who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.

One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German
footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere
drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was
incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape,
incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected
where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly
slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the
brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes
against the German name.

* * * * *

Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises
that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has
not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which
any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might
have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and
Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper
is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule
whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode
in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths
with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly
nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they
would not listen to Prince von Buelow's song, latterly against Americans
because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany
to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and
from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a
ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to