Part 6 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through, cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and the untutored Slav. 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 recognized 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 a.s.sociate 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, organized for victory by every modern method. Three strata of civilization 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 its 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, patient and unbeatable, 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 world 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.tonhole.
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 should 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, the 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 years old 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. .h.i.t; 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 navete 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.s; but I should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot- house 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 of the 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 the 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.
VII How The Kaiser Leads
Only a week before I had seen 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 had watched march into battle--armed, confident, disciplined parts of an organization, ready to sweep all before them in a charge--become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganized, 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 Doberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was told, but it suffices. Conditions at other camps might be worse; doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my information from unprejudiced observers be 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 Liege 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 s.h.i.+p than a Briton on board a German s.h.i.+p, under the circ.u.mstances,” his remark was significant in more ways than one.
His English fellow-pa.s.sengers on that splendid liner which a German submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy.
They pa.s.sed 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 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 cla.s.s. 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 civilized 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 was 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 meat 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.