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The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War

by D. Thomas Curtin · English · Gutenberg #12418 · 520,022 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Land of Deepening Shadow: Germany-at-War

Author: D. Thomas Curtin


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12418]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAND OF DEEPENING SHADOW: GERMANY-AT-WAR ***

THE LAND OF DEEPENING SHADOW

GERMANY-AT-WAR



BY


D. THOMAS CURTIN




1917



TO

LORD NORTHCLIFFE




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

      I  GETTING IN
     II  WHEN SKIES WERE BLUE
    III  THE CRIME AGAINST THE CHILDREN
     IV  PULPITS OF HATE
      V  PUPPET PROFESSORS
     VI  THE LIE ON THE FILM
    VII  THE IDEA FACTORY
   VIII  CORRESPONDENTS IN SHACKLES
     IX  ANTON LANG OF OBERAMMERGAU
      X  SUBMARINE MOTIVES
     XI  THE EAGLE AND THE VULTURE
    XII  IN THE GRIP OF THE FLEET
   XIII  A LAND OF SUBSTITUTES
    XIV  THE GAGGING OF LIEBKNECHT
     XV  PREVENTIVE ARREST
    XVI  POLICE RULE IN BOHEMIA
   XVII  SPIES AND SEMI-SPIES
  XVIII  THE IRON HAND IN ALSACE-LORRAINE
    XIX  THE WOMAN IN THE SHADOW
     XX  THE WAR SLAVES OF ESSEN
    XXI  TOMMY IN GERMANY
   XXII  HOW THE PRUSSIAN GUARD CAME HOME FROM THE SOMME
  XXIII  HOW GERMANY DENIES
   XXIV  GERMANY'S HUMAN RESOURCES
    XXV  BERLIN'S EAST-END
   XXVI  IN THE DEEPENING SHADOW
  XXVII  ACROSS THE NORTH SEA
 XXVIII  THE LITTLE SHIPS




THE LAND OF DEEPENING SHADOW

CHAPTER I

GETTING IN

Early in November, 1915, I sailed from New York to Rotterdam.

I spent nearly a month in Holland completing my preparations, and
at length one grey winter morning I took the step that I dreaded.
I had left Germany six months before with a feeling that to enter
it again and get safely out was hopeless, foolish, dangerous,
impossible.  But at any rate I was going to try.

At Zevenaar, while the Dutch customs officials were examining my
baggage, I patronised the youth selling apple cakes and coffee, for
after several months' absence from Germany my imagination had been
kindled to contemplate living uncomfortably on short rations for
some time as the least of my troubles.  Furthermore, the editorial
opinion vouchsafed in the Dutch newspaper which I had bought at
Arnhem was that Austria's reply to the "Ancona" Note made a break
with America almost a certainty.  Consequently as the train rolled
over the few remaining miles to the frontier I crammed down my
apple cakes, resolved to face the unknown on a full stomach.

The wheels ground under the brakes, I pulled down the window with a
bang and looked out no longer upon the soft rolled military cap of
Holland but upon the business-like spiked helmet of Germany.  I
steeled myself.  There was no backing out now.  I had crossed the
German frontier.

The few passengers filed into the customs room, where a corps of
skilled mechanics prised open the contents of bags and trunks.
Each man was an expert in his profession.  A hand plunged into one
of my bags and emerged with several bars of chocolate, the wrappers
of which were shorn off before the chocolate was well out of the
bag.  A bottle of liniment, the brand that made us forget our
sprains and bruises in college days, was brought to light, and with
commendable dexterity the innocent label was removed in a twinkling
with a specially constructed piece of steel.  The label had a
picture of a man with a very extensive moustache--the man who had
made the liniment famous, or _vice versa_--but the trade name and
proprietor must go unsung in the Fatherland, for the Government has
decreed that travellers entering Germany may bring only three
things containing printed matter, viz.: railroad tickets, money and
passports.

When the baggage squad had finished its task and replaced all
unsuspected articles, the bags were sealed and sent on to await the
owner, whose real troubles now began.

I stepped into a small room where I was asked to hand over all
printed matter on my person.  Two reference books necessary for my
work were tried and found not guilty, after which they were
enclosed in a large envelope and sent through the regular censor.

Switched into a third room before I had a chance even to bid
good-bye to the examiners in the second, I found myself standing
before a small desk answering questions about myself and my
business asked tersely by an inquisitor who read from a lengthy
paper which had to be filled in, and behind whom stood three
officers in uniform.  These occasionally interpolated questions and
always glared into my very heart.  When I momentarily looked away
from their riveted eyes it was only to be held transfixed by the
scrutinising orbs of a sharp, neatly dressed man who had been a
passenger on the train.  He plays the double role of
detective-interpreter, and he plays it in first-class fashion.

While the man behind the desk was writing my biography, the
detective--or rather the interpreter, as I prefer to think of him,
because he spoke such perfect English--cross-examined me in his own
way.  As the grilling went on I did not know whether to be anxious
about the future or to glow with pride over the profound interest
which the land of Goethe and Schiller was displaying in my life and
literary efforts.

Had I not a letter from Count Bernstorff?

I was not thus blessed.

Did I not have a birth certificate?  Whom did I know in Germany?
Where did they live?  On what occasions had I visited Germany
during my past life?  On what fronts had I already seen fighting?
What languages did I speak, and the degree of proficiency in each?

Many of my answers to these and similar questions were carefully
written down by the man at the desk, while his companions in the
inquisition glared, always glared, and the room danced with
soldiers passing through it.

At length my passport was folded and returned to me, but my
credentials and reference books were sealed in an envelope.  They
would be returned to me later, I was told.

I was shunted along into an adjoining small room where nimble
fingers dexterously ran through my clothing to find out if I had
overlooked declaring anything.

Another shunting and I was in a large room.  I rubbed elbows with
more soldiers along the way, but nobody spoke.  Miraculously I came
to a halt before a huge desk, much as a bar of glowing iron, after
gliding like a living thing along the floor of a rolling mill,
halts suddenly at the bidding of a distant hand.

Behind the desk stood men in active service uniforms--men who had
undoubtedly faced death for the land which I was seeking to enter.
They fired further questions at me and took down the data on my
passport, after which I wrote my signature for the official files.
Attacks came hard and fast from the front and both flanks, while a
silent soldier thumbed through a formidable card file, apparently
to see if I were a _persona non grata_, or worse, in the records.

I became conscious of a silent power to my left, and turning my
glance momentarily from the rapid-fire questioners at the desk, I
looked into a pair of lynx eyes flashing up and down my person.
Another detective, with probably the added role of interpreter, but
as I was answering all questions in German he said not a word.  Yet
he looked volumes.

Through more soldiers to the platform, and then a swift and
comparatively comfortable journey to Emmerich, accompanied by a
soldier who carried my sealed envelope, the contents of which were
subsequently returned to me after an examination by the censor.

At last I was alone! or rather I thought I was, for my innocent
stroll about Emmerich was duly observed by a man who bore the
unmistakable air of his profession, and who stepped into my
compartment on the Cologne train as I sat mopping my brow waiting
for it to start.  He flashed his badge of detective authority,
asked to see my papers, returned them to me politely, and bowed
himself out.

My journey was through the heart of industrial Germany, a heart
which throbs feverishly night and day, month in and month out, to
drive the Teuton power east, west, north, and south.

Forests of lofty chimney-stacks in Wesel, Duisburg, Krefeld, Essen,
Elberfeld and Dusseldorf belched smoke which hazed the landscape
far and wide: smoke which made cities, villages, lone brick
farmhouses, trees, and cattle appear blurred and indistinct, and
which filtered into one's very clothing and into locked travelling
bags.

But there was a strength and virility about everything, from the
vulcanic pounding and crashing in mills and arsenals to the sturdy
uniformed women who were pushing heavy trucks along railroad
platforms or polishing railings and door knobs on the long lines of
cars in the train yards.

Freight trains, military trains and passenger trains were speeding
over the network of rails without a hitch, soldiers and officers
were crowding station platforms, and if there was any faltering of
victory hopes among these men--as the atmosphere of the outside
world may have at that time led one to believe--I utterly failed to
detect it in their faces.  They were either doggedly and
determinedly moving in the direction of duty, or going happily home
for a brief holiday respite, as an unmistakable brightness of
expression, even when their faces were drawn from the strain of the
trenches, clearly showed.

But it is the humming, beehive activity of these
Rhenish-Westphalian cities and towns which crowd one another for
space that impresses the traveller in this workshop section of
Germany.  He knows that the sea of smoke, the clirr and crash of
countless foundries are the impelling force behind Germany's
soldier millions, whether they are holding far-thrown lines in
Russia, or smashing through the Near East, or desperately
counter-attacking in the West.

In harmony with the scene the winter sun sank like a molten metal
ball behind the smoke-stack forest, to set blood-red an hour later
beyond the zigzag lines in France.

Maximilian Harden had just been widely reported as having said that
Germany's great military conquests were in no way due to planning
in higher circles, but are the work of the rank and file---of the
Schultzs and the Schmidts.  I liked to think of this as the train
sped on at the close of the short winter afternoon, for my first
business was to call upon a middle-class family on behalf of a
German-American in New York, who wished me to take 100 pounds to
his relatives in a small Rhenish town.

Thus my first evening in Germany found me in a dark little town on
the Rhine groping my way through crooked streets to a home, the
threshold of which I no sooner crossed than I was made to feel that
the arm of the police is long and that it stretches out into the
remotest villages and hamlets.

The following incident, which was exactly typical of what would
happen in nineteen German households out of twenty, may reveal one
small aspect of German character to British and American people,
who are as a rule completely unable to understand German psychology.

Although I had come far out of my way to bring what was for them a
considerable sum of money, as well as some portraits of their
long-absent relatives in the United States and interesting family
news, my reception was as cold as the snow-blown air outside.  I
was not allowed to finish explaining my business when I was at
first petulantly and then violently and angrily interrupted with:--

"Have you been to the police?"

"No," I said.  "I did not think it was necessary to go to the
police, as I am merely passing through here, and am not going to
stay."

The lady of the house replied coldly, "Go to the police," and shut
the door in my face.

I mastered my temper by reminding myself that whereas such
treatment at home would have been sufficiently insulting to break
off further relations, it was not intended as such in Germany.

It was a long walk for a tired man to the _Polizeiamt_.  When I got
there I was fortunate in encountering a lank, easy-going old fellow
who had been commandeered for the job owing to the departure of all
the local police for the war.  He was clearly more interested in
trying to find out something of _his_ relations in some remote
village in America, which he said was named after them, than in my
business.

I returned to pay the 100 pounds and deliver the photographs, and
now that I had been officially "policed" was received with great
cordiality and pressed to spend the evening.

Father, mother, grown-up daughters and brother-in-law all assured
me that it was not owing to my personal appearance that I had been
so coldly received, but that war is war and law is law and that
everything must be done as the authorities decree.

Cigars and cigarettes were showered upon me and my glass was never
allowed to be empty of Rhine wine.  Good food was set before me and
the stock generously replenished whenever necessary.  It will be
remembered that I had come unexpectedly and that I was not being
entertained in a wealthy home, and this at a time when the only
counter-attack on Germany's success in the Balkans was an increased
amount of stories that she was starving.

Evidently the Schultzs and the Schmidts were not taking all the
credit for Germany's position to themselves.  They pointed with
pride to a picture of the Emperor adorning one wall and then smiled
with satisfaction as they indicated the portrait of von Hindenburg
on the wall opposite.  One of the daughters wore a huge silver
medallion of the same renowned general on her neck.  After nearly a
year and a half of war these bard-working Germans were proud of
their leaders and had absolute faith in them.

But this family had felt the war.  One son had just been wounded,
they knew not how severely, in France.  If some unknown English,
soldier on the Yser had raised his rifle just a hairbreadth higher
the other son would be sleeping in the blood-soaked soil of
Flanders instead of doing garrison duty in Hanover while recovering
from a bullet which had passed through his head just under the eyes.




CHAPTER II

WHEN SKIES WERE BLUE

There was one more passenger, making three, in our first-class
compartment in the all-day express train from Cologne to Berlin
after it left Hanover.  He was a naval officer of about forty-five,
clean-cut, alert, clearly an intelligent man.  His manner was
proud, but not objectionably so.

The same might be said of the manner of the major who had sat
opposite me since the train left Dusseldorf.  I had been in Germany
less than thirty hours and was feeling my way carefully, so I made
no attempt to enter into conversation.  Just before lunch the
jolting of the train deposited the major's coat at my feet.  I
picked it up and handed it to him.  He received it with thanks and
a trace of a smile.  He was polite, but icily so.  I was an
American, he was a German officer.  In his way of reasoning my
country was unneutrally making ammunition to kill himself and his
men.  But for my country the war would have been over long ago.
Therefore he hated me, but his training made him polite in his
hate.  That is the difference between the better class of army and
naval officers and diplomats and the rest of the Germans.

When he left the compartment for the dining-car he saluted and
bowed stiffly.  When we met in the narrow corridor after our return
from lunch, each stepped aside to let the other pass in first.  I
exchanged with him heel-click for heel-click, salute for salute,
waist-bow for waist-bow, and after-you-my-dear-Alphonse sweep of
the arm for you-go-first-my-dear-Gaston motion from him.  The
result was that we both started at once, collided, backed away and
indulged in all the protestations and gymnastics necessary to beg
another's pardon, in military Germany.  At length we entered,
erected a screen of ice between us, and alternately looked from one
another to the scenery hour after hour.

The entrance of the naval officer relieved the strain, for the two
branches of the Kaisers armed might were soon--after the usual
gymnastics--engaged in conversation.  They were not men to discuss
their business before a stranger.  Once I caught the word
Amerikaner uttered in a low voice, but though their looks told that
they regarded me as an intruder in their country they said nothing
on that point.

At Stendal we got the Berlin evening papers, which had little of
interest except a few lines about the _Ancona_ affair between
Washington and Vienna.

"Do you think Austria will grant the American demands?" the man in
grey asked the man in blue.

"Austria will do what Germany thinks best.  Personally, I hope that
we take a firm stand.  I do not believe in letting the United
States tell us how to conduct the war.  We are quite capable of
conducting it and completing it in a manner satisfactory to
ourselves."

The man in grey agreed with the man in blue.

Past the blazing munition works at Spandau, across the Havel,
through the Tiergarten, running slowly now, to the
_Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof_.

A bewildering swirl of thoughts rushed through my head as I stepped
out on the platform.  More than three months ago I had left London
for my long, circuitous journey to Berlin.  I had planned and
feared, planned and hoped.  The German spy system is the most
elaborate in the world.  Only through a miracle could the
Wilhelmstrasse be ignorant of the fact that I had travelled all
over Europe during the war for the hated British Press.  I could
only hope that the age of miracles had not passed.

The crowd was great, porters were as scarce as they used to be
plentiful, I was waiting for somebody, so I stood still and took
note of my surroundings.

Across the platform was a long train ready to start west, and from
each window leaned officers and soldiers bidding good-bye to groups
of friends.  The train was marked _Hannover_, _Koln_, _Lille_.  As
though I had never known it before, I found myself saying, "Lille
is in France, and those men ride there straight from here."

The train on which I had arrived had pulled out and another had
taken its place.  This was marked _Posen_, _Thorn_, _Insterburg_,
_Stalluponen_, _Alexandrovo_, _Vilna_.  As I stood on that platform
I felt Germany's power in a peculiar but convincing way.  I had
been in Germany, in East Prussia, when the Russians were not only
in possession of the last four places named, but about to threaten
the first two.

Now the simple printed list of stations on the heavy train about to
start from the capital of Germany to Vilna, deep in Russia, was an
awe-inspiring tribute to the great military machine of the
Fatherland.  For a moment I believed in von Bethmann-Holweg's talk
about the "map of Europe."

I was eager to see how much Berlin had changed, for I knew it at
various stages of the war, but I cannot honestly say that the
changes which I detected later, and which I shall deal with in
subsequent chapters of this book--changes which are absorbingly
interesting to study on the spot and vitally important in the
progress and outcome of the war--were very apparent then.

In the dying days of 1915 I found the people of Berlin almost as
supremely confident of victory, especially now since Bulgaria's
entrance had made such sweeping changes in the Balkans, as they
were on that day of cloudless blue, the first of August, 1914, when
the dense mass swayed before the Royal Palace, to see William II
come out upon the balcony to bid his people rise to arms.  Eyes
sparkled, cheeks flushed, the buzz changed to cheering, the
cheering swelled to a roar.  The army which had been brought to the
highest perfection, the army which would sweep Europe--at last the
German people could see what it would do, would show the world what
it would do.  The anticipation intoxicated them.

An American friend told me of how he struggled toward the
_Schloss_, but in the jam of humanity got only as far as the
monument of Frederick the Great.  There a youth threw his hat in
the air and cried: "_Hock der Krieg, Hock der Krieg_!" (Hurrah for
the war).

That was the spirit that raged like a prairie fire.

An old man next to him looked him full in the eyes.  "_Der Krieg
ist eine ernste Sache, Junge_!" (War is a serious matter, young
man), he said and turned away.  He was in the crowd, but not of it.
His note was discordant.  They snarled at him and pushed him
roughly.  They gloried in the thought of war.  They were certain
that they were invincible.  All that they bad been taught, all the
influences on their lives convinced them that nothing could stand
before the _furor teutonicus_ once it was turned loose.

Delirious days when military bands blared regiment after regiment
through lines of cheering thousands; whole companies deluged with
flowers, long military trains festooned with blossoms and greenery
rolling with clock-like regularity from the stations amid
thunderous cheers.  Sad partings were almost unknown, for, of
course, no earthly power could withstand the onslaughts of the
Kaiser's troops.  God was with them--even their belts and helmets
showed that.  So, "Good-bye for six weeks!"

The 2nd of September is Sedan Day, and in 1914 it was celebrated as
never before.  A great parade was scheduled, a parade which would
show German prowess.  Though I arrived in "Unter den Linden" two
hours before the procession was due, I could not get anywhere near
the broad central avenue down which it would pass.  I chartered a
taxi which had foundered in the throng, and perched on top.  The
Government, always attentive to the patriotic education of the
children, had given special orders for such occasions.  The little
ones were brought to the front by the police, and boys were even
permitted to climb the sacred Linden trees that they might better
see what the Fatherland had done.

The triumphal column entered through the Kaiser Arch of the
Brandenburger Tor, and bedlam broke loose during the passing of the
captured cannon of Russia, France, and Belgium--these last cast by
German workmen at Essen and fired by Belgian artillerists against
German soldiers at Liege.

The gates of Paris!  Then the clear-cut German official reports
became vague for a few days about the West, but had much of
Hindenburg and victory in the East.  Democracies wash their dirty
linen in public, while absolute governments tuck theirs out of
sight, where it usually disappears, but sometimes unexpectedly
develops spontaneous combustion.

Nobody--outside of the little circle--questioned the delay in
entering Paris.  Everything was going according to plan, was the
saying.  I suppose sheep entertain a somewhat similar attitude when
their leader conducts them over a precipice.  Antwerp must be taken
first--that was the key to Paris and London.  Such was the gossip
when the scene was once more set in Belgium, and the great Skoda
mortars pulverised forts which on paper were impregnable.  Many a
time during the first days of October I left my glass of beer or
cup of tea half finished and rushed from cafe and restaurant with
the crowd to see if the newspaper criers of headlines were
announcing the fall of the fortress on the Scheldt, How those
people discussed the terms of the coming early peace, terms which
were not by any means easy!  Berlin certainly had its thumbs turned
down on the rest of Europe.

With two other Americans I sat with a group of prosperous Berliners
in their luxurious club.  Waiters moved noiselessly over costly
rugs and glasses clinked, while these men seriously discussed the
probable terms Germany would soon impose on a conquered continent.
Belgium would, of course, be incorporated into the German Empire,
and Antwerp would be the chief outlet for Germany's commerce--and
how that commerce would soon boom at the expense of Great Britain!
France would now have an opportunity to develop her socialistic
experiments, as she would be permitted to maintain only a very
small army.  The mistake of 1870 must not be repeated.  This time
there would be no paltry levy of five billion francs.  A great
German Empire would rise on the ruins of the British.  Commercial
gain was the theme.  I did not gather from the conversation that
anybody but Germany would be a party to the peace.

A man in close touch with things military entered at midnight.  His
eyes danced as he gave us new information about Antwerp.   Clearly
the city was doomed.

I did not sleep that night.  I packed.  Next evening I was in
Holland.  I saw a big story, hired a car, picked up a _Times_
courier, and, after "fixing" things with the Dutch guards, dashed
for Antwerp.  The long story of a retreat with the rearguard of the
Belgian Army has no place here.  But there were scenes which
contrasted with the boasting, confident, joyous capital I had left.
Belgian horses drawing dejected families, weeping on their
household goods, other families with everything they had saved
bundled in a tablecloth or a handkerchief.  Some had their
belongings tied on a bicycle, others trundled wheel-barrows.
Valuable draught dogs, harnessed, but drawing no cart, were led by
their masters, while other dogs that nobody thought of just
followed along.  And tear-drenched faces everywhere.  Back in
Bergen-op-Zoom and Putten I had seen chalk writing on brick walls
saying that members of certain families had gone that way and would
wait in certain designated places for other members who chanced to
pass.  On the road, now dark, and fringed with pines, I saw a faint
light flicker.  A group passed, four very old women tottering after
a very old man, he holding a candle before him to light the way.

As I jotted down these things and handed them to my courier I
thought of the happy faces back in Berlin, of jubilant crowds
dashing from restaurants and cafes as each newspaper edition was
shouted out, and I knew that the men in the luxurious club were
figuring out to what extent they could mulct Belgium.

I pressed on in the dark and joined the Belgian army and the
British Naval Brigade falling back before the Germans.  I came upon
an American, now captain of a Belgian company.  "It's a damn shame,
and I hate to admit it," he said, "but the Allies are done for."
That is the way it looked to us in the black hours of the retreat.

Soldiers were walking in their sleep.  Some sank, too exhausted to
continue.  An English sailor, a tireless young giant, trudged on
mile after mile with a Belgian soldier on his back.  Both the
Belgian's feet had been shot off and tightly bound handkerchiefs
failed to check the crimson trail.

London and Paris were gloomy, but Berlin was basking in the bright
morning sunshine of the war.


Although the fronts were locked during the winter, the German
authorities had good reason to feel optimistic about the coming
spring campaign.  They knew that they had increased their munition
output enormously, and their spies told them that Russia had
practically run out of ammunition, while England had not yet
awakened to the realisation that this is a war of shells.

The public saw the result in the spring.  The armies of the Tsar
fell back all along the line, while in Germany the flags were
waving and the bells of victory were pealing.

All through this there was unity in Germany, a unity that the
Germans felt and gloried in.  "No other nation acts as one man in
this wonderful time as do we Germans," they told the stranger again
and again.  Unity and Germany became synonymous in my mind.

Love of country and bitterness against the enemy are intensified in
a nation going to war.  It is something more than this, however,
which has imbued and sustained the flaming spirit of Germany during
this war.  In July, 1914, the Government deliberately set out to
overcome two great forces.  The first was the growing section of
her anti-militaristic citizens, and the second was the combination
of Great Powers which she made up her mind she must fight sooner or
later if she would gain that place in the sun which had dazzled her
so long.

Her success against the opposition within her was phenomenal.
Germany was defending herself against treacherous attack--that was
the watchword.  The Social Democrats climbed upon the band-waggon
along with the rest for the joy-ride to victory, and they remained
on the band-waggon for more than a year--then some of them dropped
off.

The story of how all Germans were made to think as one man is a
story of one of the greatest phenomena of history.  It is my
purpose in the next few chapters to show how the German Government
creates unity.  Then, in later chapters, I will describe the forces
tending to disintegrate that wonderful unity.

Germany entered the war with the Government in control of all the
forces affecting public opinion.  The only way in which newspaper
editors, reporters, lecturers, professors, teachers, theatre
managers, and pulpit preachers could hope to accomplish, anything
in the world was to do something to please the Government.  To
displease the Government meant to be silenced or to experience
something worse.




CHAPTER III

THE CRIME AGAINST THE CHILDREN

The boys and girls of Germany play an important part in _die grosse
Zeit_ (this great wartime).  Every atom of energy that can be
dragged out of the children has been put to practical purpose.

Their little souls, cursed by "incubated hate," have been so worked
upon by the State schoolmasters that they have redoubled their
energies in the tasks imposed upon them of collecting gold, copper,
nickel, brass, paper, acorns, blackberries, blueberries, rubber,
woollen and war loan money.

All this summer on release from school, which commences at seven
and closes at three in most parts of Germany, the hours varying in
some districts, the children, in organised squads, have been put to
these important purposes of State.  They had much to do with the
getting in of the harvest.

The schoolmaster has played his part in the training of the child
to militarism, State worship, and enemy hatred as effectively as
the professor and the clergyman.

Here are two German children's school songs, that are being sung
daily.  Both of them are creations of the war: both written by
schoolmasters.  The particularly offensive song about King Edward
and England is principally sung by girls--the future mothers of
Germany:--

  O England, O England,
  Wie gross sind Deine Lugen!
  Ist Dein Verbrechen noch so gross,
  Du schwindelst Dich vom Galgen los.
  O Eduard, O Eduard, du Muster aller Fursten,
  Nichts hattest Du von einem Rex,
  Du eitler Schlips--und Westenfex.

[Oh, England, oh, England, how great are thy lies!  However great
thy crimes, thou cheatest the gallows.  Oh, Edward, oh, Edward,
thou model Prince!  Thou hadst nothing kindly in thee, thou vain
fop!]

  Da druben, da druben liegt der Feind,
  In feigen Schutzengraben,
  Wir greifen ihn an, und ein Hund, wer meint,
  Heut' wurde Pardon gegeben.
  Schlagt alles tot, was um Gnade fleht,
  Schiesst alles nieder wie Hunde,
  Mehr Feinde, mehr Feinde! sei euer Gebet
  In dieser Vergeltungsstunde.

[Over there in the cowardly trenches lies the enemy.  We attack
him, and only a dog will say that pardon should be given to-day.
Strike dead everything which prays for mercy.  Shoot everything
down like dogs.  "More enemies, more enemies," be your prayer in
this hour of retribution.]

The elementary schools, or _Volksschulen_, are free, and attendance
is compulsory from six to fourteen.  There are some 61,000 free
public elementary schools with over 10,000,000 pupils, and over 600
private elementary schools, with 42,000 pupils who pay fees.

Germany is a land of civil service; to enter which a certificate
from a secondary school is necessary.  Some authorities maintain
that the only way to prevent being flooded with candidates is to
make the examinations crushingly severe.  Children are early made
to realise that all hope of succeeding in life rests upon the
passing of these examinations.  Thus the despair which often leads
to suicide on the one hand and knowledge without keenness on the
other.

Hardly any class has suffered more heavily in the war than the
masters of the State schools, which are equivalent to English
Council schools and American public schools.   The thinning of
their ranks is an eloquent proof of the heaviness of the German
death toll.  Their places have been taken by elderly men, but
principally by women.  It is a kind of Nemesis that they should
have fallen in the very cause they have been propagating for at
least a generation.

Those who knew only the old and pleasant Germany do not realise the
speeding up of the hate machine that has taken place in the last
decade.  The protests against this State creation of hate grow less
and less as the war proceeds.  To-day only comparatively few
members of the Social-Democrat Party raise objection to this
horrible contamination of the minds of the coming generation of
German men and women.  Not much reflection is needed to see on what
fruitful soil the great National Liberal Party, with its backing of
capitalists, greedy merchants, chemists, bankers, ship and mine
owners, is planting its seeds for the future.  There is no cure for
this evil state of affairs, but the practical proof, inflicted by
big cannon, that the world will not tolerate a nation of which the
very children are trained to hate the rest of the world, and taught
that German _Kultur_ must be spread by bloodshed and terror.

With the change in Germany has come a change in the family life.
The good influence of some churches has gone completely.  They are
part of the great war machine.  The position of the mother is not
what it was.  The old German Hausfrau of the three K's, which I
will roughly translate by "Kids, Kitchen, and Kirk," has become
even more a servant of the master of the house than she was.  The
State has taken control of the souls of her children, and she has
not even that authority that she had twenty years ago.  The father
has become even more important than of yore.  The natural tendency
of a nation of which almost every man is a soldier, is to elevate
the man at the expense of the woman, and the German woman has taken
to her new position very readily.  She plays her wonderful part in
the production of munitions, not as in Britain in a spirit of
equality, but with a sort of admitted inferiority difficult to
describe exactly.

At four years of age the German male child begins to be a soldier.
At six he is accustomed to walk in military formation.  This system
has a few advantages, but many disadvantages.  A great concourse of
infants can, for example, be marshalled through the streets of a
city without any trouble at all.  But that useful discipline is
more than counterbalanced by the killing of individuality.  German
children, especially during the war, try to grow up to be little
men and women as quickly as possible.  They have shared the long
working hours of the grown-ups, and late in the hot summer nights I
have seen little Bavarian boys and girls who have been at school
from seven and worked in the fields from three o'clock till dark,
drinking their beer in the beer garden with a relish that showed
they needed some stimulant.  The beer is not Bass's ale, but it
contains from two to five per cent. of alcohol.  Unhealthy-looking
little men are these German boys of from twelve to fifteen during
the war.  The overwork, and the lowering of the diet, has given
them pasty faces and dark rings round their eyes.  All games and
amusements have been abandoned, and the only relaxation is corps
marching through the streets at night, singing their hate songs and
"Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles."

The girls, in like fashion, often spend their school interval in
marching in columns of four, singing the same horrible chants.

Up to the time of the scarcity of woollen materials, the millions
of little German schoolgirls produced their full output of comforts
for the troops.

The practical result, from a military point of view, of training
children to venerate the All-Highest War Lord and his family,
together with his ancestors, was shown at the beginning of the war,
when there came a great rush of volunteers (_Freiwillige_), many of
them beneath the military age, many of them beyond it.  In most of
the calculations of German man-power, some ally and neutral
military writers seem to have forgotten these volunteers, estimated
at two millions.

A significant change in Germany is the cessation of the volunteer
movement.  Parents who gladly sent forth their boys as volunteers,
are now endeavouring by every means in their power to postpone the
evil day in the firm belief that peace will come before the age of
military service has been reached.  It is a change at least as
significant as that which, lies between the German's "We have
won--the more enemies the better" of two years back, and the "We
must hold out" of to-day.

Of the school structures in modern Germany it would be idle to
pretend that they are not excellent in every respect--perfect
ventilation, sanitation, plenty of space, large numbers of
class-rooms, and halls for the choral singing, which is part of the
German system of education, and by which the "hate" songs have been
so readily spread.  The same halls are used for evening lectures
for adults and night improvement schools.

It is significant that all the schools built between 1911 and 1914
were so arranged, not only in Germany, but throughout Austria, that
they could be turned into hospitals with hardly any alteration.
For this purpose, temporary partitions divided portions of the
buildings, and an unusually large supply of water was laid on.
Special entrances for ambulances were already in existence, baths
had already been fitted in the wounded reception rooms, and in many
cases sterilising sheds were already installed.  The walls were
made of a material that could he quickly whitewashed for the
extermination of germs.  If this obvious preparation for war is
named to the average German, his reply is, "The growing jealousy of
German culture and commerce throughout the world rendered necessary
protective measures."

A total lack of sense of humour and sense of proportion among the
Germans can be gathered from the fact that Mr. Haselden's famous
cartoons of Big and Little Willie, which have a vogue among
Americana and other neutrals in Germany, and are by no means
unkind, are regarded by Germans as a sort of sacrilege.  These same
people do not hesitate to circulate the most horrible and indecent
pictures of President Wilson, King George, President Poincare, and
especially of Viscount Grey of Falloden.  The Tsar is usually
depicted covered with vermin.  The King of Italy as an evil-looking
dwarf with a dagger in his hand.  Only those who have seen the
virulence of the caricatures, circulated by picture postcard, can
have any idea of the horrible material on which the German child is
fed.  The only protest I ever heard came from the Artists' Society
of Munich, who objected to these loathsome educational efforts as
being injurious to the reputation of artistic Germany and
calculated to produce permanent damage to the juvenile mind.

The atmosphere of the German home is so different from that in
which I have been brought up in the United States, and have seen in
England, that the Germans are not at all shocked by topics of
conversation never referred to in other countries.  Subjects are
discussed before German girls of eleven and twelve, and German boys
of the same age, that make an Anglo-Saxon anxious to get out of the
room.  I do not know whether it is this or the over-education that
leads to the notorious child suicides of Germany, upon which so
many learned treatises have been written.

Just before the war it looked as though the German young man and
woman were going to improve.  Lawn tennis was spreading, despite
old-fashioned prejudice.  Football was coming in.  Rowing was
making some progress, as you may have learned at Henley.  It was
not the spontaneous sport of Anglo-Saxon countries, but a more
concentrated effort to imitate and to excel.

Running races had become lately a German school amusement, but the
results, as a rule, were that if there were five competitors, the
four losers entered a protest against the winner.  In any case,
each of the four produced excellent excuses why he had lost, other
than the fact that he had been properly beaten.

A learned American "exchange professor," who had returned from a
German university, whom I met in Boston last year on my way from
England to Germany, truly summed up the situation of athletics in
German schools by saying, "German boys are bad-tempered losers and
boastful winners."

Upon what kinds of history is the German child being brought up?
The basis of it is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, with
volumes devoted to the Danish and Austrian campaigns and minute
descriptions of every phase of all the battles with France in 1870,
written in a curious hysterical fashion.

The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are
typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play
a great role in war propaganda.  The schoolmaster having done his
work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent
dose on the Sabbath.  Sedan Day, which before the war was the
culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday
School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.

There are some traits in German children most likeable.  There are,
for example, the respect for, and courtesy and kindness towards,
anybody older than themselves.   There are admiration for learning
and ambition to excel in any particular task.  There is a genuine
love of music.  On the other hand, there is much dishonesty, as may
be witnessed by the proceedings in the German police courts, and
has been proved in the gold and other collections.

The elimination of real religion in the education of children and
the substitution of worship of the State is, in the minds of many
impartial observers, something approaching a national catastrophe.
In any other community it would probably be accompanied by anarchy.
It certainly has swelled the calendar of German crime.  German
statistics prove that every sort of horror has been greatly on the
increase in the last quarter of a century.

I went to Germany the first time under the impression that the
Anglo-Saxon had much to learn from German education.  I do not
think that any observer in Germany itself to-day would find
anything valuable to learn in the field of education, except when
the German student comes to the time he takes up scientific
research, to which the German mind, with its intense industry and
regard for detail, is so eminently suited.  The German Government
gives these young students every advantage.  They are not, as with
us, obliged to start money-making as soon as they leave school.  As
a rule a German boy's career is marked out for him by his parents
and the schoolmaster at a very early age.  If he is to follow out
any one of the thousand branches of chemical research dealing with
coal-tar products, for example, he knows his fate at fourteen or
fifteen, and his eye is rarely averted from his goal until he has
achieved knowledge and experience likely to help him in the great
German trade success which has followed their utilisation of
applied science.




CHAPTER IV

PULPITS OF HATE

The unpleasant part played by the clergy, and especially the
Lutheran pastors, needs to be explained to those who regard clerics
as necessarily men of peace.

The claim that the Almighty is on the side of Germany is not a new
one.  It was made as far back as the time of Frederick the Great.
It was advanced in the war of 1870.  It found strong voice at the
time of the Boer War, when the pastors issued a united manifesto
virulently attacking Great Britain.

These pastors are in communication with the German-American
Lutherans in the United States, who exerted their influence to the
utmost against the election of President Wilson, taking their
instructions indirectly from the German Foreign Office.

The state of affairs in the German churches is so different from
anything on the other side of the Atlantic, and in Great Britain,
that it is almost as difficult to make people in England understand
war-preaching ministers as it is to make them comprehend
war-teaching schoolmasters.

My description of the poisoning by hate songs of the child mind of
Germany at its most impressionable age came as a shock to many of
my readers.  But the hate songs of the children are not as fierce
as the hate hymns and prayers of the pastors.  Do the public here
realise that of the original Zeppelin fund hundreds of thousands of
marks were subscribed in churches and chapels, and that models of
Zeppelins have formed portions of church decorations at festivals?

The pastors of the Prussian State Church are in one important
respect the exact opposite of Martin Luther.  He was thoroughly
independent in spirit and rebelled against authority; they are
abjectly submissive to it.  As with the professor, so with the
pastor, it is no mere accident that he is a puppet-tool of the
State.  The German Government leaves nothing to chance, and
realising to the fullest the importance of docile and unified
subjects both for interior rule and exterior conquest, it
deliberately and artfully regulates those who create public opinion.

There are some Lutheran pastors in Germany who work for an ideal,
who detest the propagation of hate.  Why, one may naturally ask, do
they not cry out against such a pernicious practice?  They cannot,
for they are muzzled.  When a pastor enters this Church of which
the Supreme War Lord is the head, his first oath is unqualified
allegiance to his King and State.  If he keeps his oath he can
preach no reform, for the State, being a perfect institution, can
have no flaw.  If he breaks his oath, which happens when he raises
his voice in the slightest criticism, he is silenced.  This means
that he must seek other means of earning a livelihood--a thing
almost impossible in a land where training casts a man in a rigid
mould.  Thus these parsons have their choice between going on
quietly with their work and being nonentities in the public eye or
bespattering the non-Germanic section of the world with the mire of
hate.  I regret to say that most of them choose the latter course.

While I was in Germany I read a lengthy and solicitous letter from
Pastor Winter, of Bruch, addressed to Admiral von Tirpitz, who had
just retired for the ostensible reason that he was unwell, but
whose illness was patently only diplomatic.  The good pastor
expressed the hope that his early recovery would permit the admiral
to continue his noble work of obliterating England.  Pastor Falk,
of Berlin, is a typical fire-eater.  His Whitsuntide address was an
attack upon Anglo-Saxon civilisation and the urgent German mission
of smashing Britain and America.  The Easter sermons of hate, one
of which I heard at Stettin, were especially bloodthirsty.
Congregations are larger than usual on that day, which is intended
to commemorate a spirit quite the opposite to hate.  The clergy are
instructed not to attack Prance or Russia, and so it comes about
that, as I have previously pointed out, in Prussia, Hanover,
Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg, and Saxony, the pastors of the
State Church preach hatred of Britain, as violently in their
pulpits as in their pastoral visits.

The pulpit orators, taking their tip from the Government, are also
exhorting their congregations to "hold out and win the war."  I
know of one pastor in a good section of Berlin, however, who has
recently lost considerable influence in his congregation.  Sunday
after Sunday his text has been, "Wir mussen durchhalten!" (We must
hold out!)  "No sacrifice should be too great for the Fatherland,
no privation, too arduous to be endured if one but has the spirit
to conquer."  He paid particular attention to the rapidly
increasing number of people who grumble incessantly over the
shortage of food.  The good man was clearly losing patience with
those who complained.

One day thieves broke into his home and got away with an enormous
amount of hams and other edibles.  I remind the reader that ham had
ere this become unknown in Berlin.  Less than three hundred pigs
were being killed there per week where formerly twenty-five
thousand were slaughtered.  The Government had more-over taken a
house-to-house inventory of food, and hoarding had been made
punishable by law.

The story, of course, never appeared in the papers, since such
divines are useful implements of the State, but the whole
congregation heard of it, with the disastrous consequence that the
good man's future sermons on self-denial fell upon stony ground.

One dear old lady, a widow, whose two sons had fallen in the war,
told me that she had not gone to church for years, but after her
second son fell she sought spiritual comfort in attending services
every Sunday.  "I am so lonesome now," she said, "and somehow I
feel that when I hear the word of God I shall be nearer to my boys."

I met her some weeks later on her way home from church.  "It is no
use," she sighed, shaking her head sadly, "the church does not
satisfy the longing in my heart.  It is not for such as me.
Nothing but war, war, war, and hate, hate, hate!"

The German Navy League, an aggressive body which had gathered
around it more than a million members previous to the war, stirred
up anti-British feeling by means of leaflets, newspaper articles,
kinematograph exhibitions, and sermons.  Among the bitterest of the
preachers are returned missionaries from British possessions.

Although the social position of the pastor in a German village is
less than that of a minor Government official, yet he and his wife
wield considerable influence.  The leading pastors receive each
week many of the Government propaganda documents, including a
digest carefully prepared for them by the foreign Press Department.
I obtained some copies of this weekly digest, but was unable to
bring them out of Germany.  What purport to be extracts from the
London newspapers are ingenious distortions.  Sometimes a portion
of an article is reprinted with the omission of the context, thus
entirely altering its meaning.  The recipients of this carefully
prepared sheet believe implicitly in its authenticity.  Any chance
remark of a political nobody in the House of Commons that seems
favourable to Germany is quoted extensively.  Mr. Ramsay Macdonald,
in the eyes of the German village clergyman, ranks as one of the
most important men in the British Empire.  Mr. Stanton, M.P., in
their view, is a low hireling of the British Government, doing
dirty work in the hope of getting political preferment.  The
_Labour Leader_, which I have not seen in any house or hotel or on
any newspaper stall, is, according to this digest, one of the
leading English newspapers, and almost the only truth-telling organ
of the Allies.

These people really believe this.  When home-staying Englishmen
talk to me about the German War party, I find it difficult to
explain to them that the German War party is practically the whole
country.

One or two better-travelled and better-educated pastors have
expressed mild regret at the bloodthirsty attitude of their
brethren in private conversation.  But I never heard of one who had
the courage to "speak out in open meeting."

The modern, material Germany has not much use for religion except
as a factor in government.  The notorious spread of extreme
agnosticism in the last quarter of a century renders it essential
for the clergy to hold their places by stooping to the violence of
the Professors.  Mixed with their attitude of hostility to Britain
is a considerable amount of professional jealousy and envy.  A
number of German pastors paid a visit to London some two or three
years before the outbreak of war, and I happened to meet one of
them recently in Germany.  So far from being impressed by what he
had seen there, he had come to the conclusion that the English
clergy, and especially the Nonconformists, were an overpaid, and
undisciplined body, with no other aim than their personal comfort.
He had visited Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, Spurgeon's
Tabernacle, the City Temple, and had studied--so he told
me--English Wesleyanism and, Congregationalism in several
provincial centres.  He was particularly bitter about one
Nonconformist who had accepted a large salary to go to the United
States.  He returned to Germany impressed with the idea that the
Nonconformist and State Churches alike were a body of sycophants,
sharing the general decadent state of the English.  What struck him
principally was what he referred to continually as the lack of
discipline and uniformity.  Each man seemed to take his own point
of view, without any regard to the opinions of the particular
religious denomination to which he belonged.  All were grossly
ignorant of science and chemistry, and all were very much overpaid.
Here, I think, lay the sting of his envy, and it is part of the
general jealousy of England, a country where everybody is supposed
to be underworked and overpaid.

The only worse country in this respect from the German point of
view is the United States, "where even the American Lutheran
pastors have fallen victims to the lust for money."  The particular
Lutheran of whom I am speaking had been the guest of an English
Nonconformist minister and his wife, who had evidently tried to be
as hospitable as possible, and had no doubt put themselves out to
take him for excursions and outings in the Shakespeare country.

"It was nothing but eating and drinking and sightseeing," remarked
the Herr Pastor.

I suggested that he was a guest, to be looked after.

"I can assure you," he replied, "that Mr. ------ had nothing to do
all day but read the newspapers, and drink tea with his
congregation.  He did not take the trouble to grow his own
vegetables, and all he had to do was to preach on Sundays and
attend a very unruly Sunday school.  His wife, too, was not dressed
as one of ours."

He explained to me that his own life was very different.  He eked
out his minute salary by a small scientifically managed farm, and I
gathered the impression that he was much more of a farmer than a
pastor, for he deplored his inability to obtain imported nitrates
owing to the blockade.  The only question on which he was at all
unorthodox was that of the Junkers and their regrettable power of
holding potatoes, pigs, and other supplies while small men like him
had been obliged to sell.  He had a good collection of modern
scientific agricultural works, of which the Germans have an
abundance.

But while admiring the energy of the great capitalists and the
rational Liberal Party, the average clergyman tends towards
sympathy with the Agrarians.  The pastor of the small towns and
villages, who is very much under the thumb of the local Junker or
rich manufacturer, has as his highest ambition the hope that he and
his wife may be invited to coffee at least twice a year.  The
pastor's wife is delighted to be condescendingly received by the
great lady.  Herr Pastor talks agriculture with Herr Baron, and
Frau Pastor discusses past and coming incidents in the local birth
rate with Frau Baron.  Snobbery has no greater exemplification than
in the relations of the local Lutheran pastor and the local
landlord or millionaire.

A sidelight on German mentality is contained in a little
conversation which I had with a clergyman in the Province of Posen.
He knew England well, by residence and by matrimonial connections.

This is how he explained the battle of the Somme.  I give his own
words:--

"Many wounded men are coming back to our Church from the dreadful
Western front.  They have been fighting the British, and they find
that so ignorant are the British of warfare that the British
soldiers on the Somme refuse to surrender, not knowing that they
are really beaten, with the result that terrible losses are
inflicted upon our brave troops."

In this exact report of a conversation is summed up a great deal of
German psychology.

For the Salvation Army a number of Germans have genuine respect,
because it seems to be organised on some military basis.  The
Church of England they consider as degenerate as the Nonconformist.
Both, they think, are mere refuges for money-making ecclesiastics.




CHAPTER V

PUPPET PROFESSORS

The professor, like the army officer, has long been a semi-deity in
Germany.  Not only in his university lectures does he influence the
students, and particularly the prospective teachers of secondary
schools who hang on his words, but he writes the bulk of the
historical, economic and political literature of the daily Press,
the magazines and the tons of pamphlets which flood the country.

Years before the war the Government corralled him for its own.  It
gave him social status, in return for which he would do his part to
make the citizen an unquestioning, faithful and obedient servant of
the State.  As soon as he enters on his duties he becomes a civil
servant, since the universities are State institutions.  He takes
an oath in which it is stipulated that he will not write or preach
or do anything questioning the ways of the State.  His only way to
make progress in life, then, is to serve the State, to preach what
it wishes preached, to teach history as it wishes history taught.

The history of Prussia is the history of the House of Hohenzollern,
and the members of the House, generation after generation, must all
be portrayed a& heroes.  There was a striking illustration of this
in 1913 when the Kaiser had Hauptmann's historical play suppressed
because it represented Frederick William III. in true light, as
putty in the hands of Napoleon.

There is a small group of German professors interested solely in
scientific research, such as Professor Roentgen and the late
Professor Ehrlich, which we exclude from the "puppet professors."
Such men succeed through sheer ability and their results are their
diplomas before the world.  Neither shoulder-knots nor medals
pinned in rows across their breasts would contribute one iota to
their success, nor make that success the more glittering once it is
achieved.

One of these, a Bavarian of the old school, a thoughtful, liberal
man who had travelled widely, told me that he deplored the depths
of mental slavery to which the mass of the German professors had
sunk.  "They are living on the reputation made by us scientists,"
he declared.  "They write volumes and they go about preaching
through the land, but they contribute nothing, absolutely nothing,
to the uplifting of humanity and of the country."  He told me of
how Government spies before the war and during it watch professors
who are suspected of having independent ways of thought, and for
the slightest "offence" such as being in the audience of a Social
Democratic lecture (this before the war, of course; such meetings
are forbidden now) they are put on the official black-list and
promotion is closed to them for ever.

In warring Germany I found professors vying with one another to sow
hatred among the people, to show that Germany is always right, and
that she is fighting a war of defence, which she tried to avoid by
every means in her power, and that any methods employed to crush
Great Britain, the real instigator of the attack on Germany, are
good methods.

With the pastors, they spread the idea that "Germany is the rock
selected by Almighty God upon which to build His Empire."  J. P.
Bang, the able Danish Professor of Theology at the University of
Copenhagen, writes clearly on this point.  He says, when describing
Emanuel Geibel:--

"He has succeeded in finding the classical formula for the German
arrogance, which of necessity demands that Germanism shall be
placed above everything else in the world, and at the same time in
giving this arrogance such an expression that it shall not conflict
with the German demand for moral justification.  This has been
achieved in the lines which have been quoted times without number
in the newest German war literature:

  Und es mag am deutschen Wesen
  Einmal noch die Welt genesen!
  (The world may yet again be healed by Germanism.)

"The hope here expressed has become a certainty for modern Germany,
and the Germans see in this the moral basis for all their demands.
Why must Germany be victorious, why must she have her place in the
sun, why must her frontiers be extended, why is all opposition to
Germany shameful, not to say devilish, why must Germany become a
world-empire, why ought Germany and not Great Britain to become the
great Colonial Power?  Why, because it is through the medium of
Germanism that the world is to be healed; it is upon Germanism that
the salvation of the world depends.  That is why all attacks
against Germanism are against God's plans, in opposition to His
designs for the world; in short, a sin against God.  The Germans do
not seem to be able to understand that other nations cannot be
particularly delighted at being described as sickly shoots which
can only be healed by coming under the influence of German
fountains of health.  Yet one would think that, if they would only
reflect a little upon what the two lines quoted above imply, they
would be able in some measure to understand the dislike for them,
which they declare to be so incomprehensible.

"He also prophesied about the great master who would arise and
create the unity of Germany.  This prophecy was brilliantly
fulfilled in Bismarck.  After 1866 he loudly clamours for
Alsace-Lorraine.  This he cannot reasonably have expected to obtain
without war; but when the war comes we hear exactly the same tale
as now of the Germans' love of peace and the despicable
deceitfulness of their enemies.  'And the peace shall be a _German
peace_; now tremble before the sword of God and of Germany ye who
are strong in impiety and fruitful in bloodguiltiness.'"

Hate lectures have been both fashionable and popular in Germany
during the war.  I was attracted to one in Munich by flaming red
and yellow posters which announced that Professor Werner Sombart of
the University of Berlin would speak at the Vierjahreszeiten Hall
on "Unser Hass gegen England" (Our Hatred of England).

I sat among the elite of the Bavarian capital in a large hall with
even the standing room filled, when a black-bearded professor
stepped upon the stage amid a flutter of handclapping and proceeded
to his task without any introduction.  He was a Professor of
Hatred, and it soon became quite clear that he was full of his
subject.  His lank frame leaned over the footlights and he wound
and unwound his long, thin fingers, while his lips sneered and his
sharp black eyes gleamed venom as he instructed business men,
bankers, smart young officers, lorgnetted dowagers and sweet-faced
girls, in the duty of hating with the whole heart and the whole
mind.  I soon felt that if Lissauer is the Horace of Hate, Sombart
is its Demosthenes.

"It is not our duty (_duty_ is always a good catchword in German
appeal) to hate individual Englishmen, such as Sir Edward Grey and
Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George.  No, we must go far beyond that.
We must hate the very essence of everything English.  We must hate
the very soul of England.  An abysmal gulf yawns between the two
nations which can never, and must never, be bridged over.  We need
borrow _Kultur_ from no nation on earth, for we ourselves have
developed the highest Kultur in the world."

The professor continued in this strain for an hour and a half, and
concluded with the rather striking statements that _hatred is the
greatest force in the world to overcome tremendous obstacles_, and
that _either one must hate or one must fear_.

The moral is, of course, obvious.  Nobody wishes to be a coward,
therefore the only alternative is to hate.  Therefore, hate England!

I watched the audience during the lecture and did not fail to note
the close attention shown the professor and the constant nods and
sighs of assent of those about me.  I was not, however, prepared
for the wild tumult of applause at the finish.  Indeed the admiring
throng rushed to the stage to shower him with admiration.

"Das war aber zu schon!" sighed a dowager near me.

"Ja, ja, wunderbar.  Ein Berliner Professor!"  And the student with
_Schmissen_ (sabre cuts) across his close-cropped head smacked his
lips with, satisfaction over the words much as he might have done
over his Stein at the Furstenhof.

I investigated Professor Sombart and learned from authority which
is beyond question that he was an out and out Government agent
foisted on to the University of Berlin against the wishes of its
faculty.

The name of Professor Joseph Kohler is known, all over the world to
men who have the slightest acquaintance with German jurisprudence.
His literary output has been enormous and he has unquestionably
made many valuable contributions to legal science.  Even he,
however, cannot do the impossible, and his "_Not kennt kein Gebot_"
(Necessity knows no law), an attempt in the summer of 1915 to
justify the German invasion of Belgium, makes Germany's case on
this particular point appear worse than ever.

The Empire of Rome and the Empire of Napoleon worked upon the
principle that necessity knows no law.  Why should not the Empire
of William II.?  That is the introductory theme.  The reader then
wades through page after page of classical philosophy, biblical
philosophy, and modern German philosophy which support the theory
that a sin may not always be a sin.  One may steal, for example, if
by so doing a life he saved.  It naturally follows from this that
when a nation is confronted by a problem which involves its very
existence it may do anything which may work to its advantage.  Thus
Germany did right in attacking the little country she had solemnly
sworn to defend, and history will later prove that the real
barbarians of the war are the Americans, since they are so abjectly
ignorant as to call the Germans barbarians for acting as they did.
So argues Joseph Kohler, who certainly ranks among the first
half-dozen professors of Germany.

There are a few professors of international law in Germany,
however, who have preserved a legally-balanced attitude despite
their sympathies.   One of these wrote an article for a law
periodical, many of the statements of which were in direct
contradiction to statements in the German Press.  The German
people, for example, were being instructed--a not difficult
task--that Britain was violating international law when her vessels
hoisted a neutral flag during pursuit.  This professor simply
quoted paragraph 81 of the German Prize Code which showed that
orders to German ships were precisely the same.  Were this known to
the German population one of the ten thousand hate tricks would be
out of commission.  Therefore, this and similar articles must be
suppressed, not because they are not true, but because they would
interfere with the delusion of hate which saturates the mind of the
new Germany.  I have seen articles returned to this distinguished
writer with the censor stamp: _Not to be published till after the
war_.

When a winning Germany began to grow angry at American munition
deliveries I heard much talk of the indemnity which the United
States would be compelled to pay after Europe had been duly
disposed of.  Professor Hermann Oncken, of the University of
Heidelberg, made this his theme in a widely read booklet, entitled,
"_Deutschlands Weltkrieg und die Deutsch-Amerikaner_."

Professor P.  von Gast, of the Technical College of Aachen, does
not appear to realise that his country has a sufficient job on her
hands in Europe and Africa, but thinks the midst of a great war a
suitable time to arouse his countrymen against the United States in
Latin America.  He explains that the Monroe Doctrine was simply an
attempt on the part of the great Anglo-Saxon Republic to gobble up
the whole continent to the south for herself.  "All the world must
oppose America in this attempt," he feels.

Then there is Professor Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who writes on
reprisals in the _Juristenblatt_ of July, 1916.  It should be borne
in mind that he is a professor of law and that he is writing in a
book which is read by legal minds and not by the general public;
all the more reason that we should expect something that would
contain common sense.  Professor Bartholdy, after expressing his
profound horror over the French raid on Karlsruhe, hastens to
explain that such methods can be of not the slightest military
advantage to the French, but will only arouse Germany to fight all
the harder.  He deplores enemy attacks on unfortified districts,
and claims that the French military powers confess that such acts
are not glorious by their failure to pin decorations on the breasts
of the aviators who perpetrate them, in the same way as the German
Staff honours heroes like Boelke and Immelmann, who fight, as do
all German aviators, like men.

There have been many incidents outside of Germany of which the
professor apparently has never heard, or else his sense of humour
is below the zero mark.

My talks with German professors impressed me with how little most
of them keep in touch with the war situation from day to day and
from month to month.  A Berlin professor of repute with whom I
sipped coffee one day in the Cafe Bauer expressed the greatest
surprise when he heard that a neutral could actually get from
America to Germany.  I heard this opinion very often among the
common people, but had supposed that doctors of philosophy were
somewhat better informed.

During my conversation with another professor, whose war remarks
have been circulated in the neutral countries by the Official News
Service, he remarked that he read the London Times and other
English newspapers regularly.

"Oh, so you get the English papers?" I asked, fully aware that one
may do so in Germany.

"Not exactly," returned the professor.  "The Government has a very
nice arrangement by which condensed articles from the English
newspapers are prepared and sent to us professors."

This was the final straw.  I had always considered professors to be
men who did research work, and I supposed that professors on
political science and history consulted original sources when
possible.  Yet the German professor of the twentieth century, is
content to take what the Government gives him and only what the
Government gives to him.

Thus we find that the professor is a great power in Germany in the
control of the minds of the people, and that the Government
controls the mind of the professor.  He is simply one of the
instruments in the German Government's Intellectual Blockade of the
German people.




CHAPTER VI

THE LIE ON THE FILM

At the end of an absorbingly interesting reel showing the Kaiser
reviewing his troops, a huge green trade-mark globe revolved with a
streamer fluttering _Berlin_.  The lights were turned on and the
operator looked over his assortment of reels.

An American had been granted permission to take war films in
Germany in the autumn of 1914, to be exhibited in the United
States.  After he had arrived, however, the authorities had refused
to let him take pictures with the army, but, like the proverbial
druggist, had offered him something "just as good."  In London, on
his return journey home, he showed to a few newspaper
correspondents the films which Germany had foisted upon him.

"The next film, gentlemen, will depict scenes in East Prussia," the
operator announced.

Although I had probably seen most of these pictures in Germany, my
interest quickened, for I had been through that devastated province
during and after the first invasion.  Familiar scenes of ruined
villages and refugees scudding from the sulphur storm passed before
my eyes.  Then came the ruined heap of a once stately church tagged
_Beautiful Church in Allenburg Destroyed by the Russians_.  The
destruction seemed the more heinous since a trace of former beauty
lived through the ruins, and you could not view this link of
evidence against the Russians without a feeling of resentment.
This out-of-the-way church was not architecturally important to the
world as is Rheims Cathedral, to be sure, but the destruction
seemed just as wanton.

The next picture flashed on the screen showed a Russian church
intact, with the simple title, _Russian Church at Potetschiki_.
The moral of the sequence was clear.  The German Government, up to
the minute in all things, knows the vivid educative force of the
kinema, and realises the effect of such a sequence of pictures upon
her people at home and neutrals throughout the world, It enables
them to see for themselves the difference between the barbarous
Russians and the generous Germans.

The reel buzzed on, but I did not see the succeeding pictures, for
my thoughts were of far-off East Prussia, of Allenburg, and of the
true story of the ruined church by the Alle River.


Tannenberg had been fought, Samsanow had been decisively smashed in
the swamps and plashy streams, and Hindenburg turned north-east to
cut off Rennenkampf's army, which had advanced to the gates of
Konigsberg.  The outside world had been horrified by stories of
German crime in Belgium; whereupon Germany counter attacked with
reports of terrible atrocities perpetrated by the Russians, of boys
whose right hands had been cut off so that they could never serve
in the army, of wanton murder, rapine and burnings.  I read these
stories in the Berlin papers, and they filled me with a deep
feeling against Russia.

One of the most momentous battles of history was being fought in
the West, and the Kaiser's armies were in full retreat from the
Marne to the Aisne, but Berlin knew nothing of this.  Refugees from
East Prussia with white arm-bands filled the streets, Hindenburg
and victory were on every tongue, Paris was forgotten, and all
interest centred in the Eastern theatre of war.

That was in the good old days when the war was young, when armies
were taking up positions, when the management of newspaper
reporters was not developed to a fine art, when Europe was
topsy-turvy, when it was quite the thing for war correspondents to
outwit the authorities and see all they could.

I resolved to make an attempt to get into East Prussia, and as it
was useless to wait for official permission--that is, if I was to
see things while fresh--I determined to play the game and trust to
luck.

Danzig seemed the end of my effort, for the railroad running east
was choked with military trains, the transportation of troops and
supplies in one direction and prisoners and wounded in the other.
By good fortune, however, I booked passage on a boat for Konigsberg.

The little steamer nosed its way through a long lock canal amid
scenery decidedly Dutch, with old grey windmills dotting broad fiat
stretches, black and white cows looming large and distinct on the
landscape, and fish nets along the waters edge.  To the right the
shore grew bolder after we entered the _Frishes Haff_, a broad
lagoon separated from the Baltic by a narrow strip of pasture land.
Red sails glowed in the clear sunshine, adding an Adriatic touch.
Cumbersome junk-like boats flying the Red Cross passed west under
full sail.  Germany was using every man at her disposal to
transport wounded and prisoners from the battle region which we
were drawing near.

A smoky haze ahead indicated Konigsberg.  The mouth of the Pregel
bustled with activity, new fortifications were being everywhere
thrown up, while indistinct field-grey figures swarmed over the
plain like ants.  We glided through forests of masts and rigging
and slid up to a pier opposite great sagging warehouses behind
which the sun was setting.

As I picked up my bag to go ashore, a heavy hand fell on my
shoulder and I was asked to wait until we were boarded from the
police boat which was puffing alongside.  My detainer, a government
inspector, a man of massive frame with deep set eyes and a shaggy
black beard, refused to say more than that the police wished to see
me.  They had been signalled and were coming to the boat expressly
for that purpose.

American ammunition had not begun to play its part in German public
opinion at that time, and, moreover, America was being hailed
everywhere in Germany as a possible ally against Japan.  Therefore,
although only a few days previously Russian guns had been booming
less than a dozen miles away, and Konigsburg was now the base
against Rennenkampf, my presence was tolerated, and I finally
managed to get lodgings for the night after I had found two hotels
turned into hospitals,

I spent the following day trying to obtain permission to pass the
cordon of sentries outside the city, but I received only the advice
to go back to Berlin and apply at the _Auswartiges Amt_ (Foreign
Office).  I did not wish to wait in Berlin until this campaign was
over; I wished to follow on the heels of the army through the
ruined land and catch up to the fighting if possible.  American
correspondents had done this in Belgium.  I myself had done it with
the Austrians against the Serbs, and I succeeded in East Prussia,
but not through Berlin.

I was well aware that Germany was making a tremendous bid for
neutral favour.  I had furthermore heard so much of Russian
atrocities that I was convinced that the stories were true;
consequently I decided to play the role of an investigator of
Muscovite crime.  I won Herr Meyer of the Wolff Telegraph Bureau,
who sent me along with his card to Commandant von Rauch, who at
first refused to let me proceed, but after I had hovered outside
his door for three days, finally gave me a pass to go to Tapiau,
the high-water mark of the Russian invasion.

That night, "by chance," in the _Deutscher Hof_, I met the
black-bearded official who had arrested me on the boat, and I told
him that I had permission to go to Tapiau next morning.  When he
became convinced, that I was a professional atrocity hunter who
believed that the Russians had been brutal, his hospitality became
boundless, and over copious steins of Munich beer he described the
invaders in a manner which made Gladstone's expose of the Turks in
Bulgaria, the stories of Captain Kidd, and the tales of the Spanish
Inquisition seem like essays on brotherly love.  He was
particularly incensed at the Russians because they had destroyed
Allenburg, for Allenburg was his home.  One of the stories on which
he laid great stress was that a band of Cossacks had pillaged the
church just outside of Allenburg on the road to Friedland, after
they had driven sixty innocent maidens into it and outraged them
there.

A train of the _Militar-Personenzug_ variety bore me next morning
through a country of barbed wire, gun emplacements and fields
seamed with trenches to Tapiau, a town withered in the blast of
war.  Two ruined bridges in the Pregel bore silent testimony to the
straits of the retreating Germans, for the remaining ends on the
further shore were barricaded with scraps of iron and wood gathered
from the wreckage.

Landsturm guards examined my pass, which was good only for Tapiau
and return.  I decided to miss the train back, however, and push on
in the wake of the army to Wehlau.  Outside of Tapiau I was
challenged by a sentry, who, to my amazement, did not examine my
now worthless pass when I pulled it from my pocket, but motioned me
on.

The road ran through eye-tiring stretches of meadows pockmarked
with great shell holes full of black water.  I came upon the
remains of an old brick farmhouse battered to dust in woods which
were torn to splinters by shell, bullet and shrapnel.  The Russians
had bombarded Tapiau from here, and had in turn been shelled in the
trenches which they had dug and chopped in the labyrinth of roots.
Among the debris of tins, cases, knapsacks and cartridge clips were
fragments of uniforms which had been blown off Russian bodies by
German shells, while on a branch above my head a shrivelled human
arm dangled in the light breeze of September.

I left the sickening atmosphere of the woods behind and pushed on
to Wehlau, a primitive little town situated on the meadows where
the Alle flows into the Pregel.  Here my troubles began.  Soldiers
stared at me as I walked through crooked, narrow streets unevenly
paved with small stones in a manner that would bring joy to the
heart of a shoe manufacturer.  The sun sank in a cloudless blaze
behind a line of trenches on a gentle slope above the western shore
when I entered the _Gasthof Rabe_, where I hoped to get a room for
the night.

I had no sooner crossed the threshold, however, than I was arrested
and brought to the Etappen-Commandant in the Pregelstrasse.  I
fully expected to be placed under arrest or be deported, but I
determined to put up the best bluff possible.  A knowledge of
Germans and their respect for any authority above that invested in
their own individual selves led me to decide upon a bold course of
action, so I resolved to play the game with a high hand and with an
absolute exterior confidence of manner.

Instead of waiting to be questioned when I was brought into the
presence of the stern old officer, I told him at once that I had
been looking for him.  I informed him that Herr von Meyer and
Commandant Rauch in Konigsberg were in hearty sympathy with my
search for Russian atrocities, but although I succeeded in quieting
any suspicions which the Commandant may have entertained, I found
winning permission to stay in Wehlau an exceedingly difficult
matter.

Orders were orders!  He explained that the battle was rolling
eastward not far away and that I must go back.  To add weight to
what he said he read me a set of typewritten orders which had come
from Berlin the day before.  "Journalists are not allowed with the
army or in the wake of the army in East Prussia. . . ." he read, in
a tone which indicated that he considered the last word said.

But I had become so fascinated with this battle-scarred, uncanny,
out-of-the-way land that I resolved to try every means to stay.  I
declared that on this particular mission I was more of an
investigator than a journalist, that I had the special task
(self-imposed, to be sure) of investigating Russian atrocities;
that if Berlin reports were to be given credence abroad they must
be substantiated by some impartial observer.  If Germany would
supply the atrocities, I would supply the copy.  That she wished to
do so was evidenced by the permissions granted me by Herr von Meyer
of the Wolff Telegraph Bureau and Commandant Rauch of the capital
of the devastated province.  (I had passed beyond the point where I
was told that I could go, but at any rate their names carried
weight.)  Would it not seem strange if the Commandant at Wehlau had
me sent back after these great men had set their seal of approval
upon my investigations?  After Germany had made such grave charges
against the Russians, how would it impress American readers that
the German Commandant at Wehlau could not make good and had sent me
back?

Then, as a finishing stroke, I pulled my passport from my pocket
and showed Berlin's approval of me stamped impressively in the
right-hand corner.  This vise was not at all unique with me.  It
had been affixed to the passports of thousands of Americans of all
grades, and was merely to ensure passage from Germany into Holland.
As I did not wish to impose upon the time of the Commandant I did
not burden him with these extraneous details while he feasted his
eyes on the magic words: _Gesehen, Berlin_.  Mount Olympus, Mecca,
Imperial and Ecclesiastical Rome all rolled into one--that is
authoritative Berlin to the German of the province.

"Gesehen, Berlin" he repeated with reverence, carefully folded the
passport and deferentially handed it back to me.  I saw that I was
winning, so I sought to rise to the occasion.

"And now, Herr Commandant," I began, "can you suggest where I may
best begin my atrocity work tomorrow?  Or first, would it not be
well for me to get a more complete idea of the invasion by seeing
on the map just what routes the Russians took coming in?"

He unfolded a large military map of peerless German accuracy and
regaled me for more than half an hour with the military features of
the campaign.

"Just tell me the worst things that the Russians have done," I
began, "and I will start investigating them tomorrow."

Then he anathematised the Russians and all things Russian, while
his orderly stood stiffly and admiringly at attention and the other
officers stopped in their tracks.

"First you should visit the ruins of the once beautiful old castle
at Labiau destroyed by the beasts," he thundered.   "And they also
wantonly destroyed the magnificent old church near by."

He followed with an account of the history of the castle, and it
was clear that he was deeply affected by the loss of these
landscape embellishments which he had learned to love so much that
they became part of his life, and that their destruction deeply
enraged him against the enemy.  Though I saw his point of view and
sympathised with him, I questioned him in the hope of learning of
some real atrocities.  It was useless.  Although he made general
charges against the Russians, he always reverted, when pinned down
to facts, with a fresh burst of anger, to the castle and church of
Labiau as his pet atrocity.

The orderly had just been commanded to take me on a search for
quarters for the night, when an automobile horn tooted beneath the
window.  Heavy steps on the stairs; a Staff Officer entered the
room, looked surprised to see me, and asked who I was.  The
Commandant justified his permission to let me remain by eulogising
the noble work upon which I was engaged, but though the Staff
Officer's objections were hushed, he did not enthuse over my coming.

With intent to convince him that I was already hard at work I told
him of the terrible destruction of the castle and church at Labiau,
which I would visit on the following day.

"I have a sergeant below who was there, and I will have him come
in," he said.

The sergeant entered, clicked his heels at attention; a doughty old
warrior, small and wiry, not a civilian thrust into field-grey, but
a soldier, every inch of him, a Prussian soldier, turned to stone
in the presence of his superior officers, his sharp clear eyes
strained on some point in space directly ahead.  He might have
stepped out of the pages of the Seven Years' War.

Nobody spoke.  The pale yellow light of the oil lamp on the
Commandants desk fell on the military faces, figures and trappings
of the men in the room.  The shuffling tramp of soldiers in the
dark street below died away in the direction of the river.  I felt
the military tenseness of the scene.  I realised that I was inside
the German lines on a bluff that was succeeding but might collapse
at any moment.

Feeling that a good investigating committee should display
initiative I broke the silence by questioning the little sergeant,
and I began on a line which I felt would please the Commandant,
"You were at Labiau during the fighting?" I asked.

"I was, sir!"

He did not move a muscle except those necessary for speech.  His
eyes were still rigid on that invisible something directly ahead.
He clearly was conscious of the importance of his position, as
informant to a stranger before his superior officers.

"I have heard that the beautiful old castle and the magnificent old
church were destroyed," I continued.

"You know of this, of course?"

"Ja, ja, that is true!  Our wonderful artillery knocked them to
pieces when we drove the Russians out in panic!"

The sergeant was not the only one looking into space now.  The
Staff Officer relieved the situation by dismissing him from the
room, whereupon the Commandant sharply bade the orderly conduct me
to my night lodgings.

"No Iron Cross for the little sergeant," I reflected, as we
stumbled through the cooked old streets in the dark.  Is it any
wonder that the German Government insists that neutral
correspondents be chaperoned by someone who can skilfully show them
what is proper for them to see, and let them hear that which is
proper for them to hear?

Everywhere in rooms lighted by oil lamps soldiers sat talking,
drinking and playing cards.  They were under every roof, and were
also bivouacked on the flats along the river.  In all three inns
there was not even floor space available.   The little brick town
hall, too, was crowded with soldiers.

At the pontoon bridge we were sharply challenged by a sentry.  The
orderly answered and we passed on to a crowded beer hall above
which I was fortunate to secure a room.  By the flickering light of
a candle I was conducted to a dusty attic furnished with
ferruginous junk in one corner and a dilapidated bed in another.
No such luxuries as bed clothing, of course; only a red mattress
which had not been benefited in the least by Russian bayonet
thrusts and sabre slashes in the quest of concealed treasure.  I
could not wash unless I would go down to the river, for with the
blowing up of the bridges the water mains had also been destroyed.
The excellent organisation of the Germans was in evidence, however,
for during my stay I witnessed their prompt and efficient measures
to restore sanitation, in order to avert disease.

I went downstairs and entered the large beer room, hazy with
tobacco smoke, and filled for the most part with non-commissioned
officers.  They, like everybody else in the room, seemed to have
heard of my arrival.  I joined a group at a long table, a jovial
crowd of men who chaffed good naturedly one of their number who
said he wished to be home with his wife and little ones.  They
looked at me and laughed, then pointing at him said, "He is no
warrior!"

But it was their talk about the Russians which, interested me most.
There was no hate in their speech, only indifference and contempt
for their Eastern enemy.  Hindenburg was their hero, and they drank
toast after toast to his health.  The Russian menace was over, they
felt; Britain and France would be easily smashed.  They loved their
Army, their Emperor, and Hindenburg, and believed implicitly in all
three.

They sang a song of East Prussia and raised their foaming glasses
at the last two lines:

  "Es trinkt der Mensch, es sauft das Pferd,
  In Ostpreussen 1st das umgekehrt."

While they were singing a man in civilian clothes entered,
approached me with an air of authority, and announced in a loud
tone of voice that he had heard that I had said that I had come to
East Prussia in search of Russian atrocities.

"My name is Curtin," I began, introducing myself, although I felt
somewhat uneasy.

"Thomas!" was all he said.

"Good Heavens!" I thought.  "Is this man looking for me?  Am I in
for serious trouble now?"

Instead, however, of _Thomas_ being an interrogation as to my first
name, it was his simple introduction of himself--a strange
coincidence.

Although he was addressing his remarks to me, he exclaimed in a
tone which could be heard all over the room that he was Chief of
Police during the Russian occupation of Wehlau for three weeks, and
took great pride in asserting that he was the man who could tell me
all that I wished to know.  He was highly elated because the
Russians had employed him, given him a whistle and invested him
with authority to summon aid if he detected any wrong-doing.  They
had furthermore paid him for his services.   Although he now
roundly tongue-lashed them in general terms, there was no definite
personal accusation that he could make against them.

He told me of a sergeant who went into a house, ordered a meal and
then demanded money, threatening the woman who had served him.  A
lieutenant entered at this moment, learned the particulars of the
altercation, and struck the sergeant, whom he reproved for
disobeying commands for good conduct which had come from
Headquarters.  "Just think of such lack of respect among officers,"
Thomas concluded.  "One officer striking another for something done
against a person in an enemy country.  That is bad for discipline.
Such a thing would never happen in the German Army."

The moral of the story as I saw it was quite different from what he
had intended it to be.

A few days later I was again in the crowded beer hall when Herr
Thomas entered.  He liked to be in the limelight, and had a most
extraordinary manner of apparently addressing his conversation to
some selected individual, but carried it on in a tone which could
be heard throughout the entire room.  The Russian whistle which he
still wore, and of which he was very proud, threatened to become a
millstone about his neck, for returning refugees were accusing him
of inefficiency during his reign, since they asserted that the
Russians had stolen their goods from under his very nose.

After he had hurled the usual invectives against the invaders for
my benefit, two splendid looking officers, captain and lieutenant,
both perfect gentlemen, said that they hoped that I would not
become so saturated with this talk that I would write unfairly
about the Russians.  They added that they had been impressed by the
Russian officers in that region and the control which they had
exercised over their men.

Early next morning I met the big man with the black beard who was
either on my trail or had encountered me again by chance.  When I
said that I was going to Allenburg, of the destruction of which I
had heard so much, he practically insisted that I go with him in
his carriage.  A mysterious stranger in brown was with him, who
also assisted in the sight-seeing.

We road through a gently undulating farming and grazing country to
the Alle River, where we boarded a little Government tug which
threaded its way through dead cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and now and
then a man floating down the stream.  Battered trenches, ruined
farmhouses, splintered woods, the hoof marks of Russian horses that
had forded the stream under German fire, showed that the struggle
had been intense along the river.  The plan of battle formed in my
mind.  It was clear that the Germans had made the western bank a
main line of defence, which, however, had been broken through.

"Just wait until we reach Allenburg," said the man in brown, "and
you will see what beasts the murdering Russians are.  Wait until
you see how they have destroyed that innocent town!"

According to the course of the battle and the story of the Russian
destruction of Allenburg, I expected to find it on the western
bank, but to my great surprise it is on the eastern, with a
considerable stretch of road, separating it from the river.  We
left the boat and walked along this road, on each side of which lay
willows in perfect rows where they had been skilfully felled by the
Russians.  This sight evoked new assaults from my guides upon "the
beasts" whom they accused of wanton and wilful violation of the
arboreal beauty which the Allenburgers had loved.

I put myself in the place of the citizens of Allenburg, returning
to their little town devastated by war; I understood their feelings
and I sympathised with them.  I was seeing the other side of
Germany's page of conquest.  The war map of Europe shows that she
has done most of the invading, and during all the days I spent in
the Fatherland I never heard a single word of pity for the people
of the regions overrun by her armies--except, of course, the
Pecksniffian variety used by her diplomats.  It was now any rare
privilege to return with German refugees to _their_ ruined country,
and they vied with one another when they talked to me in the
presence of my guides in accusing the Russians of every crime under
the sun.  The war had been brought home to them, but in the
meantime other Germans had brought the war home even more forcibly
to the citizens of Belgium and northern France, but the thing could
not balance in the minds of those affected.

I was conducted to a combination home and chemist's shop, the upper
part of which had been wrecked by a shell.  The Russians had looted
the place of chemicals and had searched through all the letters in
the owner's desk.  These they had thrown upon the floor instead of
putting them back neatly in the drawers.

My guides laid great stress on such crimes, but I took mental note
of certain other things which were not pointed out to me.  The
beasts--as they always called them--had been quartered here for
three weeks, but not a mirror had been cracked, not a scratch
marred the highly polished black piano, and the well-stocked,
exquisitely carved bookcase was precisely as it had been before the
first Cossack patrol entered the city.

The owner viewed his loss philosophically.  "When we have placed a
war indemnity upon Russia I shall be paid in full," he declared in
a voice of supreme confidence.

My guides never gave me an opportunity to talk alone with the few
civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the
conversation was based on the "wanton destruction by the beasts of
an innocent town."

After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I
slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins.  I came upon
human bodies burned to a crisp.  Heaps of empty cartridge shells
littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they
were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men
defending the town.

I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had
remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to
care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest
insult.  Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had
spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path.

Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had not fired
a shot upon the town, but that the Germans had destroyed it driving
them out.

I entered a little Roman Catholic church in the undamaged section
of the town and noted with interest that nothing had apparently
been disturbed--this the more significant since the Russians hold a
different faith.

I walked back towards the river and strolled through the neat,
well-shaded, churchyard to the ruins of the large church, the
dominating feature of the town.  It was clear from what was left
that the lines of the body and the spire had been of rare beauty
for such an insignificant place as Allenburg.

"Too bad!" I remarked to a white-haired old man who was sitting on
a bench mournfully contemplating the ruins.

"Sad, so sad!" he said in a voice full of grief.  "And it seems
sadder that it had to be done by our own people," he added.

"Were you here during the fighting?" I asked.

"I was," he answered.  "I would rather die than leave this place,
where I was born and where I have always lived."


I returned to the anxious guides add told them that I had visited
the ruins of the church.

"A destruction which could serve no military purpose," declared the
man in brown.  "You see the methods of the people Germany is
fighting."

I expressed a desire to seek only one more thing, the church on the
road to Friedland which had been destroyed by the Russians after
the sixty maidens had been driven into it.  We went to it, but,
alas! it had not been disturbed in the least.  I somehow felt that
my guides saw the lack of destruction with genuine regret.  The big
man with the black beard was at a loss to reconcile the story he
told me at Konigsberg with the actual facts found on the spot.

"Somebody must have made a mistake," was all he said.

My last view of Allenburg was from across the river with the long
rays of the setting sun burnishing the ruins of the once beautiful
church, the church I saw months later on the screen in the London
display room, the church that has been shown all over the world as
evidence of Russian methods in war.

I went all through East Prussia studying first hand the effects of
the great campaign.  My luck increased from day to day.  I secured
a military pass to visit all hospitals in the XXth Army Corps,
which aided my investigations not a little.  The prejudice which I
had against the Russians died in East Prussia.  It was buried
forever the following winter when I was with the Russian Army in
the memorable retreat through the Bukowina.  In East Prussia I was
in an entirely different position from a man investigating
conditions in Belgium, for I was in the German's own country after
he had driven out the invader.  I tried to see some youth whose
hand had been cut off, but could not find a single case, although,
everybody had heard of such mutilations.  The fact that no doctor
whom I questioned knew of any case was sufficient refutation, since
a person whose hand had been cut off would need something more than
a bandage tied on at home.

When the Russians entered the province they struck yellow and black
posters everywhere announcing that it was annexed to Russia.  In
view of this the Russian officers were instructed to restrain their
men and to treat the natives well.  Isolated cases of violence, for
the most part murder and robbery of the victim, had occurred where
men had broken away from restraint, but they were surprisingly few.

After I returned to Berlin I met an American correspondent who was
in East Prussia when I was.  His sympathies were pro-German, but he
was an, open and fair-minded man, who, like me, had left Berlin
with a deep feeling against the Russians, thanks to the excellent
German propaganda.  "I went especially to get some good stories of
Russian atrocities," he said.  "I thought that every mile would be
blood-marked with evidence, but I came back defeated.  Some petty
larceny and robbery, a Red Cross flag torn to shreds by a Russian
shell, two old men murdered and robbed by Cossacks, and a woman in
the hospital at Soldau, who had been outraged by five Cossacks, was
all that I could find, even though I was aided by the German
Government."

My own first-hand investigations convinced me that it would be
difficult for any army in the world to conduct a cleaner campaign
than Russia conducted in her first invasion of East Prussia.  I
remind the reader that I am speaking of the _first_ invasion, for I
have no personal knowledge of the second.   Subsequently in Germany
when.  I spoke of the matter I was always told that it was the
_second_ invasion which was so bad.  Perhaps!  But I had been
fooled when Berlin cried wolf the first time.

By a stroke of fortune while in East Prussia I became "assistant"
for two days to a Government moving picture photographer who had a
pass for himself and assistant in those happy days of inexactitude.
We formed the kind of close comradeship which men form who are
suffocated but unhurt by a shell which kills and maims others all
about them.  That had been our experience.  He had, moreover, been
over much of the ground covered by me behind the front.

"I am instructed to get four kinds of pictures," he explained.
"(1) Pictures which show German patriotism and unity.  (2) Pictures
which show German organisation and efficiency.  (3) Pictures which
show evidence of humanity in the German Army.  (4) Pictures which
show destruction by the enemy.  Some of my pictures are kept by the
_Kriegsministerium_ for purposes of studying the war.  The greater
part, however, are used for propaganda both at home and abroad.
Furthermore, I must be careful to keep an accurate record of what
each picture is.  The pictures are then arranged and given suitable
titles in Berlin,"


I thought of all this in the London display-room when the familiar
picture of the ruined church flashed before my eyes with the title
_Beautiful Church at Allenburg Destroyed by the Russians_--a
deliberate lie on the film.

I have nothing to say against the Germans for knocking their own
town to pieces or against the British and French for knocking
French towns to pieces.  That is one of the misfortunes of war.

The point is, that the propaganda department of the Wilhelmstrasse
fully understands that people who do not see the war, especially
neutrals, are shocked at the destruction of churches.   The Germans
have been taught an unpleasant lesson in this in the case of
Rheims.  Therefore they answer by falsifying a film when it suits
their purpose with just as little compunction as they repudiate
promises.

"A little thing!" you might say.

That adds to its importance, for it is attention to detail which
characterises modern Germany.  It is the subtle things which are
difficult to detect.  The Government neglects nothing which will
aid in the ownership of public opinion at home and the influencing
of neutrals throughout the world.




CHAPTER VII

THE IDEA FACTORY

A group of diplomats and newspaper correspondents were gathered at
lunch in a German city early in the war, when one of the latter, an
American, asked how a certain proposition which was being discussed
would suit public opinion.  "Will public opinion favour such a
move?" he questioned.

"Public opinion!  Public opinion!" a member of the German Foreign
Office repeated in a tone which showed that he was honestly
perplexed.  "Why, we create it!"

He spoke the truth.  They certainly do.

The State-controlled professor, parson and moving-picture producer
appeal to limited audiences in halls and churches, but the
newspaper is ubiquitous, particularly in a country where illiteracy
is practically unknown, and where regulations bidding and
forbidding are constantly appearing in the newspapers--the reading
of which is thus absolutely necessary if one would avoid friction
with the authorities.

In a free Press, like that of the United States or Great Britain,
the truth on any question of public interest is reasonably certain
to come to light sooner or later.  Competition is keen, and if one
paper does not dig up and publish the facts, a rival is likely to
do so.  The German Press was gaining a limited degree of freedom
before the war, but that has been wiped away.  As in other
belligerent countries news of a military nature must quite properly
pass the censor.  But in Germany, unlike Great Britain, for
example, all other topics must be written in a manner to please the
Government, or trouble ensues for the writer and his paper.  To a
certain extent the Press is a little unmuzzled during the sittings
of the Reichstag--not much, but somewhat, for the reports of the
Reichstag proceedings are strictly censored.  The famous speech of
Deputy Bauer in May, 1916, was a striking example, for not a word
of his speech, the truth of which was not questioned, was allowed
to appear in a single German newspaper.  The suppression of most of
Herr Hoffmann's speech in the Prussian Diet in January, 1917, is
another important case in point.  This is in striking contrast to
the British Parliament, which is supreme, and over whose reports
the Press Bureau has no control.  The German Press Bureau, on the
other hand, revises and even suppresses the publication of
speeches.  When necessary, it specially transmits speeches by
telegram and wireless to foreign countries if it thinks those
speeches will help German propaganda.

The Berlin and provincial editors are summoned from time to time to
meetings, when they are addressed by members of the Government as
to what it is wise for them to say and not to say.  These meetings
constitute a hint that if the editors are indiscreet, if they, for
example, publish matter "calculated to promote disunity," they may
be subject to the increasingly severe penalties now administered.
If a newspaper shows a tendency to kick over the traces, a
Government emissary waits upon the editor, calls his attention to
any offending article or paragraph, and suggests a correction.  If
a newspaper still offends, it is liable to a suspension for a day
or even a week, or it may be suppressed altogether.

But in peace, as well as in war, editors all over Germany were
instructed as to the topic on which to lay accent for a limited
period, and just how to treat that topic.  For example, during the
three months preceding the war, Russia was bitterly attacked in the
German Press.  From August 1 to August 4, 1914, the German people
had it crammed down their throats that she was the sole cause of
the war.  On August 4 the Government marshalled the editors and
professors and ordered them to throw all the responsibility on
Britain, and the hate was switched from one to the other with the
speed and ease of a stage electrician throwing the lever from red
to blue.

How do the editors like being mere clerks for the Government?  The
limited numbers of editors of independent thought, such as the
"relentless" Count Reventlow, Maximilian Harden, and Theodor Wolff,
detest such a role, and struggle against it.  After sincere and
thorough investigation, however, I am convinced the average German
editor or reporter, like the average professor, prefers to have his
news handed to him to digging it up for himself.

In this connection the remark made to me by the editor of a little
paper in East Prussia is interesting.  After the Russians had
fallen back he told me of two boys in a neighbouring village whose
hands had been cut off.  He said that he was going to run the
story, and suggested that I also use it.  I proposed that we make a
little trip of investigation, as we could do so in a couple of
hours.

He looked surprised.  "Why, we have the story already," he declared.

"But I am not going to write it unless I can prove it," I replied.

A moment later I heard him sigh with despair as he half whispered
to a cavalry captain: "Yes, yes, alas, over there the Press is in
the hands of the people!"

Many newspaper readers run more or less carelessly through
articles, and many more simply read the headlines and headings.
The Official Press Bureau, for which no detail is too minute,
realises this perfectly, with the result that German newspaper
headings are constructed, less with a view to sensationalism, as in
some British and American papers, or with a view to condense
accurately the chief news feature of the day, as to impress the
reader--or the hearer, since the headlines are cried shrilly in
Berlin and other cities--with the idea that Germany is always
making progress towards ultimate victory.  The daily reports of the
General Staff have been excellent, with a few notable exceptions
such as the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of the Somme.
During reverses, however, they have shown a tendency to pack
unpalatable truths in plenty of "shock absorber," with the result
that the public mind, as I know from my personal investigations, is
completely befogged as to the significance of military operations
which did not go in a manner satisfactory to the German leaders.
In all this the headline never failed to cheer.  When the Russians
were smashing the Austrians in the East, while the British and
French were making important gains and inflicting much more
important losses on the Somme, the old reliable headline--TERRIBLE
RUSSIAN LOSSES--was used until it was worn threadbare.

What would you think, you who live in London or Hew York, if you
woke up some morning to find every newspaper in the city with the
same headlines?  And would you not be surprised to learn that
nearly every newspaper throughout your country had the same
headlines that day?  You would conclude that there was wonderful
central control somewhere, would you not?

Yet that is what happens in Germany repeatedly.  It is of special
significance on "total days."  Those are the days when the
Government, in the absence of fresh victories, adds the totals of
prisoners taken for a given period, and as only the totals appear
in the headlines the casual reader feels nearer a victorious peace.
On the morning of March 13, 1916, most of the papers had "total"
headlines for Verdun.

Not so the _Tageblatt_.  Theodor Wolff, its editor, has had so much
journalistic experience, outside of Germany, and is, moreover, a
man of such marked ability, that he is striving to be something
more than a sycophantic clerk of the Government.  He is not a
grumbler, not a dissatisfied extremist, not unpatriotic, but
possesses a breadth of outlook patriotic in the highest sense.  On
the morning after the Liebknecht riots in the Potsdamer Platz, his
paper did not appear.  The reason given by the Commandant of the
Mark of Brandenburg was that he had threatened the _Burgfriede_ by
charging certain interests in Germany with attempting to make the
war a profitable institution.  But there are those who say that the
police were very watchful in the newspaper offices that night, and
that the _Tageblatt_ did not appear because of its attempt to print
some of the happenings in the Potsdamer Platz.

It has been the custom of Herr Wolff to write a front-page article
every Monday morning signed T. W.  On the last Monday morning in
July, 1916, in a brilliantly written article, the first part of
which patted the Government on the back for some things, he
delicately expressed a desire for reform in diplomatic methods
which would render war-making less easy.  Then he added that if
some statesman, such as Prince Bulow, had been called as adviser in
July, 1914, a way to avert the war might have been found.

This so angered the Government, which has successfully convinced
its great human sheep-fold that Germany is the innocent victim of
attack, that the _Tageblatt_ was suppressed for nearly a week, and,
like the ex-Socialist paper _Vorwaerts_, was permitted to reappear
only after it promised "to be good."  Theodor Wolff was personally
silenced for several months.  This was his greatest but not his
only offence.  All over Germany the people have been officially
taught to regard this great war time as _die grosse Zeit_.  Wolff,
however, sarcastically set the expression in inverted
commas--thereby committing a sacrilege against the State.

Throughout Germany monuments have been reared and nails driven into
emblems marked DIE GROSSE ZEIT.  I have often wondered just what
thoughts these monuments will arouse in the German's mind if his
country is finally beaten and all his bloodshed and food
deprivation will have been in vain.

The Press has, of course, been the chief instrument, reinforced by
the schoolmaster, professor and parson, in spreading the doctrine
of scientific hatred.  It is not generally known that Deputy Cohn,
speaking in the Reichstag on April 8, 1916, sharply criticised the
method of interning British civilians at Ruhleben.  He went on to
say that, "reports of the persecutions of Germans in England were
magnified and to some extent invented by the German Press in order
to stir up war feeling against England."

I saw a brilliant example of the German Press Bureau's attention to
details in the late autumn of 1914.  I was on a point of vantage
half way up the Schlossberg behind Freiburg during the first aerial
attack by the French in that region.  In broad daylight a solitary
airman flew directly over the town and went on until he was
directly over the extensive barracks just outside.  Freiburg is a
compact city of 85,000 inhabitants, and it would have been easy to
have caused damage, and probably loss of life to the civilian
population.  It was clear to me in my front-row position and to the
natives, with many of whom I afterwards discussed the matter, that
the Frenchman was careful to avoid damaging the town, and circled
directly over the barracks on which he dropped all his bombs.  The
Freiburg papers said little about the raid, but to my surprise when
I reached Frankfurt and Cologne a week later, newspaper notices
were still stuck about the cities calling upon Germans to witness
again the dastardly methods of the enemy who attack the inhabitants
of peaceful towns outside of the zone of operations.

The French very properly and effectively practised reprisals later,
but the Germans believe that the shoe is on the other foot.  And so
it is in, everything connected with the war.  The Germans tell you
that they use poisonous gas because the French used it; in fact,
only their good luck in capturing some of the French gas generators
enabled them to learn the method.  Britain, not Germany, violates
the laws of the sea.  It was the Belgians who were cruel to German
troops, especially the Belgian women and the Belgian children.

When the Verdun offensive came to a standstill a spirit of
restlessness developed which was reflected in the Reichstag, where
a few Social Democrats attacked the Government because they
believed that Germany could now make peace if she wished, and that
further bloodshed would be for a war of conquest, advocated by the
annexationists.

During the succession of German military victories, especially in
the first part of the war, there was plenty of "front copy" both as
news and filler.  Some of the accounts were excellent.  The reader
seldom got the idea, however, that German soldiers were being
killed and wounded, and after a time most of the battle
descriptions contained much of soft nocturnal breezes whispering in
the moonlight, but precious few real live details of fighting.

Regarding this point, a German of exceptional information of the
world outside his own country expressed to me his utter amazement
at the accounts appearing in the British Press of the hard life in
the trenches.  "I don't see how they hope to get men to enlist when
they write such discouraging stuff," he said.  After the Battle of
the Somme opened, the German newspapers used to print extracts from
the London papers in which British correspondents vividly described
how their own men were mown down by German machine-guns after they
had passed them, so well was the enemy entrenched.  On that
occasion one of the manipulators of public opinion said to me, "The
British Government is mad to permit such descriptions to appear in
the Press.  They will have only themselves to blame if their
soldiers soon refuse to fight!"

This is one of the many instances which I shall cite throughout
this book to show that because the German authorities know other
countries they do not necessarily know other subjects.

As weeks of war became months and months became years, the
censorship screws were twisted tighter than ever, with the result
that docile editors were often at their wits' end to provide even
filler.

On July 14, for example, with battles of colossal magnitude raging
east and west, the _Berliner Morgenpost_ found news so scarce that
it had to devote most of the front page to the review of a book
called "Paris and the French Front," by Nils Christiernssen, a
Swedish writer.  I had read the book months before, as the
Propaganda Department of the Foreign Office had sent it to all
foreign correspondents.

It became noticeable, however, that as food portions diminished,
soothing-syrup doses for the public increased.   Whenever a wave of
complaints over food shortage began to rise the Press would build a
dyke of accounts of the trials of meatless days in Russia, of
England's scarcity of things to eat, and of the dread in France of
another winter.  The professors writing in the Press grew
particularly comforting.  Thus on June 30 one of them comforted the
public in a lengthy and serious article in the evening edition, of
the _Vossische Zeitung_ with "the revelation that over-eating is a
cause of baldness."

The cheering news of enemy privations continued to such an extent
that many Americans were asked by the more credulous if there were
bread-tickets in Kew York and other American cities.  In short,
Germany is being run on the principle that when you are down with
small-pox it is comforting to know that your neighbour has cholera.

The key-note of the German Press, however, has been to show that
the war was forced on peace-loving Germany.  Of the Government's
success in its propaganda among its own people I saw evidence every
day.  The people go even one step farther than the Government, for
the Government sought merely to show that it was forced to declare
war upon Russia and France.  Most of the German people are
labouring under the delusion that Russia and France actually
declared war on Germany.  This misconception, no doubt, is partly
due to the accounts in the German papers during the first days of
August, 1914, describing how the Russians and French crossed the
frontier to attack Germany before any declaration of war.

A German girl who was in England at the outbreak of war, and who
subsequently returned to her own country, asked her obstinate,
hard-headed Saxon uncle, a wealthy manufacturer, if Germany did not
declare war on Russia and France.  She insisted that Germany did,
for she had become convinced not only in England but in Holland.
Her uncle, in a rage, dismissed the matter with: _Du bist falsch
unterrichtet_.  (You are falsely informed.)

An American in Berlin had a clause in his apartment lease that his
obligations were abruptly and automatically terminated should
Germany be in a state of war.  Yet when he wished to pack up and go
his German landlord took the case to court on, the ground that
Germany had not declared war.

The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not
apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States.  Those
papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse,
can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their
attention to any particular part of the war with the same celerity
as the operator of a searchlight can direct his beam at any part of
the sky he chooses.  For the moment the whole German nation looks
at that beam and at nothing else.

      *      *      *      *      *

In the late afternoon of an autumnal day I stopped at a little
wayside inn near Hildesheim.  The place had an empty look, and the
woman who came in at the sound of my footsteps bore unmistakable
lines of trouble and anxiety.

No meat that day, no cheese either, except for the household.  She
could, not even give me bread without a bread-ticket--nothing but
diluted beer.

Before the war business had been good.  Then came one misfortune
after another.  Her husband was a prisoner in Russia, and her
eldest son had died with von Kluck's Army almost in sight of the
Eiffel Tower.

"You must find it hard to get along," I said.

"I do," she sighed.  "But, then, when fodder got scarce we killed
all the pigs, so bother with them is over now."

"You are not downhearted about the war?" I asked.

"I know that Germany cannot be defeated," she replied.  "But we do
so long for peace."

"You do not think your Government responsible at all for the war?"
I ventured.

"I don't, and the rest of us do not," was her unhesitating reply.
"We all know that our Kaiser wanted only peace.  Everybody knows
that England caused all this misery."  Then she looked squarely and
honestly into my eyes and said in a tone I shall never forget: "Do
you think that if our Government were responsible for the war that
we should be willing to bear all these terrible sacrifices?"

I thought of that banquet table more than two years before, and the
remark about creating public opinion.  I realised that the road is
long which winds from it to the little wayside inn near Hildesheim,
but that it is a road on which live both the diplomat and the
lonely, war-weary woman.  They live on different ends, that is all.




CHAPTER VIII

CORRESPONDENTS IN SHACKLES

Towards the end of 1915 the neutral newspaper correspondents in
Berlin were summoned to the _Kriegs-Presse-Bureau_ (War Press
Bureau) of the Great General Staff.  The official in charge, Major
Nicolai, notified them that the German Government desired their
signature to an agreement respecting their future activities in the
war.  It had been decided, Major Nicolai stated, to allow the
American journalists to visit the German fronts at more or less
regular intervals, but before this was done it would be necessary
for them to enter into certain pledges.  These were, mainly:--

1. To remain in Germany for the duration of the war, unless given
special permission to leave by the German authorities.

2. To guarantee that dispatches would be published in the United
States precisely as sent from Germany, that is to say, as edited
and passed by the military censorship.

3. To supply their own headlines for their dispatches, and to
guarantee that these, and none others, would be printed.

After labouring in vain to instruct Major Nicolai that with the
best of intentions on the part of the correspondents it was beyond
their power to say in exactly what form the _Omaha Bee_ or the _New
Orleans Picayune_ would publish their "copy," they affixed their
signatures to the weird document laid before them.  It was signed,
without exception, by all the important correspondents permanently
stationed in Berlin.  Two or three who did not desire to hand over
the control of their personal movements to the German Government
for an unlimited number of years did not "take the pledge," with
the result that they were not invited to join the personally
conducted junkets to the fronts which were subsequently organised.

Nothing that has happened in Germany during the war illustrates so
well the vassalage to which neutral correspondents have been
reduced as the humiliating pledges extorted from them by the German
Government as the price of their remaining in Berlin for the
practice of their profession.

It was undoubtedly this episode which inspired the American
Ambassador, Mr. Gerard, to tell the American correspondents last
summer that they would do well to obtain their freedom from the
German censorship before invoking the Embassy's good offices to
break down the alleged interference with their dispatches by the
British censorship.  When the Germans learned of the rebuff which
Mr. Gerard had administered to his journalistic compatriots, the
Berlin Press launched one of those violent attacks against the
Ambassador to which he has constantly been subject in Germany
during the war.

As I have shown in a previous chapter the German Government
attaches so much importance to the control and manufacture of
public opinion through the Press that it is drastic in the
regulation of German newspapers.  It is therefore comprehensible
that it should strive to enlist to the fullest possible extent the
Press of other countries.  At least one paper in practically every
neutral country is directly subsidised by the German Foreign
Office, which does not, however, stop at this.  The attempt to
seduce the newspapers of other nations into interpreting the
Fatherland as the Wilhelmstrasse wishes it to be interpreted leads
the investigators to a subterranean labyrinth of schemes which
would fill a volume.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914.  Long
before that Dr. Hammann, head of the _Nachrichtendienst_ of the
German Foreign Office, had organised a plan for the successful
influencing of the Press of the world.  In May, 1914, the work of a
special bureau under his direction and presided over by a woman of
international reputation was in full operation.

The following incident, which is one of the many I might cite,
throws interesting light on one method of procedure.  The head of
the special bureau asked one of the best known woman newspaper
reporters of Norway if she would like to do some easy work which
would take up very little of her time and for which she would be
well paid.

The Norwegian reporter was interested and asked for particulars.

"Germany wishes to educate other countries to a true appreciation
of things German.  Within a year, or at most within two years, we
shall be doing this by sending to foreign newspapers articles which
will instruct the world about Germany.  Of course, it is not
advisable to send them directly from our own bureau; it is much
better to have them appear to come from the correspondents of the
various foreign newspapers.  Thus, we shall send you articles which
you need only copy or translate and sign."

This has been the practice in German journalism for years, and its
extension to other countries was merely a chain in the link of
Germany's deliberate and thorough preparations for the war.

With a few exceptions, German reporters and correspondents are
underpaid sycophants, mere putty in the hands of the Government.
Therefore, the chagrin of the officials over the independence and
ability of the majority of the American correspondents is easy to
understand.  The Wilhelmstrasse determined to control them, and
through them to influence the American Press.  Hence the rules
given above.

When a man signs an agreement that he will not leave Germany until
the end of the war, without special dispensation, he has bound
himself to earn his livelihood in that country.  He cannot do this
without the consent of the Government, for if he does not write in
a manner to please them they can slash his copy, delay it, and
prevent him from going on trips to such an extent that he will be a
failure with his newspaper at home.  His whole success depends
therefore upon his being "good" much after the manner in which a
German editor must be "good."  If he expresses a wish to leave
Germany before the end of the war and the wish is granted, he feels
that a great favour has been conferred upon him and he is supposed
to feel himself morally bound to be "good" to Germany in the future.

The American journalistic colony in Germany is an entirely
different thing from what it used to be in pre-war days.  Before
1914 it consisted, merely of the representatives of the Associated
Press and United Press, half a dozen New York papers (including the
notorious _New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung_), and the well-known and
important Western journal, the _Chicago Daily News_.  To-day many
papers published in the United States are represented in Berlin by
special correspondents.  The influx of newcomers has been mostly
from German-language papers, printed in such Teutonic centres as
Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, etc.  Journals like the
_Illinoiser Staats-zeitung_, of Chicago, which for years past has
barely been able to keep its head above water, have suddenly found
themselves affluent enough to maintain correspondents in Europe
who, for their part, scorn lodgings less pretentious than those of
the _de luxe_ Hotel Adlon in Unter den Linden.

The bright star in the American journalistic firmament in Berlin is
Karl Heinrich von Wiegand, the special representative of the _New
York World_.  The _New York World_ is not pro-German, but von
Wiegand is of direct and noble German origin.  Apart from his
admitted talents as a newspaper man, his Prussian "von" is of no
inconsiderable value to any newspaper which employs him.  Von
Wiegand, I believe, is a native of California.  Persons unfriendly
to him assert that he is really a native of Prussia, who went to
the United States when a child.  Wherever he was born, he is now
typically American, and speaks German with an unmistakable
Transatlantic accent.  He is a bookseller by origin, and his little
shop in San Francisco was wiped out by the earthquake.  About
forty-five years of age, he is a man of medium build, conspicuously
near-sighted, wears inordinately thick "Teddy Roosevelt
eye-glasses," and is in his whole bearing a "real" Westerner of
unusually affable personality.  Von Wiegand claims, when taunted
with being a Press agent of the German Government, that he is
nothing but an enterprising correspondent of the _New York World_.
I did not find this opinion of himself fully shared in Germany.
There are many people who will tell you that if von Wiegand is not
an actual attache of the German Press Bureau, his "enterprise"
almost always takes the form of very effective Press agent work for
the Kaiser's cause.  He certainly comes and goes at all official
headquarters in Germany on terms of welcome and intimacy, and is a
close friend of the notorious Count Reventlow.

My personal opinion, however, is that he is above all a journalist,
and an exceedingly able one.

Von Wiegand's liaison with the powers that be in Berlin has long
been a standing joke among his American colleagues.  Shortly after
the fall of Warsaw in August, 1915, when the stage in Poland was
set for exhibition to the neutral world, he was roused from his
slumbers in his suite at the Adlon by a midnight telephone message,
apprising him that if he would be at Friedrichstrasse Station at
4.30 the next morning, with packed bags, he would be the only
correspondent to be taken on a staff trip to Warsaw.  Wiegand was
there at the appointed hour, but was astonished to discover that he
had been hoaxed.  The perpetrators of the "rag" were some of his U.
S. _confreres_.

Von Wiegand for nearly two years has been the recipient of such
marked and exclusive favours in Berlin that Mr. Hearst's _New York
American_ (the chief rival of the _New York World_, and the head of
the "International News Service" which has been suppressed in Great
Britain, where it has been proved to have maliciously lied on
divers occasions) decided to send to Germany a special
correspondent who would also have a place in the sun.  The
gentleman appointed to crowd Mr. von Wiegand out of the limelight
was a former clergyman named Dr. William Bayard Hale, a gifted
writer and speaker, who obtained some international notoriety eight
years ago by interviewing the Kaiser.  That interview was so full
of blazing political indiscretions that the German Government
suppressed it at great cost by buying up the entire issue of the
New York magazine in which the explosion was about to take place.
Enough of the contents of the interview subsequently leaked out to
indicate that its main feature was the German Emperor's insane
animosity to Great Britain and Japan and his determination to go to
war with them.

Dr. Hale also enjoyed the prestige of having once been an intimate
of President Wilson.  He had written the latter's biography, and
later represented him in Mexico as a special emissary.  Shortly
before the war he married a New York German woman, who is, I
believe, a sister or near relative of Herr Muschenheim, the owner
of the Hotel Astor, which in 1914 and 1915 was inhabited by the
German propaganda bureau, or one of the many bureaus maintained in
New York City.  From the date of his German matrimonial alliance
Dr. Hale became an ardent protagonist of _Kultur_.  One of his last
activities before going to Germany was to edit a huge "yellow book"
which summarised "Great Britain's violations of international law"
and the acrimonious correspondence on contraband and shipping
controversies between the British and American Governments.  This
publication was financed by the German publicity organisation and
widely circulated in the United States and all neutral countries.

Dr. Hale, a tall, dark, keen-looking, smooth-shaven, and
smooth-spoken American, received in Berlin on his arrival a welcome
customarily extended only to a new-coming foreign Ambassador.  He
came, of course, provided with the warmest credentials Count
Bernstorff could supply.  Long before Hale had a chance to present
himself at the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office presented itself
to him, an emissary from the Imperial Chancellor having, according
to the story current in Berlin, left his compliments at Dr. Hale's
hotel.  He had not been in Berlin many days before an interview
with Bethmann-Hollweg was handed to him on a silver plate.
Forthwith the _New York American_ began to be deluged with the
journalistic sweetmeats--Ministerial interviews, Departmental
statements, and exclusive news tit-bits--with which Karl Heinrich
von Wiegand had so long and alone been distinguishing himself.

I have told in detail these facts about von Wiegand and Hale
because between them the two men are able to flood the American
public with a torrent of German-made news and views, whose volume
and influence are tremendous.  The _New York World's_ European news
is "syndicated" to scores of newspapers throughout the American,
continent, and the service has "featured" von Wiegand's Berlin
dispatches to the exclusion, or at least almost to the eclipse, of
the _World's_ other war news.  Hale's dispatches to the Hearst
Press have been published all the way across the Republic, not only
in the dailies of vast circulation owned by Mr. Hearst in New York,
Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but
also in a great many other papers like the prominent _Philadelphia
North American_, which subscribed to the "International News
Service."

The German authorities understand all this perfectly well.  That
explains their unceasing attentions to von Wiegand and Hale, and to
other valuable correspondents.  One of these recently undertook to
compile a book on Belgium in war-time for the purpose of
white-washing Germans in American estimation.  Accompanied by his
wife, he was motored and wined and dined through the conquered
country under the watchful chaperonage of German officers.  He has
returned to Berlin to write his book, although it is common
knowledge there that during his entire stay in Belgium he was not
permitted to talk to a single Belgian.

Although nominally catered to and fawned upon by the German
authorities, the American correspondents cut on the whole a
humiliating figure, although not all of them realise it.  It is
notorious they are spied upon day and night.  They are even at
times ruthlessly scorned by their benefactors in the
Wilhelmstrasse.  One of the Americans who essays to be independent,
was some time ago a member of a journalistic party conducted to
Lille.  He left the party long enough to stroll into a jeweller's
shop to purchase a new glass for his watch.  While making the
purchase he asked the Frenchman who waited on him how he liked the
Germans.  "They are very harsh, but just," was the reply.  A couple
of weeks later, when the correspondents were back in Berlin, Major
Nicolai, of the War Press Bureau, sent for the correspondent, said
to him that he knew of the occasion on which the American
journalist had "left the party" in Lille, and demanded to know what
had occurred in the watchmaker's shop.   The correspondent repeated
precisely what the Frenchman had said.  "Well," snarled Major
Nicolai, "why didn't you send that to your papers?"  I may mention
here that these parties of neutral correspondents are herded rather
than conducted when on tour.

The American correspondents had a sample of the actual contempt in
which the German authorities hold them on the day when the
commercial submarine _Deutschland_ returned to Bremen, August 23.
For purposes of glorifying the _Deutschland's_ achievement in the
United States, the American correspondents in Berlin were
dispatched to Bremen, where they were told that elaborate special
arrangements for their reception and entertainment had been
completed.  Count Zeppelin, two airship commanders, who had just
raided England, and a number of other national heroes would be
present, together with the Grand Duke of Oldenburg at the head of a
galaxy of civil, military, and naval dignitaries.  The grand climax
of the _Deutschland_ joy carnival was to be a magnificent banquet
with plenty of that rare luxury, bread and butter, at the famous
Bremen _Rathaus_ accompanied by both oratorical and pyrotechnical
fireworks.  The correspondents were given an opportunity to watch
the triumphal progess of the _Deutschland_ through the Weser into
Bremen harbour, but at night, when they looked for their places at
the _Rathaus_ feast, they were informed that there was no room for
them.  An overflow banquet had been arranged in their special
honour in a neighbouring tavern.  This was too much even for some
of the War Press Bureau's best American friends, and the overflow
dinner party was served at a table which contained many vacant
chairs.  Their intended occupiers had taken the first train back to
Berlin, thoroughly disgusted.

It is fair to say that several of the principal American
correspondents in Berlin are making a serious effort to practise
independent journalism, _but it is a difficult and hopeless
struggle_.  They are shackled and controlled from one end of the
week to the other.  They could not if they wished send the
unadorned truth to the United States.  _All they are permitted to
report is that portion of the truth which reflects Germany in the
light in which it is useful for Germany to appear from time to
time_.

Germany has organised news for neutrals in the most intricate
fashion.  A certain kind of news is doled out for the United
States, a totally different kind for Spain, and still a different
brand, when emergency demands, for Switzerland, Brazil, or China.
There is a Chinese correspondent among the other "neutrals" in
Germany.  The "news" prepared for him by Major Nicolai's department
would be very amusing reading in the columns of Mr. von Wiegand's
or Dr. Hale's papers.

There is a celebrated and pro-Ally newspaper in New York whose
motto is "All the news that's fit to print." The motto of the
German War Press Bureau is "All the news that's safe to print."




CHAPTER IX

ANTON LANG OF OBERAMMERGAU

While I was at home on a few weeks' visit in October, 1915, I read
in the newspapers a simple announcement cabled from Europe that
Anton Lang of Oberammergau had been killed in the great French
offensive in Champagne.  This came as a shock to many Americans,
for the name of this wonderful character who had inspired people of
all shades of opinion and religious belief in his masterful
impersonation of Christ in the decennial Passion Play was almost as
well known in the United States and in England as in his native
Bavaria, and better, I found than in Prussia.

British and American tourist agencies had put Oberammergau on the
map of the world.  The interest in America after the Passion Play
of 1910 was so great, in fact, that some newspapers ran extensive
series of illustrated articles describing it.  The man who played
the part of Christ was idealised, everybody who had seen him liked
him, respected him and admired him.  Thousands had said that
somehow a person felt better after he had seen Anton Lang.  As a
supreme test of his popularity, American vaudeville managers asked
him to name his own terms for a theatrical tour.

And now the man who had imbued his life with that of the Prince of
Peace had thrown the past aside, and with the spiked helmet in
place of the Crown of Thorns had gone to his death trying not to
save but to slaughter his fellow-men.

Truly, the changes wrought by war are great!

      *      *      *      *      *

In Berlin I inquired into the circumstances of Anton Lang's death.
Nobody knew anything definite.  Berlin knew little of him in life,
much less than London, New York or Montreal.

Munich is different.  There his name is a household word.  Herr von
Meinl, then Director of the Bavarian Ministry, now member of the
Bundesrat, told me that he believed that there was a mistake in the
report that Anton had been killed.

Later, when tramping through the Bavarian Highlands, I walked one
winter day from Partenkirchen to Oberammergau, for I had a whim to
know the truth of the matter.

On the lonely mountain road that winds sharply up from Oberau I
overtook a Benedictine monk who was walking to the monastery at
Ettal.  We talked of the war in general and of the Russian
prisoners we had seen in the saw-mills at Untermberg.  I was
curious to hear his views upon the war, and I soon saw that not
even the thick walls of a monastery are proof against the
idea-machine in the Wilhelmstrasse.  Despite Cardinal Mercier's
denunciation of German methods in Belgium, this monk's views were
the same as the rest of the Kaiser's subjects.  He did, however,
admit that he was sorry for the Belgians, although, in true German
fashion, he did not consider Germany to blame.  He sighed to think
that "the Belgian King had so treacherously betrayed his people by
abandoning his neutrality and entering into a secret agreement with
France and Great Britain."  He recited the regular story of the
secret military letters found by the Germans after they had invaded
Belgium, the all-important marginal notes of which were maliciously
left untranslated in the German Press.

We parted at Ettal, and I pushed on down the narrow valley to
Oberammergau.  The road ahead was now in shadow, but behind me the
mountain mass was dazzling white in the rays of the setting sun.
"What a pity," I thought, "that the peasant must depart from these
beautiful mountains and valleys to die in the slime of the
trenches."

The day was closing in quiet and grandeur, yet all the time the
shadow of death was darkening the peaceful valley of the Ammer.  I
became aware of it first as I passed the silent churchyard with its
grey stones rising from the snow.  For there, on the other side of
the old stone wall that marks the road, was a monument on which the
Reaper hacks the toll of death.  The list for 1870 was small,
indeed, compared with that of _die grosse Zeit_.  I looked for Lang
and found it, for Hans had died, as had also Richard.

I passed groups of men cutting wood and hauling ice and grading
roads, men with rounder faces and flatter noses than the Bavarians,
still wearing the yellowish-brown uniform of Russia.  That is, most
of them wore it.  Some, whose uniforms had long since gone to
tatters, were dressed in ordinary clothing, with flaming red R's
painted on trousers and jackets.

An old woman with a heavy basket on her back was trudging past a
group of these.  "How do you like them?" I asked.  "We shall really
miss them when they go," she said.  "They seem part of the village
now.  The poor fellows, it must be sad for them so far from home."

Evidently the spirit of new Germany had not saturated her.

I went through crooked streets, bordered with houses brightly
frescoed with biblical scenes, to the _Pension Dahein_, the home of
the man I wished to see.  As he rose from his pottery bench to
welcome me, I felt that beneath his great blue apron and rough garb
of the working man was true nobility.  I did not need to ask if he
was Anton Lang.  I had seen his picture and had often been told
that his face was the image of His Who died on the Cross.  I
expected much, but found infinitely more.  I felt that life had
been breathed into a Rubens masterpiece.  No photograph can do him
justice, for no lens can catch the wondrous light in his clear blue
eyes.

I was the only guest at the _Pension Daheim_; indeed, I was the
only stranger in Oberammergau.  I sat beside Anton Lang in his work
room as his steady hands fashioned things of clay, I ate at table
with him, and in the evening we pulled up our chairs to the
comfortable fireside, where we talked of his country and of my
country, of the Passion Play and of the war.

I had been sceptical about him until I met him.  I wondered if he
was self-conscious about his goodness, or if he was a dreamer who
could not get down to the realities of this world, or if he had
been spoiled by flattery, or if piety was part of his profession.

When I finally went from there I felt that I really understood him.
His life has been without an atom of reproach, yet he never poses
as pious.  He does not preach, or stand aloof, or try to make you
feel that he is better than you, but down in your heart you know
that he is.  He has been honoured by royalty and men of state, yet
he remains simple and unaffected, though quietly dignified in
manner.  He is truly Nature's Nobleman, with a mind that is pure
and a face the mirror of his mind.

To play well his role of _Christus_ is the dominating passion of
his life.  Not the make-up box, but his own thoughts must mould his
features for the role, which has been his in 1890, 1900 and 1910.

His travels include journeys to Rome and to the Holy Land.  He is
well read, an interesting talker, and an interested listener.  He
commented upon the great change in the spirit of the people, a
change from the intoxicating enthusiasm of victory to a war-weary
feeling of trying to hold out through a sense of duty.  To my
question as to when he thought the war would end, he answered:
"When Great Britain and Germany both realise that each must make
concessions.  Neither can crush the other."

The doctrine that "only through hate can the greatest obstacles in
life be overcome" has not reached his home, nor was there hanging
on the wall, as in so many German homes, the famous order of the
day of Crown Prince Rupert of Bavaria, which commences with
"Soldiers of the army!  Before you are the English!" in which he
exhorts his troops with all the tricky sophistry of hate.

Anton Lang has worked long hard hours to bring up his family,
rather than accept fabulous offers for a theatrical tour of
America.  He refused these offers through no mere caprice.

"I admit that the temptation is great," he said to me.  "Here I
must always work hard and remain poor; there I quickly could have
grown rich.  But the Passion Play is not a business," he continued
earnestly.  "Nearly three hundred years ago, when a terrible plague
raged over the land, the people of Oberammergau vowed to Almighty
God that if He would save their village, they would perform every
ten years in His glory the Passion of His Divine Son.  The village
was saved and Oberammergau has kept its promise.  You see, if I had
accepted those theatrical offers I could never again live in my
native village, and that would break my heart."

There is carefully preserved in the town hall at Oberammergau an
old chronicle which tells of the plague.  There will undoubtedly be
preserved in the family of Lang a new chronicle, a product of the
war, printed in another country, a chronicle which did not rest
content with a notice of Anton's obituary, but told the details of
his death in battle.

Frau Lang showed me this chronicle.  She seemed to have something
on her mind of which she wished to speak, after I told her that I
was an American journalist.  At length one evening, after the three
younger children bad gone to bed, and the eldest was industriously
studying his lessons for the next day, she ventured.  "American
newspapers tell stories which are not at all true, don't they?" she
half stated, half asked.

My natural inclination was to defend American journalism by
attacking that of Germany, but something restrained me, I did not
know what.  "Of course," I explained, "in a country such as ours
where the Press is free, evils sometimes arise.  We have all kinds
of newspapers.  A few are very yellow, but the vast majority seek
to be accurate, for accuracy pays in the long run in
self-respecting journalism."  I thought that perhaps she was
referring to the announcement of the death of the man who was
sitting with us in the room.  We both agreed, however, that such a
mistake was perfectly natural since two Langs of Oberammergau had
already been killed.  In fact, Anton had read of his own death
notice in a Munich paper.  The American correspondent who had
cabled the news on two occasions had presumably simply "lifted" the
announcement from the German papers.  Frau Lang could understand
that very well when I explained, but how about the stories that
Anton had been serving a machine-gun, and other details which were
pure fiction?

She had trump cards which she played at this point.  Two gaudily
coloured "Sunday Supplements" of a certain newspaper combination in
the United States were spread before me.  The first told of how
Anton Lang had become a machine-gunner of marked ability, and that
he served his deadly weapon with determination.  Could the
Oberammergau Passion Play ever exert the old influence again, after
this? was the query at the end of the article.

A second had all the details of Anton's death and was profusely
illustrated.  The story started with Anton going years ago into the
mountains to try out his voice in order to develop it for his
histrionic task.  There was a brief account of how he had followed
in the path of the Prince of Peace, and of the tremendous effect he
had upon his audiences.

Then came the war, which tore him from his humble home.  The battle
raged, the Bavarians charged the French lines, and the spot-light
of the story was played upon a soldier from Oberammergau who lay
wounded in "No-Man's Land."  Another charging wave swept by this
soldier, and as he looked up he saw the face of the man he had
respected and loved more than all other men, the face of Anton
Lang, the _Christus_ of Oberammergau.  The soldier covered his eyes
with his hands, for never had Anton Lang looked as he did then.
The eyes which had always been so beautiful, so compassionate, had
murder in them now.

The scene shifted.  A French sergeant and private crouched by their
machine-gun ready to repel the charge, the mutual relationship
being apparently somewhat that of a plumber and his assistant.
They sprayed the oncoming Bavarians with a shower of steel and
piled the dead high outside the French trenches.  The charge had
failed, and the sergeant began to act strangely.  At length he
broke the silence.  "Did you see that last _boche_, Jean?" he
asked.  "Did you see that face?" Jean confessed that he did not.
"You are fortunate, Jean," said the sergeant.  "Never have I seen
such a face before.  I felt as if there was something supernatural
about it.  I felt that it was wrong to kill that man.  I hated to
do it, Jean.--But then the butcher was coming at us with a knife
two feet long."

I finished reading and looked up at the questioning eyes of Frau
Lang and at the wonderful, indescribable blue eyes of the "butcher"
across the table, who, I may add, is fifty-two years of age, and
has not had a day's military training in his life.

"And look," said Frau Lang, "these men are not even
Oberammergauers."

She pointed to one of the illustrations which depicted a small
group of rather vicious-looking Prussians, with rifles ready
peering over the rim of a trench.  The picture was labelled "Four
apostles now serving at the Front."

"And see," continued the perplexed woman, "there is Johann Zwinck,
the Judas in the play.  It says that he is at the front.  Why, he
is sixty-nine years old, and is still the village painter.  Only
yesterday I heard him complain that the war was making it difficult
for him to get sufficient oil to mix his paint."

I was at a loss for words.  "When one compares such terrible
untruths with our German White Book," declared Frau Lang, "it is
indeed difficult for the American people to understand the true
situation."

I felt that it would be useless for me at that moment to explain
certain very important omissions in the German White Book.
Anything would look _white_ in comparison with the yellow journal I
had just read.  But I knew, and tried to explain that the
particular newspaper combination which printed such rubbish was
well known in America for its inaccuracies and fabrications, and
although it was pro-German, it would sacrifice anything for
sensation.  But the good woman, being a German, and consequently
accustomed to standardisation, could not dissociate this newspaper
from the real Press.




CHAPTER X

SUBMARINE MOTIVES

The German submarines are standardised.   The draughts and blue
prints of the most important machinery are multiplied and sent, if
necessary, to twenty different factories, while all the minor
stampings are produced at one or other main factory.  The
"assembling" of the submarines, therefore, is not difficult.
During the war submarine parts have been assembled at Trieste,
Zeebrugge, Kiel, Bremerhaven, Stettin, and half a dozen other
places in Germany unnecessary to relate.  With commendable
foresight, Germany sent submarine parts packed as machinery to
South America, where they are being assembled somewhere on the west
coast.

The improvement, enlargement, and simplification of the submarine
has progressed with great rapidity.

When I was in England after a former visit to Germany I met a
number of seafolk who pooh-poohed extensive future submarining, by
saying that, no matter how many submarines the Germans might be
able to produce, the training of submarine officers and crew was
such a difficult task that the "submarine menace," as it was then
called in England, need not be taken too seriously.

The difficulty is not so great.  German submarine officers and men
are trained by the simple process of double or treble banking of
the crews of submarines on more or less active service.  Submarine
crews are therefore multiplied probably a great deal faster than
the war destroys them.  These double or treble crews, who rarely go
far away from German waters, and are mostly trained in the safe
Baltic, are generally composed of young but experienced seamen.
There are, however, an increasing number of cases of soldiers being
transferred abruptly to the U-boat service.

The education of submarine officers and crew begins in thorough
German fashion on land or in docks, in dummy or disused submarines,
accompanied by much lecture work and drill.  Submarine life is not
so uncomfortable as we think.  With the exception of the
deprivation of his beer, which is not allowed in submarines, or,
indeed, any form of alcohol, except a small quantity of brandy,
which is kept under the captain's lock and key, Hans in his
submarine is quite as comfortable as Johann in his destroyer.

Extra comforts are forwarded to submarine men, which consist of
gramophone records (mostly Viennese waltzes), chocolate, sausages,
smoked eels, margarine, cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco, a small
and treasured quantity of real coffee, jam, marmalade, and sugar.
All these, I was proudly told, were extras.  There is no shortage
in the German Navy.

I learned nothing of value about the largest German submarines,
except that everybody in Germany knew they were being built, and by
the time the gossip of them reached Berlin the impression there was
that they were at least as large as Atlantic liners.

Now as to German submarine policies.  The part that has to do with
winning the war will be dealt with in the next chapter.  But there
is also a definite policy in connection with the use of submarines
for winning the "war after the war."

The National Liberal Party, of which Tirpitz is the god, is at the
head of the vast, gradually solidifying mammoth trust, which
embraces Krupps, the mines, shipbuilding yards, and the
manufactures.  Now and then a little of its growth leaks out, such
as the linking up of Krupps with the new shipbuilding.

The scheme is brutally simple and is going on under the eyes of the
British every day.  These people believe that _by building ships
themselves and destroying enemy and neutral shipping_, they will be
the world's shipping masters at the termination of the war.  In
their attitude towards Norwegian shipping, you will notice that
they make the flimsiest excuse for the destruction of as much
tonnage as they can sink.  It was confidently stated to me by a
member of the National Liberal Party, and by no means an
unimportant one, that Germany is building ships as rapidly as she
is sinking them.  That I do not believe; but that a great part of
her effort is devoted to the construction of mercantile vessels I
ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I have met people in England who refuse to believe that Germany,
battling on long lines east and west, and constructing with
feverish haste war vessels of every description, can find
sufficient surplus energy to build ships which will not be of the
slightest use until after the war is finished.  I can only say that
I personally have seen the recently completed Hamburg-America
liners _Cap Polonio_ and _Cap Finisterre_ anchored in the Elbe off
Altona.  They are beautiful boats of 20,000 and 16,000 tons, a
credit to the German shipbuilding industry, which has made such
phenomenal strides in recent years.  At Stettin I passed almost
under the stem of the brand new 21,000 ton Hamburg-South America
liner, _Tirpitz_--which for obvious business reasons may be
re-named after the war.

Both at Hamburg and Lubeck, where the rattle of the pneumatic
riveter was as incessant as in any American city in course of
construction, I was amazed at the number of vessels of five or six
thousand tons which I saw being built.  Furthermore, the giant
North German, Lloyd liner, _Hindenburg_, is nearing completion,
while the _Bismarck_, of the Hamburg-America Line will be ready for
her maiden trip in the early days of peace.

Another part of the National Liberals' policy is the keeping alive
of all German businesses, banks and others, in enemy countries.
Some people in England seem to think that the Germans are anxious
to keep these businesses alive in order to make money.  Many
Germans regard John Bull as extremely simple, but not so simple as
to allow them to do that.  So long as the businesses are kept going
until after the war, when they can again start out with redoubled
energy, the Germans desire nothing more.  The Deutsche Bank, for
example, which bears no comparison to an English or American bank,
but which is an institution for promoting both political and
industrial enterprise, is entrenched behind so powerful an
Anglo-German backing in London, I was informed on many occasions,
that the British Government dare not close it down.  The mixture of
spying and propaganda with banking, with export, with manufacture,
seems so foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways as to be almost inconceivable.

Coincident with the destruction of foreign shipping, and the
maintenance of their businesses in enemy countries (England and
Italy especially) is the exploitation of the coal and other mines,
oil wells, and forests in occupied enemy territory.  The French and
Belgian coalfields are being worked to the utmost, together with
the iron mines at Longwy and Brieux.  Poland is being deforested to
such an extent that the climate is actually altering.

It is a vast and definite scheme, with such able leaders as Herr
Bassermann, the real leader of the National Liberal Party, Herr
Stresemann, and Herr Hirsch, of Essen.  "We have powerful friends,
not only in London, Milan, Rome, Madrid, New York, and Montreal,
but throughout the whole of South America, and everywhere except in
Australia where that _verdammter Hooges_ (Hughes) played into the
hands of our feeble, so-called leader, von Bethmann-Hollweg, by
warning the people that the British people would follow Hughes'
lead."

So much for the commercial part of submarining.

U-boating close to England has long ceased to be a popular
amusement with the German submarine flotilla, who have a thoroughly
healthy appreciation of the various devices by which so many of
them have been destroyed.  The National Liberals believe that the
British will not be able to tackle long-distance submarines
operating in the Atlantic and elsewhere.  Their radius of action is
undoubtedly increasing almost month by month.  From remarks made to
me I do not believe that these submarines have many land bases at
great distances--certainly none in the United States.  They may
have floating bases; but this I do know--that their petrol-carrying
capacity altogether exceeds that of any earlier type of submarine,
and that their surface speed, at any rate in official tests, runs
up to nearly 20 knots.

The trip of the _Deutschland_ was not only for the purpose of
bringing a few tons of nickel and rubber, but for thoroughly
testing the new engines (designed by Maybach), for bringing back a
hundred reports of the effects of submersion in such cold waters as
are to be found off the banks of Newfoundland, for ascertaining how
many days' submerged or surface travelling is likely to be
experienced, and, indeed, for making such a trial trip across the
Atlantic and back as was usual in the early days of steamships.




CHAPTER XI

THE EAGLE AND THE VULTURE

AS enthusiastic, war-mad crowd had gathered about an impromptu
speaker in the Ringstrasse, not far from the Hotel Bristol, in
Vienna, one pleasant August evening in 1914.  His theme was the
military prowess of Austria-Hungary and Germany.

"And now," he concluded, "Japan has treacherously joined our
enemies.  Yet we should not be disturbed, for her entrance will but
serve to bring us another ally too.  You all know of the
ill-feeling between the United States and Japan.  At any moment we
may hear that the great Republic has declared war."  He called for
cheers, and the Ringstrasse echoed with _Hoch! Hoch!  Hoch_! for
the United States of America.

That was my introduction to European opinion of my country during
the war.  During my four weeks in the Austro-Serbian zone of
hostilities, I had heard no mention of anything but the purely
military business at hand.

The following evening from the window of an
"American-Tourist-Special Train" I looked down on the happy
Austrians who jammed the platform, determined to give the Americans
a grand send-off, which they did with flag-waving and cheers.  A
stranger on the platform thrust a lengthy typewritten document into
my hands, with the urgent request that I should give it to the
Press in New York.  It was a stirring appeal to Americans to
"witness the righteousness of the cause of the Central Powers in
this war which had been forced upon them."  Three prominent
citizens of Vienna had signed it, one of whom was the famous Doctor
Lorenz.

Berlin, in an ecstasy of joyful anticipation of the rapid and
triumphal entrance into Paris, was a repetition of Vienna.  True,
in the beginning, Americans, mistaken for Englishmen by some of the
undiscerning, had been roughly treated, but a hint from those in
high authority changed that.  In like manner, well-meaning patriots
who persisted in indiscriminately mobbing all members of the yellow
race were urged to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese.

So I found festive Berlin patting Americans on the back, cheering
Americans in German-American meetings, and prettily intertwining
the Stars and Stripes and the German flag.

"Now is your opportunity to take Canada," said the man in the
street.  In fact, it was utterly incomprehensible to the average
German that we should not indulge in some neighbouring
land-grabbing while Britain was so busy with affairs in Europe.

The German Foreign Office was, of course, under no such delusion,
although it had cherished the equally absurd belief that England's
colonies would rebel at the first opportunity.  The Wilhelmstrasse
was, however, hard at work taking the propaganda which it had so
successfully crammed down the throats of the German citizen and
translating it into English to be crammed down the throats of the
people in America.  This was simply one of the Wilhelmstrasse's
numerous mistakes in the psychological analysis of other people.
But the Wilhelmstrasse possesses the two estimable qualities of
perseverance and willingness to learn, with the result that its
recent propaganda in the United States has been much more subtle
and very much more effective.

The American newspapers which reached Germany after the outbreak of
war gave that country its first intimation that her rush through
Belgium was decidedly unpopular on the other side of the Atlantic.
Furthermore, many American newspapers depicted the Kaiser and the
Crown Prince in a light quite new to German readers, who with their
heads full of Divine Right ideas considered the slightest
caricature of their imperial family as brutally sacrilegious.

But the vast majority of Germans never saw an American newspaper.
How is it, then, that they began to hate the United States so
intensely?  The answer is simple.  In the early winter of 1914-15,
the German Government with its centralised control of public
opinion turned on the current of hatred against everything American
as it had already done against everything British, for the war had
come to a temporary stalemate on both fronts, and the
Wilhelmstrasse had to excuse their failure to win the short, sharp
pleasant war into which the people had jumped with anticipation of
easy victory.  "If it were not for American ammunition the war
would have been finished long ago!" became the key-note of the new
gospel of hate, a gospel which has been preached down to the
present.

Just before I left Germany the "Reklam Book Company" of Leipzig
issued an anti-American circular which flooded the country.  The
request that people should enclose it in all their private letters
was slavishly followed with the same zest with which the Germans
had previously attached _Gott strafe England_ stickers to their
correspondence.

The circular represented a 7000-ton steamer ready to take on board
the cargo of ammunition which was arranged neatly on the pier in
the foreground.  The background was occupied by German troops,
black lines dividing them into three parts, tagged
respectively--30,000 _killed_, 40,000 _slightly wounded_, 40,000
_seriously wounded_.  This, then, is the graphic illustration of
the casualties inflicted upon the German Army by a single cargo of
one moderate-sized liner.

Since at such a rate, it would take less than two hundred cargoes
of this astoundingly effective ammunition to put the entire German
Army out of action, one wonders why Britain troubles herself to
convert her industries.

Ere the first winter of war drew to a close the official
manipulators of the public opinion battery had successfully
electrified the nation into a hate against the United States second
only to that bestowed on Great Britain.  And so it came about that
the Government had the solid support of the people when the
original submarine manifesto of February 4th, 1915, warning neutral
vessels to keep out of the war zone, threatened a rupture with the
United States.  When two weeks later Washington sent a sharp note
of protest to Berlin, the Germans became choleric every time they
spoke of America or met an American.

"Why should we let America interfere with our plan to starve
England?" was the question I heard repeatedly.  Their belief that
they could starve England was absolute.  What could be simpler than
putting a ring of U-boats round the British Isles and cutting off
all trade until the pangs of hunger should compel Britain to yield?
I heard no talk then about the "base crime of starving women and
children," which became their whine a year later when the knife
began to cut the other way.

In 1915 it was immaterial to the mass of Germans whether America
joined their enemies or not.  Their training had led them to think
in army corps, and they frankly and sneeringly asked us, "What
could you do?" They were still in the stage where they freely
applied to enemies and possible enemies the expression, "They are
afraid of us."  "The more enemies, the more glory," was the inane
motto so popular early in the war that it was even printed on post
cards.

The _Gulflight_, flying the Stars and Stripes, was torpedoed in the
reign of submarine anarchy immediately inaugurated.  But two can
play most games, and when the British Navy made it increasingly
difficult for U-boats to operate in the waters near the British
Isles, the German Foreign Office and the German Admiralty began to
entertain divergent opinions concerning the advisability of pushing
the submarine campaign to a point which would drag the United
States into the war.

Only a few people in Germany know that von Bethmann-Hollweg
strenuously opposed the plan to sink the Lusitania.  That is, he
opposed it up to a point.  The advertisement from the German
Embassy at Washington which appeared in American newspapers warning
Americans could not have appeared without his sanction.  In the
last days of July, 1914, backed by the Kaiser, he had opposed the
mobilisation order sufficient to cause a three days' delay--which
his military opponents in German politics claim was the chief cause
of the failure to take Paris--but in the case of the Lusitania he
was even more powerless against rampant militarism.

For nearly a year after the colossal blunder of the Lusitania,
there existed in the deep undercurrents of German politics a most
remarkable whirlpool of discord, in which the policy of von Tirpitz
was a severe tax on the patience of von Bethmann-Hollweg and the
Foreign Office, for it was they who had to invent all sorts of
plausible excuses to placate various neutral Powers.

The Kaiser after disastrously meddling with the General Staff
during the first month of the war, subsequently took no active hand
in military, naval and political policies unless conflicts between
his chosen chieftains forced him to do so.

One striking instance of this occurred when the Wilhelmstrasse
discovered that Washington was in possession of information in the
"_Arabic_ incident" which made the official excuses palpably too
thin.  After the German authorities became convinced that their
failure to guarantee that unresisting merchantmen would not be sunk
until passengers and crew were removed to a place of safety would
cause a break with the United States, Tirpitz asserted that the
disadvantages to Germany from America as an enemy would be slight
in comparison with the advantages from the relentless submarining
which in his opinion would defeat Britain.  He therefore advocated
that no concessions be made to Washington.  Von Bethmann-Hollweg
was of the opposite opinion.  A deadlock resulted, which was broken
when the Kaiser summoned both men to separate and secret
conferences.  He decided in favour of the Chancellor, whereupon
Washington received the famous "_Arabic_ Guarantees."  It is highly
significant that these were never made known to the German people.

Then followed six months of "frightfulness," broken pledges, notes,
crises, semi-crises, and finally the great crisis _de luxe_ in the
case of the _Sussex_.  When, a few days after my return to England
from Germany, I used the expression "_Sussex_ Crisis" to a leading
Englishman, he expressed surprise at the term "crisis."  "We did
not get the impression in England that the affair was a real
crisis," he said.

My experiences in Germany during the last week in April and the
first four days in May, 1916, left no doubt in my mind that I was
living through a crisis, the outcome of which would have a
tremendous effect upon the subsequent course of the war.  Previous
dealings with Washington had convinced the German Government as
well as the German people that the American Government would stand
for anything.  Thus the extraordinary explanation of the German
Foreign Office that the Sussex was not torpedoed by a German
submarine, since the only U-boat commander who had fired a torpedo
in the channel waters on the fateful day had made a sketch of the
vessel which he had attacked, which, according to the sketch, was
not the Sussex.

The German people were so supremely satisfied with this explanation
that they displayed chagrin which quickly changed to ugliness when
the German Press was allowed to print enough of the news from
Washington to prepare the public mind for something sharp from
across the Atlantic.  I have seen Berlin joyful, serious, and sad
during the war; I have seen it on many memorable days; but never
have I seen it exactly as on Saturday, April 22nd, the day when the
_Sussex_ Ultimatum was made known through the Press.  The news was
headlined in the afternoon editions.  The eager crowds snapped them
up, stood still in their tracks, and then one and all expressed
their amazement to anybody near them, "President Wilson began by
shaking his fist at Germany, and ended by shaking his finger," was
the way one of the President's political opponents summarised his
Notes.  That was the opinion in Germany.  And now he had "pulled a
gun."  The Germans could not understand it.  When they encountered
any of the few Americans left in their country they either foamed
in rage at them, or, in blank amazement, asked them what it was all
about.

It was extremely interesting to the student of the war to see that
the people really did not understand what it was all about.
Theodor Wolff, the brilliant editor of the _Berliner Tageblatt_,
with great daring for a German editor, raised this point in the
edition in which the Ultimatum was printed.  He asserted that the
German people did not understand the case because they purposely
had been left in the dark by the Government.  He said, among other
things, that his countrymen were in no position to understand the
feeling of resentment in the United States, because the meagre
reports permitted in the German Press never described such details
as the death agonies of women and children struggling helplessly in
the water.

This article in the _Tageblatt_ was the striking exception to the
rest of the Press comment throughout Germany, for the German
Government made one of its typical moves at this point.  "To climb
down or not to climb down," was a question which would take several
days to decide.  Public opinion was already sufficiently enraged
against America to give the Government united support in case of a
break, but it must be made more enraged and consequently more
united.  Thus on Easter Sunday the full current of hate was turned
on in the German Press.  President Wilson was violently attacked
for working in the interest of the Allies, whom he wished to save.
Germany would not bow to this injustice, she would fight, and
America, too, would be made to feel what it means to go to war with
Germany.  The German Press did its part to inflame a united German
sentiment, and the Foreign Office, which believes in playing the
game both ways when it is of advantage to do so, with
characteristic thoroughness did not permit the American
correspondents to cable to their papers the virulent lies, such as
those in the _Tagliche Rundschau_, about the affair in general and
President Wilson in particular.  These papers were furthermore not
allowed to leave Germany.

On the evening preceding the publication of the Ultimatum,
Maximilian Harden's most famous number of the _Zukunft_ appeared
with the title "If I Were Wilson."  On Saturday morning it was
advertised on yellow and black posters throughout Berlin, and was
quickly bought by a feverish public to whom anything pertaining to
German-American relations was of the sharpest interest.  The
remarkable article was directly at variance with all the
manufactured ideas which had been storming in German brains for
more than a year.  The British sea policy was represented in a
light quite different from the officially incubated German
conception of it.  President Wilson was correctly portrayed as
strictly neutral in all his official acts.  This staggered Harden's
readers quite as much as his attacks on the brutal submarine policy
of his country.

A careless censor had allowed "If I Were Wilson," to appear.  But a
vigilant Government, ever watchful of the food for the minds of its
children, hastened with the usual police methods to correct the
mistake.  The _Zukunft_ was _beschlagnahmt_, which means that the
police hastily gathered up all unsold copies at the publishers,
kiosks, and wherever else they were to be found.  If a policeman
saw one in a man's pocket he took it away.

Why did the Government do everything in its power to suppress this
article?  The Government fully understood that there was nothing in
it that was not true, nothing in it of a revolutionary character.
It divulged no military or naval secrets.  It was a simple
statement of political truths.  But the German great Idea Factory
in the Wilhelmstrasse does not judge printed matter from its truth
or falsity.  The forming of the public mind in the mould in which
it will best serve the interests of the State is the sole
consideration.  While the Directors of Thought were deliberating on
the relative disadvantages of a curtailment of submarine activity
and America as an enemy, and the order of the day was to instill
hatred, no matter how, they decided that it would be inadvisable
for the people to read the true statements of Harden.

One American correspondent began to cable five thousand words of
"If I Were Wilson" to his paper.  The Censor stopped him after he
had sent thirteen hundred.  A rival correspondent, when he glanced
at the article immediately after it had appeared, decided that it
was more suitable for mail matter than cable matter, put it in an
envelope, and actually scored a scoop over all opponents.

During the following days, when the leaders of Germany were in
conference at the Headquarters of the General Staff, I travelled as
much as possible to find out German sentiment.  The people were
intoxicated with the successes against Verdun, and were angrily in
favour of a break.  One German editor said to me "The Government
has educated them to believe that the U-boat can win the war.
Their belief is so firm that it will be difficult for the
authorities to explain a backdown to Wilson."

It was not.  The Government can explain anything to the German
people.  The back-down came, causing sentiments which can be
divided into three groups.  One, "We were very good to give in to
America.  England would not be so good."  Two, "Americans put us in
a bad position.  To curtail our submarine weapon means a
lengthening of the war.  On the other hand, to add America to the
list of our enemies would lengthen the war still more."  Three, "We
shall wait our opportunity and pay back America for what she has
done to us."  I heard the latter expression everywhere,
particularly among the upper classes.  It was the expression of
Doctor Drechsler, head of the Amerika-Institut in Berlin, and one
of the powerful propaganda triumvirate composed of himself, Doctor
Bertling, and the late Professor Munsterberg.

With the increasing deterioration inside the German Empire the
resolve of the Chancellor to avoid a clash with the United States
strengthened daily.  His opponents, however, most of the great
Agrarians and National Liberals, the men behind Tirpitz, continue
to work for a new submarine campaign in which all neutrals will be
warned that their vessels will be sunk without notice if bound to
or from the ports of Germany's enemies.  They are practical men,
who believe that only through the unrestricted use of the submarine
can Britain, whom they call the keystone of the opposition, be
beaten.  The Chancellor is also a practical man, who believes that
the entrance of America on the side of the Entente would seal the
fate of Germany.  He is supported by Herr Helfferich, the
Vice-Chancellor, and Herr Zimmermann, the foreign Secretary, men
with a deep insight into the questions of trade and treaties.  They
believe that peace will be made across the table and not at the
point of the sword, and they realise that it is much better for
Germany not to have the United States at the table as an enemy.

In September, 1916, the Chancellor began to lay the wires for a new
campaign, a campaign to enlist the services of Uncle Sam in a move
for peace.  It is significant, however, that he and his Government
continue to play the game both ways.  While Germany presses her
official friendship on the United States, and conducts propaganda
there to bring the two nations closer together, she at the same
time keeps up the propaganda of hate at home against America, in
order to have the support of the people in case of emergency.

The attacks against Washington in the _Continental Times_ show
which way the wind blows, for this paper is subsidised by the
German Foreign Office through the simple device of buying 30,000
copies of each issue--it appears three times weekly--at 2 1/2d.
per copy.  The editors are Aubrey Stanhope, an Englishman who even
before the war could not return to his native country for reasons
of his own, and R. L. Orchelle, whose real name is Hermann
Scheffauer, who claims to be an American, but is not known as such
at the American Embassy in Berlin.  He has specialised in attacks
against Great Britain in the United States.  Some of the vicious
onslaughts against Washington in Germany were made by him.

American flags are scarce in Berlin to-day, but one always waves
from the window of 48, Potsdamerstrasse.  It is a snare for the
unwary, but the League uses it here as in countless other instances
as a cloak for its warfare against the U.S.A.

The League started early in the war by issuing booklets by the ton
for distribution in Germany and America.  Subscription blanks were
scattered broadcast for contributions for the cause of light and
truth.  Donations soon poured in, some of them very large, from
Germans and German-Americans who wished, many of them sincerely, to
have what they considered the truth told about Germany.

The ways of the League, however, being crooked, some of the charter
members began to fall away from one another and many of the doings
of the ringleaders are now coming to light.

The League must be doing well financially, as William Martin, the
chief of the Potsdamerstrasse office, jubilantly declared that no
matter how the war ended he would come out of it with a million.

Any real American, whether at home or abroad, deeply resents the
degradation of his flag.  Yet the League of Truth in Berlin has
consistently dragged the Stars and Stripes in the mire, and that in
a country which boasts that the police are not only omniscient but
omnipotent.

A constant attempt, in accordance with the policy of most German
newspapers, I may add, is made to depict us as a spineless
jelly-fish nation.  They have regarded principles of international
custom as little as the manipulators of submarines under the reign
of Tirpitz.

Last fourth of July, Charles Mueller, a pseudo-American, hung from
his home in the busy Kurfurstendamm a huge American flag with a
deep border of black that Berlin might see a "real American's"
symbol of humiliation.  On the same day, dear to the hearts of
Americans, a four-page flyer was spread broadcast through the
German capital with a black border on the front page enclosing a
black cross.  The Declaration of Independence was bordered with
black inside and an ode to American degradation by John L. Stoddard
completed the slap in the face.

The League selected January 27th, 1916, the Kaiser's birthday, as a
suitable occasion for Mueller and Marten, not even hyphenates,
solemnly and in the presence of a great crowd to place an immense
wreath at the base of the statue of Frederick the Great on the
Linden, with the inscription "Wilson and his Press are not America."

The stern Police Department of Berlin does not permit the
promiscuous scattering of floral decorations and advertising matter
on the statues of German gods, and the fact that the wreath
remained there month after month proved that somebody high up was
sanctioning the methods of the League.

The protests of the American Ambassador were of no avail, until he
determined to make an end of the humiliation, after three months,
by threatening to go down to this busy section of Berlin, near the
Royal Palace, and remove the wreath himself.  Force is the only
argument which impresses the Prussians, and we are extremely
fortunate that our Ambassador to Germany is a man of force.

The League, however, had printed a picture of the wreath in its
issue of _Light and Truth_, which it endeavours to circulate
everywhere.

Stoddard, mentioned above, is the famous lecturer.  He has written
booklets for the League, one of which I read in America.  His last
pamphlet, however, is a most scurrilous attack against his country.
He raves against America, and, after throwing the facts of
international law to the winds, he shrieks for the impeachment of
Wilson to stop this slaughter for which he has sold himself.

It is no secret in Berlin that the League have systematically
hounded Mr. Gerard.  I do not know why they hate him, unless it is
because he is a member of the American Government.  I have heard it
said that one way to get at Wilson was through his Ambassador.
Their threats and abuse became so great that he and one of the
American newspaper correspondents went to 48, Potsdamerstrasse
during the _Sussex_ crisis to warn the leaders.  They answered by
swearing out a warrant against Mr. Gerard with the Berlin
police--paying no heed to international customs in such
matters--and circulating copies of the charge broadcast.

Readers who are familiar with Germany know that if a man does not
instantly defend himself against _Beleidigung_ society judges him
guilty.  Thus this and countless other printed circulations of
falsehood against Mr. Gerard have cruelly hurt him throughout
Germany, as I know from personal investigation.  Next to Mr. Wilson
and a few men in England he is the most hated man among the German
people.  He finally felt obliged to deny in the German Press some
of the absurd stories circulated about him, such as that of Mrs.
Gerard putting a German decoration he received on her dog.

Mueller, however, was not content with mere printed attacks, but
has made threats against the life of the American Ambassador.  A
prominent American has sworn an affidavit to this effect, but
Mueller still pursues his easy way.  On the night that the farewell
dinner was being given to a departing secretary at our Embassy,
Mueller and a German officer went about Berlin seeking Mr. Gerard
for the professed purpose of picking a fight with him.   They went
to Richards' Restaurant, where the dinner was being given, but
fortunately missed the Ambassador.

The trickery of the League would fill a volume, for Marten
especially is particularly clever.  He leapt into fame in Berlin by
going to Belgium "at his own risk," as he says, to refute the
charges of German cruelty there.  His book on Belgium, and a later
one claiming to refute the Bryce report, are unimpressive since
they fail to introduce facts, and the writer contents himself for
the main part with soliloquies on Belgian battlefields, in which he
attacks Russian aggression and Britain's perfidy in entering the
war.  The Belgians, we gather, are more or less delighted with the
change from Albert to Wilhelm.

Marten prints testimonials of the book from leading Germans, most
of whom, such as General Falkenhayn, content themselves with
acknowledgment of receipt with thanks and statement of having read
the work.  Count Zeppelin goes further, and hopes that the volume
will find a wide circulation, particularly in neutral countries.

And now for the vice-president of this anti-American organisation.
He is St. John Gaffney, former American Consul-General to Munich.
He belongs to the modern martyr series of the German of to-day.
All over Germany I was told that he was dismissed by Mr. Wilson
because he sympathised with Germany.  The Germans as a mass know
nothing further, but I can state from unimpeachable authority that
he used rooms of the American Hospital in Munich, while a member of
the board of that hospital and an officer in the consular service
of the United States, for propaganda purposes.  His presence became
so objectionable to the heads of the hospital, excellent people
whose sole aim is to aid suffering humanity, that he was ousted.

He returned from his American trip after his dismissal last year
and gave a widely quoted interview upon arrival in Germany which
sought to discredit America--through hitting Mr. Wilson and the
Press--in the most tense point of our last altercation in February
with Germany over the Lusitania.  Such men as Gaffney are greatly
to blame for many German delusions.

Mr. Gerard is not the only official whose path has not been strewn
with roses in Germany.  Our military attache has not been permitted
to go to the German front for nearly a year, and the snub is
apparent in the newspaper and Government circles of Berlin.  He is
probably the only one left behind.

The big Press does not use League of Truth material and certain
other anti-American copy which would be bad for Germany, to reach
foreign critics' attacks.  Many provincial papers, however,
furiously protested against the recent trip of the American
military attache through industrial Germany.  It was only the
American, not other foreign attaches, to whom they objected.

All this is useful to the German Government, for it keeps the
populace in the right frame of mind for two purposes.  In the first
place, a hatred of America inspired by the belief that she is
really an enemy, gives the German Government greater power over the
people.  Secondly, should the Wilhelmstrasse decide to play the
relentless submarine warfare as its last hand it will have
practically united support.




CHAPTER XII

IN THE GRIP OF THE FLEET

There is only one way to realise the distress in Germany, and that
is to go there and travel as widely as possible--preferably on
foot.  The truth about the food situation and the growing
discontent cannot be told by the neutral correspondent in Germany.
It must be memorised and carried across the frontier in the brain,
for the searching process extends to the very skin of the
traveller.  If he has an umbrella or a stick it is likely to be
broken for examination.  The heels are taken from his boots lest
they may conceal writings.  This does not happen in every case, but
it takes place frequently.  Many travellers are in addition given
an acid bath to develop any possible writing in invisible ink.

In Germany, as it is no longer possible to conceal the actual state
of affairs from any but highly placed and carefully attended
neutrals travelling therein, the utmost pains are being taken to
mislead the outside world.  The foreign correspondents are not
allowed to send anything the Government does not wish to get out.
They are, moreover, regularly dosed with propaganda distributed by
the _Nachrichtendienst_ (Publicity Service of the Foreign Office).

One of the books handed round to the neutrals when I was in Berlin
was a treatise on the German industrial and economic situation by
Professor Cassell, of the University of Upsala, Sweden.

He came upon the invitation of the German authorities for a three
weeks' study of conditions.  In his preface he artlessly mentions
that he was enabled to accomplish so much in three weeks owing to
the praiseworthy way in which everything was arranged for him.  He
compiled his work from information discreetly imparted at
interviews with officials, from printed statistics, and from
observations made on carefully shepherded expeditions.   Neutral
correspondents are expected to use this sort of thing, which is
turned out by the hundredweight, as the basis of their
communications to their newspapers.  We were supplied with a
similar volume on the "Great German naval victory of Jutland."

One feels in Germany that the great drama of the war is the drama
of the food supply--the struggle of a whole nation to prevent
itself being exhausted through hunger and shortage of raw materials.

After six months of war the bread ticket was introduced, which
guaranteed thirty-eight ordinary sized rolls or equivalent each
week to everybody throughout the Empire.  In the autumn of 1915
Tuesday and Friday became meatless days.  The butter lines had
become an institution towards the close of the year.  There was
little discomfort, however.

For seventeen months Germany laughed at the attempt to starve her
out.  Then, early in 1916 came a change.  An economic decline was
noticeable, a decline which was rapid and continuous during each
succeeding month.  Pork disappeared from the menu, beef became
scarcer and scarcer, but veal was plentiful until April.  In March,
sugar could be obtained in only small quantities, six months later
the unnutritious saccharine had almost completely replaced it.
Fish continued in abundance, but became increasingly expensive.  A
shortage in meat caused a run on eggs.  In September egg cards
limited each person to two eggs per week, in December the maximum
became one egg in two weeks.  Vegetables, particularly cabbage and
turnips, were plentiful enough to be of great help.

In Berlin the meat shortage became so acute in April, 1916, that
for five days in the week preceding Easter most butchers' shops did
not open their doors.  This made it imperative that the city should
extend the ticket rationing system to meat.  The police issued
cards to the residents of their districts, permitting them to
purchase one-half pound of meat per week from a butcher to whom
they were arbitrarily assigned in order to facilitate distribution.
The butchers buy through the municipal authorities, who contract
for the entire supply of the city.  The tickets are in strips, each
of which represents a week, and each strip is subdivided into five
sections for the convenience of diners in restaurants.

Since the supply in each butcher's shop was seldom sufficient to
let everybody be served in one day, the custom of posting in the
windows or advertising in the local papers "Thursday, Nos. 1-500,"
and later, "Saturday, Nos. 501-1000," was introduced.  A few
butchers went still further and announced at what hours certain
numbers could be served, thus doing away with the long queues.

Most of the competent authorities with whom I discussed the matter
agreed that the great flaw in the meat regulations was that, unlike
those of bread, they were only local and thus there were great
differences and correspondinng discontent all over Germany.

One factor which contributed to Germany's shortage of meat was the
indiscriminate killing of the livestock, especially pigs, when the
price of fodder first rose in the last months of 1914.  Most of
this excess killing was done by the small owners.  Our plates were
heaped unnecessarily.  Some of the dressing was done so hurriedly
and carelessly that there were numerous cases of pork becoming so
full of worms that it had to be destroyed.

The great agrarian Junkers were not forced by lack of fodder to
kill; consequently they own a still larger proportion of the
live-stock than they did at the beginning of the war.

On October 1st, 1916, the regulation of meat was taken out of the
hands of the local authorities so far as their power to regulate
the amount for each person was concerned, and this amount was made
practically the same throughout Germany.

First and foremost in the welfare of the people, whatever may be
said by the vegetarians, is the vital question of the meat supply.
Involved in the question of cattle is milk, leather, other
products, and of course, meat itself.

One German statistician told me he believed that the conquest of
Roumania would add between nine and ten months to Germany's
capacity to hold out, during which time, no doubt, one or other of
the Allies would succumb.

At the beginning of 1917 the actual number of cattle in Germany
does not seem to be so greatly depreciated as one would expect.
After a very thorough investigation I am convinced that there are
in Germany to-day from three-fourths to four-fifths as many head of
cattle as there were before the war.

In the spring and summer these cattle did very well, but with the
passing of the grazing season new difficulties are arising.  Cattle
must be fed, and unless sufficient grain comes from Roumania to
supply the bread for the people and the fodder for the cattle it is
obvious that there must be a wholesale slaughtering, and consequent
reduction of milk, butter, and cheese.

All these details may seem tiresome, but they directly concern the
length of the war.

To add to the shortage, the present s

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