Reaching for the Stars

CHAPTERS 1 TO 13

REACHING FOR THE STARS

BY

NORA WALN

A heart-stirring chronicle that carries you within the barriers of Naziism.

NORA WALN was brought up in a Quaker household in the Grampian hills of Pennsylvania. Her girlhood was that of any American, save for this difference: China had laid fast hold upon her imagination. She had heard the family tales and read the century-old records of her family’s trade with the Lin family of Hopei and Canton. Amber and alum root, cinnabar and chinaware, embroidered fans and lily flowers — this was the stuff upon which her adolescent fancy fed. Gradually her library grew to contain a row of Chinese histories and dictionaries; she became familiar with the philosophies of Lao-tzu, Mencius, and Mo-ti; she committed to memory analects from Confucius.

With such a head start, it was inevitable that she should find her way to the Celestial Kingdom. While still an undergraduate at Swarthmore she met a husband and wife of the House of Lin, who had been touring America and had been drawn to Philadelphia by their curiosity to see the Waln family. Thus began a friendship which was to carry Nora Waln to China, which was to admit her as an adopted daughter within the family circle of the Lins, and which was to have its perfect flowering in her first book, The House of Exile. For thirteen years China was her home. Early in her stay she fell in love with and married a prominent official, an Englishman in the service of the Chinese Customs. On his retirement, she bade farewell to her adopted family and went with him to the Rhine Valley, where, as he studied music and she fraternized with the people, the plans for her new book gradually evolved.

Reaching for the Stars is best described in her own words. To her American editor she wrote: ’I am now engaged in writing of life as I found it in my four years among Germans in the Rhineland, Vienna, Czechoslovakia, and at Dresden, with no bitterness and no malice, but a sincere attempt at interpretation. The mind which now guides my use of words strives only for accuracy. A task has been laid upon me. It is to tell as honestly as I can what I have learned from the Germans.’

REACHING FOR THE STARS

BY NORA WALN

THE fashions of this world are in continuous change and I would concern myself with things that are abiding.-JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

I

IT was the last Saturday in June, 1934. A soft summer day, the sun’s radiance tempered by a breeze.

Motoring leisurely across Belgium, my husband and I stopped in Spa at noon for lunch. We chose an open-fronted restaurant facing on the town square, shaded by awnings striped a cool green and white. My husband has the habit of resting after midday food. While waiting for our salad to be mixed he glanced about in a way which I recognized to be a search for a quiet corner; and I gave my attention to the possibility of having a look at Spa, preferably with a resident of the place.

Recently I had read Ereignisse und Gestalten by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Inheritor of the kingdom of Prussia with the emperorship of all Germany and German responsibilities beyond the seas, he abandoned his position, at the threat of German revolution, in a hasty flight from Spa, thus losing for his descendants the power which a notable line of ancestors had won, by military victories and political strategies, for the House of Hohenzollern. So Spa was of interest to me just then, not as a Belgian town, but as related to him.

The restaurant proprietor kindly sent for his daughter, whom he introduced as an educated woman, a teacher before her marriage. She generously offered to escort me and we set forth.

Keeping to the paths of the wooded rise above the town square, she pointed out the direction from which the German army had come in the summer of 1914; the buildings they had used as staff headquarters; the château where their Kaiser had dwelt; the road down which he had fled to seek sanctuary in Holland in the autumn of 1918; and the way the evacuating troops had gone.

‘I helped the officers billeted on us to pack,’ she said. ‘They were stunned by the necessity to go home before the war was won. The invaders went in an orderly manner. I was nine when the German army arrived. I was thirteen when I sat on yonder hill to watch them depart.’

She flung her comely hands in a wide circle: ‘There is where the Germans were. They succeeded in seizing all our land except a tiny corner. German orators now moan over the radio about their bleeding frontiers — but who first tore at the frontiers? Do they forget that they snatched as much as they could from their neighbors and clung to it as long as they could hold? They groan to high heaven about the Ruhr and Rhine occupation, yet they made use of everything in each place they invaded as if it were their own. Quartered on other people’s homes, they shouted, whipped, and shot if their commands were not obeyed. More than four years they sat on us. It took the allied help of half the world to move them out of Belgium and France. They would have been here still if America had not helped. You may feel that the Treaty of Versailles is bitter. So it is. The Nazis contend that Germany would have written a less vindictive settlement had she won the war. That should be so. It should be easier for conquering invaders to be magnanimous than for the nearly exhausted invaded and their allies.’

She was trembling. We sat down on a rock. As quickly as she had lost control, she quieted herself and began to ask me questions about myself.

‘Your husband is English, but you are not?’

‘I am an American, a Pennsylvanian.’

‘Where did you marry?’

‘In China.’

‘Are you on the Continent only to enjoy yourselves?’

I explained. Music has always been my husband’s avocation. It was given a secondary place in his education, and before he was of age he was started on a career in government service in China. His vacations he spent in study with private teachers and at the Royal College of Music in London. Now he had resigned. He had just completed eighteen months of music study in France and was going to Germany to study.

‘Do you know the Germans?’ she asked.

I told her that I had known many people of German descent in my native Pennsylvania; in China we had made a point of becoming acquainted with the German community in each post where we lived, entertaining them in our home and visiting in theirs; as successor to a French nurse we had had a German governess for our daughter, and at Tientsin had sent her to the German school.

‘Did you send her to school when you lived in France?’

‘Yes, to the French public school.’

‘And where is she now?’

‘At a school in Switzerland.’

‘You are n’t taking her with you into Germany?’

‘We are not willing to send her to school there until we find out how the schools are under the Nazi government.’

‘What is your opinion about war?’ she requested abruptly.

‘It is uncivilized.’

‘ I agree with you — but who is right and who is wrong when it does occur?’

‘Nobody is right. Everybody is wrong.’

‘That is loose thinking. The invaders are wrong. The German Kaiser sinned against civilization when he gave orders for his soldiers to march beyond his own frontiers, and every man who obeyed that command and set his foot on neighboring soil sinned against his fellow men.’

’It would seem from the book he has written,’ I offered lamely, ‘that Kaiser Wilhelm II did not want war.’

‘Perhaps not,’ she conceded. ‘I have read his book. I imagine he saw himself as the conductor of an orchestra of Siegfrieds. He may have believed that he had but to send them forth in operatic step, blowing a heroic E flat on shining trumpets, and all Europe would awaken to join joyously in a Pan-Germanic chorus. But they were equipped with bayonets, hand grenades, machine guns, bombs, poison gas, and submarines for an emergency.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Wilhelm II is an old man now. He is no longer important, except as an example of the self-deceptions the emotional Germans permit themselves. A young conductor has picked up the baton he dropped.’

We were silent, each busy with her own thoughts — I longing selfishly, as I have done so often since I came to live in Europe, to run far away from this war-scarred continent with its clatter of weapons now being collected for further fights.

‘I have a boy of three,’ she began. ‘I would be content if I could be confident that he could have a life free from war. A few years ago here in Europe we founded a league of women pledged to bring our sons up never to kill each other. The German women were keen about the idea. We numbered many thousands. There was a member in Germany as companion to every member in Belgium and France. When the Nazi government came into power they outlawed our society. Pacifism is treason in Germany now.’

‘Do you think that a people so intelligent as the Germans will long endure such autocratic rule?’

‘A dictator does not rise,’she asserted, ‘unless his temperament, technique, and objective are in tune with the people from whom he emerges. Power and glory are certainly the aim of many Germans, otherwise they would not have been tempted to listen to Nazi theories, and in Belgium we hear that Monsieur Hitler is a master in the art of shaping the state to this end. The Germans desire to be hypnotized by their leaders so as to feel sure that what they want is unquestionably right. He seems to possess this ability. Under such circumstances they will surely bear all that he imposes upon them, not only willingly but with enthusiasm, just so long as he inflates German importance.'

We walked on a little way and sat down again before she asked, ‘Have you read Monsieur Hitler’s book?’

I replied that I had read the English edition.

‘That tells you nothing,’ she declared impatiently. ‘The vital parts are left out. He has forbidden foreign circulation of the book in full. Get Mein Kampf as issued to Germans.'

‘How did you get it?’ I queried.

‘My mother’s family are Flemings. I had the book from a cousin. The German invasion of Belgium is continued anew now. The arms are propaganda. The Nazis are calling to the Flemings of Belgium to join in a brotherhood of race. They would weaken our country by fomenting dissension among us.’

She built a little structure of twigs and brushed it aside. ‘ It is n’t that Germans are intentionally wicked. It is that they befuddle themselves into faith that good can be achieved through evil. They have consciences that prick them and they quiet their troublesome doubts, not by self-correction, but by repeated self-assurance of the best intentions. Once a German is convinced that the Germans know how to order life for everyone’s good, he is converted to Pan-Germanism. The means is but the way to that perfectly beautiful end.’

No words for argument came to me. Therefore I was silent, and she continued: ‘After the Germans had settled down on us they were kind to children who obeyed them. In their leisure they whittled toys for us. They were homesick for their own children. They showed us pictures of their wives and little ones. As we learned to understand the language they told us anecdotes from their home lives. They wanted Belgian children kept clean. They took our schoolhouses as hospitals for their wounded, but they used their medicine for us when we were sick and even helped to nurse us. They always wanted the battles to cease for Christmas. Bringing evergreen into the house, they celebrated the festival as in their homeland. I was meek, I have flaxen hair. “Princess Golden” the soldiers quartered in our house called me, and every year they trimmed a little fir tree. Also in the famine winters they shared their rations. Ashamed of my lack of patriotism, I grew fond of them. I really missed the eldest when he was gone from our house.’

Her voice hardened: ‘But my childhood holds other memories. Hours of my mother’s weeping. The fate of my brother. The sight of relatives and friends corralled and commandeered as they were bent to the will of the conquerors. Keys to cellars and storerooms had to be given up — secrets disclosed. In the occupied areas the battles could be heard and we could get no news from outside. Even little children who slipped past the front to find their fathers were executed as spies if caught. Belgians young and old were detailed to till the fields and operate the mills for the benefit of the invaders. My brother was eleven when they came. He was a stouthearted boy with more courage than I possessed. He refused to plant potatoes to feed men who had no right in Belgium. He was taken away. We never saw him again. His fate was that of all who disobeyed. It is the fate of all who refuse to do and think as they are told in Germany to-day.’

My husband beckoned from below. We rose and moved toward the car which was to carry me into life in Germany.

‘God be with you,’ she said in parting.

II

Soon we were off. Climbing through lovely country, we came to a glorious panoramic view, then dipped to the frontier over a moor golden with early gorse.

A Belgian in uniform stopped us. He was a guard on duty. Here, on land that had been German before 1914 and used then for the peacetime manœuvres of Rhineland troops, a Belgian regiment was holding manœuvres.

His right sleeve hung empty. ‘Lost at Lantin,’ he said. ‘I was nineteen then.’ Gunfire to the east punctuated his weary voice. ‘We must practise to defend ourselves . . . every shot blows away money we need in Belgium . . . and wastes a man’s time. . . . Germany, forbidden by the peace treaty to rearm, is arming . . . our scientists are no match for hers . . . tanks that travel sixty miles an hour . . . bullets that can cut steel . . . aeroplanes directed by electric waves . . . new poisonous gases ... all these I hear Germany has. What use our practice?’

Suddenly his voice tightened: ‘Our governors said in the past: “While God is in His heaven the Germans shall not pass over Belgium.” Fine words. Fine words. I for one am not going to do any more fighting.’

He got down at the crossroads. Astonished, I stared after him as he made his way back to his post.

Farther on, in an area of sparse hill farms, we were hailed again, this time by a German. He had been running; sweat marked a broad line along his suspenders; his words were breathless. In his house his son’s wife was dangerously ill — the child refused to be born — the doctor needed things from the nearest pharmacy — he had been sent out to flag a car to help.

Beaming his thanks, he got in.

A tall, lean mountaineer, his hands were calloused, his face seamed. He spoke, with a simple pride, English learned in a war prison camp. A man for work rather than reading in those days, so he told us, he had missed the news of the war until, looking up from a furrow, he saw soldiers marching past his fields to defend the Fatherland. He did not wait for his conscription to join. Three years he fought. Then he was taken prisoner by the British.

He got home a year after the Armistice to find his native place, which had always been a part of the Fatherland, held by the enemy.

‘We were promised a vote. An unfair plebiscite in 1920 fastened Belgian rule on Eupen and Malmédy. We Germans of Eupen-Malmédy wait to be reunited to the Fatherland. The Saar first. Then our leader will rescue us. That is right. They have suffered most. It takes long. It will come — but it takes long — and I am old.’

When we left him at his house door he promised to let us know about his daughter-in-law by postal card to Bonn.

Turning east into a wooded road, along which a lonely tram track ran, we passed the Belgian Customs. Some yards farther on, the way was barred by a slender pole swung as a gate between two posts and neatly painted red and white, the colors of love and innocence.

‘Heil Hitler,’ exclaimed a young man in a uniform of green jacket, black trousers, and high black boots.

‘Heil Hitler,’ we responded to the convention.

Beyond the barrier, atop a pole of stouter proportions than the one used to close the road, waved the Nazi flag — a scarlet flag with a circle in pure white bearing a hooked cross in black. It was a banner of no flimsy stuff, but an ensign cut from a notable weaving. The branches of trees had been trimmed to give it space.

A frontier officer came to our car and bowed. He spoke politely, exchanging comment on the weather and inquiring my husband’s reason for wishing to enter Germany. Then he escorted my husband and his credentials into a small roadside building. I waited.

Up the shady road out of Germany swung an open roadster, halting across the gate from me. The shiny car was a gray Mercedes-Benz, upholstered in bright blue leather and driven by a plump man, dressed to match in a gray suit and bright blue shirt. His round head was shaven as clean as his genial pink face. Beside him sat a slim girl with fair hair and big blue eyes; pretty in a sleeveless white sports frock and without a hat.

He wanted a ride through the Belgian mountains — an hour or so. He had passports and some money. He did not have a permit to take money out of Germany. Good-naturedly he handed his wallet over to the custody of the officer questioning him, and was allowed to take from it ‘pocket cash’ — a few coins. Then pressure of the officer’s foot on a lever lifted the red and white pole. Their right hands raised high in salute, the man and the girl cheered ‘Heil Hitler’ as their car leaped forward and whizzed by.

Trams from Belgium and from Germany met at the frontier to exchange passengers. An officer in a green jacket stood at each end of the barrier. People entering walked round the right; those going out round the left. Every man, woman, and child had to show a card with a photograph on it, and respond to the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. A woman from the Belgian side who persisted in saying ‘Grüss Gott’ instead could not pass. She went away in the tram in which she had arrived.

An officer came from the roadside office. He bowed to me and, opening the hood of our car, copied our engine number on his pad. He asked about our luggage. I gave him my keys. He undid one bag, glanced in, closed it carefully, returned the keys, bowed again, and went back into his office.

With blithe ‘Heil Hitler’ three workmen bicycled round the barrier into Germany, tin dinner pails swinging on their handlebars. A boy of eight or nine would have bicycled out as casually, but he was stopped. ‘I’m on my way to my grandmother’s and late,’ he protested. ‘You officers all know she lives just over there. Her house was in Germany before war shifted the boundary.’ He was turned home to get his pass card.

The day was lazy, but the German officials did not loiter or chat. Alike in a mannered courtesy, they performed their duties with dispatch. Even when idle they did not lounge. They stood seriously, their shoulders straight and their heads high. I was surprised by their youth.

Our car’s international carnet signed, the Customs satisfied, and my husband’s passport stamped, we were assured that all was in order for our entry. I have a passport — an American passport. My husband forgot to offer it and he was not asked for credentials for me. Some months later, when we were settled in a house, the local police just put me on their registry as Ehefrau or housewife, a title of which I am proud and to which I have not the least objection. There was considerable concern about my husband’s desire to bring in and keep over an indefinite length of time a motor car of English manufacture, but seemingly no concern about his bringing in a woman.

The barrier opened. We entered the land which French friends had warned me is a land of Die Herren der Schöpfung, a civilization where man is the master of creation. I turned in my seat to watch the frontier close behind me.

Life in Germany had begun.

III

Within Germany the road we traveled was smoothly laid. It widened down a charming hill, curved and bent over the valleyed Eifel, and followed the course of the water along the banks of the Ahr and the Rhine as we circled to Bonn. Our way led through carefully kept forests clean of underbrush and gnarled trees, by tidy farmsteads, past terraced vineyards, and in and out of neat hamlets and towns each with its own tall church spire.

Poppies and cornflowers, buttercups and bouncing Bet, scattered their beauty lavishly; brown-eyed Susan, Queen Anne’s lace, John-go-to-bed-at-noon, and the prim daisy were as much at home hero as in the countryside of my childhood.

Half-timbered black and white houses, with a window box of petunias or bright geraniums blooming on every sill, had charm for us. We saw many geese, plump brown ducks, and on the pond in each town a pair of stately swans.

Children were numerous — clean, winsome children who stared wide-eyed and called ‘Ausländer’ at us, but were quick to answer smile with smile.

The highland soil was thin, the Rhineland valley a rich loam. Rich or thin, it was tilled as by those who know their craft. Tall rye swayed in the breeze. Oats were full-grained; winter wheat in fine head; the first clover crop stacked, the second deep enough to cover well the larks’ nests. In avenues approaching the villages and in orchards cherries were ripe, apples and pears coming on. Within garden fences a few very late strawberries gleamed sweetly in beds where the leaves were turning. Raspberries were in season, currants nearly ready, gooseberry bushes laden with fruit, and the vegetable gardens all nicely hoed.

At frequent intervals we passed under white cloths lettered in black stretched across the road high above our heads and read: ‘Thinkest thou, German man, and thou, German woman, of the Saar?’ — ‘ My dear German folk, forget not thy kin in the Saar ’ — ' Germans! While you enjoy life in the Fatherland, remember your brothers in the Saar’ — in German, of course.

Commercial advertisements were few. We spoke of this at a place where we bought gasoline. We were told that an order had been issued from Berlin for the removal before 1936 of all those now defacing the landscape.

At the posthouse in Blankenheim we stopped for coffee. With ‘My balcony is best in June,’ the inn host ushered us through to a porch on the edge of a ravine. The ravine’s farther side rose above us in steep cliffs; and on the loftiest crag stood a stone castle, its massive outline dark against the pale sky. Unfurled from the highest turret floated the banner of the black cross. The time was after six and the slanting light of the sun had set panes of gold in the castle windows.

We were seated at a table by the rail. ‘The castle was the home of the Knights of Blankenheim until destroyed by henchmen of Louis XIV of France,’ our host told us as he spread the cloth. ‘Hitler Youth have rebuilt it with their own hands. It is in use as a hostel; just now a Labor Corps is there.’

As he placed our cups he chatted on, and en route to his kitchen he took time to dial a radio bringing to us the ‘Unfinished Symphony’ of Franz Schubert. The players were well begun, and to the sweet rise of the composition’s theme we heard the nearer homely grind of a coffee mill, the flow of a tap, the rattle of an iron stove. Then the silence held only Schubert’s music until, from somewhere hidden quite close, came the notes of a thrush. Evening shadows lengthened while we listened. The bird, gifted with but a narrow scale, sang clear and true, adding his voice with all a thrush’s power to Schubert’s message. As I listened, for no common-sense reason there swelled in my heart a renewed confidence in the affairs of the world.

Suddenly we lost the melody of thrush and Schubert in the boom of the ‘Horst Wessel’ song; ‘Die Fahnen hock ’ — the clang of castle gates and the tramp of booted feet; ‘Die Reihen dicht geschlossen’ — down the cliff trail men climbed; ‘S.A. marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt’ — like the crack of a whip their shouted words resounded across the ravine. In double file they passed down the village street.

Thirty-two young men, near six feet tall and handsomely built; stripped to the waist, their smooth skins reddened by sun and wind; trousered in gray-green cotton cloth freshly laundered; booted to the knees in stout leather — they strode along in the vigor of physical health and mental contentment, holding between them a rope. Thus the first German Labor Corps I saw went by, their eyes glancing neither to the right nor to the left.

’Heil! Heil!' cheered the villagers. ‘Heil! Heil! Heil!—Heil!-Heil!'

‘Fine strapping fellows,’ said our inn host as he brought a tray to our table. ‘They go down to the meadow in the evenings to exercise in a game of tug-ofwar.’

The coffee was good, the cream thick, and the innkeeper gave us cherry tarts newly baked. The reckoning was fifty cents. Before we rose to go the thrush sang again.

‘Hitler — Arbeit und Brot’ we read painted on on arch of a railway bridge spanning the river below Altenahr. ‘Hitler — Work and Bread’ we read again on a white banner set in the vineyards of Walporzheim.

‘Thank the Fiihrer for 415,673 hours of work’ we read where the road widened into a fine boulevard. The new cutting was not an ugly gash in the mountainside because the raw banks had been sodded as a lawn to the end of the completed work. It was Saturday afternoon. The road builders were away. They had left their machines protected by fitted waterproof covers and their hand tools, so we presumed, were locked up in the neat red shed on wheels.

‘Ileil Hitler!’ called two boys standing in the middle of the road beyond Remagen to signal us. They asked our destination and a lift that far. ‘We are Hitler Youth/ they told us.

Both wore rucksacks, and the elder had a guitar hung on a shoulder strap. Fair-haired, freckled, clear-eyed; square hands clean even to scrubbed nails; blue shirts elbow-sleeved and open-throated; black cotton shorts, laced boots, and thick socks. We gave them our back seat.

They quickly slipped off their packs, making themselves comfortable. Frankly glad of this opportunity to practise English learned at their school in Hamburg, they used it eagerly, their voices courteous. One was fifteen, the other twelve. They had recently been in the Black Forest and were now visiting the Rhine and its tributaries, spending the summer in learning to know their country.

At night they slept in Youth Hostels. They assured us there were plenty of these places all over Germany, each equipped with facilities for keeping one’s self and clothes as a German shoidd, as well as providing shelter and the comradeship of other Hitler Youth.

‘We have serious conversations, evening campfires, and music,’ explained the elder.

‘ Rudiger plays well,’ added the younger, touching the lute.

This was the smaller boy’s first season of Youth Travel. The elder had him under his care. Rudiger had been started in the same way three years before by an experienced boy. He now knew Hannover, Thüringen, and Bayern — in fact, most of his Fatherland excepting East Prussia.

‘East Prussia is the most important province to study, because it is into the East that our nation must expand,’ Rüdiger told us. ‘A journey there is difficult. The Polish Corridor separates that part of our nation from the Fatherland. I can’t get across. The technicalities are too many. But next year I shall go by boat.’

‘I’ll go by boat, too,’ put in the younger.

‘ Yes, you can come. We must all understand East Prussia.'

We asked if they had traveled in any other countries but Germany.

‘No, that we cannot do. It would be interesting, but our Leader forbids. He wants German youth to be German, not to pick up other ways: and we have plenty to see in our own beautiful Fatherland. Also, Germany is poor. We have n’t money to spend outside.’

‘I’d like to see France,’ said the twelve-year-old. ‘My mother went to Biarritz with her parents when she was young.’

‘Flat-headed sheep is what the French call us Germans,’ the older boy told him. ‘They would take the Rhine away from us if they could.’

‘Would they?’

‘Sure, they would — and they have mines laid all along the border. All they have to do is to press a button in Strassburg to blow up our western frontier. That is what the League of Nations has let them do.’

‘But I’d like to see France,’ the little one persisted. ‘My mother liked Biarritz.’

‘We are a generation who cannot do things because we like.’ The older boy spoke firmly. ‘We must live, not for ourselves, but for Germany.’

On entering Godesberg we found the streets garlanded with swastikas. The boys were keen to know why. We stopped to let them ask. The policeman consulted answered them politely. Adolf Hitler had come to the Hotel Dreesen yesterday afternoon and the decorations had not yet been taken down.

‘The proprietor of the Hotel Dreesen is our Leader’s lifelong friend,’ Rüdiger informed us.

‘If we had come yesterday we might have seen den Führer.’

‘Have you ever seen him?’ I asked.

‘Rüdi three times and I once.’

‘Our Leader is the best man in the world,’ exclaimed Rüdiger, his eyes shining like stars.

From Godesberg on, the back seat was quiet. Once I turned to look. Within the circle of the older boy’s arm the little one was asleep, his head cradled on the other’s shoulder. As we approached Bonn, Rüdiger whispered directions. When we drove up before a Youth Hostel he woke his companion gently.

‘Thank you,’ ‘Good-bye,’ and ‘I hope we meet again,’ were their words as they shook hands with us.

‘My name is Otto. You forgot to ask,’ remarked the little one when he had hoisted up his pack.

‘Why not exchange addresses and birthday dates?’ exclaimed the elder, and we did.

‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!' we heard in a medley of cordial young voices as they were welcomed into their hostel.

We went on to a hotel. The hotelkeeper came out to the curb, greeting us as if truly glad we had come. He asked after the health of the little girls, our daughter and our niece, who had stopped here with my husband in the early spring. His remembrance of them pleased me, making me feel that I had come to live among a warm-hearted people.

Then he said: ‘Bonn is full. This is the best tourist season we have had in Germany for many years. The privilege of registered marks combined with curiosity as to whether we Germans have cloven hoofs is bringing people into our country.’

‘You have n’t rooms for us?’

He hastily assured us that he had received our letter and reserved a place. The rooms were nice. The charge — inclusive of meals, which were excellent, and the 10 per cent for service — was twenty marks a day, ‘as you are staying longer than a fortnight.’

We dined in a small room where fulllength portraits in color of Field Marshal von Hindenburg, wearing uniform, and Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, in a trench coat, looked down on us. I could see other portraits of these two leaders of the German people on the walls of a brilliantly lit café across the street. This café was filled with singing people. As we sat down they were chorusing in slow rhythm, starting low and rising high, a folk song which begins: 'Es liegt eine Krone im tiefen Rhein.'

None of this crowd were young. All were well past middle age. The women wore their long hair in knots on the top of their heads and used side combs. Most of the men had the local summer haircut, a clean shave, leaving them bald and shiny pink. All were neatly dressed in good clean clothes. They were orderly people — quiet except for their music. The waiter told us that the café was filled with rival singing clubs, come in from near-by villages to enjoy Saturday night in town.

They sang in emotional voices as people do who have pleasure in sentimental melody. At times a group would sing while all the others listened. Then the folk round another table would take a turn, sometimes repeating the last song, giving it a different interpretation. Several times quartettes came out on the pavement and, turning, sang through the open windows to their companions inside. Often there were solos.

Between songs waiters served these people with food and beer. The women buttered bread for their men and put on slices of meat or cheese. Their concert went on all the time we were eating dinner and long afterwards. My husband went out. to visit a bachelor friend, named Hans Schmidt, and I listened on to the singing. Upstairs, I found a balcony to my room and sat there in a low chair. It was like a concert, but I enjoyed it more than any formal concert I have ever attended. Here in Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven, on my first evening of residence in Germany, 1 heard Rhein-Lieder, Volkslieder, and songs from Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Löwe, Mendelssohn, Wolf, and others of the German constellation of composers — all sung as if folk songs.

As I prepared for bed a quartette of male voices were giving a song which they announced had been used by a city watchman of a bygone day. There was a verse for every hour of the night watch and a chorus repeated after every verse. This is what I heard: —

Chorus:

Thus, in serene Christian faith, a German city watchman of a bygone day had marked the passage of time from curfew until dawn, and German people of the twentieth century still cherished his words. Here was a peace like that in the Deutsch communities of my own dear Pennsylvania. These people had the same substantial build and the same homely ways of their kinfolk far across the seas whom I knew so well in my early youth.

Memory told me these were people I could love and trust. Our Pennsylvania Germans do not sing in public cafés, but this scene below had a domesticity solid as in a home. Less homesick than at any time since I came to Europe, I Listened. It seemed my bed could be in Lebanon County; it had the good comfort, and linen smelling of fresh garden lavender.

On the wings of their song I drifted to sleep.

IV

I awoke to the ring of church bells.

‘Die Welt steht auf dem Kopf,' the maid who brought my morning coffee told me, and to this information that the world stands on its head I buttered my first German Sunday bread. She lingered, and realizing that perhaps the Rhinelander, like folk in China, enjoys a friendly chat and has time for it, I did not discourage her.

‘We Germans have Adolf Hitler sent by God to help us. The poor people in other lands have nobody to help them, she declared in preface to a detailed and romantic account of his recent activities as given to her by a cousin, a waiter at the Hotel Dreesen near Godesberg. She and her cousin had spent, yesterday afternoon, their free day, walking in the Königswald.

She told how the Führer had come to the Hotel Dreesen on Friday afternoon, looking tired and worn. The usual vegetarian meal had been carefully cooked for him, but he did not notice food and it was understood by all that he wrestled with some serious government problem. She said: ‘Ordinarily, it is his habit to thank those who serve him.’

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, whom she called ‘Our Joe,’ Herr Viktor Lutze, and other aides had been there with the Führer. ‘Others give what advice and help they can, but the strain of every decision for our German good rests on our Hitler,’ she averred.

Dr. Goebbels and the Führer had left the party gathered round a table and walked on the Rhine terrace, Dr. Goebbels talking to Herr Hitler in a comforting voice. The context of his speech could not be heard, but Germany, Germany, Germany, throbbed through his words. Then the Führer walked alone, back and forth, back and forth, struggling toward decision. The hour advanced beyond midnight, a fog gathered over the Drachenfels. The orchestra, which had played all the evening, played on and on, giving such help as it could, choosing the Führer s known favorites from Wagner and the National Socialist hymns.

Back and forth, back and forth, he walked. Dispatches interrupted him and after each he stared long at the Rhine, running past in its solemn flow. Finally, there came a telephone call from Berlin. The Führer himself must be brought to the phone, He listened, but did not speak beyond an occasional monosyllable. When he had hung up, he walked alone again, paler now, his dark eyes sunken in sadness. Suddenly he turned and gave the command: ‘We go.’

An order was put through to the Bonn aerodrome for a Junkers plane to be got ready. The Führer and his party left the hotel. ‘Since then our Hitler has striven for us, putting down a revolution before it started. He lives only for Germany. He is our father and our mother, keeping us safe from all harm,’ the maid stated as she took my tray.

Downstairs I asked the hotel manager about this revolution. ‘Yes,’ he acknowledged, ‘there is serious trouble in Munich and in Berlin, but our Leader has it competently in hand. Here in the Rhineland there is not the least disturbance. Come to the door and observe the tranquillity of Bonn.’

I walked with him to the door and saw that a Sunday peace rested on the treeshaded avenue. Elderly people strolled there, quietly and neatly dressed, many of them accompanied by small children, some turning into a near-by church; folk in ages between the elderly and the very young, athletic of figure, hurried by dressed for various sports.

I went down to the tree-protected promenade along the Rhine. In the coolness here equally peaceful people were enjoying a Sunday leisure, while in and on the water several swam and many had pleasure in boats. Tiny yachts sped by, their owners wearing natty seafaring rig. Some people brought folding canoes to the bank; quickly setting them up, they paddled off.

At fairly frequent intervals passenger vessels passed, churning a wide wake of foam. Their decks were filled with happy-looking throngs, many of them singing. All the boats were cleanly painted, usually white with a trim of blue, green, or red and aflutter with flags and gay banners. On one a group of men were chorusing in fine harmony with their orchestra of wood, wind, brass, and strings.

On the opposite bank from where I walked a populace less refined than the quiet people here made merry. There a calliope played amid the white tents of a circus. A merry-go-round and Ferris wheel revolved.

A ship, with a notice inviting everyone to come on board and view a state exhibition of things made by German hands, stood docked below Bonn bridge. I was about to go up the gangplank when my husband and Hans Schmidt arrived. They came to announce their decision that after two days of motoring we needed a real walk. So we crossed by motor car to the foothills of the Siebengebirge and parked in a Platz. A dirt road on which cars were forbidden led up from here.

Donkeys for hire, saddle horses, victorias, and a miniature railway train offered conveyance to those who wished to begin their pedestrianism after arrival at the wooded summit . We joined those walking up the long hot broadway. They were a friendly sort, joking about the toil of lifting one foot after the other, quoting proverbs on the merits of exercise. and exchanging fun with those so lazy as to ride. None appeared concerned with any revolution.

Donkey men were persuasive and parents lenient, so that many children climbed the hill on donkey back. The timid clung to an adult hand while in the saddle. The bold gave themselves airs, flapped the reins, and dug in their heels. The result of this was several times disastrous. More than one young rider came down and had to suffer the mockery of the crowd: ‘ Wer den Schaden hat, braucht für den Spott nicht zu sorgen.’ Thus is the loser laughed at in many lands.

Everybody took the hill at an easy pace excepting a column of little girls dressed alike in black shoes, short blue skirts, white blouses, and brown jackets much too warm for the day. Their hair, drawn severely from centre partings into tight plaits, was damp above their brows. Sweat poured down their earnest faces. Some were of fine physique, others sadly marked by undernourishment. Sound limbs and rickety legs keeping the same forward step, they swept by singing with ardor as they marched. In face and figure they were children still — children whose honest faces were lit by a shining radiance, such as I once saw on the young converted at a Christian revival service in America.

‘Bund Dcutscher Mädel,' commented Hans. ‘The Hitler Maids.’

Verse after verse of their hymn drifted to us when they had passed, their clear young voices penetrating the distance even when we had turned from the broadway into a narrow path leading to the quietness of the wood. It was pleasant here under the deep foliage of hardbeam and beech. Our way was not crowded. Neither was it lonely. We met solitary walkers, occasional couples hand in hand, and many family groups, one in which two sturdy boys marched before their parents and a little girl was merry on her father’s back.

In technicalities beyond my education, my companions talked of the composition of symphonies, dwelling on Beethoven’s carefully weighed decisions and his intelligent courage, passing through consideration of his rondo finale to discussion of Brahms, and on to Schubert’s C Major, which they called a ‘reckless, glorious steeplechase.’ We passed a class of school children out with their teacher identifying plants and trees. Beyond a rustic bridge we met two young girls wearing green tunics and barefoot sandals and a young man dressed in matching green shirt and shorts. They were playing guitars. Swinging along three abreast, they kept stop to their music, singing as they walked: ‘Wer recht in Freuden wandern will, der geh’ der Sonn’ entgegen—' I liked the idea that those who would wander with joy must go toward the sun.

It was an idyllic day — a lovely sylvan day. Furred and feathered creatures were friendly along our paths as in a Buddhist land. Red squirrels wanted nuts. Most of the German folk had provisions for the inhabitants of the wood. There were several people who inspired such confidence that birds flew to their hands for tidbits.

We stopped for lunch at one wayside place and for coffee in another. In both I was surprised by the quality of the food. I had yet to learn the high standard in Comfort and diet which the German counts a necessity.

People were friendly everywhere. At lunch, when I made some remark about life, a stranger leaned across from her table to tell me that in some thirty poems a German poet named Märike has summed up all one needs to know. As proof she recited several beautiful verses which made me want to read his works.

Where we stopped for coffee we found a crowd gathered round a man with a long gray beard. He played a lute and gave a lead in singing whatever songs he was asked. Since leaving China I had not expected ever again to find a minstrel in a modern world, but here, they assured me, was one — a minstrel in a shabby brown velvet coat. It made me absurdly happy.

Back at our hotel the man who came to take our dusty shoes asked if we had enjoyed our walk.

‘I never miss mine,’ said he. ‘Thursday is my day off. My wife goes with me. We start from home at six in the morning so as to have a good long day. Eleven years we have been married. Rain or shine, except when she could n’t because of the baby, she has never missed coming along. He is a big boy now. Goes to school. He eats dinner at his grandmother’s on Thursdays. Packs a tasty lunch for us, my wife does. Always a surprise in it for me. When we want a drink we stop in some place for a coffee, a beer, or maybe a nice glass of wine. We don’t sit in long. It is out-of-doors we like. That is what I minded most during the war — no freedom to wander.’

V

I now set forth to find a furnished house in which to make a home during our sojourn. Child of a Pennsylvania Quaker and a Swedish mother, and wife to an Englishman whose favorite composers are German, I have always lived in homes with doors wide open for German visitors. During the Great War I was neutral, as were all my kin. Neither then nor since had it ever occurred to me that one group of the peoples involved was any more to blame for those four long years of reversion to barbarism than the other. I knew people who had been caught up in the tides of patriotism on both sides. I had mourned dead who fell facing each other’s guns.

I had some German friends and many German acquaintances, but my knowledge of things German was very superficial. I knew well one German book, a drama; and I was not entirely ignorant of Germany’s poetry, but I did not have the habit of reading her literature, nor had I given her philosophies more than a casual glance. From an early age my attention had centred on things of the Orient, but the influences round me had tended to my acceptance of the Germans as belonging to the coterie of the civilized. Also my heart was soft to them because they had been defeated. People invited to any house where I was hostess were not asked again if they were stiff to German guests met there.

On this Monday morning, July 2, 1934, I reasoned that the National Socialists of Germany are Germans, a people of violent temperament, but a moral people who, when they do wrong, soon long to make it right again. A hotel maid had gossiped of further revolution, but there could be nothing serious happening in a land where people were so serenely unconcerned in demeanor as here. I thought of the French Revolution and of the Russian Revolution, as I achieved a reasoned pardon for the violence attendant on the National Socialist, assumption of control in Germany.

Since I must live in Europe, this country now suited me as well as any other. Moving from France had interrupted a book I was writing about Chin Shih Huang Ti, the builder of the Great Wall of China. As my publisher wanted the remaining chapters as promptly as possible, I had a concern to get my domestic affairs in order quickly that I might finish my book.

Monday and Tuesday, and until late afternoon on Wednesday, I searched with a quiet heart; then my complacency was shaken. The estate agent took me to Marienburg, an attractive suburb of Cologne. We stopped before a house which was occupied.

‘This is the place you want,’ said he; ‘it has every requirement you have specified. I can only show you the location to-day, but by to-morrow morning I shall have an order to view.’

‘Who lives in it?' I asked.

‘ A man named Abendroth.'

‘The musician?’

‘Yes.’

‘ Why is he moving: ’

‘He has been dismissed from all his Cologne appointments.’

‘Abendroth dismissed! I thought he was one of the few important men in music left in Germany and Cologne’s pride. Is he a Jew:'

‘Pure Aryan,’he answered.

‘ Who dismissed him:'

‘The local government.'

‘Why?’

‘It. is not usual to question acts of government here. It borders on treason.'

‘Is Herr Abendroth banished from Germany?’

’No. As soon as the news spread that he had been dismissed from Cologne, the rival musical city of Leipzig invited him there.’

‘So Cologne loses him to Leipzig. Didn’t any of the citizens of Cologne protest?’

‘Foolishly, thirty-five did. I believe that they were elderly professors, probably most of them musicians. Two young officials in government uniform received the deputation. When the officials had explained to the petitioners the seriousness of the misdemeanor they were committing in presenting a petition against a government decision, thirtythree of them had the sense to slip away.’

‘And the other two?'

‘They’ persisted in reading the petition and were beaten insensible. One was a fine organist at one of our biggest churches. I have heard that his hands are ruined.’ The estate agent roughed nervously. ‘You must not judge ours a bad government. We have got to be ruled hard until things are straight. Our country would have gone Communist if the Nazis had not saved us. Hitler’s government is benevolent to all who willingly obey. Our Führer knows that we must be a people of one Will if we are to regain our place among the strong nations of the world.’

He offered to show me other houses, but I felt that I needed to think before using any more of his time, and I went back to my hotel. What shocked me more than the violence of the young officials was that thirty-three elderly men had slipped away. If thirty-five men had prepared the petition, then thirty-five should have supported it. A country which bred old men weak in courage had not my respect.

Wanting to think things over quietly, I went to Bonn University campus next morning. I took the morning mail along to read, and en route I bought copies of the local papers. My husband had said that he intended staying here, so I was prepared to study them in my quest for a house.

We had a postcard of greeting and ‘again thanks’ from Rüdiger and Otto, the Hitler youths whom we had given a lift on Saturday. Also a letter from the German farmer met in Eupen-Malmédy. He had a fine grandson safely born. Mother and child were doing well. Would we be godparents? This request touched my heart. Next I read a letter from my brother in America, and one from friends in China.

Then I opened the German papers. They reported troubles in other parts of the world — unrest in France, misery in Russia, a serious shipping strike in California, the breaking up of the British Empire, and hopelessness in the Danube countries. Reading here, this seemed a sorry planet; but in Germany at least there was peace. There had been an insurrection over the week-end within the National Socialist Party, but the Führer and his aides had soon brought this to order.

Twelve years in China detached me from newspaper reading as a regular habit, but my husband has The Times sent to him from London wherever he is, and several copies had come together, catching up with our new address. I opened them leisurely, half ray attention on a rusty-coated blackbird in the tree above me who was singing notes as liquid as if ihe month were May. When I had them all doubled back at the middle, where their principal news is always hidden, I suddenly saw that Germany was iii the headlines: —

‘Herr Hitler’s Coup’ — ‘A Midnight Descent on Munich ’ — ‘Arrest and Execution of S.A. Leaders’ — ‘A Party Purge’ — ‘Afore Executions in Germany’— ‘The “Clean-up” Complete’ — ‘President’s Thanks to Herr Hitler’ —‘Ban on S.A. Uniforms’ — ‘Attitude of Army’ — ‘Ex-Premier among Victims’ — ‘Bodies Found on Moors’ — ‘Growing Death Roll in Munich.’

Under these headings I read column after column of restrained English prose narrating ihe execution of an unknown number of Germans by their fellow Germans. Then I read two editorials: ‘Purging a Party’ and ‘Medueval Alcthods.’

The fair day darkened, time turned back, and memory swung me across space. . . .

It was a summer day in China and I had stepped out of a hotel at the Nankow pass under the shadow of the Great \\ all. My chair bearers, who were to carry me on a visit to friends in the northeast, sat waiting. Before us, on the plain, soldiers were drawn up in regimental formation. Discipline was in process among them. Every ninth man in every ninth row was being called out to kneel, bare his neck, and bow his head to the executioner’s sword. Silently, they were meeting death.

Then, as now, the fair green earth had waved before me in sickening black. I heard the voice of my head chair bearer speak: ‘Come, Tai-Tai, we wait and my sight had cleared that I might walk to my waiting chair. The bearers set off in their usual deliberate trot, helping me to quietness by their steadiness, hastening their pace only when they could put a hill between us and what was going on. Then without a command from me the old bearer stopped the chair and put it down. ‘You had better have a drink of tea,’ he said kindly.

I could not put the scene from my mind and must ask questions. The chief bearer explained to me that their commander was an austere man who gave to every soldier in his army a set of moral edicts: no one in his ranks could loot, rape, swear, smoke, drink, or be untidy. Slackness had come into this regiment, and its members were being taught to obey the will of their Lord by this method of striking terror into their midst. There had been no court of inquiry. Justice resided in their commander.

My memory was broken in upon by a German voice: ‘We are professors of the university. We noticed that you have copies of the London Times and would appreciate sharing them.’ Thus two men introduced themselves. I gave them the papers and they sat down, both reading from the same sheet. Their faces went white as t hey read, yet neither made any comment. When they had finished, the professors folded the papers neatly, returning them with thanks.

I went back to my hotel. On the faces of the people whom I passed I saw no troubled anxiety, no harassed, apprehensive, bewildered look. Men, women, and children all appeared concerned only with their own affairs. I crossed a market square where fruits and vegetables were offered for sale; here Hausfrauen were busy at their marketing, intent on their purchases. Reside one mother a little girl waited, gayly skipping.

I told my husband that I intended to leave, and learned again that he meant to stay. After sitting a while embroidering, I realized that he was right. Violence may occur in any land. I had never left China because it occurred. I could not now run away. Deep in my heart I knew that it is a woman’s first job in life to make her husband as comfortable a home as she can — in the place where he wants to be, regardless of geography.

VI

The forenoon of our second Sunday we went to a pageant given on Bonn campus by citizens of the town. I had supposed from reading the papers that the S.A. (Sturm Abteilung, or Storm Troops) were all on vacation, but men in the brown uniform were roping off the central grass when we arrived. In company with other observers we strolled under the trees, noticing the charm of fair children, the kindliness in the wrinkled faces of the aged, the feminine dresses of the girls and the eager attention they gave to young men, many of whom were sabre-gashed, some with a nasty black gumlike paste on fresh wounds.

A goodly audience had gathered before the citizens taking part in the pageant arrived on horseback and in open horse-drawn carriages. The men were gay in satin breeches, lace ruffles, silk stockings, and buckled shoes; the women gowned in dainty flowered silks and muslins. All wore powdered wigs. Children were replicas of their elders. ith bygone ceremony they descended from horse and carriage, greeted each other, and came on to the green to dance minuets.

Sweeping curtsy, and stately bow, distinguished the leisured performance of the opening number danced to music composed by Jean Baptiste Lully for the court of Louis XIV. Then came a minuet from Haydn, light-hearted and cheerful. This was followed by a graceful and tender melody arranged by Mozart. And, lastly, we were given one from Bonn’s own Beethoven of quicker tempo and more varied rhythm than any of those before, dignified, yet with a spirit of romping fun in it. ‘A minuet truly Rhenish,’ a woman standing near explained to me.

Later in the day xve went to a memorial serx ice held in a private house for Dr. Willi Schmid, a musical crilic xvho had lost his life at Munich during the previous xveek-end. An obituary notice was rend from the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, and a statement was made that he had been in no way involved in polities. Ills executors had arrested and shot him instead of the wanted man. It was a case of mistaken identity. The government had expressed regrets. No blemish of even suspected treason was attached to his reputation.

There was no prayer, and no discussion. The service consisted of a programme of selections from Bach’s Matthäuspassion. The infinite tenderness and sorrow of this music Idled the room for more than an hour. Then the radio was turned on that we might listen to Herr Mess, deputy to Herr Hitler, speaking at a National Socialist Congress at Königsberg in East Prussia.

Herr Hess began in a husky voice, each slow phrase emotionally controlled. In this manner he spoke of Herr Hitler’s courageous action in carrying out a grave decision with severity and energy a few days ago, thereby saving Germany and the National Socialist movement from mutineers. The death of these ringleaders had prevented a civil war. It was necessary to save the lives of thousands, if not of tens of thousands, of the best Germans, among them possibly women and children.

He thanked all the organizations of the party for their loyalty; particularly the Hitler Youth, among whom every boy looked up to the Führer as his idol, because he had always acted, especially in these days just past , in the way of an ideal heroic figure. In a few hours he had freed the nation from the thrall of a few abnormal, perverse beings, and restored to womenfolk their faith in the purity of the ideals for which their men and their children lived and strove under his leadership.

He gave no details of what had happened and mentioned no names, but went on to appeal to his East Prussian hearers — as representative of soldierly German manhood, men who could best understand the Führer. He asserted that when the fate of the nation is at stake the degree of the guilt of an individual cannot be given meticulous judgment. To my astonishment he remarked that, severe though it may he, there is a deep significance in the old German system of crushing mutinies by shooting every tenth soldier, without putting the smallest question concerning his guilt or innocence.

His delivery quickened as he entered on the major part of his address, which was a discourse on war and peace. He mentioned that within a few weeks would occur the twentieth anniversary of the day which saw the beginning of the German soldiers’ great heroic struggle. He said Germany now had the good fortune to be governed predominantly by her front-line soldiers, who had grafted the virtues of the front on to State leadership.

He paid a glowing tribute to all men who had fought at the front, on the enemy as well as the German side. Then in graphic and lengthy detail he painted a dramatic picture of the splendors and the agonies of warfare, drawn from his personal experience, and called on soldiers everywhere to prevent their governments from bringing about a repetition of these horrors.

After some caustic remarks about the men who had betrayed Germany, betrayed the German soldier, he warned the world not to confuse the Germany of to-day, the Germany of peace, with the erstwhile Germany, the Germany of pacifism. ‘The way is not open for a stroll through our land,’ he proclaimed, rousing his audience in Königsberg to loud and lasting applause, which came clearly through the radio.

‘Exactly as the French people contested each hand’s breadth of ground with their utmost powers in the Great War, so would we Germans do the same. The French-line soldier well understands us when we declare to those who are still playing with the idea of a war which would call others to the front: “Just you dare attack us! Just you dare march into the new Germany!” Then the world will learn something about the spirit of the new Germany! It would fight for freedom as heroically as any people have ever fought! Old and young would dig themselves into the soil of the Homeland! They would defend themselves with unprecedented fanaticism!’

He closed with a conclusion, under ten minutes in duration, that peace was wanted in Europe and throughout the world, asked for an understanding with France reflecting the will to peace and the mutual respect of the soldiers on the two sides of the frontier, and reminded the world that Herr Hitler had repeatedly declared that Germany desired only equality of rights in all spheres, including that of armaments. After the attainment of such an understanding between Germany and her neighbors, Germany could more easily content herself with that minimum of armaments which was necessary to secure her safety and therefore peace. A virtually defenseless country was a danger to peace, a temptation to other countries to make war on her.

When the radio talk was over there was no comment in the room where we sat. Soon the sincere simplicity of the Matthew Passion continued. Listening, I realized as never before how infinitely tender music can be when composed by a mature intellect seeking to teach humanity that only through IOAC and understanding of each other can mankind be civilized.

During the following week the greater part of my time continued to be occupied with the search for a house. Finally, since we must have a home when our daughter and niece arrived for the summer holidays, we took temporarily an apartment near the botanical gardens at Cologne. We went to tell some people who had been energetic in assisting us, and stayed to afternoon coffee.

Here we did hear comment on Herr Hess’s address. Our host and hostess denounced it in no uncertain terms. ‘The German people have a right to an adequate explanation of “bloody Saturday”’ . . . ’We Germans arc one of the foremost peoples in the world in the adequacy of our laws and the efficiency of our Courts of Justice’ . . . ‘No Chancellor has the right to turn back to mediaeval practices’ . . . ‘Herr Hess has criminally evaded the issue with an emotional smoke screen ’ . , . ’We hope that Herr Hitler, a Chancellor democratically elected, will be more adequate when he addresses the Reichstag, which has been summoned to the Kroll Opera House to hear him on Friday, July 13.’ Those were things they said.

At eight o’clock on Friday evening, July 13, AVC went to the Cologne High School of Music. We had been invited to attend the graduation exercises. But we discovered that the ceremonies would not take place until after the broadcast of Herr Hitler’s speech, to which all Germans must listen. He spoke for an hour and a half with furious animation and skillful technique. I had read his book, Mein Kampf, wherein he has explained his theories on public speaking. He fulfilled them all. He told nothing more than he wished his people to know.

The most important part of his oration, so I thought, was: ‘I am ready before history to bear the responsibility for twenty-four hours of the bitterest decision of my life, during which Fate has taught me, in anxious worry, to cling with every thought of mine to the dearest thing Ave possess in this world: the German people and the German Reich.' And: ‘In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation. Therefore the Supreme Court of the German people was myself.’

‘Audacious poetry!’ exclaimed the stranger on my left as this remark from his Chancellor came out of the radio.

When the speech was over the Cologne High School of Music ceremonies began. The programme was ambitious and disappointing. The performance was not even equal to that which I had heard the previous year at the Royal College of Music in London, and I had expected much more from scholars in a land so natively musical as this.

Afterwards, feeling that Germans have no end of vitality, I went along on an invitation to hear some real music. Arrived at a fine house, four of our number, one of them a Jew, took up their instruments. They were business men. They said they had met together to enjoy music without interruption every Tuesday since they were young men — except when interrupted by the war, in which all had fought. Our host’s promise that we should hear real music was no idle boast. They played superbly Beethoven’s ‘Quartette in E flat,’ Opus 127.

Our host had both beer and champagne on the ice, and sandwiches, ready for a party. As he filled glasses he sang from Die Fledermaus: ‘Glücklich ist, wer rergisst, was nicht mehr zu ändern ist!' (Happy is he who can forget what cannot be altered.)

VII

‘Still, sprih durch die Blume,’ was said to me when I asked a simple question as we sat drinking coffee on a Rhineland terrace.

‘Hush, speak through a flower!’ It seemed a curious answer. Because I looked puzzled, it was amplified: ‘Do not speak the names of Government officials or Party members unless you praise them.’ I felt hurt, for I had meant no harm. I probed no further that day. Mine had been but an idle curiosity.

Never before had I been so close to the frequent passing of tragedy, nor among a people who accepted tragedy as these. Every few days I encountered stories that appeared incredible in a land as outwardly serene and gay as this. For instance, I saw a woman go by, tall and fair, her beautiful face so marked by pain that I must ask about her.

I was hushed and not answered until we were in our host’s house. Then, after the servant had left the room, pillows were put down along the crack of the door, a wad of plasticine stuck in the keyhole, and the telephone — which in Germany plugs into a wall socket — pulled from its connection ‘because the inventions for listening in on families are most easily applied to the telephone and some chance remark overheard might be judged treason.’

These arrangements completed, I was cautiously told the following about the woman. Two unknown men wearing the brown uniform of the National Socialist Party had entered the house while husband and wife sat at dinner, and taken the husband away. Three months later four young men wearing black uniform with the ‘death’s head cap’ had brought back a coffin, and informed her that her husband had committed suicide. It was forbidden to open the sealed casket.

My narrators carefully explained that the husband was not a Jew, but an Aryan, a distinction in tragedy of which I did not see the point. The party officials stayed until after the funeral. The widow was made to pay five thousand marks for ‘burial services.’

From what I could learn her husband had been a respected member of the community. Neither the community nor her kin had made any united protest. In fact no protest of any kind had been made. And this was explained with the sentence: ‘It is not wise to interfere between individuals and the Party.’

Around us, as the summer advanced, trellised roses bloomed to meet the purple clematis. Stately delphinium, snapdragon, hollyhock, and sweet pea beckoned to the budding aster, the dahlia, and the chrysanthemum. The Rhineland is rural even where urban, and every man here a landed proprietor, be his estate but a window box.

In the Rhine Valley I never saw a no man’s land of old tin cans and rubbish. I never came upon an ugly back-yard corner. Everywhere were flowers in army, neat paths, and pretty lawns; in each garden there was an arbor or a tree with a clean table and chairs set beneath its shade. Nearly always there was water—a trickling stream, a lily pond, or a fountain, if the location gave no view of the river.

‘For us, where there is something growing, there is always hope,’I was told, and this was added: ’If you will look you will find the seed of blossom in every German heart. No matter how sordid the round of his daily life, tucked under the crustiest exterior each German has a sentimental love of forget-me-nots and rustic waterfalls.’

Although the Rhine is a, busy commercial river, at few places along its banks are warehouses permitted to press down to the water’s edge; long stretches of riverside are kept open, some laid out in parks, others left in wild and rugged beauty. At the close of the Great War, the peace dictated by the Allied victors leveled the fortressed walls of patrician Cologne; the havoc and mess round the proud city were soon cleared away and its double-towered cathedral now looks down on an encircling green belt planted with trees and shrubs, furnished with swimming pools and playing fields. In lovely Düsseldorf, flowering vines clamber up houses built flush on the street. It seemed they must spring from the pavement. I learned that their roots are nourished in well-tended beds in the cellars of the houses, the trunk stems carried through wall and sidewalk in encasing tubes.

Walls do not generally shut homes from view. In passing one may enjoy the flowers grown there, and also glimpse the householder surrounded by his family at coffee, or perhaps find him busy at cultivation. Even on huge estates, where there are gardeners enough, owners wheel heavy barrows, spade, plant, weed, and water, spray and train, in serene business.

‘Politics spoil the character,’ according to a German proverb, and I found few people concerned with their government, except those actively employed in it. The people I met preferred to be occupied with other things.

Daily I heard what in America is called classical music, and under the following explanation I was assured that there is nothing curious about this. Effective melodies are invariably borrowed folk tunes, and all the great German composers were folk musicians, kin to the highway minstrel and the troubadours of a day earlier than their own. The chorals of Bach were taken from the German folk songs and turned into hymns by Martin Luther, who put religious words to them. In Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace, one can hear today the rustic dance melodies, the cuckoo calls, and the final serenity which the master put into his Pastoral Symphony. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and the other great men arranged and rewrote what was already commonplace, enriching it with their own genius. Even the tune of ‘Deutschland über alles,' taken from Haydn, was got by him from a Croatian folk song.

There may have been places where the political events of this time beat in upon these people differently than I saw. As far as my observation went their concern with politics was to keep free of it. ‘We love the Fatherland deeply, truly, reverently, but we are not temperamentally suited to the management of affairs other than our own,’ I heard again and again, while broadcast on the air every day were strange statements made by members of t he National Socialist Party who quite frequently gave their remarks support by quoting phrases torn from the text of Schiller, Lessing, Fichte, and even Goethe.

’These Rhinelanders have wine in their veins, not blood,’ a Berlin friend who was visiting us said of them. ‘They need a firm hand before they can be properly incorporated into the Third Reich. They care more about carnival than politics and have a half-serious, half-mocking affection for both England and France. Liven moonlight on the Rhine, they have always been willing to let who will tend to politics.

‘But a new time is born now, a serious time, and soon their life and vigor must be harnessed more practically to the service of the State. That cannot be done, of course, until we have reoccupied the Rhine — a right the Versailles Treaty forbids us. These folk compounded of gentleness and coarseness, nimble wits and catholic piety, careless gayety and business genius, are a splendid people. They must be made more closely one with the rest of the Fatherland. Of course, some of the great factory owners here have supplied Hitler with gold, helping to make his rise possible. They gambled on him as an “unknown soldier” w ho might be right in his fanatical belief that he is selected by God to bring back German prosperity.’

I found the heavy summer heat in this valley more trying than any heat I had ever known, but the people here were not wilted by it. They were seemingly impervious to its discomfort. Boisterous in their enjoyment, they danced in the open, sometimes with flowers in their hair, the blond heads of the women shining in the sun. Young people strolling with arms round each other’s waists stopped unabashed for long kisses. Aged couples laughed at them and did likewise, it was usual to see people whose hands were callous with toil playing musical instruments. No gathering was without its song.

Peals of laughter punctuated the pleasures of the populace. The German language seems a hard-wrought struggle with thought. It lacks the ease of English, and the crystalline clearness of meaning to which I had become accustomed in China and in France. To me it is barbaric and rough, a language of doughty vigor, plastic and unformed; yet possessed of a richness more polished tongues have lost. When spoken, High German breaks upon my ears like the rumble of a wooden drum, the gutturals hard and brittle, closely overlaid by flute tones. But on the tongue of the Cologne populace language turns into a melodious dialect. They put a soft roll on the r’s and add a rich, cadence to expression, jeweling their speech with vivid phrases often vulgar, nearly always funny.

Wry shortly after arrival I learned that there was pressure to cultivate selfishness in regard to places of recreation. The National Socialists were urging the Rhinelanders, to exclude Jews from use of the river and its meadows, from the forested hills, from the swimming pools and playing fields, and to keep them out of the opera houses, theatres, and concerts.

Marie and Brenda, my daughter and niece, soon discovered this. And one afternoon I came home to be told that they were giving tea to Manfred, the son of a German neighbor. High voices arrested my attention before I opened the door to the room where they sat.

‘The Jewish problem must be settled. It is a serious world problem,’ I heard Manfred say.

‘It is no problem at all,’ put in young Brenda quickly. ‘The world is God’s and we must live in it. together peacefully.’

‘German soil is German,’ he said firmly. ‘They have to get off German soil.’

‘The German Jews are German,’Marie said. ‘They helped to make this nation, and in its good and its evils are a part of it. You cannot rise up and crush them, neither can you stamp out the pacifists, the Masons, all who believe in the League of Nations, and every other element that does not bend to this wicked creed. Don’t you know your own Hans Sachs?’

‘Children, children,’ I admonished; but I have never been able to stay Small Girl on any of her determined courses. Her voice, clear and firm, subdued mine. repeating words she had learned long ago in China from a German governess, an East Prussian: —

The three had stony faces.

To my surprise Manfred’s face softened first, and he said: ‘ You foreigners cannot hate any idea how beset with difficulties we young Germans are. We have to join the Hitler Youth. We have to accept as gospel every Nazi word. Otherwise we have no future. We are told quite plainly that no job and no profession will be open to us if we do not accept National Socialism. I want to be a doctor. I have always intended to be a doctor. I am ready to take my final high-school examination next term. I cannot study further without a certificate that I have passed it. And no one is allowed to take the examination who does not have a reputation as a believing Nazi.’

‘You poor thing,’ I heard from Brenda. ' Do take another piece of the chocolate cake.’

Marie was filling his teacup, putting in plenty of sugar, as I closed I he door to go away.

VIII

The people here were not entirely occupied with their own personal celebrations. Masses of them took part in each national celebration, as requested from Berlin, celebrating events with a fervent pageantry which often made me feel that we were a part of a Wagnerian opera.

Torchlight processions were usual — and national anthems, as romantic as they are violent, as sentimental as they are martial, assailed my ears. Local songs, drums, and full orchestras were supplemented by radioed programmes in which noise more thrilling than the words filled the air.

Into the outward serenity of this summer came the radioed news of a National Socialist uprising in Austria, the failure of a group who had tried to bring about an Auschlms with Germany. Music and noise were suddenly stilled, this gay world abruptly quiet.

‘The Anschluss is right; Austria should be joined to us. This clause must be torn from the wicked Versailles Treaty, but, alas, the Austrian is a fumbler. Somewhere his timing has gone wrong,’ one heard said. It. was known that Dollfuss was dead, and there was sadness that he had not been allowed a priest before his death. The Rhenish Catholic folk with whom I listened were much moved when a broadcast trig voice announced that his last words had been, ‘May God forgive them.’

The great anxiety was: ‘Has Austria again plunged us into war?’ Men and women mentioned radio broadcasts which, they said, had been going out from Munich, given by an Austrian National Socialist living in exile there, broadcasts against Dollfuss and his government. They spoke of thousands of Austrian National Socialists finding sanctuary in Bavaria — armed men organized into legions, camped near the Austrian frontier; men in training these eighteen months past in readiness to rescue their country when the signal should be given.

Anxiety deepened as word came across the wires, picked up from France and England and Luxembourg and other stations, that Frau Dollfuss was with Mussolini, and Italian troops wore massing on the Tyrolean border. It was remembered that the elected German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was not a birthright German but an Austrian. ‘We have been sacrificed to Austria,’ white-faced people said. ‘War has come upon us.’

Then suddenly spirits rose as quickly as they had sunk. Round the radio where I listened, listeners began to say: ‘He’d! Heil! Heil! He has saved vis!'

News had come across the wires that Adolf Hitler was in Bavaria turning back the Austrian legions. ‘All National Socialists have taken an oath to obey implicitly the Führer’s will and so there can be no question among them of disobedience,’ ran the murmur around me.

‘He is standing on the road turning them back.’ Only then was it remembered that in his book, Mein Kampf, Herr Hitler has written praise of Mussolini and expressed the view that a bond of friendship must be made and kept with him.

When it was known that a telegram had gone to President Miklas in Austria expressing President von Hindenburg’s condolences on the ‘abominable outrage’ of which Dr. Dollfuss was the victim, there was general approval.

‘Twice within a summer month this Führer has saved us from war — from inner revolution by his action at the end of June, and from world war now,’was said in these days, and I saw that many of an intellectual class who had been indifferent to him were won to his support by his conduct at this time.

IX

Full meed of praise one heard, yet never a thorough discussion of the tenets of government. Instead of this, ‘ Vorsicht, leise spree hen’ became a phrase very familiar to me. I have a lively curiosity and I had never lived with people like these before. ‘Careful, be quiet,’ had not been a habit of my life. I found it hard to acquire. Resolved not to question, I would find myself questioning. ‘I would not bother myself if I were you,’ I was told.

The amusement places were full. Old men had their own corners in codechouses, certain chairs sacred to them; here they met the same friends for the same games at the same regular times. Women too had their groups and their own sacred tables round which they had met on the same date for years; a circle of girls, often from the same school, stout matrons now who once a week went kanditor’n. They brought their handwork to the coffeehouse. Quite at home in this public place, they ate heartily of Torte, A pfelkuchen mit Schlagsahne, Pfirsich-Melba Eis, helped down by generous cups of coffee topped with whipped cream. Then they embroidered their gayly colored Kissen, Tischdecken, Läufer, and other things that would make nice presents at Christmas, discussing as they worked everything except the forbidden.

In places where there was music, usually out of doors in this fine weather, the young folk danced on a part of the paved terrace reserved for dancing. They have the custom that a young man may go to any table and with no introduction bow and ask a girl to dance. Strangers, they dance, and when the music stops he brings her back to her table and leaves her. They have this social freedom and yet a simple question on anything related to their government either brought extravagant speech lauding National Socialism or such a reply as this, said behind a hand: ‘We have the police, but that is not the end. We have the secret police and the more secret police. Who they are nobody knows. I may be one. My wife may be one. Hermann, here, may be treating us to beer with money he gets as a secret agent.’

Men are not afraid of outspokenness if they really care about a thing — nor women either. Where there is ardor of soul against a condition, people defy danger, courting martyrdom. Death is an experience common to each of us. Stirred to defense of a conviction, men and women gladly give their lives. They are not halted by threat of arrest or torture where feeling is strong enough. People the world over suffer, even die, gladly for any cause they really cherish. The Germans are no cowardly exception different from the rest of mankind. I had known too many of them to conclude this.

I found their desertion of the cause of free speech disconcerting, and their failure to stand by kin and neighbors astounding. I had a desire for ‘more light,’ as Goethe puts it. But at this period of my experience Rüdiger and Otto were the only persons who took the task of my enlightenment seriously. It became my habit to write them queries. They answered with detailed care. Beyond this I had to educate myself by observation.

Crossing the Cathedral square in Cologne one day, I heard an order broadcast to all Germany. On August 2 every church bell in the land was to ring at noon, tolling for fifteen minutes in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the day when the flower of German manhood set forth to protect the Fatherland from a war forced upon them. Flags were to be flown on every home and shop in honor of the sons of the homeland who had shown a readiness to sacrifice themselves for the just cause of Germany.

No turret, balcony, or roof was to be without its banner. The colors of the old and of the new Reich were to float there side by side. ‘The reborn nation is commanded to think in silent reverence of the incomparable spirit which they displayed in the path of heroism. Silent prayers are to be followed by church services, parades, and ceremonies in every corner of the Reich; these arc to be inspired by the thankful knowledge that God has raised us out of want and shame to National Socialism,’ said the fervent broadcasting voice.

I bought a copy of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and there read: ‘In the days of the collapse in 1918 and of the Versailles dictate it seemed as if all our sacrifices had been in vain. Today we may say that, historically considered, we did not lose the war of 19141918, for the plan to dismember the German Reich, to break up the creation of Bismarck, and to set us back where we were before 1870 did not succeed. It. did not succeed in the war, or in the postwar period, in spite of all apprehension. Since National Socialism seized power, the national spirit of self-assertion has been so renewed that skillful political leadership will be able to avert every future danger.’

On August 2 the banners of the old and the new Reich floated side by side on castle and cottage, small shop and great factory; but they were at half-mast, draped in black, and the church bells, ordered to toll in honor of the soldiers of the German army left on the field of battle, now tolled for them and for the leader of that army.

Twenty years ago to-day the German Government had informed the Belgian Government that it intended to occupy Belgian territory in order to forestall an enemy attack from that direction. A few weeks later General von Hindenburg, who had fought as a young lieutenant in the battle of Sedan which gave the Germans the victory over invaded France in 1870, had been summoned from retirement to repulse a Russian attack in the east, and at the age of sixty-seven won the battle of Tannenberg. From that date until this, with rare intervals, he had been the embodiment of German hope. In belief that red revolution, such as had occurred in Russia, was rising in the Fatherland he had advised his Kaiser to seek refuge in Holland. Leading home his defeated army, he had striven since then to establish order, and he had served republican Germany for several terms as President.

Now, early this morning, Dr. Goebbels sadly broadcast to the nation the news of his death. Round us I heard the question: ‘What will happen? Who succeeds to the Presidency?’

There was radio silence for half an hour after announcement of the death. Then Dr. Goebbels spoke again announcing the unification of the Presidency and the Chancellorship in Herr Hitler’s person: ‘The bill giving this joint office to Adolf Hitler is in two parts. Firstly, the office of the Rcichspräsident is united with that of the Rciehskattzler, and in consequence the former powers of the Reichspräsident pass to the leader and Reichskanzler, Adolf Hiller. He nominates his deputy. Secondly, this bill enters into force from the moment of the death of the Reichspräsident von Hindenburg.’

This automatically gave to Adolf Hitler General Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s place in the German army. It. was made known to the people that General von Blomberg had sent an order to the services which read: ‘The Field [Marshal’s example of service to the Fatherland until his last breath will forever be a lesson to us to pledge our strength and our lives to the new Germany. The door of this new Germany was opened to us by Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who called Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship, thus fulfilling the dream of centuries of German history. Inspired by the heroic figure of von Hindenburg, we tread the path to the future of Germany full of confidence in the leader of the Reich and the German people, Adolf Hitler.’

Soon all Germany knew that, division by division, the soldiers and sailors were pledging their loyalty with an oath: ’I swear by God this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to the leader of the German Reich and the German people, Adolf Hitler, the commander in chief of the services, and I will at all times be ready to stake my life for this oat h.'

‘The army,’ I heard, ‘is the only force capable of resisting National Socialism. This shows that it stands behind the new law and the new order.’

By evening Adolf Hitler had designated that he wished to be known as Führer and Chancellor, and that he desired the bill appointing him to this joint office to be submitted to a national plebiscite on August 10.

‘There is nothing left for us to decide,’ a woman explained to me; ‘our part is to thank t ho Fiihrcr for what he is willing to undertake for us.’

In dramatic detail Field Marshal von Hindenburg’s funeral was broadcast to the world. Every step of the black horses drawing the hearse, a gun carriage covered with a war flag, was reported on its long journey from his estate to Tannenberg, — the scene of the greatest victory of the war, — where he was buried.

At. 11.30 on the day of the interment all Germany paused fora moment; heads were bared in the streets, arms outstretched in salute, and bells rang from the steeples. In the schools children listened and were dismissed for the day. In shops and factories workers gathered round a wireless for the ceremony, spending the whole morning listening.

Every employer of labor had by government order to install a wireless set ready for this broadcast, and have it there for future use, so that it would no longer be possible for a worker to give the excuse that he had not listened to a government broadcast because no facilities were provided.

From this day on there were the bustle and stir of preparation for August 10, the day chosen for the plebiscite, or ‘thank you.’

In the midst of this the Baptist World Congress in session at Berlin passed two resolutions: ‘Firstly, this Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God all racial animosity and every form of apprehension or unfair discrimination towards Jews, colored peoples, or subject races, in any part of the world. Secondly, this Congress urges governments throughout the world to declare themselves ready to surrender whatever of their national sovereignty it may be necessary to surrender in order to establish an international authority for the maintenance of peace on a basis of equality and right, in the world.’

This seemed fine to me, but I did not hear that it stirred governments anywhere to action.

X

The plebiscite sanctioning Adolf Hitler’s election as Führer and Chancellor happened round me. There were crowds of excited people, often cheering, and hundreds sang.

People everywhere talked of the election. A man in the street car said: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II broke the ship of state which Bismarck built, and now we have a man who is certain that by gift of God he has the power not only to repair that ship but to steer it.’

There was much color. Banners and flags waved on every home and shop and on public buildings. There was much singing and marching to flute and drum, and endless parades, even a parade for work horses, in which each horse wore a bow of the National Socialist colors. The trees that shade the streets all had Ja, or yes, on their trunks.

The radio broadcasts were tireless and a loud-speaker covered ‘every inch of Germany,’ so a man in the street told me. Men from every walk of life addressed the nation and the world. There was a twenty-minute biography of Herr Hitler every evening.

An elderly woman who shared a tram-car seat with me explained the need for this. She said that since the Kaiser and the kings left their thrones there have been many political parties— twenty-eight and more in some elections each putting up a candidate. People had become bewildered and tired of it all. Few knew the names of the Chancellors that have held office. Despite familiarity with Herr Hitler’s name because of the ’Heil Hitler’ salute, it was very likely that numbers of folk knew nothing further about him.

She knew because her second son lived in Bavaria and had been a member of Herr Hitler’s party for twelve years. He had told her that Herr Hitler is a modest man who shunned publicity at first. In fact, early in Nazi history the party had been called ‘ Riders of the Night’ by the romantic. ’Then as they grew stronger the Führer had begun to make use of propaganda, and he had as his Propaganda Minister a man who was cleverer at this than any other man in the world. ‘In this hour of victory when lie stands high as the leader of all Germans within and without the present Reich, every man, woman, and child must know him,’ she concluded.

’The twenty-minute biography given each evening portrayed a moral man, virtuous and steadfast; pictured his birth in a humble home on the GermanAustrian border, his straitened childhood and unhappy youth, the loss of his mother, days of poverty in Vienna, his war service, his suffering from gas, and how he lived only to right German wrongs. Herr Frick, the Minister of the Interior, said: ‘It is the business neither of the State nor of the National Socialist Party to attack the Christian churches. The State and Party leave every man to find salvation in his own way. What they will control is political activity under cover of ecclesiastical endeavor.’

Secretary Hierl, the Reich Labor Leader, said: ‘Let us show foreign countries which are befogged by a lying international press that Adolf Hiller is no dictator oppressing the German people by force, but the true leader of Germany, raised to his position by the confiding trust and devoted love of a whole nation.’

Speaking from Hamburg on the eve of the plebiscite, Adolf Hitler repeated his philosophy of authoritative personal government as against party government because a state governed by conflicting parties is without resolution. ‘The world must now know two things,’ he said. ‘First, the German Reich will never surrender its honor and its equal rights. The German people, internal relations and economics in order, will defend the nation against all. Secondly, the German Government, like the German people, is filled with the unconditional wish to make the greatest possible contribution to the preservation of world peace. The German army does not need to rehabilitate the fame of its arms. . . .

‘The time of the German revolution is past,’ he continued. ‘The National Socialist ideal has conquered. Germany is ruled by this philosophy. But in taking over, a loyal alliance has been made with many who did not spring from the movement. In practice this has proved beneficial to the German people. Millions of Germans who have earlier stood aside or opposed have become reconciled to a regime which has no wish other than to put Germany’s best and most capable men in the posts of public life.

‘The gradual evolution of the Reich in coming decades under National Socialist leadership of the German people’s State demands discipline at home, complete order, undisturbed tranquillity. Therefore, it is my inflexible resolve personally to bring to account any who would venture to hinder or oppose this development. I will not have the ignorant, misled, insignificant persons shot. But I will in all cases crush to earth the really responsible.

‘The National Socialist State pledges itself to positive Christianity. It is my sincere aim to safeguard the rights of the two great Christian confessions, to preserve their doctrines from attack, and to create harmony between their duties and the requirements of the present State.

‘The economic tasks ahead are great. They demand decision and endurance. But the skill of the German inventor, the ability of German economic leaders, the diligence and superior ability of the German craftsman, the industry of the land tillers, the area of the foodstuffs, and the richness of the soil will supply our needs if we are courageous in our struggle.

‘Do not count on any standing in the eyes of the outer world other than that of the strength your brotherly solidity gives the Reich. . . . Not for my sake but for that of the German people I have requested this referendum. I do not need a vote of confidence to strengthen or maintain the position I hold. But the German people need a Chancellor supported before the whole world.

' I do not argue with those to-day who think they can do better in this place than I can. They have all failed. They must admit that on the whole my fifteen years of struggle for you has been successful. I have created a movement from nothing and given the German people a new and better situation at home and abroad. Ever since I have been in the struggle one thought only has ruled me — Germany.’

Just; before the voting a remark from Bismarck was broadcast to the nation: ‘We Germans, placed in the centre of Europe, must hold together more than other nations. We must be one if we do not wish to be lost. We have no natural safeguard and must stand back to back unless all sacrifices of the past are lost to us.’

The published result of the election was that out of a qualified electorate of 45,473,635 there were 43,529,710 who took advantage of their right to vote. Of these 38,362,760 voted ‘yes’ to Hitler’s appointment to the position of Führer and Chancellor combined, 4,294,654 voted ‘no,’ and 872,296 marked invalid ballots. By radio Herr Hitler immediately thanked the nation, and then General von Blomberg for the army’s oath of loyalty. He promised to uphold the integrity of the service and to consolidate the army as the sole bearer of the nation’s arms.

National enthusiasm was not allowed to subside into quietness at the conclusion of this successful election. Rally after rally for one cause and another filled the days. Events in one corner of the Reich were broadcast to every other corner. Thus a unified enthusiasm was kept astir. Greatest among these were the Saar rally at Coblenz and the Parteitag at Nürnberg. The rally at Coblenz had as its theme encouragement, to the Germans of the Saar, who would in the winter have the opportunity of voting whether they would rejoin the Fatherland or not.

At this time a young American girl, member of the sorority to which I belong, telephoned me. She was traveling in Germany, and came to stay in our apartment fora few days. On her travels she had made a friend, a young S.A. After she was gone he continued to come to offer his services in any way that would be of aid to us, despite the fact that he was very busy on the Saar rally. We did not see him for several days, as he had gone to Coblenz. I knew he had a ticket for a scat well to the fore in the assembly at which Herr Hitler would speak, and that he was eager to sit near his Führer.

‘ Well, how did you enjoy your Führer’s speech?’ I asked when he returned.

‘I did not hear it,’he said simply. ’I forgot my credentials and was found too near the Führer for one who did not possess them. So I was taken into the cellar of the building and locked there until I had been identified.’

I expressed sorrow, but I did not find him sad for himself.

‘We young Germans must learn to be silent, not only when we are dealt with justly, but even w hen enduring injustice,’ he told me. ‘And I was not treated unjustly; I should not have forgotten my credentials.’ When I showed my surprise he added: ' Wir sind zu blindem Gehorsam verpflichtet!’

‘We are pledged to blind obedience,’ I repeated after him.

’Yes,’ he assured me solemnly.

XI

It was a lovely fall. The mountain ash was gay with bunches of scarlet berries. The chestnut wore leaves of gold. The girls went off to school in Switzerland.

Every day I drove my car out into the country. One afternoon I halted in a tree-shaded street. This street was full of little boys. While I waited for them to pass a man spoke to me.

He said: ‘I see you have a large car and you don’t look busy. Would you lend yourself to our services?’

I asked him what he wanted. He explained that he was a schoolteacher and here were ten thousand little boys called in to Cologne to march past Herr Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Reichsminister.

‘This marching is not good for their hearts. Many of them have come a long way. They have had this day of parade and now they must get home again, I and other teachers have made ourselves a self-appointed committee to ask kindlylooking people with cars to give conveyance to the little ones.’

I said that I would gladly do what he asked and he filled my car to overflowing. Directed by the children, I took them home. At the very end I had just one more to deliver. We were in a small village about four miles from Cologne.

‘Our house is the first beyond the church,’ the child directed me, adding, ‘I am the pastor’s son.'

I took him there. Before he got out he thanked me for the ride, shaking hands with great, politeness, as all the others had done, saying, ‘ Auf Wiedersehen! ’ And then, like his companions, clicking his heels together and lifting his right hand, the palm spread, he exclaimed: ‘Heil Hitler!’

He seemed so very young, I waited to see him safely in. His bang of the garden gate brought a woman to the house door, a fair woman about my own age. She stooped for his kiss.

His arms tight around her neck, he told her in high excited treble: ‘Mummy, I kept step all the way. Mummy, I never once lost. step. We marched to the music. I kept marching in the tracks of the boy before me. All the way I did.’

XII

Rabbits nibbling in a field of clover display no corporate concern when a weasel slips in among them. Seemingly their caution is only enough to register brief personal alarm. Individually anxious, the rabbits hastily hop aside from the path the quiet, weasel is pursuing towards his selected victim. Crouched in hiding, they are still, heedless to the piteous death cry of their fellow. When the weasel has gone, the remaining rabbits soon present a tableau of contentment on the meadow, a pretty pastel in fawn and green.

I kept picturing the Germans of my own kind, people privileged to some education, as rabbits. My imago would have been truer if I bad seen the company of liberals the world over as rabbits of a clover field, myself among them.

But I did not see this. Despite the internationalism to which I had been led by careful educators, I had not drunk very seriously at that fountain. I still beheld the map of the earth ns in the usual school geography — the land done in blobs of color to denote the nations, and responsibilities limited by national boundaries.

My scorn was a self-righteous scorn. It was none the less bitter because I had found in Germany a people of whom I can write unconditionally that they are the most generously kind, the quickest to sympathy, of any people 1 have yet known — a folk tireless in the? practical things they will undertake and accomplish for one on the slightest acquaintance. ’This applies to all. No line can be drawn between the Nazi and the others across which one can point, saying, ‘This is white and that is black.'

At that time, in Germany, there were plenty of front doors with this placard out: Arzt für seelisches Leiden (Doctor for Suffering of the Soul). On my mentioning these soul doctors people told me that there had been many more before Herr Hitler took charge of things. Now their clientele was falling off. National Socialists explained that their movement gives joiners ‘spiritual release by self-forgetfulness in common effort " — ‘great moments of disciplined fury when souls rise and mingle in divine comradeship’ — ‘exultation to all who have been afraid of life and its insecurities"— ‘rejuvenation to men and women who have grown soft, coveteous, mean, and timid.”

The quack doctors would be outlawed by the Führer, so I was told, if this were necessary. He never wastes attention on things which will die of their own weakness. When the Reich is completely National-Socialized they will all be out of business, because nobody will consult them. I have listened to the movement’s Minister of Enlightenment and Culture broadcast: ‘National Socialism is humanity’s greatest experience. It is man gloriously in search of his soul.”

On the day of this broadcast 1 encountered National Socialism in three small shops. Radio talks usually last well over an hour, some continuing two or three, the Führer occasionally speaking what is nearer four — a physical feat no one else surpasses. While the Minister of Enlightenment and Culture’s talk was going on 1 entered a chemist’s shop to have a prescription made up. The radio was open full blast, in accord with the government order that those who speak for the party shall be listened to in every shop, public square, factory, school, and home. The proprietor’s wife served me, as usual when I went there.

‘ Ach —we drink a witch’s brew,”she exclaimed bitterly, waxing her hand at the noise.

‘Hush, Margo,’whispered her husband, and I saw that another customer was coming into the shop where we had been alone. When he had been served and was gone, the husband admonished his wife again, ‘You never know where reporters are. The very walls have ears. If you are not more careful you will get us both taken into corrective custody.’

She shrugged her Rhenish shoulders: ‘To think that I worked to help this party into power. Under the democracy I actually ran round persuading my friends to vote for them. They heralded their approach as deliverers and they stay as conquerors. A woman cannot speak her own mind any more. She cannot think her own thoughts. Libelous thoughts are punishable by death, and libel is everything which is n’t a cheer.’

‘It isn’t so bad as all that,’ said he. ‘Give them time. A great many have tried to get the German cart out of the mud since the defeat. This party are elected to do it for us and we must give them their head in a fair trial. You are only bitter because you have foolishly got yourself into trouble.’

‘Trouble! Ach—it is no trouble to me,’ she replied with scorn, and then explained. She had met a friend on the street who had asked, ‘Flow is business?' and she had answered, ‘Bad — practically nonexistent.’ This conversation had been overheard by a boy of fifteen, son of her nearest neighbor. Fie had reported it at the next meeting of his Hitler Youth Group.

‘They have a weekly confessional,’ she enlightened my puzzlement. ‘We have these confessionals in all our National Socialist Groups. The creed of this party teaches that loyalty to the State ranks above every other relationship. It comes before loyalty between husband and wife, parent and child, brothers and sisters, friend and friend.

‘In our Groups it is the leader’s duty to encourage confessional. The adult or child who is most diligent in protection of the State stands highest in favor. Have you not heard of the instruction sent out to us from the leaders of the National Socialist Movement? “They who stand in the way of the victory of the Reich will be crushed. Illegal action will lead to physical extermination. The German folk are no spies, but he who does not report observations makes himself guilty of the crime as if he had committed the error himself and will be so punished.” Every German of the Reich over fourteen years of age must know this instruction by heart. No excuse for ignorance of it is accepted.

‘My neighbor’s son meant me no harm. He did what he thought was right in repeating my words at his little group. Grumbling and gossiping are forbidden. We had a two months’ campaign of education on this in the spring. His report was forwarded to the party official of this district. I am now being taught to remember not to grumble. My punishment is light, really, compared to what some of my friends have received for no greater civic disobedience.

‘Every workday morning, for six weeks, I have to present myself at the ward office of the party. I must be there promptly at eight o’clock and wait until the official is ready to receive me. He is a young man, about twenty-six, always sleekly groomed. I have to say “Heil Hitler!” as I open the door into his private office, giving the Nazi salute as I go in. Then I must stand before his desk—he remains sealed — and, raising my hand in the salute, hold it there while I repeat “Heil Hitler! Business is good to-day!’”

From the chemist’s I went on to a grocer’s shop to leave my daily order.

' Grüss Gott,' I said absently as I went in.

’Don’t use that greeting to me,’ exclaimed the grocer woman. ‘I may forget sometime and give the same reply.’

‘Suppose you did?’

‘Yes — suppose I did. Ach! Who knows what would happen? We dare not greet God here any more. We must hail Hitler. I have three little children. Who is to protect my little children if I am taken away? I have got to be careful for their sake.’

She showed me a communication which she had received through the morning post, a message mailed in a plain white envelope with no indication on its outside as to where it came from. Inside there was a sheet of paper with the Party letter head. There was no writing, just a small newspaper clipping pinned to the centre of the clean page.

The clipping reported that various people resident in various neighborhoods had been selected to send in a memorandum as to those who were using t lie ’Heil Hitler!’ greeting. Certain shops, various individuals, even some postmen, had been found negligent. Addressed ’Heil Hitler!’ everyone responded “licit Hitler!’ but tested with other greetings several had not given back the salute of loyalty. The report closed with a question, ‘Is this the right way for these people to show gratitude for the great work the Führer is doing for us?’

‘ I would n’t be worried by it,’ I said.

‘It is not a thing to be careless about,’ she asserted. ‘The long arm of arrest reaches everywhere. Even if one is taken by the regular police and wins one’s freedom by law in the courts, the secret police can arrest again as one walks from the prison door. There is no court of appeal from under their hand. It is seldom that relatives or friends can find out where the arrested is taken. It is n’t that I would mind arrest so much for myself, but what is to happen to my children? More persons go into the concentration camps than come out. Those who get alarmed there and show rebellion never come back. I have a slow temper, uncontrollable when roused. I must be careful because of my children.

’Heil Hitler!’ she said loudly as I left.

’Heil Hitler!’ I responded to the convention of her country.

Going to the shoemaker to have some repairs done, I learned that he was away — indefinitely away. There had been a search for books. Such searches, so a. twelve-year-old son told me, are periodic but not systematic. A Party person may descend on only one house in a block when he comes. The child told me that no one is allowed to possess a book written by a pacifist, a Communist, a Jew, a Mason, or any book about Masonry; any book on politics or political science other than National Socialism; any book of science which refutes the National Socialist theory of race and blood; or any novel or poems by an author who has in any writing whatsoever ridiculed the National Socialist Party members or their tenets; any printing which gives any account of the Christian Church strife in Germany excepting that allowed by the Third Reich; or any book dealing with the German post-war period from a democratic or liberal point of view.

The searchers, two armed men, had found a book by the Englishman, Bertrand Russell, behind the shoemaker’s clock. The child said it was a book telling of paths which lead to peace,

’Does your father read English?’ I asked.

‘No, he cannot. The book belongs to a friend. We were keeping it for the friend.’

‘Has the friend been arrested, too?’

‘He is not in the Rhineland now and Papa would not give his whereabouts or name.’

“Is n’t the responsibility your friend’s?’

‘We do not reason that way in our family. We believe that loyally between friends is above submission to the imposed will of this usurper party. We are every one ready to die for that belief.

‘We certainly are,’ his little sister seconded his remark.

‘Ena is brave,’ he said, putting his arm around her young shoulders. ‘She is brave. But she is young. She is only seven. She has so many years to resist National Socialist teaching. It isn’t their harsh methods which the young have to be so strong to resist. It is their soft ways of confusing good with evil which resolve the power to resist. She has fair hair and blue eyes, as I have. I know what is before her. She is the type they want to win to their cause.’

‘Where is your mother?’ I asked.

‘She has gone to try to find out where our father has been taken and get permission to send him some soap and clean linen. There are n’t any comforts in the concentration camps.’

When I left, the boy was at his father’s last, repairing my shoes.

’I will pay in advance,’ I said, and put ten marks on the table.

‘That is too much,’ the children told me quickly. ‘Two marks sixty is the price.’

XIII

In the weeks following I had two experiences of my own concerning books. First, one which, although it may appear out of place, must be put in because of the bearing it had later on my life in Germany. I had received but given no heed to a letter from a Berlin publisher which contained a contract for German publication of my House of Exile. One afternoon, on my return from a walk, Hilgers, the manservant, told me that a man had called to see me. Hilgers described him as a very secretive man who looked like the Secret Police and would not. disclose his business. He would be back at nine o’clock next morning and left word that I was to be in.

He came next morning. By my husband’s order he was shown into my husband’s room. I was told to wait. Finally I was called. He was the publisher. He had read my book in the American edition. He knew the number of countries in which it was published and had seemingly a more complete knowledge of how it was selling in the various languages than I had. He had written to Boston for my address and learned that I was in Germany.

He explained that in Germany, under the National Socialists, if. is necessary to have a government permit to print a book. He had that permit for my book. He had sent me a letter here. I must have got it, as it was registered. There was a contract in it, and he had waited for an answer. When none arrived ho considered telephoning, then thought it better to come to Cologne to see me.

I had not replied because my feeling was such then that I did not care to publish my book in Germany. My husband and our visitor talked seriously with me concerning this attitude. When the publisher went away he had the signed contract in his pocket.

A woman brought up in the Quaker faith cannot long indulge comfortably in a scornful righteous indignation. Her conscience will begin to twinge.

To remember that in the name ‘Friend’ the people called Quaker have an ideal set before them; to believe that if one will appeal without fear to the good inherent in every other there will be response; to address noble and commoner in plainness, and treat the occupant of palace and cottage on the same human level; to form no hasty conclusions — these are precepts a Quaker child learns.

Prodigal to this gentle faith, too often I find myself away on strange paths. Then remembered precepts call me home. I now resolved to subdue my emotions and try to give more intelligent attention to these people among whom I must stay for an indefinite time.

We found a pretty house for us in a village upriver from Cologne, and I sent for my boxes of books to be forwarded from France. Sometime later I received a notification from the Customs that boxes addressed to me had arrived containing books forbidden entry to the Reich. I went over. A customs inspector handed me a ‘black list.’ I found it an illustrious rollcall.

Studying it from beginning to end, the thought occurred to me that a person wishing to read for culture might use this in purchasing a library, if life had kept him too preoccupied to acquire the necessary education to make his own selection. It was fairly complete, so far as the languages of Europe and America are concerned, but lacking in Oriental titles— in fact, entirely devoid of them. The works of the liberal Persian poets and the pacifist Chinese political philosophers were not on it. Even German, French, and English translations of their books could come in.

I handed it back to the customs inspector. I unpacked and he checked. From among my books all of Balzac, Anatole France, Victor Hugo, Andre Malraux, and Roma in Holland had to be laid aside to be sent out of Germany. All of Norman Angell, Walter Lippmann, Sinclair Lewis, Spinoza, Maxim Gorky, and Edna St. Vincent Millay must be relinquished. To the growing heap I must add the poems of Heinrich Heine; Thomas Mann’s A Man and His Hoy; a score of Mendelssohn’s Elijah; and, lastly, Lessing’s drama, Nathan der Weise.

I worked quietly, feeling bereft. Before leaving France I had selected carefully when preparing the boxes of books which were to follow me. A gypsy can carry but a limited library. These were my friends, companions chosen for my exile. Choking back self-pity, I was silent until I came to Nathan der Weise.

To part with that slim volume seemed more than I could bear without protest. It is a favorite of mine — one of the stories I like best of all the stories men have told.

Besides, it was given to me by a German who judged its tolerance good and true — as I could show in the comments he had written on the margins of its pages. It was a gift, from a man who lies dead somewhere under the forest of black crosses which mark the graves of unnamed German soldiers fallen on the soil of France — a youth who gallantly flung his life away, as did thousands of others of his generation, lighting for what he believed was the right. In this telling I brought tears to the eyes of the sentimental German who as a customs inspector of that soldier’s Fatherland was denying me the privilege of bringing home this book. But to no avail Nathan der Weise was now under ban here. He could not let it enter.

He told me that there was no condemnation of Lessing and mentioned him as one of the writers celebrated by the National Socialists. I could have copies of all his other works. I could see his comedy Minna von Barnhelm and his Emilia Galotti on the stage this winter. The objection to the book I had was that Lessing had made the hero of it a Jew.

I asked if he did not think that Lessing might be a bet ter critic of what Germans should read than the men who compiled this black list.

‘I do not meddle in politics,’ the inspector replied quickly. ‘ I do my duty — and that has not been easy these twenty years I have served. Lessing may be wisest, but he has been dead more than a hundred years and the men who declared a ban on his book are in power. If I let the book in I may find myself in trouble.’

I did not press him further. I laid my banned books in a box, fitting them so that their corners could n’t gel broken, putting my favorite in a snug place. Then I sat down to rest on the box of books allowed to stay with me, feeling exhausted.

The servant of National Socialism brought a hammer and new nails, shining as silver, with which he fastened on the lid of the box that must leave the Reich. His steady, relentless blows shook me as if they closed a coflin, their fall beating a funeral dirge for the Germany whose matchless beauty Madame de Staël heralded in De l’Allemagne.

Is that Germany dead.'' Or does she lie as Snow White in a trance from eating a poisoned apple?

To be continued

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