asserted. He had seen him die. He had been called to bring him his last
glass of water. Bismarck and a dozen others were gathered about his bed,
most of them kneeling—the picture of Bismarck on his knees was not easy
to visualize somehow—“and the emperor died with great difficulty”—my
informant demonstrated his last moments almost too realistically. The
Kaiser—he who wrecked the Hohenzollern ship—was a very ordinary man,
possibly something above the average in intelligence, but he did not
have a fair chance in life. There was his useless arm, and then his ear.
For forty years he had suffered atrociously from an abscess in his left
ear. The caretaker had seen him raging mad with it. No treatment ever
helped him. No, it was not cancer, though his mother died of that after
inhuman suffering, but it was getting nearer and nearer to his brain,
and he could not last many years now. Then there was his arm. No, it was
not inherited, but resulted from the criminal carelessness of a midwife.
For years he used an apparatus in the hope of getting some strength into
that arm, tying his left hand to a lever and working it back and forth
with his right. But it never did any good. He never got to the point
where he could lift that arm without taking hold of it with the other.
He grew extraordinarily clever in covering up his infirmity; when he
rode he placed the reins in the useless left hand with the right, and
few would have realized that they were just lying there, without any
grasp on them at all. He kept that arm out of photographs; he kept it
turned away from the public with a success that was almost superhuman.
On the whole, he was a man with a good mind. “No one of average
intelligence can help being a knowing man if he has Ministers and
counselors and all the wise men of the realm coming to him every day and
telling him everything.” But he had too much power, too much chance to
rule. He dismissed Bismarck, “a man such as there is only one born in a
century,” when he was himself still far too young to be his own
Chancellor. He never could take advice; when his Ministers came to him
they were not allowed to tell him what they thought; they could only
salute and do what he ordered them to do. And he never understood that
he should choose his words with care because they made more impression
than those of an ordinary man.
It was only when I chanced upon his favorite theme—we had returned to
his little lodge, decorated with the antlers and tusks that were the
trophies of his happiest days—that the caretaker showed any actual
enthusiasm for the ex-Kaiser. I asked if it were true that the former
emperor was a good shot. “_Ausgezeichnet!_” he cried, his weary eyes
lighting up; “he was a marvelous shot! I have myself seen him kill more
than eight hundred creatures in one day—and do not forget that he had to
shoot with one arm at that.” He did not mention how much better record
than that the War Lord had made on the western front, nor the
precautions his long experience in the “hunting-field” had taught him to
take against any possible reprisal by his stalked and cornered game.
The Crown Prince, he had told me somewhere along the way in the
oppressive royal museum, was a very nice little boy, but his educators
spoiled him. Since manhood he had been “somewhat _leichtsinnig_”—it was
the same expression, the old refrain, that I had heard wherever the
Kaiser’s heir was mentioned—“and his mind runs chiefly on women.” In one
of the rooms we had paused before a youthful portrait of Queen Victoria.
“I have seen her often,” remarked my guide, in his colorless voice. “She
came often to visit us, at many of the palaces, and the first thing she
invariably called for the moment she arrived was cognac.” It may have
been merely a little side-slap at the hated English, but there was
something in that particular portrait that suggested that the queen
would have made a very lively little _grisette_, had fate chanced to
cast her in that rôle.
Bismarck was plainly the old servant’s favorite among the titled throng
he had served and observed. “When the second Kaiser died,” he
reminisced, “after his very short reign—he was a good man, too, though
proud—he gave me a message that I was to hand over to Bismarck himself,
in person. The long line of courtiers were aghast when I insisted on
seeing him; they stared angrily when I was admitted ahead of them to his
private study. I knocked, and there was a noise inside between a grunt
and a growl”—some of our own dear colonels, I mused, had at least that
much Bismarckian about them—“and after I opened the door I had to peer
about for some time before I could see where he was, the tobacco smoke
was so thick. He always smoked like that. But he was an easy man to talk
to, if you really had a good reason for coming to see him, and I had.
When I went out all the courtiers stared at me with wonder, but I just
waved a hand to them and said, ‘The audience is over, gentlemen!’ Ah
yes, I have seen much in my day, _aber_,” he concluded, resignedly, as
he accompanied me to the door of his lodge, “_alle diese gute Zeiten
sind leider vorbei_.”
III
THOU SHALT NOT ... FRATERNIZE
The armies of occupation have been credited with the discovery of a new
crime, one not even implied in the Ten Commandments. Indeed, misinformed
mortals have usually listed it among the virtues. It is
“fraternization.” The average American—unless his habitat be New
England—cannot remain aloof and haughty. Particularly the
unsophisticated doughboy, bubbling over with life and spirits, is given
to making friends with whatever branch of the human family he chances to
find about him. Moreover, he was grateful for the advance in material
comfort, if not in friendliness, of Germany as compared with the
mutilated portion of France he had known. He did not, in most cases,
stop to think that it was the war which had made those differences. It
was an every-day experience to hear some simple country boy in khaki
remark to his favorite officer in a slow, puzzled voice, “Sa-ay,
Lieutenant, you know I like these here Boshies a lot better than them
there Frogs.” The wrangles and jealousies with their neighbors, on which
the overcrowded peoples of Europe feed from infancy, were almost
unsuspected by these grownup children from the wide land of opportunity.
The French took alarm. There seemed to be danger that the _sale Boche_
would win over _les Américains_, at least the sympathy of the men in the
ranks, by his insidious “propaganda.” As a matter of fact, I doubt
whether he could have done so. The Germans rather overdid their
friendliness. Particularly when it bore any suggestion of cringing,
deliberate or natural, it defeated itself, for, simple as he may be in
matters outside his familiar sphere, the American soldier has an almost
feminine intuition in catching, eventually, a somewhat hazy but on the
whole true conception of the real facts. But our allies were taking no
chances. A categorical order—some say it emanated from Foch
himself—warned the armies of occupation that there must be “no
fraternization.”
The interpretation of the order varied. As was to be expected, the
Americans carried it out more rigorously than did their three allies
along the Rhine. Its application also differed somewhat in separate
regions within our own area. At best complete enforcement was
impossible. With soldiers billeted in every house, what was to hinder a
lovelorn buck from making friends with the private who was billeted in
_her_ house and going frequently to visit _him_? On cold winter evenings
one rarely passed a pair of American sentries beside their little
coal-fires without seeing a slouchy youth or two in the ugly round cap
without vizor which we had so long associated only with prisoners of
war, or a few shivering and hungry girls, hovering in the vicinity,
eying the soldiers with an air which suggested that they were willing to
give anything for a bit of warmth or the leavings of the food the
sentries were gorging. Whether they merely wanted company or aspired to
soap and chocolate, there was nothing to prevent them getting warmer
when there were no officers in sight.
The soldiers had their own conception of the meaning of
fraternization. Buying a beer, for instance, was not fraternizing;
tipping the waiter who served it was—unless he happened to be an
attractive barmaid. Taking a walk or shaking hands with a German man
was to disobey the order; strolling in the moonlight with his sister,
or even kissing her under cover of a convenient tree-trunk, was not.
The interrelation of our warriors and the civilian population was
continually popping up in curious little details. To the incessant
demand of children for “Schewing Kum,” as familiar, if more guttural,
as in France, the regulation answer was no longer “No compree,” but
“No fraternize.” Boys shrilling “Along the Wabash” or “Over There,”
little girls innocently calling out to a shocked passer-by in khaki
some phrase that is more common to a railroad construction gang than
to polite society, under the impression that it was a kindly word of
greeting, showed how the American influence was spreading. “Snell” had
taken the place of “toot sweet” in the soldier vocabulary. German
schools of the future are likely to teach that “spuds” is the American
word for what the “_verdammte Engländer_” calls potatoes. When German
station-guards ran along the platforms shouting, “_Vorsicht!_” at the
approach of a train, American soldiers with a touch of the native
tongue translated it into their lingo and added a warning, “Heads up!”
The adaptable Boche caught the words—or thought he did—and thereafter
it was no unusual experience to hear the arrival of a _Schnellzug_
prefaced with shouts of, “Hets ub!” In the later days of the
occupation the Yank was more apt to be wearing a “_Gott mit uns_” belt
than the narrow web one issued by his supply company, and that belt
was more likely than not to be girdled round with buttons and metal
rosettes from German uniforms, as the original American wore the
scalps of his defeated enemies. Our intelligence police frequently ran
down merchants or manufacturers guilty of violating the fraternization
order by making or offering for sale articles with the German and the
American flags intertwined, pewter rings bearing the insignia of some
American division and the iron cross; alleged meerschaum pipes
decorated with some phrase expressive of Germany’s deep love for
America in spite of the recent “misunderstanding.” The wiseacres saw
in all this a subtle “propaganda,” cleverly directed from Berlin. I
doubt whether it was anything more than the German merchant’s
incorrigible habit of making what he can sell, of fitting his supply
to his customer’s wishes, however absurd these may seem to him.
Up to the 1st of February Americans on detached service in Germany ate
where they chose. With the non-fraternization order came the command to
patronize only the restaurants run by the army or its auxiliary
societies. The purpose was double—to shut another avenue to the
fraternizer and to leave to the Germans their own scanty food store.
This question of two widely different sources of supply side by side
required constant vigilance. When two lakes of vastly different levels
are separated only by a thin wall it is to be expected that a bit of
water from the upper shall spill over into the lower. A pound can of
cocoa cost 50 marks in a German shop—if it could be had at all; a better
pound sold for 1 mk. 25 in our commissary. A can of butter for which a
well-to-do citizen would gladly have given a week’s income was only a
matter of a couple of dollars for the man in khaki. A bar of soap, a
tablet of chocolate, a can of jam, many of the simple little things that
had become unattainable luxuries to the mass of the people about us,
cost us no more than they did at home before the war. Even if there was
no tendency to profit by these wide discrepancies—and with the vast
percentage of our soldiers there was not—the natural tender-heartedness
of America’s fighting-man moved him to transgress orders a bit in favor
of charity. Much as one may hate the Boche, it is hard to watch an
anemic little child munch a bare slice of disgusting war-bread, knowing
that you can purchase a big white loaf made of genuine flour for a
paltry ten cents.
There were curious ramifications in this “fraternization” question.
Thus, what of the American lieutenant whose father came over from his
home in Düsseldorf or Mannheim to visit his son? By strict letter of the
law they should not speak to each other. What advice could one give a
Russian-American soldier whose brother was a civilian in Coblenz? What
should the poor Yank do whose German mother wired him that she was
coming from Leipzig to see him, little guessing that for him to be seen
in public with any woman not in American uniform was an invitation to
the first M. P. who saw him to add to the disgruntled human collection
in the “brig”?
I chanced to be the “goat” in a curious and embarrassing situation that
grew quite naturally out of the non-fraternizing order. It was down the
river at Andernach, a town which, in the words of the doughboy, boasts
“the only cold-water geyser in the world—except the Y. M. C. A.” A
divisional staff had taken over the “palace” of a family of the German
nobility, who had fled to Berlin at our approach. One day the daughter
of the house unexpectedly returned, alone but for a maid. She happened
to be not merely young and beautiful—far above the average German level
in the latter regard—but she had all those outward attractions which
good breeding and the unremitting care of trained guardians from birth
to maturity give the fortunate members of the human family. She was
exactly the type the traveler in foreign lands is always most anxious to
meet, and least successful in meeting. On the evening of her arrival the
senior officer of the house thought to soften the blow of her unpleasant
home-coming by inviting her to dinner with her unbidden guests. The
little circle was charmed with her _tout ensemble_. They confided to one
another that she would stand comparison with any American girl they had
ever met—which was the highest tribute in their vocabulary. She seemed
to find the company agreeable herself. As they rose from the table she
asked what time breakfast would be served in the morning. Thanks to the
uncertainty of her English, she had mistaken the simple courtesy for a
“standing invitation.”
The officers looked at one another with mute appeal in their eyes.
Nothing would have pleased them better than to have their grim circle
permanently graced by so charming an addition. But what of the new order
against fraternization? Some day an inspector might drift in, or the
matter reach the erect ears of that mysterious and dreaded department
hidden under the pseudonym of “G-2-B.” Besides, the officers were all
conscientious young men who took army orders seriously and scorned to
use any sophistry in their interpretation. Furthermore, though it hurt
keenly to admit such a slanderous thought, it was within the range of
possibilities that the young lady was a spy, sent here with the very
purpose of trying to ingratiate herself into the circle which had so
naïvely opened itself to her. It was known that her family had been in
personal touch with the Kaiser; for all her “American manner,” she made
no secret of being German through and through. What could have been more
in keeping with the methods of Wilhelmstrasse than the suggestion that
she return to her own home and pass on to Berlin any rumors she might
chance to pick up from her unwelcome guests?
Plainly she must be gotten rid of at once. None of the officers,
however, felt confidence enough in his German to put it to so crucial a
test. Whence, it being my fortune to drop in on a friend among the
perplexed Americans just at that moment, I was unanimously appointed to
the gentle task of banishing the lady from her own dining-room.
It was at the end of a pleasant little luncheon—the sixth meal which the
daughter of the house had graciously attended. The conversation had been
enlightening, the atmosphere most congenial, the young lady more
unostentatiously beautiful than ever. We reduced the audience to her
coming humiliation as low as possible by softly dismissing the junior
members, swallowed our throats, and began. Nothing, we assured her, had
been more pleasant to us since our arrival in Germany than the privilege
of having her as a guest at our simple mess. Nothing we could think
of—short of being ordered home at once—would have pleased us more than
to have her permanently grace our board. But ... fortunately our stiff
uniform collars helped to keep our throats in place ... she had possibly
heard of the new army order, a perfectly ridiculous ruling, to be sure,
particularly under such circumstances as these, but an army order for
all that—and no one could know better than she, the daughter and
granddaughter of German high officers, that army orders are meant to be
obeyed—wherein Pershing himself commanded us to have no more relations
with the civilian population than were absolutely unavoidable. Wherefore
we ... we ... we trusted she would understand that this was only the
official requirement and in no way represented our own personal
inclinations ... we were compelled to request that she confine herself
thereafter to the upper floor of the house, as her presence on our floor
might easily be misunderstood. Her maid no doubt could prepare her
meals, or there was a hotel a few yards up the street....
The charming little smile of gratitude with which she had listened to
the prelude had faded to a puzzled interest as the tone deepened, then
to a well-mastered amazement at the effrontery of the climax. With a
constrained, “Is that all?” she rose to her feet, and as we kicked our
chairs from under us she passed out with a genuinely imperious carriage,
an icy little bow, her beautiful face suffused with a crimson that would
have made a mere poppy look colorless by comparison. We prided ourselves
on having been extremely diplomatic in our handling of the matter, but
no member of that mess ever again received anything better than the
barest shadow of a frigid bow from the young lady, followed at a
respectful distance by her maid, whom they so often met on her way to
the hotel a few yards up the street.
If it were not within the province of a soldier to criticize orders, one
might question whether it would not have been better to allow regulated
“fraternizing” than to attempt to suppress it entirely. Our soldiers,
permeated through and through, whether consciously or otherwise, with
many of those American ideals, that point of view, which we are eager
for the German _Volk_ to grasp, that there may be no more kaisers and no
more deliberately built-up military assaults upon the world, would have
been the most effective propaganda in our favor that could have been
devised to loose upon the German nation. Merely their naïve little
stories of how they live at home would in time have awakened a
discontent in certain matters, spiritual rather than material, that
would have been most salutary. But we committed our customary and
familiar American error of refusing to compromise with human nature, of
attempting impossible suppression instead of accepting possible
regulation, with the result that those ineradicable plants that might
have grown erect and gay in the sunshine developed into pale-faced,
groveling monstrosities in the cellars and hidden corners. Our allies in
the neighboring areas had the same non-fraternizing order, yet by not
attempting to swallow it whole they succeeded, probably, in digesting it
better.
There was a simple little way of fraternizing in Coblenz without risking
the heavy hand of an M. P. on your shoulder. It was to just have it
_happen_ by merest chance that the seat of the _Fräulein_ who had taken
your eye be next your own at the municipal theater. It grew increasingly
popular with both officers and enlisted men, that modest little
_Stadttheater_. The Germans who, before our arrival, had been able to
drift in at the last moment and be sure of a seat, were forced to come
early in the day and stand in line as if before a butter-shop. The
_Kronloge_, or royal box, belonged now to the general commanding the
Army of Occupation—until six each evening, when its eighteen seats might
be disposed of to ordinary people, though the occupants even in that
case were more likely than not to be girdled by the Sam Browne belt.
Some observers make the encouraging assertion that there will be more
devotees of opera in America when the quarter-million who kept the watch
on the Rhine return home. There was a tendency to drift more and more
toward the _Stadttheater_, even on the part of some whom no one would
have dared to accuse of aspiring to “high-brow” rating, though it must
be admitted that the “rag” and “jazz” and slap-stick to which the “Y”
and similar well-meaning camp-followers, steeped in the “tired business
man” fallacy, felt obliged to confine their efforts in entertaining “the
boys,” did not play to empty houses.
The little _Stadttheater_ gave the principal operas, not merely of
Germany, but of France and Italy, and occasional plays, chiefly from
their own classics. They were usually well staged, though long drawn
out, after the manner of the German, who can seldom say his say in a few
succinct words and be done as can the Frenchman. The operas, too, had a
heaviness in spots—such as those, for instance, under the feet of the
diaphanous nymphs of one hundred and sixty-five pounds each who cavorted
about the trembling stage—which did not exactly recall the Opéra in
Paris. But it would be unfair to compare the artistic advantages of a
city of eighty thousand with those of the “capital of the world.”
Probably the performances in Coblenz would have rivaled those in any but
the two or three largest French cities, and it would be a remarkable
town “back in little old U. S. A.” that could boast such a theater,
offering the best things of the stage at prices quite within reach of
ordinary people. When one stopped to reflect, those prices were
astonishing. The best seat in the _Kronloge_ was but 5 mk. 50, a bare
half-dollar then, only $1.25 at the normal pre-war exchange, and
accommodations graded down to quite tolerable places in whatever the
Germans call their “peanut gallery” at nine cents! All of which does not
mean that the critical opera-goer would not gladly endure the quintupled
cost for the privilege of attending a performance at the Opéra Comique
at Paris.
The question of fraternization and the ubiquitous one of German food
shortage were not without their connection. Intelligence officers were
constantly running down rumors of too much sympathy of our soldiers for
the hungry population. The assertion that Germany had been “starved to
her knees,” however, was scarcely borne out by observations in the
occupied area. It is true that in Coblenz even the authorized
quantities—seven pounds of potatoes, two hundred grams of meat, seven
ounces of sugar, and so on per person each week, were high in price and
not always available. Milk for invalids and those under seven was easier
to order than to obtain. A notice in the local papers to “Bring your egg
and butter tickets on Monday and get two cold-storage eggs and forty
grams of oleomargarine” was cause for town-wide rejoicing. Poor old
horses that had faithfully served the A. E. F. to the end of their
strength were easily auctioned at prices averaging a thousand marks
each, in spite of the requirement that a certificate be produced within
a week showing where they had been slaughtered. There was always a
certain _Schleichhandel_, or underhand dealing, going on between the
wealthy in the cities and the well-stocked peasants. Rancid butter, to
be had of excellent quality before the war at two marks, cost in
“underground” commerce anything from fifty marks up which the happy man
who found it was in a condition to pay. Contrasted with this picture,
the wages of an eight-hour day were seldom over five marks for
unskilled, or more than ten for skilled labor. The out-of-work-insurance
system, less prevalent in our area than “over in Germany,” made it
almost an advantage to be unemployed. A citizen of Düsseldorf offered a
wanderer in the streets eight marks for a day’s work in his stable. Many
a man would gladly have done the task for three marks before the war.
The wanderer cursed the citizen roundly. “You have the audacity,” he
cried, “to ask me to toil all day for two marks!” “_Two_ marks?” gasped
the citizen; “you misunderstood me. I said eight.” “I heard you say
eight,” shouted the workman, “and is not eight just two more than the
six we get under the unemployment act? Pest with your miserable two
marks! If you want to pay me ten for the day—that is, sixteen in
all....” He did not add that by going out into the country with his
unearned six marks he could buy up food and return to the city to sell
it at a handsome profit, but the citizen did not need to be reminded of
that oppressive fact.
It was under such conditions as these that the civilians about us lived
while we gorged ourselves on the full army ration in the hotels and
restaurants we had taken over. There was always a long and eager waiting
line where any employment of civilians by the Americans carried with it
the right to army food; in many cases it became necessary to confine the
opportunity to war widows or others whose breadwinners had been killed.
[Illustration: THE FORMER CROWN PRINCE IN HIS OFFICIAL FACE, ATTENDING
THE FUNERAL OF A GERMAN OFFICER AND COUNT, WHOSE MILITARY ORDERS ARE
CARRIED ON THE CUSHION IN FRONT]
[Illustration: THE HEIR TO THE TOPPLED THRONE WEARING HIS UNOFFICIAL AND
MORE CHARACTERISTIC EXPRESSION]
[Illustration: BARGES OF AMERICAN FOOD-STUFFS ON THEIR WAY UP THE RHINE]
[Illustration: BRITISH TOMMIES STOWING THEMSELVES AWAY FOR THE NIGHT ON
BARGES ANCHORED NEAR THE HOLLAND FRONTIER]