Your letters have been following me about, to Koseritz and to Frau Berg’s, where of course you didn’t know I wouldn’t be.  I went to Frau Berg’s today and found your last two.  I love you, my precious mother, and thank you for all your dearness and sweet unselfish understanding about Bernd and me.  You have always been my closest, dearest friend, as well as my own darling mother.  I seem now to be living in a sort of bath of love.  Can anything more ever be added to it?  I feel as if I had reached the very innermost heart of happiness.  Wonderful how one carries about such a precious consciousness.  It’s like something magic and hidden that takes care of one, keeping one untouched and unharmed; while outside, day and night, there’s this terrible noise of a people gone mad.

You wrote to me last sitting under a cherry tree, you said, in the orchard at the back of your hotel at Glion, and you talked of the colour of the lake far down below through the leaves of walnut trees, and of the utter peace.  Here day and night, day and night, since Wednesday, soldiers in new grey uniforms pass through the Brandenburger Thor down the broad road to Charlottenburg.  Their tramp never stops.  I can see them from my window tramping, tramping away down the great straight road; and crowds that don’t seem to change or dwindle watch them and shout.  Where do the soldiers all come from?  I never dreamed there could be so many in the world, let alone in Berlin; and Germany isn’t even at war!  But it’s no use asking questions, or trying to talk about it.  I’ve found the word “Why?” in this house is not only useless but improper.  Nobody will talk about anything; I suppose they don’t need to, for they all seem perfectly to know.  They’re in the inner circle in this house.  They’re not the public.  The public is that shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves.  The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don’t know; an immense multitude of slaves,—­abject, greedy, pitiful.  I don’t think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing with joy because they think the great moment they’ve been taught to wait for has come, and they’re going to get suddenly rich, scoop in wealth from Russia and France, get up to the top of the world and be able to kick it.  That’s what I saw over and over again today as I somehow got through to Frau Berg’s to fetch your letters.  An ordinary person from an ordinary country wants to cover these heated elderly gentlemen up, and hide them out of sight, so shocking are they to one’s sense of respect and reverence for human beings.  Imagine decent citizens, paunchy and soft with beer and sitting in offices, wearing cheap straw hats and carefully mended and brushed black coats, dancing with excitement on the pavement; and nobody thinking it anything but fine and creditable, at the prospect of their children’s blood going to be shed, and everybody’s children’s blood, except the blood of those safe children, the children of the Hohenzollerns!