The single village street, which was also the main highway, was thronged with small boys slowly going to school when I stepped out into the flooding sunshine soon after seven. One of the most striking sights in Germany is the flocks of children everywhere, in spite of the wastage of more than four years of war and food scarcity. Certainly none of these plump little “square-heads” showed any evidence of having suffered from hunger; compared with the pale, anemic urchins of large cities they were indeed pictures of health. They resembled the latter as ripe tomatoes resemble gnarled and half-grown green apples. At least half of them wore some portion of army uniform, cut down from the war-time garb of their elders, no doubt, the round, red-banded cap covered nearly every head, and many carried their books and coarse lunches in the hairy cowhide knapsacks of the trenches, usually with a cracked slate and the soiled rag with which they wiped their exercises off it swinging from a strap at the rear. They showed as much curiosity at the sight of a stranger in town as their fathers had the night before, but when I stealthily opened my kodak and strolled slowly toward them they stampeded in a body and disappeared pellmell within the schoolhouse door. The sun was already high in the cloudless sky. It would have been hard to imagine more perfect weather. The landscape, too, was entrancing; gently rolling fields deep-green with spring alternating with almost black patches of evergreen forests, through which the broad, light-gray highroad wound and undulated as soothingly as an immense ocean-liner on a slowly pulsating sea. Every few miles a small town rose above the horizon, now astride the highway, now gazing down upon it from a sloping hillside. Wonderfully clean towns they were, speckless from their scrubbed floors to their whitewashed church steeples, all framed in velvety green meadows or the fertile fields in which their inhabitants of both sexes plodded diligently but never hurriedly through the labors of the day. It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and brutal warriors in modern history.