On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy afternoon, I went into the dining-car toward five o’clock attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit and heavy tan boots, and, speaking German with evident pain, tactfully asked—­everybody else drinking beer—­for tea.  The man across the way whispered to his companion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at the other end of the car turned round and, gazing over the back of her chair, whispered aghast to her companion:  “Englaender!”

Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, I regained my compartment presently and glared out at the sodden landscape, with now and then a shot at the other occupant who had got on at Essen or one of the western stations and sat the day out without a word.  One of those disagreeable Prussians evidently—­until, actually needing to know, I broke the silence by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin.  He answered with perfect good humor, and we began to talk.  I mentioned the tea incident.

“Ignorant people!” he said, dismissing them with a wave of the hand.  They ought to have seen my little flag—­he had—­and, anyhow, a gentleman was a gentleman, and they were fighting England, not individual Englishmen.  Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably shifted into French, and so we talked until reaching Berlin, when, hoping that I would get what I came for, he shook hands and wished me “Bon voyage!” So you never can tell.

The militarism which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one’s finger on.  Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you —­as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner can tell you at home—­about the German belief in war as a great blessing, because it is the only way of asserting your own superior ideas over the other man’s inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead.

People want to smash England, of course, because, as they explain, she brought on the war and is trying to starve them, and they roar with the applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout who is keeping those millions of slovenly Russians from overrunning our tidy, busy, well-ordered Germany.  But Treitschke—­who was he?

And then, of course, it is not always easy to put one’s finger on just what people mean by militarism.  Some have objected to militarism because they didn’t like the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy, and some because—­“Well, those people somehow rub you the wrong way!” It is not universal conscription, because many nations have that, nor the amount spent per capita on soldiers and ships, for we ourselves spend almost as much as the Germans, and the French even more.