I know when I get to Berlin, and only want to keep abreast of the real things that may be going to happen, which will take me all my time, for I haven't been used to big events, it will be very annoying to be caught and delayed at every turn by small nets of politenesses and phrases and considerations, by having to remember every blessed one of the manners they go in for so terribly here. I've never met so much manners as in Germany. The protestations you have to make! The elaborateness and length of every acceptance or refusal! And it's all so much fluff and wind, signifying nothing, nothing at all unless it's fear; fear, again, their everlasting haunting spectre; fear of the other person's being offended if he is stronger than you, higher up,—because then he'll hurt you, punish you somehow; ten to one, if you're a man, he'll fight you.
I've read the Austrian Note. I don't wonder very much at Servia's refusing to accept it, and yet surely it would have been wiser if she had accepted it, anyhow as much of it as she possibly could.
"Much wiser," said the Grafin, smiling gently when I said this at dinner tonight. "At least, wiser for Servia. But it is well so." And she smiled again.
I've come to the conclusion that the Grafin too wants war,—-a big European war, so that Germany, who is so longing to get that tiresome rattling sword of hers out of the scabbard, can seize the excuse and rush in. One only has to have stayed here, lived among them and heard them talk, to know that they're all on tiptoe for an excuse to start their attacking. They've been working for years for the moment when they can safely attack. It has been the Kaiser's one idea, Kloster says, during the whole of his reign. Of course it's true it has been a peaceful reign,—they're always pointing that out here when endeavouring to convince a foreigner that the last thing their immense preparations mean is war; of course a reign is peaceful up to the moment when it isn't. They've edged away carefully up to now from any possible quarrel, because they weren't ready for the almighty smash they mean to have when they are ready. They've prepared to the smallest detail. Bernd told me that the men who can't fight, the old and unfit, each have received instructions for years and years past every autumn, secret exact instructions, as to what they are to do, when war is declared, to help in the successful killing of their brothers,—their brothers, little mother, for whom, too, Christ died. Each of these aged or more or less diseased Germans, the left-overs who really can't possibly fight, has his place allotted to him in these secret orders in the nearest town to where he lives, a place supervising the stores or doing organizing work. Every other man, except those who have the luck to be idiots or dying—what a world to have to live in, when this is luck—will fight. The women, and the thousands of imported Russians and Poles, will look after the farms for the short time the men will be away, for it is to be a short war, a few weeks only, as short as the triumphant war of 1870. Did you ever know anything so horrifying, so evil, as this minute concentration, year in year out, for decades, on killing—on successful, triumphant killing, just so that you can grab something that doesn't belong to you. It is no use dressing it up in big windy words like Deutschthum and the rest of the stuff the authorities find it convenient to fool their slaves with,—it comes to exactly that. I always, you see, think of Germany as the grabber, the attacker. Anything else, now that I've lived here, is simply inconceivable. A defensive war in which she should have to defend her homes from wanton attack is inconceivable. There is no wantonness now in the civilized nations. We have outgrown the blood stage. We are sober peoples, sober and civilian,—grown up, in fact. And the semi-civilized peoples would be afraid to attack a nation so strong as Germany. She is training and living, and has been training and living for years and years, simply to attack. What is the use of their protesting? One has only to listen to their points of view to brush aside the perfunctory protestations they put in every now and then, as if by order, whenever they remember not to be natural. Oh, I know this is very different from what I was writing and feeling two or three days ago, but I've been let down with a jerk, I'm being reminded of the impressions I got in Berlin, they've come up sharply again, and I'm not so confident that what was the matter with the people there was only heat and overwork. There was an eagerness about them, a kind of fever to begin their grabbing. I told you, I think, how Berlin made me think when first I got there of something seething.
Darling mother, forgive me if I'm shrill. I wouldn't be shrill, I'm certain I wouldn't, if I could believe in the necessity, the justice of such a war, if Germany weren't going to war but war were coming to Germany. And I'm afraid,—afraid because of Bernd. Suppose he—Well, perhaps by the time we get to Berlin things will have calmed down, and the Grafin will be able to come back straight here, which God grant, and I shall go back to Frau Berg and my flies. I shall regard those flies now with the utmost friendliness. I shan't mind anything they do.
Good night blessed mother. I'm so thankful these two days are over.
Your Chris.
It is this silence here, this absurd peaceful sunshine, and the placid Grafin, and the bland unconsciousness of nature that I find hard to bear.
Berlin, Wednesday, July 29th.
My own little mother,