A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.
The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too, expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was in the German woman’s, as in every German’s, nature. It had been in the Frenchwoman’s in Napoleon’s time. Many racial hates the war has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer-asphyxiating-gas hate.
If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don’t you go to war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that this and that is “not done” in humane circles--win! The Germans meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the Middle Ages in their hearts, organised for victory by every modern method. Three strata of civilisation were really fighting, perhaps: The French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents increase of numbers, its thrift and tenacity; the German, with its newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition; and the Russian, unformed, groping, vague, glamorous, immense.
The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and hates of the old and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war. After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for my buttonhole.