Memories of the Fatherland

Index

PAGE I r

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Kaiser and Kaiserin .... Frontispiece Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth, Potsdam

FACING PAGE

Princess Victoria Louise . . . . -32

Photo, Forster, Brunswick

Prince Joachim ....... 60

Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth, Potsdam

The Crown Prince . . . . . 74

Photo, Berger, Potsdam

The Emperor waiting at Potsdam for the First

Parseval Airship ...... 100

Photo, Anne Topham

Prince Adalbert . . . . . .128

Photo, F. Urbahns, Kiel

The Kaiser and Prince August Wilhelm . .150

The Kaiser at Garitza

Photo, Th. Jurgensen, Kiel

Prince Eitel Friedrich

Prince August Wilhelm

Photo, Selle, Kuntze, & Niederastroth

The Kaiser and Count Zeppelin .

Prince Oscar ....

Photo, E. Sellin, Berlin

Potsdam

214 226

240 274

Chapter I Introductory

OF all the memories of Germany and the Germans that linger in my mind, although those connected with the Prussian Court, where I spent seven interesting and not unhappy years assisting in the education of the Emperor's daughter, naturally emerge with the greatest prominence and frequency from the background of the past, yet there are many other recollections of certain phases of German life, experiences met with away from the somewhat stilted and wearisome atmosphere of the Court, the memory of which returns to me in the light of recent tragic events with a renewed and stimulated interest. The German nation and the policy that guides its destinies have recently been put to the test, while the psychology of its people has been analysed and explained as surely the soul of no race in the records of history has ever before been analysed and explained. The searchlight of a i virulent criticism applied to the dissection of that subtle thing, a national personality, is bound to throw into somewhat lurid and exaggerated relief certain traits of national character, to invest well-known personalities with a new and sinister significance.

The German nation is a nation of tremendous cohesion, hammered and welded into homogeneity by methods which do not commend themselves to our English minds, which have been developed in an atmosphere of purer freedom, of more individualistic tendencies ; but it is difficult for the ordinary Englishman — I will not say untravelled Englishman, for those who have travelled in Germany without being able to speak the language and in consequence to mix with the people, are almost as remote from understanding the German spirit as those who have never been there — it is, I say, extremely difficult for the ordinary Englishman, whose experiences have not enabled him to gain an insight into anything but the mere outward and visible expressions of German methods, to realize the difference in point of view between German and English ideals. Beyond chronicling certain experiences this book makes little attempt to interpret the German national consciousness, a very complex and in some respects astonishingly contradictory spirit, rising to wonderful heights of sublimity, merging into the most nauseous sentimentality ; often inspired by self-interest, yet anxious to convince itself of the purity of its motives, and always preserving a sense of being a part of a great whole whose culminating splendour is personified in the person of the Emperor, deified by his people to an extent incredible to English minds.

The picture of Germany as it appeared before the war to those of us who have lived there, has been one on which we have fixed our gaze with a desperate hope that after all it was not a travesty of the real thing, that the German people were, as we had believed, a simplehearted, kindly, industrious, and highly cultivated people, living up to the same standard of honour as ourselves, and inspired by those ideals which make a nation great ; but day by day the outlines of this picture have become blurred by the horrors and agonies of a warfare of such ruthless type as the modern world has never known. To those of us who knew Germany fairly well, who have lived on terms of intimacy with her people, the seeming inconsistency in her conduct, the music and poetry, the sentiment and idealism which seem so incongruously allied with an overbearing brutality and diseased egoism, are nevertheless in the nature of an easily accepted and understood attitude of mind. We can see and explain to ourselves some of the reasons that have made the German people what they are ; we know that they are docile and easily led, of somewhat plastic and childlike mind, a mind liking to keep company with other minds, kept carefully pruned and only allowed to shoot forth in government ally approved directions. We know that they are a people passionately trained from childhood to believe in the divine destiny of the

German race, that their patriotism is as their religion, blind maybe and fanatical, but followed with a faithful sense of the duty and necessity of self-sacrifice, of whole-hearted self-abnegation, a people that take a certain pride in their lack of refinement, which they regard as verging perilously on effeminacy. They have an intense and inherited hatred for French politeness and subtle wit, and prefer a blunt coarseness, a rather broad form of humour, because in it they see the virility and downright honesty which they imagine to be a purely Teuton characteristic.

Before the horror of the Present entirely obliterates the happier memories of bygone times, out of the wreck and welter of dissolving friendships and shattered illusions, one puts forth a timid hand, striving to save some broken fragment, to preserve from complete obliteration in the turbid flood of events some shadowy recollection of a saner, happier time, when Germany was at peace and all seemed well with the world.

Of the German Emperor's Court and the childhood of his daughter the writer in a former book has already given some glimpses to the outside world. That first chronicle of memories was chiefly a record of a child's life, of a child who, though born in the purple, at a time when her father had for some years been enjoying the Imperial dignity, found her chief happiness, as all children do, in the small brief happenings of existence, in the unimportant everyday things that are essentially alike in palaces and in the humblest homes.

A short time after the marriage and departure of that sunny presence from her father's Court, the dark clouds that had been threatening so long suddenly descended and the storm burst.

" I was born on a Friday and on the thirteenth of the month," laughingly remarked the Emperor's daughter on the eve of her wedding, " but my luck hasn't been so very bad, has it ? " and she looked as though she would continue to defy Fate and the omens ; but even at that time, when she was so happy, the shadow of war had already been haunting her consciousness and troubling the serenity of her dream of love.

" The poor child did nothing but cry after she was engaged," said the Empress a few days after her daughter's wedding. " She was always imagining that war would break out — extraordinary, wasn't it ? Always thinking that Prince Ernst August would have to go away and fight and they would never meet again. She was continually crying when he was away, and grew so thin and miserable — always fretting and unhappy."

The Empress smiled indulgently and pityingly at her daughter's folly, while some of the ladies of the Court commented on the peculiar obsession of the Princess. They also told how one of the Empress's suite, anxious to encourage the disconsolate fiancee, had jokingly assured her that even if war did break out in the Balkans she would have no reason for special uneasiness.

" It will be a campaign of just six weeks or so, and princes are always sent to the front packed in cotton wool, and are only unpacked when they get home again," said the old gentleman, treating her fears lightly. The Princess laughed but continued to be anxious. She had a surer instinct than those around her. She knew that the ladies and gentlemen of the Court were often curiously ignorant of the political eddies that flowed and ebbed around them. They were so accustomed to wild rumours. They had heard them so often. They were sure that trouble would be avoided by tactful diplomacy. They ignored the possibility of the tactful diplomat not being forthcoming, that some time the reins might be in the hands of a well-meaning blunderer, incapable of dealing with a difficult situation.

Few people who in recent years have visited Germany will be ready to deny that their first impressions of the Empire and its people were very pleasant ones.

The beautiful forests, lakes, and mountains of its southern regions compared favourably with any other scenery in the world, and in the country districts the simple, homely, industrious life of the people made an immediate and irresistible appeal. One felt at once attracted to those strong-looking sturdy brown peasantwomen who might be seen everywhere, working from dawn till dusk in the fields throughout the summer months, turning smiling friendly faces to the stranger who happened to pass, always with a ready word of greeting. Even though they wore no shoes or stockings, though their clothes were faded and plain, they radiated an air of neatness, of rude health, of a poverty which was self-respecting and not unduly self-conscious. One wished that all poverty were as dignified, as cheerful, and as picturesque.

It might be that our encounters with the smaller official class may have caused us to yearn for the considerate urbanity that characterizes policemen and porters in England, and our dealings with an employe of the German customs department, left in an inexplicably violent state of irritation by the delinquencies of the owner of the trunks which had been examined before ours, might have made us wonder why our innocent effects should be offered up as a sacrifice to a very human but unofficial fit of temper, why the callous hand of the purple-faced Zollner, irritated, as one plainly perceived, to that explosive point which seems so easily reached by foreign officials, should devastate our cherished and undutiable belongings in a search for things which he must have known were not there. Why did he accuse our obviously last year's, recently-cleaned blouses of being new, forcing us to reveal in public the small holes and worn places, the existence of which we had shrunk from admitting even to ourselves ?

Yet apart from some small vexations which led us to believe that a certain type of German was specially trained — as people train dogs to be savage by goading and ill-treating them — to keep all his most disagreeable qualities uppermost for the benefit of the public, our first impressions of Germany and its people were distinctly pleasant.

The doings of Das Volk — the people — were, as elsewhere, of intense and continual interest. Higher in the scale of entertainment than any amount of picture galleries, museums, churches, ruins, or other distractions thrust on the tourist, is the life of the working-class — their diversions, their tastes, their dress, their ideas. The existence of the mass of the people, untouched by foreign customs, is always the most individual, the most characteristically national.

One never grew tired of watching, on warm, sunny Sunday afternoons, the endless procession of men, women, and children — such an astonishing quantity of children — moving in a solid perspiring mass, with, on the part of the older people, that solemn, serious air, as of participants in a ceremonial function, towards the various Garten-Restaurants, where, for an iminitesimally small sum, they might indulge in beer and coffee, and would eat the honey-cakes and Butter-Brodchen that the frugal Haus-Frau had brought with her from home, carried in a green plush bag with " Guten-Appetit " worked across it in Gothic letters from corner to corner. Sometimes they would buy picture-post-cards for one Pfennig — the tenth part of a penny — and each inscribe some affectionate greeting to the soldier son of the family doing his military service in some distant garrison town.

Close to the restaurant, under the wide-spreading lime-trees planted in the light, sandy soil, at the edge of the forest, that ubiquitous delightful forest which adds so much to the charm of the country, hundreds of green-painted iron tables and chairs, as well as wooden benches with legs fixed into the ground, were placed. And at every table, flooded with the warm sunshine, in that still, golden mellow summer air of the Continent which we hardly know in our cooler islands, family groups sat enjoying themselves in the decent, quiet, respectable, orderly German way, drinking their coffee, munching Pfanne-Kuchen, sniffing the warm, resinous odour of the pine-trees.

Waiters in somewhat crushed-looking shirts and conventional if rather rusty evening suits hurried breathlessly from table to table, taking orders, performing feats of dexterity with trays and plates, bringing toothpicks and cigars, or chess-boards for those superior spirits who, completely detached from the subdued turmoil around them, could immerse themselves in the problems of the game.

When the summer darkness fell, bringing only a relative coolness, for the air still remained warm and enveloping, lights began to twinkle among the trees, beads of tiny lanterns strung on wire threads ran from branch to branch, and, under the far-away stars, to the accompaniment of the gentle rustling of the pine-branches in the dark depths of the forest, the eating and drinking still went merrily on.

Nature and restaurants are invariably associated in the German mind, and a passionate enthusiasm for food is combined with an equally intense admiration of scenery.

io MEMORIES OF THE FATHERLAND

As soon as a beauty spot is discovered, it is improved by cutting down trees if necessary, convenient paths are constructed converging to it, dangerous corners fenced off, finger-posts erected telling the travellers of the beautiful view to be seen a little higher up, seats are carefully arranged where he can sit and soak into his soul whatever it is capable of assimilating, and as he turns away, satiated perhaps with the wonders of atmosphere and scenery, unobtrusively, tactfully, but none the less inevitably, nailed perhaps to the stem of a straight, upstanding pine-tree, appears before his absorbed consciousness the wooden tablet bearing the suggestive word " Erfrischung " or " Restaur ation " with a rudely painted hand indicating the direction where the said refreshment and restoration may be found.

The W aid-Restaurant will be hidden in a nest of verdure and consist chiefly of Wald and green-painted chairs and tables, but will be none the less ready to minister every Sunday to the wants of an astonishing number of hungry and thirsty admirers of Nature.

" Prose and Poetry," sighed a German friend to me once as he drew back the chair from the table we had selected for our Abend-Essen, and he nodded in the direction of a lady on our right who was devouring Kalb-Schnitzel mit Bohnen with the whole-hearted energy and obvious enjoyment characteristic of her nation. Then he turned to the left where, above the purple peak of a hill outlined against a sky suffused with dying scarlet, a star glittered in lonely beauty.

INTRODUCTORY n

" The Ideal and the Real," he continued as he took his seat, " always they torture us with their incongruity — a continual jarring — why must people eat ? It is really a stupid, insesthetic arrangement. The world would be so much more beautiful if we did not need to be continually replenishing our bodies with greasy meat and vegetables — pieces of dead cattle " — and he looked with disgust at the Kalb- Schnitzel.

" But," I objected timidly, " somewhere I have read that Hunger is the great motive power of the world — it is what drives all the mills and steam-engines and builds the bridges and railways. Nobody would work if they never were hungry, there would be no stimulus, no urgent need "

He began to look bored, so I stopped talking, and he then ordered a large and succulent supper, not at all of a vegetarian nature, enjoying it thoroughly, and never, until he had quite finished, allowing his gaze to wander to the scenery. He then lit a large and rank-smelling cigar and became unduly sentimental, breaking into snatches of song and poetic apostrophes to the moon, whose thin sickle had swung into view from behind the pine-tops.

If there happened to be a Gesang-Verein — a choral society — out for a jaunt, it was certain that the depths of the silent woods would dissolve into sudden and frequent harmony, and the velvety darkness be pierced by tuneful voices trolling forth one of those quaint simple German Volks-Lieder which were created to be sung in the open air out under the stars among the perfumes of field and forest. And the stranger in the land, hearing and seeing these things for the first time, — the songs in the twilight, the outdoor life of sunshine and forest, — believed that this was the real Germany, the Germany which appeared to be unconscious of the necessity of a naval policy or Welt-Politik, which obviously seemed to prefer its present on the sunny, fruitful soil of the Fatherland to any potential future on the water. The simplicity, the sober mirth, and kindliness appeared to be a fundamental part of the national temperament, and the English traveller felt his prejudices melting, and, as his knowledge of the outer national life increased, his respect increased with it.

Later on he may perhaps have found himself not quite certain if all was as well as it appeared to be : he might have wondered if the benevolent despotism of German rule was good or bad for people ; if it was better to have everything arranged without worrying about the wishes or opinions of the people arranged for ; if it was good to be well governed without popular consent, or less well governed with it. In Germany politics seem to be so remote from the ordinary life of the people it is hardly worth while to discuss them, they interest only a few. Before an election there are no campaigns of heated and incoherent speeches ; no one gets excited about it ; no one writes letters to the papers. One is spared, not only the clash and clamour of opposing forces which echo in the correspondence columns of our own

English papers, but also the ventilation of the private opinions and experiences of Mr. Nobody, who with us is encouraged to write, often astonishingly illuminating letters, for the instruction of his fellow-citizens. In Germany the people are divided into two great sections, those who do as they are told and those who tell them, and if it were not for the Social Democrats, who keep things from getting tame and stagnant, and preserve an attitude of discontent which is perhaps more divine in its origin than the monarchical privileges inherited by the rulers of modern Germany, German politics would appear to be almost non-existent. As a nation the people are wonderfully docile, and accept with a kind of resigned patience much that they find personally objectionable. They know that they are a splendidly organized people, that in spite of themselves they have been welded into something massive and coherent, and they certainly have no desire to change their own form of government for anything more nearly approaching the English system. The great middle class have infinite faith in their rulers : they prefer to be spared the necessity of deciding matters of high policy, for which their training and experience have not fitted them ; they like to be masters of detail, and to leave the big design to experts ; they have been content to know that Germany has been increasing wonderfully in wealth and power and prestige during the last thirty years ; they believe her invincible ; they cannot imagine a form of government superior to the one they possess ; they are passionately inspired by a feeling of personal devotion and service to their Emperor, and are trained to an inspired patriotism whose chief note is self-sacrifice and blind obedience.

I once knew an elderly English gentleman, one of those pleasant people who always try to see the rosy side of things and find extenuating circumstances in even the worst of crimes. He had lost a good deal of money by persistently believing that the prospectuses issued by company-promoters were to be accepted as a fair and unprejudiced statement ; the golden optimism radiating from them warmed his heart and fired his imagination. He was a dear unsophisticated person, and lived a life of illusion. Fortunately, his own personal habits were of the simplest, so that he hardly missed the money he lost, and the special Providence that dedicates itself to the service of such as he, often interfered and saved him from his worst indiscretions. He once spent six weeks with his son in wandering about pleasant bypaths of the Fatherland, remote primitive places in the Black Forest, where he noted for the first time the many pleasant aspects of German existence. Since that time until his death a month before the Great War broke out, he steadily refused to believe in German militarism, and assured every one who discussed the subject with him that it did not exist. Nowhere had he seen a German uniform, and all the Germans he met had been obviously absorbed in quite peaceful occupations, tilling the soil, keeping hotels and restaurants, travelling as tourists ; they talked amiably with him in his own tongue, continually quoted Shakespeare, paid him various kind little attentions dear to the heart of an elderly gentleman, and he returned home to England almost convinced that the German Navy had no material existence, but was a fevered dream of certain excitable English politicians.

I have met a good many English men and women of that type in Germany, so determined to divest their minds of preconceived dislikes, so anxious not to be insular, but to give even the hated foreigner his due, that they have run to the opposite extreme, and enjoying, unconsciously to themselves, the mere differences of national custom as though they were something infinitely to the credit of the Germans, they accepted all the pleasures, the undiluted sunshine, the outdoor existence of Garten-Restaurants, the not entirely disinterested amiability of hotel-keepers and waiters, as proofs of some innate superiority in German social life.

They considered it a sign of national industry that so many women might be seen working in the fields, ignoring those that worked at unloading bricks and in factories ; they confused that personal sense of interest and well-being which most travellers enjoy, with something inherently attractive in the German atmosphere. They believed that they had been totally misled in their estimate of the nation, and when they returned home set themselves to persuade other people that the Germans were a peaceful race of infinite charm who were woefully misjudged in England.

The cultivated German can be very charming, and still more the cultivated German woman, but it is perhaps only when one differs in opinion with any foreigner that a real glimpse of his character is to be discovered. When all the pleasant urbanity takes to itself wings and flies away, leaving an angry, fretful person who with the unself consciousness of a child exhibits his own feelings in waves of self -revelation, then comes an opportunity to look into the man's real soul. If he is petty-minded, he will be petty and ignoble in his anger ; if he is broad-minded and tolerant, even his rage will show itself as something not unworthy of a finely constructed mental fabric. The German is easily moved to irritability and even wrath. He whips himself consciously into anger, and is prodigal of ridiculous and mirth-provoking gesticulations as evidence of the strength of his emotions. He possesses little self-control, though he talks a great deal about it. "Man muss sich selbst beherrschen" shrieks the German schoomaster, and then he clenches his fist and with prodigal armwavings raves at his pupil for some small breach of regulations. The Englishman, as a rule, when he feels himself beginning to get angry, grows rather quiet and polite ; but the German, on the contrary, from the first moment of conscious outrage disguises his feelings neither to himself nor others. I am not sure that he would not consider it almost hypocritical to do so, and in any case he has never been brought up to believe that it is disgraceful in a grown-up man to exhibit an easilyfretted and childish anger. It is in moments such as these that the national temperament seems to reveal itself, and we see the fundamental differences that eternally divide the British and the Teutonic mind.

It has been made a reproach to English people that they do not understand German ideals and the German attitude of mind, but still fewer English people appear capable of understanding the British attitude of mind, of appreciating the tremendous gulf that separates the English mentality from that of Continental nations. We do not ourselves grasp what England and English ideas of liberty have done for us and for the world, and it is only when we get away from our own shores, when we live in countries where we find other than English methods and ideas prevailing, that we begin to have an insight into all that England stands for in the world's history, to realize that when Wordsworth called our country " a bulwark of the cause of men " he was not indulging in mere poetic licence, but enunciating a very vital and significant truth.

Chapter II First Impressions

MY first visit to Germany took place some twenty years ago, when with a friend I made a three weeks' tour in, the Rhine district. That portion of the German nation which then came within my limited sphere of observation consisted chiefly of perspiring waiters talking English of a peculiarly ingenious and unusual quality, and the stout, bland, polite gentlemen in immaculate morning dress who appeared to live, move, and have their being day and night on the top step of the hotel, where they were continually engaged in welcoming the arriving or speeding the departing guests.

" Gluckliche Reise, mein Herr. Gluckliche Reise, meine Dame." No one was allowed to depart — and scores of hotel guests departed daily — without this benediction from the Wirt.

The hotel where we stayed was one of those quaint old-fashioned houses built round a central courtyard, much patronized by the Germans themselves, and therefore more interesting to live in than the palatial " Victoria," " Windsor," and " Britannia " directly on the river front, which were so crowded with Americans and English that one might almost as well have been in London or New York.

The bedrooms were distinctly German bedrooms, pervaded by a rough cleanliness. The floors were painted the colour of French mustard, and there was no dressing-table in the English sense of the word, as the marble-topped washstand with its large mirror hung above it was expected to do duty for both.

" Have you noticed," said my friend, after we had been travelling a week, " that nobody — I mean none of the women — ' do ' their hair in Germany ? And some of the younger girls have such beautiful hair, but they just twist it up anyhow into a hard knob, and if their hair curls naturally it seems to almost distress them — they remind me of colts going to the fair, with their manes plaited up as tightly as possible. Even the tiniest children have little pigtails, instead of nice curls."

" German cleanliness, German economy, German simplicity, German absence of vanity, German Tiichtigkeit," I murmured, quoting the Fraulein at whose feet we had both sat to imbibe a knowledge of the German language and literature.

" No, I don't think it's anything of the kind. The real reason is that ; " and she pointed to the combined dressing - table - washstand. " You see, here they've given us an expensive high-backed green plush sofa in our room, with three funny little square antimacassarthings pinned on it for us to rest our heads on, and also a nice round table to write on, and a fine big mahogany hanging cupboard for all the clothes we might have brought with us but didn't — and yet they take for granted that a woman can do herself justice with the only looking-glass placed flat against the wall in the darkest corner opposite to the light. I feel sorry for German women. They haven't a chance. I'm not surprised that they give up trying. They never can have a proper idea of what they look like. Yet," she reflected, in the monologue characteristic of her conversation, " they can see each other — one would think that would help ; but after all " — with an attempt at impartial judgment — " they are not perhaps really worse than the weird specimens of English we keep meeting. I wonder why people travelling are always funnier to look at and more ill-mannered than people not travelling ? I never knew what awful specimens my native isles could produce until I met them on the Continent. Why, divorced from his background, does the Englishman, and still more the Englishwoman, produce a feeling of irritation in the observer ? "

" I don't know," I interposed ; " but they certainly don't get as excited and screaming as the German traveller, and brutally bump every person in the corridor with Hand-Gepack while they utter polite phrases."