And it was the same with their poetry and literature. There was much verse inspired by the same violence as “The Hymn of Hate.” There were numberless sonnets starting off, “England, du perfides land,” and it is only this sort of stuff that we have been allowed to read in England. This is the standard by which the Germans have been judged, and it presents them in a very false light. For after all, if the “hate” verse that is scattered throughout the English Press were to be taken as representative of the ideals and the aspirations of the race, we should show up none too well. For with the majority, no sooner does a man try to put his thoughts into words, than he loses his bearings. He does not write what he feels, but what he thinks he should feel. All that is genuine in him is inarticulate, and the obvious rises to the surface. And it has followed that in the last four years there has been an incredible quantity of bad verse written and very little good. But that little good is the key to the English temperament. The secret longings of the individual have been revealed not in the type of poem that goes-- “We mean to thrash these Prussian Pups, We’ll bag their ships, we’ll smash old Krupps, We loathe them all, the dirty swine, We’ll drown the whole lot in the Rhine.” They have found their expression in the deep and sincere emotion of such poems as “Not Dead,” by Robert Graves, J. C. Squire’s “The Bulldog,” Robert Nichols’s “Fulfilment,” and Siegfried Sassoon’s “In the Pink.” And working from this basis, it is surely more just to judge Germany less by the cheap vehemence of Lissauer than by those quiet poems that, hidden away among pages of opprobrium and rhetoric, enshrine far more truthfully those emotions that have lingered in the heart of the suffering individual from the very beginning of time. There is a poem on a captured trench that opens with a brief word-picture of the scene, the squalor, the battered parapet, the dead men. “Over this trench,” the poet continues-- “Over this trench will soon be shed a mother’s tears. Pain is pain always, And courage is true wheresoever it may be found. And in the hearts of our enemy were both these things.... That we must not forget; Germany must love even with the sword that kills.” That sentiment is universal, it contains the complete tragedy of conquest. And indeed for the individual soldier war is the same under whatever standard he may fight. German militarism may have been the aggressive factor, but the individual did not know it. Unless a people feels its cause to be just, it will not enter into the lists. If it is the aggressor, then that people must be hoodwinked. The victory lust of 1914 was a collective emotion springing from the German temperament and from their belief that they were in the right. The individual soldier went to battle with feelings not too far removed from our own.