I have met but one American who said that war was at hand and knew what the Germans really are at home. He was an elderly journalist in Dresden who was jeered at until he almost imagined himself mentally unbalanced. Others thought him so, at any rate.
But Anderson was a true prophet. Dear isolated, desolated soul! I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he got out safely. How I wish I could grasp his hand and say, How wise were your convictions!
Like myself he had gone to Deutschland to admire and love the Germans. But he found what I found—an astonishing amount of ruthlessness. How could one expect that the ultimate world-justice and world-humanity were to evolve out of a race to which the army, armed soldiers and statesmen clad in steel, stand for so much?
How could anything of universal good come from a people who consider nothing from the viewpoint of a kindly common brotherhood? Contempt, intolerance, physical force, are what they gloat over in international relations. I discovered that when they must ask pardon or make amends, they do so with bad grace. They do not take a magnanimous and frank satisfaction or pleasure in righting a wrong.
You would not believe how lacking their character is in the capacity for penitence, for atonement. We will never see them sorry for any of their present enormities. The still, small voice in them has not been allowed to develop. Their notion of ethics is so different that it is inadmissible from our standards.
To be sensitive, grieve, suffer morally, is apart from their normal consciousness. For all this tender and beautiful side of human nature they substitute only the discomforted feelings of defeat. No matter how this present conflict ends, he who looks for any sympathetic actions or noble regrets from them will be dumfounded....
England, November, 1914.
Hurrah! I am at last, after disappointments and frettings, under way for Flanders. Lo, I am become, as it were, an Englishman! The British now see the full peril and are taking almost any kind of men, and I'm going along. I suppose it is because I am so keyed up that I feel so well. I'm surprised at myself. I guess I must have, after all, a little good Anglo-Saxon grit in me.
I am trying to write this scrawl to you on a round milk container in a camp near London. We are not permitted to tell where....