Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at home! Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something. As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant. "Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate. "If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge into machine-guns." Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England, almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine. The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as "brave foes." What quarrel could France and Germany have? France had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through, cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and the untutored Slav. It was not alone in Germany that a responsive Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in Germany the machinery ran smoothest.