of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat deck
with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him
in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet.
He was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their
holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust his
offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and
criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from
motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that
decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a
large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of
a superior destiny. Later I could observe the same truculent bearing,
touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the _Landwehr_
corps, that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in
Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have
been, most probably was, an officer of the _Landwehr_; and perhaps those
two fine active boys are orphans by now. Thus things acquire
significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a
mote in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered
trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on
my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels
round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green
overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting
cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion
and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West, in the direction
of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and
sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in
the winter of '81, not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with
the elements which were very angry indeed.

There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or