A Straight Deal | Page 9

own faces were like. In company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by- passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes had been leaking out for all who chose to understand them. A great many did not so choose. The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now more than ever before, because he intended that we should pay his war bills. Let him once get by England, and his sword would cut through our fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through cheese.
A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said, "Well, I like the French. But I'll not cry much if England gets hers. What's England done in this war, anyway?"
"Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing," retorted another voice.
With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the first speaker protested, "Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as any Kaiser."
"Aw, get your facts straight!" It was said with scornful force. "Don't you know George III was a German? Don't you know it was Hessians-- they're Germans--he hired to come over here and kill Americans and do his dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work the Kaiser's are doing now. We've got a letter written after the battle of Long Island by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And they stripped him and they stole his things and they beat him down with the butts of their guns--after he had surrendered, mind--when he was surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some more. That's Germans for you. Only they've been getting worse while the rest of the world's been getting better. Get your facts straight, man."
A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian his ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this timely debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to silence. Either he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what is so pithily termed "come-back." The latter, I incline to think; for come-back needs no facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in the anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German. Germans do not come back when it goes against them, they bleat "Kamerad!"--or disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making friends enemies, just as his breed has worked to set enmity between ourselves and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy, England and Russia, between everybody and everybody else all the world over, in the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the Kaiser. Thus has his breed, since we occupied Coblenz, run to the French soldiers with lies about us and then run to us with lies about the French soldiers, overlooking in its providential stupidity the fact that we and the French would inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his breed, at the moment I write these words, infesting and poisoning the earth with a propaganda that remains as coherent and as systematically directed as ever it was before the