What I Saw in Berlin and Other European Capitals During Wartime

by Piermarini

"Yes," she answered, "one of my sons last month. He was sent back here for two weeks, but now he has recovered and has gone to the front again."

I could not help admiring the old lady; she was only thinking of the success of the campaign, and very little of the danger that her sons might never come back. The German woman has remained, in this way, the wife of the fierce, barbarous warrior of Attila, in peace time counted as a slave, or at best as a nurse for the children, but ready to buckle the breast-plate of her man and to kiss him good-bye with dry eyes when the moment for fighting comes. In peace-time one has the impression that this type of woman has disappeared from Germany, and that her place has been taken by the provincial type—sentimental up to her wedding-day, practical after, or by the coquettish city type of woman, who tries to copy the Parisienne or the Viennese, and only succeeds in being the caricature of a smart woman, handicapped as she is by a certain clumsiness of body and spirit.

Now her country is at war, the German woman has become again the descendant of the Valkyrie, of the wife of the mediæval warrior, of the nursing woman of the 1870's.

This war, sweeping away the paint of more or less real culture, of social convention, of borrowed ways and manners, brings to the surface the wild qualities of men but also the good ones of women.

I asked the old lady to whom I was talking if she did not feel terribly anxious and upset about her sons, and she answered:—

"I really haven't time to think much about them. Everybody is so busy just now. We have got miseries of all kinds—wounded, refugees from the Russian frontiers, lonely children to look after—and everybody is trying to do his very best in helping the country."

I asked her the way to Doberitz, and having crossed by the ferry boat a small branch of the Havel, I went on in the direction of the village. In a very large field at the back of the Potsdam's cavalry barracks I saw a couple of thousand horses arranged in large circles of about one hundred each, round huge piles of saddles.

A number of reservists were busy showing some of the animals, and cleaning and looking after some others. The horses, seen in the distance, seemed perfectly fresh, and some of them looked exceptionally fine. They seemed to belong mostly to the Hungarian type, and had long hairy manes and tails, and strong muscles in their legs.

I was very astonished, as I had read, and not in English papers only, that the German Army was short of horses, and that the full cavalry contingent was at the frontier.