"WE SMASH HER"

Evening Post, Volume XC, Issue 42, 18 August 1915, Page 10

"WE SMASH HER"

THE SPIRIT ENGLAND DOES NOT UNDERSTAND I have heard the three terrible words so many times that I have come to think of them as the sound by which I shall identify Germany — and I have heard the grumble of her guns on her battle fronts : Gott Strafe England (God punish England). It is their morning salutation (writes Edward Fox, correspondent in Germany of the American Magazine). It is never spoken with levity. I heard men exchange it as if they were pledging anew a solemn oath. I heard the waiters in the Adlon say it each to the other. I heard it in Munich when a customer came in a shop to buy. I heard it in the hospitals at Glewitz, a wounded man muttered it to Dr. Sanders— and his wound was from a Russian gun ! At Commines when, back from the trenches, the Bavarians awoke from their piles of straw, they pledged the day to— Gott Strafe England ! I saw the spirit of Germany one Sunday night, Berlin's night, at the Winter Garden. Settled at our table on the Terrasse, we gazed ont on the audience, three thousand people that night, three thousand extravagant men and women sated in pleasure. Above, a canopied heaven gleamed with star fire, as false as a palace effect attempted in red and gold gaudiness, an, over-decorated, pillared room with obsequious liveried servants. Three thousand men and women, the Berlin that last summer knew, open love-making, ogling, wine-buying! All around us on the Terrasse glasses clinked; a pajish waiter brought two young girls to our table, who smiled and then contemptuously went their way. The music struck up; you heard snatches of the "Puppchen" song. And slowly it began to appal me ; and I thought of that dreary eastern land where men , burrowed like animals in the frozen ground, holding the Russian hordes at bay ; and I thought of that desolation in the west, where amid the black ruins of villages more Germans held off more hostile hordes, and almost as in a dream you looked about at the gaudy lights, the gaudy decorations, the gaudy crowd ; and the irony of it gripped tight. War ! and this was a Berlin night. . . . But that was before I knew their spirit. Little bells jingled ; the audience left the promenades and settled in their seats, the well-fed, well-wined audience, in which you had come to believe 1 no big emotion was possible. The lights went out ; the spangled canopy of sky seemed a little less unreal; the curtains were drawn ; a performer appeared, bowing, on the stage. His name has passed me ; but I can still hear his voice. He began a scene from "Othello," the scene where lago lies. And then dramatically he stopped, and in a moment you were struck dumb with the dramatic valueof that pause; and then again he spoke, but the words were not Shakespeare's : "French and Russian, they matter not, A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot." A murmur was audible. You were conscious that all about you people had moved. "Come, let us stand at the Judgment place. An oath to swear to, face to face, An oath of bronze no wind can shake, An oath for our sons and their sons to take. Come, hear tho word, repeat the- word, Throughout the Fatherland mak« it heard: We will never forego our hate. W© love all, but a single hate — We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone — ENGLAND !" With every word you had felt the gathering tenseness, and now it broke. You heard fists crashing on table tops, the pounding of feet — "Aucn!" "Auch!" "Jawohl!" You sensed the a.wful vitalness of it : as by a miracle those three thousand people had changed. Pleasure had fled. I saw that, in the drawn face of the man at the next table ; a smiling girl sought to pat his hand j roughly he threw her hand aside. The actor was speaking again. "Hate by water and hate by land, Hate of the head and hafco of tho hand, Hate of tho hammer and hate of the crown, Hate of seventy millions, choking down. We love as one, we hate as one, We have one foe, and one alone — " And the actor paused ; and his three thousand hearers flung back at him the word, uttered it with a, sour savagery that must have curdled their hearts, shrieked that word, flushed women and men jumping to their feet, beside themselves all, thundering all, in a single, hoarse burst — "ENGLAND!" You shivered. Thereafter the three thousand meant something more than followers of, pleasure, although you knew it was pleasure alone which had brought them there. But later, when two buffoons took the stage and the- audience laughed, and the buffoons went the way of the wings and the audience lost itself in the sensuality of " art," scantily draped, posing women, you began to doubt if that outcry had been real; if, maybe, you had overestimated the sincerity of that cry against England; or if _ it might not bo the actor and the wine his hearer* had drunk. But doubt is impossible. It is true, this " Gott Strafe England," pitifully true. When I left Berlin in March they had gone in their hatred to even further lengths. They had published a book; "Gott Strafe England!" with a cover (showing John Bull and his money bag being roasted in hell. You know th« Red Cross stamps that you buy at Christmas time to paste on the back of your letters? They are Belling hate stamps in Germany, and are sealing their letters with them. They read, "Gott Strafe England!" They are red and black stamps, a.nd the colouring means something. The black is for hate and the red is for blood. And they greet each other in the morning, the men of Berlin, with these words of hatred on their lips. And they pass it through the day, and on the battlefields it is a salutation. I walked through the front line trenches in Arras. I saw cut in the dirt wall the legend of hate—" Gott Strafe England." "I thought the French were in Arras?" I asked the soldier. "Are there any Englishmen with them?" "No," he -said, "but that does not matter. You see, the French are England's fools and the Russians are England's fools, and wo have no quarrel with them. We only feel sorry for them for being fools. But England we hate " —and he forgot we were talking in English — " und, by Gott, we smash her!"