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 he and his class held. He may
have had an even more important mission; we thought sometimes that he
perhaps was doing a little espionage work, either on his own account or
under orders, because he began to seek our company about the time we
noted a cessation of clumsy activities on the part of those two
preposterously mysterious sleuths of the German Secret Service who,
until then, had been watching us pretty closely.
Be this as it may, he manifested a gentlemanly but persistent curiosity
regarding our observations and regarding the articles which he knew we
were writing for American consumption. And meantime he lost no
opportunity of preaching into our ears the theories and the dogmas of
his Prussianized _Kultur_.
I remember that, on almost his first call upon us, either my companion
or myself remarked upon the united and the whole-hearted devotion the
civilian populace of the province, from the youngest to the oldest,
exhibited for the German cause. Instantly his posture changed. From the
polite interviewer he turned into the zealot who preaches a holy cause.
His lensed eyes became pallid blue sparks; and he said:
"Surely--and why not? For forty-odd years we have been educating our
people to believe that only through war and through conquest could our
nation achieve its place in the sun--elbowroom for its industrial and
its spiritual development. Germany is a giant--the giant of the universe
and she must have breathing space; and only by the swallowing up of
smaller states can she get that breathing space. Almost at the mother's
breast we teach our babies that. Do you know, my friends, what the first
question is, in the first primer of geography, which German children
hear when they enter school?
"No? Then I will tell you. The first question is 'What is Germany?' And
the answer is 'My Fatherland--a country entirely surrounded by Enemies!'
"So you see, gentlemen, we start at the cradle and at the kindergarten
to teach our young people what it means to live with Russia on one side
of them and with France and Belgium and Britain on the other. They
cannot forget for one instant the task that lies before them. Their
educators--parents, teachers, pastors, military instructors, officials
of every rank and every grade--never let them forget it."