"Society," in its more visible, decorative sense, is as forgotten as it is in France, as it must be in such a time. There are no dances or formal parties; every one who is not going about his civil business has in one way or another "gone to the war." The gay young men are at the front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the street a pretty young lady merely out to take the air, with hands in her muff and trotting in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like a ravening tiger and looking at the world askance with his rueful eyes. The apparent quietness and gravity is partially due to the lack of a "yellow" or, in the British or American sense of the word, popular press. There is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the better-class English civilians nor the light-hearted fighting man at the front, yet which are entertainingly written, do contain the news, and get themselves read. The German papers print comparatively little of what we call "news." They hide unpleasant truths and accent pleasant ones, and are working all the time to create a definite public opinion; but their partisanship is that of official proclamation rather than that of overworked and underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the desperation of servants working for a tip. The yelping after spies, the heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British arms, the ill-timed talk of snatching the enemy's trade in a war theoretically fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vulgarity--which might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar circumstances--one is mercifully spared. This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front. A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of Hindenburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and Hindenburg's still counting..."). And all you could find in the papers was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of the regular communiqué beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after a period of inactivity..."