"What's Baron von Stumm got against you?" asked Second Secretary Harvey, smilingly, at the American Embassy, when I arrived, bag and baggage, at nine o'clock. "He says you're not an American." Stumm was the chief of the Anglo-American section of the German Foreign Office. He knew perfectly well that I am an American. He had entertained me at his own table in May, 1910, when he gave a luncheon-party in honor of the American newspaper correspondents stationed in Berlin and those traveling with Mr. Roosevelt on the occasion of the Colonel's visit to the Kaiser. Stumm had "nothing against me" in June, I explained to Harvey, because of his own sweet volition he distinguished me with a call at my hotel during Kiel Regatta. I could not imagine what had suddenly come over the scion of the humble Westphalian blacksmith's house, which was one of the first of thenouveau richeGerman industrial tribes to be ennobled. I could only think that, like the Berlin police,LegationsratHeilbron,Herr DirektorKretschmar and nearly all other Germans, Stumm had temporarily gone mad. If I was "not an American," it had taken the Imperial German Foreign Office thirteen years to make the discovery. Some day I am going to send Stumm a Christmas card. It will be embellished with a gilded birth-certificate attested by the clerk of the County of La Porte, Indiana.No one supplied me with the details of the final negotiations which were necessary to induce the German Government graciously to consent to permit me to leave Germany alive. I have since learned that my pass was not secured without some extremely forcible remonstrances and representations. Stumm had denounced me as a "scoundrel" and in other knightly terms. Why the German Foreign Office so ardently desired to prevent my departure, after having earlier in the same day declined to promise me immunity from physical harm, is a mystery which I trust it may some day elucidate. To fathom it is beyond my own feeble powers of divination, and in this narrative of farewell tribulations in the Fatherland, I have confined myself strictly to facts. I have resolutely not yielded to the temptation to surmise. But as the official Genesis of Armageddon is not likely to honor me with mention, I have presumed to set forth my own diminutive part in it with perhaps a tiring superfluity of detail. I have the more eagerly ventured to do so because grotesque versions of the "terms" on which I, an American citizen, if you please, "secured permission to leave Germany," have been, and still are, for all I know, in circulation in Berlin. They are believed--and that is the one saddening thought they inspire in me--by people who were once my friends, among them Americans who place bread-and-butter business necessities and social expediency in Germany above the elementary dictates of gratitude and personal loyalty, which are traits one encounters even in aDachshund. It is these insufferable lickers of German bootheels who "have heard" that I "gave my word of honor" to seal my lips forever "about Germany," to "go back to the United States at once" (perhaps as press-agent to Dernburg, who was also leaving Germany), to "renounce all connection with English journalism," and other pledges of equally imbecilic character. The only "broken pledge" which the rumor-mongers did not foist upon me was an outright agreement to join Germany's army of kept journalists. I should have been better off, financially no doubt, if I had enlisted in that immaculate service, which is one of the best paid in the world.My permit to leave Germany, Harvey said, would be issued during the night and be handed me next morning at the British Embassy. Meantime, evidently to make assurance doubly sure, Ambassador Gerard gave me in his own handwriting an attest that I was leaving the country with Sir Edward Goschen. He affixed to it the great seal of the Embassy, handed me the note with a merry "Good luck," I wrung his hand in a last grip of gratitude and good-by, and we parted company.[image]Ambassador Gerard's NoteMeantime I had opened negotiations with the Embassy porter to pass the night on a cot in his lodge, where Tower had bunked after our arrest, and arranged with him to call me at four-thirty, so that I could be at the British Embassy well before six o'clock. While I was chatting in the hallway, Mrs. Gerard came along. "Where are you going to sleep to-night?" she inquired, solicitously. I told her. She would not hear of my lodging plans in the porter's basement. There were half-a-dozen bedrooms in the Embassy, and I must use one of them. Then she hustled away, in the most motherly fashion, to prepare for me what turned out to be asuite-de-luxe. My last night in Germany was slept on "American soil." It was not the most restful night I have spent in my life, but it lingers as the sweetest memory I cherish among a myriad of recollections which crowded thick one upon another in that great wild week in Berlin. "And do you like your breakfast eggs boiled three or four minutes?" was the cheery "Good night" andAuf WiedersehenI had from "Molly" Gerard.At least one German, in addition to my secretary and governess, who were models of devotion to the last, took the trouble to show me a parting mark of esteem. He was a colleague, Paul R. Krause, of theLokal-Anzeigerstaff, a son-in-law of Field Marshal von der Goltz, and one of the best of fellows. Krause lived abroad so long--his life has been spent mostly in Turkey, South Africa and South America--that he will perhaps not mind my saying that he always struck me as effectually de-Germanized. At any rate, having heard of my plight, he came to the Embassy late at night to offer me not only fraternal sympathy, but physical assistance in the form of readiness to become my "body-guard," if I really considered myself in personal danger! He could hardly be made to believe that Heilbron had been "such an ass," when I told of my parting interview in the Foreign Office. Krause and I exchangedAuf Wiedersehenin the "American bar" of the Hotel Kaiserhof, round the corner from the Embassy, where I noticed Doctor Dernburg, August Stein, of theFrankfurter Zeitung, and Doctor Fuchs, of the Deutsche Bank, gathered dolefully round a beer-table, and amazed, no doubt, to find Krause in such doubtful company.I did not seek my downy couch in the Embassy until I had had a farewell promenade and visit with two very dear newspaper pals, Swing, of theChicago Daily News, and Feibelman, of theNew York TribuneandLondon Express. Feibelman was still in the throes of the anxiety from which I was about to be relieved, as the Foreign Office had also refused him credentials owing to his connection with an English journal. He sincerely envied my good fortune in being able to escape with the British Ambassador. I was glad to hear a week later that he too had eventually contrived, with the American Embassy's assistance, to reach Holland, where he has done excellent work for his paper during the war. Swing, Feibelman and I, arm-locked, walked the silent streets around and about the Embassy until long past midnight, speculating as to what the red-clotted future had in store for each of us, embittered at Fate for so ruthlessly disrupting friendships of affectionate intimacy, and wondering, when all was over, if it ever would be, whether Berlin or Kamchatka would be the scene of our next reunion....Something told me that even a twelfth-hour attempt might be made to hamper my get-away, so, as a "positively last farewell" favor I asked "Joe" Grew, my rescuer from the police, to escort me to the train. Though it meant his tumbling out of bed at the unromantic hour of five, his breezy "Sure, I will" set my mind completely at rest. He arrived at the appointed minute. The sight of the Stars and Stripes flapping at the front of his car was a reassuring little picture. They had meant much to me during the preceding forty-eight hours. At the British Embassy, which looked more like a baggage-room or express-office struck by lightning, with the floors littered indiscriminately with hastily-packed boxes of documents and records, trunks, suit-cases, golf-bags and batches of clothing hastily slung or strapped into or around traveling-rugs--and all the other indescribable impedimenta of a suddenly-retreating army or an evicted family--I found my German pass awaiting me. It had been delivered to Godfrey Thomas, one of Sir Edward Goschen's able young attachés, all of whom, like the Ambassador himself, had given so characteristic an exhibition of British imperturbability during the final hours of crisis. The pass described me as "the English newspaper correspondent, Wile." It is reproduced opposite this page. I treasure it with the same pride which probably inspires a reprieved man to cherish the document which cheats the hangman.[image]Facsimile of the PassThere was no guard of honor to bid Sir Edward Goschen and his staff Godspeed from the Wilhelmstrasse. No single German was so poor as to do them reverence except a couple of sleepy policemen and half-a-dozen blear-eyed, early-rising Berliners on their way to work. None of them had yet learned to sayGott strafe England, so the lonely cavalcade of luggage-laden taxis, which were hauling Great Britain's official representatives on the first stage of their journey out of the enemy's capital, proceeded on its way without molestation or demonstration.The very day the Kaiser's ambassador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, was accorded a departure from London amid honors customarily reserved for a ruling sovereign. Great Britain's ambassador to Germany was leaving like a thief in the night, the Imperial Government having requested him, when shaking the dust of Berlin from his miscreant feet, to slink to the railway station as inconspicuously as possible and long before the righteous metropolis waked. Otherwise, it was solicitously suggested,Kultur, giving vent to the holy venom which now filled the Teutonic soul, might feel constrained to stone the Ambassador afresh. Thus, I, too, chaperoned by Grew, sneaked out of Berlin.My old German teacher was right. She said there was no word for "gentleman" in the Kaiser's language. The fashion in which his people went to war with England proved it.CHAPTER XIISAFE CONDUCTLehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was noten fêtein honor of the departingEngländer. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thunderingGod Save the King, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England. It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.Our band of pilgrims, who were to be some forty or fifty in all, arrived in detachments, having, as Sir Edward Goschen himself officially described it, "been smuggled away from the Embassy in taxicabs by side streets." The Ambassador himself was one of the last to turn up. No Imperial emissary came to wish him a happy journey andAuf Wiedersehen, though the Foreign Secretary deputized young Count Wedel to say good-by in his name. The Kaiser's farewell greeting to Sir Edward was conveyed the day before, when the All-Highest sent an adjutant with majestic regrets for the sacking of the Embassy premises on the night the war broke out. Of markedly less apologetic tenor was the adjutant's message that William II, "now that Great Britain had taken sides with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo, must at once divest himself of the titles of British Field Marshal and British Admiral." The uniforms, orders and decorations conferred on him by Perfidious Albion had desecrated the exalted person of the supreme Hohenzollern for the last time. In the memorable dispatch in which he so dispassionately narrated his final hours in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen sufficiently indicated the true character of the Kaiser'sadieuby mentioning that "the message lost none of its acerbity by the manner of its delivery." As a Prussian officer was firing it at the official incarnation of Great Britain, it is not difficult to imagine the mien and tone of the proud functionary on whom had been conferred the historic distinction of breathing Hate in the face of the foe at that cataclysmic hour.I shall always hold it a privilege to have been in contact with Sir Edward Goschen during the days which preceded the war and in the hours of its beginning. He was throughout an object-lesson in imperturbability. In the midst of his holidays in England when the crisis arose, having left Kiel early in July with the British squadron, he returned hurriedly to his post in Berlin just before the match was applied to the powder-barrel. I recall distinctly the invincible state of his good humor when I visited him at the Embassy on July 31, only an hour or two before the Kaiser declared Germany to be in "a state of war.""Wile," he remarked, fastening upon me a gaze which very successfully simulated vexation, "what did you mean by libeling me in that dispatch of yours from Kiel on the Kaiser's visit to our flagship? You had the effrontery to suggest that I was lolling about the quarter-deck in a tweed suit. I would have you understand that my costume afloat is always the regulation navy-blue!"I pleaded color-blindness. I said that from our perch behind the thirteen-and-one-half-inch gun turret for'd, it looked to me as if His Excellency had actually worn tweed."Well, I didn't," he insisted, "and you caused me to be twitted not a little in London for my apparent ignorance of battleship etiquette."Sir Edward Goschen, unlike other British Ambassadors I knew in Berlin, was never at any moment of his career there under any delusions as to theleitmotifof German policy toward Great Britain. No Teutonic wool was ever pulled over his eyes. During the week of tension which ended with war, he bore himself with tact and firmness characteristic of the highest diplomatic traditions. Though never surrendering a position in the trying negotiations with the Kaiser's Government, the Ambassador did not cease, up to the hour when he asked for his passports, to labor for such peace as would be consistent with British interests. It is not customary in the British service, I believe, to send a diplomatic official back to a country with which England has meantime been at war, but Sir Edward Goschen could return to Berlin with his head high, enjoying not only, I am sure, the limitless confidence of his own Government, but the unalloyed respect of Germany, as well.Our party having been politely herded into the royal waiting-room of the station, a couple of silk-hatted and frock-coated young Foreign Office officials now buzzed busily about us, checking off our respective names and identities on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorizedEngländershould escape through the ring of steel drawn tight around Germany's frontiers. Our safe-conduct train had now pulled in. We found ourselves a somewhat indiscriminate collection of refugees. Besides Sir Edward Goschen, there was, of course, the full embassy family of secretaries, attachés, clerks, the wives of one or two of them, and one bonnie group of babes with their blue-and-white "nannies." Sir Horace Rumbold, the Counselor of the Embassy, who had conducted the initial negotiations with Germany, monocled and unruffled, was as calm as if he were starting off for a week-end in the country. Captain Henderson, the Naval Attaché, and a prince of sailormen, had no inkling of the undying discomfiture soon to be his, as an ingloriously interned captive in neutral Holland, for his first assignment from the Admiralty was to command a detachment of the ill-starred naval expedition to Antwerp. Colonel Russell, the Military Attaché, was quitting German soil with emotions a little different from those of the rest of us, for he had seen the light of day at Potsdam in 1874, while his late father, Lord Ampthill, was British Ambassador to Germany. It was only a few weeks previous that the colonel's own Berlin-born son had been christened "William" under the august Godfatherhood of the Kaiser, who sent the babe a golden cup emblazoned with the Hohenzollern arms. With us, too, were Messrs. Gurney, Rattigan, Monck, Thomas and Astell, Sir Edward Goschen's able staff of secretaries and young attachés, who had all "sat tight," in their British way, so splendidly during the preceding forty-eight hours. The official party also included the British Minister to Saxony, Mr. Grant-Duff, and Lady Grant-Duff, whose windows in Dresden had been broken, too, and Messrs. Charlton and Turner of the Berlin and Leipzig consulates, respectively.The journalist-refugees consisted of Mackenzie and Jelf ofThe Times, Tower and Nevinson ofThe Daily News, Long ofThe Westminster Gazette, Lawrence of Reuter's Agency, Byles ofThe Standard, Dudley Ward, of theManchester Guardianand his newly-wed German wife, and Muirhead, the "camera man" ofThe Daily Chronicle. Poor Jelf, who enlisted within a week after his arrival in England, was killed in action during the great offensive fighting in Artois, in September, 1915. Among the others whom Sir Edward Goschen had rescued from the maws of Hate was a little Australian woman, Mrs. Gunderson, trapped in Germany with her husband at the outbreak of war. They had journeyed around the world on their honeymoon to enable him to participate in an international chess match at Mannheim. He has been stalemated ever since at the British concentration camp at Ruhleben--Berlin. Then there was an estimable old English couple who had spent a night in jail on the charge of being "spies" prowling about the German countryside in their touring-car. They were not bemoaning the loss of their automobile in the presence of their own escape and that of their chauffeur. One of the luckiest of our traveling companions was Captain Deedes, a British army officer who was passing through Germany on his way home from service in Turkey, and just gained the precincts of the British Embassy before being nabbed by the police. We shuddered to think of the fate of Captain Holland of the British navy, also en route from Constantinople, who had not been so fortunate, and was now locked up at Spandau. I was the sole and lonely American member of the caravan.The Germans provided Sir Edward Goschen with a "corridor train" of first-class cars, including "saloon carriages," which are a combination of parlor and sleeping cars, for himself and his immediate entourage, and for Baron Beyens, the Belgian Minister to Berlin, and his staff, who, appropriately enough, were conducted to the frontier along with the British. Baron Beyens has contributed to the genesis of the war not the least noteworthy evidence of Germany's felonious designs on European liberties and peace. As has been revealed by a Belgian Grey Book, the Baron was able to report to his government as early as July 26 that "the German General Staff regarded war as inevitable and near, and expected success on account of Germany's superiority in heavy guns and the unpreparedness of Russia." Baron Beyens also described his final and dramatic conversation with the German Foreign Secretary, who "announced with pain" Germany's determination to violate Belgian neutrality, and asked to be allowed to occupy Liége. The request was refused, Herr von Jagow admitting to the Minister that no other answer was possible. The Belgians had another "answer" up their sleeve, though von Jagow knew it not. It was the shambles into which the flower of the German Guard plunged at Liége a week later.[image]Berlin newspaper refugees on S. S. St. Petersburg. From left to right, standing: Muirhead; Wile; Jelf; Lawrence; Nevinson; Captain Deedes; Dudley Ward. Seated, Mackenzie.Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, a dapper little gray-haired Prussian officer with a Kaiser mustache and a heel-clicking manner, presently approached Sir Edward Goschen, saluted, introduced himself as the military chaperon of the party, and invited us to troop into the train. An armed guard, a strapping infantryman with glistening bayonet affixed to his shouldered rifle, was already aboard. He turned out, as did the lieutenant-colonel himself, to be a very harmless warden. When theOberstleutnant, gloved and helmeted as if on dress parade, was not snoozing or reading during the journey, he merely hovered about, mother-like, to see that his charges were comfortable, as well as not up to mischief. In addition to the ordinary train-crew, we were shepherded by seven or eight plain-clothes Prussian detectives, whom even the ruse of regulation railway-caps could not disguise. You can tell a German "secret policeman," as he is idiomatically called, at least a mile off. He is the last word in palpability.Our destination, we learned, was the Hook of Holland, where either a Great Eastern steamer or a British cruiser would pick us up. We were to travel via Hanover-Osnabrück to Amsterdam and thence to the sea. Mackenzie, Jelf and I, having preempted a compartment, settled down at the windows for a last long look at Berlin as the train now tugged slowly out of the station, a few minutes past eight o'clock. Speaking for myself, I am quite sure that railway trucks never rattled with such sweet melody as those beneath us were producing, for with every chug they were bringing us nearer to liberty. I remember a distinct feeling of consciousness that I should not consider myself an utterly freed felon until German territory was actually no longer under my feet. It was an indescribably gratifying sensation, all sufficient for the moment, to realize that Berlin at least was fading into oblivion. Whether any of my British colleagues were throbbing with similar emotions, I never knew. It is un-English, I believe, to reveal emotions even if one is battling with them. Whatever thoughts were in their minds, I myself was obsessed with a distinct desire, at that moment, to blot Berlin from my mind for all eternity. Perhaps, as I thus soliloquized, I was giving way unconsciously to a passing spell of that unreasoning malice which infested hate-maddened Berlin. I suppose I ought to have shed briny tears, as we skirted Spandau and sped across the dreary plain of the Mark of Brandenburg, and familiar landmarks passed from view. Certainly in the long ago, I had firmly made up my mind that when my time to leave Germany came I should go away with genuine regret. Life in the Fatherland had meant much to me and mine. Although I never adopted it, like Lord Haldane, as my "spiritual home," a man can not spend thirteen years of middle life in the same community, however alien to its spirit and institutions, without forming deep-rooted attachments. But the circumstances which precipitated me out of Germany conspired, I fear, to quench old-time affection. So, ungrateful as it may appear, my handkerchief was not brought into play and my eyes were uncommonly dry as the sand-wastes of Brandenburg vanished from our vision....It was evident that we were in for a tedious journey and that our trek across Western Germany was to be agony long drawn out. Berlin to Hanover, the first leg of the trip, was one I had accomplished times innumerable under three hours, and even aBummelzughardly took longer. It was to take us nearly three times as long to-day. Mobilization was technically complete, but every railway track in the country, especially if it fed the great trunk-line to the west along which we were traveling, was still choked with troop trains. In consequence, though ours was a "special," we had to halt, back up, sidetrack and perform every other gyration of which a train is capable, whenever we came up with battalions en route toward one of the three frontiers on which German blood was now being spilled. At every station we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than "the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. As to London, which we used to reach twenty hours after leaving Berlin, it became painfully obvious that it would be nearer forty this trip.But there was much to see, and to think and talk about. As we were being held up everywhere along the line by seemingly the entire male population of the Empire in uniform, it was not surprising, for one thing, to find the fields on either side of us as denuded of men as if Adam had never lived. None but women was discoverable at work on this eve of harvest, excepting here and there an old man, while children, too, were being pressed into service. At bridges, culverts and crossings, instead of the customary railway guards, who used to stand at salute with a flag as a train whirled past, there were now soldiers with rifles. No restrictions were placed upon our reconnoitering the adjacent country as long as we were in motion; but Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, always heel-clicking and saluting beforehand, intimated toMein Herrenthat the curtains of their compartment-windows must be drawn as the train approached or halted at stations. There was no suspicion, he begged to assure us, that we might attempt to practise espionage about troop movements. On the contrary, the suggestion was a precaution recommended in our own interests. Unfortunately, quoth the apologetic colonel, it had not been feasible to conceal the identity of our train. Western Germany was bursting with patriotic frenzy, and it was just within the range of possibilities that their exuberance might beat itself into disagreeable "demonstrations." Therefore, discretion was obviously our cue.But what we could not see at Nauen, Rathenow, Stendal, Gardelegen, Obisfelde and Lehrte, we could hear, for all the inhabitants of every hamlet and town in Central Germany appeared to have orders from somewhere to assemble at their railway-stations and sing themselves red in the face for Kaiser and Empire. Manifestly the Supreme War Lord had not only called up his armed legions, but mobilized the country'sSingvereinebesides, and man, woman and child of them were now in the trenches with their throats bared to the foe. I suppose they were chantingDie Wacht am RheinandDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesin other parts of Germany, too, but I have often thought that the country's most vociferous and tireless choral artists were concentrated on that day on the strategic line of the British safe-conduct train's route. If the Great General Staff at Berlin, with that incomparable attention to detail which is one of its vaunted accomplishments, schemed to send us out of Germany convinced, by the evidence of our own ears, that the Kaiser's people were sallying forth to war like Wagnerian heroes with music and triumphant cheers on their lips, the plan succeeded. My own indelible recollection of that farewell ride across Germany, at any rate, is the memory of song. For many days and nights afterward,Die Wacht am RheinandDeutschland, Deutschland über Alles, would ring and ring through my head. At the time it all seemed beautifully spontaneous, for the Germans are a singing folk, who put soul into their anthems, but reflection makes me wonder if that continuous song-service which so mercilessly accompanied us from Berlin to the Netherlands was not a stage-managed extravaganza with a motive. The Germans are a thorough race, and in war they overlook no opportunity.It was only at times that the singing was anything else than merely monotonous--the periodical occasions when, if we halted longer than usual at a station, the singers would line up alongside the train so closely that they could fairly shout in our ears. Then there would be a note of ill-mannered defiance in their song. At Hanover we happened to be drawn up in the station at the very moment when the British Ambassador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there was a particularly vehement vocal endurance competition outside of the window at which they were sitting. But from my own table on the opposite side of the car I observed that Sir Edward Goschen was not visibly diverted from hisWiener-Schnitzel, for, while theDeutschland, Deutschland über Alleswas doing its worst, he remarked, cheerily, to his Belgian colleague: "Rather fine singing, isn't it?"Next to the songs which knew no ending the most conspicuous manifestation ofFuror Teutonicuswas the chalking of troop-trains with exuberant inscriptions symbolical of expected great German victories to come. "Special to St. Petersburg" was a prime favorite. "Excursion to Paris" was extremely popular. That, we know, is exactly what the War Party expected the campaign to be. "Through Train to Moscow" ran a particularly sanguine sentiment and "Death to the Blood-Czar," a more sanguinary one. Then there would be rude caricatures of Nicholas II or President Poincaré either at the end of a noose or of the boot of an equally rudely-cartooned Kaiser. And, of course, there were plenty of jests at Great Britain. "We'll soon be chewing roast-beef in London" was the way one artist epitomized his hopes. "Special Train to the Peddler-City"--a shaft at London, the home of the "shopkeeper nation" which "organized war against Germany" in order to "crush an unpleasant commercial rival." "Death to our enviers!" was the language in which another Anglophobe thought found expression. Beneath the British Ambassador's car-windows, I was told, some one had chalked a John Bull drooping ignominiously from the gallows, with "Race-Traitor" for an epitaph!The night was fitful for us all. Curled up on the seats of our compartments, such attempts at sleep as we ventured were effectually defeated byDeutschland, Deutschland über AllesandDie Wacht am Rhein. All through the night they were hurled at us. At every town, regardless of the hour, the choristers were on the job. We welcomed our arrival at Bentheim, the final station in Prussia, at seven next morning, not half so eagerly because it was the last of Germany as because it was the last ofDeutschland, Deutschland über AllesandDie Wacht am Rhein. For any sins we ever committed in the Fatherland, we felt we had been richly chastised. I understood now why General Sherman once crossed the Atlantic to escapeMarching through Georgia--only to be bombarded with it beneath his windows before breakfast by an Irish band in Queenstown before he had been in Europe twelve hours. I am morally certain that when old Tecumseh said that "War is hell," he was thinking aboutMarching through Georgia. That is whatDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesmade me think about Armageddon.None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar and our other German chaperons handed us over at Bentheim to a Dutch train crew awaiting our arrival there with a Dutch locomotive. The colonel clicked and bowed his farewell respects to Sir Edward Goschen and Baron Beyens, accepted their appreciations of his courtesy and helpfulness, saluted for the last time, and then formally transferred us to Queen Wilhelmina's tender mercies. The hour of our liberation was at hand. And for the first time in a week a score of Englishmen and at least one American thought out aloud their opinions about Germany and all her works. What some of us said about the Hohenzollerns has been put by Colonel Watterson in far more immortal diction than my poor pen could epitomize it.[image]Sir Edward Goschen, late British Ambassador in Berlin, boarding S. S. St. Petersburg, en route to London, August 7th, 1914.At Rozendaal, the first station in Holland, there was a wild scramble from the newspaper coach for the railway telegraph-office. All of us had reams of "copy" to release, after having been muzzled for five days. German money, we were distressed to observe, was already at a discount in the Netherlands, and those of us who did not hand in Dutch or British gold had to put our "stuff" on the wire after more fortunate colleagues had beaten us to it with legal tender. A couple of hours later found us at Amsterdam, where representatives of the British Legation at The Hague and the local Consulate-General were on hand to greet Sir Edward Goschen's party and furnish us with the first news of actual war operations which we had had. Fighting at sea had begun. England had drawn first blood. The German mine-layerKonigin Luise, within eighteen hours of the declaration of hostilities,i.e., on Wednesday, August 5, was overtaken by the British destroyerLanceand sunk in six minutes. There was reason to fear that a fleet of enemy mine-layers, masquerading as fishing-boats and in other pacific disguises, had been occupied for the better part of a week strewing mines through an area reaching from a point off Harwich--which we were soon to approach--along the east coast far up into Scottish waters. On the next day, Thursday, August 6, the British light cruiserAmphionstruck a mine planted by theKonigin Luiseand went down with heavy loss of life. Much more cheering was the news that gallant Belgium was giving the Germans a welcome they had not bargained for. The Meuse was being gloriously defended. Liége was menaced, but still untaken. Germans had been mown down by the regiment--if reports could be believed--and we devoured them eagerly. No news is ever so welcome as that which one longs to hear--even before it is confirmed.The Hook was ready for us, we were told. The Great Eastern steamerSt. Petersburgwas there awaiting our arrival, having the night before landed Prince Lichnowsky and the other members of the German Embassy in London. The Kaiser's emissary had passed to the ship through a British guard of honor, while shore batteries fired an ambassador's salute. How like Sir Edward Goschen's slinking departure from Berlin, we thought! Shortly after two o'clock theSt. Petersburglifted anchor and amid typical North Sea weather, raw, rainy and misty, got under way. Few thought of German submarines at that time, but the Berlin Government, we pondered, had not guaranteed Sir Edward Goschen "safe conduct" through an indiscriminately sown field of floating mines. Quite obviously, we had now to pass through a zone bristling with uncertainty, to put it mildly. But we had not steamed far into the open sea before the sight of a British torpedo-boat flotilla on patrol convinced us that we were in a well-shepherded course. Then we had our first ocular demonstration of Jellicoe's unremitting vigilance, for the crescent of destroyers far forward now began rapidly to close in upon us. Our identity was apparently not known to them, and they were taking no chances. "They sent a shot across our bow yesterday, with the Germans on board," explained the skipper of theSt. Petersburgto Captain Henderson, the Naval Attaché, who was with him on the bridge. Captain Henderson was not disturbed by the possibility of our getting an innocuous three-pounder in our wireless rigging or some other harmless token of the destroyers' solicitude, but hewasconcerned lest so innocent a craft should cause British destroyer captains to burn up valuable oil fuel needlessly at such an hour. So the next I saw of Henderson he was wig-wagging mysterious messages with signal-flags from the bridge of theSt. Petersburg, which told the destroyers, I suppose, that we weren't in the slightest respect worthy of their attention or shell. They wig-wagged something back which must have pleased Henderson, for presently he clambered down smilingly from the upper regions, and said: "That'sall right!"Harwich hove into view at what should have been sundown. By six o'clock we were at the pier, boarded by the naval authorities of the port and the customs-men. Sir Edward Goschen's party, after the Ambassador himself had vouched for the identity of each and every one of us, was disembarked without formalities, and at six-forty-five P.M. of Friday, August 7, we found ourselves treading British soil. There were policemen, soldiers, reporters and photographers on the dock, but no formal welcoming delegation for the Ambassador. Somebody whispered to him that a special train would convey him and his refugees to London, and to it he took his way as undemonstratively as if he were a Cook's tourist back from a "tripper's" jaunt to the Continent. I remarked to Tower that I was afraid Americans would have made a real fuss over Goschen if he wereourAmbassador home from the enemy's country; whereuponThe Daily Newsman ejaculated something which was to ring in my ears for a year or more, whenever I presumed to comment on that strange phenomenon with which it is now my task to deal--England and the English in war-time: "Wile, you Americans can not understand the English character." Tower was right.An American is general manager of the Great Eastern Railway. I strongly suspect that he must have had an alien hand in even the semblance of a "demonstration" of greeting which Sir Edward Goschen encountered when our train pulled into Liverpool Street Station a little after eleven o'clock. I did not wait to watch it, nor even to claim my baggage, for there was a hungry first edition waiting for my "story" atThe Daily Mailoffice, and to Carmelite House I flew in the first taxi into which I could leap. By midnight Beattie, the night editor, was tearing "copy" from my hands as fast as an Underwood could reel it off, and it was rapidly approaching breakfast-time when I called it a night's work and went to bed--in England at last.CHAPTER XIIICOMPLACENCY RULES THE WAVESMore than once during the last phase of our exciting journey to England, across the mine-strewn waters between the Hook and Harwich, I reflected that I seemed doomed to take up my residence on British soil in war-time. It was in the spring of 1900, in the anxious days between Ladysmith and Mafeking, when the tide of victory was still running in favor of the Boers, that I first arrived in London, and my lot was cast there for the succeeding year and a half of the South African struggle. I felt certain that the feverish interest with which even the sluggish British temperament had followed every detail of a campaign ten thousand miles away, and which engrossed only a fraction of the Empire's strength, would pale into tepid insignificance compared to the concern which would be generated by a tremendous European war only a channel-crossing distant. But I had time for only one breakfast and one morning's papers before I realized that John Bull had donned, even for Armageddon, the garment in which his bosom swells the proudest--the armor of invincible inexcitability.Actually the only wrought-up people in the British Isles during the first week of the war appeared to be the frantic American tourist refugees, who, of course, heavily outnumbered their brothers and sisters in wretchedness whom I had left behind in Germany. If it had not been for the frantic transatlantic sob and worry fraternity storming the steamship and express companies' offices in Cockspur Street and the Haymarket on the morning of Saturday, August 8, when I went out to look for the war in London, no one could possibly have made me believe that such a thing existed. Such portions of the community as had not started for the links, the ocean, the river or the country "as usual" were demeaning themselves as self-respecting, imperturbable Britons customarily do on the edge of a "week-end." The seaside holiday season was at its zenith. The immortal "Twelfth," when grouse-shooting begins, was approaching. Everybody who was anybody was "out of town," and stayed there. It was only those fussy, fretting Americans who insisted upon losing their equilibrium and converting the most placid metropolis in the universe into a bedlam of unseemly agitation and alarm. It was "extraordinary," Englishmen said, how they resolutely declined to take a lesson from the composite stolidity of Britain, preferring to give their emotions unrestrained rein and to keep the cables hot in imperious demands for ships, gold and other panaceas for the scared and stranded. Which reminds me to say that traditional British hospitality to the stranger within the gate was never showered more graciously on American friends than in that trying hour.The British had worried a whole week about the war already. That was a departure and a concession of no mean magnitude, for it is their boast and pride that theynever"worry." Having, however, yielded to such un-British instincts in the earliest hours of the crisis, they pulled themselves together and swore a solemn resolve, come what may, not soon again to succumb to indecorous habits which the world associated exclusively with the explosive French or the irresponsibly impulsive "Yankees." I felt instinctively that an effectual rebuke was being administered to me personally by the writer of the following newspaper review of London after three days of war:"A new metal has come into the London crowd out of the crucible of these last few days. The froth and fume of flag-wagging have evaporated; so, too, have lifted bone-quaking mists of dread and suspense. Exultation and depression are alike unhealthy. It is good that we are now free from them."The faces in the street are the barometers of the souls that men hide. It does one's heart good to walk London and to behold that very notable rise--apparent to every one and swift in its example--of the mercury of the people. The great war took all our comprehensions unawares. Although it has boded for years, it walked at last like an unbelievable spectre into a warm and lighted room. What wonder that we were shaken? What wonder at a creeping ague of the spirit in front of the unknown?"The dizziness has gone. The trial before us, black as it is, is not so black as our anticipation of it. We have already surprised ourselves no less than we have confounded our enemies by our rally and our readiness. The financial situation is saved, the banks re-open, the food supplies are safeguarded, and prices controlled."A tremendous accession of calmness and reliance has come to the nation by the appointment of Lord Kitchener to the War Office. The news that the Army is in his hands, a rock of a man, has swept through London like a vivifying breeze."London is swinging back to as much of its normal life as possible. She has found herself. She is bravely being the usual London--the great city serene."
"What's Baron von Stumm got against you?" asked Second Secretary Harvey, smilingly, at the American Embassy, when I arrived, bag and baggage, at nine o'clock. "He says you're not an American." Stumm was the chief of the Anglo-American section of the German Foreign Office. He knew perfectly well that I am an American. He had entertained me at his own table in May, 1910, when he gave a luncheon-party in honor of the American newspaper correspondents stationed in Berlin and those traveling with Mr. Roosevelt on the occasion of the Colonel's visit to the Kaiser. Stumm had "nothing against me" in June, I explained to Harvey, because of his own sweet volition he distinguished me with a call at my hotel during Kiel Regatta. I could not imagine what had suddenly come over the scion of the humble Westphalian blacksmith's house, which was one of the first of thenouveau richeGerman industrial tribes to be ennobled. I could only think that, like the Berlin police,LegationsratHeilbron,Herr DirektorKretschmar and nearly all other Germans, Stumm had temporarily gone mad. If I was "not an American," it had taken the Imperial German Foreign Office thirteen years to make the discovery. Some day I am going to send Stumm a Christmas card. It will be embellished with a gilded birth-certificate attested by the clerk of the County of La Porte, Indiana.
No one supplied me with the details of the final negotiations which were necessary to induce the German Government graciously to consent to permit me to leave Germany alive. I have since learned that my pass was not secured without some extremely forcible remonstrances and representations. Stumm had denounced me as a "scoundrel" and in other knightly terms. Why the German Foreign Office so ardently desired to prevent my departure, after having earlier in the same day declined to promise me immunity from physical harm, is a mystery which I trust it may some day elucidate. To fathom it is beyond my own feeble powers of divination, and in this narrative of farewell tribulations in the Fatherland, I have confined myself strictly to facts. I have resolutely not yielded to the temptation to surmise. But as the official Genesis of Armageddon is not likely to honor me with mention, I have presumed to set forth my own diminutive part in it with perhaps a tiring superfluity of detail. I have the more eagerly ventured to do so because grotesque versions of the "terms" on which I, an American citizen, if you please, "secured permission to leave Germany," have been, and still are, for all I know, in circulation in Berlin. They are believed--and that is the one saddening thought they inspire in me--by people who were once my friends, among them Americans who place bread-and-butter business necessities and social expediency in Germany above the elementary dictates of gratitude and personal loyalty, which are traits one encounters even in aDachshund. It is these insufferable lickers of German bootheels who "have heard" that I "gave my word of honor" to seal my lips forever "about Germany," to "go back to the United States at once" (perhaps as press-agent to Dernburg, who was also leaving Germany), to "renounce all connection with English journalism," and other pledges of equally imbecilic character. The only "broken pledge" which the rumor-mongers did not foist upon me was an outright agreement to join Germany's army of kept journalists. I should have been better off, financially no doubt, if I had enlisted in that immaculate service, which is one of the best paid in the world.
My permit to leave Germany, Harvey said, would be issued during the night and be handed me next morning at the British Embassy. Meantime, evidently to make assurance doubly sure, Ambassador Gerard gave me in his own handwriting an attest that I was leaving the country with Sir Edward Goschen. He affixed to it the great seal of the Embassy, handed me the note with a merry "Good luck," I wrung his hand in a last grip of gratitude and good-by, and we parted company.
[image]Ambassador Gerard's Note
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Ambassador Gerard's Note
Meantime I had opened negotiations with the Embassy porter to pass the night on a cot in his lodge, where Tower had bunked after our arrest, and arranged with him to call me at four-thirty, so that I could be at the British Embassy well before six o'clock. While I was chatting in the hallway, Mrs. Gerard came along. "Where are you going to sleep to-night?" she inquired, solicitously. I told her. She would not hear of my lodging plans in the porter's basement. There were half-a-dozen bedrooms in the Embassy, and I must use one of them. Then she hustled away, in the most motherly fashion, to prepare for me what turned out to be asuite-de-luxe. My last night in Germany was slept on "American soil." It was not the most restful night I have spent in my life, but it lingers as the sweetest memory I cherish among a myriad of recollections which crowded thick one upon another in that great wild week in Berlin. "And do you like your breakfast eggs boiled three or four minutes?" was the cheery "Good night" andAuf WiedersehenI had from "Molly" Gerard.
At least one German, in addition to my secretary and governess, who were models of devotion to the last, took the trouble to show me a parting mark of esteem. He was a colleague, Paul R. Krause, of theLokal-Anzeigerstaff, a son-in-law of Field Marshal von der Goltz, and one of the best of fellows. Krause lived abroad so long--his life has been spent mostly in Turkey, South Africa and South America--that he will perhaps not mind my saying that he always struck me as effectually de-Germanized. At any rate, having heard of my plight, he came to the Embassy late at night to offer me not only fraternal sympathy, but physical assistance in the form of readiness to become my "body-guard," if I really considered myself in personal danger! He could hardly be made to believe that Heilbron had been "such an ass," when I told of my parting interview in the Foreign Office. Krause and I exchangedAuf Wiedersehenin the "American bar" of the Hotel Kaiserhof, round the corner from the Embassy, where I noticed Doctor Dernburg, August Stein, of theFrankfurter Zeitung, and Doctor Fuchs, of the Deutsche Bank, gathered dolefully round a beer-table, and amazed, no doubt, to find Krause in such doubtful company.
I did not seek my downy couch in the Embassy until I had had a farewell promenade and visit with two very dear newspaper pals, Swing, of theChicago Daily News, and Feibelman, of theNew York TribuneandLondon Express. Feibelman was still in the throes of the anxiety from which I was about to be relieved, as the Foreign Office had also refused him credentials owing to his connection with an English journal. He sincerely envied my good fortune in being able to escape with the British Ambassador. I was glad to hear a week later that he too had eventually contrived, with the American Embassy's assistance, to reach Holland, where he has done excellent work for his paper during the war. Swing, Feibelman and I, arm-locked, walked the silent streets around and about the Embassy until long past midnight, speculating as to what the red-clotted future had in store for each of us, embittered at Fate for so ruthlessly disrupting friendships of affectionate intimacy, and wondering, when all was over, if it ever would be, whether Berlin or Kamchatka would be the scene of our next reunion....
Something told me that even a twelfth-hour attempt might be made to hamper my get-away, so, as a "positively last farewell" favor I asked "Joe" Grew, my rescuer from the police, to escort me to the train. Though it meant his tumbling out of bed at the unromantic hour of five, his breezy "Sure, I will" set my mind completely at rest. He arrived at the appointed minute. The sight of the Stars and Stripes flapping at the front of his car was a reassuring little picture. They had meant much to me during the preceding forty-eight hours. At the British Embassy, which looked more like a baggage-room or express-office struck by lightning, with the floors littered indiscriminately with hastily-packed boxes of documents and records, trunks, suit-cases, golf-bags and batches of clothing hastily slung or strapped into or around traveling-rugs--and all the other indescribable impedimenta of a suddenly-retreating army or an evicted family--I found my German pass awaiting me. It had been delivered to Godfrey Thomas, one of Sir Edward Goschen's able young attachés, all of whom, like the Ambassador himself, had given so characteristic an exhibition of British imperturbability during the final hours of crisis. The pass described me as "the English newspaper correspondent, Wile." It is reproduced opposite this page. I treasure it with the same pride which probably inspires a reprieved man to cherish the document which cheats the hangman.
[image]Facsimile of the Pass
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Facsimile of the Pass
There was no guard of honor to bid Sir Edward Goschen and his staff Godspeed from the Wilhelmstrasse. No single German was so poor as to do them reverence except a couple of sleepy policemen and half-a-dozen blear-eyed, early-rising Berliners on their way to work. None of them had yet learned to sayGott strafe England, so the lonely cavalcade of luggage-laden taxis, which were hauling Great Britain's official representatives on the first stage of their journey out of the enemy's capital, proceeded on its way without molestation or demonstration.
The very day the Kaiser's ambassador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, was accorded a departure from London amid honors customarily reserved for a ruling sovereign. Great Britain's ambassador to Germany was leaving like a thief in the night, the Imperial Government having requested him, when shaking the dust of Berlin from his miscreant feet, to slink to the railway station as inconspicuously as possible and long before the righteous metropolis waked. Otherwise, it was solicitously suggested,Kultur, giving vent to the holy venom which now filled the Teutonic soul, might feel constrained to stone the Ambassador afresh. Thus, I, too, chaperoned by Grew, sneaked out of Berlin.
My old German teacher was right. She said there was no word for "gentleman" in the Kaiser's language. The fashion in which his people went to war with England proved it.
CHAPTER XII
SAFE CONDUCT
Lehrter Bahnhof, the gateway through which so many American tourists have passed out of Berlin en route to Hamburg or Bremen steamers, was noten fêtein honor of the departingEngländer. My memory traveled back irresistibly to the last time the British Embassy in force was assembled there--to greet King George and Queen Mary when they arrived to visit the German Court in May, 1913. The rafters rang on that occasion with the blare of a Prussian Guards band thunderingGod Save the King, cousins George and William embraced fondly and kissed, and the station was swathed in the entwined colors of Germany and England. It was a different and forbidding aspect which the old brick and steel barn of a train-shed presented this muggy August morning. At every entrance sentries in gray and policemen with Brownings at the belt stood guard, for railways and stations were now as integral a part of the war-machine as fortresses and guns. Inside, infantrymen in gray from head to foot--all Germany had now grown gray--carrying rifles with fixed bayonets patrolled the platforms, searching each Englishman, as he came along, with glances mingling watchfulness and contempt.
Our band of pilgrims, who were to be some forty or fifty in all, arrived in detachments, having, as Sir Edward Goschen himself officially described it, "been smuggled away from the Embassy in taxicabs by side streets." The Ambassador himself was one of the last to turn up. No Imperial emissary came to wish him a happy journey andAuf Wiedersehen, though the Foreign Secretary deputized young Count Wedel to say good-by in his name. The Kaiser's farewell greeting to Sir Edward was conveyed the day before, when the All-Highest sent an adjutant with majestic regrets for the sacking of the Embassy premises on the night the war broke out. Of markedly less apologetic tenor was the adjutant's message that William II, "now that Great Britain had taken sides with other nations against her old allies of Waterloo, must at once divest himself of the titles of British Field Marshal and British Admiral." The uniforms, orders and decorations conferred on him by Perfidious Albion had desecrated the exalted person of the supreme Hohenzollern for the last time. In the memorable dispatch in which he so dispassionately narrated his final hours in Berlin, Sir Edward Goschen sufficiently indicated the true character of the Kaiser'sadieuby mentioning that "the message lost none of its acerbity by the manner of its delivery." As a Prussian officer was firing it at the official incarnation of Great Britain, it is not difficult to imagine the mien and tone of the proud functionary on whom had been conferred the historic distinction of breathing Hate in the face of the foe at that cataclysmic hour.
I shall always hold it a privilege to have been in contact with Sir Edward Goschen during the days which preceded the war and in the hours of its beginning. He was throughout an object-lesson in imperturbability. In the midst of his holidays in England when the crisis arose, having left Kiel early in July with the British squadron, he returned hurriedly to his post in Berlin just before the match was applied to the powder-barrel. I recall distinctly the invincible state of his good humor when I visited him at the Embassy on July 31, only an hour or two before the Kaiser declared Germany to be in "a state of war."
"Wile," he remarked, fastening upon me a gaze which very successfully simulated vexation, "what did you mean by libeling me in that dispatch of yours from Kiel on the Kaiser's visit to our flagship? You had the effrontery to suggest that I was lolling about the quarter-deck in a tweed suit. I would have you understand that my costume afloat is always the regulation navy-blue!"
I pleaded color-blindness. I said that from our perch behind the thirteen-and-one-half-inch gun turret for'd, it looked to me as if His Excellency had actually worn tweed.
"Well, I didn't," he insisted, "and you caused me to be twitted not a little in London for my apparent ignorance of battleship etiquette."
Sir Edward Goschen, unlike other British Ambassadors I knew in Berlin, was never at any moment of his career there under any delusions as to theleitmotifof German policy toward Great Britain. No Teutonic wool was ever pulled over his eyes. During the week of tension which ended with war, he bore himself with tact and firmness characteristic of the highest diplomatic traditions. Though never surrendering a position in the trying negotiations with the Kaiser's Government, the Ambassador did not cease, up to the hour when he asked for his passports, to labor for such peace as would be consistent with British interests. It is not customary in the British service, I believe, to send a diplomatic official back to a country with which England has meantime been at war, but Sir Edward Goschen could return to Berlin with his head high, enjoying not only, I am sure, the limitless confidence of his own Government, but the unalloyed respect of Germany, as well.
Our party having been politely herded into the royal waiting-room of the station, a couple of silk-hatted and frock-coated young Foreign Office officials now buzzed busily about us, checking off our respective names and identities on their duplicate lists, lest no unauthorizedEngländershould escape through the ring of steel drawn tight around Germany's frontiers. Our safe-conduct train had now pulled in. We found ourselves a somewhat indiscriminate collection of refugees. Besides Sir Edward Goschen, there was, of course, the full embassy family of secretaries, attachés, clerks, the wives of one or two of them, and one bonnie group of babes with their blue-and-white "nannies." Sir Horace Rumbold, the Counselor of the Embassy, who had conducted the initial negotiations with Germany, monocled and unruffled, was as calm as if he were starting off for a week-end in the country. Captain Henderson, the Naval Attaché, and a prince of sailormen, had no inkling of the undying discomfiture soon to be his, as an ingloriously interned captive in neutral Holland, for his first assignment from the Admiralty was to command a detachment of the ill-starred naval expedition to Antwerp. Colonel Russell, the Military Attaché, was quitting German soil with emotions a little different from those of the rest of us, for he had seen the light of day at Potsdam in 1874, while his late father, Lord Ampthill, was British Ambassador to Germany. It was only a few weeks previous that the colonel's own Berlin-born son had been christened "William" under the august Godfatherhood of the Kaiser, who sent the babe a golden cup emblazoned with the Hohenzollern arms. With us, too, were Messrs. Gurney, Rattigan, Monck, Thomas and Astell, Sir Edward Goschen's able staff of secretaries and young attachés, who had all "sat tight," in their British way, so splendidly during the preceding forty-eight hours. The official party also included the British Minister to Saxony, Mr. Grant-Duff, and Lady Grant-Duff, whose windows in Dresden had been broken, too, and Messrs. Charlton and Turner of the Berlin and Leipzig consulates, respectively.
The journalist-refugees consisted of Mackenzie and Jelf ofThe Times, Tower and Nevinson ofThe Daily News, Long ofThe Westminster Gazette, Lawrence of Reuter's Agency, Byles ofThe Standard, Dudley Ward, of theManchester Guardianand his newly-wed German wife, and Muirhead, the "camera man" ofThe Daily Chronicle. Poor Jelf, who enlisted within a week after his arrival in England, was killed in action during the great offensive fighting in Artois, in September, 1915. Among the others whom Sir Edward Goschen had rescued from the maws of Hate was a little Australian woman, Mrs. Gunderson, trapped in Germany with her husband at the outbreak of war. They had journeyed around the world on their honeymoon to enable him to participate in an international chess match at Mannheim. He has been stalemated ever since at the British concentration camp at Ruhleben--Berlin. Then there was an estimable old English couple who had spent a night in jail on the charge of being "spies" prowling about the German countryside in their touring-car. They were not bemoaning the loss of their automobile in the presence of their own escape and that of their chauffeur. One of the luckiest of our traveling companions was Captain Deedes, a British army officer who was passing through Germany on his way home from service in Turkey, and just gained the precincts of the British Embassy before being nabbed by the police. We shuddered to think of the fate of Captain Holland of the British navy, also en route from Constantinople, who had not been so fortunate, and was now locked up at Spandau. I was the sole and lonely American member of the caravan.
The Germans provided Sir Edward Goschen with a "corridor train" of first-class cars, including "saloon carriages," which are a combination of parlor and sleeping cars, for himself and his immediate entourage, and for Baron Beyens, the Belgian Minister to Berlin, and his staff, who, appropriately enough, were conducted to the frontier along with the British. Baron Beyens has contributed to the genesis of the war not the least noteworthy evidence of Germany's felonious designs on European liberties and peace. As has been revealed by a Belgian Grey Book, the Baron was able to report to his government as early as July 26 that "the German General Staff regarded war as inevitable and near, and expected success on account of Germany's superiority in heavy guns and the unpreparedness of Russia." Baron Beyens also described his final and dramatic conversation with the German Foreign Secretary, who "announced with pain" Germany's determination to violate Belgian neutrality, and asked to be allowed to occupy Liége. The request was refused, Herr von Jagow admitting to the Minister that no other answer was possible. The Belgians had another "answer" up their sleeve, though von Jagow knew it not. It was the shambles into which the flower of the German Guard plunged at Liége a week later.
[image]Berlin newspaper refugees on S. S. St. Petersburg. From left to right, standing: Muirhead; Wile; Jelf; Lawrence; Nevinson; Captain Deedes; Dudley Ward. Seated, Mackenzie.
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Berlin newspaper refugees on S. S. St. Petersburg. From left to right, standing: Muirhead; Wile; Jelf; Lawrence; Nevinson; Captain Deedes; Dudley Ward. Seated, Mackenzie.
Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, a dapper little gray-haired Prussian officer with a Kaiser mustache and a heel-clicking manner, presently approached Sir Edward Goschen, saluted, introduced himself as the military chaperon of the party, and invited us to troop into the train. An armed guard, a strapping infantryman with glistening bayonet affixed to his shouldered rifle, was already aboard. He turned out, as did the lieutenant-colonel himself, to be a very harmless warden. When theOberstleutnant, gloved and helmeted as if on dress parade, was not snoozing or reading during the journey, he merely hovered about, mother-like, to see that his charges were comfortable, as well as not up to mischief. In addition to the ordinary train-crew, we were shepherded by seven or eight plain-clothes Prussian detectives, whom even the ruse of regulation railway-caps could not disguise. You can tell a German "secret policeman," as he is idiomatically called, at least a mile off. He is the last word in palpability.
Our destination, we learned, was the Hook of Holland, where either a Great Eastern steamer or a British cruiser would pick us up. We were to travel via Hanover-Osnabrück to Amsterdam and thence to the sea. Mackenzie, Jelf and I, having preempted a compartment, settled down at the windows for a last long look at Berlin as the train now tugged slowly out of the station, a few minutes past eight o'clock. Speaking for myself, I am quite sure that railway trucks never rattled with such sweet melody as those beneath us were producing, for with every chug they were bringing us nearer to liberty. I remember a distinct feeling of consciousness that I should not consider myself an utterly freed felon until German territory was actually no longer under my feet. It was an indescribably gratifying sensation, all sufficient for the moment, to realize that Berlin at least was fading into oblivion. Whether any of my British colleagues were throbbing with similar emotions, I never knew. It is un-English, I believe, to reveal emotions even if one is battling with them. Whatever thoughts were in their minds, I myself was obsessed with a distinct desire, at that moment, to blot Berlin from my mind for all eternity. Perhaps, as I thus soliloquized, I was giving way unconsciously to a passing spell of that unreasoning malice which infested hate-maddened Berlin. I suppose I ought to have shed briny tears, as we skirted Spandau and sped across the dreary plain of the Mark of Brandenburg, and familiar landmarks passed from view. Certainly in the long ago, I had firmly made up my mind that when my time to leave Germany came I should go away with genuine regret. Life in the Fatherland had meant much to me and mine. Although I never adopted it, like Lord Haldane, as my "spiritual home," a man can not spend thirteen years of middle life in the same community, however alien to its spirit and institutions, without forming deep-rooted attachments. But the circumstances which precipitated me out of Germany conspired, I fear, to quench old-time affection. So, ungrateful as it may appear, my handkerchief was not brought into play and my eyes were uncommonly dry as the sand-wastes of Brandenburg vanished from our vision....
It was evident that we were in for a tedious journey and that our trek across Western Germany was to be agony long drawn out. Berlin to Hanover, the first leg of the trip, was one I had accomplished times innumerable under three hours, and even aBummelzughardly took longer. It was to take us nearly three times as long to-day. Mobilization was technically complete, but every railway track in the country, especially if it fed the great trunk-line to the west along which we were traveling, was still choked with troop trains. In consequence, though ours was a "special," we had to halt, back up, sidetrack and perform every other gyration of which a train is capable, whenever we came up with battalions en route toward one of the three frontiers on which German blood was now being spilled. At every station we encountered trainloads of men in gray, singing, cheering and laughing as if bound for a picnic instead of slaughter. It was always they who had the right of way, for it was soon borne in upon us that the meanest detachment of reservists bulked larger in Germany's eye just then than "the whole bally British diplomatic service put together," as Jelf irreverently expressed it. Never at any time were we doing anything dizzier than twenty miles an hour, and we figured that if we reached Hanover by dinner-time, we should be fortunate. As to London, which we used to reach twenty hours after leaving Berlin, it became painfully obvious that it would be nearer forty this trip.
But there was much to see, and to think and talk about. As we were being held up everywhere along the line by seemingly the entire male population of the Empire in uniform, it was not surprising, for one thing, to find the fields on either side of us as denuded of men as if Adam had never lived. None but women was discoverable at work on this eve of harvest, excepting here and there an old man, while children, too, were being pressed into service. At bridges, culverts and crossings, instead of the customary railway guards, who used to stand at salute with a flag as a train whirled past, there were now soldiers with rifles. No restrictions were placed upon our reconnoitering the adjacent country as long as we were in motion; but Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar, always heel-clicking and saluting beforehand, intimated toMein Herrenthat the curtains of their compartment-windows must be drawn as the train approached or halted at stations. There was no suspicion, he begged to assure us, that we might attempt to practise espionage about troop movements. On the contrary, the suggestion was a precaution recommended in our own interests. Unfortunately, quoth the apologetic colonel, it had not been feasible to conceal the identity of our train. Western Germany was bursting with patriotic frenzy, and it was just within the range of possibilities that their exuberance might beat itself into disagreeable "demonstrations." Therefore, discretion was obviously our cue.
But what we could not see at Nauen, Rathenow, Stendal, Gardelegen, Obisfelde and Lehrte, we could hear, for all the inhabitants of every hamlet and town in Central Germany appeared to have orders from somewhere to assemble at their railway-stations and sing themselves red in the face for Kaiser and Empire. Manifestly the Supreme War Lord had not only called up his armed legions, but mobilized the country'sSingvereinebesides, and man, woman and child of them were now in the trenches with their throats bared to the foe. I suppose they were chantingDie Wacht am RheinandDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesin other parts of Germany, too, but I have often thought that the country's most vociferous and tireless choral artists were concentrated on that day on the strategic line of the British safe-conduct train's route. If the Great General Staff at Berlin, with that incomparable attention to detail which is one of its vaunted accomplishments, schemed to send us out of Germany convinced, by the evidence of our own ears, that the Kaiser's people were sallying forth to war like Wagnerian heroes with music and triumphant cheers on their lips, the plan succeeded. My own indelible recollection of that farewell ride across Germany, at any rate, is the memory of song. For many days and nights afterward,Die Wacht am RheinandDeutschland, Deutschland über Alles, would ring and ring through my head. At the time it all seemed beautifully spontaneous, for the Germans are a singing folk, who put soul into their anthems, but reflection makes me wonder if that continuous song-service which so mercilessly accompanied us from Berlin to the Netherlands was not a stage-managed extravaganza with a motive. The Germans are a thorough race, and in war they overlook no opportunity.
It was only at times that the singing was anything else than merely monotonous--the periodical occasions when, if we halted longer than usual at a station, the singers would line up alongside the train so closely that they could fairly shout in our ears. Then there would be a note of ill-mannered defiance in their song. At Hanover we happened to be drawn up in the station at the very moment when the British Ambassador and the Belgian Minister were in the dining-car, and there was a particularly vehement vocal endurance competition outside of the window at which they were sitting. But from my own table on the opposite side of the car I observed that Sir Edward Goschen was not visibly diverted from hisWiener-Schnitzel, for, while theDeutschland, Deutschland über Alleswas doing its worst, he remarked, cheerily, to his Belgian colleague: "Rather fine singing, isn't it?"
Next to the songs which knew no ending the most conspicuous manifestation ofFuror Teutonicuswas the chalking of troop-trains with exuberant inscriptions symbolical of expected great German victories to come. "Special to St. Petersburg" was a prime favorite. "Excursion to Paris" was extremely popular. That, we know, is exactly what the War Party expected the campaign to be. "Through Train to Moscow" ran a particularly sanguine sentiment and "Death to the Blood-Czar," a more sanguinary one. Then there would be rude caricatures of Nicholas II or President Poincaré either at the end of a noose or of the boot of an equally rudely-cartooned Kaiser. And, of course, there were plenty of jests at Great Britain. "We'll soon be chewing roast-beef in London" was the way one artist epitomized his hopes. "Special Train to the Peddler-City"--a shaft at London, the home of the "shopkeeper nation" which "organized war against Germany" in order to "crush an unpleasant commercial rival." "Death to our enviers!" was the language in which another Anglophobe thought found expression. Beneath the British Ambassador's car-windows, I was told, some one had chalked a John Bull drooping ignominiously from the gallows, with "Race-Traitor" for an epitaph!
The night was fitful for us all. Curled up on the seats of our compartments, such attempts at sleep as we ventured were effectually defeated byDeutschland, Deutschland über AllesandDie Wacht am Rhein. All through the night they were hurled at us. At every town, regardless of the hour, the choristers were on the job. We welcomed our arrival at Bentheim, the final station in Prussia, at seven next morning, not half so eagerly because it was the last of Germany as because it was the last ofDeutschland, Deutschland über AllesandDie Wacht am Rhein. For any sins we ever committed in the Fatherland, we felt we had been richly chastised. I understood now why General Sherman once crossed the Atlantic to escapeMarching through Georgia--only to be bombarded with it beneath his windows before breakfast by an Irish band in Queenstown before he had been in Europe twelve hours. I am morally certain that when old Tecumseh said that "War is hell," he was thinking aboutMarching through Georgia. That is whatDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesmade me think about Armageddon.
None of us experienced any special difficulty in restraining our emotions when Lieutenant-Colonel von Buttlar and our other German chaperons handed us over at Bentheim to a Dutch train crew awaiting our arrival there with a Dutch locomotive. The colonel clicked and bowed his farewell respects to Sir Edward Goschen and Baron Beyens, accepted their appreciations of his courtesy and helpfulness, saluted for the last time, and then formally transferred us to Queen Wilhelmina's tender mercies. The hour of our liberation was at hand. And for the first time in a week a score of Englishmen and at least one American thought out aloud their opinions about Germany and all her works. What some of us said about the Hohenzollerns has been put by Colonel Watterson in far more immortal diction than my poor pen could epitomize it.
[image]Sir Edward Goschen, late British Ambassador in Berlin, boarding S. S. St. Petersburg, en route to London, August 7th, 1914.
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Sir Edward Goschen, late British Ambassador in Berlin, boarding S. S. St. Petersburg, en route to London, August 7th, 1914.
At Rozendaal, the first station in Holland, there was a wild scramble from the newspaper coach for the railway telegraph-office. All of us had reams of "copy" to release, after having been muzzled for five days. German money, we were distressed to observe, was already at a discount in the Netherlands, and those of us who did not hand in Dutch or British gold had to put our "stuff" on the wire after more fortunate colleagues had beaten us to it with legal tender. A couple of hours later found us at Amsterdam, where representatives of the British Legation at The Hague and the local Consulate-General were on hand to greet Sir Edward Goschen's party and furnish us with the first news of actual war operations which we had had. Fighting at sea had begun. England had drawn first blood. The German mine-layerKonigin Luise, within eighteen hours of the declaration of hostilities,i.e., on Wednesday, August 5, was overtaken by the British destroyerLanceand sunk in six minutes. There was reason to fear that a fleet of enemy mine-layers, masquerading as fishing-boats and in other pacific disguises, had been occupied for the better part of a week strewing mines through an area reaching from a point off Harwich--which we were soon to approach--along the east coast far up into Scottish waters. On the next day, Thursday, August 6, the British light cruiserAmphionstruck a mine planted by theKonigin Luiseand went down with heavy loss of life. Much more cheering was the news that gallant Belgium was giving the Germans a welcome they had not bargained for. The Meuse was being gloriously defended. Liége was menaced, but still untaken. Germans had been mown down by the regiment--if reports could be believed--and we devoured them eagerly. No news is ever so welcome as that which one longs to hear--even before it is confirmed.
The Hook was ready for us, we were told. The Great Eastern steamerSt. Petersburgwas there awaiting our arrival, having the night before landed Prince Lichnowsky and the other members of the German Embassy in London. The Kaiser's emissary had passed to the ship through a British guard of honor, while shore batteries fired an ambassador's salute. How like Sir Edward Goschen's slinking departure from Berlin, we thought! Shortly after two o'clock theSt. Petersburglifted anchor and amid typical North Sea weather, raw, rainy and misty, got under way. Few thought of German submarines at that time, but the Berlin Government, we pondered, had not guaranteed Sir Edward Goschen "safe conduct" through an indiscriminately sown field of floating mines. Quite obviously, we had now to pass through a zone bristling with uncertainty, to put it mildly. But we had not steamed far into the open sea before the sight of a British torpedo-boat flotilla on patrol convinced us that we were in a well-shepherded course. Then we had our first ocular demonstration of Jellicoe's unremitting vigilance, for the crescent of destroyers far forward now began rapidly to close in upon us. Our identity was apparently not known to them, and they were taking no chances. "They sent a shot across our bow yesterday, with the Germans on board," explained the skipper of theSt. Petersburgto Captain Henderson, the Naval Attaché, who was with him on the bridge. Captain Henderson was not disturbed by the possibility of our getting an innocuous three-pounder in our wireless rigging or some other harmless token of the destroyers' solicitude, but hewasconcerned lest so innocent a craft should cause British destroyer captains to burn up valuable oil fuel needlessly at such an hour. So the next I saw of Henderson he was wig-wagging mysterious messages with signal-flags from the bridge of theSt. Petersburg, which told the destroyers, I suppose, that we weren't in the slightest respect worthy of their attention or shell. They wig-wagged something back which must have pleased Henderson, for presently he clambered down smilingly from the upper regions, and said: "That'sall right!"
Harwich hove into view at what should have been sundown. By six o'clock we were at the pier, boarded by the naval authorities of the port and the customs-men. Sir Edward Goschen's party, after the Ambassador himself had vouched for the identity of each and every one of us, was disembarked without formalities, and at six-forty-five P.M. of Friday, August 7, we found ourselves treading British soil. There were policemen, soldiers, reporters and photographers on the dock, but no formal welcoming delegation for the Ambassador. Somebody whispered to him that a special train would convey him and his refugees to London, and to it he took his way as undemonstratively as if he were a Cook's tourist back from a "tripper's" jaunt to the Continent. I remarked to Tower that I was afraid Americans would have made a real fuss over Goschen if he wereourAmbassador home from the enemy's country; whereuponThe Daily Newsman ejaculated something which was to ring in my ears for a year or more, whenever I presumed to comment on that strange phenomenon with which it is now my task to deal--England and the English in war-time: "Wile, you Americans can not understand the English character." Tower was right.
An American is general manager of the Great Eastern Railway. I strongly suspect that he must have had an alien hand in even the semblance of a "demonstration" of greeting which Sir Edward Goschen encountered when our train pulled into Liverpool Street Station a little after eleven o'clock. I did not wait to watch it, nor even to claim my baggage, for there was a hungry first edition waiting for my "story" atThe Daily Mailoffice, and to Carmelite House I flew in the first taxi into which I could leap. By midnight Beattie, the night editor, was tearing "copy" from my hands as fast as an Underwood could reel it off, and it was rapidly approaching breakfast-time when I called it a night's work and went to bed--in England at last.
CHAPTER XIII
COMPLACENCY RULES THE WAVES
More than once during the last phase of our exciting journey to England, across the mine-strewn waters between the Hook and Harwich, I reflected that I seemed doomed to take up my residence on British soil in war-time. It was in the spring of 1900, in the anxious days between Ladysmith and Mafeking, when the tide of victory was still running in favor of the Boers, that I first arrived in London, and my lot was cast there for the succeeding year and a half of the South African struggle. I felt certain that the feverish interest with which even the sluggish British temperament had followed every detail of a campaign ten thousand miles away, and which engrossed only a fraction of the Empire's strength, would pale into tepid insignificance compared to the concern which would be generated by a tremendous European war only a channel-crossing distant. But I had time for only one breakfast and one morning's papers before I realized that John Bull had donned, even for Armageddon, the garment in which his bosom swells the proudest--the armor of invincible inexcitability.
Actually the only wrought-up people in the British Isles during the first week of the war appeared to be the frantic American tourist refugees, who, of course, heavily outnumbered their brothers and sisters in wretchedness whom I had left behind in Germany. If it had not been for the frantic transatlantic sob and worry fraternity storming the steamship and express companies' offices in Cockspur Street and the Haymarket on the morning of Saturday, August 8, when I went out to look for the war in London, no one could possibly have made me believe that such a thing existed. Such portions of the community as had not started for the links, the ocean, the river or the country "as usual" were demeaning themselves as self-respecting, imperturbable Britons customarily do on the edge of a "week-end." The seaside holiday season was at its zenith. The immortal "Twelfth," when grouse-shooting begins, was approaching. Everybody who was anybody was "out of town," and stayed there. It was only those fussy, fretting Americans who insisted upon losing their equilibrium and converting the most placid metropolis in the universe into a bedlam of unseemly agitation and alarm. It was "extraordinary," Englishmen said, how they resolutely declined to take a lesson from the composite stolidity of Britain, preferring to give their emotions unrestrained rein and to keep the cables hot in imperious demands for ships, gold and other panaceas for the scared and stranded. Which reminds me to say that traditional British hospitality to the stranger within the gate was never showered more graciously on American friends than in that trying hour.
The British had worried a whole week about the war already. That was a departure and a concession of no mean magnitude, for it is their boast and pride that theynever"worry." Having, however, yielded to such un-British instincts in the earliest hours of the crisis, they pulled themselves together and swore a solemn resolve, come what may, not soon again to succumb to indecorous habits which the world associated exclusively with the explosive French or the irresponsibly impulsive "Yankees." I felt instinctively that an effectual rebuke was being administered to me personally by the writer of the following newspaper review of London after three days of war:
"A new metal has come into the London crowd out of the crucible of these last few days. The froth and fume of flag-wagging have evaporated; so, too, have lifted bone-quaking mists of dread and suspense. Exultation and depression are alike unhealthy. It is good that we are now free from them.
"The faces in the street are the barometers of the souls that men hide. It does one's heart good to walk London and to behold that very notable rise--apparent to every one and swift in its example--of the mercury of the people. The great war took all our comprehensions unawares. Although it has boded for years, it walked at last like an unbelievable spectre into a warm and lighted room. What wonder that we were shaken? What wonder at a creeping ague of the spirit in front of the unknown?
"The dizziness has gone. The trial before us, black as it is, is not so black as our anticipation of it. We have already surprised ourselves no less than we have confounded our enemies by our rally and our readiness. The financial situation is saved, the banks re-open, the food supplies are safeguarded, and prices controlled.
"A tremendous accession of calmness and reliance has come to the nation by the appointment of Lord Kitchener to the War Office. The news that the Army is in his hands, a rock of a man, has swept through London like a vivifying breeze.
"London is swinging back to as much of its normal life as possible. She has found herself. She is bravely being the usual London--the great city serene."