BATTLE IN THE MUD 277

bureaucracy, and, in the nature of things, in an expanding
bureaucracy.

For these and other reasons the Germans and the English
were rivals. The English did not consciously think of the
Germans as such: but the Germans did so think of the English.
They envied them, they admired them and they hated them.
For the Germans were seeking what the English had long had
and would not use for themselves—the hegemony of the world,
Germany had her army. It was larger than any other army:
it was better organised It had the repute of being invincible.
But the English, though they refused to concern themselves in
Europe's untidy affairs, would not allow the German army to
rule Europe. They would not let it march through Belgium in
1870: they refused to let it attack defeated France in 1875. The
stronger it became, the more the English, true to the most
unchanging point in their foreign policy, tended to tilt the
scales against Germany. Though contempt for France and fear
of Russia had long been second nature to them, their states-
men did not hesitate to lend their support to what the ingenuous
Teuton regarded as a decadent France and a barbarous Russia in
order to thwart the just and rightful ambitions of a virile
central Europe* After the turn of the century and still more
after Russia's defeat in the Far East, the English tendency was
increasingly in this direction. Such spiteful interference in the
affairs of the continent could only be explained, Germans con-
tended, by jealousy; the English, fearing their success, wished
to encircle them.

There were psychological differences too. When the Germans,
seeking the omnipotence they could never quite reach, gave
themselves airs, the English laughed at them. They thought of
them as conceited, slightly comical "sausages" and enjoyed the
name the discomfited but invincibly gay Viennese had invented
for Berlin of "Parvenuopopolis." Their polite but occasionally
ill-concealed contempt and their more normal indifference
touched German vanity on the raw. There were always plenty
of German statesmen, diplomats and merchants with a grudge
against England which, fanned during war into a furnace of
national hatred, was to astonish the English in 1914. In German
regiments and in the ships of the High Seas Fleet toasts were
drunk to Der Tag—the day that should not only be France's
reckoning but England's.

E.S. T