Chapter 3

"In consequence of the victorious news of the first weeks, those remaining at home had become accustomed to constant victories, and the pause in the news of the battlefield of the West is a great trial of patience." Long may that trial last! On the whole we ought to be thankful that we are in Hesse and not in Prussia. The Hessians are a simple, kindly people, pleasant, and good tempered. I have known Germany well for eighteen years. When first we travelled in the Fatherland I found each Duchy, or Kingdom, or Principality, devoted to its own particular Ruler, and little outside it mattered to its people. Nowadays there are no Hessians or Würtembergers, not even Saxons or Bavarians, but all are Germans, and for one photograph of the Grand Duke of Hesse and his Duchess you will see here one hundred of "Unser Kaiser" and "Unsere Kaiserin." They have become Imperialists, and the ambitious spirit which animates them is shown by the act of a soldier at Liège who chalked up on a wall: "Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, Emperor of Europe."

I have now 2_d._ left in the world, and have not taken my inhalation for two days, not being able to pay for it. The money I telegraphed for has not yet come, and life seems very difficult! I think of the old lines:

"'Tis a very good world we live in, To lend, or to spend, or to give in; But to beg, or to borrow, or get a man's own, 'Tis the very worst world that ever was known."

_September 19th._--At the eleventh hour and when I seemed at the end of my resources, help came from a most unexpected quarter! I can never cease to be grateful for the goodness and kindness which relieved my distress. The Germans look downcast, the Russians jubilant. How paternal this Government is no one who has not lived in Germany can imagine. For instance, above the nearest pillar box I saw a notice written "Don't forget address and stamps!"

_September 20th._--Our passports are now in the hands of the military authorities at Frankfort, and Mr. Ives, the American Vice-Consul, is doing all in his power to get us leave to go. The Superintendent of the Inhalatorium is most kind and sympathetic. She inquired why I had not been there for three days, and when I told her "Gar kein Geld" (no money) was the cause, she cried with real feeling, "Schrecklich!" (terrible). Any thing to do with money or the want of it appeals to the Teutonic mind, although the Germans sneer at us for being a nation of shopkeepers. There are two words we hope never to hear again, "Kultur" and "Unser." "Unser Deutschland," "Unser Kaiser," "Unser Kultur." How weary and trite are these! What an extraordinary mixture the Germans are, brave, conceited, sentimental, prosaic, patriotic, and yet no people so soon lose their national characteristics, and become citizens of another country as Germans. Many of their intellectual poses are absolutely morbid. They adore Ibsen as a playwright and despise Goldsmith and Sheridan; they worship Gauguin, and the school of Impressionists, and have little appreciation nowadays for pre-Raphaelitism. They are intensely and truly musical, and it is amazing, taking into consideration their extraordinary lack of humour, that they should be such accomplished students of Shakespeare, but of real wit or humour the German possesses not an atom. Take, for instance, the modern novels of Suderman, of Rudolph Herzog, of Rudolph Stratz, of Bernard Kellerman, of Paul Heyse, and you will find intense seriousness, tragedy, pathos, masterly drawing of character, and absolutely no fun from cover to cover. As for the "Fliegende Blätter," the German "Punch," it is the sickliest imitation of humour possible to conceive. Foremost in science, the German is yet a neophyte in the graces and arts of life. What cooking! what clothes!

_September 22nd._--If we may believe such good news we are to be released from this irksome life, and set at liberty next Saturday. Our joy is much damped, however, by hearing that none of the men are to be allowed to leave, and, of course, their wives stay with them. Mr. Ives has made a special journey to Berlin on behalf of our poor men, but the authorities are obdurate.

People say that the loss of life in this terrible war is beyond belief as far as the Germans are concerned. To hide this the Emperor requests that no one shall wear mourning for the dead until the war is over. Also, no complete catalogues of casualties are issued, only lists for each kingdom, or duchy, so that the bulk of the people have no idea of the waste of life. The wounded being so numerous, the doctors now have little time to attend to them on the spot, and therefore they are put into trains and sent off to "Lazaretts" sometimes before even their wounds are washed. A Belgian lady who had a special police permit to go to Frankfort, returned this afternoon in a train full of wounded soldiers. One of these was put into her carriage. He had been badly shot in the arm; his sleeve was soaked with blood, and that had coagulated; his wound had never been washed, and French earth was still on his boots, and yet he had been sent in this condition from Rheims to Giessen!

_September 23rd._--Terrible news! A telegram was posted up in the town this morning, saying that three English "Panzerkreuzers" had been sunk by one German submarine. Of course the church bells pealed, and the flags came out, and the children sang "Nun danket alle Gott," because 950 brave Englishmen had gone under. We are much depressed, and our depression is aggravated by the want of occupation here. We dare not sketch for fear of being "verhaftet" (arrested). It is no good writing because every scrap of paper will be taken from us on the frontier; nobody I know plays bridge, and so I read and walk all day long. Miss H---- tells me that a rude young clerk in the "Löwen-Apotheke" refused to talk English to her this morning, "You will have to learn German now, because we shall be in London within a fortnight," said he! No German I have yet known foresees any other result of this war but success. The Fatherland Commissariat, according to the Italian papers, leaves much to be desired. The unfortunate soldiers are almost starving, and often live for days together on raw carrots, turnips, herbs, or any other vegetable they can root up out of the ground. The doctors are puzzled because men have died of such seemingly slight wounds. One case seemed so incomprehensible that an autopsy was decided on, and a raw root with fragments of earth upon it was found in the poor creature's stomach. The Russians left at 5 a.m. this morning, men and women. It is more than hard that our poor men should be left behind. Lady M----, who has been ill, and her daughter, an invalid lady, and her maid, were given special passes to go a couple of days ago. Miss M---- and Miss G---- went to the police station armed with these passes, and requested to have their passports back. "The Demon" curtly refused. "But you _must_ give them to us," said Miss M----. "Don't say _müssen_ to me!" said "the Demon," "_bitten_ is the word!" (Don't say _must_ to me, _beg_ is the word).

_September 24th._--Joyfully packing! A last meeting was held at the "Prince of Wales' Hotel" where kind Mr. S---- presided, and we all received instructions for our journey, and our long detained passports!

Fifty women and children go. We sleep in Frankfort, and cross from Flushing to Folkestone. Oh! that terrible mined sea, and the "untersuchung" of the Frontier. I tremble for this Diary, all letters I have destroyed.

FRANKFORT, _September 25th._--We are still in the enemy's country of course, but have come out of our prison Altheim. All were early at the Bahn-Hof. There for the last time, please God! we found our old horror the Chief of Police. He had a long paper in his hand, and read out our names; "Hamilton?" "Here!" "Your passport?" (which he scrutinised as if he had never seen such a thing before), and so on. As we got our precious papers back we passed through the barrier, where our tickets were clipped, and on to the platform above. The train when it came in was crammed with soldiers, and we were advised to wait two hours for the next, but (to a woman) we all preferred travelling third, or even fourth class, rather than remain another hour where we had suffered so much. Miss G---- told me afterwards that she had travelled with two German men, who cursed England up and down, using the most horrible language about her.

Presently a wounded soldier came into the carriage, and they asked him where he had been fighting. "On the Western Frontier," said he.

"With the French?"

"Yes."

"Did you see the English?"

"No."

"Of course not! They had all run away. Cowards, cowards!"

These are the things which make life so unendurable in an enemy's land. I was sent here to the "Hessicher-Hof," which, although it masquerades under another name, I had no difficulty in recognising as the former "Englischer-Hof." Miss H---- went to the "Hotel Bristol," and when she got there found over the door the one word "Hotel." What we women should have done without the able committee who arranged all details for us with such kindness and thoroughness, I cannot imagine.

_September 28th._--There were few tears shed when we steamed out of Frankfort two days ago on our way to home and freedom. It was wonderful to feel that we might talk above a whisper in the railway-carriage; amazing that we had not to scrutinize carefully every corner to be sure no spies lurked there, and most delightful of all to know that we had got beyond the reach of the Demon of the Burg-Strasse. Egotistically enough we went over in retrospect our anxieties, disappointments and miseries. Should we ever get rid of that evil shadow, we wondered, which had darkened so cruelly two weary months of our lives!

Now and then we looked out of the windows with distaste--agreed that the outskirts of Frankfort were hideous with their obtrusive and insistent collection of factory chimneys; and shuddered at the distant and beautiful background of mountain and forest, to us so teeming with painful memories. We exclaimed at the unsightliness of the huge skeleton lettering proclaiming to all the world that a _maschinen-Fabrik_ was below. Even when we entered a bucolic region of modest gardens and saw nothing more aggressive than cabbages and turnips, we turned away from the sight with aversion. Yet the villages are picturesque enough, and so are the towns. Timber-framed and gabled houses, steeply pitched red roofs and stunted grey and mossy church spires, certainly make no unpleasing picture. In happier days I have admired the grape-vines meandering over the whitewashed cottages, and marvelled at the monotony of taste which furnished every window-ledge with exactly four pots of scarlet geraniums. Now, nothing pleased us that was German; scenery, architecture or people! "This," we said to ourselves, is "the sunny Rhineland through which we are passing, and we see no obvious signs as we go by of the struggle which is devastating Belgium and menacing France." At the first station, however, we realised that Germany was indeed at war. Red Cross nurses seemed everywhere. Long tables were spread with snowy cloths and bore coffee urns, zwiebacks, hörnchen and huge bowls of steaming soup ready for the poor wounded as they pass through. Now and then pale bandaged faces looked out at us from passing trains, and men on crutches hobbled by, and the horrors of mutilating war came home to us all. At Goch we had to show our passports, and have our luggage examined, but the reality proved not nearly so bad as our imaginings, and on the whole the officials were kind and courteous compared to our Altheim demon. The sun was setting blood-red behind a distant line of black forest when we left Goch and our enemies and imprisonment behind us and entered the Land of Promise.

We had all been saddened in the morning to learn that Mr. Ives' strenuous efforts to get permission for the men left behind to go soon, had met with a curt refusal from the Commandant at Frankfort. "When England returns our men, not before, and she had better be quick about it," said he. But how true is Rochefoucauld's cynical epigram--"Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'Autrui!" Even our sympathy with, and sorrow for, those left in Altheim could not damp the joy we felt to be free again; and when we quitted Goch, the German frontier station, I thought how blessed would be that day when "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid."

GERMAN TRAVEL NOTES

"TAKIN' NOTES"

He who knows his Rhine and loves it must take of its charms in small doses, or satiety is the outcome. There are those, of course, who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, "'Tis all barren"; but the ordinarily intelligent traveller may find much to delight and interest on the banks of the Rhine, always provided that he suits his mood to his environment, and takes but little of Rhine scenery at a time. For surely between Coblentz and Bingen there is an iteration as regards castles and ruins which is downright wearisome. Do we not between these points find Lahneck, Marksburg, Sterrenberg, Liebenstein, The Mouse, Rheinfels, The Cat, Schönburg, Gutenfels, The Pfalz, Stahleck, Furstenberg, Hohneck, Sooneck, Falkenburg, Rheinstein, and Ehrenfels?

Moreover, there is an affinity of form and colour and, indeed, of situation between all these which produces the effect of perpetual repetition. And we owe Byron a grudge for having written such trite words as "the castled crag" in relation to the Rhine, since no commonplace mind of the present day acquainted with his works but has fallen back on "the castled crag" to describe Drachenfels or Marksburg or Rheinfels, because, forsooth, its own English is too limited to supply a better adjective. So it is that conventional and inadequate English is perpetuated and individual force and expression are lost because people accept the ideas of others and will not seek language to convey their own.

All of which above prosing is the result of a day on the Rhine when the thermometer registered 74° to 84° in the shade, and a white vapour hid the banks of the river from Köln till close on Bonn. At Bonn a huge party of "personally-conducted" American tourists came on board. Their sharp, keen, eager, shrewd faces and shrill voices proclaimed their nationality at the outset. They were all obviously outside the pale of Society, and their thirst for information and keen interest in their surroundings were amazing. One learned before long that they had "done" the Paris Exhibition and meant to have a "look in" at most European countries before sailing from Naples. They took the whole ship into their confidence before a quarter of an hour had passed; and we shared alike in thrilling intelligences conveyed through the medium of Baedeker's pages. "The castled crag" resounded from one end of the boat to the other; and as for Roland and Hildegunde, the tragedy of their lives was discussed, and exclaimed over, and lamented, until, happily, a bend of the river hid Nonnenwerth from sight.

In emphatic contrast to the nervous alertness of the Yankee was the spectacle of the middle-class German and his ways. He sat by his plain, stout, ill-dressed Frau, with his back to the scenery, and ate. Occasionally he spoke in monosyllables: more often he drank; but the end and object of his Rhine trip seemed to be that of consuming as much food as lay within the limits of possibility. What Nemesis has in store for him and those of his manner of life I can only imagine!

At a table near us sat three women and two men. Directly we left Köln a waiter set forth trays in front of them laden with coffee, zwiebacks, hörnchens, and eggs. This meal over, they sat sleepily blinking their eyes, whisking away flies, and mopping the moisture from their faces until the sound of "Eis! meine Herrschaften!" "Bier! meine Herrschaften!" roused them from their lethargy. Ices and beer and cherries and peaches successively filled up the weary hours until "the tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell," carried joy to their hearts. I can never forget the rapturous look of anticipation and satisfaction which those stolid middle-class Teutonic countenances wore when "Mittagsessen" was announced. They shook off their normal and habitual torpidity, and cheerfully elbowed their neighbours, nearly tumbling down the companion-ladder in their eagerness to be first in the field. They lost no time over the unlovely detail of tucking a corner of their napkins down their necks, and smoothing its folds over their protuberant persons; and they studied the Speise-Karte with a conscientiousness that was worthy of a better cause.

Dinner began with a tolerably good soup, followed by tough roast beef, cut in thick slices and garnished with carrots, peas and beans. Next came veal, equally uneatable, and then a surprise in the shape of Rhine salmon; after which followed chicken, salad, and _compôte_. Finally, a stodgy pudding, sufficiently satisfying, and dessert. Not one item of the menu was neglected by the five. They calmly and conscientiously and readily ate through the Speise-Karte from start to finish. Then they returned to deck, only to order coffee and ices, and called for a bottle of champagne, three of light Rhine wine, and a plateful of peaches; out of which they brewed a cup, ladling it from a Taunus ware bowl into their long Munich glasses, and sipping it lazily all the afternoon between such trifles as Kuchen and fresh relays of cherries. They ate and drank from Köln to Bingen with rare intervals of dozing, and I never once saw any of the party take the faintest interest in the Rhine, so far as its banks were concerned.

It was a relief to turn from such grossness to its antithesis in the shape of two American ladies who sat near us. They were well-preserved, well-bred spinsters under forty. Everything about them was dainty and exquisitely neat. I likened them in my mind to bowls of dried rose-leaves--the freshness gone, the perfume left. Such was their intense and intelligent interest in travel that, rather than lose a timber-framed village or historic castle, a vineyard or watch-tower, they abstained from lunch and picnicked lightly on deck off tea and eggs and hörnchen. They knew the legends of the Rhine as you and I know (or ought to know) our Prayer-Books. They had studied the history of Germany, and mastered the intricacies alike of the Thirty Years' War and of the Hohenzollern pedigree; and they talked well, expressing their ideas in good Saxon words; at times, perhaps a trifle pedantic, but never offensively so.

As the day wore on the temperature became almost overpowering. The water reflected a blinding glare, and a heat like that of a burning fiery furnace was radiated from the engines. I was wondering whether a hammock in a cool English garden would not have been more desirable, when I heard a plaintive, uneducated American voice behind me ask a question of its mate which exactly embodied my own unuttered sentiments:

"What _I_ want to know, Jake, is: Is this pleasure, or ain't it? Did we come here to enjoy ourselves, or what?"

JAKE: "Wall, I guess you ain't used to travelling around, my dear, and you don't understand it. Oh, yes" (with an obvious effort), "this is real fust-class pleasure, this is!"

MRS. JAKE: "Wall, I'm darned! I'd as lief be in our store."

JAKE: "Sakes alive! You _do_ surprise me! Think what Keren-Happuch Jones will say when you mention casual on your return something that happened when you was sailing up the Rhine. She'll die of envy, she will, and spite to think you've seen more'n her."

MRS. JAKE (cheered somewhat): "Wall, I reckon, Jake, there's summat in that. Keren-Happuch don't like anyone to do what she don't do."

JAKE: "And then, my dear, think of your noo bonnet from Paris! That'll be another pill for Keren-Happuch to swallow."

MRS. JAKE: "My! Yes! I don't think much of Europe, anyway, but I could never have bought that bonnet in Baltimore. But, Jake, do look on the map and tell me when we get to Heidelberg."

JAKE: "It ain't any good my lookin', my dear, for I wasn't raised to these sort of things, and I'm darned if I know where to find it."

A groan from Mrs. Jake, followed by: "Wall, I reckon when I find myself again in No. 9, Mount Mascal Street, I won't want to go travelling around even to cut out Keren-Happuch Jones."

I came to the rescue at this point, and showed the good lady where Heidelberg lay. She was a hard-featured, plain woman of some thirty-eight summers, her hair was dragged back uncompromisingly from her forehead, and there were no "adulteries of art" about either coiffure or costume.

"You see," she said apologetically, "Jake here and me are travelling around, and the only way we can get on is to ask for a ticket to a place, and never stop travelling till we get there. We speak German all right because my parents were Germans, and Jake was born in Germany; but he don't know much about it because he was only two years old when he left it eight-and-thirty years ago. We thought we'd like to see the Paris Exposition, but my! it ain't to be compared to the Chicago Exhibition, and as for Paris, it can't come up to Noo York, and these river steamers ain't a patch on the Hudson River boats, and I don't think much of Europe anyway."

Jake, a good-looking, gentle-mannered man, tried to soften the asperity of his wife's strictures without success. He evidently adored her.

"The way we travel," resumed Mrs. Jake, "is to think of a place we've heard of, and to ask for a ticket to it. Now, we'd heard of Paris and Cologne, and Heidelberg, and Baden, and Dresden, and Berlin, and Hamburg, but we don't know now how they come--see? So we hev' to go cavortin' around to find out which to take next. A gentleman way back at Cologne"--she pronounced it "Klon"--"told me Heidelberg came next. I quite thought Baden was near Hamburg, and that we should take it last; but they tell me it ain't, and that, you see, has upset all our calculations. Guess you're a Londoner, anyway; thought so by your accent!"

When we left the steamer at Bingen, the last I heard of Mrs. Jake was a plaintive moan:

"Guess I don't think much of Europe, anyway, and I wouldn't come again, not even to cut out Keren-Happuch!"

OF SOME FELLOW TRAVELLERS AND THE CATHEDRAL OF MAINZ.