Tears and laughter and moods and passions organised! Seventy million in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army to make war.
“With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth of the people,” as a German officer said, “when we go to war the people must all be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organisation is too small to have its effect.”
Compared to the French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician’s touch. A whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion, which spread to the trenches east and west. Something like the team work of the “rah-rah” of college athletics was applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that, or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra with the brasses predominant.
There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force. Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as side lights.
When Corey and I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five, who was helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey, lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the front.