rags.

And, whirring gently, the Taube sails on through the night:

'Ich glaube.. Da oben fliegt Ich glaube.. 'ne Taube'

Again the glowworm flash, and a moment later, over on the left bank, not
far from the Luxembourg, apparently, another of those eloquent little
puffs of fire. The crowd is as delighted as children would be with
bursting soap-bubbles.

Or we are, let us say, at "Woran Wir Denken" ("What We're Thinking Of")
with delightful music and such verses as we rarely enough hear in
musical comedies at home. In the spotlight there is a square young man
dressed in a metallic coat and conical helmet, so as to suggest the
famous forty-two-centimetre shell--the shell which makes a hole like a
cellar and smashed the Belgian forts as if an earthquake had struck
them. And singing with him an exquisite, nun-like creature in a
dove-colored robe, typifying the Taube. They are singing to each other:

"I am delicate and slender And made for the salon..." "And I am the
biggest smasher In all the present season..." "High up above the clouds
I fly at heart's desire..." "And I'm a child of Krupp's, Whom nobody
knew about..." "I fly, trackless as a breath..." "I slash on with smoke
and roar..."

They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube and the
forty-two-centimetre shell, the "Brummer," or "Grumbler," as they call
it in Germany--could anything be more piquant? You should hear them--the
chaste, chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brummer, singing
that he is her dear old Grumbler and she his soft, swift Dove:

"Suesser, dicker Brummer... Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink..."

There is a sort of poetry about this--a new sort of poetry about a new
sort of war. And it might possibly be proved that such poetry could
only come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in
imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put--a people in love
with war, having a mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their
remote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double-edged swords.

I shall not attempt to do this--heaven preserve Americans from being
judged by their musical comedies !--and doubtless the children even of
our most devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead
cannon and toy soldiers. I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of
refinement and brutality, as something which, it struck me, we
Americans--who always do everything exactly right--would not have
thoug