The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War | Page 8

The protests against this State creation of hate grow less and less as the
war proceeds. To-day only comparatively few members of the
Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this horrible contamination of
the minds of the coming generation of German men and women. Not
much reflection is needed to see on what fruitful soil the great National
Liberal Party, with its backing of capitalists, greedy merchants,
chemists, bankers, ship and mine owners, is planting its seeds for the
future. There is no cure for this evil state of affairs, but the practical
proof, inflicted by big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation
of which the very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and
taught that German Kultur must be spread by bloodshed and terror.
With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life. The
good influence of some churches has gone completely. They are part of
the great war machine. The position of the mother is not what it was.
The old German Hausfrau of the three K's, which I will roughly
translate by "Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk," has become even more a servant
of the master of the house than she was. The State has taken control of
the souls of her children, and she has not even that authority that she
had twenty years ago. The father has become even more important than
of yore. The natural tendency of a nation of which almost every man is
a soldier, is to elevate the man at the expense of the woman, and the
German woman has taken to her new position very readily. She plays

her wonderful part in the production of munitions, not as in Britain in a
spirit of equality, but with a sort of admitted inferiority difficult to
describe exactly.
At four years of age the German male child begins to be a soldier. At
six he is accustomed to walk in military formation. This system has a
few advantages, but many disadvantages. A great concourse of infants
can, for example, be marshalled through the streets of a city without
any trouble at all. But that useful discipline is more than
counterbalanced by the killing of individuality. German children,
especially during the war, try to grow up to be little men and women as
quickly as possible. They have shared the long working hours of the
grown-ups, and late in the hot summer nights I have seen little
Bavarian boys and girls who have been at school from seven and
worked in the fields from three o'clock till dark, drinking their beer in
the beer garden with a relish that showed they needed some stimulant.
The beer is not Bass's ale, but it contains from two to five per cent. of
alcohol. Unhealthy-looking little men are these German boys of from
twelve to fifteen during the war. The overwork, and the lowering of the
diet, has given them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes. All
games and amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation
is corps marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs
and "Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles."
The girls, in like fashion, often spend their school interval in marching
in columns of four, singing the same horrible chants.
Up to the time of the scarcity of woollen materials, the millions of little
German schoolgirls produced their full output of comforts for the
troops.
The practical result, from a military point of view, of training children
to venerate the All-Highest War Lord and his family, together with his
ancestors, was shown at the beginning of the war, when there came a
great rush of volunteers (_Freiwillige_), many of them beneath the
military age, many of them beyond it. In most of the calculations of
German man-power, some ally and neutral military writers seem to
have forgotten these volunteers, estimated at two millions.

A significant change in Germany is the cessation of the volunteer
movement. Parents who gladly sent forth their boys as volunteers, are
now endeavouring by every means in their power to postpone the evil
day in the firm belief that peace will come before the age of military
service has been reached. It is a change at least as significant as that
which, lies between the German's "We have won--the more enemies the
better" of two years back, and the "We must hold out" of to-day.
Of the school structures in modern Germany it would be idle to pretend
that they are not excellent in every respect--perfect ventilation,
sanitation, plenty of space, large numbers of class-rooms, and halls for
the choral singing, which is part of the German system of education,
and by which the "hate" songs have been so readily spread. The same
halls are used for evening