Amsterdam is, at the present moment, the town of half words and of compromises of all kinds. "We want to please England, our friends, but we wish to avoid trouble with Germany ..." is a sentence one often hears there. Paris has given all that she had--her children, her money, and her commerce. She is waiting and hoping, for the memories of 1870 are still fresh. But Berlin--Berlin is full of astonishment. She was certain that the war would be over and Paris taken in less than a month. She does not yet admit that the campaign is going badly, but she is very much surprised that her carefully prepared military machine has not worked perfectly. Rome watches the war with almost morbid interest, as a woman of Madrid watches a bull-fight. She is aching to do something; she wants to follow the call of her strong sympathies, of her still stronger hates, and to break off the neutrality her diplomats have imposed upon her. Everywhere a word of hope is repeated, full of promise and of menace--"To Trieste, soon!" Athens is waking to something of her old spirit now heroic times have come again. She is confident in her clever diplomats, and already regards Southern Albania as an essential part of Greece. Vienna has long since begun to feel the grip of famine, defeat, and, what is worse, political dissolution. With her shops closed, her darkness, her beggars with the real accent of hunger in their tones, the town is even more sad than Brussels, that capital which is no longer a capital, that beautiful city which had to shelter in her best palaces all the bureaucrats and military cohorts of the invaders, but which still has ideals and a beloved king, and looks full of hope at her sons and her friends fighting in the near west. Brussels waits the day of resurrection. As for Constantinople, the town is displaying truly Oriental fatalism. "The Germans took the trouble to give us money, to organise our army, to augment our navy, and we hope that everything goes well. If not--the sky will be blue all the same, the figs will ripen at the right season as they did before, the world will not have changed." Thus might speak the Turk if he troubled himself to speak at all: but he is silent. All the talking there is done by the Germans. A curiosity of the war is the way the street crowds have altered in composition in the different capitals. In London there are the refugees, dressed in clothes of all shapes, colours, and dimensions, the special constables, and the crowds of recruits. In Paris--patriotic Paris--one meets many crippled people, for almost every other man not wearing a uniform has a physical deformity. In the Paris underground, at the Metropolitan Railway Station, a new figure, a sympathetic and admirable figure, has appeared: the woman who works while her husband is at the front. Often she has babies clinging to her skirt as she pierces your railway ticket.