“Enough,” I said, “I know all these speeches by heart. It has hurt me just as much as you that the Peacemakers have departed from their promises!”
“No, no,” he said sharply, “not so much, not nearly so much. It has hurt your pride, but it is killing our children. Where is the comparison?” And he turned away in disgust.
The Hôtel Adlon is like the Hôtel Belle Vue in Berne and the Bristol in Vienna, full of the oddest assemblage of human curiosities that the storms of war have tossed together. The Countess and I dined there one evening after the opera to amuse ourselves with the spectacle. Every table was crowded. It was with the greatest difficulty that we secured places. Eventually, and with the aid of a little English silver, we were invited to take seats in the corridor leading to the main dining-room. Herr Stinnes, the great man of industrial Germany, the coal king, iron master, high financier, newspaper proprietor, political “boss,” millionaire—large-eyed, impressive—the most powerful magnate in Central Europe at the present moment—sat at the next table to our own. In the corner was a famous dancer, impudent and vivacious, a dainty profligate. There were the German nouveaux riches in unaccustomed corsets and high-heeled shoes, hot and miserable under the brilliant lights. A group of fresh-looking British officers gave the wholesome touch to a hectic scene. Hysterical women, half-dressed, sang snatches of accompaniment to the waltz strains of the orchestra. A French officer made undisguised love to a fascinating brunette at a near table. Two out of three had the brilliant eyes and swarthy skin of the Jew. Every language under the sun could be heard. It was a veritable Tower of Babel. It suggested nothing so much as a company of condemned criminals spending a last riotous night before the hanging in the morning.
A pleasanter meal was eaten at the House of the American High Commissioner. America still being at war with Germany had no ambassador, but his equivalent, Mr. Drexel, was our courteous host on this occasion, and at the same table I met my old acquaintance of the American Legation in Berne, Mr. Hugh Wilson. Mr. Wilson is a delightful young American diplomat of wide sympathies and progressive views. I made his acquaintance through the kind offices of our friend in common, Mr. William Bullitt, the courageous young American who resigned his position as part of the American Delegation to Paris when he discovered that the Peace Treaty violated every one of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Mr. Wilson is small and slim, with a winning smile of extreme good nature; but he is very impatient, and properly so, with the selfish dogmatists who do not mind if the world be destroyed if only they may attempt to force everything and everybody within the four corners of their particular creed. America’s diplomacy is rich in talent if it possesses many young men as able as Mr. Hugh Wilson and his friend, Mr. Bullitt.
In one of the children’s clinics in Charlottenburg I saw the saddest sight since my visit to Vienna, crowds of little girls and boys, stripped for the doctor one by one, pitiful pale faces, ribs sticking through their bodies, hollow chests, fleshless arms—doomed to die from pulmonary disease, the helpless innocent victims of the war and of the peace. The physician received us coldly, and we could see that he felt bitter; but his manner was correct, and he warmed a little as he gradually realized that no impertinent curiosity but a real desire to understand and help had brought us to his clinic. “The next generation of Germans will be three parts diseased,” he said in a dead level voice more terrible than passion. “Is that what your people wish?” I assured him that our people did not know what was happening, but that it would be our business to tell them. Since that time the British miners alone have subscribed more than £12,000 to the fund for relief. And it may be the miners, whose standard of living is threatened at this time, who will be the first great body of workmen to learn, and the first to teach the connexion between foreign politics and the daily circumstances of their lives. The ruin of the English export trade in coal is the direct outcome of that part of the Treaty of Versailles which provides that Germany shall supply to France coal so much in excess of her needs that, not only need she not import coal from this country, but she can export it to other countries which were formerly our customers.
With the artistic life of Berlin I was not able in the short time I was there to get into close contact. Some day it will be my object to do so. The world of politics is not the only world, nor the best. The world that interprets the world, the world that takes you out of the world, the world of art is the best of all worlds. And when the passions of living men, tearing and wounding the innocent, sicken the soul, the exploits of the dead, read by the fireside, or rendered in song and dance and drama, offer a refuge for weary body and mind, tired with their fruitless protest against cruelty and wrong.