resent, but Berlin has no old
Berlin to help her. If all that is worth while in London were built in
the spirit of Downing Street and Whitehall and the statue of Nurse
Cavell, it might be said that London was not unlike Berlin.

Clearly two ideas have tried to express themselves in Germany's
capital: one is modern commerce, and the other, and more
characteristic, is military glory. The commercial houses are naturally
much the same as in the rest of Europe, gloomily utilitarian. The
military in stone, however, is neither ornamental nor useful. Strange
that the Kaiser, who was reputed to have quick intelligence, should not
have felt how excruciatingly unspiritual and truly uninspiring the
glory-statuary and architecture was. The German army was one of the
greatest military organizations the world has seen, and it was in 1914
a potential terror to every nation in Europe, but its reflection in art
was ugly. The Victory Column, the statues of Germany's heroes, the
appalling queue of stone groups each side of the Sieges Allee, all show
up now like a spiritual X-ray photograph of Prussia.

It may seem ungenerous to taunt some one who is down, after the event,
but I did not see the Avenue of Victory before 1914, and it came as a
shock. Despite the loathsome details of the war, there are many
ex-enemies of Germany who have kept in their hearts an altar of
admiration for German arms. An idea of Teutonic chivalry lurked
somewhere in the imagination. But you can realize in Berlin from the
militarist self-confession in art that there is no idealism there. How
the Kaiser could go out day after day and confront these low
conceptions of patriotism and of Germany, and not order them to be
swept away, explains in great part how it was Germany made such a
blunder as to go to war the way she did. One advantage of a revolution
in Germany might be to sweep away these sad tokens of the past.

It was in this Avenue of Victory that old Hindenburg's wooden statue
was set up and the populace struck nails into it to boost
war-charities. It became so ugly that it was hidden away at last, and
despite the Field-Marshal's great popularity has lately been broken up
and destroyed. That was really worth keeping, and ought to have found
a place in a war-museum. It was authentic, but it did not flatter, and
it had to go.

Hindenburg is the greatest hero in Germany, and all the children
idealize him. Whatever he puts his name to, goes. H