‘And in voicing our doctrine of Hate let us not forget that the German people were, and are still, solidly behind him (the Kaiser) in everything he does.’ ...
‘The German people are actively and passively with their Government to the last man and the last mark. No people receive their faith and their rules of conduct more fatuously from their rulers than do the German people. Fronting the world they stand as one with their beloved Kaiser. He who builds on a revolution in Germany as a possible ending of the war, knows not what he says. They will follow through any degradation of the body, through any torture of spirit, the tyrants they have been taught from infancy to regard as their Supreme Masters of body and soul.’ ...
And here is his picture of ‘the German’:—
... ‘a slave from birth, with no rights as a free man, owing allegiance to a militaristic Government to whom he looks for his very life; crushed by taxation to keep up the military machine; ill-nourished, ignorant, prone to crime in greater measure than the peasants of any other country—as the German statistics of crime show—a degraded peasant, a wretched future, and a loathesome past—these are the inheritances to which the German peasant is born. What type of nature can develop in such conditions? But one—the brute. And the four years’ commerce of this War has shown the German from prince to peasant as offspring of the one family—the brute family.’ ...
[64] The following—which appeared in The Times of April 17, 1915—is merely a type of at least thirty or forty similar reports published by the German Army Headquarters: ‘In yesterday’s clear weather the airmen were very active. Enemy airmen bombarded places behind our positions. Freiburg was again visited, and several civilians, the majority being children, were killed and wounded.’ A few days later the Paris Temps (April 22, 1915) reproduced the German accounts of French air-raids where bombs were dropped on Kandern, Loerrach, Mulheim, Habsheim, Wiesenthal, Tüblingen, Mannheim. These raids were carried out by squads of airmen, and the bombs were thrown particularly at railway stations and factories. Previous to this, British and French airmen had been particularly active in Belgium, dropping bombs on Zeebrugge, Bruges, Middlekirke, and other towns. One German official report tells how a bomb fell on to a loaded street car, killing many women and children. Another (dated September 7, 1915) contains the following: ‘In the course of an enemy aeroplane attack on Lichtervelde, north of Roulers in Flanders, seven Belgian inhabitants were killed and two injured.’ A despatch from Zürich, dated Sept. 24, 1915, says: ‘At yesterday’s meeting of the Stuttgart City Council, the Mayor and Councillors protested vigorously against the recent French raid upon an undefended city. Burgomaster Lautenschlager asserted that an enemy that attacked harmless civilians was fighting a lost cause.’
[65] March 27th, 1919.
[66] In Drinkwater’s play, Abraham Lincoln, the fire-eating wife of the war-profiteer, who had been violently abusing an old Quaker lady, is thus addressed by Lincoln:—
‘I don’t agree with her, but I honour her. She’s wrong, but she is noble. You’ve told me what you think. I don’t agree with you, and I’m ashamed of you and your like. You, who have sacrificed nothing babble about destroying the South while other people conquer it. I accepted this war with a sick heart, and I’ve a heart that’s near to breaking every day. I accepted it in the name of humanity, and just and merciful dealing, and the hope of love and charity on earth. And you come to me, talking of revenge and destruction, and malice, and enduring hate. These gentle people are mistaken, but they are mistaken cleanly, and in a great name. It is you that dishonour the cause for which we stand—it is you who would make it a mean and little thing....’
[67] The official record of the Meeting of the Council of Ten on January 16, 1919, as furnished to the Foreign Relations Committee of the American Senate, reports Mr Lloyd George as saying:—
‘The mere idea of crushing Bolshevism by military force is pure madness....