For many weeks the German public was in doubt as to what it all meant. The thinking element was groping about in the dark. What was the purpose of picking out a ship with so many passengers on board? Then the news came that the passengers had been warned not to travel on the steamer. That removed all doubt that the vessel had been singled out for attack.
The government remained silent. It had nothing to say. The press, standing in fear of the censor and his power to suspend publication, was mute. Little by little it became known that there had been an accident. The commander of the submarine sent out to torpedo the ship had been instructed to fire at the forward hold, so that the passengers could get off before the vessel sank. Either a boiler of the ship or (they continued) an ammunition cargo had given unlooked-for assistance to the torpedo. The ship had gone down. Nothing weaned the German public so much away from the old order of government as did the Lusitania affair. The act seemed useless, wanton, ill-considered. The doctrine of governmental infallibility came near to being wrecked. The Germans began to lose confidence in the wisdom of the men who had been credited in the past with being the very quintessence of all knowledge, mundane and celestial. Admiral Tirpitz had to go. Germany’s allies, too, were not pleased. In Austria and Hungary the act was severely criticized, and in Turkey I found much disapproval of the thing.
“The ‘Old Contemptible’ Lie.”
The “New Illustrated” (Lord Northcliffe’s latest journalistic venture) declared, in March of this year:
The story that the Kaiser called General French’s force a “contemptible little army” served a useful purpose in workingup fierce anger against the enemy in Britain, but it was an invention. The Kaiser was not so foolish as to say what the German General Staff would have known to be nonsense.
“The Corpse Fat Lie.”
The “Times” started the lie that the Germans had built factories for extracting grease from the bodies of dead soldiers. This grease was used as margarine.
Lord Robert Cecil latterly admitted in the House of Commons that there was no evidence of the story; but, of course, he believed the Germans capable of it. The London comic (?) papers issued cartoons of a German looking at a pot of grease and soliloquizing: “Alas! my poor brother!” But the lie was finally exposed and disappeared even from the stock-in-trade of the British Workers’ League—and, God knows, they were loth to let anything go.
“Who first bombed from the sky?”
The National War Savings Committee issued synopses of their lantern lectures last year for propaganda purposes. Here are the synopses of the two slides dealing with the first bomb dropped on towns: