During our tour, the Herr Director had a chance to see one university come out of its incoherence and inexplicable confusion into unity. He heard it roar like the "Bulls of Bashan," fling its flaring colors to the wind, hoot its defiance to the enemy, dance, dervish-like, around the battle flames; he saw ten thousands of young men suffering the war fever, and an equal number of young women shrieking in wild delirium; he saw embankments of automobiles struggling to reach the seat of the conflict, armies of men trying to storm the ramparts, and newspaper correspondents mad from haste; while in the center of it all, twenty-two disguised men struggled for a chalk-line. Unfortunately, no friendly guide was near us to explain it all, and as I am still an un-Americanized alien to a football game, its meaning was lost to my guests.
When two men were carried from the field limp, and seemingly lifeless, the Frau Directorin promptly fainted. The Herr Director was beside himself, for there was no way to extricate ourselves from the maddened mass of humanity; but while he was wildly and vainly calling for water, she revived, and we stayed to the finish. I wished I had not brought them, for to appreciate a football game one must be born in America, and no explanation I offered could convince the Herr Director that we are not more cruel than the Spaniards, whose opponents in their deadly games are bulls, not men. The Frau Directorin still sheds tears at the remembrance of how badly we use our "perfectly nice young men."
The fierceness back of this conflict, the vast amount of money spent upon properly playing the game, the primary place it occupies in the imagination of the American youth, its deadening influence upon scholarship, and all the multitudinous pros and cons, are over-shadowed by the fact that, as far as the community at large is concerned, it expects this Roman holiday, and a college or university is considered good or poor, to the degree that it caters to this desire. One thing I can say for it: it is thoroughly American, bringing into the lime-light some of our virtues and most of our faults.
"In Germany," again the Herr Director, "where things are not permitted to grow merely because they grow elsewhere, it was found that for military preparedness your sports are of little or no value, especially if engaged in vicariously; and that teaching men to dig trenches and serve cannon, to obey implicitly a command and carry it out effectively, is of more use, not only to the individual's well-being, but also for the great, collective purpose of national defense."