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Updated: May 17, 2025
"The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and to create examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning to the whole country." A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment. "This is not an order to the army. It is an attempt at justification for the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!"
Power, grim and terrible, he has, without shadow of doubt; but he never forgets to impress that fact and more upon the world, and every action is carefully studied to advertise, not himself, but his "frightfulness." A very fine play-actor is the king of all the beasts. But the ratel did not move. He had met his Napoleon, and was not so far as the watcher could see afraid.
My pater referred to Comrade Bickersdyke last night as a Merchant Prince. Comrade B. and I do not get on well together. Purely for his own good, I drew him aside yesterday and explained to him at great length the frightfulness of walking across the bowling-screen. He seemed restive, but I was firm. We parted rather with the Distant Stare than the Friendly Smile. But I shall persevere.
Burn, sack, violate, kill Gard heard the intimations the threats of all such frightfulness. In the furor he stood up on his table to get a better view of the extraordinary demonstration. It sounded fateful, terrible, like descriptions recited of the French Revolution. He was almost awestruck. At its height he feared personal violence for himself. He had sometimes been taken for a Britisher.
These people living at the very seat of the Great War knew nothing of it, though but two centuries had passed since, to our knowledge, it had been running in the height of its titanic frightfulness all about them, and to us upon the far side of the Atlantic still was a subject of keen interest. Here was a lifelong inhabitant of the Isle of Wight who never had heard of either Germany or England!
The officers had been faithfully trained to find militant peasants under arms, and to send back letters and reports of their discovery, which could later be used in official excuses for frightfulness. This letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later to appear in a White Paper, as justification for official murder of non-combatants.
Never in all her life had she seen any man's countenance so convulsed, not with pain, but with a soul-terrifying expression of hate, of virulent, murderous hate. Distorted though the man's face was with such bitter frightfulness, she recognized him, not as any one she knew, but merely as one of the tenants in the same apartment building.
We had all sorts of testimony to that. The trawlers and freightboat captains brought it in. He staged his piracies to a theatrical frightfulness. 'Old England! he would say, when he climbed up out of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and looked about him at the sailors, 'Old, is right, old and rotten! Then he would smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke.
It was just such a face as one has dreamed of after a hot supper and cold ale, when the whisky had been forgotten horrible, changing, vague, glimmering, and undefined; and as if something was still wanting to complete the utter frightfulness of his aspect, the splinter wound in his head burst out afresh from his violent agitation, and streamed down in heavy drops from his forehead, falling warm on my hand.
Thoroughly roused, I would reply that it was nonsense and he must know it. Then ensued an amusing but fiery argument about the neutrality of Belgium, the use of native troops, and frightfulness in general. His plea was that poor little unoffending Germany was only standing up for herself against a set of blood-thirsty enemies who wished to crush her.
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