was fairly late in the afternoon and a thunderstorm was booming from the north, trailing a cloak of sable clouds heavy with rain across the face of the town, whirling down the streets with a whipping wedge of hailstones that rattled against the window-panes like machine gun bullets. Lightning zigzagged in fantastic spikes of brilliant white and electric blue. Thunder sobbed dully, hopelessly, like the death gurgle of a shattered world.
Even so, ever-increasing crowds paraded the streets, spilling from houses and cafés and beer gardens out to the sidewalks and thence to the pavements.
Tom had taken a taxicab back to barracks, and his driver tooted his horn continuously. At sight of the beloved uniform, the shining uhlanka, the silver gray cape, the crowd would give way, often with cheers and hurrahs.
Many were drunk, the Westerner noticed. But, too, he noticed that many others, perfectly sober from an alcoholic view-point, people who, to judge from their sunken eyes, their drawn lips, had hardly partaken of food in the gigantic excitement that had swirled through the German capital like fog in the brain of a blind world, behaved even more extravagantly than the beer-soaked hooligans from the North-side slums.
They sang and cursed and cheered and yelled.
First had been the fear that England might fight by the side of France and Russia, a fear promptly argued out of existence by stale statistics and staler national psychology. Then, like a thunder clap, had come the fact: England had sent an ultimatum, followed by a declaration of war. Already the vanguard of Britain's army was crossing the channel to come to the help of France's left flank, to protect Calais, to battle, later on, gloriously at the Marne. Already the navy, Britain's floating walls, was drawing a choking net across Germany's commercial throat.
Thus nervous reaction had come to the crowd like the release of an immense steel spring. In that mad moment Germany welcomed the entry of yet more enemies into the battle arena.
"Eine Welt in Waffen!" quoted a little underfed, pimply high school boy from a text-book. "A world in arms against us!"
And, at once, a university professor, in black broadcloth, steel spectacles, ragged mustache, dirty shirt and frayed cuffs, made an impromptu speech on the same subject. He started academically, but wound up with incoherent roars, just opening his huge mouth, showing his decayed teeth and yelling mad, pathetic invectives at France and England, the crowd shouting back its approval.
Another time, as his taxicab was caught in the human eddy that rolled across the Janowitzer Bridge, Tom was shocked by the sight of a middle-aged woman, well dressed in heliotrope taffeta, neat shoes, white kid gloves, and a little black Viennese toque. Had he seen her back home, in Spokane, he would have said that she was the wife of some prosperous mining man, of good family, soundly respectable, rather conservative, most likely a member of various progressive civic organizations and clubs, and the mother of a large, happy family. In Berlin she was typical of the higher business or professional class, belonging to the soundest burgess society; and here she stood, at the curb, her neat little hat awry, her veil torn, waving a newspaper in her hand, and shouting a foaming, babbling stream of curses and obscenities against France and England and Russia and all the rest of the world.
Yet more scenes as Tom's cab progressed up the street:
A mad, nauseating hodge-podge of emotions, of shouts and yells and indecencies, a very miscarriage of patriotism, and always sprinkled and larded with God, Duty, Kaiser, Hearth, Home, Hurrah! And then more curses, more belching forth of savage blood-lust!
A cult of hatred! A cult of brutality! A cult of obscenities labeled Love of Country! And Tom thought it less terrible than pitiable. He found it in his big, simple heart to pity these people, top-heavy with worship of self and iron force, weak-kneed with meaningless, sugary sentimentality, rotten with false standards and bad beer.
Never in all his life had Tom loved his own land as during that drive. Faults? Of course America had faults. There was no nation this side of millennium free from them. A nation needs faults, like the shadows in a flame, to emphasize its brightness.
But the faults of America were those of youth, added to those of an ancient, badly digested, Mayflower Puritanism, faults at times sharpened and brought into clashing contrast by the continuous immigration and assimilation of tens of thousands of foreigners. Historical, geographical faults rather than national, or racial!
But—Germany? New Germany?