‘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.’
X
Autumn passed into winter. The fall of Antwerp; escape of the Goeben and Breslau; Declaration of War with Turkey; the bombardment of Scarborough and West Hartlepool these were landmarks in the sea of events.
People had begun to accept the War as a natural state, to cease expecting a sudden dramatic finish.