Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and HeardMcAuley, Mary Ethel
History
Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard
McAuley, Mary Ethel
World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany
If you are too lazy to walk around Berlin, you can ride around on the
city elevated, taking the train at the Potsdam Station. At this station
you can nearly always see prisoners--Arabs, Englishmen, French--waiting
to be taken out to Zossen, the great prison camp near Berlin. This
station is surrounded by coal yards, and last winter when it was so
hard to get any coal delivered, I often felt like getting out here and
stealing a lump.
[Illustration: _Entrance to the New Underground Railway Built Since the
War._]
At no time in the day can you ride around the loop without seeing a
troop train. There is always a troop train flying by. Very gay trains
with shouting soldiers hanging out of the windows and doors. All waving
and crying _Auf Wiedersehen_! That means "Till we meet again," but many
of them never come back.
Beside the soldier trains are the freight trains and the funny things
they haul: Parts of aeroplanes with the wings marked with the Iron
Cross; parts of undersea-boats; sleds for the winters in Russia--the
kind you see pictures of in story books, and then cannons, automobiles,
little field-kitchen wagons--everything painted gray--"field-gray."
Near the Charlottenburg Station is a _Mittelstandsküche_ or a
middle-class kitchen. These kitchens have been established all over
Berlin since the war, and here one can get a good meal for eighty
pfennigs.
[Illustration: _Café Victoria, Corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter Den
Linden._]
If you get off the elevated at the Lehrte Station you are in
Alt-Moabit. Near the station is the great civil prison of Berlin. It
is built like a star with five arms running out from a center. It makes
one think of an octopus. Here the spies, the offending editors and the
troublesome socialists are imprisoned. Liebknecht is here. I knew the
prison pastor, a young man named Dr. Klatt. Dr. Klatt wanted to go to
the front, but he is so useful here that they will not let him go. He
is the go-between for the prisoners and the outside world. Some of the
prisoners begged to be allowed to go to fight for their country, and
Dr. Klatt helped these men to get free. He says there is a tremendous
amount of patriotism among the prisoners.
Near the prison is a great red barracks. It is so long that one can
scarcely see from one end to the other. There are always soldiers at
the windows, and if you look their way at all, they are very apt to
call _Guten Tag_. At the far end of the building there is a path-way,
and no matter at what time of the day you go there you can see hundreds
of new recruits coming out. They have not received their uniforms as
yet, and they have on old clothes, and most of them carry boxes in
their hands. Two hundred of them come at a time, six abreast, and when
they have reached the gateway as far back as you can see, a second
batch appears. This lasts as long as you stand there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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