Germany

Germany is presented less through a sustained account of domestic life than through documents, political montage, and a brief journey across its territory. These glimpses trace a passage from belligerency to defeat, but not to settled peace: military collapse, civilian hardship, and rumors of revolution keep the country within a wider European crisis.

Belligerency and the appeal for peace

The novel gives Germany a direct political voice through a formal request from its government to the President of the United States. It asks him to help restore peace, notify the belligerents, and invite representatives to negotiate. As a basis for talks, the German government accepts the program Woodrow Wilson had set out in his January 1918 message to Congress and his later statements, particularly an address delivered on September 27. It also requests an immediate general armistice on land, at sea, and in the air. The document makes the search for peace an official German initiative, framed around Wilson’s stated principles and the urgent wish to halt further bloodshed.

That appeal sits against the account of the United States’ movement from neutrality into war. After campaigning for reelection on the claim that he had kept the country out of war, Woodrow Wilson pressed the Armed Ship Bill through Congress and declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Central Powers. The juxtaposition gives Germany a place in a changed international alignment: the same Wilson whose program the German government invokes has become the leader of a belligerent power. The novel presents the gap between the language of peace and the force of war as a political condition, not a contradiction resolved by the German request.

Defeat in the political montage

Germany’s defeat arrives in a compressed sequence rather than an extended battle scene. Prince Max of Baden is shown pleading for the Fourteen Points; French forces occupy bridgeheads on the Rhine River; and the Kaiser, wearing a silk hat, runs toward a train at Potsdam. The rapid succession reduces a complicated military and political reversal to three sharply different images: negotiation, occupation, and flight. Germany’s former ruler is not shown directing events but trying to escape them.

The passage also refuses to make the end of fighting feel like a clean ending. Around the German government’s appeal and the Kaiser’s flight, the narration sets a broader European landscape marked by the remembered effects of gas, bodies buried too shallowly, and starving children. Those details are not assigned exclusively to Germany; they frame the continental aftermath in which Germany’s request for an armistice is heard. A separate news-style line insists that worldwide war continues even while peace is being discussed. The form thus holds two conditions together: official negotiations and continuing violence. Germany’s defeat is a turning point, but the narrative does not treat it as proof that peace has arrived.

A country crossed in wartime

A later episode brings Germany into the plot as a route through which Dick Savage travels. Trains are late, the people waiting appear deathly pale, and conversation on the journey turns repeatedly to the possibility of a Bolshevik uprising. At an East Prussian station, Dick stamps his feet on the snowy platform during an extended delay and encounters Fred Summers, a guard on a Red Cross supply car. Summers invites him aboard for part of the journey. The encounter makes Germany a place of transit and waiting, where the war’s unsettled aftermath is registered in disrupted travel and anxious public talk rather than in a narrated campaign.

The supply car gives this passage a practical counterpoint to the political rumors. It has an oil stove, a cot, wine, cognac, and chocolate; the two men spend the day talking as the train moves slowly across a frozen plain. Summers describes the situation beyond the immediate journey as famine, fear, and pogroms, while Dick responds with laughter and recognition of an older comradeship between them. Their exchange does not establish that these conditions are confined to Germany. Instead, the episode places a particular German journey inside a larger, unstable region: the railway connects places, but it cannot make the surrounding crisis seem distant or orderly.

Revolution, finance, and the uncertain peace

Germany also appears in political conversations that imagine revolution spreading across Europe. On a train, Ed Schuyler predicts that syndicates will seize factories in Italy, then speaks of Hungary and Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Prussia, and France as successive points in a possible upheaval. Dick rejects the idea that revolution can end war simply by defeating opponents; in his view, armed political struggle risks becoming the war in another form. Their argument gives Prussia a place in a projected chain of unrest, while exposing how differently former allies interpret the postwar moment. For Ed, the upheaval promises a radical break; for Dick, its violence threatens to perpetuate what it claims to end.

The book’s wider financial montage adds another scale to this uncertainty. It records that the Allies borrowed $1.9 billion through J. P. Morgan & Co. by 1917, and that by the end of the Peace Conference the words associated with Morgan’s advice carried immense financial authority. These figures do not establish a direct explanation for Germany’s defeat or for the terms of peace. Their placement alongside wartime declarations and negotiations instead complicates the public language of democracy and national self-determination: the settlement belongs to a world in which financial power is also consequential. Across the peace appeal, the fleeing Kaiser, the delayed trains, and the talk of revolution, Germany remains a setting where the armistice has ended one phase of war without securing a settled political future.