It is probably true that the average soldier who fought on the German side at Ypres and elsewhere {123} was hardly more conversant with the writings of Treitschke, Nietzsche, and Bernhardi than the average British soldier opposed to him was with those of Herbert Spencer, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Norman Angell. It is very unlikely, however, that the battle of Ypres would ever have been fought had it not been for the ideas which sprang from these and similar sources. The influence of the written and spoken word upon German policy and action is glaringly manifest.[13] It inspired and supported the high bureaucrats at Berlin, and had equally to do, if indirectly, with the marching of the humblest raw recruits shoulder to shoulder to be shot down on the Menin Road. For by a process of percolation through the press and popular literature, the doctrines of these teachers--diluted somewhat, it is true, and a good deal disguised and perverted--had reached a very wide audience. Though the names of these authors were for the most part unknown, though their opinions had never been either understood or accepted by the common people, the effects of their teaching had made themselves felt in every home in Germany. The German private soldier would not have been shot down unless these eloquent sermons had been preached. None the less, he had never grasped or understood, far less had he adhered to and professed, the cardinal doctrines which they contained. He still believed in the old-fashioned morality, and thought that states as well as individual men were bound to act justly. It was this faith which gave {124} him his strength, and made him die gladly. For he believed that Germany had acted justly, the Allies unjustly, that it was his task, along with other good men and true, to win victory for his Emperor and safety for his Fatherland, and to crush the treacherous and malignant aggressors. In spite of all this preliminary discoursing which had been going on for many years past, like artillery preparation before an infantry attack--about world-power, will-to-power, and all the rest of it--nothing is more remarkable than the contrast presented, immediately after war broke out, between the blatancy of those writers who had caused the war and the bleating of those (in many cases the same) who sought to justify Germany's part in it to their countrymen and the world.