Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the

spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing

prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard
Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to

get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I
did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if

anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as
you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of

our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up
liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you

remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody
forget!

What the news was upon a certain forenoonmemorable to me, I do not
recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-

passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line
across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the

curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of
gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at

names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small

places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where
lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand

butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that
had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain

the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our
fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the

orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would
wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to

know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the bird of
prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had written it, he had

said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes had been leaking
out for all who chose to understand them. A great many did not so choose.

The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now more than ever
before, because he intended that we should pay his war bills. Let him

once get by England, and his sword would cut through our fat, defenseless
carcass like a knife through cheese.

A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said,
"Well, I like the French. But I'll not cry much if England gets hers.

What's England done in this war, anyway?"
"Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,"

retorted another voice.
With assuranceslightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the

first speaker protested, "Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as
any Kaiser."

"Aw, get your facts straight!" It was said with scornful force. "Don't
you know George III was a German? Don't you know it was Hessians--

they're Germans--he hired to come over here and kill Americans and do his
dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work the Kaiser's

are doing now. We've got a letter written after the battle of Long Island
by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And they stripped him

and they stole his things and they beat him down with the butts of their
guns--after he had surrendered, mind--when he was surrendered and naked,

and when he was down they beat him some more. That's Germans for you.
Only they've been getting worse while the rest of the world's been

getting better. Get your facts straight, man."
A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian his

ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this timely
debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to silence. Either

he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what is so pithily termed
"come-back." The latter, I incline to think; for come-back needs no

facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in the anti-Englishman
looks as if he had been a German. Germans do not come back when it goes

against them, they bleat "Kamerad!"--or disappear. Perhaps this man was a
spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking

about, peeping, listening, trying to wedge the Allies apart, doing his
little bit towards making friends enemies, just as his breed has worked

to set enmity between ourselves and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France
and England, France and Italy, England and Russia, between everybody and

everybody else all the world over, in the sacred name and for the sacred
sake of the Kaiser. Thus has his breed, since we occupied Coblenz, run to

the French soldiers with lies about us and then run to us with lies about
the French soldiers, overlooking in its providential stupidity the fact

that we and the French would inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his
breed, at the moment I write these words, infesting and poisoning the

earth with a propaganda that remains as coherent and as systematically
directed as ever it was before the papers began to assure us that there

was nothing left of the Hohenzollern government.
Chapter IV: "My Army of Spies"

"You will desire to know," said the Kaiser to his council at Potsdam in
June, 1908, after the successful testing of the first Zeppelin, "how the

hostilities will be brought about. My army of spies scattered over Great
Britain and France, as it is over North and South America, will take good

care of that. Even now I rule supreme in the United States, where three
million voters do my bidding at the Presidential elections."

Yes, they did his bidding; there, and elsewhere too. They did it at other
elections as well. Do you remember the mayor they tried to elect in

Chicago? and certain members of Congress? and certain manufacturers and
bankers? They did his bidding in our newspapers, our public schools, and

from the pulpit. Certain localities in one of the river counties of Iowa
(for instance) were spots of German treason to the United States. The

"exchange professors" that came from Berlin to Harvard and other
universities were so many camouflaged spies. Certain prominent American

citizens, dined and wined and flattered by the Kaiser for his purpose,
women as well as men, came back here mere Kaiser-puppets, hypnotized by

royalty. His bidding was done in as many ways as would fill a book.
Shopkeepers did it, servants did it, Americans among us were decorated by

him for doing it. Even after the Armistice, a school textbook "got by"
the Board of Education in a western state, wherein our boys and girls

were to be taught a German version--a Kaiser version--of Germany.
Somebody protested, and the board explained that it "hadn't noticed," and

the book was held up.
We cannot, I fear, order the school histories in Germany to be edited by

the Allies. German school children will grow up believing, in all prob-
ability, that bombs were dropped near Nurnberg in July, 1914, that German

soil was invaded, that the Fatherland fought a war of defense; they will
certainly be nourished by lies in the future as they were nourished by

lies in the past. But we can prevent Germans or pro-Germans writing our
own school histories; we can prevent that "army of spies" of which the

Kaiser boasted to his council at Potsdam in June, 1908, from continuing
its activities among us now and henceforth; and we can prevent our school

textbooks from playing into Germany's hand by teaching hate of England to
our boys and girls. Beside the sickening silliness which still asks,

"What has England done in the war?" is a silliness still more sickening
which says, "Germany is beaten. Let us forgive and forget." That is not

Christianity. There is nothing Christian about it. It is merely
sentimental slush, sloppy shirking of anything that compels national

alertness, or effort, or self-discipline, or self-denial; a moral
cowardice that pushes away any fact which disturbs a shallow, torpid,

irresponsible, self-indulgent optimism.
Our golden age of isolation is over. To attempt to return to it would be

a mere pernicious day-dream. To hark back to Washington's warning against
entangling alliances is as sensible as to go by a map of the world made

in 1796. We are coupled to the company of nations like a car in the
middle of a train, only more inevitably and permanently, for we cannot

uncouple; and if we tried to do so, we might not wreck the train, but we
should assuredly wreck ourselves. I think the war has brought us one

benefit certainly: that many young men return from Europe knowing this,
who had no idea of it before they went, and who know also that Germany is

at heart an untamed, unchanged wild beast, never to be trusted again. We
must not, and shall not, boycott her in trade; but let us not go to sleep

at the switch! Just as busily as she is bakingpottery opposite Coblenz,