12 
LAND & WATER 
June 29, 1916 
trouble was irom scattered bands o^it of touch witli Teu- 
tonic propaganda. In the towns, where ' they lilad becn> 
carefully instructed as to our ' frightfulness,' they were 
:fi<e lambs. The last time I saw the Political Officer 
for southern Persia he told me facetiously that he was 
seriously considering getting out a new edition of the 
' gun-blowing ' Ccu-d for distribution in our own interests." 
The British Forces operating in Mesopotamia have 
had some help and some hindrance from the Bedouin 
Arabs of that region, and until the accounts are cast up 
at the end of the campaign it will probably not be known 
on which side the balance lies. But with the more highly 
civilised Arabs of Mecca; and Medina — many of whom 
claim lineal; descent ffoiii the friends and disciples of the 
Prophet himself — there is good reason to believe that 
they have looked on the activity of German propagandists 
with suspicions from the first. The loyalty of Egyptian 
and Indian Mohammedans, and — especially — -the im- 
munity Jeddah and the hadj routes to Mecca have en- 
joyed from disturbance by the British, who could have at 
any time cut off seventy-live per cent, of the pilgrim 
movement to Hedjaz, have also doubtless operated 
potently to bring home the value of the friendship and 
protection of the Allies. 
Germany's Mistakes 
3.— Moral 
By Colonel Feyler 
[This is the final article of the three which Colonel 
Feyler has written on Germany's mistakes. The two 
former dealt with the strategical and the political] 
THE violation of Belgian neutrality was, as we 
have said in a preceding Article on the subject, 
a great p'^litical blunder ; but there is no 
doubt that it was even a greater blunder in the 
moral sense, for by this blunder Germany surrendered to 
her enemies all claim to whatever chivalry there may be 
in such a war. Bismarck would never have committed 
this error, though he was the last to be influenced by a 
scruple ; but he was at least quick to discern and to 
take advantage of the scruples of others. 
Not satisfied, however, with this initial lack of finesse, 
Germany added to the fundamental blunder of putting 
justice on her enemies' side an amazing variety of blunders, 
so to speak, of manner. It is possible to do a good deed 
in a manner most reprehensible : Germany not only did 
a bad deed, but added thereto a most objectionable 
manner of doing. 
She started by violating international law, and fol- 
lowed by arrogating to herself a sort of right to violate. 
Germany's necessity in attack was to excuse to all the 
world what still remained quite inexcusable on the part 
of her victims in their defence. She then added insult 
to injury by holding up to public obloquy the Belgian 
people, whom she accused of violating, in their treatment 
of her soldiery, the very articles of the Hague Convention 
which she herself had set at nought, and by telegraphing 
to all the points of the compass that they were but a 
half-civilised people — in that they were attempting to 
defend their hearths from the invader. 
To the crushing of an innocent and defenceless neutral 
state, Germany in her might added disdain and insult, 
only thereby to offend every chivalrous sentiment and 
every feeling of admiration which all the world has for 
courage in distress. Germany "seemed to grow small 
beside Belgium growing greater and greater. Herein lay 
her first blunder of manner. 
A second was soon to follow ; not content with offend- 
ing humanity's sense of justice and chivalrv, the (icrman 
Armies proceeded to vent their rage on the highest 
manifestatio'ns of the ideals of past centuries. Louvain,' 
more than half destroyed ; the cathedral of Rheims laid 
in ruins ; Notre-Dame of Paris bombarded from the 
air — an outrage on numberless past generations in their 
struggle upwards towards beauty and towards faith — a 
whole rich store of the idealism bequeathed to modern 
times by past ages, crushed to powder under a trium- 
phant Juggernaut of materialism. 
This time, however, Germany seems almost" to have 
faintly realised her blunders and in attempting to set up 
a defence committed a third aggravation, and that the 
most unbelievable and extraordinary, of her initial mis- 
take. In centuries to come, men will almost refuse to 
accept the history thereof as too amazing for belief. Of 
her attacks on justice, on weakness, and innocence, on ideal 
ism and humanity , Germany strove to make a new truth — 
and of the protests of peoples and of civilisations, a new 
HERESY. 
The whole nation seemed to lend itself with a fierce 
fanaticism to the strange work of buildivig upon a founda- 
tion of sand the cathedral of this new religion. Truth, 
which had so long dominated the world and the ages, was 
suddenly to become the monopoly of one nation against 
all others, and was to have political frontiers, like the 
religions of two thousand j^ears ago ; it was to have its 
own especial Deity, a god with a nationality, a mighty god 
— above all, a jealous god, a god of battles, giving the vic- 
tory to the people that had chosen him and punishing the 
iniquity of their enemies ; a god armed with sword and 
helmet, shield and spur and gauntlet of steel, leaning for 
support upon the monstrous howitzers which pro- 
claimed his power and imposed his sway — a god the like 
whereof no age has ever yet seen, no people ever yet 
worshipped — a god with the spirit of the Old Testament,- 
with the attributes of the Middle Ages, and with the 
power of the Twentieth Centurj'. 
The truth of this god, the " German Truth," rose up in 
battle against the nameless trath which in Germany was 
decried as an international heresy. By word of mouth, 
in writing, by post and by telegraph, in the press, in the 
outpourings of their university professors, in the writings 
of their priests, in the circulars of their public servants 
and functionaries, by every method of advertisement 
and through every agent of publicity, even in private 
' correspondence — in short, by every means whereby 
doctrine can be heard or read or insinuated into the in- 
telligence — the German people, by their very situation 
themselves unable to hear more than a faint echo of the 
world's noise, presumed and attempted to foist their own 
ignorance upon those who, seeing and hearing all, arc 
able to know much. They strove to place the whole 
world under the governance of their strange god. 
This was the last and greatest blunder of all. The vio- 
lation of international law had offended the world's 
sense of justice, the insult to the conquered its sense of 
decency, the attack on idealism its sense of art ; but the 
outrage on truth revolted and ahenated all the conscience 
of Christendom. 
From this time onwards all the highest moral forces 
fight on the side of Germany's enemies ; theirs is a 
struggle for the hberty of the peoples and they are fighting 
in a cause such as Bonaparte championed before yet he 
became Napoleon, when he still held that one nation 
may not be the subject of another. The war is inspired 
by the cause of the defence of small and neutral states 
against the greed of the Great Powers and against the 
oppression of too potent an Empire. It is a war for ideal- 
ism against rampant and purblind brutahty, a war in 
defence of the patrimony of humanity, culture and faith 
that nineteen centuries of Christian civilisation have 
handed down to mddern Europe. 
It matters but little that other interests, less elevated, 
more material, and more selfish, take some part in the 
struggle. Seen from near-by e\en the snow of the glacier 
has its impurities, but the distant mountains are none the 
less noble nor their mantle of snow less immaculate. 
The great pfescnt-day force of public opinion does not 
linger to examine the scoria, which it knows to be a 
necessary and legitimate part of material existence— 
but it knows that sentiment alone is truly dominant and 
that the world without idealism were but a poor thing 
indeed. 
The essential moral blunder on Germany's part is to 
have driven the conscience of the whole world to be the 
greatest ally of her enemies. 
