A CITY OF GLOOM AND SLACKNESS

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 130, 26 February 1920, Page 5

A CITY OF GLOOM AND SLACKNESS

(By tho Berlin Correspondent of the • "Daily Mail") Can you imagine a Guardsman in the old peace-time, splendour, of scarlet and bearskin, but with a three-days' beard, with his buttons dirty, stains and grease marks on his tunic, a badly mended tear in.his trousers, and his head-dress motheaten and shabby? Tho. first careless glanco might not observe these blotches on a formerly spick-and-span appearance, but once they -were noticed the contrast would make - a moro depressing figure than a beggar in rags and tatters. ' That is the impression Berlin makes to-day upon one who last saw it in the summer of 19U. Decayed splendour; neglected magnificonce; fly-blown pomp. To get. the effect in mind you must picture Buckingham Palace with a mud heap in the forecourt,' the railings gone rusty, and the broken window panes patched with cardboard.

No sooner have, you crossed the frontier than,the degeneration of the old national spirit of military punctuality and reverence for uniform and authority becomes plainly manifest. The German train service used to be conspicuous for exactitude, _ cleanliness, and elaborate organisation. Nowadays the only thing you can reckon on with certainty in your railway journey is that jour train will be several hours late. "Will there be a sleeping car? That depends—and no one seems to know on quite what it depends. Anyhow, it will be only a second-class sleeper, in which yon aro tucked with a, mutually resentful fellow-traveller into a space about, half that of a bathing van. "Fool-proof travelling" used to be a speciality of Germany. It needed as much deliberate effort to lose your luggage or. to get into a wrong train as was required in other countries to avoid such contingencies. You had not even to call a cab at,the station exit when you arrived. A policeman, would be there to hand you a metal check with the number of the cab you were to take, just os if you had been expected. A cabman who a6M for more than his proper faTe wou™ most likely havo been sent to a criminal lunaf.2 asylum. Times have changed. You struggle out of the Friedrichstrasse Station, the registered half of your, luggago having been lost somewhere on the journey, while the other half is pushed along on a truck by one of the rare porters whore service* you are. sharing with half a dozen other travellers. Personal search may result in ypur finding a taxicab; as likely as not it has iron rims to its wheels, and it certainly pours from its oxh'aust the dense fumes of some nauseous lubricant. "TJnter den Linden," you say-about a couplo of hundred yards away. Fifty marks," replies tho driver aggressively. And if you don't like paying, u nominal two pounds ten for a half-crown drive there is sure to be some hustling fcclueber, as tho Germans call their wa:- profiteers, who will seize on tho opportunity, leaving you to the aged driver of a ramshackle droschke whoso wizened horse shuffles dejectedly along the greasy streets, onco kept clenn as a quarterdeck but now black with muddy heaps of the snow that fell a fortnight baclt._ A city of gloom and slackness—that ia vrhat defeat has mnde of the once proud Berlin,