“The Hun,” asserted a European editorial-writer, “feels that his army has not been beaten; that, on the contrary, he had all the military prestige of the war. Then he knew that there was increasing scarcity of food at home and, feeling that the Allies were in mortal dread of new drives by the German army and would be only too glad to compromise, he proposed an armistice. Germany expected the world to supply her gladly with all her needs, as a mark of good faith, and to encourage the timorous Allies she offered to let them advance to the Rhine. Now the Germans affect to wonder why Germany is not completely supplied by the perfidious Allies, and why the garrisons, having been allowed to see the beautiful Rhine scenery, do not withdraw. Not only the ignorant classes, but those supposedly educated, take that attitude. They consider, apparently, that the armistice was an agreement for mutual benefit, and the idea that the war was anything but a draw, with the prestige all on the German side, has not yet penetrated to the German mind.” With the above—it was written in January—and the outward show of friendliness for the American Army of Occupation as a text, I examined scores of Germans of all classes, whom our sergeants picked out of the throngs that passed through our hands and pushed one by one into my little office overlooking the Rhine. Their attitude, their answers were always the same, parrot-like in their sameness. Before a week had passed I could have set down the replies, almost in their exact words, the instant the man to be interviewed appeared in the doorway, to click his heels resoundingly while holding his arms stiffly at his sides. As becomes a long-disciplined people, the German is certainly no individualist. Once one has a key to it, one can be just as sure what he is going to do, and how he is going to do it, as one can that duplicates of the shoes one has always worn are going to fit. Yet what did they really think, away down under their generations of discipline? This procession of men with their close-cropped heads and their china-blue eyes that looked at me as innocently as a Nürnberg doll, who talked so glibly with apparent friendliness and perfect frankness, surely has _some_ thoughts hidden away in the depths of their souls. Yet one seldom, if ever, caught a glimpse of them. Possibly there were none there; the iron discipline of a half-century may have killed the hidden roots as well as destroyed the plant itself. In contrast with the sturdily independent American, sharply individualistic still in spite of his year or two of army training, these heel-clicking automatons were exasperating in their garrulous taciturnity.