The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/"We'll Fight, and Fight Soon"
"WE'LL FIGHT, AND FIGHT SOON"
By that time I had, in common with the majority
of my countrymen who travelled much abroad,
been compelled to recognize the ever-increasing
hostility of the German and British peoples whenever
they encountered each other on the highways
of the world—their constant cross-purposes
on steamships, in railway trains, hotels, casinos,
post and telegraph offices—making social intercourse
difficult and friendship impossible. The
overbearing manners of many German travellers,
their aggressive and domineering selfishness,
which always demanded the best seats, the best
rooms, and the first attention, was year by year
becoming more and more intolerable to the
British spirit. It cannot be said that we acquiesced.
Indeed, it must be admitted that our
country-people usually met the German claims
to be the supermen of Europe with rather
unnecessary self-assertion. If an unmannerly
German pushed before us at the counter of a
booking-office we pushed him back; if he shouted
over our shoulders at a telegraph office we told
him to hold his tongue; and if, in stiflingly hot
weather, he insisted (as he often did) on shutting
up again and again the window of a railway
carriage after we had opened it for a breath of air,
we sometimes drove our, elbow through the glass
for final answer—as I saw an English barrister
do one choking day on the journey between Jaffa
and Jerusalem.
These were only the straws that told how the wind blew, but they were disquieting symptoms nevertheless to such of us as felt, with Professor Harnack and his colleagues at the Edinburgh Conference, that by blood, history and faith, the German and British peoples were brothers (ugly as it sounds to say so now), each more closely bound to the other in the world-task of civilization than with almost any other nation.
"If we are brothers we'll fight all the more fiercely for that fact," we thought, "and, God help us, we'll fight soon."