At five, when the afternoon train to Kiel was seen in the distance, we took off our sack-aprons and went home to tea, and I was free for an hour or so, when I gave an English lesson to the whole class of boys, which nearly always also included their Governor and the officer from the Schule who was teaching them English, a very pleasant, kind young man, who sat humbly (metaphorically speaking) at my feet and was anxious to learn all he could. They had been reading Dickens’ “Christmas Carol"—everybody in Germany reads Dickens, and gets quite a wrong idea of present-day English life from his books—but I produced Conan Doyle’s “Adventures of Brigadier Gerard,” as being in my opinion more suitable for boys, as well as more colloquial and military in tone. I never had a class which hung so much on my words before. As they all spoke with a very bad accent, I read to them myself, so that they could hear English, and then we discussed the story and the meaning of obscure words and phrases. They were very alert and intelligent, and soon became deeply absorbed in the “Brigadier.”

Sometimes in the mornings after my ride I would walk with the officer who taught English and converse with him, so that he might have the benefit of my accent; and once he took me to the Schule and installed me in his class, to hear how he instructed his thirty boys there. He was a most intelligent teacher, and spoke very correct English. It amused me to hear some of the pupils reciting “Rule Britannia” out of their English Reading-Books. It sounded like a derisive challenge as they declaimed the poem with that clear, distinct utterance specially cultivated in all German schools. I could with difficulty keep from smiling to hear a young German piping its bombastic lines:

“All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
Rule Britannia, etc.,”

while Kiel, with its rapidly increasing war-fleet, lay only an hour’s journey away.

But they were very pleasant and kindly, all those German officers; they showed me their class-rooms, their gymnasium, everything that they thought could interest me. If they knew only two words of English they said those two; but as I was by that time a fairly fluent speaker of German, we were able to exchange views without any difficulty. That rather hard, harsh, overbearing Prussian spirit that one meets in Berlin here seemed softened and humanized, and the atmosphere of the place was not so rigid and mechanical as military institutions are apt to be. It is true that the boys, whenever addressed, instantly fell into those stiff, wooden military attitudes which are a little disconcerting to unaccustomed people, squaring their shoulders, putting their heels together and lifting up their chins; but when one got used to it it was not so noticeable.

The general impression gained from the military ideal as applied to education in Germany is that, while excellently thorough and practical, it yet ignores too much those other world-forces due to science, invention and discovery, which day by day are changing the conditions of life among the nations—that it cherishes a spirit more suitable to past ages than to present progress. It seems to breed up a class of men who are earnest, loyal, and self-sacrificing, but express extremely narrow views, who see and judge everything from a purely military, autocratic standpoint, and are quite unable to sympathize with or understand the aspirations of the normal human being towards personal initiative and liberty of action.

Crushed as a nation a hundred years since, under the great Napoleon, the members of this military caste are still ruled by the fear of despotism from without, and ignore the despotism within of their own creation, still fight ideas with physical force, hold the uniform as sacrosanct, are overbearing, touchy, often (with, of course, many exceptions) insufferably vain and spiteful. They realize most emphatically that they are the masters, not the servants, of the German people; they are a class aloof, apart, a class wielding tremendous social and political power. Sometimes it seems almost a pity that Carlyle rediscovered the virtues of that “iracund Hohenzollern” Frederick William I. So many latter-day Prussians, without possessing his sturdy virtues, seem to model their conduct on his, and try to impress the world by the more disagreeable, rather than the more praiseworthy traits of his vivid forceful personality.

CHAPTER IX
THE BAUERN-HAUS AND SCHRIPPEN-FEST

THE Bauern-Haus or peasant cottage which the Emperor gave to his daughter at Christmas was built and ready for occupation by the time she returned to the New Palace in the spring. It was solemnly inaugurated, being unlocked by the Emperor and presented by him to the Princess, who was overjoyed at having a place where she could cook and wash clothes to her heart’s content; for, like most people of royal birth, she was attracted chiefly towards those occupations in which she was least likely ever to be engaged.

Before the advent of the Bauern-Haus we had made toffee on a doll’s stove in a doll’s saucepan, but the brocaded chairs and sofas of the rooms of the Prinzen-Wohnung were an unsuitable background for tentative culinary efforts, and the Princess sensibly remarked that grown-up people had not dolls’ appetites and she wanted to cook something for “Papa.”