visit Germany as an American military observer of the
German Army maneuvers. And out of this trip he learned more thoroughly
the lack of foresight in military matters in this country and saw more
clearly the position which we should be in, if such a machine as the
German Army were pitted against us instead of the weak and decayed
forces of Spain.

In the course of these maneuvers he met many of the greatest military
men of Europe. He was received and entertained by the German Emperor
{166} not only because of his position in the American army and as the
representative of the United States, but as the man who in Cuba had
treated with such kindness and courtesy German officers of a visiting
training ship who were ill with the Island fevers. He witnessed the
grand maneuvers of the greatest army the world has ever known. But,
what in his own belief was of far more importance, he met and talked
with European military experts of world-wide reputation.

Among these men the most congenial spirit was Lord Roberts. The little
man of Kandahar, the great fighter of Britain's battles, the idol of
the British public, was then striving to awaken the English people and
the English government to their own unpreparedness. He sought even
then to show them what an attack by a force like the German Army would
mean to the British Empire. For years he kept at it, lecturing,
speaking, crying aloud throughout England up to the very day when
without warning in 1914 his countrymen found themselves with a scant
two hundred thousand soldiers confronted by five millions of trained
Germans.

{167}

The great fighter, the great preacher, his little body filled with
patriotism and a great heart, unbosomed to Wood and met a responsive
assent in Wood's own nature. They discussed from all sides the right
thing to do. They went over all the European systems together with the
desire in their hearts to find something which should at the same time
give a nation a force of great size that could be quickly put into
action and still not turn that nation into a huge military machine.
Neither of them was a militarist. Both felt that peace was best
preserved by the power to preserve it.

Together they seem to have arrived at some adaptation of the Swiss
system which provides that small country with a relatively enormous
military force without causing the citizens to give up their
commercial pursuits. At that time it is probable that Wood began to
formulate t