The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/We Believed It
WE BELIEVED IT
We believed it. I am compelled to count
myself among the number of my countrymen who
through many years believed that story—that
the accident of Germany's disadvantageous geographical
position, not her desire to break
British supremacy on the sea, made it necessary
for her to enlarge her navy. I did my best to believe
it when I had to sail through the Kiel Canal
in a steamer from Cuxhaven to Copenhagen,
which was forced to shoulder her way through an
ever-increasing swarm of German battleships. I
did my best to believe it when I had to sail under
the threatening fortresses of Heligoland which
stood anchored out at the mouth of the Bight
like a mastiff at the end of his chain snarling at
the sea. I did my best to believe it when I had
to travel to Cologne by night, and the darkened
railway carriages were lit up by fierce flashes
from gigantic furnaces which were making
mountains of munitions for the evil day when
frail man would have to face the murderous
slaughter of machine-guns. I did my best to
believe it even in Berlin when German friends
of the scholastic classes accounted for their
tolerance of conscription and of the tyranny of
clanking soldiery in the streets, the cafes, and
the hotels on the ground of disciplinary usefulness
rather than military necessity. And then there was the human charm of some
German homes to soothe away suspicion—the
scholar's quiet house (beyond the clattering
parade-ground at Potsdam) where we clinked
glasses and drank "to all good friends in England,"
and the sweet simplicity of the little town in
Westphalia, with its green fields and its sweetly-flowing
river, where the nightingale sang all night
long, and where, in the midst of musical societies,
Goethe Societies and Shakespeare Societies, it
was so difficult to think of Germany as a nation
dreaming only of world-power and dominion.
Even yet it strikes a chill to the heart to recall
those German homes as scenes of prolonged
duplicity. I prefer not to do so. But all the
same I see now that the wings of war were
already approaching them, and that the German
people heard their far-off murmur long before
ourselves—heard it and told us nothing, perhaps
much less and worse than nothing.