Chapter I: SEEK FOR MY FRIEND, a free-thinking Jewess, elegant woman in the (3)

To all charges of unfair methods of warfare, of tyranny over the civilian population, of atrocities, Germany replied with an all-embracing: “You’re another.” “If we first used gas”—which by no means all Germans admitted—“think of those dreadful tanks! If we bombed London and Paris, see how our dear brethren along the Rhine suffered from your airmen. If we were forced to be stern with the population of the occupied regions, go hear what the Russians did in our eastern provinces. You make martyrs of your Cavells and Fryatts; we can name you scores of Germans who suffered worse far more unjustly. As to accusing us of wanton atrocities, that has become one of the recognized weapons of modern warfare, one of the tricks of the game, this shouting of calumnies against your gagged enemy to a keenly listening audience not averse to feeding on such morbid morsels. It was accepted as a recognized misdeal in the political poker game as far back as the Boer War, when the science of photography first reached the advanced stage that made it possible to show English soldiers catching on their bayonets babies that had never been within a hundred miles of them. Like all the underhand moves, it was immensely improved or perfected during this long life-and-death struggle. That was one of the things we somewhat neglected, first from lack of foresight, later because of the impossibility of making ourselves heard by the audience, of getting it across the footlights, while our enemies screened the whole front of the stage. Ninety per cent. of the so-called atrocities were made out of whole cloth, or out of very slight remnants. We admit the cleverness of the other side in ‘getting away with it,’ but now that it has served its purpose we expect him, if he is the fair sportsman he pretends, to acknowledge it was only a trick, at least as soon as the smoke and heat of action have cleared a bit.” (This view was widely held among citizens of Allied nations who have traveled in Germany since the signing of the armistice, though few of them admitted it except in private conversation.) “There were, of course, things that should not have been. There are in all armies; there have been in all wars, and always will be. But if some of our soldiers forgot themselves, if our reserve officers were not always of the high standard their position called for, let us tell you of some of the horrible things the Russians perpetrated in our eastern provinces”—somehow Germany always seemed to flee eastward when this question of atrocities came up.

“One of our greatest mistakes was the failure to realize the value of _réclame_, of publicity, propaganda, advertising, or whatever you choose to call it, until it was too late.” (Berlin was showing one of our great “Hun” pictures in her principal cinemas at the time of my visit, partly for the amusement of seeing themselves as others see them, but chiefly as an example of how they “missed a bet” in not discovering how the “movies” could also be “mobilized” for war ends.) “The United States was finally led astray and brought into the war chiefly because England and France made skilful use of propaganda, because they controlled the great avenues of the transmission of news. It looks like a silly, childish little trick for the Allies to take our cables away from us—along with our milch cows—but it is really very important, for they keep on telling unrefuted lies about us as long as it serves their purposes. Now that they have a clear field, they will discolor the facts more than ever. They censored, doctored their public prints far more than we did. See how they dare not even yet publish the terms of the treaty that was handed us at Versailles; yet we have had them here in Germany for days. Even the French Chamber and the American Senate got them first from our papers. Open diplomacy indeed! There never was a time during the war that French and English and, when we could get them, American papers could not be bought at any kiosk in our larger cities. Look at Haase, who publishes daily the strongest kind of attacks on the government, quite openly, while the newspapers of Paris are still sprinkled with the long white hoofprints of the censor.

“We admit our fault—and we are now paying for it. This publicity was one of the ‘perfectly legitimate’ moves in the crooked game of war, one of the cleverest of the tricks, and we overlooked it, thanks to the thick heads of our diplomats! It was perhaps the deciding factor. The English with their shopkeeper souls; the French, crudely materialistic under their pretended love of art; the traitorous Italians—were not equal all together to downing us. But when they succeeded in talking over America, a great big healthy child overtopping them all, naïve, inexperienced, rather flattered at being let into a man’s game, somewhat hysterical”—I am putting things a bit more baldly than I ever heard them stated, but that is what was meant—“we might have known it was all over with us. Now we are in a pretty predicament. We have no national wealth left, except our labor, for we have given up everything else. We cannot even emigrate—except to Russia. My children will see a great combination with them, unless this Bolshevism sweeps all before it now while the bars are down.

“But we were never defeated militarily. _Ausgeschlossen!_ We won the war—on the field of battle, such a war as was never before waged against a nation in all history. That is what makes our real defeat so bitter. America did it, with her unlimited flood of materials, her endless resources, plus the hunger blockade. With the whole world against us and starvation undermining us at the rear, what was left for us? But we still held our front; our line never cracked. The German army was the best in the world—to-day the American is—its discipline was strict, but there was a reason, centuries of experience, behind every command. But the war lasted too long; we got overtrained, went stale and....”

No German, from the mouth of the Elbe to the mountains of Bavaria, admitted for an instant that his army was defeated. Whatever their other opinions, the Boches insisted on hugging to themselves the cold conviction that they were beaten from within, never by a foreign enemy. They seemed almost fond of boasting that it took America with her boundless resources to turn the scales against them. But they were not always consistent in this view, for they admitted that with the failure of the last offensive they knew the game was up; they admitted that Hindenburg himself asserted that the side that succeeded in bringing up the last half-million fresh troops would win the war. In this connection it may be of interest to hear what the German Staff (American Intelligence Section) thought of the American army. “The United States enlisted men,” runs their statement, “were excellent soldiers. They took battle as an adventure and were the best shock troops of the war when it ended. Their officers were good up to and sometimes through battalion commanders; above that they were astonishingly weak.”

Throughout all Germany the proposed peace terms were received in much the same spirit they had been in Berlin. Outwardly they were greeted with surprising calmness, almost apathy. But one could find protests and to spare by knowing where to listen. “This peace is even less open and fair than that of the Congress of Vienna,” came the first returns. “We expected to lose some territory in the east, perhaps, but that Alsace-Lorraine should be allowed to vote which of us she cared to join, that ‘self-determination’ of which Wilson has spoken so much. Both of those provinces always belonged to Germany, except for the hundred years between the time Louis XIV stole them from us and Bismarck won them back; they belonged to Germany just as much as Poland ever did to the Poles. Lorraine may want to be French; Alsace certainly does not, and never did.”

It seemed to be the old men who resented most the loss of territory, as the women were most savage in their expressions. Probably grandfather would miss the far corner lot more than would the younger members of the family, who had not been accustomed to seeing it so long. When one could get the Germans to specify, they rated the proposed terms about as follows: “The loss of the Saar is the worst; the losses in the east, second; the loss of our colonies, third.” But they reminded one of a man who has just returned home and found his house wrecked—the farther he looks the more damage he discovers; at each new discovery he gasps a bit more chokingly, and finally stands dumb before the immensity of the catastrophe that has befallen him, for some time undecided just what his next move shall be. “We would rather pay any amount of indemnity than lose territory,” they went on, at last. “It is a crime to occupy the Rhineland, the richest, most taxable, the most freedom-loving part of Germany. And now they are trying to steal that from us in addition! The Allies are trying to Balkanize us. They do not want money from us; they want to _vernichten_ us, to destroy us completely. The immense majority of the people of the Rhineland do not want to abandon us; they are loyal to the Empire. But the French have the upper hand now; they protect the few self-seekers who are riding it over the loyal masses; the British are willing and the Americans are simple enough to believe that the republic that is to have its capital in Coblenz represents the desires of the majority. Never! The Catholics and the capitalists combined to form the Rhine Republic, with the aid of the French—because they could thus both have more power for themselves.” (How true this statement may be I can only judge from the fact that a very small minority of those I questioned on the subject while with the Army of Occupation expressed any desire to see the region separated from Germany, and that I found virtually _no_ sentiment for abandoning the Empire in any portion whatever of unoccupied Germany.)

“Then these new frontiers in the east were set by men who know the conditions there only from books, not from being on the spot, or at best by men who were misinformed by the stupid or biased agents they sent. Thus many towns almost wholly inhabited by Germans are now to be given to the Poles, and _vice versa_.” As to the proposed punishment of the Kaiser, though there seemed to be very little love and no great loyalty—except in acquitting him on the score of beginning the war—left for him among the great mass of the people, this clause aroused as great wrath as any. The German saw in it a matter of national honor.

Such anger as the peace terms aroused was, of course, chiefly poured out upon President Wilson. “We believed in Wilson and he betrayed us,” protested a cantankerous old man. “Wilson told us that if we chased the Hohenzollerns out he would ‘treat us right’; we did so, and now look what he has gone and done to us! He has led us to slaughter, and all the time we thought he was leading us out of the wilderness. He has grossly betrayed us. People put too much faith in him. _I_ never did, for I always considered his lean face the mask of hypocrisy, not the countenance of justice and idealism. We Germans, with few exceptions, believed him to be a noble character, whereas he is operated by strings in the hands of the American capitalists, like the puppets the children at the Guignol mistake for living people.” “Only the capitalists,” cried a motorman, “led by Wilson, had any say in this treaty. Your Wilson and his capitalists are far worse tyrants than the Kaiser ever aspired to be in his wildest moments.” “Wilson leads the capitalists of the world against Socialism, against socialistic Germany, which they fear far more than they ever did a military Germany,” asserted the Majority-Socialist papers.

On the other hand there were Germans who stanchly defended Wilson, taking an unprejudiced, scientific view of the entire question, as they might of the fourth dimension or of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. These were apt to bring their fellow-countrymen up with a round turn by asserting that Wilson never promised to make peace with Germany based on his Fourteen Points. Ah, those Fourteen Points! If they had been bayonets I should have resembled a sieve long, long before my journey was ended.

“We Germans can look at the problem from both sides,” insisted one such open-minded professor, “because we are more liberal than the Allies, because we travel, we do business in all parts of the world. We have advanced beyond the stage of melodrama, of believing that all right, all good is on one side and the contrary on the other. The Frenchman rarely leaves home, the Englishman never changes his mind when he does—he has it set in cement for safety’s sake before he starts. The American is too young to be able to look frankly at a question from both sides.”

“Militarism,” said a mason who had one crippled leg left, yet who chatted with me in an equally friendly manner both before and after he had learned my nationality, “was our national sport, as football is in England, and whatever you play most is in America. Now we have discovered that it is not a very pleasant sport. We have a nose full of it! Yet we cannot sign this peace. If a man has a thousand marks left and a footpad says to him: ‘I am going to take this away from you. Kindly sign this statement to the effect that you are giving it to me freely. I shall take it, anyway, but we will both be better off if I have your consent,’ what would you expect the man to do? Let the Allies come to Berlin! We cannot go to war again, but—the people must stand behind the government!”

Just what he meant by the last assertion was not entirely clear; but at least the first half of the assertion was frequently borne out by little hints that all but escaped the eye. Thus, a large bookstore in Berlin bore the meaningful placard, “War Literature at Half Price!”

“From this date” (May 8th), gasped an important Berlin daily, “we drop to a fourth-rate power, along with Spain.” (There were, to be sure, some Spanish suggestions in the uncleanliness, the apathy, the run-down condition of buildings that had suffered five years of disrepair, in the emaciated beggars one occasionally saw in the Germany of 1919.) “With this ‘peace’ we are down and out; we can never get on our feet again. There is not wealth enough in all Germany to pay this indemnity and still save ourselves. We can never recover because we can never buy the raw materials we must have to do so. There is nothing left in the country with which to pay for these raw stuffs except our labor, and we cannot set to work because we have no raw stuffs to work with. We are caught in the whirlpool! It is a fallacy to think that we shall save money on our army. The army we have to-day costs us far more than the one we had when the armistice was signed. If we are required to have an army of volunteers only and pay them as good wages as they now require ... to-day one soldier costs us more than thirty did under the old system! And what soldiers! We shall not be able to compete with the world, first of all because the exchange on the mark will make our raw materials cost us three times what they do our rivals, and then we have these new eight-hour laws and all the rest of the advance socialistic program, which they do not have in other countries. The Allies should have hunted out the guilty individuals, not punish us all as a nation, as an incompetent captain punishes his entire company because he is too lazy or too stupid to catch the actual wrong-doers. In twenty years Germany will have been completely destroyed. All the best men will have emigrated. If we try to spend anything for _Kultur_—that excellent heritage of the old régime which our enemies so falsified and garbled—for working-men’s insurance, new schools, municipal theaters, even for public baths, the Allies will say, ‘No, we want that money ourselves; you owe us that on the old war game you lost.’ In that case all we can do is to resort to passive resistance”—a strange German occupation indeed!

The little blond German “ace of aces,” credited with bringing down some twoscore Allied airmen, hoped to come to America and play in a circus. He put little faith in the rumor that he might not be received there, and thought that if there really was any opposition it could easily be overcome by getting one of our large “trusts” to take a financial interest in his case. In fact, the chief worry of many Germans seemed to be whether or not and how soon they would be allowed to come to America—North or South. “Rats desert a sinking ship.” One man whose intelligence and experience warranted attention to his words assured me that he belonged to a party that had been working for some time in favor of, and that they found a strong sentiment for—making Germany an American colony! I regret the inability to report any personal evidence to support his statements.

But if the general tone was lacrymose, notes of a more threatening timbre were by no means lacking. “With this ‘peace,’” was one assertion, “we shall have another Thirty Years’ War and all Europe will go over the brink into the abyss.” “We Germans got too high,” mused a philosophic old innkeeper accustomed to take advantage of his profession as a listening-post. “He who does is due for a fall, and we got it. But France is the haughty one now, and she is riding to a cropper. She will rue her overbearing manner, for the _revanche_ is here already—on our side this time. And if French and Germans ever go to war again there will be no prisoners taken!” “If the Germans are forced to sign this ‘peace,’” cried a fat Hollander who had lived much in Germany, “there will be another war within ten years, and all Europe will be destroyed, Holland with the rest, France certainly, for she is tottering already. If they do not sign, we shall all be plunged into anarchy.” “We had looked to Wilson to bring an end to a century-old situation that had grown intolerable,” moaned a Berlin merchant. “Now we must drill hatred into our children from their earliest age, so that in thirty years, when the time is ripe....”

What does Germany plan to do with herself, or what is left of her, now? Does she wish to remain a republic, to return to the Hohenzollerns, or to establish a new monarchy under some other less sinister dynasty? As with so many of the world’s problems, the answer depends largely on the papers one, or those of whom one made inquiries, read. The replies ran the entire gamut. Some asserted that even the heads of the socialistic parties have lost only the symbols of kaiserism, that the masses still keep even those. A majority of the peasant class is probably monarchical, when they are not wholly indifferent to anything beyond their own acres and the price of beer. They seem to like the distant glamour of a glittering pageantry, a ruler to whom they can attribute superman or demigod qualities—so long as the cost thereof is not extracted too openly from their pockets. The Junkers, the old robber barons from Borussia, of course still want a monarchy, probably of Hohenzollern complexion, though the present heir to that bankrupt estate has not a visible friend in the Empire. “The majority still want the Kaiser, or at least a monarchy,” one heard the frequent assertion; “we are not ripe for a republic.”

If I were forced to answer definitely myself I should say that most educated Germans want nothing more to do with the Kaiser and his family. Their reply to a query on this point is most apt to be an energetic, “_Ausgeschlossen!_” On the question of no monarchy at all they are by no means so decided. Naturally there is still a monarchical class left; there still is even in France. “A vote would probably give a small majority for the monarchy to-day,” said a young psychologist. “I have no politics myself; a psychologist must keep his mind clear of those squabbles, as an engineer must his gears of sand, but at least the Hohenzollerns gave us peace and quiet, and while there were some unpleasant things about their system, they now seem slight in comparison with what the war has brought us.... The German people are really democratic (_sic!_), but they are also monarchical; they want a paternal government, such as they have been used to during all the living generations. But we shall probably remain a republic now.”

Said the peasant innkeeper already introduced: “The monarchy is probably the best system for us; it fits our mentality and training. But now that we have changed there is no use in changing back again. There is not enough difference between the two schemes of government. So we shall probably stay what we are. The great trouble with this king and prince business”—he lived in Saxe-Weimar, where every seventh man used to wear a crown—“was that it was so _übertrieben_, so overdone, with us. They demanded such swarms of _Beamters_, of employees, courtiers, uniforms. And all their petty little nobles! We peasants don’t mind supporting a few such decorations, but.... Now the Kaiser gets eighty thousand marks a year instead of twenty-four million, and I doubt if he is suffering from hunger—which is less than can be said for many of the people he left behind.”

Possibly the most frequently expressed opinion in the length and breadth of Germany was the frank, “It does not much matter what kind of a government we have so long as we can get wise and honest men at the top.” That, after all, is the final answer to the whole problem that has been teasing the world for centuries. “Remember,” smiled a Dutchman, “that this democracy you are shouting about is no new American discovery. We tried a republic centuries ago, and we still have it, though now under a hereditary president called a king—or just now a queen—and we find that works best of all.” “We are like birds just let out of a lifetime cage,” protested a Socialist. “Give us time to try our wings. We shall fly much better two years from now. There was a strong republican feeling in Germany long before the war, but the Kaiser and his crowd ruthlessly strangled it.” “How fair, how revolutionary, how socialistic is the ‘new’ Germany,” raged the Independent Socialists, “is shown by the acquittal of the assassins of Liebknecht and Luxembourg contrasted with the death-sentence of Leviné, who was no more a ‘traitor against the constituted authorities’ than was Hoffmann, who drove him out, or those who upset the monarchy and established the ‘republic.’”

But we must be careful not to let partizan rage, sour grapes, obscure the problem. There has certainly been a considerable change of feeling in Germany; whether a sufficient, a final change remains to be seen. The Germans, whatever their faults, are a foresighted and a deliberate people. They are scanning the horizon with unprejudiced eyes in quest of a well-tested theory of government that will fit their problem. Though they seem for the instant to be inclined to the left, they are really balancing on the ridge between republicanism and monarchy, perhaps a more responsible monarchy than the one they have just cast off, and it will probably not take much to tip them definitely to either side. In the offing, too, Bolshevism is always hovering; not so close, perhaps, as the Germans themselves fear, or are willing to have the world believe, but distinctly menacing, for all that. In things political at least the German is no idealist. Of the rival systems of government he has an eye chiefly to the material advantages. Which one will bring him the most _Kultur_, in the shape of all those things ranging from subsidized opera to municipal baths with which the Kaiser régime upholstered his slavery? Above all, which will give him the earliest and surest opportunity to get back to work and to capitalize undisturbed his world-famed diligence? Those are his chief questions. I never heard in all Germany the hint of a realization that a republic may be the best form of government because it gives every citizen more or less of a chance to climb to the topmost rung of the ladder. But I did now and then see encouraging signs that the masses are beginning to realize that a people is responsible for the actions of its government just as a business man is responsible for his clerk’s errors—and that is already a long step forward for Germany.

X
SENTENCED TO AMPUTATION

The terms of the Peace Treaty having broken upon Berlin without arousing any of the excited scenes I had expected, I decided to go away from there. General apathy might be ruling in the provinces also, but at least I would be “on my own” if anything happened, and not where I could dart under the protecting wing of the Ally-housing Adlon at the first signs of storm. I laid a plan that promised to kill two birds with one stone. I would jump to the far eastern border of the Empire, to a section which Paris had just decreed should be handed over to the Poles, and I would walk from there into a section which the Poles had already taken. In other words, I would examine side by side an amputated member and one which the consultation of international doctors about the operating-table on which Germany lay had marked for amputation.

Luckily I took the wrong train on the teeming Friedrichsstrasse Bahnhof platform next morning, or I should have been sent back before reaching my goal. I learned just in time to drop off there that travelers into Polish territory must have their passports viséed in Frankfurt-am-Oder. There was a considerable gathering of nervous petitioners about the door of the haughty German officer who represented the Empire in this matter, at one of the huge barracks on the outskirts of town. But the delay was not correspondingly long, thanks not only to the efficient system of his office, but to the fact that many of the applicants remained only long enough to hear him dismiss them with an uncompromising “No!” All men of military age—and in the Germany of 1919 that seemed to mean every male between puberty and senility—were being refused permission to enter the amputated province, whether they were of Polish or German origin. My own case was different. The officer scowled a bit as the passport I laid before him revealed my nationality, but he stamped it quickly, as if in haste to be done with an unpleasant duty. Whether or not this official right of exit from the Empire included permission to return was a question which he curtly dismissed as no affair of his. Evidently I was burning my bridges behind me.

Frankfurt-am-Oder pulsated with soldiers, confirming the impression that reigned in khaki-clad circles at Coblenz that the German army had turned its face toward the east. Food seemed somewhat less scarce than in the capital. A moderately edible dinner cost me only eight marks. In the market-place, however, the stalls and bins were pathetically near to emptiness. A new annoyance—one that was destined to pursue me during all the rest of my travels in Germany—here first became personal. It was the scarcity of matches. In the days to come that mere hour’s search for a single box of uncertain, smoke-barraging _Streichhölzer_ grew to be a pleasant memory. Not far from the city was one of those many camps of Russian prisoners, rationed now by American doughboys, some of whose inmates had nearly five years of German residence to their discredit. If the testimony of many constant observers was trustworthy, they dreaded nothing so much as the day when they must turn their backs on American plenitude and regain their own famished, disrupted land. True, they were still farmed out to labor for their enemies. But they seldom strained themselves with toil, and in exchange were they not growing efficient in baseball and enhancing their Tataric beauty with the silk hats and red neckties furnished by an all-providing Red Cross?

The station platform of Frankfurt, strewn pellmell with Polish refugees and their disheveled possessions, recalled the halcyon days of Ellis Island. A “mixed” train of leisurely temperament wandered away at last toward the trunk line to the east which I had fortunately not taken that morning. Evidently one must get off the principal arteries of travel to hear one’s fellow-passengers express themselves frankly and freely. At any rate, there was far more open discussion of the question of the hour during that jolting thirty miles than I had ever heard in a day on sophisticated express trains.

“The idea,” began an old man of sixty or more, apropos of nothing but the thought that had evidently been running through his head at sight of the fertile acres about us, “of expecting us to surrender this, one of the richest sections of the Fatherland, and to those improvident Poles of all people! They are an intelligent race—I have never been one of those who denied them intelligence. But they can never govern themselves; history has proved that over and over again. In my twenty-three years’ residence in Upper Silesia I have seen how the laborers’ houses have improved, how they have thrived and reached a far higher plane of culture under German rule. A Polish government would only bring them down to their natural depths again. They will never treat the working-man as fairly, as generously as we have.

“But,” he continued, suddenly, with increased heat, “we will _not_ see the Fatherland torn to pieces by a band of wolfish, envious enemies. We will fight for our rights! We _cannot_ abandon our faithful fellow-countrymen, our genuine German brethren, to be driven from their homes or misruled by these wretched Poles. It would be unworthy of our German blood! There will be a _Bürgerkrieg_—a peasants’ war, with every man fighting for his own sacred possessions, before we will allow German territory to be taken from us. I will sacrifice my entire family rather than allow the Fatherland to be dismembered.”

Our fellow-passengers listened to this tirade of testy old age with the curious apathy of hunger or indifference which seemed to have settled upon the nation. Now and then one or two of them nodded approval of the sentiments expressed; occasionally they threw in a few words of like tenor. But on the whole there was little evidence of an enthusiasm for rescuing their “genuine German brethren” that promised to go the length of serious personal sacrifice.

All Germany was in bloom, chiefly with the white of early fruit-trees, giving the landscape a maidenly gaiety that contrasted strangely with the funereal gloom within the car. Gangs of women were toiling with shovels along the railway embankment. The sandy flatlands, supporting little but scrubby spruce forests, gave way at length to a rich black soil that heralded the broad fertile granary which Germany had been called upon to surrender. Barefoot women and children, interspersed with only a small percentage of men, stood erect from their labors and gazed oxlike after the rumbling train. Here and there great fields of colza, yellow as the saffron robe of a Buddhist priest, stretched away toward the horizon. The plant furnished, according to one of my fellow-passengers, a very tolerable _Ersatz_ oil. Fruit-trees in their white spring garments, their trunks carefully whitewashed as a protection against insects, lined every highway. Other trees had been trimmed down to mere trunks, like those of Brittany and La Vendée in France, as if they, too, had been called upon to sacrifice all but life itself to the struggle that had ended so disastrously.

In the helter-skelter of finding seats in the express that picked us up at the junction I had lost sight of the belligerent old man. A husband and wife who had formed part of his audience, however, found place in the same compartment as I. For a long time I attempted to draw them into conversation by acting as suspiciously as possible. I took copious notes, snapped my kodak at everything of interest on the station platforms, and finally took to reading an English newspaper. All in vain. They stared at me with that frankness of the continental European, but they would not be moved to words, not even at sight of the genuine cigar I ostentatiously extracted from my knapsack. At length I gave up the attempt and turned to them with some casual remark, bringing in a reference to my nationality at the first opportunity.

“Ah,” boasted the woman, “I _told_ my husband that you looked like an Englishman, or something. But he insisted you were a Dane.”

“I wonder if the old fellow got a seat, and some one else to listen to him—with his _Bürgerkrieg_,” mused the husband, a moment later. “We Germans have little to boast of, in governing ourselves. Germany should be divided up between Belgium, France, and England, or be given an English king.” Apparently he was quite serious, though he may have been indulging in that crude sarcasm to which the German sometimes abandons himself and which he thinks nicely veiled. “We are not ripe for a republic. What we are evidently trying to do is to make ourselves a super-republic in one jump. The Socialists were against the Kaiser because he put on too much pomp, but we Germans need that kind of a ruler, some one who will be stern but kind to us, like a father. The Kaiser himself was not to blame. At least half, if not a majority, of the people want him back—or at least another one like him.”

“We surely will have our Kaiser back again, sooner or later,” cried the woman, in a tone like that of a religious fanatic.

Just then, however, the pair reached their station and there was no opportunity to get her to elaborate her text. They shook hands heartily, wished me a “_Glückliche Reise_,” and disappeared into the night.

Sunset and dusk had been followed by an almost full moon that made the evening only a fainter replica of the perfect cloudless day. Toward nine, however, the sky became overcast and the darkness impenetrable. This was soon the case inside as well as out, for during an unusually protracted stop at a small station a guard marched the length of the train, putting out all its lights. It seemed we were approaching the “danger zone.” I had been laboring under the delusion that the armistice which Germany had concluded with her enemies was in force on all fronts. Not at all. The Poles, it seemed, were intrenched from six hundred to three thousand yards away all along this section of the line. They had been there since January, soon after the province of Posen had revolted against German rule. Almost every night they fired upon the trains, now and then even with artillery. Sometimes the line was impassable. German troops, of course, were facing them. Trench raids were of almost nightly occurrence; some of them had developed into real battles.

Now and again as we hurled on through the night there were sounds of distant firing. It was only at Nakel, however, that we seemed in any personal danger. There the Poles were barely six hundred yards away, and between the time we halted at the station and got under way again at least a hundred shots were fired, most of them the rat-a-tat of machine-guns and all of them so close at hand that we unconsciously ducked our heads. The train apparently escaped unscathed, however, and two stations farther on the guard lighted it up again, with the announcement that danger was over. We rumbled on into Bromberg, where I descended toward midnight. Soldiers held the station gate and subjected every traveler—or, more exactly, his papers—to a careful scrutiny before permitting him to pass. My own credentials they accepted more readily than those of many of their fellow-countrymen, some of whom were herded into a place of detention. As I stepped out through the gate, another soldier thrust into my hand an _Ausweis_ permitting me to remain on the streets after dark, for Bromberg was officially in a state of siege.

When I entered the nearest hotel I found that unofficially in the same condition. A drunken army officer, who was the exact picture of what Allied cartoonists would have us believe all his class, was prancing about the hotel office with drawn sword, roaring angrily and threatening to spit on his needle-pointed saber every one in the room. The possible victims were two half-grown hotel clerks, ridiculous in their professional evening dress, and a thin, mottled-faced private soldier, who cowered speechless in different corners. I was inside before I noticed the disturbance, and pride would not permit me to retreat. I took station near a convenient stool and studied the exact degree of uncertainty of the bully’s legs, with a view to future defense. But for some reason he took no notice of me and at length lurched out again into the street, cursing as he went.

I owe it to the goddess of truth to state that this was the one and only case I ever personally saw of a German officer living up to the popular Allied conception of his caste. On the contrary, I found the great majority of them quiet, courteous and gentlemanly to a high degree, with by no means so large a sprinkling of the “roughneck” variety as was to be found among our own officers in Europe. Which does not mean that they were not often haughty beyond reason, nor that they may not sometimes have concealed brutal instincts beneath their polished exteriors. But while we are on the subject, let me read into the record the testimony of their own fellow-countrymen, particularly that of many a man who served under them.

“Our active officers,” would be the composite answer of all those I questioned on the subject, “were excellent. They still had something _adel_ about them—something of the genuine nobility of the old knights from which the caste sprang. Their first and foremost thought was the fatherly care of their men—rendered with a more or less haughty aloofness, to be sure—that was necessary to discipline—but a genuine solicitude for the welfare of their soldiers. Above all”—and here, perhaps, is the chief point of divergence between them and our own officers of the same class—“they were rarely or never self-seeking. Our reserve officers, on the other hand, were by no means of the same high character. One so often felt the _Kaufmann_—the soul of a merchant underneath. Many of them were just plain rascals, who stole the presents that came addressed to their soldiers and looted for their own personal benefit. Then there were many who, though honest and well-meaning enough, had not the preparation required for so important an office. They were teachers, or scholars, or young students, who did not realize that a quiet voice is more commanding than a noisy one. The great drawback of our military system, of our national life, in fact, under the monarchy, was the impenetrable wall that separated us into the compartments of caste. Old _Feldwebels_ who had served in the army for twenty years were refused positions which they could have filled to excellent advantage, in war-time, because they were not considered in the “officer class”; and there were set over them men half their own age, school-boy officers, in some cases, who were barely eighteen, and who naturally could not have the training and experience which are required of a lieutenant. Sixty per cent. of our active officers were slain, and many others were not able to return to the line. Only 30 per cent. of our reserve officers were killed, with the result that before the war ended a man was lucky to have a superior whom he could honor and unquestioningly obey.”

It was in Bromberg that I came into personal contact with more of the class in question than I had in any other city of the Empire. Not only were soldiers more numerous here, but I purposely “butted in” upon a half-dozen military offices, ostensibly to make sure that my papers were in order, really to feel out the sentiment on the peace terms and measure the sternness of martial law. But though I deliberately emphasized my nationality, not once did an officer show any resentment at my presence. In fact, most of them saw me to the door at the end of the interview, and bowed me out with all the ceremony of their exacting social code. If the verdict that had just been issued in Paris had burst like a shell among them, they showed no evidence of panic. The official day’s work went deliberately on, and the only comment on the peace terms I succeeded in arousing was a quiet, uncompromising “Quite unacceptable, of course.”

The city itself was as astonishingly placid in the midst of what an outsider would have supposed to be exciting times. Being not only in a state of siege, but having just heard that it was soon to transfer its allegiance to another race, one was justified in expecting a town as large as Trenton or San Antonio to show at least some ripples on its surface. I looked for them in vain. It was Sunday, just the day for popular demonstrations in Germany, yet not only was there no sign whatever of rejoicing among the Polish population, but nothing even suggesting the uprising of protest among the German residents which had been so loudly prophesied. The place resembled some New England factory town on the same day of the week. Groups of Polish-looking young men, somewhat uncomfortable and stiff in their Sunday best, lounged on the street-corners, ogling the plump Polish girls on their way to church. Strollers seemed interested only in keeping to the shaded side of the street, youths and children only in their games. Tramways rumbled slowly along as usual—and, before I forget it, their female conductors wore breeches; such shops as were habitually open on Sunday seemed to be doing their customary amount of business. The whole town was as staid, heavy, and unenthusiastic as the German character.

In the face of a wide divergence of opinion among its own inhabitants it was hard for a stranger to decide which of the two races predominated in Bromberg. The Germans asserted that only 40 per cent. of the population were Poles, and that many of them preferred to see things remain as they were. The Poles defied any one to find more than twenty Germans among every hundred inhabitants, or to point out a single member of their race who sincerely wished to keep his allegiance to the Fatherland. Street and shop signs were nearly all in German, but that may have been due to legal requirement. The rank and file of the populace had a Polish look, yet they seemed to speak German by choice. Moreover, there is but scant difference of appearance between Teutons and Poles, particularly when they have lived their entire lives together in the same environment. On the wall of a church I dropped into during morning service there were five columns of names, forty-five each, of the men who had “Patriotically sacrificed their lives for a grateful Fatherland.” At least one half of them ended in “ski,” and in one column alone I counted thirty unquestionably Polish names. But then, it was a Catholic church, so there you are again. Perhaps the most unbiased testimony of all was the fact that the little children playing in the park virtually all spoke Polish.

I drifted into conversation with an intelligent young mechanic taking his Sunday ease in a _Bierhalle_. He turned out to be a Pole. As soon as he was convinced of my identity he shed his mask of commonplace remarks and fell to talking frankly and sincerely. I do not speak Polish, hence the rulers of Bromberg might have been startled to hear the statements that were poured into my ear in their own tongue. Yet my companion discussed their shortcomings and the war they had waged, quite openly, with far less circumspection than a similar criticism of the powers that be would have required in France or the United States at the same date.

“You don’t hear much Polish on the streets, do you?” he began. “But if I could take you into the homes you would find that the street-door is the dividing line between the two tongues. In the family circle we all stick to the old language, and the memory of the ancient nation that is just being resurrected has never been obscured. We are not exactly _forbidden_ to speak Polish in public, but if we do we are quite likely to be thumped on the head, or kicked in the back, or called “dirty Polacks.” Besides, it is never to our advantage to admit that we are Poles. You never know, when you meet a man, whether he is one or not. I feel sure the waiter there is one, for instance, yet you see he carefully pretends to understand nothing but German. We are treated with unfair discrimination from the cradle to the grave. When I first went to public school I could not speak German, and there was hardly a day that a gang of little _Deutschen_ did not beat me to tears. I used to go home regularly with lumps as big as walnuts on my head. Even the teacher whipped us for speaking Polish. When it came time to go to work we could only get the hardest and most poorly paid jobs. The railways, the government offices, all the better trades were closed to us. If we applied for work at a German factory, the first thing they asked was whether we were Catholics and Poles. In the courts a “ski” on the end of a name means a double sentence. Our taxes were figured far more strictly than those of the Germans. In the army we are given the dirtiest jobs and most of the punishments. At the front we were thrown into the most dangerous positions.

“The Germans could have won the Poles over if they had done away with these unfair differences and treated us as equals. They are an efficient people and some of their ways are better than our ways, but they cannot get rid of their arrogance and their selfishness. They are short-sighted. I spent four years at the front, yet I never once fired at the enemy, but into the air or into the ground. The majority of Poles did the same thing. You can imagine the ammunition that was wasted. There is not much work at home, yet you will not find one Pole in a hundred of military age in the German volunteer army. You see many of them in uniform on the streets here—all those redheaded young fellows are Poles—but that is because they are still illegally held under the old conscription act. Shortsightedness again, for if trouble ever starts, the garrison will eat itself up without any one outside bothering with it. No Pole of military age can get into the province of Posen, not even if he was born there. In Berlin there are thousands of young Poles wandering around in uniform, half starved, with nothing to do, yet who are not allowed to come home.

“No, there has been very little mixture of the two races. Intermarriage is rare. I know only one case of it among my own acquaintances. It is not the German government that is opposed to it—on the contrary—but the Church, and Polish sentiment. The Catholics are against the old order of things and want a republic; it is the Protestants who want the Kaiser restored”—here one detected a religious bias that perhaps somewhat obscured the truth. “The old-German party wants to fight to the end. If they had their say Poland would never get the territory that has been awarded her. Sign? Of course they will sign. They are merely stalling, in the hope of having the blow softened. Nor will the government that accepts the treaty be overthrown. The Social Democrats are strong, very strong; they will sign and still live. The Poles? With very few exceptions they are eager to join the new empire. Paderewski has become a national hero. Especially are the peasants strong for the change. For one thing, it will fatten their pocketbooks. The Germans pumped them dry of everything. They had to deliver so many eggs per hen, buying them if the fowls did not lay enough. Or the guilty hen had to be turned over for slaughter. It usually went into the officers’ messes. Each farmer was allowed only one rooster. The same exactions ruled among all the flocks and herds. Thousands of girls were sent into the pine forests to gather pitch for turpentine. No, I do not believe they were mistreated against their will, except perhaps in a few individual cases, no more than would happen anywhere under similar circumstances. Nor do I think the Germans wantonly destroyed trees by ‘ringing’ them. What they did, probably, was tap them too carelessly and too deep.

“All this talk about Bolshevism overspreading Germany is nonsense. The Bolshevists are poor, simple fellows who have nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain, many of them Chinese laborers brought to Russia in the time of the Czar, fatalists who think nothing of throwing their lives away—or of taking those of others. The other day the Bolshevists decreed in one of the cities they have captured that the bourgeois should move out into the outskirts and the proletariat take all the fine houses. Then they named a ‘poor day’ during which any one who had no shoes could go into all the houses and take a pair wherever he found two pairs. Can you imagine the orderly, plodding Germans subscribing to any such doctrine as that? I certainly cannot, for I have lived all my life among them and I know how they worship _Ordnung_ and _Gemütlichkeit_.

“Yes, we have several Polish newspapers published here in Bromberg. But even if you could read them it would not be worth your while, for they do not mean what they say. They are doctored and padded and censored by the German authorities until the only reason we read them is for the local gossip of our friends and acquaintances. If it were not Sunday I would take you to meet the editor of one of them, and you would find that he speaks quite differently from what he writes in his paper, once he is sure he is not talking to a German spy.”

The mechanic told me all this without once showing the slightest evidence of prejudice or bitterness against the oppressors of his race. He treated the matter with that academic aloofness, that absence of personal feeling, which I had so often been astounded to see the Germans themselves display toward the woes that had come upon them. Perhaps a lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners, ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg outwardly a picture of peace and contentment.