As the first hopes of easy victory evaporated, a note of stress and anguish replaces that of the original bluster. A poem on Ypres was noticeable in this respect. But the particular interest of the book lay to me in the Rektor’s explanations about the English. A fount of venom overflows whenever the name of Britain is mentioned. He sets forth in his own inimitable way how England, owing to her acute jealousy of Germany, had deliberately provoked the war. England’s sordid anxieties about her menaced commercial supremacy lay at the root of this action. Having plotted war and declared it at her own time, she then proceeded to wage it on the most barbarous lines. English soldiers murdered the wounded, concealed machine guns in their Red Cross wagons, and immolated whole platoons of innocent German soldiers by an abominable misuse of the white flag. The wickedness, the perfidy, the treachery of England, the outrages committed by her against every law of God and man--the Rektor lashes himself into a white heat on these themes. No less fulsome and subservient is the writer in his praise of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince. Germany’s passion for peace, a peace destroyed only by the intrigues of a jealous and wicked world, is enlarged on over and over again. This book, like its predecessors, is intended for use in schools. We can form some judgment, therefore, of the facts and fancies which writers of the Lomberg type thrust as historical truth on the rising generation. The influence of such statements can hardly be exaggerated, and much similar poison has flowed through the whole German school system. German school literature is a real mine of information to any one who wants to study the root causes of latter-day German mentality. Little wonder that animosities and misunderstandings rend nations in twain when truth is subordinated to the worst purposes of political and interested propaganda. Children are malleable stuff, and certain long-sighted Teutons realised perfectly that what is driven into a child in the first impressionable years abides through life.