But has Germany really escaped so lightly? Untouched her country may be; intact in one vital particular it certainly is not. Bricks and mortar can in time be replaced, shell holes can be filled in, and the plough pass again over the devastated fields. But at a date when the material destruction of France will be, let us hope, to a large extent repaired, Germany will still be paying for the sins of her rulers in the bodies of a generation a large proportion of which will be enfeebled and diseased. It is an insidious form of payment, lacking in obviousness or dramatic quality. But its ultimate thoroughness ought to satisfy even the moralists who demand that an entity called Germany should be punished, quite irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the actual person on whom the punishment falls. * * * * * A mile or more below the Hohenzollern bridge, where four kings of Prussia on their bronze horses survey a world fashioned now on other lines than those contemplated by Prussian arrogance, the Rhine flows along a ribbon of green strand which serves as a recreation ground for the children of the district. Here on a summer evening we sometimes walk and watch young Germany at play: children of all ages bathing, paddling, shouting, laughing, amusing themselves in a hundred different ways, while their parents sit in little groups, the women sewing or knitting, the men with their pipes. Children abound in Germany. They swarm in droves in every direction. Surely, you say, these hunger stories must have been exaggerated! The rising generation does not appear to be much affected, judging by its numbers. To the casual observer there seems to be very little amiss with these Rhineland children. My first impression was that they compared favourably with many children in our own industrial centres. The German working-classes are self-respecting folk, and however slender their resources in food and clothing during the war, they made the most of them. Also it must be remembered the Rhineland is one of the richest provinces, agriculturally no less than commercially, in the Empire, and that the British Occupation had resulted in nine months of adequate feeding before I saw Cologne.