It was in a restaurant a few hours later that I saw my first Iron Cross, black against a gray-green coat and dangling from a button. In _Bieber's_, a typical better class café of the new German type, luxurious with its marble walls and floors, and with little soft rugs underfoot and colored wicker tables and chairs, one felt the new spirit of this miracle of nations. On the broad landing of a wide marble staircase an orchestra played soldier songs and above the musicians, looking down on his people, loomed a bust of Wilhelm II, _Von Gottes Gnaden_, _Kaiser von Deutschland_. About him, between the flags of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, blazed the black, white and red, and there where all might read, hung the proclamation of August to the German people. We had read it through to the last line: "_Forward with God who will be with us as he was with our Fathers!_"--when we heard an excited inflection in the murmurings from the many tables--"_Das Eiserne Kreuz!_" And we saw the officer from whose coat dangled the black maltese cross, outlined in silver. His cheeks flushed, proud of a limping, shot-riddled leg, proud of his Emperor's decoration, but prouder still that he was a German; he must have forgotten all of battle and suffering during that brief walk between the tables. Cheers rang out, then a song, and when finally the place quieted everybody stared at that little cross of black as though held by some hypnotic power. So! We were Americans, he said when we finally were presented. That was good. We--that is--I had come to write of the war as seen from the German side. Good, _sehr gut_! He had heard the Allies, especially the English,--_Verfluchte Englanderschwein!_--were telling many lies in the American newspapers. How could any intelligent man believe them? In his zeal for the German cause his Iron Cross, his one shattered leg, the consciousness that he was a hero, all were forgotten. Of course I wanted to hear his story--the story of that little piece of metal hanging from the black and white ribbon on his coat--but tenaciously he refused. That surprised me until I knew Prussian officers. So we left the man with the Iron Cross, marveling not at his modesty but that it embodied the spirit of the German army; whereas I thought I knew that spirit. But not until the next night, when I left Hamburg behind, where every one was pretending to be busy and the nursemaids and visitors were still tossing tiny fish to the wintering gulls in the upper lake; not until the train was bringing me to Berlin did I understand what it meant. At the stations I went out and walked with the passengers and watched the crowds; I talked with a big business man of Hamburg--bound for Berlin because he had nothing to do in Hamburg; then it was I faintly began to grasp the tremendous emotional upheaval rumbling in every Germanic soul.