Never had the war seemed a more monstrous satire than on that first day in Germany as the train took me to Berlin. It was the other side of the wall of gun and rifle-fire, where another set of human beings were giving life in order to take life. The Lord had fashioned them in the same pattern on both sides. Their children were born in the same way; they bled from wounds in the same way--but why go on in this vicious circle of thought? My impressions of Germany were brief and the clearer, perhaps, for being brief and drawn on the fresh background of Paris and Calais waiting to know their fate; of England staring across the Channel in a suspense which her phlegmatic nature would not confess to learn the result of the battle for the Channel ports; of England and France straining with all their strength to hold, while the Germans exerted all theirs to gain, a goal; of Holland, solid mistress of her neutrality, fearing for it and profiting by it while she took in the Belgian foundlings dropped on her steps--Holland, that little land at peace, with the storms lashing around her.
The stiff and soldierly appearing reserve officer with bristling Kaiserian moustache, so professedly alert and efficient, who looked at the mottled back of my passport and frowned at the recent visa, “_A la Place de Calais, bon pour aller à Dunkerque, P. O. Le Chef d’État Major_,” but let me by without questions or fuss, aroused visions of a frontier stone wall studded with bayonets.
For something about him expressed a certain character of downright militancy lacking in either an English or a French guard. I could imagine his contempt for both and particularly for a “sloppy, undisciplined” American guard, as he would have called one of ours. Personal feelings did not enter into his thoughts. He had none; only national feelings, this outpost of the national organism. The mood of the moment was friendliness to Americans. Germany wished to create the impression on the outside world through the agency of the neutral press that she was in danger of starving, while she amassed munitions for her summer campaign and the Allies were lulled into confidence of siege by famine rather than by arms. A double, a treble purpose the starving campaign served; for it also ensured economy of foodstuffs, while nothing so puts the steel into a soldier’s heart as the thought that the enemy is trying to beat him through taking the bread out of his mouth and the mouths of the women and children dependent upon him.