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 200of 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 Streichh?lzer 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 201not 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 202of 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 203picked 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 204later,” 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 205danger 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 206while 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 207were 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 208and 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 pl............