"The gratitude of such dust as we, is, as we are aware, of no moment or value to you. We shall, however, implore God to grant your Majesty His divine favours in return for your royal bounty."
Too many Germans, to-day, feel that they are mere dust before the almost countless royalties of the German Empire. And these royalties are too prone to feel that the kingdoms, dukedoms and principalities of Germany and their inhabitants are their private property. The Princes of Nassau and Anspach and Hesse, at the time of our Revolution, sold their unfortunate subjects to the British Government to be exported to fight the Americans. Our American soil covers the bones of many a poor German peasant who gave up his life in a war from which he gained nothing.
When Frederick the Great, the model and exemplar of all German royalties; died in 1786, he disposed of the Kingdom of Prussia in his will as if it had been one of his horses. "I bequeath unto my dear nephew, Frederick William, as unto my immediate successor, the Kingdom of Prussia, the provinces, towns, palaces, forts, fortresses, all ammunition and arsenals, all lands mine by inheritance or right of conquest, the crown jewels, gold and silver service of plate in Berlin, country houses, collections of coins, picture galleries, gardens, and so forth." Contrast this will with the utterances of Washington and Hamilton made at the same time!
In the Grand Duchies of Mecklenburg, serfdom was not abolished until 1819.
The spies and the influencers of American correspondents made their headquarters at a large Berlin hotel. A sketch of their activities is given by de Beaufort in his book, "Behind the German Veil."
Among the American correspondents in Berlin during the war great credit should be given to Carl W. Ackerman and Seymour B. Conger, correspondents of the United and Associated Presses respectively, who at all times and in spite of their surroundings and in the face of real difficulties preserved their Americanism unimpaired and refused to succumb to the alluring temptations held out to them. I do not mean to imply that the other correspondents were not loyal, but the pro-Germanism of many of them unfortunately gave the Imperial Foreign Office and the great general staff a wrong impression of Americans. It is the splendid patriotism under fire of Ackerman and Conger that deserves special mention.
I was credited by the Germans with having hoodwinked and jollied the Foreign Office and the Government into refraining for two years from using illegally their most effective weapon.
This, of course, is not so. I always told the Foreign Office the plain simple truth and the event showed that I correctly predicted the attitude of America.
Our American national game, poker, has given us abroad an unfair reputation. We are always supposed to be bluffing. A book was published in Germany about the President called, "President Bluff."
I only regret that those high in authority in Germany should have preferred to listen to pro-German correspondents who posed as amateur super-Ambassadors rather than to the authorised representatives of America. I left Germany with a clear conscience and the knowledge that I had done everything possible to keep the peace.
An Ambassador, of course, does not determine the policy of his own country. One of his principal duties, if not the principal one, is to keep his own country informed--to know beforehand what the country to which he is accredited will do, and I think that I managed to give the State Department advance information of the moves of the rulers of Germany.
I had the support of a loyal and devoted staff of competent secretaries and assistants, and both Secretaries Bryan and Lansing were most kind in the backing given by their very ably organised department.
I sent Secretary Lansing a confidential letter every week and, of course, received most valuable hints from him. Secretary Lansing was very successful in his tactful handling of the American Ambassadors abroad and in getting them to work together as cheerful members of the same team.
When I returned to America, after living for two and a half years in the centre of this world calamity, everything seemed petty and small. I was surprised that people could still seek little advantages, still be actuated by little jealousies and revenges. Freed from the round of daily work I felt for the first time the utter horror and uselessness of all the misery these Prussian military autocrats had brought upon the world; and what a reckoning there will be in Germany some day when the plain people realise the truth, when they learn what base motives actuated their rulers in condemning a whole generation of the earth to war and death!
Is it not a shame that the world should have been so disturbed; that peaceful men are compelled to lie out in the mud and filth in the depth of raw winter, shot at and stormed at and shelled, waiting for a chance to murder some other inoffensive fellow creature? Why must the people in old Poland die of hunger, not finding dogs enough to eat in the streets of Lemberg? The long lines of broken peasants in Serbia and in Roumania; the population of Belgium and Northern France torn from their homes to work as slaves for the Germans; the poor prisoners of war starving in their huts or working in factories and mines; the cries of the old and the children, wounded by bombs from Zeppelins; the wails of the mothers for their sons; the very rustling of the air as the souls of the ten million dead sweep to another world,--why must all these horrors come upon a fair green earth, where we believed that love and help and friendship, genius and science and commerce, religion and civilisation, once ruled?
It is because in the dark, cold Northern plains of Germany there exists an autocracy, deceiving a great people, poisoning their minds from one generation to another and preaching the virtue and necessity of war; and until that autocracy is either wiped out or made powerless, there can be no peace on earth.
The golden dream of conquest was almost accomplished. A little more advance, a few more wagon loads of ammunition, and there would have been no battle of the Marne, no Joffre, a modern Martel, to hammer back the invading hordes of barbarism.
I have always stated that Germany is possessed yet of immense military power; and, to win, the nations opposed to Germany must learn to think in a military way. The mere entrance, even of a great nation like our own, into the war, means nothing in a military way unless backed by military power.
And there must be no German peace. The oldrégime, left in control of Germany, of Bulgaria, of Turkey, would only seek a favourable moment to renew the war, to strive again for the mastery of the world.
Fortunately America bars the way,--America led by a fighting President who win allow no compromise with brutal autocracy.
THE END
fig 32THIS AND THE FOLLOWING FIVE PAGES ARE A FAC-SIMILE REPRODUCTION OF THE TELEGRAM IN THE KAISER'S OWN HANDWRITING WHICH HE GAVE AMBASSADOR GERARD TO CABLE TO PRESIDENT WILSON.
fig 33
fig 34
fig 35
fig 36
fig 37
fig 38FAC-SIMILE OF SECRETARY OF STATE ZIMMERMAN'S REQUEST TO AMBASSADOR GERARD TO CALL IN ORDER TO RECEIVE THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF RUTHLESS SUBMARINE WARFARE AGAINST THE ALLIES.
fig 39fig 40THE REMODELLED DRAFT OF THE TREATY OF 1799 BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND PRUSSIA, WHICH AMBASSADOR GERARD WAS ASKED TO SIGN WHEN LEAVING GERMANY AFTER DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS HAD BEEN SEVERED.
fig 41fig 42A FAC-SIMILE REPRODUCTION OF A MULTIGRAPH SET OF INSTRUCTIONS SENT OUT BY THE GERMAN PRESS BUREAU TO THE NEWSPAPERS FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENABLING THEM TO WRITE UP THE LATEST ZEPPELIN RAID ON LONDON. THE INSTRUCTIONS WARN THEM THAT THEIR ACCOUNTS MUST NOT READ LIKE A REPRINT, BUT MUST SEEM TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN INDEPENDENTLY.
fig 43A PETITION TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, CIRCULATED FOR SIGNATURES AMONG THE AMERICANS IN EUROPE, OSTENSIBLY TO PROTEST AGAINST THE AMERICAN MANUFACTURE OF MUNITIONS OF WAR.
fig 44FIRST PAGE OF A PAMPHLET FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES, IN WHICH WIDE PUBLICITY WAS GIVEN TO LISSAUER'S FAMOUS "HYMN OF HATE".
fig 45fig 46AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF TEUTONIC EFFICIENCY. MINUTE REGULATIONS IN REGARD TO PRESENTATION AT COURT.
fig 47A BERLIN EXTRA. GERMANY DISCLAIMS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR.
fig 30INVITATION TO THE FESTIVAL IN THE NEW PALACE AT POTSDAM, JUNE FIRST, 1914.
fig 31INVITATION TO SAIL ON S. M. J. "METEOR".
fig 27INVITATION TO DINE ON THE KAISER'S YACHT, "HOHENZOLLERN," AT KIEL.
fig 28INVITATION TO THE GARDEN PARTY AT KIEL OF PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA, WHICH WAS GIVEN UP BECAUSE OF THE NEWS OF THE MURDERS AT SARAJEVO.
End of My Four Years in Germany, by James W. Gerard