The Land of Deepening Shadow Part 26

These are problems for the leaders, who have the further task of keeping the population hopeful on an alarmingly decreasing diet.

Superficially, or until you want something to eat, or a ride in a taxicab, Berlin at night is gay. But you somehow feel that the gaiety is forced. London at first sight is appallingly gloomy is the evening, and foreigners hardly care to leave their hotels. But I find that behind the gloom and the darkness there is plenty of spontaneous merriment at the theatres and other places of entertainment. There is plenty of food, little peace talk, and quiet confidence.

Across the North Sea, however, great efforts are made by the German Government to keep up the spirits of the people. No public entertainer need go to the war at all, and the opera is carried on exactly as in peace time, though I confess that my material soul found it difficult to enjoy Tristan on a long and monotonous diet of sardines, potatoes, cheese and fresh-water fish--chiefly pike and carp. A humorous American friend used to laugh at the situation--the brilliantly dressed house, officers in their extremely handsome grey uniforms, ladies, some of them with too many diamonds, and--very little to eat.

At the slightest military gain the bells of victory peal wildly, and gay flags colour mile after mile of city streets, flags under which weary, silent women crawl in long lines to the shops where food is sold. A bewildering spectacle is this crawling through victory after victory ever nearer to defeat.

Early in the war a Norwegian packer, who had not had much demand for his sardines in Germany, put the picture of Hindenhurg on the tins and christened them the "Hindenburg Sardines." When he changed the trade-mark the Germans bought them as fast as he could supply them--not because they were short of food at that time, but through the magic of a name. To-day all that is changed.

Norwegians no longer have to flatter the Germans, who are anxious to buy anything in the way of food. They flood Germany now with impunity with sardines whose merits are extolled in the hated English language, sardines which had originally been intended for Britain or America, but which are now eagerly snapped up at four and five times the peace price by people who invariably bid one another good-bye with "Gott strafe England." I saw the gem of the collection in a Friedrichstra.s.se window. It was ent.i.tled: "Our Allies Brand," on a bright label which displayed the flags of Great Britain, Prance, Russia, Italy, Belgium and j.a.pan.

In Germany you feel that the drama of the battlefield has changed to the drama of the larder. Hope and despair succeed one another in the determination to hold out economically while soldier and sailor convince the world that Germany cannot be beaten. People laugh at the blockade, sneer at the blockade and curse the blockade in the same breath. A headline of victory, a mention of the army, the army they love, and they boast again. Then a place in the food line, or a seat at table, and they whine at the long war and rage against "British treachery." Like a cork tossing on the waves--such is the spirit of Germany.

The majority struggle on in the distorted belief that Germany was forced to defend herself from attack planned by Great Britain, while the minority are kept in check by armed patrols and "preventive arrest."

The spirit of "all for the Fatherland" is yielding to the spirit of self-preservation of the individual. Everywhere one sees evidence of this. The cry of a little girl running out of a meat shop in Friedenau, an excellent quarter of Berlin, brought me in to find a woman, worn out with grief over the loss of her son and the long waiting in the _queue_ for food, lying on the floor in a semi-conscious condition. It is the custom to admit five or six people at a time. I was at first surprised that n.o.body in the line outside had stirred at the appeal of the child, but I need not have expected individual initiative even under the most extenuating circ.u.mstances from people so slavishly disciplined that they would stolidly wait their turn. But the four women inside--why did they not help the woman? The spirit of self-preservation must be the answer. For them the main event of the day was to secure the half-pound of meat which would last them for a week. They simply would not be turned from that one objective until it was reached.

And the soldiers pa.s.sing through Berlin! I saw some my last afternoon in Berlin, loaded with their kit, marching silently down Unter den Linden to the troop trains, where a few relatives would tearfully bid them good-bye. There was not a sound in their ranks--only the dull thud of their heavy marching boots. They didn't sing nor even speak. The pa.s.sers-by b.u.t.toned their coats more tightly against the chill wind and hurried on their several ways, with never a thought or a look for the men in field-grey, moving, many of them for the last time, through the streets of the capital. The old man who angered the war-mad throng before the _Schloss_ on August 1st, 1914, with his discordant croak of "War is a serious business, young man," lives in the spirit of to-day. And he did not have to go to the mountain!

CHAPTER XXVII

ACROSS THE NORTH SEA

After my last exit from Germany into Holland I was confronted by a new problem. I had found going to England very simple on my previous war-time crossings. Now, however, there were two obstacles in my path--first, to secure permission to Board a vessel bound for England; secondly, to make the actual pa.s.sage safely.

The pa.s.sport difficulty was the first to overcome. The pa.s.sport with which I had come to Europe before the war, and which had been covered with frontier _visees_, secret service permissions and military permissions, from the Alps to the White Sea and from the Thames to the Black Sea, had been cancelled in Was.h.i.+ngton at my request during my brief visit home in the autumn of 1915. On my last pa.s.sport I had limited the countries which I intended to visit to Germany and Austria-Hungary. I purposed adding to this list as I had done on my old pa.s.sport, but subsequent American regulations, aimed at restricting travellers to one set of belligerents, prevented that.

I was not only anxious to return to London to continue my work with Lord Northcliffe on _The Times_ and the _Daily Mail_, but I was encouraged by two American officials in Germany and Austria-Hungary to write the truth about Germany--a feat quite impossible, as one of them said to me, for a correspondent remaining in the zone of the Central Powers. The official in Austria-Hungary had become righteously indignant at the sneering German remarks about how they could "play with Was.h.i.+ngton in the U-boat question." He asked me to learn all possible news of submarines. The official in Germany had been impressed by my investigations among the men behind Tirpitz, men who never for a moment ceased in their efforts to turn on frightfulness in full force. When I mentioned the new American pa.s.sport regulations which would delay me getting to England, he said: "In Holland fix it with the British. I hope you will do some good with all this information, for you have the big scoop of the day. Now is the time."

I tried to "fix it" with the British authorities in Rotterdam, but as they did not know me my progress was slow for a few days. Then I went to Amsterdam to my old newspaper friend, Charles Tower, correspondent for the _Daily Mail_, a man of broad experience, and in close touch with affairs in Holland, a country which war journalists have grown to look upon as an important link in the news chain between Germany and England. I realised that this move might confirm the suspicions of von Kuhlmann's spies who were on my trail. However, the free air of Holland was making me a little incautious, a little over-confident.

"There is the man who is following you," said Tower, as we stepped in the evening from his home on to the brightly lighted street and made our way along the edge of the ca.n.a.ls. The tall, round-shouldered German shadowed us through the crowded streets to the Amstel Hotel. Then we shadowed him, while he telephoned for help which came in the form of a persistent Hollander, who insisted in sitting at the table next to us, although it had just been vacated by diners and needed re-arranging, whereas many other tables were entirely free.

That is a sample of the manner in which we were systematically spied upon. In order to make arrangements it was necessary for us to travel together so that we could talk, as our time was limited.

It was absolutely impossible for us to go into a restaurant or get into a railway compartment without having a satellite at our elbow.

They were very persistent and very thorough; but the system in Holland has the same glaring flaw that is common to the German system everywhere--too much system and not sufficient cleverness in the individual.

Von Kuhlmann, the German Minister, certainly does not lack men. We encountered them everywhere. Travelling first cla.s.s gives one more or less privacy in Holland, so that it was decidedly irritating to have a listener make for our compartment, while adjoining first-cla.s.s compartments were entirely empty. If the intrusion resulted in our going to another compartment, an ever-ready _Kamerad_ would quickly join us.

In all countries Germany considers certain telephone connections to be of great strategic importance. It is practically impossible to be connected with the British Consulate at Rotterdam, until the "interpreter" is put on. Mr. Tower experiences the same annoyance.

Indeed, the Germans are extremely attentive to him, Although he needs only a small flat, since he lives alone, he has to protect himself by hiring the floor above and the floor below, as the Germans are continually trying to get rooms as close to him as possible. The German Government has for years been pouring out money like water to conquer the world. If I were a German taxpayer I should feel much like the man who discovers that the Florida land which some smooth-talking combination travelling book-agent and real estate agent persuaded him to buy is several feet under water.

Tower and the British authorities finally obtained permission for me to land in England, but they insisted that it would be worse than useless for me to attempt to go on a Dutch steamer, as I should be taken off. Within a week two of these steamers had been conducted by the Germans to Zeebrugge.

After I had left word that I wished to go at the first possible opportunity, and had received some further instructions, Tower and I left for Rotterdam on our last train ride together in Holland.

The little man with the book who sat beside us in the tram to the Central station turned us over to a big man with whitish eyebrows and reddish hair and moustache, who followed us into a second-cla.s.s compartment, which we had entered purposely, although we had bought first-cla.s.s tickets. We then pretended to discover our mistake and changed to a vacant first-cla.s.s compartment. Through some rare oversight there was no _Kamerad_ on hand, whereupon the man with the reddish hair followed us with the pathetically feeble-explanation that he, too, had made the same mistake.

When Tower and I had talked _ad nauseam_ on such fiercely neutral subjects as Dutch cheese and Swiss scenery, I felt an impelling desire to "get even" with the intruder, and began to complain to Tower of the injustice of the British not allowing me to return to America via England, which I wished to see for a few days. He took the cue readily, and accused me of being "fed-up like all neutral correspondents in Berlin." He frankly expressed his disgust at the enthusiasm which he declared that I had been showing for everything German since I met him in Holland. As the train pulled into the Hague, where I prepared to leave him, he concluded by saying, "After all, you ought not to blame the British authorities for refusing you permission to go to England. I have done my best and have failed; there is nothing more that I can do. I did get one concession for you, however. You will not be roughly handled or otherwise maltreated when your vessel touches at Falmouth."

I had to make a serious effort to keep a straight face while leaving the train with this last realistic touch of "British brutality" ringing in my ears. Tower, I might add, had voiced the extraordinary myth one hears in the Fatherland about the terrible manner in which the British treat pa.s.sengers on neutral steamers touching at their ports.

The man with the reddish hair followed me to the office of the Holland-America Line, where I made application for a reservation on the boat which would sail in a week or ten days. From there I went to a small restaurant. He seemed satisfied and left me, whereupon I followed him. He hurried to the large Cafe Central, stepped straight to a table in the front room, which is level with the street, and seated himself beside a thin, dark German of the intellectual type who appeared to be awaiting him. From my seat in the shadows of the higher room I watched with amus.e.m.e.nt the increasingly puzzled expression on the face of the intellectual German while the man with the reddish hair unfolded his tale. When they parted my curiosity caused me to trail after the thin, dark man. He went straight to the German Legation.

For two days I nervously paced up and down the sands at Scheveningen looking out upon the North Sea and waiting for the call. It came one short drizzly afternoon. The Germans, of course, knew the whereabouts of the vessel on which I should embark for England, though it is highly improbable that they knew the sailing time, and they did not know when I should go on it.

I did everything possible to throw any possible spies off the trail as I made my way in the dark to a lonely wharf on the Maas River where I gave the pa.s.sword to a watchman who stepped out of a black corner near the ma.s.sive gates which opened to the pier.

I went aboard a little five hundred ton vessel with steam up, and stood near two other men on the narrow deck, where I watched in considerable awe the silent preparations to cast away.

A man stepped out of the cabin. "I presume, sir, that you are the American journalist," he said. He explained that he was the steward. From the bridge came the voice of the captain, "We can give them only a few minutes more," he said.

Two minutes of silence, broken only by the gentle throbbing of the engines. Then from the blackness near the street gate came the sound of hurrying feet. I could make out three stumbling figures, apparently urged along by a fourth. "Who are they?" I asked the steward.

"They must be the three Tommies who escaped from Germany. Brave lads they are. A couple more days and we'll have them hack in England."

"A couple of days?" I exclaimed. "Why, it's only eight hours to the Thames estuary, isn't it?"

"Eight hours in peace time; and eight hours for Dutch boats now--when the Germany don't kidnap them away to Zeebrugge. But the course to the Thames is not our course. The old fourteen-hour trip to Hull often takes us forty now. Every pa.s.sage is different, too.

It isn't only on the sea that the Germans try to bother us; they also keep after us when we are in port here. Only yesterday the Dutch inspectors did us a good turn by arresting five spies monkeying around the boat--three Germans and two Dutchmen."

The little vessel was headed into the stream now, the three Tommies had gone inside, followed a little later by the two men who were on the deck when I arrived, men who talked French. When the steward left I was alone on the deck.

I watched the receding lights of Rotterdam till they flickered out in the distance. The night was misty and too dark to make out anything on sh.o.r.e. My thoughts went back to the last time, nearly a year before, when I had been on that river. I saw it then, in flood of moonlight as I stepped on the boat deck of the giant liner _Rotterdam_. The soft strains of a waltz floated up from the music room, adding enchantment to the windmills and low Dutch farmhouses strung out below the level of the water.

At that time my thoughts were full of my coming attempt to get into Germany, a Germany which was smas.h.i.+ng through Serbia, and already planning the colossal onslaught against Verdun, the onslaught which she hoped would put France out of the war. I had got into Germany, but for a long time I had almost despaired of getting out; twice I had been turned back courteously but firmly from the frontiers, once when I tried to cross to Switzerland and again when I started for Denmark. A reliable friend had told me that the Wilhelmstra.s.se had suspected me but could prove nothing against me. The day before I felt Germany I was called to the Wilhelmstra.s.se, where I received the interesting and somewhat surprising information that the greatest good that a correspondent could do in the world be to use his influence to bring the United States and Germany to a better understanding. I made neither comment nor promise. I was well aware that the same Wilhelmstra.s.se, while laying the wires for an attempt to have my country play Germany's game, was sedulously continuing its propaganda of _Gott strafe Amerika_ among the German people. As in the hatred sown against Great Britain hate against America was sown so that the Government would have a united Germany behind them in case of war.

I was at last out of Germany, but the lights of the Hook of Holland reminded me that a field of German activity lay ahead--floating mines, torpedoes, submarines, and swift destroyers operating from Ostend and Zeebrugge. They are challenging British supremacy in the southern part of the North Sea, through the waters of which we must now feel our way.

We were off the Hook running straight to the open sea. The nervous feeling of planning and delay of the last few days gave way now to the exhilaration which comes of activity in danger. If the Germans should get us, the least that would happen to me would be internment until the end of the war. I was risking everything on the skill and pluck of the man who paced the bridge above my head, and on the efficiency of the British patrol of the seas.

The little steamer suddenly began to plunge and roll with the waves was.h.i.+ng her decks when I groped my way, hanging to the rail, to the snug cabin where six men sat about the table. The pallor of their faces made them appear wax-like in the yellow light of the smoking oil lamp which swung suspended overhead. Three of them were British, two were Belgian, and one was French, but there was a common bond which drew them together in a comrades.h.i.+p which transcends all harriers of nationality, for they had escaped from a common enemy.

They welcomed me to the table. It is surprising what a degree of intimacy can spring up between seven men, all with histories behind, and all with the same hope of getting to England. They were only beginning to find themselves, they were indeed still groping to pick up the threads of reality of a world from which they had been s.n.a.t.c.hed two years before.

The Englishman at my right, a corporal, had been taken prisoner with a bullet in his foot at the retreat from Mons. In the summer of 1916 he had been sent to a punishment work camp near Windau in Courland. I had already heard unsavoury rumours of this camp while I was in Germany, of men forced to toil until they dropped in their tracks, of an Englishman shot simply because his guard was in bad temper. But the most d.a.m.ning arraignment of Windau came from a young Saxon medical student, who told me that after he had qualified, for a commission as second lieutenant he declined to accept it. This was such an unusual occurrence in a country where the army officer is a semi-deity that I was naturally curious to know why.

"I am loyal to the Fatherland," the young Saxon said to me, "and I am not afraid to die. I was filled with enthusiasm to receive a commission, but all that enthusiasm died when I saw the way Russian prisoners were treated in East Prussia and at Windau. I saw them stripped to the waist under orders from the camp officers, tied to trees and lashed until the blood flowed. When I saw one prisoner, weak from underfeeding, cut with switches until he died in the presence of a Berlin captain, my mind was made up. My country has gone too far in making the army officer supreme. I now could see the full significance of Zabern, a significance which I could not realise at the time. During the first part of the war I became angry when outsiders called us barbarians; now I feel sad. I do not blame them. But it is our system that is at fault, and we must correct it. Therefore, although I am an insignificant individual and do not count, I shall, as I love my country, obey the dictates of my conscience. I will not be an officer in the German system."

I thought of that sincere young student while the boat staggered under the onslaughts of heavy seas, and the corporal told of how twelve hours' daily toil on the railway in Courland with rations entirely inadequate for such work, finally put him on the sick list, and he was sent back to Munster in western Germany.

He was then sent into the fields with two companions--the two who were in the group about the table--and with them he seized a favourable opportunity to escape. His companions had tried on previous occasions, each separately, but had been caught, sent back and put into dark cells and given only one meal a day for a long and weakening period. That did not daunt them. The Germans thought that men who had gone through that kind of punishment would not try to escape again. Yet as soon as their strength was restored through their food parcels from home they were off, but in an entirely different direction.

I asked one of them, a little Welshman, where be got the waterproof rubber bag on the floor at his feet, in which were all his earthly belongings. "That used to be the old German farmer's tablecloth,"

he said.

To-day in Europe there are millions of civilians dressed in military uniform, which fails to hide the fact that their main work of life is not that of the soldier. But the three British soldiers sitting under the smoky bra.s.s lamp were of a different sort.

Twelve years of service had so indelibly stamped them as soldiers of the King that the make-s.h.i.+ft clothing given them in Holland, could not conceal their calling. Their faces were an unnatural white from the terrible experiences which they had undergone, but, like the rest of the Old Army, they were always soldiers, every inch of them.