The main reason which impelled me to secure the authority for presenting his little work in an English dress was the fact that it tells a truthful tale about an organization of such first-rate importance as the German army. It paints that organization not only as he himself saw it, but as in its essential features it really is. In doing this Lieutenant Bilse has not only rendered an enormous service to his own country,--as indeed many thousands of Germans are recognizing to-day,--but he has also enabled the rest of the world to gain a clear insight into the inner mechanism of the most powerful fighting-machine in the world, has shown its hidden flaws, its grave organic defects, and has thus permitted us truly to gauge its inherent power. But interwoven with his criticism there is the hope, nay the conviction, that the main part of the machine is still sound. A book of this kind, “written from the inside,” has a strong merit of its own not to be measured by its purely literary qualities; for these, I am free to admit, are not of the highest order. There is talent in it, when considering that it is the first effort of a literary tyro; but its great value lies in its intense realism, interpreting that word in its higher sense. I have been compelled to make some alterations and omissions in my work of translation. The omissions have been due to the conviction both of myself and of my publisher, that the author has in certain instances given a mass of unnecessary details to which serious objection might be urged, in this country at least, on the score of clean literary taste. The alterations were either dictated by similar considerations or grew indirectly out of them. With these exceptions mentioned, however, my translation may fairly claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in Bilse’s book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German army. And there is no excuse to be offered by me for furthering that task. WOLF VON SCHIERBRAND. NEW YORK, JANUARY 1, 1904. A Little Garrison CHAPTER I AN EVENING PARTY AT CAPTAIN KÖNIG’S Standing in the centre of her parlor, a spacious and cosy one, Frau Clara König let her eyes glide over the arrangements made for the reception of her guests. For this was her regular _soirée musicale_, when she saw assembled about her, one evening each week, those of her more intimate friends who dallied habitually with Euterpe, loveliest of the Muses. To-night, however, her invitations had not been so restricted, for she had asked some other families to come, largely for the laudable purpose of admiring the musical achievements of the “artists.”