less of
the matinee hero business than in either England or France. The high
official in the civil government who said that the women were the best
fighters in the German army was not so far from the truth. The pluck of
the women is astonishing. There isn't the slightest display of sorrow
or call for sympathy. You see them everywhere in the streets, cafes,
and shops of Berlin; not in such great numbers, however, as in the
lesser provinces and the smaller towns, where the drain of men is
enormously heavier.

"Later: Have been twice to the Casualty List Office, or Information
Bureau, where the names of the verwundet und gefallen are posted --
column after column, company after company, regiment after regiment of
fine black type--nothing more or less than a printer's morgue, crowding
into one dark hallway the cemetery of a nation. There were fathers,
mothers, brothers, and children quietly and unemotionally scanning the
lists. It took me back to the terrible week at the White Star offices,
after the Titanic went down. At that time the relatives wept (some of
them) and nearly all harangued the officials, asking questions, sending
telegrams, begging for news. Here they look for the names of their
dead,--that's all,--and then go out without a question. You can't ask
questions of a Government! The Titanic lasted a week, and this goes on--
God knows how long!

"Had supper with Brown. Later a mother in black and a girl, also in
black (the daughter, or daughter-in-law, I should judge), came into the
Heiniger ( ?) Cafe while I was sitting there. For three quarters of an
hour they listened to the music, neither of them, I'll swear, speaking a
word. Then they paid twenty-five pfennigs for their beer and went out,
--still silent,--and the Ober bowed low and very respectfully. I asked
the waiter who they were, and he said the woman had that day heard of
the death of C... her fourth son. Something like the Bixby woman to
whom Lincoln wrote his famous letter. And there must be, literally,
thousands of them.

"This people is terribly in earnest,--deluded, of course, with devotion
to a false idea, but it is the delusion that spells accomplishment. The
country is earnestly and honestly possessed with an Idea, and the idea
is that Might is Right. That is the awful pity of it. When will the
awakening come?

"Later: To-day I had an interview of three quarters of an hour with Herr
Dr. R. W. Drechsler, head of the American