I have nothing but praise and admiration for the way in which the German women have thrown themselves into this struggle.  Believing implicitly as they have been told—­and with the exception of the lower classes, after more than two years of war, they believe everything the Government tells them—­that this war was carefully prepared by “Sir Grey” (Lord Grey of Fallodon), “the man without a conscience,” as he is called in Germany, they feel that they are helping to fight a war for the defence of their homes and their children, and the cynics at the German Foreign Office, who manufacture their opinions for them, rub this in in sermons from the pastors, novels, newspaper articles, faked cinema films, garbled extracts from Allied newspapers, books, and bogus photographs, Reichstag orations by Bethmann-Hollweg, and the rest of it, not forgetting the all-important lectures by the professors, who are unceasing in their efforts all over Germany.

To show how little the truth of the war is understood by the German women, I may mention an incident that occurred at the house of people of the official class at which I was visiting one day.  The eldest son, who was just back from the Somme trenches, suffering from slight shell-shock, brought home a copy of a London illustrated paper, which had been thrown across the trenches by the English.  In this photograph there was a picture of a long procession of German prisoners captured by the English.  The daughter of the house, a well-read girl of nineteen, blazed up at the sight of this photograph, and showed it to her mother, who was equally surprised.  The son of the house remarked, “Surely you know the English have taken a great many prisoners?”

His mother, realising her mistake, looked confused, and simply said, “I didn’t think.”  In other words, the obvious fact that Germans were sometimes captured had never been pointed out to her by the Government, and most Germans are accustomed to think only what they are officially told to think.

While there are an increasing number of doubters among the German males as to the accuracy of statements issued by the Government, in the class with which I mostly came into contact in Germany, the women are blindfold and believe all they are told.  So strong, too, is the influence of Government propaganda on the people in Germany that in a town where I met two English ladies married to Germans, they believed that Germany had Verdun in her grasp, had annihilated the British troops (mainly black) on the Somme, had defeated the British Fleet in the battle of Skagerrak (Jutland), and reduced the greater part of the fortifications, docks, and munition factories of London to ruins by Zeppelins.

Their anguish for the fate of their English relations was sincere, and they were intensely hopeful that Britain would accept any sort of terms of peace in order to prevent the invasion which some people in Germany still believe possible.