These delusions have been attended by their proper Nemesis: Germany has misunderstood us all—everybody and everything outside her wall.
Like the bewitched dwarfs in certain old magic tales, whose talk reveals their evil without their knowing it, Germans constantly utter words of the most naïf and grotesque self-betrayal—as when the German ambassador was being escorted away from England and was urged by his escort not to be so downcast; the war being no fault of his. He answered in sincere sadness:
"Oh, you don't realize! My future is broken. I was sent to watch England and tell my Emperor the right moment for him to strike, when England's internal disturbances would make it impossible for her to fight us. I told him the moment had come."
Or again, when a German in Brussels said to an American:
"We were sincerely sorry for Belgium; but we feel it is better for that country to suffer, even to disappear, than for our Empire, so much larger and more important, to be torpedoed by our treacherous enemies."
Or again, when Doctor Dernburg shows us why Germany had to murder eleven hundred passengers:
"It has been the custom heretofore to take off passengers and crew.... But a submarine ... cannot do it. The submarine is a frail craft and may easily be rammed, and a speedy ship is capable of running away from it."
No more than the dwarf has Germany any conception what such candid words reveal of herself to ears outside her Teutonic wall—that she has walked back to the morality of the Stone Age and made ancient warfare more hideous through the devices of modern science.
Thus her Nemesis is to misunderstand the world. She blundered as to what Belgium would do, what France would do, what Russia would do; and she most desperately blundered as to what England would do. And she expected American sympathy.
Summarized thus, the Prussianizing of Germany seems fantastic; fantastic, too, and not of the real world, the utter credulity, the abject, fervent faith of the hypnotized young men. Yet here are a young German's recent words. I have seen his letter, written to a friend of mine. He was tutor to my friend's children. Delightful, of admirable education, there was no sign in him of hypnotism. He went home to fight. There he inhaled afresh the Prussian fumes. Presently his letter came, just such a letter as one would wish from an ardent, sincere, patriotic youth—for the first pages. Then the fumes show their work and he suddenly breaks out in the following intellectual vertigo: