REMINISCENCES OF A PREVIOUS JOURNEY
September 2, 1914.
Here I am a prisoner.
What a journey! I am bitter at soul; it makes me sick to think of it. Across Rhenish Prussia, the Palatinate, the grand duchy of Baden, Würtemberg, and Bavaria, for three days and three nights, at every station, and even as we pass through the countryside, groups of peasants and gloomy crowds of citizens hurl execrations at us, stamp, and shake their fists, making signs that they would like to cut our throats and tear out our eyes. From the streets of country towns, lost amid the sweltering plains, troops of children assemble, waving flags. They form up in line beside the track. When the train comes in, moving slowly like a funeral convoy, they beg for our képis; they vociferate in their own language, “Paris kaput! Death to the French!” The sight of the red cross armlet produces paroxysms of fury. “Death,” they scream, “death to the red cross men! These are they who finish off our wounded!” The shouting becomes strident, terrible, mad. Sometimes they try to take the train by storm, and are stopped only by the bayonets of the German soldiers on guard in each compartment, who growl out threats.
The women are even more horrible than the men. The murderous glance, the clawed fingers, working and tearing as if in the dream of a tigress, the nostrils dilated and twitching, the lips cyanosed, grimacing hatred—never before have I seen such faces of damned souls, such Medusa heads. Who could believe that women should appear so horrible!… When the train stops for any time, richly dressed matrons parade beside it, offering our guards mugs of beer, cigars and cigarettes, bread-and-butter and jam, steaming sausages. Sick with hunger and fatigue, we look on at this prodigality. “Above all,” they say, “give nothing to these French! Let them starve!” We are offered water.
Everywhere, at the stations, from the steeples, the factories, the inns, huge flags are waving. Chime answers chime across the rivers. The big cathedral bells make the hills re-echo. All Germany is holiday-making, drunk with blood, thrilling with the prospect of victory.
Is this the Germany I knew last year?
I had travelled through the country in the company of Marcel Chabrières, as if on a pilgrimage. We passed through Heidelberg, my peaceful Heidelberg, so lovable in the shade of its august ruin and of its oak-crowned and vine-clad hill; Marburg, the quiet little town with its professors and its workmen, resting more quietly at the foot of the margrave’s castle than even the bones of St. Elisabeth of Hungary beneath the pavement of the church; Dresden, that fine seat of artistic and courtly life; Munich, the Teuton Florence, blooming like a flower; Weimar, more sacred than all the others, where the neighbouring houses of Schiller and Goethe mourn discreetly the memories of the golden century, the lyrical and generous youth of Germany!… We were charmed with these laughing cities of the spirit. I can still picture them in the limpid air of last spring, I recall their dainty aspect, and the cheerful welcome they accorded us; I see their waters reflecting the blue skies and the bright clouds. When I but think of them, in this damp crypt of exile, gusts of liberty, youth, and ecstasy agitate my heart.
We had strolled through the docks of Cologne and of Hamburg; we had visited Elberfeld, Barmen, Hagen, and Essen, the smoky iron-towns of Westphalia. Near the great forges of M. Krupp von Bohlen we had admired the fairylike village of Margaritendorf, where brutal modern industry would seem to have pledged itself to put its slaves to sleep every evening in an idyllic retreat. From the window of the train, on the journey from Hamburg to Berlin, passing through a country of pines and lean fields, we had a glimpse of Friedrichsruhe, the lordly domain where sleeps the “honest broker” who made the empire, “awaiting the resurrection of the just.”
After the gentle sweetness of the ancient university towns, we were intoxicated with the energies of this new world, this world of pride and of money, of sweat and of lucre. Even in ugly Berlin, the parvenu town, we paid our respects to the titanic effort of a nation in the full vigour of life, ambitious, stubborn, determined to dazzle the world, to take the place of Athens, of Rome, of Paris, convinced of its destiny to rule the universe.