Staying in Germany, a month before the war Charles Sorley wrote that though there was a type of German who had been ruined by Sedan he liked the German nature, 'as far as it is not warped by the German Empire.' After war had commenced and he was in the army, he says, 'I think the Kaiser not unlike Macbeth, with the military clique in Prussia as his Lady Macbeth, and the court flatterers as the weird sisters'; and in another letter he thinks 'a close parallel may be drawn between Faust and present history' (with Germany as Faust and Belgium as Gretchen). 'And Faust found spiritual salvation in the end!' At the outset, before the Hun had proved himself by such appalling inhumanities as sink him below the level of aboriginal negroes, Sorley could find it in his heart to write a largely tolerant, compassionate sonnet 'To Germany,' commiserating her and ourselves on the woe that had overwhelmed both:
You were blind like us. Your hurt no man designed
