Soldiers of ours—many soldiers, I am sorry to say—have come
back from Coblenz and other places in the black spot, saying that they
found the inhabitants of the black spot kind and agreeable. They give this
reason for liking the Germans better than they do the English. They found
the Germans agreeable, the English not agreeable. Well, this amounts to
something as far as it goes: but how far does it go, and how much does it
amount to? Have you ever seen an automobile painted up to look like new,
and it broke down before it had run ten miles, and you found its insides
were wrong? Would you buy an automobile on the strength of the paint?
England often needs paint, but her insides are all right. If our soldiers
look no deeper than the paint, if our voters look no further than the
paint, if our democracy never looks at anything but the paint, God help
our democracy! Of course the Germans were agreeable to our soldiers after
the armistice!
Agreeable Germany!—who sank the Lusitania; who sank five thousand
British merchant ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men, women, and
children, all murdered at sea, without a chance for their lives; who fired
on boat-loads of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine and laughed
at the drowning passengers of the torpedoed Falaba.
Disagreeable England!—who sank five hundred German ships without
permitting a single life to be lost, who never fired a shot until
provision had been made for the safety of passengers and crews.
Agreeable Germany!—who, as she retreated, poisoned wells and gassed
the citizens from whose village she was running away; who wrecked the
churches and the homes of the helpless living, and bombed the tombs of the
helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking their boys
to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving the old people
to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon England slaughtered
three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or injured seven hundred and
fifty-seven children, and made in all a list of four thousand five hundred
and sixty-eight, bombed by her airmen; whose trained nurses met our
wounded and captured men at the railroad trains and held out cups of water
for them to see, and then poured them on the ground or spat in them.
Disagreeable England!—whose colonies rushed to help her: Canada, who
within eight weeks after war had been declared, came with a voluntary army
of thirty-three thousand men; who stood her ground against that first
meeting with the poison gas and saved not only the day, but possibly the
whole cause; who by 1917 had sent over four hundred thousand men to help
disagreeable England; who gave her wealth, her food, her substance; who
poured every symbol of aid and love into disagreeable England’s lap to
help her beat agreeable Germany. Thus did all England’s colonies offer and
bring both themselves and their resources, from the smallest to the
greatest; little Newfoundland, whose regiment gave such heroic account of
itself at Gallipoli; Australia who came with her cruisers, and with also
her armies to the West Front and in South Africa; New Zealand who came
from the other side of the world with men and money—three million
pounds in gift, not loan, from one million people. And the Boers? The
Boers, who latest of all, not twenty years before, had been at war with
England, and conquered by her, and then by her had been given a Boer
Government. What did the Boers do? In spite of the Kaiser’s telegram of
sympathy, in spite of his plans and his hopes, they too, like Canada and
New Zealand and all the rest, sided of their own free will with
disagreeable England against agreeable Germany. They first stamped out a
German rebellion, instigated in their midst, and then these Boers left
their farms, and came to England’s aid, and drove German power from
Southwest Africa. And do you remember the wire that came from India to
London? “What orders from the King-Emperor for me and my men?” These were
the words of the Maharajah of Rewa; and thus spoke the rest of India. The
troops she sent captured Neue Chapelle. From first to last they fought in
many places for the Cause of England.
What do words, or propaganda, what does anything count in the face of such
facts as these?
Agreeable Germany!—who addresses her God, “Thou who dwellest high
above the Cherubim, Seraphim and Zeppelin”—Parson Diedrich Vorwerck
in his volume Hurrah and Hallelujah. Germany, who says, “It is better to
let a hundred women and children belonging to the enemy die of hunger than
to let a single German soldier suffer”—General von der Goltz in his
Ten Iron Commandments of the German Soldier; Germany, whose soldier obeys
those commandments thus: “I am sending you a ring made out of a piece of
shell.... During the battle of Budonviller I did away with four women and
seven young girls in five minutes. The Captain had told me to shoot these
French sows, but I preferred to run my bayonet through them”—private
Johann Wenger to his German sweetheart, dated Peronne, March 16, 1915.
Germany, whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszettung deplored the doings of
her Kultur on land and sea thus: “Much as we detest it as human beings and
as Christians, yet we exult in it as Germans.”
That is another verse of Germany’s hymn, hate for Poland; that is her way
of taking people by the scruff of the neck; and that is what Senator
Walsh’s resolution of sympathy with Ireland, Germany’s contemplated
Heligoland, implies for the United States, if Germany’s deferred day
should come.
