Part 6 (2/2)
Now and then the widow next me bit her lip and clenched her fist, but she gave no other sign of emotion. Another film was thrown on the screen, humorous, I believe. Suddenly the woman began to laugh. She did not stop laughing. It was a long, mirthless, dry, uncanny sort of cackle. People stared. She laughed still louder. An usher came down the aisle, and stood there, uncertain what to do. Hysterics had given way to weeping: the tears were now streaming down the woman's face. She tried to control herself, but could not, and then arose and between choking sobs and laughter fled from the darkened room out into the Friedrichstra.s.se.
I mention this incident--the sort of thing that must have existed everywhere, if one had eyes to see it--merely because it gave a glimpse through the veil of public optimism into the wells of sorrow hidden for the sake of public duty. Military and official Berlin was ”staged,” one might almost say. It was on show to impress the neutral stranger, no less than its own inhabitants, with the glorious sense of victory.
But beneath it lay untold suffering which could be endured only because of such united loyalty and team play as the world has seldom seen.
This undercurrent of suffering, which increased week by week as the writing on the wall grew longer, was in pitiful contrast to the enthusiasm with which the women sent their men and sons away to war.
More than once I watched troops drilling at Spandau Hof, the great barracks and training-grounds, a few kilometers west of the city. When, on the evening of my first visit, a half dozen battalions of Landwehr, just whipped into shape, entrained for the front, the people threw bits of earth upon them, and, according to custom, stuck green twigs in the end of every Mauser barrel, that each man might carry a bit of the Vaterland with him on to the enemy's soil. In unspotted field uniforms, and helmets still without the green-gray canvas service covering, they clattered past the reviewing officers, each right leg coming down with the thumping goose-step salute, until halls and barracks echoed with the staccato tread of thousands of hob-nailed boots. The l.u.s.ty military band blazoned out ”Die Wacht am Rhein” and other martial airs, until the creepers began to run up and down your back and you felt a lump rising in your throat. Friends, relatives, widows, mothers already in black for other sons, and more than the usual hurrahing crowd had gathered under the arch leading to the railway track. As the close-locked fours went through the gate, the people broke the ranks and pounded each man on the back, while all the time the crowd was shouting.
I asked my neighbor what they were calling.
A German friend in the group explained: ”The people shout 'congratulations!'”
At that moment a Red Cross train returning with twenty carloads of wounded stood on the siding. Scores of bandaged heads and limp arms stuck out of the windows,--these were the slightly wounded, --and even the half-dead figures strapped to the cots turned feebly toward the marching troops. Most of these also waved, and those who were physically able shouted the same words--”Bravo!” ”Congratulations!”
”Bravo!!”
That is the way after many months of war that the women and children send their men away--no regrets, no holding back. ”Good luck! Good work! You've got a chance to die for Germany!!”
Such a spirit, and with it a sincerity of purpose that could only come from the conviction of right, is typical of the rank and file of citizens. It cannot fail to impress the neutral stranger, though he has traveled far in other countries at war and seen and lived with their citizens and soldiers. One was forced to believe that the militarists acted in conformity with the feelings of the whole people, and that this hideous war was not merely the result of personal ambition. Except, of course, among the soldiers the belief was most noticeable among the lower cla.s.ses. One found it among the peasants, one's neighbor in the day coach, the artisan, the shopkeeper. You might reason with a professor, a doctor, or perhaps an official in the Foreign Office at Berlin. But it was not safe to try it on a st.u.r.dy peasant with three sons on the firing line. It was like telling a man his mother is no better than she should be.
From the Log
”Among both fighters and those left at home, there is distinctly less of the matinee hero business than in either England or France. The high official in the civil government who said that the women were the best fighters in the German army was not so far from the truth. The pluck of the women is astonis.h.i.+ng. There isn't the slightest display of sorrow or call for sympathy. You see them everywhere in the streets, cafes, and shops of Berlin; not in such great numbers, however, as in the lesser provinces and the smaller towns, where the drain of men is enormously heavier.
”Later: Have been twice to the Casualty List Office, or Information Bureau, where the names of the verwundet und gefallen are posted -- column after column, company after company, regiment after regiment of fine black type--nothing more or less than a printer's morgue, crowding into one dark hallway the cemetery of a nation. There were fathers, mothers, brothers, and children quietly and unemotionally scanning the lists. It took me back to the terrible week at the White Star offices, after the t.i.tanic went down. At that time the relatives wept (some of them) and nearly all harangued the officials, asking questions, sending telegrams, begging for news. Here they look for the names of their dead,--that's all,--and then go out without a question. You can't ask questions of a Government! The t.i.tanic lasted a week, and this goes on-- G.o.d knows how long!
”Had supper with Brown. Later a mother in black and a girl, also in black (the daughter, or daughter-in-law, I should judge), came into the Heiniger ( ?) Cafe while I was sitting there. For three quarters of an hour they listened to the music, neither of them, I'll swear, speaking a word. Then they paid twenty-five pfennigs for their beer and went out, --still silent,--and the Ober bowed low and very respectfully. I asked the waiter who they were, and he said the woman had that day heard of the death of C... her fourth son. Something like the Bixby woman to whom Lincoln wrote his famous letter. And there must be, literally, thousands of them.
”This people is terribly in earnest,--deluded, of course, with devotion to a false idea, but it is the delusion that spells accomplishment. The country is earnestly and honestly possessed with an Idea, and the idea is that Might is Right. That is the awful pity of it. When will the awakening come?
”Later: To-day I had an interview of three quarters of an hour with Herr Dr. R. W. Drechsler, head of the American Inst.i.tute, attached to the University of Berlin. To-morrow I hope to see Excellency von Harnach, president of the University of Berlin, to whom I have a letter. Dr.
Drechsler was kind, agreeable, extremely interesting. He showed me some New York newspapers--the first real news of the war I have had for weeks. The 'Tribune' and 'Times' had an account of us fellows down in the cellar at Antwerp. Drechsler and I had an interesting argument, and before I left he deluged me with pamphlets and literature for the improvement of my mind and sympathies. Even so he was unlike the average German. As a rule they have attempted to cram their arguments down my throat. These Teutons think they can force you to believe.
”Dr. Drechsler and the proprietor of the Kaiserhof, and, of course, the Foreign Office warned me that it was forbidden to go to the prisoners'
camps, either at Zossen or Doeberitz. Some correspondents had been taken on 'personally conducted' tours; but because of misinformation sent out the tours were no longer in vogue. So I thought that I would risk it, without permit, and, wis.h.i.+ng to take a swing through rural Germany, I decided to visit the camp at Zossen, twenty-five kilometers south of the capital. When the guards weren't looking, I slipped boxes of cigarettes through the barbed-wire fence to Irish privates, and listened to the talk of captured Cossacks, and watched the British Tommies kicking around a 'soccer' football, squabbling about fouls and penalties, and as much excited about the score as if they were at home on Hampstead Heath.”
It was chiefly in my wanderings through rural Germany that I was able to rub elbows with the rank and file of citizens, and to get that barometer of public feeling which Colonel Roosevelt, I believe, has called the barber-shop opinion. I think I am justified in saying that during the winter there were many evidences, too many to be overlooked, that a growing minority, suffering through loss of life and realizing the territorial advantages which are now Germany's, earnestly longed for peace on any reasonable terms. The sooner peace came, they felt, the better would be the strategic position of the Vaterland. Some of this minority, in addition to the women, were business men, or professors, or merchants, or doctors.
It was not far from Hanover, where you change cars for Cologne and Aix- la-Chapelle, dispatching-centers of the troops for the northern line of battle, that the Frankfort doctor in the seat next mine began to talk.
He was an oldish man over sixty, dressed in mourning, and careworn. He had been to Berlin, he said, to verify the report of his son's death, and was now headed for Aix, where the body lay.
After Uhlman, the fat merchant, left, we were alone in the second-cla.s.s compartment, and the doctor got up and shut the door on the noise of Landwehr soldiers singing in the section of the troop train attached behind the car. Presently he showed me two postals from his boy. They were the stereotyped cards allotted to the men on the field: on one side s.p.a.ce for the address, on the other side the printed word ”well,” s.p.a.ce for the date (but no locality), and the signature. The third card was a casualty report, signed, probably, by the company captain, with the three printed words ”slightly wounded,” ”wounded,” and ”severely wounded.” The first and last were scratched out, but after the word ”wounded” was written, ”condition low.”
The boy must have held out--because the body was sent to Aix--until well along the homeward Red Cross trip. During the Antwerp bombardment, at Brussels, Liege, and Louvain, I had seen scores of the wounded, and had myself slept on those trains with their households of blood and pain and ether, and their long lines of mail cars, box cars, and converted tram cars fitted with their triple rows of berths, one above another. As the old doctor talked, I could see the wheeled hospitals stealing into the city in the darkness--for the troops go off with bands and holiday accompaniment, but the return is made at dead of night, that the public may not know the human cost.
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