“Our courageous soldiers were never like that,” she protested. “They did not make war that way, like our heartless enemies.”
Yet in the same breath she rambled on into anecdotes of what any one of less prejudiced viewpoint would have called atrocities, but which she advanced as examples of the fighting qualities of the German troops. There again came in that curious German psychology, or mentality, or insanity, or whatever you choose to call it, which has always astounded the world at large. “Heinie” had seen the hungry soldiers recoup themselves by taking food away from the wicked Rumanians; he had often told how they entered the houses and carried away everything portable to sell to the Jews at a song, that the next battle should not find them unprepared. The officers had just pretended they did not see the men, for they could not let them go unfed. They had taken things themselves, too, especially the reserve officers. But then, war is war. If only I could get “Heinie” to tell some of the things he had seen and heard; how, for instance, the dastardly Russians had screamed when they were pushed back into the marshes, whole armies of them.
I found more interest in “Heinie’s” stories of the insuperable difficulties he had overcome as a Feldwebel in keeping up the discipline of his men after the failure of the last great German offensive, but I did not press that point in her presence.
“No,” she went on, in answer to another question, “the Germans never did anything against women. Those are all English lies! Heinie never told me of a single case”—“Heinie” was, of course, no more apt to tell mother such details than would one of the well-bred boys of our own Puritan society, but I kept the mental comment to myself. “Of course there were those shameless Polish girls, and French and Belgian hussies, who gave themselves freely to the soldiers, but....
“Certainly the Kaiser will come back,” she insisted. “We need our Kaiser; we need princes, to govern the Empire. What are Ebert and all that crowd? Handarbeiter, hand workers, and nothing more. It is absurd to think that they can do the work of rulers. We need our princes, who have had generations of training in governing. Siehst du, I will give you an example. We have been Handelsgärtner for generations. Hermann knows all about the business of gardening, because he was trained to it as a boy, nicht wahr? Do you think a man who had never planted a cabbage could come and do Hermann’s work? Ausgeschlossen! Well, it is just as foolish for a Handarbeiter like Ebert to attempt to become a ruler as it would be for one of our princes to try to run Hermann’s garden.
“Germany is divided into three classes—the rulers, the middle class (to which we belong), and the proletariat or hand-workers, which includes Ebert and all these new upstarts. It is ridiculous to be getting these distinctions all mixed up. Leave the governing to the princes and their army officers and the Junkers. We use the nickname ‘Junker’ for our noble gentlemen, von Bernstorff, for instance, who is well known in America, and all the others who have a real right to use the ‘von’ before their names, whose ancestors were first highway robbers and then bold warriors, and who are naturally very proud”—she evidently thought this pride quite proper and fitting. “Then our army officers are chosen from the very best families and can marry only in the gelehrten class, and only then if the girl has a dowry of at least eight hundred thousand marks. So they preserve all the nobility of their caste down through every generation and keep themselves quite free from middle-class taint—the real officers I am speaking of, not the Reservisten, who are just ordinary middle-class men, merchants and doctors and teachers and the like, acting as officers during the war. Those are the men who are trained to govern, and the only ones who can govern.”
GERMANS READING THE PEACE-TERMS BULLETINS BEFORE THE OFFICE OF THE “LOKAL ANZEIGER,” ON UNTER DEN LINDEN
A CORNER OF THE EX-KAISER’S PALACE AFTER THE SPARTICISTS GOT DONE WITH IT