a
punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of
normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front
were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves
into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have
more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the
war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was
being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of
Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at
the front taking more Russian soldiers.

Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly
normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was
ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when
one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly
normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows
bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and
coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the
killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy
day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to
smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at
home!

Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the
stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for
granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.

As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in
charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.
"Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military
emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which
brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.

"If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that
they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge
into machine-guns."

Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England,
almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come
in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing
of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that
small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's
knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he
had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that
miserable pigmy who had interfere