It was wearing on the disposition to turn the
leaves trying to find out how to ask somebody to pass the butter and
find instead whole pages of parallel columns of translated sentences
given over to such questions as "Where is the aunt of my stepfather's
second cousin?"
As a rule a man does not go to Europe in time of war to look up his
relatives by marriage. He may even have gone there to avoid them. War
is terrible enough without lugging in all the remote kinsfolk a fellow
has. How much easier, then, to throw oneself on the superior
educational qualifications of the German military machine. Somebody was
sure to have a linguistic life net there, rigged and ready for you to
drop into.
It was so in this instance, as it has been so in many instances before
and since. The courteous gentlemen who sat at my right side and at my
left spoke in German or French or English as the occasion suited, while
old Von Heeringen boomed away in rumbling German phrases. As I ate I
studied him.
Three weeks later, less a day, I met by appointment Lord Kitchener and
spent forty minutes, or thereabouts, in his company at the War Office in
London.
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