Villa Elsa | Page 3

some new far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and strength. Never had investments brought the German such high rates. Never had speculation been so rife and withal so uniformly profitable.
As for industry, Deutschland was a colossal beehive. If Frederick the Great started the beehive, William the Second was increasing its size to unbelievable proportions. Insignificant villages everywhere contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time, seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted precisely into the whole national plant.
It was as if the Teuton knew that other races must soon stand with their backs to the wall and that now was the moment to redouble effort to capture still more trade and reduce the rest of the world to an acknowledged state of submission.
CHAPTER II
DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES
Thus the Germans, in 1913, felt how supreme their country was or was speedily becoming. Not only their newspapers but their educators, their pastors and, more than all, their military and political leaders told them that a place above the rest of mankind had been reached. The pride, the assurance, pervading the land was the stiff and hardy efflorescence of this universal conclusion. And the Teutons had earned and therefore merited it all, for no one, nothing, scarcely even Nature, had lent a helping hand.
German women knew they were the best housekeepers, wives, mothers, dressers, dancers. Never had they been so to the fore. Never had they had so much money to spend for clothes. Never had they promenaded so proudly to martial music or waltzed so perspiringly with the fashion-plate officers whom they adored.
The children were paragons of diligence and promise. In their school books and college text books everything German was lauded in the superlative; everything foreign was decried as inferior, undesirable. Nearly every human discovery, invention, improvement, was somehow traced to a Teuton origin. Even characteristic German vices were held to be better than many virtues in other lands.
The young person grew up to believe that the Rhine was the finest of rivers, the mountains of the Fatherland were the most celebrated in song and story, its lakes the most picturesque, its soil the best tilled. He was properly stuffed with the indomitable conviction, the aggressive obsession, that the fittest civilization must prevail.
And the army! Always the army--that bulwark, that invincible force! Hundreds of thousands of civilians apparently regretted they were not back in the barracks, following the noblest of occupations as soldiers for the supreme War Lord. The army represented admitted perfection. Foreign observers were united in na?vely attesting its impeccableness. It was ready to the last shoe button, to the last twist of its waxed mustache. But ready for what? Few outside of Germany appeared to think of asking. The army was taken to be simply Teuton life and of no more ulterior significance than the national beer.
The admission was also general at home and abroad that the German Government was the most free from graft and the most thorough. In Germany the kings and princes were paid homage as models of wisdom and virtue, and the Kaiser was believed to be walking with God, hand in hand, palm to palm. In token of the mystic union between Emperor and people, Hohenzollern monuments were seen rising in all parts of the Empire in greater quantity, amid greater thanksgivings. These Denkmals were growing huger, more thunderous in appearance, and served the double purpose of keeping the populace in a state of admiring, unquestioning awe and expressing fulminating Bewares! to other races. In every home, factory, retail shop, public place, was the Kaiser's picture, with his trellised mustache, and his devout eyes cast with a chummy comradeship up to heaven.
All the foregoing explanations accounted in part for a glorious increase in noise among a people that does everything loudly. The national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the horns of the bloody chase--the cors de chasse of the legendary Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day,