These men do their best not to be quite understood.

Only six German ships! I wish the whole fleet of those dirty dogs could be sunk to the bottom." There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley.

He had followed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whose spineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing the policy of the ostrich.

He had nothing but detestation for the vile and ruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing but contempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible.
He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and bated breath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and the French, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miracle that saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to the giant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous and criminal unpreparedness.

He had squirmed with humiliation at the attempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his own country,--professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,--to prove that it was the duty of the United States to stand aloof and unmoved in the face of a menace which affected herself in no less a degree than it affected the nations then fighting for their lives, and had watched with increasing alarm the fatuous complacency of Congress which continued to deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its own war.