He was going home at evening humming ``God Save the King.’’

The Punishment

An exhalation arose, drawn up by the moon, from an old battlefield after the passing of years.  It came out of very old craters and gathered from trenches, smoked up from No Man’s Land, and the ruins of farms; it rose from the rottenness of dead brigades, and lay for half the night over two armies; but at midnight the moon drew it up all into one phantom and it rose and trailed away eastwards.

It passed over men in grey that were weary of war; it passed over a land once prosperous, happy and mighty, in which were a people that were gradually starving; it passed by ancient belfries in which there were no bells now; it passed over fear and misery and weeping, and so came to the palace at Potsdam.  It was the dead of the night between midnight and dawn, and the palace was very still that the Emperor might sleep, and sentries guarded it who made no noise and relieved others in silence.  Yet it was not so easy to sleep.  Picture to yourself a murderer who had killed a man.  Would you sleep?  Picture yourself the man that planned this war!  Yes, you sleep, but nightmares come.

The phantom entered the chamber. ``Come,’’ it said.

The Kaiser leaped up at once as obediently as when he came to attention on parade, years ago, as a subaltern in the Prussian Guard, a man whom no woman or child as yet had ever cursed; he leaped up and followed.  They passed the silent sentries; none challenged and none saluted; they were moving swiftly over the town as the felon Gothas go; they came to a cottage in the country.  They drifted over a little garden gate, and there in a neat little garden the phantom halted like a wind that has suddenly ceased. ``Look,’’ it said.

Should he look?  Yet he must look.  The Kaiser looked; and saw a window shining and a neat room in the cottage:  there was nothing dreadful there; thank the good German God for that; it was all right, after all.  The Kaiser had had a fright, but it was all right; there was only a woman with a baby sitting before the fire, and two small children and a man.  And it was quite a jolly room.  And the man was a young soldier; and, why, he was a Prussian Guardsman, —­ there was his helmet hanging on the wall, —­ so everything was all right.  They were jolly German children; that was well.  How nice and homely the room was.  There shone before him, and showed far off in the night, the visible reward of German thrift and industry.  It was all so tidy and neat, and yet they were quite poor people.  The man had done his work for the Fatherland, and yet beyond all that had been able to afford all those little knickknacks that make a home so pleasant and that in their humble little way were luxury.  And while the Kaiser looked the two young children laughed as they played on the floor, not seeing that face at the window.