We saw and sometimes met a good many German officers in a rather familiar way.  Many of the younger men reminded one of our university men at home; several of the older men resembled their well-set-up English cousins.  This seemed particularly true of the navy, which has acquired a type—­lean, keen, firm-lipped young men, with a sense of humor—­entirely different from the German often seen in cafes, with no back to his head, and a neck overflowing his collar.  Particularly interesting were those who, called back ’into uniform from responsible positions in civil life, were attacking, as if building for all time, the appallingly difficult and delicate task of improvising a government for a complex modern state, and winning the tolerance, if not the co-operation, of a conquered people confident that their subjection was but for the day.

Our progress everywhere was down a continuous aisle of heel-clickings and salutes.  Sometimes, when we had to pass through three rows of passport examiners between platform and gate, these formalities seemed rather excessive.  In the grenadier barracks in Brussels we had been taken through sleeping-rooms, cool storerooms with their beer barrels and loops of sausages—­“all made by the regiment”—­and were just entering the kitchen when a giant of a man, seeing his superior officers, snapped stiff as a ramrod and, as it is every German subordinate’s duty to do, bellowed out his “Meldung”—­who and what the men in his room were, and that they were going to have meat and noodle soup for dinner.

No Frenchman, Englishman, or American could be taught, let alone achieve of his own free will, the utter self-forgetfulness with which this vast creature, every muscle tense, breathing like a race-horse, roared, or rather exploded:  “Herr Hauptmann!  Mannschafts-Kuche-desten-Landwehr-Regiments!  Belegt-mit-einem-Unter-offizier-und-zehn-Mann!  Wir essen heute Suppe mit Nudeln und Fleisch!  Zu Befehl!”

He had stepped down a century and a half from the grenadiers of the Great Frederic, and even our hosts may have smiled.  It was different with the soldiers’ salute, or the ordinary coming to attention, which we saw repeated scores of times a day.  Whatever men might be doing, however awkward or inconvenient it might be, whether any one saw them or not, they stopped short at the sight of these long, gray-blue coats and stiffened, chin up, eyes on their superior, hands at their sides.  If they were talking, they became silent; if laughing, their faces smoothed out, and into their eyes came an expression which, when you have seen it repeated hundreds of times, you will not forget.  It is a look of seriousness, self-forgetfulness, of almost religious devotion, not to the individual, but to the idea for which he stands.  I saw a soldier half-dressed, through a barracks window under which we passed, sending after his officer, who did not even see him, that same look, the look of a man who has just volunteered to charge the enemy’s trench, or who sees nothing absurd in saying the Germans fear God and nothing else in the world!