IX
Mrs. Sebright knitted a great deal. She belonged to a ‘Work Centre’; ladies who met together three afternoons a week, and made shirts and bandages and socks.
She was patriotic, and talked about ‘our brave boys,’ and said that the British Army had never been beaten, and that the British Navy was something that the world had never seen before. She said, and seemed to believe, that English people were quite different from the people of other nations; much braver, and more high minded, less likely to do anything wrong or make mistakes.
I was puzzled by this attitude at first. I thought she was trying to encourage herself by saying these things; but I found she really did think they were true, and soon I got quite accustomed to hear them said by other people, all round, every day. I thought that there were good and bad people in our Army, and in other Armies; brave soldiers and cowardly ones; I did not find it a help to me at all to say more than that.
‘If we were all good, and the Germans all bad, the War would matter less,’ I said, one day, but Mrs. Sebright thought it unpatriotic to say anything like that.
‘When our own boys are fighting in the trenches,’ she said. ‘You surprise me, Helen.’
Maud was much worse. She was not content with praising our own Army and Navy, she kept on abusing the others. She came to stay with us in the Christmas holidays, and told a great many stories of German atrocities. In every case she would begin:
‘I know for a fact,’ or, ‘I have it on excellent authority’; but when I asked her how she knew, or on whose authority, she would get angry and did not explain.
She would say that the Germans must be taught a lesson. . . .
No civilized nation had ever behaved as they did . . . They were ‘unique in history.’
‘This policy of frightfulness is unparalleled,’ she said, ‘absolutely unparalleled. They have forfeited their right to existence as an independent nation.’
She had dismissed the German teacher in her school, and two little German girls were excluded also. ‘Feeling runs too high,’ she said. ‘I could not, in the circumstances, countenance their remaining. I hope that German will be a dead language before long.’