of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born in Germany,
had been interned and, however large his bank account, was taking
his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some cookhouse
for his ration of cabbage soup. Germans were kind to English friends
personally; but when it came to the national feeling of Germany against
England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg. Here the hate was
born of more than national sentiment; it was of the pocket; of seeing
fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling, once thriving
businesses in suspended animation. There was no moratorium in name;
there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic freemasonry in misfortune
took its place. No business man could press another for the payment of
debts lest he be pressed in turn. What would happen when the war was
over? How long would it last?
It was not quite as cruel to give one’s opinion as two years to the
inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow
Hospital in Berlin. Here, again, the system; the submergence of the
individual in the organisation. The wounded men seemed parts of a
machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganisation less in
evidence than at home, where the thought is: This is an individual
human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his own
theories of life, his own ego; not just a quantity of brain, tissue,
blood, and bone which is required for the organism called man. A human
mechanism wounded at the German front needed repairs and the repairs
were made to that mechanism. The niceties might be lacking, but the
repair factory ran steadily and efficiently at full blast. Germany had
to care for her wounded by the millions and by the millions she cared
for them.
“Two years!”
I was sorry that I had said this to the director, for its effect on
him was like a blow in the chest. The vision of more and more wounded
seemed to rise before the eyes of this kindly man weary with the strain
of doing the work which he knew so well how to do as a cog in the
system. But for only a moment. He stiffened; he became the drillmaster
again; and the tragic look in his eyes was succeeded by one of that
strange exaltation I had seen in the eyes of so many Germans, which
appeared to carry their mind away from you and their surroundings to
the battlefield where they were fighting for their “place in the sun.”
“Two years, then. We shall see it through!”
He had a son who had been living in a French family near Lille studying
French and he had heard nothing of him since the war began. They were
good people, this French family; his son liked them. They would be kind
to him; but what might not the French Government do to him, a German!
He had heard terrible stories--the kind of stories that hardened
the fighting spirit of German soldiers--about the treatment German
civilians had received in France. He could think of one French family
which he knew as being kind, but not of the whole French people as a
family. As soon as the national and racial element were considered the
enemy became a beast.
To him, at least, Berlin was not normal; nor was it to that keeper of
a small shop off Unter den Linden which sold prints and etchings and
cartoons. What a boon my order of cartoons was to him! He forgot his
psychology code and turned human and confidential. The war had been
hard on him; there was no business at all, not even in cartoons.
The Opera alone seemed something like normal to one who trusted
his eyes rather than his ears for information. There was almost a
full house for the “Rosenkavalier”; for music is a solace in time
of trouble, as other capitals than Berlin revealed. Officers with
close-cropped heads wearing Iron Crosses, some with arms in slings,
promenading in the refreshment room of the Berlin Opera House between
the acts--this in the hour of victory should mean a picture of gaiety.
But there was a telling hush about the scene. Possibly music had
brought out the truth in men’s hearts that war, this kind of war, was
not gay or romantic, only murderous and destructive. One had noticed
already that the Prussian officer, so conscious of his caste, who
had worked so indefatigably to make an efficient army, had become
chastened. He had found that common men, butchers and bakers and
candlestick makers, could be as brave for their Kaiser as he. And more
of these officers had the Iron Cross than not.
The plenitude of Iron Crosses appealed to the risibilities of the
superficial observer. But in this, too, there was system. An officer
who had been in several battles without winning one must feel a trifle
declassed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If
many were given to privates then the average soldier would not think
the Cross a prize for the few who had luck, but something that he, too,
might win by courage and prompt obedience to orders.
The masterful calculation, the splendid pretence and magnificent
offence, could not hide the suspense and suffering. Nowhere were you
able to forget the war or to escape the all-pervading influence of
the Kaiser. The empty royal box at the opera, his opera, called him
to mind. What would happen before he reappeared there for a gala
performance? When again in the shuffle of European politics would the
audience see the Czar of Russia or the King of England by his side?
It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when
you left the opera--the new Berlin, taking few pages of a guide
book compared to Paris, which he had fathered in its boom growth.
In front of his palace Russian field guns taken by von Hindenburg
at Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while the
Never-to-be-Forgotten Grandfather in bronze rode home in triumph from
Paris not far away.
One wondered what all the people in the ocean of Berlin flats were
thinking as one walked past the statue of Frederick the Great, with his
sharp nose pointing the way for future conquerors, and on along Unter
den Linden, with its broad pavements gleaming in a characteristic,
misty winter night, through the Brandenburg Gate of his Brandenburg
dynasty, or to the statue of the blood-and-iron Bismarck, with his
strong jaw and pugnacious nose--the statesman militant in uniform with
a helmet over his bushy brow--who had made the German Empire, that
young empire which had not yet known defeat because of the system which
makes ready and chooses the hour for its blow.
Not far away one had glimpses of the white statues of My Ancestors
of the Sièges Allée, or avenue of victory,--the present Kaiser’s own
idea,--with the great men of the time on their right and left hands.
People whose sense of taste, not to say of humour, may limit their
statecraft had smiled at this monotonous and grandiose row of all
the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalised in
marble to the exact number of thirty-two. But they were My Ancestors,
O Germans, who made you what you are! Right dress and keep that line
of royalty in mind! It is your royal line, older than the trees in the
garden, firm as the rocks, Germany itself. The last is not the least in
might nor the least advertised in the age of publicity. He is to make
the next step in advance for Germany and bring more tribute home, if
all Germans will be loyal to him.
One paused to look at the photograph of the Kaiser in a shop window; a
big photograph of that man whose photograph is everywhere in Germany.
It is a stern face, this face, as the leader wishes his people to
see him, with its erectile moustache, the lips firm set, the eyes
challenging and the chin held so as to make it symbolic of strength: a
face that strives to say in that pose: “Onward! I lead!” Germans have
seen it every day for a quarter of a century. They have lived with it
and the character of it has grown into their natures.
In the same window was a smaller photograph of the Crown Prince, with
his cap rakishly on the side of his head, as if to give himself a
distinctive characteristic in the German eye; but his is the face of
a man who is not mature for his years and a trifle dissipated. For a
while after the war began he, as leader of the war party, knew the
joy of being more popular than the Kaiser. But the tide turned soon
in favour of a father, who appeared to be drawn reluctantly into
the ordeal of death and wounds for his people in “defence of the
Fatherland,” and against a son who had clamoured for the horror which
his people had begun to realise, particularly as his promised entry
into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two has
the wiser head.
The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was marooned with
ennui in the face of the French trenches in the West, while all the
glory was being won in the East. Indeed, father had put son in his
place. One day, the gossips said, son might have to ask father, in the
name of the Hohenzollerns, to help him recover his popularity. His
photograph had been taken down from shop windows and in its place,
on the right hand of the Kaiser in the Sièges Allée of contemporary
fame, was the bull-dog face of von Hindenburg, victor of Tannenberg.
The Kaiser shared von Hindenburg’s glory; he has shared the glory of
all victorious generals; such is his histrionic gift in the age of the
spotlight.
Make no mistake--his people, deluded or not, love him not only because
he is Kaiser but also for himself. He is a clever man, who began his
career with the enormous capital of being emperor and made the most of
his position to amaze the world with a more versatile and also a more
inscrutable personality than most people realise. Poseur, perhaps, but
an emperor these days may need to be a poseur in order to wear the
ermine of Divine Right convincingly to most of his subjects.
His pose is always that of the anointed King of My People. He has never
given down on that point, however much he has applied State Socialism
to appease the Socialistic agitation. He has personified Germany
and German ambition with an adroit egoism and the sentiment of his
inheritance. Those critics who see the machinery of the throne may say
that he has the mind of a journalist, quick of perception, ready of
assimilation, knowing many things in their essentials but no one thing
thoroughly. But this is the kind of mind that a ruler requires, plus
the craft of the politician.
Is he a good man? Is he a great man? Banal questions! He is the Kaiser
on the background of the Sièges Allée, who has first promoted himself,
then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany with all the
zest of the foremost shareholder and president of the corporation. No
German in the German hothouse of industry has worked harder than he.
He has kept himself up to the mark and tried to keep his people up to
the mark. It may be the wrong kind of a mark; but we are not discussing
that, and we may beg leave to differ without threshing the old straw of
argument.
That young private I met in the grounds at Charlottenberg, that
wounded man helping with the harvest, that tired hospital director,
the small trader in Hamburg, the sturdy Red Cross woman in the station
at Hanover, the peasants and the workers throughout Germany, kept
unimaginatively at their tasks, do not see the machinery of the throne,
only the man in the photograph who supplies them with a national
imagination. His indefatigable goings and comings and his poses fill
their minds with a personality which typifies the national spirit.
Will this change after the war? But that, too, is not a subject for
speculation here.
Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor
bowed down with the weight of his people’s sacrifice, a grey,
determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up
defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by
the general public in the rear, a mysterious figure, not saying much
and that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather
appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism
of the struggle--such is the picture which the throne machinery has
impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best in
creating a saga.
Always the offensive! Germany would keep on striking as long as she
had strength for a blow, while making the pretence that she had
the strength for still heavier blows. One wonders, should she gain
peace by her blows, if the Allies would awaken after the treaty was
signed to find how near exhaustion she had been, or that she was so
self-contained in her production of war material that she had only
borrowed from Hans to pay Fritz, who were both Germans. Russia did not
know how nearly she had Japan beaten until after Portsmouth. Japan’s
method was the German method; she learned it from Germany.
At the end of my journey I was hearing the same din of systematic
optimism in my ears as in the beginning.
“Warsaw, then Paris, then our Zeppelins will finish London,” said the
restaurant keeper on the German side of the Dutch frontier; “and our
submarines will settle the British navy before the summer is over. No,
the war will not last a year.”
“And is America next on the programme?” I asked.
“No. America is too strong; too far away.”
I was guilty of a faint suspicion that he was a diplomatist.
IX
IN BELGIUM UNDER THE GERMANS
British hospitality to the Belgians--A Dutch refugee camp--The
American Commission for relief--Its generals--From Holland to
Belgium--A forlorn Landsturm guard--Life in a conquered Land--
The overlords in Antwerp--Belgium’s hatred--The problem of
feeding Belgium--American volunteers--“Some experience”--The
conqueror’s net--Relics of the former régime.
No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this
week beyond the sound of the guns with war’s results. It taught the
meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love and
hate. One was in a house with sealed doors, where a family of seven
millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war and
feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of a shrapnel
shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed and docketed for
exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its hot passion.
In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight and I had seen them
pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every class, with
the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying from the
storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for her sake,
opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her homes, both
modest suburban homes and big country houses which are particular about
their guests in time of peace. No British family without a Belgian
was doing its duty. Bishop’s wife and publican’s wife took whatever
Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived without the nature
of contents on the address label. All Belgians had become heroic and
noble by grace of the defenders of Liége.
Perhaps the bishop’s wife received a young woman who smoked cigarettes
and asked her hostess for rouge and the publican’s wife received a
countess. Mrs. Smith of Clapham, who had brought up her children in the
strictest propriety, welcomed as playmates for her dears, whom she had
kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian
children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity
that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith’s mind between parental
responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its
houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that
kind of houses by lifting a window with a jimmy on a dark night. It
was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said: “My Belgian is
charming!” and the other said: “Mine isn’t. Just listen--” But the
English are game; they are loyal; they bore their burden of hospitality
bravely.
The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable because of
the attitude of some refugees, who when they were getting better fare
than they ever had at home, thought that, as they had given their “all”
for England, they should be getting still better, not to mention wine
on the table in temperance families; while there was a disinclination
toward self-support by means of work on the part of certain heroes
which promised a Belgian occupation of England that would last as long
as the German occupation of Belgium. England was learning that there
are Belgians and Belgians. She had received not a few of the “and
Belgians.”
It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded Scarborough
and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the finest and
sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a disinclination to take
any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler who stands on the
street corner ogling girls and the girls who are always in the street
to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible, the tramp, the
selfish, and the cowardly are bound to be in the van of flight from any
sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous sympathy of those
who succour them.
The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at
stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means
loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to
remain with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly
appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a
hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had taken
the Allies’ side and now all individual Belgians expected the Allies to
help them.
England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no
farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated money to
care for them at the same time that it was under the expense of keeping
its army mobilised. Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen op
Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for
the Belgians. Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather
of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage.
They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to
pilfering from one another the clothes which the world’s charity
supplied. The heart was out of them. They were numbed by disaster.
“Are all these men and women who are living together married?” I asked
the Dutch officer in charge.
“It is not for us to inquire,” he replied. “Most of them say that they
have lost their marriage certificates.”
They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp, which
Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by them is
like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets, where
saloons and pawnshops are numerous and the red lights twinkle from dark
doorways.
Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals, who were
organising a different kind of campaign from that which brought glory
to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr. Rose--
that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm among the
mountaineers of the Southern States--should be succouring Belgium, and
yet only natural. Where else should he and Henry James, Jr., of the
Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of the American Red Cross,
be, if not here directing the use of an endowment fund set aside for
just such purposes?
They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern departments of
France occupied by the Germans, investigating conditions. For they were
practical men, trained for solving the problem of charity with wisdom,
who wanted to know that their money was well spent. They had nothing
for the refugees in London, but they found that the people who had
stayed at home in Belgium were worthy of help. The fund was allowing
five hundred thousand dollars a month for the American Commission for
Relief in Belgium, which was the amount that the Germans had spent in a
single day in the destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later
they were to go to Poland; then to Serbia.
With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the
head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded over
Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could
not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They must
have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work was done and
Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that could be done
only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of his force
he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes scholars at
Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.
When Harvard, 1914, who had lent a hand in the American refugees’
trials, appeared in Hoover’s office to volunteer for the new campaign,
Hoover said:
“You are going to Rotterdam to-night.”
“So I am!” said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not
red tape must prevail in such an organisation.
The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of guards
on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home under the
Germans to face humiliation and hunger. This was possible if you had
the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of visés
to accompany a _Besheinigung_, according to the form of “31 Oktober,
1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083,” signed by the German consul at Rotterdam,
which put me in the same automobile with Harvard, 1914, that stopped
one blustery, snowy day of late December before a gate, with Belgium on
one side and Holland on the other side of it on the Rosendaal-Antwerp
road.
“Once more!” said Harvard, 1914, who had made this journey many times
as a despatch rider.
One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of German
authority in Belgium, examined the pass. The conqueror was a good deal
larger around the middle than when he was young, but not so large
as when he went to war. He had a scarf tied over his ears under a
cracked old patent leather helmet, which the Saxon Landsturm must have
taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent the old fellows to keep
the Belgians in order, so that the young men could be spared to get
rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped death.
You could see that the conqueror missed his wife’s cooking and Sunday
afternoon in the beer garden with his family. However much he loved the
Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less. His nod admitted us
into German-ruled Belgium. He looked so lonely that as our car started
I sent him a smile. Surprise broke on his face. Somebody not a German
in uniform had actually smiled at him in Belgium! My last glimpse of
him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward his ears.
Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards. If your
_Passerschein_ was not right, you might survive the first set of
sentries and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some
succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you
before a _Kommandatur_. Then you were in trouble. In travelling about
Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New York I
could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the German consul’s
visa, or of dining at a French restaurant without the French consul’s.
“And again!” said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry. There
was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound case
under a celluloid face. Otherwise, it would soon have been worn out
in showing. He had been warned by the Commission not to talk and he
did not talk. He was neutrality personified. All he did was to show
his pass. He could be silent in three languages. The only time I got
anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in succession
was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.
“My! Wasn’t that a smear! In their new stadium, too! Oh, my! Wish I had
been there!”
When the car broke a spring halfway to Antwerp, he remarked,
“Naturally!” or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not
sound neutral.
While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer
as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the
farm. The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in
the garden were untouched. It happened that the scorching finger of
war’s destruction had not been laid on this little property. In the
yard the wife was doing the week’s washing, her hands in hot water
and her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in
a heavy overcoat. At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly
dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.