In a bright room I saw a German soldier.  He had the room to himself.  He was blue eyed and yellow haired, with a boyish and contagious smile.  He knew no more about it all than I did.  It must have bewildered him in the long hours that he lay there alone.  He did not hate these people.  He never had hated them.  It was clear, too, that they did not hate him.  For they had saved a gangrenous leg for him when all hope seemed ended.  He lay there, with his white coverlet drawn to his chin, and smiled at the surgeon.  They were evidently on the best of terms.

“How goes it?” asked the surgeon cheerfully in German.

“Sehr gut,” he said, and eyed me curiously.

He was very proud of the leg, and asked that I see it.  It was in a cast.  He moved it about triumphantly.  Probably all over Germany, as over France and this corner of Belgium, just such little scenes occur daily, hourly.

The German peasant, like the French and the Belgian, is a peaceable man.  He is military but not militant.  He is sentimental rather than impassioned.  He loves Christmas and other feast days.  He is not ambitious.  He fights bravely, but he would rather sing or make a garden.

It is over the bent shoulders of these peasants that the great Continental army machines must march.  The German peasant is poor, because for forty years he has been paying the heavy tax of endless armament.  The French peasant is poor, because for forty years he has been struggling to recover from the drain of the huge war indemnity demanded by Germany in 1871.  The Russian peasant toils for a remote government, with which his sole tie is the tax-gatherer; toils with childish faith for The Little Father, at whose word he may be sent to battle for a cause of which he knows nothing.

Germany’s militarism, England’s navalism, Russia’s autocracy, France, graft-ridden in high places and struggling for rehabilitation after a century of war—­and, underneath it all, bearing it on bent shoulders, men like this German prisoner, alone in his room and puzzling it out!  It makes one wonder if the result of this war will not be a great and overwhelming individualism, a protest of the unit against the mass; if Socialism, which has apparently died of an ideal, will find this ideal but another name for tyranny, and rise from its grave a living force.

Now and then a justifiable war is fought, for liberty perhaps, or like our Civil War, for a great principle.  There are wars that are inevitable.  Such wars are frequently revolutions and have their origins in the disaffection of a people.

But here is a world war about which volumes are being written to discover the cause.  Here were prosperous nations, building wealth and culture on a basis of peace.  Europe was apparently more in danger of revolution than of international warfare.  It is not only war without a known cause, it is an unexpected war.  Only one of the nations involved showed any evidence of preparation.  England is not yet ready.  Russia has not yet equipped the men she has mobilised.