confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has
overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-
promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population
drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick
the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to
lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and
preparation.

When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the
clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the
list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the
second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and
second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only
was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room
appear normal.

He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a
goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a
punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of
normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front
were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves
into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have
more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the
war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was
being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of
Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at
the front taking more Russian soldiers.

Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly
normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was