Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future. Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out now to confess--or rather to boast--that they had planned this triumph all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a German planet. The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the bills. In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never so many fowls counted before they were hatched--and in the final outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs. But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian résistance in the Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own mountainsides. Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break. So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland. The premonition of the dawning of _Der Tag_ stirred the heart of Nicky Easton, of course. He had led for months the life of a fox in a hunt-club county. Every time he put his head out he heard the bay of the hounds. He had stolen very few chickens, and he expected every moment to be pounced on. But now that he felt assured of a German triumph in a little while, he began to think of the future. His heart turned again to Mamise. His life of hiding and stealing about from place to place had compelled him to a more ascetic existence than he had been used to. His German accent did not help him, and he had found that even those heavy persons known as light women, though they had no other virtue, had patriotism enough to greet his advances with fierce hostility. His dialect insulted those who had relinquished the privilege of being insulted, and they would not soil their open palms with German-stained money.