The Bomb | Page 5

my clothes were better than most of the other boys' clothes, because every now and then I had a few Pfennige to spend, I thought myself better than my schoolmates. The master, too, never beat me or scolded me. I must have been a dreadful little snob. I remember liking my first name, Rudolph. There were princes, forsooth, called Rudolph; but Schnaubelt I hated, it seemed vulgar and common.
When I was about twelve or thirteen I had learned all that the village school had to teach. My father wished me to go to Munich to study in the Gymnasium, though he grudged the money it would cost to keep me there. When he was not drinking or working he used to preach the money-value of education to me, and I was willing enough to believe him. He never showed me much affection, and I was not sorry to go out into the larger world, and try my wings in a long flight.
It was about this time that I first of all became aware of nature's beauty. Away to the south our mountain valley broke down towards the flat country, and one could look towards Munich far over the plain all painted in different colors by the growing crops. Suddenly one evening the scales fell from my eyes; I saw the piney mountain and the misty-blue plain and the golden haze of the setting sun, and stared in wondering admiration.
How was it I had never before seen their beauty?
Well, I went to the Gymnasium. I suppose I was dutiful and teachable: we Germans have those sheep-virtues in our blood. But in my reading of Latin and Greek I came across thoughts and thinkers and at length Heine, the poet, woke me to question all the fairy tales of childhood. Heine was my first teacher, and I learned from him more than I learned in the classrooms; it was he who opened for me the door of the modern world. I finished with the Gymnasium when I was about eighteen, and left it, as Bismarck said he left it, a Freethinker and Republican.
In the holidays I used to go home to Lindau; but my father made my life harder and harder to me. He was away all day at work. He did work, that is one thing I must say for him; but he left at home the girl who took charge of the house, and she used to give herself airs. She was justified in doing so, I suppose, poor girl; but I did not like it at the time, and resented her manner, snob that I was. When I had any words with Suesel I was sure to have a row with my father afterwards, and he didn't pick his words, especially when he had drink in him. I seemed to anger him; intellectually we were at opposite poles. Even when cheating or worse he was a devout Lutheran, and his servility to his superiors was only equalled by the harshness with which he treated his underlings. His credulity and servility were as offensive to my new dignity of manhood as his cruelty to his subordinates or his bestial drunkenness.
For some unhappy months I was at a loose end. I was very proud, thought no end of myself and my petty scholarly achievements; but I didn't know what course to steer in life, what profession to adopt. Besides, the year of military service stood between me and my future occupation, and the mere thought of the slavery was inexpressibly hateful to me. I hated the uniform, the livery of murder; hated the discipline which turned a man into a machine; hated the orders which I must obey, even though they were absurd; hated the mad unreason of the vile, soul-stifling system. Why should I, a German, fight Frenchmen or Russians or Englishmen? I was willing enough to defend myself or my country if we were attacked; confident enough, too, in courage, to believe that a militia like the Swiss would suffice for that purpose. But I loved the French, as my teacher Heine loved them; a great Cultur-volk, I said to myself--a nation in the first rank of civilization; I loved the Russians, too, an intelligent, sympathetic, kindly people; and I admired the adventurous English. Race-differences were as delightful in my eyes as the genera-differences of flowers. Wars and titles belonged to the dark past and childhood of humanity; were we never to be breeched as men simply and brothers? We mortals, I thought, should be trained to fight disease and death, and not one another; we should be sworn to conquer nature and master her laws, that was the new warfare in which wisdom and courage would have their full reward in the humanization of man.
Thoughts like these lighted