evening only a fainter replica of the perfect cloudless day. Toward
nine, however, the sky became overcast and the darkness impenetrable.
This was soon the case inside as well as out, for during an unusually
protracted stop at a small station a guard marched the length of the
train, putting out all its lights. It seemed we were approaching the
“danger zone.” I had been laboring under the delusion that the armistice
which Germany had concluded with her enemies was in force on all fronts.
Not at all. The Poles, it seemed, were intrenched from six hundred to
three thousand yards away all along this section of the line. They had
been there since January, soon after the province of Posen had revolted
against German rule. Almost every night they fired upon the trains, now
and then even with artillery. Sometimes the line was impassable. German
troops, of course, were facing them. Trench raids were of almost nightly
occurrence; some of them had developed into real battles.
Now and again as we hurled on through the night there were sounds of
distant firing. It was only at Nakel, however, that we seemed in any
personal danger. There the Poles were barely six hundred yards away, and
between the time we halted at the station and got under way again at
least a hundred shots were fired, most of them the rat-a-tat of
machine-guns and all of them so close at hand that we unconsciously
ducked our heads. The train apparently escaped unscathed, however, and
two stations farther on the guard lighted it up again, with the
announcement that danger was over. We rumbled on into Bromberg, where I
descended toward midnight. Soldiers held the station gate and subjected
every traveler—or, more exactly, his papers—to a careful scrutiny before
permitting him to pass. My own credentials they accepted more readily
than those of many of their fellow-countrymen, some of whom were herded
into a place of detention. As I stepped out through the gate, another
soldier thrust into my hand an _Ausweis_ permitting me to remain on the
streets after dark, for Bromberg was officially in a state of siege.
When I entered the nearest hotel I found that unofficially in the same
condition. A drunken army officer, who was the exact picture of what
Allied cartoonists would have us believe all his class, was prancing
about the hotel office with drawn sword, roaring angrily and threatening
to spit on his needle-pointed saber every one in the room. The possible
victims were two half-grown hotel clerks, ridiculous in their
professional evening dress, and a thin, mottled-faced private soldier,
who cowered speechless in different corners. I was inside before I
noticed the disturbance, and pride would not permit me to retreat. I
took station near a convenient stool and studied the exact degree of
uncertainty of the bully’s legs, with a view to future defense. But for
some reason he took no notice of me and at length lurched out again into
the street, cursing as he went.
I owe it to the goddess of truth to state that this was the one and only
case I ever personally saw of a German officer living up to the popular
Allied conception of his caste. On the contrary, I found the great
majority of them quiet, courteous and gentlemanly to a high degree, with
by no means so large a sprinkling of the “roughneck” variety as was to
be found among our own officers in Europe. Which does not mean that they
were not often haughty beyond reason, nor that they may not sometimes
have concealed brutal instincts beneath their polished exteriors. But
while we are on the subject, let me read into the record the testimony
of their own fellow-countrymen, particularly that of many a man who
served under them.
“Our active officers,” would be the composite answer of all those I
questioned on the subject, “were excellent. They still had something
_adel_ about them—something of the genuine nobility of the old knights
from which the caste sprang. Their first and foremost thought was the
fatherly care of their men—rendered with a more or less haughty
aloofness, to be sure—that was necessary to discipline—but a genuine
solicitude for the welfare of their soldiers. Above all”—and here,
perhaps, is the chief point of divergence between them and our own
officers of the same class—“they were rarely or never self-seeking. Our
reserve officers, on the other hand, were by no means of the same high
character. One so often felt the _Kaufmann_—the soul of a merchant
underneath. Many of them were just plain rascals, who stole the presents
that came addressed to their soldiers and looted for their own personal
benefit. Then there were many who, though honest and well-meaning
enough, had not the preparation required for so important an office.
They were teachers, or scholars, or young students, who did not realize
that a quiet voice is more commanding than a noisy one. The great
drawback of our military system, of our national life, in fact, under
the monarchy, was the impenetrable wall that separated us into the
compartments of caste. Old _Feldwebels_ who had served in the army for
twenty years were refused positions which they could have filled to
excellent advantage, in war-time, because they were not considered in
the “officer class”; and there were set over them men half their own
age, school-boy officers, in some cases, who were barely eighteen, and
who naturally could not have the training and experience which are
required of a lieutenant. Sixty per cent. of our active officers were
slain, and many others were not able to return to the line. Only 30 per
cent. of our reserve officers were killed, with the result that before
the war ended a man was lucky to have a superior whom he could honor and
unquestioningly obey.”
It was in Bromberg that I came into personal contact with more of the
class in question than I had in any other city of the Empire. Not only
were soldiers more numerous here, but I purposely “butted in” upon a
half-dozen military offices, ostensibly to make sure that my papers were
in order, really to feel out the sentiment on the peace terms and
measure the sternness of martial law. But though I deliberately
emphasized my nationality, not once did an officer show any resentment
at my presence. In fact, most of them saw me to the door at the end of
the interview, and bowed me out with all the ceremony of their exacting
social code. If the verdict that had just been issued in Paris had burst
like a shell among them, they showed no evidence of panic. The official
day’s work went deliberately on, and the only comment on the peace terms
I succeeded in arousing was a quiet, uncompromising “Quite unacceptable,
of course.”
The city itself was as astonishingly placid in the midst of what an
outsider would have supposed to be exciting times. Being not only in a
state of siege, but having just heard that it was soon to transfer its
allegiance to another race, one was justified in expecting a town as
large as Trenton or San Antonio to show at least some ripples on its
surface. I looked for them in vain. It was Sunday, just the day for
popular demonstrations in Germany, yet not only was there no sign
whatever of rejoicing among the Polish population, but nothing even
suggesting the uprising of protest among the German residents which had
been so loudly prophesied. The place resembled some New England factory
town on the same day of the week. Groups of Polish-looking young men,
somewhat uncomfortable and stiff in their Sunday best, lounged on the
street-corners, ogling the plump Polish girls on their way to church.
Strollers seemed interested only in keeping to the shaded side of the
street, youths and children only in their games. Tramways rumbled slowly
along as usual—and, before I forget it, their female conductors wore
breeches; such shops as were habitually open on Sunday seemed to be
doing their customary amount of business. The whole town was as staid,
heavy, and unenthusiastic as the German character.
In the face of a wide divergence of opinion among its own inhabitants it
was hard for a stranger to decide which of the two races predominated in
Bromberg. The Germans asserted that only 40 per cent. of the population
were Poles, and that many of them preferred to see things remain as they
were. The Poles defied any one to find more than twenty Germans among
every hundred inhabitants, or to point out a single member of their race
who sincerely wished to keep his allegiance to the Fatherland. Street
and shop signs were nearly all in German, but that may have been due to
legal requirement. The rank and file of the populace had a Polish look,
yet they seemed to speak German by choice. Moreover, there is but scant
difference of appearance between Teutons and Poles, particularly when
they have lived their entire lives together in the same environment. On
the wall of a church I dropped into during morning service there were
five columns of names, forty-five each, of the men who had
“Patriotically sacrificed their lives for a grateful Fatherland.” At
least one half of them ended in “ski,” and in one column alone I counted
thirty unquestionably Polish names. But then, it was a Catholic church,
so there you are again. Perhaps the most unbiased testimony of all was
the fact that the little children playing in the park virtually all
spoke Polish.
I drifted into conversation with an intelligent young mechanic taking
his Sunday ease in a _Bierhalle_. He turned out to be a Pole. As soon as
he was convinced of my identity he shed his mask of commonplace remarks
and fell to talking frankly and sincerely. I do not speak Polish, hence
the rulers of Bromberg might have been startled to hear the statements
that were poured into my ear in their own tongue. Yet my companion
discussed their shortcomings and the war they had waged, quite openly,
with far less circumspection than a similar criticism of the powers that
be would have required in France or the United States at the same date.
“You don’t hear much Polish on the streets, do you?” he began. “But if I
could take you into the homes you would find that the street-door is the
dividing line between the two tongues. In the family circle we all stick
to the old language, and the memory of the ancient nation that is just
being resurrected has never been obscured. We are not exactly
_forbidden_ to speak Polish in public, but if we do we are quite likely
to be thumped on the head, or kicked in the back, or called “dirty
Polacks.” Besides, it is never to our advantage to admit that we are
Poles. You never know, when you meet a man, whether he is one or not. I
feel sure the waiter there is one, for instance, yet you see he
carefully pretends to understand nothing but German. We are treated with
unfair discrimination from the cradle to the grave. When I first went to
public school I could not speak German, and there was hardly a day that
a gang of little _Deutschen_ did not beat me to tears. I used to go home
regularly with lumps as big as walnuts on my head. Even the teacher
whipped us for speaking Polish. When it came time to go to work we could
only get the hardest and most poorly paid jobs. The railways, the
government offices, all the better trades were closed to us. If we
applied for work at a German factory, the first thing they asked was
whether we were Catholics and Poles. In the courts a “ski” on the end of
a name means a double sentence. Our taxes were figured far more strictly
than those of the Germans. In the army we are given the dirtiest jobs
and most of the punishments. At the front we were thrown into the most
dangerous positions.
“The Germans could have won the Poles over if they had done away with
these unfair differences and treated us as equals. They are an efficient
people and some of their ways are better than our ways, but they cannot
get rid of their arrogance and their selfishness. They are
short-sighted. I spent four years at the front, yet I never once fired
at the enemy, but into the air or into the ground. The majority of Poles
did the same thing. You can imagine the ammunition that was wasted.
There is not much work at home, yet you will not find one Pole in a
hundred of military age in the German volunteer army. You see many of
them in uniform on the streets here—all those redheaded young fellows
are Poles—but that is because they are still illegally held under the
old conscription act. Shortsightedness again, for if trouble ever
starts, the garrison will eat itself up without any one outside
bothering with it. No Pole of military age can get into the province of
Posen, not even if he was born there. In Berlin there are thousands of
young Poles wandering around in uniform, half starved, with nothing to
do, yet who are not allowed to come home.
“No, there has been very little mixture of the two races. Intermarriage
is rare. I know only one case of it among my own acquaintances. It is
not the German government that is opposed to it—on the contrary—but the
Church, and Polish sentiment. The Catholics are against the old order of
things and want a republic; it is the Protestants who want the Kaiser
restored”—here one detected a religious bias that perhaps somewhat
obscured the truth. “The old-German party wants to fight to the end. If
they had their say Poland would never get the territory that has been
awarded her. Sign? Of course they will sign. They are merely stalling,
in the hope of having the blow softened. Nor will the government that
accepts the treaty be overthrown. The Social Democrats are strong, very
strong; they will sign and still live. The Poles? With very few
exceptions they are eager to join the new empire. Paderewski has become
a national hero. Especially are the peasants strong for the change. For
one thing, it will fatten their pocketbooks. The Germans pumped them dry
of everything. They had to deliver so many eggs per hen, buying them if
the fowls did not lay enough. Or the guilty hen had to be turned over
for slaughter. It usually went into the officers’ messes. Each farmer
was allowed only one rooster. The same exactions ruled among all the
flocks and herds. Thousands of girls were sent into the pine forests to
gather pitch for turpentine. No, I do not believe they were mistreated
against their will, except perhaps in a few individual cases, no more
than would happen anywhere under similar circumstances. Nor do I think
the Germans wantonly destroyed trees by ‘ringing’ them. What they did,
probably, was tap them too carelessly and too deep.
“All this talk about Bolshevism overspreading Germany is nonsense. The
Bolshevists are poor, simple fellows who have nothing to lose and
perhaps something to gain, many of them Chinese laborers brought to
Russia in the time of the Czar, fatalists who think nothing of throwing
their lives away—or of taking those of others. The other day the
Bolshevists decreed in one of the cities they have captured that the
bourgeois should move out into the outskirts and the proletariat take
all the fine houses. Then they named a ‘poor day’ during which any one
who had no shoes could go into all the houses and take a pair wherever
he found two pairs. Can you imagine the orderly, plodding Germans
subscribing to any such doctrine as that? I certainly cannot, for I have
lived all my life among them and I know how they worship _Ordnung_ and
_Gemütlichkeit_.
“Yes, we have several Polish newspapers published here in Bromberg. But
even if you could read them it would not be worth your while, for they
do not mean what they say. They are doctored and padded and censored by
the German authorities until the only reason we read them is for the
local gossip of our friends and acquaintances. If it were not Sunday I
would take you to meet the editor of one of them, and you would find
that he speaks quite differently from what he writes in his paper, once
he is sure he is not talking to a German spy.”
The mechanic told me all this without once showing the slightest
evidence of prejudice or bitterness against the oppressors of his race.
He treated the matter with that academic aloofness, that absence of
personal feeling, which I had so often been astounded to see the Germans
themselves display toward the woes that had come upon them. Perhaps a
lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful
when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish
character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any
rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners,
ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a
get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it
manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg
outwardly a picture of peace and contentment.
The half-dozen Teuton residents with whom I talked seemed rather
apathetic toward the sudden change in their fortunes. The shopkeepers,
with one exception, announced their intention of continuing business in
Bromberg, even if it became necessary to adopt Polish citizenship. The
exception was of the impression that they would be driven out, and was
not yet making any plans for the future. A station guard, on the other
hand, denounced the decision of Paris with a genuine Prussian wrath.
“Every railway employee is armed,” he asserted, “and _die Polacken_ will
not get anything that belongs to the Fatherland without a struggle. It
is absurd,” he vociferated, “to expect that we will surrender a genuine
German city like Bromberg to a lot of improvident wastrels. Let them
keep the part about Posen and south of it; there the Poles are in the
majority. But here”—as usual, it seemed, the section to which they were
entitled was somewhere else.
A lawyer whom I found sunning himself on a park bench before the
fantastic bronze fountain discussed the problem more quietly, but with
no less heat.
“You Americans,” he perorated, “the whole Allied group, do not
understand the problem in its full significance. We look upon the Poles
very much as you do upon your negroes. They have much the same
shiftlessness, much the same tendency to revert to the semi-savagery out
of which we Germans have lifted them. Now just imagine, for the moment,
that you had been starved to submission in a war with, say, Mexico,
Japan, and England. Suppose a so-called ‘peace conference’ made up
entirely of your enemies, and sitting, say, in Canada, decreed that
Mississippi, Florida, Alabama—that half a dozen of your most fertile
Southern states must be turned over to the negroes, to form part of a
new negro nation. It is possible that your people in the North, whom the
problem did not directly touch, might consent to the arrangement. But do
you for a moment think that your hot-blooded Southerners, the white men
who would have to live in that negro nation or escape with what they
could carry with them, would accept the decision without springing to
arms even though it was signed by a dozen Northerners? That is exactly
our case here, and whether or not this alleged Peace Treaty is accepted
by the government in Berlin, the Germans of the East will not see
themselves despoiled without a struggle.”
That evening I attended an excellent performance of Südermann’s _Die
Ehre_ in the subsidized municipal theater. Tickets were even cheaper
than in Coblenz, none of them as high as four marks, even with war tax,
poor tax, and “wardrobe.” The house was crowded with the serious-minded
of all classes, Poles as well as Germans; the actors were of higher
histrionic ability than the average American town of the size of
Bromberg sees once a year. Yet equally splendid performances were
offered here at these slight prices all the year round. As I strolled
hotelward with that pleasant sensation of satisfaction that comes from
an evening of genuine entertainment, I could not but wonder whether
this, and those other undeniable advantages of German _Kultur_, whatever
sins might justly be charged against it, would be kept up after the
Poles had taken Bromberg into their own keeping.
As to the walking trip through these eastern provinces which I had
planned, fate was once more against me. I might, to be sure, have set
out on foot toward the region already amputated from the Empire, but in
the course of an hour I should have had the privilege of walking back
again. The German-Polish front was just six kilometers from Bromberg,
and a wandering stranger would have had exactly the same chance of
crossing its succession of trenches as of entering Germany from France a
year before. The one and only way of reaching the province of Posen was
by train from the village of Kreuz, back along the railway by which I
had come.
The place had all the appearance of an international frontier, a
frontier hastily erected and not yet in efficient running order.
Arrangements for examining travelers and baggage consisted only of an
improvised fence along the station platform, strewn pellmell with a
heterogeneous throng bound in both directions, and their multifarious
coffers and bundles. The soldiers who patrolled the line of demarkation
with fixed bayonets were callow, thin-faced youths, or men past middle
age who had plainly reached the stage of uselessness as combat troops.
All wore on their collars the silver oak-leaves of the recently formed
“frontier guard.” Their manner toward the harassed travelers was either
brutal or cringingly friendly. The Germans in civilian garb who examined
passports and baggage were cantankerous and gruff, as if they resented
the existence of a frontier where the Fatherland had never admitted that
a frontier existed. They vented their wrath especially against men of
military age who wished to enter Polish territory—and their
interpretation of their duties in that respect was by no means
charitable. Among others, a wretched little dwarf past fifty, whom a
glance sufficed to recognize as useless from a military point of view,
even had his papers not been stamped with the official _Untauglich_, was
wantonly turned back. Many a family was left only the choice of
abandoning the attempt to reach its home or of leaving its adult male
members behind.
The churls allowed me to pass readily enough, but rescinded their action
a moment later. Once beyond the barrier, I had paused to photograph the
pandemonium that reigned about it. A lieutenant bellowed and a group of
soldiers and officials quickly swarmed about me. Did I not know that
photography was forbidden at the front? I protested that the station
scenes of Kreuz could scarcely be called military information. What of
that? I knew that it was within the zone of the armies, did I not? Rules
were rules; it was not the privilege of every Tom, Dick, and Harry to
interpret them to his own liking. A lean, hawk-faced civilian, who
seemed to be in command, ordered me to open my kodak and confiscated the
film it contained. If I set great store by the pictures on it, he would
have it developed by the military authorities and let me have those that
proved harmless, upon my return. I thanked him for his leniency and
strolled toward the compartment I had chosen. Before I had reached it he
called me back.
“Let me see your papers again,” he demanded, in a far gruffer tone.
He glanced casually at them, thrust them into a pocket of his coat, and
snapped angrily: “Get your baggage off the train! I am not going to let
you through.”
It was plain that he was acting from personal rather than official
motives. Probably he considered my failure to raise my hat and to smile
the sycophant smile with which my fellow-passengers addressed him as an
affront to his high Prussian caste. Fortunately he was not alone in
command. A more even-tempered official without his dyspeptic leanness
beckoned him aside and whispered in his ear. Perhaps he called his
attention to the importance of my credentials from Wilhelmstrasse. At
any rate, he surrendered my papers after some argument, with an angry
shrug of the shoulders, and his less hungry-looking companion brought
them back to me.
“It has all been arranged,” he smirked. “You may take the train.”