Thrashed in the nursery, tormented in school, the German lad must then face a period of bullying in barracks, for, if he has managed to survive his _Gymnasia_ years in health, he will enter the army. It is not necessary in this narrative to dilate upon the cruelties committed in German barracks in the sacrosanct name of Discipline and Thoroughness. There is a literature in Germany on that subject, too, and the penal records of the military and civil courts comprise the bulk of it. It is only with the lesson of the system with which we need to concern ourselves here; and that is, that the German man who emerges from the army comes out with notions about the efficacy and justifiability of brute force and brutality which are certain, under the red license which war confers, to find expression in terrible deeds. In other words, a German who has himself perhaps been assaulted by his regimental sergeant on scores of occasions (such cases are plentiful), who has seen the bloody saber-duel elevated in his university days to the level of the manliest art, who has throughout his life been a supine victim of police violence, who holds womankind in semi-contempt, who thinks it sportsmanlike to shoot birds alight, who rejoices in his prowess as a slaughterer of wild game, who beats his horses, who is as unfamiliar with the ethics of sport and play as he is with the lingo of a Choctaw dialect--such a man, I say, is bound, when he is sent forth with his Kaiser’s mandate to "hack his way through," to stagger humanity as the Germans have never ceased to stagger it on land, on sea and in the air since August, 1914. Given a nation of non-combatants who have been instructed to believe that these things _must_ be because otherwise their existence will be imperiled, and you have to do with a community which, however delightful its qualities as individuals, is no longer capable of measuring right and wrong, by normal standards and which is ready to tolerate any and everything, as long as it is part and parcel of the general scheme to "preserve the Fatherland." If one considers all these things, which I set down in no spirit of venom, but purely in an attempt to diagnose German war callousness, one will begin to be able to understand why German sensibilities remain unshocked in the presence of things which have horrified civilization. One’s understanding will be complete if it is remembered that not one in a million Germans believes that these things have happened at all!