GERMAN PLANS WELL LAID

The German offensive plans were well laid.  No army that ever took the field was ever so mobile.  Thousands of army autos have been in use.  Each regiment had its supply.  The highways were mapped in advance.  There was not a crossroad that was not known.  Even the trifling brooks had been located.  Nothing had been left to chance and the advance guard was accompanied by enormous automobiles filled with corps of sappers who carried bridge and road building materials.

THE TERRIBLE KRUPP GUNS

How well the German plans worked was shown when Namur, which, it was boasted, would resist for months, fell in two days.  The terrible work of the great Krupp weapons, whose existence had been kept secret, is hard to realize.  One shot from one of these guns went through what was considered an impregnable wall of concrete and armored steel at Namur, exploded and killed 150 men.

And aside from the effectiveness of these terrible weapons, Belgian prisoners who were in the Namur forts declare their fire absolutely shattered the nerves of the defenders, whose guns had not sufficient range to reach them.

GERMANS DEFY DEATH

“It makes you sick to see the way that the Germans literally walk into the very mouth of the machine guns and cannon spouting short-fused shrapnel that mow down their lines and tear great gaps in them,” said a Belgian major who was badly wounded.  “Nothing seems to stop them.  It is like an inhuman machine and it takes the very nerve out of you to watch it.”

SPIRIT OF GERMAN WOMEN

“The women of Germany are facing the situation with heroic calmness,” said Eleanor Painter, an American opera singer on landing in New York September 7th, direct from Berlin, where she had spent the last four years.  “It is all for the Fatherland.  The spirit of the people is wonderful.  If the men are swept away in the maelstrom of war, the women will continue to fight.  They are prepared now to do so.

“There are few tears in Berlin.  Of course there is sorrow, deep sorrow.  But the German women and the few men still left in the capital realize that the national life itself is at stake and accept the inevitable losses of a successful military occupation.  There is a grim dignity everywhere.  There are no false ideas as to the enormity of the struggle for existence.  A great many Germans, in fact, realizing that it is nearly the whole world against Germany, do not believe that the Fatherland can survive.  But they are determined that while there is a living German so long will Germany fight.

FATHER AND TEN SONS ENLIST

“A German father with his ten sons enlisted.  General von Haessler, more than the allotted three-score years and ten, veteran of two wars, offered his sword.  Boys who volunteered and who were not needed at the time wept when the recruiting officers sent them back home, telling them their time would come.