England, October, 1914.
... You know how I went to Germany at your urging, with every favorable impulse toward the Germans. But you had little idea what they are. If our fellow-Americans realized what was thought and said of them beyond the Rhine, they would be in battle now.
As there is no prospect of our Government wanting fighting men, I am trying to get into the English service. No success yet....
How could you, my good mentor, be so in error about the race from which you sprang? Had you been in Germany, the scales would have dropped from your eyes. You have never lived with the Germans there—only read the best about the "most advanced" of mankind. They are so different from our American-Germans. You did not know that the educated Teuton at home is apt to be dirty in his person and habits, eats with his knife, walks before women, kicks his children about, has coarse or vulgar ideas on female chastity, enjoys the obscene, has no good words to say of anyone beyond his boundaries.
Pray do not fancy I am pretending to chide you. Weren't we all like you in America, dazzled before what apparently we were humbly ready to admit as the super-race? And yet in a multitude of ways it is so obviously a people set off by itself in much barbarism. There is its Gothic script which offends the eye somewhat like outlandish runes. Its very language growls and snorts at you, sounds threatening as if angry—pardon me for these sentences! There are its mud-colored towns and architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious, with tastelessness prevailing.
The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by thumpings in some form. The Teuton's inability to see himself as another sees him—is this not, above all, the stamp of an under-civilized people?...
England, October, 1914.
... Do not think I am unduly harsh, prejudiced, revengeful. I am trying to write in measured terms of what has been forced in upon me and my attention against my wish or expectations.