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I like the "even yet," don't you? Bernd was at the station, and drove with us to the Sommerstrasse. We went along the Dorotheenstrasse, at the back of Unter den Linden, as the Lindens were choked with people. It was impossible to get through them. They were a living wedge of people, with frantic mounted policemen trying to get them to go somewhere else.
"And if," she said, her eyes flashing, "owing to his high years his regiment was no longer able to accept his heroic leadership, he would, I know, proceed secretly to France as an assassin, and bomb the infamous Poincare, bomb him in the name of our Kaiser, of our Fatherland, and of our God." "Amen," said Frau Berg, very loud. I flew to Bernd when he came.
I went out after lunch and lay in the meadow by the water's edge with a book I didn't read, the same meadow Bernd and I anchored our fishing boat at only the day before yesterday, but really ten years ago, and I lay so quiet that the cows forgot me, and came and scrunched away at the grass quite close to my head.
"Take that woman's hand off your arm, Herr Leutnant," said the Colonel sharply. Bernd gently put my hand off, and I put it back again. "We are going to be married," I said to the Colonel, "and perhaps I may not see Bernd for a long while after tonight." "No German officer marries an alien enemy," snapped out the Colonel. "Remove the woman's hand, Herr Leutnant."
Koseritz, Sunday evening, July 19, 1914. My own darling mother, I don't know what you'll say, but I'm engaged to Bernd. That's Herr von Inster. You know his name is Bernd? I don't know what to say to it myself. I can't quite believe it.
I listened, trying to understand, trying to give all my attention to it and disentangle it, while my heart was thumping so because of Bernd. For I was being turned out in disgrace, and I am his betrothed, and so I am his honour, and whatever of shame there is for me there is of shame for him. The Grafin got more and more unsteady in her voice as she went on.
Kloster and Bernd are the two solitary sane and wise people I know here in this place of fever, the two I trust, to whom I say what I really think and feel, and I went to Kloster yesterday athirst for wisdom, for that detached, critical picking out one by one of the feathers of the imperial bird, the Prussian eagle, that I find so wholesome, so balance-restoring, so comforting, in what is now a very great isolation of spirit.
"Oh, Bernd he is in love," said the Grafin, smiling. "I don't quite see " I began. "Lovers always exaggerate," she said. "Russia and France will not interfere in so just a punishment." "But is it just?" I asked. She gazed at me critically at this. It was not, she evidently considered, a suitable remark for one whose business it was to turn into an excellent little German.
How funny that room at Frau Berg's will look and feel after being here. But I don't mind going back to it one little half a scrap. Bernd will be in Berlin; he'll be writing to me, seeing me, walking with me. With him there it will be, every bit of it, perfect. "When I come back to town in October," the Grafin said to me, "you must stay with us.
It is a sort of deep-down discomfort of spirit, the discomfort of disagreement in fundamentals. "Then there'll be war?" I said to the Grafin, staring at her placid face, and not a bit pleased about being going to be an excellent little German. "Oh, a punitive expedition only," she said. "Bernd thought it would mean Russia and France and you as well," I said.
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