Let me take you through a few typical scenes.

It was on February 1st, the day after the Zeppelin raid of January 31st,
that I left a house in the north where I had been seeing one of the
country-house convalescent hospitals, to which Englishwomen and English
wealth are giving themselves everywhere without stint, and made my way by
train, through a dark and murky afternoon, towards a Midland town. The
news of the raid was so far vague. The newspapers of the morning gave no
names or details. I was not aware that I was passing through towns where
women and children in back streets had been cruelly and wantonly killed
the night before, where a brewery had been bombed, and the windows of a
train broken, in order that the German public might be fed on ridiculous
lies about the destruction of Liverpool docks and the wrecking of "English
industry." "English industry lies in ruins," said the _Hamburger
Nachrichten_ complacently. Marvellous paper! Just after reading its
remarks, I was driving down the streets of the great industrial centre I
had come to see--a town which the murderers of the night before would have
been glad indeed to hit. As it was, "English industry" seemed tolerably
active amid its "ruins." The clumsy falsehoods of the German official
reports and the German newspapers affect me strangely! It is not so much
their lack of truth as their lack of the ironic, the satiric sense, which
is a certain protection, after all, even amid the tragedy of war. We have
a tolerable British conceit of ourselves, no doubt, and in war we make
foolish or boasting statements about the future, because, in spite of all
our grumbling, we are at bottom a nation of optimists, and apt to see
things as we wish. But this sturdy or fatuous lying about the past--the
"sinking" of the _Lion_, the "capture" of Fort Vaux, or the "bombardment"
of Liverpool docks--is really beyond us. Our sense of ridicule, if nothing
else, forbids--the instinct of an old people with an old and humourous
literature. These leading articles of the _Hamburger Nachrichten_, the