The strength of the wolf pack as a gregarious unit is undoubtedly, in suitable circumstances, enormous. This strength would seem to depend on a continuous possibility of attack and action. How far it can be maintained in inactivity and mere defence is another matter. . . . * * * * * Since the beginning of this war attracted a really concentrated attention to the psychology of the German people, it has been very obvious that one of the most striking feelings amongst Englishmen has been bewilderment. They have found an indescribable strangeness in the utterances of almost all German personages and newspapers, in their diplomacy, in their friendliness to such as they wished to propitiate, in their enmity to those they wished to alarm and intimidate. This strange quality is very difficult to define or even to attempt to describe, and has very evidently perplexed almost all writers on the war. The only thing one can be sure of is that it is there. It shows itself at times as a simplicity or even childishness, as a boorish cunning, as an incredible ant-like activity, as a sudden blast of maniacal boasting, a reckless savagery of gloating in blood, a simple-minded sentimentality, as outbursts of idolatry, not of the pallid, metaphorical, modern type, but the full-blooded African kind, with all the apparatus of idol and fetish and tom-tom, and with it all a steady confidence that these are the principles of civilization, of truth, of justice, and of Christ. {174} I have tried to put down at random some of the factors in this curious impression as they occur to the memory, but the mere enumeration of them is not possible without risking the objective composure of one’s attitude—an excellent incidental evidence that the strangeness is a reality. The incomprehensibility to the English of the whole trend of German feeling and expression suggests that there is some deeply rooted instinctive conflict of attitude between them. One may risk the speculation that this conflict is between socialized gregariousness and aggressive gregariousness. As the result of the inculcation of national arrogance and aggression, Germany has lapsed into a special type of social instinct which has opened a gulf of separation in feeling between her and other civilized peoples. Such an effect is natural enough. Nothing produces the sense of strangeness so much as differences of instinctive reaction. A similar though wider gap in instinctive reaction gives to us the appearance of strangeness and queerness in the behaviour of the cat as contrasted with the dog, which is so much more nearly allied in feeling to ourselves.