The French were almost popular.  The Kaiser had spoken of them as “brave foes.”  What quarrel could France and Germany have?  France had been the dupe of England.  Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not in fashion.  For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace with both France and Russia.  She was ready to yield at least part of Alsace-Lorraine to France.  When the negotiations fell through, cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and the untutored Slav.  It was not alone in Germany that a responsive Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in Germany the machinery ran smoothest.

For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I had never seen before hate me.  At sight of me a woman who had been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her eyes, turned a malignant devil.  Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair-haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform.  Being hungry at the station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat, and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I alighted.

My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the word, “Englisher!” If looks were daggers I should have been pierced through the heart.  Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her error.  Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was a Red Cross buffet.  An Englishman had dared to try to buy a sandwich meant for German soldiers!  She might at least glory in the fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.

A moment later a soldier approached the buffet.  She leaned over, smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in the freight shed at Calais—­a simile which would anger them both.

The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too, expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to associate with woman.  But there was the difference of the old culture and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race which was fighting to hold.  The tactics which we call the offensive was in the German woman’s, as in every German’s, nature.  It had been in the Frenchwoman’s in Napoleon’s time.  Many racial hates the war has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer, asphyxiating-gas hate.