the German Kaiser--dining, I might add, from fine French plates, with
smart German orderlies for waiters.

Except us five, and one other, the twenty-odd who sat about the great
oblong table were members of the Over-General's staff. We five were
Robert J. Thompson, American consul at Aix-la-Chapelle; McCutcheon and
Bennett, of the Chicago Tribune; Captain Alfred Mannesmann, of the
great German manufacturing firm of Mannesmann Mulag; and myself. The
one other was a Berlin artist, by name Follbehr, who having the run of
the army, was going out daily to do quick studies in water colors in the
trenches and among the batteries. He did them remarkably well, too,
seeing that any minute a shell might come and spatter him all over his
own drawing board. All the rest, though, were generals and colonels and
majors, and such--youngish men mostly. Excluding our host I do not
believe there was a man present who had passed fifty years of age; but
the General was nearer eighty than fifty, being one of the veterans of
the Franco-Prussian War, whom their Emperor had ordered out of desk jobs
in the first days of August to shepherd his forces in the field. At his
call they came--Von Heeringen and Von Hindenberg and Von Zwehl, to
mention three names that speedily became catchwords round the world--
with their gray heads full of Prussian war tactics; and very soon their
works had justified the act of their imperial master in choosing them
for leadership, and now they had new medals at their throats and on
their breasts to overlay the old medals they won back in 1870-71.

Like many of the older officers of the German Army I met, Von Heeringen
spoke no English, in which regard he was excessively unlike ninety per
cent of the younger officers. Among them it was an uncommon thing in my
experience to find one who did not know at least a smattering of English
and considerably more than a smattering of understandable French. Even