in his tragedy had to have some
woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob
his own heart out.

She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard
him groan, "I'll get a German for this!" somehow it horrified her,
coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole
nation.

America had stood by for three years feeding Europe's hungry and
selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them.
America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the
Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel
ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters;
the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing--that torture
never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most
expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and
megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.

America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind
charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood
was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill
enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their
glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further
notice.

The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were
thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their desks,
women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams,
business men across their counters, "Kill Germans!"

It was a frightful crusade; yet who was to blame for it but the
Germans and their own self-advertised frightfulness? The world was
fighting for its life and health against a plague, a new outrush from
that new plague-spot whence so many floods of barbarism had broken
over civilization.

They came forth now in gray streams like the torrent of rats that
pursued the wicked Bishop Hatto to his tower. Only the world was not
Bishop Hatto, and it did not flee. It gathered to one vast circular
battle, killing and killing rats upon rats in a frenzy of loathing
that grew with the butchery.

Countless citizens of German origin fought and died with the
Americans, but nobody thought of them as Germans now, and least of all
did they so think of themselves. In the mind of the Allied nations,
German and vermin were linked in rhyme and reason.

It may be unjust and unsympathetic, but the very best people feel it a
duty