After lunch, and after Kloster had said some more regrettable things, being much moved, it appeared, by the palace facing him and by some personal recollections he had of the particular Hohenzollern it contained, while I lay looking up along the smooth beech-trunks to their bright leaves glancing against the wonderful blue of the sky—­oh it was so lovely, little mother!—­and Frau Kloster sometimes said Aber Adolf, and occasionally announced that she had slain another mosquito, we motored on towards Brandenburg, along the chain of lakes formed by the Havel.  It was like heaven after the Lutzowstrasse.  And at four o’clock we stopped at a Gasthaus in the pinewoods and had coffee and wild strawberries, and Herr von Inster paddled me out on the Havel in an old punt we found moored among the rushes.

It looked so queer to see an officer in full Sunday splendour punting, but there are a few things which seem to us ridiculous that Germans do with great simplicity.  It was rather like being punted on the Thames by somebody in a top hat and a black coat.  He looked like a bright dragon-fly in his lean elegance, balancing on the rotten little board across the end of the punt; or like Siegfried, made up to date, on his journey down the Rhine,—­made very much up to date, his gorgeous barbaric boat and fine swaggering body that ate half a sheep at a sitting and made large love to lusty goddesses wittled away by the centuries to this old punt being paddled about slowly by a lean man with thoughtful eyes.

I told him he was like Siegfried in the second act of the Gotterdammerung, but worn a little thin by the passage of the ages, and he laughed and said that he at least had got Brunnhilde safe in the boat with him, and wasn’t going to have to climb through fire to fetch her.  He says he thinks Wagner’s music and Strauss’s intimately characteristic of modern Germany:  the noise, the sugary sentimentality making the public weep tears of melted sugar, he said, the brutal glorification of force, the all-conquering swagger, the exaggeration of emotions, the big gloom.  They were the natural expression, he said, of the phase Germany was passing through, and Strauss is its latest flowering,—­even noisier, even more bloody, of a bigger gloom.  In that immense noise, he said, was all Germany as it is now, as it will go on being till it wakes up from the nightmare dream of conquest that has possessed it ever since the present emperor came to the throne.

“I’m sure you’re saying things you oughtn’t to,” I said.

“Of course,” he said.  “One always is in Germany.  Everything being forbidden, there is nothing left but to sin.  I have yet to learn that a multiplicity of laws makes people behave.  Behave, I mean, in the way Authority wishes.”

“But Kloster says you’re a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you get does make you behave in the way Authority wishes.”