A prisoners’ “show” camp—Filthy conditions—Scanty fare—Racial characteristics—“Upholding Britain’s dignity”—Russian princes in disguise—A blind artist—A physical insult—Deadly monotony of prison life—Drilling—Hamburg a dead city—A hate of the pocket—The “system” at a Berlin hospital—Effects of the war in Berlin—At the Opera—A plethora of Iron Crosses—Immanence of the Kaiser—Imperial propaganda—The Crown Prince marooned—Glory to the Kaiser and von Hindenburg—President of the German Corporation—Always the offensive—“America too far away!”

Only a week before I had seen the 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 watched march into battle—armed, confident, disciplined parts of an organisation, ready to sweep all before them in a charge—become so many sheep, disarmed, disorganised, 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 DÖberitz, near Berlin. This was a show camp, I was told, but it suffices. Conditions at others might be worse; doubtless were. England treated its prisoners best, unless my information from unprejudiced observers is 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 LiÉge 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 ship than a Briton on board a German ship, under the circumstances,” his remark was significant in more ways than one.

His English fellow-passengers on that splendid liner which a German submarine was to send to the bottom showed him no discourtesy. They passed 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 a 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 class. 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 civilised 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 were 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 meal 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.

Our reservist guide had run away to America in youth, where he had worked at anything he could find to do; but he had returned to Berlin, where he had a “good little business” before the war. He was stout and cheery, and he referred to the prisoners as “boys.” The French and Russians were good boys; but the English were bad boys, who had no discipline. He said that all received the same food as German soldiers. It seemed almost ridiculous chivalry that men who had fought against you and were living inactive lives should be as well fed as the men who were fighting for you. The rations that I saw given to German soldiers were better. But that was what the guide said.

“This is our little sitting-room for the English non-commissioned officers,” he explained, as he opened the door of a small shanty which had a pane of glass for a window. Some men sitting around a small stove arose. One, a big sergeant-major, towered over the others; he had the colours of the South African campaign on the breast of his worn khaki blouse and stood very straight, as if on parade. By the window was a Scot in kilts, who was equally tall. He looked around over his shoulder and then turned his face away with the pride of a man who does not care to be regarded as a show. His uniform was as neat as if he were at inspection; and the way he held his head, the haughtiness of his profile against the stream of light, recalled the unconquerable spirit of the Prussian prisoner whom I had seen on the road during the fighting along the Aisne. Only a regular, but he was upholding the dignity of Britain in that prison camp better than many a member of Parliament on the floor of the House of Commons. I asked our guide about him.

“A good boy, that! All his boys obey him, and he obeys all the regulations. But he acts as if we Germans were his prisoners.”

The British might not be good boys, but they would be clean. They were diligent in the chase in their underclothes; their tents were free of odour; and there was something resolute about a Tommy who was bare to the waist in that freezing wind, making an effort at a bath. I heard tales of Mr. Atkins’ characteristic thoughtlessness. While the French took good care of their clothes and kept their tents neat, he was likely to sell his coat or his blanket if he got a chance in order to buy something that he liked to eat. One Tommy who sat on his stray tick inside the tent was knitting. When I asked him where he had learned to knit, he replied: “India!” and gave me a look as much as to say, “Now pass on to the next cage.”

The British looked the most pallid of all, I thought. They were not used to cabbage soup. Their stomachs did not take hold of it, as one said; and they loathed the black bread. No white bread and no jam! Only when you have seen Mr. Atkins with a pot of jam and a loaf of white bread and some bacon frizzling near by can you realise the hardship which cabbage soup meant to that British regular who gets lavish rations of the kind he likes along with his shilling a day for professional soldiering.

“You see, the boys go about as they please,” said our guide. “They don’t have a bad time. Three meals a day and nothing to do.”

Members of a laughing circle which included some British were taking turns at a kind of Russian blind man’s buff, which seemed to me about in keeping with the mental capacity of a prison camp.

“No French!” I remarked.

“The French keep to themselves, but they are good boys,” he replied. “Maybe it is because we have only a few of them here.” Every time one sounded the subject he was struck by the attitude of the Germans toward the French, not alone explained by the policy of the hour which hoped for a separate peace with France. Perhaps it was best traceable to the Frenchman’s sense of amour propre, his philosophy, his politeness, or an indefinable quality in the grain of the man.

The Germans affected to look down on the French; yet there was something about the Frenchman which the Germans had to respect—something not won by war. I heard admiration for them at the same time as contempt for their red trousers and their unpreparedness. While we are in this avenue, German officers had respect for the dignity of British officers, the leisurely, easy quality of superiority which they preserved in any circumstances. The qualities of a race come out in adversity no less than in prosperity. Thus, their captors regarded the Russians as big, good-natured children.

“Yes, they play games and we give the English an English newspaper to read twice a week,” said our affable guide, unconscious, I think, of any irony in the remark. For the paper was the Continental News, published in “the American language” for American visitors. You may take it for granted that it did not exaggerate any success of the Allies.

“We have a prince and the son of a rich man among the Russian prisoners—yes, quite in the Four Hundred,” the guide went on. “They were such good boys we put them to work in the cookhouse. Star boarders, eh? They like it. They get more to eat.”

These two men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first line they were and even in their privates’ uniforms they bore the unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before visitors. In the prince’s eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said: “Well, why not? We don’t mind.”

When we were taken through the cookhouse I asked about a little Frenchman, who was sitting with his nose in a soup bowl. He seemed too near-sighted ever to get into any army. His face was distinctly that of a man of culture; one would have guessed that he was an artist.

“Shrapnel burst,” explained the guide. “He will never be able to see much again. We let him come in here to eat.”

I wanted to talk with him, but these exhibitions are supposed to be all in pantomime; a question and you are urged along to the next exhibit. He was young and all his life he was to be like that—like some poor, blind kitten!

The last among a number of Russians returning to the enclosure from some fatigue duty was given a blow in the seat of his baggy trousers with a stick which one of the guards carried. The Russian quickened his steps and seemed to think nothing of the incident. But to me it was the worst thing that I saw at DÖberitz, this act of physical violence against a man by one who has power over him. The personal equation was inevitable to the observer. Struck in that way, could one fail to strike back? Would not he strike in red anger, without stopping to think of consequences? There is something bred into the Anglo-Saxon nature which resents a physical blow. We courtmartial an officer for laying hands on a private, though that private may get ten years in prison on his trial. Yet the Russian thought nothing of it, or the guard, either. An officer in the German or the Russian army may strike a man.

“Would the guard hit a Frenchman in that way?” I asked. Our guide said not; the French were good boys. Or an Englishman? He had not seen it done. The Englishman would swear and curse, he was sure, and might fight, they were such undisciplined boys. But the Russians—“they are like kids. It was only a slap. Didn’t hurt him any.”

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 on the road companies of volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of German infantry.

In Berlin we were told again that everything was perfectly normal. Trains were running as usual to Hamburg, if we 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 forest of masts of idle ships, one learned 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 the 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. Every one 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 traffic 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 organisation. The wounded men seemed parts of a machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganisation less in evidence than at home, 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 the 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 kindly 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 to him! 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, promenading 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 plenitude 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 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 Czar of Russia or the King of England by his side?

It was his Berlin, the heart of his Berlin, that was before you when you left the opera—the new Berlin, taking few pages of a guide book compared to Paris, which he had fathered in its boom growth. In front of his palace Russian field guns taken by von Hindenburg at Tannenberg were exhibited as the spoils of his war; while the Never-to-be-Forgotten Grandfather in bronze rode home in triumph from Paris not far away.

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 SiÈges AllÉe, 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 all the dead bones of distinguished and mediocre royalty immortalised 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 realise, particularly as his promised entry into Paris had failed. There can be no question which of the two has the wiser head.

The Crown Prince had passed into the background. He was marooned with ennui in the face of the French trenches in the West, while 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 SiÈges AllÉe 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 realise. 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 assimilation, 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? Banal questions! He is the Kaiser on the background of the SiÈges AllÉe, who has first promoted himself, then the Hohenzollerns, and then the interests of Germany with all the zest of the foremost shareholder and president 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; but we are not discussing that, and we may beg leave to differ without threshing the old straw of argument.

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 sturdy 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.

Through the war his pose has met the needs of the hour. An emperor bowed down with the weight of his people’s sacrifice, a grey, determined emperor hastening to honour the victors, covering up defeats, urging his legions on, himself at the front, never seen by the general public in the rear, a mysterious figure, not saying much and that foolish to the Allies but appealing to the Germans, rather appearing to submerge his own personality in the united patriotism of the struggle—such is the picture which the throne machinery has impressed on the German mind. The histrionic gift may be at its best in creating a saga.

Always the offensive! Germany would keep on striking as long as she had strength for a blow, while making the pretence that she had the strength for still heavier blows. One wonders, should she gain peace by her blows, if the Allies would awaken after the treaty was signed to find how near exhaustion she had been, or that she was so self-contained in her production of war material that she had only borrowed from Hans to pay Fritz, who were both Germans. Russia did not know how nearly she had Japan beaten until after Portsmouth. Japan’s method was the German method; she learned it from Germany.

At the end of my journey I was hearing the same din of systematic optimism in my ears as in the beginning.

“Warsaw, then Paris, then our Zeppelins will finish London,” said the restaurant keeper on the German side of the Dutch frontier; “and our submarines will settle the British navy before the summer is over. No, the war will not last a year.” “And is America next on the programme?” I asked.

“No. America is too strong; too far away.”

I was guilty of a faint suspicion that he was a diplomatist.