bomb through the roof of their house, or the news that
someone dear to them has been murdered on the high seas. But to those
actively suffering in the struggle the comic element is difficult to
seize, and it is replaced by indignation. This fantastic misconception
of the thing that is being fought is bound to be burned right out by
the realities of the enemy acts in belligerent countries. It will be
similarly destroyed--and that in no very great space of time--in all
neutral countries as well. Prussia will have it so. She is allowing no
moral defence to remain for her future. It is almost as though the men
now directing her affairs lent ear carefully to every word spoken in
praise of them abroad, and met it at once by the tremendous denial of
example. It is almost as though the Prussian felt it a sort of personal
insult to receive the praise of dupes and fools, and perhaps it is.