I
If you cannot hit or kick during a fight, at any rate you can spit. But, to be happy in this arm of the service, you have to feel sure that the adversary is signally fit to be spat upon. Hence, on each side in every war, the civilian will-to-believe that the other side are a set of ogres, every man of them. What a capital fiend the Boer, the man like Botha or Smuts, was made out to be during the last Boer War! He abused the white flag, he sawed a woman in two, he advanced behind screens of niggers; O, he was a great fellow! In 1870 French civilians laid freely to their souls the flattering unction that the Prussians murdered their prisoners. Strong in what was at bottom the same joyous faith, German civilians told you that French officers usually broke their parole. A few choice spirits will even carry this fond observance into the milder climate of sport. A boy of this kidney, while looking on at a vital house match, will give his mind ease by telling a friend what “a lot of stinkers” the other house are. A follower of Cambridge cricket, a man of fifty, in whom you might expect the choler of youth to have cooled, has been found musing darkly over a large photograph of an Oxford eleven. They seemed to me, as is the way of these heroes, to lack nothing of outward charm except the light of intellect in the eye. But “Look at them!” he observed with conviction. “The hangdog expressions! The narrow, ill-set Mongol eyes! The thin, cruel lips! Prejudice apart, would you like to meet that gang in a quiet place on a dark night?” From these sombre reflections he seemed to derive a sort of pasture.
Little doubt, then, as to what had to come when five of the greatest nations on earth were suddenly rolling over and under each other in the dust. While their armies saw to the biting, the snarling was done with a will by the press of Berlin and Vienna, Petrograd, Paris, and London. That we were all fighting foul, every man, was the burden of the strain. Phone and anti-phone, the choric hymn of detraction swelled; if this had been an age of simpler faith there might have been serious fear lest the music should reach the ear of some Jove sitting at his nectar; what if he should say in a rage that those nasty little beasts were at it again, and throw such a comet down on the earth as would settle the hash of us all? But no such fears troubled Europe. And then policy, viewing these operations of instinct, was moved to cut in. Official propaganda began, and one of its stock lines was to help in stoking these fires in the noncombatant heart.