The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
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Title: The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
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[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: Ambassador Gerard.]
THE ASSAULT
Germany Before the Outbreak and
England in War-Time
_A Personal Narrative_
By
FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE
Author of "Men Around the Kaiser"
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND FACSIMILES OF
DOCUMENTS AND CARTOONS
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1916
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
_To_
AMBASSADOR AND MRS. GERARD
LIFE-SAVERS
IN GRATITUDE
INTRODUCTION
This is not a "war book." It has not been my privilege at any stage of
the Great Blood-Letting to come into close contact with the spectacular
clash and din of the fray. Abler pens than mine, many of them wielded
by the "neutral" hands of American colleagues, are immortalizing the
terrible, yet irresistibly fascinating, scenes of this most stupendous
drama. But every drama has its scenario and its prologue and its
behind-the-curtain scenes--none ever written was so rich in these
preliminaries and accessories as is Europe's epic. To have witnessed and
lived through some of these was vouchsafed me; and to take American
readers with me down the line of the past year's recollections and
impressions is the sole object of this unpretentious effort. History,
Carlyle said, was some one's record of personal experiences. To such
experiences, as far as possible, the pages of this book are confined.
For thirteen years to the week--I have always had a respectful horror of
thirteen--I was a resident of Berlin. During the first five years of
that period my identity was clear: I was the representative in Germany
of an American newspaper, the _Chicago Daily News_. But in 1906 I
became an international complication, for it was then I joined the staff
of the _London Daily Mail_, which converted my status into that of an
_American_ serving _British_ journalistic interests in _Germany_. It
was not long afterward that welcome opportunity presented itself to
renew home professional ties in connection with my British work, and for
several years prior to the outbreak of the war I carried the credentials
of Berlin correspondent of the _New York Times_ and the _Chicago
Tribune_. They were on my person, with my United States passport, the
night of August 4, 1914, when the Kaiser's police arrested me as an
"English spy."
I feel it necessary to introduce so highly personal a narrative with
these details in order to make plain, at the outset, that it is the
narrative of an American born and bred. My proudest boast during ten
years' association with Great Britain's premier newspaper organization
was that I never lost my Americanism. My English editor, on the occasion
of my earliest physical conflict with the Mailed Fist in Berlin,
doubtless recalls taking me to task for invoking the protection of the
United States Embassy, just as my British colleagues, concerned in the
same imbroglio, had invoked the aid of their Embassy. Of the reams I
have written for the _Daily Mail_ in my day, I never sent it anything
which sprang more sincerely from the heart than the message to its
editor that I had not renounced allegiance to my country when I pledged
my professional services to a British newspaper.
I have no higher aspiration, as far as this volume is concerned, than
that critics of it, hostile or friendly, may pronounce it "pro-Ally"
from start to finish. I shall survive even the charge that it is
"pro-English." I mean it to be all of that, as I have tried to breathe
sincerity into every line of it. But I shall not feel inclined to
accept without protest an accusation that the book is "anti-German." It
is true that I regard this essentially a German-made, or rather a
Prussian-made, war, and that I hold Prussian militarism and militarists
solely responsible for plunging the world into this unending bath of
blood and tears. It is true that I wish to see Germany beaten. I wish
her beaten for the Allies' sake and for my own country's sake. A
victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become
automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United
States. My years in Germany taught me that. But I cherish no scintilla
of hatred or animosity toward the German people as individuals, who will
be the real victims of the war. I saw them with my own eyes literally
dragged into the fight against their will, fears and judgment. I know
from their own lips that they considered it a cruelly unnecessary war
and did not want it. They were joyful and prosperous a year and a half
ago--never more so. They craved a continuance of the simple blessings of
peace, unless their tearful protestations in the fateful month preceding
the drawing of their mighty sword were the plaints of a race of
hypocrites, and I do not think the percentage of hypocrisy higher in
Germany, man for man, than elsewhere in the world. The German's _Gott
strafe England_ cult, for example, is no revelation to any man who has
lived among them. Their hatred for Perfidious Albion has long been
vigorous and purposeful.
During the war I have lived in Germany, England and the United States--a
week of it in Berlin, three months at different periods in America, and
the rest of the time in London. My observations of Germany have not
been confined to the six and a half days the Prussian police permitted
me to tarry in their midst, for my work in London has dealt almost
exclusively with day-by-day examination of that weird production which
will be known to history as the German war-time Press. I am quite sure
the perspective of the life and times of the Kaiser's people in their
"great hour" was clearer from the vantage-ground of a newspaper desk
near the Thames embankment than it could possibly have been had it been
my lot to view the Fatherland at war as an observer writing, under the
hypnotic influence of mass-suggestion, of Germany from within.
Though I deal with Britain in war-time, no pretense is made of treating
so vast a subject except by way of fleeting impressions. Indeed,
nothing but snap-shots of British life are possible at the moment, so
kaleidoscopic are its developments and vagaries. I am conscious that
the pictures I have drawn are, therefore, superficial, but no portrayal
of a people in a state of flux could well be otherwise. Although the
concluding chapters were written in October, conditions now (in
mid-December) have altered vitally in many directions. Sir John French
no longer commands the British Army in France and Flanders. Serbia has
gone the way of Belgium. Gallipoli has been abandoned. The Coalition
Government, established at the end of May, is widely considered a
failure at the end of December. The Man in the Street, that oracle of
all-wisdom in these Isles, is asking whether the war can be won without
still another, and more sweeping, change of National leadership.
I hope my British friends, and particularly my professional colleagues
of ten years' standing, will not find my snap-shots too under-exposed.
The camera was in pro-British hands every minute of the time. If the
pictures appear indistinct, I trust the photography will at least not be
criticized as in any respect due to lack of sympathy with the British
cause.
F. W. W.
London, December 20, 1915.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Curtain Raiser
II. The First Act
III. The Plot Develops
IV. The Stage Managers
V. Slow Music
VI. The Climax
VII. War
VIII. The Americans
IX. August Fourth
X. The War Reaches Me
XI. The Last Farewell
XII. Safe Conduct
XIII. Complacency Rules The Waves
XIV. Pro-Ally Uncle Sam
XV. The Helmsmen
XVI. The General, The Admiral and the King
XVII. "Your King And Country Want You"
XVIII. War in the Dark
XIX. The Internal Foe
XX. The Empire of Hate
XXI. The New England
XXII. Quo Vadis?
New Introductory Chapter
HOW EUROPE VIEWS AMERICAN INTERVENTION
It will hardly be possible for any faithful chronicler of that
transcendent event to record that America's entry into the war set
embattled Europe by the ears. The most such a historian can say of the
impression created in Allied countries is that the abandonment of our
neutrality toward the "natural foe to liberty" produced profound
satisfaction but nothing in the way of a staggering sensation. Even in
Germany and among her vassals, declaration of war by the United States
failed to provoke consternation, although it was received in a spirit of
nonchalance which was more studied than real. The Damoclean sword of
Washington had hung so long in the mid-air of indecision that when the
blow fell its effect was to a large extent lost upon beneficiary and
victim alike. The peoples who became our Allies were gratified; the
Germans mortified. But our leap into the arena stained with nearly
three years of combatant blood was so belated that it seemed bereft of
the power to plunge either our friends into paroxysms of enthusiasm or
our enemies into the depths of despair.
I am speaking exclusively of the first impressions generated by
President Wilson's call to arms. In Allied Europe, as well as Germanic
Europe, opinion is changing, now that the words of April are merging
into the deeds of midsummer. Still different emotions will fire the
breasts of both our comrades-in-arms and of the common foe when the full
magnitude of American intervention dawns upon their reluctant
consciousness. As yet the illimitable import of America's "coming in"
is only faintly realized. Europe's attitude toward the new belligerent
is too strongly intrenched in decade-old disbelief in the existence of
American idealism and in gross ignorance of our actual potentialities
for war, spiritual as well as physical, to be lightly abandoned. We
shall have to win our spurs. There is at this writing no inclination
whatever to present them to us on trust.
In the introduction to the original edition of _The Assault_, which was
completed at the end of 1915, I was un-neutral enough to utter the pious
hope that Germany would be beaten. I confessed to the creed that "a
victorious Germany would be a menace to international liberty and become
automatically a threat to the happiness and freedom of the United
States." I said that "my years in Germany taught me that"--years lived
in closest contact with Prussian militarism long before it had taken the
concrete form of savagery at sea. With that passion for corroboration
of his own prejudices and predictions, which is inherent in the average
man, and which dominates most writers, I rejoice to feel that our
government and country have at length joined in liberty's fray from the
identical motives which induced me at the outset to take the only side
that it seemed possible for an American to espouse.
Properly to analyze Europe's mentality in respect of the United States'
entry into the war we need to bear in mind that for the thirty-two
preceding months President Wilson was the riddle of the political
universe. Europe had been assured ceaselessly since August, 1914, that
America was overwhelmingly and irretrievably pro-Ally, though its
confidence in such assertions was shipwrecked when we failed to go to
war over the _Lusitania_ incident and was never fully restored. Not
even Berlin could reconcile the Washington government's invincible
neutrality with the alleged existence of universal counter-sentiment.
Europeans are educated to believe that public opinion is the only
monarch to whom the American citizenry owns allegiance. They were
unable to comprehend a president who so resolutely refused to bow to the
people's sovereign will. In its myopic misconception of American
conditions, Allied Europe indulged in grotesque misinterpretation of Mr.
Wilson's hesitancy and mystic diplomacy. He had been "re-elected by
German votes." In London Americans were solemnly asked if the true
explanation of his policy did not lie in the fact that he had "a German
wife!" It was also mooted that he had "a secret understanding" with
Count Bernstorff. The president was this, that and the other
thing--everything, in fact, except what he ought to be. No American
chief magistrate since Lincoln was ever so magnificently misunderstood,
none so incorrigibly maligned.
Thus it was that although the United States' action under President
Wilson's sagacious leadership did not fill Europe with either animation
or excitement, it nevertheless came as a full-fledged surprise to both
sets of belligerents. Briton, Frenchman, Russian and Italian, as well
as German, Austrian and Hungarian, each in his own dogmatic way, had
long since and definitely made up their minds that America did not mean
to fight. Their cocksureness on this cardinal point was not unnaturally
supported by the circumstances of President Wilson's re-election on what
was commonly understood to be the democratic candidate's paramount
campaign issue--his success in keeping the country out of the war. In
the two or three days in which Mr. Wilson's fate trembled in the balance
of the Electoral College, a London newspaper, venting splenitic feelings
long pent up, gratefully acclaimed the premature announcement of Mr.
Hughes' triumph as an historic and deserved rebuke of the statesman who
was "too proud to fight."
Within a month President Wilson, in his first public utterance since
election day, made his "peace-without-victory" address to the Senate.
This cryptic deliverance was interpreted in Allied Europe as not only
obliterating all possibility of America's entering the war against
Germany, but as actually promoting Germany's efforts, launched about the
same time, to secure a premature, or "German," peace. There was
probably no time during the entire war when feeling against the
president and the United States in general ran higher in England and
France than during the ensuing weeks. It was not so much what one read
in the public prints, for press utterances were restrained if not
unqualifiedly friendly, that impelled many an American in London and
Paris to seek cover from the withering blast of criticism and impatience
to which he now found his country subjected. It was rather the
sentiments encountered among Englishmen and Frenchmen in private that
supplied the real index to, and revealed the full intensity of, the
disappointment and indignation now aroused in Allied lands.
Indelibly impressed upon my memory is the passionate outburst of a
dear--and, of course, temperamental--French friend in London. He is a
gentleman, a scholar and sincere lover of America, where he found the
charming lady who is now his wife. He had retired to a bed of illness
in consequence of the climatic iniquities which will forever make it
impossible for a Frenchman ever really to like England, and I was paying
him a neighborly visit of inquiry. Though I had hoped and intended that
the acrimonious topic of America would for once be eliminated from our
conversation, I was not to be spared what turned out to be almost the
most violent castigation of the United States and all its works under
which I could ever remember to have winced. I was left in no doubt that
his outpouring of righteous Gallic wrath, though it sprang to a certain
degree from temperature as well as temperament, was the voice of France
crying out in holy anger with the great but recreant sister republic.
Wilson had "surrendered to the Germans and pro-Germans." They were now
getting their reward. The president was "playing the Kaiser's peace
game." He may not have meant to do so, but that is what his Senate
manifesto amounted to, in French estimation. "The Americans care only
for their money." So be it. France would not forget. _Jamais_!
Americans would rue the day they had sent back to the White House the
man who was now stabbing crucified democracy in the back!
The essential difference between the French and the English is that
Frenchmen usually say what they feel, and Englishmen feel what they do
not say. Emotions were given to Frenchmen to be expressed; to
Englishmen, to be suppressed. Almost identically the same emotions
which fired the French soul, as typified by the instance I have just
cited, filled British breasts, but owing to the psychic machinery with
which his organism is equipped the Englishman was able more successfully
to stifle them. The public tone toward the latest manifestation of our
"war policy" was punctiliously correct. It was discussed by the great
newspapers in terms of polite dismay but almost invariably in good
temper. Yet millions of Britons were boiling within, and if wearing
their hearts on their sleeves had been "good form," there is little
reason to doubt that their ebullitions would have been no less
articulate or meaningful than those of my distinguished French friend
herein narrated.
It was about at this time, the end of 1916, that an American colleague,
Edward Price Bell, of _The Chicago Daily News_, set forth in the columns
of _The Times_ upon a bold adventure--an attempt to persuade captious
Britons that, far from desiring to "play the Kaiser's game," President
Wilson was actually anxious to make war on Germany, and, indeed, was
deliberately, as was his way, proceeding in that direction. It was a
risky throw for the doyen of the American press in London, who enjoyed a
reputation for sanity and sagacity and who had good reason for desiring
to preserve the respect of a community in which his professional lot had
been cast for sixteen years. I purpose summarizing the course of Bell's
effort to scale the walls of British prejudice because of its immensely
symptomatic and psychological interest.
"I believe that Wilson wants to go to war," Bell wrote to _The Times_ on
December 23. "I believe that he wants to fight Germany. I believe that
he wants Germany to commit herself to a program that would warrant him
in asking the American people to enter the conflict." In every allied
quarter in Europe, practically without exception, Bell's letter produced
a prodigious and contemptuous guffaw. Americans in Europe, any number
of them, joined in the gibes. Undismayed, Bell returned to the attack
within three days. "America can not keep out of this war unless Germany
gives way," he wrote on December 26. "The time may come very soon when
President Wilson will be under the necessity of making his appeal to the
American nation." The thunderer did not consign Bell's letters to the
editorial waste-basket, where most Englishmen believed they belonged,
yet it declined, in its scrupulously courteous way, to associate itself
with its correspondent's manifestly fantastic and fanatical sophistry.
In an editorial comment _The Times_ expressed its reluctance to place
any trust in Bell's exposition of the policy "which Mr. Wilson so
carefully wraps up." Bell had by this time become a laughing-stock far
beyond the confines of the metropolitan area of London. Paris,
Petrograd and Rome read his letters and shook with incredulous mirth.
The feelings of fellow-Americans toward him began to be tinged with
pity.
Yet Bell broke forth afresh on New Year's Day with his third letter to
Printing House Square, asserting, roundly, that "America will and can
support no peace but an Entente peace." On January 25 _The Times_
printed Bell's fourth letter within five weeks, in which he this time
declared unequivocally that "Mr. Wilson's purpose is solely to inform
the world what America stands for and what he is willing to ask America,
if need be, to fight for."
Germany now proclaimed her new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin and Count Bernstorff received his
passports in Washington. Yet Allied faith in America, momentarily
revived by these events, took wings once more when it became known that
Mr. Wilson's next "step" would be armed neutrality. The editor of _The
Times_, who had been exceptionally tolerant of the pestiferous Bell,
imagined now, I fancy, that events had at length put a timely end to the
letter-writing energies of the Chicago scribe; for Englishmen, with
notably few exceptions, had by this time pretty well "eliminated"
America from their calculations. But on February 22, inspired perhaps
by the rugged traditions clinging to that date, Bell cleared for action
for the fifth time and next day _The Times_ printed him for the fifth
time. He wrote: "I will risk the view that we are on the edge of great
things in America--things worthy of the country of Washington and
Lincoln. America, I feel, is about to fructify internationally--about to
make her real contribution to humanity and history." _The Times_ now
went so far as to suggest, with characteristic prudence, that Bell's
"sagacious and racy letter deserves careful consideration by all who are
trying to understand the situation in Washington." Unhappily, there was
little evidence in the continued British mistrust of America that _The
Times'_ counsel was being taken widely to heart.
On February 27 Bell craved the indulgence of _The Times_ for his sixth,
and final, epistle to the skeptics. With what was destined to turn out
to be rare prescience and penetration, he now said that Mr. Wilson's
delay in coming to grips with Hohenzollernism meant only that "the
president wants the public temper so hot throughout America that it will
instantly burn to ash any revolutionary unrest or any opposition by the
pacifist diehards." Five weeks later the United States and Germany were
at war, with the American nation united in fervent support of the
president's pronunciamento that the task which demanded the renunciation
of our neutrality was one to which "we can dedicate our lives, our
fortunes, everything we are and everything we have." The hour of
Europe's awakening from its scornful dreams had come.
For several days after Congress, at the president's instigation, voted
to "accept the gage of battle," there lay neatly folded up in a certain
front room of the American Embassy in London a fine, new American flag.
It had been put there for a special purpose--to be hoisted at a
psychological moment believed to be imminent. Our people in Grosvenor
Gardens, in their hearty, imaginative American way, considered that
there might possibly be a "demonstration" in welcome of Britain's latest
comrade-in-arms. There were visions of a procession, brass bands and
cheering crowds; and the spick and span stars and stripes were to be
flung to the glad breeze when the "demonstrators" reached the scene and
called for a speech from Ambassador Page on the Embassy balcony. Such
things happened when Italy and Roumania "came in." Surely history would
not fail to repeat itself in the case of "daughter America." But
neither procession, bands, cheers nor crowds ever materialized. After
all, we could not expect Englishmen to celebrate in honor of the
greatest mistake they had ever made in their lives. That would be
something more than un-English. It would be a violation of all the laws
of human nature.
Yet I suppose there was not an American in Great Britain who was not
keenly disappointed at the conspicuously undemonstrative character of
our welcome into the Allied fold. I must not be understood as
minimizing the warmth of either governmental or press utterances evoked
by President Wilson's Lincolnesque speech to Congress and the action
which so promptly ensued. The sentiments expressed by Mr. Lloyd George,
Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Bryce, in and out
of Parliament, and the thoughts which found vivid expression in the
columns of the newspapers of London and the provinces left little to be
desired; but eloquent and hearty as they were, their effect upon that
all-powerful molder of British public opinion known as the Man in the
Street was strangely negligible. I am sure I am not the only American
in England who, waiting for words of greeting from British friends and
not getting them, was irresistibly constrained to search for the reason.
Our chagrin was not lessened by assurances from Paris that "France was
going wild with joy"; that the president's speech was being read aloud
in the schools and officially placarded on all the hoardings of the
republic; that the government buildings were flying the tricolor and
"Old Glory" side by side; and that American men were being publicly
embraced in the boulevards.
Many Americans found themselves, for reasons never entirely clear to
them, the objects of "congratulation." I know of at least one instance
in which a very estimable American lady, showered with "congratulations"
by British friends on the action of her country, preserved sufficient
presence of mind to suggest that she thought "congratulations" were due
to the Allies. Another favorite view advanced by _vox populi_ was that
America had only "come in" at this late stage of the sanguinary game
because "the war was won" and intervention now was "safe" and "cheap."
It was not uncommon to be told that our determination to "spend the
whole force of the nation" was due to commercial acumen and our desire
to safeguard the heavy "investment" we had already made in the Allied
cause. Last-ditchers--their name was legion: the Englishmen who refused
to believe even yet that America "meant business"--declined to throw
their hats into the air and shout until "big words" had become "big
deeds." Much more impressive in my own ears seemed the explanation that
Britons were not tumultuous in our honor because these days of endless
sacrifice--the spring offensive in France was at its height and the
nation's best were falling in thousands--were not days for cheering and
flag-waving. And, finally, there was that extensive school of thought
which had always and sincerely opposed American intervention on the
ground that America, as a neutral granary and arsenal, was a more
effective Allied asset than a belligerent America which would naturally
and necessarily husband its vast resources for its own military
requirements.
The story of Germany's state of mind toward America's entry into the
lists against her is soon told. The German government and German people
looked upon us as all but declared enemies throughout the war. They
felt, and repeatedly said, that we were doing them quite as much damage
as neutrals as we could possibly inflict in the guise of belligerents.
That, indeed, was the argument on which Hindenburg and his
fellow-strategists based the "safety" of inaugurating unrestricted
submarine warfare and the moral certainty of war with the United States
as a result. Not all Germans blithely relegated the prospect of a
formally hostile America to the realm of inconsequence. Hindenburg and
Ludendorff know nothing about America. But men like Ballin, Gwinner,
Rathenau and Dernburg know that the United States, in a famous German
idiom, is, indeed, "the land of unlimited possibilities." There can be
no manner of doubt that the vision of America's limitless resources
harnessed to those of the nations already at war with their country
always filled the business giants of the Fatherland with all the terror
of a nightmare. But as those elements, both before and during the war,
were as a voice crying in the wilderness of Prussian militarism, they
were condemned to silence when the dreaded thing became a reality; and
the only note that issued forth from Berlin was the "inspired" croak in
the government-controlled press that only the expected had happened;
that Hindenburg's plans had been made with exact regard for that which
had now supervened, and that Germany's irresistible march to victory
would not and could not be arrested by anything the Americans could do.
Doubts were universally expressed in America and in Allied Europe as to
whether the Kaiser's government would permit President Wilson's crushing
indictment of Prussianism to be published in Germany. One heard of
picturesque schemes to drop millions of copies of the speech over the
German trenches and towns from aeroplanes. In at least one widely-read
German newspaper, the _Berliner Tageblatt_, a Radical-Liberal journal
which has not entirely surrendered its old-time independence, the
president's speech was printed almost verbatim. In nearly every paper
there were adequate extracts. But such effect as they may have been
designed to create upon the German body politic--particularly the
president's insistence that America's war is with "the Imperial German
Government" and not with "the German people"--was nullified by the press
bureau's imperious orders to editors to reject Mr. Wilson's "moral
clap-trap" as impudent and insolent interference with Germany's domestic
concerns. Under the leadership of the celebrated Berlin theologian,
Professor Doctor Adolf Harnack, meetings of German scholars and
_savants_ were organized for the purpose of giving public expression to
the "unanimity and indignation with which the German nation protests
against the American president's officious intrusion upon matters which
are the affair of the German people and themselves alone." Or words to
that effect.
Meantime the so-called comic press of Germany, which to an extent
probably unknown in any other country of the world gives the keynote for
popular sentiment, engaged in an orgy of unbridled abuse of President
Wilson, the United States and Americans in general. The _leitmotif_ of
hundreds of cartoons, caricatures and jokes was that the "American money
power" had "dragged" us into the war. _Simplicissimus_ epitomized
German thoughts of the moment in a full-page drawing entitled "High
Finance Crowning Wilson Autocrat of America by the Grace of Mammon."
The president was depicted enthroned upon a dais resting on bulging
money-bags and surmounted by a canopy fringed with gold dollars. A
crown of shells and cartridges is being placed upon his head by the
grinning shade of the late J. Pierpont Morgan. In the background is the
filmy outline of George Washington, delivering the farewell address.
Then, of a sudden, German press policy toward the United States
underwent a radical change. Silence supplanted abuse. It became so
oppressive and so profound as to be eloquent. The purpose of this
organized indifference soon became crystal-clear: on the one hand to
bolster up German confidence in the innocuousness of American enmity,
and, on the other, to slacken the United States' war preparations by
committing no "overt act" of word or deed designed to stimulate them.
Bernstorff had by this time reached Berlin and there is reason to
suspect that his was the crafty hand directing the new policy of
ostensible disinterestedness in American belligerency. The arrival of
American naval forces in European waters; the inauguration of
conscription; the far-reaching preparations for succoring our Allies
with money, food and ships; the splendid success of the Liberty Loan;
the presence of General Pershing and the headquarters staff of the
United States Army in France; the enrollment of nearly ten million young
men for military service; our ambitious plans for the air war; the
girding up of our loins in every conceivable direction, that we may play
a worthy part in the war--all these things have been either deliberately
ignored in Germany, by imperious government order, or, when not
altogether suppressed from public knowledge, been slurred or glossed
over in a way designed to make them appear as harmless or "bluff."
Finally, in an "inspired" article which offered sheer affront to the
large body of truly patriotic American citizens of German extraction,
the _Cologne Gazette_ bade Germans to continue to pin their faith in
"our best allies," _i.e._, the German-Americans, who might be relied
upon (quoth the semi-official Watch on the Rhine) to "inject into
American public opinion an element of restraint and circumspection which
has already often been a cause of embarrassment to Herr Wilson and his
English friends." "We may be sure," concluded this impudent homily,
"that our compatriots are still at their post."
Events have marched fast since America "came in." In Great Britain and
France men of perspicacity are not quite so jubilant over the effects of
the Russian revolution as they were three months ago. They realize that
the amazing cataclysm which began in Petrograd on March 13 warded off a
treacherous peace between Romanoff and Hohenzollern, but also, alas!
that it has effectually eliminated Russia as a fighting factor for the
purposes of this year's campaign. Englishmen and Frenchmen are only now
beginning to comprehend the immeasurable task that confronts New Russia
in the erection of a democratic state on the ruins of autocracy while
faced by the simultaneous necessity of warring against an enemy in
occupation of vast Russian territory.
To-day there is little inclination in London or Paris to underestimate
the providential importance of American intervention. The specter of
dwindling manpower in both countries is of itself sufficient to cause
them to gaze gratefully and longingly toward our untapped reservoir of
human sinews. _What is happening in chaotic and liberty-dazed Russia
forces Englishmen and Frenchmen, however disconcerting to their pride,
to acknowledge the absolute indispensability of American support_.
There are many among them candid enough to admit that democracy's
horizon might now be perilously beclouded if the United States had
refrained from playing a man's part in the battle of the nations. In
Berlin, too, the true import of America's decision is dawning upon
government and governed alike.
Our Allies expect us to justify our world-wide reputation for speed and
organizing capacity and to transfer our activities from the forum of
Demosthenes to the field of Mars. They are impressed by what we have
already accomplished--I write on the day when the arrival of the first
American army in France, well within three months of our entering the
war, is officially announced. But amid our remote isolation from the
scene of the conflict, safeguarded by geographical guarantees that its
consuming fires can hardly ever sear our own soil, Englishmen and
Frenchmen wonder whether we are able to estimate the magnitude of the
effort required of us if we are to rise to the majestic zenith of our
potentialities. Some of them, seemingly no wiser for their myopia of
recent times, are frankly skeptical on that point.
It is our bounden duty, as I am sure it is our unconquerable resolve, to
disillusion our Allies. To us has fallen the privilege of proving that
our mighty sword has been drawn in earnest and that we shall not sheathe
it until America's plighted word is gloriously made good. "Make Good!"
Leaping to the tasks which await us on land and sea with that indigenous
idiom on their lips, our soldiers and sailors need crave for no more
inspiring slogan. Allied Europe expects us--expects us almost
anxiously--to "make good."
London, June 28, 1917.
THE ASSAULT
CHAPTER I
THE CURTAIN RAISER
Countess Hannah von Bismarck missed her aim. The beribboned bottle of
"German champagne" with which she meant truly well to baptize the newest
Hamburg-American leviathan of sixty thousand-odd tons on the placid
Saturday afternoon of June 20, 1914, went far wide of its mark. The
Kaiser, impetuous and resourceful, came gallantly and instantaneously to
the rescue. Grabbing the bottle while it still swung unbroken in midair
by the black-white-red silken cord which suspended it from the launching
pavilion, Imperial William crashed it with accuracy and propelling power
a Marathon javelin-thrower might have envied squarely against the vast
bow. The granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, a bit crestfallen
because she had only thrown like any woman exclaimed: "I christen thee,
great ship, _Bismarck_!" and the milky foam of the _Schaumwein_ trickled
in rivulets down the nine- or ten-story side of the most Brobdingnagian
product which ever sprang from shipwrights' hands. Then, with ten
thousand awestruck others gathered there on the Elbe side, I watched the
huge steel carcass, released at last from the stocks which had so long
held it prisoner, glide and creak majestically down the greasy ways
midst our chanting of _Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber Alles_. Half a
minute later the _Bismarck_ was resting serenely, house-high, on the
surface of the murky river five hundred yards away. The Kaiser and Herr
Ballin shook hands feelingly, the royal monarch smiling benignly on the
shipping king. The military band blared forth _Heil Dir im
Siegeskranz_, and the last fete Hamburg was destined to know for many a
troublous month had passed into history.
Countess von Bismarck had missed her aim! I wonder if there are not
many, like myself, who witnessed the ill-omened launch and who endow it
now with a meaning which events of the intervening year have borne out?
For, surely, when the Great General Staff at Berlin reviews
dispassionately the beginnings of the war, as it some day will do, there
will be an absorbingly interesting explanation of how the machine which
Moltke, the Organizer of Victory, handed down to an incompetent namesake
and nephew missed _its_ aim, too--the winning of the war by a series of
short, sharp and staggering blows which should decide the issue in favor
of the Germans before the next snow. The argument has been advanced, in
vindication of Germany's innocent intentions, that the Hamburg-American
line would never have launched the mighty _Bismarck_ if the Fatherland
was planning or contemplating war. But the ship was not to have made
her maiden transatlantic voyage until April 1, 1915, the centenary of
her great patronym's birth. The German Staff expected to dictate a
glorious peace long before that time, and might have done so but for
Belgium, Joffre, "that contemptible little British army," and other
miscalculations. If the Staff, like Countess von Bismarck, had not
missed its aim, the _Bismarck_ would have poked her gigantic nose into
New York harbor on scheduled time, a mammoth symbol of Germany, the
World Power indeed, and fitting incarnation of the new Mistress of the
Seas. Who knows but what perhaps grandiose visions of that sort were in
the far-seeing Herr Ballin's card-index mind?
The Kaiser customarily visits the Venice of the North on his way to Kiel
Week, the yachting festival invented by him to outrival England's Cowes,
and the launch of the _Bismarck_ was timed accordingly. From Hamburg the
Emperor proceeds aboard the Imperial yacht _Hohenzollern_ up the Elbe to
Brunsbuettel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron,
a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Luebeck
patricians with the love of the sea inborn in their Hanseatic veins.
There was no variation from the time-honored programme in 1914. William
II even adhered to his unfailing practice of delivering an apotheosis of
the marine profession at the regatta-dinner of the N.G.Y.S. aboard the
Hamburg-American steamer on which Herr Ballin is wont to entertain for
Kiel Week a party of two or three hundred German and foreign notables.
There was no glimmer of coming events in the guest-list of S.S.
_Victoria Luise_, for it included Mr. John Walter, one of the hereditary
proprietors of _The Times_, and several other distinguished Englishmen
soon to be Germany's hated foes.
By that occult agency which determines with diabolical delight the irony
of fate, it was ordained that Kiel, 1914, should be the occasion of a
spectacular Anglo-German love-feast, with a squadron of British
super-dreadnoughts anchored in the midst of the peaceful German Armada
as a sign to all the world of the non-explosive warmth of English-German
"relations." That, at any rate, was the design of that unfortunately
nebulous element in Berlin, headed by Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, known
as the Peace Party; for had certain highly-placed Germans acting under
the Imperial Chancellor's inspiration had their way, the British
Admiralty yacht _Enchantress_, the official craft of the First Lord of
the Admiralty and actually bearing that dignitary, Mr. Winston
Churchill, M.P., would have been convoyed to Kiel by Vice-Admiral Sir
George Warrender's ironclads. The Kaiser's approval of the Churchill
project--as I happen to know--had been sought and secured. Eminent
friends of an Anglo-German rapprochement in London had done the
necessary log-rolling in England. Matters were regarded in Germany so
much of a _fait accompli_ that an anchorage diagram issued by the naval
authorities at Kiel only a fortnight before the "Week" indicated the
precise spot at which Mr. Churchill and the _Enchantress_ would make
fast in the harbor of Kiel Bay.
[Illustration: Watching for the Kaiser's Armada.]
But Mr. Churchill did not come. I know why. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz,
to whom the half-American _enfant terrible_ of British politics was a
pet aversion, did not want him at Kiel. Mr. Churchill's visit might
have resulted in some sort of an Anglo-German naval _modus vivendi_, or
otherwise postponed "the Day." The German War Party's plans, so soon to
materialize, would have been sadly thrown out of gear by such an
untimely event, and von Tirpitz is not the man to brook interference
with his programmes. Had not the German Government, under the
Grand-Admiral's invincible leadership, persistently rejected the hand of
naval peace stretched out by the British Cabinet? Was it not Mr.
Churchill's own proposals to which Berlin had repeatedly returned an
imperious No? Could Germany afford to run the risk of being cajoled,
amid the festive atmosphere of Kiel Week, into concessions which she had
hitherto successively withheld? Von Tirpitz said No again. For years
he had been saying the same thing on the subject of an armaments
understanding with Britain. He said No to Prince Buelow when the fourth
Chancellor suggested the advisability of moderating a German naval
policy certain to lead to conflict with Great Britain. He said No to
Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg when Buelow's successor timorously suggested
from time to time, as he did, the foolhardiness of a programme which
meant, in an historic phrase of Buelow's, "pressure and
counter-pressure." Von Tirpitz had had his way with two German
Chancellors, his nominal superiors, in succession. He never dreamt of
allowing himself to be bowled over now by an amateur sailor from London,
who, if he came to Kiel, would only come armed with a fresh bait
designed to rob the Fatherland of its "future upon the water."
Until a bare two weeks before the date of the arrival of the British
Squadron in German waters, nothing was publicly known either in London
or Berlin of the projected trip of Mr. Churchill to Kiel. Von Tirpitz
thereupon had resort to the weapon he wields almost as dexterously as
the submarine--publicity--to depopularize the scheme of the misguided
friends of Anglo-German peace. It was not the first time, of course,
that the Grand-Admiral had deliberately crossed the avowed policy of the
German Foreign Office. Von Tirpitz now caused the Churchill-Kiel
enterprise to be "exposed" in the press, in the confident hope that
premature announcement would effectually kill the entire plan. It did.
Tirpitz diplomacy scored again, as it was wont to do. Whereof I speak
in this highly pertinent connection I know, on the authority of one of
von Tirpitz's most subtle and trusted henchmen. To the latter's eyes, I
hope, these reminiscences may some day come. He, at least, will know
that history, not fiction, is recited here.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST ACT
"I am simply in my element here!" exclaimed the Kaiser ecstatically to
Vice-Admiral Sir George Warrender, as the twain stood surveying the
glittering array of steel-blue German and British men-of-war facing one
another amicably on the unruffled bosom of Kiel harbor at high noon of
June 25. From my perch of vantage abaft the forward
thirteen-and-one-half-inch guns of His Britannic Majesty's
superdreadnought battleship _King George V_, whither the quartette of
London correspondents had been banished during William II's sojourn in
the flagship, I could "see" him talking on the quarter-deck below,
speaking with those nervous, jerky right-arm gestures which are as
important a part of his staccato conversation as uttered words.
The Kaiser was inspecting _his_ flagship, for when he boarded us, almost
without notice, in accordance with his irrepressible love of a surprise,
Sir George Warrender's flag came down and the emblem of the German
Emperor's British naval rank, an Admiral of the Fleet, was hoisted atop
all the British vessels in the port. For the nonce the Hohenzollern War
Lord was Britannia's senior in command. Aboard the four great
twenty-three-thousand-ton battleships, _King George V, Audacious,
Centurion_ and _Ajax_ and the three fast "light cruisers" _Birmingham,
Southampton_ and _Nottingham_ there was, for the better part of an hour,
no man to say him nay. I wonder if he, or any of us at Kiel during that
amazing week, let our imaginations run riot and conjure up the vision of
the _Birmingham_ in action against German warships off Heligoland within
ten short weeks, or of the _Audacious_ at the bottom of the Irish Sea,
victim of a German mine, five months later?
Warrender's squadron had come to Kiel two days before. Another British
squadron was at the same moment paying a similar visit of courtesy and
friendship to the Russian Navy at Riga. The English said then, and
insist now, that their ships were dispatched to greet the Kaiser and the
Czar as sincere messengers of peace and good-will. The Germans, in the
myopic view they have taken of all things since the war began, are
convinced that the White Ensign which floated at Kiel six weeks before
Great Britain and Germany went to war was the emblem of deceit and
hypocrisy, sent there to flap in the Fatherland's guileless face while
Perfidious Albion was crouching for the attack. They say that to-day,
even in presence of the incongruous fact that Serajevo, which applied
the match to the European powder-barrel, wrote its red name across
history's page while the British squadron was still riding at anchor in
Germany's war harbor.
It was exactly ten years to the week since British warships had last
been to Kiel. I happened to be there on that occasion, too, when King
Edward VII, convoyed by a cruiser squadron, shed the luster of his
vivacious presence on the gayest "Week" Kiel ever knew. Meantime the
Anglo-German political atmosphere had remained too stubbornly clouded to
make an interchange of naval amenities, of all things, either logical or
possible. It was the era in which Germania was preparing her grim
battle-toilet for "the Day"--for all the world to see, as she, justly
enough, always insisted. They were the years in which her new
dreadnought fleet sprang into being. It was the period in which offer
after offer from England for an "understanding" on the question of naval
armaments met nothing but the cold shoulder in Tirpitz-ruled Berlin.
Not until the summer of 1914 had it seemed feasible for British and
German warships to mingle in friendly contact. Doctor von Bethmann
Hollweg quite legitimately accounted the arrangement of the Kiel
love-feast as an achievement of no mean magnitude, viewed in the light
of the ten acrimonious years which preceded it. The War Party,
realizing its harmlessness, and, indeed, recognizing its value for the
party's stealthy purposes, blandly tolerated it. Even Grand-Admiral von
Tirpitz was on hand to do the honors, and no one performs them more
suavely than Germany's fork-bearded sailor-statesman.
The day after Sir George Warrender's vessels crept majestically out of
the Baltic past Friedrichsort, at the mouth of Kiel harbor, to be
welcomed by twenty-one German guns from shore batteries, the symptomatic
event of the "Week" was enacted--the formal opening of the reconstructed
Kaiser Wilhelm Canal. I place that day, June 24, not far behind the
sanguinary 28th of June, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell, in its
direct relationship to the outbreak of the war. When the giant locks of
Holtenau swung free, ready henceforth for the passage of William II's
greatest warships, the moment of Germany's up-to-the-minute preparedness
for Armageddon was signalized.
For ten plodding years tens of thousands of hands had been at work
converting the waterway which links Baltic Germany with North Sea
Germany (Kiel with Wilhelmshaven) into a channel wide and deep enough
for navigation by battleships of the largest bulk. After an expenditure
of more than fifty million dollars the canal, dedicated with pomp and
ceremony in 1892 to the peaceful requirements of European shipping, was
now become a war canal, pure and simple, raised to the war dimension and
destined, as the German War Party knew, to play the role for which it
was rebuilt almost before its newly-banked stone sides had settled in
their foundations. When I watched proud William II, standing solemn and
statue-like on the bridge of his Imperial yacht _Hohenzollern_, as her
gleaming golden bow broke through the black-white-red strand of ribbon
stretched across the locks, I recall distinctly an invincible feeling
that I was witness of an historic moment. Germany's army, I said to
myself, had long been ready. Now her fleet was ready, too. With an
inland avenue of safe retreat, invulnerably fortified at either end,
Teuton sea strategists had always insisted that the Fatherland's naval
position would be well-nigh impregnable. That hour had arrived. There
was the Kaiser, before my very eyes, leading the way through the War
Canal for his twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-ton battleships and
battle cruisers, and even for his thirty-five-thousand-ton or
fifty-thousand-ton creations of some later day, for the War Canal was
made over for to-morrow, as well as for to-day. The German war machine
tightened up the last bolt when William of Hohenzollern emerged from
Holtenau locks into the harbor of Kiel, spectacular symbol of the fact
that German ironclads of any dimensions were now able to sally back and
forth from the Baltic to the North Sea and hide for a year, as the world
has meantime seen, even from the Mistress of the Seas. No wonder a
British bluejacket, forming the link of an endless chain of his fellows
dressing ship round the rail of the _Centurion_ in honor of the War
Lord, whispered audibly to a mate, as the _Hohenzollern_ steamed down
the line to her anchorage, "Say, Bill, don't he look jest like Gawd!"
Perhaps the Divinely-Anointed felt that way, too.
When the Kaiser had left the _King George V_ after a politely cursory
"inspection"--the only real "understanding" effected between England and
Germany at Kiel was a tacit agreement on the part of officers and men to
do no amateur spying in one another's ships--Sir George Warrender
summoned us from the turret and told us some details of the All-Highest
visitation. The Emperor had been "delighted to make his first call in a
British dreadnought aboard so magnificent a specimen as the _King George
V_" (she and her sisters being at the time the most powerful battleships
flying the Union Jack). He wanted the Vice-Admiral to assure the
British Government what pleasure it had done the German Navy "in sending
these fine ships to Kiel." He hoped nothing was being left undone to
"complete the English sailors' happiness" in German waters. That
extorted from Sir George Warrender the exclamation that German
hospitality, like all else Teutonic, was seemingly thoroughness
personified, for somebody had even been thoughtful enough to lay a
submarine telephone cable from the Seebade-Anstalt Hotel to the
Vice-Admiral's flagship, so that Lady Maude Warrender might talk from
her apartments on shore directly to her husband's quarters afloat.
"Yes," continued the Kaiser, who is a genial conversationalist and
_raconteur_, "I am in my element in surroundings like these. I love the
sea. I like to go to launchings of ships. I am passionately fond of
yachting. You must sail with me to-morrow, Admiral, in my newest
_Meteor_, the fifth of the name. I race only with German crews now.
Time was when I had to have British skippers and British sailors. You
see, my aim is to breed a race of German yachtsmen. As fast as I've
trained a good crew in the _Meteor_, I let it go to the new owner of the
boat. I am the loser by that system, but I have the satisfaction of
knowing that I am promoting a good cause." The confab was approaching
its end. "Oh, Admiral, before I forget, how is Lady ........ and the
Duchess of ........? I know so many of your handsome Englishwomen."
Sir George Warrender's captains and the officers of the flagship were
now grouped around him for a farewell salute to their Imperial senior
officer. The Kaiser spied the _King George V's_ chaplain, and leaning
over to him inquired, gaily, "Chaplain, is there any swearing in this
ship?" "Oh, never, Your Majesty, never any swearing in a British
dreadnought!" The War Lord liked that, for we who had been in the
Olympian heights for'd remembered his laughing aloud at this veracious
tribute to Jack Tar's world-famed purity of diction.
Kiel Week thenceforward was an endless round of Anglo-German
pleasantries. A Zeppelin, harbinger of coming events, hovered over the
British squadron at intervals, her crew wagging cheery greetings to the
ships while acquainting themselves at close range with the looks of
English dreadnoughts from the sky. British sailormen paid fraternal
visits to German dreadnoughts and German sailormen returned their calls.
The crew of the _Ajax_ gave a music-hall smoker in honor of the crew of
the big battle-cruiser _Seydlitz_, the Teuton tars being no little
awestruck by the complacency with which two heavyweight British boxers
pummeled each other a sea-green for six rounds and then smilingly shook
hands when it was all over. Germans never punch one another except in
gory hate, and they seldom fight with their fists. The Kaiser was host
nightly at splendid State dinners in the _Hohenzollern_ and Vice-Admiral
Warrender returned the fire with state banquets aboard the _King George
V_. The atmosphere was fairly thick with brotherly love. It was not so
much as ruffled even when the octogenarian Earl of Brassey, who wards
off rheumatism by an early morning pull in his row-boat, was arrested by
a German harbor-policeman as an "English spy" for approaching the
forbidden waters of Kiel dockyard. German diplomacy was typically
represented by Lord Brassey's zealous captor, for the master of the
famous _Sunbeam_ brought that venerable craft to Kiel to demonstrate
that Englishmen of his class sincerely favored peace, and, if possible,
friendship with Germany. Wilhelmstrasse tact was exemplified again
when, by way of apology to Lord Brassey, the Kiel police explained that
there was, of course, no intention of charging him with espionage. The
policeman who arrested him merely thought he was nabbing a smuggler! At
dinner that night in the _Hohenzollern_, the Kaiser chuckled jovially at
Lord Brassey's expense. England's greatest living marine historian
stole away from Kiel with the _Sunbeam_ in the gray dawn of the next
day, with new ideas of German courtesy to the stranger within the gate.
He had intended to stay longer.
[Illustration: A naval Zeppelin cruising over the British squadron at
Kiel.]
Of all the billing and cooing at Kiel there is photographed most
indelibly on my memory the glorious jamboree of the sailors of the
British and German squadrons in the big assembly hall at the Imperial
dockyard on the Saturday night of the "Week." There were free beer,
free tobacco, free provender for everybody, in typical German plenty. A
ship's band blared rag-time and horn-pipes all night long. Only the
supply of Kiel girls fell short of the demand, but that only made
merrier fun for the bluejackets, who, lacking fair partners, danced with
one another, and when the hour had become really hilarious, they tripped
across the floor, when they were not rolling over it, embracing in
threes, bunny-hugging, grotesquely tangoing, turkey-trotting and
fish-walking more joyously than men ever reveled before.
There, I thought, was Anglo-German friendship in being--not an ideal,
but an actuality. I am sure the British and German tars at Kiel that
boisterous Saturday night which melted into the Sunday of Serajevo
little dreamt that when next they would be locked in one another's arms,
it would be at grips for life or death.
CHAPTER III
THE PLOT DEVELOPS
Von G. is a Junker. He is also Germany's ablest special correspondent.
A Junker, let the uninitiated understand, is a Prussian land baron, or
one of his descendants, who considers dominion over the earth and all
its worms his by Divine Right. If, like von G., a Junker is an army
officer besides, active or _ausser Dienst_, and had a grandfather who
belonged to Moltke's headquarters in 1870-71, he is the superlatively
real thing. So, as my mission in Germany was study of the Fatherland in
its characteristic ramifications, I always felt myself richly favored by
the friendship and professional comradeship of von G. He was Junkerism
incarnate. Several years' residence in the United States had signally
failed to corrode von G.'s Junker instincts. Indeed, it intensified
them, for he was ever after a confirmed believer in the ignominious
failure of Democracy. It was he who popularized "Dollarica" as a German
nickname for "God's country."
Von G. and I roomed together at Kiel, sharing apartments and a bath in
the harbormaster's flat above the Imperial Yacht Club postoffice, whose
two stories of brick and stucco serve as "annex" to the always
overcrowded and palatial Krupp hotel, the Seebade-Anstalt, at the other
end of the flowered club grounds. That bath, which I mention in no
spirit of ablutionary arrogance, has to do with the story of von G., for
it was to bring me on a day destined to be historic in violent conflict
with Junkerism. Von G. and I regulated the bath situation at Kiel by
leaving word on our landlady's slate the night before which of us would
bathe first next morning and at what hour. The bath happened to adjoin
my sleeping quarters and von G. could not reach it except by crossing my
bedroom, which he always entered without knocking. On Sunday, June 28,
fateful day, von G. was timed to bathe at eight A.M., I at nine--so read
the schedule inscribed by our respective hands on the good _Frau
Hafenmcistcr's_ tablet. At seven-thirty I was roused from my feathered
slumbers by her soft footsteps--the softest steps of German
harbormasters' wives are quite audible--as she trundled across the room
to arrange Herr von G.'s eight o'clock dip. Junkers are punctual
people, but that morning mine was late. Eight, eight-thirty,
eighty-forty-five passed, and there was no sign of him. When nine
o'clock came, I thought I might reasonably conclude, in my rude,
inconsiderate American way, that von G. had overslept or postponed his
bath, so I made for the tub at the hour I had intended to. I was just
stepping one foot into it when--it was nine-ten now--von G., rubbing his
eyes, bolted in.
"What do you mean by taking my bath?" he yelled at me. "That's some of
your damned American impudence!"
Whereupon, imperturbably pouring the rest of me into the bath, I
ventured to suggest to Field-Marshal von G., that if he would drop the
barrack-yard tone and remember that I was neither a _Dachshund_ nor a
Pomeranian recruit, I would deign to hold converse on the point under
debate. I am not sure I spoke as calmly as that sounds, for to gain a
conversational lap on a German you must outshout him. At any rate, von
G., abandoning abuse, stalked whimperingly from the room, fired some
rearguard shrapnel about "just like an American's 'nerve'," and bathed
later in the day.
I did not see him again until about five o'clock that afternoon. He
bolted into my room this time, too, but in excitement, not anger.
"The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have been assassinated," he
exclaimed.
"Good God!" I rejoined, stupefied.
"It's a good thing," said von G. quietly.
For many days and nights I wondered what the Junker meant. I think I
know now. He meant that the War Party (of which he was a very potent
and zealous member) had at length found a pretext for forcing upon
Europe the struggle for which the German War Lords regarded themselves
vastly more ready than any possible combination of foes. The first year
of the war has amply demonstrated the accuracy of their calculations.
Germany's triumphs in the opening twelvemonth of Armageddon were the
triumphs of the superlatively prepared. If Serajevo had not come along
when it did--with the German military establishment just built up to a
peace-footing of nearly one million officers and men and re-armed at a
cost of two hundred and fifty million dollars; with von Tirpitz's Fleet
at the acme of its efficiency; with the Kiel Canal reconstructed for the
passage of super-dreadnought ironclads--Germany's readiness for war
might have been fatally inferior to that of her enemies-to-be. The
Fatherland was ready, armed to the teeth, as nation never was before.
The psychological moment had dawned.
This was the reassuring state of affairs at home. What did the War Party
see when it put its mailed hand to the vizor and looked abroad, across
to England, west over the Rhine to France, and toward Russia? It saw
Great Britain on what truly enough looked to most of the world like the
brink of revolution in Ireland. It saw a France, of which a great
Senator had only a few days before said that her forts were defective,
her guns short of ammunition and her army lacking in even such
rudimentary war sinews as sufficient boots for the troops. It saw a
Russia stirred by industrial strife which seemed to need only the threat
of grave foreign complications to inflame her always rebellious
proletariat into revolt. Serajevo had all the earmarks of providential
timeliness.
"It's a good thing," said the sententious von G.
The "trippers" from Hamburg and nearer-by points in Schleswig-Holstein,
whom the Sunday of Kiel Week attracts by the thousand, were far more
stunned than von G. by the news from Bosnia, which put so tragic an end
to their seaside holiday. The esplanade, which had been throbbing with
bustle and glittering with color, did not know at first why all the
ships in the harbor, British as well as German, had suddenly lowered
their pennants to half-mast, or why the Austrian royal standard had
suddenly broken out, also at the mourning altitude. The Kaiser was
racing in the Baltic. "Old Franz Josef," some said, "has died. He's
been going for many a day." Presently the truth percolated through the
awestruck crowds. The sleek white naval dispatch-boat _Sleipner_ tore
through the Bay, Baltic-bound. She carries news to William II when he
governs Germany from the quarter-deck of the _Hohenzollern_. _Sleipner_
dodged eel-like, through the lines of British and German men-of-war,
ocean liners, pleasure-craft and racing-yachts anchored here, there and
everywhere. In fifteen minutes she was alongside the Emperor's fleet
schooner, _Meteor V_, which had broken off her race on receipt of
wireless tidings of the Archducal couple's murderous fate. The
_Hohenzollern_ had already "wirelessed" for the fastest torpedo-boat in
port to fetch the Kaiser and his staff off the _Meteor_, and the
destroyer and _Sleipner_ snorted up, foam-bespattered, almost
simultaneously. The Emperor clambered into the torpedo-boat and started
for the harbor.
It was the face of a William II, blanched ashen-gray, which turned from
the bridge of the destroyer to acknowledge, in solemn gravity, the
salutes of the officers and crew of the British flagship, as the
Kaiser's craft raced past the _King George V_. Always stern of mien,
the Emperor now looked severity personified. His staff stood apart. He
seemed to wish to be alone, absolutely, with the overwhelming thoughts
of the moment. Three minutes later, and he stepped aboard the
_Hohenzollern_. Now another pennant showed at the mainmast of the
Imperial yacht--the blue and yellow signal flag which means: "His
Majesty is aboard, but preoccupied." I wonder if posterity will ever
know what monumental reflections flitted through the Kaiser's mind in
that first hour after Serajevo? Did he, like von G., think it was "a
good thing," too? I suppose the first stars and stripes to be
half-masted anywhere in the world that dread sundown were those which
drooped from the stern of _Utowana_, Mr. Allison Vincent Armour's
steam-yacht, anchored in the Bay off Kiel Naval Academy. A puffing
little launch took me out to the _Utowana_ as soon as I had gathered
some coherent facts, which I wanted to present to Mr. Armour and his
guests, American Ambassador and Mrs. James W. Gerard, of Berlin, who had
motored to Kiel the day before. Mrs. Gerard's sister, Countess Sigray,
is the wife of a Hungarian nobleman, and the Ambassador's wife, if my
memory serves me correctly, once told me of her sister's acquaintance
with both of the assassinated Royalties. We Americans discussed the
immediate consequences of the day's event--how the Kaiser would take it,
how it would affect poor old Emperor Francis Joseph. William II and
Admiral von Tirpitz had been the Archduke's guests at Konopischt in
Bohemia only a few weeks before. The Kaiser and the future ruler of
Austria-Hungary had become great friends. They were not always that.
There had been a good deal of the William II in Franz Ferdinand himself.
People often said it was a case of Greek meet Greek, and that two such
insistent personalities were inevitably bound to clash. Others said that
the Archduke, inspired by his brilliantly clever consort, always
insisted that German overlordship in Vienna would cease when he came to
the throne. Still others knew that despite antipathies and antagonisms,
the two men had at length come to be genuinely fond of each other, and
that their ideas and ideals for the greater glory of Germanic Europe
coincided.
These things we chatted and canvassed, irresponsibly, on _Utowana's_
immaculate deck. All of us were persuaded of the imminency of a crisis
in Austrian-Serbian relations in consequence of Princip's crime. But I
am quite sure not a soul of us held himself capable of imagining that,
because of that remote felony, Great Britain and Germany would be at war
five weeks later. Beyond us spread the peaceful panorama of British and
German war-craft, anchored side by side, and the thought would have
perished at birth.
Returned to the terrace of the Seebade-Anstalt, one found the atmosphere
heavily charged with suppressed excitement. Immaculately-groomed young
diplomats, down from Berlin for the Sunday, were twirling their
walking-sticks and yellow gloves which were not, after all, to accompany
them to Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia's garden-party. That,
like everything else connected with Kiel Week, had suddenly been called
off.
A party of Americans flocked together at the entrance to the hotel to
exchange low-spoken views on the all-pervading topic. There was big
Lieutenant-Commander Walter R. Gherardi, our wide-awake Berlin Naval
Attache, resplendent in gala gold-braided uniform, and Mrs. Gherardi,
who had motored me around the environs of Kiel that morning; Albert
Billings Ruddock, Third Secretary of the Embassy, and his pretty and
clever wife; and Lanier Winslow, Ambassador Gerard's private secretary,
his effervescent good nature repressed for the first time I ever
remembered observing it in that unbecoming and unnatural condition.
Secretary Ruddock's father, Mr. Charles H. Ruddock, of New York,
completed the group.
I met Mr. Ruddock, Sr., six months later in New York. "Do you remember
what you told me that afternoon at Kiel, when we were discussing
Serajevo?" he asked. I pleaded a lapse of recollection. "You said," he
reminded me, "'this means war.'"
The aspect of Kiel became in the twinkling of an eye as funereal as
Serajevo and Vienna themselves must have been in that blood-bespattered
hour. Bands stopped playing, flags not lowered to half-mast were hauled
down altogether, and beer-gardens emptied. "Hohenzollern weather,"
Teuton synonym for invincible sunshine, vanished in keeping with the
drooping spirits of everybody and everything, and bleak thunder-showers
intermingled with flashes of heat-lightning to complete the _mise en
scene_. A week of gaiety unsurpassed evaporated into gloom and
foreboding.
For myself it had been a week crowded with great recollections. Special
correspondents telegraphing to influential foreign newspapers,
particularly if they were English and American newspapers, were always
_persona gratissima_ with German dignitaries, even of the blood royal.
The group of us on duty at what, alas! was to be the last Kiel Week, at
least of the old sort, for many a year, were the recipients, as usual,
of that scientific hospitality which foreign newspapermen always receive
at German official hands. Before we were at Kiel twenty-four hours we
were deluged with invitations to garden-parties at the Commanding
Admiral's, to _soirees_ innumerable ashore and afloat, to luncheons at
the Town Hall, to the grand balls at the Naval Academy, and to functions
of lesser magnitude for the bluejackets. Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz had
left his card at my lodgings and so had Admiral von Rebeur-Paschwitz,
the Chief of Staff of the Baltic Station, who will be pleasantly
remembered by friends of Washington days when he was German Naval
Attache there. Captain Lohlein, the courteous chief of the Press Bureau
of the Navy Department at Berlin, had equipped me with credentials which
practically made me a freeman of Kiel harbor for the time being. In no
single direction was effort lacking, on the part of the authorities who
have the most practical conception of any Government in the world of the
value of advertising, to enable special correspondents at Kiel to
practise their profession comfortably and successfully. I must not
forget to mention the visit paid me by Baron von Stumm, chief of the
Anglo-American division of the German Foreign Office; for Stumm's
opinion of me underwent a kaleidoscopic and mysterious change a few
weeks later. Treasured conspicuously in my memories of Kiel, too, will
long remain the call I received from Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach's
private secretary, and the message he brought me from the Master of
Essen. It seems less cryptic to me now than then. I sought an
interview from the Cannon Queen's consort about the visit he and his
staff of experts had just paid to the great arsenals and dockyards of
Great Britain.
"Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach presents his compliments," said the
secretary, "and asks me to say how much he regrets he can not grant an
interview, as the matters which took him to England are not such as he
cares to discuss in public."
I wonder how many American newspaper readers, in the hurly-burly of the
fast-marching events which preceded and ushered in the war, ever knew of
the little army of eminent and expert "investigators" who honored
England with their company on the very threshold of hostilities? June
saw the presence in London, ostensibly for "the season," of Herr Krupp
von Bohlen und Halbach, accompanied not only by his plutocratic wife,
but by his chief technical expert, Doctor Ehrensberger of Essen, an
old-time friend of American steel men like Mr. Schwab and ex-Ambassador
Leishman, and by Herr von Buelow, a kinsman of the ex-Imperial
Chancellor, who was the Krupp general representative in England. With a
_naivete_ which Britons themselves now regard almost incomprehensible,
the Krupp party was shown over practically all of England's greatest
weapons-of-war works at Birkenhead, Barrow-in-Furness, Glasgow,
Newcastle-on-Tyne and Sheffield. They saw the world-famed plants of
Firth, Cammell-Laird, Vickers-Maxim, Brown, Armstrong-Whitworth and
Hadfield. Not with the eyes of Cook tourists, but with the practised
gaze of specialists, they were privileged to look upon sights which must
have sent them away with a vivid, up-to-date and accurate impression of
Britain's capabilities in the all-vital realm of production of war
materials for both army and navy. It was from this personally conducted
junket through the zone of British war industry that Herr Krupp von
Bohlen und Halbach returned--not to Essen, but to Kiel (where he has his
summer home) and to the Kaiser and von Tirpitz. It was to them his
report was made. I think I understand better now why he could not see
his way to letting me tell the British public what he saw and learned in
England. I was guileless when I sought the interview. Let this be my
apology to Herr Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach for attempting to penetrate
into matters obviously not fit "to discuss in public."
During July England entertained three other important German emissaries,
each a specialist, as befitted the country of his origin and the object
of his mission. Doctor Dernburg came over. He spent ten strenuous days
"in touch" with financial and economic circles and subjects. No man
could be relied upon to bring back to Berlin a shrewder estimate of the
British commercial situation. A few days later Herr Ballin, the German
shipping king, crossed the channel. I recall telegraphing a Berlin
newspaper notice which explained that the astute managing director of
the Hamburg-American line went to England to "look into the question of
fuel-oil supplies." Herr Ballin, like Doctor Dernburg, also kept "in
touch" with the British circles most important and interesting to
himself and the Fatherland. He must have dabbled in high politics a
bit, too, for only the other day Lord Haldane revealed that he arranged
for Herr Ballin to "meet a few friends" at his lordship's hospitable
home at Queen Anne's Gate. Germans always felt a proprietary right to
seek the hospitality of the Scotch statesman who acknowledged that his
spiritual domicile was in the Fatherland.
Then, finally, came another German, far more august than Krupp von
Bohlen und Halbach, Dernburg and Ballin--Grand-Admiral Prince Henry of
Prussia. His visit fell within a week of Germany's declaration of war
against France and Russia. The Prince, who enjoyed many warm
friendships in England and visited the country at frequent intervals,
also spent a busy week in London. He saw the King, called on with
Prince Louis of Battenberg, the then First Sea Lord, and paid his
respects to Mr. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.
Englishmen only conjecture how he put in the rest of his time.
Perhaps an episode in the trial of Karl Lody, the German naval spy who
was executed at the Tower of London on November 6, has its place in the
unrecorded history of Prince Henry of Prussia's epochal visit to the
British Isles. Lody confessed to his military judges at Middlesex
Guildhall that he received his orders to report on British naval
preparations from "a distinguished personage."
"Give us his name," commanded Lord Cheylesmore, presiding officer of the
court.
"I would rather not tell it in open court," pleaded the prisoner, whom
Scotland Yard, the day before, had asked me to look at, with a view to
possible identification with certain Berlin affiliations.
"I will write his name on a piece of paper for the court's confidential
information," Lody added. His request was granted.
When we were officially notified that the Kaiser would proceed next
morning by special train to Berlin, we made our own preparations to
depart. The British squadron had still a day and a half of its
scheduled visit to complete, and Vice-Admiral Warrender told us he would
remain accordingly. The German Admiralty had extended him the
hospitality of the new War Canal for the cruise of his fleet into the
North Sea, but he decided to send only the light cruisers by that route
and take his battleships home, as they had come, by the roundabout route
of the Baltic.
On Monday noon, June 29, I went back to Berlin, to live through five
weeks of finishing touches for the grand world blood-bath.
CHAPTER IV
THE STAGE MANAGERS
Armageddon was plotted, prepared for and precipitated by the German War
Party. It was not the work of the German people. What is the "War
Party"? Let me begin by explaining what it is _not_. It is not a party
in the sense of President Wilson's organization or Colonel Roosevelt's
Bull Moosers. It maintains no permanent headquarters or National
Committee, and holds no conventions. The only barbecue it ever
organized is the one which plunged the world into gore and tears in
August, 1914, though its attempts to drench Europe with blood are
decade-old. You would search the German city directories in vain for
the War Party's address or telephone number. No German would ever
acknowledge that he belonged to Europe's largest Black Hand league. You
could, indeed, hardly find anybody in Germany willing even to
acknowledge that the War Party even existed. Yet, unseen and sinister,
its grip was fastened so heavily upon the machinery of State that when
it deemed the moment for its sanguinary purposes at length ripe, the War
Party was able to tear the whole nation from its peaceful pursuits and
fling it, armed to the teeth, against a Europe so flagrantly unready
that more than a year of strife finds Germany not only unbeaten but at a
zenith of fighting efficiency which her foes have only begun to
approach.
When the German War Party pressed the button for the Great Massacre, the
Fatherland had, roundly, sixty-seven million five hundred thousand
inhabitants within its thriving walls. At a liberal estimate, no one
can ever convince me that more than one million five hundred thousand
Germans really wanted war. _They_ were the "War Party." Sixty-six
millions of the Kaiser's subjects, immersed in the most abundant
prosperity any European country of modern times had been vouchsafed,
longed only for the continuance of the conditions which had brought
about this state of unparalleled national weal. I do not believe that
William II, deep down in his heart, craved for war. I can vouch for the
literal accuracy of a hitherto unrecorded piece of ante-bellum history
which bears out my doubts of the Kaiser's immediate responsibility for
the war, though it does not acquit him of supine acquiescence in, and to
that extent abetting, the War Party's plot.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 1, 1914, the wife of
Lieutenant-General Helmuth von Moltke, then Chief of the Great German
General Staff, paid a visit to a certain home in Berlin, which shall be
nameless. The _Frau Generalstabschef_ was in a state of obvious mental
excitement.
"_Ach_, what a day I've been through, _Kinder_!" she began. "My husband
came home just before I left. Dog-tired, he threw himself on to the
couch, a total wreck, explaining to me that he had finally accomplished
the three days' hardest work he had ever done in his whole life--he had
helped to induce the Kaiser to sign the mobilization order!"
There is the evidence, disclosed in the homeliest, yet the most direct,
fashion, of the German War Party's unescapable culpability for the
supreme crime against humanity. The "sword" had, indeed, been "forced"
into the Kaiser's hand. This is no brief for the Kaiser's innocence.
No man did more than William II himself, during twenty-six years of
explosive reign, to stimulate the military clique in the belief that
when the dread hour came the Supreme War Lord would be "with my Army."
Yet German officers, in those occasional moments when conviviality bred
loquacity, were fond of averring, as more than one of them has averred
to me, that "the Kaiser lacked the moral courage to sign a mobilization
order." _Die Post_, a leading War Party organ, said as much during the
Morocco imbroglio in 1911. Perhaps that is why General von Moltke had
to force the pen, which for the nonce was mightier than the sword, into
the reluctant hand of William II.
The Kaiser was constitutionally addicted to swaggering war talk, but, in
my judgment, he preferred the bark to the bite. He likes his job. Like
our Roosevelt, he has a "perfectly corking time" wielding the scepter.
Raised in the belief that the Hohenzollerns were divinely appointed to
their Royal estate, William II dearly loves his trade. He does not want
to lose his throne. In peace there was little danger of its ever
slipping from under him, thanks to a Socialist "movement" which was
noisy but never really menacing. In war Hohenzollern rule is in
perpetual peril. Hostile armies, if they ever battered their way to
Potsdam, would almost surely wreck the dynasty, even if the mob had not
already saved them that trouble. The Kaiser, sagacious like every man
when his livelihood is at stake, always had these dread eventualities in
mind. His personal interests, the fortunes of his House, all lay along
the path of manifest safety--peace. Meantime his concessions to the War
Party were generous and frequent. He rattled the saber on its demand.
He donned his "shining armor" at Austria's side when the Germanic Powers
coerced Russia into recognition of the Bosnian annexation in 1909. He
sent the _Panther_ to Agadir harbor in 1911 because the War Party howled
for "deeds" in Morocco. It hoped that history in Northwestern Africa
would repeat itself--that the Triple Entente would yield to German bluff
as it yielded in Southeastern Europe two years previous. It did not,
and it was then that the German War Party swore a solemn vow of "Never
Again!" The days of the Kaiser who merely threatened war were numbered.
Next time the sword would be "forced" into his hand. "Before God and
history my conscience is clear. _I did not will this war_. One year
has elapsed since I was _obliged_ to call the German people to arms."
Thus William of Hohenzollern's manifesto to his people from Main
Headquarters on the first anniversary of the war, August 1, 1915.
Herewith I place _Frau Generalstabschef_ von Moltke on the stand as
chief witness in the Kaiser's defense.
I have said that sixty-six million Germans wanted peace and one million
five hundred thousand demanded war. But in Germany _minority_ rules.
It rules supreme when the issue is war or peace, and when the German War
Party _insisted_ upon deeds instead of speeches the nation, Kaiser and
all, Reichstag and Socialist, Prince and peasant, had but one
alternative--to yield. In July, 1914, the War Party imperiously asked
for war, and war ensued. That is the ineffaceable long and short of
Armageddon. I am persuaded that William II on July 31 was confronted
with something strangely like an abrupt alternative of mobilization or
abdication.
Assertions of the German people's consecration to peace may strike the
reader as incongruous in face of the magnificent unanimity with which
the entire Fatherland has waged and is still waging the war. But such a
view leaves wholly out of account the most prodigious and amazing of all
the German War Party's preparations--the skilful manipulation of public
opinion for "the Day." In ten brief days--those fateful hours between
July 23, when Austria launched her brutal ultimatum at Serbia, and
August 1, when mobilization of the German Army and Navy made a European
conflagration a certainty--Germany's vast peace majority, by deception
which I shall outline in a subsequent chapter, was converted into a
multitudinous mob mad for war.
I count the merely material preparations of the War Party--the steady
expansion of Krupps, the development of the Fleet, the invention of the
forty-two centimeter gun, the vast secret storage of arms and
ammunition, the 1913 increase of the Army, the accumulation of a
war-chest of gold, the stealthy organization of every conceivable
instrument and resource of war down to details too minute for the
ordinary mind to grasp; all these, I count as nothing compared to the
hypnotization of the German national mind extending over many years.
In England and America the name of Bernhardi was on everybody's lips as
the archpriest of the war. I doubt if one man in ten thousand in Germany
ever heard of Bernhardi before August, 1914. He became an international
personality mainly through the graces of foreign newspaper
correspondents in Berlin, who, recognizing his book, _Germany's Next
War_, as classic proclamation of the War Party's designs on the world,
dignified it with commensurate attention, not because of its authorship,
but because of its innate _authoritativeness_. The result was the
translation of _Germany's Next War_ into the English language, and
subsequently, I suppose, into every other civilized language in the
world. Perhaps I am myself to some extent responsible for Bernhardi's
vogue in the United States. He was going to cross our country en route
back to Europe from the Far East, and wrote to ask me to suggest to him
the name of an American translator and publisher for his books.
Bernhardi, a mere retired general of cavalry with a gift for incisive
writing, woke up to find himself famous. But nothing could be more
beyond the mark than to imagine that he was the pioneer of German
war-aggression. He was merely its most plain-spoken prophet. The way
had been blazed for decades before he appeared upon the scene. After
Bernhardi had been successfully launched on the bookshelves of the
world, the German War Party took him up, and it was not long before _Die
Post_, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_ and other organs of blood-and-iron
were able to make "the highly gratifying" announcement that Bernhardi's
manual had been compressed into a fifty-pfennig popular edition, so that
the German masses might be educated in the inspiring doctrine of
manifest Teuton destiny, as Bernhardi so unblushingly set it forth.
The German War Party's certificate of incorporation is dated Versailles,
January 18, 1871, when, on the one hundred and seventieth anniversary of
the creation of the Kingdom of Prussia, Bismarck and Moltke crowned
victorious William I of Prussia German Emperor. Cradled in Prussianism,
the German War Party has always been Prussian, rather than German. To
the credit of Bavaria, Saxony, Baden and Wurttemberg be that forever
remembered. Denmark and Austria, during the seven years preceding
Versailles, had had their lessons. Now France lay prostrate, despoiled
of her fairest provinces and financially bled white, as the conqueror
imagined. From that moment the Prussian head began swelling with
invincible self-esteem, to emerge in the succeeding generation in an
insensate and megalomaniac conviction that to the race which had
accomplished what the Germans had achieved nothing was impossible.
"World Power"--Rule or Ruin--became the national slogan.
In the reconstruction years following the 1870-71 campaign non-military
Germany was bent on laying the foundations of Teuton industrial
greatness. The project was vouchsafed no support from the military
hotspurs who, within ten years of Sedan and Paris, did their utmost to
force Bismarck into giving humbled France a fresh drubbing, that her
power to rise from the dust might be crushed for all time. Then the
Prussian War Party demanded that the scalp of Russia be added to its
insatiable belt. Bismarck propitiated the Bernhardis of that day by
thundering in the Reichstag that "We Germans fear God, and nothing else
in this world!" When the Chancellor of Iron burnt that piece of bombast
into the German soul in 1887, a year before William the Speechmaker was
enthroned, he wrote the German War Party's "platform." Since then it
has had many planks added to it, but all of them have rested squarely
and firmly on the concrete upon which they were imbedded, viz., that
_Furor Teutonicus_ was a power which, when it went forth to slay and
conquer, was invincible because it was filled with naught but the fear
of God. _Nouveau riche_ Germany, with France's one billion two hundred
and fifty million dollars of gold indemnity in its pocket, ceased to be
the Fatherland of homely virtues, celebrated in song and story, and
became the plethoric Fatherland, drunk with power and wealth won by
arms, the Fatherland which was to adopt the gospel of political
brutality as a new national _Leit-motif_. "We, not the Jews, are God's
chosen people. Our military prowess and our intellectual superiority
make German _Weltmacht_ manifest destiny. Full steam ahead!" Thus it
was, a generation ago, that the German War Party was launched on its mad
career.
During the war the English-reading world has heard much of Treitschke
and Nietzsche, just as it has had its ears dinned full of Bernhardi.
Germans with scars on their faces and other marks of a college
education--a gentry numbering several millions--know and venerate their
Treitschke and Nietzsche, and to their pernicious dogma is due in large
degree the war lust of so-called cultured Germany; yet to the German
masses these renowned apostles of Might is Right are little more than
names. Of far more importance for the purpose of tracing the origin of
the Armageddon are the living captains of the "War Party," not its
deceased intellectual sponsors. Historians of the present era will gain
the really illuminating perspective by relegating Nietzsche, "that
half-inspired, half-crazy poet-philosopher," and Treitschke, his more
modern kindred spirit, to the dead past and elevating Tirpitz and the
Crown Prince, Koester of the German Navy League and Keim of the German
Army League to their places. It is men like them, politicians like
Heydebrand, literary firebrands like Reventlow and Frobenius, and
press-pensioners like Hammann who were the real pioneers of Armageddon.
These are names with which the English-reading world, enchanted by the
myopic prominence given to the writings of Nietzsche, Treitschke and
Bernhardi, are not familiar. But they are the real stage managers of
the war tragedy, and it is with them I shall deal before narrating the
culminating effects of their devilry.
Prince Buelow, fourth Imperial Chancellor and most urbane of statesmen,
will live in German history as a man who resembled Bismarck in but one
important particular--the gift of phrase-making. Bismarck's aphorisms
are quoted by Germans with the awesome regard in which Anglo-Saxons cite
Shakespeare. Buelow's name will be enshrined in Teuton memory for an
epigram which had as direct a psychic influence on the German War
Party's demand for the present war as any other one thing said, written
or done in Germany in the last fifteen years. When he proclaimed that
Germany demanded her "place in the sun," he flung into the fire fat
which was to go sizzling down the age. It was worth its weight in
precious gems to the blood-and-iron brigade. As Bismarck's blasphemous
bluster in 1887 gave the War Party of that day its fillip, Buelow in
1907 supplied the spurred and helmeted zealots of his era with a
flamboyancy no less vicious. They snatched it up with alacrity, and,
being Germans, proceeded to exploit it with masterly efficiency and
deadly thoroughness. A "place in the sun" forthwith inspired an
entirely new German literature. It became the spiritual mother of this
war.
Like all the War Party's dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer
cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun"
for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl
Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the
Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world,
thus summarized Germany's "place in the sun":
"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred
fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven
hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895.
The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million
dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five
to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.
"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five
thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million
dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures
summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor
which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."
Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the
Fatherland's "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the
population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the
development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while
Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate
of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912
to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many
years before that date, an _importer_ of men, instead of an exporter;
that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from
1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports,
during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one
thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million
dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.
By a "place in the sun" Prince Buelow meant, primarily, territorial
expansion for Germany's "surplus population." Yet even in this respect
German aggrandizement kept pace with her fabulous economic development.
When war broke out in 1914, the German colonial empire oversea was
hundreds of thousands of square miles more extensive than Germany in
Europe. It is true that the Germans went in for colonial land-grabbing
late in the game, after England, particularly, had acquired the best
territory in both hemispheres, and many years after the Monroe Doctrine
had effectually checked European expansion in the Americas. As the
result of "colonial empire" in inferior regions of the earth, the total
white population of German colonies in 1913 was less than twenty-eight
thousand, or roundly, three and one-half per cent. of the _annual_
growth of German population. Although acquired nominally for "trade,"
Germany's commerce with her colonies in imports and exports totaled in
1914 a fraction more than twenty-five million dollars, or about
_one-half of one per cent._ of Germany's total trade of five thousand
million dollars in 1912. Germany's lust for a larger "place in the
sun," as it has been aptly described by the author of _J'Accuse_, is
"square-mile greed," pure and simple, and as the same frank and
brilliant writer points out, Germany not only demands a "place in the
sun," but claims it for herself alone, insisting that the rest of the
world shall content itself with "a place in the shade."
To popularize the "place in the sun" theory two great German national
organizations went valiantly to work--the Pan-German League and the
German Navy League. The Pan-Germans, whose efforts were seconded by a
subsidiary society called the Association for the Perpetuation of
Germanism Abroad, set themselves the task of educating German public
opinion in regard to "the bitter need" of a "Greater Germany," to be
achieved by hook or crook. The German Navy League dedicated itself to
fomenting agitation designed to meet the Kaiser's expressed "bitter
need" of vast German sea power. Ostensibly private in character, both
of these militant propaganda organizations enjoyed more or less official
countenance and support. On occasion, when their activities appeared
too pernicious or threatened to obstruct the subtle machinations of
German diplomacy, the Government would convincingly "disavow" the
leagues. But all the time they were working for Germany's "place in the
sun." Under their auspices, the country for years was drenched with
belligerent and provocative literature, which harped ceaselessly on the
theme that what Germany could not secure by diplomacy she must prepare
to extort by the sword.
As the Pan-Germans and the Navy League cherished twin aspirations, it
was not surprising that two men, General Keim, a retired officer of the
army, and Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a retired officer of the navy,
should be moving spirits in both organizations. General Keim, in his
zeal to support Admiral von Tirpitz's big navy schemes, eventually went
to such extremes in the pursuit of his duties as president of the Navy
League that the organization's existence as a national association was
momentarily threatened. It was giving the game away. Keim was
thereupon removed from his position, to be succeeded by the Grand Old
Man of the German Fleet, Grand-Admiral von Koester. Koester was
_suaviter in modo_, but no less _fortiter in re_ than Keim. Entering
the presidency of the Navy League in the midst of the Dreadnought era,
when Germany's dream of her "future upon the water" was sweetest, his
systematic fanning of the public temper, especially against England,
left nothing to be desired.
General Keim, deposed from the leadership of the Navy League, was
presently kicked up-stairs by the German War Party and made president of
the newly-formed "German Defense League." This association was
organized to launch a national agitation in favor of increasing the
German military establishment.
The methods which had caused Keim's "downfall" from the presidency of
the Navy League were promptly employed by him in the new army league.
With a host of influential newspapers and "war industry" interests at
their back, plus the benevolent patronage of the Imperial family and
Government, Koester and Keim carried out for six years preceding August,
1914, the most prodigious and audacious propaganda crusade in European
history. Germany's need for "a place in the sun," on whatever
particular chord they harped, was always their keynote. The "Defense
League" scored its crowning triumph in 1913 by accomplishing the passage
of the celebrated Army Bill whereby the land forces of the Empire were
augmented at an expense of two hundred fifty million dollars--the
immediate preliminary step to the assault of Europe by the Kaiser's
legions.
Count Reventlow, a Jingo of Jingoes, rendered both the navy and army
leagues valiant support in the columns of his newspaper, the _Deutsche
Tageszeitung_, and in a regular grist of pamphlets and books which his
facile pen from time to time reeled off. Reventlow was one of the
archpriests of the War Party. A champion hater of everything foreign,
he was temperamentally fitted to advocate the doctrine of Force and
Germany's right to world-conquest by fire and sword. Count Reventlow,
whom it was my pleasure to know intimately, hated England, France and
Russia with a ferocity delightful to behold. His Francophobism was
little diminished by his marriage to a charming French noblewoman. He
hated America, too. I could never quite divine the gallant Count's
reason for eating an American alive, in his mind, every morning for
breakfast, and for despising us as cordially as he detested Mr. Winston
Churchill, Monsieur Delcasse or the Czar, until he confessed to me one
day that he lost a fortune through unfortunate speculation in a Florida
fruit plantation. Thenceforth, apparently, Reventlow's anti-Americanism
knew no bounds. It was more explosive than usual during his discussion
of the _Lusitania_ massacre, but it was pathological.
A pillar of the German War Party, whose name is almost entirely unknown
abroad, is Doctor Hammann, chief of the notorious Press Bureau of the
German Foreign Office and Imperial Chancellery. Hammann for twenty
years, because one of the craftiest, has been one of the most powerful
men in German politics. For two decades he survived the incessant
vicissitudes and intrigues of the Foreign Office, which indeed were more
than once of his own making. He was frequently credited with being "the
real Chancellor" in Buelow's days because of his sinister influence over
that suave statesman. Hammann's nominal duties were confined to
manipulating the German press for the Government's purposes and to
exercising such "control" over the Berlin correspondents of foreign
newspapers as might from time to time appear feasible or possible.
Himself a retired journalist of unsavory reputation--he was a few years
ago under indictment for perjury in an unlovely domestic scandal--he
seemed to his superiors an ideal personage to deal with the Fourth
Estate, which Bismarck trained Germans to look upon as "the reptile
press." Hammann's function, for the War Party's purposes, was to
mislead public opinion, at home and abroad, as to the real intentions
and machinations of _Weltpolitik_. Under his shrewd direction German
newspapers, restlessly propagating the Fatherland's need for "a place in
the sun," systematically distorted the international situation so as to
represent Germany as the innocent lamb and all other nations as ravenous
wolves howling for her immaculate blood. That Hammann is regarded as
having rendered "our just cause" priceless service was proved only a few
months ago by his promotion to a full division-directorship in the
Foreign Office. He had hitherto ranked merely as a _Wirklicher
Geheimrat_, or sub-official of the department, although as a matter of
fact five Foreign Secretaries, "under" whom he nominally served, were
mere putty in the hands of Germany's Imperial Press Agent-in-Chief.
Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, of course, has for years been one of the
super-pillars of the German War Party. The Kaiser's Fleet is the
creation of von Tirpitz, though William II receives popular credit for
the achievement, and von Tirpitz created it essentially for war. Von
Tirpitz once honored me with a heart-to-heart confab on Anglo-German
naval rivalry. He rebuked me in a paternal way for specializing in
German naval news. Germany had no ulterior motive, he said. She was
building a defensive fleet primarily, though one that would be strong
enough, on occasion, to "throw into the balance of international
politics a weight commensurate with Germany's status as a World Power."
Von Tirpitz was the incarnation of the naval spirit which longed for the
chance to show the world that Germany at sea was as "glorious" as
centuries of martial history had proved her on land. German sailors
chafed under the corroding restraint of peace. They hankered for
laurels. They were tired of manning a dress-parade fleet, whose
functions seemed to be confined to holding spectacular reviews for the
Kaiser's glorification at Kiel. They hungered for "the Day." Von
Tirpitz has denied passionately that they ever drank to "the Day" in
their battleship messes. But it was the unspoken prayer which lulled
them to well-earned sleep, for in consequence of the iron discipline and
remorseless labor which von Tirpitz imposed on his officers and men in
anticipation of "Germany's Trafalgar," the Kaiser's Fleet was the
hardest worked navy in the world. No Armada in history was ever so
perpetually "battle-ready" as the German High Seas Fleet. It was the
Fleet which made its very own that other hypocritical German battle-cry,
"The Freedom of the Sea," which means, of course, a German-ruled sea.
Von Tirpitz's task was not only to build the fleet but to agitate German
public opinion uninterruptedly in favor of its constant expansion. To
him and the Navy League, which he controlled, and to his Press Bureau
and its swarm of journalistic and literary parasites, were due the
remarkable Anglophobe campaigns which resulted in the desired periodical
additions to the Fleet. A politician of consummate talent, von Tirpitz
held successive Reichstags in the palm of his hand. No Imperial
Chancellor, though nominally his chief, was ever able to override the
imperious will of von Tirpitz the Eternal. Repeatedly in the years
preceding the war England held out the hand of a naval _entente_. The
War Party and von Tirpitz said "No!" And Armageddon became as
inevitable as the setting sun.
I have enumerated only the outstanding figures of the German War Party.
They could be supplemented at will--there are the men like Professor von
Schmoller, of the University of Berlin, who foresees the day when "a
nation of two hundred million Germans oversea would rise in Southern
Brazil"; or Professor Adolf Lasson, also of Berlin, who proclaimed the
doctrine that Germans' "cultural paramountcy over all other nations"
entitles them to hegemony over the earth; or Professor Adolf Wagner, the
Berlin economist, who excoriates compulsory arbitration as the refuge of
the politically impotent and a dogma beneath the dignity of the Germany
of the Hohenzollerns; or the whole dynasty of politician-professors like
Delbrueck, Zorn, Liszt, Edward and Kuno Meyer, Eucken, Haeckel, Harnack,
or minor theorists like Muensterberg, who year in and year out preached
the doctrine of Teutonic superiority, Teutonic invincibility and
Teutonic "world destiny." These intellectual auxiliaries of the War
Party in their day have sent tens of thousands of young men out of
German universities with politically polluted minds. Their class-rooms
have been the real breeding ground and recruiting camps of the German
War Party.
And then, of course, in addition to the admirals who wanted war, and the
professors who glorified war, and the editors, pamphleteers, Navy and
Army League leaders and paid agitators who wrote and talked war, there
was the German Army, represented by its corps of fifty thousand or sixty
thousand officers, which was the living, ineradicable incarnation of war
and with every breath it drew sighed impatiently for its coming. I
suppose armies in all countries more or less constitute "war parties."
But never in our time has an army tingled and spoiled for battle as
sleeplessly as the legions of the Kaiser. It was written in the stars
that it was only a question of time when they would realize their
aspiration to prove that the German war machine of the day was not only
the peer, but incomparably the superior, of the Juggernauts with the aid
of which Frederick the Great and Moltke remapped Europe.
But the Grand Mogul of the German War Party, its pet, darling and patron
saint, was Crown Prince William, the Kaiser's ebullient heir who
contributed so conspicuously to Germany's loss of Paris in September,
1914. For ten years he was the apple of the army's eye. William II's
oratorical peace palaverings long ago convinced his military paladins
that their hopes could no longer with safety be pinned on the monarch
who would do nothing but _rattle_ his saber. "A place in the sun" could
never be achieved by such tactics, they argued, so they transferred
their affections and their expectations to the "young man" who cheered
in the Reichstag when his father's Government was accused of cowardice
in Morocco. They placed their destinies in the keeping of the Imperial
hotspur who wrote in his book, _Germany in Arms_, that "visionary dreams
of everlasting peace throughout the world are un-German." Their real
allegiance was sworn henceforth to the swashbuckling young buffoon, who,
taking leave of the Death's Head Hussars after two years' colonelcy,
admonished them to "think of him whose most ardent desire it has always
been to be allowed to share at your side the supreme moment of a
soldier's happiness--when the King calls to arms and the bugle sounds
the charge!" It was an open secret that when the Crown Prince was
exiled to the command of a cavalry regiment in dreamy Danzig, far away
from the frenzied plaudits of the multitude in Berlin, the Kaiser's
action was inspired by the disquieting realisation that his heir was
acquiring a popularity, both in and out of the army, which boded ill for
the security of the monarch's own status with his subjects.
These, then, are the men, and these their principal methods, which
provided the scenario for the impending clash. As with every great
"production," preliminary plans were well and truly laid. Rehearsals,
in the form of stupendous maneuvers on "a strictly warlike basis," had
brought the chief actors, scene shifters and other accessories to
first-night pitch. The stage managers' work was done. They had now
only to take their appointed places in the flies and wings and let the
tragedy proceed. The rest could be left to the puppets on both sides of
the footlights. A month of slow music, and then the grand _finale_.
CHAPTER V
SLOW MUSIC
July in Berlin of the red summer of 1914 began as placidly as a feast
day in Utopia. The electric shock of Serajevo soon spent its force.
Germans seemed to be vastly more concerned over the effect of the
Archduke's assassination on the health of the old Austrian Emperor than
over resultant international complications. It was Sir Edward Goschen,
British Ambassador in Berlin, previously accredited to the Vienna court,
who recalled to me Francis Joseph's once-expressed determination to
outlive his heir. The doddering octogenarian had realized his grim
ambition.
The German Emperor returned to Berlin from Kiel on Monday, the 30th of
June. Ties of deep affection united him to his aged Austrian ally. It
was universally assumed that the Kaiser, with characteristic
impetuosity, would rush to Vienna to comfort Francis Joseph and attend
the Archduke's funeral. So, as events developed, he ardently desired to
do; but intimations speedily arrived from the _Hofburg_ that "Kaiser
Franz" had chosen to carry his newest cross unmolested by the flummery
and circumstance of State obsequies, and William II remained in Berlin
for honorary funeral services in his own cathedral in memory of the
august departed. Some day a historian, who will have great things to
tell, may relate the real reason for the baffling of the Kaiser's desire
to play the role of chief mourner at spectacular death-rites in the
other German capital. He had telegraphed the orphans of the murdered
Archduke and Duchess that his "heart was bleeding for them." Men who
have an X-ray knowledge of Imperial William's psychology were unkind
enough to suggest that he longed to parade himself before the mourning
populace of the Austrian metropolis as Lohengrin in the hour of its woe,
an Emperor on whom it were safer to lean than on the decrepit figurehead
now bowed in impotent grief, with a beardless grand-nephew of an heir
apparent as the sole hope of the trembling future.
Until the late Archduke Francis Ferdinand began to assert himself,
William II's influence at Vienna had been profound. Francis Joseph
liked and trusted him. Austria was frequently governed from Potsdam.
With the great bar to his ascendency removed from the scene, the German
Emperor may well have thought the hour at length arrived for the virile
Hohenzollerns to save the crumbling Hapsburgs from themselves, and
invertebrate Austria-Hungary from the Hapsburgs. But Vienna decided it
was better the Kaiser should stay at home. His political physicians, on
the evening of July 1, suddenly discovered that His Majesty was
suffering from that famous German malady known as "diplomatic illness,"
whereupon the court M.D. dutifully announced, through the obliging
official news-agency, that "owing to a slight attack of lumbago" the
Kaiser would not attend the funeral of the murdered Archduke, "as had
been arranged." Forty-eight hours later other "face-saving" procedure
was carried out--the Viennese court proclaimed that by the express wish
of the Emperor Francis Joseph, no foreign guests of any nationality were
expected to attend the Royal obsequies.
On Monday, July 6, William's "lumbago" having yielded to treatment,
there was sprung one of the most dramatic of all the _coups_ which
preceded the fructification of the German War Party's now
fast-completing conspiracy. Although martial law was being ruthlessly
enforced in Bosnia and Herzegovina and all Austria-Hungary was in a
state of rising ferment over the "expiation" which public opinion
insisted "the Serbian murderers" must render, the Kaiser's mind was made
up for him that the international situation was sufficiently placid for
him to start on his annual holiday cruise to the North Cape. Four days
previous, July 2, though the world was not to know it till many weeks
afterward, the military governor of German Southwest Africa unexpectedly
informed a number of German officers in the colony that they might go
home on special leave if they could catch the outgoing steamer. These
officers reached Germany during the first week in August, to find orders
awaiting them to join their regiments in the field. Notifications
issued to Austrian subjects in distant countries were subsequently found
also to bear date of July 2. Things were moving.
The _Hohenzollern_ steamed away to the fjords of Norway with the Kaiser
and his customary company of congenial spirits. The
Government-controlled _Lokal-Anzeiger_ and other journalistic handmaids
of officialdom forthwith proclaimed that "with his old-time tact our
Emperor, by pursuing the even tenor of his way, gives us and the world
this gratifying and convincing sign that however menacing the
storm-clouds in the Southeast may seem, _lieb' Vaterland mag ruhig
sein_. All is well with Germany." Or words to that effect. Germany
and Europe were thus effectually lulled into a false sense of security,
for, as one read further in other "inspired" German newspapers, "our
patriotic Emperor is not the man to withdraw his hand from the helm of
State if peril were in the air." So off went the Kaiser to his beloved
Bergen, Trondhjem and Tromsoe to flatter the Norwegians as he had done
for twenty summers previous and to shake hands with the tourists who
always "booked" cabins in the Hamburg-American North Cape steamers in
anticipation of the distinction the Kaiser never failed to bestow upon
Herr Ballin's patrons.
The Kaiser's departure from Germany was particularly well timed to
bolster up the fiction subsequently so insistently propagated, that
Austria's impending coercion of Serbia was none of Germany's doing. The
_Hohenzollern_ had hardly slipped out of Baltic waters when Vienna's
"diplomatic _demarche_" at Belgrade began. It was specifically asserted
that these "representations" would be "friendly." Europe must under no
circumstances, thus early in the game, be roused from its midsummer
siesta. The official bulletin from the _Hohenzollern_ read: "All's well
on board. His Majesty listened to-day to a learned treatise on Slav
archeology by Professor Theodor Schiemann. To-morrow the Kaiser will
inspect the Fridthjof statue which he presented to the Norwegian people
three years ago."
Austria-Hungary has a press bureau, too, and doubtless a Hammann of its
own; now it cleared for action. While Vienna's "friendly
representations" were in progress at Belgrade, the papers of Vienna and
Budapest began sounding the tocsin for "vigorous" prosecution of the
Dual Monarchy's case against the Serbian assassins and their
accessories. The Serbian Government meantime remained imperturbable.
Princip and Cabrinovitch, the takers of the Archduke and Duchess' lives,
after all were Austrian-Hungarian subjects, and their crime was
committed on Austrian-Hungarian soil. Serbia, said Belgrade, must be
proved guilty of responsibility for Serajevo before she could be
expected to accept it. Then the Berlin press bureau took the field.
The _Lokal-Anzeiger_ "admitted" that things were beginning to look as if
"Germany will again have to prove her Nibelung loyalty," _i.e._, in
support of Austria, as during the other Bosnian crisis, in 1909.
By the end of the second week of July the world's most sensitive
recording instruments, the stock exchanges, commenced to vibrate with
the tremors of brewing unrest. The Bourse at Vienna was disturbingly
weak. Berlin responded with sympathetic slumps. To the _Daily Mail_ in
London and the _New York Times_ I was able, on the night of July 10, to
cable the significant message that the German Imperial Bank was now
putting pressure on all German banks to induce them to keep ten per
cent. of their deposits and assets on hand in money. On the same day an
unexplained tragedy occurred in Belgrade: the Russian minister to the
Serbian court, Monsieur de Hartwig, Germanism's arch-foe in the Balkans,
died suddenly while taking tea with his Austrian diplomatic colleague,
Baron Giesling.
Germany the while was going about its business, which at mid-July
consists principally in slowing down the strenuous life and extending
mere nocturnal "bummeling" in home haunts to seashore, forests and
mountains for protracted sojourns of weeks and months. The "cure"
resorts were crowded. In the _al fresco_ restaurants in the cities, one
could hear the Germans eating and drinking as of peaceful yore. The
schools were closed and Stettiner Bahnhof, which leads to the Baltic,
and Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway to the North Sea, were choked from
early morning till late at night with excited and perspiring Berliners
off for their prized _Sommerfrische_. _Herr Bankdirektor_ Meyer and
_Herr_ and _Frau Rechtsanwalt_ Salzmann were a good deal more interested
in the food at the _Logierhaus_ they had selected for themselves and the
_kinder_ at Heringsdorf or Westerland-Sylt than they were in Austria's
avenging diplomatic moves in Belgrade. Stock-brokers were only
moderately nervous over the gyrations of the Bourse. Germans who had
not yet made off for the seaside or the Tyrol felt surer than ever that
war was a chimera when they read that Monsieur Humbert had just revealed
to the French Senate the criminal unpreparedness of the Republic's
military establishment.
Strain between Austria and Serbia was now increasing. Canadian Pacific,
German stock-dabblers' favorite "flyer," tumbled on the Vienna and
Berlin Bourses to the lowest level reached since 1910. Real war rumors
now cropped up. Austria was reported to have "partially mobilized" two
army corps. Canadian Pacifics continued to be "unloaded" by nervous
Germans in quantities unprecedented. Now Serbia was "reported" to be
mobilizing. It was July 17. England, we gathered in Berlin, was
thinking only of Ireland. Berlin correspondents of great London dailies
who were trying to impress the British public with the gravity of the
European situation had their dispatches edited down to back-page
dimensions--if they were printed at all. One colleague, who represented
a famous English Liberal newspaper, had arranged, weeks before, to start
on his holidays at the end of July. He telegraphed his editor that he
thought it advisable to abandon his preparations and to remain in
Berlin. "See no occasion for any alteration of your arrangements," was
wired back from Fleet Street.
The German War Party, acting through Hammann, now perpetrated another
grim little witticism. It was solemnly announced in the Berlin
press--on July 18--that the third squadron of the German High Seas Fleet
was to be "sent to an English port in August (!) to return the visit
lately paid to Kiel by a British squadron." Britain's Grand Armada the
while was assembled off Spithead for the mightiest naval review in
history--two hundred and thirty vessels manned by seventy thousand
officers and men. King George spent Sunday, July 19, quietly at sea,
steaming up and down the endless lines of dreadnoughts and lesser
ironclads. The Lord Mayor of London opened a new golf course at
Croydon. And Ulster was smoldering.
Highly instructive now were the recriminations going on in the German,
Austrian and Serbian press. Belgrade denied that reserves had been
called up. The _North German Gazette_, the official mouthpiece of the
Kaiser's Government, no longer seeking to minimize the seriousness of
the Austrian-Serbian quarrel, expressed the pious hope that the
"discussion" would at least be "localized." Canadian Pacifics still
clattered downward. Acerbities between Vienna and Belgrade were growing
more acrimonious and menacing from hour to hour. Diplomatic
correspondence of historic magnitude, as the impending avalanche of
White Papers, Blue Books, Yellow Books and Red Papers was soon to show,
was already (July 20) in uninterrupted progress, though the quarreling
Irishmen and militant suffragettes of Great Britain knew it not, any
more than the summer resort merrymakers and "cure-takers" of Germany.
The foreign offices, stock exchanges, embassies, legations and newspaper
offices of the Continent were fairly alive to the imminence of
transcendent events, but the great European public, though within ten
days of Armageddon, was magnificently immersed in the ignorance which
the poet has so truly called bliss.
Her "friendly representations" at Belgrade having proved abortive,
Austria now prepared for more forceful measures. On July 21 Berlin
learned that Count Berchtold, the Viennese foreign minister, had
proceeded to Ischl to submit to the Emperor Francis Joseph the note he
had drawn up for presentation to Serbia. As the world was about to
learn, this was the fateful ultimatum which poured oil on the European
embers and set them aglare, to splutter, burn and devastate in a
long-enduring and all-engulfing conflagration. Simultaneously--though
this, too, was not known till months later--the Austrian minister at
Belgrade sent off a dispatch to his Government, declaring that a
"reckoning" with Serbia could not be "permanently avoided," that "half
measures were useless," and that the time had come to put forward
"far-reaching requirements joined to effective control." That, as
events were soon to develop, was an example of the diplomatic rhetoric
which masters of statecraft employ for concealment of thought. It meant
that nothing less than the abject surrender of Serbian sovereignty would
appease Vienna's desire for vengeance for Serajevo.
During all these hours, so pregnant with the fate of Europe, the German
Foreign Office was stormed by foreign newspaper correspondents in quest
of light on Germany's attitude. Was she counseling moderation in
Vienna, or fishing in troubled waters? Was she reminding her ally that
while Serajevo was primarily an Austrian question, it was in its broad
aspects essentially a European issue? Was the Kaiser really playing his
vaunted role as the bulwark of _European_ peace, or was Herr von
Tschirschky, his Ambassador in Vienna, adjuring the Ballplatz that it
was Austria's duty to "stand firm" in the presence of the crowning Slav
infamy, and that William of Hohenzollern was ready once again to don
"shining armor" for the defense of "Germanic honor"?
These are the questions we representatives of British and American
newspapers persistently launched at the veracious Berlin Press Bureau.
What did Hammann and his minions tell us? That Germany regarded the
Austrian-Serbian controversy a purely private affair between those two
countries; that Germany had at no stage of the imbroglio been consulted
by her Austrian ally, and that the last thing in the world which
occurred to the tactful Wilhelmstrasse was to proffer unasked-for
counsel to Count Berchtold, Emperor Francis Joseph's Foreign Minister,
at so delicate and critical a moment. Vienna would properly resent such
unwarranted interference with her sovereign prerogatives as a Great
Power--we were assured. Germany's attitude was that of an innocent
bystander and interested witness, and nothing more. That was the
version of the Fatherland's attitude sedulously peddled out for both
home and foreign consumption.
Behind us lay a week of tremor and unrest unknown since the days,
exactly forty-four years previous, preceding the Franco-Prussian War.
The money universe, most susceptible and prescient of all worlds, rocked
with nervous alarm. Its instinctive apprehension of imminent crisis was
fanned into panic on the night of July 23, when word came that Austria
had presented Serbia an ultimatum with a time limit of forty-eight
hours. My own information of Vienna's crucial step was prompt and
unequivocal. It was on its way to London and New York before seven
o'clock Thursday evening, Berlin time. I was gratified to learn at the
_Daily Mail_ office in London three weeks later that I had given England
her first news of the match which had at last been applied to the
European powder barrel. It was five or six hours later before general
announcement of the Austrian ultimatum arrived in Fleet Street.
I was not surprised to learn that my startling telegram had aroused no
little skepticism. During many days preceding it was the despair of the
Berlin correspondents of British newspapers that they seemed utterly
unable to impress their home publics with the fast-gathering gravity of
the European situation. London was no less nonchalant than Paris and St.
Petersburg. England was immersed to the exclusion of everything else in
the throes of the Irish-Ulster crisis. Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward
Carson loomed immeasurably bigger on the horizon than all Austria and
Serbia put together. In the boulevards, cafes and government-offices of
Paris the salacious details of the Caillaux trial absorbed all thought.
In St. Petersburg one hundred sixty thousand working men threatened an
upheaval which bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the revolutionary
conditions of 1905. But it was the invincible indifference of London, as
it seemed in Berlin, which appealed to us most.
The newspapers of July 21, 22 and 23 came in and indicated that for
England Ulster had become Europe. There was obviously little space for,
and less interest in, dispatches from Berlin or Vienna describing the
"undisguised concern" prevalent in those capitals. On July 21 I quoted
"high diplomatic authority" for the statement that the pistol would be
at Serbia's breast before the end of the week. But London remained
impervious. More than one of my British colleagues, equally
unsuccessful in stirring the emotions of his people, threw up his hands
in resignation, muttering things about "British complacency," which
would have come with poor grace from a mere American.
Since then it has occurred to me that England's sublime unconcern in the
approach of Armageddon may have been more apparent than real. Sir
Edward Grey's strenuous days and nights of telegraphing to his
Continental ambassadors, as England's White Paper revealed, had set in
as early as July 20, when he wired Sir Edward Goschen to Berlin that "I
asked the German Ambassador today if he had any news of what was going
on in Vienna with regard to Serbia." That was No. 1 in the series of
historic dispatches comprising the official British record of the
genesis of the war, which shows that there was no lack of anticipation
of coming events, as far as Downing Street was concerned. So I am
impelled to think that there may have been method in Fleet Street's
"splashing" (_Anglice_ for "featuring") pretty Miss Gabrielle Ray's
entangled love affairs and minimizing the determination of Austria to
plunge Europe into war. There is a fine spirit of solidarity in England
concerning foreign affairs. British editors in particular traditionally
refrain from crossing the policy of the Foreign Office, no matter what
the party complexion of the minister in charge. They are accustomed to
supporting it unequivocally either by omission or commission, as the
interests of Great Britain from hour to hour suggest. Whenever an
attitude of debonair detachment toward a given "foreign affair" is best
designed to promote the country's diplomatic programme, Fleet Street can
be insensibility incarnate, national _esprit de corps_ effectually
fulfilling the function of a censor. No one has ever told me that that
is why the appointment of a new principal for Dulwich College received
almost as much prominence on the morning of July 24 as news from Berlin,
Vienna or Belgrade. My suggestion of the reason is a diffident surmise,
pure and simple. It contributed materially, no doubt, toward making
Germany believe that England was too "preoccupied" with Irishmen and
suffragettes to think of going to war for her political honor.
But in Berlin things were now (July 24) moving toward the climax with
impetuous momentum. On that day, summing up events and opinion in
official and military quarters, I telegraphed the following message to
London:
"'We are ready!' This was the sententious reply given today by a high
official of the General Staff to an inquiry with regard to Germany's
state of preparedness in the event that an Austro-Serbian conflict
precipitates a European war.
"I am able to state authoritatively that the _casus foederis_ which
binds Austria, Germany and Italy in alliance would come into effect
automatically the instant Austria is attacked from any quarter other
than Servia.[1]
[1] The "assurances" given me by Foreign Office spokesmen, as reproduced
in the foregoing telegram, were, of course, made at a moment when the
German Government, no doubt quite sincerely, felt surer than it did ten
days hence that the _casus foederis_ which obligated Italy to join
Germany and Austria in war would be recognized by her without quibble.
Germany, as the world was so soon to find out, had convinced her own
people that her war was a holy war of defense, but Italy, visiting upon
her Triple Alliance partners the supreme condemnation of contemporary
political history, deserted them on the palpable ground that their war
was war of aggression, pure and unalloyed.
"I am further able to say that while Germany expects that war between
Austria and Serbia is possible, owing to the admittedly unprecedented
severity of the Austrian demands, this Government confidently hopes that
hostilities will be confined to them.
"It would be going too far to say that 'war fever' prevails in Berlin to
the extent it is reported to be rampant in Vienna. I find, however,
even in circles to which the thought of war is ordinarily repugnant,
that the imminent possibility of a European conflict is contemplated
with equanimity. They say that Austria's resolute action has already
cleared the atmosphere of long-prevailing 'uncertainty' which was
gradually becoming insufferable. They declare in accents of relief that
a situation has finally been reached where there can be no retreat. Far
worse things, it is declared, are conceivable than the conflagration
which Europe for years has half dreaded and half prepared for.
"Official Germany, nevertheless, does not believe that Russia will force
the issue. It is argued that the matter at stake is entirely a domestic
quarrel between Austria and Serbia and involves Pan-Slavism only
indirectly. If Russia makes the controversy a pretext for assisting the
Serbians, it is pointed out that 'the world's strongest bulwark of the
monarchial principle would practically place the stamp of approval on
regicide.' As suppression of regicide propaganda, root and branch, is
the mainspring of the Austrian action, the German Government holds it is
inconceivable that Russia could in such circumstances align herself with
Serbia. If she does, and I am permitted to underline this phase of the
crisis with all possible emphasis, the full strength of Germany's and
Italy's armed forces are ready to be mercilessly hurled against her, and
will be.
"A war against Russia would never be more popular in Germany than at the
present moment. For months past the country has been educated by its
most distinguished leaders to believe that an attack from Russia is
imminent. During the past week Professor Hans Delbrueck has been giving
wide publicity to an 'open letter' received from a Russian colleague,
Professor Mitrosanoff, containing the following passage:
"'It must not be forgotten that Russian public opinion plays a vastly
different role than it did a decade ago. It has now grown into a full
political force. Animosity toward Germans is in everybody's heart and
mouth. Seldom was public opinion more unanimous.'
"Almost simultaneously Professor Schiemann, the Kaiser's confidential
adviser on world politics, has heaped fresh fuel on the anti-Russian
fire by declaring: 'We have reason to think that the underlying purpose
of President Poincare's visit to the Czar was to expand the Triple
Entente into a Quadruple Alliance by the inclusion of Rumania against
Germany.'
"The Bourse closed amid undisguised alarm and the wildest fears for what
the week-end may bring forth. The public is inclined to remain
reassured as long as the Kaiser consents to remain afloat in the
_Hohenzollern_ in the fjords of Norway, but he can reach German waters
in twenty-four hours aboard the speedy dispatch-boat _Sleipner_, which
is attached to the Imperial squadron.
"I asked a military man today what show of force Germany would make at
the outbreak of hostilities involving her. He said: 'She could easily
mobilize one million five hundred thousand men within forty-eight hours
on each of her frontiers, east and west. That gigantic total of three
million would represent only the active war establishment and
reserves.'"
CHAPTER VI
THE CLIMAX
My long-standing preconceptions of Berlin as the phlegmatic capital of a
phlegmatic people were obliterated for all time at eight-thirty o'clock
on Saturday evening, July 25, 1914. Along with them went equally
well-founded beliefs that, however incorrigible their War Party's lust
for international strife, the German masses were pacific by temperament
and conviction. When the news of Serbia's alleged rejection of
Austria's ultimatum was hoisted in _Unter den Linden_, and Berlin gave
way in a flash to a babel and pandemonium of sheer war fever probably
never equaled in a civilized community, I knew that all my "psychology"
of the Germans was as myopic as if I had learned it in Professor
Muensterberg's laboratory at Harvard. Instantaneously I realized that
the stage managers had done their work with deadly precision and
all-devouring thoroughness. If the mere suggestion of gunpowder could
distend the nostrils of the "peaceful Germans" and cause their capital
to vibrate in every fiber of its being as that first real hint of war
did, I was forced to conclude that the cataclysm now impending would
find a Germany animated to its innermost depths by primeval fighting
passions. Events have not belied the new and disquieting impressions
with which Berlin's war delirium inspired me.
On the evening of July 25, after cabling to England and the United
States accounts of the blackest Saturday in Berlin bourse history, I
made my way to _Unter den Linden_ in anticipation of demonstrations
certain to be provoked by the result of the Austrian ultimatum, no
matter whether Serbia had yielded or defied. I reached the
Wilhelmstrasse corner, where the British Embassy stood, only a moment
after the fateful bulletin had been put up in the _Lokal-Anzeiger's_
windows. It read: "Serbia Rejects the Austrian Ultimatum!" That was
not quite true--to put it mildly--as the world was soon to know that far
from "rejecting" Count Berchtold's cavalier demands, Serbia bent the
knee to every single one of them except that which called for abject
surrender of her sovereign independence. But the huge crowds which had
been gathered in _Unter den Linden_ since sundown--it was now a little
past eight-thirty o'clock and still quite light--knew nothing of this.
All they knew and all they cared about was that "Serbien hat abgelehnt!"
War, the intuition of the mob assured it, was now inevitable.
"_Krieg! Krieg!_" (War! War!) it thundered. "_Nieder mit Serbien!
Hoch, Oesterreich!_" (Down with Serbia! Hurrah for Austria!) rang from
thousands of frenzied throats. Processions formed. Men and youths, here
and there women and girls, lined up, military fashion, four abreast.
One cavalcade, the larger, headed toward Pariser Platz and the
Brandenburg Gate. Another eastward, down the Linden. A mighty song now
rent the air--_Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser_ (God Save Emperor
Francis), the Austrian national anthem. Then shouts, yelled in the
accents of imprecation--"_Nieder mit Russland!_" (Down with Russia).
The bigger procession's destination was soon known. It was marching to
the Austrian Embassy in the Moltke-strasse. The smaller parade was
headed for the Russian Embassy in _Unter den Linden_. In my taxi I
decided to follow on to Moltke-strasse, and, crossing to the far side of
the Linden, I came up with the rearguard of the demonstrators just
opposite the chateau-like Embassy of France in the Pariser Platz.
Gathered on the portico servants were clustered watching the
"_manifestation_." At their hapless heads the processionists were
shaking their German fists as much as to say that France, too, was
included in the orgy of patriotic wrath now surging up in the Teutonic
soul. It was a touch of humor in an otherwise overwhelmingly grim
spectacle.
Through the entrance to the leafy Tiergarten, down the pompous and
sepulchral Avenue of Victory, across the Koenigs-Platz with its
Gulliverian statue of the Iron Chancellor and the Column of Victory,
through the district whose street nomenclature breathes of Germany's
martial glory--Roon-strasse, Bismarck-strasse and Moltke-strasse--the
parade, now swelled to many times its original proportions, halted in
front of the Austrian Embassy. Some self-appointed cheer-leader called
for _Hochs_ for the ally, for another stanza of the Austrian national
anthem, for more "Down with Serbia," and for more yells of defiance to
Russia. Opposite the embassy-palace towered the massive block-square
General Staff building. From it there emerged, while the demonstration
was at its zenith, three young subalterns. The mob seized them
joyously, shouldered them and acclaimed them--the brass-buttoned and
epauletted embodiment of the army on whom Germany's hopes were presently
to be pinned. "_Krieg! Krieg!_" the war mongers chanted in ecstatic
shrieks. Then "_Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_," twin of the
Austrian anthem as far as the melody is concerned, was sung with
tremendous fervor. The crowd yelled for Emperor Francis Joseph's
ambassador, the Hungarian Count von Szoegeny-Marich, but, if he was at
home, he preferred not to face the multitude. Presently a beardless
young embassy attache appeared at an open window--the physical
personification of the allied Empire--and he almost reeled from the
shock of the tumultuous shout hurtled in his monocled countenance.
For nearly an hour delirium reigned unbridled. Then the demonstrators
betook themselves back to the Linden district, where they met up with
more processions. Throughout the night, far into Sunday morning, Berlin
reverberated with their tramp and clamor. My doubts as to the capital's
temper toward war were resolved, my cherished confidence in the average
German's fundamental love of peace shattered. Berlin is the tuning-fork
of the Empire. As she was shrieking "War! War!" so, I felt sure,
Hamburg and Munich, Dresden and Stuttgart, Cologne and Breslau,
Koenigsberg and Metz, would be shrieking before the world was many hours
older. And when the Sunday papers reported that "fervent patriotic
demonstrations" had broken out everywhere the night before, as soon as
"Serbia's insolent action" was communicated to the public, something
within me said that only a miracle could now restrain war-mad Germany
from herself plunging into the fray.
I have said that Armageddon was instigated by the German War Party. In
substantiation of that charge let me narrate a bit of unrecorded
history. About four o'clock of the afternoon of July 25--the day of
orgy in Berlin above described--the Austrian Foreign Office in Vienna
issued a confidential intimation to various persons accustomed to be
favored with such communications that the Serbian reply to the ultimatum
had arrived and was satisfactory. It did not succumb in respect of
every demand put forth by Austria, but it was sufficiently groveling to
insure peace. Foreign newspaper correspondents, to several of whom the
information was supplied, learned, when they applied at their own
Embassies for confirmation, that the latter, too, had been formally
acquainted with the fact that Serbia's concessions were far-reaching
enough to guarantee a bloodless settlement of the ugly crisis.
Vienna breathed a long, sincere sigh of relief. She had feared the
worst from the moment Count Berchtold dispatched _the Berlin-dictated
ultimatum_ to Belgrade; but the worst was over now. Serbian penitence
had saved Austrian face.
While correspondents were busily preparing their telegrams, which were
to flash all over the world the welcome tidings that war had been
averted, though only by a hair's breadth, the Austrian Foreign Office
was telephoning to the Foreign Office in Berlin the text of Serbia's
reply.
A certain journalist was on his way to the telegraph office to "file"
his "story." The editor of a great Vienna newspaper, a friend,
intercepted him.
"Well, what are you saying?" the editor inquired. "That it's peace,
after all," replied the correspondent.
"It _was_ peace," said the editor sadly, "but meantime Berlin has
spoken."
* * * * *
The week of fate opened on Monday, July 27, amid general expectations
that the worst had become inevitable. Popular alarm was not assuaged by
the impulsive action of the Kaiser, contrary to the preferences of the
Government, in breaking off his Norwegian cruise when Serbia's defiance
was wirelessed to the _Hohenzollern_ and rushing back to Kiel under full
steam. "The Foreign Office regrets this step," reported Sir Horace
Rumbold, acting British Ambassador at Berlin, to Sir Edwin Grey. "It
was taken on His Majesty's own initiative and the Foreign Office fears
that the Emperor's sudden return may cause speculation and excitement."
It was, of course, characteristic of the monarch whom Paul Singer, the
late Socialist chieftain, once described to me as "William the Sudden."
"Speculation and excitement" are precisely what the Kaiser's dramatic
return did precipitate. He did not come into Berlin, but retired to the
comparative privacy of the New Palace in Potsdam, to engage forthwith in
protracted council with his political, diplomatic, military and naval
advisers. Meantime Berlin throbbed with forebodings and unrest. The
Stock Exchange almost collapsed. Values tumbled by the millions of
marks. Fortunes vanished between breakfast and lunch. Financiers
suicided. Savings banks were besieged by battalions of nervous
depositors. Gold began to disappear from circulation.
At the Foreign Office, newspaper correspondents were informed that the
situation was undoubtedly aggravated, but not "hopeless." Germany's aim
was to "localize" the Austrian-Serbian war, which was now an actuality.
"All depends on Russia," Herr Hammann's automatons assured us when we
asked who held the key to the situation. Germany remained, as she had
been from the beginning of the crisis, merely "an interested bystander."
Austria had not sought her counsel, and "none had been offered." It
would have been an insufferable offense (said the Hammannites) for
Berlin to intrude upon Vienna with "advice" at such an hour. Austria
was a great sovereign Power, Count Berchtold a diplomat of sagacity and
courage, and Germany's role was obviously that of a silent friend. She
had very particularly "not been concerned" with the admittedly stiff
terms the rejection of which had now, unhappily, resulted in war. All
this we were told at Wilhelmstrasse 76 in accents of touching sincerity.
The attitude of the German public was now one of amazing resignation to
the possibility of war. Men of affairs, who had during the preceding
forty-eight hours in many cases seen great fortunes irresistibly
slipping from their grasp, contemplated a European conflagration with
incredible equanimity. I recall with especial distinctness the views
expressed by my old friend, Geheimrat L., the head of an important
provincial bank. "We have not sought war," he said, "but we are ready
for it--far readier than any of our possible antagonists. Our
preparedness, military, naval, financial and economic, is in the most
complete state it has ever attained. Confidence in the army and navy is
unbounded, and it is justified. For years the political atmosphere has
been growing more and more uncomfortable for Germany (Geheimrat L.
evidently longed for "a place in the sun," too), and we have felt that
war was inevitable, sooner or later. It is better that it comes now,
when our strength is at the zenith, than later when our enemies have had
time to discount our superiority." Geheimrat L. and I were standing in
_Unter den Linden_ while he talked. Another procession of war-zealots
tramped by, singing _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_. "You see,"
he said, pointing to the demonstrators and waving his own hat as the
crowd shrieked "_Hoch der Kaiser!_", "we all feel the same way."
Germany, in other words, while not exactly spoiling for war, was
something more than ready for it and would leap into the ring, stripped
for the combat, almost before the gong had called time. Events did not
belie that fantasy, either.
Sir Edward Grey was now making eleventh-hour efforts to stave off fate.
He was constrained to have Vienna view the Serbian imbroglio from the
broad standpoint of a European question, which the Germanic Powers, of
course, knew that it was. He proposed a conference in London between
himself and the ambassadors of Germany, Russia, France and Italy, in the
hope of settling the Austrian-Serbian dispute on the basis of Serbia's
reply to Count Berchtold's ultimatum. "It has become only too apparent,"
the British Foreign Secretary wrote a year later in a crushing rejoinder
to the German Chancellor's revamped and distorted version of the war's
beginnings, "that in the proposal we made, which Russia, France and
Italy agreed to, and which Germany vetoed, lay the only hope of peace.
And it was such a good hope! Serbia had accepted nearly all of the
Austrian ultimatum, severe and violent as it was." Herr Hammann's
minions told us with pleasing plausibility of the reasons why Germany
declined the conference proposal. "We can not recommend Austria," they
said, "to submit questions affecting her national honor to a tribunal of
outsiders. It would not be consistent with our obligations as an ally."
That was subterfuge unalloyed, as was amply proved by Germany's
subsequent refusal even to suggest any other method of mediation, in
which Sir Edward Grey had promised acquiescence in advance. The War
Party's plans were plainly too far progressed to tolerate so tame and
inglorious a retreat. It was thirsting for blood, and was in no humor
to content itself with milk and water. It was like asking a champion
runner, trained to the second and poised on the starting tape in an
attitude of trembling expectation of the "Go" pistol, to rise, return to
the dressing-room, get into street clothes and cool his ardor for
victory and laurels by taking a leisurely walk around the block. The
Tirpitzes, the Falkehhayns, the Reventlows, the Bernhardis and the Crown
Princes, lurking Mephistopheles-like in the background, leaned over
Bethmann Hollweg and the Kaiser on July 28, while Sir Edward Grey's
proposal was undergoing final consideration, and whispered in their ear
an imperious "No!" Germany, as "evidence of good faith," the
Wilhelmstrasse told us next day, was continuing to exercise friendly
pressure "in the direction of peace" at both St. Petersburg and Vienna.
But, as the Colonel said of Mr. Taft, Berlin meant well feebly. The
mills of the war gods were grinding remorselessly, and they were not to
be clogged.
Early in the evening of Wednesday, July 29, the Kaiser summoned a
council of war at Potsdam. The council lasted far into the night. Dawn
of Thursday was approaching before it ended. All the great paladins of
State, civilian, military and naval, were present. Prince Henry of
Prussia, freshly arrived from London, brought the latest tidings of
sentiment prevailing in England. The Imperial Chancellor and Foreign
Secretary von Jagow were armed with up-to-the-minute news of the
diplomatic situation in Paris and St. Petersburg. Russia's plans and
movements were the all-dominating issue. General von Falkenhayn,
Minister of War, was prepared with confidential information that,
despite the Czar's ostensible desire for peace and his still pending
communication with the Kaiser to that end, "military measures and
dispositions" of unmistakably menacing character were in progress on
both the German and Austrian frontiers. Lieutenant-General von Moltke,
Chief of the General Staff, was supplied not only with corroborative
information of the imminency of "danger" from Russia, but with
reassuring details of Germany's power to meet and check it.
Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, Secretary of the Navy, and Admiral von Pohl,
Chief of the Admiralty Staff, were ready to convince the Supreme War
Lord that the fleet was no less prepared than the army for any and all
emergencies. There was absolutely nothing, from a military and naval
standpoint, so the generals and admirals were eager to demonstrate, to
justify Germany in assuming and maintaining anything but "a strong
position."
Some day, perhaps, the history of that fateful night at Potsdam will be
written, for there was Armageddon born. Its full details have never
leaked out. So much I believe can be here set down with certainty--it
was not quite a harmonious council which finally plumped for war. At
the outset, at any rate, it was divided into camps which found
themselves in diametrical opposition. The "peace party," or what was
left of it, is said, loath as the world is to believe it, to have been
headed by the Kaiser himself. Bethmann Hollweg supported his Imperial
Master's view that war should only be resorted to as a last desperate
emergency. Von Jagow, the innocuous Foreign Secretary, dancing as usual
to his superiors' whistle, "sided" with the Emperor and the Chancellor.
Von Falkenhayn and von Tirpitz demanded war. Germany was ready; her
adversaries were not; the issue was plain. Von Moltke was non-committal.
He is a Christian Scientist, and otherwise pacific by temperament.
Prince Henry of Prussia did not at least violently insist upon peace. I
could never verify whether the German Crown Prince was permitted to
participate in the war council or not. If he was, posterity may be sure
that his influence was not exercised unduly in the direction of a
bloodless solution of the crisis. Herr Kuehn, the Secretary of the
Treasury, submitted satisfying figures to prove that, if war must be,
Germany was financially caparisoned. From Herr Ballin came word that if
war should unhappily be forced upon the Fatherland by the bear, the
present positions of German liners were such that few, if any, of them
would fall certain prey to enemy cruisers. Those which could not reach
home ports would be able to take refuge in snug neutral harbors.
The next day, Thursday, July 30, I was able to telegraph my chiefs in
London and New York that the fat was now almost irrevocably in the fire.
The War Party's views had prevailed. The fiction that "Russian
mobilization" was an intolerable peril which Germany could no longer
face in inactivity had been so assiduously maintained that any
reluctance to go to war, which may have lingered in the Kaiser's soul,
was now overcome. The sword had literally been "forced" into his hand.
Russia, it was decided, was to be notified that demobilization or German
"counter-mobilization" within twenty-four hours was the choice she had
to make. My information went considerably beyond this so-called "last
German effort on behalf of peace." It was to the effect that while
Germany had taken "one more final step" in the direction of an amicable
solution of the crisis, _she did not really expect it to be successful,
and had, indeed, resorted to it merely in order to be able to say that
she had "left no stone unturned to prevent war_."
Germany was now in everything except a formally proclaimed state of war.
Mobilization was not actually "ordered," but all the multitudinous
preliminaries for it were well under way. As later developed, German
reservists from far-off Southwest Africa were at that very moment en
route to Europe on suddenly granted "leaves of absence." The terrible
button at whose signal the German war machine would move was all but
pressed. To prove it the super-patriotic, Government-controlled
_Lokal-Anzeiger_ let a woefully tell-tale cat out of the bag. It issued
a lurid "Extra" at two-thirty P.M., categorically announcing that "the
entire German army and navy had been ordered to mobilize." After the
news had spread through Berlin like wildfire and sent prices on the
Bourse tobogganing toward the bottom at the dizziest pace of all the
week, the _Lokal-Anzeiger_ twenty minutes later blandly issued another
"Extra," explaining that through "a gross misdemeanor in its circulating
department" the public had been furnished with "inaccurate news" about
mobilization!
The good "_Lokal's_" news was not "inaccurate." It was only premature,
for twenty-four hours later, on Friday, July 31, it was permitted, along
with other papers, to flood the metropolis with another "Extra,"
officially proclaiming that Emperor William had declared Germany to be
in a "state of war." The "Extras" added that the Kaiser would himself
shortly arrive in Berlin from Potsdam. No one doubted now that the
Fatherland was on the brink of grim and portentous events. War might
only be a matter of hours, perhaps minutes. Instantaneously all roads
led to _Unter den Linden_. Through it, now _Oberster Kriegsherr_
indeed--Supreme War Lord is not an ironical sobriquet foisted upon the
German Emperor by detractors, as many people think, but an actual,
formal title--the Kaiser would soon be passing. History was to be made
to repeat itself. Old King William I, returning to Berlin from Ems on
the eve of the Franco-Prussian War made a spectacular entrance into
Berlin under identical circumstances. The welcome to his grandson must
be no less imposing and immortal.
I was fortunate enough to secure a reserved seat in the grandstand--a
table on the balcony of the Cafe Kranzler at the intersection of
Friedrichstrasse and the Linden. The boulevard was jammed. All Berlin
seemed gathered in it. Presently the triple-toned motor horn of the
Imperial automobile tooted from afar the signal that the Kaiser was
approaching. A tornado of cheers and _Hochs_ greeted him all along the
_Via Triumphalis_. The Empress, at his side, smiled in token of the
most spontaneous welcome the Kaiser ever received at the hands of his
never overfond Berliners. The brass-helmeted War Lord himself was the
personification of gravity. His favorite pose in public is
uncompromising sternness; to-day it was the last word in severity. He
did not seem a happy man, nor even so haughty as I always imagined he
would be in the midst of war delirium. It was an unmistakably anxious
Kaiser who entered his capital on that afternoon of deathless memory.
The Imperial show, smacking strongly of William's own stage management,
had only begun, for now the Crown Prince's familiar motor signal,
_Ta-tee, Ta-ta_, sounded from the direction of Brandenburg Gate, and
presently he came along, with the beauteous and all-captivating Crown
Princess Cecelie at his side. Squatting between them, saluting solemnly
in sailor-suit, was their eldest son, the eight-year-old Kaiser-to-be.
The ebullition of the crowd in _Unter den Linden_ knew no bounds at the
sight of the Crown Prince, for years Berlin's darling. In striking
contrast to the Kaiser's solemnity was his heir's smile-wreathed face,
which, in the picturesque German idiom, was literally _freudestrahlend_
(radiant of joy). The specter of war was obviously not depressing the
Colonel of the Death's Head Hussars. He beamed and grinned in boyish
happiness as the mob surged round his car so insistently that for a
minute it could not proceed. Right and left he stretched out his arm to
shake hands with the frenzied demonstrators nearest him. The Crown
Princess shared her consort's manifest pleasure, while the princeling
saluted tirelessly. Then other cars whirled by, containing Prince and
Princess August Wilhelm of Prussia and the remaining Princes, the sailor
Adalbert, and Eitel Friedrich, Joachim and Oscar. The Hohenzollern
soldier-family picture was to be complete at this immortal hour. Now
there was a fresh outburst of acclamation almost as volcanic as that
which greeted the Crown Prince. Admiral Prince Henry, in navy blue and
steering his own automobile, was passing. The Kaiser's brother is very
dear to the popular heart in Germany. As the Crown Prince typifies the
army, so Prince Henry stands for the navy. The procession was brought up
by the funereal Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg. For him the cheering was
only desultory, as he is not a familiar figure, and many of the crowd
obviously had no notion who the worried-looking old gentleman in silk
hat and frock coat might be.
[Illustration: Soldiers in the making--aiming practice]
The throngs now streamed toward the Royal Castle in the confident hope
that William the Speechmaker would not disappoint them. About six
o'clock in the evening their patience and _Hochs_ were rewarded.
Surrounded by the members of his family, the Kaiser appeared at the
balcony window facing the Cathedral across the _Lustgarten_ (this was
more of the 1870 precedent) and, looking down upon the densest and most
fervent crowd of his subjects he ever faced, addressed to them in the
guttural, jerky, but wonderfully far-reaching tones which are his
oratorical style, the following homily:
"A fateful hour has fallen upon Germany. Envious people on all sides
are compelling us to resort to just defense. The sword is being forced
into our hand. If at the last hour my efforts do not succeed in
maintaining peace, I hope that with God's help we shall so wield the
sword that we shall be able to sheathe it with honor.
"War would demand of us enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure, but
we shall show our foes what it means to provoke Germany, and now I
commend you all to God. Go to church, kneel before God, and pray to Him
to help our gallant army."
Berlin went to bed on the night of July 31 hoarse with _Hoching_ and
footsore from standing and marching, but now indubitably certain that
events were impending which would try the Fatherland's soul as it had
never been tried before.
CHAPTER VII
WAR
"The Russian mobilization menace!" That was the great myth now
irrevocably fastened on the German mind. "The Cossacks at our gate!"
Thus was the Fatherland gulled by its war zealots into the belief that
the tide of blood sweeping down from the East could no longer be
stemmed. German war history was repeating itself. As 1870 was born in
deceit, so was 1914. Bismarck doctored the Ems telegram forty-four
years previous to extenuate the assault on France, and now the "Russian
mobilization menace," the Cossack bogy, was invented as justification
for precipitating and popularizing the conflict on which the Prussian
War Party's heart was set. A "state of war" had been decreed by the
Kaiser in accordance with the paragraph of the Imperial Constitution
which authorizes him to declare martial law whenever the domains of the
Empire or any part of them are in jeopardy. The Czar's hordes were
gathered on the Eastern frontier, preparing to launch a murderous,
burglarious attack on innocent, defenseless, peace-loving Germany. They
had done more than that--and here was another Hohenzollern 1870 analogy;
the Emperor of all the Russias had "insulted" the Kaiser by feloniously
massing his legions on the German border while William II, at Nicholas'
own request, was "working for peace." It was a pretty story, and German
public opinion, shrewdly prepared, swallowed it whole. Germans, their
Emperor's "honor" and their own safety now at stake, approved fervidly
the ultimatum which they were told had been presented at St. Petersburg,
demanding abandonment of the Czar's "provocative" military measures.
I have too much respect for the perfected might of the Teutonic
war-machine to believe that any German soldier worthy of the name ever
considered Russian military movements along the Prussian and Austrian
frontiers at the end of July, 1914, a "menace." It was only a fortnight
previous that the _German Military Gazette_, the official army organ,
had laughed the whole Russian army out of court as an organization
hardly worthy of Prussian steel. Now the transfer of half a dozen
Russian corps had become so vast a peril as to necessitate plunging the
whole German Empire into a "state of war!" Everybody who had eyes to
see and ears to hear in Germany, native and foreigner alike, always knew
that actual mobilization in that country was the merest formality. The
Germans were always ready for war. It was their commonest boast. A
high officer of the General Staff, twenty-four hours after Serbia's
rejection of the Austrian ultimatum, when asked _how_ ready Germany was
for eventualities, said, sententiously, "_All_ ready." My Junker
friend, Von G., of Kiel, himself a Prussian officer, would have snorted
with scornful glee if I had ever suggested to him that _any_ Russian
military measures could really "menace" Germany. He knew what I knew,
and what anybody with sense in Germany always understood, that, compared
to what the Fatherland with its comprehensive system of
military-controlled state railways could achieve in the way of final
"mobilization," Russia would require weeks where Germany would need only
days, or even hours. Germany would be like Texas, criss-crossed in every
direction with faultless means of communication and crammed with troops
and munitions, mobilizing against the rest of the United States, with
the latter having to concentrate armies on the Rio Grande from Florida,
Maine, Oregon and Lower California, and a shoe-string railway system
with which to do it. The "Russian mobilization menace" was Germany's
supreme bluff.
St. Petersburg had been given until twelve o'clock noon of Saturday,
August 1, to "demobilize." Failing to do so, Germany would be
"compelled to resort to a counter-mobilization." France had been called
upon to indicate what her attitude would be in case of a Russo-German
conflict, but the ultimatum to Paris, we understood, had no time limit
attached. All knew that the great decision rested essentially in
Russia's hands; that war with the Czar meant war with the French, too.
Twelve o'clock Berlin time came and went without word of any kind from
Count Pourtales, the Kaiser's ambassador in St. Petersburg. The Emperor
and his civil, military and naval advisers were closeted in a Crown
council at the Castle. Pourtales' message, if there was one, the
Foreign Office told us, would doubtless reach the Kaiser in the midst of
the council, which was a continuous one. Berlin waited in excruciating
impatience. The Bourse writhed in panic. Bankers met to consider
closing it altogether, but decided that the worst might be avoided by
limiting transactions to spot-cash deals. The air was electric with
rumor. Russia had asked for a further period of grace, one heard.
Hope, report said, while slender, was not yet utterly vanished.
The afternoon passed in almost insufferable anxiety. _Unter den Linden_
and the _Lustgarten_, the sprawling area around the Castle, were choked
with people tense with expectancy. Dread, rather than war fervor,
inspired them. About five-twenty o'clock, after one of the daily
heart-to-heart war talks I had been privileged to hold over the teacups
with Mrs. Gerard, I drove through the Wilhelmstrasse toward the Linden,
accompanied by my English colleague, Charles Tower, Berlin
representative of the _New York World_ and _London Daily News_. I do
not suppose the historic little spectacle was specially arranged in our
honor, but as a matter of fact we happened to pass the Foreign Office at
the very instant that Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg, grave with
inconcealable worry, was entering a plebeian taxicab. He was evidently
starting out on a transcendent mission, for he held in his hand a
document of such absorbing interest that he hardly raised his eyes from
it as he clambered into the cab. Accompanying him were Foreign Secretary
von Jagow and a military _aide-de-camp_. I blush to confess that Tower
and I were filled with such overweening curiosity to find out what that
ominous parchment contained, and where the Chancellor was taking it,
that we ordered our chauffeur to follow at not too respectful a
distance. I never saw a Berlin taxi tear through the heart of the
down-town district so madly as Bethmann Hollweg scorched down the
Behren-strasse, past the banks which line Germany's Wall Street and the
back of the Opera, into Franzoesische-strasse, over the little bridge
which spans the canal, and into the southern esplanade of the castle.
Only small crowds were gathered at this point, and the Chancellor's cab
swung past the sentries and through the big Neptune Gate of the
_Schloss_ almost unnoticed. Now instinctively certain of the nature of
Bethmann Hollweg's errand, Tower and I made our way to the _Lustgarten_,
since early morning an endless vista of faces stretching nearly all the
way from the Dom to the Brandenburg Gate end of _Unter den Linden_, a
mile to the west. We felt sure that the universally awaited Order of
Mobilization might be momentarily expected. As events developed, that
was the document which we had seen the Chancellor taking to the Kaiser.
It was six o'clock. The doleful chimes of the Cathedral across from the
Castle were summoning the people to the service of intercession ordained
by the Emperor earlier in the day. Solemnity hung over the multitude
like a pall. Men and women knew now that Russia's answer, or lack of
answer, whichever it might be, meant war, not peace. They had not long
to wait for confirmatory news. As soon as word was telephoned to the
Wolff Agency, the official news bureau, that the Imperial signature had
at length been officially given--that the sword was now, literally and
beyond recall, "forced" into William II's hands--the newspapers, which
had had sufficient advance information for their purposes, drenched the
capital with _Extrablaetter_ containing the fateful tidings:
+----------------------------------+
| |
| "UNIVERSAL MOBILIZATION OF THE |
| GERMAN ARMY AND NAVY!" |
| |
+----------------------------------+
Another two lines explained, breathlessly, that an order to that effect
had just been promulgated by the Supreme War Lord. The twelve-hour
period which Germany had granted to Russia for "the making of a loyal
declaration" had been ignored. To-morrow, added the chief announcement
in the most portentous _Extrablatt_ a German newspaper ever issued,
would be the first mobilization day. All Sunday, Monday and Tuesday the
_Furor Teutonicus_ would be busy donning shining armor. The deed was
done. "Gentlemen," the Kaiser is said to have remarked to Moltke,
Falkenhayn and the rest of the military clique, after affixing his
signature to the document which meant not only mobilization, but war,
"you will live to regret this."
In the midst of our exclusively German environment in those immortal
hours--we could now neither telegraph nor telephone in anything except
German, nor even read in anything except that language, for foreign
newspapers were no longer arriving--I must confess I was filled with no
little prepossession in Germany's favor. The Kaiser's case seemed not
only good. On the biased evidence available--we had, of course, no
other--it even seemed strong. Such fragmentary dispatches from abroad
as the Military Censor, already enthroned, permitted to be printed were
naturally only those which resolutely bolstered up the fiction of "our
just cause." Of the stealthy plot to violate Belgium we had no glimmer
of an inkling. We knew only of the "Russian mobilization menace," of
the Kaiser's wrecked efforts in the direction of "peace," and of the
reluctance with which impeccable Germany was stripping for the fray in
defense of her honor, rights and imperiled territorial integrity.
Convinced as I had long been of the War Party's lust for "the Day," a
setting appeared to have been contrived which put Germany in a
plausible, if not altogether blameless, light. It was mass-suggestion,
as a Berlin psychologist would describe it, all-hypnotizing in its
effects. It was not until five days afterward, when I had crossed the
German frontier, reached Dutch territory and come up with the truth that
the curtain was lifted and I could look out upon what seemed, after ten
days of "inspired" information in Berlin, like country which my eyes had
never seen before....
[Illustration: In front of the Royal Castle, Berlin, waiting for
announcement of mobilization, August 1st, 1914.]
The Mobilization Order tore through the capital with the velocity and
the shock of a shell. Expected, it yet stunned. The throng before the
Castle still sang _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ and cheered for
the Kaiser, and desultory processions of young men and boys still
marched hither and thither across the town. But an atmosphere of
soberness and grim reality now descended upon Berlin. The street-corner
pillars which serve as bill-boards in Germany were already splashed red
with the official decree, gazetting August 2, 3 and 4 as the days when
the Kaiser's subjects, liable for military service with the first line
(Reserve), must report at long-appointed assembly depots, don long-ready
uniforms, and march each to his long-designated place in the
long-prepared war. Almost simultaneously the telegraph, now like the
railway and postal services automatically passed into military control,
brought every reservist in the realm definite information as to where
and when he was expected to present himself. The magic system which
Roon devised for hurling Germany's legions across the Rhine in '70 was
once again in mechanical, yet noiseless, motion. Sheer jubilation, the
grand-stand patriotism with which Berlin had reverberated for a week,
died out. There were good-bys to be said now, long good-bys, and affairs
to be wound up. The iron business of war was waiting to be attended to.
The crowds in _Unter den Linden_ and the _Lustgarten_ melted homeward,
silently, immersed in anxious reflection. Before they waked from their
next sleep, the first shot might be fired. On what new paths had the
Fatherland entered? Would they lead to death or glory? Never before, I
imagine, was the modern German, in his inimitable idiom, given so
furiously to think.
The war began early Sunday morning, August 2. Before nine o'clock
"Extras" were in the streets with the following official news, the very
first bulletin of the war:
"Up to 4 o'clock this morning the Great General Staff has received the
following reports:
"1. During the night Russian patrols made an attack on the railway
bridge over the Warthe near Eichenried (East Prussia). The attack was
repulsed. On the German side, two slightly wounded. Russian losses
unknown. An attempted attack by the Russians on the railway station at
Miloslaw was frustrated.
"2. The station master at Johannisburg and the forestry authorities at
Bialla report that during last night (1st to 2nd) Russian columns in
considerable strength, with guns, crossed the frontier near Schwidden
(southeast of Bialla) and that two squadrons of Cossacks are riding in
the direction of Johannisburg. The telephone communication between Lyck
and Bialla is broken down.
"According to the above, Russia has attacked German Imperial territory
and begun the war."
The "Russian mobilization menace" was now an accomplished fact, and the
Cossack bogy, too, converted into an officially hall-marked actuality!
Modern war, from the newspaperman's standpoint, consists principally of
two things--censorship and rumors. Both had now set in with a
vengeance. The first day in Berlin swarmed with irresponsible report.
People believed anything. Official news was scarce and "far between."
The second General Staff bulletin to be issued was a laconic
announcement that troops of the VIII (Rhenish) army corps had occupied
Luxemburg "for the protection of German railways in the Grand Duchy."
Eydtkuhnen, the famous German frontier station opposite the Russian
border town of Wirballen, was now reported occupied by Russian cavalry
detachments. A Russian had been caught in the act of trying to blow up
the Thorn railway bridge. Now France--like Russia, "without declaration
of war"--had violated the sacredness of German territory. French
aviators had flown into Bavaria and dropped bombs in the neighborhood of
Nuremberg, evidently with the intent of destroying military railway
lines. Canard succeeded canard. The famed "German war on two fronts"
was no longer a figment of the imagination. It had become immutable
fact. Monsieur Sverbieff, the Czar's ambassador, we heard, had already
received his passports. He would leave Berlin in the evening in a
special train to the Russian frontier. When would Monsieur Cambon, the
French ambassador, the Republic's accomplished representative in
Washington during our war with Spain, be given _his_ walking-papers? So
far rowdies had yelled _Deutschland, Deutschland ueber Alles_ only in
front of the Russian Embassy. Now that French airmen had shelled
Bavaria, how long would it be before the chateau in Pariser Platz would
be stormed?
The British Embassy was wrapped in Sabbath calm. Was not Berlin reading
with intensest gratification the Wolff Agency's carefully selected
London dispatches saying that "powerful influences are at work to
prevent England becoming involved in the war"? Mr. Norman Angell had
written in that sense to _The Times_--the _Lokal-Anzeiger_ reported with
undisguised satisfaction. A large number of British professors, it
added, had launched a "protest" against war with Germany, "the leader in
art and science and against whom a war for Russia and Serbia would be a
crime against civilization." A "great and influential meeting of
Liberals in the Reform Club" had adopted resolutions commending Sir
Edward Grey's efforts on behalf of peace and "energetically demanding
the strict preservation of English neutrality." The Germans took heart.
Blandly ignorant of their Government's secret diplomatic schemings, now
in frantic progress, to keep Great Britain out of the fray, they were
lulled by their rulers and doctored press reports into thinking that the
danger of interference from the other side of the North Sea was as good
as non-existent. The German Imperial Government practised this
deception on their own people till the last possible moment. German
newspaper readers, in those fitful hours, were being led to believe that
the voice of Britain was the pacifist, pro-German voice of Radicalism as
represented by journals like _The Daily News, Westminster Gazette_ and
_The Nation_. No intimation was permitted to reach the German public
that voices like _The Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Morning
Post_ and _Daily Telegraph_ were calling for the only action by the
Government consonant with British honor and British rights. The
outburst of fanatical rage against the "perfidious sister nation" so
soon to ensue was mainly due, I shall always remain convinced, to the
diabolical swindle of which the German nation was the victim at the
hands of its dark-lantern diplomatists. In that far-off day when the
scales have fallen from Teutonic eyes, I predict that the Germans will
call for vengeance on their deceivers. As they were duped about Russia,
so were they deliberately misled about England.
Before the war was half a day old the spy mania, which was destined to
be one of the most amazing symptoms of the war's early hours, was raging
madly from one end of the country to the other. It was directly
inspired and encouraged by the Government. The authorities caused it to
be known that "according to reliable news" Russian officers and secret
agents infested the Fatherland "in great numbers." "The security of the
German Empire," the people were informed, "demands absolutely that in
addition to the regular official organs, _the entire population_ should
give vent to its patriotic sentiments by co-operating in the
apprehension of such dangerous persons." "By active and restless
vigilance," continued this official incitement to lynch law, "everybody
can in his own way contribute toward a successful result of the war."
It was not to be expected that a nation so idolatrous of officialdom as
the Germans could possibly resist this _carte-blanche_ permit to every
man to play the role of an avenging sleuth. The inevitable result was
that Germany became in a flash the scene of a nation-wide "drive" for
spies, real or imaginary. Anybody who was either known to be a Russian
or remotely suspected of being one, or who even looked like a Russian,
was in imminent danger of his life. Now the notorious story of
"poisoning of wells in Alsace by French army surgeons" was circulated.
"Hunt for French spies!" promptly read the newest invitation to mob
violence. Weird "news" began to fill the _Extrablaetter_. A "Russian
spy" had been caught in _Unter den Linden_, masquerading as a German
naval officer. After being beaten into insensibility, he was dragged to
Spandau and shot. In another part of town a couple of Russian "secret
agents," disguised as women, were caught with "basketfuls of bombs."
They, too, we learned, were riddled with bullets an hour later at
Spandau. Everywhere, in and out of Berlin, the spy-hunt was now in full
cry. An automobile, in which women were traveling, was "reported" to be
crossing the country, en route to Russia with "millions of francs of
gold." The whole rural population of Prussia turned out to intercept
it.
One of the earliest victims of the espionage epidemic was an American
newspaperman, Seymour Beach Conger, the chief Berlin correspondent of
the Associated Press, who had started for St. Petersburg, where he was
formerly stationed, as soon as war became imminent, only to be arrested
by the spy-hunting Prussian police at Gumbinnen on the charge of being
"a Russian grand-duke." Conger's United States passport, unmistakable
journalistic credentials, well-known official status in Berlin and
convincingly American exterior availed him not. He had plenty of money
and a kodak, and that was enough. He must be a spy. For three days and
nights he was locked in a cell, and, even after he had contrived to
establish communication with the American Embassy in Berlin, he had
great difficulty in securing his release. It was eventually granted on
the understanding that he should ignore the Associated Press' orders to
proceed to Russia and remain in Berlin for the rest of the war, where, I
believe, he still is. I was told, but could never verify, that one of
the conditions of Conger's liberation was that he should not "talk
about" the affair.
How many hapless persons, Russians, French or unfortunates suspected of
being such, with nothing in the world against them more incriminating
than their real or imagined nationality, were put out of the way either
by German mob savagery, police brutality or fortress firing-squads in
those opening forty-eight hours of Armageddon will probably never be
known. I do not suppose the Germans themselves know. But this _I_
know--that even at that earliest stage of their sanguinary game they
conducted themselves in a manner which, had they done no other single
thing during the war to stagger humanity, would brand them as a race of
semi-barbarians. _Kultur_ gave a sorry account of itself in the
Hottentot days between August 2 and 5, of which I shall have more to
say, of a peculiarly personal nature, in a succeeding chapter.
War Sunday in Berlin, midst rumor and spy-chasing, was marked by an
impressive open-air divine service on the Konigs-Platz, that vast
quadrangle of spread-eagle statuary and gingerbread architecture in
which the sepulchral "Avenue of Victory" culminates. In the great area
between the Column of Victory and the bulky Bismarck memorial at the
foot of the gilt-domed Reichstag building a concourse of many thousands
gathered to hear a court chaplain, Doctor Dohring, sermonize eloquently
on a text from the Revelation of St. John, chapter II, verse 10: "Be
thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." It was
a singularly appropriate theme, for hundreds of reservists, their last
day in citizens' clothes, were in the throng. There was a moment of
indescribable pathos, as the chaplain, from a dais which raised him high
above the heads of the multitude, invoked the huge congregation to
recite with him the Lord's Prayer. Strong men and women were in tears
when the Amen was reached. The service was brought to a close with a
beautiful rendition by that mighty chorus of the _Niederlaendisches
Dankgebet_, the famous hymn which proclaimed at Waterloo a century
before the end of the Napoleonic terror.
Nightfall found those seemingly immobile Berlin thousands still
clustered, now almost beseechingly, round the Royal Castle. They
hungered for an opportunity to show the Supreme War Lord that Kaiser and
Empire were dearer than ever to German hearts in the hour of imminent
trial. Just before dark, while his outlines could still be plainly
distinguished even by the rearmost ranks of the crowd, William II,
thunderously greeted, stepped out once more to the balcony from which he
had told the populace two nights previous that the sword was being
"forced" into his hand. He beckoned for silence. Men reverently removed
their hats, and leaned forward on tiptoes, the better to hear the
Imperial message. This is what the Kaiser said:
"From the bottom of my heart I thank you for the expression of your love
and your loyalty. In the struggle now impending I know no more parties
among my people. There are now only Germans among us. Whichever
parties, in the heat of political differences, may have turned against
me, I now forgive from the depths of my heart. The thing now is that
all should stand together, shoulder to shoulder, like brothers, and then
God will help the German sword to victory!"
No historian of Germany in war-time will be able to say that his people
did not take the Kaiser's stirring admonition to heart.
CHAPTER VIII
THE AMERICANS
On the occasion, nine or ten years ago, when it was my privilege to be
presented for the first time to that most sane and suave of German
statesmen, Prince Buelow--it was at one of his so-called "parliamentary
evenings" at the Imperial Chancellor's Palace during the political
season,--he inquired, pleasantly:
"How long are you remaining in Germany?"
"Just as long as Your Serene Highness will permit," I responded, half
facetiously and half seriously, for foreign correspondents are
occasionally expelled from Germany for pernicious professional activity.
For the ten days preceding August 1, 1914, while the European cloudburst
was gathering momentum, such time as I could spare from the chase for
the nimble item was devoted to patching up my journalistic fences in
Berlin, with a view to remaining there throughout the war. There was at
that time no conclusive indication that England would be involved.
Having seen Germany in full and magnificent stride in peace, I was
overwhelmingly anxious to watch her in the practise of her real
profession. As an American citizen and special correspondent of three
great American newspapers--the _New York Times, Philadelphia Public
Ledger_ and _Chicago Tribune_--and fully accredited as such in German
official quarters, I had every reason to hope that, even if England were
drawn into the war (as to which I, myself, was never in doubt), my
previous status as Berlin correspondent of Lord Northcliffe's _Daily
Mail_ would not interfere with my remaining in Germany as an American
writing exclusively for American papers. It was, of course, obvious
that if this permission were granted me, my connection with the British
news organization, which for years was Germany's _bete noire_, would
have automatically to cease.
In Ambassador Gerard, as ever, I found a ready supporter of my plans.
He recognized, as I did, that a "_Daily Mail_ man," particularly one who
had specialized, as I did for eight years, in publishing as much as I
dared about Germany's palpable preparations for war, would perhaps be on
thin ice in asking favors of the Kaiser's Government at such an hour.
But Judge Gerard also knew that, while persistently doing my duty in
reporting the sleepless machinations of the German War Party to attain
"a place in the sun," I had written copiously in England and with equal
faithfulness of the many attractive and favorable aspects of German life
and institutions. In 1913 I produced a little book, _Men Around the
Kaiser_, which from cover to cover was a sincere hymn of praise of
almost everything Teutonic. This foreigner's tribute to the real source
of modern German greatness--the Fatherland's captains of science, art,
letters, commerce, finance and industry--was considered so fair and
flattering to the Germans that _Maenner um den Kaiser_, a German
translation, went through eight editions to the two of the English
original. During the Zabern army upheaval in Alsace-Lorraine in the
winter of 1913-14 an article of mine in _The Daily Mail_ entitled "What
the Colonel Said" was the only presentation of the German military
attitude published in England. Even the War Party newspapers in Berlin
honored me with a reproduction of that attempt to interpret the Prussian
point of view that, where the sacredness of the King's tunic is at
stake, all other considerations vanish into insignificance.
The Ambassador suggested, in the always practical way of American
diplomacy, that I should assemble for him a _dossier_ of some of my
newspaper work in Berlin showing that I had consistently attempted to
show the bright, as well as the dark side, of the German picture. Judge
Gerard promised to submit my desire to remain in Germany during war, if
war came, to Foreign Secretary von Jagow and to recommend that my
aspiration should be gratified. It was welcome news which the
Ambassador was finally enabled to give me on August 1, that the Foreign
Secretary had considered my application and granted it. I rejoiced that
a long-cherished ambition seemed on the brink of realization--to see the
terrible German war-machine at work, to report its sanguinary operations
from the inside, and perhaps some day to record in a book, which would
have been incomparably more vital than this bloodless narrative, my
close-range impressions of man-killing as an applied art.
I was not the only American appealing to our Embassy for amelioration of
my troubles about this time. In fact there were so many others--hundreds
and hundreds of them--that the Ambassador and his small staff ceased
altogether to be diplomats and became merely comforters of distracted
compatriots plunged suddenly into the abyss of terror and helplessness
in a strange land by the specter of war. From early morning till long
past midnight Wilhelms Platz 7, the dignified home maintained by the
Gerards as American headquarters in Germany, was besieged by a mob of
stranded or semi-stranded fellow citizens who flocked to the Embassy
like chicks running to cover beneath the protecting wing of a mother
hen. Never even in the history of Cook's was so frantic a conclave of
the personally conducted assembled. They wanted two things and wanted
them at once--money and facilities to get out of Germany with the least
possible delay. That bespectacled school-marm from Paducah, Kentucky,
had not come to Berlin to eat war bread and spend her spare time proving
her identity at the police station--she moaned in tearful accents. That
aldermanic committee of Battle Creek, Michigan, was not getting what it
bargained for--study of Berlin's sewage farms and municipal labor
exchanges. Its main concern now was to reach Dutch or Scandinavian
territory, with the minimum of procrastination. That portly Chicago
millionaire's wife yonder, when she bought a letter of credit on the
Dresdner Bank, had not figured even on the remote possibility of its
refusing to hand her over all the money she might care to draw. The
moment had come, she was vociferating, to see what "American citizenship
amounts to, anyhow," and what she demanded was a special train to
warless frontiers, and then a ship to take her "home." These were just
a few of the plaints and claims which issued in a crescendo of
insistence and panic from these neurotic tourist folk, who, in tones
often more imperious than appealing, wanted to know what "Our
Government" intended to do with its war refugees and refugettes cruelly
trapped in Armageddonland.
Americans who come to Europe proverbially feel a proprietary interest in
their Embassies, Legations and Consulates. The Berlin Ambassador for
years put in much valuable time assuaging the grief and disappointment
of brother patriots who felt a God-given right to gratify such trifling
ambitions as an audience with the Kaiser, an inspection of the German
army or minor favors like exploration of the German educational system
under the personal chaperonage of the Minister for Culture. Then, of
course, there was the ever-present "German-Americans," who, having
slipped away from their beloved Fatherland in youth without performing
military service, would risk a visit to native haunts in later life,
only to fall victim to the German military police system which has a
long memory and a still longer arm for such transgressors. On many such
an occasion, even when, like a Chicago man I know, the "German-American"
stole back under an assumed name, the paternal diplomatic intervention
of the United States has saved the "deserter" from a felon's cell in his
"Fatherland."
By the morning of August 4, the American panic in Berlin began to assume
truly disastrous dimensions. The Embassy was literally jammed with
fretting men, and weepy women and children. Every room overflowed with
them. The cry was now for passports. It was coming from all parts of
the country. All foreigners were suspect, English-speaking ones in
particular, and the German police were demanding in martial tone that
_Auslaender_ should "legitimatize" themselves.
The railways were available now only for troops. The Hamburg-American
and North German Lloyd had canceled all their west-bound sailings, and
our Consular officials in Hamburg and Bremen were telegraphing the
Berlin Embassy that they, too, were stormed by throngs of Americans in
various stages of anxiety, fear and financial embarrassment. From
Frankfort-on-the-Main came a similar tale of woe. All around that
delightful city are famous German watering places--Bad Nauheim, Homburg,
Wiesbaden, Langen-Schwalbach, Baden-Baden, Kissingen and the like--and
American "cure-guests," regardless of their rheumatism, heart troubles,
gout and other frailties for which German waters are a panacea, forgot
such insignificant woes in the now crowning anguish to own a passport
which would designate them as peaceable and peace-loving children of the
Stars and Stripes.
The Embassy rapidly and patiently mastered the situation. Mrs. Gerard
converted herself into the adopted mother of every lachrymose American
woman and child squatted on her broad marble staircase. Mrs. Gherardi,
the wife of our Naval Attache, and Mrs. Ruddock, the wife of the Third
Secretary, who were at the time the only feminine members of the Embassy
family, resourcefully seconded the Ambassadress' efforts to soothe the
emotions of the sobbing sisters and youngsters from Iowa and Maine, from
Pennsylvania and Texas, from Montana and Florida, and from nearly all
the other States of the Union, who refused to view qualmless the
prospect of remaining shut up for Heaven knew how long in war-mad
Germany, already effectually isolated from the rest of the world behind
an impenetrable ring of steel. As for the men of the Embassy, from the
Ambassador down to "Wilhelm," the old German doorkeeper who has
initiated two generations of American diplomats into the mysteries of
their profession in Berlin, no faithful servants of an ungrateful
Republic ever came so valiantly to the rescue of fellow taxpayers. The
Embassy apartments, including the Ambassador's own sanctuary, were
turned into offices which looked for all the world like a Census Bureau.
Every available space for a desk was usurped by somebody taking
applications for passports or filling up the passports themselves, to be
turned over to Judge Gerard in an unceasing stream for his signature and
seal. Uncle Sam surely never raked in so many two-dollar fees at one
killing in all the history of his Berlin office. Nor did American
citizens, I fancy, ever part with money which they considered half so
good an investment.
The Embassy itself, hopelessly understaffed for such an emergency, was,
of course, quite unequal to the enormous strain suddenly imposed upon
it, so volunteer attaches and clerks were gladly pressed into service.
There, for instance, sat a Guggenheim copper magnate, who probably never
lifts a pen except to sign a million-dollar check, at work with a
mantel-piece as a desk, recording the vital statistics of a Vermont
grocery-man who wanted a passport. In another corner sat Henry White,
ex-Ambassador in Rome and Paris, scribbling away at breakneck pace, in
order that the age, complexion and height of that trembling Vassar
graduate might be quickly and accurately inscribed in an application for
a Yankee parchment. There, with the arm of a chair as his desk, was
Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, great authority on political economy,
currency and trusts, patiently extorting the story of his life from the
coroner of the Minnesota county who had been caught in the German war
maelstrom in the midst of an investigation of municipal morgues. What a
vast practical experience of inquests he might have reaped had he
remained in Europe! And over there, looking out on the Wilhelms Platz,
with a window-sill as a writing-board, the Titian-haired belle of
Berlin's American colony, in daintiest of midsummer frocks and saucy
turbans, who had never in years done anything more strenuous than
organize a tea-party, was in harness as a volunteer in the impromptu
army of Uncle Sam's clerks, doing her bit for her country and
country-folk. It was all very typically and very delightfully American,
a composite of true Democracy in which one is for all, and all for one.
I like to doubt if there are any other people on earth who turn in and
help one another in a spirit of all-engulfing national comradeship so
readily, so unconventionally and so good-naturedly as Americans. That
drama of companionship in misery and adaptability to emergency
conditions, which held the boards at the American Embassy in Berlin
during the first week of the Great War, will live long in the memory of
those who witnessed it as one of the striking impressions of a
Brobdingnagian moment.
Obviously things would have been different if the crisis had not found
two real Americans in command of the Embassy in the persons of Mr. and
Mrs. Gerard. When the typical New Yorker whom President Wilson sent to
Berlin less than a year previous was first presented to his compatriots
at a little function at which it was my honor to preside, the man whom
political detractors contemptuously referred to as "a Tammany Judge"
made a "keynote speech," which he meant to be interpreted as his
"policy" in Germany, as far as Americans were concerned. He said: "When
the time comes for me to retire from Berlin, if you will call me the
most American Ambassador who ever represented you in Germany, you can
call me after that anything you please."
Two years--what years--have elapsed since "Jimmy" Gerard made public
avowal of his conception of what United States diplomatic
representatives abroad ought to be--Americans, first, last and all the
time. As these lines are written German-American official relations
seem on the verge of rupture and our embassy's remaining days in Berlin
appear to be calculable in hours. Whether it shall turn out that the
_Arabic_ insult was after all swallowed as the _Lusitania_ infamy was
stomached, or whether Judge Gerard is finally recalled from Berlin as a
protest extracted at length from the most patient, reluctant and
long-suffering Government on record, he will richly have realized his
ambition--to be "the most American Ambassador" ever accredited to the
German court. In my time in Berlin I knew four American ambassadors.
Each one was a credit to his nation. But "Jimmy" Gerard was "the most
American," and I count that, in a citizen of the United States called to
_represent_ his country abroad, the superlative quality. The seductive
atmosphere of a Court in which adulation was obsequiously practised,
especially toward Americans, never turned the head of Judge Gerard or
his wife. They had far more than the share of hobnobbing w
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