denburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been
nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen
were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg
zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and
Hindenburg's still counting..."). And all you could find in the papers
was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been
very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand
prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of
the regular communique beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after
a period of inactivity..."

The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage
and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is
little or no tendency to group achievements around individual
commanders--it is "our army," not the man, although even German
collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the
post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and
Liebesgaben.

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in
Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends
off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer
verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on
noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the
scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.

You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo
slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and--"Now--for Kaiser and
fatherland!"--by means of an image thrown on a screen from the
periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and
founder.

In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the
three allies. The Russians "don't count," so to speak. They are
dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the
feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range
cattle.

Toward the French there is no bitterness either, rather a sort of pity
and the wish to be thought well of. One is reminded now and then of the
German captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's "Debacle," who, while
conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted his involuntary hosts
to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant
homme. Men tell you "they've put u