Carr eyed his daughter impassively. In a few seconds she went on.
"Of course I know that in any large army there is bound to be a certain
percentage of abnormals who will be up to all sorts of deviltry whenever
they find themselves free of direct restraint," she said. "The history
of warfare shows that. But this Belgian woman's account puts a
different face on things. These unmentionable brutalities weren't
isolated cases. Her story gave me the impression of ordered barbarity,
of systematic terrorizing by the foulest means imaginable. The sort of
thing the papers have been publishing--and worse."
"Discount that, Sophie," Carr remarked calmly. "The Germans are reckoned
in the civilized scale the same as ourselves. I'm not ready to damn
sixty-five million human beings outright because certain members of the
group act like brutes. The chances are that a German soldier would be
shot by his own command, for robbery or rape or any of these
brutalities, as promptly as one of our own offenders. The fact of the
matter is that there are a lot of hysterical people loose among us who
seem to think they can kill German soldiers by calling them bad names.
The Allies will win this war with cannon and bayonets, but up to the
present we seem to think we must supplement our bullets with epithets.
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