Nevertheless, after a time I found myself modifying my first favourable impression. The clothes of the poorest children are neat and tidy. But large numbers of the children, trim though their appearance, are pinched and pasty-faced. Under the short skirts bare legs are seen often thin and rickety. Little by little my attention was arrested by two facts: first, that these crowds of children were all apparently very much of an age; secondly, that the proportion of babies to children seemed extraordinarily small. Below the age of two and a half to three the juvenile population comes to an abrupt halt. After a time, intrigued during my walks by the relative absence of babies, I took to counting perambulators or babies in arms. The numbers were strikingly small. Motoring through Bonn one Sunday afternoon in 1919 when the family life of the town had turned out into the streets and gardens, I counted six babies in all. The explanation is simple. Statistics show that there has been a rise in the death rate of German children between two and six of over 49 per cent. during the years 1913-1917. Among school children from six to fifteen the death rate rose 55 per cent. in 1918 as compared with 1913. As for the older children, their apparent uniformity of age is largely due to arrested development. Many of them are much older than they seem. Of course there is no general rule. Some children look astonishingly well and plump if others are thin and pasty-faced. Coming home one evening along the banks of the river, we passed two typical working-class families, each supplied with a perambulator. One held the fattest and rosiest baby imaginable. I admired Heinrich, and was told he was nine months old--born at the time of the Armistice. Whatever the prenatal conditions of the mother, the baby had not suffered. But the other child--a little girl of eighteen months--its memory haunts me still. A tiny shrivelled face looked up at me under the bravery of a blue-and-white bonnet; tragic haunting eyes set in an emaciated body. My mind harked back, as I looked, to the devastated areas and to the cruel sufferings and losses of France. But here, on the frail body of this unhappy German child, war had set its seal as unmistakably as among the crater holes and shattered buildings of the line. Conqueror and conquered we looked at each other, till I the conqueror could look no more. Do any robust spirits still survive, I wonder, who take the view that an occasional war is a good thing--that it freshens every one up and makes for briskness and efficiency? Is it possible, after all we have endured and are still enduring, that large numbers of people in a mood of helpless fatalism are already talking about “the next war”; while many of them are actively encouraging policies and popular sentiments, the logical outcome of which is a future conflict even more ghastly than the last one?