The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is little or no tendency to group achievements around individual commanders--it is "our army," not the man, although even German collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and Liebesgaben. In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust. You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and--"Now--for Kaiser and fatherland!"--by means of an image thrown on a screen from the periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and founder. In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the three allies. The Russians "don't count," so to speak. They are dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range cattle. Toward the French there is no bitterness either, rather a sort of pity and the wish to be thought well of. One is reminded now and then of the German captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's "Debacle," who, while conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted his involuntary hosts to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant homme. Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the French barracks there--"but, of course, the French are an artistic people. You can allow them liberties like that." Every now and then in the papers one runs across some anecdote from France in which the Frenchman is permitted to make the retort at the expense of the English. Toward John Bull there is no mercy. He is shown naked, trying to hide himself with neutral flags; he is sprawled in his mill with a river of French blood flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is doing his grinding for him; he is hobnobbing cheek by jowl with cannibals and black men, and he is seriously discussed as a traitor to the Germanic peoples and the white race.