But the average German neither weeps nor blames.  He is generally amazed, when he is not amused, by the state of feeling which such proceedings excite.  And if he is an “intellectual,” a professor, he will exhaust himself in ingenious and utterly callous defences of all that Germany has done or may do.  An astonishing race—­the German professors!  The year before the war there was an historical congress in London.  There was a hospitality committee, and my husband and I were asked to entertain some of the learned men.  I remember one in particular—­an old man with white hair, who with his wife and daughter joined the party after dinner.  His name was Professor Otto von Gierke of the University of Berlin.  I gathered from his conversation that he and his family had been very kindly entertained in London.  His manner was somewhat harsh and over-bearing, but his white hair and spectacles gave him a venerable aspect, and it was clear that he and his wife and daughter belonged to a cultivated and intelligent milieu.  But who among his English hosts could possibly have imagined the thoughts and ideas in that grey head?  I find a speech of his in a most illuminating book by a Danish professor on German Chauvinist literature. [Hurrah and Hallelujah! By J. P. Bang, D.D., Professor of Theology at the University of Copenhagen, translated by Jessie Broechner.] The speech was published in a collection called German Speeches in Hard Times, which contains names once so distinguished as those of Von Wilamovitz and Harnack.

Professor von Gierke’s effusion begins with the usual German falsehoods as to the origin of the war, and then continues—­“But now that we Germans are plunged in war, we will have it in all its grandeur and violence!  Neither fear nor pity shall stay our arm before it has completely brought our enemies to the ground.”  They shall be reduced to such a condition that they shall never again dare even to snarl at Germany.  Then German Kultur will show its full loveliness and strength, enlightening “the understanding of the foreign races absorbed and incorporated into the Empire, and making them see that only from German kultur can they derive those treasures which they need for their own particular life.”

At the moment when these lines were written—­for the book was published early in the war—­the orgy of murder and lust and hideous brutality which had swept through Belgium in the first three weeks of the war was beginning to be known in England; the traces of it were still fresh in town after town and village after village of that tortured land; while the testimony of its victims was just beginning to be sifted by the experts of the Bryce Commission.

The hostages of Vareddes, the helpless victims of Nomeny, of Gerbeviller, of Sermaize, of Sommeilles, and a score of other places in France were scarcely cold in their graves.  But the old white-haired professor stands there, unashamed, unctuously offering the kultur of his criminal nation to an expectant world!  “And when the victory is won,” he says complacently—­“the whole world will stand open to us, our war expenses will be paid by the vanquished, the black-white-and-red flag will wave over all seas; our countrymen will hold highly respected posts in all parts of the world, and we shall maintain and extend our colonies.”