There were startling changes in the solemn, patriarchal attitude toward life which I had found so amusing, yet so charming, in the simple people of rural Germany at the time of my first visit. The war seemed to have given a sad jolt to the conservative old customs of former days, particularly among the young people. Perhaps the most tangible evidence of this fact was to see the daughters calmly light cigarettes, while the sternly religious father of ten years before, who would then have flayed them for sneezing in church, looked idly on without a sign of protest. They were still at bottom the proper German _Fräuleins_ of the rural middle class—though as much could not be said of all the sex even in respectable old Schwerin—but on the surface there were many of these little tendencies toward the _Leichtsinnig_.
When it came to discussions of the war and Germany’s conduct of it, I found no way in which we could get together. We might have argued until doomsday, were it fitting for a guest to badger his hosts, without coming to a single point of agreement. Every one of the old fallacies was still swallowed, hook and line. If I had expected national disaster to bring a change of heart, I should have been grievously disappointed. To be sure, Mechlenburg is one of the remotest backwaters of the Empire, and these laborious, unimaginative tillers of the soil one of its most conservative elements. They would have considered it unseemly to make a business of thinking for themselves in political matters, something akin to accepting a position for which they had no previous training. There was that to arouse pity in the success with which the governing class had made use of this simple, unquestioning attitude for its own ends. One felt certain that these honest, straightforward victims of premeditated official lies would never have lent a helping hand had they known that the Fatherland was engaged in a war of conquest and not a war of defense.
Here again it was the mother who was most outspoken toward what she called “the wicked wrecking of poor, innocent Germany.” The father and the children expressed themselves more calmly, if at all, though it was evident that their convictions were the same. Apparently they had reached the point where further defense of what they regarded as the plain facts of the situation seemed a waste of words.