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36 SWEDISH NEUTRALITY [chap, xviii.
and daughter, a Princess Lieven, Count Constantine
Pahlen and his sister Mademoiselle Marie de Pahlen,
etc., etc.
When in view of these tales one read in the
newspapers the accounts of the burning and the massacre
at Louvain, and the butchery at Kalisch, one
understood what German war methods were, and what the
struggle just beginning represented for the civilised
world.
I repeat, up till then I had had no sort of hatred for
Germany ; but from the first weeks of the war I
understood what the propaganda of Nietzsche, Treitschke,
Bernhardi, had made of the German people; and in
addition I realised perfectly that this terrible collision
could not end in a peace of compromise; that it was a
fight to the death, and that the worst disasters:
revolution, complete moral and political decay,;would inevitably
be the portion of the vanquished.
This feeling did but increase when one terrible month
succeeded another. The cruelties practised in Germany
upon our prisoners of war, the ghastly deeds
perpetrated in the occupied provinces of Belgium, France,
Poland, Serbia, the awful Armenian massacres, the use
of poison gas, the sinister exploits of the submarines
had all come to complete the list—or so it seemed to me
then—of the crimes of the abettors of the "fresh and
joyful war," and to fill me with loathing of the whole
German nation!
Alas! I could not foresee that the list was not
complete. That three years later Royal Highnesses,
Ministers, exalted dignitaries, and the heads of German and
Austrian armies would sit round the green table with
anarchist Jews, criminal sailors and prostitutes in order
to dismember my miserable country after their agents
had strangled her—all that was too horrible to have been
even imagined !
But let us return to the events of the beginning of
the war, and to the echoes raised by these events in
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