An over-abundance of swords tended to give the new army a comic-opera aspect, but this detail was offset by the genuine military bearing of all but a few of the multitude in uniform. The great majority, of course, had had German training. Now, however, they put the “pep” of a new game into the old forms of soldierly etiquette. Their two-finger salute was rendered with the precision of ambitious recruits and at the same time with the exactitude of “old-timers.” They sprang unfailingly to attention at sight of a superior officer and stood like automatons until he turned away. Yet there seemed to be an un-German comradeship between the rank and file and the commissioned personnel, a democracy of endeavor, a feeling that they were all embarked together on the same big new adventure. There were, to be sure, some officers and a few men whose sidewalk manners suggested that they had learned Prussian ways a bit too thoroughly, but they were lost in a mass that had something of the easy-going temperament of the East or the South.
All classes of the Polish population were represented in the new army from the bulking countryman who ran after me to say that the photograph I had just taken of him would not be a success because he had not been looking at the lens during the operation to the major who granted me special permission to use my kodak in spite of military rules. This officer had been late in reaching his office, and I passed the time in his anteroom in conversation with his sergeant-major. When he entered at last the entire office force sprang to its feet with what in an older army would have been an exaggeration of discipline. The sergeant-major, his middle finger glued to the seams of his trousers, explained my presence and request. The major asked several questions in Polish, which the sergeant repeated to me in German, relaying my replies back to the major in his native tongue. When the latter had nodded his approval and disappeared, and the office force had relaxed into mere human beings, I expressed my surprise that an officer of such high rank knew no German.
“Knows no German!” cried the sergeant-major, bursting into laughter. “The major was for nine years a captain in the German army. He is a graduate of the War College in Berlin and was a member of Hindenburg’s staff. But he never lets a word of the accursed tongue pass his lips if he can possibly avoid it.”