the train for
Koln.

On the way to Berlin from Koln, that rainy afternoon, I went into the
dining-car toward five o'clock attired in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit
and heavy tan boots, and, speaking 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
aisle stood stock-still and stared; a young woman at the other end of
the car turned round and, gazing over the back of her chair, whispered
aghast to her companion: "Englaender!"

Not particularly enlivened by the cup that cheers, I regained my
compartment presently and glared out at the sodden landscape, with now
and then a shot at the other occupant 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 to know, I
broke the silence by asking which station we arrived at in Berlin. He
answered with perfect good humor, and we began to talk. I mentioned the
tea incident.

"Ignorant people!" he said, dismissing them with a wave of the hand.
They ought to have seen my little flag--he had--and, anyhow, a gentleman
was a gentleman, and they were fighting England, not individual
Englishmen. Then, reverting to my apologies for my German, he amiably
shifted into French, and so we talked until reaching Berlin, when,
hoping that I would get what I came for, he shook hands and wished me
"Bon voyage!" So you never can tell.

The militarism which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all
about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and
understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on.
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 can tell you at
home--about the German belief in war as a great blessing, because it is
the only way of asserting your own superior ideas over the other man's
inferior ideas, and thus getting a world ahead.

People want to smash England, of course, because, as they explain, she
brought on the war and is trying to starve them, and they roar with the
applause when the lightning-change man at the Wintergarten impersonates
Hindenburg, because Hindenburg is a grand old scout who is keeping those
millions of slovenly Russians from ove