Satanism

When the public believes that the enemy began the War and blocks a permanent, profitable and godly peace, the propagandist has achieved his purpose. But to make assurance doubly sure, it is safe to fortify the mind of the* nation with examples of the insolence and depravity of the enemy. Any nation who began the War and blocks the peace is incorrigible, wicked and perverse. To insist directly upon these qualities is merely a precaution, and its chief effect is to make it more certain that the enemy could be capable of so monstrous a thing as an aggressive war. Thus, by a circularity of psychological reaction the guilty is the Satanic and the Satanic is the guilty.

The themes to be selected for emphasis depend upon the moral code of the nation whose animosity is to be aroused. But there are certain common denominators which can be counted upon to work in any situation. The opposing nation is nearly alw9,ys demonstrably overbearing and contemptuous. The French Press was full of scornful thrusts at the presumptuous “ Herrenvolk ” just across the Rhine. These insolent and ridiculous people even took for their name a word “ Allemagne,” which, literally transcribed, is supposed to mean " all people ! ” “ Deutschland fiber alles ” provoked exactly the same indignation in Downing Street and Fleet Street that “ Rule, Britannia ! ” did in the Wilhelmstrasse and the Linden. Recruiting was stimulated in ( Great Britain at one time by plapng up the alleged remark of the Kaiser, who referred to “ the contemptible little English army.”

i The enemy is not only insolent. He is sordid. The Germans were perfectly sure that British envy was the root of the War, and, as for the United States, the economic motive was all too plain. As Charles A. Collman wrote in Die Kriegstreiber in Wall Street (Leipzig; 1917), the American manufacturers and bankers stayed out of the War, until their best customer. Great Britain, was threatened with insolvency, whereupon they proceeded to stampede the American public into the War, barely in time to save their accounts. The House of Morgan, with its overdraft to the British government of $400,000,000, was faced with certain ruin, having overstrained its credit to supply the British with munitions. Only the diversion of the first Liberty loan proceeds to Morgan saved him. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bonar Law, made a clean breast of the British position in a speech which he delivered July 24th, 1917:

Indeed, it is an open secret that we had spent so freely of our resources that those available in America had become nearly exhausted when our great ally entered the struggle.

In December, 1916, the bare announcement that Germany was making overtures of peace sent stocks hurtling down. Bank credits were sharply curtailed and the Allied governments were able to renew their bills with the most extreme difficulty. The news of the diplomatic break with Germany on the 4th of February, 1917, sent Bethlehem Steel up 30 points. American industries, already geared for production to supply the Allies, had faced liquidation, readjustment and even ruin at the whispers of peace ; they were able to breathe easily once more. Mr. Henry P. Davidson, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company, had been one of the most active opponents of Germany’s “ insincere ” peace offers ; he had wished for American participation in the War in order to “ cleanse us from our selfishness.”*

The enemy is inherently perfidious. M. Felix Sartiaux wrote in the Morale Kantienne et morale humaine (1916) that

One of the most subtle tendencies of the German character is the hypocritical lie, which appears under the guise of naive sincerity, and justifies itself by the most increffible sophisms. . . . The judgment of a Latin historian, Villeius Peterculus has often been quoted. He found the ancient t Germans a race of ” born liars.”*

The enemy conducts a lying propaganda. This theme is of particular importance. Unfavourable reports about allies, the heads of the army, the conditions at the front, and the bureaucracy are certain to leak past the censorship, or to spring full-blown inside the ramparts. Psychological barriers as well as physical barriers must be interposed between dangerous news and subversive responses. This psychological barrier consists in the suspicion that unfavour-

^ These interpretations, which were current in Germany during the World War, can be read in English in J. K. Turner, Shall It Be Again ? and L. E. Rowley, War Criminals (Privately Published, Lansing, Michigan,

1924). able, news is likely to be a cunning specimen of enemy propaganda. If this supposition can be planted firmly in the public mind, a mighty weapon has been forged against disunity and defeatism.

* Page 408.

The Germans were aghast at the efficiency of Allied propaganda and they undertook to steel their people against it by protesting loudly against the official French and British Press and Press services. Rudolf Rotheit declared that one of the conditions of peace must be the emancipation of the World Press from the clutches of enemy telegraphic agencies. He wrote Die Friedensbedingungen der deutschen Presse — Los von Reuter und Havas (Berlin, 1915). Even the schools had such copying exercises as “ Reuter’s Agency, the fabricator of War lies.” The British Press was the theme of Paul Dehn’s study, entitled England und die Presse (Hamburg, 1915). The Germans took Northcliffe as the symbol of the British Press and poured vials of abuse on his head.

The cry of German propaganda in France was loud and insistent. Certain newspapers, even in the capital, were suspected of contaminating the French mind to suit German purposes. A more or less typical exposure of German methods is contained in Le Matin for October 24th, 1917. M. Louis Forest accuses the Germans of spending money to influence the Press abroad. He calls attention to the book of an Alsatian, which had exposed the German system before the War. Even during the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans had their friends in Parisian newspaper offices. After reviewing the evidence of past and present activity, he draws this conclusion : everyone can determine for himself whether the present German system is new or old. If to us it appears new, it is because we are ignorant of such things.^

The enemy is quarrelsome, crude and destructive. MM. Tudesq and J. Dyssord published Les Allemands peints par eux-memes in November, 1917. Heine was the authority for the remark that

Christianity has softened to a certain degree this brutal belligerent ardour of the German, but has been unable to destroy it entirely.

Especially, exclaim the French editors, their proclivity to destroy cathedrals, which has been amply confirmed by the bombardment of Rheims, the burning of Belgian churches and of cathedrals in Lorraine. Goethe had acknowledged that^

/ We, the Germans, are of yesterday. For a century it is true that we have made substantial progress in civilization, but centuries will yet pass before our peasants will have the ideas or the spirit of a civilization sufficiently advanced to enable them to render homage to beauty as did the Greeks. -

Schopenhauer blushes to belong to their race.

The enemy is atrociously cruel and degenerate in his conduct of the War. A handy rule for arousing hate is, if at first they do not enrage, use an atrocity. It has been employed with unvarying success in every conflict known to man. Originality, while often advantageous, is far from indispensable. In the early days of the War of 1914 a very pathetic story was told of a seven-year old youngster, who had pointed his wooden gun at a patrol of invading Uhlans, who had dispatched him on the spot. This story had done excellent duty in the Franco-Prussian War, over forty years before. But many of the most successful tales have a far more venerable history. There is one about the Turks, which had rattled down Christendom since the first crusades. According to this account, a tub full of eyes was discovered at a certain point, where captives were being tortured for the amusement of Turkish generals.

' This may be read now with a certain amusement, for the Russian documents have revealed the extent to which the Russian government bought a large percentage of the French Press support which it enjoyed in pre-war days. See the Livre Noir in particular, and the subsequent articles in UHumaniU.

Stress can always be laid upon the wounding of women, children, old people, priests and nuns, and upon sexual enormities, mutilated prisoners and mutilated non-combatants. These stories yield a crop of indignation against the fiendish perpetrators of these dark deeds, and satisfy certain powerful, hidden impulses. A young woman, ravished by the enemy, yields secret satisfaction to a host of vicarious ravishers on the other side of the border. Hence, perhaps, the popularity and ubiquity of such stories.

While all atrocity stories show a family resemblance, and the old stand-bys can be relied upon, no classification should be regarded by the practical propagandist as more than - suggestive. A certain fringe of novelty is always permissible, because the conditions of warfare are never precisely the same. Since the discovery of germs the enemy may be accused of infecting wells, cattle, and food, not to speak of wounds. A booklet on Microbe-Culture at Bucharest^Vias,^ put oujt in London in 1917, and covered the subject very nicely. If the enemy shows signs of believing that a campaign of frightfulness is sound military strategy, there need be no hesitation about calling God and man to witness that such an abomination is the new-born creation of the diabolical enemy. It was the absence of any opportunity for effective contradiction in wartime which made it possible for Professor Lavisse, for instance, to proclaim in the Pratique et doctrine de la guerre allemande that

Not one of our military writers taught the doctrine of the guerre atroce.

After peace came it was possible for another Frenchman, Demartial, to procure a hearing in the interest of veracity and to recall attention to a three-volume tome {Vainer e) by the French officer Montaigne, in which this thesis was defended :

Terrify ; and in order to terrify, destroy. One sets out to kill, one shoots to kill, one leaps at the throat of the enemy but to kill, and one kills until there is nothing left to kill.^

Americans did not think it worth while to recall the theory of war entertained by General Sheridan. He visited Bismarck at the field headquarters of the Prussian Army in France, in 1870, and declared.

The proper strategy consists in the first place in inflicting as telling blows as possible upon the enemy’s army, and then causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.* It was likewise perfectly safe for President Poincare to flay the barbarous Germans for dropping bombs upon defenceless women and children. Very few among the Allied peoples knew, and very few of them, had they known, would have cared, that on the 26th of June, 1916, French and English aviators dropped bombs upon Karlsruhe, killing or wounding 26 women and 124 children, or that on the 22nd of September, 1915, the Allied bombers had taken a toll of 103 victims in a raid upon the same city. In the fever of combat the news of the slaughter of enemy non-combatants is apt to be met by the exulting cry that the “ whelps and dams of murderous foes ” are no more, to quote a chivalrous line of Swinburne, when he heard about the frightful mortality in the concentration camps for Boer women and children in South Africa.

^ Cited on page 19 of G. Demartial, Comment on mobilisa les consciences, “ Umano/' an Italian jurist, publishes an anonymous collection of statements by public men during the War which he regards as unfounded in connection with his diffuse yet interesting study called Posiiiva scienza di governo, 1922.

* Busch, Bismarck, I : itS.

It was equally safe for the Allies to declare that it could only have occurred to a German Hun to organize a campaign of systematic destruction of machinery, warehouses, bridges and railroads in a region from which they were retreating. There was no one to call attention to the recommendations of the Engineer, a reputable British technical periodical, in its issue for September 25th, 1914, to the effect that the army ought to break up the equipment and to raze the factory of every German industry which the fortunes of war might bring into their hands. German competition after the War would thus be seriously crippled.* Nor was the destruction by the Allies of the oil properties during their retreat through Rumania conspicuously interpreted to the people as other than a smart stroke to cheat the enemy. A catalogue of the crimes which the enemy has been held to have perpetrated in the past ought to stimulate the ingenuity more than the imitativeness of the propaganda expert. The suggestions referred to here are by no means exhaustive. During the late War innumerable schemes for classifying enemy outrages were invented. As a random sample one may select the first large and important atrocity brochure put out by the French Government.^

1 Cited by Ddmartial as cited, p. 24.

German sins were sorted into bins which were labelled thus :

, T. Violation of the neutrality of Luxemburg and Belgium.

2. Violation of French Frontier before the Declaration of War.

3. Killing of prisoners and wounded.

4. Looting, arson, rape, murder.

5. Use of forbidden bullets.

6. Use of burning liquids and asphyxiating gas.

7. Bombarding of fortresses without notice and of unfortified towns ; the destruction of buildings consecrated to Religion, Art, Science and Charity.

8. Treacherous Methods of Warfare.

9. Cruelties inflicted on civil population.

Dr. Ernst Miiller-Meiningen, a member of the German Reichstag, compiled the sins of the Entente in Der Weltkrieg und der Zusammenbruch des Volkerrechts, which had passed through a third revised edition by the middle of 1915- The general scheme of organization is indicated in the Table of Contents : ;V.

I. The Neutrality of Belgium (How Belgium connived secretly with the Allies).

^ R^publique Frangaise, Documents rilatifs d, la guerre 1 91 4-1 5. Rapports et Proc^s-verH^PC WenquHe de la c&mmission institute en vue de constater les actes commi'$ par Vennemi ep violation du droit des gens, Paris, 1915, y'

2. Mobilization and the Morality of Nations.

' 3. Violation of the Congo Acts. The Colonial War.

4. The Employment of barbarous and warlike tribes in a European War.

^ 5. The Violation of the Neutrality of the Suez Canal.

6. The Breach of Chinese Neutrality by Japan and England’s Assault upon Kiao-Chau.

7. The use of Dum-Dum Bullets and the like.

8. Treatment of Diplomatic Representatives by the Triple Entente Countries in Violation of International Law. Acts of Diplomatic Representatives of the Triple Entente in Violation of International Law.

9. Non-observances and Violations of Red Cross Rules on the Part of the Triple Entente States.

10. Franc-Tireur Warfare and the Maltreatment of the Defenceless before and after the Declaration of War. Also the Imprisonment of Civilians.

' II. Unlawful and Inhumane Methods of Conducting War Practised by the Hostile Armies and the Governments of the Triple Entente and Belgium.

12. The Russian Atrocities in East Prussia in especial.

13. Jewish Pogroms and Other Russian Atrocities in Poland, Galicia, the Caucasus, etc.

14. The Spirit ” of the Troops of the Triple Entente. Plundering, and Destruction of their own country’s Property. Self-Mutilations. Verdicts upon the Troops of the Triple Entente by their own Officers.

15. The Destruction and Misuse of Telegraph Cables.

16. Further Details as to the Vendetta of Lies of the Press of the Triple Entente. A Method of Waging War contrary to all International Law. The French Art of War.''

17. The Bombardment of Towns and Villages from Aeroplanes. The use of shells that develop Gas.

18. English Business Moral and the Code of English Creditors. Deprivation of the Legal Rights of Germans in Russia and France.

19. Breaches of Neutrality on the Seas by England and the Other States of the Triple Entente. Contraband of War. Blockades, etc.

(Condensed.)

The quantitative methods of modern social science were applied to the atrocity problem as the War went on. In a report prepared for the Serbs about Austro-Hungarian atrocities the first plate, which summarizes the investigation is entitled, Statistics of Atrocities.'' It is limited to the districts of Potzerie, Matchva, Yadar and certain others. Women and children are recorded in parallel columns, and the number of cases relating to each item is recorded. The items are :

Executed or otherwise shot, Bayoneted or knifed, Throats cut. Killed, Burnt alive. Killed in massacre, Beaten to death with rifles or sticks. Stoned to death. Hanged, Disembowelled, Bound and tortured on the spot. Missing, Carried off as prisoners. Wounded, Arms cut off or broken, Legs cut off or broken. Noses cut off, Ears cut off, Eyes gouged out. Sexual parts mutilated. Skin torn in strips. Flesh or scalp removed. Corpses cut into small pieces. Breasts cut oE, Women violated.

Certain special items, such as the use of explosive bullets, which were not susceptible of statistical treatment, were dealt with in qualitative terms. ^ To the impact of the quantitative method is added the dramatization of the individual case. The book is copiously embellished with horror-photographs of mutilated corpses and devastated villages.

There is a certain technical advantage in varying the form of the atrocity account. Sometimes a victim may be permitted to tell his own story, as in the case of a distinguished Belgian scholar who was condemned by the Germans to forced labour and told his experiences in Through the Iron Bars (London, 1917). William Caine published an alleged interview with a victim of the German invasion, called Monsieur Sagotin’s Story (London, 1917). The misadventure of a single person was related by W. T. Hill in The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell.^ The neutral witness always speaks with some authority, and Dr. De Christmas testified to the sad lot of the French prisoners in Germany as he visited them. His was called Le Traitement des Prisonniers Francais en illemagne (Paris, 1917). Admissions by an enemy are always useful, and the French published the captured diary of a non-commissioned German officer, in which the cruelties perpetrated by officers on soldiers and civilians were written down. The diary was edited by Louis-Paul Alaux, and published in 1918, under the title Souvenirs de guerre d’un sous-officer allemand. The record of a German Deserter’s War Experience was published in New York, 1917.

^ Kingdom of Serbia, Report upon the atrocities committed by the Austro- Hungarian Army during the first invasion of Serbia, by R. A. Reiss, London, 1916.

An excellent device which was used by the British to lend weight to their stories of German atrocities was to constitute a commission of men with international reputations for truthfulness to collect evidence and deliver findings. The British, with an eye not alone upon their own populace, but upon the American people, delivered a stroke of genius by appointing the so-caUed Bryce Commission. The Evidence and Documents laid before the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (London, 1915) was the magnum opus of the War on this front. The brochure on German War Practices, which was published by the Committee on Public Information in the United States in 1916, was one of the last of the innumerable versions of this report.

^ The German public believed that Miss Cavell was a spy, incidentally.

Yet another form in which propaganda complaints may be made against the enemy is in the controversial statement or pamphlet. Dr. Max Kuttner remonstrated with a former pupil of his who had lent his pen to the French “ calumnies ” in a little booklet called Deutsche Verbrechen ? . . . (in reply to) Joseph Bedier, Les crimes allemands d’apres temoignages allemands (Bielefeld und Leipzig, 1915). Had not this Frenchman once been taught the importance of weighing evidence ? Hubert Grimme took a similar line in his remarks on Ein bdswilliger Sprachstumper iJdlunsieT , 1915). Nobody ever supposed that these pamphlets would produce repentance in France, but they serve to keep alive the spirit of virtuous indignation in Germany. To ask whether the Germans were criminals was like announcing a sermon on the subject, “ Are Churchmen Hypocrites ? ” The answer is a flattening and resounding negative which readily passes over into an indignant criticism of the perfidy of those who dare insinuate such a thing.

Before taking leave of the unsavoury subject of atrocities another principle must be brought out. It is always difficult for many simple minds inside a nation to attach personal traits to so dispersed an entity as a whole nation. They need to have some individual on whom to pin their hate. It is, therefore, important to single out a handful of enemy leaders and load them down with the whole decalogue of sins.

No personality drew more abuse of this sort in the last War than the Kaiser. The London Evening News christened the Kaiser the Mad Dog of Europe '' on the 6th of August, and the War Lord a little while thereafter. Austen Harrison wrote about The Kaiser* s War (London, 1914). The Liberte of Paris took pains in the issue of November 24th, 1916, to identify William II. with the Beast of the Apocalypse, as foreseen by St. John. It appeared that upon the basis of researches, conducted by an English savant, the number of the Beast was 666, and the Kaiser's number was just this. The word Kaiser has six letters. Place them one beneath the other in a column. At the left of each number, record the place in the alphabet, which is occupied by each of these letters. Thus K," the eleventh letter in the alphabet, is placed beside six, to make 116. The completed columns sum up to 666, the mystic number.^

It would be possible to multiply the individual adjectives which can serve as the themes for injurious propaganda against a nation, but it is now more to the point to suggest some of the methods by which the whole of the indictment can be presented synthetically. There are some, who do not hesitate to indict a whole civilization at a single gesture, and these mentalities may be relied upon to furnish systematic treatises upon such subjects as Civilises contre Allemands. This particular book was published in Paris in 1915, by the Frenchman, Jean Finot, who had published an excellently objective treatise on race prejudice before the War. In the same strain wrote the eminent historian, Ernest Lavisse, in his Kultur et Civilisation (1915), and Andre Saures in Nous et Eux (1915). Mr. Rudyard Kipling said in the columns of The Morning Post (London) of June 22nd, 1915 :

^ Repeated in Graux, Les fausses nouvelles de la grande guerre, I : 282. Former Ambassador J. W. GeraVd criticized the Kaiser in My Four Years in Germany, New York, 1917, and Face to Face with Kaiserism, New York, 1918. The dentist Arthur N. Davis wrote about The Kaiser as 1 Knew Him, New York and London, 1918.

But, however the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world to-day — human beings and Germans.

In what purported to be a scientific treatise on the Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London, 1917), Trotter solemnly said,

The incomprehensibility to the English of the whole trend of German feeling and expression suggests that there is some deeply-rooted instinctive conflict of attitude between them. One may risk the speculation that this conflict is between socialized gregariousness and aggressive gregariousness. ^

Mr. John Cooper Powys replied to Professor Munsterberg under the title. The Menace of German C'lilture (London, 1915). The Germans were Raping up a vast literature of' self-exaltation about the theme, Kultur. An inspection of this list of selected titles from German output will reveal something of its scope and purport :

Herm. Cohen, Ueber das Eigentiimliche des deutschen Geistes (Berlin, 1915).

E. Bergmann, Die weltgeschichtliche Mission der deutschen Bildung (Gotha, 1915).

Rudolf Eucken, Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des deutschen Geistes (Stuttgart, 1914).

R. V. Delius, Deutschlands geislige Weltmachtstellung (Stuttgart, 1915).

J. A. Lux, Deutschland als W elterzieher (Stuttgart, 1914). Herausgeg. v. Karl Honn, Der Kampf des detitschen Geistes im Weltkrieg. Dokumente des deutschen Geisteslebens aus der Kriegszeit (Gotha, 1915).

1 Page 174.

. German assurance and self-esteem was buttressed by the testimony of a cloud of foreign witnesses. Bjorn Bjomson, Scandinavian writer, paid a tribute called Vom deutschen Wesen. Impressionen eines Stammesverwandten, 1914-17 (Berlin, 1917). Houston Stewart Chamberlain, ex-patriated Englishman, rallied to the defence of the Deutsches Wesen (Miinchen, 1916). In his earlier writings he had exclaimed, " If there is in the world a peaceful, well-behaved, pious people, it is the Germans. In the last forty-three years, not a single man in the whole country has desired war — no, not one.” England had been led into the War by the unscrupulous machinations of a King who was a tool of a cunning diplomat. England was no longer the land of liberty, but the slave of a vicious oligarchy.* Ferdinand Tonnies, a celebrated German sociologist, brought together all the imperialistic utterances of British statesmen in his book about England.* The business of editing anthologies of incriminating remarks thrived all during the War. Jean Ruplinger published a collection of German War utterances, under the title. Also sprach Germania. The book appeared in Paris in 1918, with a preface by Edouard Herriot. William Archer compiled the Gems of German Thought, which was published in 1917.

A great mass of specialized studies upon different features of the life and character of another country is welcome in war. The aged philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt compared the philosophical ideals of every nation, greatly to the advantage of Germany, in a brochure entitled, Die Nationen und ihre Philosophic (Leipzig, 1914). In particular, Baron Cay von Brockdorff took care to expose the truth about Bergson, as he saw it, in Die Wahrheit iiber Bergson (Berlin, 1917). In the United States, John Dewey unintentionally did great service to those who were jjJrumming up sentiment against Germany by_ringing the changes on certain aspects of German philosophy in his book on German Philosophy and Politics {^e.'NYox\L, 1915), which had a new vogue when America went to War. If the history of Prussia was interpreted as a record of ruffian robberies by Allied scholars, the story of British imperialism was a stench in the nostrils of the Germans. Some incriminating morsels ^{ere assembled in books about Persia and India, such as the Englische Dokumente zur Erdrosselung Persiens (Berlin, 1917), and Indien unter der britischen Faust (Berlin, 1916). The real meaning of political freedom was clarified by A. O. Meyer, who discovered that real freedom was in Germany and not in England, and wrote Deutsche Freiheit und englischer Parlamentarismus (Mimchen, 1915). The Belgian Fr. De Hovee intended to compliment the British educational system, when he compared it to the disadvantage of the German system, by writing that its aim might be summarized in the slogan

‘ His earlier essays were published in England in 1915 under the title of The Ravings of a Renegade.

• An English edition was brought out in New York in 1915 under the title. Warlike England As Seen by Herself.

Be good, my pretty maid, and let who will be clever, j*...

His book was German and English Education (London, 1917). While Germany was yet at peace with America, Dr. Karl Henning published a scurrilous pamphlet on America, called Die Wahrheit iiber America (Leipzig, 1915) which was jubsequently useful when War came. Henning devoted most of his attention to the family and the educational system in the United States. He combed the reports of some of the municipal vice commissions for juicy stories about sex offences committed by children and reproduced these as typical of the standards of American life. One prize exhibit was a letter, which he said was in his possession, and was written by an eight-year old girl to a boy of the same age. It was :

Dear Arthur, — I will come over to-night, shall I ? Do you love me ? I love you very dearly and to-night we will go to a show and stay till midnight and we will dance at a theatre for a long time and then we will come home and you can sleep with me till morning and next Sunday we will go horse-riding. Your sweetheart, M. (Page 54.) 4-.

Now monographs of every variety reach a certain restricted audience, and if the wider circles of the public are to be touched by synthetic representations of the life of another country, the form must be personal and dramatic and literary. Of this sort of thing a book put out in England during the War may well serve as a model. It was plausible, weU-written, and utterly devastating. I have been told by more than one member of the German propaganda service, that they considered it the best piece of propaganda ^ work gottenj)ut by the Allies in the course of the War. This was Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley (New York, 1917). It purported to be an authentic collection of letters written, by a music student in Germany to her mother in England. The girl was a talented violinist and in May, 1914, went over ^ to study with a great German master. She was bubbling ^ with enthusiastic anticipation of art and life in Germany. She wrote her Berlin letters from an address in Liitzowstrasse, where a Pension was km wn to be.

All is buoyance and happiness until, by degrees, German civilization begins to make itself known to her. The police are boorish and haughty. Her music master is secretly scornful of the whole German regime. The talk at the Pension is about clean Berlin, and slummy London. She is held more or less personally responsible for the Boer War. She is pestered by all sorts of irritating rules and regulations, for she is not allowed to practise on the Sabbath. Rules are typical of Germany, and she finds a girl acquaintance celebrating the birthday of her father, whom she despised, five years after his death. Her lamp is taken away at lo p.m. and she is left with a candle. Snobbishness abounds. A Countess patronizes the arts, but will not permit her daughter to become contaminated. A young German of igh birth longs to become a musician, but the caste coni^entions make an officer of him. The children kill themselves in Germany because of overwork in the schools. She is elbowed by men and boys when she walks abroad alone. The pros and cons of Weltpolitik follow her everywhere. An ominous sense of impending war pervades everything. The lower classes grovel in servile respect before the upper classes. The drill, perhaps, does it. Unmarried girls are not supposed to ask questions in conversations, but to keep discreetly silent and unobtrusive. A rural pastor lectures her on the English love of money bags. She meets a staff officer, who ominously advises her to ask the Council of her Sussex village to straighten the road for heavy traffic. An expectant mother prays for a boy baby, so that she can be the mother of a soldier. She finds the German aristocrats so middle class. She becomes engaged to the charming young officer with musical frustrations. As the international crisis approaches, she sees wild orgies of joy at the , imminence of War. Her violin master has his mouth stuffed by receiving a Royal decoration. Her marriage is blocked by the superior officer of her betrothed. She flees to escape internment and is stopped on the border. A young subordinate forces her to wait in the sun for two hours, and she gets double pneumonia, dying at Stuttgart on the 8th of August, 1914. All the facts about German life are floated in a wave of gush about music and mother. The whole thing is marvellously executed, and the book had a tremendous circulation among women and school children in Allied and neutral countries. It is typical of the circumstantialsentimental type of thing which can be placed in the fiction columns of a woman’s magazine or in the book stalls. By such a thing does the opposing nation become His Satanic Majesty, the Enemy.

y The cuh of satanism thus arises and feeds on hate. Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord, and the Lord is working through us to destroy the Devil. The stirring stanzas of Lissauer’s famous “ Hymn of Hate ” expose all this in its pristine nudity.

/ Hate by water and hate by land ;

Hate of the heart and hate of the hand ;

We love as one, we hate as one ;

We have but one foe alone, — England.

All the specific means of conquering the Evil One are, and should be, glorified. The cult of battle requires that every form of common exertion (enlistment, food-saving, munition making, killing the enemy) should have the blessing of all the holy sentiments. In Christian countries precautions must be taken to calm the doubts of those who undertake to give such a book as the Bible an inconvenient interpretation. It is always expedient to circulate the arguments of the preachers and priests who are willing to explain how you can follow Jesus and kill your enemies. There are always enough theological leaders to undertake the task, since it is only the small sects, usually regarded as fanatical, who see any serious difficulty in the problem. In the German war literature are to be found many books which were written to remove doubts from those hesitant souls, who hated to shoot worse than they hated the English. Theodore Birt reassured the Christians who were perplexed by the exhortation to “ Love your enemies ” in Was heisst “ Liebet cure Feinde ” ? Ein Wort zur Beruhigung (Marburg, 1915). W. Walther wrote a popular treatise for the benefit of the Lutherans. It is called Deutschlands Schwert durch Luther geweiht (2 Aufl., Leipzig, 1915). Otto Albrecht found a forecast of victory in Luther, Eine Kriegspredigt aus Luthers Schriften

(1914)-

It is also useful to justify war in general on ethical rather than exclusively religious grounds. The eminent Rudolf Eucken praised the moral power of war in Die sittlichen Krdfte des Krieges (Leipzig, 1914), and Theodor Elsenhaus lauded it as a great teacher in Der Krieg als Erzieher (Dresden, 1914). Theodor Kipp saw no antithesis between the idea of might and right, the important thing being to make the right mighty, as he contended in Von der Macht des Rechts (Berlin, 1914).

The justification of war can, proceed more smoothly if the hideous aspects of the war business are screened from public gaze. People may be permitted to deplore war in the abstract, but they must not be encouraged to paint its horrors too vividly. In fact, there is place for such items as this one, which appeared in the American Press during the early days of the Spanish- American War :

DEATH RATE HAS GROWN LESS. Fearful Record of Trafalgar’s Days has never been equalled. Machine Gun’s Moral Effect. Modern guns less destructive than flint locks, dart, or javelin.*

Better yet, of course, is the interpretation of the war in terms of heroism, good fellowship, smartness and picturesqueness. In the late War, an artist like Muirhead Bone could be relied upon to present The Western Front in softened sketches. The humorous magazines and books help ^ J banter away the realities of battle and they profit from the impulse to turn one’s head away from a spectacle which, if completely realized, might well prove unbearable. A Bruce Baimsfather is worth at least an Army Corps.* Popular accounts of how the military machinery works give the public a sense of knowing just how things get on ; of course, the writers should be careful to keep too much blood from getting mixed in the story. Such writers as Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle, were sent to visit the British officials and they came back with discreet accounts of how they felt about it. Ludwig Ganghofer described all the German fronts in a series of books.

^ Louisville Courier-Journal, June 26, 1898.

* See, for instance. Bullets and Billets, N.Y., 1917*

It is the letters and books written by actual fighters to which the most importance is attached. Harold R. Peat {Private Peat) and Sergeant Guy Empey {Over the Top) explained the actual conduct of modern war to Americans. Donald Hankey {A Student in Arms) was a soldier who saw the War through the lenses of a moral and religious idealist, and his book struck many responsive chords in America and England. This same quality pervaded the work of certain other writers, such as Carry On ? by Coningsby Dawson. A whimsical, determined note in Ian Hay’s First Hundred Thousand sent it through the English-speaking world, as soon as it fell from the Press.

Tales of individual adventure kept the old spell of romance about war. One soldier told Was ich in mehr als 8o Schlachten und Gefechten erlehte (Berlin, 1916). Pat O’Brien told how he escaped from the Germans in Outwitting the Hun (New York, 1916). Dr. Th. Preyer tells how he managed to return home from New York in Von New York nach Jerusalem und in die Wiiste (Berlin, 1916). Paul Konig related the exploits of the submarine which crossed the Atlantic in Die Fahrt der Deutschland (Berlin, 1917). Marcel Hadaud caught the atmosphere of air battle in En plein vol (Paris, 1916). The Zeppeline uber England met with a warm reception in Germany in 1916, as did Kapitdnleutnant Freiherr von Forstner als U- Bootes Kommandant gegen England. Von Miicke’s story of the Emden was one of the most popular books of the War. Kurt Agram told the sensational story of the 100,000 Germans, who were banished to Siberia by the Russian Government, and of how he managed to escape, in Nach Sibirien mit 106,000 Deutschen. How he managed to reach the Fatherland from the besieged colonies was the theme of Emil Zimmermann, Meine Kriegsfahrt von Kamerun zur Heimat.

Special collections of letters from the front were prepared in all countries. Der deutsche Krieg in Feldpostbriefen, Soldier's Tales of the Great War, and similar collections ran into several volumes. Special volumes were continually appearing, such as Charles Foley, La vie de la guerre (Paris,

1917) , in which the War letters first published in L’Fcho de Paris are brought within one cover. Sketches of the front were always welcome when done with any literary skill, and Henry de Forge, Ah! la belle France ! (Paris, 1916), Maurice Grandolphe, La marche d la victoire (Paris, 1915), or Max Buteau, Tenir. Ricits de la vie de TrancMes (Paris,

1918) were ample to satisfy the demand.*

Professional people of various kinds are able to reach their own public, and should be encouraged to write. Aug. A. Lemaitre, pastor at Lievin, and of Swiss origin, gave his story of \Jn an prhs des champs de bataille de V Artois (Edit6 par la societe centrale 6vang61ique, Paris). J. Emile Blanche’s Cahiers d’un artiste (Paris, 1917) touched the artistic fraternity. Teachers, doctors and nurses, not to speak of engineers and chemists, belong to the ranks of those, who can usually describe what they see, with some reserves about the unpleasant.

During the first few weeks of the War those elements in the business community who required Jgme coddling before s they would face realities, were fed on such catchwords as ■ “ Business as Usual.” This phrgise sprang up quickly in England, where it had a short vogue before succumbing to facts and ridicule. Mr. Tom Bruce Jones brought out a pamphlet on The Danger of Britain’s Invasion, and how it may be met whilst carrying on “ business as usual ” (Falkirk, 1914). On the nth of August, the phrase appeared in the London Daily Chronicle in the letter from H. E. Morgan of W. H. Smith and Sons. Thus are all barriers down to the glorification of all the means necessary to the overcoming of evil by force, v

^ Boyd Cable performed the difficult task of squeezing stories out of official communiques. In his Between the Lines and other books,, a dull, dry extract from an official despatch was polished up into a story.