And so the legend may have been spun until it reached
the censors and propagandists, who, whether they believed it or not,
saw its value, and let it loose on the German civilians. They too were
not altogether sorry to find that the people they were outraging were
sub-human. And, above all, since the legend came from their heroes,
they were not only entitled to believe it, they were unpatriotic if
they did not.
But where so much is left to the imagination because the scene of
action is lost in the fog of war, there is no check and no control.
The legend of the ferocious Belgian priests soon tapped an old hatred.
For in the minds of most patriotic protestant Germans, especially of
the upper classes, the picture of Bismarck's victories included a long
quarrel with the Roman Catholics. By a process of association, Belgian
priests became priests, and hatred of Belgians a vent for all their
hatreds. These German protestants did what some Americans did when
under the stress of war they created a compound object of hatred out
of the enemy abroad and all their opponents at home. Against this
synthetic enemy, the Hun in Germany and the Hun within the Gate, they
launched all the animosity that was in them.
The Catholic resistance to the atrocity tales was, of course,
defensive. It was aimed at those particular fictions which aroused
animosity against all Catholics, rather than against Belgian Catholics
alone.
Pages:
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115