My Year of the War. Frederick Palmer
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 companies of volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy 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 ships, one saw 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 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. 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 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 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 declassed 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