SATAN: “You are in very truth my master.”] Neuve Chapelle Nothing could be more thoroughly characteristic of the Prussian mind than its utter misunderstanding of England. It exhibits all the characteristics which we are accustomed to associate with “German Thought,” and especially the combination of enormous industry in the accumulation of facts with an utter inability to appreciate such facts as cannot be catalogued and an amazing stupidity in passing judgment even upon the facts which are recognised. Thus, before the outbreak of war, the Prussians, knowing that we were in the main a commercial people, immediately deduced the conclusion that we should never fight for any other purpose than that of making money. They found themselves in error. Similarly, after our intervention, they looked up their documents and, discovering that we had never had a very large army, concluded that we were not to be reckoned with seriously in the field of military operations. Our naval power they allowed for, for they could count the ships and had them all duly docketed. But our army was “contemptible,” and would certainly remain so. That a nation, not originally military, could transform itself into a nation in arms by the mere action of patriotic enthusiasm and anger was a thing altogether undreamed of in the Prussian philosophy. The revelation that the thing was so has produced first, incredulity, and then a sort of bewilderment, as if all the foundations of “scientific thought,” as the Germans understand it, had collapsed--as, indeed, they had. The thing that has not collapsed is the eternal strength which belongs to a nation utterly convinced with the justice of its cause. The thing is not possible to Prussians; but it is possible to Englishmen, as the Prussians are already beginning to know. CECIL CHESTERTON [Illustration: NEUVE CHAPELLE ORDER OF THE CROWN PRINCE OF BAVARIA: “You must give those English heavy blows.” TOMMY (_to prisoners after Neuve Chapelle_): “Weren’t they heavy?”] Atrocities The lecturer, with true German casuistry, minimises the rhinoceros and magnifies the fly, so that there is “very little difference” between them, as far as his arguments are concerned. Fortunately for the cause of the Allies, casuistry is not a military asset; had it been one, Germany would long since have won the war, and that not only on this count, for the saying that “the wish is father to the thought” is nowhere more true than in Germany.