You may not like this salute or you may not like the parade step, but you can be very sure of one thing—­that it is not the militarism that pushes civilians off the sidewalk nor permits an officer to strike his subordinate—­though these things have happened in Germany—­that is holding back England and France and driving the Russian millions out of East Prussia.  It is something bigger than that.  Peasants and princes, these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a passionate unity such as the world has not often seen.  This, and not the futile nurses’ tales with which the American public permitted itself to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, is what strikes one in Germany.  It is a fact, like the Germans being in Belgium, which you have got to face and think about, whether you like it or not.  Berlin, February, 1915.

Chapter VII

Two German Prison Camps

Visiting a prison camp is somewhat like touching at an island in the night—­one of those tropical islands, for instance, whose curious and crowded life shows for an instant as your steamer leaves the mail or takes on a load of deck-hands, and then fades away into a few twinkling lights and the sound of a bell across the water.  You may get permission to see a prison camp, but may not stay there, and you are not expected, generally, to talk to the prisoners.  You can but walk past those rows of eyes, with all their untold stories, much as you might go into a theatre in the midst of a performance, tramp through the audience and out again.

It is a strange experience and leaves one hoping that somebody—­some German shut away in the south of France, one of those quick-eyed Frenchmen in the human zoo at Zossen—­is keeping a diary.  For while there have always been prison camps, have there ever been—­at least, since Rome—­such menageries as these!  Behind the barbed-wire fence at Zossen—­Zossen is one of the prisons near Berlin—­there are some fifteen thousand men.  The greater number are Frenchmen, droves of those long blue turned-back overcoats and red trousers, flowing sluggishly between the rows of low barracks, Frenchmen of every sort of training and temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity.  I do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were, uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down the muddy road from Berlin—­that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly round and round in the mud.