“I’ll get a German for this––somehow!”
CHAPTER V
Mamise shuddered when she heard the blood-cry wrung out of Davidge’s agony.
She knew that the ship was more than a ship to him. Its death was as the death of many children. It might mean the death of many children. She stood over him, weeping for him like another Niobe among her slaughtered family. The business man in his tragedy had to have some woman at hand to do his weeping for him. He did not know how to sob his own heart out.
She felt the vigor of a high anger grip his muscles. When she heard him groan, “I’ll get a German for this!” somehow it horrified her, coming from him; yet it was becoming the watchword of the whole nation.
America had stood by for three years feeding Europe’s hungry and selling munitions to the only ones that could come and get them. America had been forced into the war by the idiotic ingenuities of the Germans, who kept frustrating all their own achievements, the cruel ones thwarting the clever ones; the liars undermining the fighters; the wise, who knew so much, not knowing the first thing––that torture never succeeded, that a reputation for broken faith is the most expensive of all reputations, that a policy of terror and trickery and megalomania can accomplish nothing but its own eventual ruin.
America was aroused at last. The German rhinoceros in its blind charges had wakened and enraged the mammoth. A need for German blood was the frank and undeniable passion of the American Republic. To kill enough Germans fast enough to crush them and their power and their glory was the acknowledged business of the United States until further notice.
The strangest people were voicing this demand. Preachers were thundering it across their pulpits, professors across their 199 desks, women across their cradles, pacifists across their shattered dreams, business men across their counters, “Kill Germans!”