The committee which inquired into German atrocities in Belgium, and is responsible for the Bryce Report, had on it such shrewd, practical, hard-headed men as Lord Bryce, Sir Edward Clarke, Sir Frederick Pollock, and their report is the most dreadful indictment ever drawn up against any nation, civilised or uncivilised. It says: ‘In the minds of Prussian officers, war seems to have become a sort of sacred mission, one of the highest functions of the omnipotent State, which is itself as much an army as a State. Ordinary morality and the ordinary sentiment of pity vanish in its presence, superseded by a new standard which justifies to the soldier every means that can conduce to success, however shocking to a natural sense of justice and humanity, however revolting to his own feeling.... Cruelty becomes legitimate when it promises victory.’ Then a very pregnant sentence is added: ‘It is a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a ruling caste who have brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession, and been hypnotised by its spirit.... If this explanation be the true one, the mystery is solved, and that which seemed scarcely credible becomes more intelligible, though not less pernicious.’ The use of ‘frightfulness’ as a method of war, in other words, is the result of diseased psychological conditions. To have ‘brooded and thought and written and talked and dreamed about war’ is a process which might well result in an evil obsession as real, and as devilish in its spirit and its fruits, as possession by the devil himself. But the most astonishing thing in this whole astonishing story is that Germany betrays no sense that it has done anything worthy of blame. It learns with a bewildered exasperation that the outside world disapproves of this example of German ‘culture.’ The Kaiser is quite sure that he has the Divine approval in this, and everything else he does. From the wireless station at Berlin an official ‘explanation’ of this stupendous crime of a destroyed city was sent to the newspapers of the world: ‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity, and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.’ Now, as an example of inverted ethics, this is almost worthy of a place in De Quincey’s essay on ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ ‘The German Government,’ says Secretary Hay, ‘is generally brutal, but not often silly.’ Here, however, it is at once both silly and brutal in a quite superlative degree. It is, of course, exactly this doctrine of ‘frightfulness’ which has made Germany the outlaw of the civilised world. Perhaps nothing in this war will so sharply arrest what we have called the literary imagination as the uncertainty, the dim half-lights as to its reasons and issues, with which it began.