We believed it. I am compelled to count myself among the number of my
countrymen who through many years believed that story--that the accident
of Germany’s disadvantageous geographical position, not her desire to
break British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary for her to enlarge
her navy. I did my best to believe it when I had to sail through the
Kiel Canal in a steamer from Lubeck to Copenhagen, which was forced to
shoulder her way through an ever-increasing swarm of German battleships.
I did my best to believe it when I had to sail under the threatening
fortresses of Heligoland which stood anchored out at the mouth of the
Bight like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at the sea. I did
my best to believe it when I had to travel to Cologne by night, and the
darkened railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes from gigantic
furnaces which were making mountains of munitions for the evil day when
frail man would have to face the murderous slaughter of machine-guns.
I did my best to believe it even in Berlin when German friends of the
scholastic classes accounted for their tolerance of conscription and
of the tyranny of clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafés, and the
hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness rather than military
necessity.
And then there was the human charm of some German homes to soothe
away suspicion--the scholar’s quiet house (beyond the clattering
parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked glasses and drank “to all
good friends in England,” and the sweet simplicity of the little town in
Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing river, where
the nightingale sang all night long, and where, in the midst of musical
societies, Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it was so
difficult to think of Germany as a nation dreaming only of world-power
and dominion. Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall those
German homes as scenes of prolonged duplicity, I prefer not to do
so. But all the same I see now that the wings of war were already
approaching them, and that the German people heard their far-off murmur
long before ourselves--heard it and told us nothing, perhaps much less
and worse than nothing.