I have sometimes wondered if it is really possible to hate a country for which one has such unbounded contempt and disgust as one has for Germany. It is quite possible to fear without hate; one would not hate a rattlesnake or a shark, even at close quarters. On the other hand it is conceivable that you might hate a fearsome but still noble beast like the lion, if you were camping on the desert and he sat persistently in front of your tent, alternately licking his chops and shaking your soul with his loud anticipatory roars.
Usually we do fear what we hate. But the Germans have overshot the mark. They have been so dully and unchangeably brutal, that many of us have come to feel for them the same mental condition of loathing we should feel for an obscene, flat-headed giant running amok, while doing our best to hit him in a vulnerable spot. Even if they reached these shores and went automatically about disciplining the natives I feel sure we should continue to despise them and to find them ridiculous.
It is possible that if they had won the war in three months we should feel differently. Then we might have hated them for devastating France, but she it would have been who received our contempt. Her course in history would have been run; she would have been as degenerate as the Germans so fondly hoped. We might have hated Germany for subjugating so vast and potential a country as Russia, but we should have respected her might, the magnificance of her great army. We should have hated her roundly, and the hate would have done us all good, for it would have been a great emotion provoked by a great cause.
But Germany as a fighting machine is a failure. She has been defeated where she has been compelled to depend upon force of arms alone. Her only striking successes have been won by hitting below the belt, cowardly underhand methods, sneaking propaganda, millions expended upon buying human tools, and furnishing them with other millions necessary to work wholesale destruction, and sacrifice the helpless proletariat.
In the Death House at Sing Sing the robust murderers have no sympathy for the poisoner, refuse to admit him to that last tragic companionship. So it is with Germany. She is the poisoner, the Medici, among nations. From strangling her enemy with gas to bombing unfortified towns, torpedoing passenger ships and firing on the life boats, or sinking hospital ships, often carrying her own wounded to ease and plenty, she has merely shown herself the super-snake, supercharged with venom, not the lion, who proudly stands in the open spaces and challenges his enemy to battle. The bewildered expression on the faces of these German clods in the act of being rescued by British women nurses, while a home torpedo burrows in the vitals of the ship, is a fair portent of the minds of the German people after the war when they learn that they have been fooled, and martyred, and crushed, not by the enemy but by their own unregenerate rulers in Berlin. If they annihilate that caste and set up a Republic they may win back the respect of the world. Otherwise not. We sometimes forgive those we hate, but only a miracle forces a man to respect where he has both instinctively and thinkingly despised.
GERTRUDE ATHERTON.
