that marvelous organism, the German private soldier, was apt to astonish
you at unexpected moments by answering in fair-enough English the
questions you put to him in fractured and dislocated German.

Not once or twice, but a hundred times during my cruising about in
Belgium and Germany and France, I laboriously unloaded a string of
crippled German nouns and broken-legged adjectives and unsocketed verbs
on a hickory-looking sentry, only to have him reply to me in my own
tongue. It would come out then that he had been a waiter at a British
seaside resort or a steward on a Hamburg-American liner; or, oftener
still, that he had studied English at the public schools in his native
town of Kiel, or Coblenz, or Dresden, or somewhere.

The officers' English, as I said before, was nearly always ready and
lubricant. To one who spoke no French and not enough German to hurt
him, this proficiency in language on the part of the German standing
army was a precious boon. The ordinary double-barreled dictionary of
phrases had already disclosed itself as a most unsatisfying volume in
which to put one's trust. It was wearing on the disposition to turn the
leaves trying to find out how to ask somebody to pass the butter and
find instead whole pages of parallel columns of translated sentences
given over to such questions as "Where is the aunt of my stepfather's
second cousin?"

As a rule a man does not go to Europe in time of war to look up his
relatives by marriage. He may even have gone there to avoid them. War
is terrible enough without lugging in all the remote kinsfolk a fellow
has. How much easier, then, to throw oneself on the superior
educational qualifications of the German military machine. Somebody was
sure to have a linguistic life net there, rigged and ready for you to