The people go even one step farther than the Government, for
the Government sought merely to show that it was forced to declare
war upon Russia and France. Most of the German people are
labouring under the delusion that Russia and France actually
declared war on Germany. This misconception, no doubt, is partly
due to the accounts in the German papers during the first days of
August, 1914, describing how the Russians and French crossed the
frontier to attack Germany before any declaration of war.

A German girl who was in England at the outbreak of war, and who
subsequently returned to her own country, asked her obstinate,
hard-headed Saxon uncle, a wealthy manufacturer, if Germany did not
declare war on Russia and France. She insisted that Germany did,
for she had become convinced not only in England but in Holland.
Her uncle, in a rage, dismissed the matter with: _Du bist falsch
unterrichtet_. (You are falsely informed.)

An American in Berlin had a clause in his apartment lease that his
obligations were abruptly and automatically terminated should
Germany be in a state of war. Yet when he wished to pack up and go
his German landlord took the case to court on, the ground that
Germany had not declared war.

The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not
apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States. Those
papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse,
can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their
attention to any particular part of the war with the same celerity
as the operator of a searchlight can direct his beam at any part of
the sky he chooses. For the moment the whole German nation looks
at that beam and at nothing else.

* * * * *

In the late afternoon of an autumnal day I stopped at a little
wayside inn near Hildesheim. The place had an empty look, and the
woman who came in at the sound of my footsteps bore unmistakable
lines of trouble and anxiety.

No meat that day, no cheese either, except for the household. She
could, not even give me bread without a bread-ticket--nothing but
diluted beer.

Before the war business had been good. Then came one misfortune
after another. Her husband was a prisoner in Russia, and her
eldest son had died with von Kluck's Army almost in sight of the
Eiffel Tower.

"You must find it hard to get along," I said.

"I do," she sighed. "But, then, when fodder g