When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the clerk at the desk said, “I will see, sir.”  He ran his eye up and down the list methodically before he added:  “Yes, we have a good room on the second floor.”  Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and second floors of the hotel were closed.  The small dining-room only was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room appear normal.

He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of normality.  Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves into confidence.  The clerk believed that some day he would have more guests than ever and a bigger hotel.  All who suffered from the war could afford to wait.  Germany was winning; the programme was being carried out.  The Kaiser said so.  In proof of it, multitudes of Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at the front taking more Russian soldiers.

Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly normal.  No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was ever treated to more optimistic propaganda.  Perfectly normal—­when one found only three customers in a large department store!  Perfectly normal—­when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships!  Perfectly normal—­when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange!  Perfectly normal—­when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at home!

Are you for us or against us?  The question was put straight to the stranger.  Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for granted that he was a pro-Ally.  He must be pro-something.

As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.  “Are you an Englishman?” was his first question.  The guttural, military emphasis which he put on “Englishman” was most significant.  Which brings us to another factor in the psychology of war:  hate.

“If men are to fight well,” said a German officer, “it is necessary that they hate.  They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge into machine-guns.”

Hate was officially distilled and then instilled—­hate against England, almost exclusively.  The public rose to that.  If England had not come in, the German military plan would have succeeded:  first, the crushing of France; then, the crushing of Russia.  The despised Belgian, that small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant’s knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest.  For he had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt—­that miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine.