Part 8

The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was something about the Frenchman which the Germans had to respect-- something not won by war. I heard admiration for them at the same time as contempt for their red trousers and their unpreparedness. While we are in this avenue, German officers had respect for the dignity of British officers, the leisurely, easy quality of superiority which they preserved in any circumstances. The qualities of a race come out in adversity no less than in prosperity. Thus, their captors regarded the Russians as big, good-natured children.

“Yes, they play games and we give the English an English newspaper to read twice a week,” said our affable guide, unconscious, I think, of any irony in the remark. For the paper was the _Continental News_, published in “the American language” for American visitors. You may take it for granted that it did not exaggerate any success of the Allies.

“We have a prince and the son of a rich man among the Russian prisoners--yes, quite in the Four Hundred,” the guide went on. “They were such good boys we put them to work in the cookhouse. Star boarders, eh? They like it. They get more to eat.”

These two men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first line they were and even in their privates’ uniforms they bore the unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before visitors. In the prince’s eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said: “Well, why not? We don’t mind.”

When we were taken through the cookhouse I asked about a little Frenchman, who was sitting with his nose in a soup bowl. He seemed too near-sighted ever to get into any army. His face was distinctly that of a man of culture; one would have guessed that he was an artist.

“Shrapnel burst,” explained the guide. “He will never be able to see much again. We let him come in here to eat.”

I wanted to talk with him, but these exhibitions are supposed to be all in pantomime; a question and you are urged along to the next exhibit. He was young and all his life he was to be like that--like some poor, blind kitten!

The last among a number of Russians returning to the enclosure from some fatigue duty was given a blow in the seat of his baggy trousers with a stick which one of the guards carried. The Russian quickened his steps and seemed to think nothing of the incident. But to me it was the worst thing that I saw at Döberitz, this act of physical violence against a man by one who has power over him. The personal equation was inevitable to the observer. Struck in that way, could one fail to strike back? Would not he strike in red anger, without stopping to think of consequences? There is something bred into the Anglo-Saxon nature which resents a physical blow. We courtmartial an officer for laying hands on a private, though that private may get ten years in prison on his trial. Yet the Russian thought nothing of it, or the guard, either. An officer in the German or the Russian army may strike a man.

“Would the guard hit a Frenchman in that way?” I asked. Our guide said not; the French were good boys. Or an Englishman? He had not seen it done. The Englishman would swear and curse, he was sure, and might fight, they were such undisciplined boys. But the Russians--“they are like kids. It was only a slap. Didn’t hurt him any.”

New barracks for the prisoners were being built which would be comfortable if crowded, even in winter. The worst thing, I repeat, was the deadly monotony of the confinement for a period which would end only when the war ended. Any labour should be welcome to a healthy-minded man. It was a mercy that the Germans set prisoners to grading roads, to hoeing and harvesting, retrieving thus a little of the wastage of war. Or was it only the bland insistence that conditions were luxurious that one objected to?--not that they were really bad. The Germans had a horde of prisoners to care for; vast armies to maintain; and a new volunteer force of a million or more--two millions was the official report--to train.

While we were at the prison camp we heard at intervals the rap-rap of a machine gun at the practice range near by, drilling to take more prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed on the road companies of volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of German infantry.

In Berlin we were told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains were running as usual to Hamburg, if we cared to go there. “As usual” in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time. At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forest of masts of idle ships, one learned what sea power meant. That city of eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells. Hamburgers tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea, while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office windows and the portholes of the ships.

For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the corpuscles did not run red. They were blue. Hamburg’s citizens had to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of bombardment: that of the silent guns of British dreadnoughts far out of range. They were good Germans; they meant to play the game; but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with the propagandist attitude of Berlin.

A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world. It had even been called an English city, owing to the number of English business men there as agents of the immense commerce between England and Germany. Every one who was a clerk or an employer spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on the good terms which traffic requires and met at luncheons and dinners and in their clubs. Englishmen were married to German women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their governments would keep the peace.

Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had spent most 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.