“The trouble with the German, or at least the Prussian,” one new official put in, “is that it is his nature to get things by force. He was born that way. Why, the Prussians stole even their name; it was originally Barrusen, as the little corner of Russia was called where the robbers first banded together. They marauded their way westward and southward, treading first little people and then little nations under their iron heels. The very word the German uses for “get” or “obtain” tells his history. It is _kriegen_, to win by war—_krieg_. You seldom hear him use the gentler _bekommen_. Everything he possesses he has _gekriegt_. Then he is such a hypocrite! In 1916, when we Poles first began to suffer seriously from hunger, some German officers came with baskets of fruit and sandwiches, gathered a group of Polish urchins, filled their hands with the food, and had themselves photographed with them, to show the world how generous and kind-hearted they were. But they did not tell the world that the moment the photographs had been taken the food was snatched away from the hungry children again, some of the officers boxing their ears, and sent back to the German barracks. How do you think the Poles who have been crippled for life fighting for the ‘Fatherland’ feel as they hobble about our streets? What would you say to serving five years in the German army only to be interned as a dangerous enemy alien at the end of it, as is the case with thousands of our sons who were not able to get across the frontier in time? No, the Germans in Poznan are not oppressed as our people were under their rule. We are altogether _too_ soft-hearted with them.” The German residents themselves, as was to be expected, took a different view of the situation. When the Polish authorities had decorated my passport with permission to return to Berlin, I took no chances of being held up by the cantankerous dyspeptic at Kreuz and applied for a new visé by the German _Volksrat_ of Posen. It occupied a modest little dwelling-house on the wide, curving avenue no longer recognizable under its former title of “Kaiser Wilhelm Ring.” Barely had I established my identity when the gloomy Germans took me to their bosom. Had I been fully informed of _their_ side of the situation? Would I not do them the kindness to return at eleven, when they would see to it that men of high standing were there to give me the real facts of the case? My impressions of Posen would be wholly false if I left it after having consorted only with Poles.