ut of the railway
carriage window some quarter of a mile before we arrived at Potsdam
and saw numerous brown trains marked with the Ked Cross, trains
that usually travel by night in Germany.

There were a couple of officers of the Guard Cavalry in the same
carriage with me. They also looked out. "_Ach, noch 'mal_"
("What, again?") discontentedly remarked the elder. They were a
gloomy pair and they had reason to be. The German public has begun
to know a great deal about the wounded. They do not yet know all
the facts, because wounded men are, as far as possible, hidden in
Germany and never sent to Socialist centres unless it is absolutely
unavoidable. The official figures which are increasing in an
enormous ratio since the development of Britain's war machine, are
falsified by manipulation.

And if easy proof be needed of the truth of my assertion I point to
the monstrous official misstatement involved in the announcement
that over ninety per cent. of German wounded return to the firing
line! Of the great crush of wounded at Potsdam I doubt whether any
appreciable portion of the serious cases will return to anything
except permanent invalidism. They are suffering from shell wounds,
not shrapnel, for the most part, I gathered.

As our train emptied it was obvious that some great spectacle was
in progress. The exit to the station became blocked with staring
peasant women returning from the early market in Berlin, their high
fruit and vegetable baskets empty on their backs. When I
eventually got through the crowd into the outer air and paused at
the top of the short flight of steps I beheld a scene that will
never pass from my memory. Filmed and circulated in Germany it
would evoke inconceivable astonishment to this deluded nation and
would swell the malcontents, already a formidable mass, into a
united and dangerous army of angry, eye-opened dupes. This is not
the mere expression of a neutral view, but is also the opinion of a
sober and patriotic German statesman.

I saw the British wounded arrive from Neuve Chapelle at Boulogne; I
saw the Russian wounded in the retreat from the Bukovina; I saw the
Belgian wounded in the Antwerp retreat, and the German wounded in
East Prussia, but the wounded of the Prussian Guard at Potsdam
surpassed in sadness anything I have witnessed in the last two
bloody years.

The British Neuve Chapelle wounded were, if not gay, many of them
blithe and smiling--their bodies were