Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection and had to spend the night at Saintes.  The tall, quizzical, rather grim old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare—­characteristic of that rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know little about—­was plainly puzzled.  There we were, two able-bodied men, and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he lived in Cognac.  “In Cognac!” the old woman repeated, looking from one to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question:  “But you are not soldiers?”

We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in.  There was scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful of young fellows passed on the other side singing.  They were boys of the 1915 class who had been called out and in a few days would be getting ready for war.  In Paris you will see young fellows just like them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at home.  Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing as they marched: 

“Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere—­d.”

“He’s red, white, and black, And split up the back!”

They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as now they were marching down the streets of Saintes—­and they kept flinging back through the frosty dark: 

“Il est rouge—­et noir—­et blanc—­Et fendu—­au derriere—­d...”

Chapter VI

“The Great Days”

They were playing “The Categorical Imperative” that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Linden.  It is an old-fashioned comedy laid in the Vienna of 1815—­two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo.  A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he.  The older woman with her knowing charm, the younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his “categorical imperative.”

You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present sense, begun to exist; how to that audience—­nearly every one of whom had a son or husband or brother at the front—­the century suddenly seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own “grosse Zeit.”  You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching them from the window, come down across the years: