Villers-Cotteret," were chalked on the standing walls; and on door-
casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard billeted
there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.
"Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser's sons, was here and I
talked with him," said the Mayor, who thought we would enjoy a
morsel from court circles in exchange for a copy of the Echo de Paris,
which contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded
later. The Mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to
play the shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he
deserted his charge and a lady, Mme. Mâcherez, took his place. All I
know is that he was present that day; or, at least, a man who was
introduced to me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a
bon mot by saying that he feared there was some fault in his
hospitality because he had been unable to keep his guest.
"May I have this confiture?" asked a battle-stained French orderly,
coming up to him. "I found it in that ruined house there--all the
Germans had left. I haven't had a confiture for a long time, and,
monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for confitures."
All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again
rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a
table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started
back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the
landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves
were around their camp-fires making savoury stews for the evening
meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under
the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of
many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became
one of the mole and the beaver.
Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and
convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of
the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and
German natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both
Prussian. One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which
was the product of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I
should not have been surprised to see him break into a goose-step.
The other was of that mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic
provinces, with the thin, white skin which does not tan but burns. He
was frailer than the other and he was tired! He would lag and then
stiffen back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more
energy into his steps.
A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked pretty
tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural, easy way
in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who have a
genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German
fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same
logic, the cowboy pony's gait is better for thirty miles day in and day
out than the gait of the high-stepping carriage horse.
You could realize the contempt which those two martial Germans had
for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside
loosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.
"You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading our
country; and you'll get more of it!"
The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his
head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to
appreciate the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost.
Such as he would fight fair and hold this war of the civilizations up to
something like the standards of civilization.
The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had
taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous,
as their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognize the faces of
those two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten
years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans' attitude toward
this war and their military lords?
It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a
more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best
possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and
simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the
same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the
doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth
Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von
Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity of
youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central
direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one
of the most brilliant manœuvres of the war, before staffs had settled
down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see
the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom, a
soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realized
that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to
toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home.
Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the
bureaucracy.
From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an
officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that he
exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge; that
he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception
and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt sure
that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked
explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.
"All goes well!" he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes well!
He would say it when things looked black or when they looked bright,
and in a way that would make others believe it.
Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no
hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary activity that is associated
with an army headquarters. A motor-car drove up, an officer got out;
another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires
carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in
his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke
against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order.
That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult
accomplishment of all in war.
After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a town,
for our motor-car lamps spread their radiant streams over wet
pavements. But these were the only lights. Tongues of loose bricks
had been shot across the cobblestones and dimly the jagged skyline
of broken walls of buildings on either side could be discerned. It was
Senlis, the first town I had seen which could be classified as a town in
ruins. Afterwards, one became a sort of specialist in ruins, comparing
the latest with previous examples of destruction.
Approaching footsteps broke the silence. A small, very small, French
soldier--he was not more than five feet two--appeared, and we
followed him to an ambulance that had broken down for want of
petrol. It belonged to the Société de Femmes de France. The little
soldier had put on a uniform as a volunteer for the only service his
stature would permit. In those days many volunteer organizations
were busy seeking to "help." There was a kind of competition among
them for wounded. This ambulance had got one and was taking him
to Paris, off the regular route of the wounded who were being sent
south. The boot-soles of a prostrate figure showed out of the dark
recess of the interior. This French officer, a major, had been hit in the
shoulder. He tried to control the catch in his voice which belied his
assertion that he was suffering little pain. The drizzling rain was chilly.
It was a long way to Paris yet.
"We will make inquiries," said our kindly general.
A man who came out of the gloom said that there was a hospital kept
by some Sisters of Charity in Senlis which had escaped destruction.
The question was put into the recesses of the ambulance:
"Would you prefer to spend the night here and go on in the morning?"
"Yes, monsieur, I--should--like--that--better!" The tone left no doubt of
the relief that the journey in a car with poor springs was not to be
continued after hours of waiting, marooned in the street of a ruined
town.
Whilst the ambulance passed inside the hospital gate, I spoke with an
elderly woman who came to a near-by door. Cool and definite she
was as a French soldier, bringing home the character of the women
of France which this war has made so well known to the world.
"Were you here during the fighting?"
"Yes, monsieur, and during the shelling and the burning. The shelling
was not enough. The Germans said that someone fired on their
soldiers--a boy, I believe--so they set fire to the houses. One could
only look and hate and pray as their soldiers passed through, looking
so unconquerable, making all seem so terrible for France. Was it to
be '70 over again? One's heart was of stone, monsieur. Tiens! They
came back faster than they went. A mitrailleuse was down there at
the end of the street, our mitrailleuse! The bullets went cracking by.
They crack, the bullets; they do not whistle like the stories say. Then
the street was empty of Germans who could run. The dead they
could not run, nor the wounded. Then the French came up the street,
running too--running after the Germans. It was good, monsieur, good,
good! My heart was not of stone then, monsieur. It could not beat fast
enough for happiness. It was the heart of a girl. I remember it all very
clearly. I always shall, monsieur."
"Allons!" said our statesman. "The officer is well cared for."
The world seemed normal again as we passed through other towns
unharmed and swept by the dark countryside, till a red light rose in
our path and a sharp "Qui vive?" came out of the night as we slowed
down. This was not the only sentry call from a French Territorial in
front of a barricade.
At a second halt we found a chain as well as a barricade across the
road. For a moment it seemed that even the suave parliamentarism
of our statesman and the authority of our general and our passes
could not convince one grizzled reservist, doing his duty for France at
the rear whilst the young men were at the front, that we had any right
to be going into Paris at that hour of the night. The password, which
was "Paris," helped, and we felt it a most appropriate password as we
came to the broad streets of the city that was safe.
There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won
his battles single-handed. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen
along to help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until
they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the
excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralized
in face of German organization, merely talks with his hands. In a
great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their
democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war
to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans.
For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don't know
that He even approved of the war.
V
And Calais Waits
To the traveller, Calais had been the symbol of the shortest route
from London to Paris, the shortest spell of torment in crossing the
British Channel. It was a point where one felt infinite relief or sad
physical anticipations. In the last days of November Calais became
the symbol of a struggle for world-power. The British and the French
were fighting to hold Calais; the Germans to get it. In Calais,
Germany would have her foot on the Atlantic coast. She could look
across only twenty-two miles of water to the chalk cliffs of Dover. She
would be as near her rival as twice the length of Manhattan Island;
within the range of a modern gun; within an hour by steamer and
twenty minutes by aeroplane.
The long battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea had been
established. There was no getting around the Allied flank; there had
ceased to be a flank. To win Calais, Germany must crush through by
main force, without any manœuvre. From the cafés where the British
journalists gathered England received its news, which they gleaned
from refugees and stragglers and passing officers. They wrote
something every day, for England must have something about that
dizzy, head-on wrestle in the mud, that writhing line of changing
positions of new trenches rising behind the old destroyed by German
artillery. The British were fighting with their last reserves on the Ypres-
Armentiéres line. The French divisions to the north were suffering no
less heavily, and beyond them the Belgians were trying to hold the
last strip of their land which remained under Belgian sovereignty.
Cordons of guards which kept back the observer from the struggle
could not keep back the truth. Something ominous was in the air.
It was worth while being in that old town as it waited on the issue in
the late October rains. Its fishermen crept out in the mornings from
the shelter of its quays, where refugees gathered in crowds hoping to
get away by steamer. Like lost souls, carrying all the possessions
they could on their backs, these refugees. There was numbness in
their movements and their faces were blank--the paralysis of brain
from sudden disaster. The children did not cry, but mechanically
munched the dry bread given them by their parents.
The newspaper men said that "refugee stuff" was already stale;
eviction and misery were stale. Was Calais to be saved? That was
the only question. If the Germans came, one thought that madame at
the hotel would still be at her desk, unruffled, businesslike, and she
would still serve an excellent salad for déjeuner; the fishermen would
still go to sea for their daily catch.
What was going to happen? What might not happen? It was human
helplessness to the last degree for all behind the wrestlers. Fate was
in the battle-line. There could be no resisting that fate. If the Germans
came, they came. Belgian staff officers with their high-crowned, gilt-
braided caps went flying by in their cars. There always seemed a
great many Belgian staff officers back of the Belgian army in the
restaurants and cafés. Habit is strong, even in war. They did not often
miss their déjeuners. On the Dixmude line all that remained of the
active Belgian army was in a death struggle in the rain and mud. To
these "schipperkes" honour without stint, as to their gallant king.
Slightly-wounded Belgians and Belgian stragglers roamed the streets
of Calais. Some had a few belongings wrapped up in handkerchiefs.
Others had only the clothes they wore. Yet they were cheerful; this
was the amazing thing. They moved about, laughing and chatting in
groups. Perhaps this was the best way. Possibly relief at being out of
the hell at the front was the only emotion they could feel. But their
cheerfulness was none the less a dash of sunlight for Calais.
The French were grim. They were still polite; they went on with their
work. No unwounded French soldiers were to be seen, except the old
Territorials guarding the railroad and the highways. The military
organization of France, which knew what war meant and had
expected war, had drawn every man to his place and held him there
with the inexorable hand of military and racial discipline. Calais had
never considered caring for wounded, and the wounded poured in. I
saw a motor-car with a wounded man stop at a crowded corner, in
the midst of refugees and soldiers; a doctor was leaning over him,
and he died whilst the car waited.
But the journalists were saying that stories of wounded men were
likewise stale. So they were, for Europe was red with wounded. Train
after train brought in its load from the front, and Calais tried to care
for them. At least, it had buildings which would give shelter from
the rain. On the floor of a railway freight shed the wounded lay in
long rows, with just enough space between them to make an alley.
Those in the row against one of the walls were German prisoners.
Their green uniforms melted into the stone of the wall and did not
show the mud stains. Two slightly wounded had their heads together
whispering. They were helplessly tired, though not as tired as most
of the others, those two stalwart young men; but they seemed to be
relieved, almost happy. It did not matter what happened to them, now,
so long as they could rest.
Next to them a German was dying, and others badly hit were glassy-
eyed in their fatigue and exhaustion. This was the word, exhaustion,
for all the wounded.
They had not the strength for passion or emotion. The fuel for those
fires was in ashes. All they wanted in this world was to lie quiet; and
some fell asleep not knowing or caring probably whether they were in
Germany or in France. In the other rows, in contrast with this
chameleon, baffling green, were the red trousers of the French and
the dark blue of the Belgian uniforms, sharing the democracy of
exhaustion with their foe.
A misty rain was falling. In a bright spot of light through a window one
by one the wounded were being lifted up on to a seat, if they were not
too badly hit, and on to an operating-table if their condition were
serious. A doctor and a sturdy Frenchwoman of about thirty, in
spotless white, were in charge. Another woman undid the first-aid
bandage and still another applied a spray. No time was lost; there
were too many wounded to care for. The thing must be done as
rapidly as possible before another train-load came in. If these
attendants were tired, they did not know it any more than the
wounded had realized their fatigue in the passion of battle. The
improvized arrangement to meet an emergency had an appeal which
more elaborate arrangements of organization which I had seen
lacked. It made war a little more red; humanity a little more human
and kind and helpless under the scourge which it had brought on
itself.
Though Calais was not prepared for wounded, when they came the
women of energy and courage turned to the work without jealousy,
without regard to red tape, without fastidiousness. I have in mind half
a dozen other women about the streets that day in uniforms of short
skirts and helmets, who belonged to a volunteer organization which
had taken some care as to its regimentals. They were types not
characteristic of the whole, of whom one practical English doctor said:
"We don't mind as long as they do not get in the way." Their criticisms
of Calais and the arrangements were outspoken; nothing was
adequate; conditions were filthy; it was shameful. They were going to
write to the English newspapers about it and appeal for money. When
they had organized a proper hospital, one should see how the thing
ought to be done. Meantime, these volunteer Frenchwomen were
doing the best they knew how and doing it now.
A fine-looking young Frenchman who had a shell-wound in the thigh
was being lifted on to the table. He shuddered with pain, as he
clenched his teeth; yet when the dressing was finished he was able to
breathe his thanks. On the seat was a Congo negro who had been
with one of the Belgian regiments, coal black and thick-lipped, with
bloodshot eyes; an unsensitized human organism, his face as
expressionless as his bare back with holes made by shell-fragments.
A young Frenchwoman--she could not have been more than nineteen
--with a face of singular refinement, sprayed his wounds with the
definiteness of one trained to such work, though two days before it
had probably never occurred to her as being within the possibilities
of her existence. Her coolness and the coolness of the other women
in their silent activity had a charm that added to one's devout respect.
The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis
which overwhelmed personal thoughts. Help was needed at the front;
they knew it. On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French passed
through Calais. With a pass from the French commandant at Calais, I
got on board one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn.
This lot were Turcos, under the command of a white-haired veteran of
African campaigns. An utter change of atmosphere from the freight
shed! Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think. My
companions in the officers' car were as cheery as the brown devils
whom they led. They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and
their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine.
Enough! It was war time, as they said.
"We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris--and
in the night. Hard luck!"
They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in
the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line
was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on
the heels of another.
They did not know where they were going; one never knew. Probably
they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call
for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry. He seemed to
understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little
longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head
had Father Joffre.
Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that
is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more
characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the
roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal
within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which
were helping the Belgians to hold their line. At Dunkirk most excellent
pâtisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop. Why shouldn't
tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them? The British naval
reserve officers used to take tea in this shop. Little crowds of citizens
who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in
such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had
come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the
atmosphere of battle.
Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the
field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of
shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly
and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these
"schipperkes" of the nation that was unprepared for war who had
done their part, when the only military thought was for more men,
unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.
Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful. They could
still smile and say, "Bonne chance!"
Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians. At a
hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball
of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth. He
had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many
German cavalry scouts in the first two weeks of the war. A staff
motor-car had run over him on the road.
"I think the driver of the car was careless," he said mildly, as if he
were giving a gentle reproof to a student.
By contrast, he had reason to be thankful for his lot. Looked after by a
brave man attendant in another room were the wounded who were
too horrible to see; who must die. Then, in another, you had a picture
of a smiling British regular, with a British nurse and an Englishwoman
of Calais to look after him. They read to him, they talked to him, they
vied with each other in rearranging his pillows or bedclothes. He was
a hero of a story; but it rather puzzled him why he should be. Why
were a lot of people paying so much attention to him for doing his
duty?
In the cavalry, he had been separated from his regiment on the
retreat from Mons. Wandering about the country, he came up with a
regiment of cuirassiers and asked if he might not fight with them. A
number of the cuirassiers spoke English. They took him into the
ranks. The regiment went far over on the Marne, through towns with
French names which he could not pronounce, this man in khaki with
the French troopers. He was marked. C'est un Anglais! People
cheered him and threw flowers to him in regions which had never
seen one of the soldiers of the Ally before.
Yes, officers and gentlemen invited him to dine, like he was a
gentleman, he said, and not a Tommy, and the French Government
had given him a decoration called the Legion of Honour or something
like that. This was all very fine; but the best thing was that his own
colonel, when he returned, had him up before his company and made
a speech to him for fighting with the French when he could not find
his own regiment. He was supremely happy, this Tommy. In waiting
Calais one might witness about all the emotions and contrasts of war
--and many which one does not find at the front.
VI
In Germany
Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first
day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of
the wall of gun and rifle-fire where another set of human beings were
giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the
same pattern on both sides of the wall. Their children were born in the
same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in
this vicious circle of thought?
My impressions of Germany were brief, and the clearer perhaps for
being brief, and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais
waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel, in a
suspense which her stoicism would not confess, to learn the result of
the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with
all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain,
a goal; of Holland, stolid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and
profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her
steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing
around her.
The stiff and soldierly-appearing reserve officer with bristling
Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked
at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, "A
la Place de Calais, bon pour aller à Dunkerque, P.O. Le Chef d'Etat-
Major," but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a
frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.
For something about him expressed a certain character of downright
militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could
imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a "sloppy,
undisciplined" American guard, as he would have called one of ours.
Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only
national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of
the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to
create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the
neutral press that she was in | danger of starving, whilst she amassed
munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into
confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble
purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy
of foodstuffs, whilst nothing so puts the steel into a soldier's heart as
the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the
bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children
dependent upon him.
Tears and laughter and moods and passions organized! Seventy
millions in the union of determined earnestness of a life-and-death
issue! Germany had studied more than how to make war with an
army. She had studied how the people at home should help an army
to make war.
"With our immense army, which consists of all the able-bodied youth
of the people," as a German officer said, "when we go to war the
people must be passionate for war. Their impulse must be the
impulse of the army. Their spirit will drive the army on. They must be
drilled, too, in their part. No item in national organization is too small
to have its effect."
Compared to the, French, who had turned grim and gave their prayers
as individuals to hearten their soldiers, the Germans were as
responsive as a stringed instrument to the master musician's touch. A
whisper in Berlin was enough to set a new wave of passion in motion,
which spread to the trenches east and west.
Something like the team-work of the "rah-rah" of college athletics was
applied to the nation. The soft pedal on this emotion, the loud on that,
or a new cry inaugurated which all took up, not with the noisy, paid
insincerity of a claque, but with the vibrant force of a trained orchestra
with the brasses predominant.
There seemed less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than
of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of
material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force.
Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival
leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should
succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism
which was dinned into my ears that affected me as much as
sidelights.
When I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make
a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five who was
helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey,
lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been
allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same
sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to
make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the
front.
Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was righting to
hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting
on the enemy's soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the
defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it
was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That
was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every
conversation and every act.
The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward.
The Englishman's phrase is "Stick it," which means to hold what you
have; the German's phrase is "Onward." It was national youth against
national middle-age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within
was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and
comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The
French were saying, What if we should lose? And the Germans were
saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany
had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-
morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to
be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune
at fifty.
It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out
from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a
people. The Englishman thought of his defence as keeping what he
already had; the German was defending what he considered that he
was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then
Calais ought to be his. A nation, with the "closed in" culture of the
French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on
the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe,
thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the
blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the
battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only
receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.
Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system
of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the
system, converting the Philistine with machine-guns. Confidence, the
confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has
overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realization of the long-
promised day of the "place in the sun" for the immense population
drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick
the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to
lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and
preparation.
When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the
clerk at the desk said, "I will see, sir." He ran his eye up and down the
list methodically before he added: "Yes, we have a good room on the
second floor." Afterwards, I learned that all except the first and
second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only
was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room
appear normal.
He was an efficient clerk; the buttons who opened the room door, a
goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibiting a
punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of
normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front
were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves
into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have
more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the
war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was
being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of
Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at
the front taking more Russian soldiers.
Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly
normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was
ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when
one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly
normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows
bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and
coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the
killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy
day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to
smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at
home!
Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the
stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for
granted that he was a pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.
As I returned to the railway station after my walk, a soldier took me in
charge and marched me to the office of the military commandant.
"Are you an Englishman?" was his first question. The guttural, military
emphasis which he put on "Englishman" was most significant. Which
brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.
"If men are to fight well," said a German officer, "it is necessary that
they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge
into machine-guns."
Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England,
almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come
in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing
of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that
small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant's
knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he
had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that
miserable pigmy who had interfered with the plans of the machine.
The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as
"brave foes." What quarrel could France and Germany have? France
had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous
Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on
German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not
in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace
with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of
Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through,
cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and
the untutored Slav. It was not alone in Germany that a responsive
Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in
Germany the machinery ran smoothest.
For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I
had never seen before hate me. At sight of me a woman who had
been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her
eyes, turned a malignant devil. Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair-
haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and
robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform. Being hungry at the
station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat,
and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I
alighted.
My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and
an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as
her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of
hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the
word, "Englisher!" If looks were daggers I should have been pierced
through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her
error. Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was
a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a
sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the
fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I
murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.
A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over,
smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment
before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for
him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in
the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.
The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too,
expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to
associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture
and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race
which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was
in the German woman's, as in every German's, nature. It had been in
the Frenchwoman's in Napoleon's time. Many racial hates the war
has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer,
asphyxiating-gas hate.
If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don't you go to
war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that
this and that is "not done" in humane circles--win! The Germans
meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the
Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern
method. Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps: The
French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a
Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents
increase of numbers, its thrift and its tenacity; the German, with its
newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden
system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition;
and the Russian, patient and unbeatable, vague, glamorous,
immense.
The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot
product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and
hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not
yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war.
After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all
to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed
on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up
in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for
my buttonhole.
This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an
ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three
hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He
must be pro the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to
the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or
Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be
on your side secretly. If they weren't they must be on the other. Are
you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in
Germany. If I had been for them I should have "dug in" and not told
them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of
sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the
better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have
made a study of war. They are experts in war.
However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which
could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I
met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome
question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose
quiet I had sought for an hour's respite from war. One could be
shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed
the American tourist, without hearing a guide's monotone explaining
who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who
painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me
see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the
Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel
lobbies--those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble
in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State
Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over
victories won by another type of German.
About twenty-one years old this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who
saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The
hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up
and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was
hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been
killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly
as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days
he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he
hoped so.
The French were brave; but they hated the Germans and thought
that they must make war on the Germans, and they were a cruel
people, guilty of many atrocities. So the Fatherland had fought to
conquer the enemies who planned her destruction. A peculiar,
childlike naïveté accompanied his intelligence, trained to run in certain
grooves, which is the product of the German type of popular
education; that trust in his superiors which comes from a diligent and
efficient paternalism. He knew nothing of the atrocities which
Germans were said to have committed in Belgium. The British and
the French had set Belgium against Germany and Germany had to
strike Belgium for playing false to her treaties. But he did think that
the French were brave; only misled by their Government. And the
Kaiser? His eyes lighted in a way that suggested that the Kaiser was
almost a god to him. He had heard of the things that the British said
against the Kaiser and they made him want to fight for his Kaiser. He
was only one German--but the one was millions.
In actual learning which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was
better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I
should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot-
house product of a skilful nurseryman's hand, who knew the value of
training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield
well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it
seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the
Lusitania on his brow; that event which history cannot yet put in its
true perspective. Other races will think of the Lusitania when they
meet a German long after the Belgian atrocities are forgotten. It will
endure to plague a people like the exile of the Acadians, the
guillotining of innocents in the French Revolution, and the burning of
the Salem witches. But he had nothing to do with it. A German
admiral gave an order as a matter of policy to make an impression
that his submarine campaign was succeeding and to interfere with
the transport of munitions, and the Kaiser told this boy that it was
right. One liked the boy, his loyalty and his courage; liked him as a
human being. But one wished that he might think more. Perhaps he
will one of these days, if he survives the war.
VII
How The Kaiser Leads
Only a week before I had seen wounded Germans in the freight shed
at Calais; and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in
ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under
escort, had been Germans. The sharpest contrast of all in war which
the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from
the other side, he had watched march into battle--armed, confident,
disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in
a charge--become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, rounded
up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed
wire and sentries.
Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians
whom I saw at Döberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was
told, but it suffices. Conditions at other camps might be worse;
doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my
information from unprejudiced observers be wrong. But Germany had
enormous numbers of prisoners. A nation in her frame of mind
thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of
those who had fought against her.
Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another.
Crossing the Atlantic on the Lusitania we had a German reserve
officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived
at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany.
Naturally he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool. He
was a steadfast German. When a wireless report of the German
repulse at Liege came, he would not believe it. Germany had the
system and Germany would win. But when he said, "I should rather
be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a
German ship, under the circumstances," his remark was significant in
more ways than one.
His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German
submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy.
They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make
his awkward situation easy. Yet it was apparent that he regarded their
kindliness as racial weakness. Krieg ist Krieg. When Germany made
war she made war.
So allowances are in order. One prison camp was like another in this
sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty. It put him in jail. The
British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a
separate class. But the others were men of civil industries and
settled homes. Except during their term in the army, they went to
the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms. They were
free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and
freedom of movement when they came home in the evening. They
might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human
beings in civilized surroundings.
Here, they were pacing animals in a cage, commanded by two field-
guns, who might walk up and down and play games and go through
the daily drill under their own non-commissioned officers. It was the
mental stagnation of the thing that was appalling. Think of such a lot
for a man used to action in civil life--and they call war action! Think of
a writer, a business man, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, reduced to
this fenced-in existence, when he had been the kind who got
impatient if he had to wait for a train that was late! Shut yourself up in
your own backyard with a man with a rifle watching you for twenty-
four hours and see whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison-
camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy
packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to
laugh over what Mark Twain called "the damfool human race."
Inside a cookhouse at one end of the enclosure was a row of soup-
boilers. Outside was a series of railings, forming stalls for the
prisoners when they lined up for meals. In the morning, some
oatmeal and coffee; at noon, some cabbage soup boiled with
desiccated meat and some bread; at night, more coffee and bread.
How one thrived on this fare depended much upon how he liked
cabbage soup. The Russians liked it. They were used to it.
"We never keep the waiter late by tarrying over our liqueurs," said a
Frenchman.
Our reservist guide had run away to America in youth, where he had
worked at anything he could find to do; but he had returned to Berlin,
where he had a "good little business" before the war. He was stout
and cheery, and he referred to the prisoners as "boys." The French
and Russians were good boys; but the English were bad boys, who
had no discipline. He said that all received the same food as German
soldiers. It seemed almost ridiculous chivalry that men who had
fought against you and were living inactive lives should be as well fed
as the men who were fighting for you. The rations that I saw given to
German soldiers were better. But that was what the guide said.
"This is our little sitting-room for the English non-commissioned
officers," he explained, as he opened the door of a shanty which had
a pane of glass for a window. Some men sitting around a small stove
arose. One, a big sergeant-major, towered over the others; he had
the colours of the South African campaign on the breast of his worn
khaki blouse and stood very straight as if on parade. By the window
was a Scot in kilts, who was equally tall. He looked around over his
shoulder and then turned his face away with the pride of a man who
does not care to be regarded as a show.
His uniform was as neat as if he were at inspection; and the way he
held his head, the haughtiness of his profile against the stream of
light, recalled the unconquerable spirit of the Prussian prisoner whom
I had seen on the road during the fighting along the Aisne. Only a
regular, but he was upholding the dignity of Britain in that prison camp
better than many a member of Parliament on the floor of the House of
Commons. I asked our guide about him.
"A good boy that! All his boys obey him and he obeys all the
regulations. But he acts as if we Germans were his prisoners."
The British might not be good boys, but they would be clean. They
were diligent in the chase in their underclothes; their tents were free
from odour; and there was something resolute about a Tommy who
was bare to the waist in that freezing wind, making an effort at a bath.
I heard tales of Mr. Atkins' characteristic thoughtlessness. While the
French took good care of their clothes and kept their tents neat, he
was likely to sell his coat or his blanket if he got a chance in order to
buy something that he liked to eat. One Tommy who sat on his straw
tick inside the tent was knitting. When I asked him where he had
learned to knit, he replied: "India!" and gave me a look as much as to
say, "Now pass on to the next cage."
The British looked the most pallid of all, I thought. They were not used
to cabbage soup. Their stomachs did not take hold of it, as one said;
and they loathed the black bread. No white bread and no jam! Only
when you have seen Mr. Atkins with a pot of jam and a loaf of white
bread and some bacon frizzling near by can you realize the hardship
which cabbage soup meant to that British regular who gets lavish
rations of the kind he hkes along with his shilling a day for
professional soldiering.
"You see, the boys go about as they please," said our guide. "They
don't have a bad time. Three meals a day and nothing to do."
Members of a laughing circle which included some British were taking
turns at a kind of Russian blind man's buff, which seemed to me
about in keeping with the mental capacity of a prison camp. "No
French!" I remarked.
"The French keep to themselves, but they are good boys," he replied.
"Maybe it is because we have only a few of them here."
Every time one sounded the subject he was struck by the attitude of
the Germans toward the French, not alone explained by the policy of
the hour which hoped for a separate peace with France. Perhaps it
was best traceable to the Frenchman's sense of amour propre, his
philosophy, his politeness, or an indefinable quality in the grain of the
man.
The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was
something about the Frenchmen which the Germans had to respect--
something not won by war. I heard admiration for them at the same
time as contempt for their red trousers and their unprepared-ness.
While we are in this avenue, German officers had respect for the
dignity of British officers, the leisurely, easy quality of superiority
which they preserved in any circumstances. The qualities of a
race come out in adversity no less than in prosperity. Thus,
their captors regarded the Russians as big, good-natured children.
"Yes, they play games and we give the English an English newspaper
to read twice a week," said our affable guide, unconscious, I think, of
any irony in the remark. For the paper was the Continental News,
published in "the American language" for American visitors. You
make take it for granted that it did not exaggerate any success of the
Allies.
"We have a prince and the son of a rich man among the Russian
prisoners--yes, quite in the Four Hundred," the guide went on. "They
were such good boys we put them to work in the cookhouse. Star
boarders, eh? They like it. They get more to eat."
These two men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first
line they were and even in their privates' uniform they bore the
unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each
saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before
the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before
visitors. In the prince's eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said:
"Well, why not? We don't mind."
When we were taken through the cookhouse I asked about a little
Frenchman who was sitting with his nose in a soup bowl He seemed
too near-sighted ever to get into any army. His face was distinctly that
of a man of culture; one would have guessed that he was an artist.
"Shrapnel injury," explained the guide. "He will never be able to see
much again. We let him come in here to eat."
I wanted to talk with him, but these exhibits are supposed to be all in
pantomime; a question and you are urged along to the next exhibit.
He was young and all his life he was to be like that--like some poor,
blind kitten!
The last among a number of Russians returning to the enclosure from
some fatigue duty was given a blow in the seat of his baggy trousers
with a stick which one of the guards carried. The Russian quickened
his steps and seemed to think nothing of the incident. But to me it
was the worst thing that I saw at Döberitz, this act of physical violence
against a man by one who has power over him. The personal
equation was inevitable to the observer. Struck in that way, could one
fail to strike back? Would not he strike in red anger, without stopping
to think of consequences? There is something bred into the Anglo-
Saxon which resents a physical blow. We court-martial an officer for
laying hands on a private, though that private may get ten years in
prison on his trial. Yet the Russian thought nothing of it, or the guard,
either. An officer in the German or the Russian army may strike a
man.
"Would the guard hit a Frenchman in that way?" I asked. Our guide
said not; the French were good boys. Or an Englishman? He had
not seen it done. The Englishman would swear and curse, he was
sure, and might fight, they were such undisciplined boys. But the
Russians--"they are like kids. It was only a slap. Didn't hurt him any."
New barracks for the prisoners were being built which would be
comfortable, if crowded, even in winter. The worst thing, I repeat, was
the deadly monotony of the confinement for a period which would end
only when the war ended. Any labour should be welcome to a
healthy-minded man. It was a mercy that the Germans set prisoners
to grading roads, to hoeing and harvesting, retrieving thus a little of
the wastage of war. Or was it only the bland insistence that conditions
were luxurious that one objected to?--not that they were really bad.
The Germans had a horde of prisoners to care for; vast armies to
maintain; and a new volunteer force of a million or more--two millions
was the official report--to train.
While we were at the prison camp we heard at intervals the rap-rap of
a machine-gun at the practice range near by, drilling to take more
prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed companies of
volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of
German infantry.
In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains
were running as usual to Hamburg, if one cared to go there. "As
usual" in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time.
At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of
masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant. That city of
eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead
as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers
tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still
had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea,
while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office-
windows and the portholes of ships.
For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the
corpuscles did not run red. They were blue. Hamburg's citizens had
to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of
bombardment: that of the silent guns of British Dreadnoughts far out
of range. They were good Germans; they meant to play the game;
but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to
serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with
the propagandist attitude of Berlin.
A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in
other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world. It had
even been called an English city, owing to the number of English
business men there as agents of the immense commerce between
England and Germany. Everyone who was a clerk or an employer
spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries
which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on
the good terms which commerce requires and met at luncheons and
dinners and in their clubs. Englishmen were married to German
women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their
governments would keep the peace.
Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had
spent most of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born
in Germany, had been interned and, however large his bank account,
was taking his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some
cookhouse for his ration of cabbage soup. Germans were kind to
English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of
Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg.
Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the
pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling,
once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no
moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic
freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could
press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn.
What would happen when the war was over? How long would it last?
It was not quite as cruel to give one's opinion as two years to the
inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow
Hospital in Berlin. Here, again, the system; the submergence of the
individual in the organization. The wounded men seemed parts of a
machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was
less in evidence than with us, where the thought is: This is an
individual human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his
own theories of life, his own ego; not just a quantity of brain, tissue,
blood and bone which is required for the organism called man. A
human mechanism wounded at the German front needed repairs and
repairs were made to that mechanism. The niceties might be lacking
but the repair factory ran steadily and efficiently at full blast. Germany
had to care for her wounded by the millions and by the millions she
cared for them. "Two years!"
I was sorry that I had said this to the director, for its effect on him was
like a blow in the chest. The vision of more and more wounded
seemed to rise before the eyes of this man, weary with the strain of
doing the work which he knew so well how to do as a cog in the
system. But for only a moment. He stiffened; he became the
drillmaster again; and the tragic look in his eyes was succeeded by
one of that strange exaltation I had seen in the eyes of so many
Germans, which appeared to carry their mind away from you and
their surroundings to the battlefield where they were fighting for their
"place in the sun." "Two years, then. We shall see it through!" He had
a son who had been living in a French family near Lille studying
French and he had heard nothing of him since the war began. They
were good people, this French family; his son liked them. They would
be kind to him; but what might not the French Government do to him,
a German! He had heard terrible stories--the kind of stories that
hardened the fighting spirit of German soldiers--about the treatment
German civilians had received in France. He could think of one
French family which he knew as being kind, but not of the whole
French people as a family. As soon as the national and racial element
were considered the enemy became a beast.
To him, at least, Berlin was not normal; nor was it to that keeper of a
small shop off Unter den Linden which sold prints and etchings and
cartoons. What a boon my order of cartoons was! He forgot his
psychology code and turned human and confidential. The war had
been hard on him; there was no business at all, not even in cartoons.
The Opera alone seemed something like normal to one who trusted
his eyes rather than his ears for information. There was almost a full
house for the "Rosenkavalier"; for music is a solace in time of
trouble, as other capitals than Berlin revealed. Officers with close-
cropped heads, wearing Iron Crosses, some with arms in slings,
promenaded in the refreshment room of the Berlin Opera House
between the acts. This in the hour of victory should mean a picture of
gaiety. But there was a telling hush about the scene. Possibly music
had brought out the truth in men's hearts that war, this kind of war,
was not gay or romantic, only murderous and destructive. One had
noticed already that the Prussian officer, so conscious of his caste,
who had worked so indefatigably to make an efficient army, had
become chastened. He had found that common men, butchers and
bakers and candlestick makers, could be as brave for their Kaiser as
he. And more of these officers had the Iron Cross than not.
The prevalence of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the
superficial observer. But in this, too, there was system. An officer who
had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle
declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If
many Crosses were given to privates, then the average soldier would
not think the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something
that he, too, might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.
The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent
offence could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were
you able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of
the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the Opera, His Opera, called him
to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala
performance? When again, in the shuffle of European politics, would
the audience see the Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the
Kaiser's side?
It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you
left the Opera--the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom
growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris. In front
of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at
Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far
away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in
triumph from Paris.
One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were
thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his
sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along
Unter den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a
characteristic misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his
Brandenburg dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron
Bismarck, with his strong jaw and pugnacious nose--the statesman
militant in uniform with a helmet over his bushy brow--who had made
the German Empire, that young empire which had not yet known
defeat because of the system which makes ready and chooses the
hour for its blow.
Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors
of the Sieges Allée, or avenue of victory--the present Kaiser's own
idea--with the great men of the time on their right and left hands.
People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their
statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of the
dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized in
marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors,
O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that
line of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the
garden, firm as the rocks, Germany itself. The last is not the least in
might nor the least advertised in the age of publicity. He is to make
the next step in advance for Germany and bring more tribute home, if
all Germans will be loyal to him.
One paused to look at the photograph of the Kaiser in a shop
window; a big photograph of that man whose photograph is
everywhere in Germany. It is a stern face, this face, as the leader
wishes his people to see him, with its erectile moustache, the lips firm
set, the eyes challenging and the chin held so as to make it symbolic
of strength: a face that strives to say in that pose: "Onward! I lead!"
Germans have seen it every day for a quarter of a century. They
have lived with it and the character of it has grown into their natures.
In the same window was a smaller photograph of the Crown Prince,
with his cap rakishly on the side of his head, as if to give himself a
distinctive characteristic in the German eye; but his is the face of a
man who is not mature for his years, and a trifle dissipated. For a
while after the war began he, as leader of the war party, knew the joy
of being more popular than the Kaiser. But the tide turned soon in
favour of a father who appeared to be drawn reluctantly into the
ordeal of death and wounds for his people in "defence of the
Fatherland" and against a son who had clamoured for the horror
which his people had begun to realize, particularly as his promised
entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two
has the wise head.
The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was
marooned with ennui in the face of French trenches in the West,
whilst all the glory was being won in the East. Indeed, father had put
son in his place. One day, the gossips said, son might have to ask
father, in the name of the Hohenzollerns, to help him recover his
popularity. His photograph had been taken down from shop windows
and in its place, on the right hand of the Kaiser in the Sieges Allée of
contemporary fame, was the bull-dog face of von Hindenburg, victor
of Tannenberg. The Kaiser shared von Hindenburg's glory; he has
shared the glory of all victorious generals; such is his histrionic gift in
the age of the spotlight.
Make no mistake--his people, deluded or not, love him not only
because he is Kaiser, but also for himself. He is a clever man, who
began his career with the enormous capital of being emperor and
made the most of his position to amaze the world with a more
versatile and also a more inscrutable personality than most people
realize. Poseur, perhaps, but an emperor these days may need to be
a poseur in order to wear the ermine of Divine Right convincingly to
most of his subjects.
His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has
never given down on that point, however much he has applied State
Socialism to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified
Germany and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the
sentiment of his inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of
the throne may say that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of
perception, ready of assimilation, knowing many things in their
essentials, but no one thing thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind
that a ruler requires, plus the craft of the politician.
Is he a good man? Is he a great man? Banal questions! He is the
Kaiser on the background of the Sieges Allée, who has first promoted
himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany,
with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and chairman of the
corporation. No German in the German hothouse of industry has
worked harder than he. He has kept himself up to the mark and tried
to keep his people up to the mark. It may be the wrong kind of a
mark. Indeed, without threshing the old straw of argument, most of
the people of the civilized world are convinced that it is.
That young private I met in the grounds at Charlottenberg, that
wounded man helping with the harvest, that tired hospital director, the
small trader in Hamburg, the sturdy Red Cross woman in the station
at Hanover, the peasants and the workers throughout Germany, kept
unimaginatively at their tasks, do not see the machinery of the throne,
only the man in the photograph who supplies them with a national
imagination. His indefatigable goings and comings and his poses fill
their minds with a personality which typifies the national spirit. Will
this change after the war? But that, too, is not a subject for speculation
here.
Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor
bowed down with the weight of his people's sacrifice, a grey,
determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up
defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by the
general public in the rear; a mysterious figure, not saying much and
that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather
appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism of
the struggle--such is the picture which the throne machinery has
impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best
in creating a saga.
Always the offensive! Germany would keep on striking as long as she
had strength for a blow, whilst making the pretence that she had the
strength for still heavier blows. One wonders, should she gain peace
by her blows, if the Allies would awaken after the treaty was signed to
find how near exhaustion she had been, or that she was so self-
contained in her production of war material that she had only
borrowed from Hans to pay Fritz, who were both Germans. Russia
did not know how' nearly she had Japan beaten until after
Portsmouth. Japan's method was the German method; she learned it
from Germany.
At the end of my journey I was hearing the same din of systematic
optimism in my ears as in the beginning.
"Warsaw, then Paris, then our Zeppelins will finish London," said the
restaurant keeper on the German side of the Dutch frontier; "and our
submarines will settle the British navy before the summer is over. No,
the war will not last a year."
"And is America next on the programme?" I asked.
"No. America is too strong; too far away."