The admission was also general at home and abroad that the German Government was the most free from graft and the most thorough. In Germany the kings and princes were paid homage as models of wisdom and virtue, and the Kaiser was believed to be walking with God, hand in hand, palm to palm. In token of the mystic union between Emperor and people, Hohenzollern monuments were seen rising in all parts of the Empire in greater quantity, amid greater thanksgivings. These Denkmals were growing huger, more thunderous in appearance, and served the double purpose of keeping the populace in a state of admiring, unquestioning awe and expressing fulminating Bewares! to other races. In every home, factory, retail shop, public place, was the Kaiser's picture, with his trellised mustache, and his devout eyes cast with a chummy comradeship up to heaven.
All the foregoing explanations accounted in part for a glorious increase in noise among a people that does everything loudly. The national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the horns of the bloody chase—the cors de chasse of the legendary Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it was proper to gorge themselves like the human gods they were. Even the most servile took on a conscious air of being of a regal species.
In this wise, the German, like Cain, the competent iron-worker, was treading the earth with resounding footsteps. Over his bullneck and under his spiked hat he had naturally come to look upon himself as a super-being. While the American watched ball games, the Englishman played golf and the Frenchman wrote to his loved one, the Teuton was keeping himself hardened for war, and toiling like the systematic beaver in up-building national industries that were so swiftly dominating all others. To say the least, this intense people were strenuously perfecting an intensive and powerful civilization such as never had been seen.
So—as Gard Kirtley was finding and yet failing to explain to himself—expectancy, undescribable and splendid, was in the air beyond the Rhine. And there was one special toast drunk to it all with ever more loudly clinking glasses—Der Tag! Such was triumphant Germany, the triumphant Vaterland, in 1913—foretasting a portentous future; pregnant with colossal success; swollen with a hundred years of victories and growth; as sure of its prowess and might as were the swaggering gods of its Valhallas.
Imperial Deutschland über Alles!
CHAPTER III
Gard Kirtley
INTO this Triumphant Germany young Kirtley had come to recuperate from the sadness over the loss, the previous year, of his parents and from a siege of sickness. Still somewhat pale, somewhat weak, he showed the shock he had undergone. He had toured across southern Germany and up to Berlin where he had bidden good-by to his chance American traveling companion, Jim Deming, who was knocking about Italy and Teutonland. They had exchanged final addresses.