The German newspapers, of course, are rigidly censored. Not a word of war news is ever published except that which emanates from headquarters. Nevertheless, the German people, who are not fools, now know full well that the kaiser’s war promises are not being fulfilled. He promised in the beginning that their victorious troops would be home by Christmas of 1914. They know now that Christmas, 1918, will see the world still at war. The kaiser promised his people Verdun, but he could not deliver Verdun. He promised them the annihilation of the British army before this year’s summer. But the British army still fights on and even the German newspapers dare not claim that the British show signs of weakness or surrender. The German people were promised, above all, that their commander-in-chief would end the war victoriously before the Americans could raise and transport overseas any army worthy of the name. This supreme promise the government, until Pershing annihilated the St. Michiel salient, tried to make the people believe was being kept. Because they knew that unless the war was won before the Americans come in in great numbers, it never could be won. Secretary of War Baker, quoting from the semi-official _Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_ of Berlin, gives a sample of the sedative stuff with which the German authorities kept the people’s nerves quiet. Admitting that a country of one hundred million population might conceivably raise an army of one million five hundred thousand men, the article goes to great pains to prove that such an army will never cross the seas. “The American political situation” is such that the greater part of the army will have to be kept at home. At best only four to five hundred thousand men can be put into the European battle-field. “There is an American army in France,” concedes the article, with an air of being quite candid on the subject, “but it consists entirely of woodcutters, railroad men and doctors, except two or three divisions whose precious lives are being spared in quiet places far behind the front.” When I read those words I laughed. Because I have been in a good many of those quiet places behind the front, and I know that what was being done there was not coddling American soldiers, nor yet keeping them safe from battle. What was and is being done there is making them one hundred per cent. efficient fighters. Not mass fighters alone, not men who at the word of command go forward to be mown down by machine-gun fire. But individual fighters, men who can move together in a mass, yes, but men who also know how to fight alone, who have initiative, resourcefulness, responsibility. Men who know every trick in the game.