Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/21

Rh German. It would seem that the German soldiers, unlike the French, or the British, have lost that faculty of hero-worship which, even if rooted in illusion, multiplies the man-power of an army in wondrous wise. Hero-worship is one of the spiritual factors overlooked by the inventors of Germany's system of scientific warfare, which might be compared with the invasion of the body by microbes—the bacilli of a "Grey Plague," as it were—actuated by a blind instinctive lust of destruction, as in this picture of a fever:

Even if the soldiers of the Allies had not been higher in the scale of spirituality than leucocytes, yet the German attack on civilisation must have failed—for the bodies politic invaded were sound and healthy, and the cleansing sun and the sunlit air were also allied against the disease engendered in darkness and corruption. Of the small amount of verse written by German soldiers since the war began, and printed in German newspapers, nearly all is but flagrant rhetoric, noisy rather than strong, and "bloody-rooted though leaf-verdant," seeing that it grows out of a theory of national conduct which, having murdered peace, has aimed further at murdering war. The very few German trench poets are moved more by hatred for other people's countries than by love of their own, and, as munitions of spirituality, their poems are of less value than Zulu war-chants. And if we believe, with Napoleon the Great—a tyrant subject to, but not a barbarian—that war is three-fourths a moral issue, this non-moral stuff is yet another ominous sign that the German Army is doomed