The weather is fiercely hot.  There’s a brassy sky without a cloud, and all the leaves of the trees in the Thiergarten are shiny and motionless as if they were cut out of metal.  A little haze of dust hangs perpetually along the Lindens and the road to Charlottenburg,—­not much of it, because the roads are too well kept, but enough to show that the troops never leave off tramping.  And all down where they pass, on each side, are the perspiring crowds of people, red and apoplectic with excitement and heat, women and children and babies mixed up in one heaving, frantic mass.  The windows of the houses on each side of the Brandenburger Thor are packed with people all day long, and the noise of patriotism doesn’t leave off for an instant.

It’s a very ugly noise.  The only place where I can get away from it—­and I do hate noise, it really hurts my ears—­is the bathroom here, which is a dark cupboard with no window, in the very middle of the house.  I thought it a dreadful bathroom when I first saw it, but now I’m grateful that it can’t be aired.  The house was built years and years before Germans began to wash, and it wasn’t till the Koseritzes came that a bath was wanted.  Then it had to be put in any hole, and this hole is the one place where there is silence.  Everywhere else, in every room in the house, it is as if one were living next door to a dozen public houses in the worst slums of London and it were always Saturday night.  I do think the patriotism of an unattacked, aggressive country is a hideous thing.

Bernd got me somehow through the crowd to the calmer streets on the way to Frau Berg.  He didn’t want me to go out at all, but I want to see what I can.  The Kaiser rushed through the Brandenburger Thor in his car as we went out.  You never saw such a scene as then.  It was frightening, like a mob of lunatics let loose.  Every time he is seen tearing along the streets there’s this wild scene, Bernd says.  He has suddenly leaped to the topmost top of popularity, for he’s the dispenser now of the great lottery in which all the draws are going to be prizes.  You know there isn’t a German, not the cleverest, not the most sober, who doesn’t regularly and solemnly buy lottery tickets.  Aren’t they, apart from all the other things they are, the funniest people.  So immature in wisdom, so top-heavy with dangerous knowledge that their youngness in wisdom makes them use wrongly.  If they hadn’t got the latest things in guns and equipment they would be quiet, and wouldn’t think of fighting.

Bernd made me promise to wait at Frau Berg’s till he could fetch me, and as he didn’t get back till two o’clock, and Frau Berg very amiably said I must be her guest at the well-known mid-day meal, I found myself once more in the bosom of the boarders.  Only this time I sat proudly on Frau Berg’s right, in the place of honour next to Doctor Krummlaut, instead of in the obscurity of my old seat at the dark end near the door.