The German papers print comparatively little of what we call “news.”  They hide unpleasant truths and accent pleasant ones, and are working all the time to create a definite public opinion; but their partisanship is that of official proclamation rather than that of overworked and underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the desperation of servants working for a tip.  The yelping after spies, the heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British arms, the ill-timed talk of snatching the enemy’s trade in a war theoretically fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vulgarity—­which might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar circumstances—­one is mercifully spared.

This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front.  A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of Hindenburg’s victory; military attaches were saying that there had been nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen were croaking:  “Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen...  Hindenburg zahlt noch immer...” ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and Hindenburg’s still counting...").  And all you could find in the papers was the General Staff report that “at one place the fighting has been very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand prisoners,” etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of the regular communique beginning:  “Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after a period of inactivity...”

The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is little or no tendency to group achievements around individual commanders—­it is “our army,” not the man, although even German collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg’s dependable old face off the post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and Liebesgaben.

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.

You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and—­“Now—­for Kaiser and fatherland!”—­by means of an image thrown on a screen from the periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and founder.

In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the three allies.  The Russians “don’t count,” so to speak.  They are dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range cattle.