It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he already had; the German was defending what he considered that he was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe, thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny. Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long- promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and preparation. When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room appear normal. He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at the front taking more Russian soldiers.