o loves his country above anything in the
world. This is most completely realised in the following opening
sentences of a long and careful review given to the original by the_
"_Spectator_":--

"_The Englishman who is acutely distressed by the report of
shortcomings in the German Army can hardly be human. The frank pleasure
which the Germans took in our troubles is too recent to be quite
forgotten, even by a people so forgetful as we are. But for all that,
only those who crave for the_ '_wicked joys of the soul_,' _which grow,
the poet tells us, near by the gates of hell, can lay down Herr
Beyerlein's story without a sense of sadness. In spite of its freshness
and its humour, there breathes through it that note of disappointment,
almost of lassitude, which is not seldom audible in Germany to-day. If
is as though the nation, which has travelled such an astonishing
distance in the last thirty years, were pausing to ask_, '_Is this all
that has come of it?_'

"_Herr Beyerlein's theme is the decadence of the German Army. That
it is decadent he has no doubt at all, and he is a close, careful and
not unfriendly observer. But the writer who deals boldly and broadly
with the German Army is in reality dealing with a much larger subject.
The British Army is a piece cut from the stuff of which the nation is
made, and shaped to a particular end. In Germany the whole material of
the nation passes through the Army, and is to some extent shaped and
coloured in the process; if does not come out precisely as it went in.
German military training is an iron pressure to which men cannot be
submitted for two years at an impressionable age and remain unchanged.
Symptoms of decay in the Army point, therefore, not only to possible
disaster abroad, but to demoralisation at home; and it is with this
aspect of his subject that Herr Beyerlein is chiefly concerned._"

JENA OR SEDAN?

CHAPTER I

"Must I go, must I go,
Away into the town?"
(_Swabian Folk-song._)

Franz Vogt was on his way home. He carried a neatly tied-up parcel
containing the under-linen and the boots that he had been buying in the
town. He had trodden this same road a countless number of times during
his life; but now that he must bid good-bye to it so soon, the old
fa