1
The three girls went to a little hotel that had been a favorite resort
of Gisela's in times of peace when she had felt an imperative need of
the high solitudes and eternal snows. They planned a week's rest, and a
fortnight or more of mountain climbing, dismissing the world war from
their minds as far as possible. But their gentle plans were upset on the
eighth day after their arrival, when at the end of an hour's hard
skating, clad in the bright sweaters and caps of old, Gisela suddenly
stopped short and returned the hard stare of two young women who had
drawn apart and were evidently discussing her. That they were Americans
Gisela recognized at a glance, but for a moment she saw them through a
curtain of fire and smoke and shrieking shells and dying groans, so
deep in the background of her memory were the people and events of her
merely personal life. One of the young women was very tall, with a slim
dashing figure, fine fair hair, keen cold gray eyes, a haughty nostril
and upper lip: a beauty of the patrician American type. The other was
shorter but also excessively thin, with dark dancing eyes, a warm color,
a coquettish nose and pouting lips--which somehow invoked the complacent
visage of the late Herr Graf Niebuhr--and a brilliant smile. In a moment
Gisela recognized Ann Howland Prentiss and Kate Terriss, now Mrs. Tolby.
This American friend of her childhood had married an American whose
business kept him in London, and her path and Gisela's had never crossed
since her finishing days in Berlin; although she had corresponded with
Lili for two or three years and knew the family history in vague
outline.
Gisela skated directly over to them and held out her hand to Kate. "It
is a long while," she said, "but perhaps you remember me--"
"Do I? Ann will not believe me--that you are Gisela von Niebuhr not
Döring. What a lark that was to run off to America and fool everybody! I
wish I had come across you. It would have been quite dramatic to tear
off the mask of the governess and reveal the junker. I think it was too
stupid of you, Ann, that you didn't guess."
"I noticed many inconsistencies," said Mrs. Prentiss dryly. She added,
holding out her hand with a charming smile: "But later, I was so proud
to have known Gisela Döring, that personal curiosity seemed impertinent.
How we have missed your writings these last dreadful years!"
Then all three began to talk at once and Gisela gathered that Mrs. Tolby
had nursed behind the British lines in France since the early days of
the war, and that her old friend, Mrs. Prentiss, had joined her a few
months since. Kate asked innumerable questions about the other girls,
particularly Mariette, whom she remembered as a Germanic blonde of warm
coloring, the coldest eyes, the most subtly rigid and ruthless mouth
she had ever seen. She had found some difficulty picturing her as a Red
Cross nurse and was not surprised to hear that she was in charge of an
enormous organization for the supply of cantines. Of her executive
ability and quick determination there could be no doubt--as she told Ann
Prentiss later.
In the excitement and exhilaration of this purely feminine
conversation--which soon included Heloise and Mimi--the two parties
forgot the gory chasm that divided them. When they dropped suddenly at a
chance word to the present that gripped even these glittering snow
fields with its red insatiable fingers, Kate, as ever, was equal to the
formidable moment and cried out, snapping her fingers at the blue ether
so tranquilly aloof from warring hosts:
"Forget it! For to-day, at least. What are you thinking about so hard,
Ann?"
"I'll tell you later. Let us go in and have tea and then skate again. I
noticed how well my step suited Countess Gisela's."
Ann Howland, as the wife of an eminent politician, had long since
cultivated the art of mental suppleness and had learned to fascinate the
most diverse intelligences and egos. Gisela, who was always warmly
responsive to personal charm when not too obviously insincere, enjoyed
the hour on the ice so exclusively devoted to her by the distinguished
American and went to bed that night well content to bury the war during
this period of necessary rest, grateful for this fresh current that
swept her for the moment into one of those old backwaters of mere
femininity. Mrs. Prentiss had not related a single anecdote of the
front, nor alluded to the fact that she was a Red Cross nurse.
But she and Kate Terriss sat up until midnight. They were both women
capable of seizing those rare opportunities for service that flit past
so many intelligent women lacking initiative, and here was one that the
most clear-thinking man would have envied. It was a piece of
unbelievable luck; Gisela Döring was not only here to their hand in a
relaxed and friendly mood, but she possessed charm combined with a
great intelligence and an iron will: she was far more the obvious leader
than they had inferred from her work, and they guessed something of the
powerful influence she must quietly have obtained over the women of
Germany. Mrs. Prentiss had by no means approved of her at an earlier
period, for she had shrewdly suspected that it was the handsome German
governess, not the high-born Irma, who thwarted her designs upon the
most attractive "foreigner" she had ever met. But even if she had
cherished a grudge, and her life had been far too happy and successful
for that, she would have been so profoundly grateful to Gisela for
saving her from the anomalous and wretched position of other modern
American women married to medieval Germans, that she felt almost as
great a desire to serve her as civilization in general.
When the two Americans parted for the night a methodical program had
been worked out, with every date at command and every fact in damning
sequence. The result of this momentous conference was that none of the
five went to bed on the following night, but sat about a large oval
table in the common sitting-room of Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Tolby, and
wrangled until dawn.
2
The challenge was given by the Americans and accepted by the Germans,
whose curiosity had been carefully pricked, and all had agreed that no
matter how intensely distasteful any argument might be they would not
separate for at least eight hours, and that there should be as little
"hot stuff" (quoting Mimi Brandt) as possible.
The avowed object of the Americans was to prove conclusively that
Germany, carrying out a deliberate program, had precipitated the war in
1914, believing Russia to be deliquescent, France riddled with
syndicalism, and Britain on the verge of civil war; consequently that
the exact moment had come for the swift execution of her scientifically
wrought plan for world dominion.
The three German girls, deep and many as were their causes for
resentment and disgust, had clung fast to the belief in their country's
defensive attitude in the face of a gigantic conspiracy, and were not
pried apart from it without hours of argument, hot and resentful on the
one side, cool, precise, and logical on the other. But those acute
German brains responded to the high intelligence of their opponents and
to their manifest honesty. Moreover, it was indisputable that from the
beginning the Americans had been in a position to know every side and
detail of the ghastly story, while the Germans, confined within their
own narrow borders and taught that the foreign newspapers were a tissue
of "strategic lies," had been wholly dependent upon their government for
"facts."
During this long debate Gisela sat at the head of the table, rigid and
watchful, when she was not fiercely arguing; Mimi Brandt sprawled in an
easy chair, satirical and slangy, enveloped in smoke; Heloise, very pale
and the first to be convinced, sat with her little hands clenched
against her cheek bones; Ann Prentiss, unshakenly cool quick and
precise; the more brilliant Mrs. Tolby flashing her beacon light into
recesses darkened these three years by systematic lies, but incapable of
the final stupidity.
That long argument need not be reproduced here. All the world has made
up its mind about Germany, knows her far better than as yet she knows
herself. It was the deliberate effort of the Americans to force these
three intelligent Germans, one of them a leader of the first importance,
to realize that their country stood to the rest of the world for lying,
treachery, cruelty, brutality, degeneracy, bad sportsmanship, ostrich
psychology; above all, that she had forfeited her place among modern and
honest nations.
When these facts had been hammered in, Mrs. Prentiss moved on to the
two cardinal facts for whose elucidation the rest had been a mere
preamble: that the Central Powers were beaten and knew it, but were
determined to go on sacrificing the manhood of the country, reducing the
population to the ultimate miseries of mind and body rather than yield;
and that the only hope of obtaining mercy from the Entente Allies in the
inevitable hour of surrender was to dethrone the Hohenzollerns and
establish a Republic. Otherwise as a nation they would cease to exist
and their last fate would be infinitely worse than their present. A
German Republic would be welcomed into the family of nations and receive
a friendly and helping hand from every one of the great adversaries,
whose prestige and wealth were still unshaken, and who all desired to
preserve the balance of power in Europe. Above all might they rely upon
the United States of America, the friendly hints of whose President had
been systematically distorted by the anxious Pan-Germans still in the
saddle; who would cheerfully witness the loss of every drop of the
people's life blood rather than their own power.
A conquered empire that had been hypnotized to the end by the monster
criminals of history, whose word no man would ever take again, would be
a mere collection of enslaved States for generations to come; the
conquerors, having given them their choice, would show no mercy.
Britain could not be starved. The submarine war, whatever its
devastations, and the vast inconveniences it had caused, was a failure.
And the colossal wealth of the United States in money, in food, in men!
Who knew her resources better than Gisela, who had lived in the country
for four years and found it an absorbing study, who had continued to
read American books, newspapers, and reviews up to the outbreak of the
war? Well, they were all at the disposal of democracy; and as the
Entente Allies, including the United States, were already many times
stronger than Germany, how could they fail to win in the end, no matter
how many millions of lives on all sides Germany continued to shovel
into Moloch?
All of these three clever German girls had been more or less prepared to
hear Germany proved a liar. They knew from British wounded that London
was neither a fortified city nor reduced to ashes; also that all the
Zeppelin raids on defenseless towns put together had been of less
strategical value to Germany than the taking of one village in the war
zone; she had merely piled up a mountain of hatred and contempt which
must be leveled by the quick repudiation of her people if they would
regain their lost intercourse with a triumphant world. Like all the
other women who had nursed near the front and knew the truth, they
translated into their own cynical vernacular such grandiose collocations
as "Strategic retreats" from that of the Battle of the Marne to those
which had been occurring periodically on the Western front since the
beginning of the Somme offensive of 1916.
3
Gisela's mind was complex and subtle, but it was also honest. When it
yielded a point, it yielded audibly. It was during the preliminary
discussion that she exclaimed:
"It is true--certain things come back to me--Mimi, open the window. The
air is blue and we are all hardy and can stand the night air. It was
after the Agadir incident that I felt a change. I say felt because I was
so absorbed in my work that I had no inclination for world politics and
never discussed them. Up to that time I had never heard a hint of war
for aggression on the part of Germany.... While, as far back as I can
remember, it was taken for granted there would be a great war some day,
I doubt if any but the military party really believed in it. We thought
the time had passed for real wars, that we were far too highly
civilized. Of course I knew that the military party to which my father
belonged would have welcomed a war, for war was their profession, their
game, their excuse for being, and I heard more or less talk among my
brothers of Pan-Germanism; but still I imagined that it was merely a
defensive Teutonic ideal, just as our oppressive standing army was a
necessity owing to our geographical position. My brother Karl said
once--it comes back to me, although I had quite forgotten it--that it
was futile for the military caste to try to work up a war, because every
moneyed man in the Empire--financiers, merchants, manufacturers, all the
rest--never would hear of it. The country was too prosperous. Our wealth
was growing at a pace which even the United States could not rival, and
poverty was practically eliminated. That is the reason no hint made any
impression on me. It seemed to me that we were the most fortunate and
advanced nation in Europe and had only to wait for our kultur to pervade
the earth.
"But--after Agadir--I seem to look back upon a slowly rising tide,
muttering, sullen, determined--even in Bavaria the old serenity, the
settled feeling, was gone--war was discussed as a possibility less
casually than of old--"
"I recall a good deal more than that," interrupted Mimi. "Remember that
I was the daughter of a manufacturer, and the wife, so-called, of a
merchant. They were always grinding their teeth--and from about the time
you speak of--over the wrongs of Germany. What the wrongs were I never
could make out, and I am bound to say I did not listen very attentively,
being absorbed in my own--but it would seem that Germany being the
greatest country in the world was somehow not being permitted to let the
rest of the world find it out--"
"It is all simple enough, now that I have the key. Germany tried to
bully France, and not only was France anxious to avoid war but Britain
showed her teeth. Germany was not then prepared to fight the world and
was forced to compromise. France gave her a slice of the Kongo in
exchange for Germany's consent to a French Protectorate in Morocco. Of
course--after that it must have been evident to all the business brains
of Germany that however great and prosperous the Empire might be she was
not strong enough to dictate to Europe; nor presume to demand any more
of the great prizes than she had already.
"In other words, she was shown her place. It was also more than possible
that her aggressive prosperity might one of these days excite the
apprehension of Great Britain, who would then show more than her teeth.
Gradually the idea must have permeated, taken possession of the minds of
men who had vast fortunes to increase or lose, that sooner or later they
must fight for what they had and that it were better perhaps to strike
first, at a moment they might choose themselves--however little they
might sympathize with the ambitions of the Pan-German Party for supreme
power in Europe--"
"Perhaps nothing," said Mimi. "They made up their minds to do it and
they did it. It is as plain as daylight. I'd forgive them, too, if
they'd won in six months, as they were so sure they would. What I don't
forgive them for is that they have proved themselves the most criminal
fools unhung. I'm glad that I am a Bavarian, and that Prussia, whom we
have always so hated and despised that we have never turned the lions
about on the Siegesthor, should be the prime offenders, humiliating as
it may be that we fell for their lies and got into this rotten mess. But
go ahead, Mrs. Prentiss. What's your next? Gee, but you can hand it out.
You must have kept tab since August 1st, 1914."
"I took merely an intelligent American woman's interest," said Mrs.
Prentiss, momentarily haughty. "And I spent the first two years and a
half in Washington, where I often knew more than the newspapers; at all
events where I was constantly in the society of thinking men. Also
honest men, for war was the last thing we wanted, until our honor became
too deeply involved to permit us to hold aloof and fatten on your misery
any longer. Also, to be frank, our interests."
The fact which impressed the Germans and reduced all that had gone
before to a heated academic discussion, was that Germany was beaten, and
that the United States embargo would reduce the Central Empires to
actual starvation, not merely devitalizing subnourishment; combined with
their own certainty that the Teutonic Powers would go on fighting, under
the lash of Prussia, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of loyal German
and Austrian boys, plunge countless more families into hopeless grief,
doom all the children in the land to sheer hunger and tuberculosis.
Starvation! That was the inevitable fate of Germany if she prolonged the
war. And for what? Prostration, physical, financial, economic. To suffer
for a generation, at least, the fate of the outlaw, mangy dogs nosing
among rotten bones, kicked by the victors whenever they stood on their
hind legs and whined for mercy.
And the Americans were prepared to pour into France and Britain billions
of dollars and millions of men and incalculable tons of food and
ammunition.
4
The two Americans had a deeper purpose in forcing this long argument
than hammering the truth into those intelligent but Prussianized brains.
As the hours wore toward the dawn they observed with satisfaction that
Gisela's face grew whiter and grimmer, until finally it set itself in
rigid lines. Her mouth was hard, her eyes expanded as if they saw far
beyond the crystal mountains glittering before the open windows. Her
mass of dark hair had fallen, and Mrs. Tolby whispered to Mrs. Prentiss
that she looked like the Medusa in the Glyptothek in Munich, lovely but
relentless.
Gisela was no longer the radiant and voluptuous beauty who had incurred
the secret wrath of Ann Howland at Bar Harbor. These years of war,
during which she had known hard physical labor and often insufficient
nourishment, more rarely still a full night's sleep, had taken her
lovely curves of cheek and form, her brilliant color. She was thin,
almost gaunt; but the dissolving of the flesh had given her intellect,
her force of character, her aspiring spirit, their first real
opportunity to stamp her features. She would always be handsome, with
her long dark eyes and masses of soft dark hair, her noble outlines; and
her womanly sympathies had preserved their balance between a
devitalizing horror on the one hand and callousness on the other; but it
was a spiritualized beauty, devoid of that appeal to sex of which she
had been, even after she had buried the memory of Franz von Nettelbeck
and all desire for love, femininely tenacious, however disdainful.
Mimi was the first to speak after a long interval of silence.
"You've got me, all right. I've been digging up a few more things. We're
up against it for keeps, and it's get out or starve out. I've a notion
to sneak off to my relations in Milwaukee. Mrs. Prentiss, I'll go as
your maid--"
"You'll do nothing of the sort!" Gisela's voice cut through the ripples
of laughter which always greeted Mimi's redundant slang. "You'll go back
to Germany with me and do your part in putting an end to this war!" All
but Heloise half arose, but she sat staring at that hard drawn face as
if in telepathic communication.
"Can you do anything--really?" gasped Kate. "We have been hoping for a
revolution, but had given up the idea--until after the war. Your
Socialists either eat out of the Kaiser's hand or sputter and fizzle
out. And all your able-bodied men are at the front--"
"But not the women."
"The what?"
"You have both lived in Germany. You know that German women are big
strong creatures--what you call husky. They are stronger than many of
the men because they have led more decent lives. The men at the front
are hopeless as revolutionary material--at present. They are hypnotized.
They have been taught not to think. They are sick of the war, they
suffer when they come home and see their women reduced to shadows, or go
to the cemeteries to visit the graves of their little brothers and
sisters; but the teaching of a lifetime: the omnipotence of their
sovereigns, whom they innocently believe to rule by divine right, sends
them back submissive, patient, sad. I know what you had in mind when you
brought us here to convince us that our country was not only responsible
for the war, but beaten. You hoped we would somehow bring about the
assassination of the Kaiser and the Crown Prince Ruprecht of
Bavaria--all the great generals. Is it not so? That would, assuredly,
break down the morale of the army, give it a more smashing blow than any
it has received even on the Western front. Well, it cannot be done. Even
I could not obtain a pass into Great Headquarters. You might as well
expect a British soldier to be permitted to saunter over from his lines
and make sketches of the German trenches. Those men guard
themselves--day and night, at every point--as if haunted with the fear
of assassination. Perhaps they are. And remember that the downfall of
Cæsarism means the downfall not only of junkerism but of all the other
kings and Grand Dukes--who are powerful and wealthy in their own
domains. They have no doubt cursed Prussia daily since September, 1914,
but now they all sink or swim together. They will force Germany to die a
thousand deaths in the hope of a miracle that will save a class to which
the rest of poor Germany is a breeding-ground for their mighty armies. I
belong to that class. One of my brothers is on the staff of the Crown
Prince of Prussia. Take my word for it: the solution of Germany's
deliverance is not to be found in the simple antidote of political
assassination, for only men bound up in the success of the German arms,
or their terrorized creatures of our own sex, are near enough to throw
the bomb."
"It was rather a commonplace idea," said Kate, gracefully, "but what can
you do?"
"Quite aside from the women of the industrial and lower classes
generally, who have given the municipalities serious trouble with their
food riots--far more than you know about--the German women altogether
are restless and dissatisfied. They were promised a short and triumphant
war. They are daily more skeptical of promises. They have suffered death
in life. All that early exaltation--exhilaration--has gone long since.
They shut their teeth and endure because they still believe the cunning
official lies--that Britain must be starved by the submersibles, that
France's man power is nearly exhausted, that the United States cannot
prepare an army in less than two years and needs all her trained men at
home to quell the riots of the masses who disapprove of the war. They
are taught to believe that ultimate victory for Germany is
inevitable--that it is merely a question of months.
"But--convince them that Germany cannot win, that their own conquest is
inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and
personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon
their own conscienceless rulers--"
"Jimminy!" cried Mimi. "That's the dope. Pound it into them that the
Enemy Allies will give them a square deal as a Republic and put them
under the steam-roller with the Hohenzollerns if they stand pat, and
you'll get them. No more hungry and tubercular babies, no more babies
born with a cuticle short in theirs. They'd rise as one man--I
mean--damn the men!--as one woman."
Heloise left her seat like a whirlwind and flung herself at Gisela's
feet. Her face was flaming white. She looked like a sibyl. "I knew it
would be you!" she cried in her sweet bell-like tones. "I have had
visions of you leading us out of this awful war. You have only to talk
to the women--your word was gospel to them before the war--they too will
have the vision and they will make it fact."
"Yes--but--" interrupted the practical Ann. "How shall you go to work?
It is a stupendous idea. But you never could keep such a propaganda
movement a secret. Some one would be sure to betray you. German women
are perfect fools about men."
"No longer. Nor were they for several years before the war as
subservient (inwardly) to men as they had been in the past. Far from it.
And now! They have suffered too much at the hands of men. They have no
illusions left. Love and marriage are ghastly caricatures to women who
have lived in a time when men are slaughtered like pigs in massed
formation; when their little boys are driven to war; when young
girls--and widows!--are forced to bring more males into the world with
the sanction of neither love nor marriage; when those too young for the
trench or the casual bed wail incessantly for bread. Oh, no! The German
man's day of any but legal dominion is over. Of course there is always
the danger of spies and traitors, but--"
"The wall for you at sunrise if you get caught," cried Mimi, with
another subsidence of enthusiasm.
"If that happen to be my destiny. Can any one experience what we have
done during these three years and not be as fatalistic as the men in the
trenches? I'd rather die before a firing squad after an attempt to save
my wretched country than live to see it set back a hundred years. But I
refuse to believe that I shall be betrayed or that I shall fail. _That_
I believe to be my destiny. For a long time the idea has been fumbling
in the back of my mind, but it lacked the current which would switch it
into my consciousness. You two have supplied the current."
Kate threw back her head and gave her merry, ringing laugh. "What
delicious irony! Germany defeated by its women! When I think of your
august papa, dear Gisela! That kulturistically typical, that naïve yet
Jovian symbol of all the arrogance and conceit, the simple creed of
Kaiserism über alles, and will-to-rule, that hurled this colossus on
the back of Europe--"
"Quite so. You of all present know that I received the proper training
for the part I am about to play. If all goes well we women will erect a
tablet to my father's memory in the cathedral at Berlin." She leaned
down and patted the rapt face of Heloise, then scowled at Mimi. "May I
not count on you?" she asked sternly.
"May you? Well, say, what are you taking me for? I'm more afraid of you
than I am of a firing squad, and anyhow I seem to know we'll win out.
I'm going to carry a club in case I mix up with Hans. But what's your
plan?"
"This is neither the time nor place to work out a campaign. The first
move will be to train lieutenants in every State in Germany--women whom
we know either personally or through correspondence. You, Heloise, will
return to Munich at once and make out the lists. We shall have no
difficulty obtaining permits to travel all over the Empire, for it will
never enter the insanely stupid official head to doubt whatever excuse
we may choose to give. Not only are we German women and therefore sheep,
but we are Red Cross nurses.... And remember that nearly all the men who
are still in the factories are Socialists--and that women swarm in all
of those factories--"
"Marie!" cried Heloise. "How she will work! She has the confidence of
the Socialist party--both wings--wherever she is known; and she can
talk--like a torrent of liquid fire."
"And the next chapter?" asked Mrs. Prentiss curiously. "You led the
German women in thought for five years. Shall you have a Woman's
Republic, with you as President?"
"Certainly not. It is not in the German women--not yet--to crave the
grinding cares of public life. We shall make the men do the work, and we
will live for the first time. Delivered from Cæsarism and junkerism and
with the advanced men of Germany at the head of a Republic, I should
feel too secure of Germany's future to demand any of the ugly duties of
government--although the women will speak through the men. Their day of
silence and submission is forever passed--"
"Same here," remarked Mimi, stretching and yawning. "Let's go to bed. I
have smoked fifty-three cigarettes and my voice is ruined. Nevertheless
I shall be a great prima donna, and you, Gisela, can chuck propaganda,
and write romance. The world will devour it after these years of
undiluted realism written in red ink on a black page. Look at the sun
trying to climb out of that mist and give us his blessing."
"I shall go for a walk," said Gisela, "and I shall go alone."