In this same connection it may not be amiss for us to consider the predominant and predominating viewpoints of another and an equally formidable group of the foemen. In October, 1913, nearly a year before Germany started the World War, one of the recognised leaders of the association who called themselves "Young Germany" wrote in the official organ, the accepted mouthpiece of the Junker set and the Crown Prince's favoured adherents, a remarkable statement—that is, it would have been a remarkable statement coming from any other source than the source from whence it did come. It read as follows:

"War is the noblest and holiest expression of human activity. For us, too, the great glad hour of battle will strike. Still and deep in the German heart must live the joy of battle and the longing for it. Let us ridicule to the uttermost the old women in breeches who fear war and deplore it as cruel or revolting. War is beautiful.... When here on earth a battle is won by German arms and the faithful dead ascend to heaven, a Potsdam lance corporal will call the guard to the door and 'Old Fritz,' springing from his golden throne, will give the command to present arms. That is the heaven of Young Germany!"

The likening of Heaven to a place of eternal beatitude, populated by German soldiers, with a Potsdam lance corporal succeeding Saint Peter at the gate, and "Old Fritz"—Frederick the Great—in sole and triumphant occupancy of the Golden Throne, where, according to the conceptions of the most Christian races, The Almighty sits, is a picture requiring no comment.

It speaks for itself. Also it speaks for the paranoia of militant Prussianism.

I think I am in position to tell something of the growth of these sentiments among the Germans. As I stated on almost the first page of this little book, it fell to my lot to be on German soil in September and October of that first year of the Great War, before there was any prospect of our entering it as a belligerent Power, and when the civilian populace, having been exalted by the series of unbroken victories that had marked the first stage of hostilities for the German forces, east and west, was suffering from the depressions occasioned by the defeat before Paris, the retreat from the Marne back to the Aisne, and finally by the growing fear that Italy, instead of coming into the conflict as an ally of the two Teutonic Empires, might, if she became an active combatant at all, cast in her lot with France and with England.

It was from civilians that I got a sense of the intellectual motive powers behind the mass of civilians in Rhenish Prussia. It was from them that I learned something of the real German meaning of the German word Kultur. In view of recent and present developments on our side of the ocean, culminating in our entry into the war, I am constrained to believe I may perhaps, in my own small way, contribute to American readers some slight measure of appreciation of what that Kultur means and may mean as applied to other and lesser nations by its creators, protagonists and proud proprietors.

I heard nothing of Kultur from the German military men with whom I had theretofore come into contact in Belgium and in Northern France, and whom I still was meeting daily both in their social and in their official capacities. So far as one might judge by their language and their behaviour they, almost without an exception, were heartily at war for a hearty love of war—the officers, I mean. To them the war—the successful prosecution of it, regardless of the cost; the immediate glory, and the final ascendancy over all Europe and Asia of the German arms—was everything. With them nothing else counted but that—except, of course, the ultimate humbling of Great Britain in the dust. Seemingly the woful side of the situation, the losses and the sufferings and the horrors, concerned them not a whit. War for war's sake; that was their religion; never mind what had gone before; never mind what might come after. To make war terribly and successfully, to make it with frightfulness and with a frightful speed, was their sole aim.

Never did I hear them, or any one of them, openly invoking the aid of the Creator. They were content with the tools forged for their hands by their military overlords. As for the men in the ranks, if they did any thinking on their own account it was not visible upon the surface. Their business was to use their bodies, not their heads; their trade to obey orders. They knew that business and they followed that trade. And already poor little wasted Belgium stood a smoking, bloody monument to their thorough, painstaking and most efficient craftsmanship.

Nor, except among the green troops which had not yet been under fire, was there any expressed hatred, either with officers or men, for the opposing soldiers. During our experiences in the battle lines, and directly behind the battle lines, in the weeks immediately preceding the time of which I purpose to write, we had aimed at a plan of ascertaining, with perfect accuracy, whether the German forces we encountered had seen any service except theoretical service. If we ran across a command whose members spoke contemptuously of the French or the English or the Belgian soldiers, we might make sure in our own minds that here were men who had yet to come to grips at close range with their enemy.

On the other hand, troops who actually had seen hard fighting rarely failed to evince a sincere respect, and in some instances a sort of reluctant admiration, for the courage and the steadfastness of their adversaries. They were convinced—and that I suppose was only natural—of the superiority of the German soldiers, man for man, over the soldiers of any other nation; but they had been cured of the earlier delusion that most of the stalwart heroes were to be found on the one side and most of the weaklings and cravens on the other.

Likewise the hot furnaces of battle had smelted much of the hate out of their hearts. The slag was gone; what remained was the right metal of soldierliness. I imagine this has been true in a greater or less degree of all so-called civilised wars where brave and resolute men have fought against brave and resolute men. Certainly I know it to have been true of the first periods of this present war.

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