GERMANY AT HOME.

Grey River Argus, Volume X, Issue 837, 3 April 1871, Page 2

GERMANY AT HOME.

The following graphic picture of Germany in her widowhood and bereavement is furnished to the Nciv York World by a travelling contributor, who dates his communication from St. Goa, near Bingen, on the Rhine, on the Bth of October last :—

I want your readers to leave this war for awhile, or at least to leave its tented fields, and to come with me on what ought to be considered a pleasant excursion in these desperate times. I want to take them far away from the sounds and from the sights of strife to where the beautiful little village of St. Goa nestles amid the vine-covered slopes of the Rhine. If Bunyan had seen such a place we should have had the " Village Beautiful," as we have the "House Beautiful," in his glorious allegory. For in itself, as in its surroundings, it is all beauty. The sun has thrown its richest radiance over it to-day, and every bit of metal in the place, from the weathercock on the steeple to the well-worn latch on the pastor's gate, glows with the rich light of polished gold. We are in a country at war, I want you to remember, but we are far away from the war. There has been nothing to remind us of it in our lazy march up the pleasant hill. There will assuredly be nothing to remind us of it in St. Goa, where we are going to loiter until sundown and drink our flask of wine. It cannot be. Listen to the tinkling of the sheep-bells, the pleasant hum of the bees, the laughter of these little children playing: at "Franz and Anna" on the pathway to the river. It would be easy, sitting down on this broad stone, a good 600 yards away from the nearest house, to picture the life of our village before we have entered its only | street. It will be precisely as we found it some two years ago when we made that never-to-be-forgotten walking tour in the holidays. Herr Antmann will be sitting at his old fashioned writing desk by the •office window, alternately filling in one of his eternal Government returns, and leaning over into the garden in the most ungovernmental way in the world to get a new sigfht or scent of his unrivalled flowers. The village watchman-policeman, fireman-soldier— l don't know whether he is one or all— will be blinking up at the heavens in the attitude of attention, as if he were specially posted at the street corner to keep a watch on the vagaries of the sun. Mine host will be setting down his wine-glass to give the key-note for a Rhine chorns to half a dozen jolly fellows seated round a table in that cunningly contrived little arbor at the end of the gasthaus garden. The lumbering giant that digs the village graves and keeps the keys of the church, and performs I know not what other material services for relition *will be beating Herr Pastor's pulpit cushion at the chancel door ; and Fritz the blacksmith, with open treatise beside him, will be performing some delicate operation in veterinary surgery on the damaged fetlock of the counsellor's mare. The women will be spinning at their doors, or polishing the hereditary furniture for the sixteenth time within the week.

Alas for the faithfulness of our fancy picture. We have entered; the village, and the first person conspicuous by his absence is Herr Amtmann himself. The

desk is there by the open window, but where is the man 1 He has been gone away some weeks, you learn, to fill some subordinate official post in conquered Alsace, now colonised by a multitude of German clerks. The gasthaus is open, and we shall find plenty of good fellows there to compensate us for the loss of Herr Amtmann, who, for us free-and-easy rovers, was never more than an imposing picture at the best. But why is the little arbour so empty and so silent, and where 13 that leader of choruses, our social host? Oh, heavens ! we must not ask, for such a question might kill this woman in black, who walks with downcast head towards U3 with the tray of wine. " Killed before Paris, killed before Paris !" whispers an old broken-down man who puts up the nine-pins in the alley, and does all the odd jobs of the place. He left here last Sunday fortnight, and in ten days a letter came to tell us that he had been shot through the head at Villejuif. Ah, cursed war ! then it has reached our Village Beautiful after all. It has reached it, and it has marred its beauty ; for what is sunshine on the hill-tops when there is gloom in the hearts of women and men 1 The old hanger-on shall be our guide, and he shall tell us of all the misery that war has donein this distant place, where it would have seemed a crime to breathe its name. Our blacksmith, stout Fritz, is no longer doctoring ; he is being doctored-ior. a desperate hurt got in the first day's fighting at Sedan. The anvil is silent, the forge fire is out, and Fritz lies in the neat little chamber beyond the smithy, with two bullet-holes through the lungs that will 360n relieve the doctor of all care of him. The sexton was a krankentrager, and if you walk into that cottage by the church, where his mother lives, you may see a letter in his handwriting, dated Rezonville, in which he tells of such an enlargement of his professional ideas in the matter of grave-digging as throws you into a fit of hysterical laughter at the madness of men. Hans was used, as he reminds his good old mother, to fashion his "last houses" trimly and neatly, as befitted places destined for the reception of bodies that had once held a Christian soul ; " but now, ach, if you could only see the gutters into which we throw them ! And what help ? Why, only yesterday we had to cover up a good quarter o£ a mile of men."

Such are now the village sights and tales. Village sights there are none, or next to none. A blight has fallen on the place. It is a village of mourners for the dead. Every third or fourth person wears at least some great, weighty patch of • black, and some are clothed in it from head to foot. A woman in black, as we have seen, takes your order at the wineshop ; a woman in black looks out your letters at the npste restante ; and a poor forlorn creature, who would be clad in the garb of woe if she could afford it, brings the water from the stable-yard to rinse out the mouths of the diligence team. There is movement still in the little place, but it is movement without sound. It is a village of working mutes, and, with the exception of the children and the aged, all the mutes are women. Women bake and brew, and sweep for public as well as for private wants. They carry on most of the trades, and there is no horse-shoeing in the village now, for the simple reason that Frau Hofmeyer tried it, but had to give it up after laming a horse and nearly crushing her own hand.

Such is the meaning of the word "war" in Germany, for this village picture reproduced to scale would answer equally wall for the whole of the Fatherland. Glorious war, with its brilliant victories, has this actual meaning and signification for the bulk of the German folk. Every fresh bulletin of success is a fresh terror. Every post letter is.a new pang. Throughout the whole of the Rhine valley the wail of widows and orphans, the rueful grumblings of half-starved old men, are sickening and saddening to hear. Poll those to whom no existing constitution allows a voice in national affairs, and who yet, strangely enough, are intelligent human beings like ourselves — the women, I mean — and you wo\ild have a peace tomorrow. But take the sense of the few who are deputed to speak officially for all these sensitive, silent hearts, and of course the voice would be for war. And so the voice of Germany remains for war. You must still believe it, although you may have seen what I have seen, and heard what I have heard, in my wanderings through this country during the past few weeks. To see a nation in a warlike mood, and to believe that mood is a reality, and not a wretched assumption and a show, you must read its newspapers. There, I confess to you, the cause looks bravely enough. The leaders breathe martial rage and defiance even in the hour of defeat. The descriptive columns are all aglow with the reflected light from glittering bayonets and from polished casques. The veiy mortuary notices show a temper of stern resignation that bode 3 an eternal duration of the strife. But if you want to retain this impression, as I have said, you must take care never to lay your newspaper aside, and to look at the thing with your own eyes and listen to it with your own ears. For if you do, every passer-by on the street — nay, the very streets themselves — will give your old spirit-stirring ideas and notions the lie. "A sermon by Pastor Hochnuthiu aid of the fund for the relief of the sick." That announcement I humbly opine has the proper ring about it of endurance to the bitter end. It is not a protest by any means, but a kind of official sanctification of the strife. Herr Pastor must h^ve already made up his mind that it is lawful for a ma.n to get sick in such a cause, or he would not thus undertake to preach in his aid. Well, you read this, and you lay your newspaper aside with the consolatory reflection that the offering was no doubt equal to the urgency of the occasion, and there all your concern in the matter ends. But have you actually heard that sermon, or any sermon of the same kind, as I have lately in half score of villages like St. Goa ? Have you seen Herr. Pastor walk to his pulpit amid a congregation of bowed forms shaken by one universal sob ? Have you seen the little introductory hymn given up altogether midway in its execution as an impossible thing, by reason of the involuntary and most inartistic quavering of the voices of the singers ? Have you witnessed that most generous interruption to Herr Pastor's truthful and feeling description of the horrors of the last fight, caused by the young.girl there by the pulpit stair falling flat before the altar in a dead faint 1 Have you heard the discourse as it again moves along after '

this unfortunate interruption, punctuated — so to speak — with groans, not the revivalist groans of spiritual anguish, but the groanß of human sorrow for human suffering and human woe ? And lastly, have you se&n Herr Pastor himself, after manfully coughing through some interruptions and silently praying through others, fairly break down in the midst of a telling illustration of his third point, and, laying aside the authoritative Inne of the spiritual teacher, say| in "the ; pleasing broken accents of the soul-stricken man, "My children, forgive me. * cannot go on. You must finish the sermon for me in your own charitable hearts" ? Because, if you have not seen and heard all this, you will form but a very poor conception of the real meaning of the newspaper announcement that war. sermons are being preached from every pulpit in the Fatherland. "A national subscription for the sufferers by the war" has again a most calm, determined, formidable look. The rich giving of their abundance, and the poor of their need — jellies, lint, surgical baudagesj cigars, illustrated periodicals, dressing gowns, and boots and shoes — forwarded in splendid profusion to the hospital depots at the front. Very good, but this enumeration does not tell all. They meet a wonderful variety of wants, those subscriptions in time of war. What think you, for instance, of a'litfle village gathering of groschen for the supply of widows' weeds — or what answers to widows' weeds amongst us here ? There is a florid grimness in a public undertaking of this kind that lends a new aspect of terror to the demon of war. But it is all very natural if you will only give it a moment's thought. "Poor Hans was suddenly marched off from my 3ide the other day, to go and keep the ' Wacht am Rhein.' It proved a dead watch for him, and I, his poverty-stricken and most wre+ched widow, beside doing my best to hold him in sweet remembrance by my loving care of all his little household odds and ends, wish to carry about some public testimony of my heart's sorrow for him for all the world to see. To put it quite plainly to you well-to-do gentlemen, I want a black gown, no matter how coarse the stuff, and if you do not buy one for me I will scrape together and bny it myself, though I starved and my very children cry for food." .»

Have I wearied you by dwelling on these scenes ? Have 1 deceived you by asking you to follow me to a smiling village, and then unveiling before your eyes these scenes of woe ? I may have done so, but alas ! what choice have lin the matter? It happens to be my duty to give you some picture of the Fatherland, and I can show you nothing else but this were I to take you north, south, east, or west. At this present moment of writing — at this, great epoch of the national and ever-to-be-remembered war of 1870, what I have been feebly attempting to describe is the mighty German Fatherland. " Germany may be thankful," wrote a distinguished military critic the other day— summing up the situation,' no doubt, from the comfortable standpoint of his own hearth-rug — "that she has been spared the horrors cf war." Thankful to whom and for what 1 Well, thank you for nothing in any case, Germany might safely say. Go into her great towns, in Frankfort, Munich, Dresden, and even Berlin, and say if the state of suspended animation in which you find them does not constitute one of the horrors of war. See factories closed or keeping two machines going where they formerly kept ten ; women doing the work of men, and children the work of women ; the poor fed on . rations, and their numbers swelling frightfully from day to day ; the men hurrying in batches to the front, with here and there the grey hairs straggling from beveath the iron helmets, or the weakly knees of : ill-grown youth knocking together in the military boots ; the churches many of them deserted for want of pastors to officiate ; the. theatre playing only pieces in which one man can appear in three parts ; the hotels merely playing at keeping open, with their landlords for customers, or giving up the farce altogether and nailing their shutters up ; the hospitals with raw boys officiating in the operating room, these soon being drafted off daily as every fresh bulletin arrives. This is the. real state of Germany to-day. Make the best of it or the worst of it, enemies and friends.