"Later: Have been twice to the Casualty List Office, or Information Bureau, where the names of the verwundet und gefallen are posted — column after column, company after company, regiment after regiment of fine black type—nothing more or less than a printer's morgue, crowding into one dark hallway the cemetery of a nation. There were fathers, mothers, brothers, and children quietly and unemotionally scanning the lists. It took me back to the terrible week at the White Star offices, after the Titanic went down. At that time the relatives wept (some of them) and nearly all harangued the officials, asking questions, sending telegrams, begging for news. Here they look for the names of their dead,—that's all,—and then go out without a question. You can't ask questions of a Government! The Titanic lasted a week, and this goes on— God knows how long!
"Had supper with Brown. Later a mother in black and a girl, also in black (the daughter, or daughter-in-law, I should judge), came into the Heiniger ( ?) Cafe while I was sitting there. For three quarters of an hour they listened to the music, neither of them, I'll swear, speaking a word. Then they paid twenty-five pfennigs for their beer and went out, —still silent,—and the Ober bowed low and very respectfully. I asked the waiter who they were, and he said the woman had that day heard of the death of C… her fourth son. Something like the Bixby woman to whom Lincoln wrote his famous letter. And there must be, literally, thousands of them.
"This people is terribly in earnest,—deluded, of course, with devotion to a false idea, but it is the delusion that spells accomplishment. The country is earnestly and honestly possessed with an Idea, and the idea is that Might is Right. That is the awful pity of it. When will the awakening come?
"Later: To-day I had an interview of three quarters of an hour with Herr Dr. R. W. Drechsler, head of the American Institute, attached to the University of Berlin. To-morrow I hope to see Excellency von Harnach, president of the University of Berlin, to whom I have a letter. Dr. Drechsler was kind, agreeable, extremely interesting. He showed me some New York newspapers—the first real news of the war I have had for weeks. The 'Tribune' and 'Times' had an account of us fellows down in the cellar at Antwerp. Drechsler and I had an interesting argument, and before I left he deluged me with pamphlets and literature for the improvement of my mind and sympathies. Even so he was unlike the average German. As a rule they have attempted to cram their arguments down my throat. These Teutons think they can force you to believe.
"Dr. Drechsler and the proprietor of the Kaiserhof, and, of course, the Foreign Office warned me that it was forbidden to go to the prisoners' camps, either at Zossen or Doeberitz. Some correspondents had been taken on 'personally conducted' tours; but because of misinformation sent out the tours were no longer in vogue. So I thought that I would risk it, without permit, and, wishing to take a swing through rural Germany, I decided to visit the camp at Zossen, twenty-five kilometers south of the capital. When the guards weren't looking, I slipped boxes of cigarettes through the barbed-wire fence to Irish privates, and listened to the talk of captured Cossacks, and watched the British Tommies kicking around a 'soccer' football, squabbling about fouls and penalties, and as much excited about the score as if they were at home on Hampstead Heath."
It was chiefly in my wanderings through rural Germany that I was able to rub elbows with the rank and file of citizens, and to get that barometer of public feeling which Colonel Roosevelt, I believe, has called the barber-shop opinion. I think I am justified in saying that during the winter there were many evidences, too many to be overlooked, that a growing minority, suffering through loss of life and realizing the territorial advantages which are now Germany's, earnestly longed for peace on any reasonable terms. The sooner peace came, they felt, the better would be the strategic position of the Vaterland. Some of this minority, in addition to the women, were business men, or professors, or merchants, or doctors.
It was not far from Hanover, where you change cars for Cologne and Aix- la-Chapelle, dispatching-centers of the troops for the northern line of battle, that the Frankfort doctor in the seat next mine began to talk. He was an oldish man over sixty, dressed in mourning, and careworn. He had been to Berlin, he said, to verify the report of his son's death, and was now headed for Aix, where the body lay.
After Uhlman, the fat merchant, left, we were alone in the second-class compartment, and the doctor got up and shut the door on the noise of Landwehr soldiers singing in the section of the troop train attached behind the car. Presently he showed me two postals from his boy. They were the stereotyped cards allotted to the men on the field: on one side space for the address, on the other side the printed word "well," space for the date (but no locality), and the signature. The third card was a casualty report, signed, probably, by the company captain, with the three printed words "slightly wounded," "wounded," and "severely wounded." The first and last were scratched out, but after the word "wounded" was written, "condition low."
The boy must have held out—because the body was sent to Aix—until well along the homeward Red Cross trip. During the Antwerp bombardment, at Brussels, Liege, and Louvain, I had seen scores of the wounded, and had myself slept on those trains with their households of blood and pain and ether, and their long lines of mail cars, box cars, and converted tram cars fitted with their triple rows of berths, one above another. As the old doctor talked, I could see the wheeled hospitals stealing into the city in the darkness—for the troops go off with bands and holiday accompaniment, but the return is made at dead of night, that the public may not know the human cost.
"We must have peace," the doctor finished, "and we must have it soon. I do not say this because I have lost a son, and I do not say it alone. There are thousands who feel it just as much, but they are afraid to speak what is in their mind. You are a traveler from the great city [Berlin], and you do not know what war means. All you have heard is the talk of fight and victory and glory, and that is all you see if you do not look close. You must live in the smaller cities, must see the villages and farms without men, and you must come with me and see the homes without husband or son." For the third time he interrupted himself to ask:—"You are Amerikaner—yes? And why do you come?"