7:00 A. M. I have slept little. All night I thought I heard groans from afar. Toward dawn I imagine I hear a screech, but of course it cannot be that.... When we take coffee in the candlelight, the Colonel seems to have lost the distraction he showed at dinner. He laughs and jokes.... It is rapidly growing light when I climb up on the transport that is to take me to Tilsit.... Down over the pines, the black winged birds are flying—a screech? One wonders.
XIII
THE HERO OF ALL GERMANY
Field Marshal von Hindenburg
To the accompaniment of heels clicking in salute we passed the Saxonian sentries and hurrying through the darkened gateway were met by an orderly. Field Marshal von Hindenburg was expecting us. Down the corridors of the castle into a great hall into which opened many doors ever opening and closing to the passage of hurrying soldier clerks; here a telegraph was chattering, there a telephone buzzing, messengers coming and going, staff officers gliding from one room to another, the warm stuffy air vitalized with magic import—this was my first impression of the headquarters of the commander in chief of the German armies of the East.
I was looking at a placard written with a pen and fastened to one of the unpretentious doors, opening into little ante rooms from the great hall, which read—"Commander in Chief." On the other side of that door was the sixty-eight-year-old warrior who has become the national hero of Germany. To name the town where this took place would be a breach of military etiquette. I am, however, permitted to say that the Field Marshal has had his headquarters at Posen, Allenstein, Insterburg, and another place south of Insterburg about one hundred and fifty kilometers which the officers of General von Eichorn's Tenth Army spoke of as "a place unnamed." The reason for this secrecy was reflected in "the town." Plunged in total darkness, save for a few lanterns, it was impossible to locate from the sky. Russian aviators could not steal over it by night and drop bombs to kill the man who is so utterly a master of the armies that the Czar sends against Germany.
There came Captain Cammerer, first adjutant of Hindenburg, a Prussian officer of artillery, who said that the Field Marshal would soon receive us. One gleaned that although the Captain appreciated the distinction, he longed for the battlefield; one heard him talk eagerly of Tannenberg where he had made some Russian prisoners. "But now my fingers are covered with corns," and Cammerer smiled in a melancholy way. "I have to write much." And then the door that bore the sign, "Commander in Chief," opened, and the officer bowed us in. Field Marshal von Hindenburg had risen to meet us.
My first impression was that Von Hindenburg's pictures have done him an injustice. There is no denying that his photographs create the impression of a tremendously strong face ruthless almost to the point of cruelty. But the camera fails utterly to catch the real Hindenburg. His is a face tremendously strong, with a chin that is like a buttress and a forehead of the width that means power and there is a firmness to his little blue eyes; all these things the camera shows. It does not show the twinkle in these eyes; nor does it show the kindness that lurks in the wrinkles of his warty weather-beaten skin. It fails utterly to depict the pleasant smile that his small sharply cut mouth can show. Sixty-eight years you are thinking in amazement. This man does not look more than fifty. All his faculties seem at their zenith. His nose is the nose of the eagle and it impresses you with wonderful alertness. There is much color in his mustache, a tawny shade, a large curving but rather peaceful looking mustache that has not the aggressive angle of the Emperor's. So massive are his shoulders that I thought at first that his close cropped gray head was perhaps a little small. But it is a typically round German head of the strong mold that you see in the pictures of Durer and Holbein.