The German’s mind was one amazement.  He had been sure of being shot, he had meant to make a good end, fierce and scornful, a relentless fighter to the last; and these men who might have shot him like a man were going to spare him like a dog.  His mind was a tumbled muddle of old and new ideas.  He had been brought up in an atmosphere of the foulest and fiercest militarism; he had been trained to relentlessness, ruthlessness and so forth; war was war and the bitterer the better, frightfulness was your way to victory over every enemy.  But these people had found a better way.  Here were Dutch and English side by side; sixteen years ago they had been at war together and now they wore the same uniform and rode together, and laughed at him for a queer fellow because he was for spitting at them and defying them, and folding his arms and looking level at the executioners’ rifles.  There were to be no executioners’ rifles....  If it was so with Dutch and English, why shouldn’t it be so presently with French and Germans?  Why someday shouldn’t French, German, Dutch and English, Russian and Pole, ride together under this new star of mankind, the Southern Cross, to catch whatever last mischief-maker was left to poison the wells of goodwill?

His mind resisted and struggled against these ideas.  “Austere,” he whispered.  “The ennobling tests of war.”  A trooner rode up alongside, and offered him a drink of water

“Just a mouthful,” he said apologetically.  “We’ve had to go rather short."...

“There’s another brain busy here with the same idea,” the Angel interrupted.  And the bishop found himself looking into the bedroom of a young German attache in Washington, sleepless in the small hours.

“Ach!” cried the young man, and sat up in bed and ran his hands through his fair hair.

He had been working late upon this detestable business of the Lusitania; the news of her sinking had come to hand two days before, and all America was aflame with it.  It might mean war.  His task had been to pour out explanations and justifications to the press; to show that it was an act of necessity, to pretend a conviction that the great ship was loaded with munitions, to fight down the hostility and anger that blazed across a continent.  He had worked to his limit.  He had taken cup after cup of coffee, and had come to bed worked out not two hours ago.  Now here he was awake after a nightmare of drowning women and children, trying to comfort his soul by recalling his own arguments.  Never once since the war began had he doubted the rightness of the German cause.  It seemed only a proof of his nervous exhaustion that he could doubt it now.  Germany was the best organized, most cultivated, scientific and liberal nation the earth had ever seen, it was for the good of mankind that she should be the dominant power in the world; his patriotism had had the passion of a mission.  The English were indolent, the French decadent, the Russians barbaric, the Americans basely