DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES
Thus the Germans, in 1913, felt how supreme their country was or was
speedily becoming. Not only their newspapers but their educators,
their pastors and, more than all, their military and political
leaders told them that a place above the rest of mankind had been
reached. The pride, the assurance, pervading the land was the stiff
and hardy efflorescence of this universal conclusion. And the
Teutons had earned and therefore merited it all, for no one,
nothing, scarcely even Nature, had lent a helping hand.
German women knew they were the best housekeepers, wives, mothers,
dressers, dancers. Never had they been so to the fore. Never had
they had so much money to spend for clothes. Never had they
promenaded so proudly to martial music or waltzed so perspiringly
with the fashion-plate officers whom they adored.
The children were paragons of diligence and promise. In their school
books and college text books everything German was lauded in the
superlative; everything foreign was decried as inferior,
undesirable. Nearly every human discovery, invention, improvement,
was somehow traced to a Teuton origin. Even characteristic German
vices were held to be better than many virtues in other lands.
The young person grew up to believe that the Rhine was the finest of
rivers, the mountains of the Fatherland were the most celebrated in
song and story, its lakes the most picturesque, its soil the best
tilled. He was properly stuffed with the indomitable conviction, the
aggressive obsession, that the fittest civilization _must_ prevail.
And the army! Always the army--that bulwark, that invincible force!
Hundreds of thousands of civilians apparently regretted they were
not back in the barracks, following the noblest of occupations as
soldiers for the supreme War Lord. The army represented admitted
perfection. Foreign observers were united in naïvely attesting its
impeccableness. It was ready to the last shoe button, to the last
twist of its waxed mustache. But ready for what? Few outside of
Germany appeared to think of asking. The army was taken to be simply
Teuton life and of no more ulterior significance than the national
beer.
The admission was also general at home and abroad that the German
Government was the most free from graft and the most thorough. In
Germany the kings and princes were paid homage as models of wisdom
and virtue, and the Kaiser was believed to be walking with God, hand
in hand, palm to palm. In token of the mystic union between Emperor
and people, Hohenzollern monuments were seen rising in all parts of
the Empire in greater quantity, amid greater thanksgivings. These
_Denkmals_ were growing huger, more thunderous in appearance, and
served the double purpose of keeping the populace in a state of
admiring, unquestioning awe and expressing fulminating Bewares! to
other races. In every home, factory, retail shop, public place, was
the Kaiser's picture, with his trellised mustache, and his devout
eyes cast with a chummy comradeship up to heaven.
All the foregoing explanations accounted in part for a glorious
increase in noise among a people that does everything loudly. The
national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and
orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the
night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the
horns of the bloody chase--the _cors de chasse_ of the legendary
Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder
of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big
marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish
angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting
Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the
hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of
their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it
was proper to gorge themselves like the human gods they were. Even
the most servile took on a conscious air of being of a regal
species.
In this wise, the German, like Cain, the competent iron-worker, was
treading the earth with resounding footsteps. Over his bullneck and
under his spiked hat he had naturally come to look upon himself as a
super-being. While the American watched ball games, the Englishman
played golf and the Frenchman wrote to his loved one, the Teuton was
keeping himself hardened for war, and toiling like the systematic
beaver in up-building national industries that were so swiftly
dominating all others. To say the least, this intense people were
strenuously perfecting an intensive and powerful civilization such
as never had been seen.
So--as Gard Kirtley was finding and yet failing to explain to
himself--expectancy, undescribable and splendid, was in the air
beyond the Rhine. And there was one special toast drunk to it all
with ever more loudly clinking glasses--Der Tag! Such was triumphant
Germany, the triumphant Vaterland, in 1913--foretasting a portentous
future; pregnant with colossal success; swollen with a hundred years
of victories and growth; as sure of its prowess and might as were
the swaggering gods of its Valhallas.
Imperial Deutschland über Alles!