I have stood in German households since this war began, I have entered into and for the time being have _become_ German men and German women, and I understand them and love them. I even admire them, for their devotion to their own is immense. Once let that strength go out in real brotherhood to all mankind, and these people would be truly great. Is it possible? All things are possible to the human soul, and these people are very human. The defect is in their vaunted education. They teach themselves that they are the chosen people. When they learn that they are not the chosen people in war, the very force of the shock may upset the pillar of egotism that stands upright in the centre of the German soul. The world should not let that pillar fall with a crash, but softly ease the blow--not too softly, lest mercy be mistaken for war-weariness. The World-Mother has a hard and erring child. It has to be punished, but not refused a seat at the family table. I have said these things to you because, if you do not shrink, I have things to tell you in my next letter which will need fortitude for you to receive, fortitude and charity, whose other name is love. _March 24._ LETTER VIII SPECTRES OF THE CONGO I HAVE been in Poland and I have been in Serbia; but now I want to write of Belgium and of karma,[1] race karma, karma old and new. With and behind the invading Germans, urging them on to murder, pillage and destruction, rape and burning, were not only the devils from the outer vast, whose time for activity had come; but with and behind the German army was a horde of undeveloped and earth-bound spirits who had suffered in the Congo. Karma, always karma! The world knows something of what has been done in Belgium, something of what Germans have done there. I have seen men, women, and little children murdered in cold blood. I have witnessed the soul of a murdered man tearing at a soldier who was violating the murdered man’s wife. I have seen the soul of a mother wringing her hands as she would have wrung them on earth when her little daughter was being maltreated by brutes who were blind with madness. An old man out here followed a soldier for days until he saw revenge accomplished by means of a Belgian bayonet; then as the German soul came out he grappled with it again, and the two were torn by each other, the soldier not knowing he had left the body and feeling that he was at grips with an enemy still on earth. There was much of what is called Voodoo in the Congo. Its practitioners do not go to sleep for a long time. They go on and on in the invisible world, making their evil preparations and weaving their spells. They gather round spilled blood, they absorb vitality from it, and that vitality they use to bring evil and death upon anything toward which they direct their will.