During those early days the chief interest of our life lay in the insight it gave into the conditions and psychology of the German people. For nearly four years we had been at war with this nation, and yet we knew practically nothing about it. For four years an iron screen had been drawn between us and them. All the information that we received came to us through the filtering places of many censorships. We were told only what the authorities wished us to be told; and of the countless activities of Germany, report reached us of none that could bring credit to any nation but our own. But now we were able to converse freely with German officers and soldiers, and form our own opinion as to their attitude towards us. Of course this opinion is subject to numberless qualifications. Even from the highest window of the citadel only a limited view can be obtained of a country that has been the subject of so much calumny and conjecture. Our impressions were confined to one province and one town in that province; they cannot be said to represent the mentality of Germany as a whole; and of the five hundred officers confined within the barracks, each individual has brought home with him a different idea of Germany and the Germans. And again, it may be that personally I have been rather fortunate in my experiences. Baden-Hessen is one of the least Prussianised Provinces in Germany, and officer prisoners of war are treated a great deal better than the men. But I do believe that the conversations I had with various Germans, both soldiers and civilians, give a fairly accurate index to the attitude of a large number of the enemy. What came as the greatest surprise to me personally was the absence, to a considerable extent, of all vindictiveness and hate. Evidence goes to prove that there was in the early months of the war a good deal of collective hate; and as a relic of this there were in the shops picture postcards of sinking battleships headed “Gott strafe England,” and the cartoons in the illustrated papers such as _Simplicissimus_ and the _Lustige Blätter_ were all to the tune of “my baton drips with blood.” But the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, which is the representative paper of that part of the country, was absolutely free from articles headed “The English Beast” or “The Devilish Briton.” It afforded an ideal example of journalistic continence.