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VILLA ELSA

_A Story of German Family Life_

BY

STUART HENRY


NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE


COPYRIGHT 1920, BY
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All Rights Reserved_

_Printed in the United States of America_




TO

Pat and Anna

IN LOVING TOKEN OF OUR WINTER'S
CONVERSATIONS ON THE GERMANS




FOREWORD


This narrative offers a gentle but permanent answer to the problem
presented to humanity by the German people. It seeks to go beyond
the stage of indemnities, diplomatic or trade control, peace by
armed preponderance. These agencies do not take into account Teuton
nature, character, manner of living, beliefs.

Unless the Germans are changed, the world will live at swords'
points with them both in theory and in practice. Whether they are
characteristically Huns or not, it should be tragically realized
that something ought to be done to alter their type. Their minds,
hearts, souls, should be touched in a direct, personal, intimate
way. There should be a natural relationship of good feeling, an
intelligent and _lived_ mutual experience, worked up, brought
about. A League of Nations, of Peace, inevitably based on some sort
of force, should be followed by a truly human programme leading to
the amicable conversion of that race, if it is at heart unrepentant,
crafty, murderous.

In the absence of any particular heed being paid to this underlying,
fundamental subject, the present pages suggest for it a vital
solution that seems both easy and practical and would promise to
relieve anxiety as to an indefinitely uncertain, ugly future ahead
of harassed mankind.

How shall the German be treated in the present century and beyond?

To try to answer this aright, it is obviously necessary to know what
the German is--what he is really like. To know him at his best, in
his truest colors, is to live with him in his most normal condition,
and that is at his fireside, surrounded by his family. This aspect
has been the least fully presented during the war. What the Teuton
military and political chieftains, clergymen, professors, captains
of industry, editors and other men of position have said, how they
have conducted themselves toward the rest of humanity, is
notoriously and distressingly familiar. But what the ordinary,
educated German of peaceful pursuits, staying by his hearthstone
far behind and safe from the battle line, thought and wished to
say, has been beyond our ken. There has been no way to get at him
or hear from him as to what lay frankly in his mind.

His leaders loudly proclaimed themselves to be as terrifying as Huns
and unblushingly gloried in this profession. Has he agreed or has he
silently disagreed? Has he too wished this or has he been unwilling?
Is he essentially a Hun, are his family essentially Huns, or are
they in reality good and kindly people like our people? Are they
temporarily misled?

The humble German families of education who are hospitable, who sing
and weep over sentimental songs in their homes, whose duties are
modest and revenues small, who have never been out of their
provinces, who have had no relations with foreigners and could have
no personal cause for hatred--have they been so bloodthirsty about
killing and pillaging in alien lands?

Villa Elsa contains a family immune from any foreign influence and
matured in the most regular and unsuspecting Teuton way. The German
household is the most thoroughly instructed of all households. Its
members are disciplined to do most things well. How can it then be
Hun in any considerable degree? Impossible, said the nations, and so
they remained illy prepared against a frenzied onslaught. But a
shocked public has beheld how readily the most erudite of mankind,
as the Germans were generally held to be, could officially,
deliberately and repeatedly as soldiers, singly and _en masse_,
act like their ancestors--the barbarians of the days of Attila.

These are all puzzling queries which this story attempts to
illuminate and solve by its pictures and observations of the
life of such a modest and typical Teuton home in 1913 and 1914.
Admittedly too much light, too much study, cannot be given to
the greatest issue civilization as a whole has faced.

Villa Elsa is but Germany in miniature. In the significant
character, habits and activities of this household may be found
the true pith and essence of real Germanism as normally developed.
This Germanism appears ready to continue after the War to be the
malignant and would-be assassin of other civilizations. It is,
therefore, tragically important to find and act on the right
answer to the question:

Is there any possible way to make the Germans become true,
peace-loving friends with us--with the rest of mankind?




CONTENTS


CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD vii

I. TRIUMPHANT GERMANY IN 1913 1

II. DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES 6

III. GARD KIRTLEY 11

IV. VILLA ELSA 19

V. FAMILY LIFE 29

VI. THE HOME 36

VII. GERMAN LOVING 46

VIII. GERMAN COURTSHIP 54

IX. A JOURNALIST 64

X. SPIES AND WAR 71

XI. GERMAN WAYS 78

XII. HABITS AND CHILDREN 86

XIII. DOWN WITH AMERICA! 94

XIV. AFTERMATH 106

XV. MILITARY BLOCKHEADS 113

XVI. A LIVELY MUSICIAN 120

XVII. IMMORALITY AND OBSCENITY 125

XVIII. THE NAKED CULT 134

XIX. JIM DEMING OF ERIE, PAY 145

XX. AN AMERICAN VICTORY 152

XXI. A PEOPLE PECULIAR OR PAGAN? 160

XXII. MAKING FOR WAR 168

XXIII. SOCIAL ETIQUETTE 178

XXIV. THE COURT BALL 186

XXV. FRITZI AND ANOTHER CONVERSATION 192

XXVI. SOME OF THE LESS KNOWN EFFICIENCY 200

XXVII. THE IMPERIAL SECRET SERVICE 210

XXVIII. JIM DEMING'S FATE 218

XXIX. WINTER AND SPRING 229

XXX. VILLA ELSA OUTDOORS 238

XXXI. A CASUAL TRAGEDY 247

XXXII. A GERMAN MARRIAGE PROPOSAL 256

XXXIII. A WAITRESS DANCE 263

XXXIV. CHAMPAGNE 272

XXXV. RECUPERATION 279

XXXVI. THE GERMAN PROBLEM. AN ANSWER 285

XXXVII. A GERMAN "GOTT BE WITH YE" 294

XXXVIII. A JOURNEY 302

XXXIX. THE TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE 313

XL. THE END OF A LITTLE GAME 323

XLI. ARE THEY HUNS? 329

XLII. THE ANTI-CHRISTIANS? 336

XLIII. THE TEUTON PROBLEM. A SOLUTION 347




VILLA ELSA

CHAPTER I

TRIUMPHANT GERMANY IN 1913


In the late summer of 1913 a quiet American college man of
twenty-three, tall, lean, somewhat listless in bearing, who had
been idling on a trip in Germany without a thought of adventure,
was observing, without being able to define or understand, one of
the most remarkable conditions of national and racial exhilaration
that ever blessed a country in time of ripest peace.

He had never been out of America, and supposed his Yankee people,
with all their wide liberty, contemplated life with as much
enjoyment as any other. But in that land which is governed with
iron, where (as Bismarck said) a man cannot even get up out of his
bed and walk to a window without breaking a law, Gard Kirtley was
finding something different, strange, wonderful, in the way of
marked happiness. It pulsated everywhere, in every man, woman and
child. It seemed to be a sensation of victory, yet there had been
no victory. It appeared to reflect some mighty distinctive human
achievement or event of which a whole race could be proud in
unison. There had been nothing of the sort.

And yet it was there, a certain exuberance. The people, with heads
carried high, quickly moving feet and pockets full of money, were
enlivened by a public joyousness because they were humans and,
above all, because they were Germans. It seemed a joy of human
prestige, of wholesale well-being, of an assuredly auspicious
future. Multitudes of toasts were being drunk. The marching and
counter-marching of soldiers looked excessive even for Germany. A
season of patriotic holidays was apparently at hand. Festivals,
public rites, celebrated the widespread exultation. The whole
country conducted itself as on parade, _en fete_.

Wages were higher and comforts greater than ever known there. For
the first time chambermaids often drank champagne and wore on their
heads lop-sided creations of expensive millinery with confident
awkwardness--creations which they said came from Paris. The chimney
sweeps had high hats and smoked good tobacco which they may have
thought came from London. For the imported was the high water mark
of plenty in Germany as always elsewhere, though she claimed to make
the best goods.

The scene should not be painted in too high colors--colors too
fixed. To the careless observer it doubtless appeared little
different from the annual flowering forth of the German race in
its short summer season. Always at that time were the open gardens
lively, the roses blooming with the crude, dense hues that the
Teutons like, and all the folk pursuing their busy tasks and
vigorous pleasures with a sort of goose-step alacrity.

But the closer, more sensitive onlooker felt something more in
1913--something widely organized, unified, puissant, imperial
indeed, such as, he may have imagined, had not existed since the
days of the great emperors in Rome. What the Germans told all comers
was that they had the best of governments, and that no nation had
been so thoroughly, soundly and extensively prosperous.

For each citizen read in his daily paper of successful and growing
Teuton activities in the most distant parts of the earth--in ports,
regions and among peoples whose names he had never heard before and
could not pronounce. At breakfast his capacious paunch and his
wife's fat, flowing bosom expanded with pride in hearing of some new
far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany
brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's
safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and
strength. Never had investments brought the German such high
rates. Never had speculation been so rife and withal so uniformly
profitable.

As for industry, Deutschland was a colossal beehive. If Frederick
the Great started the beehive, William the Second was increasing its
size to unbelievable proportions. Insignificant villages everywhere
contained millions of dollars' worth of machinery, manufacturing
goods of untold value. Not an ounce of energy, not a second of time,
seemed to be lost in the Empire. Every German was a busy cog fitted
precisely into the whole national plant.

It was as if the Teuton knew that other races must soon stand with
their backs to the wall and that now was the moment to redouble
effort to capture still more trade and reduce the rest of the world
to an acknowledged state of submission.




CHAPTER II

DEUTSCHLAND UEBER ALLES


Thus the Germans, in 1913, felt how supreme their country was or was
speedily becoming. Not only their newspapers but their educators,
their pastors and, more than all, their military and political
leaders told them that a place above the rest of mankind had been
reached. The pride, the assurance, pervading the land was the stiff
and hardy efflorescence of this universal conclusion. And the
Teutons had earned and therefore merited it all, for no one,
nothing, scarcely even Nature, had lent a helping hand.

German women knew they were the best housekeepers, wives, mothers,
dressers, dancers. Never had they been so to the fore. Never had
they had so much money to spend for clothes. Never had they
promenaded so proudly to martial music or waltzed so perspiringly
with the fashion-plate officers whom they adored.

The children were paragons of diligence and promise. In their school
books and college text books everything German was lauded in the
superlative; everything foreign was decried as inferior,
undesirable. Nearly every human discovery, invention, improvement,
was somehow traced to a Teuton origin. Even characteristic German
vices were held to be better than many virtues in other lands.

The young person grew up to believe that the Rhine was the finest of
rivers, the mountains of the Fatherland were the most celebrated in
song and story, its lakes the most picturesque, its soil the best
tilled. He was properly stuffed with the indomitable conviction, the
aggressive obsession, that the fittest civilization _must_ prevail.

And the army! Always the army--that bulwark, that invincible force!
Hundreds of thousands of civilians apparently regretted they were
not back in the barracks, following the noblest of occupations as
soldiers for the supreme War Lord. The army represented admitted
perfection. Foreign observers were united in naively attesting its
impeccableness. It was ready to the last shoe button, to the last
twist of its waxed mustache. But ready for what? Few outside of
Germany appeared to think of asking. The army was taken to be simply
Teuton life and of no more ulterior significance than the national
beer.

The admission was also general at home and abroad that the German
Government was the most free from graft and the most thorough. In
Germany the kings and princes were paid homage as models of wisdom
and virtue, and the Kaiser was believed to be walking with God, hand
in hand, palm to palm. In token of the mystic union between Emperor
and people, Hohenzollern monuments were seen rising in all parts of
the Empire in greater quantity, amid greater thanksgivings. These
_Denkmals_ were growing huger, more thunderous in appearance, and
served the double purpose of keeping the populace in a state of
admiring, unquestioning awe and expressing fulminating Bewares! to
other races. In every home, factory, retail shop, public place, was
the Kaiser's picture, with his trellised mustache, and his devout
eyes cast with a chummy comradeship up to heaven.

All the foregoing explanations accounted in part for a glorious
increase in noise among a people that does everything loudly. The
national noisiness was harmonized somewhat by innumerable bands and
orchestras. Public balls seemed to have become the order of the
night, and the famous forests by day were filled by echoes of the
horns of the bloody chase--the _cors de chasse_ of the legendary
Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder
of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big
marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish
angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting
Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the
hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of
their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it
was proper to gorge themselves like the human gods they were. Even
the most servile took on a conscious air of being of a regal
species.

In this wise, the German, like Cain, the competent iron-worker, was
treading the earth with resounding footsteps. Over his bullneck and
under his spiked hat he had naturally come to look upon himself as a
super-being. While the American watched ball games, the Englishman
played golf and the Frenchman wrote to his loved one, the Teuton was
keeping himself hardened for war, and toiling like the systematic
beaver in up-building national industries that were so swiftly
dominating all others. To say the least, this intense people were
strenuously perfecting an intensive and powerful civilization such
as never had been seen.

So--as Gard Kirtley was finding and yet failing to explain to
himself--expectancy, undescribable and splendid, was in the air
beyond the Rhine. And there was one special toast drunk to it all
with ever more loudly clinking glasses--Der Tag! Such was triumphant
Germany, the triumphant Vaterland, in 1913--foretasting a portentous
future; pregnant with colossal success; swollen with a hundred years
of victories and growth; as sure of its prowess and might as were
the swaggering gods of its Valhallas.

Imperial Deutschland ueber Alles!




CHAPTER III

GARD KIRTLEY


Into this Triumphant Germany young Kirtley had come to recuperate
from the sadness over the loss, the previous year, of his parents
and from a siege of sickness. Still somewhat pale, somewhat weak, he
showed the shock he had undergone. He had toured across southern
Germany and up to Berlin where he had bidden good-by to his chance
American traveling companion, Jim Deming, who was knocking about
Italy and Teutonland. They had exchanged final addresses.

Kirtley, clean-shaven, with pleasant brown eyes, and brown hair
brushed down flat, giving his head the appearance of smallness,
looked very lank and Yankeeish among the robust, fat Teutons of the
Saxon capital. He was entering Dresden on a late afternoon brown
with German sunshine. The school year had begun, but a loitering
summer-time brightened city and countryside. As he made his way
slowly through the throng at the station, he gave evidence of a
rather shy way of looking up and about, an apologetic readiness
to step aside, to yield place, not characteristic of the speedy
American in Europe. He had not, as we have said, come to Germany
for adventure. He had not come merely to idle for the winter. And
certainly he little mistrusted he was finally to figure as a modest
hero in a curious and dangerous experience that linked itself up
with the beginning of the war of which he, like the world at large,
felt not the slightest premonition.

His German teacher had been his favorite in his eastern college
where he had one season been a very fair halfback. His better
showing had exhibited itself in his ability to throw from left field
to home plate on the ball team. This American preceptor of German
parentage had taken an interest in Kirtley with the insistent way of
Teutonic pedagogues. Always commending with a uniform vigor the
Germans and German fashions of living, he had gradually filled Gard
full of the idea of their excelling merits.

Kirtley heard of the tonic of the nutritious Teuton beer and Teuton
music in overflowing measures. In the Kaiser's realm, it appeared,
the digestions are always good. How desirable it would be for Gard
to take on some flesh in the German manner! In that climate,
Professor Rebner claimed with assurance, although he had never been
abroad, one can eat and drink his fill without causing the human
system to rebel as it is apt to in our dry, high-strung America. His
pupil's appetite would come back. Hearty meals of robust cheese and
sausages would be craved with an honest, clamorous hunger that meant
foolish indelicacy here at home.

Rebner also urged that Gard could in Deutschland improve his German
which, notwithstanding his affection for his preceptor, was
indifferent. Its gutturalness grated on his nerves, antagonized him.
But he criticized himself for this, not the language. Had not his
old mentor always sung of the superiorities of that tongue?

Kirtley could improve, too, his fingering on the piano by
familiarizing himself with the noble melodies that flooded the
German land. Two hairy hands would go up in exultation,

"To hear Beethoven and Wagner in their own country, filling the
atmosphere with their glories! And then Goethe and Schiller. Those
mighty deities. To read them in their own home!"

But the greatest thing, to the old professor's mind, would be to
behold the German people themselves, study them, profit by them in
their preeminence. What an example, what an inspiration, what a
grand symphony of concentrated harmony! Germany was the source of
Protestantism and therefore of modern morals--honest, uncompromising
morals. German discipline would have a bracing, solidifying effect
on a typically casual, slack American youth like Gard, whose latent
capabilities were never likely to be fully called upon in the
comparatively hit-and-miss organization of Yankee life.

For he had not yet begun to find himself. He had not even decided on
a calling at an age when the German is almost a full-fledged
citizen, shouldering all the accompanying obligations. Kirtley's
exemplary conduct and the gravity cast over him by the death of his
loved ones, had led him to think a little of Rebner's suggestions
about the ministry. And for this, Luther's country would be expected
to be sublime.

The loudly reiterated praise of Germany and the Germans had at last
produced the desired effect on Gard. He was prevailed upon to break
away from the old associations, go abroad for a year and get a fresh
and stout hold on the future. Rebner, through his connections, had
been able to arrange for a home in Saxony for his pupil's sojourn.
It was in "a highly estimable and well-informed family" who had
never taken a paying guest. Although a new experience for them, they
had urgently insisted that they would do everything they could to
make his stay agreeable and beneficial. This was deemed most lucky.
For the real German character and existence could there be observed
and lived with the best profit, uncontaminated by the intermixture
of doubtful foreign associations.

And so Gard had arrived in Dresden, in whose attractive suburb of
Loschwitz, on the gently rising banks of the Elbe, the worthy
Buchers were domiciled. As his limping German did not give him
confidence about the up-and-down variety of the Saxon dialect, he
did not venture this afternoon to find his way by tram to the house.
The blind German script in which his hosts' solicitous and minute
instructions were couched, and the funny singsong of the natives
talking blatantly about him, made him feel still more helpless. He
sought refuge in an open droschke. He could then, too, enjoy the
drive across the city.

The Saxon capital sits capaciously like a comfortable old dowager
fully dressed in stuffs of a richly dull color. Her thick skirts are
spread about her with a contented dignity which does not interfere
with her eating large sandwiches openly and vigorously at the opera.
To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a
becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through
the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park,
all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal
palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet
lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor Gard knew.

The dingy baroque architecture, whose general tastelessness was
heavily banked up by a multitude of towers, gables and high copings,
suggested an old-fashioned residential city of the days of urban
fortifications. The uniform arrays of buildings, all pretending to
the effect of sumptuousness thickened by weighty proportions and
blasphemed by rococo hesitations and doubts, seemed constructed to
exalt the doughty glory of Augustus the Strong--Dresden's local
Thor, its chief heroic figure in the favorite Teuton galaxy of
muscled Titans. Somber medieval squares, blocked away quaintly from
the world, were relieved by the celebrated Bruehl Terrace, enlivened
by gilded statuary and by historic and literary memories.

Through all this metropolis of formidable and dun respectability
curved the Elbe as if to round off the massive imitations of
something better somewhere else. Hither coursed the smooth brown
stream from Bohemia, not far away, through the high fastnesses of
the Erz range and the groomed vistas of Saxon Switzerland, and past
the frowning old fortress of Koenigstein, towering near a thousand
feet above its untroubled bosom. Kirtley was to find the river, with
its carefully tended shores, a companion in many an hour.




CHAPTER IV

VILLA ELSA


Such in brief was the scene that stretched out around him and
enveloped his attention and interest. There was not majesty that
would offend, but rather a cosy formality that is the absence of
style. It cured somewhat the homesick inclinations that quite
naturally haunted him after a wearying day of travel and as
nightfall drew down about his loneliness. He was bound for the
home of a strange family, speaking a tongue in which he was far
from glib. It had been written, though, that the Bucher young
people had learned English pretty well at school.

Kirtley reached his destination to find that the parents were
waiting expectantly to receive him. With German consciousness, they
were stuffily attired for this novel and important event. After
staunch greetings he was led into the house past a big angry dog
that stood guard tempestuously at the door. Gard found later that
such savage barking was quite a feature of the Teuton threshold, and
might be considered one bristling aspect or cause of the ungenial
development of the social spirit in Germany. _Cave canem_ can hardly
be called a suitable first attraction toward the spread of
hospitality. He feared he was going to be bitten and wished his
welcome had not been complicated with shudders.

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