But at Lübeck nothing happened--nothing to us. A train load of
wounded had just come in and our hearts jumped at the sight of the
men in the gray-green coats of the firing line, slowly climbing the
long iron steps from the train platforms. Hurrying, we saw them go
clumping down a long, airy waiting room and as they approached
the street their hobbling steps suddenly quickened to the sharper
staccato of the canes upon which they leaned. Hurrying too, we saw
there a vague mass of pallid faces in a dense crowd; some one waved a
flag;--it stuck up conspicuously above that throng;--some one darted
forth;--"_Vater!_"--"_Liebes Mütterchen!_"
Past the burly _Landsturm_, who was trying his utmost to frown his
jolly face into threatening lines that would keep back the crowd, a
woman was scurrying. One of the big gray-green wounded men caught her
in his arm--the other arm hung in a black sling--and she clung to him
as though some one might take him away, and because she was a woman,
she wept in her moment of happiness. Her _Mann_ had come home....
Forgetting the dinner we were to have eaten in the Lübeck station, we
finally heeded a trainman's warning and turned back to our car. There
remained etched in my mind the line of pallid, apprehensive faces, the
tiny waving flags, the little woman and the big man. It was my first
sight of war.
From Lübeck to Hamburg the ride was uneventful. The hour was not late
and beyond remarking that the towns through which we passed were
not as brilliantly lighted as usual, the courier could from the car
window observe no difference between the Germany of peace and of war.
Here and there we noticed bridges and trestles patroled by _Landwehr_
and outside our compartment we read the handbill requesting every
passenger to aid the government in preventing spies throwing explosives
from the car windows. From the conductor we learned that there had
been such attempts to delay the passage of troop trains. Whereupon
we congratulated ourselves upon buying the conductor, as we had the
compartment to ourselves. One thought of what would have happened had
there been an excitable German in with us and while the train was
crossing a bridge, we had innocently opened a window for air!
It was almost ten when the close, clustered lights of Hamburg closed in
against the trackside and we caught our first glimpse of the swarming
_Bahnhof_. Soldiers everywhere. The blue of the Reservists, the
gray-green of the Regulars--a shifting tide of color swept the length
of the long platforms, rising against the black slopes of countless
staircases, overrunning the vast halls above, increasing, as car after
car emptied its load. And then, as at Lübeck, we saw white bandages
coming down under cloth-covered helmets and caps, or arms slung in
black slings; the slightly wounded were coming in from the western
front.
All this time we had forgotten the Englishman, and it was with a start
that we recalled him.
"If he spots us," advised my companion, "we've got to hand him the cold
shoulder. Mark my words, he'll try to trail along to the same hotel and
stick like a leech."
Again he was right. At the baggage room the Englishman overtook us,
suggesting that we make a party of it--he knew a gay café--first going
to the hotel. He suggested the _Atlantic_. Bluntly he was informed we
were visiting friends, but nothing would do then but we must agree to
meet him in, say, an hour. Not until he found it an impossibility did
he give us up and finally, with marvelous good nature, he said good
night. The last I saw of him was his broad back disappearing through a
door into a street.
The courier nudged me.
"Quick," he whispered, "look,--the man going out the next door."
Before I could turn I knew whom he meant. I saw only the man's profile
before he, too, disappeared into the street; but it was a face
difficult to forget, for it had been close to me at Warnemunde; it was
the face of the police spy.
"I told you they purposely let him get through," continued my friend.
"That police fellow must have come down on the train from Warnemunde. I
tell you it's best not to pick up with any one these days. Suppose we
had fallen for that Englishman and gone to a café with him to-night--a
nice mess!"
It was in a restaurant a few hours later that I saw my first Iron
Cross, black against a gray-green coat and dangling from a button.
In _Bieber's_, a typical better class café of the new German type,
luxurious with its marble walls and floors, and with little soft rugs
underfoot and colored wicker tables and chairs, one felt the new spirit
of this miracle of nations. On the broad landing of a wide marble
staircase an orchestra played soldier songs and above the musicians,
looking down on his people, loomed a bust of Wilhelm II, _Von Gottes
Gnaden, Kaiser von Deutschland_. About him, between the flags of
Austria-Hungary and Turkey, blazed the black, white, and red, and
there where all might read, hung the proclamation of August to the
German people. We had read it through to the last line: "_Forward with
God who will be with us as he was with our Fathers!_"--when we heard
an excited inflection in the murmurings from the many tables--"_Das
Eiserne Kreuz!_" And we saw the officer from whose coat dangled the
black maltese cross, outlined in silver. His cheeks flushed, proud
of a limping, shot-riddled leg, proud of his Emperor's decoration,
but prouder still that he was a German; he must have forgotten all of
battle and suffering during that brief walk between the tables. Cheers
rang out, then a song, and when finally the place quieted everybody
stared at that little cross of black as though held by some hypnotic
power.
So! We were Americans, he said when we finally were presented. That
was good. We--that is--I had come to write of the war as seen from the
German side. Good, _sehr gut_! He had heard the Allies, especially the
English,--_Verfluchte Englanderschwein!_--were telling many lies in the
American newspapers. How could any intelligent man believe them?
In his zeal for the German cause his Iron Cross, his one shattered leg,
the consciousness that he was a hero, all were forgotten. Of course
I wanted to hear his story--the story of that little piece of metal
hanging from the black and white ribbon on his coat--but tenaciously he
refused. That surprised me until I knew Prussian officers.
So we left the man with the Iron Cross, marveling not at his modesty
but that it embodied the spirit of the German army; whereas I thought
I knew that spirit. But not until the next night, when I left Hamburg
behind, where every one was pretending to be busy and the nursemaids
and visitors were still tossing tiny fish to the wintering gulls in
the upper lake; not until the train was bringing me to Berlin did I
understand what it meant. At the stations I went out and walked with
the passengers and watched the crowds; I talked with a big business man
of Hamburg--bound for Berlin because he had nothing to do in Hamburg;
then it was I faintly began to grasp the tremendous emotional upheaval
rumbling in every Germanic soul.