"But surely," I said, "a man like Franz von Kreu-zenach admits the brutality of Germany in Belgium--the shooting of. priests and civilians--the forced labour of girls--the smashing of machinery--and all the rest of it?"
Brand said that Franz von Kreuzenach deplored the "severity" of German acts, but blamed the code of war which justified such acts. It was not his view that Germans had behaved with exceptional brutality, but that war itself is a brutal way of argument. "We must abolish war," he says, "not pretend to make it kind." As far as that goes, I agree with him.
"How about poison gas, the _Lusitania_, the sinking of hospital ships, submarine warfare?"
"The German answer is always the same. War is war, and they were hard pressed by our superiority in material, man-power and sea-power. We were starving them to death with our blockade. They saw their children dying and diseased, their old people carried to the grave, their men weakened. They had to break through somehow, anyhow, to save their race. I don't think we should have stopped at much if England had been ringed round with enemy ships and the kids were starving in Mayfair and Maida Vale, and every town and hamlet."
He laughed, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he lit his pipe for about the fifteenth time.
"Argument is no good," he said. "I've argued into the early hours of the morning with that fellow Franz von Kreuzenach, who is a fine fellow and the whitest man I've met in Germany. Nothing will convince him that his people were, more guilty than ourselves. Perhaps he's right. History will decide. Now we must start afresh--wipe out the black past, confess that though the Germans started the war we were all possessed by the devil--and exorcise ourselves. I believe the German people are ready to turn over a new leaf and start a fresh chapter of history if we will help them and give them a chance. They have an immense hope that England and America will not push them over into the bottomless abyss, now that they have fulfilled Wilson's demand to get rid of their old rulers and fall into line with the world's democracy. If that hope fails them they will fall back to the old philosophy of hatred, with vengeance as its goal--and the damned thing will happen again in fifteen--twenty--thirty years."