At Rennenkampf’s headquarters at Wirballen, where formerly one changed trains going from Berlin to Petersburg, one sees the fashion in which Russia shapes for war.  Here, beneath a little bridge with a black and white striped sentry box upon it, its muddy banks partitioned with rotten planks into goose-pens, runs that feeble stream which separates Russia from Germany.  Upon its further side, what is left of Eydtkuhnen, the Prussian frontier village, looms drearily through its screen of willows—­walls smoke-blackened and roofless, crumbling in piles of fallen brick across its single street, which was dreary enough at its best.  To the north and south, and behind to the eastward, are the camps, a city full, a country full of men armed and equipped; the mean and ugly village thrills to the movement and purpose.  On the roof of the schoolhouse there lifts itself against the pale Autumn sky the cobweb mast and stays of the wireless apparatus, and in the courtyard below and in the shabby street in front there is a surge of automobiles, motor cycles, mounted orderlies—­all the message-carrying machinery of a staff office.  The military telephone wires loop across the street, and spray out in a dozen directions over the flat and trodden fields; for within the dynamic kernel to all this elaborate shell is Rennenkampf, the Prussian-Russian who governs the gate of Germany.

[Illustration:  GEN.  PAUL PAU Commanding one of the French Armies (Photo from Underwood & Underwood.)]

[Illustration:  GEN.  D’AMADE Commanding One of the French Armies (Photo from Bain News Service.)]

Here is the brain of the army.  Its limbs go swinging by at all hours, in battalions and brigades, or at the trot, with a jingle of bits and scabbards, or at the walk, with bump and clank, as the gun wheels clear the ruts.  It is the infantry—­that fills the eye—­fine, big stuff, man for man the biggest infantry in the world.

Their uniform of peaked cap, trousers tucked into knee-boots, and khaki blouse is workmanlike, and the serious middle-aged officers trudging beside them are hardly distinguishable from the men.  They have not yet learned the use of the short, broad-bladed bayonets; theirs are of the old three-cornered section type with which the Bulgarians drove the Turks to Chataldja; but there is something else that they have learned.  Since the first days of the mobilization that brought them from their homes there is not a man among them that has tasted strong drink.  In 1904 the men came drunk from their homes to the centres; one saw them about the streets and on the railways and in the gutters.  But these men have been sober from the start, and will perforce be sober to the end.