If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can?  Don’t you go to war to win?  There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that this and that is “not done” in humane circles—­win!  The Germans meant to win.  Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern method.  Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps:  The French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents increase of numbers, its thrift and its tenacity; the German, with its newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition; and the Russian, patient and unbeatable, vague, glamorous, immense.

The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war.  After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for my buttonhole.

This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three hundred years ago.  Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe.  He must be pro the other side.  He could not be a neutral and belong to the human kind with such a name.  Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be on your side secretly.  If they weren’t they must be on the other.  Are you for us? or, Are you against us?  I grew weary of the question in Germany.  If I had been for them I should have “dug in” and not told them.  In France and England they asked you objectively the state of sentiment in America.  But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have made a study of war.  They are experts in war.

However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome question to me.  He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose quiet I had sought for an hour’s respite from war.  One could be shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed the American tourist, without hearing a guide’s monotone explaining who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who painted his picture.  This boy could have more influence in making me see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel lobbies—­those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over victories won by another type of German.