All classes of the Polish population were represented in the new army from the bulking countryman who ran after me to say that the photograph I had just taken of him would not be a success because he had not been looking at the lens during the operation to the major who granted me special permission to use my kodak in spite of military rules. This officer had been late in reaching his office, and I passed the time in his anteroom in conversation with his sergeant-major. When he entered at last the entire office force sprang to its feet with what in an older army would have been an exaggeration of discipline. The sergeant-major, his middle finger glued to the seams of his trousers, explained my presence and request. The major asked several questions in Polish, which the sergeant repeated to me in German, relaying my replies back to the major in his native tongue. When the latter had nodded his approval and disappeared, and the office force had relaxed into mere human beings, I expressed my surprise that an officer of such high rank knew no German. “Knows no German!” cried the sergeant-major, bursting into laughter. “The major was for nine years a captain in the German army. He is a graduate of the War College in Berlin and was a member of Hindenburg’s staff. But he never lets a word of the accursed tongue pass his lips if he can possibly avoid it.” The new Polish government had established a conscription act as drastic as if it had been taken bodily from the old German statute-books. All males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were liable to service. Those between eighteen and thirty had already been called to the colors, though thus far German residents had been tacitly exempted. Every afternoon of my stay in Poznan a hundred or two of recruits, flower-bedecked and carrying each his carton of travel rations, marched in column of squads from the railway station to what had once been the Kaiser’s barracks, singing as they went some rousing Polish song of the olden days. At least half of them wore more or less complete German uniforms. Some were so under-sized that a rifle in their hands would have resembled a machine-gun. But with few exceptions their military bearing testified to previous training under the exacting drill-sergeants of their former rulers. Watching this new addition each day to the hordes in uniform that already crowded the city, one could not but wonder whether the new Poland was not giving refuge, perhaps unconsciously, to the discredited spirit of militarism that had so recently been expelled from its German Fatherland.