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ENGLAND AND THE WAR

being

SUNDRY ADDRESSES

delivered during the war
and now first collected

by

WALTER RALEIGH

OXFORD

1918




CONTENTS


PREFACE

MIGHT IS RIGHT
  First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets,
  October 1914.

THE WAR OF IDEAS
  An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
  December 12, 1916.

THE FAITH OF ENGLAND
  An Address to the Union Society of University
  College, London, March 22, 1917.

SOME GAINS OF THE WAR
  An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute,
  February 13, 1918.

THE WAR AND THE PRESS
  A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College,
  March 14, 1918.

SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND
  The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British
  Academy, delivered July 4, 1918.




PREFACE


This book was not planned, but grew out of the troubles of the time.
When, on one occasion or another, I was invited to lecture, I did not
find, with Milton's Satan, that the mind is its own place; I could speak
only of what I was thinking of, and my mind was fixed on the War. I am
unacquainted with military science, so my treatment of the War was
limited to an estimate of the characters of the antagonists.

The character of Germany and the Germans is a riddle. I have seen no
convincing solution of it by any Englishman, and hardly any confident
attempt at a solution which did not speak the uncontrolled language of
passion. There is the same difficulty with the lower animals; our
description of them tends to be a description of nothing but our own
loves and hates. Who has ever fathomed the mind of a rhinoceros; or has
remembered, while he faces the beast, that a good rhinoceros is a
pleasant member of the community in which his life is passed? We see
only the folded hide, the horn, and the angry little eye. We know that
he is strong and cunning, and that his desires and instincts are
inconsistent with our welfare. Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler creature
than a German, and does not trouble our thought by conforming, on
occasion, to civilized standards and humane conditions.

It seems unreasonable to lay great stress on racial differences. The
insuperable barrier that divides England from Germany has grown out of
circumstance and habit and thought. For many hundreds of years the
German peoples have stood to arms in their own defence against the
encroachments of successive empires; and modern Germany learned the
doctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged suffering at the hands
of the greatest master of that immoral school--the Emperor Napoleon. No
German can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage which the
English mind quite naturally assumes when it is brought into contact
with foreigners. The best example of this superiority of attitude is to
be seen in the people who are called pacifists. They are a peculiarly
English type, and they are the most arrogant of all the English. The
idea that they should ever have to fight for their lives is to them
supremely absurd. There must be some mistake, they think, which can be
easily remedied once it is pointed out. Their title to existence is so
clear to themselves that they are convinced it will be universally
recognized; it must not be made a matter of international conflict.
Partly, no doubt, this belief is fostered by lack of imagination. The
sheltered conditions and leisured life which they enjoy as the parasites
of a dominant race have produced in them a false sense of security. But
there is something also of the English strength and obstinacy of
character in their self-confidence, and if ever Germany were to conquer
England some of them would spring to their full stature as the heroes of
an age-long and indomitable resistance. They are not held in much esteem
to-day among their own people; they are useless for the work in hand;
and their credit has suffered from the multitude of pretenders who make
principle a cover for cowardice. But for all that, they are kin to the
makers of England, and the fact that Germany would never tolerate them
for an instant is not without its lesson.

We shall never understand the Germans. Some of their traits may possibly
be explained by their history. Their passionate devotion to the State,
their amazing vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanical
efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not strong in individual
character, who have suffered much to achieve union, and who have
achieved it by subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal
taskmaster. But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that are
deeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilization
was believed to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods who gave their
names to the days of the week are alive again in Germany. The English
soldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who is
prepared to make the best of a bad job. The German soldier sacrifices
himself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God. The
filthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all that
is elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food that
is to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred
vessels in the churches--all these things, too numerous and too
monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the
brute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised,
by officers no less than by men. The waves of emotional exaltation which
from time to time pass over the whole people have the same character,
the character of savage religion.

If they are alien to civilization when they fight, they are doubly alien
when they reason. They are glib and fluent in the use of the terms which
have been devised for the needs of thought and argument, but their use
of these terms is empty, and exhibits all the intellectual processes
with the intelligence left out. I know nothing more distressing than the
attempt to follow any German argument concerning the War. If it were
merely wrong-headed, cunning, deceitful, there might still be some
compensation in its cleverness. There is no such compensation. The
statements made are not false, but empty; the arguments used are not
bad, but meaningless. It is as if they despised language, and made use
of it only because they believe that it is an instrument of deceit. But
a man who has no respect for language cannot possibly use it in such a
manner as to deceive others, especially if those others are accustomed
to handle it delicately and powerfully. It ought surely to be easy to
apologize for a war that commands the whole-hearted support of a nation;
but no apology worthy of the name has been produced in Germany. The
pleadings which have been used are servile things, written to order, and
directed to some particular address, as if the truth were of no
importance. No one of these appeals has produced any appreciable effect
on the minds of educated Frenchmen, or Englishmen, or Americans, even
among those who are eager to hear all that the enemy has to say for
himself. This is a strange thing; and is perhaps the widest breach of
all. We are hopelessly separated from the Germans; we have lost the use
of a common language, and cannot talk with them if we would.

We cannot understand them; is it remotely possible that they will ever
understand us? Here, too, the difficulties seem insuperable. It is true
that in the past they have shown themselves willing to study us and to
imitate us. But unless they change their minds and their habits, it is
not easy to see how they are to get near enough to us to carry on their
study. While they remain what they are we do not want them in our
neighbourhood. We are not fighting to anglicize Germany, or to impose
ourselves on the Germans; our work is being done, as work is so often
done in this idle sport-loving country, with a view to a holiday. We
wish to forget the Germans; and when once we have policed them into
quiet and decency we shall have earned the right to forget them, at
least for a time. The time of our respite perhaps will not be long. If
the Allies defeat them, as the Allies will, it seems as certain as any
uncertain thing can be that a mania for imitating British and American
civilization will take possession of Germany. We are not vindictive to a
beaten enemy, and when the Germans offer themselves as pupils we are not
likely to be either enthusiastic in our welcome or obstinate in our
refusal. We shall be bored but concessive. I confess that there are
some things in the prospect of this imitation which haunt me like a
nightmare. The British soldier, whom the German knows to be second to
none, is distinguished for the levity and jocularity of his bearing in
the face of danger. What will happen when the German soldier attempts to
imitate that? We shall be delivered from the German peril as when Israel
came out of Egypt, and the mountains skipped like rams.

The only parts of this book for which I claim any measure of authority
are the parts which describe the English character. No one of purely
English descent has ever been known to describe the English character,
or to attempt to describe it. The English newspapers are full of praises
of almost any of the allied troops other than the English regiments. I
have more Scottish and Irish blood in my veins than English; and I think
I can see the English character truly, from a little distance. If, by
some fantastic chance, the statesmen of Germany could learn what I tell
them, it would save their country from a vast loss of life and from many
hopeless misadventures. The English character is not a removable part of
the British Empire; it is the foundation of the whole structure, and the
secret strength of the American Republic. But the statesmen of Germany,
who fall easy victims to anything foolish in the shape of a theory that
flatters their vanity, would not believe a word of my essays even if
they were to read them, so they must learn to know the English character
in the usual way, as King George the Third learned to know it from
Englishmen resident in America.

A habit of lying and a belief in the utility of lying are often
attended by the most unhappy and paralysing effects. The liars become
unable to recognize the truth when it is presented to them. This is the
misery which fate has fixed on the German cause. War, the Germans are
fond of remarking, is war. In almost all wars there is something to be
said on both sides of the question. To know that one side or the other
is right may be difficult; but it is always useful to know why your
enemies are fighting. We know why Germany is fighting; she explained it
very fully, by her most authoritative voices, on the very eve of the
struggle, and she has repeated it many times since in moments of
confidence or inadvertence. But here is the tragedy of Germany: she does
not know why we are fighting. We have told her often enough, but she
does not believe it, and treats our statement as an exercise in the
cunning use of what she calls ethical propaganda. Why ethics, or morals,
should be good enough to inspire sympathy, but not good enough to
inspire war, is one of the mysteries of German thought. No German, not
even any of those few feeble German writers who have fitfully criticized
the German plan, has any conception of the deep, sincere, unselfish, and
righteous anger that was aroused in millions of hearts by the cruelties
of the cowardly assault on Serbia and on Belgium. The late German
Chancellor became uneasily aware that the crucifixion of Belgium was one
of the causes which made this war a truceless war, and his offer, which
no doubt seemed to him perfectly reasonable, was that Germany is willing
to bargain about Belgium, and to relax her hold, in exchange for solid
advantages elsewhere. Perhaps he knew that if the Allies were to spend
five minutes in bargaining about Belgium they would thereby condone the
German crime and would lose all that they have fought for. But it seems
more likely that he did not know it. The Allies know it.

There is hope in these clear-cut issues. Of all wars that ever were
fought this war is least likely to have an indecisive ending. It must be
settled one way or the other. If the Allied Governments were to make
peace to-day, there would be no peace; the peoples of the free countries
would not suffer it. Germany cannot make peace, for she is bound by
heavy promises to her people, and she cannot deliver the goods. She is
tied to the stake, and must fight the course. Emaciated, exhausted,
repeating, as if in a bad dream, the old boastful appeals to military
glory, she must go on till she drops, and then at last there will be
peace.

These may themselves seem boastful words; they cannot be proved except
by the event. There are some few Englishmen, with no stomach for a
fight, who think that England is in a bad way because she is engaged in
a war of which the end is not demonstrably certain. If the issues of
wars were known beforehand, and could be discounted, there would be no
wars. Good wars are fought by nations who make their choice, and would
rather die than lose what they are fighting for. Military fortunes are
notoriously variable, and depend on a hundred accidents. Moral causes
are constant, and operate all the time. The chief of these moral causes
is the character of a people. Germany, by her vaunted study of the art
and science of war, has got herself into a position where no success can
come to her except by way of the collapse or failure of the
English-speaking peoples. A study of the moral causes, if she were
capable of making it, would not encourage her in her old impious belief
that God will destroy these peoples in order to clear the way for the
dominion of the Hohenzollerns.




MIGHT IS RIGHT

_First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets, October 1914_


It is now recognized in England that our enemy in this war is not a
tyrant military caste, but the united people of modern Germany. We have
to combat an armed doctrine which is virtually the creed of all Germany.
Saxony and Bavaria, it is true, would never have invented the doctrine;
but they have accepted it from Prussia, and they believe it. The
Prussian doctrine has paid the German people handsomely; it has given
them their place in the world. When it ceases to pay them, and not till
then, they will reconsider it. They will not think, till they are
compelled to think. When they find themselves face to face with a
greater and more enduring strength than their own, they will renounce
their idol. But they are a brave people, a faithful people, and a stupid
people, so that they will need rough proofs. They cannot be driven from
their position by a little paper shot. In their present mood, if they
hear an appeal to pity, sensibility, and sympathy, they take it for a
cry of weakness. I am reminded of what I once heard said by a genial and
humane Irish officer concerning a proposal to treat with the leaders of
a Zulu rebellion. 'Kill them all,' he said, 'it's the only thing they
understand.' He meant that the Zulu chiefs would mistake moderation for
a sign of fear. By the irony of human history this sentence has become
almost true of the great German people, who built up the structure of
modern metaphysics. They can be argued with only by those who have the
will and the power to punish them.

The doctrine that Might is Right, though it is true, is an unprofitable
doctrine, for it is true only in so broad and simple a sense that no one
would dream of denying it. If a single nation can conquer, depress, and
destroy all the other nations of the earth and acquire for itself a sole
dominion, there may be matter for question whether God approves that
dominion; what is certain is that He permits it. No earthly governor who
is conscious of his power will waste time in listening to arguments
concerning what his power ought to be. His right to wield the sword can
be challenged only by the sword. An all-powerful governor who feared no
assault would never trouble himself to assert that Might is Right. He
would smile and sit still. The doctrine, when it is propounded by weak
humanity, is never a statement of abstract truth; it is a declaration of
intention, a threat, a boast, an advertisement. It has no value except
when there is some one to be frightened. But it is a very dangerous
doctrine when it becomes the creed of a stupid people, for it flatters
their self-sufficiency, and distracts their attention from the
difficult, subtle, frail, and wavering conditions of human power. The
tragic question for Germany to-day is what she can do, not whether it is
right for her to do it. The buffaloes, it must be allowed, had a
perfect right to dominate the prairie of America, till the hunters came.
They moved in herds, they practised shock-tactics, they were violent,
and very cunning. There are but few of them now. A nation of men who
mistake violence for strength, and cunning for wisdom, may conceivably
suffer the fate of the buffaloes and perish without knowing why.

To the English mind the German political doctrine is so incredibly
stupid that for many long years, while men in high authority in the
German Empire, ministers, generals, and professors, expounded that
doctrine at great length and with perfect clearness, hardly any one
could be found in England to take it seriously, or to regard it as
anything but the vapourings of a crazy sect. England knows better now;
the scream of the guns has awakened her. The German doctrine is to be
put to the proof. Who dares to say what the result will be? To predict
certain failure to the German arms is only a kind of boasting. Yet there
are guarded beliefs which a modest man is free to hold till they are
seen to be groundless. The Germans have taken Antwerp; they may possibly
destroy the British fleet, overrun England and France, repel Russia,
establish themselves as the dictators of Europe--in short, fulfil their
dreams. What then? At an immense cost of human suffering they will have
achieved, as it seems to us, a colossal and agonizing failure. Their
engines of destruction will never serve them to create anything so fair
as the civilization of France. Their uneasy jealousy and self-assertion
is a miserable substitute for the old laws of chivalry and regard for
the weak, which they have renounced and forgotten. The will and high
permission of all-ruling Heaven may leave them at large for a time, to
seek evil to others. When they have finished with it, the world will
have to be remade.

We cannot be sure that the Ruler of the world will forbid this. We
cannot even be sure that the destroyers, in the peace that their
destruction will procure for them, may not themselves learn to rebuild.
The Goths, who destroyed the fabric of the Roman Empire, gave their
name, in time, to the greatest mediaeval art. Nature, it is well known,
loves the strong, and gives to them, and to them alone, the chance of
becoming civilized. Are the German people strong enough to earn that
chance? That is what we are to see. They have some admirable elements of
strength, above any other European people. No other European army can be
marched, in close order, regiment after regiment, up the <DW72> of a
glacis, under the fire of machine guns, without flinching, to certain
death. This corporate courage and corporate discipline is so great and
impressive a thing that it may well contain a promise for the future.
Moreover, they are, within the circle of their own kin, affectionate and
dutiful beyond the average of human society. If they succeed in their
worldly ambitions, it will be a triumph of plain brute morality over all
the subtler movements of the mind and heart.

On the other hand, it is true to say that history shows no precedent for
the attainment of world-wide power by a people so politically stupid as
the German people are to-day. There is no mistake about this; the
instances of German stupidity are so numerous that they make something
like a complete history of German international relations. Here is one.
Any time during the last twenty years it has been matter of common
knowledge in England that one event, and one only, would make it
impossible for England to remain a spectator in a European war--that
event being the violation of the neutrality of Holland or Belgium. There
was never any secret about this, it was quite well known to many people
who took no special interest in foreign politics. Germany has maintained
in this country, for many years, an army of spies and secret agents; yet
not one of them informed her of this important truth. Perhaps the
radical difference between the German and the English political systems
blinded the astute agents. In England nothing really important is a
secret, and the amount of privileged political information to be gleaned
in barbers' shops, even when they are patronized by Civil servants, is
distressingly small. Two hours of sympathetic conversation with an
ordinary Englishman would have told the German Chancellor more about
English politics than ever he heard in his life. For some reason or
other he was unable to make use of this source of intelligence, so that
he remained in complete ignorance of what every one in England knew and
said.

Here is another instance. The programme of German ambition has been
voluminously published for the benefit of the world. France was first to
be crushed; then Russia; then, by means of the indemnities procured from
these conquests, after some years of recuperation and effort, the naval
power of England was to be challenged and destroyed. This programme was
set forth by high authorities, and was generally accepted; there was no
criticism, and no demur. The crime against the civilization of the world
foreshadowed in the horrible words 'France is to be crushed' is before a
high tribunal; it would be idle to condemn it here. What happened is
this. The French and Russian part of the programme was put into action
last July. England, who had been told that her turn was not yet, that
Germany would be ready for her in a matter of five or ten years, very
naturally refused to wait her turn. She crowded up on to the scaffold,
which even now is in peril of breaking down under the weight of its
victims, and of burying the executioner in its ruins. But because
England would not wait her turn, she is overwhelmed with accusations of
treachery and inhumanity by a sincerely indignant Germany. Could
stupidity, the stupidity of the wise men of Gotham, be more fantastic or
more monstrous?

German stupidity was even more monstrous. A part of the accusation
against England is that she has raised her hand against the nation
nearest to her in blood. The alleged close kinship of England and
Germany is based on bad history and doubtful theory. The English are a
mixed race, with enormous infusions of Celtic and Roman blood. The Roman
sculpture gallery at Naples is full of English faces. If the German
agents would turn their attention to hatters' shops, and give the
barbers a rest, they would find that no English hat fits any German
head. But suppose we were cousins, or brothers even, what kind of
argument is that on the lips of those who but a short time before were
explaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute frankness, how
they intended to compass our ruin? There is something almost amiable in
fatuity like this. A touch of the fool softens the brute.

The Germans have a magnificent war-machine which rolls on its way,
crushing all that it touches. We shall break it if we can. If we fail,
the German nation is at the beginning, not the end, of its troubles.
With the making of peace, even an armed peace, the war-machine has
served its turn; some other instrument of government must then be
invented. There is no trace of a design for this new instrument in any
of the German shops. The governors of Alsace-Lorraine offer no
suggestions. The bald fact is that there is no spot in the world where
the Germans govern another race and are not hated. They know this, and
are disquieted; they meet with coldness on all hands, and their remedy
for the coldness is self-assertion and brag. The Russian statesman was
right who remarked that modern Germany has been too early admitted into
the comity of European nations. Her behaviour, in her new international
relations, is like the behaviour of an uneasy, jealous upstart in an
old-fashioned quiet drawing-room. She has no genius for equality; her
manners are a compound of threatening and flattery. When she wishes to
assert herself, she bullies; when she wishes to endear herself, she
crawls; and the one device is no more successful than the other.

Might is Right; but the sort of might which enables one nation to govern
another in time of peace is very unlike the armoured thrust of the
war-engine. It is a power compounded of sympathy and justice. The
English (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have studied justice
and desired justice. They have inquired into and protected rights that
were unfamiliar, and even grotesque, to their own ideas, because they
believed them to be rights. In the matter of sympathy their reputation
does not stand so high; they are chill in manner, and dislike all
effusive demonstrations of feeling. Yet those who come to know them know
that they are not unimaginative; they have a genius for equality; and
they do try to put themselves in the other fellow's place, to see how
the position looks from that side. What has happened in India may
perhaps be taken to prove, among many other things, that the inhabitants
of India begin to know that England has done her best, and does feel a
disinterested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. She has long
been a mother of nations, and is not frightened by the problems of
adolescence.

The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in governing other
peoples. Might is Right; and it is quite conceivable that they may
acquire colonies by violence. If they want to keep them they will have
to shut their own professors' books, and study the intimate history of
the British Empire. We are old hands at the business; we have lost more
colonies than ever they owned, and we begin to think that we have learnt
the secret of success. At any rate, our experience has done much for us,
and has helped us to avoid failure. Yet the German colonial party stare
at us with bovine malevolence. In all the library of German theorizing
you will look in vain for any explanation of the fact that the Boers
are, in the main, loyal to the British Empire. If German political
thinkers could understand that political situation, which seems to
English minds so simple, there might yet be hope for them. But they
regard it all as a piece of black magic, and refuse to reason about it.
How should a herd of cattle be driven without goads? Witchcraft,
witchcraft!

Their world-wide experience it is, perhaps, which has made the English
quick to appreciate the virtues of other peoples. I have never known an
Englishman who travelled in Russia without falling in love with the
Russian people. I have never heard a German speak of the Russian people
without contempt and dislike. Indeed the Germans are so unable to see
any charm in that profound and humane people that they believe that the
English liking for them must be an insincere pretence, put forward for
wicked or selfish reasons. What would they say if they saw a sight that
is common in Indian towns, a British soldier and a Gurkha arm in arm,
rolling down the street in cheerful brotherhood? And how is it that it
has never occurred to any of them that this sort of brotherhood has its
value in Empire-building? The new German political doctrine has bidden
farewell to Christianity, but there are some political advantages in
Christianity which should not be overlooked. It teaches human beings to
think of one another and to care for one another. It is an antidote to
the worst and most poisonous kind of political stupidity.

Another thing that the Germans will have to learn for the welfare of
their much-talked Empire is the value of the lone man. The architects
and builders of the British Empire were all lone men. Might is Right;
but when a young Englishman is set down at an outpost of Empire to
govern a warlike tribe, he has to do a good deal of hard thinking on the
problem of political power and its foundations. He has to trust to
himself, to form his own conclusions, and to choose his own line of
action. He has to try to find out what is in the mind of others. A young
German, inured to skilled slavery, does not shine in such a position.
Man for man, in all that asks for initiative and self-dependence,
Englishmen are the better men, and some Germans know it. There is an old
jest that if you settle an Englishman and a German together in a new
country, at the end of a year you will find the Englishman governor, and
the German his head clerk. A German must know the rules before he can
get to work.

More than three hundred years ago a book was written in England which is
in some ways a very exact counterpart to General von Bernhardi's
notorious treatise. It is called _Tamburlaine_, and, unlike its
successor, is full of poetry and beauty. Our own colonization began with
a great deal of violent work, and much wrong done to others. We suffered
for our misdeeds, and we learned our lesson, in part at least. Why, it
may be asked, should not the Germans begin in the same manner, and by
degrees adapt themselves to the new task? Perhaps they may, but if they
do, they cannot claim the Elizabethans for their model. Of all men on
earth the German is least like the undisciplined, exuberant Elizabethan
adventurer. He is reluctant to go anywhere without a copy of the rules,
a guarantee of support, and a regular pension. His outlook is as prosaic
as General von Bernhardi's or General von der Golt's own, and that is
saying a great deal. In all the German political treatises there is an
immeasurable dreariness. They lay down rules for life, and if they be
asked what makes such a life worth living they are without any hint of
an answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically ordered, and full of
pusillanimous jealousies.

It is not impious to be hopeful. A Germanized world would be a
nightmare. We have never attempted or desired to govern them, and we
must not think that God will so far forget them as to permit them to
attempt to govern us. Now they hate us, but they do not know for how
many years the cheerful brutality of their political talk has shocked
and disgusted us. I remember meeting, in one of the French Mediterranean
dependencies, with a Prussian nobleman, a well-bred and pleasant man,
who was fond of expounding the Prussian creed. He was said to be a
political agent of sorts, but he certainly learned nothing in
conversation. He talked all the time, and propounded the most monstrous
paradoxes with an air of mathematical precision. Now it was the
character of Sir Edward Grey, a cunning Machiavel, whose only aim was to
set Europe by the ears and make neighbours fall out. A friend who was
with me, an American, laughed aloud at this, and protested, without
producing the smallest effect. The stream of talk went on. The error of
the Germans, we were told, was always that they are too humane; their
dislike of cruelty amounts to a weakness in them. They let France escape
with a paltry fine, next time France must be beaten to the dust. Always
with a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England. England was
decadent and powerless, her rule must pass to the Germans. 'But we shall
treat England rather less severely than France,' said this bland apostle
of Prussian culture, 'for we wish to make it possible for ourselves to
remain in friendly relations with other English-speaking peoples.' And
so on--the whole of the Bernhardi doctrine, explained in quiet fashion
by a man whose very debility of mind made his talk the more impressive,
for he was simply parroting what he had often heard. No one criticized
his proposals, nor did we dislike him. It all seemed too mad; a rather
clumsy jest. His world of ideas did not touch our world at any point, so
that real talk between us was impossible. He came to see us several
times, and always gave the same kind of mesmerized recital of Germany's
policy. The grossness of the whole thing was in curious