ostrate on the ground, in hospital trains,
on hospital ships. I saw mounds, too, marked with wooden crosses.

Volunteers and patriots! A race incapable of a mean thing, incapable
of a cruelty. A race of sportsmen, playing this horrible game of war
fairly, almost too honestly. A race, not of diplomats, but of
gentlemen.

"You will always be fools," said a captured German naval officer to
his English captors, "and we shall never be gentlemen!"

But they are not fools. It is that attitude toward the English that
may defeat Germany in the end.

Every man in the British Army to-day has counted the cost. He is there
because he elected to be there. He is going to stay by until the thing
is done, or he is. He says very little about it. He is uncomfortable
if any one else says anything about it. He is rather matter of fact,
indeed, and nonchalant as long as things are being done fairly. But
there is nothing calm about his attitude when his opponent hits below
the belt. It was a sense of fair play, as well as humanity, that made
England rise to the call of Belgium. It is England's sense of fair
play that makes her soldiers and sailors go white with fury at the
drowning of women and children and noncombatants; at the unprincipled
employment of such trickery in war as the use of asphyxiating gases,
or at the insulting and ill-treating of those of their army who have
been captured by the Germans. It is at the English, not at the French
or the Belgians, that Germany is striking in this war. Her whole
attitude shows it. British statesmen knew this from the beginning, but
the people were slow to believe it. But escaped prisoners have told
that they were discriminated against. I have talked with a British
officer who made a sensational escape from a German prison camp.
German soldiers have called across to the French trenches that it was
the English they were after.

In his official order to his troops to advance, the German Emperor
voiced the general sentiment.

"It is my Royal and Imperial Command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and
that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my
soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over
General French's contemptible little army.

"Headquarters,

"Aix-la-Chapelle, August 19th, 1914."

In the name of