When the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the
proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that invincible soul
of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so arrogantly
denying for more than a century. Perhaps in the whole record of human
transactions there have never been performances so brazen and so vile as
the manifestoes of the German Emperor and the Grand Duke Nicholas of
Russia; and, I imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human
heart and intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were
flung into the face of historical truth. It was like a scene in a
cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort
unfathomable by the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be
so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment. At that time,
and for the first two months of the war, I happened to be in Poland, and
I remember perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out,
the confidence in the moral turpitude of mankind they implied did not
even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men whose most sacred feelings
and dignity they outraged.
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