I believe in the truthfulness of that abbé of Esternay, who was one of the unfortunates that the Germans used as a screen before the operations of a body of troops. I believe in the truthfulness of the keen old peasant woman at Châtillon, whose home had been riddled by German bullets and who had been fired at when she took refuge in the cellar of her house, and of many others with whom I talked of their experiences during the early days of September, 1914. Unfortunately, there was no photographer at work those days along the Marne valley, though no doubt the German denying office would instantly impugn the evidence of a photograph of the act. Each one of us, however, has his own inner instinctive tests of truth to which he puts the credibility of a story, and I believe the abbé, the old woman, and many others who suffered abominably at the hands of German soldiers.
One fact only too evident to anybody who has followed in German footsteps through the valley of the Marne is the part that mere drunkenness had in this affair. The flower of the German army was incredibly drunken throughout the advance into France. Pillage, rape, incendiarism followed inevitably. They are common crimes to be expected where an exhausted soldiery is inflamed with drink. But the cowardly slaughter of non-combatants, the wanton destruction of monuments, the brutal tyrannies toward conquered peoples--these are the blacker crimes against the German name.
Self-control is not a Teutonic ideal. Of all the psychological surprises that the war has revealed, the exhibition of the German temperament has not been one of the least. Not its frank philosophic materialism, which any one who had followed the drift of German thought and literature might have expected, but its extraordinary lack of self-control. English and Americans are taught that an individual who cannot master his own temper is unfit to master others. Yet here is a people pretending to world rule whose tempers individually are so little under control that they explode in senseless passion on the least provocation. The German nation froths with hate first against the English because they were neither as cowardly nor selfish as had been expected, then against the Italians because they would not listen to Prince von Bülow's song, latterly against Americans because the United States dared to question the divine right of Germany to do with neutrals what she pleased. Judging from the German press and from the Germans whom I have met, the German nation is living in a ferment of rage, all the more extraordinary as the fighting seems to have gone their way thus far. What would happen to this uncontrolled people should the war take an unfavorable turn and not supply them with daily victories? Self-control is not included in that famous German discipline. Uncontrolled tempers, drink, the ordinary fund of brutality in the pit of human beings with the extraordinary conditions of war will explain much of all this barbarism--but not all.