-expectancy, undescribable and splendid, was in the air
beyond the Rhine. And there was one special toast drunk to it all
with ever more loudly clinking glasses--Der Tag! Such was triumphant
Germany, the triumphant Vaterland, in 1913--foretasting a portentous
future; pregnant with colossal success; swollen with a hundred years
of victories and growth; as sure of its prowess and might as were
the swaggering gods of its Valhallas.

Imperial Deutschland ueber Alles!

CHAPTER III

GARD KIRTLEY

Into this Triumphant Germany young Kirtley had come to recuperate
from the sadness over the loss, the previous year, of his parents
and from a siege of sickness. Still somewhat pale, somewhat weak, he
showed the shock he had undergone. He had toured across southern
Germany and up to Berlin where he had bidden good-by to his chance
American traveling companion, Jim Deming, who was knocking about
Italy and Teutonland. They had exchanged final addresses.

Kirtley, clean-shaven, with pleasant brown eyes, and brown hair
brushed down flat, giving his head the appearance of smallness,
looked very lank and Yankeeish among the robust, fat Teutons of the
Saxon capital. He was entering Dresden on a late afternoon brown
with German sunshine. The school year had begun, but a loitering
summer-time brightened city and countryside. As he made his way
slowly through the throng at the station, he gave evidence of a
rather shy way of looking up and about, an apologetic readiness
to step aside, to yield place, not characteristic of the speedy
American in Europe. He had not, as we have said, come to Germany
for adventure. He had not come merely to idle for the winter. And
certainly he little mistrusted he was finally to figure as a modest
hero in a curious and dangerous experience that linked itself up
with the beginning of the war of which he, like the world at large,
felt not the slightest premonition.

His German teacher had been his favorite in his eastern college
where he had one season been a very fair halfback. His better
showing had exhibited itself in his ability to throw from left field
to home plate on the ball team. This American preceptor of German
parentage had taken an interest in Kirtley with the insistent way of
Teutonic pedagogues. Always commending with a uniform vigor the
Germans and German fashions of living, he had gradually filled Gard
full of the idea of their excelling merits.

Kirtley heard of the tonic of the