I must not end this chapter, which I hope is recognizable as a poor expression of gratitude to all concerned for many kindnesses rendered, without a mention of the youngest, but by no means the least meritorious member, of the Berlin war Embassy family--Lanier Winslow, the Ambassador’s ever-ebullient private secretary. War sobered Winslow so rapidly that he committed matrimony before it was six months old. I can hear him now, in the midst of the passport panic, still imitating Frank Tinney or humming _Get Out and Get Under_, just as Nero might have done if Rome had known what rag-time was. At an hour when it was most needed, Lanier Winslow was a paragon of good humor, and altogether, by common consent, a thing of beauty and a joy forever. CHAPTER IX AUGUST FOURTH Germany’s war Juggernaut by the morning of Monday, August 3, was in full, but incredibly noiseless, motion. I always knew it was a magnificently well greased machine, geared for the maximum of silence, but I felt sure it could not swing into action without some reverberating creaks. Yet Berlin externally had been far more feverishly agitated on Spring Parade days at recurring ends of May than it was now, with "enemies all around" and that "war on two fronts," which most Germans used to talk about as something, _Gott sei Dank_, they would never live to see. One’s male friends of military age--it was now the second day of mobilization--kept on melting away from hour to hour, but amid a complete lack of fuss and bustle. It almost seemed as if the army had orders to rush to the fighting-line in gum-shoes and that everything on wheels had rubber tires. As the Fatherland for years had armed in silence, so she was going to battle. We saw no seventeen-inch guns rumbling to the front. Those were Germany’s best-concealed weapons. A military attaché of one of the chief belligerents, who lived in Berlin for four years preceding the war, has since confessed that he never even knew of the "Big Berthas’" existence! Germany girding for Armageddon was distinctly a disappointment. I entirely agreed with a portly dowager from the Middle West, who, between frettings about when she could get a train to the Dutch frontier, continually expressed her chagrin at such "a poor show." She imagined, like a good many of the rest of us, that mobilization in Germany would at the very least see the Supreme War Lord bolting madly up and down _Unter den Linden_, plunging silver spurs into a foaming white charger and brandishing a glistening sword in martial gestures as Caruso does when he plays Radames in the finale of the second act of Aida. Verdi’s Egyptian epic is the Kaiser’s favorite opera, and he ought to have remembered, we thought, how a conquering hero should demean himself at such a blood-stirring hour. At least Berlin, we hoped, would rise to the occasion, and thunder and rock with the pomp and circumstance of war’s alarums.