My first impression of Berlin was the long cement platform gliding by,
a dazzling brilliance of great arc lamps and a rumbling chorus of song.
Pulling down the compartment window I caught the words "_Wir kämpfen_
_Mann für Mann, für Kaiser and Reich!_" And leaning out I could see
down at the other end of the Friederichstrasse Station a regiment
going to the front.
Flowers bloomed from the long black tubes from which lead was soon to
pour; wreaths and garlands hung from cloth-covered helmets; cartridge
belts and knapsacks were festooned with ferns. The soldiers were
all smoking; cigars and cigarettes had been showered upon them with
prodigal hand. Most of them held their guns in one hand and packages of
delicacies in the other; and they were climbing into the compartments
or hanging out of the windows singing, always singing, in the terrific
German way. Later I was to learn that they went into battle with the
"_Wacht am Rhein_" on their lips and a wonderful trust in God in their
hearts.
I felt that trust now. I saw it in the confident face of the young
private who hung far out of the compartment in order to hold his wife's
hand. It was not the way a conscript looks. This soldier's blue eyes
sparkled as with a holy cause, and as I watched this man and wife I
marveled at their sunny cheer. I saw that each was wonderfully proud
of the other and that this farewell was but an incident in the sudden
complexity of their lives. The Fatherland had been attacked: her man
must be a hero. It was all so easy, so brimming with confidence. Of
course he would come back to her.... You believed in the Infinite
ordering of things that he would.
Walking on down the platform I saw another young man. They were all
young, strapping fellows in their new uniforms of field gray. He was
standing beside the train; he seemed to want to put off entering the
car until the last minute. He was holding a bundle of something white
in his arms, something that he hugged to his face and kissed, while the
woman in the cheap furs wept, and I wondered if it was because of the
baby she cried, while that other childless young wife had smiled.
Back in the crowd I saw a little woman with white hair; she was too
feeble to push her way near the train. She was dabbing her eyes and
waving to a big, mustached man who filled a compartment door and who
shouted jokes to her. And almost before they all could realize it, the
train was slipping down the tracks; the car windows filled with singing
men, the long gray platform suddenly shuffling to the patter of men's
feet, as though they would all run after the train as far as they could
go. But the last car slipped away and the last waving hand fell weakly
against a woman's side. They seemed suddenly old, even the young wife,
as they slowly walked away. Theirs was not the easiest part to play in
the days of awful waiting while the young blood of the nation poured
out to turn a hostile country red.
I thought I had caught the German spirit at Lübeck and at the café in
Hamburg when the hero of the Iron Cross had declined to tell me his
tale; but this sensation that had come with my setting foot on the
Berlin station--this was something different. Fifteen hundred men going
off to what?--God only knows!--fifteen hundred virile types of this
nation of virility; and they had laughed and they had sung, and they
had kissed their wives and brothers and babies as though these helpless
ones should only be proud that their little household was helping their
Fatherland and their Emperor. Self? It was utterly submerged. On that
station platform I realized that there is but one self in all Germany
to-day and that is the soul of the nation. Nothing else matters; a
sacrifice is commonplace. Wonderful? Yes. But then we Americans fought
that way at Lexington; any nation can fight that way when it is a thing
of the heart; and this war is all of the heart in Germany. As we walked
through the station gates I understood why three million Socialists
who had fought their Emperor in and out of the Reichstag, suddenly
rallied to his side, agreeing "I know no parties, only Germans." I felt
as I thought of the young faces of the soldiers, cheerfully starting
down into the unknown hell of war, that undoubtedly among their number
were Socialists. In this national crisis partisan allegiance counted
for nothing, they had ceased dealing with the Fatherland in terms of
the mind and gave to it only the heart.
Even in Berlin I realized that war stalks down strange by-paths.
It forever makes one feel the incongruous. It disorders life in a
monstrous way. I have seen it in an instant make pictures that the
greatest artist would have given his life to have done. It likes to
deal in contrasts; it is jolting....
With General von Loebell I walked across the Doeberitz camp, which is
near Berlin. At Doeberitz new troops were being drilled for the front.
We walked towards a dense grove of pines above which loomed the sky,
threateningly gray. Between the trees I saw the flash of yellow flags;
a signal squad was drilling. Skirting the edge of the woods we came to
a huge, cleared indentation where twenty dejected English prisoners
were leveling the field for a parade ground. On the left I saw an
opening in the trees; a wagon trail wound away between the pines. And
then above the rattling of the prisoners' rakes I heard the distant
strains of a marching song that brought a lump to my throat. Back there
in the woods somewhere, some one had started a song; and countless
voices took up the chorus; and through the trees I saw a moving line of
gray-green and down the road tramped a company of soldiers. They were
all singing and their boyish voices blended with forceful beauty. "In
the Heimat! In the Heimat!" It was the favorite medley of the German
army.
The prisoners stopped work; unconsciously some of those dispirited
figures in British khaki stiffened. And issuing from the woods in
squads of fours, all singing, tramped the young German reserves,
swinging along not fifteen feet from the prison gang in olive drab--"In
the Heimat!" And out across the Doeberitz plains they swung, big and
snappy.
"They're ready," remarked General von Loebell. "They've just received
their field uniforms."
And then there tramped out of the woods another company, and another,
two whole regiments, the last thundering "_Die Wacht am Rhein_," and
we went near enough to see the pride in their faces, the excitement in
their eyes; near enough to see the Englishmen, young lads, too, who
gazed after the swinging column with a soldier's understanding, but
being prisoners and not allowed to talk, they gave no expression to
their emotions and began to scrape their rakes over the hard ground....