“All this talk about Bolshevism overspreading Germany is nonsense. The Bolshevists are poor, simple fellows who have nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain, many of them Chinese laborers brought to Russia in the time of the Czar, fatalists who think nothing of throwing their lives away—or of taking those of others. The other day the Bolshevists decreed in one of the cities they have captured that the bourgeois should move out into the outskirts and the proletariat take all the fine houses. Then they named a ‘poor day’ during which any one who had no shoes could go into all the houses and take a pair wherever he found two pairs. Can you imagine the orderly, plodding Germans subscribing to any such doctrine as that? I certainly cannot, for I have lived all my life among them and I know how they worship _Ordnung_ and _Gemütlichkeit_. “Yes, we have several Polish newspapers published here in Bromberg. But even if you could read them it would not be worth your while, for they do not mean what they say. They are doctored and padded and censored by the German authorities until the only reason we read them is for the local gossip of our friends and acquaintances. If it were not Sunday I would take you to meet the editor of one of them, and you would find that he speaks quite differently from what he writes in his paper, once he is sure he is not talking to a German spy.” The mechanic told me all this without once showing the slightest evidence of prejudice or bitterness against the oppressors of his race. He treated the matter with that academic aloofness, that absence of personal feeling, which I had so often been astounded to see the Germans themselves display toward the woes that had come upon them. Perhaps a lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners, ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg outwardly a picture of peace and contentment.