“What most characterizes the German,” said Mosers, more than a century ago, “is obedience, respect for force.” What probably struck the plain American doughboy even more than mere obedience was their passive docility, their immediate compliance with all our requirements. They could have been so mean, so disobedient in petty little ways without openly disobeying. Instead, they seemed to go out of their road to make our task of occupation easy. Their racial discipline not merely did not break down; it permeated every nook and corner. The very children never gave a gesture, a whisper of wilfulness; the family warning found them as docile as a lifetime of training had left the adults. It was easy to imagine French or American boys under the same conditions—all the bright little Hallowe’en tricks they would have concocted to make unpleasant the life of the abhorred enemy rulers. Was it not perhaps this, from the German point of view, criminally undisciplined character of other races, as much as their own native brutality, that caused the armies of the Kaiser to inflict so many unfair punishments? Any traveler who has noted the abhorrence with which the German looks upon the simplest infraction of the most insignificant order—the mere entering by a “Verbotener Eingang”—that the American would disobey and pay his fine and go his way with a smile of amusement on his face, will not find it difficult to visualize the red rage with which the German soldier beheld any lack of seriousness toward the stern and sacred commands of their armies of occupation. None of us guessed aright as to Germany’s action in case of defeat. Talk of starvation though we will, she did not fight to a standstill, as our South did, for example. She gave proof of a strong faith in the old adage beginning “He who fights and runs away....” She quit when the tide turned, not at the last crag of refuge, and one could not but feel less respect for her people accordingly. But whatever remnant of estimation may have been left after their sudden abandonment of the field might have been enhanced by an occasional lapse from their docility, by a proof now and then that they were human, after all. Instead, we got something that verged very closely upon cringing, as a personal enemy one had just trounced might bow his thanks and offer to light his victor’s cigar. It is impossible to believe that any one could be rendered so docile by mere orders from above. It is impossible to believe they had no hatred in their hearts for the nation that finally turned the balance of war against them. It must be habit, habit formed by those with superimposed rulers, as contrasted with those who have their word, or at least fancy they have, in their own government.