Page:Secrets of Crewe House.djvu/25

Rh due to lack of appreciation of their importance—the Germans' very energetic propaganda effort miscarried. Wrongly assuming that the war would be of short duration, they made use of untruths and half-truths, mis-statements and over-statements. These produced a temporary effect, but the protraction of the war brought its own refutation of their misrepresentation, and, instead of operating to the good of the Central Empires, the campaign wrought harm to their cause.

Moreover, as they afterwards realised, the Germans did not agree among themselves in their misrepresentations. There was, as a well-known British authority on German propaganda has pointed out, a chaotic exuberance of different points of view. And they were incapable of understanding other nations. Dr. Karl Lamprecht, the distinguished German professor, deplored this in the course of a lecture at the end of 1914, when the Germans regarded their victory as assured. "When the war came," he said, "everyone who could write obtained the largest possible goose quill and wrote to all his foreign friends, telling them that they did not realise what splendid fellows the Germans were, and not infrequently adding that in