Next to its change of tongue the most striking feature of the new Poznan was its military aspect. The streets swarmed with soldiers even during the day; in the evening the chief gathering-places became pulsating seas of field gray. For it was still the garb of their former servitude that clothed the vast majority of these warriors of the reborn nation. The silver double-eagle on his service-faded cap was all that was needed to turn a wearer of the German uniform into a soldier of Poland. Many still wore their “_Gott mit uns_” belt-buckles and their Prussian buttons. A scattering minority, officers for the most part, were conspicuous in the full new Polish uniform—double-breasted, with a forest-green tinge. The high, square cap, distinctive only of the province of Poznan, was more widely in evidence; the less cumbersome headgear of military visitors from Warsaw or Galizia now and then broke the red-banded monotony. But the only universal sign of new fealty was the silver double-eagle. This gleamed everywhere. Men in civilian garb wore it on their hats or in their coat lapels; women adorned their bodices with it; boys and girls proudly displayed it in some conspicuous position. It fluttered on a thousand banners; it bedecked every Polish shop-front; it stared from the covers of newly appeared books, pamphlets, music-sheets in the popular tongue; the very church spires had replaced their crosses with it. One could buy the resurrected insignia, of any size or material, in almost any shop—providing one could produce “legitimation papers” or other proof that it would not be used to disguise a German as a Pole. An over-abundance of swords tended to give the new army a comic-opera aspect, but this detail was offset by the genuine military bearing of all but a few of the multitude in uniform. The great majority, of course, had had German training. Now, however, they put the “pep” of a new game into the old forms of soldierly etiquette. Their two-finger salute was rendered with the precision of ambitious recruits and at the same time with the exactitude of “old-timers.” They sprang unfailingly to attention at sight of a superior officer and stood like automatons until he turned away. Yet there seemed to be an un-German comradeship between the rank and file and the commissioned personnel, a democracy of endeavor, a feeling that they were all embarked together on the same big new adventure. There were, to be sure, some officers and a few men whose sidewalk manners suggested that they had learned Prussian ways a bit too thoroughly, but they were lost in a mass that had something of the easy-going temperament of the East or the South.