But Germany was not merely present in the spirit:  Germany was present in the flesh.  Without any desire to underrate the exploits of the English or the Orangemen, I can safely say that the finest touches were added by soldiers trained in a tradition inherited from the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, and of what the old ballad called “the cruel wars of High Germanie.”  An Irishman I know, whose brother is a soldier, and who has relatives in many distinguished posts of the British army, told me that in his childhood the legend (or rather the truth) of ’98 was so frightfully alive that his own mother would not have the word “soldier” spoken in her house.  Wherever we thus find the tradition alive we find that the hateful soldier means especially the German soldier.  When the Irish say, as some of them do say, that the German mercenary was worse than the Orangemen, they say as much as human mouth can utter.  Beyond that there is nothing but the curse of God, which shall be uttered in an unknown tongue.

The practice of using German soldiers, and even whole German regiments, in the make-up of the British army, came in with our German princes, and reappeared on many important occasions in our eighteenth-century history.  They were probably among those who encamped triumphantly upon Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more gratifying thought) among those who ran away with great rapidity at Prestonpans.  When that very typical German, George III., narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled with all that was spirited, not only in the democracy of America but in the aristocracy of England, German troops were very fitted to be his ambassadors beyond the Atlantic.  With their well-drilled formations they followed Burgoyne in that woodland march that failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden faces beheld our downfall.  Their presence had long had its effect in various ways.  In one way, curiously enough, their very militarism helped England to be less military; and especially to be more mercantile.  It began to be felt, faintly of course and never consciously, that fighting was a thing that foreigners had to do.  It vaguely increased the prestige of the Germans as the military people, to the disadvantage of the French, whom it was the interest of our vanity to underrate.  The mere mixture of their uniforms with ours made a background of pageantry in which it seemed more and more natural that English and German potentates should salute each other like cousins, and, in a sense, live in each other’s countries.  Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was already regarded as something of a menace by the English politicians, and as nothing but a madman by the English people.  Yet it did not seem in any way disgusting or dangerous that Edward VII. should appear upon occasion in a Prussian uniform.  Edward VII. was himself a friend to France, and worked for the French Alliance.  Yet his appearance in the red trousers of a French soldier would have struck many people as funny; as funny as if he had dressed up as a Chinaman.