might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar
circumstances--one is mercifully spared.

This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front.
A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of
Hindenburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been
nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen
were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg
zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and
Hindenburg's still counting..."). And all you could find in the papers
was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been
very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand
prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of
the regular communiqué beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after
a period of inactivity..."

The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage
and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is
little or no tendency to group achievements around individual
commanders--it is "our army," not the man, although even German
collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the
post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and
Liebesgaben.

In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in
Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends
off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer
verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on
noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the
scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.