Looking at Colored Pictures in an Old Book-Shop.
It is very interesting to watch the troop trains coming in from the front. When I first went to Berlin it was all a novelty to me and I spent a great deal of my time at the stations. One night just before Christmas, 1915, the first Christmas I was in Berlin, I spent three hours at the Anhalt Station watching the troops come home. They were very lucky, these fellows, six months in the trenches and then to be home at Christmas time! They were the happiest people I had seen in the war unless it were the people who came to meet them.
Cheering the Soldier on His Way to the Front.
Most of the soldiers were sights. Their clothes were dirty, torn and wrinkled. Many of them coming from Russia were literally covered with a white dust. At first I thought that they were bakers, but when I saw several hundred of them I changed my mind. Beside his regular paraphernalia, each soldier had a dozen or more packages. The packages were strapped on everywhere, and one little fellow had a bundle stuck on the point of his helmet.
A little child, perhaps three years old, was being held over the gate near me and all the while he kept yelling, "Papa! Urlaub!" An Urlaub is a furlough, and when the father did come at last the child screamed with delight. Another soldier was met by his wife and a tiny little baby. He took the little one in his arms, and the tears rolled down his cheeks, "My baby that I have never seen," he said.
This night the soldiers came in crowds. Everybody was smiling, and in between the trains we went into the station restaurant. At every table sat a soldier and his friends. One young officer had been met by his parents, and he was so taken up with his mother that he could not sit down but he hung over her chair. Was she happy? Well, I should say so!
At another table sat a soldier and his sweetheart. They did not care who saw them, and can you blame them? He patted her cheeks and he kissed her hand.... An old man who sat at the table pretended that he was reading, and he tried to look the other way, but at last he could hold himself no longer, and grasping the soldier's hand he cried, "Mahlzeit!"
