You never saw anything like the streets yesterday.  They seemed full of drunken people, shouting up and down with red faces all swollen with excitement.  It is of course intensely interesting and new to me, who have never been closer to such a thing as war than history lessons at school, but what do they all think they’re going to get, what do they all think it’s really for, these poor creatures bellowing and strutting, and waving their hats and handkerchiefs, and even their babies, high over their heads whenever a konigliche Hoheit dashes past in a motor, which happens every five minutes because there are such a lot of them.  Our drive from Koseritz to Stettin on Monday, which now seems so remote that it is as if it was another life, was the last beautiful ordinary thing that happened.  Since then it has been one great noise and ugliness.  I can’t forget the look of the country as we passed through it on Monday, so lovely in its summer peacefulness, the first rye being cut in the fields, the hedges full of Traveler’s Joy.  I didn’t notice how beautiful it was at the time, I only wanted to get on, to get away, to get the news; but now I’m here I remember it as something curiously innocent, and I’m so glad we had a puncture that made us stop for ten minutes in a bit of the road where there were great cornfields as far as one could see, and a great stretch of sky with peaceful little white clouds that hardly moved, and only the sound of poplars by the roadside rustling their leaves with that lovely liquid sound they make, and larks singing.  It comforts me to call this up again, to hide in it for a minute away from the shouting of Deutschland uber Alles, and the hochs and yellings.  Then we got to Stettin; and since then I have lived in ugliness.

The Kaiser came back on Monday.  He had arrived in Berlin by the time we got here, and the Grafin’s triumphant calm visibly increased when the footman who met us at the station eagerly told her the news.  For this, as the papers said that evening, hardly able to conceal their joy beneath their pious hopes that the horrors of war may even yet be spared the world, reveals the full seriousness of the situation.  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.

Bernd was so dear, and oh it was such a blessing to be near him again!  But he was solemn, and didn’t smile at all except when he looked at me.  Then that dear smile that is so full of goodness changed his whole face.  “Oh Bernd, I do love you so much,” I couldn’t help whispering, leaning forward to do it regardless of Helena who sat next to him; and seeing by Helena’s stare that she had heard, and feeling recklessly cheerful at having got back to him, I turned on her and said, “Well, he shouldn’t smile at me in that darling way.”