About this time also we became conscious of a fierce, delirious,
intoxicating hate of our people which was developing in the hearts of
our enemies. Before the outbreaking of the war it had been Russia and
the Russians who had (by inherited antipathy from the founder of the
German Empire) been the chief objects of German hatred. Now it was
Britain and the British. Hymns of Hate (our enemies called it “sacred
hate”) were composed, recited, and sung:
French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot,
We love them not, we hate them not,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe, and one alone--
England!
England was not moved to retaliate in kind. We remembered what the
German Churchmen had said about our Teutonic brotherhood, and allowed
ourselves to believe that this was only the call of the blood in the
German race--the mad, bad blood of fratricidal hate, the most devilish
hate of all. We also reflected that it was a form of hatred not
unfamiliar in asylums for the insane, where it has always been equally
tragic and pitiful in its effects, and certain to recoil on the
sufferer’s own head. But as no sane father of a family would make
free of his children’s nursery the deranged relative who required the
protection and restraint of the padded room, we decided that there
was only one safe way with our aliens as a whole--to shut them up. God
forbid that any of us should say that all our German aliens were under
suspicion of criminal intentions. On the contrary, we know that some
of them are among the sincere friends of Great Britain, passionately
opposing Germany’s objects in this war and loathing Germany’s methods.
We know, too, that a few belong to that rare company whose sympathies
can rise even higher than nationality into the realm of “human empire.”
We also know that countless persons, long resident in this country, and
deeply attached to the land of their adoption, have suffered unspeakable
hardships from the accident of German origin. It is painful to think
of some of the people who frequented our houses, whose houses we
frequented, whose wives and children are our kindred, being shut
up behind barbed wire in open encampments. But these are among the
inevitable cruelties of a war for which we are not responsible. In
putting the great body of our enemy aliens under control we did no more
than our plain duty to the soldiers who were fighting for us at the
front. What will happen to them (and us) when the war is over, and they
come out of their prisons, none can say. It seems as if the world can
never be the same place as before--the devil has played too hard a game
with it.