Face to Face with Kaiserism Part 15

German newspapers, as a rule, are very p.r.o.nounced in their views, either distinctly Conservative or Liberal or Socialist or Roman Catholic. The _Berliner Tageblatt_ is nearest our idea of a great independent, metropolitan, daily newspaper. Other newspapers represent a cla.s.s and many of them are owned by particular interests such as the Krupps and other manufacturers or munition makers.

There is little that is sensational in the German newspaper. I remember on one occasion that two women murderers were beheaded in accordance with German law. Imagine how such an occurrence would have been "played up" in the American newspapers, with pictures, perhaps, of the executioner and his sword, with articles from poets and women's organisations, with appeals for pardon and talk of brainstorms and the other hysterical concomitants of murder trials in the United States. But in the German newspapers a little paragraph, not exceeding ten lines, simply related the fact that these two women, condemned for murdering such and such a person, had been executed in the strangely medieval manner--their heads cut off on the scaffold by a public executioner.

The German newspapers in reporting police court and other judicial proceedings often omit names and it is possible in Berlin for a man to prosecute a blackmailer without having his own name in print.

When a German victory was announced flags were displayed, but as the war progressed so many victories announced turned out to be nothing wonderful or decisive that little attention was paid to the vain-glorious flaunting of German triumphs. Following an old custom ten or fifteen trumpeters climbed the tower of Rathhaus or City Hall and there quite characteristically blew to the four quarters of Heaven; but again as these official and brazen blowings were not always followed by the confirmation in fact, trumpetings were gradually discontinued.

The Germans cleverly kept back the announcement of certain successes in order to offset reverses. For instance, on a day when it was necessary to tell the people of a German retreat the newspapers would have great headlines across the front of the first page announcing the sinking of a British cruiser (sunk, perhaps, a month before) and then hidden in a corner would be a minimised announcement of a German defeat.

To us in Germany there was at the time no battle of the Marne. So gradually was the news of the retreat of the German forces broken to the people that to-day the ma.s.ses do not realise that the fate of the world was settled at the Marne!

CHAPTER X

THE LITTLE KAISERS

As the king idea seems inseparably connected with war there is no country in the world where kings and princes have been held in such great account as in the Central Empires.

I believe there are only two Christian kings in the world--the kings of Italy and of Montenegro--who are not by blood related to some German or Austrian royalty.

For remember that while we think of Germany as ruled by the Kaiser and while it is his will that is certainly imposed upon the whole of that territory which does not exist politically or even geographically but which we call Germany, there are houses of royalty in it almost as numerous as our big corporations.

There are the three kings of Bavaria, Wurtemburg and Saxony, grand dukes and dukes, and princes, all of them taking themselves very seriously and all of them residing in their own domains; jealously keeping away from the Emperor's court and jealously guarding every remnant of rule which the const.i.tution of the German Empire has bequeathed to them.

Once I asked one of these princelings what his older brother, the reigning prince, did with his time in the small provincial town which is the capital of the princ.i.p.ality. The brother looked at me with real surprise in his eyes and answered, "Why he reigns!"

Before the const.i.tution of the German Empire, many of these poverty-stricken little courts were centres of kindly amus.e.m.e.nt, even of intellectual life.

The court of the Grand Duke Charles-Augustus, of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach at Weimar where Goethe resided and where he was entrusted with responsible state duties, was renowned in Europe as a literary centre.

Many of these princelings, however ridiculous their courts may have seemed, exercised despotic power. To-day the inhabitants of the two Mecklenburg duchies are protected by neither const.i.tution nor bill of rights. The grand duke's power is absolute and he can behead at will any one of his subjects in the market-place or torture him to death in the dungeons of the castle and is responsible to G.o.d alone.

Here is an example from history. George Louis, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg-Celle, married his mistress, a Huguenot girl called Eleanore d'Olbreuze. They had one daughter, Sophia Dorothea, who married the Elector of Hanover, who was also George I of England. Sophia Dorothea was supposed to have been involved in a love affair with a Swedish Count, Philip Konigsmarck.

Konigsmarck was murdered by order of George I, and Sophia Dorothea incarcerated in Ahlden where she died in 1726.

Konigsmarck's sister went to Saxony to beg the aid of the Saxon King, Augustus the Strong. She failed to get news of her brother, but became one of the mistresses of Augustus the Strong and the mother of the celebrated Marshal Saxe. I say one of the "mistresses" of Augustus the Strong because he boasted that he was the father of 365 illegitimate children!

The daughter of Sophia Dorothea was the mother of Frederick the Great and his brothers, and therefore, an ancestor of the present German Kaiser. Any one writing about her in a disparaging manner is subject to be imprisoned, under the decisions of the Imperial Supreme Court, for "lese-majeste" or injuring the person of the present monarch in daring to slander his ancestors. And, I suppose, any one referring to Augustus the Strong may be shut up in Dresden for insulting a predecessor of the present King.

Every year the n.o.bles of the Central Empires hold a convention at Frankfort, where the means are discussed by which their privileges may be preserved. No newspaper prints an account of this Convention of the highest Caste.

The German peasants, as far as I have seen, are not so much under the dominion of feudal tradition as are the peasants in Austria and Hungary.

I was shooting once with a Hungarian Count who stationed me in one corner of a field to await the partridges, which driven by the beaters were expected to fly over my head and as I stood waiting for the beaters to take up their positions two peasant girls walked past me. One of them, to my surprise, caught hold of my hand, which she kissed with true feudal devotion. As a guest of the Count I was presumably of the n.o.ble cla.s.s and therefore ent.i.tled by custom and right to this mark of subjugation. And it became quite a task in walking through the halls of the castle to dodge the servants, all of whom seemed anxious to imprint on me the kiss of homage.

Thackeray in the "Fitzboodle Confessions" gives a most amusing account of life in one of these small, sleepy, German courts and relates how he left Pumpernickel hurriedly, by night, after the court ball where he had discovered not only that his German fiancee had eaten too much, but that she had a taste for bad oysters.

All of these small kings and princes are jealous of the King of Prussia and of his position of German Emperor and show their jealousy by avoiding Berlin.

In October, 1913, when in London on my way to Germany, I met the young Grand Duke of Mecklenburg Strelitz in the Ritz Hotel where he was dining with an English earl and his beautiful wife. As I happened to have a box for the Gaiety Theatre, we all went there together and paid a visit to George Grossmith behind the scenes and talked with Emmy Wehlen, the Austrian actress, who was appearing in the comic opera then running. But in all the time that I was in Germany I never once saw or heard of the young Grand Duke who rules the subjects of his duchy with autocratic rule without even the semblance of a const.i.tution.

Formerly our minister used to be accredited to some of these courts and, on inquiring informally through a friend, I learned that the American Minister is still accredited to Bavaria on the records of the Bavarian Foreign Office, no letters of recall ever having been presented. The fact that the American Amba.s.sador is accredited to none of these courts is a distinct disadvantage because without letters of credence he does not come into contact with any of the twenty-four rulers of Germany who control the Bundesrat in which their representatives sit, voting as they are told by the kings, grand dukes and princes. A number of these kings and princelings, combining in the Bundesrat, can outvote the powerful king of Prussia. But they don't dare!

CHAPTER XI

ROYALTY'S RECREATION

I had a shooting estate about twenty miles from Berlin, one that I could reach by automobile in forty-five minutes from the door of the Emba.s.sy. Because of the strict German game laws I had better shooting there than within two hundred miles of large cities in America.

There seemed to be something to shoot there almost every day of the year. On the sixteenth of May the season opened for male roe--a very small deer. About the first of August the ducks, which breed in northern Germany, can be shot. These were mallards and there were about two thousand or more on a lake on my preserve. We usually shot them by digging blinds in the oat fields, shooting them after sunset as they flew from the lake to feed in the newly harvested grain. The season for Hungarian partridge opened on August 20th. These were shot over dogs in the stubble and in the potato fields. After a few weeks partridges became very wild and we then shot them with a kite. When we had put up a covey out of range and marked where they went down in a potato patch or field, perhaps of lucern or clover, a small boy would fly a kite made in the form of a hawk over the field. This kept the partridges from flying and they would lie while the dogs pointed until we put them up.

By October 1st pheasants could be shot; English pheasants become wild. These roosted in the trees at night and so escaped the plentiful foxes. Later on came shooting at long ranges, after they had collected in bands, of the female roedeer and also the hare shooting. Rabbits were shot at all times, and in November and December and January on foggy days it was not difficult to get a wild goose.

The hares were shot in cold weather, after the snow was on the ground, by walking in line of ten or fifteen beaters with two or three guns at intervals along the line and later, when the hares were very wild and the weather very cold, by what is called by the Germans "kessel-jagd" or kettle-hunt. For this hunt the head keeper would collect a number of beaters, as many as a hundred, from the neighboring towns and villages, mostly small boys and old men. On the great, flat plain the keeper would send out his beaters to the right and the left, walking in a straight line at about twenty-yard intervals. After each side had gone perhaps half a mile they would then turn at right angles, walk a mile, and then turn at right angles until the two lines met, so that perhaps a square mile of territory would be enclosed by the beaters with the ten to fifteen men with guns at intervals in the line. When the square had been formed the head keeper blew a blast on his bugle and all turned and walked slowly towards the centre and the hares were shot as they attempted to break through the line.

On one day just before I left Germany, I and members of the Emba.s.sy shot more than two hundred hares on one of these hunts.

The German hare is an enormous animal with dark meat, almost impossible to distinguish from venison.

After these hare drives, besides, of course, paying the beaters their regular wages, I used to hold a lottery, giving a number of these hares as prizes or distributing hares to the magnates of the village, such as the pastor, the school teacher, the policeman and the postmaster.

When we were shooting in the summer and autumn the peasants were working in the fields and one had to be very careful in shooting roebuck with a high-powered rifle. It is customary to hunt roebuck on these flat plains from a carriage. In this way a bullet, travelling at a downward angle, if the buck is missed, strikes the ground within a short distance. If one were to shoot lying down, kneeling or standing, the danger to peasants in the fields would be very great. The pheasants were sometimes shot over dogs, but usually as the beaters drove small woods. A pheasant driven and flying high makes a difficult mark. One getting up before the dogs is almost too easy a shot.

We shot the rabbits by using ferrets, little animals like weasels wearing little muzzles and bells upon their necks. In the woods where the rabbits had their holes four or five ferrets would be put in the rabbits' holes and it was quite difficult to shoot rabbits as they came out like lightning, dodging among the trees.

In the early spring the "birkhahns" were shot, a variety of black and white grouse. There were some blinds or little huts of twigs erected near places where the ground was beaten hard and on these open, beaten spots early in the morning the "birkhahns" waltz, doing a peculiar backward and forward dance in some way connected with their marriage ceremonies. There were also on this estate numbers, at times, of a curious bird found only in Spain, Roumania, Asia Minor, and these plains of the Mark of Brandenburg, a large bustard called by the Germans "trappe." These birds were very shy and hard to approach. Although I had several shots at them with a rifle at four or five hundred yards I did not succeed in getting one.

In talking with the Chancellor he almost always opened the conversation by asking if I had yet killed a "trappe." As a rule the German uses for shooting deer and roebuck a German Mauser military rifle, but with the barrel cut down and a sporting stock with pistol grip added. On this there is a powerful telescope.

Many Germans carry a "ziel-stock," a long walking stick from the bottom of which a tripod can be protruded and near the top a sort of handle piece of metal about as big as a little finger. When the German sportsman has sighted a roebuck he plants his aiming stick in the ground, rests the rifle on the side projection, carefully adjusts his telescope, sets the hair trigger on his rifle and finally touches the trigger.

At the commencement of the war the Duke of Ratibor collected all these sporting rifles with telescopes and sent them to the front.

These were of the same calibre as the military rifles and took the military cartridge, so they proved enormously useful for sniping purposes.

Going one day to a proof establishment to try a gun I opened by mistake a door which led to a great room where thousands of German military rifles were being fitted with telescopes. These telescopes have crossed wires, like those in a surveyor's instrument, and it is only necessary in aiming to fix the centre of the crossed wires on the game and pull the trigger. A clever arrangement enables the wires to be elevated for distant shooting.

So great is the discipline of the German people that game on these estates is seldom, if ever, touched by the peasants. There is no free shooting in Germany. The shooting rights of every inch of land are in possession of some one and the tens of thousands of game keepers constantly killing the crows, hawks, foxes and other birds and animals that destroy eggs and game make the game plentiful. The keeper has the right by law to shoot any stray dog or cat found a hundred yards from a village. I paid the head keeper a certain sum per month and in addition he received a premium called "shot money" for each bird or roebuck shot. He also received a premium for each fox or crow or hawk he destroyed, bringing, on the first of the month, the beaks and claws of the hawks, etc., to prove his claim. Foxes are very plentiful in Germany and in one winter on this estate, only twenty miles from Berlin, the keeper trapped or killed twelve foxes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EXAMPLE OF THE COMMEMORATIVE MEDAL OFFERED FOR SALE. ON THE OBVERSE IS THE PORTRAIT OF THE CROWN PRINCE. ON THE REVERSE IS "YOUNG SIEGFRIED" ATTACKING A CHIMERA-LIKE MONSTER WITH FOUR HEADS: A BEAR FOR RUSSIA, A UNICORN FOR ENGLAND, A LION FOR BELGIUM, AND A c.o.c.k FOR FRANCE]

The Emperor is very fond of fox shooting. Foxes are driven out of the forest past his shooting stand by beaters and one of the reasons why Prince Furstenberg was such a favourite of the Emperor was that he provided him with splendid fox shooting, although it is whispered that he bought foxes in boxes in all parts of Germany and had them turned loose for the Emperor's benefit.

In the more thickly forested portions of Germany deer as well as roedeer are shot and in many districts wild boar. In Poland and in a few estates in Germany on the eastern border, moose, called elk (elch in German), are to be had. These, however, have very poor horns.

Talking to the keepers and beaters on this shooting estate gave me a very good idea of the hards.h.i.+ps suffered in rural Germany, of the way in which the people in the farming districts are kept down by the lords of the manor and by the government, and it was from this village and the neighbouring town that I got some idea of the number of men called to arms in Germany.