feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to
the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German
habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to
feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well--carried with it, so to
speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.

You may be of this persuasion. The thing one cannot escape, however, in
Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality,
the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be
applied to smashing forts or staging a play. When a people can hold
back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the
other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost,
yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the
theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most
spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with
a fact which a reporter in his travels must record--a force which, as
the saying goes, "must be reckoned with."

So far as the special business of keeping the war going is concerned,
this vitality, after seven months of fighting, in spite of those lists
in Dorotheenstrasse, seems ample. Here in Berlin, which is an all day's
express journey from either front, you see thousands of fit young men
marching through the streets, singing and whistling; you are told of
millions ready and waiting to go. Every one seems confident that
Germany will win--indeed, with a unity and resolution which could
scarcely be more complete if they were defending their last foot of
territory, determined that Germany must win.

When I was in London in the autumn a man who had made a flying trip to
Berlin said that the German capital made him think of a man with his