Part 2

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.

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 und 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 partizan 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....

I stood on the Dorotheenstrasse looking up at the old red brick building which before the second of August in this year of the world war was the War Academy. I had heard that when tourists come to Berlin they like to watch the gay uniformed officers ascending and descending the long flights of gray steps; for there the cleverest of German military youths are schooled for the General Staff. Like the tourists, I stood across the street to-day and watched the old building and the people ascending or descending the long flights of gray steps. Only I saw civilians, men alone and in groups, women with shawls wrapped around their heads, women with yellow topped boots, whose motors waited beside the curb, and children, clinging to the hands of women, all entering or leaving by the gray gate; some of the faces were happy and others were wet with tears, and still others stumbled along with heavy steps. For this old building on Dorotheenstrasse is no longer the War Academy; it is a place where day after day hundreds assemble to learn the fate of husband, kin or lover. For inside the gray gate sits the Information Bureau of the War Ministry, ready to tell the truth about every soldier in the German army! I, too, went to learn the truth.

I climbed a creaking staircase and went down a creaking hall. I met the Count von Schwerin, who is in charge. I found myself in a big, high-ceilinged room the walls of which were hung with heroic portraits of military dignitaries. My first impression was of a wide arc of desks that circling from wall to wall seemed to be a barrier between a number of gentle spoken elderly gentlemen and a vague mass of people that pressed forward. The anxious faces of all these people reminded me of another crowd that I had seen--the crowd outside the White Star offices in New York when the _Titanic_ went down. And I became conscious that the decorations of this room which, the Count was explaining, was the Assembly Hall of the War Academy, were singularly appropriate--the pillars and walls of gray marble, oppressively conveying a sense of coldness, insistent cold, like a tomb, and all around you the subtle presence of death, the death of hopes. It was the Hall of Awful Doubt.

And as I walked behind the circle of desks I learned that these men of tact and sympathy, too old for active service, were doing their part in the war by helping to soften with kindly offices the blow of fate. I stood behind them for some few moments and watched, although I felt like one trespassing upon the privacy of grief. I saw in a segment of the line a fat, plain-looking woman, with a greasy child clinging to her dress, a white haired man with a black muffler wrapped around his neck, a veiled woman, who from time to time begged one of the elderly clerks to hurry the news of her husband, and then a wisp of a girl in a cheap, rose-colored coat, on whose cheeks two dabs of rouge burned like coals.

Soldiers from the Berlin garrison were used there as runners. At the bidding of the gentle old men they hastened off with the inquiry to one of the many filing rooms and returned with the news. This day there was a new soldier on duty; he was new to the Hall of Awful Doubt.

"I cannot imagine what is keeping him so long," I heard an elderly clerk tell the woman with the veil. "He'll come any minute.... There he is now. Excuse me, please."

And the elderly clerk hurried to meet the soldier, wanting to intercept the news, if it were bad, and break it gently. But as he caught sight of the clerk I saw the soldier click his heels and, as if he were delivering a message to an officer, his voice boomed out: "_Tot!_" ... Dead!

And the woman with the veil gave a little gasp, a long, low moan, and they carried her to another room; and as I left the gray room, with the drawn, anxious faces pushing forward for their turns at the black-covered desks, I realized the heartrending sacrifice of the women of France, Belgium, Russia, England, Servia, and Austria, who, like these German mothers, wives, and sweethearts, had been stricken down in the moment of hope.

That night I went to the Jägerstrasse, to Maxim's. The place is everything the name suggests; one of those Berlin cafés that open when the theaters are coming out and close when the last girl has smiled and gone off with the last man. I sat in a white and gold room with a cynical German surgeon, listening to his comments.

"It is the best in town now," he explained. "All the Palais de Danse girls come here. Don't be in a hurry. I know what you want for your articles. You'll see it soon."

Maxim's, like most places of the sort, was methodically banal. But one by one officers strolled in and soon a piano struck up the notes of a patriotic song. When the music began the girls left the little tables where they had been waiting for some man to smile, and swarmed around the piano, singing one martial song upon another, while officers applauded, drank their healths, and asked them to sing again.

Time passed and the girls sang on, flushed and savage as the music crashed to the cadenzas of war. What were the real emotions of these subjects of Germany; had the war genuine thrills for them? I had talked with decent women of all classes about the war; what of the women whose hectic lives had destroyed real values?

"Get one of those girls over here," I told the surgeon, "and ask her what she thinks of the war."

"Do you really mean it?" he said with a cynical smile.

"Surely. This singing interests me. I wonder what's back of it?"

He called one of them. "Why not sing?" Hilda said with a shrug. "What else? There are few men here now and there are fewer every night. What do I think of this war? My officer's gone to the front without leaving me enough to keep up the apartment. _Krieg?_ _Krieg ist schrecklich!_ War is terrible!"

My German friend was laughing.

"War?" he smiled. "And you thought it was going to change that kind."

But I was thinking of the woman with the veil whom I had seen in the Hall of Awful Doubt; and outside the night air felt cool and clean....

But my symbol of Berlin is not these things--not bustling streets filled with motors, swarming with able-bodied men whom apparently the army did not yet need. Its summation is best expressed by the varied sights and emotions of an afternoon in mid-December.

Lódz has fallen; again Hindenburg has swept back the Russian hordes. Black-shawled women call the extras. Berlin rises out of its calmness and goes mad. Magically the cafés fill.... I am walking down a side street. I see people swarming toward a faded yellow brick church. They seem fired with a zealot's praise. I go in after them and see them fall on their knees.... They are thanking Him for the Russian rout.... Wondering I go out. I come to another church. Its aisles are black with bowed backs; the murmur of prayer drones like bees; a robed minister is intoning:

"Oh, Almighty Father, we thank Thee that Thou art with us in our fight for the right; we thank Thee that--"

It is very quiet in there. War seems a thing incredibly far away. The sincerity of these people grips your heart. I feel as I never felt in church before. Something mysteriously big and reverent stirs all around.... Then outside in the street drums rattle, feet thump. A regiment is going to the front! I hurry to see it go by, but back in the church the bowed forms pray on.

II

"THE BELOVED KING"

_Being impressions gained during my talk with His Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria_

Knowing what was in the wind when the summons came that night, I hurried down Unter den Linden and through Wilhelmstrasse to the Foreign Office. Several days before, Excellence Freiherr von Mumm had discussed the possibilities with me and as the old-fashioned portal of the Foreign Office swung back to admit me, I wondered if the news would be good or bad. Without delay I was ushered into the office of Dr. Roediger. He was just laying the telephone aside.

"It has been arranged," he said. "I was just talking with München. You are to leave Berlin to-night on the 10.40 train. Upon your arrival in München in the morning, you will go to the Hotel Vierjahrzeiten. At ten in the morning present yourself to Excellence Baron von Schön at the Prussian Embassy in München. He will inform you as to the details. At twelve o'clock His Majesty, the King of Bayern, will be pleased to receive you.... Adieu and good luck."

Thanking Dr. Roediger for the arrangement--with true German thoroughness they had laid out a perfect schedule for me, even to the hotel at which I was to stop in München--I had a race of it to get packed and catch the train. But once in the compartment, with the train whirling away from Berlin, I had a chance to collect my thoughts. So, His Majesty would no doubt talk with me upon some subject of interest to Americans. I ran over half a dozen of these in my mind, but King Ludwig's personality kept obtruding. What sort of a man was he? I had seen an excellent colored photograph of him in a gallery in Unter den Linden. It was one of those pictures which make you wonder at the reality and in this case made me anticipate the meeting with unrestrained keenness. I remembered that he had waited long for the throne, that it had not descended to him until September of 1913, that he had been crowned King of his beloved Bayern at the regal age of sixty-eight. I recalled that his house, the house of Wittelsbacher, was the oldest in Germany, the line going back to the year 907. King Ludwig, ruler of that southern German land where so many Americans like to go, his home in Munich, which every American sooner or later comes to admire for its famous galleries and golden brown Münchener beer; King Ludwig, what would be his message to the United States?

Ten o'clock the following morning found me shaking hands with Baron von Schön, the Prussian Ambassador to Bavaria. It was the Baron who was Germany's Ambassador to France at the outbreak of war, and how I regretted that obligations of his diplomatic position forbade a discussion of those frantic nights and days in Paris before the war. We could talk of other things, however, and as there were two hours before the appointed time of my presentation to King Ludwig, Baron von Schön helped me to get my bearings. To my consternation I learned that the King spoke only a little English. I informed the Baron that I spoke only a little German. Whereupon immediately the Geheimrat's office in the Embassy began to ring with one telephone call after another, for an interpreter had to be secured, a man whom His Majesty would be pleased to receive with me. And finally such a man was found in Counselor of Legation von Stockhammern.

After motoring down a long avenue, lined with pretty residences, the car turned in, approaching a rather old, unpretentious but severely dignified building of faded yellow brick, suggesting Windsor. This was the Wittelsbacher Palast, the home of King Ludwig. I remembered having seen that morning on my way to the Embassy, a far more imposing looking palace, the Residence, and contrasting its ornateness with the simplicity of the building which we were approaching, I wondered at royalty living there. It was typical of the democratic King I came to know.

As our motor rolled up, I saw two blue and white striped sentry boxes marking the entrance and through an arched driveway I had a glimpse of an inner court paved with stones, where an official automobile waited. Then I was escorted through the entrance to the right wing of the palace. Here Staatsrat (Secretary of the Royal Cabinet) von Dandl, a tall, soldierly looking man in uniform, greeted us, after which I was taken to an antechamber, where Counselor of Legation von Stockhammern, my interpreter, was waiting. There appeared a young Bavarian officer in full dress uniform, whom I was told was the Adjutantour to the King. Upon being introduced he left as quickly as he had come. It lacked a quarter hour of the time of reception, and Von Stockhammern and I were talking about München, when the young Adjutantour as quickly returned and said that His Majesty would receive me.

I climbed with Von Stockhammern several flights of a wooden staircase; the tan and red bordered corded runaway reminded you of a church, as did the bare white walls, and you felt a solemn silence, accentuated by the jangling of the sword; and then turning with a last flight of steps, I saw above two guards in the uniform of the Hartschier Regiment, two white coated, blue trousered, plumed statues standing beside a wide entrance door. The click of presenting arms and the statues came to life, and passing between them we found ourselves in what was evidently an antechamber of the Audience Saal, a comfortably furnished room; the walls covered with small oil paintings. I remember a silk-stockinged, stooping doorman who wore black satin breeches, like a character that I had seen sometime in a French romantic play. He was standing with his hand upon the knob of two brown oaken doors as if awaiting a signal. Apparently it came, although I heard nothing, for suddenly the brown doors swung back, and I found myself gazing into the long high-ceilinged room, the Audience Saal, and in the middle of this room stood an elderly man, in the dress uniform of an officer in the Second Bavarian Infantry. The uniform was blue and red and braided with gold, and the man had a white beard and a wonderfully kind face. It was His Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria.

My first thought, as I walked towards him, was of how closely he resembled the picture I had seen of him in the gallery on Unter den Linden. But as I drew nearer, I saw that the picture had not caught the man. You were conscious of kind eyes smiling a welcome through silver spectacles. You instantly felt that kindness seemed to be a dominant note of his character, and you realized the intellectual power behind that wide, thoughtful forehead; and you saw a firm mouth and chin suggesting determination, kindness, brains, force, every inch a king! But somehow, had I not known he was a king, the military regimentals which he wore might have been a little incongruous; he impressed me as being the kind of man you might expect to see in the black coated garb of a professor; a man of great, grave and forceful dignity and learning, and utterly foreign to the popular American conception of a monarch.

This impression was borne out a moment later, when as Staatsrat von Dandl came forward to present me, King Ludwig showed me a delightful courtesy. Casting court etiquette aside, he welcomed me in true American fashion, his hand outstretched.

There began then the usual preliminaries to a conversation and while we exchanged greetings, I noticed that His Majesty was wearing a great number of minor orders, strung in a bright ribboned line across his chest, and beneath them, on the left side, the Iron Cross, the Star of St. Hubertus, and the Order of the Crown. Presently, in a pleasantly modulated voice, King Ludwig told me that through his people he had long felt a great friendship for America.