An enormous cheer received the Kronprinzessin. After remaining on the balcony for a few minutes, during which she repeatedly bowed and kissed the fair head of her eldest son, she retired, loud cheers being again raised.
I asked the reason of the demonstration, shivering at the idea that a big success had been obtained by the German and that this was the way the Berlin population expressed loyalty to its rulers.
"Why, she appears every afternoon!" I was told. "A crowd comes here every day at four o'clock. It has been so since the beginning of the war."
"Even when the war news was not very good?" I asked.
"The news has always been very good," said my informant in a contemptuous tone, and away he walked, disgusted at my disrespectful remark.
The crowd had now melted away slowly, and the Lustgarten had resumed its air of aristocratic calm. In front of me was the huge mass of the Imperial Palace, with the large bronze groups given to the Hohenzollern family fifty years ago by the grandfather of the present Tsar.
The balustrade of the balcony on which the Kronprinzessin had just appeared is "decorated," to use the complimentary word of my Baedeker, with the statues of German emperors and empresses in mythological attire. Wilhelm II. is dreaming, I am sure, of putting there in a few years his own effigy, of which he seems so extremely fond. What disguise he will choose I cannot imagine; possibly he will dress as Janus, the god of peace, Kaiser Frederich having already taken the armour and shield of Mars.
As for his son, everybody will agree that Mercury would be a suitable rôle. Mercury was considered in old Rome the protector of the thieves.
* * *
The most astonishing thing I heard during my trip was that the price of beer is going up steadily, and that maybe the classical types of German beer—Pilsener and Münchener—will have to give place to other drinks to make which oats are not required. Most of the oats supply is imported, I learn, from South Russia and America, and the importation, of course, is now completely stopped.