The French were almost popular. The Kaiser had spoken of them as "brave foes." What quarrel could France and Germany have? France had been the dupe of England. Cartoons of the hairy, barbarous Russian and the futile little Frenchman in his long coat, borne on German bayonets or pecking at the boots of a giant Michael, were not in fashion. For Germany was then trying to arrange a separate peace with both France and Russia. She was ready to yield at least part of Alsace-Lorraine to France. When the negotiations fell through, cartoonists were again free to make sport of the aenemic Gaul and the untutored Slav. It was not alone in Germany that a responsive Press played the weather vane to Government wishes; but in Germany the machinery ran smoothest.
For the first time I knew what it was to have a human being whom I had never seen before hate me. At sight of me a woman who had been a good Samaritan, with human kindness and charity in her eyes, turned a malignant devil. Stalwart as Minerva she was, a fair- haired German type of about thirty-five, square-shouldered and robustly attractive in her Red Cross uniform. Being hungry at the station at Hanover, I rushed out of the train to get something to eat, and saw some Frankfurter sandwiches on a table in front of me as I alighted.
My hand went out for one, when I was conscious of a movement and an exclamation which was hostile, and looked up to see Minerva, as her hand shot out to arrest the movement of mine, with a blaze of hate, hard, merciless hate, in her eyes, while her lips framed the word, "Englisher!" If looks were daggers I should have been pierced through the heart. Perhaps an English overcoat accounted for her error. Certainly, I promptly recognized mine when I saw that this was a Red Cross buffet. An Englishman had dared to try to buy a sandwich meant for German soldiers! She might at least glory in the fact that her majestic glare had made me most uncomfortable as I murmured an apology which she received with a stony frown.
A moment later a soldier approached the buffet. She leaned over, smiling, as gentle as she had been fierce and malignant a moment before, making a picture, as she put some mustard on a sandwich for him, which recalled that of the Frenchwoman among the wounded in the freight shed at Calais—a simile which would anger them both.
The Frenchwoman, too, had a Red Cross uniform; she, too, expressed the mercy and gentle ministration which we like to associate with woman. But there was the difference of the old culture and the new; of the race which was fighting to have and the race which was fighting to hold. The tactics which we call the offensive was in the German woman's, as in every German's, nature. It had been in the Frenchwoman's in Napoleon's time. Many racial hates the war has developed; but that of the German is a seventeen-inch-howitzer, asphyxiating-gas hate.
If hates help to win, why not hate as hard as you can? Don't you go to war to win? There is no use talking of sporting rules and saying that this and that is "not done" in humane circles—win! The Germans meant to win. Always I thought of them as having the spirit of the Middle Ages in their hearts, organized for victory by every modern method. Three strata of civilization were really fighting, perhaps: The French, with its inherent individual patriotism which makes a Frenchman always a Frenchman, its philosophy which prevents increase of numbers, its thrift and its tenacity; the German, with its newborn patriotism, its discovery of what it thinks is the golden system, its fecundity, its aggressiveness, its industry, its ambition; and the Russian, patient and unbeatable, vague, glamorous, immense.
The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war. After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for my buttonhole.
This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He must be pro the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be on your side secretly. If they weren't they must be on the other. Are you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in Germany. If I had been for them I should have "dug in" and not told them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have made a study of war. They are experts in war.
However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose quiet I had sought for an hour's respite from war. One could be shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed the American tourist, without hearing a guide's monotone explaining who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel lobbies—those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over victories won by another type of German.
About twenty-one years old this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he hoped so.