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VILLA ELSA
_A Story of German Family Life_
BY
STUART HENRY
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT 1920, BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
TO
Pat and Anna
IN LOVING TOKEN OF OUR WINTER'S
CONVERSATIONS ON THE GERMANS
FOREWORD
This narrative offers a gentle but permanent answer to the problem
presented to humanity by the German people. It seeks to go beyond
the stage of indemnities, diplomatic or trade control, peace by
armed preponderance. These agencies do not take into account Teuton
nature, character, manner of living, beliefs.
Unless the Germans are changed, the world will live at swords'
points with them both in theory and in practice. Whether they are
characteristically Huns or not, it should be tragically realized
that something ought to be done to alter their type. Their minds,
hearts, souls, should be touched in a direct, personal, intimate
way. There should be a natural relationship of good feeling, an
intelligent and _lived_ mutual experience, worked up, brought
about. A League of Nations, of Peace, inevitably based on some sort
of force, should be followed by a truly human programme leading to
the amicable conversion of that race, if it is at heart unrepentant,
crafty, murderous.
In the absence of any particular heed being paid to this underlying,
fundamental subject, the present pages suggest for it a vital
solution that seems both easy and practical and would promise to
relieve anxiety as to an indefinitely uncertain, ugly future ahead
of harassed mankind.
How shall the German be treated in the present century and beyond?
To try to answer this aright, it is obviously necessary to know what
the German is--what he is really like. To know him at his best, in
his truest colors, is to live with him in his most normal condition,
and that is at his fireside, surrounded by his family. This aspect
has been the least fully presented during the war. What the Teuton
military and political chieftains, clergymen, professors, captains
of industry, editors and other men of position have said, how they
have conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity, is
notoriously and distressingly familiar. But what the ordinary,
educated German of peaceful pursuits, staying by his hearthstone
far behind and safe from the battle line, thought and wished to
say, has been beyond our ken. There has been no way to get at him
or hear from him as to what lay frankly in his mind.
His leaders loudly proclaimed themselves to be as terrifying as Huns
and unblushingly gloried in this profession. Has he agreed or has he
silently disagreed? Has he too wished this or has he been unwilling?
Is he essentially a Hun, are his family essentially Huns, or are
they in reality good and kindly people like our people? Are they
temporarily misled?
The humble German families of education who are hospitable, who sing
and weep over sentimental songs in their homes, whose duties are
modest and revenues small, who have never been out of their
provinces, who have had no relations with foreigners and could have
no personal cause for hatred--have they been so bloodthirsty about
killing and pillaging in alien lands?
Villa Elsa contains a family immune from any foreign influence and
matured in the most regular and unsuspecting Teuton way. The German
household is the most thoroughly instructed of all households. Its
members are disciplined to do most things well. How can it then be
Hun in any considerable degree? Impossible, said the nations, and so
they remained illy prepared against a frenzied onslaught. But a
shocked public has beheld how readily the most erudite of mankind,
as the Germans were generally held to be, could officially,
deliberately and repeatedly as soldiers, singly and _en masse_,
act like their ancestors--the barbarians of the days of Attila.
These are all puzzling queries which this story attempts to
illuminate and solve by its pictures and observations of the
life of such a modest and typical Teuton home in 1913 and 1914.
Admittedly too much light, too much study, cannot be given to
the greatest issue civilization as a whole has faced.
Villa Elsa is but Germany in miniature. In the significant
character, habits and activities of this household may be found
the true pith and essence of real Germanism as normally developed.
This Germanism appears ready to continue after the War to be the
malignant and would-be assassin of other civilizations. It is,
therefore, tragically important to find and act on the right
answer to the question:
Is there any possible way to make the Germans become true,
peace-loving friends with us--with the rest of mankind?
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. TRIUMPHANT GERMANY IN 1913 1
II. DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES 6
III. GARD KIRTLEY 11
IV. VILLA ELSA 19
V. FAMILY LIFE 29
VI. THE HOME 36
VII. GERMAN LOVING 46
VIII. GERMAN COURTSHIP 54
IX. A JOURNALIST 64
X. SPIES AND WAR 71
XI. GERMAN WAYS 78
XII. HABITS AND CHILDREN 86
XIII. DOWN WITH AMERICA! 94
XIV. AFTERMATH 106
XV. MILITARY BLOCKHEADS 113
XVI. A LIVELY MUSICIAN 120
XVII. IMMORALITY AND OBSCENITY 125
XVIII. THE NAKED CULT 134
XIX. JIM DEMING OF ERIE, PAY 145
XX. AN AMERICAN VICTORY 152
XXI. A PEOPLE PECULIAR OR PAGAN? 160
XXII. MAKING FOR WAR 168
XXIII. SOCIAL ETIQUETTE 178
XXIV. THE COURT BALL 186
XXV. FRITZI AND ANOTHER CONVERSATION 192
XXVI. SOME OF THE LESS KNOWN EFFICIENCY 200
XXVII. THE IMPERIAL SECRET SERVICE 210
XXVIII. JIM DEMING'S FATE 218
XXIX. WINTER AND SPRING 229
XXX. VILLA ELSA OUTDOORS 238
XXXI. A CASUAL TRAGEDY 247
XXXII. A GERMAN MARRIAGE PROPOSAL 256
XXXIII. A WAITRESS DANCE 263
XXXIV. CHAMPAGNE 272
XXXV. RECUPERATION 279
XXXVI. THE GERMAN PROBLEM. AN ANSWER 285
XXXVII. A GERMAN "GOTT BE WITH YE" 294
XXXVIII. A JOURNEY 302
XXXIX. THE TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE 313
XL. THE END OF A LITTLE GAME 323
XLI. ARE THEY HUNS? 329
XLII. THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS? 336
XLIII. THE TEUTON PROBLEM. A SOLUTION 347
VILLA ELSA
CHAPTER I
TRIUMPHANT GERMANY IN 1913
In the late summer of 1913 a quiet American college man of
twenty-three, tall, lean, somewhat listless in bearing, who had
been idling on a trip in Germany without a thought of adventure,
was observing, without being able to define or understand, one of
the most remarkable conditions of national and racial exhilaration
that ever blessed a country in time of ripest peace.
He had never been out of America, and supposed his Yankee people,
with all their wide liberty, contemplated life with as much
enjoyment as any other. But in that land which is governed with
iron, where (as Bismarck said) a man cannot even get up out of his
bed and walk to a window without breaking a law, Gard Kirtley was
finding something different, strange, wonderful, in the way of
marked happiness. It pulsated everywhere, in every man, woman and
child. It seemed to be a sensation of victory, yet there had been
no victory. It appeared to reflect some mighty distinctive human
achievement or event of which a whole race could be proud in
unison. There had been nothing of the sort.
And yet it was there, a certain exuberance. The people, with heads
carried high, quickly moving feet and pockets full of money, were
enlivened by a public joyousness because they were humans and,
above all, because they were Germans. It seemed a joy of human
prestige, of wholesale well-being, of an assuredly auspicious
future. Multitudes of toasts were being drunk. The marching and
counter-marching of soldiers looked excessive even for Germany. A
season of patriotic holidays was apparently at hand. Festivals,
public rites, celebrated the widespread exultation. The whole
country conducted itself as on parade, _en fête_.
Wages were higher and comforts greater than ever known there. For
the first time chambermaids often drank champagne and wore on their
heads lop-sided creations of expensive millinery with confident
awkwardness--creations which they said came from Paris. The chimney
sweeps had high hats and smoked good tobacco which they may have
thought came from London. For the imported was the high water mark
of plenty in Germany as always elsewhere, though she claimed to make
the best goods.
The scene should not be painted in too high colors--colors too
fixed. To the careless observer it doubtless appeared little
different from the annual flowering forth of the German race in
its short summer season. Always at that time were the open gardens
lively, the roses blooming with the crude, dense hues that the
Teutons like, and all the folk pursuing their busy tasks and
vigorous pleasures with a sort of goose-step alacrity.
But the closer, more sensitive onlooker felt something more in
1913--something widely organized, unified, puissant, imperial
indeed, such as, he may have imagined, had not existed since the
days of the great emperors in Rome. What the Germans told all comers
was that they had the best of governments, and that no nation had
been so thoroughly, soundly and extensively prosperous.
For each citizen read in his daily paper of successful and growing
Teuton activities in the most distant parts of the earth--in ports,
regions and among peoples whose names he had never heard before and
could not pronounce. At breakfast his capacious paunch and his
wife's fat, flowing bosom expanded with pride in hearing of some new
far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany
brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's
safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and
strength. Never had investments brought the German such high
rates. Never had speculation been so rife and withal so uniformly
profitable.
As for industry, Deutschland was a colossal beehive. If Frederick
the Great started the beehive, William the Second was increasing its
size to unbelievable proportions. Insignificant villages everywhere
contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing
goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time,
seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted
precisely into the whole national plant.
It was as if the Teuton knew that other races must soon stand with
their backs to the wall and that now was the moment to redouble
effort to capture still more trade and reduce the rest of the world
to an acknowledged state of submission.