There were still a few minutes before the play began, and we walked
through some of the barracks with the commandant, a tall, bronzed
officer of middle age, with gracious manners, one of those Olympian
Germans who resemble their English cousins of the same class. Each
barrack had its captain, and over these was a camp-captain--formerly an
English merchant of Berlin--who went with us on our rounds.

The stables were crowded with bunks and men--like a cattleship
forecastle. One young man, fulfilling doubtless his English ritual of
"dressing for dinner," was punctiliously shaving, although it was now
practically dark; in another corner the devotee of some system of how to
get strong and how to stay so, stripped to the skin, was slowly and with
solemn precision raising and lowering a pair of light dumb-bells. Some
saluted as private soldiers would; some bowed almost as to a friend,
with a cheery "Guten Abend, Herr Baron!" There seemed, indeed, to be a
very pleasant relation between this gentleman soldier and his gentlemen
prisoners, and the camp-captain, lagging behind, told how one evening
when they had sung "Elijah," the men had stood up and given three
English cheers for the commandant, while his wife, who had come to hear
the performance, stood beside him laughing and wiping her eyes.

As you get closer to war you more frequently run across such things. The
fighting men kill ruthlessly, because that, they think, is the way to
get their business over. But for the most part they kill without hate.
For that, in its noisier and more acrid forms you must go back to the
men who are not fighting, to the overdriven and underexercised
journalists, sizzling and thundering in their swivel-chairs.

The dimly lit hall under the grand stand was already crowded as we were