I have had some informing conversations with wounded officers of the enemy. They indicate a definite mental attitude very different from ours. I see no trace of religious enthusiasm and little of nationality in the wider sense. The Germans have the greatest confidence and pride in their army. They tell me that two million volunteers were inscribed at the beginning of the war--an enormous fact, if correct. The attitude of the German women is such that no man who can serve dares to remain at home. My informants fully realise that for Germany the war is a matter of life and death. They have served on the western front and described the French fortresses as extremely strong ("brillant"). The Bavarians are terrible in warfare and spread alarm among the population. The losses of the first move through Belgium were enormous. The Belgians are described as excellent soldiers, and large German losses are put down to them. In the march on Paris the reserves and the commissariat could not keep up. The retreat is accepted as an unpleasant necessity. There was a certain pedantry among my informants in insisting on the need of turning the allied right wing, whatever should happen at other points. They claimed that the Germans were now in Calais. Large losses against the Russians were admitted, but it was claimed, without any real evidence, that the Russians had lost more. Again, there was a kind of machine-like insistence on the need of attack in columns with reserves close up--as this was "our tactics." The Germans had so far been saved by the default of any real Russian winter, which would have ruined the German transport and artillery and robbed their operations of all effect. What struck me most was the absence of any real intelligence as to the political issues in debate. My informants were, for reasons of humanity, in favour of a _status quo_ peace. Some Austrians gave an interesting account of the origin of the war. The Austro-Serbian quarrel was not political but personal. The Serbian dynasty, failing to obtain any satisfactory recognition from Austria, was credited with a personal hostility against the late Archduke, who was described as in general a friend of the Slavs. Proof in support of this view of his end had been widely circulated in Austria in December. The personal quarrel between the reigning houses of Austria and Serbia had been turned by the insistence of the Emperor William into an occasion for a European war, specially directed against Russia, into which Austria had been hurried against her will. Her present position now was described as very precarious. To a Hungarian officer I put the question whether the war had produced any real poetry in Hungary. He answered that there had been some rough-and-ready effusions among the working classes, whom he described as militant in their habits in time of peace and always ready for any war, especially with Russia. But the educated classes were not well disposed either to war or to this war.