In what are we most like our kinsmen the Germans, and in what most
unlike? I was convicted of Teutonism when first, in Germany, I ate
“brod und butter,” and found the words pronounced in an English way,
slurred. But if we are like the Germans in the names of simple and
childish things, we grow more unlike them, we draw farther apart from
them, as we grow up. We love war less and less, as they love it more.
We love our word of honour more and more as they, for the love of war,
love their word less.
There is no nation in the world more unlike us; because there is no war
so perfect, so conscious, so complete as the German. And being thus
all-predominant, German war is the greatest of outrages on life and
death. We English have a singular degree of respect for the dead. It
has no doubt expressed itself in some slight follies and vulgarities,
such as certain funeral customs, not long gone by; but such respect
is a national virtue and emotion. No nation loving war harbours that
virtue. And in nothing do the kinsmen with whom we have much language
in common differ from us more than in the policy that brought this
Prussian host to cumber the stagnant waters of the Marshes of Pinsk.
The love of war has cast them there, displayed, profaned, in the
“cold obstruction” of their dissolution. Corruption is not sensible
corruption when it is a secret in earth where no eye, no hand, no
breathing can be aware of it. There is no offence in the grave. But the
lover of war, the Power that loved war so much as to break its oath for
the love of war, and for the love of war to strike aside the hand of
the peace-maker, Arbitration, that Power has chosen thus to expose and
to betray the multitude of the dead.