One day thieves broke into his home and got away with an enormous amount of hams and other edibles.  I remind the reader that ham had ere this become unknown in Berlin.  Less than three hundred pigs were being killed there per week where formerly twenty-five thousand were slaughtered.  The Government had more-over taken a house-to-house inventory of food, and hoarding had been made punishable by law.

The story, of course, never appeared in the papers, since such divines are useful implements of the State, but the whole congregation heard of it, with the disastrous consequence that the good man’s future sermons on self-denial fell upon stony ground.

One dear old lady, a widow, whose two sons had fallen in the war, told me that she had not gone to church for years, but after her second son fell she sought spiritual comfort in attending services every Sunday.  “I am so lonesome now,” she said, “and somehow I feel that when I hear the word of God I shall be nearer to my boys.”

I met her some weeks later on her way home from church.  “It is no use,” she sighed, shaking her head sadly, “the church does not satisfy the longing in my heart.  It is not for such as me.  Nothing but war, war, war, and hate, hate, hate!”

The German Navy League, an aggressive body which had gathered around it more than a million members previous to the war, stirred up anti-British feeling by means of leaflets, newspaper articles, kinematograph exhibitions, and sermons.  Among the bitterest of the preachers are returned missionaries from British possessions.

Although the social position of the pastor in a German village is less than that of a minor Government official, yet he and his wife wield considerable influence.  The leading pastors receive each week many of the Government propaganda documents, including a digest carefully prepared for them by the foreign Press Department.  I obtained some copies of this weekly digest, but was unable to bring them out of Germany.  What purport to be extracts from the London newspapers are ingenious distortions.  Sometimes a portion of an article is reprinted with the omission of the context, thus entirely altering its meaning.  The recipients of this carefully prepared sheet believe implicitly in its authenticity.  Any chance remark of a political nobody in the House of Commons that seems favourable to Germany is quoted extensively.  Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, in the eyes of the German village clergyman, ranks as one of the most important men in the British Empire.  Mr. Stanton, M.P., in their view, is a low hireling of the British Government, doing dirty work in the hope of getting political preferment.  The Labour Leader, which I have not seen in any house or hotel or on any newspaper stall, is, according to this digest, one of the leading English newspapers, and almost the only truth-telling organ of the Allies.

These people really believe this.  When home-staying Englishmen talk to me about the German War party, I find it difficult to explain to them that the German War party is practically the whole country.