In all these young men, the élite of the German nation, there was effervescing a strange force, there was surging an ardent and emotional nationalism, a veritable religion of German primacy. They considered that primacy inevitable. It originated spontaneously; its increase was dependent upon organic growth; and no accident, whether in war or peace, could either hasten or hinder it. They were all radiating hope; they all had faith in the present, a warm vintage yielding a thick and heady must, of intoxicating aroma, and whence will be derived a robust wine for the peoples to drink. They were sincere when they spoke of peace. Doubtless their idealist ambition was transformed into a materialist and brutal ambition among men of business, officers, and bureaucrats. For these latter, German production was to ruin that of England, the German will was to control the foreign chancelleries. But such ends cannot be secured without war. Or they could be secured without war, only if Europe made up her mind to submit! Only if the English merchants were good enough to go bankrupt! Only if the greater Slavs should offer no objection to the enslavement of their little brothers on the Drina! Thus while the young liberals were dreaming of a pacific hegemony, Krupp was making his 420 millimetre guns, sergeants were teaching recruits to fear their officers as they feared God, and Berlin was fashioning new military laws which even the socialists, after some formal resistance, voted integrally. But during this journey, the fact which struck me most of all was the existence of a liberal youth. I had not expected to find anything of the kind. I had been so positive that from the Rhine to the Vistula I should hear nothing but the noise of military accoutrements. * * * * * I had seen the German army in Strasburg, at the _Parole Aufgabe_ in the Place de Broglie, when the general transmits to the officers’ corps the orders and the passwords. The whole of this assembly, in its light-grey uniform in which a simple sub-lieutenant was indistinguishable from a colonel, made salutes. The salute seemed to me the distinctive sign of this army, a fervent salute, involving the head and the entire spine, passing off in a smile at once triumphant and humble, martial and innocent, seeming to say, “How enviable I am in that I obey! How enviable I am in that I command!” I looked down on this from the third story of the editorial offices of _Le Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine_. Suddenly I came to understand the feudal spirit, the cascade of absolute authority and of submission which formerly descended from the sovereign to the serf by way of the hierarchy of barons.