getting better. Get your facts straight, man."

A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian his
ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this timely
debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to silence. Either
he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what is so pithily termed
"come-back." The latter, I incline to think; for come-back needs no
facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in the anti-Englishman
looks as if he had been a German. Germans do not come back when it goes
against them, they bleat "Kamerad!"--or disappear. Perhaps this man was a
spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking
about, peeping, listening, trying to wedge the Allies apart, doing his
little bit towards making friends enemies, just as his breed has worked
to set enmity between ourselves and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France
and England, France and Italy, England and Russia, between everybody and
everybody else all the world over, in the sacred name and for the sacred
sake of the Kaiser. Thus has his breed, since we occupied Coblenz, run to
the French soldiers with lies about us and then run to us with lies about
the French soldiers, overlooking in its providential stupidity the fact
that we and the French would inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his
breed, at the moment I write these words, infesting and poisoning the
earth with a propaganda that remains as coherent and as systematically
directed as ever it was before the papers began to assure us that there
was nothing left of the Hohenzollern government.



Chapter IV: "My Army of Spies"