The figures I heard varied very much, but a well-informed officer said that Germany will have in March-April over a thousand new machines, and that the engines of the whole air-fleet are already finished. I asked what was Germany's object in getting such an enormous number of machines ready, but I could only get the answer, "You wait and see!" As for the balloons, the largest workshops are in Posen and Hanover. The hangars erected at Potsdam are only four, but they are very large, and a new system of concrete has been used in place of wood or corrugated iron. The new Zeppelin seems very agile, considering its huge volume. The cigar-like shape seems to me to be thicker than the old model, and the distance between the gondolas carrying the engines and the body of the airship has been very much reduced. A kind old lady lent me her good field-glasses, and I could see that the crew numbered over a dozen, and that a general in uniform was on board. The new airship did not, for the moment, show any number or mark of any kind. After a few more evolutions the Zeppelin disappeared, concealed by the trees of the Brauhausberg. I gave back the glasses to the old lady who lent them to me, and she said that she was a widow of a captain who died in the 'seventies near Sedan, and had now two sons and two sons-in-law at the front. "They are at the right wing fighting the Englishmen, at the place of honour. Do you know England at all?" she asked me, and then went on without giving me time to answer her question. "Oh, I do hate that country! She had no business to come into this war, and without her we should at this time be in Paris. Our fleet would have destroyed the French fleet, and everything would be over." I asked her if any of her relations had been wounded. "Yes," she answered, "one of my sons last month. He was sent back here for two weeks, but now he has recovered and has gone to the front again." I could not help admiring the old lady; she was only thinking of the success of the campaign, and very little of the danger that her sons might never come back. The German woman has remained, in this way, the wife of the fierce, barbarous warrior of Attila, in peace time counted as a slave, or at best as a nurse for the children, but ready to buckle the breast-plate of her man and to kiss him good-bye with dry eyes when the moment for fighting comes. In peace-time one has the impression that this type of woman has disappeared from Germany, and that her place has been taken by the provincial type--sentimental up to her wedding-day, practical after, or by the coquettish city type of woman, who tries to copy the Parisienne or the Viennese, and only succeeds in being the caricature of a smart woman, handicapped as she is by a certain clumsiness of body and spirit. Now her country is at war, the German woman has become again the descendant of the Valkyrie, of the wife of the mediæval warrior, of the nursing woman of the 1870's.