“ But I shall not feel inclined to accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish her beaten for the Allies' sake and for my own country's sake. A victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United States. ”

“ The time to write an accurate history of these isles during the Great Test will come not when peace is signed, but perhaps a decade later, when the New England will have begun to assume, in misty outline at least, the physical, moral and intellectual dimensions in which war, with its scars and its cleansings, left her.
Organized for war, body and soul, as Germany has been for generation upon generation, and never more so, of course, than in the living generation, the country slid into the bloody groove as neatly as if it had never had its being elsewhere. ”

“ Succeeding events of the war of stalemate in the West and fiasco in the Dardanelles--dreary and weary months of fighting accounted "victorious" if it took three hundred yards of trenches, or a hill, or a cemetery, or a sugar-factory, or a strip of beach, or if it advanced the British line a mile and a half over a front of twelve miles--every "gain" entailing a terrible toll in killed and maimed and fabulous expenditure of shells--all demonstrated one outstanding, immutable fact: that nothing but sheer preponderance of man-power weight would or could "cleave the way to victory." ”

“ I can not help thinking that, in many respects, it is wasted achievement, for the object which England and her Allies have set themselves is not merely the pinioning of Germany to fronts in Russia, France, Belgium and Greece beyond which she can not thrust herself. I am not unmindful of the glorious response of Britain's noblest sons, who sleep by their gallant thousands in the blood-manured soil of France, Belgium, Turkey and the Balkans, nor of the Trojan spirit in which the women of the Empire are giving their best and bravest, and weeping not. ”

“ I have said that the triumphs of Germany behind the firing-line--the fortitude with which she has borne her hideous losses in life, the magnificently effective demonstration of unity, economy, self-sacrifice, industrial and financial organization, and adaptability to all the domestic conditions of war--were only things which those of us who knew the Germans expected to come to pass. They were as inevitable, in their paternalized State, the Empire of System, as were the early cannon-ball successes of the German army. ”

“ Aristocratic to the core, with the blood of the Marlboroughs in his veins, and a snob of snobs in his personal relations, it is an anomalous fact that Churchill is an endlessly popular figure with the crowd. Whether it is his youth--he is only forty-one, was a soldier of no mean renown at twenty-three, a Member of Parliament at twenty-six, a Cabinet Minister at thirty-two and a force in Imperial politics long before he was forty--or his impetuous devil-may-care make-up, or his bombastic platform style, the masses like him. ”

“ It is not that England is incapable of defeating Germany. It is that she seems unwilling to do so by throwing into the balance every atom of strength for which that prodigious task calls. For at least a decade before 1914 Britain's political ostriches, disarmament-mongers, professional pacifists and pro-Germans declined to recognize the German danger even when it was approaching with strides so brazen that almost the blind could see. ”

“ Seven or eight months of unrealized objectives had to pass over English men and women's resolute heads before they began even to doubt the efficacy of the complacent principle they had laid down for themselves. But the mills of Mars, like those of his colleagues, keep on grinding, and England was to learn that, while invasion had not seared her soil as it had scotched that of all her European allies, war yet had terrors capable of burning into the soul, saddening the homes and despoiling the pockets of even an unravished land. ”

“ The historic and ineffaceable fact is that Austria--wabbly, invertebrate Austria, which would even to-day, but for Germany, lay prostrate and vanquished--never made a solitary move in the whole plot to coerce Serbia without the full concurrence of the big brother at Berlin. It would be an insult to the intelligence of German diplomacy, stupid as it is, to imagine that the Kaiser's Government sat mute, unconsulted and nonchalant, while Austria worked out a scheme certain, as the Germans themselves admit in their White Paper, to plunge Europe into war. ”

“ When England, like Germany, has relentlessly marshaled every tithe of her national strength for war, subordinated all else to that purpose, harnessed to the chariot of Mars every conceivable resource at her command, pulverized caste distinctions, banned politics and politicians, and made the war and the winning of it the only thing the nation eats for, works for, dreams of, or wastes thought upon--then I shall feel constrained to feel assured that victory will perch, however distant the hour, on Liberty's and not on Tyranny's banners. ”

“ At every station we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than "the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. ”

“ And over there, looking out on the Wilhelms Platz, with a window-sill as a writing-board, the Titian-haired belle of Berlin's American colony, in daintiest of midsummer frocks and saucy turbans, who had never in years done anything more strenuous than organize a tea-party, was in harness as a volunteer in the impromptu army of Uncle Sam's clerks, doing her bit for her country and country-folk. It was all very typically and very delightfully American, a composite of true Democracy in which one is for all, and all for one. ”

“ Why, I asked myself, was such a disheartening picture as good as physically impossible in Berlin or Hamburg or Düsseldorf or Breslau? I may be wrong, but the answer seemed to me to be that paternalistic Government in Germany had produced a race of men and women who, because better educated, better housed, better fed and generally better cared for--even under the relentless jackboot of Militarism--looked upon a war for national existence through entirely different-colored spectacles than this slipshod composite of British illiteracy and nonchalance. ”

“ If the world-wide realm on which the sun never sets can produce armies calculable only in millions, as it most assuredly is able to do, let them come forth, or be brought forth. If the wealth of the United Kingdom, India and the dominions oversea represents riches unmatched, as it does, let it be lavished exclusively on war, and not squandered in any other single direction. If common sense is the proudest of Anglo-Saxon virtues, let it prevail and sweep away governments which value votes more than men's lives and abolish a Censorship which treats Britons as if they were half-witted. ”

“ Gerard strolled across the Wilhelms Platz to the ramshackle old Auswärtiges Amt, to tell the German Government what Washington thought of this, that or the other of her recurring acts of lawlessness, but I vow that von Jagow has got to know Gerard for just what he is--an American from the top of his extraordinarily well-shaped head to the soles of his feet. The war has brought us many blessings. Among them we may count high the fact that at the capital of the enemy of all mankind we had, ready to speak up and to stand up for us, in gladness or vicissitude, a real man. ”

“ As for the Ambassador, he has demonstrated, to my way of thinking, that a graduate course in the university of American politics is ideal training for diplomacy. Intelligence, tact, resourcefulness and courage, the rudiments of the diplomatic career, are qualities which surely nothing can develop in a man more thoroughly than the hurly-burly, rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of an American electioneering campaign. It is amid its storms and tribulations that a man learns to be something more than an inhabited dress-suit. It is there he acquires the art of being human. ”

“ It was inevitable that the country would listen to him in his newest and greatest rôle as organizer of victory.
Lloyd-George's goal is undoubtedly the Premiership--the ambition of every British politician. He has plenty of time to wait--he is only fifty-two--and unfailing week-end golf keeps him as "fit" as a man fifteen years his junior. Of Napoleonic stockiness of build, with a wealth of wavy gray hair worn long, he is a figure which radiates strength and power, though unimpressive of itself. He is a capital "mixer." It is, indeed, his principal political asset. ”

“ History is barren of an instance of a Power defeated in war, who retained command of the sea. Were there no other considerations which spell the eventual, though probably not the early, frustration of Germany's ambition to master Europe and, as William II once sighed, to snatch the trident from Britannia's grasp, the vise-like grip of naval power which Jellicoe has wrested alone denotes that Armageddon can have but one ending, however long it be deferred. ”

“ Yet, unseen and sinister, its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to approach. ”

“ New York was clearly more feverishly interested in the war than London. Nowhere in Fleet Street had I seen such vibrant throngs in front of newspaper-offices, as stood eager and transfixed by day and far into the night in Times and Herald Squares, Columbus Circle and Park Row. America might have been in the fray herself, to judge by the one absorbing topic which dominated men and women's talk and obsessed their thoughts. ”