the Irish body and the English soul, for
the privilege of patching up a Prussian after the sabre-stroke of Jena.

But Germany was not merely present in the spirit: Germany was present in
the flesh. Without any desire to underrate the exploits of the English
or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest touches were added by
soldiers trained in a tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty
Years' War, and of what the old ballad called "the cruel wars of High
Germanie." An Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and who has
relatives in many distinguished posts of the British army, told me that
in his childhood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 was so
frightfully alive that his own mother would not have the word "soldier"
spoken in her house. Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find
that the hateful soldier means especially the German soldier. When the
Irish say, as some of them do say, that the German mercenary was worse
than the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth can utter. Beyond
that there is nothing but the curse of God, which shall be uttered in
an unknown tongue.

The practice of using German soldiers, and even whole German regiments,
in the make-up of the British army, came in with our German princes, and
reappeared on many important occasions in our eighteenth-century
history. They were probably among those who encamped triumphantly upon
Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among
those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. When that very
typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and
coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited,
not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England,
German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the
Atlantic. With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in
that woodland march that failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces
beheld our downfall. Their presence had long had its effect in various
ways. In one way, curiously enough, their very militarism helped England
to be less military; and especially to be more mercantile. It began to
be felt, faintly of course and never consciously, that fighting was a
thing that foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased the prestige of
the Germans as the military people, to the disadvantage of the French,
whom it was the interest of our vanity to underrate. The mere mixture