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“The Belgians should not be shot dead. They should be … so left as to make impossible all hope of recovery. The troops are to treat the Belgian civil population with unrelenting severity and frightfulness. Weak nations have not the same right to live as powerful … nations. The world has no longer need of little nationalities. We Germans have little esteem and less respect … for Holland. We need to enlarge our colonial possessions; such territorial acquisitions we can only realize at the cost of other states.

“Russia must no longer be our frontier. The Polish press should be annihilated … likewise the French and Danish…. The Poles should be allowed … three privileges: to pay taxes, serve in the army, and shut their jaws. France must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross our path. You must remember that we have not come to make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadent and without respect for the Divine law. Against England we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have to … crush absolutely perfidious Albion … subdue her to such an extent that her influence all over the world is broken forever.

“German should replace English as the world language. English, the bastard tongue … must be swept into the remotest corners … until it has returned to its original elements of an insignificant pirate dialect. The German language acts as a blessing which, coming direct from the hand of God, sinks into the heart like a precious balm. To us, more than any other nation, is intrusted the true structure of human existence. Our own country, by employing military power, has attained a degree of Culture which it could never have reached by peaceful means.

“The civilization of mankind suffers every time a German becomes an American. Let us drop our miserable attempts to excuse Germany’s action. We willed it. Our might shall create a new law in Europe. It is Germany that strikes. We are morally and intellectually superior beyond all comparison…. We must … fight with Russian beasts, English mercenaries and Belgian fanatics. We have nothing to apologize for. It is no consequence whatever if all the monuments ever created, all the pictures ever painted, all the buildings ever erected by the great architects of the world, be destroyed…. The ugliest stone placed to mark the burial of a German grenadier is a more glorious monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together. No respect for the tombs of Shakespeare, Newton and Faraday.

“They call us barbarians. What of it? The German claim must be: … Education to hate…. Organization of hatred…. Education to the desire for hatred. Let us abolish unripe and false shame…. To us is given faith, hope and hatred; but hatred is the greatest among them.”

XII

Can the splendid land of Goethe unlearn its Prussian lesson and regain its own noble sanity, or has it too long inhaled the fumes? There is no saying yet. Still they sit inside their wall. Like a trained chorus they still repeat that England made the war, that Louvain was not destroyed, that Rheims was not bombarded, that their Fatherland is the unoffending victim of world-jealousy. When travelers ask what proofs they have, the trained chorus has but one reply: “Our government officials tell us so.” Berlin, Cologne, Munich–all their cities–give this answer to the traveler. Nothing that we know do they know. It is kept from them. Their brains still wear the Prussian uniform and go mechanically through the Prussian drill. Will adversity lift this curse?

Something happened at Louvain–a little thing, but let it give us hope. In the house of a professor at the University some German soldiers were quartered, friendly, considerate, doing no harm. Suddenly one day, in obedience to new orders, they fell on this home, burned books, wrecked rooms, destroyed the house and all its possessions. Its master is dead. His wife, looking on with her helpless children, saw a soldier give an apple to a child.