prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed companies of
volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of
German infantry.

In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains
were running as usual to Hamburg, if one cared to go there. "As
usual" in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time.

At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of
masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant. That city of
eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead
as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers
tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still
had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea,
while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office-
windows and the portholes of ships.

For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the
corpuscles did not run red. They were blue. Hamburg's citizens had
to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of
bombardment: that of the silent guns of British Dreadnoughts far out
of range. They were good Germans; they meant to play the game;
but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to
serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with
the propagandist attitude of Berlin.

A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in
other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world. It had
even been called an English city, owing to the number of English
business men there as agents of the immense commerce between