The Admiral thought that the British landing-party had been badly prepared, though he spoke admiringly of the skill with which the Allies had managed their retreat. I also obtained further light on the German attitude toward the Armenian massacres. Usedom made no attempt to justify them; neither did he blame the Turks. He discussed the whole thing calmly, dispassionately, and merely as a military problem, and one would never have guessed from his remarks that the lives of a million human beings had been involved. He simply said that the Armenians were in the way, that they were an obstacle to German success, and that it had therefore been necessary to remove them, just like so much useless lumber. He spoke about them as detachedly as one would speak about removing a row of houses in order to bombard a city. Poor Serbia! As our train sped through her devastated valleys I had a picture of what the war had meant to this brave little country. In the last two years this nation had stood alone, practically unassisted by her allies, attempting to stem the rush of Pan-German conquest, just as, for three centuries, she had stood as a bulwark against the onslaughts of the Turks. And she had paid the penalty. Practically every farm we passed was abandoned, overgrown with weeds and full of debris, and the buildings were usually roofless and sometimes razed to the ground. Whenever we crossed a stream we saw the remains of a dynamited bridge; in all cases the Germans had built new ones to replace those which had been destroyed. We saw many women and children, looking ragged and half-starved, but, significantly, we saw very few men, for all had either been killed or they were in the ranks of Serbia’s still existing and valiant little army. All this time trainloads of German soldiers were passing us or standing on the switches at the stations where we slowed up, a sufficient explanation for all the misery and devastation we saw on our way. CHAPTER XXIX VON JAGOW, ZIMMERMAN, AND GERMAN-AMERICANS