Two or three days after my arrival in Berlin I might have been detected one morning in the act of stepping out of a wabbly-kneed Droschke at the Stettiner Bahnhof soon after sunrise. In the northernmost corner of the Empire there lived—or had lived, at least, before the war—a family distantly related to my own. I had paid them a hurried visit ten years before. Now I proposed to renew the acquaintance, not only for personal reasons, but out of selfish professional motives. The exact degree of war suffering would be more easily measured in familiar scenes and faces; moreover, the German point of view would be laid before me frankly, without any mask of “propaganda” or suspicion.

Memories of France had suggested the possible wisdom of reaching the station well before train-time. I might, to be sure, have purchased my ticket in leisurely comfort at the Adlon, but for once I proposed to take pot-luck with the rank and file. First-hand information is always much more satisfactory than hearsay or the dilettante observation of the mere spectator—once the bruises of the experience have disappeared. The first glimpse of the station interior all but wrecked my resolution. Early as I was, there were already several hundred would-be travelers before me. From both ticket-windows lines four deep of disheveled Germans of both sexes and all ages curved away into the farther ends of the station wings. Boy soldiers with fixed bayonets paraded the edges of the columns, attempting languidly and not always successfully to prevent selfish new-comers from “butting in” out of their turn. I attached myself to the end of the queue that seemed by a few inches the shorter. In less than a minute I was jammed into a throng that quickly stretched in S-shape back into the central hall of the station.

We moved steadily but almost imperceptibly forward, shuffling our feet an inch at a time. The majority of my companions in discomfort were plainly city people of the poorer classes, bound short distances into the country on foraging expeditions. They bore every species of receptacle in which to carry away their possible spoils—hand-bags, hampers, baskets, grain-sacks, knapsacks, even buckets and toy wagons. In most cases there were two or three of these to the person, and as no one dreamed of risking the precious things out of his own possession, the struggle forward suggested the writhing of a miscellaneous scrap-heap. Women were in the majority—sallow, bony-faced creatures in patched and faded garments that hung about their emaciated forms as from hat-racks. The men were little less miserable of aspect, their deep-sunk, watery eyes testifying to long malnutrition; the children who now and then shrilled protests at being trodden underfoot were gaunt and colorless as corpses. Not that healthy individuals were lacking, but they were just that—individuals, in a throng which as a whole was patently weak and anemic. The evidence of the scarcity of soap was all but overpowering. Seven women and at least three children either fainted or toppled over from fatigue during the two hours in which we moved a few yards forward, and they were buffeted out of the line with what seemed to be the malicious joy of their competitors behind. I found my own head swimming long before I had succeeded in turning the corner that cut off our view of the pandemonium at the ticket-window.

At eight-thirty this was suddenly closed, amid weak-voiced shrieks of protest from the struggling column. The train did not leave until nine, but it was already packed to the doors. Soldiers, and civilians with military papers, were served at a supplementary window up to the last minute before the departure. The disappointed throng attempted to storm this wicket, only to be driven back at the point of bayonets, and at length formed in column again to await the reopening of the public guichets at noon.

The conversation during that three-hour delay was incessantly on the subject of food. Some of it was good-natured; the overwhelming majority harped on it in a dreary, hopeless grumble. Many of the women, it turned out, were there to buy tickets for their husbands, who were still at work. Some had spent the previous day there in vain. I attempted to ease my wearying legs by sitting on my hamper, but querulous protests assailed me from the rear. The gloomy seekers after food seemed to resent every inch that separated them from their goal, even when this was temporarily unattainable. One would have supposed that the order-loving Germans might have arranged some system of numbered checks that would spare such multitudes the necessity of squandering the day at unproductive waiting in line, but the railway authorities seemed to be overwhelmed by the “crisis of transportation.”

From noon until one the struggle raged with double fury. The boy soldiers asserted their authority in vain. A mere bayonet-prick in the leg was apparently nothing compared with the gnawing of continual hunger. Individual fights developed and often threatened to become general. Those who got tickets could not escape from the crushing maelstrom behind them. Women were dragged unconscious from the fray, often feet first, their skirts about their heads. The rear of the column formed a flying wedge and precipitated a free-for-all fracas that swirled vainly about the window. When this closed again I was still ten feet away. I concluded that I had my fill of pot-luck, and, buffeting my way to the outer air, purchased a ticket for the following morning at the Adlon.

A little episode at my departure suggested that the ever-obedient German of Kaiser days was changing in character. The second-class coach was already filled when I entered it, except that at one end there was an empty compartment, on the windows of which had been pasted the word “Bestellt.” In the olden days the mere announcement that it was “engaged” would have protected it as easily as bolts and bars. I decided to test the new democracy. Crowding my way past a dozen men standing obediently in the corridor, I entered the forbidden compartment and sat down. In a minute or two a seatless passenger put his head in at the door and inquired with humble courtesy whether it was I who had engaged the section. I shook my head, and a moment later he was seated beside me. Others followed, until the compartment was crowded with passengers and baggage. One of my companions angrily tore the posters from the windows and tossed them outside.

“Bestellt indeed!” he cried, sneeringly. “Perhaps by the Soldiers’ Council, eh? I thought we had done away with those old favoritisms!”

A few minutes later a station porter, in his major’s uniform, appeared at the door with his arms full of baggage and followed by two pompous-looking men in silk hats. At sight of the throng inside he began to bellow in the familiar old before-the-war style.

“This compartment is bestellt,” he vociferated, in a crown-princely voice, “and it remains bestellt! You will all get out of there at once!”

No one moved; on the other hand, no one answered back. The porter fumed a bit, led his charges farther down the train, and perhaps found them another compartment; at any rate, he never returned. “Democracy” had won. Yet through it all I could not shake off the feeling that if any one with a genuinely bold, commanding manner, an old army officer, for instance, decorated with all the thingamabobs of his rank, had ordered the compartment vacated, the occupants would have filed out of it as silently and meekly as lambs.

The minority still ruled in more ways than one. A placard on the wall, forbidding the opening of a window without the unanimous consent of the passengers within the compartment, was strictly obeyed. The curtains had long since disappeared, as had the leather straps with which one raised or lowered the sash, which must now be manipulated by hand. As in the occupied zone, the seats had been stripped of their velvety coverings, suggesting that this had been no special affront to the Allies, but merely a sign of the scarcity of cloth for ladies’ blouses. It was a cloudless Sunday, and railway employees along the way were taking advantage of it to work in their little vegetable gardens, tucked into every available corner. They did not neglect their official duties, however, for all that. At every grade crossing the uniformed guard stood stiffly at attention, his furled red flag held like a rifle at his side, until the last coach had passed.

At Spandau there lay acre upon acre of war material of every species, reddening with rust and overgrowing with grass and weeds. The sight of it aroused a few murmurs of discontent from my companions. But they soon fell back again into that apathetic silence that had reigned since our departure. A few had read awhile the morning papers, without a sign of feeling, though the head-lines must have been startling to a German, then laid them languidly aside. Apparently the lack of nourishing food left them too sleepy to talk. The deadly apathy of the compartment was quite the antithesis of what it would have been in France; a cargo of frozen meat could not have been more uncommunicative.

The train showed a singular languor, due perhaps to its Ersatz coal. It got there eventually, but it seemed to have no reserve strength to give it vigorous spells. The station we should have passed at noon was not reached until one-thirty. Passengers tumbled off en masse and besieged the platform lunch-room. There were Ersatz coffee, Ersatz cheese, watery beer, and war-bread for sale, the last only “against tickets.” I had not yet been supplied with bread-coupons, but a fellow-passenger tossed me a pair of them and replied to my thanks with a silent nod. The nauseating stuff seemed to give the traveler a bit of surplus energy. They talked a little for the next few miles, though in dreary, apathetic tones. One had recently journeyed through the occupied area, and reported “every one is being treated fairly enough there, especially by the Americans.” A languid discussion of the Allies ensued, but though it was evident that no one suspected my nationality, there was not a harsh word toward the enemy. Another advanced the wisdom of “seeing Germany first,” insisting that the sons of the Fatherland had been too much given to running about foreign lands, to the neglect of their own. Those who carried lunches ate them without the suggestion of an offer to share them with their hungry companions, without even the apologetic pseudo-invitation of the Spaniard. Then one by one they drifted back to sleep again.

The engine, too, seemed to pick up after lunch—or to strike a down-grade—and the thatched Gothic roofs of Mechlenburg soon began to dot the flat landscape. More people were working in the fields; cattle and sheep were grazing here and there. Groups of women came down to the stations to parade homeward with their returning soldier sons and brothers. Yet after the first greeting the unsuccessful warriors seemed to tire of the welcome and strode half proudly, half defiantly ahead, while the women dropped sadly to the rear.

Where I changed cars, four fellow-travelers reached the station lunch-room before me and every edible thing was bestellt when my turn came. With three hours to wait I set out along the broad, well-kept highway. A village hotel served me a huge Pfannkuchen made of real eggs, a few cold potatoes, and some species of preserved fruit, but declined to repeat the order. The bill reached the lofty heights of eight marks. Children playing along the way, and frequently groups of Sunday strollers, testified that there was more energy for unnecessary exertion here in the country than in Berlin. The flat, well-plowed land, broken only by dark masses of forest, was already giving promise of a plentiful harvest.

The two women in the compartment I entered at a station farther on gave only one sign of life during the journey. A railway coach on a siding bore a placard reading, “Übergabe Wagen an die Entente.” The women gazed at it with pained expressions on their gaunt faces.

“It’s a fine new car, too,” sighed one of them, at last, “with real leather and window-curtains. We don’t get any such to ride in—and to think of giving it to England! Ach! These are sad times!”

The sun was still above the horizon when I reached Schwerin, though it was nearly nine. There was a significant sign of the times in the dilapidated coach which drove me to my destination for five marks. In the olden days one mark would have been considered a generous reward for the same journey in a spick-and-span outfit. The middle-aged woman who met me at the door was by no means the buxom matron she had been ten years before. But her welcome was none the less hearty.

“Bist du auch gegen uns gewesen?” she asked, softly, after her first words of greeting. “You, too, against us?”

“Yes, I was with our army in France,” I replied, watching her expression closely.

There was regret in her manner, yet, as I had foreseen, not the faintest suspicion of resentment. The German is too well trained in obedience to government to dream that the individual may make a choice of his own international affairs. As long as I remained in the household there was never a hint from any member of it that the war had made any gulf between us. They could not have been more friendly had I arrived wearing the field gray of the Fatherland.

A brief glance about the establishment sufficed to settle once for all the query as to whether the civil population of Germany had really suffered from the ravages of war and of the blockade. The family had been market-gardeners for generations. Ten years before they had been prosperous with the solid, material prosperity of the well-to-do middle class. In comparison with their neighbors they were still so, but it was a far call from the plenitude of former days to the scarcity that now showed its head on every hand. The establishment that had once been kept up with that pride of the old-fashioned German as for an old family heirloom, which laughs at unceasing labor to that end, was everywhere sadly down at heel. The house was shedding its ancient paint; the ravages of weather and years gazed down with a neglected air; the broken panes of glass in the hotbeds had not been replaced; farm wagons falsely suggested that the owner was indifferent to their upkeep; the very tools had all but outlived their usefulness. Not that the habit of unceasing labor had been lost. The family sleeping-hours were still from ten to four. But the war had reduced the available helping hands and the blockade had shut out materials and supplies, or forced them up to prices which none but the wealthy could reach.

Inside the house, particularly in the kitchen, the family had been reduced to almost as rudimentary a life as the countrymen of Venezuela, so many were the every-day appliances that had been confiscated or shut off by the war-time government, so few the foodstuffs that could be obtained. Though other fuel was almost unattainable, gas could only be had from six to seven, eleven to twelve, and seven to eight. Electricity was turned on from dark until ten-thirty, which at that season of the year meant barely an hour. Petroleum or candles were seldom to be had. All the better utensils had long since been turned in to the government. When I unearthed a bar of soap from my baggage the family literally fell on my neck; the only piece in the house was about the size of a postage-stamp, and had been husbanded for weeks. Vegetables were beginning to appear from the garden; without them there would have been little more than water and salt to cook. In theory each adult member of the household received 125 grams of beef a week; in practice they were lucky to get that much a month. What that meant in loss of energy I began to learn by experience; for a mere three days without meat left me weary and ambitionless. Those who could bring themselves to eat it might get horse-flesh in the markets, without tickets, but even that only in very limited quantities. The bread, “made of potatoes, turnips, and God knows what all they throw into it,” was far from sufficient. Though the sons and daughters spent every Sunday foraging the country-side, they seldom brought home enough to make one genuine meal.

The effect of continued malnutrition seemed to have been surprisingly slight on those in the prime of life. The children of ten years before, men and women now, were plump and hardy, though the color in their cheeks was by no means equal even to that of the grandfather—sleeping now in the churchyard—at the time of my former visit. Of the two granddaughters, the one born three years before, when the blockade was only beginning to be felt in these backwaters of the Empire, was stout and rosy enough; but her sister of nine months looked pitifully like the waxen image of a maltreated infant of half that age. The simple-hearted, plodding head of the household, nearing sixty, had shrunk almost beyond recognition to those who had known him in his plump and prosperous years, while his wife had outdistanced even him in her decline.

Business in the market-gardening line had fallen off chiefly because of the scarcity of seeds and fertilizers. Then there was the ever more serious question of labor. Old women who had gladly accepted three marks for toiling from dawn until dark ten years before received eleven now for scratching languidly about the gardens a bare eight hours with their hoes and rakes. Male help had begun to drift back since the armistice, but it was by no means equal to the former standard in numbers, strength, or willingness. On top of all this came a crushing burden of taxation. When all the demands of the government were reckoned up they equaled 40 per cent. of the ever-decreasing income. The war had brought one advantage, though it was as nothing compared to the misfortunes. For generations two or three members of the family had spent six mornings a week, all summer long, at the market-place in the heart of town. Since the fall of 1914 not a sprig of produce had been carried there for sale; clamoring women now besieged the gate of the establishment itself in far greater numbers than the gardens could supply.

The hardship of the past four years was not the prevailing topic of conversation in the household, however, nor when the subject was forced upon them was it treated in a whining spirit. Most of the family, like their neighbors, adroitly avoided it, as a proud prize-fighter might sidestep references to the bruises of a recent beating. Only the mother could now and then be drawn into specifying details of the disaster.

“Do you see the staging around our church there?” she asked, drawing me to a window one morning after I had persisted some time in my questions. “They are replacing with an Ersatz metal the copper that was taken from the steeple and the eaves. Even the bells went to the cannon-foundries, six of them, all but the one that is ringing now. I never hear it without thinking of an orphan child crying in the woods after all the rest of its family has been eaten by wolves. Ach! What we have not sacrificed in this fight to save the Fatherland from our wolfish enemies! We gave up our gold and our silver, then our nickel and our copper, even our smallest pots and pans, our aluminum and our lead, our leather and our rubber, down to the last bicycle tire. The horses and the cows are gone, too—I have only goats to milk now. Then the struggles I have had to keep the family clothed! Cloth that used to cost fifty pfennigs a meter has gone up to fifteen marks, and we can scarcely find any of that. Even thread is sold only against tickets, and we are lucky to get a spool a month. We are far better off than the poor people, too, who can only afford the miserable stuff made of paper or nettles. America also wants to destroy us; she will not even send us cotton. And the wicked Schleichhandel and profiteering that go on! Every city has a hotel or two where you can get anything you want to eat—if you can pay for it. Yet our honest tickets are often of no use because rascals have bought up everything at wicked prices. If we do not get food soon even this Handarbeiter government will recommence war against France, surely as you are sitting there. The young men are all ready to get up and follow our generals. The new volunteer corps are taking on thousands every day. Ach! The sufferings of these last years! And now our cruel enemies expect our poor brave prisoners to rebuild Europe. But then, I have no right to complain. At least my dear own boy was not taken from me.”

The son, whom we will call Heinrich, I had last seen as a child in knickerbockers. Now he was a powerful, two-fisted fellow of twenty-one, with a man’s outlook on life. Having enlisted as a Freiwilliger on his sixteenth birthday, at the outbreak of the war, he had seen constant service in Russia, Rumania, and in all the hottest sectors of the western front, had been twice wounded, twice decorated with those baubles with which princes coax men to die for them, and had returned home with the highest non-commissioned rank in the German army. What struck one most forcibly was the lack of opportunity offered such men as he by their beloved Fatherland. In contrast with the positions that would have been open to so promising a youngster, with long experience in the command of men, in America, he had found nothing better than an apprenticeship in the hardware trade, paying forty marks for the privilege and bound to serve three long years without pay. Like nearly all the young men in town, from grocery clerks to bankers’ sons, he still wore his uniform, stripped of its marks of rank, not out of pride, but because civilian clothing was too great a luxury to be indulged, except on Sundays. I was surprised, too, at the lack of haughtiness which I had fancied every soldier of Germany felt for his calling. When I made some casual remark about the gorgeous spiked helmet he had worn, with its Prussian and Mechlenburger cockades, which I took for granted he would set great store by to the ends of his days, he tossed it toward me with: “Here, take the thing along, if you want it. It will make a nice souvenir of your visit.” When I coaxed him outdoors to be photographed in his two iron crosses, he would not put them on until we had reached a secluded corner of the garden, because, as he explained, the neighbors might think he was boastful.

“I should gladly have died for the Fatherland,” he remarked, as he tossed the trinkets back into the drawer full of miscellaneous junk from which he had fished them, “if only Germany had won the war. But not for this! Not I, with no other satisfaction than the poor fellows we buried out there would feel if they could sit up in their graves and look about them.”

There were startling changes in the solemn, patriarchal attitude toward life which I had found so amusing, yet so charming, in the simple people of rural Germany at the time of my first visit. The war seemed to have given a sad jolt to the conservative old customs of former days, particularly among the young people. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this fact was to see the daughters calmly light cigarettes, while the sternly religious father of ten years before, who would then have flayed them for sneezing in church, looked idly on without a sign of protest. They were still at bottom the proper German FrÄuleins of the rural middle class—though as much could not be said of all the sex even in respectable old Schwerin—but on the surface there were many of these little tendencies toward the Leichtsinnig.

When it came to discussions of the war and Germany’s conduct of it, I found no way in which we could get together. We might have argued until doomsday, were it fitting for a guest to badger his hosts, without coming to a single point of agreement. Every one of the old fallacies was still swallowed, hook and line. If I had expected national disaster to bring a change of heart, I should have been grievously disappointed. To be sure, Mechlenburg is one of the remotest backwaters of the Empire, and these laborious, unimaginative tillers of the soil one of its most conservative elements. They would have considered it unseemly to make a business of thinking for themselves in political matters, something akin to accepting a position for which they had no previous training. There was that to arouse pity in the success with which the governing class had made use of this simple, unquestioning attitude for its own ends. One felt certain that these honest, straightforward victims of premeditated official lies would never have lent a helping hand had they known that the Fatherland was engaged in a war of conquest and not a war of defense.

Here again it was the mother who was most outspoken toward what she called “the wicked wrecking of poor, innocent Germany.” The father and the children expressed themselves more calmly, if at all, though it was evident that their convictions were the same. Apparently they had reached the point where further defense of what they regarded as the plain facts of the situation seemed a waste of words.

“I cried when the armistice was signed,” the mother confided to me one day, “for it meant that our enemies had done what they set out to do many years ago. They deliberately planned to destroy us, and they succeeded. But they were never able to defeat our wonderful armies in the field. England starved us, otherwise she would never have won. Then she fostered this Bolshevismus and Spartakismus and the wicked revolution that undermined us at the rear. But our brave soldiers at the front never gave way: they would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.”

She was a veritable mine of stories of atrocities by the English, the French, and especially the Russians, but she insisted there had never been one committed by the Germans.

“Our courageous soldiers were never like that,” she protested. “They did not make war that way, like our heartless enemies.”

Yet in the same breath she rambled on into anecdotes of what any one of less prejudiced viewpoint would have called atrocities, but which she advanced as examples of the fighting qualities of the German troops. There again came in that curious German psychology, or mentality, or insanity, or whatever you choose to call it, which has always astounded the world at large. “Heinie” had seen the hungry soldiers recoup themselves by taking food away from the wicked Rumanians; he had often told how they entered the houses and carried away everything portable to sell to the Jews at a song, that the next battle should not find them unprepared. The officers had just pretended they did not see the men, for they could not let them go unfed. They had taken things themselves, too, especially the reserve officers. But then, war is war. If only I could get “Heinie” to tell some of the things he had seen and heard; how, for instance, the dastardly Russians had screamed when they were pushed back into the marshes, whole armies of them.

I found more interest in “Heinie’s” stories of the insuperable difficulties he had overcome as a Feldwebel in keeping up the discipline of his men after the failure of the last great German offensive, but I did not press that point in her presence.

“No,” she went on, in answer to another question, “the Germans never did anything against women. Those are all English lies! Heinie never told me of a single case”—“Heinie” was, of course, no more apt to tell mother such details than would one of the well-bred boys of our own Puritan society, but I kept the mental comment to myself. “Of course there were those shameless Polish girls, and French and Belgian hussies, who gave themselves freely to the soldiers, but....

“Certainly the Kaiser will come back,” she insisted. “We need our Kaiser; we need princes, to govern the Empire. What are Ebert and all that crowd? Handarbeiter, hand workers, and nothing more. It is absurd to think that they can do the work of rulers. We need our princes, who have had generations of training in governing. Siehst du, I will give you an example. We have been HandelsgÄrtner for generations. Hermann knows all about the business of gardening, because he was trained to it as a boy, nicht wahr? Do you think a man who had never planted a cabbage could come and do Hermann’s work? Ausgeschlossen! Well, it is just as foolish for a Handarbeiter like Ebert to attempt to become a ruler as it would be for one of our princes to try to run Hermann’s garden.

“Germany is divided into three classes—the rulers, the middle class (to which we belong), and the proletariat or hand-workers, which includes Ebert and all these new upstarts. It is ridiculous to be getting these distinctions all mixed up. Leave the governing to the princes and their army officers and the Junkers. We use the nickname ‘Junker’ for our noble gentlemen, von Bernstorff, for instance, who is well known in America, and all the others who have a real right to use the ‘von’ before their names, whose ancestors were first highway robbers and then bold warriors, and who are naturally very proud”—she evidently thought this pride quite proper and fitting. “Then our army officers are chosen from the very best families and can marry only in the gelehrten class, and only then if the girl has a dowry of at least eight hundred thousand marks. So they preserve all the nobility of their caste down through every generation and keep themselves quite free from middle-class taint—the real officers I am speaking of, not the Reservisten, who are just ordinary middle-class men, merchants and doctors and teachers and the like, acting as officers during the war. Those are the men who are trained to govern, and the only ones who can govern.”

I knew, of course, that the great god of class was still ruling in Germany, but I confess that this bald statement of that fact left me somewhat flabbergasted. It is well to be reminded now and again, however, that the Teuton regards politics, diplomacy, and government as lifelong professions and not merely as the fleeting pastimes of lawyers, automobile-makers, and unsuccessful farmers; it clarifies our vision and aids us to see his problems more nearly as he sees them.

Several rambles in and about Schwerin only confirmed the impressions I had already formed—that the region was hopelessly conservative and that it had really seriously suffered from the war and the blockade. On the surface there was often no great change to be seen; but scratch beneath it anywhere and a host of social skeletons was sure to come to light. Even the famous old Schwerinerschloss, perhaps the most splendid castle in Germany, showed both this conservatism and the distress of the past years. The repairs it was undergoing after a recent fire had ceased abruptly with the flight of the reigning family of Mechlenburg, but the marks of something more serious than the conflagration showed in its seedy outward appearance. Yet not a chair had been disturbed within it, for all the revolution, and guards stationed about it by the Soldiers’ Council protected it as zealously as if they, too, were waiting for “our princes” to come back again. Almost the only sign of the new order of things was the sight of a score or more of discharged soldiers calmly fishing in the great Schwerinersee about the castle, a crime that would have met with summary vengeance in the old ducal days.

Rumor having it that the peace terms were to be published that afternoon, I hastily took train one morning back to Berlin, that I might be in the heart of the uproar they were expected to arouse. At the frontier of Mechlenburg soldiers of the late dukedom went carefully through passengers’ baggage in search of food, particularly eggs, of which a local ordinance forbade the exportation. The quest seemed to be thorough and I saw no tips passed, but there was considerable successful smuggling, which came to light as soon as the train was well under way again. A well-dressed merchant beside me boastfully displayed a twenty-mark sausage in the bottom of his innocent-looking hand-bag, and his neighbors, not to be outdone in proof of cleverness, showed their caches of edibles laboriously concealed in brief-cases, hat-boxes, and laundry-bags.

“The peasants have grown absolutely shameless,” it was agreed. “They have the audacity to demand a mark or more for a single egg, and twenty for a chicken”—in other words, the rascals had turned upon the bourgeois some of his own favorite tricks, taking advantage of conditions which these same merchants would have considered legitimate sources of profit in their own business. Wrath against the “conscienceless” countrymen was unlimited, but no one thought of shaming the smugglers for their cheating.

The contrast between the outward courtesy of these punctilious examples of the well-to-do class and their total lack of real, active politeness was provoking. A first-class compartment had been reserved for a sick soldier who was plainly on his last journey, with a comrade in attendance. Travelers visibly able to stand in the corridor crowded in upon him until the section built for six held thirteen, and forced the invalid to crouch upright in a corner. Women were rudely, almost brutally, refused seats, unless they were pretty, in which case they were overwhelmed with fawning attentions.

A discussion of America broke out in the compartment I occupied. It resembled an exchange of opinions on the character of some dear friend of the gathering who had inadvertently committed some slight social breach. There was not a word at which the most chauvinistic of my fellow-countrymen could have taken offense. When I had listened for some time to the inexplicable expressions of affection for the nation that had turned the scales against their beloved Fatherland, I discarded my incognito. My companions acknowledged themselves surprised, then redoubled their assertions of friendliness. Was their attitude a mere pose, assumed on the chance of being heard by some representative of the country they hoped to placate? It seemed unlikely, for they had had no reason to suspect my nationality. I decided to overstep the bounds of veracity in the hope of getting at their real thoughts, if those they were expressing were merely assumed.

“I said I am an American,” I broke in, “but do not misunderstand me. We Chileans are quite as truly Americans as those grasping Yankees who have been fighting against you.”

To my astonishment, the entire group sprang instantly to the defense of my real countrymen as against those I had falsely adopted. All the silly slanders I had once heard in Chile they discarded as such, and advanced proofs of Yankee integrity which even I could not have assembled.

“You Chileans have nothing to fear from American aggression,” the possessor of the twenty-mark sausage concluded, reassuringly, as the rumble of the train crossing the Spree set us to gathering our traps together. “The North Americans are a well-meaning people; but they are young, and England and France have led them temporarily astray, though they have not succeeded in corrupting their simple natures.”