The sentiment is typical; German diaries are full of such things. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that the kind of teaching which has made Clausewitz and Treitschke and Bernhardi the gospel of the German people, and has found authoritative expression in the German War Book, could have commanded the prestige which it does command in Germany if it had not found a people apt and eager by temperament to receive it. Germany stands alone among modern nations in extending its official conception, and even its academic analysis[71] of war, to include the deliberate “terrorization” of non-combatants. She alone has taught, both by precept and example, that there are no limitations to what is justifiable by the exigencies of war. “_C’est la guerre_” is the common answer of German officers when implored by the victims to stop the lust and rapine of their men.[72] It follows from all this that war as taught and practised by the Germans exceeds in savagery even the practices of the ancient world, in which it was thought the mark of barbarism to poison wells, desecrate temples and murder priests--practices which the Germans have not hesitated to pursue. Incitement to assassination, which was thought a mean and dishonourable thing by the Roman mind,[73] is specifically recommended in the German War Book. In the ancient world the vanquished were regarded as rightless, and whole populations were sold into slavery after they had been decimated by the slaughter of their leading citizens. The German practice is not intrinsically different; municipal magistrates, parish priests, and one in three of the civil population have been butchered, many civilians carried off to Germany to work in the fields, and those who are left behind forced to dig trenches for their captors while their wives and daughters are handed over to the lust of the soldiery, and their movable property transported. It is difficult to see how this differs in anything but name from the tragic fate of those unhappy communities who in the laconic phrase of the ancient world passed _sub corona_ and were sold by auction. All this differs from the practices of the ancient world in nothing except a certain affectation, the one concession to modern sentiment being a studious defamation by the Germans of the people whom they ravish and despoil. It seems to me that bad as the German crimes are the German justification for them is even worse. For it betrays a real corruption of mind. The ancients were often brutal but they were never hypocritical. The Bankruptcy of The Hague Conventions.