The first time my companion told me we were coming on German prisoners, I shut my eyes, determined to open them unprejudiced, with a vision clear of all preconceptions; really, at the bottom of my heart, expecting that I should find them extraordinarily like anyone else.... But they were not. They were all so like each other, that by the time you had seen several hundreds you were still wondering confusedly whether they were all relations ... even my Western eye detected more difference between the types of Chinamen I met upon the road than in these Teutons. Of course, the round brimless cap has something to do with it, as has the close hair-crop, but when all is said, how much of a type they are, how amazingly so, as though they had all been bred to one purpose through generations! The outstanding ear, placed very low on the wide neck, the great development of cheekbones and of the jaw on a level with the ears, and then the sudden narrowing at the short chin ... and the florid bulkiness of them. A detachment of _poilus_ swung past in their horizon blue, and what a different type was flashed up against that background of square jowls, what a thin, nervous, wiry type, all animation.... The Germans were so exactly like all the photographs of prisoners one has seen in the daily papers that it was quite satisfying; I remember the same feeling of satisfaction when on first going to New England I saw a frame house and an old man with a goatee beard driving a spider-wheeled buggy, exactly like an illustration out of _Harper's_.... All of which--with the exception of the old man out of _Harper's_--is not as irrelevant as it may appear, in fact, is not irrelevant at all, for it is these things, this landscape, these varied races, this whole atmosphere, which goes to make life's background for everyone quartered hereabouts, and it is the background which, especially to memory in after years, makes so great a part of the whole.