This was revealed in a curious way at the time of the signature of the Treaty. At the gathering of the representatives, the German delegate spoke sitting down. It turned out afterwards that he was so ill and distraught, that he dared not trust himself to stand up. Every paper was full of the incident, as also of the fact that the paper-cutter in front of him on the table was found afterwards to be broken; that he placed his gloves upon his copy of the Treaty; and that he had thrown away his cigarette on entering the room. These were the offences which prompted the _Daily Mail_ to say: 'After this no one will treat the Huns as civilised or repentant.' Almost the entire Press rang with the story of 'Rantzau's insult.' But not one paper, so far as I could discover, paid any attention to what Rantzau had said. He said:-- 'I do not want to answer by reproaches to reproaches.... Crimes in war may not be excusable, but they are committed in the struggle for victory and in the defence of national existence, and passions are aroused which make the conscience of peoples blunt. The hundreds of thousands of non-combatants who have perished since November 11 by reason of the blockade, were killed with cold deliberation, after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.' No one seems to have noticed this trifle in presence of the heinousness of the cigarette, the gloves, and the other crimes. Yet this was an insult indeed. If true, it shamefully disgraces England--if England is responsible. The public presumably simply did not care whether it was true or not. A few months after the Armistice I wrote as follows:-- 'When the Germans sank the _Lusitania_ and slew several hundred women and children, _we_ knew--at least we thought we knew--that that was the kind of thing which Englishmen could not do. In all the hates and stupidities, the dirt and heartbreaks of the war, there was just this light on the horizon: that there were certain things to which we at least could never fall, in the name of victory or patriotism, or any other of the deadly masked words that are "the unjust stewards of men's ideas." 'And then we did it. We, too, sank _Lusitanias_. We, too, for some cold political end, plunged the unarmed, the weak, the helpless, the children, the suffering women, to agonising death and torture. Without a tremor. Not alone in the bombing of cities, which we did so much better than the enemy. For this we had the usual excuse. It was war.