ssing to sing--to his drawn
blinds--"Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles." Mr. Britling could
imagine those young people, probably dressed more or less uniformly in
white, with flushed faces and shining eyes, letting their voices go,
full throated, in the modern German way....

And then came stories of atrocities, stories of the shooting of old men
and the butchery of children by the wayside, stories of wounded men
bayoneted or burnt alive, of massacres of harmless citizens, of looting
and filthy outrages....

Mr. Britling did his utmost not to believe these things. They
contradicted his habitual world. They produced horrible strains in his
mind. They might, he hoped, be misreported so as to seem more violent or
less justifiable than they were. They might be the acts of stray
criminals, and quite disconnected from the normal operations of the war.
Here and there some weak-minded officer may have sought to make himself
terrible.... And as for the bombardment of cathedrals and the crime of
Louvain, well, Mr. Britling was prepared to argue that Gothic
architecture is not sacrosanct if military necessity cuts through it....
It was only after the war had been going on some months that Mr.
Britling's fluttering, unwilling mind was pinned down by official
reports and a cloud of witnesses to a definite belief in the grim
reality of systematic rape and murder, destruction, dirtiness and
abominable compulsions that blackened the first rush of the Prussians
into Belgium and Champagne....

They came hating and threatening the lands they outraged. They sought
occasion to do frightful deeds.... When they could not be frightful in
the houses they occupied, then to the best of their ability they were
destructive and filthy. The facts took Mr. Britling by the throat....

The first thing that really pierced Mr. Britling with the conviction
that there was something essentially different in the English and the
German attitude towards the war was the sight of a bale of German comic
papers in the study of a friend in London. They were filled with
caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English, and they
displayed a force and quality of passion--an incredible force and
quality of passion. Their amazing hate and their amazing filthiness
alike overwhelmed Mr. Britling. There was no appearance of national
pride or national dignity, but a bellowing patriotism and a limitless
desire to hurt and humiliate. They spat. They were r