When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey, lowering winter day.  The other hand was in a bandage.  He had been allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again.  The same sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the front.

Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to hold what he had and on his own soil.  The German had been fighting on the enemy’s soil to gain more land.  He, too, thought of it as the defensive.  All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive.  But it was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive.  That was it—­that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every conversation and every act.

The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward.  The Englishman’s phrase is “Stick it,” which means to hold what you have; the German’s phrase is “Onward.”  It was national youth against national middle-age.  A vessel with pressure of increase from within was about to expand or burst.  A vessel which is large and comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without.  The French were saying, What if we should lose?  And the Germans were saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to?  Germany had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-morrow as good as to-day.  Germany looked forward to a fortune to be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune at fifty.

It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a people.  The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he already had; the German was defending what he considered that he was entitled to.  If he could make more of Calais than the French, then Calais ought to be his.  A nation, with the “closed in” culture of the French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe, thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the blow.  When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.

Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns.  Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-promised day of the “place in the sun” for the immense population drilled in the system, was the keynote.  They knew that they could lick the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and preparation.