gentlemen up, and hide them
out of sight, so shocking are they to one's sense of respect and
reverence for human beings. Imagine decent citizens, paunchy and soft
with beer and sitting in offices, wearing cheap straw hats and
carefully mended and brushed black coats, _dancing_ with excitement on
the pavement; and nobody thinking it anything but fine and creditable,
at the prospect of their children's blood going to be shed, and
everybody's children's blood, except the blood of those safe children,
the children of the Hohenzollerns!

The weather is fiercely hot. There's a brassy sky without a cloud, and
all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless
as if they were cut out of metal. A little haze of dust hangs
perpetually along the Lindens and the road to Charlottenburg,--not much
of it, because the roads are too well kept, but enough to show that the
troops never leave off tramping. And all down where they pass, on each
side, are the perspiring crowds of people, red and apoplectic with
excitement and heat, women and children and babies mixed up in one
heaving, frantic mass. The windows of the houses on each side of the
Brandenburger Thor are packed with people all day long, and the noise
of patriotism doesn't leave off for an instant.

It's a very ugly noise. The only place where I can get away from
it--and I do hate noise, it really _hurts_ my ears--is the bathroom
here, which is a dark cupboard with no window, in the very middle of
the house. I thought it a dreadful bathroom when I first saw it, but
now I'm grateful that it can't be aired. The house was built years and
years before Germans began to wash, and it wasn't till the Koseritzes
came that a bath was wanted. Then it had to be put in any hole, and
this hole is the one place where there is silence. Everywhere else, in
every room in the house, it is as if one were living next door to a
dozen public houses in the worst slums of London and it were always
Saturday night. I do think the patriotism of an unattacked, aggressive
country is a hideous thing.

Bernd got me somehow through the crowd to the calmer streets on the way
to Frau Berg. He didn't want me to go out at all, but I want to see
what I can. The Kaiser rushed through the Brandenburger Thor in his
car as we went out. You never saw such a scene as then. It was
frightening, like a mob of lunatics let loose. Every time he is seen
tearing along the streets there's t