“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “And when did you meet her?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “what do you think I’ve been doing all these
weeks in Cologne? Drinking coffee at the Domhof Hotel with the A.P.M.
and his soldier-policemen? Watching the dancing-girls every evening in
wine-rooms like this?”
We sat in a _Wein-stube_ as we talked, for the sake of light and a
little music. It was typical of a score of others in Cologne, with
settees of oak divided from each other in “cosy corners” hung with
draperies of green and red silk; and little tables to which waiters
brought relays of Rhine wines in tall thin bottles for the thirstiness
of German civilians and British officers. At one end of the room was a
small stage, and an orchestra composed of a pianist who seemed to be
suffering from a mild form of shell-shock (judging from a convulsive
twitch), a young German-Jew who played the fiddle squeakily, and a
thin, sad-faced girl behind a ’cello. Every now and then a bald-headed
man in evening clothes mounted the stage and begged the attention of
the company for a dance by the well-known artist Fräulein So-and-So.
From behind a curtain near the wine-bar came a dancing-girl, in the
usual ballet dress and the usual fixed and senseless smile, who
proceeded to perform Pavlova effects on a stage two yards square, while
the young Jew fiddler flattened himself against the side curtain, with
a restricted use of his bow, and the pianist with the shell-shock
lurched sideways as he played, to avoid her floppy skirts, and the girl
behind the ’cello drew deep chords with a look of misery.
“These are pretty dull spots,” I said to the little doctor, “but where
have you been spending your time? And when did you meet Elsa von
Kreuzenach?”
Dr. Small told me that he had been seeking knowledge in the only place
where he could study social health and social disease--hospitals,
work-shops, babies’ crèches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English
officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany
after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of _ersatz_ pastry
(“filth!” he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a
big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.
“You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as
England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes
and the labourers stay indoors after their day’s job, and do not
exhibit their misery in the public ways.”
“Real misery?” I asked. “Hunger?”
Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.
“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their
babes, and the babes who are bulbous-headed, with rickets. Come and see
the tenement lodgings where working-families sit round cabbage-soup, as
their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but
gives ’em a sense of fulness, not enjoyed by those who have no bread.
Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into
the slums to find hunger--four years of under-nourishment which has
weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work, or fall asleep
through weakness in the tram-cars. In many of the big houses where life
looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so
rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is
manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the _ersatz_ factories. I found
that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.”
“How?” I asked.
“She is a nurse in a babies’ _crèche_, poor child. Showed me round
with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies
cried, ‘_Guten Tag! Guten Tag!_’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After
to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can
we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her
words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else, presently. I saw
her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the door-step
at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round
bullied her.
“‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked.
“‘_Ersatz_ coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good
_Frühstuck_, doctor.’
“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’
“‘Cabbage-soup, and _ein kleines Brödchen_,’ she says. ‘After four
years one gets used to it.’
“‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things.
“She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke.
“‘Cabbage soup and turnips,’ she said, ‘and a regular feast.’
“‘I thought your father was a Baron,’ I remarked in my sarcastic way.
“‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘and an honest man he is, and therefore
poor. It is only the profiteers who feed well in Germany. All through
the war they waxed fat on the flesh-and-blood of the men who fought
and died. Now they steal the food of the poor by bribing the peasants
to sell their produce at any price. _Schleichandlung_ is the word she
used. That means ‘smuggling.’ It also means hell’s torture, I hope, for
those who do it.... So there you are. If Wickham Brand marries Elsa
von Kreuzenach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by
four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be?
Ricketty, tuberculous, undersized, weak-framed. Wickham Brand deserves
better luck than that, sonny.’”
I roared with laughter at the little doctor, and told him he was
looking too far ahead, as far as Brand and the German girl were
concerned. This made him angry, in his humourous way, and he told me
that those who don’t look ahead fail to see the trouble under their
nose until they fall over it.
We left the _Weinstube_ through a fog of smoke. Another dancing girl
was on the tiny stage, waving her arms and legs. An English officer,
slightly fuddled, was writing a cheque for his bill and persuading the
German manager to accept it. Two young French officers were staring at
the dancing-girl with hostile eyes. Five young Germans were noisy round
six tall bottles of Liebfraumilch. The doctor and I walked down to the
bank of the Rhine below the Hohenzollern bridge. Our sentries were
there, guarding heavy guns which thrust their snouts up from tarpaulin
covers.
Two German women passed, with dragging footsteps, and one said wearily,
“_Ach, lieber Gott!_”
The doctor was silent for some time after his long monologue. He stared
across the Rhine, on whose black surface lights glimmered with a milky
radiance. Presently he spoke again, and I remember his words, which
were, in a way, prophetic.
“These German people are broken. They _had_ to be broken. They are
punished. They _had_ to be punished. Because they obeyed the call of
their leaders, which was to evil, their power has been overthrown
and their race made weak. You and I, an Englishman, an American,
stand here, by right of victory, overlooking this river which has
flowed through two thousand years of German history. It has seen the
building-up of the German people, their industry, their genius, their
racial consciousness. It has been in the rhythm of their poetry and
has made the melody of their songs. On its banks lived the little
people of German fairy-tales, and the heroes of their legends. Now
there are English guns ready to fire across the water, and English,
French and American soldiers pacing this road along the Rhine, as
victors and guards of victory. What hurt to the pride of this people!
What a downfall! We must be glad of that because the German challenge
to the world was not to be endured by free peoples. That is true, and
nothing can ever alter its truth or make it seem false. I stand firm
by that faith. But I see also, what before I did not see, that many of
these Germans were but slaves of a system which they could not change,
and spellbound by old traditions, old watch-words, belonging to the
soul of their race, so that when they were spoken they had to offer
their lives in sacrifice. High power above them arranged their destiny,
and the manner and measure of their sacrifice, and they had no voice,
or strength, or knowledge, to protest--these German peasants, these
boys who fought, these women and children who suffered and starved. Now
it is they, the ignorant and the innocent, who must go on suffering,
paying in peace for what their rulers did in war. Men will say that is
the justice of God. I can see no loving God’s work in the starvation
of babes, nor in the weakening of women so that mothers have no milk.
I see only the cruelty of men. It is certain now that, having won the
war, we must be merciful in peace. We must relieve the Blockade, which
is still starving these people. We must not go out for vengeance but
rather to rescue. For this war has involved the civilian populations
of Europe and is not limited to armies. A treaty of peace will be with
Famine and Plague rather than with defeated generals and humiliated
diplomats. If we make a military peace, without regard to the agonies
of peoples, there will be a tragic price to pay by victors as well as
by vanquished. For the victors are weak too. Their strength was nearly
spent. They--except my people--were panting to the last gasp when their
enemy fell at last. They need a peace of reconciliation for their own
sakes, because no new frontiers may save them from sharing the ruin of
those they destroy, nor the disease of those they starve. America alone
comes out of the war strong and rich. For that reason we have the power
to shape the destiny of the human race, and to heal, as far as may be,
the wounds of the world. It is our chance in history. The most supreme
chance that any race has had since the beginning of the world. All
nations are looking to President Wilson to help them out of the abyss
and to make a peace which shall lead the people out of the dark jungle
of Europe. My God!... If Wilson will be noble and wise and strong, he
may alter the face of the world, and win such victory as no mortal
leader ever gained. If not--if not--there will be anguish unspeakable,
and a worse darkness, and a welter of anarchy out of whose madness
new wars will be bred, until civilisation drops back to savagery, or
disappears.... _I am afraid!_”
He spoke those last words with a terrible thrill in his rather high,
harsh voice, and I, too, standing there in the darkness, by the
Rhine, had a sense of mighty powers at work with the destiny of many
peoples, and of risks and chances and hatreds and stupidities thwarting
the purpose of noble minds and humble hearts after this four years’
massacre.... And I was afraid.