the women were most savage in their expressions. Probably grandfather
would miss the far corner lot more than would the younger members of the
family, who had not been accustomed to seeing it so long. When one could
get the Germans to specify, they rated the proposed terms about as
follows: “The loss of the Saar is the worst; the losses in the east,
second; the loss of our colonies, third.” But they reminded one of a man
who has just returned home and found his house wrecked—the farther he
looks the more damage he discovers; at each new discovery he gasps a bit
more chokingly, and finally stands dumb before the immensity of the
catastrophe that has befallen him, for some time undecided just what his
next move shall be. “We would rather pay any amount of indemnity than
lose territory,” they went on, at last. “It is a crime to occupy the
Rhineland, the richest, most taxable, the most freedom-loving part of
Germany. And now they are trying to steal that from us in addition! The
Allies are trying to Balkanize us. They do not want money from us; they
want to _vernichten_ us, to destroy us completely. The immense majority
of the people of the Rhineland do not want to abandon us; they are loyal
to the Empire. But the French have the upper hand now; they protect the
few self-seekers who are riding it over the loyal masses; the British
are willing and the Americans are simple enough to believe that the
republic that is to have its capital in Coblenz represents the desires
of the majority. Never! The Catholics and the capitalists combined to
form the Rhine Republic, with the aid of the French—because they could
thus both have more power for themselves.” (How true this statement may
be I can only judge from the fact that a very small minority of those I
questioned on the subject while with the Army of Occupation expressed
any desire to see the region separated from Germany, and that I found
virtually _no_ sentiment for abandoning the Empire in any portion
whatever of unoccupied Germany.)
“Then these new frontiers in the east were set by men who know the
conditions there only from books, not from being on the spot, or at best
by men who were misinformed by the stupid or biased agents they sent.
Thus many towns almost wholly inhabited by Germans are now to be given
to the Poles, and _vice versa_.” As to the proposed punishment of the
Kaiser, though there seemed to be very little love and no great
loyalty—except in acquitting him on the score of beginning the war—left
for him among the great mass of the people, this clause aroused as great
wrath as any. The German saw in it a matter of national honor.
Such anger as the peace terms aroused was, of course, chiefly poured out
upon President Wilson. “We believed in Wilson and he betrayed us,”
protested a cantankerous old man. “Wilson told us that if we chased the
Hohenzollerns out he would ‘treat us right’; we did so, and now look
what he has gone and done to us! He has led us to slaughter, and all the
time we thought he was leading us out of the wilderness. He has grossly
betrayed us. People put too much faith in him. _I_ never did, for I
always considered his lean face the mask of hypocrisy, not the
countenance of justice and idealism. We Germans, with few exceptions,
believed him to be a noble character, whereas he is operated by strings
in the hands of the American capitalists, like the puppets the children
at the Guignol mistake for living people.” “Only the capitalists,” cried
a motorman, “led by Wilson, had any say in this treaty. Your Wilson and
his capitalists are far worse tyrants than the Kaiser ever aspired to be
in his wildest moments.” “Wilson leads the capitalists of the world
against Socialism, against socialistic Germany, which they fear far more
than they ever did a military Germany,” asserted the Majority-Socialist
papers.
On the other hand there were Germans who stanchly defended Wilson,
taking an unprejudiced, scientific view of the entire question, as they
might of the fourth dimension or of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy.
These were apt to bring their fellow-countrymen up with a round turn by
asserting that Wilson never promised to make peace with Germany based on
his Fourteen Points. Ah, those Fourteen Points! If they had been
bayonets I should have resembled a sieve long, long before my journey
was ended.
“We Germans can look at the problem from both sides,” insisted one such
open-minded professor, “because we are more liberal than the Allies,
because we travel, we do business in all parts of the world. We have
advanced beyond the stage of melodrama, of believing that all right, all
good is on one side and the contrary on the other. The Frenchman rarely
leaves home, the Englishman never changes his mind when he does—he has
it set in cement for safety’s sake before he starts. The American is too
young to be able to look frankly at a question from both sides.”
“Militarism,” said a mason who had one crippled leg left, yet who
chatted with me in an equally friendly manner both before and after he
had learned my nationality, “was our national sport, as football is in
England, and whatever you play most is in America. Now we have
discovered that it is not a very pleasant sport. We have a nose full of
it! Yet we cannot sign this peace. If a man has a thousand marks left
and a footpad says to him: ‘I am going to take this away from you.
Kindly sign this statement to the effect that you are giving it to me
freely. I shall take it, anyway, but we will both be better off if I
have your consent,’ what would you expect the man to do? Let the Allies
come to Berlin! We cannot go to war again, but—the people must stand
behind the government!”
Just what he meant by the last assertion was not entirely clear; but at
least the first half of the assertion was frequently borne out by little
hints that all but escaped the eye. Thus, a large bookstore in Berlin
bore the meaningful placard, “War Literature at Half Price!”
“From this date” (May 8th), gasped an important Berlin daily, “we drop
to a fourth-rate power, along with Spain.” (There were, to be sure, some
Spanish suggestions in the uncleanliness, the apathy, the run-down
condition of buildings that had suffered five years of disrepair, in the
emaciated beggars one occasionally saw in the Germany of 1919.) “With
this ‘peace’ we are down and out; we can never get on our feet again.
There is not wealth enough in all Germany to pay this indemnity and
still save ourselves. We can never recover because we can never buy the
raw materials we must have to do so. There is nothing left in the
country with which to pay for these raw stuffs except our labor, and we
cannot set to work because we have no raw stuffs to work with. We are
caught in the whirlpool! It is a fallacy to think that we shall save
money on our army. The army we have to-day costs us far more than the
one we had when the armistice was signed. If we are required to have an
army of volunteers only and pay them as good wages as they now
require ... to-day one soldier costs us more than thirty did under the
old system! And what soldiers! We shall not be able to compete with the
world, first of all because the exchange on the mark will make our raw
materials cost us three times what they do our rivals, and then we have
these new eight-hour laws and all the rest of the advance socialistic
program, which they do not have in other countries. The Allies should
have hunted out the guilty individuals, not punish us all as a nation,
as an incompetent captain punishes his entire company because he is too
lazy or too stupid to catch the actual wrong-doers. In twenty years
Germany will have been completely destroyed. All the best men will have
emigrated. If we try to spend anything for _Kultur_—that excellent
heritage of the old régime which our enemies so falsified and
garbled—for working-men’s insurance, new schools, municipal theaters,
even for public baths, the Allies will say, ‘No, we want that money
ourselves; you owe us that on the old war game you lost.’ In that case
all we can do is to resort to passive resistance”—a strange German
occupation indeed!
The little blond German “ace of aces,” credited with bringing down some
twoscore Allied airmen, hoped to come to America and play in a circus.
He put little faith in the rumor that he might not be received there,
and thought that if there really was any opposition it could easily be
overcome by getting one of our large “trusts” to take a financial
interest in his case. In fact, the chief worry of many Germans seemed to
be whether or not and how soon they would be allowed to come to
America—North or South. “Rats desert a sinking ship.” One man whose
intelligence and experience warranted attention to his words assured me
that he belonged to a party that had been working for some time in favor
of, and that they found a strong sentiment for—making Germany an
American colony! I regret the inability to report any personal evidence
to support his statements.
But if the general tone was lacrymose, notes of a more threatening
timbre were by no means lacking. “With this ‘peace,’” was one assertion,
“we shall have another Thirty Years’ War and all Europe will go over the
brink into the abyss.” “We Germans got too high,” mused a philosophic
old innkeeper accustomed to take advantage of his profession as a
listening-post. “He who does is due for a fall, and we got it. But
France is the haughty one now, and she is riding to a cropper. She will
rue her overbearing manner, for the _revanche_ is here already—on our
side this time. And if French and Germans ever go to war again there
will be no prisoners taken!” “If the Germans are forced to sign this
‘peace,’” cried a fat Hollander who had lived much in Germany, “there
will be another war within ten years, and all Europe will be destroyed,
Holland with the rest, France certainly, for she is tottering already.
If they do not sign, we shall all be plunged into anarchy.” “We had
looked to Wilson to bring an end to a century-old situation that had
grown intolerable,” moaned a Berlin merchant. “Now we must drill hatred
into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when
the time is ripe....”
What does Germany plan to do with herself, or what is left of her, now?
Does she wish to remain a republic, to return to the Hohenzollerns, or
to establish a new monarchy under some other less sinister dynasty? As
with so many of the world’s problems, the answer depends largely on the
papers one, or those of whom one made inquiries, read. The replies ran
the entire gamut. Some asserted that even the heads of the socialistic
parties have lost only the symbols of kaiserism, that the masses still
keep even those. A majority of the peasant class is probably
monarchical, when they are not wholly indifferent to anything beyond
their own acres and the price of beer. They seem to like the distant
glamour of a glittering pageantry, a ruler to whom they can attribute
superman or demigod qualities—so long as the cost thereof is not
extracted too openly from their pockets. The Junkers, the old robber
barons from Borussia, of course still want a monarchy, probably of
Hohenzollern complexion, though the present heir to that bankrupt estate
has not a visible friend in the Empire. “The majority still want the
Kaiser, or at least a monarchy,” one heard the frequent assertion; “we
are not ripe for a republic.”
If I were forced to answer definitely myself I should say that most
educated Germans want nothing more to do with the Kaiser and his family.
Their reply to a query on this point is most apt to be an energetic,
“_Ausgeschlossen!_” On the question of no monarchy at all they are by no
means so decided. Naturally there is still a monarchical class left;
there still is even in France. “A vote would probably give a small
majority for the monarchy to-day,” said a young psychologist. “I have no
politics myself; a psychologist must keep his mind clear of those
squabbles, as an engineer must his gears of sand, but at least the
Hohenzollerns gave us peace and quiet, and while there were some
unpleasant things about their system, they now seem slight in comparison
with what the war has brought us.... The German people are really
democratic (_sic!_), but they are also monarchical; they want a paternal
government, such as they have been used to during all the living
generations. But we shall probably remain a republic now.”
Said the peasant innkeeper already introduced: “The monarchy is probably
the best system for us; it fits our mentality and training. But now that
we have changed there is no use in changing back again. There is not
enough difference between the two schemes of government. So we shall
probably stay what we are. The great trouble with this king and prince
business”—he lived in Saxe-Weimar, where every seventh man used to wear
a crown—“was that it was so _übertrieben_, so overdone, with us. They
demanded such swarms of _Beamters_, of employees, courtiers, uniforms.
And all their petty little nobles! We peasants don’t mind supporting a
few such decorations, but.... Now the Kaiser gets eighty thousand marks
a year instead of twenty-four million, and I doubt if he is suffering
from hunger—which is less than can be said for many of the people he
left behind.”
Possibly the most frequently expressed opinion in the length and breadth
of Germany was the frank, “It does not much matter what kind of a
government we have so long as we can get wise and honest men at the
top.” That, after all, is the final answer to the whole problem that has
been teasing the world for centuries. “Remember,” smiled a Dutchman,
“that this democracy you are shouting about is no new American
discovery. We tried a republic centuries ago, and we still have it,
though now under a hereditary president called a king—or just now a
queen—and we find that works best of all.” “We are like birds just let
out of a lifetime cage,” protested a Socialist. “Give us time to try our
wings. We shall fly much better two years from now. There was a strong
republican feeling in Germany long before the war, but the Kaiser and
his crowd ruthlessly strangled it.” “How fair, how revolutionary, how
socialistic is the ‘new’ Germany,” raged the Independent Socialists, “is
shown by the acquittal of the assassins of Liebknecht and Luxembourg
contrasted with the death-sentence of Leviné, who was no more a ‘traitor
against the constituted authorities’ than was Hoffmann, who drove him
out, or those who upset the monarchy and established the ‘republic.’”
But we must be careful not to let partizan rage, sour grapes, obscure
the problem. There has certainly been a considerable change of feeling
in Germany; whether a sufficient, a final change remains to be seen. The
Germans, whatever their faults, are a foresighted and a deliberate
people. They are scanning the horizon with unprejudiced eyes in quest of
a well-tested theory of government that will fit their problem. Though
they seem for the instant to be inclined to the left, they are really
balancing on the ridge between republicanism and monarchy, perhaps a
more responsible monarchy than the one they have just cast off, and it
will probably not take much to tip them definitely to either side. In
the offing, too, Bolshevism is always hovering; not so close, perhaps,
as the Germans themselves fear, or are willing to have the world
believe, but distinctly menacing, for all that. In things political at
least the German is no idealist. Of the rival systems of government he
has an eye chiefly to the material advantages. Which one will bring him
the most _Kultur_, in the shape of all those things ranging from
subsidized opera to municipal baths with which the Kaiser régime
upholstered his slavery? Above all, which will give him the earliest and
surest opportunity to get back to work and to capitalize undisturbed his
world-famed diligence? Those are his chief questions. I never heard in
all Germany the hint of a realization that a republic may be the best
form of government because it gives every citizen more or less of a
chance to climb to the topmost rung of the ladder. But I did now and
then see encouraging signs that the masses are beginning to realize that
a people is responsible for the actions of its government just as a
business man is responsible for his clerk’s errors—and that is already a
long step forward for Germany.
X
SENTENCED TO AMPUTATION
The terms of the Peace Treaty having broken upon Berlin without arousing
any of the excited scenes I had expected, I decided to go away from
there. General apathy might be ruling in the provinces also, but at
least I would be “on my own” if anything happened, and not where I could
dart under the protecting wing of the Ally-housing Adlon at the first
signs of storm. I laid a plan that promised to kill two birds with one
stone. I would jump to the far eastern border of the Empire, to a
section which Paris had just decreed should be handed over to the Poles,
and I would walk from there into a section which the Poles had already
taken. In other words, I would examine side by side an amputated member
and one which the consultation of international doctors about the
operating-table on which Germany lay had marked for amputation.
Luckily I took the wrong train on the teeming Friedrichsstrasse Bahnhof
platform next morning, or I should have been sent back before reaching
my goal. I learned just in time to drop off there that travelers into
Polish territory must have their passports viséed in Frankfurt-am-Oder.
There was a considerable gathering of nervous petitioners about the door
of the haughty German officer who represented the Empire in this matter,
at one of the huge barracks on the outskirts of town. But the delay was
not correspondingly long, thanks not only to the efficient system of his
office, but to the fact that many of the applicants remained only long
enough to hear him dismiss them with an uncompromising “No!” All men of
military age—and in the Germany of 1919 that seemed to mean every male
between puberty and senility—were being refused permission to enter the
amputated province, whether they were of Polish or German origin. My own
case was different. The officer scowled a bit as the passport I laid
before him revealed my nationality, but he stamped it quickly, as if in
haste to be done with an unpleasant duty. Whether or not this official
right of exit from the Empire included permission to return was a
question which he curtly dismissed as no affair of his. Evidently I was
burning my bridges behind me.
Frankfurt-am-Oder pulsated with soldiers, confirming the impression that
reigned in khaki-clad circles at Coblenz that the German army had turned
its face toward the east. Food seemed somewhat less scarce than in the
capital. A moderately edible dinner cost me only eight marks. In the
market-place, however, the stalls and bins were pathetically near to
emptiness. A new annoyance—one that was destined to pursue me during all
the rest of my travels in Germany—here first became personal. It was the
scarcity of matches. In the days to come that mere hour’s search for a
single box of uncertain, smoke-barraging _Streichhölzer_ grew to be a
pleasant memory. Not far from the city was one of those many camps of
Russian prisoners, rationed now by American doughboys, some of whose
inmates had nearly five years of German residence to their discredit. If
the testimony of many constant observers was trustworthy, they dreaded
nothing so much as the day when they must turn their backs on American
plenitude and regain their own famished, disrupted land. True, they were
still farmed out to labor for their enemies. But they seldom strained
themselves with toil, and in exchange were they not growing efficient in
baseball and enhancing their Tataric beauty with the silk hats and red
neckties furnished by an all-providing Red Cross?
The station platform of Frankfurt, strewn pellmell with Polish refugees
and their disheveled possessions, recalled the halcyon days of Ellis
Island. A “mixed” train of leisurely temperament wandered away at last
toward the trunk line to the east which I had fortunately not taken that
morning. Evidently one must get off the principal arteries of travel to
hear one’s fellow-passengers express themselves frankly and freely. At
any rate, there was far more open discussion of the question of the hour
during that jolting thirty miles than I had ever heard in a day on
sophisticated express trains.
“The idea,” began an old man of sixty or more, apropos of nothing but
the thought that had evidently been running through his head at sight of
the fertile acres about us, “of expecting us to surrender this, one of
the richest sections of the Fatherland, and to those improvident Poles
of all people! They are an intelligent race—I have never been one of
those who denied them intelligence. But they can never govern
themselves; history has proved that over and over again. In my
twenty-three years’ residence in Upper Silesia I have seen how the
laborers’ houses have improved, how they have thrived and reached a far
higher plane of culture under German rule. A Polish government would
only bring them down to their natural depths again. They will never
treat the working-man as fairly, as generously as we have.
“But,” he continued, suddenly, with increased heat, “we will _not_ see
the Fatherland torn to pieces by a band of wolfish, envious enemies. We
will fight for our rights! We _cannot_ abandon our faithful
fellow-countrymen, our genuine German brethren, to be driven from their
homes or misruled by these wretched Poles. It would be unworthy of our
German blood! There will be a _Bürgerkrieg_—a peasants’ war, with every
man fighting for his own sacred possessions, before we will allow German
territory to be taken from us. I will sacrifice my entire family rather
than allow the Fatherland to be dismembered.”
Our fellow-passengers listened to this tirade of testy old age with the
curious apathy of hunger or indifference which seemed to have settled
upon the nation. Now and then one or two of them nodded approval of the
sentiments expressed; occasionally they threw in a few words of like
tenor. But on the whole there was little evidence of an enthusiasm for
rescuing their “genuine German brethren” that promised to go the length
of serious personal sacrifice.
All Germany was in bloom, chiefly with the white of early fruit-trees,
giving the landscape a maidenly gaiety that contrasted strangely with
the funereal gloom within the car. Gangs of women were toiling with
shovels along the railway embankment. The sandy flatlands, supporting
little but scrubby spruce forests, gave way at length to a rich black
soil that heralded the broad fertile granary which Germany had been
called upon to surrender. Barefoot women and children, interspersed with
only a small percentage of men, stood erect from their labors and gazed
oxlike after the rumbling train. Here and there great fields of colza,
yellow as the saffron robe of a Buddhist priest, stretched away toward
the horizon. The plant furnished, according to one of my
fellow-passengers, a very tolerable _Ersatz_ oil. Fruit-trees in their
white spring garments, their trunks carefully whitewashed as a
protection against insects, lined every highway. Other trees had been
trimmed down to mere trunks, like those of Brittany and La Vendée in
France, as if they, too, had been called upon to sacrifice all but life
itself to the struggle that had ended so disastrously.
In the helter-skelter of finding seats in the express that picked us up
at the junction I had lost sight of the belligerent old man. A husband
and wife who had formed part of his audience, however, found place in
the same compartment as I. For a long time I attempted to draw them into
conversation by acting as suspiciously as possible. I took copious
notes, snapped my kodak at everything of interest on the station
platforms, and finally took to reading an English newspaper. All in
vain. They stared at me with that frankness of the continental European,
but they would not be moved to words, not even at sight of the genuine
cigar I ostentatiously extracted from my knapsack. At length I gave up
the attempt and turned to them with some casual remark, bringing in a
reference to my nationality at the first opportunity.
“Ah,” boasted the woman, “I _told_ my husband that you looked like an
Englishman, or something. But he insisted you were a Dane.”
“I wonder if the old fellow got a seat, and some one else to listen to
him—with his _Bürgerkrieg_,” mused the husband, a moment later. “We
Germans have little to boast of, in governing ourselves. Germany should
be divided up between Belgium, France, and England, or be given an
English king.” Apparently he was quite serious, though he may have been
indulging in that crude sarcasm to which the German sometimes abandons
himself and which he thinks nicely veiled. “We are not ripe for a
republic. What we are evidently trying to do is to make ourselves a
super-republic in one jump. The Socialists were against the Kaiser
because he put on too much pomp, but we Germans need that kind of a
ruler, some one who will be stern but kind to us, like a father. The
Kaiser himself was not to blame. At least half, if not a majority, of
the people want him back—or at least another one like him.”
“We surely will have our Kaiser back again, sooner or later,” cried the
woman, in a tone like that of a religious fanatic.
Just then, however, the pair reached their station and there was no
opportunity to get her to elaborate her text. They shook hands heartily,
wished me a “_Glückliche Reise_,” and disappeared into the night.