Then again it would be some incident of death and mutilation in Antwerp, that Van der Pant described to him.  The Germans in Belgium were shooting women frequently, not simply for grave spying but for trivial offences....  Then came the battleship raid on Whitby and Scarborough, and the killing among other victims of a number of children on their way to school.  This shocked Mr. Britling absurdly, much more than the Belgian crimes had done.  They were English children.  At home!...  The drowning of a great number of people on a torpedoed ship full of refugees from Flanders filled his mind with pitiful imaginings for days.  The Zeppelin raids, with their slow crescendo of blood-stained futility, began before the end of 1914....  It was small consolation for Mr. Britling to reflect that English homes and women and children were, after all, undergoing only the same kind of experience that our ships have inflicted scores of times in the past upon innocent people in the villages of Africa and Polynesia....

Each month the war grew bitterer and more cruel.  Early in 1915 the Germans began their submarine war, and for a time Mr. Britling’s concern was chiefly for the sailors and passengers of the ships destroyed.  He noted with horror the increasing indisposition of the German submarines to give any notice to their victims; he did not understand the grim reasons that were turning every submarine attack into a desperate challenge of death.  For the Germans under the seas had pitted themselves against a sea power far more resourceful, more steadfast and skilful, sterner and more silent, than their own.  It was not for many months that Mr. Britling learnt the realities of the submarine blockade.  Submarine after submarine went out of the German harbours into the North Sea, never to return.  No prisoners were reported, no boasting was published by the British fishers of men; U boat after U boat vanished into a chilling mystery....  Only later did Mr. Britling begin to hear whispers and form ideas of the noiseless, suffocating grip that sought through the waters for its prey.

The Falaba crime, in which the German sailors were reported to have jeered at the drowning victims in the water, was followed by the sinking of the Lusitania.  At that a wave of real anger swept through the Empire.  Hate was begetting hate at last.  There were violent riots in Great Britain and in South Africa.  Wretched little German hairdressers and bakers and so forth fled for their lives, to pay for the momentary satisfaction of the Kaiser and Herr Ballin.  Scores of German homes in England were wrecked and looted; hundreds of Germans maltreated.  War is war.  Hard upon the Lusitania storm came the publication of the Bryce Report, with its relentless array of witnesses, its particulars of countless acts of cruelty and arrogant unreason and uncleanness in Belgium and the occupied territory of France.  Came also the gasping torture of “gas,” the use of flame jets, and a new exacerbation of the savagery of the actual fighting.  For a time it seemed as though the taking of prisoners along the western front would cease.  Tales of torture and mutilation, tales of the kind that arise nowhere and out of nothing, and poison men’s minds to the most pitiless retaliations, drifted along the opposing fronts....