torial occupation they employed themselves, in many places, in burglaries with violence, as carefully prepared as notarial documents.

Under the administrative régime properly so-called their fury has been little less unbridled. They have levied exorbitant war-taxes in all the communes, large or small. Factories of all sorts very soon began to be dismantled. Machines, ovens, vats, taps and cocks, weaving frames, raw materials emigrated to Germany in procession. Of all the textile, metal-working, and other establishments, there soon remained in the North of France only a few munition factories, a few saw-mills producing posts and timbers for the trenches, a few electric power-houses, and some sauerkraut factories set up in remodeled sugar refineries.

Not

Agriculture suffered no less. only crops and cattle, but all the good horses and the best farming implements were taken to Germany; to such an extent that the Germans, becoming conscious of the mistake they had made, eventually brought them back in a hurry. In 1916 there were villages of 1600 people which had no more than twenty cows and a few superannuated horses. Other villages had none at all.

In 1915 the special requisitions of leather, rubber, metals, wool, and cotton began. Even the worn-out leather on carriage-shafts was carefully detached. In 1916 the German Cyclops shook the church bells everywhere to bring down the bronze. Table linen and body linen were swept away in the same torrent of spoliation. Mattresses were opened and emptied of their wool. In one village of a thousand people, five hundred mattresses were thus disinflated in a few days. No mercy was shown even to the mattresses on which sick persons lay. The sole manifestation of German delicacy consisted in replacing the wool by chips. In 1917

the kitchen utensils and the silver plate fell into the abyss in ever-increasing quantities. Everything was requisitioned by the Boches, says one of the repatriates, even the night vessels.

The general spoliation is accompanied by destruction pure and simple. Houses in the peaceful occupation of their owners, a long way from the trenches, are demolished to obtain wood for burning or construction. Doors, windows, floors, even school furniture, are used for fires.

To sum up- pillage, requisition, destruction go side by side, look alike, and run in harness together, like a fraternal team of apocalyptic monsters.

But, concurrently with these direct methods, the occupying forces seek also to increase their prizes by oblique devices. They assume the mask of commerce, the mask of industry, to say nothing of the judicial mask, which enables them to glut themselves with fines without number. In the dairy country, in 1915, they requisitioned all the butter, paid for it at the rate of fifteen cents a pound, and sold it at double the price to the inhabitants. This exploitation of the farm was transformed into a comedy of unending spoliation. The Kommandantur issued its orders to the laborers, but did not pay them; it laid that burden on the commune. It exacted from the farmer himself a huge indemnity, said to be for the expenses of cultivation. And, as a climax, it rushed the harvest into Germany by motor, without in all cases taking the trouble to hand the farmer the notes of requisition, which were in any event a mere mockery of payment.

Thus, it was not enough to confiscate the crop, but the invaders devised this buffoonery of compelling payment to themselves by those whom they despoiled, including the workmen, whose daily wage did not exceed thirty cents. The rule is the same for the wood

cutting and for the few industries which remain, such as saw-mills. The mayor is the inexhaustible paymaster, and the Kommandantur takes unto itself the product. The French municipality, with a rope about its neck, pays even the very workers in the munition factories.

The Germans' quarrelsome and extravagant attention to trivialities is equally open to criticism, alongside their brutality, their falsity, and their greed. Their organization of conquest and rapine is carried on in accordance with a meticulous, oppressive, and enfeebling system of rules. Let us cite this one fact: they have extended their census-taking to include hens, rabbits, pigeons, and even the most microscopic beasts, and have given to each one of them a certificate of civil status, recording their birth and their demise. They keep an exact account of vegetables and eggs; and certain villages for instance, the gallant little village of Bony in the Department of the Aisne

All these details show clearly enough what an intolerable state of serfdom our compatriots have fallen into; and how they are being rushed en masse down the incline of destitution and starvation. Kept closely confined within the bounds of their towns or villages, they go thence only to perform enforced labor in the fields, or to be deported to distant parts. They are literally fettered to the soil, and can, at most, go to the next commune on payment of a fee. The Germans, as the inevitable result of their retrograde imperialism, have

revived feudal customs, and brought forth from the depths of past ages the most archaic abuses and usages - the servitude of mortmain, peonage, the whim of the lord of the manor, and compulsory labor.

In agriculture, too, they have reestablished the régime of the primitive community; for the fields of each village are cultivated as a whole, with out distinction of ownership, under the direction of a Boche inspector who is very often a blockhead.

Another truly gothic backward step is the almost universal closing of the schools, which are transformed into barracks or hospitals. There are no longer boarding-schools, as the children of the country districts are not allowed to go to the town. Tens of thousands of children have broken off their studies. It is a return to the darkness of the year 1000.

In a word, on all sides our defenseless compatriots are confronted by a barbarian despotism which tramples on them, and deprives them of their most legitimate rights and their means of liveli hood. Materially they lack everything. In many communes there has been a coal famine for three years: nothing to burn but green wood. The people sometimes lack clothing, and often leather shoes: they wear clogs or sabots or shoes of old cloth. They no longer have either gas or kerosene. Barring an occasional lighting plant of acetylene or electricity, they are reduced to grease-pots, which recall the crasset of the serfs in the Middle Ages. They make them of jars, blacking-boxes, or bottles, filled with lard taken from their rations, and in this they dip a wick made of a skein of yarn or cotton.

Since 1914 this unfortunate people, accustomed all their lives to the light wines of the country, have had absolutely nothing but water to drink. No wine- the Germans having drunk the

cellars dry in less than no time. No beer -the breweries having been stripped of their machinery. No cider-the apples having been taken to Germany. The population eats meat once in two months or once in six months. There is little milk, and the children die in large numbers, from being poorly nourished. In 1917 many villages no longer possessed a single hen or a single rabbit.

And with all the rest there are the troops passing through and in occupation, who fill the houses to overflowing and compel even the women to lie on the floor. They search the cupboards and seize the provisions which the family has succeeded in putting by as a reserve. Moreover, as a result of the withdrawal of the German lines in 1917, or of the digging of new trenches, whole villages have been evacuated, and their people quartered in the more distant ones, which are already overcrowded; so that a twofold destitution results. It sometimes happens that even the most well-to-do have nothing to eat except a compote of beets and boiled grass which they pick themselves at the side of the road, by virtue of a special permit.

To cap the climax, doctors and medicines are almost impossible to find in many districts.

In very truth our 3,600,000 compatriots (1915) have descended to the last stage of want and are hovering on the brink of famine. Only the Spanish-American, and, later, the SpanishDutch supplies are keeping them alive, far from abundant as they are. They are sustained only by clinging, with a feeble grasp, to that source of succor, which the Germans have not always held inviolate.

And all about them, before their eyes, for three years past Germany, deaf to the appeal of humanity, pursues more and more deliberately her plan of underfeeding the deported

French and Belgians, whom she regales, after her fashion, with nettle soup, a little black bread, and a little weak coffee. For three years she has been starving the prisoners. In 1916, to mention a few instances among a thousand, the Russian prisoners who were working in the trenches actually picked up oat-grains in the muddy roads, and pulled up beetroots, which they gnawed greedily. At Hirson, out of five hundred Roumanian prisoners, seventeen were carried away, dead from lack of nourishment, in a single day. At Vendhuille two hundred and twelve out of four hundred British prisoners died of cold and privation during the winter of 1917.

IX

All the brutality, perfidy, and savagery manifested by Germany from day to day is not to be explained by any philosophic theory, or as a systematic policy. Temperament is an essential part of it. Moreover, there must be a special lack of the moral sense, an inherent deficiency of the sentiments of justice, honor, and charity. There must be an hereditary perversity. Intellectual perversion by the sophisms of a Fichte or a Haeckel would not have sufficed to make Huns, or to change men to wolves. Grafted upon a sound trunk, the Pangermanist heresy would never have sprouted. Never would Germany-leaders and flocks have been able to sink so deep into her violent self-worship, her terrorism, and her unmitigated brigandage in war, if she had not glided into it by degrees through weakness of conscience and latent criminality. In reality, behind a false cloak of philosophy and policy, one can detect in her nothing more than revolting organs of the carnivora, retarded in their human development.

I

FORTY miles north of Chicago, on the high bluffs that overlook Lake Michigan, the Naval Training Station of the Great Lakes stretches a mile back to the railroad tracks from a mile frontage on the shore; and even beyond the tracks the latest additions have crept out on the rolling prairie. Here, covering approximately three hundred acres, the vast camp, with its recent additions to meet the war emergency, houses an average total of 22,000 men the largest and most complete naval training establishment in the world.

There had been a heavy blizzard in Chicago the first week in January, and when, on the eighth, I walked up from the railroad station to the great brick entrance, the ground was deep with snow. Beyond the iron gates, hundreds of jackies in white trousers and blue pea-coats were piling the snow back from roads and sidewalks. From the entrance a long, straight road stretched almost to the lake. On either side, and back as far as the eye could see, the substantial brick buildings of the station extended in orderly arrangement, like the buildings of a modern university. At the far end the tall, massive clock-tower of the Administration Building rose red against the blue winter sky. High above it, to the right, the slender tapering towers of the wireless caught their swinging cobwebs of wires up four hundred feet against the blue. Below, everywhere,

the red brick buildings and the glitter of sun-touched snow in zero air.

In the recruiting building a long line of men already were waiting to swear their loyalty to Uncle Sam's Navy, and merciless hostility to his enemies. One by one we filed into the recruiting-room, where a dozen jackies, in neat uniforms with their yeomen's ratings on their blue sleeves, shamed our motley civilian clothes by contrast. Short and tall, stout and thin, from Texas, Ohio, Colorado, and Minnesota, in cheap 'sport suits,' sweaters, caps, derbies, every kind of clothing, with broken dress-suit-cases, cord-bound, with paper bundles, and many with hands empty

here was young America in its infinite variety.

To the room where physical examinations were held we were passed along with our identifying papers. Yellow sunshine shone warmly through high windows; there was the moist smell of steam radiators, and the unmistakable and indescribable smell of naked bodies which threw my recollection back to school and college gymnasia. At a desk by the window the surgeon faced the room; two assistants stood beside him; along the side of the room three or four yeomen at tables recorded the results of the examination.

The test was severe, and from our little squad of seventeen, two were cast out for defective eyesight, one for stric ture, two for heart trouble, and another for some imperfection of the foot. Weighed, measured, tested for eyesight and color-sight, identified by

scars and blemishes, we dressed and then recorded our finger-prints on the voluminous record, which grew as the examination progressed. It was late afternoon and the electric lights were lighted when we finally stood before the desk of the last officer, and, with right hand lifted, touched the Book with our left and swore to follow the flag by sea or land wherever the fate of war might call us.

In Two Years Before the Mast I recollect the phrase, 'There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life'; and in that long first day of my admission to the Navy I began to realize in but small measure, to be sure - the tremendous change that I was soon to experience, and the vastness of the education that I must acquire before I could hope to be of even slight value in a sailor's capacity.

The Great Lakes Naval Training Station was originally built in 1911, to care for 1600 men. But with the declaration of war with Germany, the enlargement of its capacity was begun on a stupendous scale. South, north, and west of the station, additional acreage was acquired, and under the direction of enlisted engineers and architects complete villages or camps were built, increasing the capacity of the station to over twenty thousand men. Although the new construction was only for emergency purposes, on land leased for the duration of the war and a year beyond, nothing was omitted by which the comfort of the men might be increased, their health maintained, and the efficiency of their training most expeditiously promoted. They were grouped in camps, each holding several thousand men; the barracks of each camp were arranged about a central square or drill-ground, and each camp was provided with its central steamheating plant, mess-kitchen, laundry,

dispensary, hospital, drill-halls, and such buildings as are necessary for the officers and the storage and distribution of supplies, as well as a system of hot and cold water, complete sewerage, electric lighting, and fire hydrants.

In order that as much of the material as possible may be salvaged when the war is over and the temporary buildings are taken down, each building was so designed that it might be constructed of boards and timbers of stock sizes, without cutting, so put together that the buildings can be resolved into approximately the identical piles of lumber from which they were built.

Each day hundreds of recruits pass through Chicago on their way to the station. From every corner of the United States, from every walk of life and representing practically every vocation, they swell the ever-increasing total of our naval forces. For about three months they remain at the station: three weeks in detention, then to the main camp for intensive training, and finally off to sea. With seabags neatly packed and shouldered, the blue-clad contingents depart; not with the great band playing, but by night, at hours unknown to the sleeping world. Under the stars the long trains pause, are loaded, and are gone. A few days later the men are put on shipboard at some Atlantic port.

In order to prevent recruits who have been exposed to contagious diseases from being immediately admitted to the main camps, to spread contagion among the men, a detention camp is maintained, whe.e every recruit must pass three weeks of complete isolation. from the world and the main camp. During these three weeks the men are not only regularly examined and constantly observed by the medical staff, but the several vaccinations against smallpox and typhoid are administered, throat-cultures tested, and other