Читать книгу What I Saw in Berlin and Other European Capitals During Wartime онлайн

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The task I have essayed during the last five months has been to look at these thermometers with the eye of a doctor—sometimes anxious, sometimes unsympathetic, but always, I trust, impartial. The great capitals of Europe have been the aim of my journeys.

Upon my desk lies a cheap war-map cut from a daily paper. It is scribbled all over with blue pencil marks—marks which represent my wanderings across Europe since the beginning of the war. The atlas I have just consulted tells me I have travelled fifteen thousand miles; fifteen thousand miles of travel, during which time I met continuously new people, people of different temperaments, different nationalities, different religions; but all interested in one subject, and talking about one subject only—the war.

I have visited eight large capitals of European States, lived their lives, felt the intense wave of their sympathies, hates, sorrows, and joys, strong, of course, in a terrible crisis like the present.

From London to Paris, from Berlin to Amsterdam, from Vienna to Brussels, from Rome to Athens and Constantinople, all the European capitals show more or less the effects of the war. Curiously enough, Rome, Amsterdam, and Athens—capitals of States as yet neutral—are among the cities most altered, while least changes are to be seen in the town which has given to the war almost the whole of her adult sons—Berlin.