Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

Great

aterloo. A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the younger with her freshness, present a dualis

hom had a son or husband or brother at the front-the century suddenly seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own "grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the

o easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a- ... And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a v

andaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and something to eat-will they never st

ilitary automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay "Ta-tee! Ta-td!"-the extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk in the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the Frie

street-lamp, the casualty lists. You must imagine a building like the Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, o

ight have heard of Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece might succeed with luck, o

kespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting, and a man's very soul deve

rman to waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to the wall, facing and holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic, going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Wom

feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all a people's capabilities,

other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German habit of accumulating

g a play. When a people can hold back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost, yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the thea

s an all day's express journey from either front, you see thousands of fit young men marching through the streets, singing and whistling; you are told of millions ready and waiting to go. Every one

in his heart that he was doomed. I find little to suggest such a picture. The thing that at once impresses the stranger, along with the apparent reserve strength, is the moral earnestness behind that strength, the passionate conviction

arty German of the commercial class, such as you might expect to find running a brewery at home or a bank or coffee plantati

nting toward the cathedral towers in whose shadow we stood. And th

aside what was taken for granted before consid

teer myself." He was fifty-five years old, but thoroughly fit. He doubled up a big right arm and laug

il the war cut off her business, and she was now supporting herself with the six marks (one dollar and fifty cents) weekly war benefit given by the municipality and by making soldiers' shirts for the War Department at fifty pfennigs

ut that inside. The first class they wear outside," and, as if she cou

They hope to save his leg, but he will always be lame. He got the Iron Cross. He was at Dixmude. They marched up singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They were all shot down. There were three hundred of th

to crawl back-if only she could go

uch things said to me. Our Kaiser did not want the war-he did everything he could to prevent the war-no ruler in the world ever did more for his people than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, woman, o

d Hood River-crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped thr

killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual crowds. One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards. They were not boys an

est. It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon. All these chimne

y through another year. Meanwhile, one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not nee

to appear, and at a central place like the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from whic

but Germans eat so little bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person scarcely noticed the difference. Every one must have his bread-card now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day-about four pounds a week-which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer gets his bread. Without

and prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands. Yet there are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour onl

n one way or another "gone to the war." The gay young men are at the front, the idle young women knitting or nursing or helping the poor, and it is an adventure uncommon enough to be remembered to meet on the str

ere is none of that noisy hate continually dinned into one's ears in London by papers which, to be sure, represent neither the better-class Engli

on rather than that of overworked and underpaid reporters striving to please their employers with all the desperation of servants working for a tip. The yelping after spies, the heaping of adjectives on every trifling achievement of British a

ts the newswomen were croaking: "Sechsund-zwanzig tausend Russen gefangen... Hindenburg zahlt noch immer..." ("Twenty-six thousand Russians captured... and Hindenburg's still counting..."). And all you could find in the papers was the General Staff report that "at on

e is little or no tendency to group achievements around individual commanders-it is "our army," not the man, although even German collectiv

off her seven sons or the bearded father meets his youngest boy, schwer verwundet, on the battle-field; or cheer when the curtain goes down

, breech-block closed, and-"Now-for Kaiser and fatherland!"-by means of an image thrown on

ans "don't count," so to speak. They are dangerous because of their numbers and must be flung

hosts to know that he, too, had been to Paris and knew how to be a galant homme. Men tell you "they've put up a mighty good fight, say!" or speaking of the young French sculptor allowed to go on with his work in the prison camp at Zossen, or the flower-beds in front of the

ch blood flowing by from the battle-fields of France, while the cartoonist asks France if she cannot see that she is doing his grinding for him;

breakfast without saying: "Gott strafe die Englander!" ("God punish the English!") In a recent Ulk there is a cartoon of a young mother hol

est, to be shut off from sending food to Germany. Yet, in spite of this and the extremely difficult situation created by the submarine blockade, the individual Americ

rst thing, on a copy of "Tartarin sur les Alpes," which

fe!" and forthwith he bellowed for help. A young officer sauntered out from the near-by office, saluted, and said, "Good morning!" glanced at "Tartarin" with a smile

German with evident pain, tactfully asked-everybody else drinking beer-for tea. The man across the way whispered to his companion and stared; a middle-aged man farther up the a

cupant who had got on at Essen or one of the western stations and sat the day out without a word. One of those disagreeable Prussians evidently-until, actually needing

tleman, and they were fighting England, not individual Englishmen. Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably shifted into French, and

Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you -as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner c

with the applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout

e the manners of the German waiters at the Savoy, and some because-"Well, those people somehow rub you the wrong way!" It is not universal conscription, becaus

ldier, that it was "their damned police!" No, when people think they are talking about German militarism, they are quite as likely to be talking about the way German

erent from the French love of "gloire" and the English keenness for war as a sort of superior fox-hun

m an aeroplane, the lights of Paris, the silver thread of the Seine and its bridges. There is a faint whirring, and two faces emerge vaguel

glau-u-be Da oben fl

es a motion with his hand, there is a sort of glowworm flash, and a few seconds later, away down there among the Paris roofs a puff of red smoke and fire. The illusion is perfect, and the audience is e

y, the Taube sails

oben fliegt Ich g

from the Luxembourg, apparently, another of those eloquent little puffs of fi

ere is a square young man dressed in a metallic coat and conical helmet, so as to suggest the famous forty-two-centimetre shell-the shell which makes a hole like a cellar and smashed

esent season..." "High up above the clouds I fly at heart's desire..." "And I'm a child of Krupp'

bler," as they call it in Germany-could anything be more piquant? You should hear them-the chaste, chic, nun-lik

mer... Du mein Taubch

nly come from a people so bred to arms that they do not shrink, even in imagination, from the uses to which arms must be put-a people in lo

devoted advocates of universal peace have played with lead cannon and toy soldiers. I merely speak of it, this curious mixture of refinement and

step, sometimes laughed at as the "goose step" in England and at home. I was lunching the other d

ry muscle in their bodies taut and tingling as steel wire, every eye on the Emperor, and when they bring those feet down-bi

ease one day in my hotel when a young officer with whom I had started, in the American fashion, comfortably to shake han

e about it. They square off and bring that hand to their heads and look that officer square i

ack England and France and driving the Russian millions out of East Prussia. It is something bigger than that. Peasants and princes, these men are dying gladly, backed up by fitness, discipline, and a passionate unity such as the world has not often seen. This, and not the futile nur