There is nothing like newspapers for giving one an idea of national sentiment. I had not spoken to a German, save to a few terrified German rats, prisoners of war in France, since the beginning of the war and I knew that my knowledge of German thought must be rusty. So I sent the willing waiter for all the German papers and periodicals he could lay his hands on. He returned with stacks of them, _Berliner Tageblatt, Kélnische Zeitung, Vorwérts;_ the alleged comic papers, _Kladderadatsch, Lustige Blétter_ and _Simplicissimus;_ the illustrated press, _Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, Der Weltkrieg im Bild,_ and the rest: that remarkable café even took in such less popular publications as Harden's _Zukunft_ and semi-blackmailing rags like _Der Roland von Berlin._ For two hours I saturated myself with German contemporary thought as expressed in the German press. I deliberately laid my mind open to conviction; I repeated to myself over and over again: "We Germans are fighting a defensive war: the scoundrelly Grey made the world-war: Gott strafe England!" Absurd as this proceeding seems to me when I look back upon it, I would not laugh at myself at the time. I must be German, I must feel German, I must think German: on that would my safety in the immediate future depend. I laid aside my reading in the end with a feeling of utter amazement. In every one of these publications, in peace-time so widely dissimilar in conviction and trend, I found the same mentality, the same outlook, the same parrot-like cries. What the _Cologne Gazette_ shrieked from its editorial columns, the comic (God save the mark) press echoed in foul and hideous caricature. Here was organization with a vengeance, the mobilization of national thought, a series of gramophone records fed into a thousand different machines so that each might play the selfsame tune. "You needn't worry about your German mentality," I told myself, "you've got it all here! You've only got to be a parrot like the rest and you'll be as good a Hun as Hindenburg!" A Continental waiter, they say, can get one anything one chooses to ask for at any hour of the day or night. I was about to put this theory to the test. "Waiter," I said (of course, in German), "I want a bag, a handbag. Do you think you could get me one?" "Does the gentleman want it now?" the man replied. "This very minute," I answered. "About that size?"--indicating Semlin's. "Yes, or smaller if you like: I am not particular." "I will see what can be done." In ten minutes the man was back with a brown leather bag about a size smaller than Semlin's. It was not new and he charged me thirty gulden (which is about fifty shillings) for it. I paid with a willing heart and tipped him generously to boot, for I wanted a bag and could not wait till the shops opened without missing the train for Germany.