Further Foolishness: Ch. 11 - Germany from Within Out

Ch. 11 - Germany from Within Out

The adventure which I here narrate resulted out of a
strange psychological experience of a kind that (outside
of Germany) would pass the bounds of comprehension.

To begin with, I had fallen asleep.

Of the reason for my falling asleep I have no doubt. I
had remained awake nearly the whole of the preceding
night, absorbed in the perusal of a number of recent
magazine articles and books dealing with Germany as seen
from within. I had read from cover to cover that charming
book, just written by Lady de Washaway, under the title
_Ten Years as a Toady, or The Per-Hapsburgs as I Didn't
Know Them_. Her account of the life of the Imperial Family
of Austria, simple, unaffected, home-like; her picture
of the good old Emperor, dining quietly off a cold potato
and sitting after dinner playing softly to himself on
the flute, while his attendants gently withdrew one by
one from his presence; her description of merry, boisterous,
large-hearted Prince Stefan Karl, who kept the whole
court in a perpetual roar all the time by asking such
riddles as "When is a sailor not a sailor?" (the answer
being, of course, when he is a German Prince)--in fact,
the whole book had thrilled me to the verge of spiritual
exhaustion.

From Lady de Washaway's work I turned to peruse Hugo von
Halbwitz's admirable book, _Easy Marks, or How the German
Government Borrows its Funds_; and after that I had read
Karl von Wiggleround's _Despatches_ and Barnstuff's
_Confidential Letters to Criminals_.

As a consequence I fell asleep as if poisoned.

But the amazing thing is that, whenever it was or was
not that I fell asleep, I woke up to find myself in
Germany.

I cannot offer any explanation as to how this came about.
I merely state the fact.

There I was, seated on the grassy bank of a country road.

I knew it was Germany at once. There was no mistaking
it. The whole landscape had an orderliness, a method
about it that is, alas, never seen in British countries.
The trees stood in neat lines, with the name of each
nailed to it on a board. The birds sat in regular rows,
four to a branch, and sang in harmony, very simply, but
with the true German feeling.

There were two peasants working beside the road. One was
picking up fallen leaves, and putting them into neat
packets of fifty. The other was cutting off the tops of
the late thistles that still stood unwithered in the
chill winter air, and arranging them according to size
and colour. In Germany nothing is lost; nothing is wasted.
It is perhaps not generally known that from the top of
the thistle the Germans obtain picrate of ammonia, the
most deadly explosive known to modern chemistry, while
from the bulb below, butter, crude rubber and sweet cider
are extracted in large quantities.

The two peasants paused in their work a moment as they
saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple
gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on
his head until I had finished looking at him.

I felt quite certain, of course, that it must only be a
matter of a short time before I would inevitably be
arrested.

I felt doubly certain of it when I saw a motor speeding
towards me with a stout man, in military uniform and a
Prussian helmet, seated behind the chauffeur.

The motor stopped, but to my surprise the military man,
whom I perceived to be wearing the uniform of a general,
jumped out and advanced towards me with a genial cry of:

"Well, Herr Professor!"

I looked at him again.

"Why, Fritz!" I cried.

"You recognize me?" he said.

"Certainly," I answered, "you used to be one of the six
German waiters at McCluskey's restaurant in Toronto."

The General laughed.

"You really took us for waiters!" he said. "Well, well.
My dear professor! How odd! We were all generals in the
German army. My own name is not Fritz Schmidt, as you
knew it, but Count von Boobenstein. The Boobs of
Boobenstein," he added proudly, "are connected with the
Hohenzollerns. When I am commanded to dine with the
Emperor, I have the hereditary right to eat anything that
he leaves."

"But I don't understand!" I said. "Why were you in
Toronto?"

"Perfectly simple. Special military service. We were
there to make a report. Each day we kept a record of the
velocity and direction of the wind, the humidity of the
air, the distance across King Street and the height of
the C.P.R. Building. All this we wired to Germany every
day."

"For what purpose?" I asked.

"Pardon me!" said the General, and then, turning the
subject with exquisite tact: "Do you remember Max?" he
said.

"Do you mean the tall melancholy looking waiter, who used
to eat the spare oysters and drink up what was left in
the glasses, behind the screen?"

"Ha!" exclaimed my friend. "But _why_ did he drink them?
_Why?_ Do you know that that man--his real name is not
Max but Ernst Niedelfein--is one of the greatest chemists
in Germany? Do you realise that he was making a report
to our War Office on the percentage of alcohol obtainable
in Toronto after closing time?"

"And Karl?" I asked.

"Karl was a topographist in the service of his High
Serenity the King Regnant of Bavaria"--here my friend
saluted himself with both hands and blinked his eyes four
times--"He made maps of all the breweries of Canada. We
know now to a bottle how many German soldiers could be
used in invading Canada without danger of death from
drought."

"How many was it?" I asked.

Boobenstein shook his head.

"Very disappointing," he said. "In fact your country is
not yet ripe for German occupation. Our experts say that
the invasion of Canada is an impossibility unless we use
Milwaukee as a base--But step into my motor," said the
Count, interrupting himself, "and come along with me.
Stop, you are cold. This morning air is very keen. Take
this," he added, picking off the fur cap from the
chauffeur's head. "It will be better than that hat you
are wearing--or, here, wait a moment--"

As he spoke, the Count unwound a woollen muffler from
the chauffeur's neck, and placed it round mine.

"Now then," he added, "this sheepskin coat--"

"My dear Count," I protested.

"Not a bit, not a bit," he cried, as he pulled off the
chauffeur's coat and shoved me into it. His face beamed
with true German generosity.

"Now," he said as we settled back into the motor and
started along the road, "I am entirely at your service.
Try one of these cigars! Got it alight? Right! You notice,
no doubt, the exquisite flavour. It is a _Tannhauser_.
Our chemists are making these cigars now out of the refuse
of the tanneries and glue factories."

I sighed involuntarily. Imagine trying to "blockade" a
people who could make cigars out of refuse; imagine trying
to get near them at all!

"Strong, aren't they?" said von Boobenstein, blowing a
big puff of smoke. "In fact, it is these cigars that have
given rise to the legend (a pure fiction, I need hardly
say) that our armies are using asphyxiating gas. The
truth is they are merely smoking German-made tobacco in
their trenches."

"But come now," he continued, "your meeting me is most
fortunate. Let me explain. I am at present on the
Intelligence Branch of the General Staff. My particular
employment is dealing with foreign visitors--the branch
of our service called, for short, the Eingewanderte
Fremden Verfullungs Bureau. How would you call that?"

"It sounds," I said, "like the Bureau for Stuffing Up
Incidental Foreigners."

"Precisely," said the Count, "though your language lacks
the music of ours. It is my business to escort visitors
round Germany and help them with their despatches. I took
the Ford party through--in a closed cattle-car, with the
lights out. They were greatly impressed. They said that,
though they saw nothing, they got an excellent idea of
the atmosphere of Germany. It was I who introduced Lady
de Washaway to the Court of Franz Joseph. I write the
despatches from Karl von Wiggleround, and send the
necessary material to Ambassador von Barnstuff. In fact
I can take you everywhere, show you everything, and"
--here my companion's military manner suddenly seemed
to change into something obsequiously and strangely
familiar--"it won't cost you a cent; not a cent, unless
you care--"

I understood.

I handed him ten cents.

"Thank you, sir," he said. Then with an abrupt change
back to his military manner, "Now, then, what would you
like to see? The army? The breweries? The Royal court?
Berlin? What shall it be? My time is limited, but I shall
be delighted to put myself at your service for the rest
of the day."

"I think," I said, "I should like more than anything to
see Berlin, if it is possible."

"Possible?" answered my companion. "Nothing easier."

The motor flew ahead and in a few moments later we were
making our arrangements with a local station-master for
a special train to Berlin.

I got here my first glimpse of the wonderful perfection
of the German railway system.

"I am afraid," said the station-master, with deep apologies,
"that I must ask you to wait half an hour. I am moving
a quarter of a million troops from the east to the west
front, and this always holds up the traffic for fifteen
or twenty minutes."

I stood on the platform watching the troops trains go by
and admiring the marvellous ingenuity of the German
system.

As each train went past at full speed, a postal train
(Feld-Post-Eisenbahn-Zug) moved on the other track in
the opposite direction, from which a shower of letters
were thrown in to the soldiers through the window.
Immediately after the postal train, a soup train (Soup-Zug)
was drawn along, from the windows of which soup was
squirted out of a hose.

Following this there came at full speed a beer train
(Bier-Zug) from which beer bombs were exploded in all
directions.

I watched till all had passed.

"Now," said the station-master, "your train is ready.
Here you are."

Away we sped through the meadows and fields, hills and
valleys, forests and plains.

And nowhere--I am forced, like all other travellers, to
admit it--did we see any signs of the existence of war.
Everything was quiet, orderly, usual. We saw peasants
digging--in an orderly way--for acorns in the frozen
ground. We saw little groups of soldiers drilling in the
open squares of villages--in their quiet German fashion
--each man chained by the leg to the man next to him;
here and there great Zeppelins sailed overhead dropping
bombs, for practice, on the less important towns; at
times in the village squares we saw clusters of haggard
women (quite quiet and orderly) waving little red flags
and calling: "Bread, bread!"

But nowhere any signs of war. Certainly not.

We reached Berlin just at nightfall. I had expected to
find it changed. To my surprise it appeared just as usual.
The streets were brilliantly lighted. Music burst in
waves from the restaurants. From the theatre signs I
saw, to my surprise, that they were playing _Hamlet_,
_East Lynne_ and _Potash and Perlmutter_. Everywhere
was brightness, gaiety and light-heartedness.

Here and there a merry-looking fellow, with a brush and
a pail of paste and a roll of papers over his arm, would
swab up a casualty list of two or three thousand names,
amid roars of good-natured laughter.

What perplexed me most was the sight of thousands of men,
not in uniform, but in ordinary civilian dress.

"Boobenstein," I said, as we walked down the Linden
Avenue, "I don't understand it."

"The men?" he answered. "It's a perfectly simple matter.
I see you don't understand our army statistics. At the
beginning of the war we had an army of three million.
Very good. Of these, one million were in the reserve. We
called them to the colours, that made four million. Then
of these all who wished were allowed to volunteer for
special services. Half a million did so. That made four
and a half million. In the first year of the war we
suffered two million casualties, but of these seventy-five
per cent, or one and a half million, returned later on
to the colours, bringing our grand total up to six million.
This six million we use on each of six fronts, giving a
grand total of thirty six million.

"I see," I said. "In fact, I have seen these figures
before. In other words, your men are inexhaustible."

"Precisely," said the Count, "and mark you, behind these
we still have the Landsturm, made up of men between
fifty-five and sixty, and the Landslide, reputed to be
the most terrible of all the German levies, made up by
withdrawing the men from the breweries. That is the last
final act of national fury. But come," he said, "you must
be hungry. Is it not so?"

"I am," I admitted, "but I had hesitated to acknowledge
it. I feared that the food supply--"

Boobenstein broke into hearty laughter.

"Food supply!" he roared. "My dear fellow, you must have
been reading the English newspapers! Food supply! My dear
professor! Have you not heard? We have got over that
difficulty entirely and for ever. But come, here is a
restaurant. In with you and eat to your heart's content."

We entered the restaurant. It was filled to overflowing
with a laughing crowd of diners and merry-makers. Thick
clouds of blue cigar smoke filled the air. Waiters ran
to and fro with tall steins of foaming beer, and great
bundles of bread tickets, soup tickets, meat cards and
butter coupons.

These were handed around to the guests, who sat quietly
chewing the corners of them as they sipped their beer.

"Now-then," said my host, looking over the printed menu
in front of him, "what shall it be? What do you say to
a ham certificate with a cabbage ticket on the side? Or
how would you like lobster-coupon with a receipt for
asparagus?"

"Yes," I answered, "or perhaps, as our journey has made
me hungry, one of these beef certificates with an affidavit
for Yorkshire pudding."

"Done!" said Boobenstein.

A few moments later we were comfortably drinking our tall
glasses of beer and smoking _Tannhauser_ cigars, with an
appetising pile of coloured tickets and certificates in
front of us.

"Admit," said von Boobenstein good-naturedly, "that we
have overcome the food difficulty for ever."

"You have," I said.

"It was a pure matter of science and efficiency," he went
on. "It has long been observed that if one sat down in
a restaurant and drank beer and smoked cigars (especially
such a brand as these _Tannhausers_) during the time it
took for the food to be brought (by a German waiter),
all appetite was gone. It remained for the German scientists
to organise this into system. Have you finished? Or
would you like to take another look at your beef
certificate?"

We rose. Von Boobenstein paid the bill by writing I.O.U.
on the back of one of the cards--not forgetting the
waiter, for whom he wrote on a piece of paper, "God bless
you"--and we left.

"Count," I said, as we took our seat on a bench in the
Sieges-Allee, or Alley of Victory, and listened to the
music of the military band, and watched the crowd, "I
begin to see that Germany is unconquerable."

"Absolutely so," he answered.

"In the first place, your men are inexhaustible. If we
kill one class you call out another; and anyway one-half
of those we kill get well again, and the net result is
that you have more than ever."

"Precisely," said the Count.

"As to food," I continued, "you are absolutely invulnerable.
What with acorns, thistles, tanbark, glue, tickets,
coupons, and certificates, you can go on for ever."

"We can," he said.

"Then for money you use I.O.U.'s. Anybody with a lead
pencil can command all the funds he wants. Moreover, your
soldiers at the front are getting dug in deeper and
deeper: last spring they were fifty feet under ground:
by 1918 they will be nearly 200 feet down. Short of mining
for them, we shall never get them out."

"Never," said von Boobenstein with great firmness.

"But there is one thing that I don't quite understand.
Your navy, your ships. There, surely, we have you: sooner
or later that whole proud fleet in the Kiel Canal will
come out under fire of our guns and be sunk to the bottom
of the sea. There, at least, we conquer."

Von Boobenstein broke into loud laughter.

"The fleet!" he roared, and his voice was almost hysterical
and overstrung, as if high living on lobster-coupons and
over-smoking of _Tannhausers_ was undermining his nerves.
"The fleet! Is it possible you do not know? Why all
Germany knows it. Capture our fleet! Ha! Ha! It now lies
fifty miles inland. _We have filled in the canal_--pushed
in the banks. The canal is solid land again, and the
fleet is high and dry. The ships are boarded over and
painted to look like German inns and breweries. Prinz
Adelbert is disguised as a brewer, Admiral von Tirpitz
is made up as a head waiter, Prince Heinrich is a bar
tender, the sailors are dressed up as chambermaids. And
some day when Jellicoe and his men are coaxed ashore,
they will drop in to drink a glass of beer, and then--pouf!
we will explode them all with a single torpedo! Such is
the naval strategy of our scientists! Are we not a nation
of sailors?"

Von Boobenstein's manner had grown still wilder and more
hysterical. There was a queer glitter in his eyes.

I thought it better to soothe him.

"I see," I said, "the Allies are beaten. One might as
well spin a coin for heads or tails to see whether we
abandon England now or wait till you come and take it."

As I spoke, I took from my pocket an English sovereign
that I carry as a lucky-piece, and prepared to spin it
in the air.

Von Boobenstein, as he saw it, broke into a sort of hoarse
shriek.

"Gold! gold!" he cried. "Give it to me!"

"What?" I exclaimed.

"A piece of gold," he panted. "Give it to me, give it to
me, quick. I know a place where we can buy bread with it.
Real bread--not tickets--food--give me the gold--gold--for
bread--we can get-bread. I am starving--gold--bread."

And as he spoke his hoarse voice seemed to grow louder
and louder in my ears; the sounds of the street were
hushed; a sudden darkness fell; and a wind swept among
the trees of the _Alley of Victory_--moaning--and a
thousand, a myriad voices seemed to my ear to take up
the cry:

"Gold! Bread! We are starving."

Then I woke up.

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