ed by Teutonism to an amazed world. The "degradation" of
a whole people was already Germany's greatest and unforgivable offence.
Few, even the most cynical, among the students of European politics
could have believed that the Kaiser's troops would sully their country's
repute by the inhuman excesses committed during those first days in
Belgium. At the best, "war is hell"; but the great American leader who
summed up its attributes in that pithy phrase thought only of the
mangled men, the ruined homesteads, the bereaved families which mark its
devastating trail. He had seen nothing of German "frightfulness." The
men he led would have scorned to ravage peaceful villages, impale babies
on bayonets and lances, set fire to houses containing old and bedridden
people, murder hostages, rape every woman in a community, torture
wounded enemies, and shoot harmless citizens in drunken sport. Yet the
German armies did all these things before they were a fortnight in the
field. They are not impeached on isolated counts, attributable, perhaps,
to the criminal instincts of a small minority. They carried out bestial
orgies in battalions and brigades acting under word of command. The
jolly, good-humoured fellows who used to tramp in droves through the
Swiss passes every summer, each man with a rucksack on his back, and
beguiling the road in lusty song, seemed to cast aside all their
cheerful camaraderie, all their exuberant kindliness of nature, when
garbed in the "field gray" livery of the State, and let loose among the
pleasant vales and well-tilled fields of Flanders. That will ever remain
Germany's gravest sin. When "the thunder of the captains and the
shouting" is stilled, when time has healed the wounds of victor and
vanquished, the memories of Vise, of Louvain, of Aershot, of nearly
every town and hamlet in Belgium and Northern France once occupied by
the savages from beyond the Rhine, will remain imperishable in their
horror. German _Kultur_ was a highly polished veneer. Exposed to the hot
blast of war it peeled and shrivelled, leaving bare a diseased,
worm-eaten structure, in which the honest fibre of humanity had been
rotted by vile influences, both social and political.

Women seldom err when they sum up the characteristics of the men of a
race, and the women of every other civilised nation were united in their
dislike of German men long before the first week in August, 1914. Irene
Beresford had yet to peer into the foulest dept