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The war was not of their making, and those poor foreigners were caught up in a terrible web of tragic circumstance. He himself had many dear and valued friends in Germany, professors whose only aim in life was the spread of "Kultur," not perhaps quite the same thing as we meant by the word culture, for the German "Kultur" meant something with a wider, more universal significance.
Sure of its own superiority, it took no counsel with antiquity and scorned the advice of its neighbors. It was intent on producing something entirely new and all its own a purely German Kultur, independent of the past, and irresponsible to any laws except those of Germany's interests and needs.
Orientis Graeci, 90; Wendland, Hellenistisch-römische Kultur, 1907, p. 74 f. and notes.
And how much there was to see in it! The Continent, America, the gorgeous East! They mapped out tours that would find them middle-aged before they neared England again. Does life consist then, in flitting from hotel to hotel, from train to steamship? Not it. German Kultur took care to upset that theory.
This is readily understood when one realises that before the war the thing the Germans prided themselves on was their commerce and their civilisation, their Kultur.
If you call one of them a liar he does not argue the matter after the manner of a German gentleman, but brutally knocks you down. The Americans have absolutely no Kultur."
In keeping with these teachings and practices were the theft of foreign passports by the German Government which handed them over to spies, as in the case of Lody, who was executed in London in the early part of the war. Thus the binding force of moral and of human law is dissolved whenever it clashes with German national, military, or commercial interests. This dogma lies at the roots of Kultur.
It had no element of humanity in it. It was a triumph of Kultur. The men might as well have been dummies, set by a clock and run by electricity. There was a blackboard on the wall which told how many prisoners were in the institution and what they were getting. The strongest and worst punishment given is called "Streng Arrest," and the number who were getting it was three.
God the God of Germany the celestial friend and comrade of his War Lord would presently correct him if he was transgressing military discipline or the etiquette of Kultur. As for the levelled rifles of the execution squad, he preferred another way.... This way!... His eyes were already glazing when the burly form of Sticky Smith filled the doorway.
But it was a hard struggle to maintain the correctly neutral behavior which we were under obligation to do. And when the end of this strain came, which was when America entered the War, and the inside Americans had to go out, they all, almost to a man, rushed to the trenches to make their protest, with gun in hand, against German Kultur as it had been exemplified under their eyes in Belgium.
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