long been accustomed to the belief that Germany was hitentionally 

 heading for a great war. Prophets of woe were not lacking in the Reich 

 and a swarm of novels appeared which maintained that the army was 

 being undermined and corrupted by wealth. Beyerlein's ]cna oder Sedan 

 made a great sensation and, at the same time, aroused fierce anger by 

 its description of rich young men who entered the service merely for 

 the social prestige which it gave them and whose arrogance and tyranny 

 made the army a breeding-ground for Socialism. I had no means of tell- 

 ing how far these jeremiads were true; probably the tendencies they 

 described were real, but, if so, the War proved that the wonderful Ger- 

 man military machine had suffered no deterioration. 



In 1926, after attending the International Geological Congress at 

 Madrid and making a short stay in Paris, I had an intensely interesting 

 visit of nearly three weeks in Germany. Most of the time was spent in 

 Heidelberg, but I also visited Strassburg, Stuttgart and Cologne. Such 

 of my old friends as were still alive, gave me a cordial welcome, cher- 

 ishing no resentment, or, at least, displaying none, on account of the 

 part which we had taken against them in the War. They all attributed 

 their defeat to us, saying, with practical unanimity, "if it hadn't been 

 for you, we should have won," The civilians passionately repudiated 

 the idea that Germany had brought on the War, though such officers as 

 I met had nothing to say of their country's innocence. Indeed one 

 "professional" officer (i.e. as distinguished from the Reserve) who 

 had spent his life in the army, gave me distinctly to understand, without 

 exactly saying so, that the Great General Staff was responsible. 



While they all looked back on the war years with horror, many told 

 me that the inflation period was even worse. My landlady at a pension 

 told me that she had been glad to accept an American dollar for a 

 month's board and lodging. A Heidelberg professor confirmed this, 

 saying that, at that time, whoever had a dollar, had a fortune. I re- 

 marked that the people one saw on the streets were comfortably clothed 

 and seemed well fed and that I could see but little sign of poverty, and 

 was told that there was a great deal of poverty that hid itself; people 

 who had been living on their invested savings and had lost them all 

 in the inflation time, and a great many officers' families were slowly 

 starving. Of soldiers, I saw none at all and the most obvious change 

 from the old Germany was the disappearance of uniforms from the 

 streets; policemen, postmen and employes of railroads and streetcars 

 were the only uniformed figures one saw. The officials in the post offices 



C 291 3 



