But the convulsions of war have thrown up things that are
deeper than these, primaeval things, which, until recently, civilization
was believed to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods who gave their
names to the days of the week are alive again in Germany. The English
soldier of to-day goes into action with the cold courage of a man who is
prepared to make the best of a bad job. The German soldier sacrifices
himself, in a frenzy of religious exaltation, to the War-God. The
filthiness that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of all that
is elegant and gracious and antique, their spitting into the food that
is to be eaten by their prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred
vessels in the churches--all these things, too numerous and too
monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarsenesses of the
brute beast; they are a solemn ritual of filth, religiously practised,
by officers no less than by men. The waves of emotional exaltation which
from time to time pass over the whole people have the same character,
the character of savage religion.
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