Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, a dapper little gray-haired Prussian officer with a Kaiser mustache and a heel-clicking manner, presently approached Sir Edward Goschen, saluted, introduced himself as the military chaperon of the party, and invited us to troop into the train. An armed guard, a strapping infantryman with glistening bayonet affixed to his shouldered rifle, was already aboard. He turned out, as did the lieutenant-colonel himself, to be a very harmless warden. When the Oberstleutnant, gloved and helmeted as if on dress parade, was not snoozing or reading during the journey, he merely hovered about, mother-like, to see that his charges were comfortable, as well as not up to mischief. In addition to the ordinary train-crew, we were shepherded by seven or eight plain-clothes Prussian detectives, whom even the ruse of regulation railway-caps could not disguise. You can tell a German "secret policeman," as he is idiomatically called, at least a mile off. He is the last word in palpability.
Our destination, we learned, was the Hook of Holland, where either a Great Eastern steamer or a British cruiser would pick us up. We were to travel via Hanover-Osnabrück to Amsterdam and thence to the sea. Mackenzie, Jelf and I, having preempted a compartment, settled down at the windows for a last long look at Berlin as the train now tugged slowly out of the station, a few minutes past eight o'clock. Speaking for myself, I am quite sure that railway trucks never rattled with such sweet melody as those beneath us were producing, for with every chug they were bringing us nearer to liberty. I remember a distinct feeling of consciousness that I should not consider myself an utterly freed felon until German territory was actually no longer under my feet. It was an indescribably gratifying sensation, all sufficient for the moment, to realize that Berlin at least was fading into oblivion. Whether any of my British colleagues were throbbing with similar emotions, I never knew. It is un-English, I believe, to reveal emotions even if one is battling with them. Whatever thoughts were in their minds, I myself was obsessed with a distinct desire, at that moment, to blot Berlin from my mind for all eternity. Perhaps, as I thus soliloquized, I was giving way unconsciously to a passing spell of that unreasoning malice which infested hate-maddened Berlin. I suppose I ought to have shed briny tears, as we skirted Spandau and sped across the dreary plain of the Mark of Brandenburg, and familiar landmarks passed from view. Certainly in the long ago, I had firmly made up my mind that when my time to leave Germany came I should go away with genuine regret. Life in the Fatherland had meant much to me and mine. Although I never adopted it, like Lord Haldane, as my "spiritual home," a man can not spend thirteen years of middle life in the same community, however alien to its spirit and institutions, without forming deep-rooted attachments. But the circumstances which precipitated me out of Germany conspired, I fear, to quench old-time affection. So, ungrateful as it may appear, my handkerchief was not brought into play and my eyes were uncommonly dry as the sand-wastes of Brandenburg vanished from our vision....
It was evident that we were in for a tedious journey and that our trek across Western Germany was to be agony long drawn out. Berlin to Hanover, the first leg of the trip, was one I had accomplished times innumerable under three hours, and even a Bummelzug hardly took longer. It was to take us nearly three times as long to-day. Mobilization was technically complete, but every railway track in the country, especially if it fed the great trunk-line to the west along which we were traveling, was still choked with troop trains. In consequence, though ours was a "special," we had to halt, back up, sidetrack and perform every other gyration of which a train is capable, whenever we came up with battalions en route toward one of the three frontiers on which German blood was now being spilled. At every station we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than "the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. As to London, which we used to reach twenty hours after leaving Berlin, it became painfully obvious that it would be nearer forty this trip.
But there was much to see, and to think and talk about. As we were being held up everywhere along the line by seemingly the entire male population of the Empire in uniform, it was not surprising, for one thing, to find the fields on either side of us as denuded of men as if Adam had never lived. None but women was discoverable at work on this eve of harvest, excepting here and there an old man, while children, too, were being pressed into service. At bridges, culverts and crossings, instead of the customary railway guards, who used to stand at salute with a flag as a train whirled past, there were now soldiers with rifles. No restrictions were placed upon our reconnoitering the adjacent country as long as we were in motion; but Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, always heel-clicking and saluting beforehand, intimated to Mein Herren that the curtains of their compartment-windows must be drawn as the train approached or halted at stations. There was no suspicion, he begged to assure us, that we might attempt to practise espionage about troop movements. On the contrary, the suggestion was a precaution recommended in our own interests. Unfortunately, quoth the apologetic colonel, it had not been feasible to conceal the identity of our train. Western Germany was bursting with patriotic frenzy, and it was just within the range of possibilities that their exuberance might beat itself into disagreeable "demonstrations." Therefore, discretion was obviously our cue.
But what we could not see at Nauen, Rathenow, Stendal, Gardelegen, Obisfelde and Lehrte, we could hear, for all the inhabitants of every hamlet and town in Central Germany appeared to have orders from somewhere to assemble at their railway-stations and sing themselves red in the face for Kaiser and Empire. Manifestly the Supreme War Lord had not only called up his armed legions, but mobilized the country's Singvereine besides, and man, woman and child of them were now in the trenches with their throats bared to the foe. I suppose they were chanting Die Wacht am Rhein and Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles in other parts of Germany, too, but I have often thought that the country's most vociferous and tireless choral artists were concentrated on that day on the strategic line of the British safe-conduct train's route. If the Great General Staff at Berlin, with that incomparable attention to detail which is one of its vaunted accomplishments, schemed to send us out of Germany convinced, by the evidence of our own ears, that the Kaiser's people were sallying forth to war like Wagnerian heroes with music and triumphant cheers on their lips, the plan succeeded. My own indelible recollection of that farewell ride across Germany, at any rate, is the memory of song. For many days and nights afterward, Die Wacht am Rhein and Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, would ring and ring through my head. At the time it all seemed beautifully spontaneous, for the Germans are a singing folk, who put soul into their anthems, but reflection makes me wonder if that continuous song-service which so mercilessly accompanied us from Berlin to the Netherlands was not a stage-managed extravaganza with a motive. The Germans are a thorough race, and in war they overlook no opportunity.
It was only at times that the singing was anything else than merely monotonous--the periodical occasions when, if we halted longer than usual at a station, the singers would line up alongside the train so closely that they could fairly shout in our ears. Then there would be a note of ill-mannered defiance in their song. At Hanover we happened to be drawn up in the station at the very moment when the British Ambassador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there was a particularly vehement vocal endurance competition outside of the window at which they were sitting. But from my own table on the opposite side of the car I observed that Sir Edward Goschen was not visibly diverted from his Wiener-Schnitzel, for, while the Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles was doing its worst, he remarked, cheerily, to his Belgian colleague: "Rather fine singing, isn't it?"
Next to the songs which knew no ending the most conspicuous manifestation of Furor Teutonicus was the chalking of troop-trains with exuberant inscriptions symbolical of expected great German victories to come. "Special to St. Petersburg" was a prime favorite. "Excursion to Paris" was extremely popular. That, we know, is exactly what the War Party expected the campaign to be. "Through Train to Moscow" ran a particularly sanguine sentiment and "Death to the Blood-Czar," a more sanguinary one. Then there would be rude caricatures of Nicholas II or President Poincaré either at the end of a noose or of the boot of an equally rudely-cartooned Kaiser. And, of course, there were plenty of jests at Great Britain. "We'll soon be chewing roast-beef in London" was the way one artist epitomized his hopes. "Special Train to the Peddler-City"--a shaft at London, the home of the "shopkeeper nation" which "organized war against Germany" in order to "crush an unpleasant commercial rival." "Death to our enviers!" was the language in which another Anglophobe thought found expression. Beneath the British Ambassador's car-windows, I was told, some one had chalked a John Bull drooping ignominiously from the gallows, with "Race-Traitor" for an epitaph!
The night was fitful for us all. Curled up on the seats of our compartments, such attempts at sleep as we ventured were effectually defeated by Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles and Die Wacht am Rhein. All through the night they were hurled at us. At every town, regardless of the hour, the choristers were on the job. We welcomed our arrival at Bentheim, the final station in Prussia, at seven next morning, not half so eagerly because it was the last of Germany as because it was the last of Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles and Die Wacht am Rhein. For any sins we ever committed in the Fatherland, we felt we had been richly chastised. I understood now why General Sherman once crossed the Atlantic to escape Marching through Georgia--only to be bombarded with it beneath his windows before breakfast by an Irish band in Queenstown before he had been in Europe twelve hours. I am morally certain that when old Tecumseh said that "War is hell," he was thinking about Marching through Georgia. That is what Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles made me think about Armageddon.
None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar and our other German chaperons handed us over at Bentheim to a Dutch train crew awaiting our arrival there with a Dutch locomotive. The colonel clicked and bowed his farewell respects to Sir Edward Goschen and Baron Beyens, accepted their appreciations of his courtesy and helpfulness, saluted for the last time, and then formally transferred us to Queen Wilhelmina's tender mercies. The hour of our liberation was at hand. And for the first time in a week a score of Englishmen and at least one American thought out aloud their opinions about Germany and all her works. What some of us said about the Hohenzollerns has been put by Colonel Watterson in far more immortal diction than my poor pen could epitomize it.
