me
to join his father's regiment in Poland. When his captain calls for
volunteers for a dangerous mission, the boy steps forward. For hours
they trudge over the snow until surrounded by a Cossack patrol. The
Bavarian boy, although having a chance to escape, goes back under fire
to succor his wounded comrade. Just as he is about to drag the comrade
into the zone of safety, a bullet pierces his lung. For two days he
suffers torture on the snow. The body is found and brought home to his
mother.

Now and then the widow next me bit her lip and clenched her fist, but
she gave no other sign of emotion. Another film was thrown on the
screen, humorous, I believe. Suddenly the woman began to laugh. She did
not stop laughing. It was a long, mirthless, dry, uncanny sort of
cackle. People stared. She laughed still louder. An usher came down
the aisle, and stood there, uncertain what to do. Hysterics had given
way to weeping: the tears were now streaming down the woman's face. She
tried to control herself, but could not, and then arose and between
choking sobs and laughter fled from the darkened room out into the
Friedrichstrasse.

I mention this incident--the sort of thing that must have existed
everywhere, if one had eyes to see it--merely because it gave a glimpse
through the veil of public optimism into the wells of sorrow hidden for
the sake of public duty. Military and official Berlin was "staged," one
might almost say. It was on show to impress the neutral stranger, no
less than its own inhabitants, with the glorious sense of victory.

But beneath it lay untold suffering which could be endured only because
of such united loyalty and team play as the world has seldom seen.

This undercurrent of suffering, which increased week by week as the
writing on the wall grew longer, was in pitiful contrast to the
enthusiasm with which the women sent their men and sons away to war.
More than once I watched troops drilling at Spandau Hof, the great
barracks and training-grounds, a few kilometers west of the city. When,
on the evening of my first visit, a half dozen battalions of Landwehr,
just whipped into shape, entrained for the front, the people threw bits
of earth upon them, and, according to custom, stuck green twigs in the
end of every Mauser barrel, that each man might carry a bit of the
Vaterland with him on to the enemy's soil. In unspotted field uniforms,
and helmets still without the green-gray canvas service