ll over his
own drawing board. All the rest, though, were generals and colonels and
majors, and such--youngish men mostly. Excluding our host I do not
believe there was a man present who had passed fifty years of age; but
the General was nearer eighty than fifty, being one of the veterans of
the Franco-Prussian War, whom their Emperor had ordered out of desk jobs
in the first days of August to shepherd his forces in the field. At his
call they came--Von Heeringen and Von Hindenberg and Von Zwehl, to
mention three names that speedily became catchwords round the world--
with their gray heads full of Prussian war tactics; and very soon their
works had justified the act of their imperial master in choosing them
for leadership, and now they had new medals at their throats and on
their breasts to overlay the old medals they won back in 1870-71.

Like many of the older officers of the German Army I met, Von Heeringen
spoke no English, in which regard he was excessively unlike ninety per
cent of the younger officers. Among them it was an uncommon thing in my
experience to find one who did not know at least a smattering of English
and considerably more than a smattering of understandable French. Even
that marvelous organism, the German private soldier, was apt to astonish
you at unexpected moments by answering in fair-enough English the
questions you put to him in fractured and dislocated German.

Not once or twice, but a hundred times during my cruising about in
Belgium and Germany and France, I laboriously unloaded a string of
crippled German nouns and broken-legged adjectives and unsocketed verbs
on a hickory-looking sentry, only to have him reply to me in my own
tongue. It would come out then that he had been a waiter at a British
seaside resort or a steward on a Hamburg-American liner; or, oftener
still, that he had studied English at the public schools in his native
town of Kiel, or Coblenz, or Dresden, or somewhere.

The officers' English, as I said before, was nearly always ready and
lubricant. To one who spoke no French and not enough German to hurt
him, this proficiency in language on the part of the German standing
army was a precious boon. The ordinary double-barreled dictionary of
phrases had already disclosed itself as a most unsatisfying volume in
which to put one's trust. It was wearing on the disposition to turn the
leaves trying to find out how to ask somebody to pass the butter and
find instead whole