The first intimations of this that struck upon his mind were the news of the behaviour of the Kaiser and the Berlin crowd upon the declaration of war, and the violent treatment of the British subjects seeking to return to their homes.  Everywhere such people had been insulted and ill-treated.  It was the spontaneous expression of a long-gathered bitterness.  While the British ambassador was being howled out of Berlin, the German ambassador to England was taking a farewell stroll, quite unmolested, in St. James’s Park....  One item that struck particularly upon Mr. Britling’s imagination was the story of the chorus of young women who assembled on the railway platform of the station through which the British ambassador was passing to sing—­to his drawn blinds—­“Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles.”  Mr. Britling could imagine those young people, probably dressed more or less uniformly in white, with flushed faces and shining eyes, letting their voices go, full throated, in the modern German way....

And then came stories of atrocities, stories of the shooting of old men and the butchery of children by the wayside, stories of wounded men bayoneted or burnt alive, of massacres of harmless citizens, of looting and filthy outrages....

Mr. Britling did his utmost not to believe these things.  They contradicted his habitual world.  They produced horrible strains in his mind.  They might, he hoped, be misreported so as to seem more violent or less justifiable than they were.  They might be the acts of stray criminals, and quite disconnected from the normal operations of the war.  Here and there some weak-minded officer may have sought to make himself terrible....  And as for the bombardment of cathedrals and the crime of Louvain, well, Mr. Britling was prepared to argue that Gothic architecture is not sacrosanct if military necessity cuts through it....  It was only after the war had been going on some months that Mr. Britling’s fluttering, unwilling mind was pinned down by official reports and a cloud of witnesses to a definite belief in the grim reality of systematic rape and murder, destruction, dirtiness and abominable compulsions that blackened the first rush of the Prussians into Belgium and Champagne....

They came hating and threatening the lands they outraged.  They sought occasion to do frightful deeds....  When they could not be frightful in the houses they occupied, then to the best of their ability they were destructive and filthy.  The facts took Mr. Britling by the throat....

The first thing that really pierced Mr. Britling with the conviction that there was something essentially different in the English and the German attitude towards the war was the sight of a bale of German comic papers in the study of a friend in London.  They were filled with caricatures of the Allies and more particularly of the English, and they displayed a force and quality of passion—­an incredible force and quality of passion.  Their amazing hate and their amazing filthiness alike overwhelmed Mr. Britling.  There was no appearance of national pride or national dignity, but a bellowing patriotism and a limitless desire to hurt and humiliate.  They spat.  They were red in the face and they spat.  He sat with these violent sheets in his hands—­ashamed.