Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism
consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not
knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the
directing Prussian mind why the sinking of the _Lusitania_ should have
shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. The
_Lusitania_ happened to be importing goods available in war, therefore
the _Lusitania_ must be sunk. All the penumbræ of further consideration
which the civilised man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly,
the Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender,
convention decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an
armed man be just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he
has but to cry “Kamerad” to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at
the mouth with indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is
forgotten in the heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field
which Prussia for the first time employed (and reluctantly compelled
her civilised opponents to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell
bursts because solid explosive becomes gaseous. To use shell which in
bursting wounds and kills men is to use gas in war; therefore if one
uses gas in the other form of poison, disabling one’s opponent with
agony, it is all one. Precisely the same barbaric use of logic--which
reminds one of the antics of an animal imitating human gestures--will
later apply to the poisoning of water supplies, or the spreading of
an epidemic. It is soldierly and excites no contempt or indignation
to strike at your enemy with a sword or shoot a pellet of lead at
him in such a fashion that he dies. What is all this foolish pother
about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns or with a drop of
poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of houses with the
torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between that and the
methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang and the
equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with little
capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always applies--but
only against the opponent: never to oneself. From that attitude of mind
the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God, see that mood
in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the coercion of
the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by Prussian
logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning when the
royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the sinking
Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will not
keep faith.