I stood on the platform watching the troops trains go by
and admiring the marvellous ingenuity of the German
system.

As each train went past at full speed, a postal train
(Feld-Post-Eisenbahn-Zug) moved on the other track in
the opposite direction, from which a shower of letters
were thrown in to the soldiers through the window.
Immediately after the postal train, a soup train (Soup-Zug)
was drawn along, from the windows of which soup was
squirted out of a hose.

Following this there came at full speed a beer train
(Bier-Zug) from which beer bombs were exploded in all
directions.

I watched till all had passed.

"Now," said the station-master, "your train is ready.
Here you are."

Away we sped through the meadows and fields, hills and
valleys, forests and plains.

And nowhere--I am forced, like all other travellers, to
admit it--did we see any signs of the existence of war.
Everything was quiet, orderly, usual. We saw peasants
digging--in an orderly way--for acorns in the frozen
ground. We saw little groups of soldiers drilling in the
open squares of villages--in their quiet German fashion
--each man chained by the leg to the man next to him;
here and there great Zeppelins sailed overhead dropping
bombs, for practice, on the less important towns; at
times in the village squares we saw clusters of haggard
women (quite quiet and orderly) waving little red flags
and calling: "Bread, bread!"

But nowhere any signs of war. Certainly not.

We reached Berlin just at nightfall. I had expected to
find it changed. To my surprise it appeared just as usual.
The streets were brilliantly lighted. Music burst in
waves from the restaurants. From the theatre signs I
saw, to my surprise, that they were playing _Hamlet_,
_East Lynne_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_. Everywhere
was brightness, gaiety and light-heartedness.

Here and there a merry-looking fellow, with a brush and
a pail of paste and a roll of papers over his arm, would
swab up a casualty list of two or three thousand names,
amid roars of good-natured laughter.

What perplexed me most was the sight of thousands of men,
not in uniform, but in ordinary civilian dress.

"Boobenstein," I said, as we walked down the Linden
Avenue, "I don't understand it."

"The men?" he answered. "It's a perfectly simple matter.
I see you don't understand our army statistics. At the
beginning of the war we had an army of three million.
Very good. Of these, one million were