Long before the war, Germany had published far and wide her scorn of her enemies. The Russians were an undisciplined barbarian horde; the English, stupid idlers who spent on their sport the energy that the industrious German devoted to preparing himself for world rule. As for the French, they were an amiable and amusing people, but degenerate--fickle, feeble, rotten with disease. Germany's hate was reserved for the English, her most ignoble slurs for the French. Needless to say, Germany has not found any one of her many enemies as wholly despicable as she had imagined them to be. Her miscalculations were greatest with France. That the French people are smaller in stature than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,--negligible. This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of that lack of imagination which is the Teuton's undoing.
The courage, endurance, and high spirit displayed by the French have compelled German admiration. The French have become the most tolerable of all her enemies, and it is an open secret that for many months Germany has desired to win France away from her allies by an honorable, even advantageous peace. Meantime French prisoners are favored in the German prison camps, being accorded a treatment altogether more humane than that given the English prisoners or the Russians. But France has replied to the dishonorable advances no more than to the calumnies. One of the astonishing revelations of national psychology unfolded in the war has been the taciturnity of the French, their silent tenacity. For nearly two generations the nation has lived in expectation of an ultimate struggle for existence with the barbarian: now that it has come with more than the feared ferocity the French have no time or energy to waste in comment. They must expel the barbarian from their home and put a limit "for an hundred years" to the menace of his barbarism.
That is in part why the clear-headed Latin has learned the German lesson faster than his allies.