English had developed to the fullest extent the virtues and vices of
safety and comfort; they had a hatred of science and dramatic behaviour;
they could see no reason for exactness or intensity; they disliked
proceeding "to extremes." Ultimately everything would turn out all
right. But they knew what it is to be carried into conflicts by
energetic minorities and the trick of circumstances, and they were ready
to understand the case of any other country which has suffered that
fate. All their habits inclined them to fight good-temperedly and
comfortably, to quarrel with a government and not with a people. It took
Mr. Britling at least a couple of months of warfare to understand that
the Germans were fighting in an altogether different spirit.

The first intimations of this that struck upon his mind were the news of
the behaviour of the Kaiser and the Berlin crowd upon the declaration of
war, and the violent treatment of the British subjects seeking to return
to their homes. Everywhere such people had been insulted and
ill-treated. It was the spontaneous expression of a long-gathered
bitterness. While the British ambassador was being howled out of Berlin,
the German ambassador to England was taking a farewell stroll, quite
unmolested, in St. James's Park.... One item that struck particularly
upon Mr. Britling's imagination was the story of the chorus of young
women who assembled on the railway platform of the station through which
the British ambassador was passing to sing--to his drawn
blinds--"Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles." Mr. Britling could
imagine those young people, probably dressed more or less uniformly in
white, with flushed faces and shining eyes, letting their voices go,
full throated, in the modern German way....

And then came stories of atrocities, stories of the shooting of old men
and the butchery of children by the wayside, stories of wounded men