It is strange that the Huns, as they are called, should have been so strict in moral discipline.  Many of them were not so austere in the villages when they let their passions loose and behaved like drunken demons or satyrs with flaming torches.  There is a riddle in the psychology of all these contrasts between the iron discipline and perfect organization by which all outrage was repressed in the large towns occupied for any length of time by German troops, and the lawlessness and rapine of the same race in villages through which they passed hurriedly, giving themselves just time enough to wreak a cruel ferocity upon unoffending people.  Riddle as it is, it holds perhaps the key to the mystery of the German character and to their ideal of war.  Whenever there was time to establish discipline, the men were well behaved, and did not dare to disobey the orders of their chiefs.  It was only when special orders for “frightfulness” had been issued, or when officers in subordinate command let their men get out of hand, or led the way to devilry by their own viciousness of action, that the rank and file of the enemy’s army committed its brutalities.

Even now, after all that I have seen in the ruined villages in France, I cannot bring myself to believe that the German race is distinguished from all other peoples in Europe by the mark of the beast, or that ’they are the exclusive possession of the devil.  The prisoners I have spoken to, the blue-eyed Saxons and plump Bavarians with whom I travelled for awhile after the battle of Neuve Chapelle, seemed to me uncommonly like the yokels of our own Somersetshire and Devonshire.  Their officers were polite and well-bred men in whom I saw no sign of fiendish lusts and cruelties.  In normal moods they are a good-natured people, with a little touch of Teuton grossness perhaps, which makes them swill overmuch beer, and with an arrogance towards their womenfolk which is not tolerable to Englishmen, unless they have revolted from the older courtesies of English life because the Suffragettes have challenged their authority.

It was in abnormal moods that they committed their atrocities, for in the hot sun of the first September of the war their blood was overheated, and in the first intoxication of their march through France, drunk with the thrill of butcher’s work as well as with French wine, brought back suddenly to the primitive lusts of nature by the spirit of war, which strips men naked of all refinements and decent veils, they became for a time savages, with no other restraint than that of Red Indians on the warpath.  They belonged to an Army of Invasion, marching through hostile territory, and the soul of war robbed the individual of his own separate soul and put a spell of madness on him, so that his eyes were bloodshot and his senses inflamed with lust.  In the Peninsular War young Englishmen from decent villages in quiet countrysides, with pious mothers praying for them at home in grey old churches, and with pretty sisters