United States or Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some one was twirling a French soldier's cap on a bayonet, we heard smothered yawns, the words "Russland," "Vaterland," and finally the infantry whistling in unison as they limped along. August 30th, Sunday. At two o'clock in the morning the whole family was aroused by a thundering rap from the butt of a gun on the big front entrance.
They flew in a wedge-shaped formation, the Vaterland highest and leading, the tail receding into the corners of the sky. They flew in long, regular undulations, great dark fish-like shapes, showing hardly any light at all, the engines making a throb-throb-throbbing sound that was very audible out on the gallery. They were going at a level of five or six thousand feet, and rising steadily.
The weight is about half that of the Vaterland, that is, it is nearly twice the weight of the men of the British standing army; and the usual speed is about, say, 15 knots.
Several of these guns, and especially that at Giffords and the one on Beacon Hill above Matawan, were remarkably well handled. The former, at a distance of five miles, and with an elevation of six thousand feet, sent a shell to burst so close to the Vaterland that a pane of the Prince's forward window was smashed by a fragment.
It was the voice of a fanatic intoning "Die Wacht am Rhein" of a zealot speaking for the whole embattled Vaterland. The situation was becoming farcical. "Nothing in the world, I assure you," I replied. "They are a simple, kindly people. They are musical. They have given the world Schiller, Goethe, the famous Kultur, and a new conception of the possibilities of war.
He perceived some difference on the Vaterland for which he could not account, and then he realised that the engines had slowed to an almost inaudible beat. He stuck his head out of the window it was a tight fit and saw in the bleak air the other airships slowed down to a scarcely perceptible motion. A second bugle sounded, was taken up faintly from ship to ship.
The American passengers appeared one and all to be rejoicing over the impotence of the great ship. Every one of them seemed to be violently pro-Ally, derisively conjecturing the feelings of the Vaterland as every day under her very nose British ships arrived and departed and presently arrived again, the same ships she had seen depart coming back unharmed, unhindered by her country's submarines.
They all tried to tell him at once, but Tiefel prevailed. "Because they were for making our country Austrian, my friend," he cried. "Because they were overbearing, and ground the poor. Because the most of them were immoral like the French, and we knew that it must be by morality and pure living that our 'Vaterland' was to be rescued. And so we formed our guilds in opposition to theirs.
It is neither a pretty nor an inspiriting story, this of the mangling of Germany by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago.
You will not think of us as foreign swill, but as patriots who love our new Vaterland even as you love it. You must come to our Turner Halls, where we are drilling against the time when the Union shall have need of us." "You are drilling now?" exclaimed Stephen, in still greater astonishment. The German's eloquence had made him tingle, even as had the songs.
Word Of The Day