to make King Ludwig talk of that time, in a way which suggested the
close proximity of this war. And I asked him concerning that situation.
"Yes, we knew war was coming," he admitted gravely. "Last winter the
great debates were going on in the French parliament over the question
of changing the term of military service from two to three years. We
could not understand that. The extra years would increase the annual
strength of the French army fully fifty per cent. It was ominous. Then
we knew that Russia had nine hundred thousand men under arms whose term
of service had expired and who had every right to return to their homes.
Why were they not sent? Yes, we knew it was coming, but we did not fear
it, and Germany will fight to the last drop of blood. You have but to
see the spirit of our troops and the spirit of the recruits,
disappointed because their offers to serve in the army are rejected. We
do not need every recruit now, and as we do take new men, there are
hundreds of thousands more, ready to serve the Fatherland--to the end."
"And when will the end be?" I asked His Majesty. When would peace be
declared? The King smiled, but it was a smile of reluctance.
"Who can say?" Then that Imperial chin suddenly seemed made of stone,
and there was fire in his eyes. He declared: "There will be no end to
this war until we have peace conditions which we shall judge to be
worthy of our nation and worthy of our sacrifice. This war was forced
upon us. We shall go through with it. We do not finish until we have an
uncontestable victory. The heart and soul of the whole country is in
this fight. Between all the German kings and confederated princes, there
is absolute unswerving unity. We are one idea, one hope, one ideal, one
wish."
Instantly I thought of the Socialists. We had heard in America there
could be no war. We had been told that the German Socialists would not
let their country go to war.
The King smiled, for it was obviously inconceivable to him. "We
Germans," he explained, "quarrel between ourselves in peaceful times,
but when we are surrounded by enemies, we are one. And the Socialists
know that war was as much against our plans as it was against theirs.
In times of stress, Germany is always a united nation. Beside the
Fatherland, dogmas are trivial. We Germans like to talk. We are great
philosophers. We go deep into things, but it is against our racial
instincts to let our own individualism come before the welfare of the
State. It is because we have deep national pride that we are one people
to-day."
"And, Your Majesty, after the war?" I asked, "what then? Is it to be the
last war of the world, so terrible that humanity will not tolerate
another?"
"This is for each nation to say," he replied gravely. "Our hands are
clean. For more than forty years we have worked for the peace of Europe,
and there have been times when, had our policy been such, it might have
been to our advantage to go to war. Our hands are clean," he repeated.
"They brought this upon us. We did not want it. After it is over, we
shall rebuild. I foresee an era of great prosperity for our country. We
shall not be impoverished. Many of our industries are working day and
night now. Until last August they were busy with the products of peace;
now it is with the products of war. So many skilled workmen are needed
to-day that we cannot take them from the shops to send them to the
front, even though their regiments go. And after the war the factories
will all go on as before, manufacturing the things of peace, and those
other industries which are closed now will be doubly busy. War, no
matter how severe it may be, cannot check the commercial growth of a
country like Germany."
When King Ludwig spoke of the industrial future, it was the voice of one
who had given deep study to everything of vital importance to his
country.
Baron von Schön had told me that all his life King Ludwig had been a
hard worker, that political economy, agriculture, industry, waterways,
were all subjects which fascinated him, that most of His Majesty's
evenings were spent attending conferences, given by the specialized
learned men in every branch of a nation's prosperity.
I mentioned the wonderful spirit of the Bavarian troops I had seen, and
His Majesty's face grew bright.
"I have two sons at the front," he said proudly. "Prince Francis,
commander of a brigade. He was wounded in Flanders, but he will be back
before the war is over; and as you know, Crown Prince Rupprecht is also
fighting in the West."
And I thought that an expression of longing crossed that kindly face, as
though the King wished he could be there too.
"I also am wounded," he said with a smile, "but that was long
ago--1866."
The conversation changed; it became more personal. Like most Americans,
King Ludwig showed himself to be thoroughly fond of sport. He told me
that he liked all forms of outdoor sports and admired America for its
almost national participation in them. He spoke of his fondness for
sailing, and horses, of yacht races on the Sternberger See. He mentioned
with enjoyment his great stables, where personally he concerns himself
with the breeding of his own horses, taking a great pride in them
whenever they race. He told me of his farm, Leutstetten, near München,
where he likes to spend the summers, living an outdoor life.
Further expressing again his warm feeling of friendship--a friendship
deeper than that dictated by the rules of mere international courtesy,
for it has come from the Americans who have lived from time to time in
Bavaria--King Ludwig concluded our talk with the message of German's
deep and sincere friendship to the people of the United States.
We shook hands again; it was an American farewell. The dapper Adjutant
came into the room, and I bid His Majesty "Adieu." My last impression
was of his straight uniformed figure standing in the center of the room,
across his breast the Iron Cross and the Order of St. Hubertus; then the
oaken doors closed. Back into the little antechamber with the countless
oil paintings, back through the austere reception hall, past the white
coated, white plumed Hartschier guards, down the great staircase, and
with Legation Counselor von Stockhammern, I was escorted into a motor.
As we drove down to the Promenade Platz, where I was to call at the
Foreign Ministry of Bavaria, I asked the Counselor about the
Wittelsbacher Palast.
"It is the palace," he said, "where the King has lived all his life, and
which he does not like at all to leave. When he became King two years
ago, he did not change in his tastes. Only on the occasion of great
ceremony is he to be seen in the Residence, where lived the former King
of Bavaria."
And I understood now what I had heard before, that King Ludwig was fond
only of a simple life, and that he loved only work, and family
happiness; and I thought that here was no case of mere birth making a
man high in the land, for Ludwig of Wittelsbacher would have made his
way if he had been born outside the purple; and I thought of something I
had heard, how a Bavarian Socialist had once said that though his party
might battle against the Government, they could never battle against
King Ludwig.
"Everybody in Bayern supports King Ludwig with all their heart," Von
Stockhammern was saying.
"I know now why you Bavarians love him," I replied.
III
TO THE WEST FRONT
A note from Dr. Roediger of the Foreign Office directed me to report
early in January at ten o'clock at that building on Moltkestrasse and
Königsplatz, where lives and works that marvelous central organization
of the German army, the Great General Staff. There I found waiting
Dawson, the photographer who had accompanied me from America, and a
plump, smiling, philosophical Austrian, Theyer, a Cino-operator who was
to go along with Dawson and make "movies" of the front.
Climbing endless wooden stairways in the old building, I was finally
shown into a room that only lacked wax flowers under glass to recall the
Rutherford B. Hayes period of interior decorating. Presently the door
opened to admit an officer whom I liked at the first glimpse, and in his
careful, groping English Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann of the Grosser General
Stab introduced himself. He explained that he would accompany us on our
trip to the front and bring us back to Berlin; whereupon I blessed the
Staff for giving me an officer with merry eyes and delightful
personality. He would do everything in his power--not small as I later
learned--to have me shown the things I wanted to see in that forbidden
city, the army front.
That afternoon I bought a dunnage bag such as navy men the world over
use, and remembering Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann's advice to carry as
little as possible, I packed only a change of boots, socks,
under-clothing, and flannel shirts. Come to think of it, an elaborate
series of cloth maps, each a minutely described small district of the
whole Western front, took up as much room as anything else. And as I had
heard officers say that a hypodermic with a shot of morphine was good to
carry in case one was hit, that went in, too. During our conversation at
the General Staff, Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann had emphasized the point
that it must be understood that this trip I was about to make was
entirely upon my own responsibility. A suit of army gray green was
desirable and a hat or gloves of a similar neutral color, prevented me
from being a conspicuous mark.
I think I was at Anhalter Bahnhof the next night half an hour before the
gate opened for the Metz train. There were no sleeping compartments
available, so securing a day compartment to themselves, Dawson and
Theyer withdrew to concoct a series of movie narratives, while the
Ober-Lieutenant induced the conductor to lock me up with him in a nearby
compartment meant for four, After the train had pulled out we discussed
the war between the United States and Japan, which all well informed
people whom I have met in Germany, diplomatic, naval, and army, believe
must soon come. For the first time I noticed that the Ober-Lieutenant's
uniform was different from any of the thousands of uniforms that I had
seen in Germany; trimmed with blue of a shade that I had never before
noticed, and across his left chest I observed an order, and that was
also as totally different, a bar about four inches long and one inch
high, wound with the black and white of the iron cross and yellow and
red. Pinned to it were two golden bars, bearing strange words:
_Heroland_, and some outlandish word that I have forgotten.
"You're puzzled at my uniform," smiled the Ober-Lieutenant. "It does not
surprise me. There are but two others in Germany. My uniform is that of
the regiment of German Southwest Africa. The Emperor created it a
special regiment after our campaign there." And I found myself looking
at the tiny golden bars, and wondering what deeds of daring this
merry-eyed man had performed there. His medals bore now the names of
battles in Africa. "My regiment," he explained, "is still in Africa.
Since August I have been with the General Staff in Berlin."
We talked long that night, while the train rushed towards the Southwest.
He told me of his experiences in German Southwest Africa, and of the
ways of the natives there. We slept that night, each sprawled out on a
compartment seat, and I awoke with a huge arc lamp glaring through the
window. My watch showed seven and when I drowsily heard the
Ober-Lieutenant say that we were in Frankfort, and that the train
stopped half an hour, and would I like to get out for coffee?
I rubbed open my eyes. We passed the photographers' compartment, to find
them both asleep, but then photographers in warring Germany can have
nothing but easy consciences; they see so little.
Long after day had broken--with the photographers still sleeping--we
passed the brown mountains of the Rhine, and at Bingen, where we saw the
old robber's castle clinging to the cliffs, with the watch tower on an
islet below, the train stopped. Opening one of the wide car windows we
saw a commotion under a shed of new boards, and there swarmed forth the
women of Bingen, with pails of smoking coffee and trays of sandwiches.
We saw them crowding past, and then by stretching our necks we were able
to see, three cars down, one after another helmeted head and gray-green
pair of shoulders pop forth, while the women smiled happily and passed
up the coffee and bread.
"I think a car full of soldiers for the front was joined on during the
night," observed Herrmann.
Our train passed through Lorraine which those who generalize like to
tell us was the cause of this war, forgetting Lombard Street and Honest
John Bull. I had heard how they hated the Germans, these people of
Lorraine, but at every station there were the women and girls with the
cans of coffee and the plates of _Butterbrot_. One saw no poverty there,
only neat, clean little houses--no squalor. Germany is wise in the
provisions made for the contentment of her working classes.
We drew near Metz, cupped by the distant blue ring of the fortified
Vosges where last August the army of the Crown Prince smashed the French
invasion. I saw beside a road four graves and four wooden crosses and
wondered if on one of those broiling summer days, a gray motor of the
Red Cross had not stopped there to bury the wounded. A field flew by,
serried with trenches that rotated like the spokes of a great wheel; but
the trenches were empty and the road that followed the wire fence close
by the tracks, was bare of soldiers. There was no need longer for
trenches, or that barbed entanglement of rusted wire, for the guns
rumbled now far beyond the guardian hills.
The shadows of a domed station fell over the train, likewise the shadows
of supervision, for I was to see none of the fortifications of Metz.
Historic Metz that guards the gate to Germany by the south, was not for
a foreigner's eyes. For only ten minutes was I in Metz and, although it
was the natural thing to do to spend them waiting on the station
platform, I had a feeling, though, that had I wished otherwise and
attempted to go out into the city, a soldier would have barred the way.
Never, not even in the captured French and Belgium cities that I later
saw, did I gain the impression of such intense watchfulness as prevailed
at Metz.
"We are going to the Great Headquarters now," said Ober-Lieutenant
Herrmann, explaining for the first time our destination. Whereupon, I
forgot my disappointment at not seeing Metz, and wondered if he had not
deliberately withheld this as a surprise for me. The Great
Headquarters! You thought of it as the place of mystery. In Berlin you
remembered hearing it spoken of only vaguely, its location never named.
You had heard it kept in darkness, that all lighted windows were
covered, lest French flyers seek it by night. You knew that from the
Great Headquarters three hundred miles of battle line were directed;
that it was the birthplace of stratagems; the council table around which
sat the Falkenheim, Chief of the General Staff, Tirpitz, ruler of the
Navy. Perhaps the Emperor was there!
I think I must have turned over in my mind for half an hour a certain
question, before deciding that it was not a breach of military etiquette
to put it to Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann.
"Where," I finally asked, "is the Great Headquarters located?"
"At Charleville," he promptly answered. "We shall not arrive there until
evening." And then, getting out a number of those marvelous maps of the
General Staff that show every tree, fence and brook, in the desired
district, he traced for me the route the train was following. "We cross
the Frontier into France, just beyond Fentsch and then go diagonally
northwest through Longuion, Montmédy and Sedan to Charleville. We are
going behind the battle line, out of artillery range, of course, but
still the French flyers watch this line," and Herrmann bent down to
glance towards the sky. "We may get some excitement."
There is something discomfortingly casual in the way these Prussian
officers talk of danger, and from the moment I saw the frontier post,
with its barber-pole stripings, slip by unguarded, and realized that
frontier guards were a thing of the past and that I was now with the
invaders in France, I could not help but feel that an aeroplane bomb was
the thing to be expected.
We passed, on a siding, a troop train filled with new troops from
Bavaria. One of the compartment doors was open and I saw that the floor
was strewn with straw. The soldiers grinned and waved to us and pointed
to the blue and white streamers so that we might know from what part of
Germany they came.
When we were approaching Audun le Roman, which is just across the
frontier on the road to Pierrepont, I saw on a hill not a quarter of a
mile from the train a row of gray plastered houses. Through them, the
gray sky showed in ragged, circular patches, framed by the holes in
their walls. Sunken roofs, shattered floors, heaps of black débris, the
charred walls gaping with shell holes; beside one house, a garden
surprisingly green for so early in the year, serenely impassive to the
story of the ruined walls--that row of little houses was as a guidepost.
At last we followed the road to war.
I saw in the next field a black swarm of birds pecking at the plowed
ground. Plow furrows? One wondered.... For a mile we did not see a
living thing, only the black birds, that feed on death.
"This place," observed Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann, whose face seemed to
have lost some of the former indifference to war, "was apparently under
heavy artillery fire when the Crown Prince invaded towards Longwy."
At Pierrepont I saw the first formal sign of the German occupation. Near
the railroad station in a little square, where you could not miss it,
loomed a large wooden sign, that began with "_nichts_" and ended with
"_verboten_." Then the train passed over a trestle and across the dirty
little road that ran beneath. I saw a German soldier hurrying towards a
squatty peasant house. I could see the door open and a blue-smocked old
man appear on the threshold. Why had the soldier hurried towards him;
what was the old man saying? Stories? You felt them to be in every
little house.
The train crept on. I saw a French inn with a German flag painted over
the red signboard. The tracks ran between fields scarred on either side
with the brown, muddy craters of shells. At the Longuion Station I
watched a German soldier standing on a ladder, painting out all French
words within the sweep of his brush. Further on I saw a two-wheeled cart
in a deserted farmhouse yard; its shafts were tilted up, and a load of
bags rotted on the ground, as though the owner, unhitching the horse,
had fled.
Almost stopping, so slowly did the train move, it approached a tunnel
that the retreating French had blown up. Inky darkness closed in, and
the Ober-Lieutenant was saying that the Germans were digging the tunnel
out, when a yellow torch flared against the window. I sprang to open it
and saw the ghostly forms of soldiers standing along the rails.
"_Zeitung! Zeitung!_" they cried, and in answer we tossed out to them
all the newspapers in the compartment. You had a feeling that the tunnel
was dangerous, for the shaky, temporary wooden trestle was yielding to
the train's weight. The tunnel marked the beginning of a destroyed
railroad and, as we proceeded, I found myself looking into a house flush
against the track. It was like a room on the stage, the fourth wall
removed. All the intimate possessions of the owner were before me; the
pink wall paper was hideous in its flamboyant bad taste. Herrmann came
to my rescue.
"The tracks from now are either repaired or laid new by our engineers.
As they retreated, the French blew up everything. In some cases we had
to run our line through houses."
The engineers had cut away the half of the house which was in their way
and left the remainder to be boarded up.
A gray castle, that crowned a hill, had been the vortex of the terrific
fighting that raged around Montmédy. It seemed tranquil enough now. I
saw the front door open, and down the terrace there shuffled a squad of
baggy red-trousered French prisoners with their watchful guards.
When we passed through Sedan it was almost dark, swarming with the
Germans as in 1870. One after another we tarried at the stations of
these captured towns. Finally we pulled up to a larger station where
the shadowy forms of houses were closer together. I was awakened from my
speculations by the Ober-Lieutenant saying: "We are in Charleville, the
Great Headquarters."
As I left the train I felt a thrill of anticipation that grew apace
during the long explanation that Herrmann was giving the station guards.
Outside loomed the vague tops of trees, and the whiteness of a house
accentuated against the dark night. Here and there a solitary light
burned, but Charleville was a place of darkness.
Herrmann had expected an automobile to be waiting, but when to the
saluting click of sentries' heels, we had gone the length of the station
front, he said to me: "You please get Mr. Dawson and Mr. Theyer and wait
in the dining-room. I shall walk to Headquarters and see what we are to
do."
Of course, I suggested going with him. There might be a chance of seeing
Falkenheim, who now is responsible for the movements of more than a
million men on the West front; perhaps I might even see the Emperor.
Perhaps Herrmann guessed why I insisted so strongly on keeping him
company on his walk to the Great Headquarters.
"The roads are muddy," he said, in a way that blended consideration with
decision. "Remain in there," and he pointed to the door of the station
dining-room, "until I return."
Then he showed us into a typical way station restaurant that would have
reminded you of any dirty American railroad lunchroom, had not the
principal object of furniture been a large buffet, shining with bottled
French wines and liqueurs. As I sat down at one of the marble-topped
tables, I realized that we were the only civilians in the room, except
the three men with white aprons and the pretty low-class French girl who
was waiting to take our order.
"_Diner_," I said briefly, not attempting to remember French after
struggling for weeks with German, and fell to studying the room. It
apparently was an officers' mess of the General Staff. The clean
field-green jackets and the dashing gray capes gave a touch of romance
to that dingy dining-room.
We lingered long over the coffee and Theyer, the Austrian, was telling
how he had been with Jack London, taking movies for Pathé in the South
Sea Islands, when Ober-Lieutenant Herrmann finally returned.
"We must go at once to the hotel," he said, "and go to bed. We shall
have to be up by five, and on our way to Lille."
So it was Lille! There was real fighting in that northern section of
France.
"How long do we remain in Lille?" I asked, disappointed at being rushed
away from the Great Headquarters.
"Five days," he replied, setting my fears at rest. "We shall use Lille
as a base and go out to different points on the front."
I knew then why he had been so long in returning; clearly he had been
receiving his instructions at the Great Headquarters, and the slight
distrust I had come to feel at being rushed away from Metz and now from
Charleville was entirely dissipated. After all, they meant business;
Lille proved that; and five days at the front!
If ever I return to Charleville and want to go to the Hotel de Commerce,
it will be impossible without a guide. I remember going the length of a
long street of shady trees, crossing a wide square, and then turning off
into a narrow alley where ancient lanterns, well masked, hung over from
grilled wall brackets. I remember flashing my electric pocket lamp down
on the cobbled street, for just an instant, when Herrmann dropped his
gloves. We stumbled down a blind alley that called to mind the
habitation of François Villon in "The Lodging for a Night." Then
Herrmann was rattling the knocker on the huge oaken doors of a two story
flat-roofed house that looked a century old. The door groaned back and I
found myself gazing into the blinking eyes of an old portier who held a
candle and who would have demanded what we wanted had he not suddenly
spied the military gray of Herrmann's cape and at once asked us to come
in.