Berlin ought to be interesting. He would meet his sister Dorothy there, with her German husband. He would get to hear things and see things. It would be strange to walk about among the Enemy, without being killed.
Not long ago the Germans were “They.” During the war that was always the word used. “They” are putting up a strafe along the Menin Road. “They” are very quiet to-day. “They” are rather active on the Divisional Front. It would be damn funny to meet them in shops and restaurants, perhaps in private drawing-rooms—men, very likely, who had potted at him when he’d shown his cap a second above the parapet, or fired the five-point-nines which had rattled his nerves in a rat-haunted dug-out. . . .
Bertram could not get a room in any hotel in Berlin. There was a waiters’ strike, and all the hotels were closed and picketed except the Adlon, which paid what the strikers demanded, clapped the difference on to the bills, and did a roaring business with every room booked weeks in advance, and crowds of Germans, Austrians, English, and Jews of all nationalities, clamouring for admittance at any price, and bribing the head clerk with thousands of marks, to get their names on the waiting list.
It was the outside porter of the Adlon who saved Bertram from a night in the streets, by giving him a card to a private lodging-house somewhere near the Grossspielhaus, where he was able to obtain a bed-sitting-room in which all his meals would be served.
His landlord came in repeatedly to study his comfort, to explain the working of the electric light, to ask whether he desired helles or dunkles beer, and to carry in his tray with the Abend-essen. He was a tall Prussian of middle-age who had been a Feldwebel, or sergeant-major, with the Second Prussian Guards, after keeping a small hotel in Manchester. He spoke very good English, and lingered to talk while Bertram ate a well-cooked steak.
“You were an officer in the English army?”
Bertram nodded. “In France, all the time.”
“I also. We were opposite the English at Ypres, Cambrai, the Somme, in ’16. I used to hear your men talking in the trenches. Sometimes I called out to them, and sometimes they answered back. ‘How deep are you in mud, Tommy?’ That was in the winter of ’16. ‘Up to our bloody knees,’ said an English Tommy. ‘That’s nothing,’ I answered, ‘We’re up to our waists.’ ‘Serve you bloody well right!’ said the English boy.”
He chuckled over the reminiscence, but presently sighed deeply and said:
“The war was one long horror.”