"We are also awaiting with genuine interest the receipt of our first American guns," the Field Marshal added. How was Germany expecting to get guns from America? He was asked to explain the mystery.
"I read somewhere in the papers that a large shipment of heavy cannon had left America for Russia," he said with dry humor, "in transit for us—for if they're consigned to the Russians, we'll have them sooner or later, I hope;" adding, with his habitual tense earnestness, "the Americans are something more than shrewd, hard-headed business men. Have they ever vividly pictured to themselves a German soldier smashed by an American shell, or bored through the heart by an American bullet? The grim realism of the battlefield—that should make also the business man thoughtful."
"Shall you go west when you have cleaned up here in the east?" I suggested.
"I can't betray military secrets which I don't know myself, even to interest the newspaper readers," he said. He gave me the impression, however, that, east or west, he would be found fighting for the Fatherland so long as the Fatherland needed him.
"Now it means work again. You must excuse me," he concluded, courteously. "You want to go to the front. Where should you like to go?"
"To Warsaw," I suggested, modestly.
"I, too," he laughed, "but today—ausgeschlossen, ('nothing doing,' in Americanese.) Still—that may be yet."
"May I come along, your Excellency?"
"Certainly, then you can see for yourself what sort of 'barbarians' we Germans are."
"Dropping in on Hindenburg" yields some unimportant but interesting by-products. The railroad Napoleon, as all the world knows, lives and works in a palace, but this palace doesn't overawe one who has beaten professionally at the closed portals of Fifth Avenue. It would be considered a modest country residence in Westchester County or on Long Island. Light in color and four stories high, including garret, it looks very much like those memorials which soap kings and sundry millionaires put up to themselves in their lifetime—the American college dormitory, the modern kind that is built around three sides of a small court. The palace is as simple as the man.