The next morning he insisted on rising early to accompany me a few miles on my journey. He expressed his astonishment that I carried no weapon, and though he laughed at the notion that I was in any danger without one, he did not propose that anything should befall me on his “beat.” As we advanced, our conversation grew more serious. He was not quite ready to admit that Germany had started the war, but he was forceful in his assertion that the capitalists and the “Old German” party had wanted it. The working-class, he insisted, would never have gone into the war if those higher up had not made them think Germany had been treacherously attacked, that England and France had determined to annihilate her. He was still not wholly convinced that those were not the facts, but he was enraged at what he insisted were the crimes of the capitalists. It goes without saying that he was a Socialist, his leanings being toward the conservative side of that widely spread party. He told several tales of fraternization with French soldiers of similar opinions during his years in the trenches. The republican idea, he asserted, had been much in evidence among the working-classes long before the war, but it had never dared openly show its head. For German rulers, from Kaiser and princes down to his own army officers, he had the bitterest scorn. Their first and foremost interest in life he summed up under the head of “women.” Some of his personal-knowledge anecdotes of the “high and mighty” were not fit to print. His opinions of German womanhood, or at least girlhood, were astonishingly low for a youth of so naïve and optimistic a character. On the other hand he lapsed every little while into childlike boasting of Germany’s military prowess, quite innocently, as one might point to the fertility or the sunshine of one’s native land. The Germans had first used gas; they had been the first to invent gas-masks; they had air-raided the capitals of their enemies, sunk them at sea long before the slow-witted Allies had ever thought of any such weapons or contrivances.