It was chiefly in my wanderings through rural Germany that I was able to rub elbows with the rank and file of citizens, and to get that barometer of public feeling which Colonel Roosevelt, I believe, has called the barber-shop opinion. I think I am justified in saying that during the winter there were many evidences, too many to be overlooked, that a growing minority, suffering through loss of life and realizing the territorial advantages which are now Germany's, earnestly longed for peace on any reasonable terms. The sooner peace came, they felt, the better would be the strategic position of the Vaterland. Some of this minority, in addition to the women, were business men, or professors, or merchants, or doctors. It was not far from Hanover, where you change cars for Cologne and Aix- la-Chapelle, dispatching-centers of the troops for the northern line of battle, that the Frankfort doctor in the seat next mine began to talk. He was an oldish man over sixty, dressed in mourning, and careworn. He had been to Berlin, he said, to verify the report of his son's death, and was now headed for Aix, where the body lay. After Uhlman, the fat merchant, left, we were alone in the second-class compartment, and the doctor got up and shut the door on the noise of Landwehr soldiers singing in the section of the troop train attached behind the car. Presently he showed me two postals from his boy. They were the stereotyped cards allotted to the men on the field: on one side space for the address, on the other side the printed word "well," space for the date (but no locality), and the signature. The third card was a casualty report, signed, probably, by the company captain, with the three printed words "slightly wounded," "wounded," and "severely wounded." The first and last were scratched out, but after the word "wounded" was written, "condition low." The boy must have held out--because the body was sent to Aix--until well along the homeward Red Cross trip. During the Antwerp bombardment, at Brussels, Liege, and Louvain, I had seen scores of the wounded, and had myself slept on those trains with their households of blood and pain and ether, and their long lines of mail cars, box cars, and converted tram cars fitted with their triple rows of berths, one above another. As the old doctor talked, I could see the wheeled hospitals stealing into the city in the darkness--for the troops go off with bands and holiday accompaniment, but the return is made at dead of night, that the public may not know the human cost.