Nor did I ever hear any German, not even a Socialist of the extremest left, not even a Bavarian, admit that Germany was wholly in the wrong. Once only did I hear a man go so far as to assert that Germany had at least half the guilt of the war. He was a stanch-minded, rather conservative Socialist living in the Polish atmosphere of Bromberg. On the other hand, citizens of the Allied countries, who had dwelt in Germany since 1914, were all more or less firm converts to the England-France-Russia theory. Such is the power of environment. An English governess, who had lost a brother in the war and who was returning home for the first time since it began, expressed the fear that she would soon be compelled to return to Germany to preserve her peace of mind. A few laid the blame entirely to Russia; some charged it all to “the Jews,” implying a rather extraordinary power on the part of the million or so of that race within the Empire.
Now and then one ran across a simple old countryman who took his opinions wholly and unreservedly as they had been delivered to him, without ever having opened the package. “How did it start? Why, let’s see. They killed some prince down in ... somewhere or other, I never can remember these foreign names, and his wife, too, if I remember, and then Russia ...” and so on. He was of the same class as those who asserted, “I don’t know when gas was first used, or just where, but it was by the wicked French—or was it the scoundrelly English?” But these simple, swallow-it-whole yokels were on the whole more rare than they would have been in many another land. However much we may sneer at her _Kultur_, the Kaiser régime brought to the most distant corners of the Empire a certain degree of instruction, even if it was only of a deliberately Teutonic brand. In the great majority of cases one was astounded at the clear, comprehensive, and, within limits, unprejudiced view of all the field of European politics of many a peasant grubbing out his existence on a remote hillside. More than one of them could have exchanged minds with some of our national officials to the decided advantage of the latter. My memory still harks back to the tall, ungainly farmer in whose lowly little inn I spent the last night of my German tramp, a man who had lived almost incessantly in the trenches during all the war, and returned home still a “simple soldier,” who topped off a sharp, clear-cut exposé of the politics of Europe for the past half-century with: “Who started it? Listen. Suppose a diligent, sober, hard-working mechanic is engaged on the same job with an arrogant, often careless, and sometimes intoxicated competitor. Suppose the competitor begins to note that if things go on as they are the sober mechanic will in time be given all the work, for being the more efficient, or that there will come a time when, thanks to his diligence, there will be no work left for either of them. If the rowdy suddenly strikes his rival a foul blow in the back when he is not looking and the hard-worker drops his tools and strikes back, who started it?”