should mean a picture of gaiety.  But there was a telling hush about the scene.  Possibly music had brought out the truth in men’s hearts that war, this kind of war, was not gay or romantic, only murderous and destructive.  One had noticed already that the Prussian officer, so conscious of his caste, who had worked so indefatigably to make an efficient army, had become chastened.  He had found that common men, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, could be as brave for their Kaiser as he.  And more of these officers had the Iron Cross than not.

The prevalence of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the superficial observer.  But in this, too, there was system.  An officer who had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride.  If many Crosses were given to privates, then the average soldier would not think the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something that he, too, might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.

The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent offence could not hide the suspense and suffering.  Nowhere were you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of the Kaiser.  The empty royal box at the Opera, His Opera, called him to mind.  What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala performance?  When again, in the shuffle of European politics, would the audience see the Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the Kaiser’s side?

It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you left the Opera—­the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris.  In front of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in triumph from Paris.

One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose—­the statesman militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow—­who had made the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the hour for its blow.