Far more profitable, obviously, than hunting war excitement was examination of the causes which accounted for its absence, and to that I forthwith devoted myself. In the first place, there was the navy, "England's All in All." By a fortuitous circumstance, for which, with all his faults, the Empire must render imperishable gratitude to its young half-American First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the Fleet was instantly at its "war stations," fully mobilized, and in a state of battle-readiness and general efficiency unparalleled in British history. War maneuvers on an unapproached scale had been in progress for the preceding fortnight or three weeks. Only the merest word of command was wanting to convert the Grand Fleet into the battering-ram and shield, to constitute which in the hour of emergency it had been created. "Ringed by her leaden seas," which were held, moreover, by a "supreme" armada, there seemed every justification for equanimity, for the United Kingdom has no frontiers which an invading army can violate as long as Britannia rules the waves.The domestic political situation, more menacingly turbulent than at any time within the memory of living Englishmen, had been resolved with miraculous rapidity and completeness. "Revolution" in Ulster, on which the Germans had so fondly banked, vanished as effectually as if it had never raised its head. "We will ourselves defend the coasts of Ireland," declared John Redmond in the House of Commons in a speech which will never die, "and I say to the Government that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland." Mrs. Pankhurst, freshly released from a periodical hunger-striking sojourn in Brixton jail, announced that the suffragettes had stacked arms and now knew only womankind's duty to England. That sent another Berlin dream careening into oblivion. "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" proclaimed in Parliament through the mouth of the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, that the Government's political opponents were prepared to accord it "unhesitating support." In the Government itself the "Potsdam Party," as that relentless iconoclast, Leo Maxse, long termed the coterie which was for peace with Germany at almost any price, was either weeded out or suppressed. Lord Morley, the Lord President of the Council; "Honest John" Burns, still true to convictions, President of the Local Government Board, and Charles P. Trevelyan, Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education, unobtrusively retired from Mr. Asquith's official family in consequence of their inability to sanction the war. They have played their parts meantime with honorable consistency--by maintaining an hermetical silence on questions of the war. And finally, though primarily in popular judgment, Lord Haldane, the graduate of Göttingen, the translator of Schopenhauer and the admirer of GermanGeist, was driven by scandalized public opinion from the War Office, whither he had just come as an "assistant" to the Prime Minister, whose cabinet portfolio was the Secretaryship for War. Most of England sighed with thankful relief when the able Scotch lawyer and philosopher whom contemporary history accuses of responsibility for Britain's military unpreparedness, beat an ignominious retreat back to his regular post, the wool-sack, which, as Lord Chancellor, he by general consent conspicuously adorned. The country's relief became enthusiastic assurance when the lawyer, Asquith, himself retired from the War Office, to make way for the soldier, Kitchener, who was recalled by telegram the day before from Dover, just as he was about to board ship for Cairo, to resume his duties as the ruler of Egypt. With the "Potsdam Party" banished or made harmless, the Cabinet was now regarded as satisfactorily purged. The public heard with boundless gratification that the "strong men" of the Government--Grey, Lloyd-George and Churchill--had been uncompromisingly for war from the start as the only recourse compatible with British honor, to say nothing of the elementary dictates of self-preservation. It was at length possible for Mr. Asquith to assure the country that he presided over an administration of whose unity of view and determination there was no shadow of a doubt--a Government which was resolved, as Sir Edward Grey's great speech in the House of Commons on August 3 set forth, to accomplish three cardinal purposes:1. To protect the defenseless French coast against attack by the German navy;To defend the integrity of Belgium; and3. To put forth all Britain's strength and not run away from the obligations of honor and interest.When the events of the Great War, and perhaps the chief actors in it themselves, have passed away, some British historian will almost certainly arise to tell the world the story--the "inside story"--of how Mr. Asquith's cabinet, through three days and nights of doubts, uncertainties, trials and tribulations, crossed the Rubicon to the shore of unanimity on the subject of British participation. There were moments, beyond all question, when that issue hung perilously in the balance. The French Government's frantic eleventh-hour appeals for a decision in Downing Street are mute evidence of the vacillation which prevailed--a species of tentativeness which has never been missing from the British conduct of the purely diplomatic affairs of the war. The ministerial debates during which the die was cast in favor of war will make immortal reading, even if only a digest of them is all that is vouchsafed posterity. The "strong men" of the Government, if report is reliable, were called upon to fight valiantly and ceaselessly to avoid England's "running away from the obligations of honor and interest." The tense interval which ensued while they were battering down the trenches of skepticism, chicken-heartedness and nonchalance among their Cabinet colleagues caused a delay which might easily have proved of fatal import; for the decision to throw the strength of the British army, as well as the navy, into the scales was under discussion, and it is conceivable that the Expeditionary Force, which it was eventually determined to send, might have been kept back for weeks, or even altogether, instead of the mere days its dispatch was actually retarded. Disaster incalculable would almost inevitably have resulted in that event.The indispensable and all-governing preliminary measures for war in respect of domestic politics, the Government and the naval and military administration having thus been taken, equally radical precautions were invoked to put the nation's economic house in order. The Stock Exchange, following the lead of New York, Paris and Berlin, had shut down as early as July 31, in order that mere insensate panic on the part of the speculative and investing world might not degenerate into irretrievable rout. War having descended with irresistible suddenness during the "week-end" preceding the traditional August Bank Holiday (Monday, the 3rd), a meeting of great financiers in the Bank of England on the holiday itself decided to prolong it, as far as banks and bankers were concerned, for three days,i.e., until Friday, the 7th, in what turned out to be the well-grounded hope that public excitement would meantime subside and prevent "runs" ruinous alike to banks and depositors. A moratorium was established. The Bank discount-rate, which had already vaulted from four to eight per cent., was now raised to ten, an unheard-of figure, which effectually curbed the lust of persons anxious to profit from war abnormalities or otherwise indulge in operations not consistent with the gravity of the hour.[image]Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans clamoring for passage back to Germany.It was mainly these things--wholesome, substantial proofs that their rulers had grappled with the situation with bold initiative that inspired the people of London with reassurance, which, diluted with the stoicism of the British character, became calm confidence Gibraltar-like in its inflexibility. She had "the men," England was saying; she had "the ships," and, Parliament having voted an initial war fund of one hundred million pounds as unconcernedly as if it were a thousand-pounds grant for a new switch-track at Woolwich arsenal, she unmistakably had "the money," too.But even more self-comforting, if possible, than this iron trust in her own inexhaustible resources was England's conviction in the invincibility of her Allies. Was not even little Belgium holding back the flower of the German army before Liége? Even in the unlikely event of Liége's fall, would not the impregnable fortress of Namur provide Krupp guns with a still tougher nut to crack? Those were, alas! the hours in which the existence of the forty-two-centimeter siege gun was not even mooted in ostrich England. France? The Germans would find a vastly different antagonist awaiting them this time in the Ardennes, the Vosges passes and along the Meuse and the Sambre. There was a "New France," a France ofélanand iron. It was the virile Republic of Poincaré, Delcassé, Joffre, Bleriot, Pegoud and Carpentier, with which the Prussian hosts must this time measure lances, not the degenerate Empire of the third Napoleon, which crumbled at Sedan and Metz and surrendered Paris. Russia? "Can't you just hear the steam-roller rumbling across East Prussia and thundering at the gates of Berlin?" a great English peer asked me, in all seriousness, during my first week in London. "Isn't the tread of the Czar's countless millions, pounding remorselessly toward the west, almost audible?" he persisted. Millions of Englishmen were thinking and saying the same thing. As for the German army, almost as many of them were convinced that that "over-organized, peace-stale" military establishment, which was a magnificent spectacle on parade, but lacked leaders experienced in modern campaigning, would crash to pieces not only against "superior numbers" but against Allied troops and commanders who had been fighting great wars this past quarter of a century in Africa and Asia. London's feelings toward Germany seemed, indeed, almost compassionate. Many people, otherwise sane, talked about the war being over by Christmas. The Kaiser's navy would come out and be smashed, they calculated, and such work as had not already been accomplished by the Allied armies within the Fatherland's eastern and western frontiers would soon be completed by "internal collapse," industrial stagnation, national impoverishment and universal starvation. Poor Germany! She had brought it on herself. Her end, after a peace soon to be dictated in Berlin, would manifestly be speedy and annihilating. The Social Democrats, it was true, were bamboozled into support of the war by fictitious assurances that the sword had been "forced" into Germany's unwilling and blameless hand, but the scales would presently fall from their eyes, and then woe betide whatever remained of the Hohenzollerns' ravished, defenseless realm! Street-hawkers in the Strand were selling blatant copies--a penny each--ofThe Kaiser's Last Will and Testament. Would William II be sent to St. Helena, like the other Napoleon, or be interned in some more accessible point in the British Empire, to pass the remaining days of his humiliation and remorse? And the "Crown Prince" with him, of course. These were the reveries of Britain in the early days of August, 1914. Nothing disturbed them except the creaking and the rumbling of the Russian steam-roller. Those being dulcet reverberations, John Bull paused eagerly in the midst of his musings to let them lull him into a still deeper siesta of optimism....Serene and imperturbable as the vast majority of Englishmen were, the responsible leaders of the nation were under no delusions as to the magnitude of the task now confronting them. To the country's intense astonishment, though Lord Roberts had been dinning it in their ears incessantly for at least five years previous, England found itself in a state of practical impotence as far as effective participation in modern large-scale military operations was concerned. In the same five minutes during which Parliament voted one hundred million pounds as a first war credit, it also sanctioned an increase of the British army by five hundred thousand men. At that moment the Home military establishment, which was immediately mobilized as "The British Army Expeditionary Force" when England decided to enter the war with her soldiers as well as her sailors, consisted of eight divisions of all arms--roundly, one hundred fifty thousand men. An organization of another half-million troops, officered and equipped for a great Continental campaign, could not be stamped out of the ground. Its production, even in a country with the glorious military traditions of England, was manifestly fraught with stupendous difficulties. There was no mistrust of British patriotism; but when men recalled the futility of Lord Roberts' efforts to implant in England's conscience the necessity of some form of National Service--how he not only failed, but was ridiculed and vilified for pursuing his sagacious crusade in the face of merciless rebuff--and when inherent British repugnance to "soldiering" and even to wearing uniforms was remembered, there were widespread misgivings.Prussian militarism long filled me with abhorrence. I had learned to detest it not as an institution, but for its numerous disgusting manifestations, principally the arrogance of its gilded popinjays and the brutal and overweening contempt in which their traditions and training taught them to hold mere civilian microbes. Yet in those frantic hours when hopelessly unready military England was compelled to patch up an army for battle against the world's most scientific war-machine, I pondered what a blessing a little "militarism" would have been for the British democracy. I had seen Germany trooping off to war, singing, cheering and flower-garnished; and I knew that her debonair demeanor was due less to lust for the fray--the great mass of the nation was animated by no such sentiment as that--than to the realization, which sprang from immutable facts and numbers, that her citizen army was equal to almost any emergencies it would be called upon to meet. Germany was a nation in arms. England was a nation in difficulties. How grotesquely unprepared to play a commensurate part in a military war, compared to her Continental allies and foes, this table showing the size of the various armies indicates:Peace footing War footing GunsGreat Britain ............... 234,000 380,000 1,000Austria-Hungary ............. 500,000 2,200,000 2,500France (including Algeria) .. 790,000 4,000,000 4,200Germany ..................... 850,000 6,000,000 5,500Russia ...................... 1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000Lord Kitchener was obviously the man of the hour. An organizer primarily, rather than a strategist, tactician or field-marshal, his appointment to the War Secretaryship demonstrated that whoever was responsible for it--men say it was Lord Northcliffe--recognized instantly the all-overshadowing requirement: a recruiting sergeant. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, would necessarily retain the supreme direction of the Allied forces operating against the German front in France and Belgium. England's part was to send him men. And the one to find, drill and equip them was unmistakably Kitchener of Khartum, South Africa, India and Egypt, the "organizer" of victory against the fuzzy-wuzzies and the Boers, the disciplinarian who had galvanized the Indian army into new life, and the administrator who was licking Egypt into Imperial shape. There would be time enough for the war itself to produce another Wellington or Roberts. What was needed now was men, rifles and guns, cartridges, shells and uniforms, war-planes, motor-lorries and hospital-trains and all the other innumerable impedimenta of modern man-killing. The summoning to the task of the big bluff soldier who first saw the light in County Kerry, who was looked upon as the incarnation of initiative and relentless efficiency, and who had proved his right so to be considered, was elementary and inevitable. It was work for a "sergeant-major" and a "drill-sergeant" rather than for a Napoleonic genius; and when England learned that "K.," as he is affectionately known in the army, was on the prodigious job, England took heart. She responded with a will to his first appeal for men. The hoardings of the Kingdom were plastered with it on the morning of August 8. It read as follows:+------------------------------------------------------------------+| || YOUR KING AND COUNTRY || NEED YOU. || || A CALL TO ARMS || || An addition of 100,000 men to his Majesty's Regular Army || is immediately necessary in the present grave National || Emergency. || || Lord Kitchener is confident that this appeal will be at once || responded to by all those who have the safety of our || Empire at heart. || || TERMS OF SERVICE || || General Service for a period of 3 years or until the war is || concluded. || || Age of Enlistment between 19 and 30. || || HOW TO JOIN || || Full information can be obtained at any Post Office in the || Kingdom or at any Military depot. || || GOD SAVE THE KING! || |+------------------------------------------------------------------+In the past England's volunteer army had been maintained by a recruiting system which produced, on the average, about thirty-five thousand new men a year. They did not come easily, even in halcyon peace times, and the gaily-caparisoned recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square, who would buttonhole a hundred likely "Tommies" in a day, earned well his fee if he succeeded in inducing ten of them to "take the shilling." It remained to be seen if "the present grave National Emergency" would find dormant in Britain military talent and inclination hitherto undreamt of. In the opening flush of the excitement and enthusiasm which the war engendered, Lord Kitchener's hopes were satisfactorily realized. Recruiting-offices in numerous districts were literally stormed. The response from the middle, "upper-middle" and upper classes was particularly buoyant. Duke, peer, aristocrat, nobleman, "nut," banker, lawyer, doctor, merchant, teacher and clerk came forward splendidly. But artisan, docker and miner lagged. The lower class revealed an inclination to continue to throng the public-houses rather than the recruiting-offices. It seemed evident at the outset that it was not they who were bent on saving England. They gave disquieting indication that their sort of patriotism was primarily individual self-preservation, that for them, love of country began at home. A waking-up process in their unenlightened ranks was destined to come to pass, thanks mainly to "separation allowances" for missus and the kids, but it was never to attain the dimensions of a rousing which extorted from their atrophied intelligence even an approximate appreciation of their obligations or their country's peril. Britain's war is being waged, as it will be won--speaking broadly--by the patriotism and blood of the excoriated upper ten thousand. The struggle had been in progress for more than a year, at a cost of nearly five hundred thousand British casualties, when it was still necessary for Lloyd-George to remind working-class England, in as unqualified language as a politician dare speak to the nation's electoral masters, that it was not doing its full duty.While Britain at large still hugged the delusion of easy victory, in grotesque underestimation of the enemy's power, and while Kitchener's recruit-finding machinery was being put in vigorous motion, the War Office, in co-operation with the navy, was accomplishing as magnificent a piece of military work as army annals hold--the silent landing of the British Expeditionary Force of one hundred and sixty thousand men, with its full complement of horses, guns and stores, on the shores of France. That feat will live as immortal disproof of the charge popular in the United States that "hustle" is a word which is conspicuously missing from the British lexicon. Compared to it, our "hustle" in landing an army in Cuba in 1898 was the quintessence of procrastination and muddle. The British railways had been taken over by the Government coincident with the arrival of war, an "Executive Committee" consisting of the General Managers of the main companies having been established more than a year previous as an advisory council for such an emergency as had now supervened. Embarkation of the Expeditionary Force commenced on the night of August 7th. Admiral Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, assured Lord Kitchener that the channel passage was as safe as the Thames itself. The British public, receiving its first lesson in relentless censorship of war news, was kept so effectually in the dark as to the dispatch of the largest army which ever left English shores that it knew nothing whatever of it till the host was at its destination, with breasts bared to the foe. The landing of Sir John French's legions on the soil of France was accomplished, complete in every detail, by August 17th.British railways, when the record of that marvel of transportation is compiled, will share the honors with the ironclads of Britain's navy and the liners of her mercantile marine. Southampton being the main port of departure, the performance of the London and Southwestern Railway, which has carried so many thousand Americans in pacific days from Waterloo Station to the ship's side, is a case in point. I heard Sir H. A. Walker, the "Southwestern's" general manager make before the American Luncheon Club in London the first announcement of the railways' part in England's military mobilization. With his subsequent permission, I was privileged to give the British public its first information on that subject. The L. & S. W. had been assigned the task of making ready for dispatch to Southampton within sixty hours three hundred and fifty trains of thirty cars each. It did the trick in forty-five hours. During the first three weeks of war there were dispatched to and unloaded at the ships' sides seventy-three of such trains every fourteen hours. They arrived from the four quarters of the kingdom, and none of them was late. "I come from the land of 'big railway stunts,'" said Henry W. Thornton, the American general manager of the Great Eastern railway when Sir H. A. Walker had told this convincing story of British "hustle." "We think we are 'pulling off' some feat when we handle G.A.R. encampments and national conventions, but what British railways accomplished in the ten days between August 7 and 17 last may fairly be claimed as a unique record in railway history." What Mr. Thornton modestly failed to add was that he himself, as a colleague presently bore testimony, had played a conspicuous rôle in the drama of British military mobilization. Certain inanimate things, almost as well known to Americans as Mr. Thornton, played big parts, too. The palatialMauretania, with hersuites de-luxebattered into cargo-room for Tommy Atkins, and her big new sister,Aquitania, with only a maiden crossing or two to her credit, similarly knocked to pieces, made incessant trips back and forth between Southampton and other channel ports to Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, landing in France on each occasion no less than five thousand British fighting-men, ready for death and glory.Each mother's son of them carried with him this little personal message from Lord Kitchener:"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience."Remember that the honour of the British army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty, not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle. The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier."Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome, and to be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty can not be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy."Do your duty bravely."Fear God."Honour the King."KITCHENER, Field-Marshal."I remained in England only a week after my arrival from Germany. Part of the time had been pleasantly spent editing a special "American edition" ofThe Timesfor Lord Northcliffe, who placed the full machinery of his journalistic organization at the disposal of the "Yankee War Refugees." He was only prevented from extending them the hospitality of Sutton Place, his lovely estate in Surrey, now a hospital, for a "week-end" outing by the inability of the railways to guarantee the necessary special train facilities. To my astonishment but unalloyed delight Lord Northcliffe "ordered" me to take a month's vacation in the United States. He thought my family and kinsmen would like to have a look at an "English spy," fresh from Germany, before the earmarks of his nefarious trade had entirely evaporated, and so, having obtained the last bunk left on that veteran Cunard hulk,S.S. Campania, which had brought my wife and me to Europe on our honeymoon voyage, I sailed away from Liverpool on Saturday, August 15th, along with twelve hundred or fifteen hundred other sardines packed in an eighteen-knot steel box.CHAPTER XIVPRO-ALLY UNCLE SAMSomewhere in E. W. Hornung'sRaffles, there is this homely bit of epigrammatic philosophy:"Money lost, little lost. Honor lost, much lost. Pluckiest, all lost!"The aphorism was paraphrased by my fellow war refugees in theCampania, tucked away in couples, trios, quintettes and baker's dozens into cabins which the Cunarder's designers back in the dim mid-Victorian past built for a half or a third as many passengers.They made it read like this:"Baggage lost, all lost!"Now and then some particularly sentimental soul would spare a humanitarian thought for the minor horrors of the calamity which had fallen upon Europe and civilization. But his heart would not throb for long when somebody would break in upon his maudlin reflections with a really harrowing tale of trunks left behind in Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne, in Carlsbad, Lucerne or Ostend, at the Gare du Nord in Paris, or the quayside in Boulogne or Calais; or of suit-cases and "innovations" lost, strayed or stolen in the maelstrom of military traffic in Germany, Belgium or France; or of Packards, Peerlesses, Studebakers or Overlands summarily abandoned somewhere in the war zone. What were Europe's travails to these genuine disasters? It was all right for the war-mad Continent to deck itself in battle-paint if sanguinarily inclined, but ruthlessly and without notice to break up Americans' traveling plans, knock Cook tours into a cocked hat, interrupt "cures," and on top of that, if you please, actually to play ducks and drakes with the personal effects of free-born American citizens--all because, forsooth, eight or ten million troops required the right of way and insisted upon getting it--that was manifestly the last word in inconsiderateness. Incidentally, of course, it denoted how hopelessly inefficient Europe was, anyway, in the presence of a sudden emergency. Why, the general manager of a cross-town transfer company in New York would have tackled the job without turning a hair. Bah! It served Americans right--quoth a promenade-deck psychologist. Year in and year out they'd been lavishing "good United States dollars" on Europe, and this was her gratitude to her best paying guests. There was no dissent from the view, which prevailed from rudder to bow, that it was the ragged edge of what Bostonians call "the limit." "See America first!" ceasing to be mere admonition, was burnt there and then into the hearts of our baggage-bereft ship's company with all the force of a fervid national aspiration. "Never again!" was the way my Chicago millionairess deck-chair neighbor, who looted the Rue de la Paix annually, sententiously epitomized not only her aggrieved sentiments, but those of nearly everybody else. All swore a virtuous vow henceforth to practise the stay-at-home habit and for the rest of eternity let man-killing Europe wallow in its savagery.The story of the exodus which the Second Book of Moses records will probably outlive the flight of the children of Columbia across the Atlantic in the summer of 1914. But that hegira will outrank its Egyptian prototype in one gleaming respect--its atmosphere of indomitable good humor, once the Campanians surmounted the initial stage of "grouch," groaning and gnashing of teeth.Bank presidents and college professors willing to be buffeted across the ocean in the steerage; society women who bunked contentedly on sofas in the "ladies' saloon" of the stuffy second cabin; Pittsburgh plutocrats game enough to sleep six in a stateroom built for four; pampered folk with Frenchchefsat home, who sat uncomplainingly through the interminable and usually refrigerated "second serving" in theCampania'sold-fashioned dining-room; corporation lawyers with incomes the size of a King's civil list, who considered themselves lucky to have captured the hammocks of the fourth engineer or the hospital attendant in the odoriferous hold; all these compatriots, grinning and bearing, proved that after all we are the most adaptable people on earth. After each and all of us had exchanged tales of woe--everybody had one, even Doctor Ella Flagg Young, the septuagenarian Superintendent of Chicago's public schools, who was chased out of the war-zone across Scandinavia into England--and swapped stories of arrest or less thrilling inconveniences, and abused the incompetent authorities of the belligerent governments to our hearts' content, with a slap now and then, to vary the monotony, at our own United States--theCampania'spassengers soon shook down to what turned out to be as jolly a crossing as any of us, I dare say, ever had. Between thrills about imaginary "German cruisers" and equally fantastic "rumbling of naval artillery," and our amusing discomforts, the week passed almost before we knew it, and more quickly than some of us even wished. There was, of course, that irrepressible Illinois State Senator who circulated a petition to "censure" the Cunard line for not sending us all home in theAquitania, even though the British Government had requisitioned her for transport work; but a much more popular note was struck by my young friend, Miss Marjorie Rice, a typical New York belle, who collected a couple of hundred dollars with which to present Captain Anderson with a souvenir of our gratitude for having so gallantly brought us through invisible dangers. German cruisers were still roaming in the Atlantic, and, though we traveled at night with masked lights and took various other precautions like an occasional zigzag course, one never could tell, though I think most of us banished all thought of peril once we heard that British ironclads were keeping a lane of safety for Uncle Sam's fretting sons and daughters all the way from Fastnet to the Fire Island lightship. Asked by the ship's officers to tell "How the Germans Went to War" at the last-night-out concert, to which the Cunard Line with British reverence for tradition still religiously adheres, I could confidently interpret the sentiment of every American aboard in voicing deep thankfulness for the fact that Britannia ruled the waves. Going back with us to the United States was a batch of three or four young Germans, evidently of university education, because their jowls were embellished with saber-cuts. They had been stopped in England on their way home to fight, but were graciously permitted to return whence they came. Timorous friends beseeched me to beware of "saying too much" about the Germans in the hearing of these would-be soldiers of the Kaiser; but I escaped molestation and even heard next day that I had been "most fair."Not till many days after we landed in New York did I know that two very eminent representatives of Allied Powers were sandwiched among theCampania'shome-fleeing American passengers--Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador at Washington, and his colleague of France, the cultured Monsieur Jusserand. They had crossed in impenetrable incognito. Not only were their names missing from the passenger-list, but if they had ever promenaded or eaten or smoked, they must have done it in solitary enjoyment of their own exclusive society, as nobody during seven whole days and nights ever heard of them or saw them, or, what is vastly more miraculous aboard-ship, ever even talked about them. American newspapermen afloat in a liner like to flatter themselves that nothing with even the remotest odor of news ever escapes their insatiable quest. I had myself bored with strenuous pertinacity into every news-well in theCampania, and there were many. But Spring-Rice and Jusserand eluded me as thoroughly as if they had been contraband stored away in the hold, or stokers who only come to life out of the black hole of Calcutta once or twice a trip, when everybody with a white face is tight asleep. Bernstorff came in two days later like a brass band. The British and French Ambassadors broke into the United States, apparently, in felt-slippers through a back door on a dark night. The manner of the respective arrivals of the German and the Allied Ambassadors was to be characteristic of their conduct in the country throughout the war.On Monday, August 24, I was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Bernstorff had landed that forenoon in the Dutch liner,Noordam. To my astonishment, the Ambassador, whom I had noticed lunching a few tables away with James Speyer, arose and advanced across the restaurant to where I was sitting. Bernstorff and I were old acquaintances. I liked him. Most newspapermen did. Through long residence in Washington, he had acquired an almost Rooseveltian art in dealing with us. I used to see him regularly during his periodical official visits to Berlin, having known him professionally from the days he was Councillor of the German Embassy in London during the Boer War. Few Americans are aware that Count Bernstorff was born in England while his father was serving as Prussian Minister to the Court of St. James. History was destined to repeat itself in the case of the son, who not only adopted the career of his father, but when he became an ambassador to a neutral country during one of Germany's wars was called upon to occupy himself just as the elder Count Bernstorff had done in London in 1870-71. The father put in most of his time in England in a vain endeavor to persuade Queen Victoria's Government to place an embargo on shipment of British arms and ammunition to the French. He failed as lamentably in that effort as his son and heir was destined to do in the United States under almost identical circumstances forty-four years later.Smiling his most persuasive diplomatic grimace, Count Bernstorff went straight to the object of his luncheon-table call on me."Wile," he began, "you've gone back on us! I can see your hand at work in the attitude theNew York Timeshas taken up."I could not imagine at what the genial Count was driving. Perhaps he had read in the preceding day'sTimesmy long account of the beginnings of the war as I observed them in Berlin, or my introduction toThe Times'exclusive publication of the German White Paper, printed that day."Your Excellency flatters me," I ventured to rejoin. "I have only been in the country since Saturday night, and my activities atThe Timesoffice have been limited to the very prosaic duty of handing in several wads of 'copy' written aboard-ship."But Bernstorff knew better. I had poisoned the atmosphere of Times Square against Germany's holy cause. He insisted upon thrusting upon me some occult influence over Mr. Ochs,The Times'able proprietor, and Mr. Miller, its brilliant editor, and said he was going to see somebody or other atThe Timeslater in the day and "fix things up." Judging by the rivers of interviews which thenceforth flowed in an unceasing torrent from the Ambassador's headquarters in the Ritz-Carlton, he must have seen not only someTimesmen, but nearly all the journalists in Greater New York. How satisfactorily he "fixed things up" with the great newspaper which has proved to be the Allies' most consistent and effective supporter in the United States could be judged from next morning's edition, which was about as anti-Bernstorffian as could be imagined. The Imperial German Press-Agent's palaver about his ability to "fix things up" was bombast, pure and unalloyed. There was never the slightest possibility that he could "fix" anything in theNew York Timesoffice or in any American newspaper office where self-respect, journalistic honor and rugged independence are enthroned. There are American newspapers which lay no claim to these virtues, and their names are undoubtedly, and long have been, carefully card-indexed at 1435 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. Some of their owners have decorations bestowed by the Kaiser.It proved to be a rare stroke of Fate which took me to the Ritz-Carlton, for I was destined to be an eyewitness of the assemblage of the Kaiser's Great General Staff for the Germanization of American public opinion on the war. Doctor Dernburg had arrived in theNoordamwith Count Bernstorff, and along with them came Captain Boy-Ed, the Naval Attaché at Washington. I knew personally, from Berlin days, both the ex-Colonial Secretary and the sailor. Dernburg, before he was pitchforked into Government office from the comparatively humble station of a bank director in 1906, was the most approachable of men. His command of the American language was remarkable--an inheritance from his youth, part of which was spent as a volunteer clerk in a Wall Street bank. I never forgot my first call on him in Germany. I assumed him to be a Jew, as his father was. Some Semitic question of public interest was the news of the moment, and I regarded Dernburg an ideal man to interview. With a smile I recall how, insistently disavowing his origin, he told me I had come to "the wrong address." Later I watched his tempestuous career as administrator of the barren sand-wastes known as German colonies, saw him give electioneering in the Fatherland a new phase with his shirt-sleeves campaigning methods, and observed his meteoric rise to Imperial grace and political power, so soon to be followed by his equally precipitate fall from those dizzy heights. Dernburg's lack of manners and tact was commonly said in Berlin to have led to his official demise after less than four years of Cabinet glory. No one ever questioned his eminent ability. But his reputation as a banker rested on cold-blooded ruthlessness, and when he attempted to carry those methods into a bureaucratic government department, he struck snags which wrecked his bark. Neither he nor I supposed on August 24, 1914, when we chatted in the palm-court of the Ritz-Carlton, that his attempt to transplant Berlin ruthlessness into the United States would eventually prove his undoing there, too.Captain Boy-Ed, as subsequent history was also to show, was bent on practising in America the tactics which won him renown and promotion in Germany. Prior to coming to Washington as Count Bernstorff's Naval Attaché--the Kaiser had decided that the United States navy was attaining dimensions which required watching by a shrewd observer--the captain was von Tirpitz' right-hand man at the Imperial Admiralty in Berlin. He had charge of the so-called News Division, nominally entrusted with the duty of informing the German public of "routine naval intelligence, such as accidents, transfers of ships and officers, etc., etc.," as I once heard von Tirpitz persuasively and naïvely describe the functions of theNachrichten-Abteilungduring a periodical plea to the Reichstag for more dreadnoughts. Boy-Ed, the son of a Turkish father and a German mother, devoted himself chiefly in the years between 1906 and 1912 to conducting von Tirpitz' astute propaganda for naval expansion. It was the era in which the Kaiser's fleet was being converted by leaps and bounds from a navy of obsolete thirteen-thousand-ton ships of theDeutschlandandBraunschweigclass into an armada of dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the eighteen-thousand to twenty-four-thousand-ton "all-big-gun"Ost-FrieslandandSeydlitzclass. German public opinion required to be carefully manipulated in order to secure parliamentary sanction for "supplementary" appropriations which rose by stealthy degrees from $60,000,000 to $115,000,000 a year. Boy-Ed was assigned the responsible duty of organizing and carrying out the necessary campaign of education, and right well and thoroughly he did it. The shoals of pamphlets, books, newspaper-articles, public-lectures, Navy League speeches and other "educational" matter with which the Fatherland was flooded--always with "England, the Foe" as theleitmotif,--were to a large extent the child of Boy-Ed's resourceful brain. He did not write them all, of course, but he was their inspirer-in-chief. I account him one of the real creators of the modern German navy, second only to von Tirpitz himself. It was "the chief's" idea, but Boy-Ed made its materialization a practical possibility.Knowing his methods, no revelations of his pernicious activities in the United States ever surprised me. He was only up to his old tricks, altering them to suit the American climate and character, but adhering always to certain basic principles which had stood him in such good stead in the Fatherland. It would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge numerous professional courtesies received at Boy-Ed's hands when he was misleading the press of Germany and the world at the News-Division in Leipziger-Platz, Berlin. He nearly had me arrested at the Imperial dockyard in Wilhelmshaven in March, 1907, for gaining access, despite thoroughgoing preventive measures, to the launch of Germany's first dreadnought, theNassau, but during his career at the Admiralty he more than made up for that by enabling me, in the columns ofThe Daily Mail, to be the medium of a formal discussion between von Tirpitz and the British naval authorities on the endlessly controversial question of Anglo-German sea rivalry. For the best "copy" it was ever my good fortune to send across the North Sea, my unwithering gratitude is due and is hereby expressed to the shifty chieftain of Germany's war-time "intelligence service" in the United States.Who else besides Bernstorff, Dernburg, Boy-Ed and Speyer attended the opening council of war of the German field-marshals in the United States that broiling August day at the Ritz-Carlton, I never learned with certainty. Dernburg assured me that as far as he was concerned, purely humanitarian business had brought him to our generous shores; he had come to collect funds for the German Red Cross, and he once wrote me a letter on paper emblazoned with that worthy organization's innocuous trade-mark. I suspect that before the day was over, Professor Münsterberg of Harvard, Poet Viereck ofThe Fatherland, and Herman Ridder paid their respects to the propaganda-chieftains, and received their orders; and probably Julius P. Mayer, the New York manager of the Hamburg-American Line, and Claussen, his expert "publicity manager," left their cards, too. Evidently James Speyer thought his sequestered and palatial home at Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, far from the madding sleuths of the New York press, was a more ideal retreat for so momentous a pow-wow, for it was to that idyllic refuge that Count Bernstorff told me he was immediately repairing. Purely diplomatic affairs at Washington could obviously wait on the more transcendent business the Imperial German Ambassador now had in hand; and before he quit the banks of the Hudson for the shores of the Potomac, the Fatherland's marvelous attack on the natural sympathies of the American Republic in the great war was launched with all the force, skill and impudence of a German assault on the frontier of a foe.New York was clearly more feverishly interested in the war than London. Nowhere in Fleet Street had I seen such vibrant throngs in front of newspaper-offices, as stood eager and transfixed by day and far into the night in Times and Herald Squares, Columbus Circle and Park Row. America might have been in the fray herself, to judge by the one absorbing topic which dominated men and women's talk and obsessed their thoughts. Detached as we were, it was unmistakable that Europe's agony had eaten deep into our souls, for even the baseball bulletin-boards were now deserted in favor of those which were telling in breathless telegrams of the German cannon-ball plunge through Belgium toward the fatal Marne and of Russia's seemingly irresistible advance into East Prussia. I had heard no Englishman arguing about the issues of Armageddon or the kaleidoscopic events of the battlefield with half the flaming ardor of those Broadway war experts. In fact there were no blackboards at all around which the British could hold curbstone parliaments, for Lord Kitchener's censorship was not parting with news enough, apparently, to make even the chalk worth while. In London I had observed the inexplicable phenomenon that at the moment when hell had broken loose for the British Empire, great journals, instead of deluging the public with news, actually reduced their ordinary size in some cases to four pages, though I believe that fear of a print-paper famine and disappearance of advertising had something to do with those atrophied dimensions. All in all, however, there was no doubt that isolated neutral America was excited about the war to a degree which reduced British interest almost to nonchalance by comparison.Though I tarried in the East but forty-eight hours, I was conscious of breathing almost exclusively pro-Ally air. President Wilson's neutrality proclamation was being respected in letter, as far as restraining our people from actual breaches in favor of either belligerent group was concerned, but every minute of the day, everywhere, it was being vociferously violated in spirit. Before the war was a month old, Americans already were confessing freely that they were so "neutral" that they didn't care who won as long as Germany was "licked." They resigned themselves to the Chief Magistrate's dictum that the country as such must be guilty of no "un-neutral" acts, but it failed lamentably to still the natural instincts of American hearts which were beating fervently, irresistibly, for the Allies. Bernstorff's hour-by-hour interviews, apologies and explanations, Münsterberg's homilies,The Fatherland'svituperations, theNew-Yorker Staatszeitung'seditorials in English signed by Ridder and "boiler-plated" to any newspapers which would give them space, "fair play" appeals from obsequious ex-Berlin exchange-professors like Dean Burgess of Columbia--all these things fell on deaf ears. None of them could obliterate the crime of Germany, which loomed ineradicable on the war horizon as Americans scanned it--Belgium. All the instincts of American justice, liberty, humanity and regard for treaty obligations rebelled against "Necessity-knows-no-law" and "scrap of paper" ethics. We had gone to war ourselves, in 1898, to defend the rights of a small nation. The spectacle of Military Germany trampling little Belgium under foot, causelessly, mercilessly, was enough, had there been no other single issue to enlist our sympathy, to vouchsafe it, whole-heartedly, to the nations which were leagued in support of the old-fashioned principle that Right is nobler than Might. Thus was America's mind attuned in August, 1914, and at least in the opinion-molding area of the country which lies between the seaboard and the line where the Middle West begins, that mind was, with American predilection for reaching right conclusions spontaneously, irrevocably made up. The attempts of the Propaganda Steam-Roller to flatten out the anti-German prejudices provoked by the rape of Belgium were frantic, but fruitless. The pre-digested baby food which pedagogues and demagogues, ambassadors, brewers and rabbis now began to ladle out for American consumption did not temper those prejudices. Indeed, it was manifest that it was but aggravating them. Our own General Brooke, attending the German army maneuvers in Silesia eight or nine years ago, was asked by the Kaiser if he had ever been in Germany before. "Never in this part," remarked Brooke. "Where, then?" persisted William II. "In Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee," replied the general. I was about to enter "that part" of Germany now. I was not there long before realizing that pro-Ally sentiment was immeasurably less assertive, at any rate, than in the outspokenly pro-Ally East. Chicago, of course, has more Germans than Düsseldorf, and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, in spots, are as Teutonic as Hamburg or Bremen, so it was natural to findDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesmore than disputing supremacy withRule Britannia. In Chicago pro-Germanism was rampant and articulate. An article written by me for theChicago Tribunein the first fortnight of September, in which I ventured to express my opinion as to where the responsibility for the war lay, how long it would last and who would win it, brought down on me as violent a torrent of abuse as if it had been published in theBerliner Tageblatt. For saying that, in my judgment, the German War Party had made the war; that it would go on till Germany was beaten to her knees, and that eventual exhaustion of the Germanic Powers and the longer resources of the Allies would win the war for the latter, I became forthwith the target of all the forty-two-centimeter guns in the Windy City.
Far more profitable, obviously, than hunting war excitement was examination of the causes which accounted for its absence, and to that I forthwith devoted myself. In the first place, there was the navy, "England's All in All." By a fortuitous circumstance, for which, with all his faults, the Empire must render imperishable gratitude to its young half-American First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the Fleet was instantly at its "war stations," fully mobilized, and in a state of battle-readiness and general efficiency unparalleled in British history. War maneuvers on an unapproached scale had been in progress for the preceding fortnight or three weeks. Only the merest word of command was wanting to convert the Grand Fleet into the battering-ram and shield, to constitute which in the hour of emergency it had been created. "Ringed by her leaden seas," which were held, moreover, by a "supreme" armada, there seemed every justification for equanimity, for the United Kingdom has no frontiers which an invading army can violate as long as Britannia rules the waves.
The domestic political situation, more menacingly turbulent than at any time within the memory of living Englishmen, had been resolved with miraculous rapidity and completeness. "Revolution" in Ulster, on which the Germans had so fondly banked, vanished as effectually as if it had never raised its head. "We will ourselves defend the coasts of Ireland," declared John Redmond in the House of Commons in a speech which will never die, "and I say to the Government that they may to-morrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland." Mrs. Pankhurst, freshly released from a periodical hunger-striking sojourn in Brixton jail, announced that the suffragettes had stacked arms and now knew only womankind's duty to England. That sent another Berlin dream careening into oblivion. "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" proclaimed in Parliament through the mouth of the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, that the Government's political opponents were prepared to accord it "unhesitating support." In the Government itself the "Potsdam Party," as that relentless iconoclast, Leo Maxse, long termed the coterie which was for peace with Germany at almost any price, was either weeded out or suppressed. Lord Morley, the Lord President of the Council; "Honest John" Burns, still true to convictions, President of the Local Government Board, and Charles P. Trevelyan, Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education, unobtrusively retired from Mr. Asquith's official family in consequence of their inability to sanction the war. They have played their parts meantime with honorable consistency--by maintaining an hermetical silence on questions of the war. And finally, though primarily in popular judgment, Lord Haldane, the graduate of Göttingen, the translator of Schopenhauer and the admirer of GermanGeist, was driven by scandalized public opinion from the War Office, whither he had just come as an "assistant" to the Prime Minister, whose cabinet portfolio was the Secretaryship for War. Most of England sighed with thankful relief when the able Scotch lawyer and philosopher whom contemporary history accuses of responsibility for Britain's military unpreparedness, beat an ignominious retreat back to his regular post, the wool-sack, which, as Lord Chancellor, he by general consent conspicuously adorned. The country's relief became enthusiastic assurance when the lawyer, Asquith, himself retired from the War Office, to make way for the soldier, Kitchener, who was recalled by telegram the day before from Dover, just as he was about to board ship for Cairo, to resume his duties as the ruler of Egypt. With the "Potsdam Party" banished or made harmless, the Cabinet was now regarded as satisfactorily purged. The public heard with boundless gratification that the "strong men" of the Government--Grey, Lloyd-George and Churchill--had been uncompromisingly for war from the start as the only recourse compatible with British honor, to say nothing of the elementary dictates of self-preservation. It was at length possible for Mr. Asquith to assure the country that he presided over an administration of whose unity of view and determination there was no shadow of a doubt--a Government which was resolved, as Sir Edward Grey's great speech in the House of Commons on August 3 set forth, to accomplish three cardinal purposes:
1. To protect the defenseless French coast against attack by the German navy;
To defend the integrity of Belgium; and
3. To put forth all Britain's strength and not run away from the obligations of honor and interest.
When the events of the Great War, and perhaps the chief actors in it themselves, have passed away, some British historian will almost certainly arise to tell the world the story--the "inside story"--of how Mr. Asquith's cabinet, through three days and nights of doubts, uncertainties, trials and tribulations, crossed the Rubicon to the shore of unanimity on the subject of British participation. There were moments, beyond all question, when that issue hung perilously in the balance. The French Government's frantic eleventh-hour appeals for a decision in Downing Street are mute evidence of the vacillation which prevailed--a species of tentativeness which has never been missing from the British conduct of the purely diplomatic affairs of the war. The ministerial debates during which the die was cast in favor of war will make immortal reading, even if only a digest of them is all that is vouchsafed posterity. The "strong men" of the Government, if report is reliable, were called upon to fight valiantly and ceaselessly to avoid England's "running away from the obligations of honor and interest." The tense interval which ensued while they were battering down the trenches of skepticism, chicken-heartedness and nonchalance among their Cabinet colleagues caused a delay which might easily have proved of fatal import; for the decision to throw the strength of the British army, as well as the navy, into the scales was under discussion, and it is conceivable that the Expeditionary Force, which it was eventually determined to send, might have been kept back for weeks, or even altogether, instead of the mere days its dispatch was actually retarded. Disaster incalculable would almost inevitably have resulted in that event.
The indispensable and all-governing preliminary measures for war in respect of domestic politics, the Government and the naval and military administration having thus been taken, equally radical precautions were invoked to put the nation's economic house in order. The Stock Exchange, following the lead of New York, Paris and Berlin, had shut down as early as July 31, in order that mere insensate panic on the part of the speculative and investing world might not degenerate into irretrievable rout. War having descended with irresistible suddenness during the "week-end" preceding the traditional August Bank Holiday (Monday, the 3rd), a meeting of great financiers in the Bank of England on the holiday itself decided to prolong it, as far as banks and bankers were concerned, for three days,i.e., until Friday, the 7th, in what turned out to be the well-grounded hope that public excitement would meantime subside and prevent "runs" ruinous alike to banks and depositors. A moratorium was established. The Bank discount-rate, which had already vaulted from four to eight per cent., was now raised to ten, an unheard-of figure, which effectually curbed the lust of persons anxious to profit from war abnormalities or otherwise indulge in operations not consistent with the gravity of the hour.
[image]Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans clamoring for passage back to Germany.
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Germans Anxious to Fly from England. Remarkable scenes were witnessed outside the American Consulate, thousands of Germans clamoring for passage back to Germany.
It was mainly these things--wholesome, substantial proofs that their rulers had grappled with the situation with bold initiative that inspired the people of London with reassurance, which, diluted with the stoicism of the British character, became calm confidence Gibraltar-like in its inflexibility. She had "the men," England was saying; she had "the ships," and, Parliament having voted an initial war fund of one hundred million pounds as unconcernedly as if it were a thousand-pounds grant for a new switch-track at Woolwich arsenal, she unmistakably had "the money," too.
But even more self-comforting, if possible, than this iron trust in her own inexhaustible resources was England's conviction in the invincibility of her Allies. Was not even little Belgium holding back the flower of the German army before Liége? Even in the unlikely event of Liége's fall, would not the impregnable fortress of Namur provide Krupp guns with a still tougher nut to crack? Those were, alas! the hours in which the existence of the forty-two-centimeter siege gun was not even mooted in ostrich England. France? The Germans would find a vastly different antagonist awaiting them this time in the Ardennes, the Vosges passes and along the Meuse and the Sambre. There was a "New France," a France ofélanand iron. It was the virile Republic of Poincaré, Delcassé, Joffre, Bleriot, Pegoud and Carpentier, with which the Prussian hosts must this time measure lances, not the degenerate Empire of the third Napoleon, which crumbled at Sedan and Metz and surrendered Paris. Russia? "Can't you just hear the steam-roller rumbling across East Prussia and thundering at the gates of Berlin?" a great English peer asked me, in all seriousness, during my first week in London. "Isn't the tread of the Czar's countless millions, pounding remorselessly toward the west, almost audible?" he persisted. Millions of Englishmen were thinking and saying the same thing. As for the German army, almost as many of them were convinced that that "over-organized, peace-stale" military establishment, which was a magnificent spectacle on parade, but lacked leaders experienced in modern campaigning, would crash to pieces not only against "superior numbers" but against Allied troops and commanders who had been fighting great wars this past quarter of a century in Africa and Asia. London's feelings toward Germany seemed, indeed, almost compassionate. Many people, otherwise sane, talked about the war being over by Christmas. The Kaiser's navy would come out and be smashed, they calculated, and such work as had not already been accomplished by the Allied armies within the Fatherland's eastern and western frontiers would soon be completed by "internal collapse," industrial stagnation, national impoverishment and universal starvation. Poor Germany! She had brought it on herself. Her end, after a peace soon to be dictated in Berlin, would manifestly be speedy and annihilating. The Social Democrats, it was true, were bamboozled into support of the war by fictitious assurances that the sword had been "forced" into Germany's unwilling and blameless hand, but the scales would presently fall from their eyes, and then woe betide whatever remained of the Hohenzollerns' ravished, defenseless realm! Street-hawkers in the Strand were selling blatant copies--a penny each--ofThe Kaiser's Last Will and Testament. Would William II be sent to St. Helena, like the other Napoleon, or be interned in some more accessible point in the British Empire, to pass the remaining days of his humiliation and remorse? And the "Crown Prince" with him, of course. These were the reveries of Britain in the early days of August, 1914. Nothing disturbed them except the creaking and the rumbling of the Russian steam-roller. Those being dulcet reverberations, John Bull paused eagerly in the midst of his musings to let them lull him into a still deeper siesta of optimism....
Serene and imperturbable as the vast majority of Englishmen were, the responsible leaders of the nation were under no delusions as to the magnitude of the task now confronting them. To the country's intense astonishment, though Lord Roberts had been dinning it in their ears incessantly for at least five years previous, England found itself in a state of practical impotence as far as effective participation in modern large-scale military operations was concerned. In the same five minutes during which Parliament voted one hundred million pounds as a first war credit, it also sanctioned an increase of the British army by five hundred thousand men. At that moment the Home military establishment, which was immediately mobilized as "The British Army Expeditionary Force" when England decided to enter the war with her soldiers as well as her sailors, consisted of eight divisions of all arms--roundly, one hundred fifty thousand men. An organization of another half-million troops, officered and equipped for a great Continental campaign, could not be stamped out of the ground. Its production, even in a country with the glorious military traditions of England, was manifestly fraught with stupendous difficulties. There was no mistrust of British patriotism; but when men recalled the futility of Lord Roberts' efforts to implant in England's conscience the necessity of some form of National Service--how he not only failed, but was ridiculed and vilified for pursuing his sagacious crusade in the face of merciless rebuff--and when inherent British repugnance to "soldiering" and even to wearing uniforms was remembered, there were widespread misgivings.
Prussian militarism long filled me with abhorrence. I had learned to detest it not as an institution, but for its numerous disgusting manifestations, principally the arrogance of its gilded popinjays and the brutal and overweening contempt in which their traditions and training taught them to hold mere civilian microbes. Yet in those frantic hours when hopelessly unready military England was compelled to patch up an army for battle against the world's most scientific war-machine, I pondered what a blessing a little "militarism" would have been for the British democracy. I had seen Germany trooping off to war, singing, cheering and flower-garnished; and I knew that her debonair demeanor was due less to lust for the fray--the great mass of the nation was animated by no such sentiment as that--than to the realization, which sprang from immutable facts and numbers, that her citizen army was equal to almost any emergencies it would be called upon to meet. Germany was a nation in arms. England was a nation in difficulties. How grotesquely unprepared to play a commensurate part in a military war, compared to her Continental allies and foes, this table showing the size of the various armies indicates:
Peace footing War footing GunsGreat Britain ............... 234,000 380,000 1,000Austria-Hungary ............. 500,000 2,200,000 2,500France (including Algeria) .. 790,000 4,000,000 4,200Germany ..................... 850,000 6,000,000 5,500Russia ...................... 1,700,000 7,000,000 6,000
Lord Kitchener was obviously the man of the hour. An organizer primarily, rather than a strategist, tactician or field-marshal, his appointment to the War Secretaryship demonstrated that whoever was responsible for it--men say it was Lord Northcliffe--recognized instantly the all-overshadowing requirement: a recruiting sergeant. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, would necessarily retain the supreme direction of the Allied forces operating against the German front in France and Belgium. England's part was to send him men. And the one to find, drill and equip them was unmistakably Kitchener of Khartum, South Africa, India and Egypt, the "organizer" of victory against the fuzzy-wuzzies and the Boers, the disciplinarian who had galvanized the Indian army into new life, and the administrator who was licking Egypt into Imperial shape. There would be time enough for the war itself to produce another Wellington or Roberts. What was needed now was men, rifles and guns, cartridges, shells and uniforms, war-planes, motor-lorries and hospital-trains and all the other innumerable impedimenta of modern man-killing. The summoning to the task of the big bluff soldier who first saw the light in County Kerry, who was looked upon as the incarnation of initiative and relentless efficiency, and who had proved his right so to be considered, was elementary and inevitable. It was work for a "sergeant-major" and a "drill-sergeant" rather than for a Napoleonic genius; and when England learned that "K.," as he is affectionately known in the army, was on the prodigious job, England took heart. She responded with a will to his first appeal for men. The hoardings of the Kingdom were plastered with it on the morning of August 8. It read as follows:
+------------------------------------------------------------------+| || YOUR KING AND COUNTRY || NEED YOU. || || A CALL TO ARMS || || An addition of 100,000 men to his Majesty's Regular Army || is immediately necessary in the present grave National || Emergency. || || Lord Kitchener is confident that this appeal will be at once || responded to by all those who have the safety of our || Empire at heart. || || TERMS OF SERVICE || || General Service for a period of 3 years or until the war is || concluded. || || Age of Enlistment between 19 and 30. || || HOW TO JOIN || || Full information can be obtained at any Post Office in the || Kingdom or at any Military depot. || || GOD SAVE THE KING! || |+------------------------------------------------------------------+
In the past England's volunteer army had been maintained by a recruiting system which produced, on the average, about thirty-five thousand new men a year. They did not come easily, even in halcyon peace times, and the gaily-caparisoned recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square, who would buttonhole a hundred likely "Tommies" in a day, earned well his fee if he succeeded in inducing ten of them to "take the shilling." It remained to be seen if "the present grave National Emergency" would find dormant in Britain military talent and inclination hitherto undreamt of. In the opening flush of the excitement and enthusiasm which the war engendered, Lord Kitchener's hopes were satisfactorily realized. Recruiting-offices in numerous districts were literally stormed. The response from the middle, "upper-middle" and upper classes was particularly buoyant. Duke, peer, aristocrat, nobleman, "nut," banker, lawyer, doctor, merchant, teacher and clerk came forward splendidly. But artisan, docker and miner lagged. The lower class revealed an inclination to continue to throng the public-houses rather than the recruiting-offices. It seemed evident at the outset that it was not they who were bent on saving England. They gave disquieting indication that their sort of patriotism was primarily individual self-preservation, that for them, love of country began at home. A waking-up process in their unenlightened ranks was destined to come to pass, thanks mainly to "separation allowances" for missus and the kids, but it was never to attain the dimensions of a rousing which extorted from their atrophied intelligence even an approximate appreciation of their obligations or their country's peril. Britain's war is being waged, as it will be won--speaking broadly--by the patriotism and blood of the excoriated upper ten thousand. The struggle had been in progress for more than a year, at a cost of nearly five hundred thousand British casualties, when it was still necessary for Lloyd-George to remind working-class England, in as unqualified language as a politician dare speak to the nation's electoral masters, that it was not doing its full duty.
While Britain at large still hugged the delusion of easy victory, in grotesque underestimation of the enemy's power, and while Kitchener's recruit-finding machinery was being put in vigorous motion, the War Office, in co-operation with the navy, was accomplishing as magnificent a piece of military work as army annals hold--the silent landing of the British Expeditionary Force of one hundred and sixty thousand men, with its full complement of horses, guns and stores, on the shores of France. That feat will live as immortal disproof of the charge popular in the United States that "hustle" is a word which is conspicuously missing from the British lexicon. Compared to it, our "hustle" in landing an army in Cuba in 1898 was the quintessence of procrastination and muddle. The British railways had been taken over by the Government coincident with the arrival of war, an "Executive Committee" consisting of the General Managers of the main companies having been established more than a year previous as an advisory council for such an emergency as had now supervened. Embarkation of the Expeditionary Force commenced on the night of August 7th. Admiral Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, assured Lord Kitchener that the channel passage was as safe as the Thames itself. The British public, receiving its first lesson in relentless censorship of war news, was kept so effectually in the dark as to the dispatch of the largest army which ever left English shores that it knew nothing whatever of it till the host was at its destination, with breasts bared to the foe. The landing of Sir John French's legions on the soil of France was accomplished, complete in every detail, by August 17th.
British railways, when the record of that marvel of transportation is compiled, will share the honors with the ironclads of Britain's navy and the liners of her mercantile marine. Southampton being the main port of departure, the performance of the London and Southwestern Railway, which has carried so many thousand Americans in pacific days from Waterloo Station to the ship's side, is a case in point. I heard Sir H. A. Walker, the "Southwestern's" general manager make before the American Luncheon Club in London the first announcement of the railways' part in England's military mobilization. With his subsequent permission, I was privileged to give the British public its first information on that subject. The L. & S. W. had been assigned the task of making ready for dispatch to Southampton within sixty hours three hundred and fifty trains of thirty cars each. It did the trick in forty-five hours. During the first three weeks of war there were dispatched to and unloaded at the ships' sides seventy-three of such trains every fourteen hours. They arrived from the four quarters of the kingdom, and none of them was late. "I come from the land of 'big railway stunts,'" said Henry W. Thornton, the American general manager of the Great Eastern railway when Sir H. A. Walker had told this convincing story of British "hustle." "We think we are 'pulling off' some feat when we handle G.A.R. encampments and national conventions, but what British railways accomplished in the ten days between August 7 and 17 last may fairly be claimed as a unique record in railway history." What Mr. Thornton modestly failed to add was that he himself, as a colleague presently bore testimony, had played a conspicuous rôle in the drama of British military mobilization. Certain inanimate things, almost as well known to Americans as Mr. Thornton, played big parts, too. The palatialMauretania, with hersuites de-luxebattered into cargo-room for Tommy Atkins, and her big new sister,Aquitania, with only a maiden crossing or two to her credit, similarly knocked to pieces, made incessant trips back and forth between Southampton and other channel ports to Dieppe, Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, landing in France on each occasion no less than five thousand British fighting-men, ready for death and glory.
Each mother's son of them carried with him this little personal message from Lord Kitchener:
"You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.
"Remember that the honour of the British army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty, not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire, but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle. The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier.
"Be invariably courteous, considerate, and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with a welcome, and to be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty can not be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.
"Do your duty bravely."Fear God."Honour the King."KITCHENER, Field-Marshal."
I remained in England only a week after my arrival from Germany. Part of the time had been pleasantly spent editing a special "American edition" ofThe Timesfor Lord Northcliffe, who placed the full machinery of his journalistic organization at the disposal of the "Yankee War Refugees." He was only prevented from extending them the hospitality of Sutton Place, his lovely estate in Surrey, now a hospital, for a "week-end" outing by the inability of the railways to guarantee the necessary special train facilities. To my astonishment but unalloyed delight Lord Northcliffe "ordered" me to take a month's vacation in the United States. He thought my family and kinsmen would like to have a look at an "English spy," fresh from Germany, before the earmarks of his nefarious trade had entirely evaporated, and so, having obtained the last bunk left on that veteran Cunard hulk,S.S. Campania, which had brought my wife and me to Europe on our honeymoon voyage, I sailed away from Liverpool on Saturday, August 15th, along with twelve hundred or fifteen hundred other sardines packed in an eighteen-knot steel box.
CHAPTER XIV
PRO-ALLY UNCLE SAM
Somewhere in E. W. Hornung'sRaffles, there is this homely bit of epigrammatic philosophy:
"Money lost, little lost. Honor lost, much lost. Pluckiest, all lost!"
The aphorism was paraphrased by my fellow war refugees in theCampania, tucked away in couples, trios, quintettes and baker's dozens into cabins which the Cunarder's designers back in the dim mid-Victorian past built for a half or a third as many passengers.
They made it read like this:
"Baggage lost, all lost!"
Now and then some particularly sentimental soul would spare a humanitarian thought for the minor horrors of the calamity which had fallen upon Europe and civilization. But his heart would not throb for long when somebody would break in upon his maudlin reflections with a really harrowing tale of trunks left behind in Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne, in Carlsbad, Lucerne or Ostend, at the Gare du Nord in Paris, or the quayside in Boulogne or Calais; or of suit-cases and "innovations" lost, strayed or stolen in the maelstrom of military traffic in Germany, Belgium or France; or of Packards, Peerlesses, Studebakers or Overlands summarily abandoned somewhere in the war zone. What were Europe's travails to these genuine disasters? It was all right for the war-mad Continent to deck itself in battle-paint if sanguinarily inclined, but ruthlessly and without notice to break up Americans' traveling plans, knock Cook tours into a cocked hat, interrupt "cures," and on top of that, if you please, actually to play ducks and drakes with the personal effects of free-born American citizens--all because, forsooth, eight or ten million troops required the right of way and insisted upon getting it--that was manifestly the last word in inconsiderateness. Incidentally, of course, it denoted how hopelessly inefficient Europe was, anyway, in the presence of a sudden emergency. Why, the general manager of a cross-town transfer company in New York would have tackled the job without turning a hair. Bah! It served Americans right--quoth a promenade-deck psychologist. Year in and year out they'd been lavishing "good United States dollars" on Europe, and this was her gratitude to her best paying guests. There was no dissent from the view, which prevailed from rudder to bow, that it was the ragged edge of what Bostonians call "the limit." "See America first!" ceasing to be mere admonition, was burnt there and then into the hearts of our baggage-bereft ship's company with all the force of a fervid national aspiration. "Never again!" was the way my Chicago millionairess deck-chair neighbor, who looted the Rue de la Paix annually, sententiously epitomized not only her aggrieved sentiments, but those of nearly everybody else. All swore a virtuous vow henceforth to practise the stay-at-home habit and for the rest of eternity let man-killing Europe wallow in its savagery.
The story of the exodus which the Second Book of Moses records will probably outlive the flight of the children of Columbia across the Atlantic in the summer of 1914. But that hegira will outrank its Egyptian prototype in one gleaming respect--its atmosphere of indomitable good humor, once the Campanians surmounted the initial stage of "grouch," groaning and gnashing of teeth.
Bank presidents and college professors willing to be buffeted across the ocean in the steerage; society women who bunked contentedly on sofas in the "ladies' saloon" of the stuffy second cabin; Pittsburgh plutocrats game enough to sleep six in a stateroom built for four; pampered folk with Frenchchefsat home, who sat uncomplainingly through the interminable and usually refrigerated "second serving" in theCampania'sold-fashioned dining-room; corporation lawyers with incomes the size of a King's civil list, who considered themselves lucky to have captured the hammocks of the fourth engineer or the hospital attendant in the odoriferous hold; all these compatriots, grinning and bearing, proved that after all we are the most adaptable people on earth. After each and all of us had exchanged tales of woe--everybody had one, even Doctor Ella Flagg Young, the septuagenarian Superintendent of Chicago's public schools, who was chased out of the war-zone across Scandinavia into England--and swapped stories of arrest or less thrilling inconveniences, and abused the incompetent authorities of the belligerent governments to our hearts' content, with a slap now and then, to vary the monotony, at our own United States--theCampania'spassengers soon shook down to what turned out to be as jolly a crossing as any of us, I dare say, ever had. Between thrills about imaginary "German cruisers" and equally fantastic "rumbling of naval artillery," and our amusing discomforts, the week passed almost before we knew it, and more quickly than some of us even wished. There was, of course, that irrepressible Illinois State Senator who circulated a petition to "censure" the Cunard line for not sending us all home in theAquitania, even though the British Government had requisitioned her for transport work; but a much more popular note was struck by my young friend, Miss Marjorie Rice, a typical New York belle, who collected a couple of hundred dollars with which to present Captain Anderson with a souvenir of our gratitude for having so gallantly brought us through invisible dangers. German cruisers were still roaming in the Atlantic, and, though we traveled at night with masked lights and took various other precautions like an occasional zigzag course, one never could tell, though I think most of us banished all thought of peril once we heard that British ironclads were keeping a lane of safety for Uncle Sam's fretting sons and daughters all the way from Fastnet to the Fire Island lightship. Asked by the ship's officers to tell "How the Germans Went to War" at the last-night-out concert, to which the Cunard Line with British reverence for tradition still religiously adheres, I could confidently interpret the sentiment of every American aboard in voicing deep thankfulness for the fact that Britannia ruled the waves. Going back with us to the United States was a batch of three or four young Germans, evidently of university education, because their jowls were embellished with saber-cuts. They had been stopped in England on their way home to fight, but were graciously permitted to return whence they came. Timorous friends beseeched me to beware of "saying too much" about the Germans in the hearing of these would-be soldiers of the Kaiser; but I escaped molestation and even heard next day that I had been "most fair."
Not till many days after we landed in New York did I know that two very eminent representatives of Allied Powers were sandwiched among theCampania'shome-fleeing American passengers--Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, British Ambassador at Washington, and his colleague of France, the cultured Monsieur Jusserand. They had crossed in impenetrable incognito. Not only were their names missing from the passenger-list, but if they had ever promenaded or eaten or smoked, they must have done it in solitary enjoyment of their own exclusive society, as nobody during seven whole days and nights ever heard of them or saw them, or, what is vastly more miraculous aboard-ship, ever even talked about them. American newspapermen afloat in a liner like to flatter themselves that nothing with even the remotest odor of news ever escapes their insatiable quest. I had myself bored with strenuous pertinacity into every news-well in theCampania, and there were many. But Spring-Rice and Jusserand eluded me as thoroughly as if they had been contraband stored away in the hold, or stokers who only come to life out of the black hole of Calcutta once or twice a trip, when everybody with a white face is tight asleep. Bernstorff came in two days later like a brass band. The British and French Ambassadors broke into the United States, apparently, in felt-slippers through a back door on a dark night. The manner of the respective arrivals of the German and the Allied Ambassadors was to be characteristic of their conduct in the country throughout the war.
On Monday, August 24, I was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Bernstorff had landed that forenoon in the Dutch liner,Noordam. To my astonishment, the Ambassador, whom I had noticed lunching a few tables away with James Speyer, arose and advanced across the restaurant to where I was sitting. Bernstorff and I were old acquaintances. I liked him. Most newspapermen did. Through long residence in Washington, he had acquired an almost Rooseveltian art in dealing with us. I used to see him regularly during his periodical official visits to Berlin, having known him professionally from the days he was Councillor of the German Embassy in London during the Boer War. Few Americans are aware that Count Bernstorff was born in England while his father was serving as Prussian Minister to the Court of St. James. History was destined to repeat itself in the case of the son, who not only adopted the career of his father, but when he became an ambassador to a neutral country during one of Germany's wars was called upon to occupy himself just as the elder Count Bernstorff had done in London in 1870-71. The father put in most of his time in England in a vain endeavor to persuade Queen Victoria's Government to place an embargo on shipment of British arms and ammunition to the French. He failed as lamentably in that effort as his son and heir was destined to do in the United States under almost identical circumstances forty-four years later.
Smiling his most persuasive diplomatic grimace, Count Bernstorff went straight to the object of his luncheon-table call on me.
"Wile," he began, "you've gone back on us! I can see your hand at work in the attitude theNew York Timeshas taken up."
I could not imagine at what the genial Count was driving. Perhaps he had read in the preceding day'sTimesmy long account of the beginnings of the war as I observed them in Berlin, or my introduction toThe Times'exclusive publication of the German White Paper, printed that day.
"Your Excellency flatters me," I ventured to rejoin. "I have only been in the country since Saturday night, and my activities atThe Timesoffice have been limited to the very prosaic duty of handing in several wads of 'copy' written aboard-ship."
But Bernstorff knew better. I had poisoned the atmosphere of Times Square against Germany's holy cause. He insisted upon thrusting upon me some occult influence over Mr. Ochs,The Times'able proprietor, and Mr. Miller, its brilliant editor, and said he was going to see somebody or other atThe Timeslater in the day and "fix things up." Judging by the rivers of interviews which thenceforth flowed in an unceasing torrent from the Ambassador's headquarters in the Ritz-Carlton, he must have seen not only someTimesmen, but nearly all the journalists in Greater New York. How satisfactorily he "fixed things up" with the great newspaper which has proved to be the Allies' most consistent and effective supporter in the United States could be judged from next morning's edition, which was about as anti-Bernstorffian as could be imagined. The Imperial German Press-Agent's palaver about his ability to "fix things up" was bombast, pure and unalloyed. There was never the slightest possibility that he could "fix" anything in theNew York Timesoffice or in any American newspaper office where self-respect, journalistic honor and rugged independence are enthroned. There are American newspapers which lay no claim to these virtues, and their names are undoubtedly, and long have been, carefully card-indexed at 1435 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. Some of their owners have decorations bestowed by the Kaiser.
It proved to be a rare stroke of Fate which took me to the Ritz-Carlton, for I was destined to be an eyewitness of the assemblage of the Kaiser's Great General Staff for the Germanization of American public opinion on the war. Doctor Dernburg had arrived in theNoordamwith Count Bernstorff, and along with them came Captain Boy-Ed, the Naval Attaché at Washington. I knew personally, from Berlin days, both the ex-Colonial Secretary and the sailor. Dernburg, before he was pitchforked into Government office from the comparatively humble station of a bank director in 1906, was the most approachable of men. His command of the American language was remarkable--an inheritance from his youth, part of which was spent as a volunteer clerk in a Wall Street bank. I never forgot my first call on him in Germany. I assumed him to be a Jew, as his father was. Some Semitic question of public interest was the news of the moment, and I regarded Dernburg an ideal man to interview. With a smile I recall how, insistently disavowing his origin, he told me I had come to "the wrong address." Later I watched his tempestuous career as administrator of the barren sand-wastes known as German colonies, saw him give electioneering in the Fatherland a new phase with his shirt-sleeves campaigning methods, and observed his meteoric rise to Imperial grace and political power, so soon to be followed by his equally precipitate fall from those dizzy heights. Dernburg's lack of manners and tact was commonly said in Berlin to have led to his official demise after less than four years of Cabinet glory. No one ever questioned his eminent ability. But his reputation as a banker rested on cold-blooded ruthlessness, and when he attempted to carry those methods into a bureaucratic government department, he struck snags which wrecked his bark. Neither he nor I supposed on August 24, 1914, when we chatted in the palm-court of the Ritz-Carlton, that his attempt to transplant Berlin ruthlessness into the United States would eventually prove his undoing there, too.
Captain Boy-Ed, as subsequent history was also to show, was bent on practising in America the tactics which won him renown and promotion in Germany. Prior to coming to Washington as Count Bernstorff's Naval Attaché--the Kaiser had decided that the United States navy was attaining dimensions which required watching by a shrewd observer--the captain was von Tirpitz' right-hand man at the Imperial Admiralty in Berlin. He had charge of the so-called News Division, nominally entrusted with the duty of informing the German public of "routine naval intelligence, such as accidents, transfers of ships and officers, etc., etc.," as I once heard von Tirpitz persuasively and naïvely describe the functions of theNachrichten-Abteilungduring a periodical plea to the Reichstag for more dreadnoughts. Boy-Ed, the son of a Turkish father and a German mother, devoted himself chiefly in the years between 1906 and 1912 to conducting von Tirpitz' astute propaganda for naval expansion. It was the era in which the Kaiser's fleet was being converted by leaps and bounds from a navy of obsolete thirteen-thousand-ton ships of theDeutschlandandBraunschweigclass into an armada of dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the eighteen-thousand to twenty-four-thousand-ton "all-big-gun"Ost-FrieslandandSeydlitzclass. German public opinion required to be carefully manipulated in order to secure parliamentary sanction for "supplementary" appropriations which rose by stealthy degrees from $60,000,000 to $115,000,000 a year. Boy-Ed was assigned the responsible duty of organizing and carrying out the necessary campaign of education, and right well and thoroughly he did it. The shoals of pamphlets, books, newspaper-articles, public-lectures, Navy League speeches and other "educational" matter with which the Fatherland was flooded--always with "England, the Foe" as theleitmotif,--were to a large extent the child of Boy-Ed's resourceful brain. He did not write them all, of course, but he was their inspirer-in-chief. I account him one of the real creators of the modern German navy, second only to von Tirpitz himself. It was "the chief's" idea, but Boy-Ed made its materialization a practical possibility.
Knowing his methods, no revelations of his pernicious activities in the United States ever surprised me. He was only up to his old tricks, altering them to suit the American climate and character, but adhering always to certain basic principles which had stood him in such good stead in the Fatherland. It would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge numerous professional courtesies received at Boy-Ed's hands when he was misleading the press of Germany and the world at the News-Division in Leipziger-Platz, Berlin. He nearly had me arrested at the Imperial dockyard in Wilhelmshaven in March, 1907, for gaining access, despite thoroughgoing preventive measures, to the launch of Germany's first dreadnought, theNassau, but during his career at the Admiralty he more than made up for that by enabling me, in the columns ofThe Daily Mail, to be the medium of a formal discussion between von Tirpitz and the British naval authorities on the endlessly controversial question of Anglo-German sea rivalry. For the best "copy" it was ever my good fortune to send across the North Sea, my unwithering gratitude is due and is hereby expressed to the shifty chieftain of Germany's war-time "intelligence service" in the United States.
Who else besides Bernstorff, Dernburg, Boy-Ed and Speyer attended the opening council of war of the German field-marshals in the United States that broiling August day at the Ritz-Carlton, I never learned with certainty. Dernburg assured me that as far as he was concerned, purely humanitarian business had brought him to our generous shores; he had come to collect funds for the German Red Cross, and he once wrote me a letter on paper emblazoned with that worthy organization's innocuous trade-mark. I suspect that before the day was over, Professor Münsterberg of Harvard, Poet Viereck ofThe Fatherland, and Herman Ridder paid their respects to the propaganda-chieftains, and received their orders; and probably Julius P. Mayer, the New York manager of the Hamburg-American Line, and Claussen, his expert "publicity manager," left their cards, too. Evidently James Speyer thought his sequestered and palatial home at Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, far from the madding sleuths of the New York press, was a more ideal retreat for so momentous a pow-wow, for it was to that idyllic refuge that Count Bernstorff told me he was immediately repairing. Purely diplomatic affairs at Washington could obviously wait on the more transcendent business the Imperial German Ambassador now had in hand; and before he quit the banks of the Hudson for the shores of the Potomac, the Fatherland's marvelous attack on the natural sympathies of the American Republic in the great war was launched with all the force, skill and impudence of a German assault on the frontier of a foe.
New York was clearly more feverishly interested in the war than London. Nowhere in Fleet Street had I seen such vibrant throngs in front of newspaper-offices, as stood eager and transfixed by day and far into the night in Times and Herald Squares, Columbus Circle and Park Row. America might have been in the fray herself, to judge by the one absorbing topic which dominated men and women's talk and obsessed their thoughts. Detached as we were, it was unmistakable that Europe's agony had eaten deep into our souls, for even the baseball bulletin-boards were now deserted in favor of those which were telling in breathless telegrams of the German cannon-ball plunge through Belgium toward the fatal Marne and of Russia's seemingly irresistible advance into East Prussia. I had heard no Englishman arguing about the issues of Armageddon or the kaleidoscopic events of the battlefield with half the flaming ardor of those Broadway war experts. In fact there were no blackboards at all around which the British could hold curbstone parliaments, for Lord Kitchener's censorship was not parting with news enough, apparently, to make even the chalk worth while. In London I had observed the inexplicable phenomenon that at the moment when hell had broken loose for the British Empire, great journals, instead of deluging the public with news, actually reduced their ordinary size in some cases to four pages, though I believe that fear of a print-paper famine and disappearance of advertising had something to do with those atrophied dimensions. All in all, however, there was no doubt that isolated neutral America was excited about the war to a degree which reduced British interest almost to nonchalance by comparison.
Though I tarried in the East but forty-eight hours, I was conscious of breathing almost exclusively pro-Ally air. President Wilson's neutrality proclamation was being respected in letter, as far as restraining our people from actual breaches in favor of either belligerent group was concerned, but every minute of the day, everywhere, it was being vociferously violated in spirit. Before the war was a month old, Americans already were confessing freely that they were so "neutral" that they didn't care who won as long as Germany was "licked." They resigned themselves to the Chief Magistrate's dictum that the country as such must be guilty of no "un-neutral" acts, but it failed lamentably to still the natural instincts of American hearts which were beating fervently, irresistibly, for the Allies. Bernstorff's hour-by-hour interviews, apologies and explanations, Münsterberg's homilies,The Fatherland'svituperations, theNew-Yorker Staatszeitung'seditorials in English signed by Ridder and "boiler-plated" to any newspapers which would give them space, "fair play" appeals from obsequious ex-Berlin exchange-professors like Dean Burgess of Columbia--all these things fell on deaf ears. None of them could obliterate the crime of Germany, which loomed ineradicable on the war horizon as Americans scanned it--Belgium. All the instincts of American justice, liberty, humanity and regard for treaty obligations rebelled against "Necessity-knows-no-law" and "scrap of paper" ethics. We had gone to war ourselves, in 1898, to defend the rights of a small nation. The spectacle of Military Germany trampling little Belgium under foot, causelessly, mercilessly, was enough, had there been no other single issue to enlist our sympathy, to vouchsafe it, whole-heartedly, to the nations which were leagued in support of the old-fashioned principle that Right is nobler than Might. Thus was America's mind attuned in August, 1914, and at least in the opinion-molding area of the country which lies between the seaboard and the line where the Middle West begins, that mind was, with American predilection for reaching right conclusions spontaneously, irrevocably made up. The attempts of the Propaganda Steam-Roller to flatten out the anti-German prejudices provoked by the rape of Belgium were frantic, but fruitless. The pre-digested baby food which pedagogues and demagogues, ambassadors, brewers and rabbis now began to ladle out for American consumption did not temper those prejudices. Indeed, it was manifest that it was but aggravating them. Our own General Brooke, attending the German army maneuvers in Silesia eight or nine years ago, was asked by the Kaiser if he had ever been in Germany before. "Never in this part," remarked Brooke. "Where, then?" persisted William II. "In Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee," replied the general. I was about to enter "that part" of Germany now. I was not there long before realizing that pro-Ally sentiment was immeasurably less assertive, at any rate, than in the outspokenly pro-Ally East. Chicago, of course, has more Germans than Düsseldorf, and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, in spots, are as Teutonic as Hamburg or Bremen, so it was natural to findDeutschland, Deutschland über Allesmore than disputing supremacy withRule Britannia. In Chicago pro-Germanism was rampant and articulate. An article written by me for theChicago Tribunein the first fortnight of September, in which I ventured to express my opinion as to where the responsibility for the war lay, how long it would last and who would win it, brought down on me as violent a torrent of abuse as if it had been published in theBerliner Tageblatt. For saying that, in my judgment, the German War Party had made the war; that it would go on till Germany was beaten to her knees, and that eventual exhaustion of the Germanic Powers and the longer resources of the Allies would win the war for the latter, I became forthwith the target of all the forty-two-centimeter guns in the Windy City.