The depth and fervour of this self-denying spirit among them as contrasted with the "healthy individual egotism" of the Allies constitutes one of the most disquieting phenomena of the struggle. Austria has been scoffed at for her abject submissiveness to Germany. But there is another way of looking at her attitude. She has courageously effaced her individuality more completely even than Turkey for the sake of the common cause. And she has lost nothing by the painful effort. Her various peoples who were expected to be tearing each other to pieces have given us a splendid example of discipline and self-abnegation. In the Skoda works at Pilsen, where machine guns are made, fifteen thousand workmen are cheerfully toiling and moiling every day of the week, Sundays and holidays not excepted. Since the war began Germany has accomplished as great things at home as on foreign battlefields. She built and launched a Dreadnought of 25,600 tons, a line-of-battle ship of 26,200 tons. And while the latter vessel was on the stocks, the reports published in the British press of the splendid results obtained by the 15-inch guns of the _Queen Elizabeth_ moved the German Admiralty to substitute these for the 12-inch guns already adopted. Two swift cruisers, 12 small submarines and 24 larger ones of 1200 tons displacement, with a speed of 16 knots under water, 20 on the surface and a radius of action of 3000 miles--were among the results of a single year's activity.
And our enemies' resourcefulness and power of adaptation is of a piece with their capacity for work. When war was declared and foreign trade arrested, numerous German factories underwent a quick transformation. Silk-works began to turn out bandages and lint; velvet works produced materials for tents; umbrella makers took to manufacturing rain-proof cloth; the output of sewing-machine factories was changed to shrapnel; piano manufacturers became makers of cartridges. Paper producers supplied the War Office with paper-made blankets. For copper, when the supply began to grow short, nickelled iron was quickly substituted. Sugar was employed to obtain the spirit which had to take the place of benzine. And the upshot of these transformations is that the orders received for military needs exceed those which would in normal conditions of exportation have been placed by foreign customers with German industry. The goods traffic on German railways, which had fallen to 41 per cent. during the first month of the war, has since gone up to 96 per cent. Those achievements are not merely noteworthy in themselves, they are ominously symptomatic.