The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, “A la Place de Calais, bon pour aller a Dunkerque, P.O.  Le Chef d’Etat-Major,” but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.

For something about him expressed a certain character of downright militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard.  I could imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a “sloppy, undisciplined” American guard, as he would have called one of ours.  Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts.  He had none; only national feelings, this outpost of the national organism.  The mood of the moment was friendliness to Americans.  Germany wished to create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms.  A double, a treble purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier’s heart as the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children dependent upon him.

Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized!  Seventy millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death issue!  Germany had studied more than how to make war with an army.  She had studied how the people at home should help an army to make war.

“With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth of the people,” as a German officer said, “when we go to war the people must be passionate for war.  Their impulse must be the impulse of the army.  Their spirit will drive the army on.  They must be drilled, too, in their part.  No item in national organization is too small to have its effect.”

Compared to the, French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician’s touch.  A whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion, which spread to the trenches east and west.

Something like the team-work of the “rah-rah” of college athletics was applied to the nation.  The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that, or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra with the brasses predominant.

There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival.  If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.  Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire.  I was told that I should succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as sidelights.