pages of parallel columns of translated sentences
given over to such questions as "Where is the aunt of my stepfather's
second cousin?"

As a rule a man does not go to Europe in time of war to look up his
relatives by marriage. He may even have gone there to avoid them. War
is terrible enough without lugging in all the remote kinsfolk a fellow
has. How much easier, then, to throw oneself on the superior
educational qualifications of the German military machine. Somebody was
sure to have a linguistic life net there, rigged and ready for you to
drop into.

It was so in this instance, as it has been so in many instances before
and since. The courteous gentlemen who sat at my right side and at my
left spoke in German or French or English as the occasion suited, while
old Von Heeringen boomed away in rumbling German phrases. As I ate I
studied him.

Three weeks later, less a day, I met by appointment Lord Kitchener and
spent forty minutes, or thereabouts, in his company at the War Office in
London. In the midst of the interview, as I sat facing Kitchener I
began wondering, in the back part of my head, who it was Lord Kitchener
reminded me of. Suddenly the answer came to me, and it jolted me. The
answer was Von Heeringen.

Physically the two men--Kitchener of Khartoum and Von Heeringen, the
Gray Ghost of Metz--had nothing in common; mentally I conceived them to
be unlike. Except that both of them held the rank of field marshal, I
could put my finger on no point of similarity, either in personality or
in record, which these men shared between them. It is true they both
served in the war of 1870-71; but at the outset this parallel fell flat,
too, because one had been a junior officer on the German side and the
other a volunteer on the French side. One was a Prussian in every
outward aspect; the other was as British as it is possible for a Briton
to be. One had been at the head of the general staff of his country,
and was now in the field in active service with a sword at his side.
The other, having served his country in the field for many years, now
sat intrenched behind a roll-top desk, directing the machinery of the
War Office, with a pencil for a baton. Kitchener was in his robust
sixties, with a breast like a barrel; Von Heeringen was in his
shrinking, drying-up seventies, and his broad shoulders had already
begun to fold in on his ribs and his big black eyes to retreat deeper
into his skull. One was be