They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube and the forty-two-centimetre shell, the “Brummer,” or “Grumbler,” as they call it in Germany—­could anything be more piquant?  You should hear them—­the chaste, chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brummer, singing that he is her dear old Grumbler and she his soft, swift Dove: 

“Suesser, dicker Brummer...  Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink...”

There is a sort of poetry about this—­a new sort of poetry about a new sort of war.  And it might possibly be proved that such poetry could only come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put—­a people in love with war, having a mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their remote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double-edged swords.

I shall not attempt to do this—­heaven preserve Americans from being judged by their musical comedies !—­and doubtless the children even of our most devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead cannon and toy soldiers.  I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of refinement and brutality, as something which, it struck me, we Americans—­who always do everything exactly right—­would not have thought of doing in just that way.

Many of the ways of this people are not our ways.  You have heard, let us say, of the German parade step, sometimes laughed at as the “goose step” in England and at home.  I was lunching the other day with an American military observer, and he spoke of the parade step and the effect it had on him.

“Did you ever see it?” he demanded.  “Have you any idea of the moral effect of that step?  You see those men marching by, every muscle in their bodies taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Emperor, and when they bring those feet down—­bing! bang!—­the physical fitness it stands for, the unity, determination—­why, it’s the whole German idea—­nothing can stop ’em!”

“Did you ever see one of these soldiers salute?” Yes, I had seen hundreds of them, and I had been made extremely ill at ease one day in my hotel when a young officer with whom I had started, in the American fashion, comfortably to shake hands suddenly whacked his heels together like a couple of Indian clubs and, stiff as a ramrod, snapped his hand to his cap.

“Did you ever see them salute?  They don’t do it like a baggage porter—­ there’s nothing servile about it.  They square off and bring that hand to their heads and look that officer square in the eyes as if to say:  ‘Now, damn you, salute me!’ And he gets his salute, too—­like a man!”