"The Great Days"
They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the
Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid
in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told,
across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly
see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young
cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and
philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a
kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a
girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the
younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any
he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun
consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure
reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got
him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his
"categorical imperative."
You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and
philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present
sense, begun to exist; how to that audience--nearly every one of whom
had a son or husband or brother at the front--the century suddenly
seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own
"grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous
older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and
with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching
them from the window, come down across the years:
"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other?
There it stands in the paper--two thousand more men--it writes itself so
easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a--
... And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory,
and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the
'forces'--so and so many men--and nobody even knows his name..."
You must imagine them coming back from the war, and pale, benign,
leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the
footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with
real wounds--pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron
Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from
East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them
pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and
something to eat--will they never stop eating?--fathers and mothers and
daughters with their Butterbrod and Schinken and big glasses of beer in
the genial German fashion, beaming on the young heroes limping by or,
with heads bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in spite of
their scars.
And when they drift out into the street at last, softened and brought
together by the play--the street with its lights and flags, officers in
long, blue-gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a military
automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay "Ta-tee! Ta-td!"--the
extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk
in the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the Friedrichsstrasse corner
is chanting it hoarsely, "Zwei englische Dampfer gesunken!"--and they
read that "the sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain risen
on the tragedy of England's destiny."
Great days, indeed! Days of achievement, of utter sacrifice, and
flinging all into the common cause. Round the corner from Unter den
Linden, under the dark windows of the Information Bureau, you may see
part of the price. It is still and deserted there, except for a lone
woman with a shawl over her head, trying to read, by the light of the
street-lamp, the casualty lists. You must imagine a building like the
Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in
Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and
pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down
the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, of
microscopic type; columns of names, arranged in the systematic German
way--lightly wounded, badly wounded--schwer verwundet--gefallen. Some
have died of wounds--tot--some dead in the enemy's country--in
Feindesland gefallen. Rank on rank, blurring off into nothingness,
endless files of type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding
here.
One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" in a New York
playhouse--of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster
really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of
Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet
comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece
might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and
how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with
which it was played--and watched--it was but part of the week's work.
And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a
dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night--and yet tourists generally
speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as
a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and
Prussian arrogance. You might have seen them at the opera or symphony
concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to
read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand,
so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the
Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A
wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting,
and a man's very soul developing before you all the time--sandwiches and
beer and more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no
longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added
to one's life. Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre
shells--good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity,
homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit.
Mere talk about plays would not be much encouraged in Germany nowadays.
In one of the Cologne papers the other day there were two imaginary
letters--one signed "One Who Means Well," asking that there be a little
relief from war poems, war articles, and the like; and the other signed
"One Who Means Better," demanding if it were possible for any German to
waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in
greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to
the wall, facing and holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic,
going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda
Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's
troubles--if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" Yet a woman,
asking at the same time that the "finer and sweeter voices of peaceful
society" be not forgotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the
cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, and it is not
necessary that they should always and forever be drowned out."
I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration of that many-sided
vitality one feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all
a people's capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed up, I
suppose, in that hapless word Kultur.
You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one
pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very
feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to
the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German
habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to
feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well--carried with it, so to
speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.
You may be of this persuasion. The thing one cannot escape, however, in
Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality,
the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be
applied to smashing forts or staging a play. When a people can hold
back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the
other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost,
yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the
theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most
spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with
a fact which a reporter in his travels must record--a force which, as
the saying goes, "must be reckoned with."
So far as the special business of keeping the war going is concerned,
this vitality, after seven months of fighting, in spite of those lists
in Dorotheenstrasse, seems ample. Here in Berlin, which is an all day's
express journey from either front, you see thousands of fit young men
marching through the streets, singing and whistling; you are told of
millions ready and waiting to go. Every one seems confident that
Germany will win--indeed, with a unity and resolution which could
scarcely be more complete if they were defending their last foot of
territory, determined that Germany must win.
When I was in London in the autumn a man who had made a flying trip to
Berlin said that the German capital made him think of a man with his
feet on the table smoking a cigar and pretending to be unconcerned
although he knew all the time in his heart that he was doomed. I find
little to suggest such a picture. The thing that at once impresses the
stranger, along with the apparent reserve strength, is the moral
earnestness behind that strength, the passionate conviction that they
are fighting a defensive fight, that they are right. I shall not
attempt to explain this here, but merely record it as a fact. Possibly
all people in all great wars believe they are right--and that is why
there are great wars.
Crossing the frontier from Rotterdam, I stopped for a day or two at
Cologne. The proprietor of the hotel, a typical, big, hearty German of
the commercial class, such as you might expect to find running a brewery
at home or a bank or coffee plantation in South America, came out of his
office when he heard English spoken. There are no "loose Englishmen" in
Germany nowadays.
"I suppose you are surprised to see the Dom, yes?" he laughed, pointing
toward the cathedral towers in whose shadow we stood. And then--"What
do you think about the war?" I asked him what he thought.
"Well," he said, and with the air of brushing aside what was taken for
granted before considering more doubtful issues, "of course we win!"
He showed me a photograph of his son, just made an officer. "In a few
weeks," he said, "maybe I volunteer myself." He was fifty-five years
old, but thoroughly fit. He doubled up a big right arm and laughingly
gripped it. "Like iron!" he boomed. "And there are five million men
like me. Not men--soldiers!"
I found myself the other evening, after zigzagging all over Berlin with
an address given me at a typewriter agency, in a little apartment on the
outskirts of the town. The woman who lived there had been a
stenographer in the city until the war cut off her business, and she was
now supporting herself with the six marks (one dollar and fifty cents)
weekly war benefit given by the municipality and by making soldiers'
shirts for the War Department at fifty pfennigs (twelve and one-half
cents) a shirt. She was glad to get typewriting, and without words on
either side at once got to work. So we proceeded for a page or two
until something was said about an Iron Cross stuck inside a soldier's
coat.
"That is the Iron Cross of the second class," she interrupted; "they put
that inside. The first class they wear outside," and, as if she could
keep still no longer, she suddenly flung out, almost without a pause:
"My brother has the Iron Cross. I have seven brothers in the army.
Three are in the east and three are in the west, and one is in the
hospital. He was shot three times in the leg--here--and here--and here.
They hope to save his leg, but he will always be lame. He got the Iron
Cross. He was at Dixmude. They marched up singing 'Deutschland ueber
Alles.' They were all shot down. There were three hundred of them, and
every one fell. They knew they must all be shot, but they marched on
just the same, singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They knew they were
going against the English, and nothing could stop them."
Her brother would go back if he had to crawl back--if only she could go
and not have to sit here and wait!
"I told you," she said, "when you first came in, that I was German. And
I asked you if you were an American, because I know that dreadful things
have been said in America about our Kaiser, and I will not have such
things said to me. Our Kaiser did not want the war--he did everything
he could to prevent the war--no ruler in the world ever did more for his
people than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, woman, or child
in Germany who would not fight for him." And this, you must remember,
was from a woman whose support was cut off by the war and who was making
a living by sewing shirts at twelve and a half cents a shirt.
I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright
shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit--apples from Canada and
Hood River--crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow
streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through
in November. There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, and
in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella a parapluie.
An American who lives in Cologne told me that the decrease in the number
of young men was noticeable, and that eleven sons of his friends had
been killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual
crowds. One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards. They
were not boys and street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their
wives and daughters, people who looked as if they might have sons or
brothers at the front.
The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp
guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains
of the west. It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost
touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon.
All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course,
why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on--if not as
usual, at any rate going on.
The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat,
the crop which is to carry the country through another year. Meanwhile,
one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not
needed for beets--for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more
now than she needs--also be seeded to wheat.
Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex
web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means: In
ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million
dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not
coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like
the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and
Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve
and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost
before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from
which to see Berlin going by. Even were Berlin, in a journalistic
sense, "starving," one presumes the cosmopolitans in the tea-rooms of
the Kaiserhof or Adlon or Esplanade would still have their trays of
fancy cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting plenty to
eat at a--for them--not unreasonable price.
For weeks white bread has had to contain a certain amount of rye flour
and rye bread a certain amount of potato--the so-called war bread--and,
except in the better hotels, one was served, unless one ordered
specially, with only two or three little wisps of this "Kriegsbrod." For
Frenchmen this would mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little
bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person
scarcely noticed the difference. Every one must have his bread-card
now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day--about four
pounds a week--which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer
gets his bread. Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had
for love or money. Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape
your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs
(seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin "automats" to one mark
fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.
Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big,
popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for
one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay of
the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been
made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also
expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to
be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person,
at a moderate price. There are said to be eight hundred thousand
prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has
been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are
more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands. Yet there
are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of
London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the
soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a
day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin
going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the
people's patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that
England never can starve them out if every German does his economical
duty. Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so
efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow
"arranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while
the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o'clock
every morning and the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank
covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat.
"Society," in its more visible, decorative sense, is as forgotten as it
is in France, as it must be in such a time. There are no dances or
formal parties; every one who is not going about his civil business has
in one way or another "gone to the war." The gay young men are at the
front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and
it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the
street a pretty young lady merely out to take the air, with hands in her
muff and trotting in front of her the timorous dachshund, muzzled like a
ravening tiger and looking at the world askance with his rueful eyes.
The apparent quietness and gravity is partially due to the lack of a
"yellow" or, in the British or American sense of the word, popular
press. There is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's
ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the
better-class English civilians nor the light-hearted fighting man at the
front, yet which are entertainingly written, do contain the news, and
get themselves read.
The German papers print comparatively little of what we call "news."
They hide unpleasant truths and accent pleasant ones, and are working
all the time to create a definite public opinion; but their partisanship
is that of official proclamation rather than that of overworked and
underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the
desperation of servants working for a tip. The yelping after spies, the
heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British arms, the
ill-timed talk of snatching the enemy's trade in a war theoretically
fought for a high principle, all that journalistic vulgarity--which
might be as characteristic of our own papers under similar
circumstances--one is mercifully spared.
This taciturnity is astonishing toward the work of the men at the front.
A few days ago flags were flung out all over Berlin at the news of
Hindenburg's victory; military attaches were saying that there had been
nothing like this since Napoleon; up and down the streets the newswomen
were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg
zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and
Hindenburg's still counting..."). And all you could find in the papers
was the General Staff report that "at one place the fighting has been
very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand
prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of
the regular communiqué beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after
a period of inactivity..."
The picturesqueness and personalities of the war are left to the stage
and the innumerable weeklies and humorous papers, yet even here there is
little or no tendency to group achievements around individual
commanders--it is "our army," not the man, although even German
collectivism cannot keep Hindenburg's dependable old face off the
post-cards nor regiments of young ladies from sending him letters and
Liebesgaben.
In the theatre you see the Feldgrau heroes in dugouts in Flanders or in
Galician trenches; see the audience weep when the German mother sends
off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer
verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down on
noble blond giants in spiked helmets dangling miniature Frenchmen by the
scruff of the neck and forcing craven Highlanders to bite the dust.
You may even see a submarine dive down into green water, see the torpedo
slid into the tube, breech-block closed, and--"Now--for Kaiser and
fatherland!"--by means of an image thrown on a screen from the
periscope, see the English cruiser go up in a tower of water and
founder.
In all this comment there is a very different feeling for each of the
three allies. The Russians "don't count," so to speak. They are
dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung back, but the
feeling toward them is not unlike that toward a herd of stampeded range
cattle.
Toward the French there is no bitterness either, rather a sort of pity
and the wish to be thought well of. One is reminded now and then of the
German captain quartered at Sedan, in Zola's "Debacle," who, while
conscious of the strength behind him, yet wanted his involuntary hosts
to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant
homme. Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or
speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in
the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the French
barracks there--"but, of course, the French are an artistic people. You
can allow them liberties like that." Every now and then in the papers
one runs across some anecdote from France in which the Frenchman is
permitted to make the retort at the expense of the English.
Toward John Bull there is no mercy. He is shown naked, trying to hide
himself with neutral flags; he is sprawled in his mill with a river of
French blood flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the
cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is doing his grinding
for him; he is hobnobbing cheek by jowl with cannibals and black men,
and he is seriously discussed as a traitor to the Germanic peoples and
the white race.
A German woman told me the other day that in her house it was the custom
to fine everybody in the family ten pfennigs if they came down to
breakfast without saying: "Gott strafe die Englander!" ("God punish the
English!") In a recent Ulk there is a cartoon of a young mother holding
up her baby to his proud father with the announcement that he has spoken
his first words. "And what did he say?" "Gott strafe England!"
America is criticised for supplying the Allies with arms--shades of
South American revolutions and the old "Ypiranga"!--while permitting
itself, without sufficient protest, to be shut off from sending food to
Germany. Yet, in spite of this and the extremely difficult situation
created by the submarine blockade, the individual American is not
embarrassed unless mistaken for an Englishman or unless he finds some
supersensitive patriot in a restaurant or theatre who objects even to
hearing English.
At the frontier the honest customs inspector landed, first thing, on a
copy of "Tartarin sur les Alpes," which I had picked up at the railroad
news-stand in the Hague.
"Franzosisch!" he declared, flapping over the pages. Next it was a
bundle of letters of introduction, the top one of which happened to be
in English. "Englische Briefe!" and forthwith he bellowed for help. A
young officer sauntered out from the near-by office, saluted, and said,
"Good morning!" glanced at "Tartarin" with a smile, and tossed it back
into the bag, at letters and passport, said it must be very interesting
to see both sides, and so, after a question or two, to the train for
Koln.
On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy afternoon, I went into the
dining-car toward five o'clock attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit
and heavy tan boots, and, speaking German with evident pain, tactfully
asked--everybody else drinking beer--for tea. The man across the way
whispered to his companion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the
aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at the other end of
the car turned round and, gazing over the back of her chair, whispered
aghast to her companion: "Englaender!"
Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, I regained my
compartment presently and glared out at the sodden landscape, with now
and then a shot at the other occupant who had got on at Essen or one of
the western stations and sat the day out without a word. One of those
disagreeable Prussians evidently--until, actually needing to know, I
broke the silence by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin. He
answered with perfect good humor, and we began to talk. I mentioned the
tea incident.
"Ignorant people!" he said, dismissing them with a wave of the hand.
They ought to have seen my little flag--he had--and, anyhow, a gentleman
was a gentleman, and they were fighting England, not individual
Englishmen. Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably
shifted into French, and so we talked until reaching Berlin, when,
hoping that I would get what I came for, he shook hands and wished me
"Bon voyage!" So you never can tell.
The militarism which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all
about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and
understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on.
Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every
man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you
--as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner can tell you at
home--about the German belief in war as a great blessing, because it is
the only way of asserting your own superior ideas over the other man's
inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead.
People want to smash England, of course, because, as they explain, she
brought on the war and is trying to starve them, and they roar with the
applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates
Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout who is keeping those
millions of slovenly Russians from overrunning our tidy, busy,
well-ordered Germany. But Treitschke--who was he?
And then, of course, it is not always easy to put one's finger on just
what people mean by militarism. Some have objected to militarism
because they didn't like the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy,
and some because--"Well, those people somehow rub you the wrong way!" It
is not universal conscription, because many nations have that, nor the
amount spent per capita on soldiers and ships, for we ourselves spend
almost as much as the Germans, and the French even more.
One of our old-school cattlemen, used to shooting all the game, cutting
all the timber, and using all the water he wanted to, would doubtless
say, without seeing a soldier, that it was "their damned police!" No,
when people think they are talking about German militarism, they are
quite as likely to be talking about the way German faces are made or
about German collectivism--the uncanny ability Germans have for taking
orders, for team-work, for turning every individual energy into the
common end.
One may, however, run across a certain feeling toward war, quite local
and unconscious, yet very different from the French love of "gloire" and
the English keenness for war as a sort of superior fox-hunting or
football. You are, let us say, watching one of the musical comedies
which the war has inspired.
The curtain rises on a darkened stage, through whose blackness you
presently discover, twinkling far below, as if you were looking down
from an aeroplane, the lights of Paris, the silver thread of the Seine
and its bridges. There is a faint whirring, and two faces emerge
vaguely from the dark--the hero and heroine swinging along in a Taube.
And as they fly they sing a wistful little waltz song, a sort of cradle
song:
"Ich glau-u-be... Ich glau-u-be Da oben fliegt... 'ne Taube..."
They are thinking, so the song runs, that there is a Taube overhead; it
has flown here out of its German nest, and let's hope it will not let
anything fall on them. And, as they sing, the young man makes a motion
with his hand, there is a sort of glowworm flash, and a few seconds
later, away down there among the Paris roofs a puff of red smoke and
fire. The illusion is perfect, and the audience is enchanted--that ride
through the velvet night, so still, so quaint, so roguish in its way,
and the flash far below, that has flung some unsuspecting citizen on the
cobblestones like a bundle of old rags.
And, whirring gently, the Taube sails on through the night:
'Ich glaube.. Da oben fliegt Ich glaube.. 'ne Taube'
Again the glowworm flash, and a moment later, over on the left bank, not
far from the Luxembourg, apparently, another of those eloquent little
puffs of fire. The crowd is as delighted as children would be with
bursting soap-bubbles.
Or we are, let us say, at "Woran Wir Denken" ("What We're Thinking Of")
with delightful music and such verses as we rarely enough hear in
musical comedies at home. In the spotlight there is a square young man
dressed in a metallic coat and conical helmet, so as to suggest the
famous forty-two-centimetre shell--the shell which makes a hole like a
cellar and smashed the Belgian forts as if an earthquake had struck
them. And singing with him an exquisite, nun-like creature in a
dove-colored robe, typifying the Taube. They are singing to each other:
"I am delicate and slender And made for the salon..." "And I am the
biggest smasher In all the present season..." "High up above the clouds
I fly at heart's desire..." "And I'm a child of Krupp's, Whom nobody
knew about..." "I fly, trackless as a breath..." "I slash on with smoke
and roar..."
They are in love with each other, you see, the Taube and the
forty-two-centimetre shell, the "Brummer," or "Grumbler," as they call
it in Germany--could anything be more piquant? You should hear them--the
chaste, chic, nun-like Taube and the thick-chested old Brummer, singing
that he is her dear old Grumbler and she his soft, swift Dove:
"Suesser, dicker Brummer... Du mein Taubchen, zart und flink..."
There is a sort of poetry about this--a new sort of poetry about a new
sort of war. And it might possibly be proved that such poetry could
only come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in
imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put--a people in love
with war, having a mystical feeling for its instruments, such as their
remote ancestors had for their battle-axes and double-edged swords.
I shall not attempt to do this--heaven preserve Americans from being
judged by their musical comedies !--and doubtless the children even of
our most devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead
cannon and toy soldiers. I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of
refinement and brutality, as something which, it struck me, we
Americans--who always do everything exactly right--would not have
thought of doing in just that way.
Many of the ways of this people are not our ways. You have heard, let
us say, of the German parade step, sometimes laughed at as the "goose
step" in England and at home. I was lunching the other day with an
American military observer, and he spoke of the parade step and the
effect it had on him.
"Did you ever see it?" he demanded. "Have you any idea of the moral
effect of that step? You see those men marching by, every muscle in
their bodies taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Emperor,
and when they bring those feet down--bing! bang!--the physical fitness
it stands for, the unity, determination--why, it's the whole German
idea--nothing can stop 'em!"
"Did you ever see one of these soldiers salute?" Yes, I had seen
hundreds of them, and I had been made extremely ill at ease one day in
my hotel when a young officer with whom I had started, in the American
fashion, comfortably to shake hands suddenly whacked his heels together
like a couple of Indian clubs and, stiff as a ramrod, snapped his hand
to his cap.
"Did you ever see them salute? They don't do it like a baggage porter--
there's nothing servile about it. They square off and bring that hand
to their heads and look that officer square in the eyes as if to say:
'Now, damn you, salute me!' And he gets his salute, too--like a man!"
You may not like this salute or you may not like the parade step, but
you can be very sure of one thing--that it is not the militarism that
pushes civilians off the sidewalk nor permits an officer to strike his
subordinate--though these things have happened in Germany--that is
holding back England and France and driving the Russian millions out of
East Prussia. It is something bigger than that. Peasants and princes,
these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a
passionate unity such as the world has not often seen. This, and not
the futile nurses' tales with which the American public permitted itself
to be diverted during the early weeks of the war, is what strikes one in
Germany. It is a fact, like the Germans being in Belgium, which you
have got to face and think about, whether you like it or not. Berlin,
February, 1915.