se sheets, he did not doubt them for an instant when
their assertions fed his eager restless passion. Where the enemy was
concerned he adopted the principle, that the worst is sure to be
true--and he was almost grateful to Germany when, by acts of cruelty
and repeated violations of justice, she furnished him the solid
confirmation of the sentence which, for greater security, he had
pronounced in advance.

Germany gave him full measure. Never did a country at war seem more
anxious to raise the universal conscience against her. This apoplectic
nation bursting with strength, threw itself upon its adversary in a
delirium of pride, anger and fear. The human beast let loose, traced
a ring of systematic horror around him from the first. All his
instinctive and acquired brutalities were cleverly excited by those
who held him in leash, by his official chiefs, his great General
Staff, his enrolled professors, his army chaplains. War has always
been, will forever remain, a crime; but Germany organised it as she
did everything. She made a code for murder and conflagration, and over
it all she poured the boiling oil of an enraged mysticism, made up of
Bismarck, of Nietzsche, and of the Bible. In order to crush the world
and regenerate it, the Super-Man and Christ were mobilised. The
regeneration began in Belgium--a thousand years from now men will tell
of it. The affrighted world looked on at the infernal spectacle of
the ancient civilisation of Europe, more than two thousand years old,
crumbling under the savage expert blows of the great nation which
formed its advance guard. Germany, rich in intelligence, in science
and in power, in a fortnight of war became docile and degraded; but
what the organisers of this Germanic frenzy failed to foresee was
that, like army cholera, it would spread to the other camp, and once
installed in the hostile countries it could not be dislodged until it
had infected the whole of Europe, and rendered it uninhabitable for
centuries. In all the madness of this atrocious war, in all its
violence, Germany set the example. Her big body, better fed, more
fleshly than others, offered a greater target to the attacks of the
epidemic. It was terrible; but by the time the evil began to abate
with her, it had penetrated elsewhere and under the form of a slow
tenacious disease it ate to the very bone. To the insanities of German
thinkers, speakers in Paris and everywhere were not slow to respond
with their extrav