Part 7
When Corey and I took a walk away from a railway station where I had to make a train connection, I saw a German reservist of forty-five, who was helping with one hand to thresh the wheat from his farm, on a grey, lowering winter day. The other hand was in a bandage. He had been allowed to go home until he was well enough to fight again. The same sort of scene I had witnessed in France; the wounded man trying to make up to his family the loss of his labour during his absence at the front.
Only, that man in France was on the defensive; he was fighting to hold what he had and on his own soil. The German had been fighting on the enemy’s soil to gain more land. He, too, thought of it as the defensive. All Germany insisted that it was on the defensive. But it was the defensive of a people who think only in the offensive. That was it--that was the vital impression of Germany revealed in every conversation and every act.
The Englishman leans back on his oars; the German leans forward. The Englishman’s phrase is “stick it,” which means to hold what you have; the German’s phrase is “onward.” It was national youth against national middle age. A vessel with pressure of increase from within was about to expand or burst. A vessel which is large and comfortable for its contents was resisting pressure from without. The French were saying, What if we should lose? and the Germans were saying, What if we should not win all that we are entitled to? Germany had been thinking of a mightier to-morrow and England of a to-morrow as good as to-day. Germany looked forward to a fortune to be won at thirty; England considered the safeguarding of her fortune at fifty.
It is not professions that count so much as the thing that works out from the nature of a situation and the contemporaneous bent of a people. The English thought of his defence as keeping what he already had; the German was defending what he considered that he was entitled to. If he could make more of Calais than the French, then Calais ought to be his. A nation with the “closed in” culture of the French on one side and the enormous, unwieldy mass of Russia on the other, convinced of its superiority and its ability to beat either foe, thought that it was the friend of peace because it had withheld the blow. When the striking time came, it struck hard and forced the battle on enemy soil, which proved, to its logic, that it was only receiving payment of a debt owed it by destiny.
Bred to win, confident that the German system was the right system of life, it could imagine the German Michael as the missionary of the system, converting the Philistine with machine guns. Confidence, the confidence which must get new vessels for the energy that has overflowed, the confidence of all classes in the realisation of the long-promised day of the “place in the sun” for all the immense population drilled in the system, was the keynote. They knew that they could lick the other fellow and went at him from the start as if they expected to lick him, with a diligence which made the most of their training and preparation.
When I asked for a room with a bath in a leading Berlin hotel, the clerk at the desk said, “I will see, sir.” He ran his eye up and down the list methodically before he added: “Yes, we have a good room on the second floor.” Afterward, I learned that all except the first and second floors of the hotel were closed. The small dining-room only was open, and every effort was made to make the small dining-room appear normal.
He was an efficient clerk; the buttons boy who opened the room door, a goose-stepping, alert sprout of German militarism, exhibited a punctiliousness of attention which produced a further effect of normality. Those Germans who were not doing their part at the front were doing it at home by bluffing the other Germans and themselves into confidence. The clerk believed that some day he would have more guests than ever and a bigger hotel. All who suffered from the war could afford to wait. Germany was winning; the programme was being carried out. The Kaiser said so. In proof of it, multitudes of Russian soldiers were tilling the soil in place of Germans, who were at the front taking more Russian soldiers.
Everybody that one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal--when one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly normal--when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal--when the spool of the killed and wounded rolled out by yards like that of a ticker on a busy day on the Stock Exchange! Perfectly normal--when women tried to smile in the streets with eyes which had plainly been weeping at home! Are you for us or against us? The question was put straight to the stranger. Let him say that he was a neutral and they took it for granted that he was pro-Ally. He must be pro-something.
As Corey and I returned to the railway station after our walk, a soldier took us in charge and marched us to the office of the military commandant. “Are you an Englishman?” was his first question. The guttural military emphasis which he put on Englishman was most significant. Which brings us to another factor in the psychology of war: hate.
“If men are to fight well,” said a German officer, “it is necessary that they hate. They must be exalted by a great passion when they charge into machine guns.”
Hate was officially distilled and then instilled--hate against England, almost exclusively. The public rose to that. If England had not come in, the German military plan would have succeeded: first, the crushing of France; then, the crushing of Russia. The despised Belgian, that small boy who had tripped the giant and then hugged the giant’s knees, delaying him on the road to Paris, was having a rest. For he had been hated very hard for a while with the hate of contempt--that miserable pigmy who interfered with the plans of the machine.
The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as “brave foes.” What quarrel could France and Germany have? France had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace with both France and Russia. France was to have Alsace-Lorraine as the price of the arrangement. When the negotiations fell through the cartoonists were free to make sport of the anæmic Gaul and the untutored Slav again. And it was not alone in Germany that a responsive press played the weather vane to Government wishes. But in Germany the machinery ran smoothest.
For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I had never seen before hate me. At sight of me a woman who had been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her eyes, turned a malignant devil. Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair-haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform. Being hungry at the station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat, and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I alighted.
My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the word, “Englisher!” If looks were daggers I should have been pierced through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her error. Certainly I promptly recognised mine when I saw that this was a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I murmured an apology, which she received with a stony frown.
A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in the freight shed at Calais--a simile which would anger them both.
The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too, expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was in the German woman’s, as in every German’s, nature. It had been in the Frenchwoman’s in Napoleon’s time. Many racial hates the war has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer-asphyxiating-gas hate.
If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don’t you go to war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that this and that is “not done” in humane circles--win! The Germans meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the Middle Ages in their hearts, organised for victory by every modern method. Three strata of civilisation were really fighting, perhaps: The French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents increase of numbers, its thrift and tenacity; the German, with its newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition; and the Russian, unformed, groping, vague, glamorous, immense.
The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and hates of the old and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war. After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for my buttonhole.
This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He must be pro- the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be on your side secretly. If they weren’t they must be on the other. Are you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in Germany. If I had been for them I would have “dug in” and not told them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have made a study of war. They are experts in war.
However, this rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose quiet I had sought for an hour’s respite from war. One could be shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed the American tourist, without hearing a guide’s monotone explaining who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel lobbies--those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble in other days for disobeying the _verbotens_ and then asking our State Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over victories won by another type of German.
About twenty-one this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he hoped so.
The French were brave; but they hated the Germans and thought that they must make war on the Germans, and they were a cruel people, guilty of many atrocities. So the Fatherland had fought to conquer the enemies who planned her destruction. A peculiar, childlike _naïveté_ accompanied his intelligence, trained to run in certain grooves, which is the product of the German type of popular education; that trust in his superiors which comes from a diligent and efficient paternalism. He knew nothing of the atrocities which Germans were said to have committed in Belgium. The British and the French had set Belgium against Germany and Germany had to strike Belgium for playing false to her treaties. But he did think that the French were brave; only misled by their Government. And the Kaiser? His eyes lighted in a way that suggested that the Kaiser was almost a god to him. He had heard of the things that the British said against the Kaiser and they made him want to fight for his Kaiser. He was only one German--but the one was millions.
In actual learning which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hothouse product of a skilful nurseryman’s hand, who knew the value of training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the _Lusitania_ on his brow; that event which history cannot yet put in its true perspective. Other races will think _Lusitania_ when they meet a German long after the Belgian atrocities are forgotten. It will endure to plague a people like the exile of the Acadians, the guillotining of innocents in the French Revolution, and the burning of the Salem witches. But he had nothing to do with it. A German admiral gave an order as a matter of policy to make an impression that his submarine campaign was succeeding and to interfere with the transport of munitions, and the Kaiser told this boy that it was right. One liked this boy, his loyalty and his courage; liked him as a human being. But one wished that he might think more. Perhaps he will one of these days, if he survives the war.
VIII
HOW THE KAISER LEADS
A prisoners’ “show” camp--Filthy conditions--Scanty fare--Racial characteristics--“Upholding Britain’s dignity”--Russian princes in disguise--A blind artist--A physical insult--Deadly monotony of prison life--Drilling--Hamburg a dead city--A hate of the pocket--The “system” at a Berlin hospital--Effects of the war in Berlin--At the Opera--A plethora of Iron Crosses-- Immanence of the Kaiser--Imperial propaganda--The Crown Prince marooned--Glory to the Kaiser and von Hindenburg--President of the German Corporation--Always the offensive--“America too far away!”
Only a week before I had seen the wounded Germans in the freight shed at Calais and all the prisoners that I had seen elsewhere, whether in ones or twos, brought in fresh from the front or in columns under escort, had been Germans. The sharpest contrast of all in war which the neutral may observe is seeing the men of one army which, from the other side, he watched march into battle--armed, confident, disciplined parts of an organisation, ready to sweep all before them in a charge-- become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganised, rounded up like vagrants in a bread-line and surrounded by a fold of barbed wire and sentries. Such was the lot of the nine thousand British, French, and Russians whom I saw at Döberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was told, but it suffices. Conditions at others might be worse; doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my information from unprejudiced observers is wrong. But Germany had enormous numbers of prisoners. A nation in her frame of mind thought only of the care of the men who could fight for her, not of those who had fought against her.
Then, the German nature is one thing and the British another. Crossing the Atlantic on the _Lusitania_ we had a German reserve officer who was already on board when the evening editions arrived at the pier with news that England had declared war on Germany. Naturally, he must become a prisoner upon his arrival at Liverpool. He was a steadfast German. When a wireless report of the German repulse at Liége came, he would not believe it. Germany had the system and Germany would win. But when he said, “I should rather be a German on board a British ship than a Briton on board a German ship, under the circumstances,” his remark was significant in more ways than one.
His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy. They passed the time of day with him and seemed to want to make his awkward situation easy. Yet it was apparent that he regarded their kindliness as a racial weakness. _Krieg ist Krieg._ When Germany made war she made war.
So allowances are in order. One prison camp was like another in this sense, that it deprived a man of his liberty. It put him in jail. The British regular, who is a soldier by profession, was, in a way, in a separate class. But the others were men of civil industries and settled homes. Except during their term in the army, they went to the shop or the office every day, or tilled their farms. They were free; they had their work to occupy their minds during the day and freedom of movement when they came home in the evening. They might read the news by their firesides; they were normal human beings in civilised surroundings.
Here, they were pacing animals in a cage, commanded by two field guns, who might walk up and down and play games and go through the daily drill under their own non-commissioned officers. It was the mental stagnation of the thing that was appalling. Think of such a lot for a man used to action in civil life--and they call war action! Think of a writer, a business man, a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, reduced to this fenced-in existence, when he had been the kind who got impatient if he had to wait for a train that was late! Shut yourself up in your own backyard with a man with a rifle watching you for twenty-four hours and see whether, if you have the brain of a mouse, prison-camp life can be made comfortable, no matter how many greasy packs of cards you have. And lousy, besides! At times one had to laugh over what Mark Twain called “the damfool human race!”
Inside a cookhouse at one end of the enclosure was a row of soup boilers. Outside were a series of railings, forming stalls for the prisoners when they lined up for meals. In the morning, some oatmeal and coffee; at noon, some cabbage soup boiled with desiccated meal and some bread; at night, more coffee and bread. How one thrived on this fare depended much upon how he liked cabbage soup. The Russians liked it. They were used to it.
“We never keep the waiter late by tarrying over our liqueurs,” said a Frenchman.
Our reservist guide had run away to America in youth, where he had worked at anything he could find to do; but he had returned to Berlin, where he had a “good little business” before the war. He was stout and cheery, and he referred to the prisoners as “boys.” The French and Russians were good boys; but the English were bad boys, who had no discipline. He said that all received the same food as German soldiers. It seemed almost ridiculous chivalry that men who had fought against you and were living inactive lives should be as well fed as the men who were fighting for you. The rations that I saw given to German soldiers were better. But that was what the guide said.
“This is our little sitting-room for the English non-commissioned officers,” he explained, as he opened the door of a small shanty which had a pane of glass for a window. Some men sitting around a small stove arose. One, a big sergeant-major, towered over the others; he had the colours of the South African campaign on the breast of his worn khaki blouse and stood very straight, as if on parade. By the window was a Scot in kilts, who was equally tall. He looked around over his shoulder and then turned his face away with the pride of a man who does not care to be regarded as a show. His uniform was as neat as if he were at inspection; and the way he held his head, the haughtiness of his profile against the stream of light, recalled the unconquerable spirit of the Prussian prisoner whom I had seen on the road during the fighting along the Aisne. Only a regular, but he was upholding the dignity of Britain in that prison camp better than many a member of Parliament on the floor of the House of Commons. I asked our guide about him.
“A good boy, that! All his boys obey him, and he obeys all the regulations. But he acts as if we Germans were his prisoners.”
The British might not be good boys, but they would be clean. They were diligent in the chase in their underclothes; their tents were free of odour; and there was something resolute about a Tommy who was bare to the waist in that freezing wind, making an effort at a bath. I heard tales of Mr. Atkins’ characteristic thoughtlessness. While the French took good care of their clothes and kept their tents neat, he was likely to sell his coat or his blanket if he got a chance in order to buy something that he liked to eat. One Tommy who sat on his stray tick inside the tent was knitting. When I asked him where he had learned to knit, he replied: “India!” and gave me a look as much as to say, “Now pass on to the next cage.”
The British looked the most pallid of all, I thought. They were not used to cabbage soup. Their stomachs did not take hold of it, as one said; and they loathed the black bread. No white bread and no jam! Only when you have seen Mr. Atkins with a pot of jam and a loaf of white bread and some bacon frizzling near by can you realise the hardship which cabbage soup meant to that British regular who gets lavish rations of the kind he likes along with his shilling a day for professional soldiering.
“You see, the boys go about as they please,” said our guide. “They don’t have a bad time. Three meals a day and nothing to do.”
Members of a laughing circle which included some British were taking turns at a kind of Russian blind man’s buff, which seemed to me about in keeping with the mental capacity of a prison camp.
“No French!” I remarked.
“The French keep to themselves, but they are good boys,” he replied. “Maybe it is because we have only a few of them here.”
Every time one sounded the subject he was struck by the attitude of the Germans toward the French, not alone explained by the policy of the hour which hoped for a separate peace with France. Perhaps it was best traceable to the Frenchman’s sense of _amour propre_, his philosophy, his politeness, or an indefinable quality in the grain of the man.