Brave with swords, bright with brass hats, aglitter with aiguillettes was the imposing line of French, British, Italian, American and Japanese officers who filed across from the _Hercules_ to the _Verdun_ an hour before dawn on the morning of December 16. An hour after darkness descended, wet with rain, bespattered with mud, ashiver with cold, those same officers straggled back to the _Hercules_ again. This is the order in which one of them summed up the day's observation: "The most notable event of the inspection," he said as he warmed his chilled frame before the ward-room fire, "was the sight of the first pig we have clapped eyes on in Germany; the next so was meeting a Hun with enough of a sense of humour to take us three miles round by a muddy road and over ploughed fields and deep ditches to a point he could have reached by a mile of comparatively dry railway track; and the third was a drive through ten miles of Schleswig countryside that was beautiful beyond words, even in the pelting rain. The Great Belt Forts? Oh, yes, we saw them. They were five holes in the ground on top of one hill, four holes in the ground on the top of another fifteen miles away, and a dozen or so ancient guns dumped into the hold of a tug. But--let's talk about the pig." There is not much that I can add to the succinct summary of the inspection of the forts of the "Baltic Gibraltar." What the sub-commission saw--or rather failed to see--there went a long way toward confirming the impression (which had been growing stronger ever since the arrival of the _Hercules_ at Wilhelmshaven) that Germany had depended upon mines rather than guns for the defence of her coasts. The porker mentioned was the one I alluded to in an earlier chapter as just failing to win the officer sighting it the pool which was to go to the first man who saw a pig in Germany, because an Irish-American member of the party had testified that it had "died from hog cholera an hour before it had been killed." The lovely stretch of farming country driven through showed many signs of its Danish character, and at several windows I even saw the red-and-white flag of the mother country discreetly displayed. This region, of course, falls well north of the line that is expected to form the new Danish boundary. * * * * *