Bismarck was plainly the old servant’s favorite among the titled throng he had served and observed. “When the second Kaiser died,” he reminisced, “after his very short reign—he was a good man, too, though proud—he gave me a message that I was to hand over to Bismarck himself, in person. The long line of courtiers were aghast when I insisted on seeing him; they stared angrily when I was admitted ahead of them to his private study. I knocked, and there was a noise inside between a grunt and a growl”—some of our own dear colonels, I mused, had at least that much Bismarckian about them—“and after I opened the door I had to peer about for some time before I could see where he was, the tobacco smoke was so thick. He always smoked like that. But he was an easy man to talk to, if you really had a good reason for coming to see him, and I had. When I went out all the courtiers stared at me with wonder, but I just waved a hand to them and said, ‘The audience is over, gentlemen!’ Ah yes, I have seen much in my day, _aber_,” he concluded, resignedly, as he accompanied me to the door of his lodge, “_alle diese gute Zeiten sind leider vorbei_.” III THOU SHALT NOT ... FRATERNIZE The armies of occupation have been credited with the discovery of a new crime, one not even implied in the Ten Commandments. Indeed, misinformed mortals have usually listed it among the virtues. It is “fraternization.” The average American—unless his habitat be New England—cannot remain aloof and haughty. Particularly the unsophisticated doughboy, bubbling over with life and spirits, is given to making friends with whatever branch of the human family he chances to find about him. Moreover, he was grateful for the advance in material comfort, if not in friendliness, of Germany as compared with the mutilated portion of France he had known. He did not, in most cases, stop to think that it was the war which had made those differences. It was an every-day experience to hear some simple country boy in khaki remark to his favorite officer in a slow, puzzled voice, “Sa-ay, Lieutenant, you know I like these here Boshies a lot better than them there Frogs.” The wrangles and jealousies with their neighbors, on which the overcrowded peoples of Europe feed from infancy, were almost unsuspected by these grownup children from the wide land of opportunity. The French took alarm. There seemed to be danger that the _sale Boche_ would win over _les Américains_, at least the sympathy of the men in the ranks, by his insidious “propaganda.” As a matter of fact, I doubt whether he could have done so. The Germans rather overdid their friendliness. Particularly when it bore any suggestion of cringing, deliberate or natural, it defeated itself, for, simple as he may be in matters outside his familiar sphere, the American soldier has an almost feminine intuition in catching, eventually, a somewhat hazy but on the