Section 4

Mr. Britling was only one of a multitude who wanted to feel the bumps of Germany at that time.  The effort to understand a people who had suddenly become incredible was indeed one of the most remarkable facts in English intellectual life during the opening phases of the war.  The English state of mind was unlimited astonishment.  There was an enormous sale of any German books that seemed likely to illuminate the mystery of this amazing concentration of hostility; the works of Bernhardi, Treitschke, Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, became the material of countless articles and interminable discussions.  One saw little clerks on the way to the office and workmen going home after their work earnestly reading these remarkable writers.  They were asking, just as Mr. Britling was asking, what it was the British Empire had struck against.  They were trying to account for this wild storm of hostility that was coming at them out of Central Europe.

It was a natural next stage to this, when after all it became manifest that instead of there being a liberal and reluctant Germany at the back of imperialism and Junkerdom, there was apparently one solid and enthusiastic people, to suppose that the Germans were in some distinctive way evil, that they were racially more envious, arrogant, and aggressive than the rest of mankind.  Upon that supposition a great number of English people settled.  They concluded that the Germans had a peculiar devil of their own—­and had to be treated accordingly.  That was the second stage in the process of national apprehension, and it was marked by the first beginnings of a spy hunt, by the first denunciation of naturalised aliens, and by some anti-German rioting among the mixed alien population in the East End.  Most of the bakers in the East End of London were Germans, and for some months after the war began they went on with their trade unmolested.  Now many of these shops were wrecked....  It was only in October that the British gave these first signs of a sense that they were fighting not merely political Germany but the Germans.

But the idea of a peculiar malignity in the German quality as a key to the broad issue of the war was even less satisfactory and less permanent in Mr. Britling’s mind than his first crude opposition of militarism and a peaceful humanity as embodied respectively in the Central Powers and the Russo-Western alliance.  It led logically to the conclusion that the extermination of the German peoples was the only security for the general amiability of the world, a conclusion that appealed but weakly to his essential kindliness.  After all, the Germans he had met and seen were neither cruel nor hate-inspired.  He came back to that obstinately.  From the harshness and vileness of the printed word and the unclean picture, he fell back upon the flesh and blood, the humanity and sterling worth, of—­as a sample—­young Heinrich.