much! We of the Allies desire respect and loyalty that come from
reason. The Germans demand unreasoning obedience and denied that,
they destroy. One philosophy is Christian; the other Babylonian.
But the devilish strength of the German philosophy came to us
more forcibly in Italy than it came elsewhere because of certain
contrasts. They were contrasts in what might be called public
wisdom. The Germans take better care of their poor than some of
the Allies. The Germans know that poverty is a curse to a nation,
and during the past generation they have done much to alleviate
it. And in alleviating poverty they have kept their poor docile;
and they go into battle feeling that they have something to fight
for. In the allied countries too often we have let the devil take
the hindermost. As we rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan we
wondered, looking at the farms and the farmers along the road, why
those farmers should be asked to die for a country that kept them
in so low an estate. And yet they were better off than the farmers
of Southern Italy. But in socializing industry the Italian farmer
has been forgotten, and when the press came upon the Italian
front, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay down their arms,
deluded by a German spy ruse so simple that it should have fooled
no intelligent soldier. But they were not intelligent. Their
intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations,
and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy! You
cannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousand
years' sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier who
is even half awake!

As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a curious experience.
There entered our compartment at twilight one of the carabinieri!
We had been looking with admiration at the carabinieri for days.