y, she had not
anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her
treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced
to be not a crime merely, but a blunder of the stupidest sort. It is
perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in
the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the
psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till
now, at any rate, of 'having got the hang of it' at all. But critics of
her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it
merely because it did not interest her. It was not worth her while to
master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not
to understand them, but to conquer them. She had all the information she
wanted about their armies and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and
correctly tabulated. Why, then, since this was all that concerned her,
should she cram her head with irrelevant information about what they
might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the torpedoing of neutral
ships without warning? As long as her fumes were deadly and her
submarines subtle, nothing further concerned her.

But Europe generally made a great mistake in supposing that Germany
could not learn psychology, and the process of its distillation into
diplomacy when it interested her. The psychology of the French and
English was a useless study, for she was merely going to fight them, but
for years she had been studying with an industry and a patience that
put our diplomacy to shame (as was most swiftly and ignominiously proven
when it came into conflict with hers) the psychology of the Turks. For
years she had watched the dealings of the Great Powers with Turkey, but
she had never really associated herself with that policy. She sat
quietly by and saw how it worked. Briefly it was this. For a hundred
years Turkey had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of
the Physician Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the
stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse. So
there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of
strychnine and oxygen, and, no less, by a policy of rousing and
irritating the patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they
persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by
her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him;
France deprived him of hi