My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for being brief, and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain, a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing around her. The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, "A la Place de Calais, bon pour aller à Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat- Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a frontier stone wall studded with bayonets. For something about him expressed a certain character of downright militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy, undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours. Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children dependent upon him. Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized! Seventy millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army to make war. "With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the people must be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organization is too small to have its effect."