We had exceptional opportunities of knowing Germans of all classes, from the cleaning women in the theatre to royalty. The military types are most varied, ranging from the Prussian Junker to the _gemuetlicher Bayer_, with his easy South German ways. We met many officers and their families, both in Metz and Darmstadt. In Metz, during the last year, we grew to know and be fond of a young Bavarian lieutenant. With him we drove and picnicked in the lovely Metz country. It was early spring, and we would take the train to some little village near by, and have our tea in the woods or at one of the thousands of _Gasthäuse_ that dot Germany. I remember one Sunday afternoon in a still, steep-sided ravine, the walls of it rising sharply on either side, thickly wooded with giant beeches; the sun-flecked grass aquiver with myriads of white ethereal wind-flowers. A shrine, with a blue-robed Virgin looked down on us, and the wood-hush was only broken by the songs of birds, twittering and gurgling high above us in the branches. Suddenly far off the sound of singing; and slowly a procession of children came into view, singing in well-harmonized parts as they walked. They all genuflected before the Virgin and wound off into the woods, their voices dying away in the distance. We often studied the old battlefields, so fiercely contested in 1870, and F---- would point out to us just where the different regiments advanced and fell. A long way off seemed the horrors of war, and we never dreamed what much greater horrors were soon to descend on us. We loved the Bavarians with their kind artistic souls in those days, and yet they tell me they were among the worst in the early days in Belgium.