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386 WITH THE GERMAN ARMIES IN THE WEST
seat of war. But the world will be deceived and is deceived.
Hence the educators of the British nation spread broadcast
the meanest calumnies concerning the " Huns’ barbarity " to
their unhappy prisoners.
The magnificent drawing-room inside the hall of the Hotel
Kaiserhof usually formed the rendezvous of a little Swedish
colony in the evening. Here I met Cavalry Captain Count
Gilbert Hamilton, who had become a German subject and
officer in order to strike a blow in the Germanic fight for
existence. He was just on his way to his regiment and was
looking forward to a very different reveille from that he was
accustomed to at our own sleepy horse-guards barracks at
home in Stockholm. Here also I met once more my old friend
Colonel Gustaf Bouveng, who had spent two and a half months
at the front and who, among innumerable other impressions,
was also taking home with him the conviction that in a military
sense Germany simply cannot be defeated by her present
opponents. Instead of tiring and becoming decimated, the
German army grows in strength and numbers from month
to month.
On the I2th of November I took my departure from the
Stettiner Bahnhof and set out on my journey home to Sweden.
As I reached Sassnitz, dusk was descending over the Baltic.
The passports and effects of the passengers were subjected to
a most careful scrutiny. The same calm, the same sure self-
possession, the same discipline and order as I had noticed
everywhere in Germany and in the firing lines, made them-
selves felt here, too, on the outermost planks of the harbour
pier. At Sassnitz fourteen torpedo boats lay ready for
immediate action, and in the roads a gigantic hospital
ship was riding at anchor, ready to receive wounded from
the sea.
The ferry cast off her moorings. Little by little in the gather-
ing gloom we lose sight of land, that land whose seconds are
as long as years, whose people is now writing its epos in runes
of blood on the pages of the world’s history—a united people,
a virile people, a people which stood ready in its hour of trial,
armed for the defence of its honour, its liberty and its future
when the ravenous monster of strife rose up upon its frontiers,
a people which has the will to win and which therefore in the
time to come will march at the head of the ruling race upon
our earth.
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