man army. It paints that organization not only as
he himself saw it, but as in its essential features it really is. In
doing this Lieutenant Bilse has not only rendered an enormous service
to his own country,--as indeed many thousands of Germans are
recognizing to-day,--but he has also enabled the rest of the world to
gain a clear insight into the inner mechanism of the most powerful
fighting-machine in the world, has shown its hidden flaws, its grave
organic defects, and has thus permitted us truly to gauge its
inherent power. But interwoven with his criticism there is the hope,
nay the conviction, that the main part of the machine is still sound.

A book of this kind, "written from the inside," has a strong merit of
its own not to be measured by its purely literary qualities; for
these, I am free to admit, are not of the highest order. There is
talent in it, when considering that it is the first effort of a
literary tyro; but its great value lies in its intense realism,
interpreting that word in its higher sense.

I have been compelled to make some alterations and omissions in my
work of translation. The omissions have been due to the conviction
both of myself and of my publisher, that the author has in certain
instances given a mass of unnecessary details to which serious
objection might be urged, in this country at least, on the score of
clean literary taste. The alterations were either dictated by similar
considerations or grew indirectly out of them.

With these exceptions mentioned, however, my translation may fairly
claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest
moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in
Bilse's book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical
exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many
traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German
army. And there is no excuse to be offered by me for furthering that
task.

WOLF VON SCHIERBRAND.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 1, 1904.

A Little Garrison

CHAPTER I

AN EVENING PARTY AT CAPTAIN KOeNIG'S

Standing in the centre of her parlor, a spacious and cosy one, Frau
Clara Koenig let her eyes glide over the arrangements made for the
reception of her guests.

For this was her regular _soiree musicale_, when she saw assembled
about her, one evening each week, those of her more intimate friends
who dallied habitu