Take this series of incidents as typical of the Berlin spirit: One day as I walked along Unter den Linden I saw a minor officer standing in front of a sentry who was not far from his black-and-white striped sentry-box, his body as erect as a ramrod, his gun “presented” stiff before him, not an eyelash moving, not a breath stirring. This endured for possibly fifty seconds or longer. You would not get the importance of this if you did not realize how strict the German military regulations are. At the sound of an officer’s horn or the observed approach of a superior officer there is a noticeable stiffening of the muscles of the various sentries in sight. In this instance the minor officer imagined that he had not been saluted properly, I presume, and suspected that the soldier was heavy with too much beer. Hence the rigid test that followed. After the officer was gone, the soldier looked for all the world like a self-conscious house-dog that has just escaped a good beating, sheepishly glancing out of the corners of his eyes and wondering, no doubt, if by any chance the officer was coming back. “If he had moved so much as an eyelid,” said a citizen to me, emphatically and approvingly, “he would have been sent to the guard-house, and rightly. Swine-hound! He should tend to his duties!”
Coming from Milan to Lucerne, and again from Lucerne to Frankfort, and again from Frankfort to Berlin, I sat in the various dining-cars next to Germans who were obviously in trade and successful. Oh, the compact sufficiency of them! “Now, when you are in Italy,” said one to another, “you see signs—‘French spoken,’ or ‘English spoken’; not ‘German spoken.’ Fools! They really do not know where their business comes from.”
On the train from Lucerne to Frankfort I overheard another sanguine and vigorous pair. Said one: “Where I was in Spain, near Barcelona, things were wretched. Poor houses, poor wagons, poor clothes, poor stores. And they carry English and American goods—these dunces! Proud and slow. You can scarcely tell them anything.”
“We will change all that in ten years,” replied the other. “We are going after that trade. They need up-to-date German methods.”
In a café in Charlottenberg, near the Kaiser-Friedrich Gedächtnis-Kirche, I sat with three others. One was from Leipzig, in the fur business. The others were merchants of Berlin. I was not of their party, merely an accidental auditor.
“In Russia the conditions are terrible. They do not know what life is. Such villages!”
“Do the English buy there much?”
“A great deal.”
“We shall have to settle this trade business with war yet. It will come. We shall have to fight.”
“In eight days,” said one of the Berliners, “we could put an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men in England with all supplies sufficient for eight weeks. Then what would they do?”