d mechanical
efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual
character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have
achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal
taskmaster. But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that are
deeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilization
was believed to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods who gave their
names to the days of the week are alive again in Germany. The English
soldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who is
prepared to make the best of a bad job. The German soldier sacrifices
himself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God. The
filthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all that
is elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food that
is to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred
vessels in the churches--all these things, too numerous and too
monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the
brute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised,
by officers no less than by men. The waves of emotional exaltation which
from time to time pass over the whole people have the same character,
the character of savage religion.

If they are alien to civilization when they fight, they are doubly alien
when they reason. They are glib and fluent in the use of the terms which
have been devised for the needs of thought and argument, but their use
of these terms is empty, and exhibits all the intellectual processes
with the intelligence left out. I know nothing more distressing than the
attempt to follow any German argument concerning the War. If it were
merely wrong-headed, cunning, deceitful, there might still be some
compensation in its cleverness. There is no such compensation. The
statements made are not false, but empty; the arguments used are not
bad, but meaningless. It is as if they despised language, and made use
of it only because they believe that it is an instrument of deceit. But
a man who has no respect for language cannot possibly use it in such a
manner as to deceive others, especially if those others are accustomed
to handle it delicately and powerfully. It ought surely to be easy to
apologize for a war that commands the whole-hearted support of a nation;
but no apology worthy of the name has been produced in Germany. The
pleadings which have been use