This time I had no difficulty about the frontier whatever.  I simply put on the costume of a British admiral and walked in.

“Three Cheers for the British Navy!” said the first official whom I met.  He threw his hat in the air and the peasants standing about raised a cheer.  It was my first view of the marvellous adaptability of this great people.  I noticed that many of them were wearing little buttons with pictures of Jellicoe and Beatty.

At my own request I was conducted at once to the nearest railway station.

“So your Excellency wishes to go to Berlin?” said the stationmaster.

“Yes,” I replied, “I want to see something of the people’s revolution.”

The stationmaster looked at his watch.

“That Revolution is over,” he said.

“Too bad!” I exclaimed.

“Not at all.  A much better one is in progress, quite the best Revolution that we have had.  It is called—­Johann, hand me that proclamation of yesterday—­the Workmen and Soldiers Revolution.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“The basis of it,” said the stationmaster, “or what we Germans call the Fundamental Ground Foundation, is universal love.  They hanged all the leaders of the Old Revolution yesterday.”

“When can I get a train?” I inquired.

“Your Excellency shall have a special train at once, Sir,” he continued with a sudden burst of feeling, while a tear swelled in his eye.  “The sight of your uniform calls forth all our gratitude.  My three sons enlisted in our German Navy.  For four years they have been at Kiel, comfortably fed, playing dominos.  They are now at home all safe and happy.  Had your brave navy relaxed its vigilance for a moment those boys might have had to go out on the sea, a thing they had never done.  Please God,” concluded the good old man, removing his hat a moment, “no German sailor now will ever have to go to sea.”

I pass over my journey to Berlin.  Interesting and varied as were the scenes through which I passed they gave me but little light upon the true situation of the country:  indeed I may say without exaggeration that they gave me as little—­or even more so—­as the press reports of our talented newspaper correspondents.  The food situation seemed particularly perplexing.  A well-to-do merchant from Bremen who travelled for some distance in my train assured me that there was plenty of food in Germany, except of course for the poor.  Distress, he said, was confined entirely to these.  Similarly a Prussian gentleman who looked very like a soldier, but who assured me with some heat that he was a commercial traveller, told me the same thing:  There were no cases of starvation, he said, except among the very poor.

The aspect of the people too, at the stations and in the towns we passed, puzzled me.  There were no uniforms, no soldiers.  But I was amazed at the number of commercial travellers, Lutheran ministers, photographers, and so forth, and the odd resemblance they presented, in spite of their innocent costumes, to the arrogant and ubiquitous military officers whom I had observed on my former visit.