I have already mentioned that the relations between officers and men were good. In this connection it is as well to say that those stories one sometimes reads of German officers flogging their men are quite impossible. It is unthinkable that a German officer should hit a soldier. I have never heard of its being done, and redress is so quick and certain, that even if it had occurred by mischance in any regiment, it could never have become a regular practice. Brutality, however, had plenty of opportunities to manifest itself. I heard a story of two old school friends who had a quarrel in the trenches. One was a private, the other a corporal. Unfortunately the private forgot himself and used bad language to his friend the corporal. The latter immediately reports the affair, the private is court-martialled and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Before he is sent away, the battalion is drawn up on parade, the major in command lectures them on the heinousness of the crime, spits at the criminal, and then, turning his back on the men, says, “I now leave you to do what you like with him.” They take the hint and give him a good drubbing with the butt-ends of their rifles. I do not think that such a thing could have happened in our regiment, but there was nothing in the regulations of the army to prevent it. Although the relations between officers and men were good, those between the various social classes among the common soldiers were very bad. In England the war seems to have drawn the classes together, they have come to understand and respect one another. In the German Army exactly the opposite has happened. Theoretically from the moment war was declared, all classes were equal in the army. Promotion was to be by merit alone. In practice, the educated men were marked out from the beginning for promotion, if only they showed any promise at all, and they were not only more quickly promoted, they could rise higher, they could receive a commission. The uneducated, no matter what his abilities, never got beyond a sergeant. On this account the “lower” classes bore the “upper” classes a grudge, and did what they could to make their life miserable. The educated men, on the other hand, were disgusted by the continual thieving of the working-man, his brutality, and his utter want of comradeship. I know of no educated man in the German Army whose thinking had not taken on an anti-Socialist and pro-Conservative tendency as the result of his experiences in the war. To know the German labourer was not to respect him. My experiences with the working-man were uniformly wretched until almost the last, when I made the acquaintance of some artisans at Irkutsk. These men one could respect, and it was possible to form such friendships with them as we read of in the English Army. But then they belonged to the aristocracy of labour, some of them had thriving businesses of their own, and I do not think they regarded themselves as ordinary labourers. Be that