ganda, and, knowing
that, as we know, they thought all were false. They said
"Lies-lies-lies!"--and made counter--charges against the Russians and
Poles. They could not bring themselves to believe that their sons and
brothers had been more brutal than the laws of war allow, and what
brutality they had done was imposed upon them by ruthless discipline.
But they deplored the war, and the common people, ex-soldiers and
civilians, cursed the rich and governing classes who had made profit out
of it, and had continued it when they might have made peace with honor.
That was their accusation against their leaders--that and the ruthless,
bloody way in which their men had been hurled into the furnace on a
gambler's chance of victory, while they were duped by faked promises of
victory.

When not put upon their defense by accusations against the whole
Fatherland, the German people, as far as I could tell by talking with a
few of them, and by those letters which fell into our hands, revolted
in spirit against the monstrous futility and idiocy of the war, and were
convinced in their souls that its origin lay in the greed and pride
of the governing classes of all nations, who had used men's bodies as
counters in a devil's game. That view was expressed in the signboards
put above the parapet, "We're all fools: let's all go home"; and in that
letter by the woman who wrote:

"For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones,
the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very
eyes... All soldiers--friend and foe--ought to throw down their weapons
and go on strike, so that this war, which enslaves the people more than
ever, may cease."

It is that view, terrible in its simplicity, which may cause a more
passionate revolution in Germany when the people awaken from their
stupor. It was that view which led to the Russian Revolution and to
Bolshevism. It is the suspicion which is creeping into the brains of
British working-men and making them threaten to strike against any
adventure of war, like that in Russia, which seems to them (unless
proved otherwise) on behalf of the "gilded ones" and for the enslavement
of the peoples.

Not to face that truth is to deny the passionate convictions of masses
of men in Europe. That is one key to the heart of the revolutionary
movement which is surging beneath the surface of our European state.
It is a the belief of many brooding minds that almost as great as
the dir