Daily capital journal. (Salem, Oregon) 1903-1919, 1917-05-05
Men That Don't
Play the Game
By Irwin S. Cobb
of the Vigilantes.

(By courtesy of the Saturday Evening
Post)
We have got to remember that the
Germany with which We have broken rs
not the Germany of Heine and Goethe
and Haeckle and Beethoven; not the
Germany that gave us Stcuben in the
Revolutionary war, and Sigel and
Schurz in the Civil war; not the Ger
many of the sentimental, chivalrous,
lovable Saxon. or yet of the music.lov-
ing, home-lovlng Bavarian; not the
Germany that was the birthplace of the
kindly, honorable, Industrious, patriotic
German-speaking neighbor round the
corner from you-but the fanatical
tryrannical, power-mad, blood-and-iron
PrussianiZed Germany OF Bismarck and
Won Bernhard, of the Crown Prince and
the Junkers-that passionate Prussian-
lied Germany which for 40 years
through the instrumenctality of its rul-
ing classeS-nOt necessarily its kaiser,
but its real ruling classes been
jealousy striving to pervert every ma
tive ounce of its scientific and its in
vcntive and its creative genius out of
the paths of progress and civilization
and to join it into the grooves of the
greatest autocratic machine, the great
est organism for killing off human be-
ings, the greatest engine of misbegottcn
and msairected efficiency that was
ever created in the world. Because we
have an admiration for one Of these two
Germans is no more a reason why we
should abate our indignation and our
destcstation for the other Germany than
that because & man loves a chcery blaze
upon his hearthStone he should refuse to
fight a forest fire
We have got to remember another
thing. If our oversee observations Of
this war abroad have taught US any
thing, they should have taught us that
army I mean in this case, not its men
but its officers, since in the German
army the officers are essentially the
brain and the power and the motive
force directing the unthinking, blindly
obcdicnt mass beneath thcm-that the
German army is not an army of good
sportsmcn. And that, | take it, is an
even more important consideration upon
the field OF battle than it is upon the
athletic field. AS the saying goes, the
Germans don't play the game. 1t is as
inconceiyahle to imagine German Off
GERS going in for baseball or football or
cricket as it is to imagine American
volunteers marching the goose step.
The Germans are not an outdoor
race; they arc not given to playing out
nj, I, 4 bo gP
those sports, as Englishmen and as
Americans are. And in war-that big
gest of all outdoor games-it stands
proved against them that they do not
play according to the rules, except they
be rules of their own making. The Ger
man is q greedy winner and he is bad
loser--a most remarkably bad loser.
Good sportsmen would not have broken
Belgium into bloody bits because Bel
gium stood between them and their
goal; good sportsmen would not have
sung the Hymn of Hate, or made "Gott
Strafc England" their battle cry; good
sportsmen would not have shot Edith
/ Cavell of sunk the Lusitania. Good
sportsmen would not have packed the
helpless men and boys Of conquered
and a Frustrated land off as captives
into an enforced scrvitude worse than
5 African slavery; would not wantonly
/ have wasted La Fere and Chauny and
, Ham, and hundred other French
I towns, as did they last month, for no
conceivable reason than that they must
! surrender these towns back into the
hand of the enemy; would not, while
ostensibly at peace with us, have plot.
: ted to destroy our industrial plants and
! to plant the seeds Of sedition among our
: foreign-born citizens, and to dismem.
her our country, parceling it out to a
brown race in Mexico and a yellow race
in Japan. Good sports do not do these
things, and Germany did all Of them
That means something