ple talk about me carried
the day, and I decided for war," he said. It was reserved for
Harnack and Hauptmann, not to speak of the Kaiser, to cant about the
responsibilities of "Kul-tur" (that harlot of the German dictionary,
debased by all ignoble uses), about the hastening of the kingdom of
heaven, and about the German sword being sanctified by God. But the old
German Adam remained, and when, two days before the declaration of war
with France, the German soldiers were flying to the Belgian frontier
there was no thought of the Archduke Ferdinand or of the doddering
old man on the Austrian throne, whose paternal heart had been sorely
wounded. Germany was out to rob France of her colonies--to rob her, and
the Germans knew it.

"A few centuries may have to run their course," said their own poet
Goethe (who surely knew the German soul), "before it can be said of the
German people, 'It is a long time since they were barbarians.'"

Such, then, were some of the events in the great drama of the war
which took place in Germany before the rising of the curtain. Not a
theologian, a philosopher, an historian, or a poet to recall the past of
his country, to warn it not to repeat the crime of a century and a half
before, which had stained its name for ever before the tribunals of man
and God; not a statesman to remind a generation that was too young to
remember 1870 of the miseries and horrors of war, for (alas for the
welfare of the world!) the one great German voice that could have done
so with searching and scorching eloquence (the voice of Bebel) had only
just been silenced by the grave. And so it came to pass that Germany, in
the last days of July 1914, presented the pitiful spectacle of a great
nation being lured on to its moral death-agony amid canting appeals to
the Almighty, and wild outbursts of popular joy.

A CONVERSATION WITH LORD ROBERTS

Meantime what had been happening among ourselves? The far-off murmur of
the approaching wind had been heard by all of us, but as none can hope
to describe the effect on the whole Empire, perhaps each may be allowed
to indicate the character of the warning as it came to his own ears. It
was at Naples, not long after the event, that I heard how the late King
had felt about his last visit to Berlin. I was then on my way home
from Egypt, where I had spent some days at Mena, while Lord Roberts was
staying there on his way back from the Soudan. He seemed restless and
anxious. On t