Part 7 (1/2)
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 pa.s.sed companies of volunteers returning from drill with that st.u.r.dy march characteristic of German infantry.
In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains were running as usual to Hamburg, if one 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 forests of masts of idle s.h.i.+ps, one saw what sea power meant. That city of eager s.h.i.+ppers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by sh.e.l.ls. Hamburgers tried to make the best of it; they a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+ps.
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 fort.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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. Everyone 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 commerce 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 organization. The wounded men seemed parts of a machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was less in evidence than with us, 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 quant.i.ty 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 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 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! 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, promenaded 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 prevalence 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 decla.s.sed and that it was time for him to make amends to his pride. If many Crosses 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 Tsar of Russia or the King of England by the Kaiser's side?
It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you left the Opera--the new Berlin, which he had fathered in its boom growth, taking few pages of a guidebook compared to Paris. In front of his palace Russian field-guns taken by von Hindenburg at Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while not far away the never-to-be-forgotten grandfather in bronze rode home in triumph from Paris.
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 Sieges Allee, 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 the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalized 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 realize, particularly as his promised entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two has the wise head.
The Crown Prince had pa.s.sed into the background. He was marooned with ennui in the face of French trenches in the West, whilst 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 Sieges Allee 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 realize. 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 a.s.similation, 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? Ba.n.a.l questions! He is the Kaiser on the background of the Sieges Allee, who has first promoted himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany, with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and chairman 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. Indeed, without thres.h.i.+ng the old straw of argument, most of the people of the civilized world are convinced that it is.
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 st.u.r.dy 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.