But we are not all preux chevaliers. We have at the other extremity the people who are craving for loot and vengeance, who clamour for the humiliation and torture of the enemy, who rave against the village burnings and shootings by the Prussians in one column and exult in the same proceedings by the Russians in another, who demand that German prisoners of war shall be treated as criminals, who depict our Indian troops as savage cutthroats because they like to think of their enemies being mauled in the spirit of the Indian Mutiny, who shriek that the Kaiser must be sent to Devil’s Island because St. Helena is too good for him, and who declare that Germany must be so maimed and trodden into the dust that she will not be able to raise her head again for a century.  Let us call these people by their own favourite name, Huns, even at the risk of being unjust to the real Huns.  And let us send as many of them to the trenches as we can possibly induce to go, in the hope that they may presently join the lists of the missing.  Still, as they rather cling to our soil, they will have to be reckoned with when the settlement comes.  But they will not count for much then.  Most of them will be heartily ashamed of what they said in those first three or four weeks of blue funk (I am too timid myself not to make allowances for that most distressing and universal, but fortunately transient effect of war); and most of those who are not will be ashamed to bear malice publicly.

The Commercial Attitude.

Far more weighty in the matter will be the intermediate sections.  First, our commercial main body, which thinks that chivalry is not business, and that rancour is childish, but cannot see why we should not make the Germans pay damages and supply us with some capital to set the City going again, forgetting that when France did that after 1871 for Berlin, Berlin was set going so effectually that it went headlong to a colossal financial smash, whilst the French peasant who had provided the capital from his old stocking throve soberly on the interest at the expense of less vital classes.  Unfortunately Germany has set the example of this kind of looting.  Prussian generals, like Napoleon’s marshals, have always been shameless brigands, keeping up the seventeenth and eighteenth century tradition of making cities bribe them to refrain from sack and pillage and even billeting, and being quite incapable of the magnificence of the great Conde (or was it Turenne?), who refused a payment offered by a city on the ground that he had not intended to march through it.  Blucher’s fury when Wellington would not allow him to plunder Paris, and his exclamation when he saw London “What a city to loot!” is still regarded as fair soldiering; and the blackmail levied recently by the Prussian generals on the Belgian and French towns they have occupied must, I suppose, be let pass as ransom, not as ordinary criminal looting.  But if the penalty of looting be thus spared, the Germans can hardly complain if they are themselves held to ransom when the fortunes of war go against them.  Liege and Lille and Antwerp and the rest must be paid their money back with interest; and there will be a big builder’s bill at Rheims.  But we should ourselves refrain strictly from blackmail.  We should sell neither our blood nor our mercy.  If we sell either we are as much brigands as Blucher.