GERMANY AT HOME.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 74, 29 March 1871, Page 4

GERMANY AT HOME.

o The following graphic picture of Germany in her widowhood and bereavement is furnished to the New 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, 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 wine-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 wo are far away from the war. There has been nothing to remind us of it in our lazy march up this 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. Ifc 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" in the pathway to the river. It would be easy, sitting down ou this broad stone, a good \soo' 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 Aye found it some two years ago when we made* that never-to-be-forgotten walking tour in the holidays. Hern Amtmann 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 sight or scent of his unrivalled flowers. The village-watchman-poiiceman-fireman-soldier — I don't know whether he is one or all — will be blinking up at the heavens in the attitude of attention, as if lie" were specially posted at the street corner to keep a watcli on the vagaries of the sun. Mine host will be setting down his wine-glass to give the key-note for a Rhine chorus to half-a-dozen jolly fellows seated round a table in that cunningly-contrived little arbour at the end of the gasthaus garden. Tho lumbering giant that digs the valley graves and keeps the keys of the church, and performs I know not what other material services for religion, will be beating Herr Pastor's pulpit cushion at the chancel door, and Fritz, the blacksmith, with open treaties beside him will be performing some delicate operation in veterinary surgeiy on the damaged fetlock of the councillor'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 ? He has beeu gone away some six 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 is tho great leader of choruses, our social host ? Oh, heavens ! we must not ask, fur such a question might kill this woman in black, who walks with downcast head towards us 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 10 days a letter came to tell that he had been shot Uirough the head at Villojuif. 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. The old hanger-on shall be our guide, and he shall tell us of all the misery that war had done in this distant place, where it would have seemed a crime to breathe ils name. Our blacksmith, stout Fritz, is no longer doctoring ; he is being doctored for 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-hoks through the lungs that will soon relieve the doctor of all care for him. The sexton was a krankentragpr, and if you walk into that cottage by the church, where his mother lives, you may see a letter in his handwriting, dated Bezonville, 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 o^men. Hans was used, as he reminds Ms 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, nch, if you could only see the gutters into which we throw them ! And what help ? Why. only yesterday we had fio cover up a- good quarter of a mile of men." J Such are now thfK 'village sights and tales. Village sights ifhere are none, or next to none. A/bli2h| had fallen on the place. It is a izefllasre 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 wine shop ; a woman in black looks out your letters at the paste restnvfe ; 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 tho mouths of the diligence team. There is movement still in the little place, but it is movement without sound. It is a village of work in jj mutes, and, with i]\r> exception of the children nnd tho atred, nil 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 done 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 well for the whole of the. Fatherland. Glorious war, with its brilliant victories, has this actual meaning and significance for the bulk of the German folk". Eveiy fresh bulletin of success is a fresh terror. Every post letter is a new pang. Throughout the whole of the Rhine valley theVafl of widows and orphans, the rueful grumblings of half-starved old men, are sickening aud 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 would 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, although you ma)' - have seen what I have seen and heard what I have heard in my wanderings through this country during the past few days. 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 very mortuary notices show a temper of stern resignation that bodes an eternal duration to the strife. But if you want to retain this impression, as I have said, you must take care never to lay your newspapers aside and to look at the thing with your own eyes and to 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. " • ' To be concluded in our next.