have no respect for his own spoken word to
foreigners, or even his written word.

This is his old habit of the tribal fanatic. To lie to, to
cheat, to steal from, to kill, aliens is no admitted sin in the
moral decalogue of the Germans when an advantage can be derived.
Murder, senseless destruction, violation of women, obscenity, do
not therefore horrify them. If you as a foreigner strike the
metallic shield of their character, no resounding ringing of
what we know as conscience is heard, because extreme erudition
in Germany largely takes the place of moral feelings. "Science
without con_science_ is the death of man." And the women and
State religion are as Hunnish as the males. All these influences
make for war.

This conscienceless dullness, or immense hollowness, in the
Teuton people always suggests to me an eggshell encased in the
pomp of steel. Should they be defeated, I feel that the nation
may cave in tremendously, horribly. How can it be otherwise with
a race that never sees anything foolish in itself, and
exaggerates the core of its costly army and bureaucracy at the
expense of the kernel?

By living abroad a part of their study years the young Germans
would little by little come to prefer to substitute amity for
armaments, confident trust for suspicion, love as a motto
instead of hate. For they would see that other peoples are
worthy to live. They would learn more chivalry toward women and
children, the beautiful significance of humanity and of
universal brotherhood. They would learn that what they call
weakness desirably lends delicacy, tenderness, spiritual and
moral loveliness to existence which the coarse bigness and
bow-wowness of the German ideal itself will never attain....

When March came, and the birds flew back to find no trees, no grass,
no flowers, Gard Kirtley, in his spring-time of life, stepped out
from his dugout in Flanders with a gun, and faced the Huns of the
northeast. He was prepared to greet Death which is the fruit of old
age but which in youth appears as with a crown of laurel.

THE END

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