In the evening he left by one of the numberless roads which at short distances traverse Germany toward the west like the straight lines of a railway.  The quiet of the landscape was disturbed by the fifes, rattle of wheels, and clanking of chains, and to all the villages along the road they brought back the consciousness, forgotten till now, that Germany’s best blood was to be shed in a stream flowing westward.  A time was beginning for Wilhelm of powerful but very painful impressions, not, it is true, to be compared with those which the battlefields of 1866 had made on him when an unformed youth.  The war unveiled to him the foundations of human nature ordinarily buried under a covering of culture, and his reason, marveled over the reconciliation of such antitheses.  On the one hand one saw the wildest struggle for gain, and love of destruction; on the other hand were the daily examples of the kindest human nature, self-sacrifice for fellow-creatures, and an almost unearthly devotion to heroic conceptions of duty.  Now it appeared as if the primitive animal nature in man were let loose, and bellowing for joy that the chains in which he had lain were burst, and now again as if the noblest virtues were proudly blossoming, only wanting favorable circumstances in which to develop themselves.  Life was worth nothing, the laws of property very little; whatever the eyes saw which the body desired, the hand was at once stretched out to obtain, and the point of the bayonet decided if anything came between desire and satisfaction.  But these same men, who were as indifferent to their own lives, and as keen to destroy the lives of others as savages, performed heroic deeds, helping their comrades in want or danger, sharing their last mouthful with wounded or imprisoned enemies, who returned them no thanks; and after the battle, in the peasant’s hut, cradling in their arms the little child, whose roof they had perhaps destroyed, and possibly whose father they might have slain.  These impulses, as far apart as the poles, occurred hour after hour before Wilhelm’s eyes.  He was not a born soldier, and his nature was not given to fighting.  But when it was necessary to endure the wearisome fulfillment of duty, to bear privation silently, and to look at menacing danger indifferently, then few were his equals, and none before him.  This quiet, passive heroism was noticed by his comrades.  The officers of his company found out that he did not smoke, and never drank anything stronger than spring water.  They noticed also that dirt was painful to him, even the ordinary dust of the country roads, and that he was dissatisfied if his boots and trousers bore the marks of muddy fields.  They thought him a spoiled mother’s darling, a “molly-coddle,” and their instructive knowledge of human nature found a name for him, the same name his schoolfellows had already given him.  They called him the “Fraulein.”