words of greeting. “You, too, against us?”
“Yes, I was with our army in France,” I replied, watching her expression
closely.
There was regret in her manner, yet, as I had foreseen, not the faintest
suspicion of resentment. The German is too well trained in obedience to
government to dream that the individual may make a choice of his own
international affairs. As long as I remained in the household there was
never a hint from any member of it that the war had made any gulf
between us. They could not have been more friendly had I arrived wearing
the field gray of the Fatherland.
A brief glance about the establishment sufficed to settle once for all
the query as to whether the civil population of Germany had really
suffered from the ravages of war and of the blockade. The family had
been market-gardeners for generations. Ten years before they had been
prosperous with the solid, material prosperity of the well-to-do middle
class. In comparison with their neighbors they were still so, but it was
a far call from the plenitude of former days to the scarcity that now
showed its head on every hand. The establishment that had once been kept
up with that pride of the old-fashioned German as for an old family
heirloom, which laughs at unceasing labor to that end, was everywhere
sadly down at heel. The house was shedding its ancient paint; the
ravages of weather and years gazed down with a neglected air; the broken
panes of glass in the hotbeds had not been replaced; farm wagons falsely
suggested that the owner was indifferent to their upkeep; the very tools
had all but outlived their usefulness. Not that the habit of unceasing
labor had been lost. The family sleeping-hours were still from ten to
four. But the war had reduced the available helping hands and the
blockade had shut out materials and supplies, or forced them up to
prices which none but the wealthy could reach.
Inside the house, particularly in the kitchen, the family had been
reduced to almost as rudimentary a life as the countrymen of Venezuela,
so many were the every-day appliances that had been confiscated or shut
off by the war-time government, so few the foodstuffs that could be
obtained. Though other fuel was almost unattainable, gas could only be
had from six to seven, eleven to twelve, and seven to eight. Electricity
was turned on from dark until ten-thirty, which at that season of the
year meant barely an hour. Petroleum or candles were seldom to be had.
All the better utensils had long since been turned in to the government.
When I unearthed a bar of soap from my baggage the family literally fell
on my neck; the only piece in the house was about the size of a
postage-stamp, and had been husbanded for weeks. Vegetables were
beginning to appear from the garden; without them there would have been
little more than water and salt to cook. In theory each adult member of
the household received 125 grams of beef a week; in practice they were
lucky to get that much a month. What that meant in loss of energy I
began to learn by experience; for a mere three days without meat left me
weary and ambitionless. Those who could bring themselves to eat it might
get horse-flesh in the markets, without tickets, but even that only in
very limited quantities. The bread, “made of potatoes, turnips, and God
knows what all they throw into it,” was far from sufficient. Though the
sons and daughters spent every Sunday foraging the country-side, they
seldom brought home enough to make one genuine meal.
The effect of continued malnutrition seemed to have been surprisingly
slight on those in the prime of life. The children of ten years before,
men and women now, were plump and hardy, though the color in their
cheeks was by no means equal even to that of the grandfather—sleeping
now in the churchyard—at the time of my former visit. Of the two
granddaughters, the one born three years before, when the blockade was
only beginning to be felt in these backwaters of the Empire, was stout
and rosy enough; but her sister of nine months looked pitifully like the
waxen image of a maltreated infant of half that age. The simple-hearted,
plodding head of the household, nearing sixty, had shrunk almost beyond
recognition to those who had known him in his plump and prosperous
years, while his wife had outdistanced even him in her decline.
Business in the market-gardening line had fallen off chiefly because of
the scarcity of seeds and fertilizers. Then there was the ever more
serious question of labor. Old women who had gladly accepted three marks
for toiling from dawn until dark ten years before received eleven now
for scratching languidly about the gardens a bare eight hours with their
hoes and rakes. Male help had begun to drift back since the armistice,
but it was by no means equal to the former standard in numbers,
strength, or willingness. On top of all this came a crushing burden of
taxation. When all the demands of the government were reckoned up they
equaled 40 per cent. of the ever-decreasing income. The war had brought
one advantage, though it was as nothing compared to the misfortunes. For
generations two or three members of the family had spent six mornings a
week, all summer long, at the market-place in the heart of town. Since
the fall of 1914 not a sprig of produce had been carried there for sale;
clamoring women now besieged the gate of the establishment itself in far
greater numbers than the gardens could supply.
The hardship of the past four years was not the prevailing topic of
conversation in the household, however, nor when the subject was forced
upon them was it treated in a whining spirit. Most of the family, like
their neighbors, adroitly avoided it, as a proud prize-fighter might
sidestep references to the bruises of a recent beating. Only the mother
could now and then be drawn into specifying details of the disaster.
“Do you see the staging around our church there?” she asked, drawing me
to a window one morning after I had persisted some time in my questions.
“They are replacing with an _Ersatz_ metal the copper that was taken
from the steeple and the eaves. Even the bells went to the
cannon-foundries, six of them, all but the one that is ringing now. I
never hear it without thinking of an orphan child crying in the woods
after all the rest of its family has been eaten by wolves. _Ach!_ What
we have not sacrificed in this fight to save the Fatherland from our
wolfish enemies! We gave up our gold and our silver, then our nickel and
our copper, even our smallest pots and pans, our aluminum and our lead,
our leather and our rubber, down to the last bicycle tire. The horses
and the cows are gone, too—I have only goats to milk now. Then the
struggles I have had to keep the family clothed! Cloth that used to cost
fifty pfennigs a meter has gone up to fifteen marks, and we can scarcely
find any of that. Even thread is sold only against tickets, and we are
lucky to get a spool a month. We are far better off than the _poor_
people, too, who can only afford the miserable stuff made of paper or
nettles. America also wants to destroy us; she will not even send us
cotton. And the wicked _Schleichhandel_ and profiteering that go on!
Every city has a hotel or two where you can get anything you want to
eat—if you can pay for it. Yet our honest tickets are often of no use
because rascals have bought up everything at wicked prices. If we do not
get food soon even this _Handarbeiter_ government will recommence war
against France, surely as you are sitting there. The young men are all
ready to get up and follow our generals. The new volunteer corps are
taking on thousands every day. _Ach!_ The sufferings of these last
years! And now our cruel enemies expect our poor brave prisoners to
rebuild Europe. But then, _I_ have no right to complain. At least my
dear own boy was not taken from me.”
The son, whom we will call Heinrich, I had last seen as a child in
knickerbockers. Now he was a powerful, two-fisted fellow of twenty-one,
with a man’s outlook on life. Having enlisted as a _Freiwilliger_ on his
sixteenth birthday, at the outbreak of the war, he had seen constant
service in Russia, Rumania, and in all the hottest sectors of the
western front, had been twice wounded, twice decorated with those
baubles with which princes coax men to die for them, and had returned
home with the highest non-commissioned rank in the German army. What
struck one most forcibly was the lack of opportunity offered such men as
he by their beloved Fatherland. In contrast with the positions that
would have been open to so promising a youngster, with long experience
in the command of men, in America, he had found nothing better than an
apprenticeship in the hardware trade, paying forty marks for the
privilege and bound to serve three long years without pay. Like nearly
all the young men in town, from grocery clerks to bankers’ sons, he
still wore his uniform, stripped of its marks of rank, not out of pride,
but because civilian clothing was too great a luxury to be indulged,
except on Sundays. I was surprised, too, at the lack of haughtiness
which I had fancied every soldier of Germany felt for his calling. When
I made some casual remark about the gorgeous spiked helmet he had worn,
with its Prussian and Mechlenburger cockades, which I took for granted
he would set great store by to the ends of his days, he tossed it toward
me with: “Here, take the thing along, if you want it. It will make a
nice souvenir of your visit.” When I coaxed him outdoors to be
photographed in his two iron crosses, he would not put them on until we
had reached a secluded corner of the garden, because, as he explained,
the neighbors might think he was boastful.
“I should gladly have died for the Fatherland,” he remarked, as he
tossed the trinkets back into the drawer full of miscellaneous junk from
which he had fished them, “if only Germany had won the war. But not for
this! Not I, with no other satisfaction than the poor fellows we buried
out there would feel if they could sit up in their graves and look about
them.”
There were startling changes in the solemn, patriarchal attitude toward
life which I had found so amusing, yet so charming, in the simple people
of rural Germany at the time of my first visit. The war seemed to have
given a sad jolt to the conservative old customs of former days,
particularly among the young people. Perhaps the most tangible evidence
of this fact was to see the daughters calmly light cigarettes, while the
sternly religious father of ten years before, who would then have flayed
them for sneezing in church, looked idly on without a sign of protest.
They were still at bottom the proper German _Fräuleins_ of the rural
middle class—though as much could not be said of all the sex even in
respectable old Schwerin—but on the surface there were many of these
little tendencies toward the _Leichtsinnig_.
When it came to discussions of the war and Germany’s conduct of it, I
found no way in which we could get together. We might have argued until
doomsday, were it fitting for a guest to badger his hosts, without
coming to a single point of agreement. Every one of the old fallacies
was still swallowed, hook and line. If I had expected national disaster
to bring a change of heart, I should have been grievously disappointed.
To be sure, Mechlenburg is one of the remotest backwaters of the Empire,
and these laborious, unimaginative tillers of the soil one of its most
conservative elements. They would have considered it unseemly to make a
business of thinking for themselves in political matters, something akin
to accepting a position for which they had no previous training. There
was that to arouse pity in the success with which the governing class
had made use of this simple, unquestioning attitude for its own ends.
One felt certain that these honest, straightforward victims of
premeditated official lies would never have lent a helping hand had they
known that the Fatherland was engaged in a war of conquest and not a war
of defense.
Here again it was the mother who was most outspoken toward what she
called “the wicked wrecking of poor, innocent Germany.” The father and
the children expressed themselves more calmly, if at all, though it was
evident that their convictions were the same. Apparently they had
reached the point where further defense of what they regarded as the
plain facts of the situation seemed a waste of words.
“I cried when the armistice was signed,” the mother confided to me one
day, “for it meant that our enemies had done what they set out to do
many years ago. They deliberately planned to destroy us, and they
succeeded. But they were never able to defeat our wonderful armies in
the field. England starved us, otherwise she would never have won. Then
she fostered this Bolshevismus and Spartakismus and the wicked
revolution that undermined us at the rear. But our brave soldiers at the
front never gave way: they would never have retreated a yard but for the
breakdown at home.”
She was a veritable mine of stories of atrocities by the English, the
French, and especially the Russians, but she insisted there had never
been one committed by the Germans.
“Our courageous soldiers were never like that,” she protested. “_They_
did not make war that way, like our heartless enemies.”
Yet in the same breath she rambled on into anecdotes of what any one of
less prejudiced viewpoint would have called atrocities, but which she
advanced as examples of the fighting qualities of the German troops.
There again came in that curious German psychology, or mentality, or
insanity, or whatever you choose to call it, which has always astounded
the world at large. “Heinie” had seen the hungry soldiers recoup
themselves by taking food away from the wicked Rumanians; he had often
told how they entered the houses and carried away everything portable to
sell to the Jews at a song, that the next battle should not find them
unprepared. The officers had just pretended they did not see the men,
for they could not let them go unfed. They had taken things themselves,
too, especially the reserve officers. But then, war is war. If only I
could get “Heinie” to tell some of the things he had seen and heard;
how, for instance, the dastardly Russians had screamed when they were
pushed back into the marshes, whole armies of them.
I found more interest in “Heinie’s” stories of the insuperable
difficulties he had overcome as a _Feldwebel_ in keeping up the
discipline of his men after the failure of the last great German
offensive, but I did not press that point in her presence.
“No,” she went on, in answer to another question, “the Germans _never_
did anything against women. Those are all English lies! Heinie never
told me of a single case”—“Heinie” was, of course, no more apt to tell
mother such details than would one of the well-bred boys of our own
Puritan society, but I kept the mental comment to myself. “Of course
there were those shameless Polish girls, and French and Belgian hussies,
who gave themselves freely to the soldiers, but....
“Certainly the Kaiser will come back,” she insisted. “We need our
Kaiser; we _need_ princes, to govern the Empire. What are Ebert and all
that crowd? _Handarbeiter_, hand workers, and nothing more. It is absurd
to think that they can do the work of rulers. We need our princes, who
have had generations of training in governing. _Siehst du_, I will give
you an example. We have been _Handelsgärtner_ for generations. Hermann
knows all about the business of gardening, because he was trained to it
as a boy, _nicht wahr_? Do you think a man who had never planted a
cabbage could come and do Hermann’s work? _Ausgeschlossen!_ Well, it is
just as foolish for a _Handarbeiter_ like Ebert to attempt to become a
ruler as it would be for one of our princes to try to run Hermann’s
garden.
“Germany is divided into three classes—the rulers, the middle class (to
which _we_ belong), and the proletariat or hand-workers, which includes
Ebert and all these new upstarts. It is ridiculous to be getting these
distinctions all mixed up. Leave the governing to the princes and their
army officers and the Junkers. We use the nickname ‘Junker’ for our
noble gentlemen, von Bernstorff, for instance, who is well known in
America, and all the others who have a real right to use the ‘von’
before their names, whose ancestors were first highway robbers and then
bold warriors, and who are naturally very proud”—she evidently thought
this pride quite proper and fitting. “Then our army officers are chosen
from the very best families and can marry only in the _gelehrten_ class,
and only then if the girl has a dowry of at least eight hundred thousand
marks. So they preserve all the nobility of their caste down through
every generation and keep themselves quite free from middle-class
taint—the _real_ officers I am speaking of, not the _Reservisten_, who
are just ordinary middle-class men, merchants and doctors and teachers
and the like, acting as officers during the war. _Those_ are the men who
are trained to govern, and the only ones who _can_ govern.”
[Illustration: GERMANS READING THE PEACE-TERMS BULLETINS BEFORE THE
OFFICE OF THE “LOKAL ANZEIGER,” ON UNTER DEN LINDEN]
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE EX-KAISER’S PALACE AFTER THE SPARTICISTS
GOT DONE WITH IT]
[Illustration: THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS NOT ALWAYS SAVAGE OF FACE]
[Illustration: THE GERMAN’S ARTISTIC SENSE LEADS HIM TO OVERDECORATE
EVEN HIS MERRY-GO-ROUNDS]
I knew, of course, that the great god of class was still ruling in
Germany, but I confess that this bald statement of that fact left me
somewhat flabbergasted. It is well to be reminded now and again,
however, that the Teuton regards politics, diplomacy, and government as
lifelong professions and not merely as the fleeting pastimes of lawyers,
automobile-makers, and unsuccessful farmers; it clarifies our vision and
aids us to see his problems more nearly as he sees them.
Several rambles in and about Schwerin only confirmed the impressions I
had already formed—that the region was hopelessly conservative and that
it had really seriously suffered from the war and the blockade. On the
surface there was often no great change to be seen; but scratch beneath
it anywhere and a host of social skeletons was sure to come to light.
Even the famous old _Schwerinerschloss_, perhaps the most splendid
castle in Germany, showed both this conservatism and the distress of the
past years. The repairs it was undergoing after a recent fire had ceased
abruptly with the flight of the reigning family of Mechlenburg, but the
marks of something more serious than the conflagration showed in its
seedy outward appearance. Yet not a chair had been disturbed within it,
for all the revolution, and guards stationed about it by the Soldiers’
Council protected it as zealously as if they, too, were waiting for “our
princes” to come back again. Almost the only sign of the new order of
things was the sight of a score or more of discharged soldiers calmly
fishing in the great _Schwerinersee_ about the castle, a crime that
would have met with summary vengeance in the old ducal days.
Rumor having it that the peace terms were to be published that
afternoon, I hastily took train one morning back to Berlin, that I might
be in the heart of the uproar they were expected to arouse. At the
frontier of Mechlenburg soldiers of the late dukedom went carefully
through passengers’ baggage in search of food, particularly eggs, of
which a local ordinance forbade the exportation. The quest seemed to be
thorough and I saw no tips passed, but there was considerable successful
smuggling, which came to light as soon as the train was well under way
again. A well-dressed merchant beside me boastfully displayed a
twenty-mark sausage in the bottom of his innocent-looking hand-bag, and
his neighbors, not to be outdone in proof of cleverness, showed their
caches of edibles laboriously concealed in brief-cases, hat-boxes, and
laundry-bags.
“The peasants have grown absolutely shameless,” it was agreed. “They
have the audacity to demand a mark or more for a single egg, and twenty
for a chicken”—in other words, the rascals had turned upon the bourgeois
some of his own favorite tricks, taking advantage of conditions which
these same merchants would have considered legitimate sources of profit
in their own business. Wrath against the “conscienceless” countrymen was
unlimited, but no one thought of shaming the smugglers for their
cheating.
The contrast between the outward courtesy of these punctilious examples
of the well-to-do class and their total lack of real, active politeness
was provoking. A first-class compartment had been reserved for a sick
soldier who was plainly on his last journey, with a comrade in
attendance. Travelers visibly able to stand in the corridor crowded in
upon him until the section built for six held thirteen, and forced the
invalid to crouch upright in a corner. Women were rudely, almost
brutally, refused seats, unless they were pretty, in which case they
were overwhelmed with fawning attentions.
A discussion of America broke out in the compartment I occupied. It
resembled an exchange of opinions on the character of some dear friend
of the gathering who had inadvertently committed some slight social
breach. There was not a word at which the most chauvinistic of my
fellow-countrymen could have taken offense. When I had listened for some
time to the inexplicable expressions of affection for the nation that
had turned the scales against their beloved Fatherland, I discarded my
incognito. My companions acknowledged themselves surprised, then
redoubled their assertions of friendliness. Was their attitude a mere
pose, assumed on the chance of being heard by some representative of the
country they hoped to placate? It seemed unlikely, for they had had no
reason to suspect my nationality. I decided to overstep the bounds of
veracity in the hope of getting at their real thoughts, if those they
were expressing were merely assumed.
“I said I am an American,” I broke in, “but do not misunderstand me. We
_Chileans_ are quite as truly Americans as those grasping Yankees who
have been fighting against you.”
To my astonishment, the entire group sprang instantly to the defense of
my real countrymen as against those I had falsely adopted. All the silly
slanders I had once heard in Chile they discarded as such, and advanced
proofs of Yankee integrity which even I could not have assembled.
“You Chileans have nothing to fear from American aggression,” the
possessor of the twenty-mark sausage concluded, reassuringly, as the
rumble of the train crossing the Spree set us to gathering our traps
together. “The North Americans are a well-meaning people; but they are
young, and England and France have led them temporarily astray, though
they have not succeeded in corrupting their simple natures.”
IX
THUS SPEAKS GERMANY
Lest he talk all the pleasure out of the rambles ahead, let us get the
German’s opinion of the war cleared up before we start, even if we have
to reach forward now and then for some of the things we shall hear on
the way. I propose, therefore, to give him the floor unreservedly for a
half-hour, without interruption, unless it be to throw in a question now
and then to make his position and his sometimes curious mental processes
clearer. The reader who feels that the prisoner at the bar is not
entitled to tell his side of the story can easily skip this chapter.