To one who knows how reserved and silent German people generally are, at least with foreigners, about their Government, their diplomacy, and especially about the sacred person of their Emperor, the free way in which they discuss them now is really astounding.
"Our army has been a success," said the same officer to me when asked what he thought of the conduct of the war, "but our diplomacy has proved un ratage complet; everything has been arranged clumsily before the war broke out, and managed still more clumsily since then. Our diplomats seem busy making mistake after mistake; we have lost the sympathies of all countries on earth, even of those who were formerly our friends. If we are to have peace on favourable conditions, our arms must win it on the battlefield, because our diplomacy will not be able to. After Algeciras our diplomacy seems to have lost completely even the bluff qualities which marked her last success."
The Kaiser now begins to be discussed, and I heard more than once this definition of His Imperial Majesty: "A man good enough in peace-time, but hardly capable of bearing the responsibilities or of carrying out alone and successfully the task he has lately undertaken."
The English cartoonists show us every German soldier weighed down by a large iron cross hanging from his neck; in real life the thing is just as bad as in caricature. One often sees groups of fifteen or twenty men every one of whom shows the large square piece of blackened tin hanging from the third button-hole of his grey-green uniform. It is as though the iron cross, instead of being a decoration, was an indispensable accessory of the uniform.
I have seen two battalions of the new recruits coming back from drill to their barracks on the Spree; some of the soldiers did not look more than sixteen, they were headed by a very old captain of the Landsturm and accompanied by a few officers—all old men (I have seen a lieutenant who was probably sixty-five).
Those who were not aged were suffering from recent wounds. A lieutenant who had evidently been struck by a bullet in the knee, limped painfully at their side, leaning on a stick, his right sleeve hanging empty from his shoulder. He was the only one in the column who smiled cheerfully, and the crowd in the streets looked at him with admiration, while some old men raised their hats.
A curious crowd indeed, this of Berlin. Women and children composed a very large part of it, and the number of people in mourning was really astonishing, far more than I saw in Paris or Vienna. Some people were wearing a white and red armlet or a band crosswise with the number of the regiment to which the man who died used to belong. An old lady was wearing the band with the number of a regiment repeated three times on it. She had lost three sons who were all in the same regiment.