and women recklessly over-worked until the
loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances
and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the
formula, "Remember that we are at war now." I have said that men assumed
that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless
we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and
beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not
change men's minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was
that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that
every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science
and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying
grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and
most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has
been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the
pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like
hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us,
the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek
history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves
into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest,
joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first,
and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with
insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of
civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the
very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers,
and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was
crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that
German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by
journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in
fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and
our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they
certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of
German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German
literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant
abominations standing towa