It was not quite as cruel to give one’s opinion as two years to the inquirers in Hamburg as to the director of the great Rudolph Virchow Hospital in Berlin.  Here, again, the system; the submergence of the individual in the organization.  The wounded men seemed parts of a machine; the human touch which may lead to disorganization was less in evidence than with us, where the thought is:  This is an individual human being, with his own peculiarities of temperament, his own theories of life, his own ego; not just a quantity of brain, tissue, blood and bone which is required for the organism called man.  A human mechanism wounded at the German front needed repairs and repairs were made to that mechanism.  The niceties might be lacking but the repair factory ran steadily and efficiently at full blast.  Germany had to care for her wounded by the millions and by the millions she cared for them.  “Two years!”

I was sorry that I had said this to the director, for its effect on him was like a blow in the chest.  The vision of more and more wounded seemed to rise before the eyes of this man, weary with the strain of doing the work which he knew so well how to do as a cog in the system.  But for only a moment.  He stiffened; he became the drillmaster again; and the tragic look in his eyes was succeeded by one of that strange exaltation I had seen in the eyes of so many Germans, which appeared to carry their mind away from you and their surroundings to the battlefield where they were fighting for their “place in the sun.”  “Two years, then.  We shall see it through!” He had a son who had been living in a French family near Lille studying French and he had heard nothing of him since the war began.  They were good people, this French family; his son liked them.  They would be kind to him; but what might not the French Government do to him, a German!  He had heard terrible stories—­the kind of stories that hardened the fighting spirit of German soldiers—­about the treatment German civilians had received in France.  He could think of one French family which he knew as being kind, but not of the whole French people as a family.  As soon as the national and racial element were considered the enemy became a beast.

To him, at least, Berlin was not normal; nor was it to that keeper of a small shop off Unter den Linden which sold prints and etchings and cartoons.  What a boon my order of cartoons was!  He forgot his psychology code and turned human and confidential.  The war had been hard on him; there was no business at all, not even in cartoons.

The Opera alone seemed something like normal to one who trusted his eyes rather than his ears for information.  There was almost a full house for the “Rosenkavalier”; for music is a solace in time of trouble, as other capitals than Berlin revealed.  Officers with close-cropped heads, wearing Iron Crosses, some with arms in slings, promenaded in the refreshment room of the Berlin Opera House between the acts.  This in the hour of victory