What I Saw in Berlin and Other European Capitals During Wartime

by Piermarini

I can easily fancy Berlin without the Linden, or the Sieges-Säule, the most insolent monument I have ever seen—even without the Kaiser, but not without plenty of beer. I am trying to think what the Berlin cafés will look like at night without the national drink. Probably they will get as dull as the teetotal London night clubs in war-time!

I found myself walking down the Gendarmen Market, perhaps the only fine square in Berlin.

Here is the Schauspielhaus in which during one of my former visits Moissi, an Italian who is one of Germany's best tragic actors, was appearing in Hamlet and Othello. I remember an old German professor telling me of his almost exclusive love for the Shakespearean theatre, and comparing it with the old and modern German theatre to the total disadvantage of his countrymen.

I wonder if the Chauvinistic influence of the war has made him love Hauptmann and detest Shakespeare!

Here is also the old French church, spoiled by recent restoration. Till the outbreak of the war there used to be here a daily French service and a Sunday sermon. Now the church is closed, most of the priests have gone back to France, and one of them is said to be fighting against Germany. Only an old French lady and the sacristan are there in a small house at the back of the church.

I knock for some time at the door, and finally I am admitted to an old-world sitting-room, furnished with quite a number of plasters, bronzes, and prints of all the saints who have blossomed during the past centuries on the fertile soil of France.

It takes me quite a time to persuade the good old lady that I am not German, and not there to find out anything, but I finally get all her confidence when I offer to carry a letter for her son, one of the French church priests now in France. She tells me that they had inquisitions over inquisitions by the military authorities since the beginning of the war.

"They went to look even in the church; they respect nothing, the brutes," she went on, forgetting her prudence, and, pointing to the picture of the Rheims Cathedral cut out of an illustrated paper, "This, Monsieur, was no human work. Men can construct churches, of course, and beautiful ones too, but the Cathedral was more than that; it was divine, and they have destroyed it.

"They have shelled God's house," she said, "just because Germans are, and will always be, jealous of all that is beautiful and gentle and refined. I should not talk like this. I am too old to hate anybody, but I can't help it. I have been in Berlin ten years now, and I am afraid I will never see France again. Perhaps it is better so. I could not stand seeing the eagle where the tricolour was. But we must win; the world will never have peace until Germany is beaten."

I tried to persuade her that this was also my opinion, and I got her to speak about the condition of the foreigners in Berlin. "I don't know about the others," she said, "but the French are having an awful time of it."