Truly, the changes wrought by war are great!

* * * * *

In Berlin I inquired into the circumstances of Anton Lang’s death.  Nobody knew anything definite.  Berlin knew little of him in life, much less than London, New York or Montreal.

Munich is different.  There his name is a household word.  Herr von Meinl, then Director of the Bavarian Ministry, now member of the Bundesrat, told me that he believed that there was a mistake in the report that Anton had been killed.

Later, when tramping through the Bavarian Highlands, I walked one winter day from Partenkirchen to Oberammergau, for I had a whim to know the truth of the matter.

On the lonely mountain road that winds sharply up from Oberau I overtook a Benedictine monk who was walking to the monastery at Ettal.  We talked of the war in general and of the Russian prisoners we had seen in the saw-mills at Untermberg.  I was curious to hear his views upon the war, and I soon saw that not even the thick walls of a monastery are proof against the idea-machine in the Wilhelmstrasse.  Despite Cardinal Mercier’s denunciation of German methods in Belgium, this monk’s views were the same as the rest of the Kaiser’s subjects.  He did, however, admit that he was sorry for the Belgians, although, in true German fashion, he did not consider Germany to blame.  He sighed to think that “the Belgian King had so treacherously betrayed his people by abandoning his neutrality and entering into a secret agreement with France and Great Britain.”  He recited the regular story of the secret military letters found by the Germans after they had invaded Belgium, the all-important marginal notes of which were maliciously left untranslated in the German Press.

We parted at Ettal, and I pushed on down the narrow valley to Oberammergau.  The road ahead was now in shadow, but behind me the mountain mass was dazzling white in the rays of the setting sun.  “What a pity,” I thought, “that the peasant must depart from these beautiful mountains and valleys to die in the slime of the trenches.”

The day was closing in quiet and grandeur, yet all the time the shadow of death was darkening the peaceful valley of the Ammer.  I became aware of it first as I passed the silent churchyard with its grey stones rising from the snow.  For there, on the other side of the old stone wall that marks the road, was a monument on which the Reaper hacks the toll of death.  The list for 1870 was small, indeed, compared with that of die grosse Zeit.  I looked for Lang and found it, for Hans had died, as had also Richard.

I passed groups of men cutting wood and hauling ice and grading roads, men with rounder faces and flatter noses than the Bavarians, still wearing the yellowish-brown uniform of Russia.  That is, most of them wore it.  Some, whose uniforms had long since gone to tatters, were dressed in ordinary clothing, with flaming red R’s painted on trousers and jackets.