He gazed at me a moment, and then smiled. "High politics, and little heads," he said. "High politics, and little women's heads,—" and went on up the stairs smiling and shaking his own.
I do wish they wouldn't keep on talking as though my head were so dreadfully small. Never in my life have people taken so utterly and complacently for granted that I'm stupid.
Well, I feel very sick at heart. How long will it be before Bernd too will be one of that marching column on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. He won't go away from me that way, I know. He's on the Staff, and will go more splendidly; but those men in the new grey uniforms tramping day and night are symbols each one of them of departing happiness, of a closed chapter, of the end of something that can never be the same again.
Your tired Chris.
Before Breakfast.
Berlin, Sat., Aug. 1st, 1914.
My blessed little mother,
I've seen a thing I don't suppose I'll forget. It was yesterday, after the news came that Germany had sent Russia an ultimatum about instantly demobilizing, demanding an answer by eleven this morning. The sensation when this was known was tremendous. The Grafin was shaken out of her calm into exclamations of joy and fear,—joy that the step had been taken, fear lest Russia should obey, and there be no war after all.
We had to shut the windows to be able to hear ourselves talk. Some women friends of the Grafin's who were here—we had no men with us—instantly left to drive by back streets to the Schlossplatz to see the sight it must be there, and the Grafin, saying that we too must witness the greatest history of the world's greatest nation in the making, sent for a taxi—her chauffeur has gone—and prepared to follow. We had to wait ages for the taxi, but it was lucky we had to, else we might have gone and come back and missed seeing the Kaiser come out and speak to the crowd. We went a long way round, but even so all Germany seemed to be streaming towards the Lindens and the part at the end where the palace is. I don't expect we ever would have got there if it hadn't been that a cousin of the Grafin's, a very smart young officer in the Guards, saw us in the taxi as it was vainly trying to cross the Friedrichstrasse, and flicking the obstructing policemen on one side with a sort of little kick of his spur, came up all amazement and salutes to inquire of his most gracious cousin what in the world she was doing in a taxi. He said it was hopeless to try to get to the Schlossplatz in it, but if we would allow him to escort us on foot he would be proud—the gracious cousin would permit him to offer her his arm, and the young ladies would keep very close behind him.
So we set out, and it was surprising the way he got us through. If the crowd didn't fall apart instantly of itself at his approach, an obsequious policeman—one of those same Berlin policemen who are so rude to one if one is alone and really in need of help—sprang up from nowhere and made it. It's as far from the Friedrichstrasse to the Schlossplatz as it is from here to the Friedrichstrasse, but we did it very much quicker than we did the first half in the taxi, and when we reached it there they all were, the drunken crowds—that's the word that most exactly describes them—yelling, swaying, cursing the ones in their way or who trod on their feet, shouting hurrahs and bits of patriotic songs, every one of them decently dressed, obviously respectable people in ordinary times. That's what is so constantly strange to me,—these solid burghers and their families behaving like drunken hooligans. Somehow a spectacled professor with a golden chain across his blackwaistcoated and impressive front, just roaring incoherently, just opening his mouth and hurling any sort of noise out of it till the veins on his neck and forehead look as though they would burst, is the strangest sight in the world to me. I can imagine nothing stranger, nothing that makes one more uncomfortable and ashamed. It is what will always jump up before my eyes in the future at the words German patriotism. And to see a stout elderly lady, who ought to be presiding with slow dignity in some ordered home, hoarse with shouting, tear the feathered hat she otherwise only uses tenderly on Sundays off her respectable grey head and wave it frantically, screaming hochs every time a prince is seen or a general or one of the ministers, makes one want to cry with shame at the indignity put upon poor human beings, at the exploiting of their passions, in the interests of one family.
The Grafin's smart cousin got us on to some steps and stood with us, so that we should not be pushed off them instantly again, as we would have been if he had left us. I think they were the steps of a statue, or fountain, or something like that, but the whole whatever it was was so covered with people, encrusted with them just like one of those sticky fly-sticks is black with flies, that I don't know what it was really. I only know that it wasn't a house, and that we were quite close to the palace, and able to look down at the sea beneath us, the heaving, roaring sea of distorted red faces, all with their mouths wide open, all blistering and streaming in the sun.