“No doubt about that, oh, none at all,” he would sigh. “I only wish we had a few more like you in the camp. It’s the right spirit.”
And we should acknowledge the panegyric with a smile, and leave him to his dreams and aspirations, his Pan-Saxon Utopia.
But it could not be done. In actuality the scheme would lose its glamour, its wayward charm. It was better to let it remain in the imagination, the fresh counterpart of some less noble phenomenon. Aimez ce que jamais on ne verra pas deux fois.
CHAPTER VI
THE GERMAN ATTITUDE
During those early days the chief interest of our life lay in the insight it gave into the conditions and psychology of the German people. For nearly four years we had been at war with this nation, and yet we knew practically nothing about it. For four years an iron screen had been drawn between us and them. All the information that we received came to us through the filtering places of many censorships. We were told only what the authorities wished us to be told; and of the countless activities of Germany, report reached us of none that could bring credit to any nation but our own. But now we were able to converse freely with German officers and soldiers, and form our own opinion as to their attitude towards us.
Of course this opinion is subject to numberless qualifications. Even from the highest window of the citadel only a limited view can be obtained of a country that has been the subject of so much calumny and conjecture. Our impressions were confined to one province and one town in that province; they cannot be said to represent the mentality of Germany as a whole; and of the five hundred officers confined within the barracks, each individual has brought home with him a different idea of Germany and the Germans.
And again, it may be that personally I have been rather fortunate in my experiences. Baden-Hessen is one of the least Prussianised Provinces in Germany, and officer prisoners of war are treated a great deal better than the men. But I do believe that the conversations I had with various Germans, both soldiers and civilians, give a fairly accurate index to the attitude of a large number of the enemy.
What came as the greatest surprise to me personally was the absence, to a considerable extent, of all vindictiveness and hate. Evidence goes to prove that there was in the early months of the war a good deal of collective hate; and as a relic of this there were in the shops picture postcards of sinking battleships headed “Gott strafe England,” and the cartoons in the illustrated papers such as Simplicissimus and the Lustige Blätter were all to the tune of “my baton drips with blood.” But the Frankfurter Zeitung, which is the representative paper of that part of the country, was absolutely free from articles headed “The English Beast” or “The Devilish Briton.” It afforded an ideal example of journalistic continence.
And it was the same with their poetry and literature. There was much verse inspired by the same violence as “The Hymn of Hate.” There were numberless sonnets starting off, “England, du perfides land,” and it is only this sort of stuff that we have been allowed to read in England. This is the standard by which the Germans have been judged, and it presents them in a very false light. For after all, if the “hate” verse that is scattered throughout the English Press were to be taken as representative of the ideals and the aspirations of the race, we should show up none too well. For with the majority, no sooner does a man try to put his thoughts into words, than he loses his bearings. He does not write what he feels, but what he thinks he should feel. All that is genuine in him is inarticulate, and the obvious rises to the surface. And it has followed that in the last four years there has been an incredible quantity of bad verse written and very little good. But that little good is the key to the English temperament. The secret longings of the individual have been revealed not in the type of poem that goes—
“We mean to thrash these Prussian Pups,
We’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old Krupps,
We loathe them all, the dirty swine,
We’ll drown the whole lot in the Rhine.”