e overcome the food difficulty for ever."

"You have," I said.

"It was a pure matter of science and efficiency," he went
on. "It has long been observed that if one sat down in
a restaurant and drank beer and smoked cigars (especially
such a brand as these _Tannhausers_) during the time it
took for the food to be brought (by a German waiter),
all appetite was gone. It remained for the German scientists
to organise this into system. Have you finished? Or
would you like to take another look at your beef
certificate?"

We rose. Von Boobenstein paid the bill by writing I.O.U.
on the back of one of the cards--not forgetting the
waiter, for whom he wrote on a piece of paper, "God bless
you"--and we left.

"Count," I said, as we took our seat on a bench in the
Sieges-Allee, or Alley of Victory, and listened to the
music of the military band, and watched the crowd, "I
begin to see that Germany is unconquerable."

"Absolutely so," he answered.

"In the first place, your men are inexhaustible. If we
kill one class you call out another; and anyway one-half
of those we kill get well again, and the net result is
that you have more than ever."

"Precisely," said the Count.

"As to food," I continued, "you are absolutely invulnerable.
What with acorns, thistles, tanbark, glue, tickets,
coupons, and certificates, you can go on for ever."

"We can," he said.

"Then for money you use I.O.U.'s. Anybody with a lead
pencil can command all the funds he wants. Moreover, your
soldiers at the front are getting dug in deeper and
deeper: last spring they were fifty feet under ground:
by 1918 they will be nearly 200 feet down. Short of mining
for them, we shall never get them out."

"Never," said von Boobenstein with great firmness.

"But there is one thing that I don't quite understand.
Your navy, your ships. There, surely, we have you: sooner
or later that whole proud fleet in the Kiel Canal will
come out under fire of our guns and be sunk to the bottom
of the sea. There, at least, we conquer."

Von Boobenstein broke into loud laughter.

"The fleet!" he roared, and his voice was almost hysterical
and overstrung, as if high living on lobster-coupons and
over-smoking of _Tannhausers_ was undermining his nerves.
"The fleet! Is it possible you do not know? Why all
Germany knows it. Capture our fleet! Ha! Ha! It now lies
fifty miles inland. _We have filled in the canal_--pushed
in the banks. The canal is solid land again, and