But man, rash man, must always be trying to go one better than the best. With this thing of beauty there for our use, crying out to be used, some of our propagandists must needs go beyond it and try to make out that the average German soldier, the docile blond with yellow hair, long skull, and blue, woolgathersome eyes, who swarmed in our corps cages during the last two years of the war, craving for some one, anyone, to give him an order, was one of the monsters who hang about the gates of Vergil's Hell. If you had to make out a good hanging case against Germany could you, as Hamlet asks his injudicious mother, on that fair mountain cease to feed and batten on this moor? And yet some of us did. The authentic scarecrow, the school of thought that ruled the old German State, was not used for half of what it was worth. But the word went forth that any redeeming traits in the individual German conscript were better hushed up. When he showed extreme courage in an attack, not much must be made of it. When he behaved well to a wounded Englishman, it must be hidden. A war correspondent who mentioned some chivalrous act that a German had done to an Englishman during an action received a rebuking wire from his employer, "Don't want to hear about any nice, good Germans." Even in the very temple of humourless shabbiness comedy may contrive to keep up a little shrine of her own, and on this forlorn altar the dread of "crying up anything German" laid, now and then, an undesigned offering. One worthy field censor was suddenly taken aback by a dangerous flaw in a war correspondent's exultant account of a swiftly successful British attack. "Within ten minutes from zero," I think the correspondent had written, "our men were sitting at ease on what had been the enemy's parapet, smoking good German cigars." "Hullo!" said the censor, "this won't do. 'Good' German cigars. _Good_ German cigars! No! 'Good' must come out." And come out it did. Like the _moral_ of his troops, like the generalship of his chiefs, the foeman's tobacco had to be bad. It was the time when some of our patriotic pundits found out that Mommsen's Roman history was all wrong, and that Poppo did not half know his Thucydides. III