drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais
waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a
suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of
the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with
all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain,
a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and
profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her
steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing
around her.

The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling
Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked
at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, "A
la Place de Calais, bon pour aller a Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat-
Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a
frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.

For something about him expressed a certain character of downright
militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could
imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy,
undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours.
Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only
national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of
the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to
create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the
neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed
munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into
confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble
purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy
of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as
the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the
bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children
dependent upon him.

Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized! Seventy
millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death
issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an
army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army
to make war.

"With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth
of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the
people must be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the
impulse of the