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