Prussia in every war has betrayed that peculiar mark of barbarism
consisting in using the intellectual weapons of a superior, but not
knowing how to use them. It is still a matter of mystery to the
directing Prussian mind why the sinking of the _Lusitania_ should have
shocked the world. A submarine cannot take a prize into port. The
_Lusitania_ happened to be importing goods available in war, therefore
the _Lusitania_ must be sunk. All the penumbrae of further consideration
which the civilized man weighs escape this sort of logic. Similarly, the
Prussian argues, if an armed man is prepared to surrender, convention
decrees that his life should be spared. Therefore, if an armed man be
just fresh from the murder of a number of children, he has but to cry
"Kamerad" to be perfectly safe. And Prussia foams at the mouth with
indignation whenever this strict rule of conduct is forgotten in the
heat of the moment. The use of poison in the field which Prussia for the
first time employed (and reluctantly compelled her civilized opponents
to reply to) is in the same boat. A shell bursts because solid explosive
becomes gaseous. To use shell which in bursting wounds and kills men is
to use gas in war; therefore if one uses gas in the other form of
poison, disabling one's opponent with agony, it is all one. Precisely
the same barbaric use of logic--which reminds one of the antics of an
animal imitating human gestures--will later apply to the poisoning of
water supplies, or the spreading of an epidemic. It is soldierly and
excites no contempt or indignation to strike at your enemy with a sword
or shoot a pellet of lead at him in such a fashion that he dies. What is
all this foolish pother about killing him with bacilli in his cisterns
or with a drop of poison in his tea? Men in war have burned groups of
houses with the torch in anger or for revenge. Why distinguish between
that and the methodical sprinkling of petroleum from a hose by one gang
and the equally methodical burning of the whole town house by house with
little capsules of prepared incendiary stuff? The rule always
applies--but only against the opponent: never to one's self. From that
attitude of mind the Prussian will never emerge. We shall, please God,
see that mood in all its beauty in later stages of the war, when the
coercion of the Prussian upon his own soil leads to acts indefensible by
Prussian logic. We have already had a taste of this sort of reasoning
when the royalties fled from Karlsruhe and when the murderers upon the
sinking Zeppelin received the reward due to men who boast that they will
not keep faith.