Past the burly Landsturm, who was trying his utmost to frown his jolly face into threatening lines that would keep back the crowd, a woman was scurrying. One of the big gray-green wounded men caught her in his arm—the other arm hung in a black sling—and she clung to him as though some one might take him away, and because she was a woman, she wept in her moment of happiness. Her Mann had come home....
Forgetting the dinner we were to have eaten in the Lübeck station, we finally heeded a trainman's warning and turned back to our car. There remained etched in my mind the line of pallid, apprehensive faces, the tiny waving flags, the little woman and the big man. It was my first sight of war.
From Lübeck to Hamburg the ride was uneventful. The hour was not late and beyond remarking that the towns through which we passed were not as brilliantly lighted as usual, the courier could from the car window observe no difference between the Germany of peace and of war. Here and there we noticed bridges and trestles patroled by Landwehr and outside our compartment we read the handbill requesting every passenger to aid the government in preventing spies throwing explosives from the car windows. From the conductor we learned that there had been such attempts to delay the passage of troop trains. Whereupon we congratulated ourselves upon buying the conductor, as we had the compartment to ourselves. One thought of what would have happened had there been an excitable German in with us and while the train was crossing a bridge, we had innocently opened a window for air!
It was almost ten when the close, clustered lights of Hamburg closed in against the trackside and we caught our first glimpse of the swarming Bahnhof. Soldiers everywhere. The blue of the Reservists, the gray-green of the Regulars—a shifting tide of color swept the length of the long platforms, rising against the black slopes of countless staircases, overrunning the vast halls above, increasing, as car after car emptied its load. And then, as at Lübeck, we saw white bandages coming down under cloth-covered helmets and caps, or arms slung in black slings; the slightly wounded were coming in from the western front.
All this time we had forgotten the Englishman, and it was with a start that we recalled him.
"If he spots us," advised my companion, "we've got to hand him the cold shoulder. Mark my words, he'll try to trail along to the same hotel and stick like a leech."
Again he was right. At the baggage room the Englishman overtook us, suggesting that we make a party of it—he knew a gay café—first going to the hotel. He suggested the Atlantic. Bluntly he was informed we were visiting friends, but nothing would do then but we must agree to meet him in, say, an hour. Not until he found it an impossibility did he give us up and finally, with marvelous good nature, he said good night. The last I saw of him was his broad back disappearing through a door into a street.
The courier nudged me.
"Quick," he whispered, "look,—the man going out the next door."
Before I could turn I knew whom he meant. I saw only the man's profile before he too disappeared into the street; but it was a face difficult to forget, for it had been close to me at Warnemunde; it was the face of the police spy.