Mein Kampf
the heavy long-distance batteries was pounding upon the gates of Paris?
How the boiling heat of national passion was hurled in the faces of the retreating regiments! How propaganda and inspired skill at influencing the masses labored to pound into the hearts of the broken fronts a belief in the final victory, now more than ever!
And what was happening on our side? Nothing, or worse than nothing.
I was often carried away with anger and indignation when I received the latest newspapers, and saw the psychological mass murder they were committing.
More than once I was tortured by the thought that if Providence had put me in place of these incompetent or criminal could-nots and would-nots in our propaganda service, war would have been declared on Destiny in a different fashion.
During those months I felt for the first time the full force of the malicious fate which kept me at the front, in a spot where the chance gesture of any negro might shoot me down, while in another place I might have done very different service for the Fatherland.
Even then I was presumptuous enough to believe I would have succeeded. But I was a nameless one among eight millions; so it was better to hold my tongue, and to do my duty as well as possible where I was.
In the summer of 1916 the first enemy leaflets fell into our hands.
Although with some changes of form, their substance was almost invariably the same: Distress in Germany was growing ever greater; the war would last forever, while the chance of winning it was vanishing; and for that reason the people at home were longing for peace, but “militarism” and the “Kaiser” would not permit it; the whole world—which well realized this—was therefore not making war on the German people, but exclusively upon the sole guilty party, the Kaiser; the struggle would not come to an end until this enemy of peaceable mankind was eliminated; but
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