I encountered the same argument, and more violent hostility, from a high ecclesiastic in Berlin, who was a great friend of the Kaiser’s and formerly a professed lover of England. He was a tall, thin, handsome man, who spoke English perfectly, but was not very civil to me. Presently, as we talked of the relations between our two nations, he paced up and down the room with evident emotion, with suppressed rage, indeed, which broke at last through his restraint.
“English policy,” he said, “cuts directly across our legitimate German rights. England is trying to hem in Germany, to hamper her at every turn, to humiliate her in every part of the world, and to prevent her economic development. During recent days she has not hesitated to affront us very deeply and deliberately. It is intolerable!”
He spoke of an “inevitable war” with startling candor, and when I said something about the duty of all Christian men, especially of a priest like himself, to prevent such an unbelievable horror, he asked harshly whether I had come to insult him, and touched the bell for my dismissal.
Such conversations were alarming. Yet I did not believe that they represented the general opinion of the great mass of German people. I was only able to get glimpses here and there in Düsseldorf and Frankfort, Hanover, Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden of middle-class and working-class thought, but wherever I was able to test it in casual conversation with business men, railway porters, laborers, hotel waiters, and so on, with whom I exchanged ideas in my very crude German, or their remarkably good English (in the case of commercial men and waiters), I found utter incredulity regarding the possibility of war between England and Germany, and a contempt of the sword-rattling and “shining armor” of the Kaiser and the military caste.
I was, for instance, in a company of commercial men at _Abendessen_ in a hotel at Leipzig, when the topic of conversation was the Zabern affair, in which Lieutenant von Förstner had drawn his sword upon civilians--and a cripple--who had jeered at him for swaggering down the sidewalk like a popinjay. The Crown Prince had sent him a telegram of approbation for his defense of his uniform and caste. But, one and all, the commercial men with whom I sat expressed their loathing of this military arrogance, and were indignant with those who defended its absurdity. I remember the German who sat next to me had been a designer in a porcelain factory in the English potteries for many years. With him I talked quietly of the chance of war between England and Germany. “What is the real feeling of the ordinary folk in Germany?” I asked. He answered with what I am certain was absolute sincerity--though he was wrong, as history proved. He told me that, outside the military caste, there was no war feeling in Germany, and that the idea of a conflict with England was abhorrent and unbelievable to the German people. “If there were to be war with England,” he said, “we should weep at the greatest tragedy that could befall mankind.”