In the morning I had a peculiarly disagreeable experience at Lohne,
some distance from the German frontier, where we had again to
change trains en route to the capital. Experience had by this time
taught me, when thrown with people on the road, to show them my
papers and make my identity known as soon as possible.
I therefore clung pretty closely to my argumentative German
acquaintance of Bentheim and Aix. During the melee of changing
cars I was, however, separated from him, and became engaged in
conversation (spoken in English) with a Dutch chocolate merchant.
The argument must have been interesting, for I did not at first notice a
crowd of twenty or thirty travelers and villagers gathering around us: I
did, however, notice when they began to push and jostle in a manner
obviously intended for insult. When I tried to retreat the exits were
locked. The crowd, convinced that I was an English spy, closed more
compactly and manhandled me off toward an officer on the street
behind the platform. My hat was knocked off, and for a brief moment I
recalled the lynching anger which I had seen in the eyes of Belgian
mobs, as German spies in Antwerp were being led to the police
station.
At the last moment my rescuer came in the shape of the German
friend of Bentheim, who broke through the mob and whispered in my
ear, "Speak German. Always speak in German, you fool!"
I admitted the soft impeachment.
"Ich bin ein Amerikaner--ein correspondent," I explained to the row
of angry faces; and while my German friend soothed and reassured
his testy compatriots, I moved away, glad enough to escape another
visit to jail. Those personally conducted jail tours were not so bad, I
had found, with a handsome gendarme at your side; but a howling
crowd was altogether another matter.
I reached the capital that night. One of my letters says, a few days
later:--
"The atmosphere is oppressive to the Anglo-Saxon visitor. His looks,
his manner, his accent betray him as one of the English-speaking
pest, and the crowd, with its mind so full of English hatred, does not
readily distinguish the American. So drop into a word of English in a
cafe: your neighbor glowers and draws away. You face it out with a
nonchalant air, but gradually the tension grows, especially when, as
happened to-day at the prisoners' camp at Zossen, twenty miles
south of Berlin, a great burly Prussian puts a menacing eye on you
and says, without introduction: 'It is very dangerous for an
Englishman here!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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