Chapter XXV · HOME TO TRELLEBORG

IN the morning of the memorable 6th of November I left Metz by the train for Saarbrücken, the town where the first shots were fired in the last Franco-German war. I had some time to spare, and settled down at a table in the restaurant of the Terminus Hotel to read some really recent newspapers. Life seemed to go on here just as usual, and one noticed nothing of the war. The regular customers came in for their Frühschoppen (early mug of beer) as they always do, and here and there an officer or a civilian was breakfasting.

At Ludwigshafen a conductor came along and shouted into every compartment of the train that the windows were to be kept shut, and that nobody must lean out whilst passing over the Rhine bridge. It was pleasant to see the alacrity with which his order was obeyed—after all one had plenty of time to contemplate the great and mighty river between that town and Mannheim. Just as the train was starting, this same conductor jumped into my compartment. Aha, I thought, he thinks my shabby field clothes look suspicious in a first-class compartment, and he sees that I am busy with map, note-book and pencil. However, I met him half-way in my frankest manner, and asked whether the window-closing order was a precaution against bomb attacks on the bridge. He smiled and answered that the orders were that the windows were to be shut. Then I asked what the consequence would be if one disobeyed the order, opened the window and looked out. “In that case,” he said, “there are sentries outside who would note the compartment and the window, and the end would be that the guilty party would land in a place where he would find no windows at all.”

At Mannheim nothing happened. But at Heidelberg I had hardly stepped on to the platform before two officers came up to me. One said in firm but very polite tones that I must accompany him to the District Commandant’s office. “Of course,” I said, “I shall be delighted, but I hope you will be kind enough to let me bring my hand luggage.” “Why certainly,” was the answer. On the way to the office, which happened to be close to the platform, the officer remarked: “Your passport must be examined by the military authorities.” “Why can’t you look at it at once?” I asked, and handed him my pass, now soiled and frayed at the edges. “Well, perhaps I might do so,” he answered, and we stopped. He read the paper with General von Moltke’s name, turned to his companion and whispered my name in his ear, whereupon both saluted and held out their hands, which I pressed almost as heartily as I laughed at the little adventure.

“Aber Herr Doktor, sie müssen uns doch entschuldigen, wir ...” (“Really, doctor, you must excuse us, we ...”)

“Bitte, bitte, das ist ja reizend.” (“But please don’t mention it, I am delighted.”) Thereupon my German eagles also broke into hearty laughter over their prey.

“Your train does not leave for an hour. In place of the examination at the office, won’t you come and drink a glass of beer with us at the buffet?”

“Why, of course, I shall be most happy!” And so the time passed all too quickly, and we got a lot of fun out of the little adventure—an adventure which I might have repeated at every station, had I liked to do so. But it would not do, war is too serious a matter for jest. My new friends told me that the conductor had found me very suspicious-looking, especially on account of my maps and note-book, and had telephoned from Mannheim. At Heidelberg he had conducted the officers to my compartment. I assured them that I could find no words to express the admiration which I felt for the alertness and vigilance which pervaded the whole of Germany from frontier to frontier—it seemed like clockwork where every cog drops into its place with automatic precision, and where the hours strike their solemn strokes to the fraction of a second. When it was time to part they saw me into my carriage, and as the train moved out they gave me a final friendly salute and bade me God-speed.⁠[41]⁠

At Karlsruhe, on the following day, I waited on the noble and high-minded mother of our Queen, the Dowager Grand Duchess Luise, as well as on the Grand Duke and his Consort. I was only due to leave for Berlin by the night train, and was therefore very glad to be able to accept the Grand Duchess Luise’s most gracious proposal that I should inspect the gigantic and ideally equipped hospital in the Gewerbeschule under her Royal Highness’s own august guidance. I met there two distinguished head nurses, the wife of General von Oetinger and Frau Sautier, also Fru Linder from Stockholm who was here to study hospital arrangements in the field and who had met with the greatest hospitality in Karlsruhe.

It was most touching to see the Grand Duchess, in spite of her seventy-six years, walk from bed to bed, from ward to ward, encouraging soldiers and speaking to them in a way that went straight to the heart. In her black dress and her black lace veil over her head, she looked like a pious abbess giving comfort and solace to the wounded warriors, and indeed she made a most welcome break in their long weary hours of suffering. Behind our Queen’s mother came several nurses carrying armfuls of flowers and little packets of portraits of the Grand-Ducal pair. Before leaving, this guardian angel of the wounded graciously handed a packet and a picture to each soldier as a souvenir of her visit.

The most delightful part of my visit was the witnessing of the homage paid by the convalescent soldiers to the venerable and beloved lady, as they stood assembled in the great hall of the hospital. When the Grand Duchess came out, they spontaneously broke into the stirring and moving tones of the great German National Hymn here given in translation:—

(Tune: “Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him.”)

“Thank you, thank you, God bless you all,” said the Grand Duchess, and disappeared as unpretentiously as she had come.

In Berlin I looked up several old friends and also had the honour and pleasure to be invited to supper with the pretty, charming and altogether delightful Crown Princess. In the evening we sat round an open, flaming hearth, and I recounted my recollections from the front and from the desert, whilst my illustrious hostess and her ladies-in-waiting were listening and knitting socks for the brave soldiers in the trenches. The Crown Princess had another guest whom it was a great pleasure to me to meet again—Baron von Maltzahn, who now, after his unlucky motor drive, had recovered sufficiently to hop about on crutches.

The streets of Berlin looked the same as they had done two months previously. Men and women, motor-cars and ’buses moved about as busily as they had done before, and the streets were flooded with electric light all night just as in piping times of peace. At the appointed hour the Palace Guard came marching along Unter den Linden as it has always done, with its alluring, rapturous military music calling to fresh deeds of valour. Had one not known it, one could not possibly have guessed, but for the shouting of the newsboys, that the country was involved in the most gigantic war of all time. Neither did I notice any thinning of the numbers of able-bodied men in the streets, and yet had I not seen through the carriage window from Metz armies of recruits, reservists and volunteers all drilling in barrack squares and fields along the line?

It has been stated in certain newspapers that the Germans treated their prisoners of war in a cruel and inhuman manner. That this was untrue like everything else which forms part of the educational campaign, I readily understood, but all the same I thought it would be interesting to find out for myself the facts of the case. Accordingly I paid a visit to the acting General Staff. Not only did they give me the usual prompt permission to go out to the prisoners’ camp at Döberitz, but I was given as guide a most capable and learned major.

At the entrance to the camp we were received by a colonel and several other officers, who took us round and explained everything. Here were four thousand Russians, four thousand British and a few hundred French, Belgians and Turcos—I am sorry to say there were no other specimens from the ethnological colour-box at Döberitz. The prisoners live in gigantic tents where they have their beds close together on the ground in four enormous rows. I went into one of the tents and found a group of Russians with caps on the back of their heads and coats or blankets over their shoulders, and asked if they were satisfied with the treatment they received. “Oh yes, nitchevo,” was the answer. But one of them shouted, “It is too cold to lie on the ground in late autumn.” “Yes,” I answered, “of course it was warmer in the firing lines in Poland. How would you like to go back and warm yourselves a bit?” “No, Heaven preserve us!” came as a chorus on every side.

My old friend Tommy Atkins was strolling about inside the barbed-wire fence and looked and felt very bored. But he was not ill-treated, on the contrary, he was very well looked after. I saw him at dinner with his ally Ivan Ivanovitch. The 8500 prisoners were fed in three-quarters of an hour, and the whole thing was despatched with the utmost smoothness. In front of the kitchen building, in which gigantic caldrons were steaming, railings had been put up, permitting the men to advance in files of eight to the window opening, through which the mess cooks with the adroitness, touch and quickness of a virtuoso filled to the brim the bowls held out to them with wholesome, nourishing, steaming soup. When their bowls had been filled, the men went back another way so as to avoid congestion. The system is the same as at the booking offices at busy railway stations.

The British soldier is, under normal conditions, a sinewy and well-knit man, who has hardened and trained his body with football, tennis, cricket and other salutary exercises. But in Germany he merely vegetates and swells in bulk and by no means over-exerts himself over the work offered him in confinement, by which he can earn a couple of pfennigs a day for tobacco. If therefore on his return home Tommy tries to make out that he has been living “below starvation mark” in Germany, his comfortably rounded form and his eloquencia corporis will give him the lie!

It is surprising and peculiar to see Tommy Atkins and Ivan Ivanovitch arm-in-arm—figuratively speaking, of course! For in the concentration camps they hate one another heartily. Tommy regards Ivan as a lousy savage and Ivan looks on Tommy as an impudent upstart whom the modest patron of the samovar ought not to associate with. And yet, for all practical purposes, they march arm-in-arm and use all the most hellish infernal machines of modern militarism to destroy the German militarism and free the earth from the Germanic barbarians. Great Britain and Russia! It really staggers the imagination when one thinks that these two countries have neither in Europe nor in Asia, in heaven nor on earth, a single positive interest in common.

We need only think of India, the most precious jewel in Great Britain’s crown. Of the possibility of a Russian invasion of India Lord Curzon, the greatest and most clear-sighted Viceroy India has ever had, has given utterance to the following: “It would involve the most terrible and lingering war that the world has ever seen; and it could only be effected by a loss, most unlikely to occur, and more serious in its effects upon the human race than that of India itself, namely, the loss of the fibre of the British people.” Elsewhere, when saying that India’s safety is Great Britain’s foremost duty, he speaks as follows of a Russian attack on that country: “It can only be prosecuted in the teeth of international morality, in defiance of civilised opinion and with the ultimate certainty of a war with this country that would ring from pole to pole.”

The Novoye Vremya writes at about the same time (1st December, 1888): “Our attention has been focussed on the necessity of bringing Khorasan under Russia’s exclusive influence, the more so as through Khorasan runs a convenient road in the direction of Herat and in case of military operations against India, Khorasan would therefore serve as a base of supply for our further operations.” Then we have Skobeleff’s and Kuropatkin’s very detailed and minute plans for an invasion of India.⁠[42]⁠

Many years have elapsed since Lord Curzon thoroughly and exhaustively, as usual, dealt with this question. But is there anyone who believes that the danger is less serious now that the Russians have been checked in the Far East by the Japanese and in the Far West by Germany and Austria-Hungary? It is true that there is one other outlet in the west—a truth which the Swedes should bear in mind. But nevertheless the danger to India is far greater now than it was twenty-five years ago.

It is therefore not a little peculiar to see Tommy Atkins helping Ivan Ivanovitch with blood and iron, on land and sea, to gain that power and strength which he needs for carrying out an invasion of India. For England this world war is a national calamity, however it may end. “We have forty million reasons for failure but not a single excuse.”

We also visited the hospital at Döberitz, where the prisoners receive all the care that human charity can give to the sick. It is not charity alone that demands the greatest sacrifices in this respect, for a concentration camp where thousands of men live huddled together on one spot may become a source of contagion, if ill-managed. Hence skilled doctors, sick attendants and nurses are engaged, and the slightest symptom is immediately followed by isolation to prevent the possibility of an epidemic.

In one of the paths I came across a Tommy walking up and down. He looked very pale, but was convalescent.

“How are you getting on?” said I, but received no reply.

“I hope you will soon become a little bit of all right by and by,” I tried once more in my very best colloquial English. Tommy only smiled and looked at me.

“Is he deaf or is he mad?” I asked the doctor who accompanied us.

“No, he is Russian,” answered the doctor, laughing. But how this Russian had got into Tommy’s uniform remains an unsolved riddle.

It is a rather significant fact that whilst the good-natured Russians need only four per cent of guards, the self-conscious English require ten per cent; in other words, four German soldiers look after a hundred Russians, whilst a hundred English need ten guardians. The reason may possibly be found in the inborn servility traceable to generations of serfdom, but the principal reason of the difficulty in handling the English prisoners is probably that they have no national service and have not accustomed themselves to discipline. The cases of insubordination in the prisoners’ camps are almost entirely confined to the British prisoners. The punishment for the first offence consisted in letting the culprit stand a couple of hours to guard the guns on a little flat eminence near the camp, where the wind usually blew cold and strong. After a graver offence the delinquent was usually tied to a tree for an hour or two, but this latter punishment had only been resorted to in isolated cases.

My impression of the treatment of prisoners at Döberitz confirmed all that I had witnessed in this connection at the seat of war. But the world will be deceived and is deceived. Hence the educators of the British nation spread broadcast the meanest calumnies concerning the “Huns’ barbarity” to their unhappy prisoners.

The magnificent drawing-room inside the hall of the Hotel Kaiserhof usually formed the rendezvous of a little Swedish colony in the evening. Here I met Cavalry Captain Count Gilbert Hamilton, who had become a German subject and officer in order to strike a blow in the Germanic fight for existence. He was just on his way to his regiment and was looking forward to a very different reveille from that he was accustomed to at our own sleepy horse-guards barracks at home in Stockholm. Here also I met once more my old friend Colonel Gustaf Bouveng, who had spent two and a half months at the front and who, among innumerable other impressions, was also taking home with him the conviction that in a military sense Germany simply cannot be defeated by her present opponents. Instead of tiring and becoming decimated, the German army grows in strength and numbers from month to month.

On the 12th of November I took my departure from the Stettiner Bahnhof and set out on my journey home to Sweden. As I reached Sassnitz, dusk was descending over the Baltic. The passports and effects of the passengers were subjected to a most careful scrutiny. The same calm, the same sure self-possession, the same discipline and order as I had noticed everywhere in Germany and in the firing lines, made themselves felt here, too, on the outermost planks of the harbour pier. At Sassnitz fourteen torpedo-boats lay ready for immediate action, and in the roads a gigantic hospital ship was riding at anchor, ready to receive wounded from the sea.

The ferry cast off her moorings. Little by little in the gathering gloom we lose sight of land, that land whose seconds are as long as years, whose people is now writing its epos in runes of blood on the pages of the world’s history—a united people, a virile people, a people which stood ready in its hour of trial, armed for the defence of its honour, its liberty and its future when the ravenous monster of strife rose up upon its frontiers, a people which has the will to win and which therefore in the time to come will march at the head of the ruling race upon our earth.

But the belt of sea between the ferry and the German coast grows wider. The song “Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein” has long since died away. The twilight, the transition between day and night, is over. And in the north bides the deep impenetrable darkness.