It need not necessarily be supposed that the directors of German
destiny, who are not devoid of intelligence, took the ravings of
Bernhardi over-seriously. He had his special uses no doubt before the
day. But on the morrow of the day, when questions of responsibility
came to be raised, he became one of many inconvenient witnesses; and
there has scarcely been a better joke among the grim humours of this
catastrophe than the mission of this Redhot-Gospeller of the New
Unchivalry of War to explain to “those idiotic Yankees” that he was
really an ardent pacifist. The most just, the most brilliant, the most
bitter pamphlet of invective could surely not say so much as this
reeking cleaver, those bloody hands, that fatuous leer and gesture,
this rigid victim. Bernhardism was not a mere windy theory. It was
exactly practised on the Belgian people.
And this spare, dignified figure of Uncle Sam, contemptuously
incredulous, is, I make bold to say, a more representative symbol of
the American people than one which our impatience sometimes tempts us
now to draw. Most Americans now regret, as Pope Benedict must regret,
that the first most cruel rape of Belgium was allowed to pass without
formal protest in the name of civilisation. But that occasion gone,
none other, not the _Lusitania_ even, showed so clear an opportunity. A
people’s sentiments are not necessarily expressed by the action of its
Government, which moves always in fetters. Nor has President Wilson’s
task been as simple as his critics on this or the other side of the
Atlantic profess to believe.