He used to wonder sometimes whether that were not treachery to his old standards of loyalty and honour, and was conscience-stricken because he accepted hospitality, kindness, even friendship, from these people. But he found it impossible to keep up the old “hate” against them. Even in war-time that spirit of hate had been behind the lines rather than in the trenches. The “Tommies” had given cigarettes to their prisoners after the heat of battle. German officers had been treated civilly by British officers, if they were at all well-behaved, and within a few days after the occupation of Cologne, British soldiers had clinked beer mugs with the fellows who had once lain behind machine guns, mowing them down. That was the real spirit of chivalry, a lesson taught by the common man, obeying some instinctive decent law of nature, to neurotic and morbid-minded people who watered the roots of hate and cultivated its poisonous fruit with unceasing care.
Only by some friendly pact with these people could Europe have peace. Bertram could see no chance of peace if they were to be treated for ever as moral lepers. It was ridiculous to regard them as moral lepers.
How could he take that view when he moved among their crowds in the Opera House, in pleasant beer gardens outside Berlin to which they flocked in the evenings, by the lakeside and in the woods of the Grünewald? These young Germans with their girls, drinking light beer, eating ices, chattering to the music of the band, playing with little flaxen-haired children, did not behave like moral lepers. They were good-natured, decent, smiling folk, the girls wonderfully neat and pretty and plump, in cheap frocks, the men shabbily dressed, many in their old war tunics dyed and re-cut to civilian styles, but scrupulously brushed.
Von Arenburg, who had a certain sense of humour, limited by a Prussian outlook, used to ask Bertram what he thought of the “Huns” in assemblies like that. “Do they behave like barbarians? Do you see them eating their babies?”
“No,” said Bertram; “but I find them enjoying themselves, obviously well-fed, not badly dressed, and spending quite a lot of marks on their evening’s amusement. What about this German poverty, that you keep telling me about?”
It was Dorothy who tried to explain. These people in their home lives stinted and scraped to enjoy an evening’s pleasure like this. They lived in overcrowded rooms, stiflingly hot in summer. To go to a beer garden in the evening was essential for very life and health. It cost but a few marks for light beer or a pink ice. Look at the girls’ frocks, so clean, but so cheap. Look at their boots, made of paper and sham leather.
Bertram was not satisfied with these explanations. It seemed to him in Berlin and the other towns to which he went, that the German people were marvellously prosperous after the war. It was true that in exchange value German paper money was slumping away at an alarming rate, and that every time it dropped prices were higher in the shops. But wages seemed to rise also, and people seemed to get more paper money every month, which, in Germany, had still a fair purchasing power.
He wandered round the great stores, like Wertheim’s, and was startled by the amazingly low price of everything manufactured in Germany, and there seemed nothing they didn’t make. Translated into English figures, at the current rate of exchange, they were a mockery of English competition. At such prices they could beat us in every market of the world, and, so it seemed, were doing.
Von Arenburg pooh-poohed his argument.
“It’s all illusion,” he said. “I admit the feverish activity of German trade and industry. It’s the genius of our people, inspired by a desperate desire to avert their ruin. But nothing can do that so long as the Allied nations do not release their stranglehold. We sell below cost price. To buy raw material from abroad we have to pay the difference on the mark. We’re bleeding to death. Presently the crash will come, and Europe will shudder in all its members.”