Greatly cheered we picked up the Division again at Chouy, and sat deliciously on a grass bank to wait for the others. Just off the road on the opposite side was a dead German. Quite a number of men broke their ranks to look curiously at him-anything to break the tedious, deadening monotony of marching twenty-five miles day after day: as a major of the said to us as we sat there, "It is all right for us, but it's hell for them!"

The Company came up, and we found that in Chouy the Germans had overlooked a telephone-great news for the cable detachment. After a glance at the church, a gorgeous bit of Gothic that we had shelled, we pushed on in the rain to Billy-sur-Ourcq. I was just looking after a convenient loft when I was sent back to Chouy to find the Captain's watch. A storm was raging down the valley. The road at any time was covered with tired foot sloggers. I had to curse them, for they wouldn't get out of the way. Soon I warmed and cursed them orudely and glibly in four languages. On my return I found some looted boiled eggs and captured German Goulasch hot for me. I fed and turned in.

This day my kit was left behind with other unnecessary "tackle," to lighten the horses' load. I wish I had known it.

and Hartennes, where we were given hot tea by that great man, Sergeant C of the Divisional Cyclists. I rode back to Rozet St Albin, a pleasant name, along a road punctuated with dead and very evil-smelling horses. Except for the smell it was a good run of about ten miles. I picked up the Division again on the sandy road above Chacrise.

Sick of column riding I turned off the main road up a steep hill into Ambleuf, a desolate black-and-white village totally deserted. It came on to pour, but there was a shrine handy. There I stopped until I was pulled out by an ancient captain of cuirassiers, who had never seen an Englishman before and wanted to hear all about us.

On into

where I decided to head off the Division at Ciry, instead of crossing the Aisne and riding straight to Vailly, our proposed H.Q. for that night. The decision saved my life, or at least my liberty. I rode to Sermoise, a bright little village where the people were actually making bread. At the station there was a solitary cavalry man. In Ciry itself there was no one. way up the Ciry hill, a sort of dry watercourse, I ran into some cavalry and learnt that the Germans were holding the Aisne in unexpected strength. I had all but ridden round and in front of our own cavalry outposts.

Half

Two miles farther back I found T and one of our brigades. We had a bit of

bully and biscuit under cover of a haystack, then we borrowed some glasses and watched bodies of Germans on the hills the other side of the Aisne. It was raining very fast. There was no decent cover, so we sat on the leeward side of a mound of sand.

When we awoke the sun was setting gorgeously. Away to the west in the direction of Soissons there was a tremendous cannonade. On the hills opposite little points of flame showed that the Germans were replying. On our right some infantry was slowly advancing in extended order through a dripping turnip-field.

The Battle of the Aisne had begun.

We were wondering what to do when we were commandeered to take a message down that precipitous hill of Ciry to some cavalry. It was now quite dark and still raining. We had no carbide, and my carburetter had jibbed, so we decided to stop at Ciry for the night. At the inn we found many drinks-particularly some

wonderful cherry brandy—and a friendly motor-cyclist who told us of a billet that an officer was probably going to leave. We went there. Our host was an old soldier, so, after his wife had hung up what clothes we dared take off to dry by a red-hot stove, he gave us some supper of stewed game and red wine, then made us cunning beds with straw, pillows, and blankets. Too tired to thank him we dropped asleep.

That, though we did not know it then, was the last night of our little Odyssey. We had been advancing or retiring without a break since my tragio farewell to Nadine. We had been riding all day and often all night. But those were heroic days, and now as I write this in our comfortable, slack winter quarters, I must confess I would give anything to have them all over again. Now we motor - cyclists are middle-aged warriors. Adventures are work. Experiences are a routine. Then, let's be sentimental, we were young.

to

SINCE the beginning of the war numerous attempts at the analysis of the German character-many of them excellent have appeared in print. The mentality of the nation, its subservience officialdom, the scheme of German upbringing, the thoroughness with which things are thought out, and the bases of measures prepared and laid down-all have been the theme either of warm admiration or of cool dissection. But one has looked in vain for a description of one of the most striking features of this war, which is a direct outcome of the system on which the German nation is educated and administerednamely, the entire ignorance and almost wilful blindness of Germany regarding the nations outside her own boundaries.

Not, of course, as regards geographical or statistical information about foreign nations. No; I am sure that every German schoolboy could give points to the ordinary British boy as to the amount of corn-stuffs produced, the population, the history, the rivers on which the big towns are situated, the colour of the people's hair, and the ethnological and sociological details of numerous countries outside their respective fatherlands. But as regards the peoples themselves, their trend of thought, the way in which they would be likely to act in given circumstances, the effect of great popular move

ments-in fact, the nation's mind of this, not only the German schoolboy but the German man, the German nation, is absolutely and stupendously ignorant.

To give but a few concrete instances regarding our own country in which German opinion went widely and ignorantly astray.

In the first place, Germany was strongly of opinion that England would not go to war in support of France and Russia, and, mark you, for the following reasons:

First, that Ireland was on the verge of civil war, and was so disintegrated that it would be impossible for us to embark on a foreign war without the certainty of a break-up at home.

Secondly, that our colonies were so dissatisfied with the Mother Country that they would break loose and disown her at the earliest opportunity.

Thirdly, that India would rise in rebellion and evict the hated British Raj for all time.

Could any Government have gone more hopelessly and gloriously astray in its calculations than this? And yet it is Germany who has for many years had spies and agents by the thousand in Great Britain and all her possessions, who has spent more money in Secret Service than the rest of the civilised Powers put together, and who prides herself on knowing, in the minutest details,

everything that is going on throughout the world.

Look at the Holy War, the Jehad, which was proclaimed to German order at Constantinople by the venerable Sheikh ul Islam, which the Germans were convinced would cause a general uprising of Mohammedans throughout the world against British supremacy. One would have thought that any one who had been but a few months in the East would have known that although the nominal head of the religion, in the person of the Padishah, resides at Constantinople, and is venerated as Khalifa by a large portion of the followers of Islam, still, the Turks are in most evil odour with the rest of their co-religionists; and the fact that the Turks wanted a thing done would be an excellent reason for not doing it. The ridiculous official story, too, about the Senussi being on the point of attacking Egypt, shows a complete ignorance of the Senussi movement and its aims. Yet the German Agency in Cairo has been working for many years studying native politics, and its chief agent, one Baron Oppenheim, has to my personal knowledge been in close touch with Senussi agents in Egypt.

At the commencement of the Russo-Japanese war the German General Staff put, nay lumped, their money on the wrong horse. Their information led them to believe that the vast Russian armies would have no difficulty in crushing Japan at the outset,

and they made no secret of their belief. The fact that their own Colonel Meckel had been chief instructor to the Japanese army, and that this army had imbibed German military views through a number of German instructors, would-one would have thought have rendered it likely that the General Staff in Berlin would have had some idea as to Japanese prowess and Japanese power on land. But no-the information, if any, was discarded, and the false views of Russian power were adopted. It must, however, be added that, though crestfallen at the miscarriage of their prophecies, the German Staff had no hesitation in taking the credit to themselves for the success of the Japanese arms, and in taking every advantage of the consequent weakness of the Russian military organisation during the following years.

But here again they were wrong in their calculations, as it proved. Though, largely owing to Russian military weakness, they succeeded in forcing the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina down the throat of a reluctant Europe în 1909, they went too far in their contempt for the Russian military machine. For it is a fact, though scarcely to be believed, that official Berlin was, as lately as July 1914, convinced that Russia would be too weak to object to the Austrian ultimatum to Servia, and would be obliged to acquiesce, without fighting, in the dismemberment of the