f material gain. Any whim, or point of
pride, or fixed idea, or old habit, is enough to make a man or a nation
forgo the hope of profit and fight for a creed.

The German creed is by this time well known. Before the war we took
little notice of it. We sometimes saw it stated in print, but it seemed
to us too monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole people. We
were wrong; it was the creed of a whole people. By the mesmerism of
State education, by the discipline of universal military service, by the
pride of the German people in their past victories, and by the fears
natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its fronts, an absolute
belief in the State, in war as the highest activity of the State, and in
the right of the State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, to
its purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse peoples that are
united under the Prussian Monarchy. Most of them are not naturally
warlike peoples. They have been lured, and frightened, and drilled, and
bribed into war, but it is true to say that, on the whole, they enjoy
fighting less than we do. One of the truest remarks ever made on the war
was that famous remark of a British private soldier, who was telling
how his company took a trench from the enemy. Fearing that his account
of the affair might sound boastful, he added, 'You see, Sir, they're not
a military people, like we are.' Only the word was wrong, the meaning
was right. They are, as every one knows, an enormously military people,
and, if they want to fight at all, they have to be a military people,
for the vast majority of them are not a warlike people. A first-class
army could never have been fashioned in Germany out of volunteer
civilians, like our army on the Somme. That army has a little shaken the
faith of the Germans in their creed. Again I must quote one of our
soldiers: 'I don't say', he remarked, 'that our average can run rings
round their best; what I say is that our average is better than their
average, and our best is better than their best.' The Germans already
are uneasy about their creed and their system, but there is no escape
for them; they have sacrificed everything to it; they have impoverished
the mind and drilled the imagination of every German citizen, so that
Germany appears before the world with the body of a giant and the mind
of a dwarf; they have sacrificed themselves in millions that their creed
may prevail, and with their creed they must stand