So we set out, and it was surprising the way he got us through. If the crowd didn’t fall apart instantly of itself at his approach, an obsequious policeman — one of those same Berlin policemen who are so rude to one if one is alone and really in need of help — sprang up from nowhere and made it. It’s as far from the Friedrichstrasse to the Schlossplatz as it is from here to the Friedrichstrasse, but we did it very much quicker than we did the first half in the taxi, and when we reached it there they all were, the drunken crowds — that’s the word that most exactly describes them — yelling, swaying, cursing the ones in their way or who trod on their feet, shouting hurrahs and bits of patriotic songs, every one of them decently dressed, obviously respectable people in ordinary times. That’s what is so constantly strange to me, — these solid burghers and their families behaving like drunken hooligans. Somehow a spectacled professor with a golden chain across his blackwaistcoated and impressive front, just roaring incoherently, just opening his mouth and hurling any sort of noise out of it till the veins on his neck and forehead look as though they would burst, is the strangest sight in the world to me. I can imagine nothing stranger, nothing that makes one more uncomfortable and ashamed. It is what will always jump up before my eyes in the future at the words German patriotism. And to see a stout elderly lady, who ought to be presiding with slow dignity in some ordered home, hoarse with shouting, tear the feathered hat she otherwise only uses tenderly on Sundays off her respectable grey head and wave it frantically, screaming hochs every time a prince is seen or a general or one of the ministers, makes one want to cry with shame at the indignity put upon poor human beings, at the exploiting of their passions, in the interests of one family.
The Grafin’s smart cousin got us on to some steps and stood with us, so that we should not be pushed off them instantly again, as we would have been if he had left us. I think they were the steps of a statue, or fountain, or something like that, but the whole whatever it was was so covered with people, encrusted with them just like one of those sticky fly-sticks is black with flies, that I don’t know what it was really. I only know that it wasn’t a house, and that we were quite close to the palace, and able to look down at the sea beneath us, the heaving, roaring sea of distorted red faces, all with their mouths wide open, all blistering and streaming in the sun.
The Grafin, who had recovered her calm in the presence of her inferiors of the middle classes, put up her eyeglasses and examined them with interest and indulgence. Helena stared. The cousin twisted his little moustache, standing beside us protectingly, very elegant and slender and nonchalant, and remarked at intervals, “Fabelhafte Enthusiasmus, was?”
It came into my mind that Beerbohm Tree must sometimes look on like that at a successful dress rehearsal of his well-managed stage crowds, with the same nonchalant satisfaction at the excellent results, so well up to time, of careful preparation.
Of course I said “Colossal” to the cousin, when he expressed his satisfaction more particularly to me.
“Dreckiges Yolk, die Russen” he remarked, twisting his little moustache’s ends up. “Werden lernen was es heisst, frech sein gegen uns. Wollen sie blau und schwartz dreschen.”
You know German, so I needn’t take its peculiar flavour out by transplanting the young man’s remarks.
“Oh pardon — aber meine Gnadigste — tausendmal pardon—” he protested the next minute in a voice of tremendous solicitude, having been pushed rather hard and suddenly against me by a little boy who had scrambled down off whatever it was he was hanging on to; and he turned on the little boy, who I believe had tumbled off rather than scrambled, with his hand flashing to his sword, ready to slash at whoever it was had dared push against him, an officer; and seeing it was a child and therefore not satisfactionsfahig as they say, he merely called him an infame and verfluchte Bengel and smacked his face so hard that he would have been knocked down if there had been room to fall in.
As it was, he was only hurled violently against the side of a man in a black coat and straw hat who looked like an elderly confidential clerk, so respectable and complete with his short grey beard and spectacles, who was evidently the father, for he instantly on his own account smacked the boy on his other ear, and sweeping off his hat entreated the Herr Leutnant to forgive the boy on account of his extreme youth.
The cousin, whom by now I didn’t like, was beginning very severely to advise the parent jolly well to see to it, or German words to that effect, that his idiotic boy didn’t repeat such insolences, or by hell, etc., etc., when there was such a blast of extra noise and hurrahing that the rest of his remarks were knocked out of his mouth. It was the Kaiser, come out on the balcony of the palace.
The cousin became rigid, and stood at the salute. The air seemed full of hats and handkerchiefs and delirious shrieking. The Kaiser put up his hand.
“Majestat is going to speak,” exclaimed the Grafin, her calm fluttered into fragments.
There was an immense instantaneous hush, uncanny after all the noise. Only the little boy with the boxed ears continued to call out, but not patriotically. His father, efficient and Prussian, put a stop to that by seizing his head, buttoning it up inside his black coat, and holding his arm tightly over it, so that no struggles of suffocation could get it free. There was no more noise, but the little boy’s legs, desperately twitching, kicked their dusty little boots against the cousin’s shins, and he, standing at the salute with his body rigidly turned towards Majestat, was unable to take the steps his outraged honour, let alone the pain in his shins, called for.
I was so much interested in this situation, really absorbed by it, for the little boy unconsciously was getting quite a lot of his own back, his little boots being sturdy and studded with nails, and the father, all eyes and ears for Majestat, not aware of what was happening, that positively I missed the first part of the speech. But what I did hear was immensely impressive. I had seen the Kaiser before, you remember; that time he was in London with the Kaiserin, in 1912 or 1913 I think it was, and we were staying with Aunt Angela in Wilton Crescent and we saw him driving one afternoon in a barouche down Birdcage Walk. Do you remember how cross he looked, hardly returning the salutations he got? We said he and she must have been quarrelling, he looked so sulky. And do you remember how ordinary he looked in his top hat and black coat, just like any cross and bored middle-class husband? There was nothing royal about him that day except the liveries on the servants, and they were England’s. Yesterday things were very different. He really did look like the royal prince of a picture book, a real War Lord, — impressive and glittering with orders flashing in the sun. We were near enough to see him perfectly. There wasn’t much crossness or boredom about him this time. He was, I am certain, thoroughly enjoying himself, — unconsciously of course, but with that immense thrilled enjoyment all leading figures at leading moments must have: Sir Galahad, humbly glorying in his perfect achievement of negations; Parsifal, engulfed in an ecstasy of humble gloating over his own worthiness as he holds up the Grail high above bowed, adoring heads; Beerbohm Tree — I can’t get away from theatrical analogies — coming before the curtain on his most successful first night, meek with happiness. Hasn’t it run through the ages, this great humility at the moment of supreme success, this moved self-depreciation of the man who has pulled it off, the “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us” attitude, — quite genuine at the moment, and because quite genuine so extraordinarily moving and impressive? Really one couldn’t wonder at the people. The Empress was there, and a lot of officers and princes and people, but it was the Emperor alone that we looked at. He came and stood by himself in front of the others. He was very grave, with a real look of solemn exaltation. Here was royalty in all its most impressive trappings, a prince of the fairy-tales, splendidly dressed, dilated of nostril, flashing of eye, the defender of homes, the leader to glory, the object of the nation’s worship and belief and prayers since each of its members was a baby, become visible and audible to thousands who had never seen him befo
re, who had worshipped him by faith only. It was as though the people were suddenly allowed to look upon God. There was a profound awe in the hush. I believe if they hadn’t been so tightly packed together they would all have knelt down.
Well, it is easy to stir a mob. One knows how easily one is moved oneself by the cheapest emotions, by something that catches one on the sentimental side, on that side of one that through all the years has still stayed clinging to one’s mother’s knee. We’ve often talked of this, you and I, little mother. You know the sort of thing, and have got that side yourself, — even you, you dear objective one. The three things up to now that have got me most on that side, got me on the very raw of it — I’ll tell you now, now that I can’t see your amused eyes looking at me with that little quizzical questioning in them — the three things that have broken my heart each time I’ve come across them and made me only want to sob and sob, are when Kurwenal, mortally wounded, crawls blindly to Tristan’s side and says, “Schilt mich nicht dass der Treue auch mitkommt” and Siegfried’s dying “Brunnhild, heilige Braut,” and Tannhauser’s dying “Heilige Elisabeth, bitte fur mich.” All three German things, you see. All morbid things. Most of the sentimentality seems to have come from Germany, an essentially brutal place. But of course sentimentality is really diluted morbidness, and therefore first cousin to cruelty. And I have a real and healthy dislike for that Tannhauser opera.
But seeing how the best of us — which is you — have these little hidden swamps of emotionalness, you can imagine the effect of the Kaiser yesterday at such a moment in their lives on a people whose swamps are carefully cultivated by their politicians. Even I, rebellious and hostile to the whole attitude, sure that the real motives beneath all this are base, and constitutionally unable to care about Kaisers, was thrilled. Thrilled by him, I mean. Oh, there was enough to thrill one legitimately and tragically about the poor people, so eager to offer themselves, their souls and bodies, to be an unreasonable sacrifice and satisfaction for the Hohenzollerns. His speech was wonderfully suited to the occasion. Of course it would be. If he were not able to prepare it himself his officials would have seen to it that some properly eloquent person did it for him; but Kloster says he speaks really well on cheap, popular lines. All the great reverberating words were in it, the old big words ambitious and greedy rulers have conjured with since time began, — God, Duty, Country, Hearth and Home, Wives, Little Ones, God again — lots of God.
Perhaps you’ll see the speech in the papers. What you won’t see is that enormous crowd, struck quiet, struck into religious awe, crying quietly, men and women like little children gathered to the feet of, positively, a heavenly Father. “Go to your homes,” he said, dismissing them at the end with uplifted hand,— “go to your homes, and pray.”
And we went. In dead silence. That immense crowd. Quietly, like people going out of church; moved, like people coming away from communion. I walked beside Helena, who was crying, with my head very high and my chin in the air, trying not to cry too, for then they would have been more than ever persuaded that I’m a promising little German, but I did desperately want to. I could hardly not cry. These cheated people! Exploited and cheated, led carefully step by step from babyhood to a certain habit of mind necessary to their exploiters, with certain passions carefully developed and encouraged, certain ancient ideas, anachronisms every one of them, kept continually before their eyes, — why, if they did win in their murderous attack on nations who have done nothing to them, what are they going to get individually? Just wind; the empty wind of big words. They’ll be told, and they’ll read it in the newspapers, that now they’re great, the mightiest people in the world, the one best able to crush and grind other nations. But not a single happiness really will be added to the private life of a single citizen belonging to the vast class that pays the bill. For the rest of their lives this generation will be poorer and sadder, that’s all. Nobody will give them back the money they have sacrificed, or the ruined businesses, and nobody can give them back their dead sons. There’ll be troops of old miserable women everywhere, who were young and content before all the glory set in, and troops of dreary old men who once had children, and troops of cripples who used to look forward and hope. Yes, I too obeyed the Kaiser and went home and prayed; but what I prayed was that Germany should be beaten — so beaten, so punished for this tremendous crime, that she will be jerked by main force into line with modern life, dragged up to date, taught that the world is too grown up now to put up with the smashings and destructions of a greedy and brutal child. It is queer to think of the fear of God having to be kicked into anybody, but I believe with Prussians it’s the only way. They understand kicks. They respect brute strength exercised brutally. I can hear their roar of derision, if Christ were to come among them today with His gentle, “Little children, love one another.”
Your Chris.
Berlin, Sunday, August 2nd, 1914.
My precious mother,
Just think, — when I had my lesson yesterday Kloster wouldn’t talk either about the war or the Kaiser. For a long time I thought he was ill; but he wasn’t, he just wouldn’t talk. I told him about Friday, and the Kaiser’s “Geht nach Hause und betet,” and how I had felt about it and the whole thing, and I expected a flood of illuminating and instructive and fearless comment from him; and instead he was dumb. And not only dumb, but he fidgeted while I talked, and at last stopped me altogether and bade me go on playing.
Then I asked him if he were ill, and he said, “No, why should I be ill?”
“Because you’re different, — you don’t talk,” I said.
And he said, “It is only women who always talk.”
So then I got on with my playing, and just wondered in silence.
I ran against Frau Kloster in the passage as I was coming out, and asked her if there was anything wrong, and she too said, “No, what should there be wrong?”
“Because the Master’s different,” I said. “He won’t talk.”
And she said, “My dear Mees Chrees, these are great days we live in, and one cannot be as usual.”
“But the Master—” I said. “Just these great days — you’d think he’d be pouring out streams of all the things that most need saying—”
And she shrugged her shoulders and merely repeated, “One is not as usual.”
So I came away, greatly puzzled. I had expected bread, and here I was going off with nothing but an unaccountable stone. Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit. And he was dumb. I can’t get over it.
I’ve not seen Bernd since, as he is frightfully busy and wasn’t able to come yesterday at all, but he’s coming to lunch today, and perhaps he’ll be able to explain Kloster. I’ve been practising all the morning, — it will seem to you an odd thing to have done while Rome is burning, but I did it savagely, with a feeling of flinging defiance at this topsy-turvy world, of slitting its ugliness in spite of itself with bright spears of music, insisting on intruding loveliness on its preoccupation, the loveliness created by its own brains in the days before Prussia got the upper hand. All the morning I practised the Beethoven violin concerto, and the naked, slender radiance of it without the orchestra to muffle it up in a background, enchanted me into forgetting.
The crowds down there are soberer since Friday, and I didn’t have to go into the bathroom to play. Now that war is upon them the women seem to have started thinking a little what it may really mean, and the men aren’t quite so ready incoherently to roar. They keep on going to church, — the churches have been having services at unaccustomed moments throughout yesterday, of course by order, and are going on like that today too, for the churches are very va
luable to Authority in nourishing the necessary emotions in the people at a time like this. The people were told by the Kaiser to pray, and so they do pray. It is useful to have them praying, it quiets them and gets them out of the streets and helps the authorities. Berlin is really the most godless place. Religion is the last thing anybody thinks of. Nobody dreams of going to church unless there is going to be special music there or a prince, and as for the country, my two Sundays there might have been week-days except for the extra food. It is true on each of them I saw a pastor, but each time he came to the family I was with, they didn’t go to him, to his church. Now there’s suddenly this immense recollection of God, turned on by Authority just as one turns on an electric light switch and says “Let there be light,” and there is light. So I picture the Kaiser, running his finger down his list of available assets and coming to God. Then he rings for an official, and says, “Let there be God”; and there is God.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 187
