Now It Can Be Told · Part VIII · Part 8 1 (2/2)

The official propaganda, the words and actions of British statesmen, did actually express the conscious and subconscious psychology of the multitude. The call to the old watchwords of national pride and imperial might thrilled the soul of a people of proud tradition in sea-battles and land-battles. Appeals for the rescue of “the little nations” struck old chords of chivalry and sentiment⁠—though with a strange lack of logic and sincerity Irish demand for self-government was unheeded. Base passions as well as noble instincts were stirred easily. Greedy was the appetite of the mob for atrocity tales. The more revolting they were the quicker they were swallowed. The foul absurdity of the “corpse-factory” was not rejected any more than the tale of the “crucified Canadian” (disproved by our own G.H.Q.) or the cutting off of children’s hands and women’s breasts, for which I could find no evidence from the only British ambulances working in the districts where such horrors were reported. Spy-mania flourished in mean streets, German music was banned in English drawing-rooms. Preachers and professors denied any quality of virtue or genius to German poets, philosophers, scientists, or scholars. A critical weighing of evidence was regarded as pro-Germanism and lack of patriotism. Truth was delivered bound to passion. Hatred at home, inspired largely by feminine hysteria and official propaganda, reached such heights that when fighting-men came back on leave their refusal to say much against their enemy, their straightforward assertions that Fritz was not so black as he was painted, that he fought bravely, died gamely, and in the prison-camps was well-mannered, decent, industrious, good-natured, were heard with shocked silence by mothers and sisters who could only excuse this absence of hate on the score of war-weariness.