My Year of the War - Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and - the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the - First Time in its Complete Form by Frederick Palmer
page 85 of 428 (19%)
page 85 of 428 (19%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
England and Germany. Everyone who was a clerk or an employer
spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on the good terms which commerce requires and met at luncheons and dinners and in their clubs. Englishmen were married to German women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their governments would keep the peace. Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had spent most of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born in Germany, had been interned and, however large his bank account, was taking his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some cookhouse for his ration of cabbage soup. Germans were kind to English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg. Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling, once thriving businesses in suspended animation. There was no moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact. A patriotic freemasonry in misfortune took its place. No business man could press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn. What would happen when the war was over? How long would it last? It was not quite as cruel to give one's opinion as two years to the inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow Hospital in Berlin. Here, again, the system; the submergence of the individual in the organization. The wounded men seemed parts of a machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was less in evidence than with us, where the thought is: This is an individual human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his |
|