A Popular History of The Great War/Volume 1/Page 113


CASES OF COURTESY


with anguish and suspense, were allowed to see their relatives. Mr. Drummond-Hay pleaded that his young son should not be longer kept a prisoner, and he was allowed to go out and join his mother. At ten o'clock on the following night the consul was told that he and his family and staff could leave. They reached Flushing after a further long and tedious journey, ten days after their departure from Danzig. Behind the firing-line Prussia threw off the thin veneer of civilization which for forty years had disguised her true character, and showed herself in her true colours — as a land but little removed from barbarism.

Yet there were strange contrasts, and where the civil government of Germany still retained, or succeeded in recovering, some vestige of control, the civil officials did try, however faint-heartedly, to stem this extraordinary flood of militarist outrage. During the day which followed the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany the emperor's court marshal sent a special message to the English chaplain in Berlin, informing him that he would do all in his power to assist the chaplain to keep open the English church of St. George in the gardens of the Monbijou palace, that he would arrange that there should be no difficulty in English residents attending service at their church as usual, and that he would be glad to learn of any arrangements for relieving distress among English residents.

Similarly, in some of the western cities, Englishmen returning home stated that the officials treated them often with decided courtesy. It was only when they came into contact with some rampant lieutenant, overwhelmed with a sudden sense of his own relief from the bonds of civil restraint, or with some half-crazy police-sergeant, ignorant, for the most part, of the very look of a passport, that maltreatment ensued. It is abundantly evident, from this and many similar instances, that what happened in Germany was the breakdown of the whole system of civil government, even where it was merely intended that it should be reinforced or controlled in its broadest outlines by the military governors. The Prussian military system and the German civil code came into conflict, and the victory of rampant militarism was assured from the outset.

The sudden revolt against, or, as is more probable, the general fear of anything that might look foreign produced some results which, under other circumstances, would have been truly ludicrous. Most of the German cities had gradually become

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