The German theory, of course, is exactly opposite to this.  They would smash the town, if they were to take it, to put fear into the hearts of the inhabitants and command obedience; and if they knew they could not take it they would smash it to cripple the enemy that much!  We of the Allies desire respect and loyalty that come from reason.  The Germans demand unreasoning obedience and denied that, they destroy.  One philosophy is Christian; the other Babylonian.  But the devilish strength of the German philosophy came to us more forcibly in Italy than it came elsewhere because of certain contrasts.  They were contrasts in what might be called public wisdom.  The Germans take better care of their poor than some of the Allies.  The Germans know that poverty is a curse to a nation, and during the past generation they have done much to alleviate it.  And in alleviating poverty they have kept their poor docile; and they go into battle feeling that they have something to fight for.  In the allied countries too often we have let the devil take the hindermost.  As we rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan we wondered, looking at the farms and the farmers along the road, why those farmers should be asked to die for a country that kept them in so low an estate.  And yet they were better off than the farmers of Southern Italy.  But in socializing industry the Italian farmer has been forgotten, and when the press came upon the Italian front, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay down their arms, deluded by a German spy ruse so simple that it should have fooled no intelligent soldier.  But they were not intelligent.  Their intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords for generations, and in a crisis the German civilization overcame its enemy!  You cannot shake the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thousand years’ sleep and make him get up and go out and whip a soldier who is even half awake!

As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a curious experience.  There entered our compartment at twilight one of the carabinieri!  We had been looking with admiration at the carabinieri for days.  They were well-set-up soldiers, apparently of a picked grade of men, who wore wide cocked hats, like those worn by the British troops in the American revolution.  The cocked hats of the Italian carabinieri are as wide as their handsome shoulders and they make striking figures.  This one who entered our compartment was drunk—­grandly, gorgeously and sociably drunk.  He wanted to talk to us.  He tried Italian and we shook our heads.  Then Medill tackled him in French and he shook his head.  Then Henry squared off and gave him the native Kansas English—­with appropriate gestures.  But the Italian sighed amiably and it was clear he was balked.  Then he looked up and down the outer corridor of the car, came in, shut the door and smiled as broadly as his cocked hat.