While we were at the prison camp we heard at intervals the rap-rap of a machine-gun at the practice range near by, drilling to take more prisoners, and on the way back to Berlin we passed companies of volunteers returning from drill with that sturdy march characteristic of German infantry.

In Berlin I was told again that everything was perfectly normal.  Trains were running as usual to Hamburg, if one cared to go there.  “As usual” in war time was the ratio of one to five in peace time.

At Hamburg, in sight of steamers with cold boilers and the forests of masts of idle ships, one saw what sea power meant.  That city of eager shippers and traders, that doorstep of Germany, was as dead as Ypres, without a building being wrecked by shells.  Hamburgers tried to make the best of it; they assumed an air of optimism; they still had faith that richer cargoes than ever might come over the sea, while a ghost, that of bankruptcy, walked the streets, looking at office-windows and the portholes of ships.

For one had only to scratch the cuticle of that optimism to find that the corpuscles did not run red.  They were blue.  Hamburg’s citizens had to exhibit the fortitude of those of Rheims under another kind of bombardment:  that of the silent guns of British Dreadnoughts far out of range.  They were good Germans; they meant to play the game; but that once prosperous business man of past middle age, too old to serve, who had little to do but think, found it hard to keep step with the propagandist attitude of Berlin.

A free city, a commercial city, a city unto itself, Hamburg had been in other days a cosmopolitan trader with the rest of the world.  It had even been called an English city, owing to the number of English business men there as agents of the immense commerce between England and Germany.  Everyone who was a clerk or an employer spoke English; and through all the irritation between the two countries which led up to the war, English and German business men kept on the good terms which commerce requires and met at luncheons and dinners and in their clubs.  Englishmen were married to German women and Germans to Englishwomen, while both prayed that their governments would keep the peace.

Now the English husband of the German woman, though he had spent most of his life in Hamburg, though perhaps he had been born in Germany, had been interned and, however large his bank account, was taking his place with his pannikin in the stalls in front of some cookhouse for his ration of cabbage soup.  Germans were kind to English friends personally; but when it came to the national feeling of Germany against England, nowhere was it so bitter as in Hamburg.  Here the hate was born of more than national sentiment; it was of the pocket; of seeing fortunes that had been laboriously built dwindling, once thriving businesses in suspended animation.  There was no moratorium in name; there was worse than one in fact.  A patriotic freemasonry in misfortune took its place.  No business man could press another for the payment of debts lest he be pressed in turn.  What would happen when the war was over?  How long would it last?